Last week, Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo spent some days in Washington, where he met with Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and announced “our arms are open” to a new relationship with the U.S. to share “common values.” In remarks to Fox News Digital he said that President Rodrigo Paz Pereira is interested in breaking up China’s monopoly on mining Bolivia’s natural resources, “particularly lithium.” Bolivia “seeks a long-term relationship with the U.S.,” Aramayo said, noting that the U.S. has “a lot of experience in sustainable extraction of resources…. We want to take advantage of that.”
This of course is the watchword of the Trump administration, to get China out of Ibero-America, as is clear in the current onslaught against Venezuela. Both China and Russia have had significant investments in Bolivian mining, and under both Evo Morales and Luis Arce, the relationship with China’s Belt and Road Initiative was consolidated. Aramayo pointedly referenced the expansion of drug cartels throughout South America and complained about the “narco-authorities” he claimed have governed the country over the past two decades—a reference to Evo Morales and Luis Arce, who served as Morales’ Finance Minister before becoming President in November 2020. President Rodrigo Paz has said he is doing everything “to free Bolivia of the narcoterrorism” he claimed Morales and Arce represented.
Notably, at the end of last week, former President Arce was swept up on a street in La Paz, as he walked alone, by hooded individuals who pushed him into a van with shaded windows. He subsequently was taken before a judge, who accused him of embezzlement from the Indigenous Development Fund while he served as Finance Minister, and sentenced him to five months of “preventive detention” at the San Pedro prison. This is allegedly because he represented a flight risk or a threat to obstruct the investigation.
