Evo Morales: A divisive president

Came across this article in the Economist. Very interesting…

Evo Morales is a popular president, but his brand of politics is dividing his country

Reuters

ON THE high plane, the altiplano, surrounding La Paz, where the landscape is drawn in shades of dusty brown, new brick buildings stand out against the bright sky. Most are residences of a couple of storeys, but there are schools and clinics too. Some even boast cement balustrades, a flourish that echoes the Spanish colonial style. In a place where there are still adobe houses, and where a dowry may be measured partly in potatoes freeze-dried by nights spent above 4,000 metres (13,000 feet), this is a transformation.

President Evo Morales’s government has shovelled money towards this part of the country ever since he was elected in 2005. But its time in power has been deeply divisive. Leopoldo Fernández, an opposition politician who is governor of the Pando province in the north, has been in prison for ten months without standing trial. In March Victor Hugo Cárdenas, an Aymara Indian who was once the country’s vice-president, had his house attacked by a mob after opposing a new constitution proposed by the government.

Abroad, Mr Morales’s government has revelled in the worsening of a number of its most important relationships. It expelled the United States’ ambassador, along with his country’s drug-enforcement agents. The accusations of American plots against the government had abated in anticipation of the new Obama administration, but business has now returned to usual, with President Morales expelling another American diplomat and lambasting the United States for refusing to renew a preferential trade agreement that is linked to Bolivia’s performance on combating its drug barons. Bolivia’s relations with Peru are awful and it has failed to convince Brazil to abandon plans for new hydro resources in the Amazon which will lessen its demand for Bolivia’s gas.

In part this drive to isolate the country is deliberate. Many in the government dream of an economic autarky, powered by gas. Yet Mr Morales has accepted help from Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and Iran to further his “Movement to Socialism” (MAS) party. Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007.

The antagonism between the government in the Andean city of La Paz and its opponents in Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s clearest fault line. The conflict is usually described as pitting indigenous Bolivians in the uplands against descendants of Spain in the lowlands, or poor versus rich, but in fact Santa Cruz is ethnically mixed and average incomes in the two cities are comparable. Instead, the conflict is one of identity. The cruceños see themselves as pioneers who carved prosperity out of a pestilential jungle. Those who live on the altiplano are likely to view Mr Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, with pride and to think that his government offers them a chance to get their share of revenues from the gasfields around Santa Cruz. By contrast, the cruceño elite fear losing their property, businesses and power.

This fear has increased since April, when government troops burst into the Hotel Las Américas in Santa Cruz, killed three men and arrested two others. The government claimed that this raid prevented an assassination attempt on Mr Morales. The hotel, all brown marble and glass with a few sad ferns in the atrium, seems an unlikely base for a terrorist cell, and the supposed terrorists were an unlikely bunch. That three of them were killed in their beds rather than spared for interrogation has aroused suspicion that they were in effect executed.

Whatever the case, a continuing investigation acts as a useful reminder to would-be rebels that they should stay in line. It has also destroyed any kind of moderate opposition. Carlos Dabdoub Arrien, one of the more constitutionally minded of the government’s opponents in Santa Cruz, describes Mr Morales as an “indigenous fascist”.

Those new brick houses on the altiplano are likely to keep Mr Morales in power in the elections due at the end of the year. He has handsomely increased government spending for the past three years, including much-needed increases in cash-transfer programmes. Some of these were inherited from the previous government, but they have been boosted and renamed. One programme is called “Bolivia changes, Evo delivers”.

Maybe. But at least one pundit, reckoning that the voters are still unlikely to give Mr Morales the landslide he craves in the legislature, says Bolivia is suffering a classic bout of Latin American populism: personalised politics, mild paranoia, bad economic policy and a weak opposition.

Morales opens the door to mob justice… consequences begin to pop up

An outbreak of government paranoia

From the Economist

IN THE mid-1990s, when he was vice-president, Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, an Aymara Indian, oversaw the introduction of bilingual education: pupils were to be taught in their indigenous language as well as Spanish. You might think that would still endear him to Bolivia’s Indians. Not so, to some of them at least.

