Oscar Holder­er, the last known mem­ber of Oper­a­tion Paper­clip, has died: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32620119

A note on Hel­la Pöch — if one looks care­ful­ly at the title page of her 1957 arti­cle (her only one post-war and strange­ly based on old research from Africa rather than any­thing from Indone­sia, one sees that she, or who­ev­er was using her name, nonethe­less was mak­ing no effort to hide her where­abouts at that time: “z.Z (i.e. ‘at present’)Sumbawa besar, Indone­sien”. Hid­ing in plain sight?

Here’s the link:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/29537136?uid=3737864&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21106326578341

One of the many inter­est­ing open ques­tions about the South Amer­i­can activ­i­ties of the post-war Nazi dias­po­ra is what role it may have played/still played in the South Amer­i­can drug trade. Espe­cial­ly giv­en the his­to­ry of Klaus Bar­bie and the Boli­vian “cocaine coup”.

Relat­ed to that, Paul Krug­man has a post with some rather dark humor relat­ed to Wall Street that also just might apply to the Under­ground Reich...at least the South Amer­i­ca com­po­nent: Just how coked up are the peo­ple run­ning the world?:

The New York Times
The Con­science of a Lib­er­al
Sex and Drugs and Zero Rates

Paul Krug­man
May 29 6:52 am

Bloomberg has a clever chart, show­ing just how many traders have nev­er seen an econ­o­my not at the zero low­er bound:
[see chart]
This cries out, of course, for a call­back to my favorite blog com­ment ever, on Kevin O’Rourke’s What Do Mar­kets Want? Saith the com­menter,

The mar­kets want mon­ey for cocaine and pros­ti­tutes. I am dead­ly seri­ous.

Most peo­ple don’t real­ize that “the mar­kets” are in real­i­ty 22–27 year old busi­ness school grad­u­ates, furi­ous­ly con­coct­ing chaot­ic trad­ing strate­gies on excel sheets and report­ing to boss­es per­haps 5 years senior to them. In addi­tion, they gen­er­al­ly pos­sess the men­tal­i­ty and prob­a­bly intel­li­gence of junior cycle sec­ondary school stu­dents. With­out knowl­edge of these basic facts, noth­ing about the mar­kets makes any sense—and with knowl­edge, every­thing does.

...

Is cocaine fuel­ing Wall Street? Seems very pos­si­ble.

But con­sid­er­ing the prox­im­i­ty of the Nazi dias­po­ra to the heart of the cocaine trade, you real­ly have to won­der just how coked out South Amer­i­ca’s Nazis have been all these years? Some­thing like that sure would help a move­ment dead set on ris­ing again (metaphor­i­cal­ly speak­ing).

That said, cocaine may not be the Under­ground Riech’s drug of choice. But regard­less of what they may have been snort­ing of not, the ques­tion of the poten­tial role played by the Nazi under­ground in South Amer­i­ca is one of those dif­fi­cult to answer ques­tions that’s prob­a­bly going to remain very rel­e­vant for many years to come.

Oh look, a US-backed right-wing coup. In Bolivia. Again: Fol­low­ing the dec­la­ra­tion by the Boli­vian mil­i­tary lead­er­ship that Pres­i­dent Evo Morales must step down (mak­ing this an unam­bigu­ous coup), we’re learn­ing more about the forces behind the protests about ‘elec­tion irreg­u­lar­i­ties’. It turns out there’s min­i­mal evi­dence of elec­tion irreg­u­lar­i­ties but abun­dant evi­dence that the peo­ple behind this coup are far right Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers with a lega­cy that goes back to the Boli­vian Social­ist Falange, the group that gave shel­ter to Klaus Bar­bie. Sur­prise.

The leader of the coup, Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho, is an overt Chris­t­ian fas­cist with deep ties to sep­a­ratist move­ments in the wealth San­ta Cruz region. Cama­cho him­self comes from a fam­i­ly of cor­po­rate elites from Bolivi­a’s nat­ur­al gas indus­try, which hap­pens to be one of the indus­tries most impact­ed by Morales’s left-wing poli­cies. Cama­cho also has exten­sive ties to groups in Wash­ing­ton DC and the US gov­ern­ment. He was groomed by the fas­cists para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion, the Unión Juve­nil Cruceñista, or San­ta Cruz Youth Union (UJC). It’s mem­bers are known for their Nazi-style salutes.

Cama­cho was elect­ed as vice pres­i­dent of the UJC in 2002. He left a cou­ple years lat­er to build in fam­i­ly’s busi­ness empire and rose through the ranks of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee, where he was tak­en under the wing of a Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch Banko Marinkovic. Marinkovic appears to have fam­i­ly ties going back to the Ustache. In 2013, it was report­ed that the US gov­ern­ment was work­ing with the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee to encour­age the breakup of Bolivia. A 2008 NY Times pro­file of Marinkovic describe the polit­i­cal under­cur­rents in San­ta Cruz as, “a bas­tion of open­ly xeno­pho­bic groups like the Boli­vian Social­ist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspi­ra­tion from the fas­cist Falange of the for­mer Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­co.” Marinkovic rou­tine­ly uses the same kind of Chris­t­ian fas­cist rhetoric heard from Cama­cho in the wake of coup. Oh, and it turns out Marinkovic was impli­cat­ed in the bizarre 2009 assas­si­na­tion plot against Morales involv­ing the Szek­ler Legion group of inter­na­tion­al neo-Nazis. Marinkovic charged with pro­vid­ing the plot­ters $200,000. He denied the charges and ini­tial­ly fled to the US where he was giv­en asy­lum. He then relo­cat­ed to Brazil where he lives today. And Marinkovic is the ide­o­log­i­cal god father of the move­ment behind this US-backed coup and the ide­o­log­i­cal men­tor of its coups cur­rent pub­lic cham­pi­on:

The Gray Zone

Bolivia coup led by Chris­t­ian fas­cist para­mil­i­tary leader and mul­ti-mil­lion­aire – with for­eign sup­port

Boli­vian coup leader Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho is a far-right mul­ti-mil­lion­aire who arose from fas­cist move­ments in the San­ta Cruz region, where the US has encour­aged sep­a­ratism. He has court­ed sup­port from Colom­bia, Brazil, and the Venezuela coup regime.

By Max Blu­men­thal and Ben Nor­ton
Novem­ber 11, 2019

When Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho stormed into Bolivia’s aban­doned pres­i­den­tial palace in the hours after Pres­i­dent Evo Morales’s sud­den Novem­ber 10 res­ig­na­tion, he revealed to the world a side of the coun­try that stood at stark odds with the pluri­na­tion­al spir­it its deposed social­ist and Indige­nous leader had put for­ward.

With a Bible in one hand and a nation­al flag in the oth­er, Cama­cho bowed his head in prayer above the pres­i­den­tial seal, ful­fill­ing his vow to purge his country’s Native her­itage from gov­ern­ment and “return God to the burned palace.”

“Pachama­ma will nev­er return to the palace,” he said, refer­ring to the Andean Moth­er Earth spir­it. “Bolivia belongs to Christ.”

Bolivia’s extreme right-wing oppo­si­tion had over­thrown left­ist Pres­i­dent Evo Morales that day, fol­low­ing demands by the country’s mil­i­tary lead­er­ship that he step down.

Vir­tu­al­ly unknown out­side his coun­try, where he had nev­er won a demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tion, Cama­cho stepped into the void. He is a rich and pow­er­ful mul­ti-mil­lion­aire named in the Pana­ma Papers, and an ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist groomed by a fas­cist para­mil­i­tary noto­ri­ous for its racist vio­lence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy sep­a­ratist region of San­ta Cruz.

Cama­cho also hails from a fam­i­ly of cor­po­rate elites who have long prof­it­ed from Bolivia’s plen­ti­ful nat­ur­al gas reserves. And his fam­i­ly lost part of its wealth when Morales nation­al­ized the nation’s resources, in order to fund his vast social pro­grams — which cut pover­ty by 42 per­cent and extreme pover­ty by 60 per­cent.

In the lead-up to the coup, Cama­cho met with lead­ers from right-wing gov­ern­ments in the region to dis­cuss their plans to desta­bi­lize Morales. Two months before the putsch, he tweet­ed grat­i­tude: “Thank you Colom­bia! Thank you Venezuela!” he exclaimed, tip­ping his hat to Juan Guaido’s coup oper­a­tion. He also rec­og­nized the far-right gov­ern­ment of Jair Bol­sonaro, declar­ing, “Thank you Brazil!”

Cama­cho had spent years lead­ing an overt­ly fas­cist sep­a­ratist orga­ni­za­tion. The Gray­zone edit­ed the fol­low­ing clips from a pro­mo­tion­al his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­tary that the group post­ed on its own social media accounts:

The rich oli­garch leader of Bolivia’s right-wing coup, Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho, was the leader of an explic­it­ly fas­cist para­mil­i­tary group.

Here are some clips from a pro­mo­tion­al his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­tary it pub­lished:https://t.co/gFMyfjsi2p pic.twitter.com/XXNQfhD7ii

— The Gray­zone (@GrayzoneProject) Novem­ber 12, 2019

While Cama­cho and his far-right forces served as the mus­cle behind the coup, their polit­i­cal allies wait­ed to reap the ben­e­fits.

The pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Bolivia’s oppo­si­tion had field­ed in the Octo­ber elec­tion, Car­los Mesa, is a “pro-busi­ness” pri­va­tiz­er with exten­sive ties to Wash­ing­ton. US gov­ern­ment cables pub­lished by Wik­iLeaks reveal that he reg­u­lar­ly cor­re­spond­ed with Amer­i­can offi­cials in their efforts to desta­bi­lize Morales.

Mesa is cur­rent­ly list­ed as an expert at a DC-based think tank fund­ed by the US government’s soft-pow­er arm USAID, var­i­ous oil giants, and a host of mul­ti-nation­al cor­po­ra­tions active in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Evo Morales, a for­mer farmer who rose to promi­nence in social move­ments before becom­ing the leader of the pow­er­ful grass­roots polit­i­cal par­ty Move­ment Toward Social­ism (MAS), was Bolivia’s first Indige­nous leader. Wild­ly pop­u­lar in the country’s sub­stan­tial Native and peas­ant com­mu­ni­ties, he won numer­ous elec­tions and demo­c­ra­t­ic ref­er­en­da over a 13-year peri­od, often in land­slides.

On Octo­ber 20, Morales won re-elec­tion by more than 600,000 votes, giv­ing him just above the 10 per­cent mar­gin need­ed to defeat oppo­si­tion pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mesa in the first round.

Experts who did a sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of Bolivia’s pub­licly avail­able vot­ing data found no evi­dence of irreg­u­lar­i­ties or fraud. But the oppo­si­tion claimed oth­er­wise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.

The events that pre­cip­i­tat­ed the res­ig­na­tion of Morales were indis­putably vio­lent. Right-wing oppo­si­tion gangs attacked numer­ous elect­ed politi­cians from the rul­ing left­ist MAS par­ty. They then ran­sacked the home of Pres­i­dent Morales, while burn­ing down the hous­es of sev­er­al oth­er top offi­cials. The fam­i­ly mem­bers of some politi­cians were kid­napped and held hostage until they resigned. A female social­ist may­or was pub­licly tor­tured by a mob.

The squalid US-backed fanat­ics of the Boli­vian right ran­sack the house of the country’s elect­ed pres­i­dent, Evo Morales. And the hav­oc is just begin­ning. Let no one call them “pro-democ­ra­cy.” pic.twitter.com/rwwvOSAEaA

— Max Blu­men­thal (@MaxBlumenthal) Novem­ber 11, 2019

Fol­low­ing the forced depar­ture of Morales, coup lead­ers arrest­ed the pres­i­dent and vice pres­i­dent of the government’s elec­toral body, and forced the organization’s oth­er offi­cials to resign. Camacho’s fol­low­ers pro­ceed­ed to burn Wipha­la flags that sym­bol­ized the country’s Indige­nous pop­u­la­tion and the pluri­na­tion­al vision of Morales.

The Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States, a pro-US orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Wash­ing­ton dur­ing the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-com­mu­nist coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca, helped rub­ber stamp the Boli­vian coup. It called for new elec­tions, claim­ing there were numer­ous irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the Octo­ber 20 vote, with­out cit­ing any evi­dence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was over­thrown by his mil­i­tary and his party’s offi­cials were attacked and vio­lent­ly forced to resign.

