Bolivia: From Judicial Plan Condor to Lithium Blackmail

By Geraldina Colotti  –  June 5, 2026

As the Latin American continent faces a new wave of reactionary counteroffensive, Bolivia is emerging as the epicenter of a relentless class struggle, where the logic of transnational capital seeks to subjugate the sovereignty of a nation that has dared to rebuild itself on plurinational foundations. For over a month, the country has been rocked by protests, demonstrations, and more than 90 roadblocks in at least seven departments.

The response from the government of Rodrigo Paz has followed the script characteristic of the colonial restoration plans dictated from Washington: the Senate’s approval of the State of Emergency Regulation Law and the public entry onto the scene of the Pentagon and the US Department of War.

The voices of Evo Morales and Wilma Colque in Bolivia’s struggle
In this scenario of resistance and siege, the voices of indigenous leader and former president Evo Morales Ayma and of leader Wilma Colque, representative of the Coordinating Committee of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba, have the value of an indispensable theoretical and practical testimony. Their analyses were part of two important international forums dedicated to solidarity with the Bolivian people and to denouncing the imperialist attack on the Patria Grande: one promoted by Argentinian popular organizations, and the other organized by the Bolivarian Socialist Workers’ Central of Venezuela (CBST).

Instead of being mere chronicles of a regional crisis, their analyses reveal the invisible threads connecting domestic neoliberalism with global strategies for the plundering of strategic resources. The context in which these denunciations resonate is no accident.

The Bolivarian Socialist Workers’ Central of Venezuela, faithful to the tradition of proletarian internationalism and aware that imperialist aggression does not respect geopolitical borders, has transformed its weekly meetings into an ideological stronghold: more necessary than ever at this moment of maximum aggression and growing imperialist blackmail against the Bolivarian Revolution, following the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. Discussing Bolivia in Caracas, or in forums of continental solidarity, means recognizing that the fate of the peoples of the region is closely intertwined.

The criminalization of Bolivian popular forces, the combined use of lawfare and open violence, are not isolated phenomena, but rather follow the same script applied against every attempt at self-determination in the continent. In this space for coordination, the vanguard of the labor and peasant movements has denounced how the current US administration is encircling the anti-imperialist axis, identifying the fall of plurinational Bolivia as the necessary piece for the economic recolonization of the entire region, which began with the blackmailing of Venezuela.

The global nature of the confrontation has been laid bare without filters by the statements of US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Through his X account, the senior White House official has cast aside the mask of formal diplomacy, labeling the leaders of the Bolivian social organizations spearheading the protests as “narco-terrorists.”

The use of this linguistic and legal category is not new in the history of Latin America; it is the same security paradigm used during the darkest years of Operation Condor to justify political extermination and the annihilation of popular movements. Hegseth, speaking on behalf of the Department of War and the nascent Anti-Cartel Coalition of the Americas (A3C), reaffirmed Washington’s unconditional support for the right-wing government of Rodrigo Paz Pereira, warning that the United States “is watching what is happening in Bolivia” to ensure that a return to the old status quo of “criminal domination” is not permitted.

Evo Morales Ayma’s response to this explicit act of interference was immediate and forceful. The leader of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS-IPCP) underscored how the United States seeks, once again, to exercise colonial control over the nation’s internal affairs. In his address at the CBST’s international forum, Morales dismantled the empire’s narrative.

“While the people struggle to defend their economy, their natural resources, and their right to determine their own destiny, the United States is once again meddling to support a government that is increasingly under scrutiny,” he said. “Now they are once again resorting to the rhetoric of ‘narco-terrorism’ to stigmatize social protest and the legitimate demands of those who defend democracy, sovereignty, and our common goods. Bolivia needs neither guardianship nor threats.”

The former president then drew a lucid picture of the ongoing coup d’état that is suffocating the country. This is not merely a government crisis, but a complex operation that Morales defines as a veritable “judicial Plan Condor.” The first step in this strategy has been the structural hollowing out of democratic institutions and the outlawing of genuinely revolutionary forces. Morales explained in detail how magistrates and judges have operated outside the constitutional mandate to strip the MAS-IPCP of its social base, preventing the most popular leaders from participating in politics.

This “preliminary electoral scam” allowed the rise to power of neoliberal forces led by Rodrigo Paz, an administration that today governs without a real consensus. The macroeconomic and social data presented by Morales are telling: rampant inflation, a return to dependence on the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, and a de facto devaluation of the national currency have destroyed workers’ purchasing power.

However, facing this institutional violence, the Bolivian people have responded with resistance and with numbers that refute the legitimacy touted from the government palace. Morales highlighted the historic result of the “Null Vote” in the latest municipal elections, which reached levels of 80% in single-member districts and saw the defeat of the government’s project in 169 municipalities.

This data aligns with current urban polls, which show popular rejection and a disapproval rating of President Paz’s administration nearing 87%. Bolivian neoliberalism, therefore, relies exclusively on bayonets and external support from the US Southern Command. The legal pillar of this authoritarian restoration is the Law on the Regulation of the State of Emergency, approved by the Senate at the end of a dramatic session in which three ministers of state participated, and now sent to the Chamber of Deputies for final approval.

An analysis of this bill reveals a subversive design aimed against the 2009 Plurinational Constitution itself. As Senator Wilder Veliz strongly decried—and as has been echoed in international forums—the State of Emergency Law grants a veritable “carte blanche” to security forces to repress and kill protesters. The law establishes that the armed forces may intervene in internal security operations whenever the police’s operational capacity is deemed insufficient, extending military control over “critical infrastructure,” water systems, telecommunications, and strategic roadways.