Having disappeared from the political limelight for a decade, Mr Cárdenas recently emerged as a powerful opponent of the new constitution promoted by Evo Morales, a fellow Aymaran who, as president since 2006, claims to be refounding the country along indigenous-socialist lines. Ahead of a referendum in January in which voters approved this document, Mr Cárdenas appeared in opposition television advertisements. He says that the constitution’s endorsement of “community justice” is a “mechanism of abuse”.

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On March 7th a mob of indigenous people several hundred-strong attacked Mr Cárdenas’s house in a village on the shore of Lake Titicaca, violently evicting his wife, Lidia Katari, herself an indigenous-rights activist, and two of his children before setting fire to his belongings. The few police who turned up did nothing. The assailants claimed that they had staged an act of “community justice” against Mr Cárdenas. They later said that they would not allow him, the police or public prosecutors to enter the area, claiming that the new constitution gives them control over a large swathe of surrounding territory.

Mr Morales may well have had nothing to do with the attack. But his opponents have long claimed that he is opening the way to this kind of mob rule. The government information service implausibly claimed that Mr Cárdenas had staged the incident himself as a publicity ploy.

Certainly, Mr Cárdenas has emerged as a potential leader for an opposition hitherto dominated by lighter-skinned Bolivians from the eastern lowlands. Under the new constitution, a presidential election is due to be held in December in which Mr Morales will seek a second term. And he suddenly looks rattled.

In an opinion poll in January by Ipsos-Apoyo, a respected pollster, the president’s popularity rating had slipped to 53%, nine points down from November and the lowest level for two years. Since then the government has been shaken by a corruption scandal at YPFB, the state-owned oil and gas company which Mr Morales revived. Santos Ramírez, the company’s president, was sacked and arrested, accused of orchestrating backhanders of over $3m from a company contract. Other YPFB officials are implicated.

What makes this so damaging is that Mr Ramírez was a senior leader in Mr Morales’s Movement to Socialism. And the nationalisation of the natural-gas industry, along with the new constitution, is the president’s main initiative. The opposition claims that the policy of giving state companies free rein to sign contracts—which the government says is necessary to sidestep bureaucracy—is a recipe for graft.

In another sign of growing official paranoia, Mr Morales blamed the YPFB imbroglio on the CIA, expelling an American diplomat this week who he claimed was involved (he turfed out the ambassador last year). He still has a bedrock of support among poorer Bolivians of Indian descent in the west of the country. But he is starting to look as if he is on the defensive.

Indians challenging Morales in Bolivia face danger

From the Associated Press

SANCKAJAWIRA, Bolivia (AP) — Evo Morales’ opponents have figured out one thing as they look ahead to presidential elections this year: To beat Bolivia’s first Indian leader, you need to run an Indian.

Morales’ supporters have come to the same conclusion — and shown no reluctance in attacking an indigenous politician for suggesting he might challenge their champion in elections expected in December.

When Victor Hugo Cardenas, a native Aymara like Morales and a former vice president, hinted he would run, the response was brutal: A mob of Aymaras violently evicted Cardenas’ family from their house here on Lake Titicaca’s shore, beating his wife and 24-year-old son with whips and sticks so badly they were hospitalized for two days.

Then, on Friday, the community ceremoniously banished the Cardenas family. A man and a woman in red ponchos bullwhipped the politician’s effigy, then symbolically buried it.

“We don’t pardon those who betray our brother Morales,” a leader of the 400-strong mob, Alfredo Huaynapaco, told The Associated Press. Reporters found the house garbage-strewn, nearly all the furniture gone. “Taken over by the people,” someone painted on a wall of the two-story brick home.

Neither police nor prosecutors have acted against the aggressors. While Morales condemned the violence, he also said: “The Bolivian people have no tolerance for traitors, nor do they forgive them.”

Cardenas, who wasn’t with his family at the time, brought his injured wife and children to the relative safety of their apartment in La Paz, the capital. He told the AP in an interview Monday that his sons still wake up jumpy at night, but a flood of telephoned insults has diminished.

