Marcelo Arce Mosqueira, son of the Bolivian president, in a picture shared on social networks.
The tough battle between Evo Morales and Luis Arce for control of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), Bolivia’s main party, continues to escalate. The target now is Marcelo Arce Mosqueira, the son of Bolivia’s president, who was accused by Morales of negotiating with foreign companies over the country’s lithium and gas concessions. Morales relied on an audio recording in which the young man was heard saying: “When I spoke to Luis, he told me: Son, son, I don’t have time now… You take responsibility for the lithium and the gas to see . “the plans, the support of the campaign, the problems of the projects, all of that.”
Morales presented two more audios. In one of them, the president’s son is heard asking to speak to an unknown person so that he would be “much more interested in Bolivia,” given that country’s great potential to be “a reliable supplier” of supposedly lithium a certain “technology”. In this tone there is an unclear allusion to an international financial investment company.
Based on this material, the Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation, which was also requested by Arce Mosqueira. The president’s son, a 31-year-old industrial engineer specializing in petroleum, denied any wrongdoing and called for the judiciary to be involved. “Once again, Mr. Evo M. has launched an unfounded attack against me. I make it clear to the population that family businesses do not exist and will not exist. [como acusó Morales]“, he wrote on a social network. The former Bolivian president accepted the challenge and sent his lawyers to file the complaint, which was quickly accepted by the public prosecutor’s office. According to Morales’ supporters, the care of this institution is due to the fact that the intention of its owners is to discard the alleged evidence and “wash the image” of the president’s son. This faction has repeatedly complained that the judiciary is controlled by the ruling party. Still, he hasn’t stopped using it against himself.
The Arce government urged Morales not to “lie” to the president or “mess with the family.” The former president responded that “they should rather be careful that the family does not interfere with the heritage of the Bolivian people in a matter of state” and compared Arce to previous presidents who have had political problems due to the activities of their relatives. One explanation for the known audio recordings is that they are recordings from 2020, when Arce was a candidate and his son supported him in the election campaign; hence the allusion to “campaign support” present in one of them.
It is not the only accusation that Marcelo Arce Mosqueira has received of unlawful interference in the country’s agreements with extractive companies. In June 2022, EL PAÍS reported the existence of a photo in which the president’s son posed with two executives of the Russian state-owned company Uranium One, Alexander Kochnev and Andrey Shutov. At the time, this company was one of eight selected in a pilot program for the direct extraction of lithium, the technology chosen by the Bolivian government to exploit its enormous reserves of the mineral. Subsequently, Uranium One, along with several of Chinese origin, was selected to make immediate investments in the Bolivian lithium industry, which, despite its great potential, lags far behind the other two countries that make up the “Lithium Triangle”. Chile and Argentina. On this occasion, Arce Mosqueira told this newspaper that he had “nothing to do with the recruitment,” adding that it was “carried out in accordance with the law and monitored by the competent authority.” He did not explain the context in which the photo was taken.
The opposition had previously described the fact that the president’s son worked in the main state-owned company Yacimientos Petrolófilos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) as nepotism. The oil company’s authorities said Arce Mosqueira held a “non-managerial” position until September 2021, when he resigned to avoid harming his father. He started at YPFB when he was very young, as one of the company’s warehousemen, a humble position. At the time, his father was Minister of Economy in Evo Morales’ government. He then received a state scholarship for outstanding students and was able to study a master’s degree in petroleum at the University of Genoa.
When his father became president, theories began to circulate about Marcelo Arce’s role at YPFB. To the point that, as Evo Morales later said, in one of his last meetings with Arce, when both still considered themselves members of the same party, he told him to be careful with his son. He interrupted him and asked him not to touch his family. It was noted that this intervention by Morales marked a turning point in the relationship between the two leaders. So far, President Arce has not addressed the issue.
Proven false accusations have also been made against Arce Mosqueira. In 2022, a journalist was forced to recant when a press court ruled that it was false that the Bolivian president’s son had traveled to Caracas to hand over management of the Venezuelan government’s state-owned urea factory, as she had published.
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