Bolivia’s Morales

I’m catching up on old New Yorkers. Back in March there was an interesting Lawrence Wright article asking: Can Bolivia become the Saudi Arabia of the electric-car era? Lots of lithium in that country.

The article is largely about President Evo Morales and I found this snippet of interest:

Last fall, when Morales was in Manhattan for the annual U.N. meeting, Harry Belafonte had planned a benefit for him, in Harlem. But Morales was sidelined by an earache. According to another former member of Morales’s staff, the President doesn’t trust American medicine, so he called a doctor in Bolivia, who prescribed flushing the ear with warm water. “The hotel said they would charge forty dollars for a pot of steaming water,” the former staffer recalled. “When I left, his aides were rolling up newspapers, setting them on fire, then sticking them in his ear.”