The most disturbing and brutal element of the law is the introduction of a presumption of legality and good faith for actions carried out by the military and police during a state of emergency. In practical terms, this means that the use of lethal force against roadblocks and popular assemblies will be considered legitimate a priori by the state, guaranteeing legal impunity and even government technical and legal assistance to those who carry out the massacres.

As Senator Veliz pointed out, this provision openly violates international human rights treaties and systematically paves the way for a political genocide against communities in struggle.

Wilma Colque and the materiality of land: the agrarian crisis
While Evo Morales’s analysis defines the macro-political framework, the testimony of Wilma Colque, a prominent representative of the indigenous and peasant organizations of the Tropics of Cochabamba, restores the material reality of the daily drama experienced by the grassroots. Hers is not a theoretical abstraction, but the story of barren land, of work in the fields, and of hunger rearing its head once again in homes.

Colque condemned the devastating impact of fuel shortages and smuggling, a crisis caused by the Paz administration’s policies of rampant deregulation.

Bolivian agriculture, particularly in highly producing regions such as the Tropics, has undergone a profound process of mechanization over the past 20 years: the land is no longer worked solely by the tireless manual labor of the hoe, but through the use of tractors and machinery that are now paralyzed by the lack of diesel.

This disruption of the production chain has led to the collapse of food exports, such as banana crops, and to a dramatic food shortage in urban centers.

The social consequences of this economic disaster directly impact future generations: Colque estimated that 30,000-40,000 elementary school children have dropped out of school in recent months due to poverty and families’ inability to guarantee basic subsistence, a phenomenon similarly reflected in the dropout rate that is emptying the country’s public universities.

A central theme of Wilma Colque’s discourse concerns the defense of indigenous identity against the attempt at assimilation and symbolic annihilation carried out by the new neoliberal elites. The leader denounced with indignation the hypocrisy of right-wing candidates who, during election campaigns, do not hesitate to don the traditional poncho, take photos with women in polleras, and stammer phrases in native languages to win over the rural vote.

Once in power, however, those same garments and bodies become the targets of tear gas, rubber bullets, and lead projectiles fired by the police. In this context, the reappropriation of symbols becomes a revolutionary act. The Wiphala, Colque highlighted, is not an electoral flag or the logo of a political party: it is the millennia-old emblem of Andean resistance, a cosmogonic code that unites peoples across borders, extending to communities in struggle in Peru.

The Paz government’s attempt to ban or diminish the value of plurinational symbols responds to the colonial desire to erase the political subjectivity of indigenous peoples, reducing them once again to subordinate and invisible labor. The analytical convergence between Morales and Colque reaches its climax when they point out the true driving force behind the Bolivian crisis: control over strategic mineral reserves, primarily lithium and rare earths—metals essential to the West’s technological and industrial transition.

Bolivia in Crisis: In Conversation With Evo Morales

Bolivia possesses the largest lithium reserves on the planet, located in the heart of the geographical region known as the Lithium Triangle. While in neighboring countries, such as Kast’s Chile and Javier Milei’s Argentina, this resource has been completely sold off and handed over to US and European multinationals without any real benefit to local populations, the Bolivia of the plurinational revolution had initiated a model of sovereign industrialization with the state as the main actor.

Rodrigo Paz’s government operates as the internal agent tasked with dismantling this sovereign model to align with the extractive demands of Washington and the major corporations of Silicon Valley. To achieve this economic objective, the militarization of the territory has become an urgent necessity. Wilma Colque issued a detailed report that lifts the veil on the new forms of cyberwarfare and technological espionage being deployed on the ground.

“A surveillance system operated directly by US agencies,” she said, “has penetrated the tripartite borders between the departments of Cochabamba and La Paz. They have installed high-tech equipment capable of intercepting telecommunications signals, monitoring every call, every message, and every movement of union leaders. We know exactly where these bases are located, and we know that the ultimate goal is the capture of our brother Evo Morales, to display him as a political trophy for imperialism.”

In addition to this digital surveillance network, there is the old strategy of corruption and internal dirty war. Enormous financial resources, derived from international loans that never translate into public works for the people, are being funneled through briefcases containing up to $100,000 to buy the loyalty of compliant leaders, divide historic unions, and fracture the cohesion of the Coordinating Committee of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba.

Facing a repressive apparatus that has equipped itself with special legal instruments to legalize the massacre and with foreign technologies for social control, the response coming from the communities in struggle is not one of submission, but of historical dignity. The conclusion of Wilma Colque’s speech resonates as a manifesto of political ethics for the entire continent. Indigenous women—the mothers who have seen generations of their children fight against the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s—stand today as the guardians of the future of the Patria Grande.

The message is clear: if the Paz government decides to declare a state of siege over the weekend, social movements will take to the streets with their children to engage in mass civil disobedience, withdrawing young people from the barracks and employing tactics of territorial self-defense, such as controlled power outages and the disruption of internet networks to blind the state’s espionage apparatus.

Bolivia’s struggle, as articulated by Evo Morales and Wilma Colque in international forums, demonstrates that the conflict is not about supposed institutional stability or the bureaucratic management of a crisis. What is at stake is the choice between being an extractive colony subordinate to the Pentagon’s geopolitical needs or remaining a sovereign Plurinational State, where the land, lithium, and the fate of men and women belong to those who work them and defend them. “We are millions,” the indigenous leader recalls, “and we are willing to die, but not to bow our heads.”

 

 

(Resumen Latinoamericano English)