Alberto Echazú was the “strong man” of Bolivian lithium during the governments of Evo Morales. As minister, vice minister and manager, he was in charge of the construction of the plants that were to help Bolivia exploit this mineral on its own, without the participation of transnational companies in the sector. In his moments of greatest power, when he managed an investment of almost 1 billion dollars, it would have been impossible to think that his colleague in Morales' cabinet, the then Minister of Economy, Luis Arce, current president of the country, would end up sending him to prison. His arrest marks that the “100% Bolivian” lithium industrialization strategy, which Morales tried to execute between 2006 and 2019, did not achieve his objectives.
Echazú was arrested this Monday on charges of signing contracts harmful to the State, breach of duties and uneconomic conduct, that is, harmful to the treasury. It is assumed that he committed these crimes in the installation of the evaporation pools and the lithium carbonate plant built by the State in the Uyuni salt flat, which is considered one of the sites with the most lithium resources in the world. Karla Calderón, president of Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB), accused 10 former officials of the time, including Echazú, for the serious deficiencies that she, as she stated, had found in the mineral extraction and processing infrastructure. “We had to redo things from scratch,” he had declared in October 2023. One of the problems, according to the authorities, is the malfunction of the brine evaporation pool lines that were to provide the raw material to be refined by the lithium carbonate plant, completed in December of last year. For this reason, they anticipated that this plant will not be able to produce 15,000 tons of lithium per year, as planned. The direct cost of the alleged bad decisions amounts to $60 million, according to the Government.
Echazú declared to the press that his arrest is due to the fact that “the Government wants to hide three and a half years of paralysis of the project.” This 75-year-old engineer, a lifelong communist, belongs to the wing loyal to Evo Morales of the now divided Movement towards Socialism (MAS). His colleagues, who went to protest at the doors of the police station where he was detained after his arrest, maintain that if the pools are in poor condition it is due to lack of maintenance, a negligence that they attribute to the authorities of the wing loyal to the President Luis Arce, also from the MAS and in charge of the Executive. They also believe that Echazú's arrest seeks to cover up the “failure of direct lithium extraction”, the exploitation method that Arce has tried to carry out together with Chinese and a Russian transnational companies, after verifying the difficulties presented by the conventional technique, evaporation and successive refining of the brines, which had been undertaken.
Bolivia has 23 million tons of lithium resources in Uyuni and other salt flats, but until now it has not found a way to extract this wealth. In addition to the supposed poor construction of conventional infrastructure, there is the fact that, according to several experts, this is not applicable in salt flats where it rains, like those in Bolivia. “Direct extraction”, which supposedly overcomes this problem, does not start. Despite the optimistic official announcements, the projects remain in an experimental stage.
The fall of Echazú marks the failure of the dream shared by an Evo Morales who had recently come to power, in 2006, and the peasants who live around Uyuni that the State would do everything important and would not seek to be a producer of lithium carbonate, but of electric batteries, providing themselves with what is necessary for such a task. In the end, after the highest state mining investment in the history of Bolivia, 960 million dollars, raw materials were not even produced industrially.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América in Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
#Evo #Morales39 #minister #charge #Bolivian #lithium #industrialization #strategy #arrested