The government of Rodrigo Paz launched its most forceful operation yet to restore supply lines into La Paz, deploying bulldozers and riot police to clear a highway choked by three weeks of pro-Morales blockades. Dubbed the “White Flags Humanitarian Corridor,” the mission aimed to prise open the artery linking the capital with Oruro and the country’s agricultural heartland, where food and fuel shortages have grown acute. In a parallel diplomatic thrust, Buenos Aires confirmed it had dispatched military Hercules transport planes to mount an air bridge carrying provisions from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to the highland cities of La Paz and El Alto. President Paz publicly thanked his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, for the gesture, telling a television interviewer that “in difficult moments, the solidarity of brother nations is revealed.”

Behind the logistical drama lies a political confrontation six months into Paz’s mandate. Government spokesman José Luis Gálvez accused former president Evo Morales of orchestrating an insurrectionary strategy, with over ninety per cent of road closures concentrated in the indigenous-stronghold departments of La Paz, Oruro and Cochabamba. Gálvez alleged that the blockades, which have led to more than 127 arrests, aim “to force a rupture of constitutional order through strictly violent and non-democratic tools.” Protesters, many loyal to the Movement for Socialism (MAS) split that backs Morales, demand Paz’s resignation and blame his administration for a deepening dollar scarcity and collapsing fuel supplies. Paz retorted that the country has been “in crisis for twenty years,” pointing a finger at the MAS governments of Morales and Luis Arce for exhausting reserves and hollowing out the hydrocarbons sector.

Viewed from Buenos Aires, the logistics assistance carries a clear ideological charge. Milei’s libertarian government has framed the airlift as an act of “Shield of the Americas” solidarity, a nascent alignment of conservative regional forces confronting left-populist movements. The move marks a sharp departure from Argentina’s traditional diplomatic caution towards its Andean neighbour, and analysts in La Paz note that it risks anchoring Bolivia’s internal strife more firmly inside a transnational culture war. Argentine officials privately cast the airbridge as a bulwark against the kind of supply-chain warfare they themselves faced during blockades under the previous Peronist administration, lending the operation a layer of mirror-image political memory.

For Bolivia’s beleaguered executive, success will be measured not only in tonnes of food delivered but in whether the corridor reopens a path to negotiated settlement. The government has invited demonstrators to dialogue, yet Paz acknowledged that “there are groups who do not want to talk,” while insisting that Morales’s ultimate aim is to return to power. Diplomats monitoring the Andean region caution that if the bulldozers secure only a narrow, contested lifeline, the underlying stand-off will persist, leaving La Paz vulnerable to renewed encirclement and forcing the Milei-Paz axis to contemplate a longer, costlier entanglement.