U.S. Shelters Bolivia Ex-President From Genocide Charges As Evo Morales Offers Snowden Asylum
U.S. Shelters Bolivia Ex-President From Genocide Charges As Evo Morales Offers Snowden Asylum
Posted: 07/13/2013 8:20 am EDT
Residents from El Alto protest in front of the U.S. embassy in La Paz on Oct. 17, 2012, to demand the extradition of Bolivian former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (poster), now in exile in the United States
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Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, president of Bolivia from 2002 to 2003, was a free-market reformer and U.S. ally. He fled his country after protests to his plans to route natural gas through neighboring Chile toppled his government in 2003 -- an episode known in Bolivia as the “Gas War.” He now faces charges of genocide in Bolivia for allegedly ordering the military to fire on protesters in 2003, killing more than 60 people, as well as a civil lawsuit in the U.S. brought by relatives of those who died. Sánchez de Lozada, now living in the U.S., is being sheltered from extradition back to Bolivia.
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“It’s an absurd expectation that Bolivia would extradite Snowden if he ever arrived there with this kind of precedent,” Kathyrn Ledebur, director of the Cochabamba-based Andean Information Network, told The Huffington Post. “It’s kind of this elephant on the table that they’re pretending doesn’t exist, but is a huge problem.”
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Sánchez de Lozada’s critics viewed him as out of touch. A similar conflict, known as the “Water War,” had broken out in 2000, when the U.S. contractor Bechtel Corp. bought the local water system in the city of Cochabamba, then raised rates by as much as 400 percent.
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The U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights brought new allegations in an amended complaint last month, saying the former Bolivian president and his defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, decided during meetings before they took office to use lethal force against civilians who protested their economic projects. Based in part on the experience of the Water War, they anticipated they might have to kill as many as 3,000 civilians to overcome protests to routing natural gas through Chile, according to the filing.
“They personally ordered the Armed Forces to enter Bolivian towns and villages as if they were attacking a foreign invader,” the complaint says. “The Armed Forces employed tactics of war, including deploying military sharpshooters armed with high-powered rifles who shot into houses and chased and shot unarmed villagers as they fled through fields into the mountains.”
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/13/us-bolivia-president-snowden_n_3587654.html?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=World
Why look! There's Bechtel again! The TPP assholes. And a US-raise, US-installed, US-backed President who exploited people, started *globalizing* Bolivia and then when the people rose up against him, looted the Bolivian Treasury and fled to the US with the goods where he's lived in peace for years. And the US is as TONE DEAF, or pretends to be, as its Ostrich defense line that tries to hide and distort everything to keep people in ignorance. 3 months ago, things were bad enough and Evo Morales responds to John Kerry: Never Again Will We Be Your Backyard. Instead of processing that, we just continue making matters worse.
At what price profit for the 1%? At what price our ignorance and apathy about our dirty deeds in Latin America?
If you have time, here's a fascinating documentary about the DLC running that criminal's presidential campaign in Bolivia.
Published on Nov 14, 2012
Our Brand Is Crisis is a 2005 documentary film by Rachel Boynton on American political campaign marketing tactics by Greenberg Carville Shrum in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. The election saw Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada elected President of Bolivia ahead of Evo Morales.
= new reply since forum marked as read
in Brasil than in the ruling class in Korea. Internationalism of labor is the best why out of our predictament in my opinion.
(Sorry but I can't help myself, and yes, I am one: "Dyslexics of the World: Untie!"
That's the only time I'll say it here I promise.
after all, he is just a figure head of state, like the Queen of England.
He is just there for the tourists
Last edited Mon Jul 15, 2013, 05:03 AM - Edit history (1)
This is helpful background on Goni's hideous massacre:
Black October
Victims of a Bolivian massacre seek justice in Miami.
By Tim Elfrink
published: December 18, 2008
~snip~
Natural gas deposits have been discovered in Bolivia, and tensions between the mostly white ruling class and indigenous leaders over this national treasure have simmered for weeks. Confrontations between protesters and the nation's military are erupting in violence, and word has just reached the village that the army is now marching toward Warisata to kill its men.
Marlene's mother tells the girl to stay calm. Her father, who has fled to the dun-colored hills to hide, will be back soon, she promises. But Marlene's curiosity cannot be contained. It keeps her up late at night studying by candlelight, dreaming of a life this impoverished village cannot offer. And it keeps her standing at the window, looking toward the mountains where her father has gone, into the dusky darkness.