The 58-year-old university professor and linguist has had a long career of representing Bolivia’s oppressed Indian majority. Like Morales, he grew up poor on Bolivia’s barren high plains. He made his name as a social agitator during military rule that ended in 1982.

Rising to vice president under President Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada from 1993-97, he did much to enshrine in Bolivia’s legal code greater equality for its natives — particularly in bilingual education — in a society where Indians only won the right to vote in 1952 and still face discrimination.

“The political fight is part of my personal history. They jailed and tortured me during the dictatorships but never did anyone take action against my wife and children. And if (former dictator Hugo) Banzer couldn’t shut me up, neither can Morales,” Cardenas told the AP.

Until Morales’ 2005 election, no other Indian had attained a higher political post. But many Morales supporters resent Cardenas’ association with Sanchez de Losada, a mining industry executive who fled into U.S. exile during his second term after troops in 2003 fired on Morales-affiliated protesters, killing 63 people.

Cardenas says Morales’ ruling Movement Toward Socialism has turned Bolivian discrimination inside out, exploiting age-old resentments.

“The indigenous peoples are used as shock troops,” Cardenas told the AP in August. The Bolivian Indian “had a lot of respect in the world (but) is now seen as a symbol of the discrimination of revenge, of confrontation and racism.”

Two days later, Morales won a recall election by a 2-1 margin.

Cardenas later campaigned against the centerpiece of Morales’ “anti-colonialist agenda,” the new constitution, saying that instead of truly empowering the Indians, it will concentrate power in an undemocratic leftist regime.

In January, the new charter was endorsed by 61 percent of voters.

Until Cardenas’ family was attacked, he didn’t appear to be a big concern for Morales. But now even the president’s supporters think the sacking and banishment will become a touchstone in this year’s campaign. Pro-Morales congressman Jorge Silva predicts it will encourage the opposition to “use known indigenous figures to divide and weaken Morales.”

The banishment came under a centuries-old community justice system still practiced in highland settlements once ruled by the Incas, where old methods often trump the modern democratic state.

But Cardenas claims his neighbors were put up to it by a pro-Morales activist in the National Federation of Peasant Women, Beatriz Quispe. He’s filed a formal complaint against Quispe, Huaynapaco and two others. The chief prosecutor’s office said it would interview them this week.

Meanwhile, Cardenas says he is working on uniting Morales’ foes in the highlands as well as the pro-autonomy eastern lowlands, where wealthy landowners resent the president’s attempts to expropriate land for redistribution to the poor.

Cardenas and Morales have not yet formally declared they’ll run in elections expected in December, and the opposition is badly splintered, with nobody approaching a national leader.

Already, another indigenous politician has announced his presidential campaign — Mayor Rene Joaquino of the highlands mining city of Potosi — but he hasn’t used anti-Morales rhetoric.

Joaquino, 42, is Quechua, from Bolivia’s largest ethnic group, the Incas’ direct descendants. The Aymara are No. 2 and dominate La Paz.

The two ethnic groups meld in Bolivia’s new political elite, which is copper-colored and proud, Indian and mestizo. It runs the ministries, the military and police, Congress, the state-run energy company YPFB and more than three in five city halls.

Some analysts say Morales can no longer control this new elite, some of whom show little regard for civil liberties while others have ignored his anti-corruption agenda.

“Morales’ greatest adversary these days isn’t the opposition, it’s MAS itself, due to the great corruption scheme involving a good part of the executive branch,” said Carlos Toranzo, an academic who consults for the U.N. and European governments.

Valdez reported from La Paz, Bolivia. Associated Press Writer Frank Bajak contributed from Lima, Peru.

