Bolivia: Plot or Ploy?

Plotting against the government has long been a national sport in Bolivia. And denouncing subversive plots—real or imagined—is the government's favorite way of knocking off political enemies. Last week Air Force General René Barrientos, 45, head of the military junta that ousted President Víctor Paz Estenssoro last November, was suddenly crying plot as if he had invented the game. Barrientos' troops rounded up 26 of the ex-President's supporters and disarmed the 2,000-man national police. The cops, fumed Barrientos, while calling for reorganization of the force, were at the center of an insidious anti-government plot.

Guns & Burs. Was it...