Since the Spanish discovered the massive Potosí silver mines, Bolivia has had the mixed fortune to be a supplier of raw material wealth to the rest of the world. More recently coca leaves and petroleum have been Bolivia's most valuable, and troublesome, exports. Now they're once again finding themselves at the end of the rainbow -- this time the wealth is lithium, a key ingredient in new battery power technologies.

Bolivian president Evo Morales, who's been resisting outside interlopers for his whole career (including American political consultants James Carville and Stan Greenberg) is determined to resist the plundering of his nation's resources.

This PBS Newshour story captures the Bolivian government's attempts to hold the tiger by the tail:

VINCENT BOLLORE, French businessman (through translator): It's you who controls the raw materials for the 21st and 22nd centuries. You're like Saudi Arabia. It's you.

LINDSEY HILSUM: In the Bolivian capital La Paz, they're dreaming about that pot of gold. A new socialist constitution says foreign companies exploiting the country's natural resources must reinvest all profits in Bolivia.

LUIS ALBERTO ECHAZU, Bolivian minister of mining (through translator): Any company which would like to work with us will have to develop industries here, otherwise there's nothing. It's very simple: We will not continue exporting raw materials for another 500 years. That is over.

LINDSEY HILSUM: They're analyzing the lithium and other minerals at a laboratory borrowed from La Paz University. Mitsubishi and Sumitomo are advising, but President Morales says they must promise to produce the lithium ion batteries and even the electric cars in Bolivia.

But he's also got to worry about the restive eastern province of the country, Santa Cruz. Low altitude, wealthier, more mestizo, less indigenous than the high mountain plateau home turf of Evo, they've resisted Morales' government in much the same way that the middle classes of Venezuela have resisted Chavez.

The conflict between Evo and his political opponents in Santa Cruz reached an unlikely crescendo on April 16th when government forces killed three men in a shoot out in a Santa Cruz hotel. One of the men was described by the New York Times as "Eduardo Rozsa Flores, 49, a Bolivian with Hungarian and Croatian passports and a nebulous past as a leader of foreigners fighting for Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia."

More on the enigmatic Flores and his sudden death in the full entry.

Flores was certainly a character, here's the trailer of "Chico" a 2001 documentary about his life and adventures in the Balkans:

More from the Times piece on Flores and his end:

Returning to Hungary after the war, Mr. Rozsa Flores converted to Islam, a shift from his earlier association with Opus Dei, the conservative Roman Catholic group. And he found a new political obsession, explaining in a television interview last year with a Hungarian journalist that he was moving to Bolivia to organize a militia.

“There is a need for weapons,” he said in the interview, which was broadcast for the first time in Hungary last week after his killing, “so it isn’t about the boys marching in the streets with flags and bamboo sticks.”

Mr. Rozsa Flores went further in the interview, saying his goal was not toppling Mr. Morales, but achieving autonomy for Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s wealthiest department, or province. Envisioning a clash with La Paz over this issue, he nonchalantly described his goal as “declaring independence and creating a new country.”

Over the weekend, a prosecutor presented a video recorded on a cellphone, without clear audio, in which he said Mr. Rozsa Flores had discussed a plan to kill Mr. Morales on a recent trip to Lake Titicaca.

Such assertions fit well into the way Mr. Morales’s government portrays Santa Cruz: as a region where powerful industrialists and bankers, some of them descendants of Croatian immigrants, want to secede from Bolivia in a rupture inspired by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

But while Mr. Morales has described the men killed in Santa Cruz as part of a “tentacle of a structure” intent on killing him and other senior officials named in a list obtained by his government, missteps by officials in describing their handling of the group have led to further questions about the men and what they were doing in Santa Cruz.

Mr. García Linera, the vice president, at first said the three were killed in a 30-minute gunfight, but an insurance report filed for the hotel and obtained by La Razón, a newspaper, apparently found no signs of an exchange of gunfire. Two men taken captive at the hotel, Elod Toazo, a Hungarian, and Mario Tadik, a Bolivian, seem to have surrendered without a fight.

“What happened was the killing of three people who were sleeping, which means murder,” said Óscar Ortiz, president of Bolivia’s Senate and a top opponent of Mr. Morales.

Alfredo Rada, a senior minister, made things worse when he went on television with images of men in Santa Cruz clasping weapons, claiming they were linked to those killed. But the men in the photos, lifted from a Facebook page, debunked the claim by explaining that they practiced “airsoft,” a game in which participants fire at one another with pellet guns.

The case is fueling conspiracy theories of every stripe, but some secrets were taken to the grave by Mr. Rozsa Flores and his two comrades in arms.

Here's an Irish Times piece with more background, the "origin of Chico" if you will:

Former acquaintances in Budapest say Flores found work as a journalist and correspondent’s assistant for the BBC’s Spanish-language service and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia , which took him to former Yugoslavia as it descended into war in the early 1990s.

At this point, Flores abandoned journalism and joined the fighting, helping to establish a foreign volunteers brigade based around the northern Croatian town of Osijek, and fought for Croatia’s independence from Belgrade’s rule.

“The Serbs detained Eduardo for three or four days, beat him up and accused him of being a spy. He was livid and told a Croatian journalist soon afterwards that he wanted to fight,” a close friend of Flores in Budapest told The Irish Times on condition of anonymity.

Flores claimed to have been wounded several times in Croatia, and to have been promoted to the rank of colonel and given Croatian citizenship by then-president Franjo Tudjman.

But the Balkan wars also cast a dark shadow on Flores’ reputation, and caused several old Budapest acquaintances to shun him, particularly as rumours swirled that he may have ordered the killing of a Swiss and a British journalist who went to Croatia to investigate his volunteers brigade.

After the war ended in 1995, Flores returned to Hungary and wrote poetry (www.poetasdelmundo.com/verInfo_europa.asp?ID=1067) but was seen less frequently in Budapest. On his page on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/eduflores), he said he was living in the country village of Szurdokpuspoki and described himself as an “international war correspondent-turned-platoon-leader” and said he was working as a journalist and actor.

Flores did play himself in a film that was based on his adventures, called Chico , and many of the tributes in Croatian and Hungarian posted on his YouTube pages and his own blog (http://eduardorozsaflores.blogspot.com) refer to him by that nickname.

In recent years, Flores converted to Islam and continued to support a bewildering array of causes, including independence for the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia where he was killed, opposing the US war in Iraq and calling for a Palestinian state.

This is just weird shit. Flores seems like the definitive international adventurer -- a caste I've learned to deeply distrust -- but his motives seem to have been idealistic rather than mercenary. The conflicts in Bolivia are deep-seated and Flores seems to have made himself a very convenient target to a Morales government always on the lookout for enemies in the east.

Of course from Evo's perspective, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.