Election in Bolivia Might Give US an Important Ally

While the U.S. navy blows up drug boats in Caribbean waters off Venezuela, Latin America’s narco-communism could be taking another direct hit in the Andean country of Bolivia, through the ballot box.

“I hope that Trump takes out that criminal Maduro. It would be a signal to his friends here” said a taxi driver in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, who will be casting his vote for conservative candidate Antonio “Tuto” Quiroga in elections this Sunday.

It may be hard to imagine how events in this remote, landlocked but mineral rich nation that’s among the most impoverished in Latin America, can influence U.S. geopolitical interests. But a victory for Quiroga would be a major boost for president Trump’s efforts to align regional support for ousting Venezuela’s narco-socialist regime. It would end the two decade rule of Maduro’s similarly corrupt Bolivian allies that are turning the country’s strategic rare earth mineral reserves over to China.

Quiroga has vowed to bring back U.S. anti-drug agencies expelled by former president Evo Morales, to conduct a massive crack down on illegal coca leaf plantations and cocaine processing labs growing exponentially in the region of Chapare, which is the main stronghold of Morales’ ruling MAS party. He also vows to fully prosecute Morales on pending criminal charges that the MAS administration under current president Luis Arce, wont pursue.

“Tuto will open a new front in Trump’s war against the drug cartels,” says a Bolivian ex-army officer. Quiroga recently visited Washington for meetings with officials at the State Department and the NSC. Bolivia is the world’s third largest producer of cocaine, feeding much of its product to Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles in exchange for past financial backing, technical and military support.

But the U.S. stake in Bolivia now reaches beyond the war on drugs. The country contains one of the world’s largest proven reserves of Lithium in the Salar de Uyuni, a thick 10,000 square kilometer salt lake occupying the Andean high plain.

China has been scheming to control the rare earth reserves through a series of contracts with the MAS government, extending a $1 billion loan as a holding fee. Opponents in the Congress have held up approval of the agreements, and Quiroga wants to flip control of what could become the world’s largest lithium mine over to the U.S.

He is proposing a joint venture between Wall Street hedge funds and a Bolivian public company his government would create to distribute $1,500 shares in the lithium mine project to all Bolivian families. A former administrator of state energy and mining enterprises, Jaime Davila, says it’s a privatization scheme that would ultimately involve the buying up the state issued shares by the American investors, locking in U.S. ownership of Bolivia’s strategic minerals.

Latest opinion polls place Quiroga 8 — 10 points ahead of “centrist” candidate Rodrigo Paz but shy of a majority, with 13 percent saying they are undecided or casting blank ballots.

Bolivians suffering the standard effects of socialist misrule — rampant inflation, currency restrictions blocking availability of dollars, crippling fuel shortages whose effects are seen in the mile long cues of trucks outside gas stations — virtually wiped MAS off the political map in last August’s first election round between five candidates.

The ruling party’s official candidate scored 3 percent of the vote, or barely enough for the group to maintain representation in Congress.

The international media has bought into the narrative that the left is dead in Bolivia and that both Quiroga and Paz equally represent a shift to the right. But a closer examination of Paz’s political legacy and the background of his closest advisors indicate that beneath a softer populist rhetoric and the adoption of a defunct Christian Democrat grouping to label his new party, he is deeply compromised with the corrupt radical leftists and narco-trafficking interests that have driven Bolivia to the abyss.

Rodrigo Paz is the son of Jaime Paz Zamora, founder of the radical Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) which plotted armed revolution with Fidel Castro back in the 1980s and whose communist flag is unfurled at his rallies.

His campaign manager and chief fund raiser is convicted drug lord Oscar Eid who was released from prison when Paz senior occupied the presidency in the early 1990s, through a highly controversial amnesty decree pardoning drug traffickers “regretting” their crimes.

Paz senior was himself eventually indicted for narco links based on sworn testimony before a U.S. federal court by an extradited police chief. But the case against him was never pursued and his U.S. visa restrictions were lifted through the diligent efforts of the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia at the time, Manuel Rocha, recently charged by the FBI as a Cuban mole.

Much controversy also surrounds Rodrigo Paz’s running mate, ex-police captain Edman Lara who was expelled from the force over accusations of extortion. He went on to get a law degree from the Bolivarian Union University, a Venezuelan funded college directed by Venezuela’s ambassador in Bolivia, Cesar Trompis.

“We are seeing another Petro” says a former senior U.S. intelligence officer with extensive experience in Latin America, comparing Paz with the current president of Colombia, a former member of a leftist guerrilla group who got elected on a moderate platform and turned into an ally of Maduro.

Quiroga says that Paz-Lara are the “ continuity” of the MAS regime so resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of Bolivians. Some fear that Morales’ political machine which still controls much of the rural vote that counts 3 to 1 over the urban vote in his drafted constitution, is secretly backing Paz, having delivered his surprisingly strong showing in last August’s primary elections in which he received the largest vote share.

Some analysts suspect foul play. An engineer who has held a variety of technical positions in Bolivian state enterprises and multinational corporations, Ivan Fernandez, has presented a study of results in recent elections which indicate what in Spanish he calls a “fraude depurativo,” by which anti-government voters are systematically purged from rolls or get ballots switched to blank votes during the count until a majority is secured for the “deep state” candidate.

“MAS opponents have signed countless protest petitions filed with the government over the years, in which they wrote their national ID numbers. This information gets cross referenced with the voter rolls” says Fernandez.

It’s the same system used to fix elections in Venezuela which failed in the last 2024 elections because the opposition vote was so overwhelming that it surpassed electronic capacities to alter it. The opposition also managed to receive authentic vote tallies from local precincts before they could be electronically manipulated through the centralized count.

A prominent Bolivian opposition lawyer and law professor, Christian Barrientos, told The American Spectator of how he was shocked to discover he was erased from official registries when he went to renew his professional credentials last week.

He says that he has heard of other similar cases in recent days, including that of his father, who worked with the U.S. embassy in drafting anti-drug legislation and whose national ID number is now assigned to someone else.

Morales tried pulling off a fraudulent election victory in 2019 when attempts to hack into the vote count were uncovered by the opposition and denounced before Bolivia’s supreme court. The U.S. convened an emergency session of the OAS which condemned Morales, who was forced to resign when the army refused to put down mass protests calling for his ouster.

The Trump administration and its regional allies need to remain equally vigilant this time around. A golden chance to strike a stinging blow against narco driven socialism in Latin America while challenging China’s rare earth monopoly used to blackmail the U.S. on trade, might otherwise be lost.