Page 16 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, OCTUBRE 2021 (English)

Bolivia: Lithium and Nuclear Energy Will Be Exploited with Russia
The objective of the Governments of La Paz and Moscow is to elevate bilateral cooperation “to a qualitatively higher level.” Russia expressed its desire to increase and diversify trade with large investment projects.
The Economy of Bolivia
The first official visit to Moscow by the Bolivian Foreign Minister, Rogelio Mayta, was very beneficial for his Government. His meeting with the Foreign Minister of Russia Erguirse Lavrov, revealed that country’s interest in increasing its weight in the Latin American market, and diplomats addressed a series of new projects that range from the exploitation of lithium to the use of nuclear energy. In addition, both ministers agreed to strengthen cooperation against the coronavirus, where the supply of the Sputnik V vaccine is another diplomatic success of Moscow to expand its influence on the continent and diversify its exports.
“The Plurinational State of Bolivia is one of Russia’s priority partners in the Latin American and Caribbean Region,” Lavrov said. The Russian Foreign Minister stressed that the ties of both countries “have become notably stronger in recent months” and their Presidents have spoken by phone up to three times since Luis Arce came to power in November 2020.
The meeting had an obvious clearly economic key. “We have a mutual interest in increasing and diversifying trade with large investment projects,” Lavrov added. The intergovernmental commission for commercial and scientific cooperation will take charge of this at the end of the year.
Russian Projects
Among the most interested companies is Gazprom, present in the Bolivian Incahuasi field for five years and which has estimated reserves of 70,8 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Likewise, the Russian organization also revealed that it will be submitted to the public tender for the direct extraction of lithium, a key resource for building batteries for future clean energies and for which Bolivia has the largest reserves on the planet.
This interest is linked to that of the Russian state atomic consortium Rosatom, whose nuclear research centre in the city of El Alto is in the last phase of construction. “In addition, Rosatom has proposed other areas of cooperation for the peaceful use of nuclear energy for medical, industrial and agricultural purposes,” added the Russian Foreign Minister.
To these projects was added the interest of other companies to invest in Bolivia, such as Russian Railways, and the great export product of that country with the pandemic: The Sputnik V vaccine. Bolivia received almost 2,5 million doses so far and both Ministries agreed to “further expand cooperation in the fight against the virus.” Mayta highlighted the support offered by the Russian alternative against the coronavirus. “In this complicated time of the pandemic, the first country with which we were able to subscribe to the possibility of having vaccines against covid-19 was Russia,” the minister recalled.
In addition to the economy, both ministers addressed the international political plane. Mayta delivered a message to Lavrov from President Luis Arce to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and the top diplomats in both countries agreed that they have “identical positions” and should “strengthen the coordination of foreign policy.”
UN Defence
One of the tools they addressed was the recently created Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter, which held its first meeting in Caracas at the end of September with representatives of 18-member countries, including Syria, China, Belarus, Korea of the North, Cuba, Iran and Palestine, apart from Bolivia and Russia. Mayta stressed that his country is “pacifist”, while Lavrov advocated “the democratization of international relations based on the United Nations Charter” and for “respect for international law and non- interference in internal affairs.”
Likewise, both ministers considered it important to consolidate the regional integration processes. For this they advocated for an authorized platform such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, Celac. This is followed by Russia’s interest in having more weight in the Region, as Lavrov himself recognized: “We have looked at how to achieve greater rapprochement between Russia and the multilateral platforms in the area.”
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