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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/11/elon-musk-is-acting-like-a-neo-conquistador-for-south-americas-lithium/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/11/elon-musk-is-acting-like-a-neo-conquistador-for-south-americas-lithium/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Elon Musk Is Acting Like a
Neo-Conquistador for South America’s Lithium<br>
</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits"><span
class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/vijaybeja4813/"
rel="nofollow">Vijay Prashad – Alejandro Bejarano</a> -
March 11, 2020<br>
</span></div>
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<p>Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an
electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet
Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in
early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go
to Brazil sometime this year. All <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/brica-da-tesla-no-pais-03-mar-/dlcxs9/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">eyes</a>
are on the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina,
whose Secretary of International Affairs Derian Campos
is in direct contact with Musk. Two automobile
manufacturers—BMW and GM—already have factories in Santa
Catarina. Marcos Pontes (Minister of Science,
Technology, Innovation, and Communications) held a video
conference with Anderson Ricardo Pacheco, a senior Tesla
official. They were joined by Daniel Freitas, a
congressman, and Claiton Pacheco Galdino, who is the
business development director for Criciúma, a city in
Santa Catarina. They are eager for Tesla to open a
Gigafactory—Tesla’s name for a big factory—in South
America’s largest economy.</p>
<p>It helps that Brazil has considerable lithium
deposits—mostly in the southeastern states of Minas
Gerais and Paraíba and in the northeastern states of
Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte. The production of lithium
is limited, largely having been used for ceramics and
glass production. The Bolsonaro government is interested
in increasing the production of lithium, including as a
key raw material for the lithium-ion batteries that
power electric cars such as those made by Tesla. But
Brazil’s lithium will not be sufficient. Tesla would
need to import lithium from elsewhere.</p>
<p><b>The Lithium Triangle</b></p>
<p>Over 50 percent of the world’s known lithium deposits
are in the “Lithium Triangle”—the lithium concentrated
brine sources in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.
Bolivia’s high mountain deserts—the Salar de Uyuni—have
by far the largest known reserves of lithium.</p>
<p>In a bizarre <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ina-status-1231329703853723651/dlcxsc/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">tweet</a>,
the Bolivian entrepreneur Samuel Doria Medina wrote that
since Elon Musk and Jair Bolsonaro will discuss the
Tesla plant in Brazil, they should add to this
initiative the following: “build a Gigafactory in the
Salar de Uyuni to supply lithium batteries.” Doria
Medina is not just an entrepreneur. He is the
vice-presidential candidate alongside the “interim
president” Jeanine Áñez for the May 3, 2020, Bolivian
presidential elections. Áñez came to power only because
of the <i>coup d’état</i> against Evo Morales in
November 2019. Doria Medina’s welcome mat to Tesla
should, therefore, be seen as having the full authority
of the coup government behind it.</p>
<p>Morales’ government had been very cautious with these
lithium reserves. It had made clear that these precious
resources were not to be turned over to transnational
corporations in deals favorable to the firms; what gains
come from lithium, Morales had <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/m-question-looms-large-bolivia/dlcxsf/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">pointed
out</a>, must be properly shared with the Bolivian
people. The point that Morales’ government made is that
any deal must be done with Comibol—Bolivia’s national
mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio
Bolivianos—Bolivia’s national lithium company. The
monetary gains from the mining would come into the
Bolivian exchequer and then fund the social programs so
necessary for the country. This sensible socialist
policy was too much for three major transnational
firms—Eramet (France), FMC (United States), and Posco
(South Korea)—all three of whom turned tail and went to
Argentina.</p>
<p><b>The Lithium Coup</b></p>
<p>It was Morales’ socialist policy toward Bolivia’s
resources that doomed his government. The oligarchy,
which was angry with Morales’ government and its
socialism, used every mechanism to undermine the
election of 2019. Forest fires in the northern and
eastern regions of Bolivia provided the oligarchy’s
media with the weaponry to suggest that Morales had
abandoned his commitment to the environment and to <i>Pachamama </i>(Mother
Earth), and that he was now working to benefit the
cattle ranchers; it is important to point that this is
not only ridiculous, but that as soon as the coup
government of Áñez came into office, it passed
legislation that allowed the ranchers to extend their
lands into forested areas.</p>
<p>Morales’ opponent—Carlos Mesa—and other senior leaders
of the oligarchy’s political parties openly said long
before the election that Morales could only win by
fraud. A self-proclaimed Council for the Defense of
Democracy said that Morales was an illegitimate
candidate because he had lost the 2016 constitutional
referendum. The media—backed by these corporate and
neofascist interests—banged the drum of fraud, while
Carlos Mesa—on the night of the election—said that there
was “monumental fraud” in the election. These
provocations from Mesa, the neofascists, and the
corporate elites resulted in street violence; in the
midst of this, the police—sections of whom were angry
with Morales for cracking down on police
corruption—mutinied. The 36 Bolivians who died in the
immediate post-election aftermath are victims of Mesa’s
incendiary language. The Organization of American States
(OAS), egged on by the U.S. government, came up with a
“preliminary report” of fraud in the election; the hard
conclusions in the report were not substantiated by the
data in it. The OAS report played an important role in
legitimizing the coup against Morales.</p>
<p>It is important to point out that there was no
controversy about Morales’ election in 2014; in that
election, Morales won 61 percent of the votes to defeat
the entrepreneur Samuel Doria Medina, who won 24 percent
(Doria Medina is the same person who is now running for
vice president and welcomes Tesla to Bolivia’s lithium).