The day after, the Don­ald Trump White House enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly praised the coup, trum­pet­ing it as a “sig­nif­i­cant moment for democ­ra­cy,” and a “strong sig­nal to the ille­git­i­mate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

Emerg­ing from the shad­ows to lead a vio­lent far-right putsch

While Car­los Mesa timid­ly con­demned the opposition’s vio­lence, Cama­cho egged it on, ignor­ing calls for an inter­na­tion­al audit of the elec­tion and empha­siz­ing his max­i­mal­ist demand to purge all sup­port­ers of Morales from gov­ern­ment. He was the true face of the oppo­si­tion, con­cealed for months behind the mod­er­ate fig­ure of Mesa.

A 40-year-old mul­ti-mil­lion­aire busi­ness­man from the sep­a­ratist strong­hold of San­ta Cruz, Cama­cho has nev­er run for office. Like Venezue­lan coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom more than 80 per­cent of Venezue­lans had nev­er heard of until the US gov­ern­ment anoint­ed him as sup­posed “pres­i­dent,” Cama­cho was an obscure fig­ure until the coup attempt in Bolivia hit its stride.

He first cre­at­ed his Twit­ter account on May 27, 2019. For months, his tweets went ignored, gen­er­at­ing no more than three or four retweets and likes. Before the elec­tion, Cama­cho did not have a Wikipedia arti­cle, and there were few media pro­files on him in Span­ish- or Eng­lish-lan­guage media.

Cama­cho issued a call for a strike on July 9, post­ing videos on Twit­ter that got just over 20 views. The goal of the strike was to try to force the res­ig­na­tion of Boli­vian government’s elec­toral organ the Supreme Elec­toral Tri­bunal (TSE). In oth­er words, Cama­cho was pres­sur­ing the government’s elec­toral author­i­ties to step down more than three months before the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

It was not until after the elec­tion that Cama­cho was thrust into the lime­light and trans­formed into a celebri­ty by cor­po­rate media con­glom­er­ates like the local right-wing net­work Uni­tel, Tele­mu­n­do, and CNN en Español.

All of a sud­den, Camacho’s tweets call­ing for Morales to resign were light­ing up with thou­sands of retweets. The coup machin­ery had been acti­vat­ed.

Main­stream out­lets like the New York Times and Reuters fol­lowed by anoint­ing the unelect­ed Cama­cho as the “leader” of Bolivia’s oppo­si­tion. But even as he lapped up inter­na­tion­al atten­tion, key por­tions of the far-right activist’s back­ground were omit­ted.

Left unmen­tioned were Camacho’s deep and well-estab­lished con­nec­tions to Chris­t­ian extrem­ist para­mil­i­taries noto­ri­ous for racist vio­lence and local busi­ness car­tels, as well as the right-wing gov­ern­ments across the region.

It was in the fas­cist para­mil­i­taries and sep­a­ratist atmos­phere of San­ta Cruz where Camacho’s pol­i­tics were formed, and where the ide­o­log­i­cal con­tours of the coup had been defined.

Cadre of a Fran­coist-style fas­cist para­mil­i­tary

Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho was groomed by the Unión Juve­nil Cruceñista, or San­ta Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fas­cist para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion that has been linked to assas­si­na­tion plots against Morales. The group is noto­ri­ous for assault­ing left­ists, Indige­nous peas­ants, and jour­nal­ists, all while espous­ing a deeply racist, homo­pho­bic ide­ol­o­gy.

Since Morales entered office in 2006, the UJC has cam­paigned to sep­a­rate from a coun­try its mem­bers believed had been over­tak­en by a Satan­ic Indige­nous mass.

The UJC is the Boli­vian equiv­a­lent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hin­du suprema­cist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov bat­tal­ion. Its sym­bol is a green cross that bears strong sim­i­lar­i­ties to logos of fas­cist move­ments across the West.

And its mem­bers are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes.

Here is anoth­er video post­ed by Bolivia’s fas­cist oppo­si­tion San­ta Cruz Youth Union.

Coup leader Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho @LuisFerCamachoV pre­vi­ous­ly helped lead this sieg-heil­ing group.

These are the peo­ple who over­threw elect­ed Pres­i­dent Evo Morales. https://t.co/gFMyfjsi2p pic.twitter.com/GvvMfL21UZ

— The Gray­zone (@GrayzoneProject) Novem­ber 12, 2019

Even the US embassy in Bolivia has described UJC mem­bers as “racist” and “mil­i­tant,” not­ing that they “have fre­quent­ly attacked pro-MAS/­gov­ern­ment peo­ple and instal­la­tions.”
[see pic of US embassy doc­u­ment]
After jour­nal­ist Ben­jamin Dan­gl vis­it­ed with UJC mem­bers in 2007, he described them as the “brass knuck­les” of the San­ta Cruz sep­a­ratist move­ment. “The Unión Juve­nil has been known to beat and whip campesinos march­ing for gas nation­al­iza­tion, throw rocks at stu­dents orga­niz­ing against auton­o­my, toss molo­tov cock­tails at the state tele­vi­sion sta­tion, and bru­tal­ly assault mem­bers of the land­less move­ment strug­gling against land monop­o­lies,” Dan­gl wrote.

“When we have to defend our cul­ture by force, we will,” a UJC leader told Dan­gl. “The defense of lib­er­ty is more impor­tant than life.”

Cama­cho was elect­ed as vice pres­i­dent of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the orga­ni­za­tion two years lat­er to build his family’s busi­ness empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee. It was in that orga­ni­za­tion that he was tak­en under the wing of one of the sep­a­ratist movement’s most pow­er­ful fig­ures, a Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch named Branko Marinkovic.

In August, Cama­cho tweet­ed a pho­to with his “great friend,” Marinkovic. This friend­ship was cru­cial to estab­lish­ing the right­ist activist’s cre­den­tials and forg­ing the basis of the coup that would take form three months lat­er.

Hoy cumple años un gran líder cruceño y expres­i­dente del Comité pro San­ta Cruz pero todo un gran ami­go, Branko Marinkovic, quien entregó todo, su lib­er­tad y su vida, por su pueblo. pic.twitter.com/uVzNrgH2pI

— Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho (@LuisFerCamachoV) August 21, 2019

Camacho’s Croa­t­ian god­fa­ther and sep­a­ratist power­bro­ker

Branko Marinkovic is a major landown­er who ramped up his sup­port for the right-wing oppo­si­tion after some of his land was nation­al­ized by the Evo Morales gov­ern­ment. As chair­man of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee, he over­saw the oper­a­tions of the main engine of sep­a­ratism in Bolivia.

In a 2008 let­ter to Marinkovic, the Inter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion for Human Rights denounced the com­mit­tee as an “actor and pro­mot­er of racism and vio­lence in Bolivia.”

The human rights group added that it “condemn[ed] the atti­tude and seces­sion­ist, union­ist and racist dis­cours­es as well as the calls for mil­i­tary dis­obe­di­ence of which the Pro-San­ta Cruz Civic Com­mit­tee for is one of the main pro­mot­ers.”

In 2013, jour­nal­ist Matt Ken­nard report­ed that the US gov­ern­ment was work­ing close­ly with the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee to encour­age the balka­niza­tion of Bolivia and to under­mine Morales. “What they [the US] put across was how they could strength­en chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” the vice pres­i­dent of the com­mit­tee told Ken­nard. “The embassy said that they would help us in our com­mu­ni­ca­tion work and they have a series of pub­li­ca­tions where they were putting for­ward their ideas.”

In a 2008 pro­file on Marinkovic, the New York Times acknowl­edged the extrem­ist under­cur­rents of the San­ta Cruz sep­a­ratist move­ment the oli­garch presided over. It described the area as “a bas­tion of open­ly xeno­pho­bic groups like the Boli­vian Social­ist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspi­ra­tion from the fas­cist Falange of the for­mer Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­co.”

The Boli­vian Social­ist Falange was a fas­cist group that pro­vid­ed safe haven to Nazi war crim­i­nal Klaus Bar­bie dur­ing the Cold War. A for­mer Gestapo tor­ture expert, Bar­bie was repur­posed by the CIA through its Oper­a­tion Con­dor pro­gram to help exter­mi­nate com­mu­nism across the con­ti­nent. (Despite its anti­quat­ed name, like the Ger­man Nation­al Social­ists, this far-right extrem­ist group was vio­lent­ly anti-left­ist, com­mit­ted to killing social­ists.)

The Boli­vian Falange came into pow­er in 1971 when its leader, Gen. Hugo Banz­er Suarez, oust­ed the left­ist gov­ern­ment of Gen. Juan Jose Tor­res Gon­za­les. The gov­ern­ment of Gon­za­les had infu­ri­at­ed busi­ness lead­ers by nation­al­iz­ing indus­tries and antag­o­nized Wash­ing­ton by oust­ing the Peace Corps, which it viewed as an instru­ment of CIA pen­e­tra­tion. The Nixon admin­is­tra­tion imme­di­ate­ly wel­comed Banz­er with open arms and court­ed him as a key bul­wark against the spread of social­ism in the region. (An espe­cial­ly iron­ic 1973 dis­patch appears on Wik­ileaks show­ing Sec­re­tary of State Hen­ry Kissinger thank­ing Banz­er for con­grat­u­lat­ing him on his Nobel Peace Prize).

The movement’s putschist lega­cy per­se­vered dur­ing the Morales era through orga­ni­za­tions like the UJC and fig­ures such as Marinkovic and Cama­cho.

The Times not­ed that Marinkovic also sup­port­ed the activ­i­ties of the UJC, describ­ing the fas­cist group as “a qua­si-inde­pen­dent arm of the com­mit­tee led by Mr. Marinkovic.” A mem­ber of the UJC board told the US news­pa­per of record in an inter­view, “We will pro­tect Branko with our own lives.”

Marinkovic has espoused the kind of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric famil­iar to the far-right orga­ni­za­tions of San­ta Cruz, call­ing, for instance, for a “cru­sade for the truth” and insist­ing that God is on his side.

The oligarch’s fam­i­ly hails from Croa­t­ia, where he has dual cit­i­zen­ship. Marinkovic has long been dogged by rumors that his fam­i­ly mem­bers were involved in the country’s pow­er­ful fas­cist Ustashe move­ment.

The Ustashe col­lab­o­rat­ed open­ly with Nazi Ger­man occu­piers dur­ing World War Two. Their suc­ces­sors returned to pow­er after Croa­t­ia declared inde­pen­dence from the for­mer Yugoslavia – a for­mer social­ist coun­try that was inten­tion­al­ly balka­nized in a NATO war, much in the same way that Marinkovic hoped Bolivia would be.

Marinkovic denies that his fam­i­ly was part of the Ustashe. He claimed in an inter­view with the New York Times that his father fought against the Nazis.

But even some of his sym­pa­thiz­ers are skep­ti­cal. A Balkan ana­lyst from the pri­vate intel­li­gence firm Strat­for, which works close­ly with the US gov­ern­ment and is pop­u­lar­ly known as the “shad­ow CIA,” pro­duced a rough back­ground pro­file on Marinkovic, spec­u­lat­ing, “Still don’t know his full sto­ry, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s par­ents are 1st gen (his name is too Slav­ic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sym­pa­thiz­ers flee­ing Tito’s Com­mu­nists after WWI.”

The Strat­for ana­lyst excerpt­ed a 2006 arti­cle by jour­nal­ist Chris­t­ian Par­en­ti, who had vis­it­ed Marinkovic at his ranch in San­ta Cruz. Evo Morales’ “land reform could lead to civ­il war,” Marinkovic warned Par­en­ti in the Texas-accent­ed Eng­lish he picked up while study­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Hous­ton.

Today, Marinkovic is an ardent sup­port­er of Brazil’s far-right leader Jair Bol­sonaro, whose only com­plaint about Chilean dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet was that he “didn’t kill enough.”

Marinkovic is also a pub­lic admir­er of Venezuela’s far-right oppo­si­tion. “Todos somos Leopol­do” — “we are all Leopol­do,” he tweet­ed in sup­port of Leopol­do López, who has been involved in numer­ous coup attempts against Venezuela’s elect­ed left­ist gov­ern­ment.

While Marinkovic denied any role in armed mil­i­tant activ­i­ty in his inter­view with Par­en­ti, he was accused in 2008 of play­ing a cen­tral role in an attempt to assas­si­nate Morales and his Move­ment Toward Social­ism par­ty allies.

He told the New York Times less than two years before the plot devel­oped, “If there is no legit­i­mate inter­na­tion­al medi­a­tion in our cri­sis, there is going to be con­fronta­tion. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Boli­vians.”

