misiles shultz

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Saturday, April 03, 2010

The U.S. Lets an Ex-President Stand Trial for its Clandestine Collusion with the Bolivian Military

Readers:

Thank you for your positive reaction to our April Fools Day Blog on the plan to make Bolivia and Venezuela one country. We especially thank those of you

who fell for it and reproduced it as news.

This Blog post is not a joke. It is dead serious, a special report on how the U.S. went behind the back of a democratic President and today lets that former leader hang in the wind on treason charges because "politics" won't permit

Washington to tell the truth. This is the case of the Chinese missiles and the wrongful prosecution of former President Eduardo Rodriguez. The report

includes documents from both the U.S. and Bolivian governments never before published in public.

Jim Shultz

The Democracy Center

The U.S. Lets an Ex-President Stand Trial for its Clandestine Collusion with the Bolivian Military

Over the past four years, Bolivian President Evo Morales has leveled one

charge after another that the U.S. does not respect Bolivian sovereignty and that it has meddled in the country's domestic affairs.

Some of those charges have been based on substance. It is suspicious that Ambassador Phillip Goldberg went on a tour in September 2008 to visit the

country's opposition governors, just on the eve of their launching a series of hot street rebellions against Morales. It is also a fact that an Embassy official

illegally solicited Fulbright Scholars and Peace Corps volunteers to scrounge

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up intelligence for the Embassy.

Other times Morales' charges against the U.S. have been just silly. This includes the infamous photo (right) taken of a smiling Goldberg on the floor of the Santa Cruz fair, Epocruz, along

side a supposed Colombian paramilitary operative. To cite the photo as evidence of a U.S. conspiracy, as Morales did at a summit of Latin American

Presidents, is to assume that the U.S. Embassy prefers to hold its clandestine meetings amidst thousands of people sampling local fruits and machinery.

There is however another recent case of U.S. intervention in Bolivia's domestic

affairs that goes far, far beyond meddling. It is a case that involves the U.S. Pentagon colluding with the Bolivian Army behind a President's back. It involves the clandestine removal of Bolivian arms for shipment to the U.S. It involves the

proffer of a $400,000 payment by the Pentagon to the leaders of Bolivia's armed forces, again behind the back of the President. And it is a case that is not

based on conjecture but on hard evidence, including documents we are publishing here in this post.

If the Morales government is looking for evidence of U.S. disregard for Bolivia's

sovereignty, then this is the case upon which that charge can be made and made clearly. Instead however, the Bolivian government is letting the U.S. off

the hook and pinning the blame, wrongly, on the former President behind whose back the U.S. conspired.

This is the story of the U.S. theft of Bolivia's surface-to-air missiles, and of the

wrongful prosecution of former President Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze.

The Chinese Missiles

In August of 1986, four Bolivian military officials went to China on a shopping expedition for weapons. Their wish list mainly included guns and bullets, some 3,300 of the first and millions of the second. After a long period of negotiations, the weapons were finally purchased with a loan by the Chinese government of $2 million. Later, in October 1997, when one batch of those weapons arrived in

Bolivia, military officials discovered something else in the mix – what many

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Bolivians would call una yappa, like the extra tomato a vegetable seller might add in as a thank you for purchasing the other twenty.

Included in the crates that arrived were thirty HN-5 Chinese surface-to-air missiles, known in the military trade as Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS). Bolivia suddenly had what some in the military liked to refer to as an "air defense

system."

In the course of this investigation I had a long conversation with a Canadian arms specialist who works for the UN on weapons destruction projects (who

spoke on condition of not being identified by name). He told me that the Chinese surface to air missiles like those shipped to Bolivia were considered

the "Yugo" of MANPADS. In other words, they were poorly made to begin with and even more useless over time. "It's the Russian models that you want," he

told me.

Maybe it was for that reason that the Bolivian Army was reluctant to test them. It was three years later, in 2000, when the Army finally took a shot at firing one.

These missiles are small weapons, thin tubes about five feet long and weighing just twenty pounds. Their lethal qualities come not from their size or range but their function. Used against aircraft, the missiles aim for the heat emitted from the exhaust pipe and tunnel right inside before exploding. They attack a plane

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or helicopter at its weak spot, in the way that Luke Skywalker took out the Empire's Death Star through a tiny ventilation shaft.

