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PufPuf93 » Mon Nov 11, 2019 7:12 pm wrote:Is the recent expulsion of Evo Morales by the military a coup in fact?
Who benefits?
What is the history?
What foreign factors are in play?
5 Fast Facts About the Military Coup in Bolivia...
Despite what the mainstream media headlines would have you believe, a coup is underway in Bolivia.
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1. Evo Morales won re-election on October 20th
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2. Reports of election fraud are unfounded
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3. Carlos Mesa has a cozy relationship with the U.S.
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4. 50-70% of the world’s lithium supply is found in Bolivia
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5. Evo Morales opposes U.S. imperialism in Latin America
Harvey » Mon Nov 11, 2019 3:44 pm wrote:Time for CIA Coup Master Thread?
What do you think the moutpiece[sic] of the CIA is going to say about this?
'I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment' - Pompeo Secretary Pompeo participates in a Q&A discussion at Texas A&M University as part of the Wiley Lecture Series, in College Station, Texas on April 15, 2019.
The Cocaine Coup and the Coca Revolution
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2005
The word mercy's gonna have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves - Bruce Cockburn
I get many emails telling me I'm too negative. It's hard for me to disagree. Though what I want to be is just negative enough: neither stricken by paralysis nor buoyed up by cheap hope. That's a tough one.
So when good things happen - when real blows land against the empire and the last become first, at least for a while - they need acknowledgement. If only for the good of clearing my own head. Even sometimes at hope's "limited hangout" of electoral victory. Especially in Bolivia, when an indiginous man who talks like this is elected president:
When we speak of the "defense of humanity," as we do at this event, I think that this only happens by eliminating neoliberalism and imperialism. But I think that in this we are not so alone, because we see, every day that anti-imperialist thinking is spreading, especially after Bush's bloody "intervention" policy in Iraq. Our way of organizing and uniting against the system, against the empire's aggression towards our people, is spreading, as are the strategies for creating and strengthening the power of the people.
As Evo Morales begins to exercise his unambiguous mandate, it will be interesting, and quite likely disheartening, to watch how Bolivia suddenly becomes a topic of great concern in certain quarters; even possibly a crisis of national security demanding intervention.
Here's an early example from Jim Kouri, a Vice President of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, who's written an opinion piece entitled "Bolivian Thug Becomes President." He predictably bloviates that the win "will increase the destabilization of the South American continent," and that Morales is an "ally of the drug cartels and traffickers."
The continent enjoys far greater stability today - and in the mental health sense of the word, too - than in the days of death's head satraps employing the methods of the School of the Americas and answerable to none but Washington. And in an interview with Luis Gómez of Narco News, former Bolivian guerrilla leader and presidential candidate Felipe Quispe makes distinctions between coca and cocaine that undoubtedly would be lost on Kouri:
Coca has been, ancestrally, a sacred leaf. We, the indigenous, have had a profound respect toward it... a respect that includes that we don't "pisar" it (the verb "pisar" means to treat the leaves with a chemical substance, one of the first steps in the production of cocaine). In general, we only use it to acullicar: We chew it during times of war, during ritual ceremonies to salute Mother Earth (the Pachamama) or Father Sun or other Aymara divinities, like the hills. Thus, as an indigenous nation, we have never prostituted Mama Coca or done anything artificial to it because it is a mother. It is the occidentals who have prostituted it. It is they who made it into a drug. This doesn't mean that we don't understand the issue. We know that this plague threatens all of humanity and, from that perspective, we believe that those who have prostituted the coca have to be punished.
Kouri walks his readers right up to "regime change": "should [Morales's] coca policy show an increase of cocaine on US city streets, his regime will be seen as a national security threat and rightly so."
Funny, that. Or rather, like so many things these days, it would be funny if it didn't mean people's lives. Because on July 17, 1980, "los Novios de la Muerte" - narcotics traffickers and mercenaries recruited by fugitive Nazi and CIA asset Klaus Barbie - overthrew the democratic government of Bolivia in the "Cocaine Coup." Cocaine production increased dramatically and America was flooded with the cheap drug. In his essay on the drug war's shills in Kristina Borjesson's Into the Buzzsaw, 25-year DEA veteran Michael Levine writes that "there are few events in history that have caused more and longer-lasting damage to our nation." Bolivians could say the same.
Levine made headlines two months prior to the coup when his DEA sting netted Bolivian cartel leaders Roberto Gasser and Alfredo Gutierrez outside a Miami bank. He had paid them $8 million for the then-largest ever seizure of cocaine. Just a few weeks later Gasser and Gutierrez were released, thanks to pressure from the CIA and the State Department, and weeks after that both men and their cartels became principal financiers of the coup, and were rewarded by the new regime with squads of neo-Nazis to bully their competition.
