Bolivian Could Be a 'Nightmare' for U.S.

[Eugene]

Bolivian Could Be a 'Nightmare' for U.S.

By FIONA SMITH, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 12, 3:03 PM ET

CARACOLLO, Bolivia - As a little boy in Bolivia's bleak highlands, Evo Morales used to run
behind buses to pick up the orange skins and banana peels passengers threw out the windows.
Sometimes, he says, it was all he had to eat. Now, holding the lead ahead of Sunday's
presidential election, he's threatening to be "a nightmare for the government of the United States."

It's not hard to see why. The 46-year-old candidate is a staunch leftist who counts Cuba's
Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez among his close friends. Moreover, he's a coca farmer,
promising to reverse the U.S.-backed campaign to stamp out production of the leaf that is used
to make cocaine.

With his Aymara Indian blood and a hatred for the free-market doctrines known to Latin Americans
as neo-liberalism, Morales in power would not only shake up Bolivia's political elite,
but strengthen the leftward tide rippling across South America.

"Something historic is happening in Bolivia," Morales told The Associated Press in an interview.
"The most scorned, hated, humiliated sector now has the capacity to organize."

<snip>

Full article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051212/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/bolivia_america_s_foe

[Trillo]

1. I once read that the coca leaf has been used since the time of the Incas.

Likely, its historical use goes back much further.

[freethought]

20. Use of Coca leaves goes back centuries in South America

They didn't snort cocaine or anything but they did chew on the raw leaves.
Some of the natives still chew on the leave to this day. It is said that chewing the Coca leaves slightly heigtens awareness and surpresses the appetite.
If you consider where the Incas lived, where distances had to be traversed by foot, maybe chewing on a few leaves may get you to a destination just a little faster if you don't have to stop and eat.

[orwell]

2. Translation...

...a "nightmare" is anybody we haven't bribed, coerced or threatened into total submission to our will.

Tell us again, oh great leader, about this wondrful "freedom" you speak so highly of. Tell us again...

[Union Thug]

3. I am inspired by the resurgence of the Left in Latin America...

We are living in fascinating times!

[NEOBuckeye]

4. This gives me hope.

Someday soon, America's own Liberal Left Wing will emerge anew and carry this country forward to a much better place.

[stickdog]

5. Viva la democracia!

[acmavm]

6. I find it funny in a way how anything that smacks of civil rights for the

poorest in a nation is demonized by the US media. What do these asswipes think drove people to these shores from Europe in the first place?

[rman]

8. Demonizing and subverting of socialist democracies is official US doctrine

The reason why the mainstream media contribute to it is that those media are owned by the same powers that set the agenda of US (foreign) policies.

Media ownership is not exactly a secret and speaks for itself (see www.takebackthemedia.com > who owns the media)

Official doctrine speaks less for itself, and requires evidence - in this case declassified State Department documents from 1948.

====

From a debate between Noam Chomsky and Richard Perle at The Ohio State University in 1988 http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8409

"One learns a lot from looking at the documentary record, and one learns a lot from the fact that certain people don't want you to look at it." - Noam Chomsky

"Official doctrine is quite inconsistent with the historical and documentary record. Official doctrine conforms to the pattern of evolving events (US support of RW dictators and vilification of socialist governments), and is entirely inconsistent with widely proclaimed doctrine." - Noam Chomsky


Quotes from declassified State Department documents:

On the 3rd World:

"...a source of raw material and markets for the industrialist capitalist powers, to be exploited for their reconstruction"...

On Latin America:

"Prime concern is the protection of our raw materials. We have 50% of the worlds wealth but only 6% of its population, we must maintain this disparity to the extent possible, by force if necessary, putting aside vague and idealistic slogans such as human rights, raising of living standards, democratization, preferring police states if needed over democracies that might be to liberal and to indulgent to communists, the latter has lost any substantial meaning in US political rhetoric, referring simply to anyone who stands in our way."

"The primary threat to the US in Latin America is the trend towards nationalistic regimes that respond to popular demand for improvement in low living standards and production for domestic needs. That's not acceptable because the US is committed to encouraging a climate inductive to private investment, in particular guaranties for opportunity to earn and in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return."