That particular knowledge of the missiles' mechanism must have been lost on Bolivia's Army in its La Paz test launch. According to sources, the missile fired and then went crazy, flailing around in the air and sending soldiers diving for cover. It then fell – a dud. The only other test attempted by the Army was in

2004 when the missile wouldn't fire at all. Its battery, like that of the rest of the missiles, had gone dead.

U.S. interest in stripping other countries of their surface to air missiles began

not long after the September 11, 2001 attacks. That effort to find and decommission stockpiles of the MANPADS got a key push in 2005 by a

bipartisan team of U.S. Senators, Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana and a freshman Democrat from Illinois, Barack Obama. Speaking of the MANPADS Lugar said. “Such weapons could be used by terrorists to attack commercial

airliners, military installations and government facilities here at home and abroad. Al Qaeda reportedly has attempted to acquire MANPADS on a number

of occasions.”

The focus of the U.S. hunt for these weapons was on the Russian-made variety, which were considered serious weapons and loose in the world in great

numbers. Why the U.S. suddenly took such an obsessive interest in Bolivia's outdated junk-MANPADS in the middle of 2005 is a subject of speculation and

theory – but an obsessive interest it took.

The Unlikely President

In most countries of the world the men and women who become President do so only after decades of careful plotting and positioning. Eduardo Rodriguez became the President of Bolivia with about 30 minutes notice and he wasn't

very happy at all about the prospect.

On the night of June 10, 2005, as Bolivia was spiraling into nationwide chaos, the scholarly Chief Justice of the country's

Supreme Court was watching the news on television with his wife and getting ready to go to bed when his telephone rang. It was the President of the Senate,

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Hormando Vaca Diez.

For days, Bolivia's social movements had paralyzed the country with a series of protests and road blockades demanding nationalization of the nation's gas and

oil. The protesters were furious with the watered down gas and oil reforms being pushed by President Carlos Mesa, and Mesa was once again repeating his penchant for threatening resignation to try to cajole the Congress and the

country his way.

Mesa's resignation gaming had set off a monumental power struggle between he and Vaca Diez, the next in the line of succession. When his rivals called

Mesa's bluff and told him to send the resignation right over, Mesa refused if it meant that the right-wing Senator would take control (Vaca Diez had declared

publicly that his answer to the protests would be to crush them with the military).

That night in June the Congress had fled the capital in La Paz, where the social movements had made it impossible to meet. Instead the Congress sought to

convene in a surprise session in Sucre where it would accept Mesa's resignation and swear in Vaca Diez. The social movements, led by dynamite-wielding miners from Potosi, surrounded the Congress in session and blocked

members' exit to the airport. Bolivia was on the verge of exploding.

Over the phone, Vaca Diez explained that he, President Mesa, and the leader of the House of Deputies, Mario Cossio, had finally agreed to the only deal they could think of to keep Bolivia from rolling off the precipice. Mesa would resign and the two Congressional leaders would relinquish their right to succession.

That meant that Rodriguez as head of the Supreme Court would have to assume the Presidency, a move which would also trigger automatic elections within six months. "Do you agree to do this?" Vaca Diez asked him. Rodriguez

knew he didn't have any choice.

After hanging up the phone and changing back into a suit and tie, Rodriguez found himself an hour later speaking live before the Congress and the nation. "I

didn't even have a speech prepared," Rodriguez told me, explaining the odd and dramatic events that night. "I had to make it up as I went along."

Afterwards Rodriguez was up until 4am getting briefed by the nation's generals on one standoff after another around the country where the Army and the social

movements were on the verge of open warfare with one another. As he recounted the events of the night he told me, "You can't imagine the stress.

Presidents come into office with a whole team of people they have worked with. I was totally alone."

The next morning Rodriguez's two young children awoke to discover that their father was now the President. As he walked the two out his front door in Sucre to the car that would take them to school, the children looked wide-eyed at the line-up of television cameras and the swarm of armed soldiers roaming around their home. Rodriguez told me that is seven-year-old son looked up at him and

said, "Dad, you are the President. What are you going to do?"

