For the US the war on drugs is an excuse to better control other countries. In Latin America it is narco-terrorism. In Iraq, preventative wars and weapons of mass destruction. And what do they really want? To control the oil.And this:
. . . the fight against drug trafficking has been a pretext for the U.S. government to install military bases ... and these policies will be revised.Well, which is it, Evo? Oil or military bases? Do we even have a military base in Bolivia? If so, where? He continued:
Causachun coca, wanuchun Yanquis! - Long live coca, death to the Yankees.And, finally, this:
I'll be a nightmare for US.Of course, he has good reason to be angry at us. We've never done anything for Bolivia, right?
Between the start of the 1952 revolution and Morales' internal migration in the 1980s, nine tenths of the money Bolivia received from abroad were grants and soft credits from the U.S.. By 1957, the United States was subsidizing 30 percent of the government's budget.Anyway, as soon as his election was finalized, Evo whipped it now to Havana to meet Fidel, another highly successful Latin leader. He visits Fidel Castro immediately after his election as president of Bolivia (that's in South America), where he said that the US was practising terrorism in Iraq and had run a dirty campaign against him. Evo is also a bit of a dreamer:
I never had good relations with the United States, but rather with the American people.Huh? Ask your everyday ordinary man-on-the-street who Evo Morales is and I doubt that one in ten thousand will know. Probably only one in a thousand even know where Bolivia is (it's in South America). And probably 99,000 out of 100,000 could not possibly care any less about Evo and/or Bolivia and would wonder why you are wasting their time asking stupid questions.
Now, Evo campaigned on a promise to legalize the growing of coca, from whence cocaine is derived. Cooler heads have prevailed and he is already backing out of that promise. Coca is grown legally in a supposedly controlled area of Bolivia (that's in South America) because the indians have chewed it for its mellow "high" for thousands of years. When the past president legalized this "controlled" legal growing area, the coca farmers quickly doubled their authorized output and illegal cocaine production ballooned by 35% just last year. Evo will, of course, put a stop to this illegal activity.
How will he do that? With strong language like this: He declared that
. . . zero cocaine and zero drug trafficking, but not zero coca or zero cocaleros.I feel better already, don't chew?
Then, it was off to Caracas to visit the pig Chavez, where Evo whipped this on the world:
This movement is not only in Bolivia; Fidel in Cuba and Hugo in Venezuela are logging triumphs in social movements and leftist policies.To which Chavez added,
The axis of evil - do you know who the axis of evil is? Washington - that's the axis of evil. And their allies in the world, who threaten, who invade, who kill, who assassinate.Jeez. I just can't understand why he isn't being welcomed in Washington with open arms.
Yawn. They'll all go down eventually. One must feel some sympathy for their people, however. The Bolivians nationalized the tin mines, then successive governments ran them into the ground and the industry collapsed. Mexico nationalized its oil industry and is still running it into the ground. There is a major wildlife and human killing pipeline rupture about once a month in Mexico due to poor-to-non-existant maintenance or infrastructure investment and Pemex is one of the most indebted companies in the world. Now Evo wants to do the same to the Bolivian natural gas industry. How do you think that will go?
Mexico, Bolivia and about every Central and South American country, through a long series of revolutions, civil wars, assasinations, tin pot dictators, etc. have taken land away from the owners and given it to the campesinos (peasant farmers). Here is how they do it. You can have the land, free of charge, they say, but you cannot sell it, transfer it to anyone other than your children or use it for anything other than farming. So, what happens? They give a campesino a nice plot of rock of, say, 10 acres or so. In 20 years he has two sons and 2 daughters. The daughters get nothing and the sons split the land between them. Now each son has 5 acres with which to feed his family. Hmm. Not so easy. Then, each son has two sons and the land is divided again. Now, the original campesino's grandsons have 2.5 acres each to support their families. It very quickly becomes impossible to feed the great-grandchildren, so everybody pulls up stakes and heads for Gringolandia.
Has the United States, or, more specifically, US business interests taken advantage of the incompetent leadership of these countries? Of course. You play the game by the local rules. If you don't, you don't do business with that particular banana/narco republic. Have the people of those banana/narco republics suffered? Of course they have. Is that our responsibility? No. The United States is the only government that I know of which holds it illegal to bribe a foreign official. That makes it very difficult to compete against the the French, Germans, Russians and Chinese who bribe away with abandon. So, our companies do it illegally. They have to or they would have no business.
I know of no cases, at least in this century, where an American businessman sat down across from a Latin American dictator or politician or whatever and unilaterally signed a deal that became the law of that land. There was always a signature from the other side of the table, greased by money. That's the way it was done and is being done today, as we speak, so to speak. We have no reason to feel guily about anything. They do, however. They've done this to themselves, or, in the cases of the innocent campesinos, have allowed it to be done to themselves.
TAGS: Evo Morales, Bolivia, Latin America, corruption, banana/narco republics, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez
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