On November 24^th, Elon Musk’s agent and now deposed Bolivian coup leader Jeanine Áñez was caught trying to escape justice by making her way to Brazil, but was prevented from boarding a plane by a group of citizens who were able to identify her in Trinidad.

Áñez was astoundingly prevented from boarding a plane at the Jorge Henrich Arauz airport in the city of Trinidad, as she was trying to go to a border city and then flee to Brazil. There is likely to be more to this story, involving a small deal with Trinidad & Tobago’s intelligence service, who appears to have informed a left-leaning activist group with ties to Bolivia and Venezuela, to make the ‘citizen’s arrest’, so as to separate the state from the actual arrest. Trinidad is a member of the U.S. led Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), invites significant U.S. foreign investment, and is likely not to want to be seen as overtly involved.

These exciting events are now transpiring as the result of what has become an ultimately failed coup attempt in Bolivia, a tragic year-long period where democratic rule was upended.

Indeed, last month something incredible happened. The Globalist’s golpe de estado failed, in what has been a series of incredible failures world-wide. Among their sought after bounty was Bolivia’s lithium wealth, valued in billions. Bolivia is known to have somewhere between 50 to 80 percent of the world’s lithium.

Morales (L) and Áñez (R)

Goldman Sachs says that the global market demand for lithium could in fact triple to some 570,000 tons a year in the next 10 years due to electric vehicles. It’s no wonder that Elon Musk’s hands were all over it.

But nevertheless, Evo Morales made a come-back in at the end of October 2020, and was able to overturn a coup (by way of law-fare) imposed on the country from the Globalist deep state.

Summarizing it succinctly, Ramona Wadi wrote for SCF last month;

“Bolivia has managed to overturn the neoliberal agenda which the U.S. attempted to force upon the nation in the 2019 coup, which ousted former President Evo Morales to install the far-right wing Jeanine Añez as president, or dictator. While Chile was dealing with its state violence, the Bolivian coup was out in the streets exerting its vengeance on the country’s indigenous population. For months, Bolivians protested against state violence and police repression. It is now the new government’s obligation to bring the perpetrators to justice, while retracing Bolivia’s path to its revolutionary progress.”

Besides being involved in an unconstitutional coup, where the armed forces and the police conspired with U.S. Deep-State agents to overthrow Evo Morales, Jeanine Áñez is also wanted in particular for killing of civilians in Senkata and Sacaba.

And yet despite all this, western media – in backing the coup – painted her as a symbol of a woman “breaking the glass ceiling”, and then she doubled-down on virtue signaling by claiming without evidence that she had ‘contracted the coronavirus’, in what was no doubt both a sympathy ploy and a signal to globalist elites that she was still their man, or woman, rather.

Of course we face a strange and newly arisen contradiction in our terminology, where in Latin America ‘far-right’ means almost nothing like what it means inside the U.S. In Latin America, it describes an agent of the bankers and foreign interests who undermine sovereignty, and who employ the tactics of death squads and mass repression. In Latin America, it is the ‘far right’ who view the common people as the ‘deplorables’, and tend to view themselves as trying to maintain a vestige of privilege bestowed on them by the legacy of Spanish colonialism on the continent.

Despite her own obviously indigenous features, Jeanine Áñez is among a certain upwardly mobile demographic of La Paz’s urban petit-bourgeoisie whose blonde hair comes from the bottle and not from the mother. While perhaps a seemingly trivial point for those outside of Latin America, this ‘personality tick’ of hers has become a symbolic focus of outrage against her coup, as it is emblematic of the disastrous neoliberal policies of its petit-bourgeoisie who fetishize the downplaying of any indigenous roots. For these reasons and more, the big news of her detention on November 24^th was widely celebrated by Bolivia’s underclass.

But others from her administration have already successfully escaped justice. Defense Minister Fernando Lopez who was critical in organizing the coup and who is believed to have received millions from Elon Musk, has escaped to Brazil. Last week, former de facto government minister Arturo Murillo, facing corruption charges and more, successfully fled the country and arrived in Panama. As a result of this, three officials of the Bolivian Migration Directorate were arrested for allowing these wanted fugitives to escape. Presently Bolivia is in both diplomatic talks and litigation to push Panama and Brazil to return the ‘asylum seekers’ to face justice in La Paz.

Following the inauguration of Morales’ ally, the newly-elected Bolivian President Luis Arce, the corruption that prevailed during the de facto government has been further revealed. At present, there are some 24 cases open and being reviewed by courts.

Last October the Plurinational Legislative Assembly moreover recommended that the Public Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía) open a lawsuit against Añez for the massacres of Cochabamba, Senkata, Sacaba, and El Alto, which all occurred in November 2019. She stands accused of committing the crimes of genocide, torture, and kidnappings.

Elements from within the armed forces and the police were the primary ‘on the ground’ actors of the coup d’état of November 10th, 2019. At the time in exile in Argentina and fearing his own life, Evo Morales repeatedly called for charges against those responsible for the massacre in El Alto. Morales has denounced Bolivia’s high military commands for decorating and honoring the “coup leaders,” who now stand accused in the massacring of citizens.

The aim of these killings ordered by Áñez was to strike fear in indigenous communities, because of the mechanisms of the coup. Many coup tactics are employed during elections, as being seen right now in the U.S. against Donald Trump. It is an opportune time because electronic voting devices, or the much older method of controlling local political machines, are used to throw the vote towards an otherwise unpopular leader – such as Biden.

But in the case of Bolivia, with Añez who was backed by American plutocrat Elon Musk, the coup had to be arranged after the election because the re-election of the wildly popular Morales was hard to contest. But in Bolivia, where indigenous communities live protected from many of the depravities of modernity, it is difficult to widely use electronic voting. And more, the local political machines are controlled by indigenous people who saw Evo Morales as one of their own.

And so the coup relied upon the mid-century fascist tactics of the death squad, torture, and classical repression.

Elon Musk’s hopes were that the then upcoming October 2020 elections could see a continuation of the Añez junta, if sufficient numbers of Bolivian populists could be murdered.

But now with the come-back success of Morales’ party with the assumption of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) into power with Morales ally Luis Arce, the promises to investigate the various crimes committed the year that Áñez was in government are now coming to fruition.

Elon Musk, in search of ever-cheaper access to lithium, got behind this brazen gilded-age act of imperialist violence. He was eager to oppose the will of millions of Bolivian voters, a base widely backed by its indigenous population with its pre-Columbian culture.

Now the character of Elon Musk has been difficult for some to discern, but what is abundantly clear is that he represents a breed of ‘entrepreneurs’ in name only, who in fact rely on ‘socialism for the rich’, on subsidies and government largesse. He has angled on themes that suit his own interests, and his own interests alone. At times appearing to align with Trump’s populism on space technology or against lockdowns, but in fact got his start from deep connections with the Obama administration’s mini ‘Green New Deal’, and the privatization of NASA resources that made Tesla Motors and Space-X a possibility.

It is lamentable, or at the very least hypocritical, that he would work so hard to subvert any kind of socialism for the poor, as was the case when he so enthusiastically supported the coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales.

The successful prosecution of Áñez, who faces murder and kidnapping charges, will help bring closure to a troubled, if brief, chapter in the long trajectory of independence, national liberation, and self-determination for Bolivia and its 11 million people.

Joaquin Flores is educated in the field of IR and IPE at California State University Los Angeles; previously served as a business agent and organizer for the SEIU labor union; has published internationally on subjects of geopolitics, war, and diplomacy; serves as the director of the Belgrade-based Center for Syncretic Studies, and is Chief Editor at Fort Russ News.