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In the landscape of Bolivian politics, Rodriguez is an oddity. He came to the Presidency not as a lifelong politician, nor as a social movement leader. He rose to lead the Supreme Court based on a respected and squeaky-clean

record as a lawyer and public servant. In Latin America in 2005 there wasn't a President anywhere that seemed a less likely candidate to be screwed by the

U.S.

Eduardo Rodriguez is the kind of man one might pass on the street and not notice, even if you had seen him on television a number of times. At 54, with

scholarly glasses and a short graying hair, Rodriguez looks like the mild-mannered lawyer he set out to be at an early age. He grew up in Cochabamba across the street from Plaza Colon. His parents owned a local pharmacy and

Rodriguez was schooled nearby by the Jesuits at St. Augustine, a private Catholic School which also graduated just a few years afterwards Morales' Vice

President, Alvaro Garcia Linera.

The first thing that set Rodriguez on the path toward law, he says, was a school requirement that sent the clean-cut high school student to the San Sebastian men's jail to help teach inmates to read. The school requirement was for two months, Rodriguez stayed six. Injustice, he told me, was no longer a theory

taught in class.

Rodriguez second conversion experience came in 1973 during the year he spent in Springfield Missouri as a high school exchange student. Night after night the teenager from Cochabamba joined his host family and millions of

Americans as they watched the Senate Watergate hearings unfold on television. Thinking about the brutal dictatorships back at home, Rodriguez was

mesmerized by a political system that brought down its President without a shot.

Back in Bolivia he set his professional trajectory on public service. After

attending public university and law school, he got a job as junior staff to a special Congressional committee investigating the country's most recent

dictatorships, an operation quickly shut down in 1980 with the arrival of yet another coup. Later he won a USAID scholarship to attend the Kennedy School

of Government at Harvard. On his return he helped build a new national auditor's office, the stuff of numbers not revolution. In 1999 Rodriguez tossed his hat in the ring for an improbable promotion, as a Justice of the country's

Supreme Court. Then candidates for the job were selected by a vote of Congress. In a process overflowing with politics and party jockeying, the

unaffiliated Rodriguez ended up finishing first place in the Congressional vote. Later he was elevated by his bench mates to be Chief Justice.

Then in September 2005, just three months after assuming the presidency,

Rodriguez discovered that the U.S. military officials and the Army chiefs under his command had been mobilizing behind his back.

The U.S. Acts Behind the President's Back

During the last weekend of that September, President Rodriguez was on a rare

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trip away from Bolivia, to a Presidential summit in Brazil. That is when the Bolivian Army and its U.S. counterparts decided to act.

On Sunday morning of that weekend a Bolivian military unit entered the

weapons storage facility in La Paz where the missiles were held and loaded them on a truck for the drive uphill to El Alto. The 28 missiles that remained in

the Bolivian arsenal were taken to the base of the Bolivian Air Force where they were transferred to a U.S. military aircraft and transported out of the country.

The President knew nothing of the operation, finding out about it only afterwards.

Nor did President Rodriguez find out until afterwards about the four-page signed document that the U.S. Pentagon left behind as a thank you, a September 30, 2005 "Mutual Cooperation Agreement" between Bolivia and the U.S. (read the

document here). It includes the following:

WHEREAS in recognition of the Republic of Bolivia's outstanding support of the war on terrorism and as incentive to continue this support DoD [Department of

Defense] desires to transfer $400,000 to the Republic of Bolivia.

The Pentagon memorandum then leaves a series of blank spaces where the Bolivian generals were expected to list the bank, bank account, and beneficiary

to which that $400,000 in Pentagon cash should be wired. The Bolivian Generals could have listed anyone on the simple return form to Washington,

including themselves.

The whole manner in which the U.S. rushed to remove the missiles from the Bolivian arsenal in the closing months of 2005 raises a series of crucial

questions.

First, why the rush and why behind the back of the democratic President of the country?

The UN arms destruction specialist who I spoke with was astonished on this point. "Handing over weapons to the UN or to another country for destruction is

an extremely political decision. Usually it requires an act of Congress."

