Bolivia is of interest to U.S. imperialism in large part because of its lithium deposits. Elon Musk publicly celebrated the 2019 coup, declaring, “We’ll coup whoever we want.” How will this shape the U.S. relationship with Bolivia in the years ahead?

The 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia made our role in the international division of labor very clear-cut. We are caught in the middle of a dispute between imperialist and capitalist powers in an attempt to control and plunder our country’s resources. As these world powers dispute their hegemonic distribution, the Trump administration has taken measures that threaten to redefine the world scene. After decades of commercial disputes and the growing presence of Chinese capital in the region, the United States seems to call for a return to the Monroe Doctrine.

The 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia was not only publicly celebrated by Musk but was also funded, planned, and organized by U.S. imperialism under the first Trump presidency through the Organization of American States. The Trump administration’s allies in the region, like former Argentine president Mauricio Macri, actively provided weapons to the Bolivian armed forces during the coup, which allowed it to carry out the Senkata and Sacaba massacres, which left 37 people dead and hundreds wounded and tortured.

In the world division of labor, there are no transnational “partners” or “good” imperialists, as many progressive governments claim. But the means of pressure applied to dependent countries, such as Bolivia, change according to the political turns in Washington. Trump made it clear in 2019 that his administration had no problem openly supporting military coups to ensure control over Bolivia’s resources; according to reports in The Intercept, the administration was willing to carry out a second coup in 2020 to avoid the transition to the Arce government after the October elections. This means that the next years will be marked by a growing regional tension between the United States, which seeks to retake control over what it considers its “backyard,” and the Latin American region, which is being jolted by interesting processes of mobilization and resistance.

The United States is not the only country that seeks to take advantage of Bolivia’s lithium. Can you explain Bolivia’s relationship with China and Russia, and the role these countries play in extraction?

Bolivia has a growing external debt. Our main multilateral creditor is the Inter-American Development Bank (32 percent), followed by the Andean Community (CAN) (20 percent) and the World Bank (12 percent). Bolivia’s biggest bilateral creditor is China, with just over 10 percent of our debt ¹Bolivian Central Bank, External Debt Report, June 2024. Part of the justification for the international policies of the MAS governments, first under Evo Morales and now under Luis Arce Catacora, has been an attempt to embellish China and Russia’s capitalist character with a discourse of a “multilateral world” or “counter-hegemonic blocs.”

We live in a world of crossed dependencies, and Latin America is no longer exclusively the United States’ backyard. There are multiple interests at play. Bolivia’s integration as an associated state of the BRICS bloc is an attempt by the Arce government to gain both political and economic support from Russia and China.

While short-term imperialist tactics to pillage and plunder their spheres of influence are quite clear, there are long-term tactics of systematic sabotage or paralysis that can leave the extraction and industrialization of resources at a standstill for years. The Bolivian government has pursued multiple international contracts to extract and industrialize lithium, first with Chinese companies, then with German companies, and now in 2024 with a Chinese-Russian consortium. Each contract has led to its own series of protests, criticisms, and scandals. From a technical point of view, the initial project proposed an evaporation approach and constructed a series of pools to extract lithium and other minerals from the salt flats. After the infrastructure was built and left unmaintained, there was a sudden change in plans, adopting a direct extraction method.

The consequences of failing to advance beyond the initial or pilot implementation are that, even though Bolivia has the largest proven reserves of lithium in the world (over 21 million tons, about 23 percent of the world’s reserves²USGS, 2023), it doesn’t account for even 1 percent of the world’s lithium production or exports. This lack of industrialization is weaponized by the opposition as a criticism of the state’s role in the economy. This leaves the door open for any future governments to reach deals to hand over control of the lithium to other transnational conglomerates.

For those who haven’t followed closely, what’s behind the conflict taking place within the MAS (Bolivia’s governing party)? What different interests do the party’s leading figures, Arce and Evo Morales, represent? And how does this crisis relate to the coup attempt in June of last year?

During the 14 years of Evo Morales’s government, there was a transformation from MAS as a popular front—an electoral bloc to coopt and demobilize the important anti-neoliberal struggles such as the Water War (2000) and the Gas War (2003)—into a semi-bonapartist regime built around Morales as the caudillo.³The term caudillo refers to an often-charismatic and populist political leader, in whose hands a high degree of military and political power is concentrated. A long tradition of caudillismo exists, in both left and right-wing varieties, in Latin America. After Evo Morales was banned from running  in the 2020 elections, the MAS apparatus held assemblies all over the country to decide on the candidates. Morales did not agree to these candidacies, and from exile in Buenos Aires he proclaimed Luis Arce Catacora and David Choquehuanca as the official candidates.