The United States and Bolivia

Published by the Huffington Post on Feb 25

With the Obama administration’s policy towards Venezuela pretty much decided, and the embargo on Cuba considered untouchable because no one is willing to risk losing support among Cuban Americans in the swing state of Florida, that leaves Bolivia as a left government in the region where the hostility of the Bush administration could be quickly reversed. However there are a number of outstanding issues between the two countries. The United States and Bolivia currently do not have ambassadors. Bolivia expelled the U.S. ambassador on September 10, on the grounds that he (and Washington) were intervening in Bolivia’s internal affairs. Among other offenses, the U.S. embassy was caught trying to use Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar for spying; U.S. ambassador Phillip Goldberg had met privately with opposition leaders at a time when elements of the opposition were engaged in destabilizing violence; and the U.S. seemed to lend tacit support to the Bolivian opposition by not condemning this violence or even offering condolences when dozens of government supporters were massacred in Pando on September 11. The Bush administration responded to the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador by expelling Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzmán. But there are also other important issues for Bolivia. On September 26, the Bush administration suspended Bolivia’s trade preferences under the ATPDEA (Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act). The official reason was that Bolivia had not been co-operating sufficiently in the war on drugs. But according to the UN’s 2008 report, Bolivia’s coca cultivation had increased by just 5%, compared to a 27% increase in Colombia, the biggest beneficiary of U.S aid in the region. The Bolivians are eager to begin a new chapter of improved relations with Washington. To demonstrate this willingness, the Bolivian government refrained from filing a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the United States for the suspension of its trade preferences. Their legal case is quite solid; under WTO rules, countries are allowed to establish rules for preferential access to their markets, but the rules must be applied equally to all countries receiving the preferences. But before filing a complaint at the WTO, Bolivia wanted to see if the new administration is interested in improving relations. Then there is another holdover from the Bush administration: Bolivia’s new constitution declares that health care (along with water and other necessities) is a human right and cannot be privatized. In keeping with their constitutional law, Bolivia asked the WTO for permission to withdraw the previous government’s commitment to open up its hospitals and health care sector to foreign corporations. According to the WTO’s procedural rules, if there are no objections to such a request within 45 days, it is approved. The European Union, home to some of the big health care corporations that might have an interest in the issue, responded that it had no objections. On January 5, the last day of the waiting period, the Bush administration objected. The Obama team has not yet decided whether it will rescind the Bush administration’s objection to Bolivia’s WTO request. Presumably they will; if not, it would be an unmistakable signal of continued hostility. Far from being an arcane detail of constitutional or international law, it has real meaning to millions of Bolivians: the struggle against water privatization was a significant part of the movement that brought Evo Morales to power. This is the political origin of the constitutional provisions establishing these essentials as human rights that cannot be infringed upon by private interests: many poor Bolivians had found themselves unable to afford water after it was privatized and user fees tripled. Bolivia has also kicked out the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and it does not look like they are coming back. To the Bolivians, the U.S. is using the “war on drugs” throughout Latin America mainly as an excuse to get boots on the ground, and establish ties with local military and police forces. They see the whole process as destabilizing and a threat to their sovereignty and democracy. Despite all of these differences, it is still possible that Washington might choose to normalize relations with Bolivia. There are apparently some divisions within the administration over tactics. The “doves” apparently include Thomas Shannon, the current top State Department official for the Western Hemisphere, and a holdover from the Bush administration. These officials can see that there is a public relations problem in abusing Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and more importantly one led by the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. To most of the world, he is the Nelson Mandela of Bolivia, with his government bringing an end to centuries of apartheid-like exclusion of the country’s indigenous majority. For the “doves” in the new administration, it would be better to avoid a public fight with Bolivia, so as not to distract from the guy who is sitting on what may be the largest petroleum reserves in the world – in Venezuela – and whom they have already successfully vilified in the media. On the other hand, there are hard liners who feel the need to “lay down the law” with Bolivia. We will soon know who has prevailed.

Constitutional Referendum in Bolivia: Will it unite the country?

Unlikely.

This BBC article was able to capture in a decent manner what seems to be occurring in Bolivia.

It is the second time in six months that Bolivia has voted and will probably lead to a new Presidential election in December which promises to deliver a new round of polarized politics in 2009.

According to the early polling numbers, the Yes vote is very likely to win the vote.

However, there is plenty of room for disagreement over the implementation of the new constitution, and disputes between the government and the opposition look set to continue regardless.