Former President Rodriguez recounted a conversation he had with the then-U.S. Ambassador, David Greenlee on this question. According to Rodriguez, Greenlee told him, "We had to get them out. If we didn’t get them out then we

wouldn't be able to."

There are several theories about why the U.S. went rogue.

One has to do with the other big event taking place in Bolivia that September – a historic Presidential election in which a fierce U.S. adversary, Evo Morales, was surging to the lead. Was the U.S. really worried that two dozen outdated

missiles in the hands of Morales was some kind of threat?

According to Rodriguez and others, U.S. concerns about stray MANPADS falling into the hands of Al Qaeda included charges of some form of terrorist

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presence on the Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay border. Witnesses in an Argentine legal case reportedly testified that members of the Bolivian military had sold at

least one missile in the area and Rodriguez believes that reports like these made the U.S. nervous about the possible slippage of the Bolivian MANPADS

into undesirable hands.

President Rodriguez, a man known to be a stickler for the law and correct procedure, was not likely to give a stamp of approval to such a politicized action

as handing over missiles to the U.S. without submitting it to public disclosure and proper consideration. And that undoubtedly would have spilled the U.S.

request over into a Morales administration.

Or was the U.S. trying to curry favor with the Bolivian military on the eve of a Morales presidency? This is where the offered payment of $400,000 becomes

especially curious, especially given the informality with which the generals could submit the designated beneficiary for that fortune. I asked the UN weapons

expert about the payment and the U.S. insistence that the missiles be removed from Bolivia for destruction.

"Twenty-eight MANPADS? It's a simple process. You dig a hole three meters

wide and three meters deep in an unpopulated area, wrap them in a bundle with some dynamite and explode them. If I were contracting it out it would be a day's

work and cost about $1,500."

Nearly half a million dollars is a mighty big thank you for such a small project. In fact, it remains unclear why the U.S. wanted the missiles removed from Bolivia at all, instead of just observing their destruction in some desolate hole in the

altiplano.

Speaking about the scandal to Voice of America, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormick dismissed concerns that the U.S. had acted behind a

President's back. "As for who was told in Bolivia about the action, you'll have to talk to the Bolivian government about that."

Given the long history of the U.S. colluding with militaries in the region behind

the backs of democratic leaders (see General Pinochet, Chile, 1973) one would expect that the State Department understands that talking to the generals is not

enough.

Facing Trail for Treason and Left Hanging in the Wind by Uncle Sam

Last month the Morales government announced that it was going to accelerate its efforts to prosecute a list of former Presidents, and included Eduardo

Rodriguez on the list. While the others face charges of corruption related to foreign oil contracts, the case against Rodriguez, over the missiles, is

something altogether more serious. He faces charges of treason that can carry up to thirty years in a Bolivian prison.

There is no question that Rodriguez was kept in the dark about the handover of the missiles to Washington. In fact, upon discovering it, Rodriguez cancelled the

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$400,000 offer from Washington, demanded a full report (read the report here), and fired both the head of the Army and the Minister of Defense.

Why the Morales administration is going after Rodriguez over the missiles,

instead of leveling those charges against Washington, is a mystery -- especially given that the reason for the U.S. operation may have been fears of Morales

himself.

The U.S., for its part, knows it wronged Rodriguez and is letting him face life in prison over a set of acts that it undertook not him. The former President claims

that several high level U.S. officials have admitted as much to him in private, but say that the U.S. can't admit its actions in public for "political reasons." The former exchange student to Missouri is being taught a new lesson about the realities of U.S. politics, one not nearly so attractive as the accountability he

witnessed during Watergate. Today Rodriguez is looking at options for filing a legal action against the U.S., on behalf of Bolivia and its people.

The U.S. has says often that it wants to build a new relationship with Bolivia, including exchanging ambassadors again (the two countries kicked out their

respective ambassadors in September 2008). If it wants to do so it should start by coming clean about its behind-the-back-of-democracy shenanigans that

September weekend in 2005. It should not let a decent man take the rap for the Pentagon's suspicious maneuvers. And if the Morales government wants its

prosecution of other former Presidents, including Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, to look like more than a political twitch, it should re-aim its sights on the

missile case to where those sights belong – on Washington.

posted by The Democracy Center at 1:51 PM

20 Comments:

Timothy Welsh said...

