(Natural News)—There has been much unrest in Bolivia in recent days, as Bolivian Army General Juan Jose Zuniga threatened to overthrow President Luis Arce as he demanded a new cabinet and the release of political prisoners. He led military units to gather in the main square of La Paz, home to the presidential palace and Congress. An armored vehicle slammed a palace door to allow soldiers to rush into the building. But it was a failed attempt.
Amidst Bolivia’s bid to join the BRICS group, Arce, supported by international allies, addressed and defused the situation, reaffirming his commitment to democracy and swearing in new military commanders. The now dismissed military chief was ordered to six months of “preventive detention” for his role in leading the failed coup against the government.
Following Wednesday’s unsuccessful coup, observers have raised suspicion that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was part of the master plan. Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, speculated that the coup attempt was secretly backed by the CIA, either because of Bolivia’s vast supplies of lithium, in retaliation for its closeness to Russia or its hostility to Israel. One X user said: “This is the second CIA-backed coup plot against the Bolivian state in under five years. Bolivia has 21 million tons of lithium reserves, the largest on the planet. Bolivia also cut off all relations with Israel in condemnation of the genocide in Gaza. Coincidence? I think not.” A comment that seemed to refer to the U.S. from Puerto Rican communist “Combate” said: “They own Argentina. They own Chile. They’re going after Bolivia.”
A different post highlighted Arce’s recent trip to St. Petersburg and talks between Bolivia and Russia on nuclear research. “Let’s not pretend we don’t know who is responsible for today’s coup, this is the work of the U.S. CIA,” the post said.
Meanwhile, Great Game India reported that Zuniga was seeking to prevent former President Evo Morales from running for president again. He claimed that the former chief would harm the country. However, a Bolivian court has already declared Morales unable to run again.
Just like X users, analysts also believe that the CIA is involved in the failed resistance. Suspicion of the U.S. in Bolivia, stemming from the CIA’s historical support for Latin American military regimes and the State Department’s involvement in several coups under Henry Kissinger, has left a lasting legacy on the political life of the South American country, which has seen over 190 coup attempts in its history. (Related: How the CIA helped discredit Hunter laptop story for Biden win.)
Also, Bolivia is a contender for BRICS membership, which is likely to take place at the BRICS leaders’ conference in Kazan, Russia on Oct. 22. Arce has been vocal about his commitment to the intergovernmental organization’s worldview. In fact, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month, June 5-7, and they discussed the importance of the emerging multipolar world, free of neocolonialism and the strictures of the “rules-based order.” So, if Zuniga was successful in his coup attempt, Arce’s removal from power would be convenient for those forces targeting Brazil.
In a speech to supporters at the palace, Zuniga “saluted those officers who wear their uniform with pride and value the Armed Forces in a democratically-elected government,” Los Tiempos, a Bolivian newspaper, said. The Presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela all issued statements of support for Arce while Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Celinda Sosa Lunda urged the international community to come out in support of Arce and Bolivian democracy.
Arce celebrates Zuniga’s failed coup attempt
The former Army commander has been handed a terrorism charge, which carries 15-20 years in prison, as well as a charge for an armed uprising, which carries a sentence of 5-15 years. The Attorney General’s Office requested the six-month detention and said other government bodies, including the Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry, supported the request “due to the importance and seriousness of the events that occurred,” state prosecutor Cesar Siles said.
Within hours of the attack, Zuniga urged the soldiers to withdraw, after leaders from around the world blasted the army’s actions as illegal. Zuniga later claimed that he was following an order from Arce, who has denied having any involvement in or prior knowledge of Zuniga’s operation.
The Bolivian president hailed the withdrawal as a victory for Bolivia’s democracy and addressed the country’s citizens in the aftermath, some of whom had taken to the streets in protest of the alleged coup attempt. “Many thanks to the Bolivian people,” said Arce. “Long live democracy.”
A video has been shown on Bolivian television showing Arce facing down Zuniga and a group of soldiers in a palace hallway on Wednesday. “I am your captain, and I order you to withdraw your soldiers, and I will not allow this insubordination,” Arce said.
Zuniga was Arce’s hand-picked leader for Bolivia’s military. But as he entered the presidential palace on Wednesday, Zuniga cited the malaise in the country as the reason why he started the resistance. “The three chiefs of the armed forces have come to express our dismay. There will be a new cabinet of ministers. Surely things will change, but our country cannot continue like this any longer,” Zuniga told a local TV station. “Stop destroying, stop impoverishing our country, stop humiliating our army.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