And then there's Sun Myung Moon. Robert Parry remembers that one of the first international well-wishers who travelled to La Paz to congratulate the putschists was Moon's right hand Bo Hi Pak, former publisher of The Washington Times and "Koreagate" principal, who declared "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city." Later disclosures from the Bolivian government strongly suggested that Moon's organization had heavily invested in the coup, and Parry writes that in 1981 "war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were often seen together in apparent prayer." Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, an Argentine intelligence officer recruited by Barbie, described Ward as his "CIA paymaster." His monthly salary was drawn from the offices of Moon's anti-communist umbrella organization, CAUSA. (As we've seen, Moon still has a huge stake in South America, having purchased the land above the world's largest fresh water aquifer, in Paraguay. These people play a long game.)
"Meanwhile," Parry adds, "Barbie started a secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight." Old habits, hardly dying, and a polyglot web of fascist patrons unashamed to profit by the labours of their Nazi lieutenants.
And here's another would-be funny thing: there were no American headlines about all of that. None at all.
But maybe that's enough talk for now about a coup, while there's a revolution going on.
morales inurl:wikileaks.org/plusd/
Cables show that, among South American leaders, Evo Morales—after Chávez—has probably been the most strongly opposed by the US government since his election in 2005. Morales’s electoral victory represented a seismic shift in Bolivia’s history—he is the country’s first indigenous president—and cables show that some foreign governments perceived him as “Bolivia’s Mandela.” His triumph at the ballot box by an unprecedented margin came after a string of unpopular predecessors (one, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, notoriously spoke Spanish with an American accent).
As embassy cables reveal, the US government was antagonistic toward Morales from the beginning, referring to him derisively in a State Department background note in 2005, for example, as an “illegal-coca agitator.” This attitude continued even after Morales took office.
On January 3, 2006, just two days after Morales’s inauguration as president, the US ambassador made clear that multilateral assistance to Bolivia would hinge on what the embassy would subsequently refer to as the “good behavior” of the Morales government:[The ambassador] also showed the crucial importance of US contributions to key international financial [sic] on which Bolivia depended for assistance, such as the International Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “When you think of the IDB, you should think of the US,” the Ambassador said. “This is not blackmail, it is simple reality.”
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“I hope you as the next president of Bolivia understand the importance of this,” he said, “because a parting of the ways would not be good for the region, for Bolivia or for the United States.” [06LAPAZ6] [Emphasis added.]
Unfortunately for the US Department of State, the Morales government would quickly show that it was not interested in a new IMF agreement—an unprecedented stance from a country that had been under IMF agreements for virtually all of the preceding twenty years, and a clear signal to Washington that this was a government determined to be more independent than its predecessors.
A few weeks later, Ambassador David Greenlee explicitly laid out a “carrots and sticks” approach to the Morales administration. Many of these related to Bolivia’s relationship with the IDB or to the existing preferential trade arrangement with the US, the ATPDEA:4. (C) Dealing with the MAS-led government will require a careful application of carrots and sticks to encourage good, and to discourage bad, behavior and policy.
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It may be important to send clear signals early on, shots over the bow, that it will not be business as usual. A menu of options that could be used depending on circumstances and that would resonate clearly include:
•Use USG’s veto authority within the IDB’s Fund for Special Operations (from which Bolivia currently receives all its IDB funding) to withhold IDB funding for Bolivia, estimated by the IDB Resrep in Bolivia to total $200 million in 2006.
•Postpone decision on the forgiveness of IDB debt (approximately $800 million under the Fund for Special Operations and $800 million under the IDB’s regular program) pending clarification of the new GOB’s economic policies.
•Pursue a postponement of the World Bank’s vote on debt relief for Bolivia. Request a 6-month delay, pending a review of the GOB’s economic policies.
•Disinvite GOB participation as observers at future Andean FTA events, pending clarification of the new GOB’s interest in participating in the FTA.
•Discourage GOB interest in pursuing dialogue on a possible MCC compact.
•Deny GOB requests for logistical support by NAS aircraft and equipment, except in cases of humanitarian disasters.
•Stop material support (tear gas, anti-riot gear, and other assistance) for Bolivia’s security services.
•Announce USG intention to not extend the ATPDEA trade benefits beyond the December 31, 2006 expiry date.
[06LAPAZ93]
“Many USAID-administered economic programs run counter to the direction the GOB wishes to move the country,” the cable also noted.
Supporting a violent opposition
Cables and much other evidence reveal that the US government supported a violent opposition movement in Bolivia. The US sought to redefine power relations in Bolivia—to the advantage of regional governments and the detriment of the central government—and used USAID to further this goal: “US assistance via USAID continues at previous levels, but the focus of assistance has shifted from the central government to Bolivia’s prefects and other decentralized players” [06LAPAZ1952] [Emphasis added.]