An assas­si­na­tion plot links Bolivia’s right to inter­na­tion­al fas­cists

In April 2009, a spe­cial unit of the Boli­vian secu­ri­ty ser­vices barged into a lux­u­ry hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two oth­ers remained on the loose. Four of the alleged con­spir­a­tors had Hun­gar­i­an or Croa­t­ian roots and ties to right­ist pol­i­tics in east­ern Europe, while anoth­er was a right-wing Irish­man, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in San­ta Cruz six months before.

The ring­leader of the group was said to be a for­mer left­ist jour­nal­ist named Eduar­do Rosza-Flo­res who had turned to fas­cism and belonged to Opus Dei, the tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholic cult that emerged under the dic­ta­tor­ship of Spain’s Fran­cis­co Fran­co. In fact, the code­name Rosza-Flo­res assumed in the assas­si­na­tion plot was “Fran­co,” after the late Gen­er­alis­si­mo.

Dur­ing the 1990s, Rosza fought on behalf of the Croa­t­ian First Inter­na­tion­al Pla­toon, or the PIV, in the war to sep­a­rate from Yugoslavia. A Croa­t­ian jour­nal­ist told Time that the “PIV was a noto­ri­ous group: 95% of them had crim­i­nal his­to­ries, many were part of Nazi and fas­cist groups, from Ger­many to Ire­land.”

By 2009, Rosza returned home to Bolivia to cru­sade on behalf of anoth­er sep­a­ratist move­ment in San­ta Cruz. And it was there that he was killed in a lux­u­ry hotel with no appar­ent source of income and a mas­sive stock­pile of guns.

The gov­ern­ment lat­er released pho­tos of Rosza and a co-con­spir­a­tor pos­ing with their weapons. Pub­li­ca­tion of emails between the ring­leader and Ist­van Belo­vai, a for­mer Hun­gar­i­an mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cer who served as a dou­ble agent for the CIA, cement­ed the per­cep­tion that Wash­ing­ton had a hand in the oper­a­tion.

Marinkovic was sub­se­quent­ly charged with pro­vid­ing $200,000 to the plot­ters. The Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch ini­tial­ly fled to the Unit­ed States, where he was giv­en asy­lum, then relo­cat­ed to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involve­ment in the plan to kill Morales.

As jour­nal­ist Matt Ken­nard report­ed, there was anoth­er thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged par­tic­i­pa­tion of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Mel­gar.

“Rozsa didn’t come here by him­self, they brought him,” the Boli­vian government’s lead inves­ti­ga­tor told Ken­nard. “Hugo Achá Mel­gar brought him.”

The Human Rights Foun­da­tion desta­bi­lizes Bolivia

Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had found­ed the Boli­vian sub­sidiary of the Human Rights Foun­da­tion (HRF), an inter­na­tion­al right-wing out­fit that is known for host­ing a “school for rev­o­lu­tion” for activists seek­ing regime change in states tar­get­ed by the US gov­ern­ment.

HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezue­lan oli­garch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hel­lum. The first cousin of the vet­er­an Venezue­lan coup plot­ter Leopol­do Lopez, Halvorssen was a for­mer col­lege Repub­li­can activist who cru­sad­ed against polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and oth­er famil­iar right-wing hob­gob­lins.

After a brief career as a fire­brand right-wing film pro­duc­er, in which he over­saw a scan­dalous “anti-envi­ron­men­tal­ist” doc­u­men­tary financed by a min­ing cor­po­ra­tion, Halvorssen rebrand­ed as a pro­mot­er of lib­er­al­ism and the ene­my of glob­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism. He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing bil­lion­aires like Peter Thiel, con­ser­v­a­tive foun­da­tions, and NGOs includ­ing Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al. The group has since been at the fore­front of train­ing activists for insur­rec­tionary activ­i­ty from Hong Kong to the Mid­dle East to Latin Amer­i­ca.

Though Achá was grant­ed asy­lum in the US, the HRF has con­tin­ued push­ing regime change in Bolivia. As Wyatt Reed report­ed for The Gray­zone, HRF “free­dom fel­low” Jhanisse Vaca Daza helped trig­ger the ini­tial stage of the coup by blam­ing Morales for the Ama­zon fires that con­sumed parts of Bolivia in August, mobi­liz­ing inter­na­tion­al protests against him.

At the time, Daza posed as an “envi­ron­men­tal activist” and stu­dent of non-vio­lence who artic­u­lat­ed her con­cerns in mod­er­ate-seem­ing calls for more inter­na­tion­al aid to Bolivia. Through her NGO, Rios de Pie, she helped launch the #SOS­Bo­livia hash­tag, which sig­naled the immi­nent for­eign-backed regime-change oper­a­tion.

Court­ing the region­al right, prep­ping the coup

While HRF’s Daza ral­lied protests out­side Boli­vian embassies in Europe and the US, Fer­nan­do Cama­cho remained behind the scenes, lob­by­ing right-wing gov­ern­ments in the region to bless the com­ing coup.

In May, Cama­cho met with Colombia’s far-right Pres­i­dent Ivan Duque. Cama­cho was help­ing to spear­head region­al efforts at under­min­ing the legit­i­ma­cy of Evo Morales’ pres­i­den­cy at the Inter-Amer­i­can Court of Human Rights, seek­ing to block his can­di­da­cy in the Octo­ber elec­tion.

That same month, the right­ist Boli­vian agi­ta­tor also met with Ernesto Araújo, the chan­cel­lor of Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive admin­is­tra­tion in Brazil. Through the meet­ing, Cama­cho suc­cess­ful­ly secured Bolsonaro’s back­ing for regime change in Bolivia.

This Novem­ber 10, Araújo enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly endorsed the ouster of Morales, declar­ing that “Brazil will sup­port the demo­c­ra­t­ic and con­sti­tu­tion­al tran­si­tion” in the coun­try.

Then in August, two months before Bolivia’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Cama­cho held court with offi­cials from Venezuela’s US-appoint­ed coup regime. These includ­ed Gus­ta­vo Tarre, Guaido’s faux Venezue­lan OAS ambas­sador, who for­mer­ly worked at the right-wing Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS) think tank in Wash­ing­ton.

After the meet­ing, Cama­cho tweet­ed grat­i­tude to the Venezue­lan coup-mon­gers, as well as to Colom­bia and Brazil.

No vamos a parar has­ta ten­er una democ­ra­cia real! Seguimos avan­zan­do!

Vamos suman­do apoyo… aho­ra lo hace Venezuela…Gracias a Dios.. hay esper­an­za!

Gra­cias Colom­bia!
Gra­cias Venezuela!
Gra­cias Brasil! pic.twitter.com/v9TQ2Fi2Sa

— Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho (@LuisFerCamachoV) August 27, 2019

Mesa and Cama­cho: a mar­riage of cap­i­tal­ist con­ve­nience

Back in Bolivia, Car­los Mesa occu­pied the spot­light as the opposition’s pres­i­den­tial can­di­date.

His eru­dite image and cen­trist pol­i­cy pro­pos­als put him in a seem­ing­ly alter­nate polit­i­cal uni­verse from fire-breath­ing right­ists like Cama­cho and Marinkovic. For them, he was a con­ve­nient front man and accept­able can­di­date who promised to defend their eco­nom­ic inter­ests.

“It might be that he is not my favorite, but I’m going to vote for him, because I don’t want Evo,” Marinkovic told a right-wing Argen­tine news­pa­per five days before the elec­tion.

Indeed, it was Camacho’s prac­ti­cal finan­cial inter­ests that appeared to have neces­si­tat­ed his sup­port for Mesa.

The Cama­cho fam­i­ly has formed a nat­ur­al gas car­tel in San­ta Cruz. As the Boli­vian out­let Primera Lin­ea report­ed, Luis Fer­nan­do Camacho’s father, Jose Luis, was the own­er of a com­pa­ny called Ser­gas that dis­trib­uted gas in the city; his uncle, Enrique, con­trolled Socre, the com­pa­ny that ran the local gas pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties; and his cousin, Cris­t­ian, con­trols anoth­er local gas dis­trib­u­tor called Con­tro­gas.

Accord­ing to Primera Lin­ea, the Cama­cho fam­i­ly was using the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee as a polit­i­cal weapon to install Car­los Mesa into pow­er and ensure the restora­tion of their busi­ness empire.

Mesa has a well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of advanc­ing the goals of transna­tion­al com­pa­nies at the expense of his own country’s pop­u­la­tion. The neolib­er­al politi­cian and media per­son­al­i­ty served as vice pres­i­dent when the US-backed Pres­i­dent Gon­za­lo “Goni” Sanchez de Loza­da pro­voked mass protests with his 2003 plan to allow a con­sor­tium of multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions to export the country’s nat­ur­al gas to the US through a Chilean port.

Bolivia’s US-trained secu­ri­ty forces met the fero­cious protests with bru­tal repres­sion. After pre­sid­ing over the killing of 70 unarmed pro­test­ers, Sanchez de Loza­da fled to Mia­mi and was suc­ceed­ed by Mesa.

By 2005, Mesa was also oust­ed by huge demon­stra­tions spurred by his pro­tec­tion of pri­va­tized nat­ur­al gas com­pa­nies. With his demise, the elec­tion of Morales and the rise of the social­ist and rur­al Indige­nous move­ments behind him were just beyond the hori­zon.

US gov­ern­ment cables released by Wik­iLeaks show that, after his ouster, Mesa con­tin­ued reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dence with Amer­i­can offi­cials. A 2008 memo from the US embassy in Bolivia revealed that Wash­ing­ton was con­spir­ing with oppo­si­tion politi­cians in the lead-up to the 2009 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, hop­ing to under­mine and ulti­mate­ly unseat Morales.

The memo not­ed that Mesa had met with the chargé d’affaires of the US embassy, and had pri­vate­ly told them he planned to run for pres­i­dent. The cable recalled: “Mesa told us his par­ty will be ide­o­log­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar to a social demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty and that he hoped to strength­en ties with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty. ‘We have noth­ing against the Repub­li­can par­ty, and have in fact got­ten sup­port from IRI (Inter­na­tion­al Repub­li­can Insti­tute) in the past, but we think we share more ide­ol­o­gy with the Democ­rats,’ he added.”
[see pic of wik­ileaks doc­u­ment]

Today, Mesa serves as an in-house “expert” at the Inter-Amer­i­can Dia­logue, a neolib­er­al Wash­ing­ton-based think tank focused on Latin Amer­i­ca. One of the Dialogue’s top donors is the US Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID), the State Depart­ment sub­sidiary that was exposed in clas­si­fied diplo­mat­ic cables pub­lished on Wik­ileaks for strate­gi­cal­ly direct­ing mil­lions of dol­lars to oppo­si­tion groups includ­ing those “opposed to Evo Morales’ vision for indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties.”

Oth­er top fun­ders of the Dia­logue include oil titans like Chevron and Exxon­Mo­bil; Bech­tel, which inspired the ini­tial protests against the admin­is­tra­tion in which Mesa served; the Inter-Amer­i­can Devel­op­ment Bank, which has force­ful­ly opposed Morales’ social­ist-ori­ent­ed poli­cies; and the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States (OAS), which helped dele­git­imize the Morales’s re-elec­tion vic­to­ry with dubi­ous claims of irreg­u­lar vote counts.

...

———-

“Bolivia coup led by Chris­t­ian fas­cist para­mil­i­tary leader and mul­ti-mil­lion­aire – with for­eign sup­port” by Max Blu­men­thal and Ben Nor­ton; The Gray Zone; 11/11/2019

“The day after, the Don­ald Trump White House enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly praised the coup, trum­pet­ing it as a “sig­nif­i­cant moment for democ­ra­cy,” and a “strong sig­nal to the ille­git­i­mate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.””

A “sig­nif­i­cant moment for democ­ra­cy,” that’s how the Trump White House hailed the coup. Because of course. And, of course, there does­n’t appear to have been any actu­al elec­tion irreg­u­lar­i­ties. It was all right-wing hype. Even more telling is that Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho called for a strike back in July that was intend­ed to force the gov­ern­men­t’s elec­toral author­i­ties to resign. Claim­ing elec­toral irreg­u­lar­i­ties and call­ing for the ouster of Morales was always part of the plan. But it was only after the elec­tion that the media start­ed giv­ing Cama­cho’s calls heavy media cov­er­age:

...
On Octo­ber 20, Morales won re-elec­tion by more than 600,000 votes, giv­ing him just above the 10 per­cent mar­gin need­ed to defeat oppo­si­tion pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mesa in the first round.

