Outgoing socialist President of Bolivia Luis Arce denounced alleged “death threats” that loom over Latin America as a result of the United States’ ongoing drug-fighting efforts in Caribbean international waters during his final speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Thursday.
Arce is in the final weeks of his disastrous socialist presidency and is set to leave office in early November. Bolivians will head to the polls on October 19 for a presidential runoff election between Senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira and conservative former President Jorge Quiroga.
The Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party to which Arce belongs had monolithically ruled Bolivia for nearly two decades until it suffered a resounding defeat in the August general election, losing not just the presidency but all Senate seats and retaining only two seats at the Chamber of Deputies. Arce chose not to run for reelection in August.
Arce spent much of his speech to the UNGA lashing out against the United States and capitalism, accusing entrepreneurs of “misusing” artificial intelligence to “increase the climate crisis and turning the immense majority of the population as unnecessary,” in addition to other “risks” that, he asserted, raise the possibility of a third world war.
Arce also defended the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela, two of his closest ideological allies, denouncing the U.S. “embargo” of Cuba and the “provocation” of the ongoing U.S. drug-fighting military deployment in the region as “a new way of implementing Monroeism” by the Trump administration.
“Wars are now multidimensional, combining economic, financial, media, and cyber warfare mechanisms with traditional military warfare, which now also includes space warfare, biological warfare, and other techniques that continue to be developed with impunity based on warfare technology,” Arce said.
“It will come as no surprise to encounter climate and energy wars that impact food sovereignty and security, also putting strategic resources such as water at risk,” he continued. “The survival of human beings on earth and of life itself on the planet is being put at risk. It is time to remove the mask from this series of tragedies.”
Arce, whose regime essentially sought to give away Bolivia’s lithium and other resources to China and Russia, further claimed that the “imperialist phase of capitalism” seeks to loot natural resources and exert control on other states. He accused the United States government of seeking to establish the conditions of a worldwide “neocolonialism.”
“More immediate is the Trump administration’s obsessive desire to restore the United States to its position of hegemony at the cost of calling into question the liberal system itself, so-called free trade, globalization, and causing pain and death,” Arce said.
“Taking control of raw materials for the benefit of an imperial bourgeoisie and subordinating most countries to its insatiable thirst for wealth and privilege, and trying to maintain a unipolar order at all costs,” he continued.
Arce described the ongoing U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean as a “death threat that looms” over the region and condemned its actions as a “violation of international rights.”
According to Arce, the United States seeks to “intervene” in Venezuela and steal its oil and other resources, as well as “reconquer” Latin America and the Caribbean by “undermining liberal democracy, promoting militarization, and employing other colonialist tactics that we must call out for what they are.”
“Imperialism — it claims to intervene to fight drug trafficking and organized crime, which is a fallacy. Because if that were true, it would begin to effectively address both issues within its own country,” Arce said. “Where the demand for all types of drugs is high and rising, and where different forms of organized crime are taking shape.”
“What the United States really wants is to turn our region into a dam to hold back the construction of a multipolar world and subject it to its interests,” he continued. “These actions, whose images have been seen all over the world, are compounded by other types of devastating actions, such as those aimed at tightening the economic blockade against Cuba.”
The socialist president further claimed that the United States owes “billions of dollars” to the Cuban state as a result of the “embargo.”
Outside of Latin America, Arce denounced the ongoing war between Israel and the genocidal jihadist terror group Hamas, condemning Israel for its alleged “genocide in Gaza” and accusing the country of using the “unconditional support” of the United States to accelerate the “displacement of the Palestine people in the shortest time possible.”
“Peace will remain an empty word as long as the Palestinian people continue to be subjected to genocidal practices and do not have their own territory and full sovereignty with East Jerusalem as their capital,” he said.
Arce also denounced sovereign Taiwan’s “departure” from Communist Chinese rule, NATO’s “expansionist ambition” against Russia through the use of Ukraine, and the territorial dispute of the Senkaku Islands between Japan, China, and Taiwan as other examples of U.S. “neocolonialism.”
The socialist president proposed the creation of a “reparations commission for slavery, genocide, and colonialism in countries in the global south,” which he suggested should be funded from the military budgets of “the lords of war and death.”
Similarly, he called upon the U.N. to gain binding authority over member nations and that its resolutions not be allowed to be vetoed by anyone and be backed by “effective enforcement.” Lastly, he urged to “democratize” the U.N. Security Council to include the voices of “historically marginalized peoples.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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