Invention of the Bolivian Lithium Conspiracy Theory, Or the World Upside Down
If Elon Musk really did promote a coup d’état in Bolivia to control its lithium, it was a bad bet and a lost commercial initiative. The top lithium producers in the world are Australia, Chile, Argentina and China. Bolivia is not on the list.
Originally published in Spanish in Siete de Copas
A tweet from multi-billionaire capitalist Elon Musk on July 24 reinitiated the belief in a conspiracy theory that has circulated on the internet after the fall from power of Evo Morales in November 2019, following his disputed reelection for an unconstitutional fourth term as the president of Bolivia. The theory is that behind his resignation (that followed protests against election fraud and the suggestion to resign by the military chief Kaliman, the so-called “military coup”) the real reason for removing him from the presidency was to guarantee capitalist control over lithium reserves in Bolivia by a US imperialist plot.
The belief that lithium was the secret motive behind the fall of Evo Morales is in the end an unfounded conspiracy theory that leaps over reality and the debate between “it was a coup” or “it was fraud”. The theory not only confuses the events of November 2019 but amazingly manages to turn reality upside down. Ironically, the theory was invented in the heart of imperialism, in the United States by observers ignorant of the political realities and local actors in Bolivia. The lithium conspiracy theory serves an ideological end that deceptively erases the actions of the Bolivian people to defend their natural resources.
The Coup Mongering Tweet
To go back to Elon Musk’s controversial tweet. Musk is an American capitalist who made his fortune by inventing the electronic payment service PayPal. He is now one of the richest men on the planet. He is an eccentric technologist who used his fortune to create an electric car industry, Tesla. Musk also created his own private space rocket agency to colonize Mars, SpaceX. Furthermore, he has cultivated a celebrity image and personality cult as a mad genius and technological inventor.
But for the lithium conspiracy theory the most important fact, apart from his celebrity, is that the electric batteries his company produces use lithium as an essential material. Other European and Japanese companies also use lithium for their batteries but Musk’s celebrity has made him the focus for believers in the conspiracy theory.
One of those, the Twitter user (@historyofarmani) responded to Musk (@elonmusk), accusing him of being behind a coup against Evo Morales to take control of Bolivian lithium. Musk responded arrogantly and defiantly, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
His response was immediately taken as evidence of the entire plot, directly by Evo Morales through his Twitter account, declaring “We will always defend our resources!”. It then circulated through the news media sympathetic to Morales’ political party Movement for Socialism (MAS), newspapers in Argentina, Telesur in Venezuela, and the newspaper La Razón in Bolivia.
This is not the first time that Elon Musk has created controversy with his public statements. In 2018, he smoked a marijuana cigar and drank whiskey in the middle of a live interview with Joe Rogan, which precipitated a drop in the stock shares of his company Telsa. A few months ago he named his infant son with the musician Grimes, “X AE A-XII” (how to pronounce the name remains in doubt). In his last interview with the New York Times, published the same weekend as his controversial tweet, he challenged the actor Johnny Depp to a “cage fight” over allegations that he had relations with Depp’s ex-wife. In other words, Musk’s expressions reflect more his egomania and disrespect for others than serious statements. His tweet was a bad joke in poor taste.
Rather, politically speaking, his tweet reflects Elon Musk’s new antagonism with the progressive left in the United States. Although his wife calls herself a “socialist” and Musk has been an ally of the Democratic Party in the past, the COVID-19 quarantine has put Musk at odds with US progressive politics. When the liberal-progressive state of California banned him from reopening his Tesla factory for sanitary reasons, Musk declared the quarantine “fascist” and promised to relocate his factory to conservative Texas.
With this infantile attitude, it is not surprising that Musk took the opportunity to antagonize leftists in the US, whose popular politicians support Evo Morales, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In context, Musk’s tweet that the Twitter user responded to, accusing him of the coup, was a criticism of the Democratic party’s plan for economic stimulus with direct checks and benefits for the unemployed.
In the United States, the ideological roles in the debate over the COVID-19 quarantine are the direct opposite as in Bolivia. While in Bolivia the rightwing is in favor of strict quarantine, in the United States it is the left. The rightwing in the United States has protested against the quarantine, and supporters of Donald Trump support the toxic chlorine dioxide as a miracle cure for COVID-19, just like MAS in Bolivia. If MAS supporters knew that they are aligned with US ultra-reactionaries.
The Gringo Origin of the Lithium Conspiracy Theory
Although the lithium theory now circulates on the internet as leftist common sense, it has an intellectual origin that we can discern. It is a source of ignorance with clearly defined ideological motives.
In Bolivia, the claimants of a military coup argue that the motive for protests against Morales was not electoral fraud but rather racism on the part of the rightwing and the elite sectors. Abroad his supporters sought to uncover an economic motive. Through confirmation bias they found it.
The details of lithium conspiracy theory were invented by the American leftwing news-site Common Dreams. The staff writer Eoin Higgins first proposed it on November 11, 2019. On November 12, the historian Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, published another article on the same site advancing the same theory. Observing Bolivia from the United States, Eoin Higgins and Vijay Prashad proposed that the motive behind the fall of Evo Morales was the cancellation of the Bolivian state contract with the German company ACI Systems to exploit lithium in the Salar de Uyuni for the next 70 years. They drew attention to the fact that the contract was canceled one week before his resignation. Bolivia has more than two thirds of the world’s lithium reserves. Thus, they combined point one with point two to invent a story.