The initial disputes between Morales and Arce, far from being a struggle over ideas or alternative projects, were expressions of a miserable caudillismo for power quotas. This split has led to a chasm between the two factions of MAS, which has been fought out within the legislative, electoral, and judicial branches of the state, in the streets with massive marches, and within the peasant and indigenous movements. The two factions have divided the main social organizations, such as the national campesino union federation, CSUTCB. In both chambers of parliament, there are two different MAS caucuses. Each will negotiate positions and act in unity with factions of the right-wing opposition according to their current interests.

The campesino social base of the Morales faction is centered in the Chapare region of Cochabamba. The government faction, on the other hand, is built from the state, supporting itself on the middle class and white-mestizo professionals and technocrats, although it does have popular, peasant, and indigenous support in some regions like Santa Cruz. Despite the violent dispute between Morales and Arce, the truth is that they both respond to the same interests—leaders of big business  and capitalists—and they are in agreement on leaning on Chinese and Russian capital, while the right-wing opposition is more comfortable with U.S. imperialism.

When the Chamber of Commerce demanded that Arce free all exports (even if the internal market was not covered), Morales was a fervent supporter of their demands, also adding that the government should remove the Financial Transaction Tax targeting banks and other financial institutions. A few days later, Arce signed a 10-point agreement with the Chamber, conceding to their demands.

The coup attempt of June 26, 2024, demonstrates that the political cycle that started with the 2019 coup d’état has not closed. The military and the police are key political actors, and the upper ranks  of these repressive institutions can play a decisive role in national politics. As army tanks rammed the former presidential palace door and military police took control of the central Plaza Murillo (where both the executive and legislative powers reside), the initial response from across the political spectrum was to reject any potential rupture of constitutional order. As support from military barracks for former commander Zuñiga [the leader of the June 2024 coup attempt] failed to materialize, a new high command was designated, and the situation began to de-escalate. After this point, tensions between the government and opposition (including Morales) began to grow, with accusations against Arce of an attempted self-coup or act of political theater.

For revolutionary socialists, the issue is not whether the failed coup attempt was part of a government plan, but the growing tendency of state repression against workers, peasants, and feminist, women’s, and LGBTQ+ movements, along with the role of the military as a political actor. Neither faction of what was the MAS (Morales’s followers have resigned from the party en masse, announcing they will form a new political organization) offers any alternative to the working people of the city and the countryside. Both have taken every possible opportunity to negotiate with the traditional oligarchy and to guarantee the continuity of their business interests.

During Morales’s government, there was a notable increase in state repression, including the repression of the indigenous march in defense of the TIPNIS Indigenous Territory-National Park Isiboro-Sécure, the persecution of trade unions, and the student movement for public university funding. The Arce government, lacking charismatic leadership, depends on the judicial system and the police in its attempt to guarantee stability. The judicial hierarchy has taken it upon itself to extend its own terms and partially suspend the democratic elections of judges. It has legalized tens of thousands of hectares of land for large agribusiness (in violation of the country’s Constitution). The judicial system is the final instance to resolve conflicts within a state that is in a deep organic crisis, serving class interests.

While business leaders and bankers continue to keep their dollars in tax havens and funnel cash into the black market, the MAS government has systematically attacked independent workers’ unions, peasant unions, and activists within the women’s movement. Dozens of peasant union leaders linked to Morales have been arrested in media operations on charges of terrorism or sedition. Feminists, LGBTQ+ people, and activists are persecuted for participating in demonstrations, such as marches in solidarity with Palestine or against the economic crisis.

Certain sectors of the Left in the United States view Bolivia and the MAS in particular as an important model for advancing the conditions of workers and oppressed communities and resisting imperialism. In contrast, you’ve argued that Morales came to power through a diversion of significant processes of class struggle. Can you explain further how this helps us understand the current crisis in Bolivia?

The anti-neoliberal resistance of workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, and youth from 2000 to 2005 in Bolivia marked several important victories. The Water War in Cochabamba (2000) overturned the World Bank’s attempts to privatize the region’s water supplies. The Gas War, with its epicenter in the city of El Alto (2003), toppled the government of business leader Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and left a clear mandate for the October agenda. This agenda, which was a product of the assemblies, called for not selling gas through Chile, nationalizing the natural resources of the country, and holding a constitutional assembly.

In the different struggles from 2003 to 2005, every time a president resigned, instead of calling for a government of the workers, the MAS party made a case for constitutional succession, even in 2005 when the state reached a point of running out of potential successors, naming the head of the Supreme Court as interim president. From the moment Morales took office, MAS leaders emphasized that this “revolution” was not an anti-capitalist revolution but rather a democratic and cultural one. It sought to “humanize” the most  savage expressions of neoliberalism without questioning the capitalist social relations that underpin it. Even though the representatives of the capitalist class were severely de-legitimized, the MAS systematically sought to include them as part of the “process of change.” The consequence was a gradual economic and social strengthening of those capitalist classes while the popular masses were demobilized. The institutional and legal reforms implemented to supposedly advance the “decolonization of the state and society” were fundamental to this demobilization, while the state rebuilt a new political regime, stronger than the state that the national uprisings had overthrown.