Significant support was allocated to the opposition-based departments of the “Media Luna,” an eastern “crescent” comprised of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, where the majority of Bolivia’s important natural gas deposits lie. A cable from April 2007 describes “USAID’s larger effort to strengthen regional governments as a counter-balance to the central government” [07LAPAZ1167]. A USAID report from 2007 stated that “OTI has approved 101 grants for $4,066,131 to help departmental governments operate more strategically.” A year later, the Media Luna departments would feel sufficiently emboldened to hold referenda on autonomy—despite these having been ruled illegal by the national judiciary.
As this later cable shows, the US embassy in La Paz shared a common political strategy with opposition groups—some of which were pursuing an actual separatist goal—versus the Morales government:In a March 27–28 outreach trip to Santa Cruz, A/DCM met briefly with the Prefect (Governor), new Civic Committee President, business leaders, leaders in the forestry sector, a media owner, and the Cardenal. While they understand there are limits to what the US can do to reverse antidemocratic trends in Bolivia, they are grateful for continued US engagement. [09LAPAZ501] [Emphasis added.]
Support for departmental governments became, whether intended or not, wrapped up with support for a violent, destructive campaign against the Morales government in the later months of 2008.
When a full-blown political crisis emerged in August and September 2008, there was no public indication that the US government attempted to temper the opposition, and at no point did the US denounce the opposition violence as did, for example, the Union of South American Nations.
Following weeks of violence (in the worst incident, over a dozen indigenous Morales supporters were killed in Porvenir, in Pando province, apparently by a far-right militant group), property destruction (including the ransacking of government offices and the sabotage of a gas pipeline), and road blockades, there was hope that dialogue between the Morales government and the opposition would resolve the crisis. But this cable from September 18, 2008, shows that the opposition preferred a hard line that they did not expect the Morales government to accept, and opposition prefects and the central democratic opposition coalition (CONALDE) “were in agreement” that the “next stage” would be “to blow up gas lines.” The cable does not describe US officials attempting to dissuade the opposition figures from this strategy:7. (C) Opposition Strategist Javier Flores told Emboff the morning of September 17 that the dialogue will break down, “it’s only a question of when.” Flores and opposition civic leader Branko Marinkovic predict more violence after the dialogue fails. Some radicals in the Santa Cruz prefecture and Santa Cruz civic committee reportedly wanted to stop the process yesterday and begin blowing up gas lines, but Flores and Marinkovic advocated playing out the dialogue option first. Once dialogue breaks down, however, the opposition group CONALDE is generally in agreement that the next stage is to blow up gas lines. [08LAPAZ2004]
Similarly, a cable from September 9 shows that “both [Pando prefect Leopoldo Fernández] and also Tarija’s opposition Prefect, Mario Cossio see violence as a probability to force the government to admit to the divisions in the country and take seriously any dialog” [08LAPAZ1931]. Fernández was arrested a week later in connection with the Porvenir massacre two days after this cable, on September 11.
Despite a lack of public commentary from US officials to this effect at the time, cables reveal that internally the State Department took seriously the possibility of Morales’s ouster or assassination in 2008. “Sources report that both sides are armed with personal weapons and ready to fight, with the opposition-aligned Santa Cruz Youth Union and university students reportedly preparing a trap for the government forces which could lead to a bloodbath,” noted a secret cable of September 24, 2008, describing how the Emergency Action Committee would “develop, with [US Southern Command Situational Assessment Team], a plan for immediate response in the event of a sudden emergency, i.e. a coup attempt or President Morales’ death” [08LAPAZ2083].
Fed up with US support for people and groups working to violently overthrow it, the Morales government declared US ambassador Philip Goldberg persona non grata on September 10, 2008, and expelled him. USAID’s lack of transparency regarding whom it was funding in Bolivia had contributed to the breakdown in relations; Bolivian officials had repeatedly requested the information, to no avail. Cables from 2007 describe the anger of the minister of the presidency, Juan Ramón Quintana, at the secretive nature of USAID’s programs [07LAPAZ2387]. US researchers also sought the release of USAID and related documents; by the time of the September 2008 events, three-and-a-half-year-old Freedom of Information Act requests remained unanswered. The US continued to send hundreds of millions of dollars to unnamed recipients in Bolivia via USAID after 2009. Ultimately, in 2013, Bolivia expelled USAID as well.
Elvis » 11 Nov 2019 23:27 wrote:Harvey » Mon Nov 11, 2019 3:44 pm wrote:Time for CIA Coup Master Thread?
That strikes me as not a bad idea. The history makes clear that, until proven otherwise, CIA-backed regime change is the default explanation for this or any ME, African or Central/South American ouster of leftist governments. It could be a genuinely useful thread in terms of connecting dots and revealing patterns. For max efficacy, can we all agree to keep it focused and consolidated in one thread?
Best title wins.
No Evidence That Bolivian Election Results Were Affected by Irregularities or Fraud, Statistical Analysis Shows
Examination Finds Tally Sheets Consistent with Evo Morales’s First-Round Victory
For Immediate Release: November 8, 2019
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