George Soros is a bad guy, intent on cosying up to the Bolivian government of Evo Morales to ensure he gets a slice of much hyped potential of the country’s vast lithium deposits. That’s the café gossip in Bolivia’s capital La Paz, that crazy city in a crater 4,000 metres above sea level. Politics in Bolivia, one of the world’s poorest countries, is rarely dull and now is no exception.

Bolivia is, depending on who you listen to or speak with, going through a period of radical change. That’s saying something given the country, celebrating its 200th anniversary of liberation from Spain, has had 80 presidents in that time. But in 2006 the election of the first Indigenous President, Evo Morales and his MAS party to the Congress, has convulsed the country. Morales spent his first 12 months in office hanging out with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and declaring his antipathy to the US and neo liberalism — a term recently discovered by our own Prime Minister.

A new Constitution was passed after a campaign that spilt the country between the Morales support base on the impoverished altiplano, and the prosperous lowlands centred around the economic boom town of Santa Cruz. Morales wants to redistribute wealth through land transfers, greater use of cooperatives, and renationalizing vast swathes of the economy in areas such as energy and telecoms.

So where does George Soros, the billionaire financier who, having made a fortune out of the global capital markets and who now runs an array of NGOs across the globe, fit in? According to two bestselling books by a journalist Emilio Martinez, Citizen X and X-2, Soros bankrolled Morales’ successful 2006 election campaign and is very close to Juan Ramón Quintana, who works from the Presidential Palace as a minister in the Morales administration.

Soros, goes the theory, wants to snare some rights to Bolivia’s vast lithium deposits, which with the advent of electric cars, is shaping up to be a very valuable source of income for Bolivia. Uranium concessions are all owned by the State, and Soros would have the inside running on getting permission to develop them. It might be conspiratorial or it might not be — Soros developed a large scale silver mine in Bolivia a decade ago, but on the other hand the Soros NGO website does not list Bolivia as one of the countries in which it works!

The Soros banter, opaque and oblique on the one hand and wild and fantastic on the other, is not an isolated case in this country. In April police raided a hotel in Santa Cruz and shot dead a self confessed fascist, poet and actor, Eduardo Rózsa Flores, and a 24-year-old Irishman Michael Dwyer and a 28-year-old Romanian, Árpád Magyarosi.

Morales says the men were going to assassinate him and he immediately passed an anti-sedition law aimed at his wealthy political enemies. But, as media reports have noted, the trio had hardly been keeping a low profile, having partied and drunk their way through a series of bars and nightclubs in the days leading up to the shootings.

Morales himself is a character of contrasts. He is reported to be a workaholic and control freak, sleeping only a few hours a day, and people in La Paz will tell you it’s not unusual to get a call in the early hours of the morning from Morales’ aides telling you that the President will see you in 30 minutes. Makes Kevin Rudd’s reputed hard work ethic look decidedly impish.

Bolivia is one place on this earth where, if you take more than a passing interest in politics, you would never be short of a story.

Send Crikey a letter from wherever you live or may be passing through to boss@crikey.com.au with the title ‘Letter from’ in the subject field.