Rocky path

Bolivia’s Congress approved holding a referendum only after Mr Morales agreed to make a number of concessions.

Crucially, Mr Morales agreed to restrict his candidature as president to a single five-year term.The election would take place in December 2009.

Under the current 1967 constitution, no president is allowed to have two consecutive terms. This was due to be changed under the original draft text, prompting fears from the opposition that Mr Morales could stay in office until 2019.

Under the new constitution, Catholicism would no longer be the official religion

But in a key concession, the president promised to stand just once more in elections due in December this year if the new constitution is approved.

This means that he is still likely to stay in power until 2014, but he says no longer.

He also made other concessions on autonomy, land reform and Congressional voting procedures.

Nonetheless, in his view, the key changes – extending the rights of Bolivia’s 36 indigenous groups and strengthening state control over the country’s natural resources – remain broadly intact.

When agreement was reached on the concessions back in October, Mr Morales wept in front of a huge crowd of supporters in La Paz’s Central Plaza, where Indians were not allowed to set foot until the 1950s.

“We have made history,” he said. “I can now go to the cemetery a happy man.”

Key provisions

Among the 411 articles of the new constitution, some of the key changes provide for:

• A mixed economy which recognises public, private and communitarian ownership. However, the state will control natural resources such as oil, gas and minerals

• The state as unitary and pluri-national, designed to stress the importance of ethnicity in Bolivia’s make-up. A whole chapter of the draft text is devoted to indigenous rights

• Power will be decentralised, creating four levels of autonomy – departmental, regional, municipal and indigenous

• Indigenous systems of justice will be given the same status as the official existing system. Judges will be elected, and no longer appointed by Congress.

In a further concession, Mr Morales agreed that new limits on land ownership will not be retroactive – a parallel referendum on Sunday will determine whether this limit should be set at 5,000 (12,355 acres) or 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres).

Battles are looming over how [the constitution's] provisions are finally applied John Crabtree Analyst

But even if the vote is in favour of 5,000 hectares – and there are many farms in the east larger than this – landowners will not be affected if they can show that their land is not idle and fulfils a social and economic function.

However, Mr Morales’ opponents say that since it will be up to central government to decide if landowners are complying, the system could be open to abuse.

Another controversial change to the constitution is that Catholicism would no longer be the official state religion – there would be no state religion.

The Church has also criticised the new draft text for not recognising the right to life from conception (possibly opening the way to legalising abortion), although the existing constitution does not either.

Some bishops have joined with the opposition in campaigning against the constitution. One of their slogans says “Choose God, Vote for No”.

Conflict remains

Most analysts say that despite making a number of concessions, Mr Morales remains in a strong position.

They point out that the opposition is split between more moderate members of the Congress and the more confrontational governors of the four, mainly eastern, departments known as the media luna, or half-crescent.

“The balance of power shifted,” says George Gray Molina, a research fellow at Oxford University in the UK.

Protests against the government have sometimes turned violent

“Evo has already won the referendum vote. The opposition will probably retrench for a while with an eye on providing a unitary candidate for the December [presidential] elections,” he says.

However, there is plenty of room for continuing opposition from the four media luna departments, which tend to be wealthier and more ethnically mixed than the mainly indigenous departments of the western highlands. They want more autonomy from the central state.

They also contain most of Bolivia’s natural gas production and agribusiness, such as soya.

There are two main issues over which opposition civic organisations can continue to fight.

The first is whether their departments will have priority over the other three levels of autonomous organisation envisaged in the new constitution.

Another is how the taxes on gas exports will be divided up between the state and the four levels of autonomous organisations.

“The civic groups in Santa Cruz and Tarija, in particular, will continue to demand a bigger share of the proceeds of gas exports,” says John Crabtree, an analyst at the Oxford Centre for Latin American Studies in the UK.

“While the new constitution may now be legally enacted,” he says, “battles are looming over how its provisions are finally applied.”