Experts who did a sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of Bolivia’s pub­licly avail­able vot­ing data found no evi­dence of irreg­u­lar­i­ties or fraud. But the oppo­si­tion claimed oth­er­wise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.

The events that pre­cip­i­tat­ed the res­ig­na­tion of Morales were indis­putably vio­lent. Right-wing oppo­si­tion gangs attacked numer­ous elect­ed politi­cians from the rul­ing left­ist MAS par­ty. They then ran­sacked the home of Pres­i­dent Morales, while burn­ing down the hous­es of sev­er­al oth­er top offi­cials. The fam­i­ly mem­bers of some politi­cians were kid­napped and held hostage until they resigned. A female social­ist may­or was pub­licly tor­tured by a mob.

The squalid US-backed fanat­ics of the Boli­vian right ran­sack the house of the country’s elect­ed pres­i­dent, Evo Morales. And the hav­oc is just begin­ning. Let no one call them “pro-democ­ra­cy.” pic.twitter.com/rwwvOSAEaA

— Max Blu­men­thal (@MaxBlumenthal) Novem­ber 11, 2019

Fol­low­ing the forced depar­ture of Morales, coup lead­ers arrest­ed the pres­i­dent and vice pres­i­dent of the government’s elec­toral body, and forced the organization’s oth­er offi­cials to resign. Camacho’s fol­low­ers pro­ceed­ed to burn Wipha­la flags that sym­bol­ized the country’s Indige­nous pop­u­la­tion and the pluri­na­tion­al vision of Morales.

The Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States, a pro-US orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Wash­ing­ton dur­ing the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-com­mu­nist coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca, helped rub­ber stamp the Boli­vian coup. It called for new elec­tions, claim­ing there were numer­ous irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the Octo­ber 20 vote, with­out cit­ing any evi­dence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was over­thrown by his mil­i­tary and his party’s offi­cials were attacked and vio­lent­ly forced to resign.

...

He first cre­at­ed his Twit­ter account on May 27, 2019. For months, his tweets went ignored, gen­er­at­ing no more than three or four retweets and likes. Before the elec­tion, Cama­cho did not have a Wikipedia arti­cle, and there were few media pro­files on him in Span­ish- or Eng­lish-lan­guage media.

Cama­cho issued a call for a strike on July 9, post­ing videos on Twit­ter that got just over 20 views. The goal of the strike was to try to force the res­ig­na­tion of Boli­vian government’s elec­toral organ the Supreme Elec­toral Tri­bunal (TSE). In oth­er words, Cama­cho was pres­sur­ing the government’s elec­toral author­i­ties to step down more than three months before the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

It was not until after the elec­tion that Cama­cho was thrust into the lime­light and trans­formed into a celebri­ty by cor­po­rate media con­glom­er­ates like the local right-wing net­work Uni­tel, Tele­mu­n­do, and CNN en Español.

All of a sud­den, Camacho’s tweets call­ing for Morales to resign were light­ing up with thou­sands of retweets. The coup machin­ery had been acti­vat­ed.
...

What has­n’t been giv­en much cov­er­age is Cama­cho’s back­ground as a leader of the far right San­ta Cruz Youth Union (UJC) which has long called for break­ing the coun­try up:

...
Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho was groomed by the Unión Juve­nil Cruceñista, or San­ta Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fas­cist para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion that has been linked to assas­si­na­tion plots against Morales. The group is noto­ri­ous for assault­ing left­ists, Indige­nous peas­ants, and jour­nal­ists, all while espous­ing a deeply racist, homo­pho­bic ide­ol­o­gy.

Since Morales entered office in 2006, the UJC has cam­paigned to sep­a­rate from a coun­try its mem­bers believed had been over­tak­en by a Satan­ic Indige­nous mass.

The UJC is the Boli­vian equiv­a­lent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hin­du suprema­cist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov bat­tal­ion. Its sym­bol is a green cross that bears strong sim­i­lar­i­ties to logos of fas­cist move­ments across the West.

And its mem­bers are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes.

Here is anoth­er video post­ed by Bolivia’s fas­cist oppo­si­tion San­ta Cruz Youth Union.

Coup leader Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho @LuisFerCamachoV pre­vi­ous­ly helped lead this sieg-heil­ing group.

These are the peo­ple who over­threw elect­ed Pres­i­dent Evo Morales. https://t.co/gFMyfjsi2p pic.twitter.com/GvvMfL21UZ

— The Gray­zone (@GrayzoneProject) Novem­ber 12, 2019

Even the US embassy in Bolivia has described UJC mem­bers as “racist” and “mil­i­tant,” not­ing that they “have fre­quent­ly attacked pro-MAS/­gov­ern­ment peo­ple and instal­la­tions.”
[see pic of US embassy doc­u­ment]
After jour­nal­ist Ben­jamin Dan­gl vis­it­ed with UJC mem­bers in 2007, he described them as the “brass knuck­les” of the San­ta Cruz sep­a­ratist move­ment. “The Unión Juve­nil has been known to beat and whip campesinos march­ing for gas nation­al­iza­tion, throw rocks at stu­dents orga­niz­ing against auton­o­my, toss molo­tov cock­tails at the state tele­vi­sion sta­tion, and bru­tal­ly assault mem­bers of the land­less move­ment strug­gling against land monop­o­lies,” Dan­gl wrote.

“When we have to defend our cul­ture by force, we will,” a UJC leader told Dan­gl. “The defense of lib­er­ty is more impor­tant than life.”
...

Anoth­er crit­i­cal aspect of Cama­cho’s back­ground is the fact that he’s the pro­tege of fas­cist Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch named Branko Marinkovic, the chair­man of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee, the main group call­ing for break­ing up Bolivia. The San­ta Cruz region was described in 2008 by the New York Times as “a bas­tion of open­ly xeno­pho­bic groups like the Boli­vian Social­ist Falange,” the group that hap­pened to pro­vide safe haven for Klaus Bar­bie. The Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee has a doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of work­ing with the US gov­ern­ment as recent­ly as 2013:

...
Cama­cho was elect­ed as vice pres­i­dent of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the orga­ni­za­tion two years lat­er to build his family’s busi­ness empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee. It was in that orga­ni­za­tion that he was tak­en under the wing of one of the sep­a­ratist movement’s most pow­er­ful fig­ures, a Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch named Branko Marinkovic.

...

Branko Marinkovic is a major landown­er who ramped up his sup­port for the right-wing oppo­si­tion after some of his land was nation­al­ized by the Evo Morales gov­ern­ment. As chair­man of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee, he over­saw the oper­a­tions of the main engine of sep­a­ratism in Bolivia.

...

In 2013, jour­nal­ist Matt Ken­nard report­ed that the US gov­ern­ment was work­ing close­ly with the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee to encour­age the balka­niza­tion of Bolivia and to under­mine Morales. “What they [the US] put across was how they could strength­en chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” the vice pres­i­dent of the com­mit­tee told Ken­nard. “The embassy said that they would help us in our com­mu­ni­ca­tion work and they have a series of pub­li­ca­tions where they were putting for­ward their ideas.”

In a 2008 pro­file on Marinkovic, the New York Times acknowl­edged the extrem­ist under­cur­rents of the San­ta Cruz sep­a­ratist move­ment the oli­garch presided over. It described the area as “a bas­tion of open­ly xeno­pho­bic groups like the Boli­vian Social­ist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspi­ra­tion from the fas­cist Falange of the for­mer Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­co.”

The Boli­vian Social­ist Falange was a fas­cist group that pro­vid­ed safe haven to Nazi war crim­i­nal Klaus Bar­bie dur­ing the Cold War. A for­mer Gestapo tor­ture expert, Bar­bie was repur­posed by the CIA through its Oper­a­tion Con­dor pro­gram to help exter­mi­nate com­mu­nism across the con­ti­nent. (Despite its anti­quat­ed name, like the Ger­man Nation­al Social­ists, this far-right extrem­ist group was vio­lent­ly anti-left­ist, com­mit­ted to killing social­ists.)
...

Marinkovic also appears to have had par­ents who were mem­bers of Ustashe, although he denies this:

...
Marinkovic has espoused the kind of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric famil­iar to the far-right orga­ni­za­tions of San­ta Cruz, call­ing, for instance, for a “cru­sade for the truth” and insist­ing that God is on his side.

The oligarch’s fam­i­ly hails from Croa­t­ia, where he has dual cit­i­zen­ship. Marinkovic has long been dogged by rumors that his fam­i­ly mem­bers were involved in the country’s pow­er­ful fas­cist Ustashe move­ment.

The Ustashe col­lab­o­rat­ed open­ly with Nazi Ger­man occu­piers dur­ing World War Two. Their suc­ces­sors returned to pow­er after Croa­t­ia declared inde­pen­dence from the for­mer Yugoslavia – a for­mer social­ist coun­try that was inten­tion­al­ly balka­nized in a NATO war, much in the same way that Marinkovic hoped Bolivia would be.

Marinkovic denies that his fam­i­ly was part of the Ustashe. He claimed in an inter­view with the New York Times that his father fought against the Nazis.

But even some of his sym­pa­thiz­ers are skep­ti­cal. A Balkan ana­lyst from the pri­vate intel­li­gence firm Strat­for, which works close­ly with the US gov­ern­ment and is pop­u­lar­ly known as the “shad­ow CIA,” pro­duced a rough back­ground pro­file on Marinkovic, spec­u­lat­ing, “Still don’t know his full sto­ry, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s par­ents are 1st gen (his name is too Slav­ic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sym­pa­thiz­ers flee­ing Tito’s Com­mu­nists after WWI.”
...

And it appears that Marinkovic was the financier of the 2009 inter­na­tion­al far right assas­si­na­tion attempt against Morales. Marinkovic fled to the US where he was giv­en asy­lum:

...
In April 2009, a spe­cial unit of the Boli­vian secu­ri­ty ser­vices barged into a lux­u­ry hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two oth­ers remained on the loose. Four of the alleged con­spir­a­tors had Hun­gar­i­an or Croa­t­ian roots and ties to right­ist pol­i­tics in east­ern Europe, while anoth­er was a right-wing Irish­man, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in San­ta Cruz six months before.

The ring­leader of the group was said to be a for­mer left­ist jour­nal­ist named Eduar­do Rosza-Flo­res who had turned to fas­cism and belonged to Opus Dei, the tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholic cult that emerged under the dic­ta­tor­ship of Spain’s Fran­cis­co Fran­co. In fact, the code­name Rosza-Flo­res assumed in the assas­si­na­tion plot was “Fran­co,” after the late Gen­er­alis­si­mo.

...

Marinkovic was sub­se­quent­ly charged with pro­vid­ing $200,000 to the plot­ters. The Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch ini­tial­ly fled to the Unit­ed States, where he was giv­en asy­lum, then relo­cat­ed to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involve­ment in the plan to kill Morales.
...

And it turns out that anoth­er fig­ure who appears to be behind the 2009 assas­si­na­tion attempt, Hugo Achá Mel­gar, is the founder of the Boli­vian sub­sidiary of the uman Rights Foun­da­tion (HRF), described as an inter­na­tion­al right-wing out­fit that is known for host­ing a “school for rev­o­lu­tion” for activists seek­ing regime change in states tar­get­ed by the US gov­ern­ment. The HRF was launched with grants from NGOs and right-wing bil­lion­aires like Peter Thiel:

...
As jour­nal­ist Matt Ken­nard report­ed, there was anoth­er thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged par­tic­i­pa­tion of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Mel­gar.

“Rozsa didn’t come here by him­self, they brought him,” the Boli­vian government’s lead inves­ti­ga­tor told Ken­nard. “Hugo Achá Mel­gar brought him.”

The Human Rights Foun­da­tion desta­bi­lizes Bolivia

Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had found­ed the Boli­vian sub­sidiary of the Human Rights Foun­da­tion (HRF), an inter­na­tion­al right-wing out­fit that is known for host­ing a “school for rev­o­lu­tion” for activists seek­ing regime change in states tar­get­ed by the US gov­ern­ment.

HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezue­lan oli­garch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hel­lum. The first cousin of the vet­er­an Venezue­lan coup plot­ter Leopol­do Lopez, Halvorssen was a for­mer col­lege Repub­li­can activist who cru­sad­ed against polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and oth­er famil­iar right-wing hob­gob­lins.