Suddenly the sound of gunshots peppers the evening air. Marlene's mother tells her to step back from the window, but before the girl can move, a sharp crack rattles the small room. Glass sprinkles the ground. Marlene sucks in her breath and stumbles backward into her mother's arms.
"Tayca," Marlene says, gasping the Aymara word for mother.
"Jani!" her mother yells — no! — holding Marlene tightly as the girl collapses onto the bed, her blood soaking the thick strands of alpaca wool. A single bullet has lanced straight through her chest, crossed the tiny room, and lodged in the dusty brick wall.
Marlene Rojas Mamani dies without another word.
~snip~
Although the case has generated scant interest in Miami, it is being closely watched in La Paz and Washington. Sánchez de Lozada was among the staunchest of U.S. allies in Latin America, helping to turn Bolivia into a test lab for America's ideas on how to fix the region's economies. That he and his former defense minister are here today is an embarrassment, to say the least, to both the Bush and Clinton administrations, which is perhaps the reason the pair is represented by none other than Greg Craig, whom President-Elect Barack Obama has already named his White House chief counsel.
Of course, there is another side of the story. To hear Sánchez de Lozada tell it, the real culprit of Black October is none other than Evo Morales, the current president of Bolivia. It was Morales, Sánchez de Lozada says, who whipped the indigenous protesters into a frenzy over government plans to privatize gas drilling and exportation, leading groups that blocked roads and sparked bloody confrontations with the military. A soldier was the first casualty in the conflict, Sánchez de Lozada's legal team maintains; the army merely tried to keep chaos at bay in their homeland, they say.
More:
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/content/printVersion/1280808/
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Trial of Former Bolivian President Sánchez de Lozada and His Accomplices for the Massacres of 2003
~snip~
On the morning of October 15, 2003, while the demonstrations that two days later would take down a president spread through La Paz and El Alto, the mineworkers’ leaders of Oruro province decided to march to the capital to support the rebels. In the La Salvadora mine, a 36-year-old woman, widow, and mother of six children between the ages of two and twelve, joined the miners’ contingent. Filomena León, who months later would tell her story before the cameras of Verónica Auza and Claudia Espinoza, was among the people who arrived that morning in the town of Patacamaya, a little more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from La Paz.
“I don’t know how they surprised us. We were getting out of the car peacefully to drink some tea.”
The soldiers had orders to stop the caravan, and held back the miners with gunshots. First, they burst the tires on the miners’ trucks and seized their few belongings, then they attacked the miners, who, armed with sticks of dynamite, resisted the offensive. The palliri (woman miner) was among those injured in the clash. “I felt the bullet, just the bullet. I haven’t risen since. I was ahead of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind. I don’t remember anything else.” The high caliber projectile embedded itself in Filomena’s spinal cord. For months, in at least two public hospitals, the brave woman slowly lost her health and will to live; she was paralyzed, and her younger children couldn’t even recognize her.
On April 30, nearly six months after being shot, Filomena León died of a lethal infection at the La Paz Clinic Hospital, according to the Gas War Memorial Testimony – a book put together by Auza and Espinoza to record the dozens of deaths, the hundreds of wounded and mutilated, that were the high price paid by the Bolivian insurrection last year. In the last weeks of her life, one could see a fist-sized hole in her back. Filomena’s sweet voice and black, abundant braids left this land forever. The same happened to Teodocia Morales Mamani (who was pregnant), Marcelo Chambi Mollinedo, Ramiro Vargas Astilla, and many other Alteños (from the city of El Alto), Aymara peasant-farmers, children and grandparents, men and women. And today, despite the Bolivian National Congress having authorized their prosecution, those responsible for so much pain go unpunished.
The Death Sentence
In a story of courage and strength, Bolivia’s poor, most importantly its Aymara indigenous population, defended their natural gas in September and October of last year, blockading highways and paralyzing El Alto and La Paz. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, serving his second term as president, hoped to export this valuable natural resource to the United States through Chilean ports, against the will of the people. During the conflict, soldiers and police constantly fired on people armed only with sticks, stones, and occasionally dynamite. As in the case of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or of the insurrection in Argentina in 2001, the repressive forces of the Bolivian state had “orders from above”; a license to kill.
More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1138.html
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Thank you, Catherina. This history MUST be opened and shown to the citizens of the U.S. whose politicians and their support community have been calling the SHOTS against the multitudes of the poor and defenseless of the Americas.
committed inconsequential crimes like mass-murder on the behalf of our corporate overlords.