"We must therefore oppose what is regularly called ultra nationalism in secret documents, that means efforts to pursue domestic needs. We must foster exports or (...) production in the interests of US investors. It is recognized such programs have very little appeal to the Latin American public. So the conclusion is that we must therefore gain control over the military which can in turn control domestic opposition and overthrow civilian governments if necessary."


====

"There is a declassified State Department paper from 1948 that outlines what the US intended to do with various regions of the world after World War II. The US decided to take the Middle East and Asia. When it came to Africa, the document essentially says that we're not so interested in Africa, so we'll give it to the Europeans to "exploit"-that's the word used-for their reconstruction." - Chomsky
http://www.madre.org/articles/chomsky-0801.html

====

I. Fundamental Principles: Straight Power Concepts

The fundamental aims of Western foreign policy under American leadership, were stated in a now declassified top-secret planning report produced by the US State Department’s policy planning staff, headed at the time (February 1948) by the ‘liberal’ George Kennan: "We have about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain’ the ‘position of disparity’ between the West and the rest of the world. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.’
http://www.transcend.org/t_database/articles.php?ida=78

[bemildred]

7. Right. Bolivia is a "threat" to the USA.

And they dissed Jimmy Carter for running away from a rabbit.
Leave Bolivia alone, you morons.

[RaulGroom]

9. Bolivia is a threat of sorts

Bush's obsession with Iraq has prevented the US from doing much serious work in maintaining the southern half of the hemisphere in the "regional mode," meaning business-dominated quasi-democracies in which the ruling parties murder anyone from the lower classes who gets too close to the levers of power.

Bolivia is just one country, of course, and a small, fairly insignificant one in a strategic sense. But here is the "danger" to the US in the eyes of the State Department.

Right now, Venezuela and Cuba have a partership in which Cuba exports educated people - doctors, businesspeople, policy analysts, etc. - to Venezuela to help Venezuela build an economy that can continue to exist and thrive even in the event of a complete breakdown in US/Venezuela international relations. Venezuela, meanwhile, provides financial and diplomatic support for long-suppressed leftist movements elsewhere in the region, allowing countries like Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, etc. to drift toward democratic socialism (and perhaps beyond).

The key to all of this is Venezuela, of course. If Venezuela can develop a real middle class, and lift its rural population out of extreme poverty, it can become a consumer market for the other socialist countries in the region and they won't have to rely so much on access to US markets, or the help of the international monetary institutions.

Though Venezuela is very strategically important, the real danger in the eyes of the State department is that the revolution may begin to move north once it's consolidated in South America. If you look at a map of South Americna you'll see very quickly why the US cannot allow Colombia to ever emerge from its civil war and become a normally functioning society. If that happened Colombia would quickly become part of the bolivarian bloc and it would be only a matter of time before the revolution spread north toward the US client states of Nicaragua, Honduras, el Salvador and Guatemala.

Every South American country that moves toward autonomy is another step toward Colombia's return to normality. The more democratic the region becomes, the less feasible it is for the US to continue its decisive support for the Colobian narcoterror wars.

[bemildred]

10. La verdad.

I know Raul, but the US government cannot admit that what it truly fears is a range of good, functioning, independent social democracies in Latin America, run by Latin Americans for the benefit of Latin Americans.

And it is still ridiculous to claim that Bolivia is any threat to the USA, as such.

[400Years]

13. as Chomsky says "it's the threat of a viable alternative"

[IrateCitizen]

15. Bolivia is a "rotten apple"...

That being that if Bolivia shows that an alternative to neoliberalism is possible for developing nations, that they no longer must maintain tributary status toward the global North, then other nations might try and do the same.

Once that occurs, what lands will the industrialized North exploit for resources?

Vietnam was never a threat to the US either. Yet we dropped more tons of bombs on it than we did on Germany and Japan combined in WWII and killed over 3 million Vietnamese. Why? Because we had to show that if one of the "little guys" tried to do something we didn't agree with, then they would pay a heavy price -- to discourage anyone else from doing the same.

Same goes for Nicaragua in the 1980's and Cuba 1959-1961.

[depakid]

19. It's the domino theory recycled

and just like all the old TV shows that get recycled into movies- it's no better this time around than the last....