After a brief career as a fire­brand right-wing film pro­duc­er, in which he over­saw a scan­dalous “anti-envi­ron­men­tal­ist” doc­u­men­tary financed by a min­ing cor­po­ra­tion, Halvorssen rebrand­ed as a pro­mot­er of lib­er­al­ism and the ene­my of glob­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism. He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing bil­lion­aires like Peter Thiel, con­ser­v­a­tive foun­da­tions, and NGOs includ­ing Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al. The group has since been at the fore­front of train­ing activists for insur­rec­tionary activ­i­ty from Hong Kong to the Mid­dle East to Latin Amer­i­ca.

Though Achá was grant­ed asy­lum in the US, the HRF has con­tin­ued push­ing regime change in Bolivia. As Wyatt Reed report­ed for The Gray­zone, HRF “free­dom fel­low” Jhanisse Vaca Daza helped trig­ger the ini­tial stage of the coup by blam­ing Morales for the Ama­zon fires that con­sumed parts of Bolivia in August, mobi­liz­ing inter­na­tion­al protests against him.

At the time, Daza posed as an “envi­ron­men­tal activist” and stu­dent of non-vio­lence who artic­u­lat­ed her con­cerns in mod­er­ate-seem­ing calls for more inter­na­tion­al aid to Bolivia. Through her NGO, Rios de Pie, she helped launch the #SOS­Bo­livia hash­tag, which sig­naled the immi­nent for­eign-backed regime-change oper­a­tion.
...

So that’s all part of the back­sto­ry for the coup that just took place. It’s a back­sto­ry about a US-backed far right move­ment that pro­mot­ed sep­a­ratism, assas­si­na­tion, and has now suc­ceed­ed in over­throw­ing the the gov­ern­ment. Note how legit­i­mate­ly win­ning an elec­tion by appeal­ing to the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion does­n’t appear to have been a major agen­da item for this move­ment, which makes sense since its root­ed in a Nazi-like hatred of Bolivi­a’s indige­nous pop­u­la­tion.

@ Pter­rafractyl
In all like­li­hood there’s a con­nec­tion between the right-wing Boli­vian coup that top­pled Pres­i­dent Evo Morales and the Bor­mann cap­i­tal
net­work. From Eoin Hig­gins at Com­mon Dreams Novem­ber 11 2019:

“The Sun­day mil­i­tary coup in Bolivia has put in place a gov­ern­ment which appears like­ly to reverse a deci­sion by just-resigned Pres­i­dent
Evo Morales to can­cel an agree­ment with a Ger­man com­pa­ny for devel­op­ing lithi­um deposits in the Latin Amer­i­can coun­try for bat­ter­ies
like those in elec­tric cars...The Morales move on Nov. 4 to can­cel the Decem­ber 2018 agree­ment with Ger­many’s ACI Sys­tems Ale­ma­nia
(ACISAS) came after weeks of protests from res­i­dents of the Poto­si area. The region has 50% to 70% of the world’s lithi­um deposits in the
Salar de Uyu­ni salt flats...Among oth­er clients ACISA pro­vides bat­ter­ies to Tes­la; Tes­la’s stock rose Mon­day after the week­end.”
Hel­lo insid­er trad­ing com­bined with a fas­cist coup any­one? Shades of Dal­las ’63 and 9/11/2001.

Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO at Tes­la grew up of course in Pre­to­ria dur­ing South Africa’s apartheid era. With out­fits like ACISA, HRF,
UJC and indi­vid­u­als past and present such as Klaus Bar­bie and Peter Thiel the Bor­mann org can’t be far away.

Lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies pow­er smart­phones, lap­tops and tablets as well as elec­tric cars. For the military/industrial/surveillance resource extrac­tion
com­plex access to the world’s lithi­um sup­plies were being hin­dered by the Morales social reforms nation­al­iza­tion projects. Con­tracts had been
annulled by the Morales gov­ern­ment in order to nation­al­ize and cre­ate greater wealth for Boli­vians.

But the desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na may have been a fac­tor in Bolivi­a’s coup. Chi­nese firms had been mak­ing deals with YLB Bolivi­a’s nation­al
lithi­um com­pa­ny. Appar­ent­ly Chi­nese investors were offer­ing a bet­ter deal to grow the Boli­vian econ­o­my than those offered by the transna­tion­als
from India, Cana­da, Switzer­land, and the US.

Vijay Prashad Com­mon Dreams Nov 12 2019:
“Morales him­self was a direct imped­i­ment to the takeover of the lithi­um fields by the non-Chi­nese transna­tion­al firms. He had to go.”

@Dennis: Here’s a set of arti­cles relat­ed to the Ger­man inter­ests in devel­op­ing Bolivi­a’s lithi­um reserves and the deci­sion of the coup gov­ern­ment to reverse Evo Morales’s deci­sion to can­cel ACI’s con­tract days before the coup: First, here’s an arti­cle that makes the case that we should­n’t actu­al­ly expect a large boom in Bolivi­a’s lithi­um min­ing as a result of the coup. Why? Well, accord­ing to the author, there are a range of rea­sons, includ­ing the rel­a­tive­ly high lev­els of impu­ri­ties in Bolivi­a’s lithi­um deposits that make refine­ment more expen­sive than else­where. ACI claimed it had a method for doing this effi­cient, but accord­ing to the author, even if that’s the case that won’t real­ly help boost demand for Bolivi­a’s lithi­um because the main hur­dle hold­ing back glob­al demand for lithi­um is that the glob­al lithi­um busi­ness faces a high degree uncer­tain­ty due to the fact that demand is dri­ven heav­i­ly for use build­ing bat­ter­ies for elec­tric vehi­cles and the man­u­fac­tur­ing of elec­tric car bat­ter­ies remains a high­ly inef­fi­cient process. The cost of the lithi­um isn’t the biggest fac­tor in the cost of build­ing elec­tric car bat­ter­ies. Oth­er inef­fi­cien­cies are the biggest cost and those aren’t going away after this coup.

The sec­ond arti­cle is about how Tel­sa just announced it’s going to be build­ing the bat­ter­ies for its elec­tric vehi­cles in Ger­many to take advan­tage of Ger­many’s advanced automa­tion capa­bil­i­ties to bring down costs. So just days after the coup, the new inter­im gov­ern­ment announces its rein­stat­ing ACI’s con­tract to mine Bolivi­a’s lithi­um and then days lat­er Tel­sa makes a major announce­ment that it’s going to build bat­ter­ies in Ger­many to low­er the costs by automat­ing the process­es, thus address­ing one of the main hur­dles that what was hold­ing back the devel­op­ment of Bolivi­a’s lithi­um deposits. The tim­ing is mighty inter­est­ing.

And then the third arti­cle points out that the ACI deal was heav­i­ly backed by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment with the idea of mak­ing Ger­many the world’s lead­ing loca­tion for build­ing elec­tric car bat­ter­ies. 80 per­cent of the export­ed lithi­um was going to be going to Ger­many, so if a com­pa­ny like Tes­la want­ed access to it, set­ting up shop in Ger­many was basi­cal­ly a require­ment.

Ok, here’s the first arti­cle mak­ing the case that inef­fi­cien­cies in the build­ing of lithi­um elec­tric car bat­ter­ies is why we should­n’t expect a huge post-coup lithi­um boom:

The Con­ver­sa­tion

Boli­vian lithi­um: why you should not expect any ‘white gold rush’ in the wake of Morales over­throw

Matthew Eisler
Strath­clyde Chan­cel­lor’s Fel­low, Fac­ul­ty of Human­i­ties and Social Sci­ences, Uni­ver­si­ty of Strath­clyde
Novem­ber 15, 2019 12.03pm EST

The over­throw of Boli­vian pres­i­dent Evo Morales shows how the pol­i­tics of envi­ron­men­tal­ism and social jus­tice inter­sect in a sil­very-white met­al. As Morales flew to exile in Mex­i­co, com­men­ta­tors won­dered what will become of Bolivia’s lithi­um, a strate­gic resource used in con­sumer elec­tron­ics and elec­tric cars.

Lithi­um bat­ter­ies are the most ener­getic ever cre­at­ed, and have inspired hopes that elec­tric vehi­cles can help reverse cli­mate change, as well as expec­ta­tions of a boom in “white petro­le­um” or “white gold,” as boost­ers refer to lithi­um. These are loaded analo­gies in a coun­try defined by the bru­tal lega­cy of the Span­ish con­quest, and this his­to­ry has guid­ed how the Morales gov­ern­ment approached the ques­tion of nat­ur­al resources.

...

Will Bolivia get its white gold rush under new man­age­ment? The short answer is prob­a­bly not, for rea­sons that have as much to do with the para­dox­es of pub­lic pol­i­cy and the glob­al mar­ket for elec­tric cars as with per­sis­tent north-south inequity.

Elec­tric cars caused a lithi­um boom

Essen­tial­ly, Boli­vian lithi­um gained val­ue thanks to Cal­i­for­nia air qual­i­ty pol­i­cy. In 1990, the Gold­en State basi­cal­ly forced the auto indus­try to pro­duce bat­tery elec­tric vehi­cles. Automak­ers were aghast because bat­ter­ies have short­er lifes­pans than elec­tric motors, and this dura­bil­i­ty dilem­ma pri­mar­i­ly rewards bat­tery-mak­ing, not auto-mak­ing. In response, they fierce­ly lob­bied to delay their com­mit­ments, infa­mous­ly recall­ing and “killing” their small fleets of leased electrics around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um.

In the late 2000s, though, electrics staged a come­back, large­ly thanks to Tes­la Motors, a start-up that ben­e­fit­ed from heavy state and fed­er­al sub­si­dies. In turn, Tesla’s sur­vival led some main­stream automak­ers to grudg­ing­ly recon­sid­er electrics.

And that stim­u­lat­ed the glob­al lithi­um indus­try, espe­cial­ly in South Amer­i­ca, home to the “lithi­um tri­an­gle”, a vast area of lithi­um-rich salt pans in the Andean high desert that over­laps Argenti­na, Bolivia and Chile. Over the past decade, Bolivia’s neigh­bours became impor­tant exporters of lithi­um car­bon­ate, the basic form of refined lithi­um, and the Morales gov­ern­ment want­ed in, too.

Bolivia has at least a quar­ter of the world’s lithi­um, includ­ing the sin­gle largest deposit in the Salar de Uyu­ni, a salt pan so large it can be seen from space. In 2008, the gov­ern­ment start­ed work on a pilot plant to refine lithi­um car­bon­ate and in 2018 struck a deal with a Ger­man com­pa­ny called ACI Sys­tems to build an inte­grat­ed plant pro­duc­ing lithi­um com­pounds and bat­tery com­po­nents.

Iso­lat­ed, impure and hard to extract

Scep­ti­cal observers point­ed out that this ambi­tious scheme faced a host of seri­ous tech­ni­cal, eco­nom­ic and geopo­lit­i­cal obsta­cles from the out­set. Lithi­um is mined in two ways: from hard rock, as in Aus­tralia, one of the world’s largest pro­duc­ers, or by evap­o­rat­ing the thin lay­er of brine that cov­ers salt pans. This is how it is done in the Chilean and Argen­tine deposits.

But the Uyu­ni is wet­ter and at a high­er alti­tude (3,656 metres), so evap­o­ra­tion there is less effi­cient. More­over, Boli­vian lithi­um con­tains more impu­ri­ties, com­pli­cat­ing the extrac­tion process. ACI said it could over­come these prob­lems with new tech­nol­o­gy, but delays and dis­putes about roy­al­ties led the Boli­vian gov­ern­ment to can­cel the deal in ear­ly Novem­ber. Days lat­er, Morales was deposed.

It is impos­si­ble to abstract lithi­um pol­i­tics from Bolivia’s long­stand­ing social cri­sis, often char­ac­terised as a strug­gle pit­ting white eco­nom­ic elites based in the low­land city of San­ta Cruz, the com­mer­cial cen­tre, against the large­ly indige­nous polit­i­cal class in high­land La Paz, the nation­al cap­i­tal. Crit­ics argued that the inte­grat­ed lithi­um oper­a­tion had been ill-coor­di­nat­ed and some wel­comed the coup as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reor­gan­ise and speed up the effort.

Elec­tric vehi­cle uncer­tain­ty is bad for busi­ness

The real­i­ty is that Bolivia is behold­en to forces large­ly out of its con­trol. Its lithi­um reserves are iso­lat­ed and hard to process, but the main fac­tor pre­vent­ing a white gold rush is the uncer­tain mar­ket for all-bat­tery elec­tric vehi­cles.