If you think the milk in Bolivia tastes weird, it does in Spain as well.

3:40 PM Anonymous said...

"Why the Morales administration is going after Rodriguez over the missiles, instead of leveling those charges against Washington is a

mystery"

Jim, you still don't get it...Morales is like GWB, "you are either with us or against us." When he said that he will put Juan del Granado in

Chonchoroco (maximum security prison) for daring to break from the political coalition and challenge his mayoral candidate, it shows his true

colors.

Please be more objective in all of this, it is not the romantic scene that you like to paint.

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thats my evo fuck those m.....f...........and


Dr. Rodriguez doesn´t need to pay for general´s business,including people who is very close to actual governor.

This trial is only a political move,injustice and not democratic laws are a day by day issue in Bolivia.


This is a resonating Pandora's box full of singing worms, but the tunes they sing are anonymus...great lessons for everybody contemplating

coop deals with foreign interests, and following the chain of command will suffice to draw a spectrum of guilt for the military to be exemplarily

punished for treason as the case merits. Now when it comes to Mr. Rodriguez, whether his "cancellation" of the 400.000 $ meant pocketing the sum, or brokering a free deal for Washington, is only anecdotal, he owes the amount and must be made accountable for, that's where he

may learn his ultimate lesson of what to expect from the DoD, on behalf, or in spite of the RoB. LPF/EFI

2:29 AM locojhon said...

In Bolivia, those missiles were a big deal at the time--as they involved not only national security, but perhaps more importantly, national sovereignty

and pride. I'm pretty certain it is panning out something like this:

The military still has great strength in Bolivia, and the ties to the US are strong, long-lasting and run deep in the military leadership, especially.

The Morales government has asked for documentation on this and other cases, and the Generals' response has been to stall with one excuse

after another, or provide partial documentation or to flat-out simply stone-wall and refuse.

Under previously corrupted governments, many in the military were tested, vetted and trained at the SOA/WHINSEC in the USA, to then

return to Bolivia where they infiltrated and advanced in the hierarchy. The treasonous missile transfer was as a result of that corrupting influence,

as the new documentation reveals. Today, in spite of policies in place that facilitate prosecution--by offering freedom to those who are proved to be ordered to commit irregularities from above--the military is well dug in to protect themselves from below.

The trial of the (honorable) President Rodriguez is the only way that Morales can purge the highest ranks of the military of its traitors--by

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going at them from above. Rodriguez will be acquitted and returned to the court, the Generals fired with pensions lost, and the military purged of those who work in service

to the US, as opposed to Bolivia. In the process, more documents will be brought to light that will confirm long-standing US involvement in the internal affairs of Bolivia, and the corrupting influence it has had on the Bolivian military and ruling elite.

In the longer term, this case might be the keystone that when removed, destroys the edifice of US benevolence in Latin America--one country at

a time, with Bolivia leading the way. Thanks to the administration of Evo Morales, Bolivia is regaining its

sovereignty day by day--and a likely US-inspired military insurrection and coup averted--all without firing a shot.

Viva Bolivia, and Evo Morales! Locoto

8:33 AM Anonymous said...

No one would had described the Bolivian government as stable in those days. The president resigned under pressure, others abdicated, a stand-in placed in office for 6 months, a potentially hostile government in the

offing...no one knew what was going to happen. Unstable governments are notorious sources of weapons - remember the days after the USSR fell, when entire fighter aircraft and tanks were sold on the black market? Even low grade weapons like the ones described can be repaired, and even a failed attack can do great political damage.

The nightmare the open society of America faced was heat seeking missiles launched by terrorists who smuggled them into the US. One

crash was being investigated as a possible missile attack in New York. So the US bought potentially lethal weapons - you'd rather they send in

the Marines and take them? Or should the US wait until more of its people are murdered, then file a useless complaint with the UN?

It is the Bolivian government who is unjustly prosecuting an innocent man. Blaming the US is disingenuous at best.