Morales’ term, from the 2014 election, had not yet
expired in November 2019; the removal of Morales then
violated the mandate of 2014, a point that has received
almost no discussion either inside Bolivia or abroad.</p>
<p>John Curiel and Jack Williams of the Election Data and
Science Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) went over the Bolivian election data and found no
fraud: “There is not any statistical evidence of fraud
that we can find,” they <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/found-no-reason-suspect-fraud-/dlcxsh/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">wrote</a>
conclusively in the Washington Post. Curiel and Williams
contacted the OAS, but they note, “We and other scholars
within the field reached out to the OAS for comment; the
OAS did not respond.” By their assessment, Morales won
the election in November 2019 and should have been
inaugurated this year to a new term.</p>
<p>Terrible pressure by the coup government against the
party of Morales (the Movement for Socialism, or MAS)—as
well as the presence of USAID monitors and a U.S.-backed
head of the election commission, Salvador Romero—<a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/-the-midst-of-an-ongoing-coup-/dlcxsk/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">suggests</a>
that this election on May 3 is not going to be at all
fair; it will likely favor the coup government,
including the entrepreneur who wants to turn over
Bolivia’s lithium to Elon Musk’s Tesla and Jair
Bolsonaro’s Brazil.</p>
<p><b>A World of Lithium</b></p>
<p>In 2019, the benchmark Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s
“Energy Storage Outlook 2019” <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/new-energy-outlook-/dlcxsm/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">report</a>
anticipated that by 2030, the price of the lithium-ion
battery would drop dramatically, and that—as a
consequence—renewable energy (solar and wind) plus
storage of energy in batteries will expand
exponentially. By 2040, there is an <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ttery-costs-halve-next-decade-/dlcxsp/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">expectation</a>
that wind and solar will produce 40 percent of world
energy consumption, rather than the 7 percent it now
produces. For this, demand for energy storage will
increase. “The total demand for batteries from the
stationary storage and electric transport sectors is
forecast to be 4,584GWh (Gigawatt hours) by 2040,” <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ttery-costs-halve-next-decade-/dlcxsp/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">write</a>
the Bloomberg analysts, “providing a major opportunity
for battery makers and miners of component metals such
as lithium, cobalt and nickel.” The current use is
merely 9GW/17GWh.</p>
<p>The key point to emphasize here is that this will
provide “a major opportunity” for “miners of component
metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.” When
Bloomberg’s analysts use a word like “miners,” they do
not mean the Bolivian miners or the Congolese miners,
but the transnational firms, such as Tesla and its
chief, Elon Musk. As far as Bloomberg and Áñez are
concerned, South America is no longer to follow the
resource nationalist project of Evo Morales; this is
Elon Musk’s South America, a place for the
neo-conquistadors to make money and leave behind them
social carnage.</p>
<p><b>Vijay Prashad</b> is an Indian historian, editor and
journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief
correspondent at <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/globetrotter-/dlcxsr/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">Globetrotter</a>,
a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the
chief editor of <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/y976jlvu/dlcxst/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">LeftWord
Books</a> and the director of Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research. He has written more than
twenty books, including <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1595583424--tag-alternorg08-20/dlcxsw/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8"><i>The
Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third
World</i></a> (The New Press, 2007), <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1781681589--tag-alternorg08-20/dlcxsy/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8"><i>The
Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South</i></a> (Verso, 2013), <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/0520293266--tag-alternorg08-20/dlcxt1/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8"><i>The
Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab
Revolution</i></a> (University of California Press,
2016) and <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/B0799NP7DD--tag-alternorg08-20/dlcxt3/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8"><i>Red
Star Over the Third World</i></a> (LeftWord, 2017).
He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick,
AlterNet and BirGün.</p>
<p><b>Alejandro Bejarano</b> is a Bolivian musician,
documentarian, and social media manager. In 2016, he
received the Medal of Honor for Cultural Merit of the
Plurinational Legislative Assembly of Bolivia.</p>
<p><i>This article was produced by <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/globetrotter-/dlcxsr/571991948?h=nXsURcNoUmBGXufRPejzm9bDLPYh3pTdgi2GDw2NLu8">Globetrotter</a>,
a project of the Independent Media Institute.</i></p>
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