The social strengthening of the capitalists, accelerated by the rise in commodity prices after the 2008 boom, encouraged them to regain direct control over the state after Morales’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies provoked widespread rejection from the middle classes. This situation eventually led to the 2019 coup d’état. At that time, the divorce between union and social movement leaders and the grassroots became all too evident. Fourteen years of state co-optation and the corruption of the bureaucracies of the social organizations had left the vast majority of workers without any form of organization to resist the coup.

When the coup plotters and paramilitary groups burned the wiphala (the traditional flag of Bolivia’s indigenous resistance) and committed violent racist acts, the workers and peoples were forced to improvise new organizations for mobilization, ignoring state officials and leaders aligned with the MAS, who, like Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera, chose to run away rather than confront the coup. This crisis of representation is still very much present, impeding broader resistance to the austerity measures but also opening the possibility of new political phenomena emerging from these crises, drawing lessons from the progressive political cycle.

For us, the members of the LOR-CI (Revolutionary Workers’ League for the Fourth International), this situation poses important challenges and demands that we advance in the struggle to build a true Revolutionary Workers’ Party.

Morales was elected as the first indigenous president in a country where indigenous people have long suffered from extreme poverty, racism, and marginalization. Have things changed since the MAS first took office, and what are the conditions facing indigenous people today?

Evidently, the boom in the price of natural gas, alongside a policy of redistributing surplus public revenue, allowed a significant portion of the peasant and indigenous population to begin to form part of a new middle class. This exceptional economic situation, combined with the policies of social and state inclusion for broad sectors that had previously been excluded, facilitated a partial democratization of society. This was expressed, for example, in the recognition of legal pluralism by incorporating the indigenous and peasant justice system into the national legal system. We could also mention the so-called indigenous and regional autonomies that allowed for the incorporation of the uses, customs, and forms of organization of indigenous communities as part of the “plurinational” state structure. These democratizing measures, combined with the price boom that enabled the social ascent of important sectors of the population, helped rebuild the battered bourgeois political regime while encouraging the demobilization of the mass movement. These and other democratic provisions, far from being simply initiatives of Morales, were truly the fruits of mass struggles, modifying the balance of forces between the classes during the cycle of uprisings from 2000 to 2005.

Today, the capitalists threaten to take back every conquest of the workers, peasants, and popular movements, but the workers and the people will not passively accept a return to the neoliberal conditions of the 1990s. The crisis of the Arce government is deepening in all respects, and it is clear that the future holds new and tougher class struggles. The Bolivian mass movement defeated the Áñez coup government after the August 2020 rebellion. In that sense, the balance of forces between the classes is not predetermined. It is on this basis that the socialist revolutionaries of the LOR-CI are preparing to intervene.

General elections will take place later this year. What are some possible scenarios for these elections?

The elections are marked by a deep representation crisis combined with a very fragile economic situation. The gas-based accumulation cycle has reached its end, and lithium is still only a promise. The shortage of dollars, gasoline, and diesel strongly affects working families’ pockets.

The growing social unrest can be seen in the endless lines to load diesel and gasoline, while big businesses profit from speculation, which also affects the supply and access to food, increasing prices. The desperation is evident in the markets and in tense fights at food-distribution centers, such as the state stores of EMAPA [Empresa de Apoyo a la Producción de Alimentos], where products are sold at “controlled prices.”

The Bolivian state subsidizes gasoline and diesel, importing them at international prices and selling them at 3.72 bolivianos ⁴Bolivia’s currencyand 6.73 bolivianos in the domestic market. The big beneficiaries of this subsidy are the agro-industrial and mining companies.

In this context, the elections are scheduled for August 17, and it remains to be decided whether the ruling faction of MAS and the right-wing opposition will allow Morales’s candidacy. Over the last months and years, there has been a systematic campaign to ban Morales, even though he is the caudillo who still polls highest among voters. As we can see, Morales no longer has the strength and hegemony he enjoyed for almost 14 years, but he is still the strongest among all the other weak candidates. If Morales is banned, the entire electoral process will be tainted and delegitimized as undemocratic, while Morales remains a political mediator in case of new social convulsions or outbreaks of class struggle. If the Arce government and the right-wing opposition are forced to recognize the candidacy of Morales, we will likely face a very polarized scenario in the electoral contest, where events similar to the 2019 crisis cannot be ruled out.

As you can see, it is a very open scenario. The prospects, beyond who may be the eventual winner, involve a weak government supported by deeply de-legitimized institutions and within the framework of growing social and political polarization that encourages the emergence of “outsiders” and diverse political phenomena. We are preparing for a scenario of greater crisis and class struggle.