Locoto, or maybe you should think about why your good buddy Evo wants to go after the US on anything but this one. Who is he so afraid of,

the Bolivian Army?

If you don't see something fishy here you stopped sniffing.


8:55 Got it, the bottom line is the US can do whatever the f*** it wants, forget whether there is another sovereign nation involved. How about

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rendition flights from Bolivia for MAS members that make the US nervous? Same principle, no?

Glad to see the Embassy is reading and commenting on the Blog.


I recall that before the whole Autonomia/dos Tercios campaigns in the East against Morales which were designed to split the country, the first head of the hydra to raise itself was indeed that of a La Paz based ex-General who called for a Spanish style rising rising against the govt - Antezana, I think his name was - but they processed him for treason more or less immediately.It does indeed look as though Secretary of

State Rummy's first plan of attack against Bolivian democracy involved an old style coup.

The response of the weapons expert you spoke to really contextualises this.It does indeed look as though Sec Rummy was palming a big gold coin into the hands of some old, long neglected friends to remind them

who paid their rents.And the Bolivian govt. should take notice of what you say.If this guy is who you say he is they should not accuse the wrong

people.

12:56 PM locojhon said...

@anon 8:55,,, I remember the unsubstantiated/propagandist fear-provoking reports of

fighters and tanks being sold on the Russian black market, but have never seen any authenticated accounts of any. As a matter of fact,

neither can Google. If you are not pumping out bullshit, certainly you can provide proof of it, can't you? (I'll wait while breathing.)

Nice false-choice you presented—either steal them or invade. It is interesting that you defend illegal means to obtain the missiles, instead of

through legal means. No--no reason or even pretense for a reason for the US to attack Bolivia. No reason for the US to do anything other than to investigate who really

was responsible for 9-11--because it certainly wasn't 19 Muslims directed by OBL from some cave. The 9-11 Commission report is cover to cover,

nothing but bullshit that you have apparently swallowed entirely. Despite Monroe Doctrine suggestions to the contrary, LA is not the territory of the USA, nor are the sovereign nations, including Bolivia,

subject to US control. The most-destructive terrorist nation in the world is the USA, not some internally-invented "war on terrorism".

The rest of the world sees this, and it's about time you did too. @anon 9:34,,,

Yes,,,some of the military higher-ups, especially those trained by the US in SOA/WHINSEC, as well as those trained/promoted under them in

successionary roles are historically feared, and with good reason, too. Though they try to resist the Executive, the military will not go against the

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courts or refuse the legal court orders--and they know it is futile to try. Those who know they will be tried and convicted will try to leave and

claim asylum elsewhere--like Miami--where they will feel right at home with other like criminals.

And with each one, little by little, Bolivia regains its sovereignty. @anon 9:37--re. Embassy reading--I was thinking the same thing.

@anon 12:56--you bring up additional supportive points. With every dot connected, the picture becomes ever clearer. Thank you.

Viva Bolivia, and Evo Morales! locoto


Loco: You left out that the moon walk was a hoax, JFK was killed by Martians, and George Bush was actually a woman. Then your analysis

would be complete.


It Could have been an upfront payment to stop Morales, but, even

if the military had orquestrated a military coup, the INDIANS WOULD HAVE

HANGED THE MILITARY THEM IN THE STREETS.

THIS IS NO LONGER 1952 WHEN THE INDIANS WERE TREATED AS ANIMALS, THIS IS THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY, CELL PHONES,

INTERNET, RADIOS, ETC, THE INDIANS WOULD HAVE ORGANIZED THEMSELVES AND PRETTY MUCH SHUT DOWN THE WHOLE COUNTRY UNTIL THE MILITARY IS

HANGED AND LEAVE. THE OTHER OPTION WOULD HAVE BEEN FOR THEM TO GO TO

SANTA CRUZ AND BURN IT DOWN, SINCE IT IS WHERE A MILITARY COUP WOULD HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED.

