Chapter 390: Military Coup (Part 1)

After reaching an intentional agreement with Colonel Numar, Yuri also began the final preparations before the military coup.

Bolivia is not like countries in Europe or Asia; like most countries in Latin America, it suffers from varying degrees of lax border defense.

Because he had been preparing for more than a month, over a thousand mercenaries under his command had already entered Bolivia in advance through various means.

Some entered through normal channels, while others adopted smuggling methods to arrive.

Of course, while it was easy to sneak the personnel in, the equipment was not so easy; it was basically transported separately.

Yuri had bribed border patrol and customs personnel in advance, and some light weaponry, including standard-issue rifles, bullets, hand grenades, machine guns, and so on, were all continuously transported in through small, dispersed shipments.

As for heavy military equipment, such as tanks and armored vehicles, it could only be secretly transported to La Paz through warehouse channels by train.

The security company under Yuri had already begun to take shape after nearly half a year of his painstaking management.

Although it is one of the BRICS countries most favored by the international community, the chaos of the domestic situation in Brazil is actually even worse than in India and South Africa.

Drug abuse and the power of drug lords are constantly increasing, and the lax immigration policy has allowed a large influx of low-quality personnel into the country, leading to a year-by-year surge in gang members relying on urban slums, along with political corruption.

The true scene in Brazil is that the wealth gap within the country is widening at a speed visible to the naked eye, while various internal troubles continue to escalate.

Under these circumstances, more and more people are finding it difficult to make a living.

Veterans are no exception; in fact, in Brazil, because they cannot be properly resettled by the state after leaving the military, more and more soldiers in recent years have turned into thugs for gangs and drug lords after retirement, further exacerbating social chaos.

It was for this reason that when Yuri recruited personnel in Brazil under the name of a security company and offered higher salaries than other security companies, although every interviewee was told that they might be dispatched abroad or even to war zones to execute dangerous tasks in the future, Yuri still managed to recruit thousands of trained veterans in a very short time, and nearly a quarter of these veterans came from Venezuela.

With the help of Colonel Numar, Yuri and his team successfully gathered them into a barracks he controlled, while the Bolivian authorities remained completely unaware of this.

In addition to the addition of Yuri's mercenaries, the army controlled by Colonel Numar also received some aid in terms of weapons.

Sun Cheng had been purchasing ordnance from Russia for some time; the first batch of standard-issue ordnance originating from Russia had already been transported to South America, and except for some anti-aircraft missiles and radar systems that the base could use, the rest were stored in several relatively hidden locations.

The aid Yuri gave to Colonel Numar consisted mostly of old AK-74 series weapons phased out by the Russian Army, as well as a small number of RPG rocket launchers and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

Although not much, the Bolivian military garrison stationed in the capital, La Paz, consisted of only three regiments, totaling less than 2,900 people, among which one regiment was the armed force controlled by Colonel Numar, prepared for the coup.

Moreover, there was only one armored battalion among the garrison near La Paz, and all the tanks and armored vehicles they were equipped with added up to only thirty-some units; although they were all in the hands of the current president's confidants, they were just old, broken junk.

This was not really Yuri looking down on the Bolivian Army, but the truth.

Look at the weapons equipped by the Bolivian Army: the T17 Staghound armored cars equipped by the United States during World War II still have over a dozen in service in the Bolivian mechanized units; besides that, the most powerful tank battalion equipped by the Bolivian Army consists of dozens of T-72s scavenged from former Soviet countries when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the last century, and they have been used for decades, with parts severely aged, many on the verge of being scrapped, the kind where even replacing a spare part for maintenance is a waste.

Seeing that everything was proceeding in full swing, Yuri was, after all, from the CIA, and he was all too familiar with the methods that United States intelligence agencies like to use when subverting other countries' regimes abroad.

He suggested to Colonel Numar that a coup is only a means, and that control over public sentiment and public opinion must also be strengthened.

After an investigation during the previous period, Yuri was very clear that the current domestic population of Bolivia, especially businessmen and the middle class, held great fear regarding the "Movement for Socialism" proposed by the new president.

Thanks to the uninterrupted demonization of 'socialism' by the United States and Western society over the past few decades, plus the fact that revolutions exported abroad by the Soviet Union and a certain country in the last century generally advocated seizing power by force—Peru, just across the water from Bolivia, was deeply affected and has yet to completely resolve the Shining Path to this day.

Therefore, Yuri believed that as long as Colonel Numar raised this banner, he would inevitably gain unexpected support.

Colonel Numar was no fool; although he chose the coup for his own political ambitions, Yuri's proposal seemed like a very good excuse to him.

The two hit it off immediately; Yuri personally paid to bribe many newspapers, periodicals, and private radio stations within Bolivia, spreading the propaganda materials he had specifically hired people to rush to complete throughout all major cities in Bolivia, calling on the public and all domestic classes to criticize the current president's political leanings, and vigorously playing up the increasingly severe economic hardship and high prices in Bolivia in recent years, subtly shifting the blame for problems that previous governments had failed to solve onto the new president.

These propaganda materials naturally were not stupid enough to state who was the "great savior" or anything of that sort, so although they immediately attracted the attention of the government and intelligence agencies once they broke out, when they really wanted to investigate further, they found that although there were many clues, they were too complex, and to really investigate them would require investing a large amount of manpower and material resources.

Moreover, they were also worried about falling into a trap set by the mastermind, thereby neglecting the control of the capital, La Paz, so they could only secretly increase their vigilance; at the same time, the current president appeared before the public and the media for days, denouncing various irresponsible reports and calling on all sectors to give him more trust and support, saying he would use time to prove that he would surely lead Bolivia toward a brighter future.

Even Yuri had to admit that this new president elected by Bolivia was indeed a character; he had a sense of responsibility and courage, held considerable hostility toward the United States, and at the same time, relying on several failed assassinations and coups in the country, had almost controlled most of the situation in Bolivia.

Unfortunately, someone had set their sights on Bolivia.

……

With the planning and support of Yuri and the base behind him, Colonel Numar's coup plan was exceptionally rigorous and thorough, even though the La Paz authorities soon became suspicious of him, and even three days before the originally scheduled coup, found an excuse to strip him of his military power and ordered him to rest at home for the time being.

Although this move by the authorities made the coup seem to have many more uncertainties in the Colonel's eyes.

But in Yuri's eyes, the coup had actually already succeeded.

Because on this day, he finally met as he wished the other Supervisor who had replaced Number Two to come and cooperate with him to complete this Bolivian operation.