BOLIVIAN president-elect Luis Arce announced the restoration of relations with Venezuela, Cuba and Iran on Tuesday, countries the coup administration had severed ties with.

Mr Arce said that the Andean country would open the door to all based on the premise of mutual respect and sovereignty.

The government headed by far-right Christian fundamentalist Jeanine Anez tried to roll back social progress and, in one of the first acts after coming to power in a Washington-backed coup, expelled Cuban health workers from the country.

“We are going to re-establish all relations. This government has acted very ideologically, depriving the Bolivian people of access to Cuban medicine, Russian medicine and advances in China. For a purely ideological issue, it has exposed the population in a way unnecessary and harmful,” he said.

Mr Arce won Sunday’s crucial presidential elections in a thumping victory almost a year after Evo Morales was ousted in what he claimed was a plot by imperialist powers to gain access to Bolivia’s vast lithium reserves.

His Movement Towards Socialism also swept to victory in the parliamentary elections in a stunning success for the leftists who retained popular support in Bolivia despite the efforts of the coup regime.

The president-elect warned the Washington-based Organisation of American States (OAS) that it must now make amends for its treatment of Bolivia. The body was complicit in authoring a report claiming election irregularities in last November’s poll.

The allegations have since been proved false. The OAS is accused of backing the brutal and repressive regime of Ms Anez and complicity in the massacre of hundreds of indigenous Bolivians that followed the coup.

“If it does not, we (the elected government) will work, as well as with other countries, with international organisations that respect us,” he said.