MANY INDIANS STATED THAT THERE WAS A PLAN TO TAKE THE

CITY OF SANTA CRUZ AND BURN IT DOWN AND THE INDIANS WOULD HAVE MOVED THEIR BASES TO THAT CITY. AT THE

PRESENT THERE IS A PLAN TO INCREASE INDIAN PRESENCE AND INDIAN INSTITUTIONS LIKE THE "RED PONCHOS" AND OTHER

INDIAN GROUPS TO START THEIR MOVEMENTS IN SANTA CRUZ.

IT WOULD BE HARD TO MAINTAIN A MILITARY COUP IN THIS DAY AND AGE. THEY WOULD HAVE TO VIRTUALLY KILL 8 MILLION INDIANS TO IMPOSE SUCH A MESURE TO APPEASE FOREIGN

POWERS LIKE THE U.S.

BUT, EVERYONE KNOWS IN BOLIVIA THAT THE U.S. HAS

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FOMENTED THE OPPOSITION, MOST LIKELY VIA FINANCIAL AND ASSYLUM AND WILL PROBABLY CONTINUE TO DO SO, YET

MORALES HAS MADE IT KNOWN THAT HE WILL INCREASE AND FOMENT MASS INDIAN IMMIGRATION TO THE ORIENT AND THE ESTABLISHEMENT OF NEW CITIES IN THE ORIENT WHICH HAVE BEEN NEGLECTED AND BECOME HOT BEDS FOR SEPARATISTS.


thanks Jim for a very interesting article and thanks to the posters, especially locoto, who show just how insane Evo's hard core supporters

are.

There are plenty of Veltzes in Bolivia. People who had no connection to the corrupt leaders of the past, but who are now persecuted simply

because of the color of their skin, because they got some education, or they did their best to better themselves.

People should realize from this article, that the US is simply protecting its interests, that there is no grand conspiracy, or anything like some of the posters say. From the Monroe doctrine, to Plan Condor, to the war on

Drugs, the US is doing that not a single Bolivian President has been able or cared to do: put their country's interests above anything.


I can agree with Anonymous @ 800PM. I can see how some americans would be proud of its government for protecting its interests, I also agree with the fact that most likely no bolivian president has ever done that for

Bolivia. But one should wonder if any citizen should be proud of its government when it breaks international law or does what the US has

done all over the place to protect its interests... I'm sure many germans felt proud during WWII when their government started a big war where

millions perished, I'm pretty sure we can also argue the german government was indeed watching for its country's interests. I guess when

nationalism gets in the way, objectivism goes out the window.


I know Eduardo. Since he was a youth. He always was a wuzz. As Bolivia's commander-in-chief of the armed force, the buck stops with him.

President Morales is correct to seek to have Eduardo tried and held accountable for his acts of treason, high crimes, malfeasance and gross negligence (willful or otherwise). His collusion is obvious by the fact that he neglected to prosecute the responsible Bolivian military leader who

acted as agents for the US. Instead, he covered it up. Fortunately, President Morales will make "pagar para los platos rotos".

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The United States did a great favor to Bolivia, the Western Hemisphere, and the world for removing potential terrorist weapons from a hostile

government. Our eternal thanks!


Jim, who is the anonymous "UN arms destruction specialist" you claim you spoke to and who are the "former high US level officials" Rodriguez

claims he spoke to? If we're to believe your report from anonymous sources, I claim that a

headless alien from the Andromeda galaxy mated with a chuño to spawn Morales because an unanymous yatiri told me so.

Really, really!


Anon 10:55 do not make the mistake of reductio ad hitlerum, it just does not apply. Hitler was not protecting the Germany's interests by killing jews. As far as breaking international law, that is a more sticky point.

First common sense should prevail, specially since any one vote in the Security council can negate a legitimate claim.

Anon 12:45 let's extend your logic...ergo, Evo Morales should be in jail for protecting the killers of Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, Luis Espinal,

etc???

However, it would be worthwhile for someone to tell us why Evo is so fearful of some people like the FFAA, Quintana, Morales Davila, and

other well known and well proven criminals, yet is a huge bully to some powerless bureaucrats?


This is political persecution, has nothing to do with the US. President Sanchez de Lozada's trial is a political persecution? Yes, this is how the

"rule of law" is used in Bolivia, again has nothing to do with the US.

misiles shultz

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