Bolivia, a criminal threat to America
By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 21/07/2025
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Drug trafficking, human trafficking, and other crimes may exist for greater purposes than lining criminals' pockets. This is true when we analyze how Evo Morales used the illegal cocaine trade to terrorize Bolivia beginning in the late 1980s, although with greater force during the early years of the 21st century. Not to mention the growth of organized crime during his nearly fifteen years in office.
However, the coca grower was merely a pawn within a larger criminal structure: the Sao Paulo Forum. Let's remember that Evo Morales's almost religious subservience to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez was, in reality, part of their drug trafficking networks. These irregular associations facilitated the use of border checkpoints, government offices, and other public resources for the covert transportation of illicit narcotics. In fact, Chávez turned Venezuela into a cocaine superhighway, a mega-structure where corrupt uniformed officers, immoral judges, and drug traffickers use Venezuelan state structures to traffic drugs to the United States.
But Bolivia has an additional advantage over Venezuela: it is located in the center of South America. This characteristic was well analyzed by Iran, one of the transnational partners of the dictatorships of 21st-century socialism. In this regard, Sergio Berensztein, an expert on security and organized crime, highlights in his article "The Bolivian crisis is deepening and is a threat to regional security":
Relations with Hezbollah have recently strengthened (the same is true in Brazil and Colombia), which plays a vital role in logistics, especially in the transport of cocaine base to the waterway, generally carried out by small planes. Furthermore, the presence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force has been detected (according to intelligence sources, between 120 and 150 members of that force have been identified between Venezuela and Bolivia). The Argentine government, particularly the Ministry of Security, is aware of the situation and has warned the Bolivian authorities of their decision to strictly prevent any incursion into national territory.
Similarly, in June 2025, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) included Bolivia on its gray list of countries that are not doing enough to combat crime.
The growth of the informal economy, from 50% to 85%, during the two decades the Movement Toward Socialism has been in power cannot be overlooked. The strategy follows the following methodology:
1) The tax system makes it impossible to operate in the formal economy.
2) Entrepreneurs, overwhelmed by taxes, fines, and violations, are taking refuge in the informal sector.
3) Growing informality is the perfect umbrella for hiding and laundering organized crime money through, for example, the drop-by-drop loans offered by Colombian lenders.
Additionally, the Bolivian judicial and prison systems are among the most corrupt in the world. It is well known that the most dangerous criminals can continue to operate with total impunity from prison.
This cocktail of corruption, poverty, informality, Castro-Chavism, and Islamic radicalism has turned Bolivia into a very dangerous threat to the entire region. This is something the transnational partners of the Bolivian dictatorship are not about to lose, hence the dangerous possibility that the left will rally around Andrónico Rodríguez, a leader born and raised in the criminal heart of Cochabamba's Chapare.
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