In a broad-ranging interview with former Bolivian President Evo Morales published July 15 in Consortium News, Matt Kennard of Declassified U.K. asked Morales to comment on the news that Kennard himself had publicized in March of 2021 that the British embassy in Laz Paz and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) were involved in the November 2019 coup against Morales and in subsequent activity to secure looting rights to Bolivia’s natural resources, specifically its large lithium deposits.
Morales told Kennard that when he first learned about the UK involvement in the coup, which Kennard himself had publicized in great detail in a March, 2021 Declassified UK article using FCO documents his publication had obtained, he was convinced that the coup was related to the issue of class struggle but saw it was “also an attack on our economic model, a model that belongs to the people, not to empire, not to the International Monetary Fund,” but one based on Bolivia having sovereign control over its natural resources through nationalization and using that sovereign control to industrialize and develop the nation.
This was the model Morales established during his 13 years as President, and this, he said, is what empire can’t accept or forgive—"that there is another model better than neoliberalism, that another world is possible, that another Bolivia is possible.”
In his 2021 article, Kennard, who is a chief investigator at Declassified UK, had shown that the coup against Morales was very much an Anglo-American effort. Clearly on orders from the FCO, the British embassy in La Paz had coordinated with British financial and intelligence networks but also with the U.S. State Department and Organization of American States (OAS) to lay the groundwork for the coup. The British government fully backed Janine Anez, the right-wing religious fanatic illegally installed after Morales’s ouster, after which the UK embassy declared itself to be Anez’s “strategic partner” and went to work coordinating with London to advance the involvement of British companies in exploiting lithium and other of Bolivia’s vast natural resources.
Morales found it “incomprehensible” that the Foreign Office replied “there was no coup” when Kennard contacted it about his initial investigation showing otherwise. “This is a totally colonial mindset,” Morales said. “They think that some countries are the property of other nations. They think God put them there, so the world belongs to the U.S. and the UK. That’s why the rebellions and the uprisings will continue.”