There are around 5 mil­lion elec­tric vehi­cles in the world today. An impres­sive fig­ure in his­tor­i­cal con­text, but elec­tric cars still rep­re­sent only 0.7% of over­all pro­duc­tion, and main­stream automak­ers are not keen to ramp it up. The cars gen­er­al­ly lose mon­ey and remain expen­sive.

Because the elec­tric vehi­cle fleets are so new, nobody knows what bat­tery life­time and life­cy­cle costs might be and who is going to pay for replace­ment packs. Right now, those costs are decou­pled from mar­ket demand and obscured by pub­lic sub­si­dies that in some cas­es are being phased out.

And these uncer­tain­ties are bad news for lithi­um pro­duc­ers. Expect­ing an elec­tric vehi­cle boom, they over­in­vest­ed and cre­at­ed a sup­ply glut that slashed the price of lithi­um car­bon­ate from US$25,000 to US$10,000 per met­ric tonne over the past two years. You might think that this would make for cheap­er bat­ter­ies, but bat­tery packs are actu­al­ly less sen­si­tive to the prices of com­mod­i­ty mate­ri­als than typ­i­cal­ly assumed – instead, much of the cost comes from man­u­fac­tur­ing inef­fi­cien­cies.

If the coup-mak­ers believe that get­ting rid of Morales is going to change any of this, they are like­ly to be dis­ap­point­ed. The for­mer pres­i­dent rep­re­sent­ed a con­stituen­cy that is in no hur­ry to devel­op the country’s resources if that means giv­ing con­trol and most of the prof­its to out­siders. The chang­ing for­tunes of the elec­tric car indus­try, symp­to­matic more of a vast exper­i­ment than a true com­mer­cial enter­prise at this stage, bear out this cau­tious approach. What is cer­tain is that the civ­il unrest pro­voked by the coup will not do Bolivia’s lithi­um indus­try any good.
———-

“Boli­vian lithi­um: why you should not expect any ‘white gold rush’ in the wake of Morales over­throw” by Matthew Eisler; The Con­ver­sa­tion; 11/15/2019

“Bolivia has at least a quar­ter of the world’s lithi­um, includ­ing the sin­gle largest deposit in the Salar de Uyu­ni, a salt pan so large it can be seen from space. In 2008, the gov­ern­ment start­ed work on a pilot plant to refine lithi­um car­bon­ate and in 2018 struck a deal with a Ger­man com­pa­ny called ACI Sys­tems to build an inte­grat­ed plant pro­duc­ing lithi­um com­pounds and bat­tery com­po­nents.”

At least a quart of the world’s lithi­um, includ­ing the largest sin­gle deposit. That’s quite a geostrate­gic trea­sure trove. And a con­tract signed with the Ger­man com­pa­ny ACI in 2018 to mine those reserves was can­celed by the Morales gov­ern­ment just days before he was over­throw:

...
But the Uyu­ni is wet­ter and at a high­er alti­tude (3,656 metres), so evap­o­ra­tion there is less effi­cient. More­over, Boli­vian lithi­um con­tains more impu­ri­ties, com­pli­cat­ing the extrac­tion process. ACI said it could over­come these prob­lems with new tech­nol­o­gy, but delays and dis­putes about roy­al­ties led the Boli­vian gov­ern­ment to can­cel the deal in ear­ly Novem­ber. Days lat­er, Morales was deposed.
...

But even if ACI suc­ceed­ed in devel­op­ing the tech­nol­o­gy need­ed to effi­cient mine Bolivi­a’s lithi­um, low­er costs for lithi­um still might not be what is required to increase glob­al demand for lithi­um because the demand is pri­mar­i­ly dri­ven by the demand for elec­tric vehi­cle, where the costs of the bat­ter­ies is a major fac­tor in the costs of the vehi­cle. But the costs of build­ing those bat­ter­ies isn’t dri­ven by the cost of lithi­um. It’s oth­er aspects of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process that are dri­ving the costs. That, accord­ing to the author, is why we should­n’t expect to see a big new boom in demand for Bolivi­a’s lithi­um:

...
And these uncer­tain­ties are bad news for lithi­um pro­duc­ers. Expect­ing an elec­tric vehi­cle boom, they over­in­vest­ed and cre­at­ed a sup­ply glut that slashed the price of lithi­um car­bon­ate from US$25,000 to US$10,000 per met­ric tonne over the past two years. You might think that this would make for cheap­er bat­ter­ies, but bat­tery packs are actu­al­ly less sen­si­tive to the prices of com­mod­i­ty mate­ri­als than typ­i­cal­ly assumed – instead, much of the cost comes from man­u­fac­tur­ing inef­fi­cien­cies.
...

And now here’s an arti­cle about how Tes­la announced days after the coup that it’s going to be build­ing a new elec­tric vehi­cle bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Berlin. Why Berlin? To take advan­tage of Ger­many’s advanced automa­tion capa­bil­i­ty to low­er the costs of build­ing these bat­ter­ies:

Reuters

Ger­man automa­tion tal­ent pow­ers Musk’s bat­tery move to Europe

Edward Tay­lor
Novem­ber 14, 2019 / 12:08 AM

FRANKFURT (Reuters) — To unclog bot­tle­necks last year at his Tes­la Inc (TSLA.O) plant in Cal­i­for­nia, Elon Musk flew in six plane­loads of new robots and equip­ment from Ger­many to speed up bat­tery pro­duc­tion for its Mod­el 3.

Now the Tes­la CEO is try­ing to tap that Ger­man automa­tion ecosys­tem direct­ly with Tuesday’s announce­ment that the elec­tric car­mak­er will build a Euro­pean car and bat­tery fac­to­ry near Berlin.

So far, Musk has failed in his plans to cre­ate a fac­to­ry so high­ly auto­mat­ed that it allows Tes­la to make cars more effi­cient­ly than much big­ger rivals. As a result, the automak­er has strug­gled to meet pro­duc­tion goals and been hit with defec­tions of key staff mem­bers to rival firms.

The new Ger­man fac­to­ry is designed to help change all that.

“Every­one knows Ger­man engi­neer­ing is out­stand­ing for sure. You know that is part of the rea­son why we are locat­ing Gigafac­to­ry Europe in Ger­many,” Musk said at a pres­ti­gious Ger­man car awards cer­e­mo­ny in Berlin late on Tues­day.

BMW (BMWG.DE) has a fac­to­ry in Leipzig, where it builds its i3 elec­tric vehi­cle and it will source bat­tery cells from a fac­to­ry in Erfurt run by China’s Con­tem­po­rary Amperex Tech­nol­o­gy Ltd (CATL) (300750.SZ)..

VW is retool­ing a plant in Zwick­au to build 330,000 elec­tric cars and Ger­man engi­neer­ing giant Siemens AG (SIEGn.DE), which has an indus­tri­al and tech­nol­o­gy hub in Berlin, last week said it met with Musk to dis­cuss projects in the area of advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and car charg­ing.

Ger­man car­mak­ers and sup­pli­ers are tap­ping in to a 1 bil­lion euro ($1.10 bil­lion) fund set up by Ger­many to increase bat­tery cell pro­duc­tion and are fur­ther aid­ed by a gov­ern­ment-fund­ed research facil­i­ty to increase bat­tery cell devel­op­ment know-how.

PRODUCTION GOAL

Tes­la has yet to meet its goal of build­ing more than 500,000 Mod­el 3 cars by 2018. That goal was set back in 2016 and since then Tesla’s pro­duc­tion guru, Peter Hochholdinger, a for­mer Audi pro­duc­tion expert, quit to joined rival Lucid.

This year Tes­la expects to deliv­er 360,000 to 400,000 cars, a tar­get that includes sell­ing all mod­els.

By con­trast, the Volk­swa­gen brand deliv­ered 6.24 mil­lion cars last year and is ready­ing its glob­al pro­duc­tion net­work to build 22 mil­lion elec­tric cars by 2028.

To ramp up man­u­fac­tur­ing, Tes­la start­ed mak­ing its Mod­el 3 in a tent, but the Cal­i­for­nia-built cars often failed to meet Ger­man qual­i­ty stan­dards.

In August, Ger­man car rental com­pa­ny Nextmove walked away from a 5 mil­lion-euro ($5.55 mil­lion) order for 85 Tes­la Mod­el 3 elec­tric vehi­cles, fol­low­ing a dis­pute over how to fix qual­i­ty issues.

POTENTIAL FOR AUTOMATION

Although Tes­la has cho­sen a high-cost loca­tion, there is high­er poten­tial for automa­tion with elec­tric cars since they are less com­plex to build than com­bus­tion engined vehi­cles.

A com­bus­tion engined car has 1,400 com­po­nents in the motor, exhaust sys­tem and trans­mis­sion. By con­trast, an elec­tric car’s bat­tery and motor has only 200 com­po­nents, accord­ing to ana­lysts at ING.

While the aver­age com­bus­tion engine takes 3.5 hours to make, and the aver­age trans­mis­sion requires 2.7 hours of assem­bly, an elec­tric motor takes only about 1 hour to assem­ble, con­sul­tants at Alix Part­ners said in their Glob­al Auto­mo­tive Out­look study.

“Per­son­nel is not a high cost fac­tor in the pro­duc­tion of elec­tric cars,” Ever­core ISI ana­lyst Arndt Elling­horst said.

Today the biggest cost fac­tor is still bat­tery packs, which amount to between 30% and 50% of the cost of an elec­tric vehi­cle.

QUALITY VS SCALE

By adding the “Made in Ger­many” qual­i­ty, Tes­la could sig­nif­i­cant­ly boost sales of its elec­tric cars, which are already class-lead­ing.

On Tues­day Tesla’s Mod­el 3 was award­ed the “Gold­en Steer­ing Wheel” by Germany’s Auto Bild mag­a­zine, with jury mem­ber Robin Horn­ing say­ing the Mod­el 3 had beat­en the new BMW 3 series and the Audi A4 in “mid and pre­mi­um class” cat­e­go­ry.

...

———-

“Ger­man automa­tion tal­ent pow­ers Musk’s bat­tery move to Europe” by Edward Tay­lor; Reuters; 11/14/2019

“Although Tes­la has cho­sen a high-cost loca­tion, there is high­er poten­tial for automa­tion with elec­tric cars since they are less com­plex to build than com­bus­tion engined vehi­cles.”

Automa­tion was always part of Tes­la’s busi­ness mod­el and now it appears that Tes­la is out­sourc­ing that part of its mod­el to Ger­many, where car man­u­fac­tur­ing is already heav­i­ly auto­mat­ed:

...
So far, Musk has failed in his plans to cre­ate a fac­to­ry so high­ly auto­mat­ed that it allows Tes­la to make cars more effi­cient­ly than much big­ger rivals. As a result, the automak­er has strug­gled to meet pro­duc­tion goals and been hit with defec­tions of key staff mem­bers to rival firms.

The new Ger­man fac­to­ry is designed to help change all that.

...

A com­bus­tion engined car has 1,400 com­po­nents in the motor, exhaust sys­tem and trans­mis­sion. By con­trast, an elec­tric car’s bat­tery and motor has only 200 com­po­nents, accord­ing to ana­lysts at ING.

While the aver­age com­bus­tion engine takes 3.5 hours to make, and the aver­age trans­mis­sion requires 2.7 hours of assem­bly, an elec­tric motor takes only about 1 hour to assem­ble, con­sul­tants at Alix Part­ners said in their Glob­al Auto­mo­tive Out­look study.

“Per­son­nel is not a high cost fac­tor in the pro­duc­tion of elec­tric cars,” Ever­core ISI ana­lyst Arndt Elling­horst said.

Today the biggest cost fac­tor is still bat­tery packs, which amount to between 30% and 50% of the cost of an elec­tric vehi­cle.
...

