On an unusually warm day in July 2024, a team of seven Russian “specialists” landed in La Paz, Bolivia, with the aim of “stabilising” the government of President Luis Arce, an ally of Russia, ahead of a national election scheduled for the following year.
The stakes were high: 2024 had been a hard year for Bolivians, marked by economic difficulties, a severe fuel shortage, extensive wildfires, and more than 500 protests and anti-governmental demonstrations. Inflation was at its highest since 2008, and Arce’s Movement for Socialism party (MAS) was riven by an internecine battle for control between the president and his ally-turned-rival and predecessor, former President Evo Morales. The MAS regime, in the meantime, was one of the few remaining Kremlin allies in the region, and resource-rich Bolivia has 21% of the world’s deposits of lithium, a vital mineral for next-generation technologies.
Three weeks before the arrival of the Russians, on 26 June that year, a small band of soldiers led by the chief of the army, general José Luis Zúñiga, had tried to take control of the presidential palace, only to surrender soon after. When arrested, Zúñiga said the uprising had been staged by President Arce himself to boost his flagging public support; a narrative seized on by media, opposition politicians, and also Morales and his supporters, but vehemently denied by Arce.
