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The overthrow
of
Evo Morales and the first lithium war (Britain's Role)
Voltaire Network,
by Thierry Meyssan
Mar 16, 2021
The world was used to oil wars since the end of the 19th century.
Now the wars over lithium, a mineral that is essential for mobile
phones, but above all for electric cars, are beginning. Foreign Office
documents obtained by a British historian and journalist show that the
UK engineered the overthrow of Bolivian president Evo Morales to steal
the country's lithium reserves.
While you were watching him clown around, Boris Johnson oversaw the
overthrow of President Morales in Bolivia, occupied the island of
Socotra off the coast of Yemen, and organised Turkey's victory over
Armenia. You haven't heard any discussion of this.
Remember the overthrow of Bolivian President Evo Morales in late 2019.
At the time, the mainstream press claimed that he had turned his
country into a dictatorship and had just been ousted by his people. The
Organisation of American States (OAS) issued a report certifying that
the elections had been rigged and that democracy was being restored.
However, President Morales, who feared he would end up like Chilean
President Salvador Allende and had fled to Mexico, denounced a coup
d'état organised to seize the country's lithium reserves. But he failed
to identify the principals and was met with nothing but sarcasm in the
West. Only we revealed that the operation had been carried out by a
community of Croatian Ustasha Catholics, present in the country in
Santa Cruz since the end of the Second World War; a NATO stay-behind
network [1].
A year later, President Morales' party won new elections by a large
majority [2]. There was no challenge and he was able to return
triumphantly to his country [3]. His so-called dictatorship had never
existed, while that of Jeanine Áñez had just been overthrown at the
ballot box.
Historian Mark Curtis and journalist Matt Kennard had access to
declassified Foreign Office documents which they studied. They
published their findings on the Declassified UK website, based in South
Africa since its military censorship in the UK [4].
Throughout his work, Mark Curtis has shown that UK policy was hardly
changed by decolonisation. We have cited his work in dozens of articles
on Voltaire Network.
It appears that the overthrow of President Morales was a commission
from the Foreign Office and elements of the CIA that eluded the Trump
administration. Its aim was to steal the country's lithium, which the
UK covets in the context of the energy transition.
The Obama administration had already attempted a coup d'état in 2009,
which was repressed by President Morales and led to the expulsion of
several US diplomats and officials. In contrast, the Trump
administration apparently gave the neoconservatives a free hand in
Latin America, but systematically prevented them from carrying out
their plans.
Lithium is a component of batteries. It is found mainly in the brines
of high-altitude salt deserts in the mountains of Chile, Argentina and
especially Bolivia ("the lithium triangle"), and even in Tibet, the
"salars". But also in solid form in certain minerals extracted from
mines, particularly in Australia. It is essential for the transition
from petrol cars to electric vehicles. It has therefore become a more
important issue than oil in the context of the Paris Agreements
supposed to combat global warming.
In February 2019, President Evo Morales gave permission to a Chinese
company, TBEA Group, to exploit his country's main lithium reserves.
The UK therefore devised a plan to steal it.
Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, became president of Bolivia in 2006. He
represented the producers of coca; a local plant essential to life at
high altitude, but also a powerful drug banned worldwide by the US
virtue leagues. His election and governance marked the return of the
Indians to power who had been excluded since Spanish colonisation.
- As early as 2017-18, the UK sent experts to Bolivia's national
company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB), to assess the
conditions for Bolivian lithium mining. - In 2019-20, London funded a
study to "optimise the exploration and production of Bolivian lithium
using British technology". - In April 2019, the UK Embassy in Buenos
Aires organised a seminar with representatives from Argentina, Chile
and Bolivia mining companies and governments, to present the benefits
of using the London Metal Exchange. The Morales administration was
represented by one of its ministers. - Immediately after the coup, the
Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) was found to be financing the
British projects. - The Foreign Office had commissioned - long before
the coup - an Oxford company, Satellite Applications Catapult, to map
lithium reserves. It was not paid by the IADB until after the overthrow
of President Morales. - A few months later, the UK embassy in La Paz
organised a seminar for 300 stakeholders with the help of Watchman UK.
This company specialises in how to involve people in projects that
violate their interests, in order to prevent them from revolting.
Before and after the coup, the British embassy in Bolivia neglected the
capital La Paz and focused on the Santa Cruz region, where the Ustasha
Croats had legally taken power. There, it multiplied cultural and
commercial events.
To neutralise the Bolivian banks, the British embassy in La Paz
organised a seminar on computer security eight months before the coup.
The diplomats introduced DarkTrace (a company set up by the British
internal security services), explaining that only banks that used
DarkTrace for their security would be able to work with the City.
According to Mark Curtis and Matthew Kennard, the US did not
participate in the plot as such, but officials left the CIA to prepare
it. DarkTrace, for example, recruited Marcus Fowler, a CIA cyber
operations specialist, and especially Alan Wade, the agency's former
head of intelligence. Most of the operation's personnel were British,
including the heads of Watchman UK, Christopher Goodwin-Hudson (a
former career military officer, then director of security at
Goldman-Sachs) and Gabriel Carter (a member of the very private Special
Forces Club in Knightsbridge who had distinguished himself in
Afghanistan).
The historian and the journalist also state that the British embassy
provided the Organisation of American States with the data it used to
'prove' that the election had been rigged; a report that was later
refuted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) [5] before being refuted by the Bolivians themselves during the
following elections.
The current situation proves Mark Curtis's work as a historian right.
For example, in the three years since the coup in Bolivia (2019), we
have shown London's role in the Yemen war (2020) [6] and the
Nagorno-Karabakh war (2020) [7].
The UK conducts short wars and covert operations, if possible without
the media picking up on its actions. It controls the perception of its
presence through a multitude of news agencies and media outlets that it
secretly subsidises. It creates unmanageable living conditions for
those on whom it imposes them. It uses them to exploit the country to
its advantage. Moreover, it can keep this situation going for as long
as possible in the certainty that its victims will still appeal to it,
it only being capable of calming the conflict it has created itself.
Thierry Meyssan Translation Roger Lagassé
Mark Curtis
http://markcurtis.info/2007/02/01/web-of-deceit/