Morales: “The far right tried to kill me”

As reported in CNN — A top Bolivian government official said Monday that the country’s intelligence services had uncovered a plot to assassinate President Evo Morales.

“A few weeks ago, the state organizations of intelligence received information about plans in relation to an assassination, and that those plans came from the far-right opposition,” Minister of Government Alfredo Rada told reporters in La Paz.

Rada said the plan was to be carried out by an indigenous person while Morales was in a crowd.

The assertion came after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said over the weekend that Morales, the nation’s first indigenous president, had revealed to him in a telephone call the existence of the alleged conspiracy to kill him.

Liberalitas note: After reviewing the spanish media coverage and the statements made, the evidence provided to support this claim is sketchy. Any allegation of an assassination attempt is  not to be taken lightly and should also be accompanied by evidence that is credible. It is not the first time Morales alleges that there is a conspiracy against him led by the United States. He shares the rhetoric of the U.S. blame game with his close ally Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and it seems that both presidents are less interested in speaking to a concrete plan to address the sociall ills that continue to affect their countries and are glad spending their precious public time speaking to conspiracies and plots against the southern Bolivarian revolution.

Bolivia: A divided year ahead

Bolivia's Congress during the session in which the text for the new constitution was passed

The political divide in Bolivia is stark. Often portrayed as East vs West, Indigenous vs White, Rich vs Poor or Capitalism vs Socialism, the divide is, in reality, much more complex. In the most recent recall election, Evo Morales won his re-election by more than 60% of the vote, but the governors of the departments where the opposition is strong also won by similar margins. It remains clear that Morales’ support is strong in the Andes, but has significantly decreased in the eastern lowlands. The challenge for Morales is to find a way to get cooperation from the eastern departments as they control more 60% of the economy. Unfortunately, the Morales’ government has repeatedly used inflammatory rhetoric to describe those who oppose or disagree with him as traitors, racists or friends of the “empire”. The opposition has responded with a similar tone and the political unrest has been intensifying.

On September 11, 2008, violent conflict between Morales supporters and pro-autonomy groups erupted in the department of Pando resulting in over 20 deaths. A recent commission has found that most of the responsibility lies with opposers of Morales and the opposition has already labelled the commission’s report as biased. The truth probably lies somewhere in between but there is no prospect of a political resolution in the country in the near future.

On January 25th, Bolivia will hold a referendum to approve the text of the new Constitution. Odds are, the political divide will once again be clear once the votes have been counted and that the campaign leading up to the presidential election set for December of 2009 will be long and divisive.

What will happen in Bolivia is unclear. However, Morales has already begun to target his opposers by filing charges of corruption against most of the Governors of the departments where the opposition is strong. They are unlikely to not respond. Things in Bolivia’s could get a whole lot worse before they get better.

Professor John Crabtree from Oxford University’s Centre for Latin American Studies provides a brief overview of the year ahead and the year that has past by in this short article. He states that the political polarisation between the government and its most bitter critics in the dissident civic committees will not disappear.

The Comité Pro-Santa Cruz, which is by far the most powerful of the civic organisations in eastern Bolivia, has already indicated its dissatisfaction with the agreement on the constitution between the government and the main opposition parties. Indeed, most of Santa Cruz’s Podemos congressmen voted against the law enabling the referendum to go ahead, an act of defiance against the party leadership of former president Jorge Quiroga. The local leaders in Santa Cruz say they will rally their supporters for a “no” vote in the January referendum. The civic leaders in Sucre are equally bitter, since their demands that their city be restored to its historical role as full capital of Bolivia were blatantly ignored in the agreement.

The good, the bad and the ugly

FIgure out which one is which. Harper, Chavez, Morales.

What a week it has been! Canada is close to a transfer of power from the Conservative party to an opposition coalition while Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez seeks to eliminate constitutional limits on presidential terms and Bolivian President Evo Morales has started to officially target his opposition on charges of terrorism.

