The Duran Podcast
Bolivia coup failure
All right, Alexandra, let's talk about the attempted coup in Bolivia attempted, failed, and when you dig into the story a bit about Bolivia and why this coup might have taken place, you come up with some interesting information, which is that Bolivia is sitting on 21 million tons of lithium. Bolivia wants to enter bricks. Bolivia, I believe Bolivia has cut off diplomatic ties with Israel over the war in Gaza. And I also read, I haven't been able to confirm this, haven't at the time to confirm this, but I also read that Bolivia is in negotiations with Russia or working with Russia to start to build or construct nuclear reactors. I'm not quite sure on that one, but definitely reasons if you're a three letter agency to be upset with Bolivia and to try to to coup out the current administration. What are your thoughts on what's going on in Bolivia? On the last point, the Bolivian president, the one who they've just attempted to overthrow was just recently in Russia, where he attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. In fact, he participated in the Clean Recession, where he was the major guest alongside President Putin. So yes, they are planning all kinds of economic links. They want to join the bricks. They want to, as you correctly say, develop all kinds of commercial and other business relations and nuclear power, undoubtedly does feature in all of this. So all sorts of reasons, an overabundance of reasons why somebody might not be happy about the direction that Bolivia is currently taking, and why there might be an attempt by people who want to change Bolivia's direction to mount a coup. Now, I would say that this is a somewhat vulnerable moment for the government in Bolivia, because the current president is in dispute with Eva Morales, who was the left-wing president before. They've quarreled, as far as I can see, not so much about policy issues. They're both very much on the left in terms of Bolivian politics, and on the big policy issues, they're in agreement with each other. But there are arguments about who should be the leader of the major Bolivian left-wing party. So there's been that argument. Bolivia also is going through difficult economic times. There's been high inflation, and all of that, everywhere, all around the world, there is high inflation. Bolivia is not an exception. I think China is the only country which has managed to avoid inflation and inflation problem, but Bolivia has done. So there's been tensions within Bolivia. So it may be, if I could say definitely, that it was the case that people said to each other, well, this is in Washington, in London, wherever it was, that this is the moment to strike. He's an unpopular president, he's intentioned, he's quarreled with Morales, he's not got full support from his own party, he's taking Bolivia in a dangerous direction. Let's do that, which we have done so many times. Let's mount a military coup. And they did. And a military coup duly happened, and it followed all the classic lines of military coves in Latin America for decades. It's original moves, were almost identical to the ones that I remember in Chile and was it the early 1970s. The army assembles around the presidential palace. It starts to take control of the parliament, and that kind of thing. And then it collapsed almost immediately, because the president then sacked the military chief who was conducting the coup. He appointed somebody else to take his place. The army wasn't prepared to support the general who was organizing the coup, the military commander in charge. And they decided to accept the constitutionally appointed military chief, the new military chief immediately ordered the troops to leave and return to barracks, and they did, and the entire coup collapsed. And it seems the police force also remained loyal to the president and to the government. So on the one hand, the coup I think shows how alarmed the usual alphabet agencies and all of those people are with the direction of policy in Bolivia. And as you said, the lithium deposits, Bolivia's massive Libyan deposits are a particular concern, especially if Bolivia does enter the bricks. So they wanted to carry out the coup. They still have contacts within the Bolivia military, but it also shows that conducting coups like this in Latin America now has become far more difficult than it used to be in the 50s and 60s and 70s. The political levels of political sophistication have developed to a great degree and that you can't just pull a switch, call the right people on the phone and get a coup organized. Also information sophistication. I mean, right when this is going on, everyone on social media, they understood exactly what was happening and all the information started to come out about about Bolivia and what would be the reasons to overthrow the government and the speculation about who would want to overthrow the government in Bolivia. By the way, I think Eva Morales also supported the government. He came up with the government and also supported the government. So yeah, if you don't have the military, if you don't have the people with you, no coup is going to be successful. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm glad by the way you made the last one because I've seen some people claim that Morales was behind the coup. He manifestly wasn't. He was directly as much against him as it was against the current president. And of course, Morales himself was the target of what was in effect a coup, which actually managed to overthrow him. And so he had to go into exile for a time. He's absolutely not somebody who's going to support an adventure like this. But you're absolutely right. They don't control the information space. They don't control social media. They don't have the support of the population overall. They don't have the support of the major political parties. Today, the time when organizing coups of this kind in Latin America was easy has passed. And there are some people who don't seem to understand that, but we see how it's played out. The result is that probably Bolivia's current direction has been reinforced rather than reversed. Yeah. So yeah, the COVID in 2014 in Russia's, let's say sphere sphere of influence in Russia's neighborhood, decided in 2014 that it was not the best idea to cut off relations with Russia and to not only work with the West and with Europe, but it would be prudent, wise, rational to keep good relations with with Russia, Ukraine's neighbor. Bolivia in the US's neighborhood, the US's sphere of influence, you could say, decided, you know, bricks looks pretty good. Russia has some technology and some some things that it can offer us. And we would like to explore the the bricks path of of development, the multipolar world path of development and they're so freaked out at losing power that they'll remove governments, whether they're in Russia's neighborhood, whether they're in China's neighborhood, whether they're in their own neighborhood. Exactly. You're quite right. That's exactly what they do. I mean, again, this is, this is, this is what they do. This is how they think. I mean, they, they attempted to overthrow this government because it looks vulnerable. It turns out it's not so vulnerable after all, but the United States, because let's give the country where all this comes from. It's now the United States has been behind so many coups in so many places. Somebody drew up a list of the number of coups that the United States had been involved in before 1989, and it was already into the scores. And now it still continues, but it's losing its old skills. It's not able to do it because the world has changed. Yeah, well, think about the coups that have taken place since 2014. Okay, so you had the Maidan, a successful coup, you could say, definitely a successful coup for the, if you're the United States. But then after that, you, you've had an attempted coup in Belarus, failed, getting attempted coup in Kazakhstan, failed. Syria, you could say, was a regime change operation, which led to a terrible war, but that has failed. 2016, you also had a coup against, against Erdogan. I'm not saying that was, that was U.S. a sponsor, but that was also a coup that failed. Definitely Russia played a role in keeping Erdogan in power, at least letting Erdogan know what was going on. And now you have Bolivia, and that has failed. And then we've had other coups as well, but you're seeing a lot of failure in Venezuela, the coup d'etat business, Venezuela, Guaido, and all that, absolutely. What it demonstrates, what these events demonstrate, is the extent to which the world has changed. But at the center of power in Washington, the outlook of people there has not changed. They still, to a great extent, imagine that they can do things in the same way that they used to do them in the '90s and '80s and before. And in fact, they're continuing to pull the old levers and press the old buttons and pull the old switches. And what they discover is that the engine just doesn't rev up in the way that they expected that it would. Or it did rev up a little in this place, in this case. But then immediately it gasped out. So it's that they're driving an increasingly old and weak engine. By contrast, what we are seeing is coups taking place in some places in West Africa, for example. But they're in a completely opposite direction. They are countries that are actually distancing themselves from the United States. And interestingly enough, all of those coups turn out to be popular. Because they have the support of the military and the support of the people. Correct. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, we'll end the video there. It's interesting that they actually believe that they would be able to regime change Putin in Russia when they're having difficulties in Bolivia. Oh, well, you know, I mean, anyway, it'll make it'll make them redouble their efforts to regime change Putin. They'll say that the reason they felt in Bolivia was because of him, because if he goes, that's the way they're going to approach it. Everything solved. Yeah, right. Okay, well, we'll let it there. The Duran dot locals.com we on rumble Odyssey, but you tell the Grand Rock Finn and Twitter X and go to the Duran shop. Use the code football 24. Pick up some football merch link is in the description box down below. Take care. [Music]