“This isn’t the first time the United States has spoken out about our natural resources. And I want to emphasize that they are our natural resources,” Bolivian President Luis Arce said in an interview with Telam news agency in Argentina.
The President reiterated that his country would not “accept unreasonable demands from anyone who claims our natural resources as their own.”
Speaking to the Atlantic Council in Washington, the military chief argued that Latin America is of interest to the United States as part of its national security.
The senior Pentagon official justified Washington’s ambitions on hydrocarbons, other minerals, aquifers and Amazon biodiversity on the basis of an alleged threat to democracy in this area from Russia and China.
“But why is this region important? Because it is rich in resources and rare earths, with the so-called lithium triangle (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile), a much-needed metal for the technology,” said the senior official in the secretariat in charge of the war in the power of the north.
Arce recalled in an interview with the Argentine agency that in 2006 Bolivia nationalized the hydrocarbons, for which they are part of the full sovereignty of the people, as stipulated in the political constitution of the Plurinational State promulgated in 2009.
“The history of our country has been the plundering of our natural resources and left no benefit to the Bolivians. Since the nationalization of gas on May 1, 2006 and with the industrialization of lithium, Bolivia has changed its economic model,” the dignitary explained.
After attending the VII Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) this Tuesday in Buenos Aires, Arce described this path in an interview as “strategic for our development, not for maintaining the exploitation of one country by another”.
“Today we face a multiple and systematic capitalist crisis that increasingly endangers the life of humanity and our mother earth, a food, water, energy, climate, health, economic, trade and social crisis,” described he.
During the meeting at the Sheraton Hotel in the Argentine capital, the President insisted that the countries of the world should think about future generations and Mother Earth, which he described as “our common home”.
He recalled that this was characterized by the reproduction of domination, exploitation and the exclusion of the vast majority.
He also specified that CELAC must return to the principles of multilateralism, not to preserve the unjust international order that is overwhelming states and peoples, but to move towards a better world, which he believes is “possible”.
rgh/jpm