The good: Canada abides by its constitution and could see a legal transition of power in take place in accordance with the law and without violence or turmoil. Many Canadians will experience a democratic process that occurs once in a lifetime if the opposition parties manage to form a coalition government, further consolidating the notion that constitutions are the law of the land and that democratic institutions allow for power struggles to occur within a peaceful setting. Prime Minister Stephen Harper may not be happy with where this week has lead and with the prospect of losing power, but he is still playing by the rules.

The Bad: Following municipal and regional elections, Hugo Chavez made it clear in Venezuela that he is not leaving. The president said Sunday that he would seek changes to the Constitution that would lift his term limits, allowing him to run for indefinite re-election. The move, which would have to be approved by a nationwide referendum, is expected to polarize the country further, coming a year after voters rejected a broad constitutional overhaul that included a similar measure.

The Ugly: Bolivia’s government said on Sunday it was preparing to charge a top leader of an autonomy movement with “terrorism”. The government of President Evo Morales said Branko Marinkovic, who helped lead an autonomy push by Bolivia’s four richest provinces, would be charged for instigating attacks in which at least 17 people were killed. The evidence is sketchy and he just happens to be a prominent political figure that is outspoken in his opposition to Morales.
Evo has also targeted Governor Ruben Costas as a person of interest in relation to other “crimes”, the leading opposition figure in the department of Santa Cruz. Opposition leaders are claiming this is political persecution by the Morales government.

President Morales blames Bush… again

President Morales has been busy calling the U.S. decision to exclude Bolivia from tariff benefits “political revenge”. The accusation followed the decision of the United States to suspend Bolivia’s special trade benefits on grounds that it has not cooperated in fighting drugs.

What did President Morales think was going to happen?  After kicking out the American Ambassador, kicking out the Drug Enforcement Agency officials and blaming the U.S. for most of Bolivia’s structural problems, how did he think the Americans were going to respond? He must have seen this coming. If anything, it just gives him more material to use against the Americans. I guarantee he will blame the United States when the Bolivian Economy goes down the drain… cause it will. The merits for expelling the agencies is a debate of its own, but what is clear is the fact that the Bolivian economy will suffer because of this.

Losing these trade benefits could end up costing the Bolivian economy up to almost a half billion dollars in the middle of a global economic downturn and will cost the Bolivian people who depend on the industries bound by the agreement the most.

Bad politics have repercussions and the Bolivian people are about to suffer because of irresponsible politics by the current government. At what point is this government going to learn that you engage your “adversaries” rather than simply antagonizing them and kicking them out of your country?

Eye on Democracy: Violations of Freedom of the Press

The Human Rights Foundation released a press release today outlining the contents of a letter sent to Mr. Insulza (Secretary General of the OAS), which highlights some of the violations against the freedom of the press taking place in the Americas. The letter denounces Insulza’s inaction with regard to flagrant violations of freedom of the press in the Americas, including the shutdown of television and radio stations and government-encouraged attacks on journalists.

From the HRF Release:
In Bolivia, members of groups supportive of President Morales have physically attacked reporters, journalists and other members of the media each time the president labels them “enemies” or “friends of the empire.” On October 8, 2008, Jorge Melgar Quette, host of a Bolivian television program, was arbitrarily detained by masked men following his release of a video showing a cabinet minister inciting criminal violence. Melgar is in prison on charges of terrorism and sedition.

In Ecuador, President Correa referred to the press in his country as “the lowest of the low,” labeled them as “slanderers,” and accused them of being his main opposition. On July 8, 2008, the Ecuadorean government seized three private television channels and appointed government officials as their directors (TC Television, Cable Vision and Gamavision).

In Nicaragua, President Ortega is the principal instigator of harassment aimed at journalists and other members of the media by the “blue shirts,” a group that forms part of the president’s security forces. The blue shirts continue to employ intimidation tactics aimed at members of the media, including the assault of at least two journalists in the last year.

In Venezuela, President Chavez’s constant threats against the press resulted in the 2007 closing of television channel RCTV. Journalists and stations critical of the government have also fallen victim of harassment by government supporters. In the last five years the remaining independent station, Globovision, has seen its reporters physically attacked at least 25 times, and independent journalists have faced repeated attempts on their lives for their work.