Higgins and Prashad uncritically interpreted the cancellation of the contract as a step towards the total nationalization and industrialization of Bolivia’s lithium, led by the “socialist” Evo Morales. Supposedly, this insult to international capital was far too much, “he had to go” as Prashad explained. These observers invented the lithium conspiracy with ignorance of the local actors, their demands, and the lithium policies of Evo Morales’ government. But the story serves an ideological end.
The lithium conspiracy theory first circulated in the English language world, then in Spanish, arriving last in Bolivia, long after the actual events of November 2019. Already in exile, in Mexico, Evo Morales realized the usefulness of this made-up story, and in an interview on December 3, 2019 reiterated that lithium was the motive behind a military coup against him. The friendly interview was with the American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who did not ask him once about evidence or accusations of electoral fraud. Glenn Greenwald lives in Brazil and is married to a congressman from the Brazilian Workers’ Party, political allies of MAS and Evo Morales.
The World Upside Down
The amazing thing about the lithium conspiracy theory is not so much its simplicity or ideological vulgarity, but how it presents events completely opposite to their significance for local actors in Bolivia. It is a world turned upside down.
As is known in Bolivia, the cancellation of the lithium exploitation contract for the Salar de Uyuni was not done willingly by Evo Morales, but rather against him. Since his government signed the contract with ACI Systems (Supreme Decree 3738), the local regional Potosí civic committee (COMCIPO) had rejected the terms of the contract and the allotted distribution of future rents. Potosí is the region in which the Salar de Uyuni is located. Local protesters demanded an increase in the percentage of local rents from 3 to 11% and guarantees for the industrialization of lithium.
Since August 2019, COMCIPO organized protests against the contract, culminating in a regional strike in Potosí weeks before the general elections on October 20. Days before the election, Morales’ government publicly defended the contract with the foreign company in a letter addressed to the COMCIPO, and rejected the local demand for the cancelation of the contract. In reality, Evo Morales was the defender of transnational capital interests.
After the election, when massive protests against electoral fraud turned into a national strike, the local protesters in Potosí effectively continued their previous strike, while the COMCIPO united local demands for the cancelation of the contract with national demands for the resignation of Evo Morales. Now facing a rising wave of protests across the country, Evo Morales abrogated the contract in an attempt to pacify Potosí. His political bet did not pay off and the protests continued in Potosí. Morales resigned from the presidency on November 10. In reality, protesters calling for the resignation of Evo Morales were the obstacle to international capital.
If the story of a lithium coup by international capitalists sounds too much like the dramatic plot of a James Bond Hollywood movie, it is because it is. It is the same plot as the 2008 film Quantum of Solace, in which a foreign businessman tries to promote a military coup in Bolivia in order to control the country’s water reserves. Luckily there was another gringo (James Bond) to save Bolivia from this evil plot. We are not in the world of real events, but the pure imagination of the international left. Within the conspiracy theory, Bolivia and its people are a simple object, on to which, to project their ideological fantasies. It is a fairy tale that allows the left to victimize itself without reflecting on its defeat.
Aside from local demands about lithium exploitation in Bolivia, the other problem for sustaining the the lithium conspiracy theory is that, despite the magnitude of the reserve in the Salar de Uyuni, the feasibility of its exploitation has not yet been proven. The evaporation method for lithium extraction, promoted by Bolivian government in the last ten years, is too expensive for the low prices of lithium on the world market. The magnesium content of the Salar de Uyuni is too high for cheap extraction. Bolivia’s lithium is not yet being extracted for sale on the market. In other words, if Elon Musk really did promote a coup d’état in Bolivia to control its lithium, it was a bad bet and a lost commercial initiative. The top lithium producers in the world are Australia, Chile, Argentina and China. Bolivia is not on the list.
While the international left is focused on conspiracy theories about lithium in order to defend the “indigenous leader” Evo Morales, the expansion of lithium extraction in Argentina and Chile is a very real threat to indigenous territories. As the Aymara intellectual Pedro Portugal Mollinedo points out, international reporting on the political crisis in Bolivia has been dominated by romanticism and colonial myths about indigenous people.
The lithium conspiracy theory not only turns reality upside down but also distracts from analysis of the true economic interests behind Jeanine Añez’s rightwing interim government. It is no secret that since Añez came to power she has advanced the interests of monopolistic agro-industries, freeing export limitations, covering the sector’s private business debts with state credits and allowing the cultivation of genetically modified crops. These are the same elite sectors that Evo Morales previously courted as allies of his government. He promoted the aggressive expansion of the agricultural frontier to the point of disaster, witnessed in 2019 with the massive burning the native Amazonian rainforest of the Chiquitanía region. A tragedy that is being repeated in 2020.
Colonial thought remains dominant on the political left, projecting its power fantasies on “underdeveloped” countries like Bolivia, be it the Noble Savage in Evo Morales or Black Legends about imperialism, with zero criteria based in the complex reality and lived experience of oppressed peoples. The lithium conspiracy theory is another example of this colonial mentality. If the left sincerely wants to show solidarity with the wretched of the earth, they need to learn how to see past these mirages.
*Correction: The article originally stated that the December 3rd interview was the first statement made by Evo Morales supporting the lithium coup conspiracy theory. However, Evo Morales’ first iteration of the lithium coup conspiracy theory appears in an interview published November 21, 2019 in Mexico with former Ecuadorian president and political ally Rafael Correa.