[yurbud]

11. Would we be terrorists if we made campaign contributions to this guy?

[400Years]

12. wow, that story seemed almost fair in its reporting

surprised they didn't call him names and actually humanized him.

[IrateCitizen]

14. I'm actually writing a paper on this right now...

At least the commonalities of Bolivia's 1952-64 social revolution and the indigenous movement.

Morales is not the person in Bolivia that scares the shit out of Washington, although they certainly wouldn't want him to come to power. The person that would scare Washington shitless is Felipe Quispe.

Morales wants to install socialism in Bolivia, but isn't staunch on nationalizing hydrocarbon revenues (which are the 800 lb gorilla in the Bolivian livingroom). Quispe has not only stated his dedication to seeing hydrocarbon revenues nationalized, but also has stated that the indigenous only want "90% of the power" in Bolivia, and that if the ruling white minority don't cede to this demand, then there will undoubtedly be war.

Bolivia is an interesting place right now -- a country that is majority indigenous in which the international indigenous movement has come full bloom to directly challenge the Washington consensus. We will just have to wait and see if it marks a sea change in Latin America, or becomes another sad chapter in Latin American history....

[applegrove]

16. Was it Bolivia where the neocons pushed a corporation to own all

water - including what fell from the sky?

[Judi Lynn]

17. It was a water-grabbing connection to the Bechtel corporation

which was the last straw. (I am certain I've read _{George H. W. Bush} is involved in Bechtel.)

Google grab:

Sell the rain
How the privatization of water caused riots in Cochabamba, Bolivia
Connie Watson, CBC Radio | Feb. 4, 2003

In South America, private companies have taken over municipal water supplies in at least half a dozen countries, but there's one city where the takeover didn't go as planned.

In 1999, a consortium, controlled by U.S. multinational Bechtel, signed a 40-year deal to increase water supplies and services to Cochabamba, Bolivia. Six months later, rioting Bolivians chased the company out of the country.
(snip/...)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~

BLAME THE BECHTEL CORP. NOT NARCOTRAFFICKERS FOR BOLIVIA UPRISING

Bolivia, that landlocked country high in the Andes, which few in the U.S. ever think about, has been in the news. A week of enormous, often violent, civil uprisings here left at least seven people dead, more than a hundred others injured and flashed pictures of the nation abroad that made government leaders here very nervous for their and the nation's foreign image. Quick to put blame in the easiest place possible, government spokesman, Ronald MacLean, told the few international reporters here Monday, "I want to denounce the subversive attitude absolutely politically financed by narcotraffickers."

For reporters and editors who have never been here it may be an easy line to swallow, but it would take about two minutes on the ground to figure out how big a lie the Bolivian government seeks to spin. The issue in the past week's uprisings had nothing to do with drugs, it was about water. The culprits weren't narcotraffickers hiding out in the jungle but the well-tailored executives of the Bechtel Corporation sitting smugly in their downtown San Francisco offices a hemisphere away.

The roots of the uprisings here began last year when, under heavy pressure from the World Bank, the Bolivian government sold off Cochabamba's public water system to a Bechtel subsidiary, "Aguas del Tunari". The details of the deal are secret, with the company claiming the numbers are confidential "intellectual property". What is very clear, however, is that Bechtel's people here were intent on getting as much as they could as fast as they could out of the people's pockets in South America's poorest country. Within weeks of hoisting their new corporate logo over local water facilities the Bechtel subsidiary hit local water users with rate hikes of double and more. Families earning a minimum wage of less than $100 per month were told to fork over $20 and more, or have the tap shut off.
(snip)

http://www.democracyctr.org/waterwar/#blame

[applegrove]

18. I bet all those people who suddenly had to buy water that fell from the

sky will be life long leftists. Really - neocons pay no attention to consequences of any of their policies and go totally on Utopian hopes. While robbing people who have nothing or more - they simply showed the world how dystopian the planet would be if non persons such as corporations were allowed to set the rules.

[dennisnyc]

21. Evo Morales is often discussed on Democracy Now! One

interview link here:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/1414214&mode=thread&tid=25

a site search of Morales gave 27 hits

I think the guy would be great progress for indigenous and autonomy forces.