So will Tes­la see the low­ered cost of build­ing car bat­ter­ies it’s hop­ing for as a result of Ger­many automa­tion? We’ll see. But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle form Decem­ber 2018 about the ini­tial sign­ing of the deal between ACI and the Boli­vian gov­ern­ment makes clear, this was­n’t just a deal between a pri­vate Ger­man com­pa­ny and Bolivia. The deal had heavy back­ing by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment and the plan is to export the lithi­um to Ger­man and else­where in Europe. In oth­er words, if Tes­la want­ed access to that Boli­vian lithi­um, relo­cat­ing its bat­tery fac­tor­ing in Ger­many is prob­a­bly the biggest fac­tor in secur­ing that access because ACI/Bolivia deal was part of a Ger­man gov­ern­ment pro­gram to relo­cate bat­tery pro­duc­tion in Ger­many:

Reuters

Ger­many secures access to vast lithi­um deposit in Bolivia

Michael Nien­aber
Decem­ber 12, 2018 / 9:32 AM

BERLIN (Reuters) — Ger­many and Bolivia on Wednes­day sealed a part­ner­ship for the indus­tri­al use of lithi­um, a key raw mate­r­i­al for bat­tery cell pro­duc­tion, in an impor­tant step to become less depen­dent on Asian mar­ket lead­ers in the dawn­ing age of elec­tric cars.

Inter­est in bat­tery met­als such as cobalt, nick­el and lithi­um is soar­ing as the auto indus­try scram­bles to build more elec­tric cars and cut nox­ious fumes from vehi­cles pow­ered by fos­sil fuels in light of stricter emis­sion rules.

“Ger­many should become a lead­ing loca­tion for bat­tery cell pro­duc­tion. A large part of pro­duc­tion costs is linked to raw mate­ri­als,” Ger­man Econ­o­my Min­is­ter Peter Alt­maier said.

“Ger­man indus­try is there­fore well advised to secure its needs for lithi­um ear­ly in order to avoid falling behind and slip­ping into depen­den­cy,” Alt­maier said, adding the deal was “an impor­tant build­ing block” to secure this sup­ply.

With the joint ven­ture, Boli­vian state com­pa­ny YLB is team­ing up with Germany’s pri­vate­ly-owned ACI Sys­tems to devel­op its mas­sive Uyu­ni salt flat and build a lithi­um hydrox­ide plant as well as a fac­to­ry for elec­tric vehi­cle bat­ter­ies in Bolivia.

ACI Sys­tems is also in talks to sup­ply com­pa­nies based in Ger­many and else­where in Europe with lithi­um from Bolivia.

The joint ven­ture aims to pro­duce up to 40,000 tons of lithi­um hydrox­ide per year from 2022 over a peri­od of 70 years.

Wolf­gang Schmutz, CEO of ACI Group, the par­ent com­pa­ny of ACI Sys­tems, said more than 80 per­cent of the lithi­um would be export­ed to Ger­many.

ACI Sys­tems is in talks to sup­ply a big Ger­man car­mak­er with lithi­um, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the project.

An ACI Sys­tems spokes­woman declined to com­ment.

MORE CONTROL

For Ger­many, the pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship is part of wider gov­ern­ment efforts to sup­port the pro­duc­tion of bat­tery cells in Europe and help com­pa­nies get more con­trol over the val­ue-added chain of elec­tric vehi­cles.

The gov­ern­ment has ear­marked 1 bil­lion euros to sup­port domes­tic com­pa­nies look­ing to pro­duce bat­tery cells for elec­tric vehi­cles as a way to reduce Ger­man car­mak­ers’ depen­dence on Asian sup­pli­ers and pro­tect jobs at risk from the shift away from com­bus­tion engines.

For Bolivia, the deal to extract lithi­um from the Uyu­ni salt flats in the Andes, one of the world’s largest deposits, enables the gov­ern­ment to bring jobs to a region plagued by pover­ty.

Nicole Hoffmeis­ter-Kraut, econ­o­my min­is­ter of Germany’s south­west­ern state of Baden-Wuert­tem­berg, the home region of ACI Sys­tems, said the lithi­um deal would help Ger­man car­mak­ers to become less depen­dent on Asian sup­pli­ers of car bat­ter­ies.

The suc­cess of the ven­ture now depends on whether both sides can rec­on­cile eco­nom­ic inter­ests with envi­ron­men­tal and social require­ments, she added.

LITHIUM TRIANGLE

...

Pres­i­dent Evo Morales has sought to keep lithi­um from being export­ed mere­ly as raw mate­r­i­al and Germany’s will­ing­ness to help build pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties in Bolivia played a key role in the deci­sion to start the joint ven­ture.

When Bolivia sought a for­eign part­ner to devel­op Uyu­ni, a Chi­nese com­pa­ny seemed a nat­ur­al fit, giv­en China’s dom­i­nance in the glob­al lithi­um sup­ply chain and its strong ties with La Paz.

Instead, Bolivia picked ACI Sys­tems, a com­pa­ny from south­ern Ger­many untest­ed in lithi­um that nonethe­less beat sev­en rivals from Chi­na, Rus­sia and Cana­da.

Back­ing from Ger­man fed­er­al and region­al min­istries was key to per­suad­ing Bolivia ACI’s bid was seri­ous, com­pa­ny and gov­ern­ment offi­cials from Bolivia and Ger­many told Reuters.

———–

“Ger­many secures access to vast lithi­um deposit in Bolivia” by Michael Nien­aber; Reuters; 12/12/2018

“For Ger­many, the pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship is part of wider gov­ern­ment efforts to sup­port the pro­duc­tion of bat­tery cells in Europe and help com­pa­nies get more con­trol over the val­ue-added chain of elec­tric vehi­cles.”

Yep, the ACI deal with Bolivia was a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship that includ­ed the Ger­man gov­ern­ment and is part of a large Ger­man ini­tia­tive to to sup­port domes­tic com­pa­nies look­ing to pro­duce bat­tery cells for elec­tric vehi­cles. When the deal with announced, Ger­many’s Econ­o­my Min­is­ter declared that Ger­many should become a lead­ing loca­tion for bat­tery cell prod­uct and ACI announced that 80 per­cent of the export­ed lithi­um would be head­ing to Ger­many. So get­ting com­pa­nies to locate their bat­tery pro­duc­tion in Ger­many was part of the plan:

...
“Ger­many should become a lead­ing loca­tion for bat­tery cell pro­duc­tion. A large part of pro­duc­tion costs is linked to raw mate­ri­als,” Ger­man Econ­o­my Min­is­ter Peter Alt­maier said.

...

ACI Sys­tems is also in talks to sup­ply com­pa­nies based in Ger­many and else­where in Europe with lithi­um from Bolivia.

...

Wolf­gang Schmutz, CEO of ACI Group, the par­ent com­pa­ny of ACI Sys­tems, said more than 80 per­cent of the lithi­um would be export­ed to Ger­many.

ACI Sys­tems is in talks to sup­ply a big Ger­man car­mak­er with lithi­um, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the project.

...

The gov­ern­ment has ear­marked 1 bil­lion euros to sup­port domes­tic com­pa­nies look­ing to pro­duce bat­tery cells for elec­tric vehi­cles as a way to reduce Ger­man car­mak­ers’ depen­dence on Asian sup­pli­ers and pro­tect jobs at risk from the shift away from com­bus­tion engines.

...

Back­ing from Ger­man fed­er­al and region­al min­istries was key to per­suad­ing Bolivia ACI’s bid was seri­ous, com­pa­ny and gov­ern­ment offi­cials from Bolivia and Ger­many told Reuters.
...

And that plan that appears to have suc­ceed­ed with the announce­ment by Tel­sa. Thanks to the coup. Giv­en all that, it seems like we should­n’t be too sur­prised if Bolivi­a’s lithi­um indus­try does see a surge in invest­ments. Although don’t for­get that the rea­son for the can­ce­la­tion of the ACI con­tract days before the coup was due to com­plaints the con­tract did­n’t do enough to ben­e­fit the locals. So while Bolivi­a’s lithi­um indus­try might ben­e­fit from the coup, we should­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expect the Boli­vian peo­ple to ben­e­fit from it, which is pret­ty much what we should expect from a coup.

Here’s the kind of dis­turb­ing sto­ry that sug­gests the new far right Boli­vian coup gov­ern­ment has no intent of even try­ing to find some sort of com­mon ground with the indige­nous pop­u­la­tions that large­ly backed the now-over­thrown Morales gov­ern­ment: the new inter­im pres­i­dent Jea­nine Áñez was sworn in last week with her inter­im cab­i­net and, sur­prise!, there isn’t a sin­gle indige­nous cab­i­net mem­ber. Not one. So if the coup plot­ters want­ed to ensure that the cur­rent strife deep­ens and indige­nous pop­u­la­tion feels like they are fac­ing a immi­nent oppres­sion they could­n’t have cho­sen a more effec­tive way to send that mes­sage. And keep in mind that, as we saw, the forces behind this coup have also long been behind a sep­a­ratist dri­ve to break up Bolivia. And now we’re get­ting reports of the police open­ly shoot­ing and killing large­ly indige­nous pro-Morales pro­test­ers. So if it seems like the coup plot­ters are try­ing to spark an out­right civ­il war, keep in that’s what they’ve been try­ing to do all along:

The Guardian

Bolivia pres­i­den­t’s ini­tial indige­nous-free cab­i­net height­ens polar­iza­tion

* Rightwing Chris­t­ian Jea­nine Áñez vows to ‘paci­fy’ coun­try
* Dis­re­spect for indige­nous Wipha­la flag stokes out­rage

Dan Col­lyns in La Paz
Thu 14 Nov 2019 15.38 EST
Last mod­i­fied on Fri 15 Nov 2019 10.24 EST

Bolivia’s con­tro­ver­sial new inter­im pres­i­dent has unveiled a new cab­i­net which crit­ics say could fur­ther increase polar­iza­tion in the coun­try still deeply split over the oust­ing of her pre­de­ces­sor, Evo Morales.

To the applause of mil­i­tary top brass, law­mak­ers and sen­a­tors, Jea­nine Áñez vowed to “recon­struct democ­ra­cy” and “paci­fy the coun­try” at a late-night cer­e­mo­ny in the “Pala­cio Que­ma­do” (Burnt Palace) pres­i­den­tial build­ing.

“We want to be a demo­c­ra­t­ic tool of inclu­sion and uni­ty,” said the 52-year-old reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive, sit­ting at a table bear­ing a huge open Bible and cru­ci­fix.

But the tran­si­tion­al cab­i­net ini­tial­ly sworn into office on Wednes­day night did not include a sin­gle indige­nous per­son, in a coun­try where at least 40% of the pop­u­la­tion belongs to one of 36 indige­nous groups.

Sev­er­al more min­is­ters were sworn in at a sec­ond cer­e­mo­ny on Thurs­day, includ­ing Martha Yujra Apaza, wear­ing the tra­di­tion­al pollera skirt, as cul­ture and tourism min­is­ter.

“It’s impor­tant to pre­serve our cul­tur­al prac­tices of our Boli­vian peo­ple, because they enrich the nation­al iden­ti­ty,” she said.

“Bolivia can­not con­tin­ue revolv­ing around a tyrant,” Áñez added, in a remark direct­ed at her pre­de­ces­sor, who flew into exile in Mex­i­co on Mon­day and has since ques­tioned the legit­i­ma­cy of his tem­po­rary suc­ces­sor.

Morales resigned under pres­sure on Sun­day after a tumul­tuous 48 hours in which police offi­cers mutinied, a damn­ing audit by the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States found elec­toral irreg­u­lar­i­ties and the mil­i­tary com­mand urged him him to quit.

Áñez has called for fresh elec­tions but has not yet set the date for the vote, which under the con­sti­tu­tion she must do with­in 90 days.

Speak­ing in Mex­i­co City on Wednes­day, Morales hint­ed that he might return to Bolivia, but Áñez made clear that he would not be allowed to run again.

“Evo Morales does not qual­i­fy to run for a fourth term. It’s because [he did] that we’ve had all this con­vul­sion, and because of this that so many Boli­vians have been demon­strat­ing in the streets,” she said.

The for­mer leader’s sup­port­ers have decried heavy-hand­ed polic­ing in street protests and say they are being tar­get­ed for being indige­nous in appear­ance or dress. On Wednes­day, the for­mer sen­ate head Adri­ana Sal­vatier­ra, a Morales loy­al­ist who resigned just after he did, was pre­vent­ed from enter­ing the par­lia­ment build­ing by police who scuf­fled with her sup­port­ers.

Áñez’s choice of cab­i­net showed no signs that she intend­ed to reach across the country’s deep polit­i­cal and eth­nic divide. Her senior min­is­ters includes promi­nent mem­bers of the busi­ness elite from San­ta Cruz, Bolivia’s most pop­u­lous city and a bas­tion of oppo­si­tion to Evo Morales.

