Por W. T. Whitney
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Image by Jon Tyson. |
Desperate US defense of its agent will not forestall future uprising in Bolivia
US efforts to shore up conservative Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz’s troubled, almost year-long tenure recently took a bizarre turn. Measures taken to protect an agent were so extraordinary as to signal hyped-up US determination to ward off social revolution in Bolivia.
Argentinian Fernando Cerimedo and his paramour Nadia Beller were close advisors of the newly-elected Paz and his family. The couple had a falling-out. Cerimedo arranged for Beller to be shot, but she survived. Hospitalized, she told reporters about Cerimedo’s crimes. He’s in prison, charged with narcotrafficking, illicit wealth, attempted murder, and domestic abuse.
Low-grade donnybrook
Attorney General Roger Mariaca was investigating Cerimedo’s alleged crimes. The US government on September 28 imposed sanctions on Mariaca and 13 other prosecuting officials. Bolivian police arrested Mariaca on October 1, with DEA help. He too is in prison, charged with narcotrafficking and money laundering. He may be extradited to the United States.
Bolivia’s Legislative Assembly has the power to install and to dismiss an attorney general. A US official is said to have paid Legislative Assembly members to approve Mariaca’s removal from office.
Mariaca claims the US wants to end his investigation of Cerimedo. Former President Evo Morales agrees. Meanwhile President Paz, returning to Bolivia after addressing the UN General Assembly on September 24, visited in Boca Raton, Florida for three days. There’s no indication of why he did so.
Vice President Edmand Lara normally presides over the Legislative Assembly. He was in Spain when Mariaca was arrested. A substitute Assembly president on October 2 approved both Mariaca’s removal and appointment of a replacement attorney general.
Lara reported that, while in Spain, the “police … warned him of a plan to plant false evidence and arrest him.” He had already claimed that US agents had participated in Mariaca’s arrest. Having returned to Bolivia, he accused the Assembly of “violating the principle of the presumption of innocence.” He eventually certified the new attorney general.
The purpose of these US-assisted shenanigans was that of returning Cerimedo to his role as US agent. A recent summary shows that the US government, intervening in the region’s elections and more, was relying on Cerimedo’s arsenal of bots and social media, his own right-wing news service, and tight relations with regional powerbrokers.
Cerimedo, a fixer for all time, was a conduit for huge sums of money. He orchestrated lobbyists in the United States and contributed much to successful US efforts to install right-wing governments in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Peru, and Bolivia. Southern Florida’s rightwing émigré community spared no pains in honoring Cerimedo.
Revolutionary possibilities
The Paz government would fulfill expectations of Bolivia’s upper classes and of overseers in Washington. From the colonial era on, foreign powers, joined later by the United States, exploited Bolivia’s strategically-important natural resources. Long subjected to class-and-ethnic-based oppression, and to extreme poverty, Bolivia’s majority population has resisted, to the point even of revolutionary stirrings. This was the scenario for Cerimedo’s activities.
Analyst Vijay Prashad points out that the US recently updated its Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and now wants to “reorganize the mineral wealth of the Western Hemisphere around its own industrial and military needs while keeping China at arm’s length.” According to the Oakland Institute, the compliant Paz “opened the mining sector [and] its vast resources of lithium, silver, and tin to US corporate interests.” Bolivia commands “about 30% of global resources” of lithium.
That Bolivia has “$2 billion in contracts with Chinese and Russian firms to extract lithium” suggests difficulties ahead for US ambitions. A leading impediment would be the rebelliousness of oppressed Bolivians.
In May and June 2026, “transport workers, miners, teachers, the Bolivian Workers’ Center, and other workers” protested massively against “[a]usterity measures, public spending cuts, the privatization of state enterprises, along with tax cuts for large-scale corporate projects.”
Observer Lena Souza suggests the Paz government was “up against the ropes.” And creation of more than 100 highway blockades throughout the nation represented a “general strike.” The uprising failed.
Memories of success
The US and Bolivian governments most certainly would have taken comfort from the mobilization’s fault lines: lack of centralized coordination, divisions among protesting groups, their separate negotiations with the government, and their “vacillation.”
US officials likely approved of the Bolivian government’s repressive measures and criminalization of rebels as narcotraffickers. Even so, “millions of people began to question the very legitimacy of the government,” and Bolivians retained their “enormous capacity for struggle,” according to Souza.
It’s likely that, in the end, oppressed Bolivians harbor an awareness of past revolutionary successes, also that such awareness strengthens their zeal for real change. It seems likely that, what with attitudes like these, weird US intrusions aimed at protecting Fernando Cerimedo will be disappointing.
To explain: For 10 years or so following 2006, Bolivia’s government achieved much under the leadership of President Evo Morales and his Movement toward Socialism Party (MAS). That experience may still incentivize oppressed Bolivians.
Academician and writer Jorge Majfud conveniently enough provides a summary. He cites “poverty reduced by 25 percent, extreme poverty reduced by 43 percent … large increase in the minimum wage … high level of international reserves [and] unprecedented economic growth.” He notes a marked decrease in economic inequality, a 45% increase in social spending over seven years, gas and oil revenues shifted to the public sector via nationalization, and the “highest foreign direct investment in South America.”
The effort lapsed. The MAS leaders could not overcome difficult realities beyond their control, among them: lowered prices on the world market for oil and natural gas whose export paid for social services, exhausted natural gas deposits, and the resulting lack of dollars for servicing loans and purchasing fuel and basic household supplies. Planners partially filled the void with foreign currency reserves, and these were soon exhausted. Difficulties culminated in a US-assisted coup taking place in 2019.
It’s true also that MAS achievements fell victim to divisions, schism, and corruption. Nevertheless, revolutionary strivings did bear fruit. That’s a reality informing oppressed Bolivians now. Surely, their will to confront US tricks and perversions and US imperialism itself prevails still.
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.
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