Former Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is visiting Caracas briefly, used the occasion of an interview with journalist Ernesto Villegas to bring up an interview which Col. Richard Black (ret.), former state senator from Virginia, had given to Sputnik, published Dec. 10, 2019, in which Black denounced the vicious U.S. treatment of Venezuela and Bolivia, particularly attacking the U.S. role in the coup that had ousted Morales just a month earlier.
Holding up a picture of Black, who he described as a “Republican Senator,” Morales referenced Black’s discussion of the coup (which Morales referred to as a “lithium coup") and the U.S. role in it, including even choosing Morales’s successor, right-wing fanatic Jeanine Añez. “You know,” Black said, “again here we are, the U.S. is selecting its anointed ruler. I just believe it would have been better for Bolivians to work things out themselves.” Had there been “irregularities” in the elections, he continued—that’s what the State Department claimed—they “were the subject of internal struggles in Bolivia. I just don’t think it’s up to us to sort it out.” Black went on to say that the U.S. was likely concerned “that the Chinese might begin to exert influence within Bolivia. And that it might have somehow made it more difficult for the United States to obtain lithium for batteries that we’re now using in automobiles.... I think it was part of the equation at least.”