Speak­ing to jour­nal­ists, Áñez’s new inte­ri­or min­is­ter, Arturo Muril­lo, vowed to “hunt down” his pre­de­ces­sor Juan Ramón Quin­tana, a promi­nent Morales ally, stok­ing fears of a witch-hunt against mem­bers the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion.

Mark­ing dis­tance from Morales’s “21st-cen­tu­ry social­ism”, the new­ly appoint­ed for­eign min­is­ter, Karen Lon­gar­ic, said: “We leave behind those times in which eth­nic and class resent­ments which divide Boli­vians are used as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.”

Such com­ments were an implic­it attack on Bolivia’s first pres­i­dent from its indige­nous pop­u­la­tion, who changed the con­sti­tu­tion in 2009 to rede­fine the coun­try as a “pluri­na­tion­al” state which enshrined the expand­ed ter­ri­to­r­i­al rights of indige­nous peo­ple.

The per­ceived dis­re­spect of indige­nous sym­bols has also whipped up out­rage among Morales sup­port­ers in Bolivia and across Latin Amer­i­ca. Social media videos show­ing the burn­ing of the Wipha­la – the mul­ti-coloured flag of native peo­ple of the Andes close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Morales’s lega­cy – has brought thou­sands on to the streets wav­ing the ban­ner.

One police chief made a pub­lic apol­o­gy after anoth­er video showed offi­cers cut­ting the flag out of their uni­forms.

Áñez her­self has drawn crit­i­cism after racist remarks against indige­nous peo­ple were unearthed in tweets attrib­uted to her from 2013.

“This is def­i­nite­ly an anti-indige­nous gov­ern­ment,” said María Galin­do, founder of the Mujer Cre­an­do fem­i­nist move­ment. “It’s not just racism but also the issue of the pluri­na­tion­al state,” she said.

But Galin­do, a fierce crit­ic of Morales, was most wor­ried by the pow­er vac­u­um the left­wing icon left behind. “The right has filled the gigan­tic void in a chill­ing and dan­ger­ous way,” she said.

“Espe­cial­ly for me because I’m an anti-fas­cist fight­er in this coun­try, I’m open­ly les­bian and I could be tar­get­ed, threat­ened and mur­dered in this coun­try,” she added.

...

But there are signs oth­er unelect­ed fig­ures are exert­ing influ­ence. Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho, a self-styled civic leader who has gained increas­ing promi­nence as a Morales oppo­nent, entered the pres­i­den­tial palace with fol­low­ers and then emerged to declare that “the Bible has re-entered the palace”.

His right-hand man, Jer­jes Jus­tini­ano, was select­ed as a min­is­ter of the pres­i­den­cy on Wednes­day.

As Áñez swore in her cab­i­net, a heavy police pres­ence had quelled protests in the city’s down­town. But the for­mer president’s sup­port­ers flood­ed into the streets of La Paz’s sis­ter city of El Alto, chant­i­ng, “Now, civ­il war!”

“Nobody elect­ed her,” said Jim Shultz, founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Democ­ra­cy Cen­tre who lived in Bolivia for 19 years.

“If Boli­vians who sup­port­ed Evo – and there’s a lot of them – think that, some­how, with­out any vic­to­ry in the bal­lot box, the right is get­ting back into pow­er, then that is going to inflame divi­sions.”

———-

“Bolivia pres­i­den­t’s ini­tial indige­nous-free cab­i­net height­ens polar­iza­tion” by Dan Col­lyns; The Guardian; 11/14/2019

“Áñez’s choice of cab­i­net showed no signs that she intend­ed to reach across the country’s deep polit­i­cal and eth­nic divide. Her senior min­is­ters includes promi­nent mem­bers of the busi­ness elite from San­ta Cruz, Bolivia’s most pop­u­lous city and a bas­tion of oppo­si­tion to Evo Morales.”

As we can see, the inter­im gov­ern­ment appears to be tak­ing almost every step pos­si­ble to inflame the divi­sions between the new coup gov­ern­ment and the indige­nous pop­u­la­tion, includ­ing mak­ing the right-hand man of far right sep­a­ratist leader Luis Ger­nan­do Cama­cho one of the new min­is­ters. It real­ly does seem like spark­ing a civ­il war is the intent here:

...
But there are signs oth­er unelect­ed fig­ures are exert­ing influ­ence. Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho, a self-styled civic leader who has gained increas­ing promi­nence as a Morales oppo­nent, entered the pres­i­den­tial palace with fol­low­ers and then emerged to declare that “the Bible has re-entered the palace”.

His right-hand man, Jer­jes Jus­tini­ano, was select­ed as a min­is­ter of the pres­i­den­cy on Wednes­day.
...

So giv­en that the new gov­ern­ment is led by groups that have long advanced sep­a­ratism in Bolivia and now appears to be try­ing to cre­ate the kind of shock and despair in the indige­nous pop­u­la­tions that will lead to the civ­il war, it’s worth recall­ing that the inter­na­tion­al group of neo-Nazis behind the bizarre 2009 assas­si­na­tion plot against Evo Morales — which Cama­cho’s men­tor Branko Marinkovic appeared to be behind — was affil­i­at­ed with the sep­a­ratist group Nación Cam­ba. In oth­er words, a decade ago these forces appeared to have a plan of assas­si­nat­ing Morales in order to trig­ger a break up of the coun­try so we should­n’t be too sur­prised if that’s still the plan fol­low­ing this coup:

The Irish Times

Inde­pen­dence strug­gle dates back to Incas, says sep­a­ratist group

Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 01:00

TOM HENNIGAN writes from San­ta Cruz on a meet­ing of Nación Cam­ba, one of Bolivia’s most rad­i­cal groups

AT FIRST glance the gath­er­ing in the ele­gant, colon­nad­ed court­yard of the Muse­um of Region­al His­to­ry looks like just anoth­er one of the many cul­tur­al offer­ings in this intel­lec­tu­al­ly vibrant city.

But this crowd of about 100 most­ly mid­dle-class cruceños is not lis­ten­ing to a lec­ture on art his­to­ry or a dis­cus­sion on the lat­est find­ings by the region’s archae­ol­o­gists. Instead, it is a talk on how an inde­pen­dent Cam­ba state would very quick­ly become strate­gi­cal­ly vital in South Amer­i­can geopol­i­tics.

The speak­er sketch­es out his vision under green and black ban­ners draped over the upper balustrades, while mem­bers in para­mil­i­tary-style kaki shirts and black trousers hand out lit­er­a­ture at the door.

This is the fort­night­ly meet­ing of Nación Cam­ba, the largest and most promi­nent of San­ta Cruz’s rad­i­cal sep­a­ratist move­ments.

A young cruceño wear­ing a kaki top explains that the region’s strug­gle for inde­pen­dence from Bolivia’s cen­tral gov­ern­ment locat­ed in La Paz even pre­dates the arrival of the Euro­peans.

“The peo­ple on the Alti­plano high­lands in the Andes always organ­ised them­selves along impe­r­i­al lines. There was always El Inca who con­trolled every­thing. In this part of the Ama­zon basin the Indi­ans did not have this max­i­mum leader and the Inca invaders were resist­ed by the peo­ple here. So our strug­gle with the Alti­plano is one that goes way back,” says Juan Manuel Par­avici­ni.

In Bolivia, a cam­ba is some­one from the trop­i­cal low­lands in the east­ern two-thirds of the coun­try. Many of these main­ly mes­ti­zo cam­bas say they iden­ti­fy lit­tle with the Andean Bolivia to the west, which is much poor­er and has an over­whelm­ing indige­nous major­i­ty.

A major­i­ty of cam­bas sup­port a civic move­ment for greater region­al auton­o­my. But Nación Camba’s ide­ol­o­gy goes fur­ther, insist­ing cam­bas form a sep­a­rate dis­tinct nation, and that the join­ing of their region with the Andean west into one coun­try at inde­pen­dence from Spain was a dis­as­ter.

Its fol­low­ers say they are proud defend­ers of their region’s iden­ti­ty against what they see as the aggres­sion of the cen­tral gov­ern­ment. To oppo­nents, it is a racist and pro­to-fas­cist organ­i­sa­tion try­ing to pull Bolivia apart.

The group’s sym­bols were found on the blog of Eduar­do Rózsa Flo­res, the sup­posed leader of the group of men whose hotel rooms were raid­ed by elite Boli­vian police last week. Rózsa Flo­res died in the raid along­side Irish­man Michael Dwyer and Hun­gar­i­an Arpad Mag­yarosi. Anoth­er Hun­gar­i­an and a Boli­vian hold­ing a Croat pass­port were arrest­ed at the scene. A Nación Cam­ba flag was also found in what police say was an arms cache belong­ing to Rózsa Flores’s group.

...

In a video Rózsa Flo­res record­ed in Hun­gary before head­ing to South Amer­i­ca, he said he had been invit­ed back to his home­land “to organ­ise the defence of San­ta Cruz, because indige­nous mili­tias and pro-gov­ern­ment ele­ments are caus­ing trou­ble there”. He said if nec­es­sary he was ready to fight for an inde­pen­dent San­ta Cruz.

The Boli­vian gov­ern­ment has used the video to accuse the oppo­si­tion in the region of being linked to ter­ror­ism and says it will short­ly sum­mon local lead­ers in for ques­tion­ing. The Irish Gov­ern­ment has raised ques­tions about the raid amid evi­dence that Dwyer and the two oth­ers were sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ed.

Nación Cam­ba lead­ers say they now expect to be called in soon by the gov­ern­ment, but deny any link with the Rózsa Flo­res group.

“The events in the hotel were a sur­prise to us when we heard about them. They were here for some time but they nev­er got in touch with us. Our sym­bols are on Flores’s blog, but maybe he just felt a roman­tic con­nec­tion with our ideas,” says Nación Cam­ba founder and chief ide­o­logue Ser­gio Ante­lo.

Ante­lo ques­tions the notion that the group was plan­ning to under­take some sort of covert or para­mil­i­tary action.

“Some­one brought them here. Some­one gave them mon­ey, sus­tained them. But they did not prac­tise the min­i­mum basics of secu­ri­ty that ter­ror­ists use. Some of the arms found in this sup­posed arms cache date from the Cha­co War against Paraguay in the 1930s. And at no time did an armed group announce itself.”

Ante­lo also reject­ed the notion that the height­ened ten­sions between San­ta Cruz and the gov­ern­ment in La Paz that pre­ced­ed Rózsa Flores’s arrival in Bolivia could lead to open armed con­fronta­tion between the two.

“In San­ta Cruz there is always talk of a pos­si­ble con­fronta­tion with the cen­tral gov­ern­ment, but it is always just talk. Some time ago we con­clud­ed that in South Amer­i­ca today there do not exist any of the con­di­tions for any sep­a­ratist move­ment. Any­one who aspires to devel­op a sep­a­ratist move­ment in San­ta Cruz is con­demned to fail­ure.”

———-

“Inde­pen­dence strug­gle dates back to Incas, says sep­a­ratist group” by TOM HENNIGAN; The Irish Times; 04/24/2009

“The group’s sym­bols were found on the blog of Eduar­do Rózsa Flo­res, the sup­posed leader of the group of men whose hotel rooms were raid­ed by elite Boli­vian police last week. Rózsa Flo­res died in the raid along­side Irish­man Michael Dwyer and Hun­gar­i­an Arpad Mag­yarosi. Anoth­er Hun­gar­i­an and a Boli­vian hold­ing a Croat pass­port were arrest­ed at the scene. A Nación Cam­ba flag was also found in what police say was an arms cache belong­ing to Rózsa Flores’s group.”

So the neo-Nazi assas­si­na­tion team was using the sym­bols of the Nación Cam­ba when they were plan­ning Morales’s assas­si­na­tion. That’s the kind of delib­er­ate use of sym­bols and vio­lence that sounds like the whole point of the assas­si­na­tion was to spark a sep­a­ratist civ­il war. And all evi­dence sug­gests the same forces behind this cur­rent coup were the same forces behind that 2009 assas­si­na­tion attempt. Will their desires to break up Bolivia be pla­cat­ing now that they have tem­po­rary con­trol of the coun­try or is this going to be seen as the ulti­mate oppor­tu­ni­ty for final­ly car­ry­ing out a balka­niza­tion agen­da? We’re going to see, but all signs right now are point­ing towards an agen­da of inflam­ing and mar­gin­al­iz­ing the indige­nous pop­u­la­tion as much as pos­si­ble. So maybe the plan is, ‘overt oppres­sion, and if that results in civ­il war so be it’. It’s a sce­nario that unfor­tu­nate­ly fits the avail­able data points.