Bolivian President Luis Arce announced on June 18 that his government is restarting construction of the Mutún Steel plant in the southeastern department (state) of Santa Cruz, a flagship project vital to the country’s industrialization, but shut down in 2020 by the fascist-leaning Jeanine Áñez government that illegally seized power in November 2019, after overthrowing then-President Evo Morales in a Maidan-style, State Department-backed coup. Áñez’s government of neoliberal speculators shut down a total of 800 development projects, looted state-sector companies, and prepared to hand over natural resources to foreign financial interests.
The agreement Bolivia signed with China’s Sinosteel in 2017 was to have allowed development of the huge iron ore deposits at Mutún, estimated at 40 billion tons, and building the country’s first steel plant. A new Memorandum of Understanding was signed in February of this year with Sinosteel and the state company ESM to restart the project. The “Mutún Model,” as it was known, reflected the Morales government’s policy of taking control of its natural resources as a means of guaranteeing the nation’s sovereign economic development—as it did with the 2008 renationalization of its natural gas and oil reserves and enterprises. Lyndon LaRouche supported that policy, stating at the time that, “privatization has been cancelled. The castration of Bolivia has ended, and this has some very significant implications for the entire continent.” https://larouchepub.com/other/2019/4632-bolivia_sets_its_sights_on_fus.html
