U.S. Warns Against Toppling Bolivia President as Crisis Deepens

Bolivia · Politics

The United States has thrown its weight behind Bolivia’s embattled president, casting weeks of resignation protests as an attempted overthrow — a striking intervention in a country it once kept at arm’s length.

Washington steps into the Bolivia crisis

The United States moved on Thursday to shore up Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, pairing a pledge of emergency aid with a pointed warning to anyone seeking to remove him. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media that the American defense establishment would “reject all attempts to overthrow the legitimate government” of Paz, adding that Bolivia must not “fall prey to the old status quo of narco-terrorist dominance.” In a phone call the same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Paz that Washington was, in the words of a State Department spokesman, ramping up emergency assistance and logistics support to help Bolivians cope with acute food and medical shortages caused by the roadblocks paralysing the country.

The framing was as notable as the substance. By characterising the protest movement as an attempt to topple a legitimate government, the Trump administration aligned itself squarely with Paz at a moment when his own cabinet is fracturing and the streets are demanding he go. It marks an unusually direct US involvement in the internal politics of a country that, under nearly two decades of leftist rule, had been one of Washington’s most distant partners in South America.

Weeks of protests over a deepening economic collapse

The US statements land in the middle of the gravest crisis of Paz’s young presidency. He took office in November 2025 after winning a runoff with about 55% of the vote, ending close to twenty years of government by the Movement for Socialism. A centrist who campaigned as a renewal candidate, Paz inherited an economy in its worst shape in forty years: depleted dollar reserves, double-digit inflation, and a collapse in domestic energy and fuel production that has left motorists queuing for hours.

His decision to tighten spending and unwind long-standing fuel subsidies triggered protests that have since hardened into nationwide strikes and roadblocks. Miners, teachers, farmers, transport workers and trade unions have joined a movement demanding his resignation, choking the flow of food and fuel into major cities and placing the administrative capital, La Paz, under what residents describe as a siege. The political cost has climbed alongside the economic one: the defense and education ministers stepped down on June 2, the highest-level departures so far, and the government has refused to rule out declaring a state of emergency and deploying the military, after the lower house voted to scrap a 2020 law limiting the army’s role in internal unrest.

Morales, the opposition and the road ahead

Adding to the pressure is former president Evo Morales, who governed from 2006 to 2019 and has mobilised his supporters in a long march toward La Paz under chants demanding Paz step down. The convergence of organised labour, rural and indigenous movements, and the Morales bloc has given the protests a breadth that a six-month-old government has struggled to contain. Bolivia‘s country risk has climbed to among the highest in the region, behind only Venezuela, as investors weigh the prospect of prolonged instability in a state that was, until recently, a significant natural-gas exporter.

For foreign observers, the US move reframes a domestic crisis as a geopolitical contest. Washington’s explicit backing gives Paz an external lifeline and signals that the Trump administration sees Bolivia — rich in lithium and natural gas, and long courted by China — as a country it wants anchored on its side of a shifting regional map. Whether that support steadies a government running short of cash, fuel and political room will depend less on statements from Washington than on whether Paz can ease the shortages that put Bolivians in the streets in the first place.