U.S. Faults Bolivia Anti-Drug Efforts

[Judi Lynn]

U.S. Faults Bolivia Anti-Drug Efforts

By JENNIFER LOVEN
The Associated Press
Monday, September 18, 2006; 9:06 PM

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration said Monday it sees disturbing trends in Bolivia's dealings with efforts to combat illicit drugs.

Concerns about contributions to the illegal drug trade by the South American nation came as the White House released the U.S. government's annual list of major drug-transit or drug-producing countries.

The list remained unchanged from a year ago, with 20 nations cited: Afghanistan, the Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela.

President Bush sent a report to Congress that also noted that Myanmar and Venezuela, for the second year in a row, were determined to have "failed demonstrably" to meet their obligations under international counternarcotics requirements.
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091800384.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Odd behavior toward Bolivian professor from the Bush administration:

UNL still seeks visa for Bolivian scholar

LINCOLN, Neb. - The University of Nebraska-Lincoln continues to seek a visa for a Bolivian scholar possibly caught in a political dispute.

UNL hired Waskar Ari, a professor Latin American history from Bolivia, in June 2005. The university petitioned the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for Ari's visa, submitted the required documentation and paid a $1,000 processing fee so he could enter the country in time to start teaching.

However, upon arriving in Bolivia from the United States last summer Ari was told that his visa application had been delayed without explanation and that the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia, had been told by the State Department to cancel all existing visas.

The university has hired someone else to teach Ari's fall semester classes while it works to convince federal authorities he poses no security risk.
(snip/...)

http://www.fremontneb.com/articles/2006/09/18/ap-state-ne/d8k7c1i80.txt

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

_Bush had Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld warn Bolivia there would be repercussions if they elected the leftist, populist, native Bolivian President. Looks as if he's hard at work proving it.

[Mythsaje]

2. Yeah, and the efforts of the past several decades

have yielded such great results.

Bolivia to Bush: "Go fuck yourself."

[Judi Lynn]

3. Bolivian neighbor:U.S. Military in Paraguay Prepares To “Spread Democracy”

09/15/06
09:51:42 pm, Categories: Voices, 1757 words
U.S. Military in Paraguay Prepares To “Spread Democracy”
Benjamin Dangl
From "Upside Down World"



Estigarribia airbase in Paraguay Copyright: Clarin

Controversy is raging in Paraguay, where the U.S. military is conducting secretive operations. 500 U.S. troops arrived in the country on July 1st with planes, weapons and ammunition. Eyewitness reports prove that an airbase exists in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, which is 200 kilometers from the border with Bolivia and may be utilized by the U.S. military. Officials in Paraguay claim the military operations are routine humanitarian efforts and deny that any plans are underway for a U.S. base. Yet human rights groups in the area are deeply worried.

{More:}

White House officials are using rhetoric about terrorist threats in the tri-border region (where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet) in order to build their case for military operations, in many ways reminiscent to the build up to the invasion of Iraq. (1)

The tri-border area is home to the Guarani Aquifer, one of the world’s largest reserves of water. Near the Estigarribia airbase are Bolivia’s natural gas reserves, the second largest in Latin America. Political analysts believe U.S. operations in Paraguay are part of a preventative war to control these natural resources and suppress social uprisings in Bolivia.

Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel commented on the situation in Paraguay, "Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave. And that really frightens me." (2)

The Estigarribia airbase was constructed in the 1980s for U.S. technicians hired by the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and is capable of housing 16,000 troops. A journalist writing for the Argentine newspaper Clarin, recently visited the base and reported it to be in perfect condition, capable of handling large military planes. It’s oversized for the Paraguayan air force, which only has a handful of small aircraft. The base has an enormous radar system, huge hangars and an air traffic control tower. The airstrip itself is larger than the one at the international airport in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital. Near the base is a military camp which has recently grown in size. (3)
(snip/...)

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2006/09/15/title_23

[Peace Patriot]

4. Yup, the Bush Cartel is just terribly concerned about "drugs" and the

health of your children and criminal activity in South America.

They want all you Soccer moms to know that they are working every day in every way to keep their future cannon fodder "drug free" and focused on the "family values" of torture, greed and killing democracy wherever it arises.

They are furthermore destroying many American literary endeavors by making sarcasm and irony almost impossible. To use sarcasm and irony successfully, you have to have targets with at least a minimum level of morality and conscience. Take Swift's "A Modest Proposal," for instance. The notion of solving "the Irish problem" by the English upper classes roasting Irish babies for dinner effectively appealed to the conscience of the English upper class, and caused quite a stir. But such a proposal would not affect the Bush Junta in the least. In fact, they would probably introduce it as a bill in the Diebold Congress and argue that eating Irish babies will aid the "wart on error" (ahem...the war on terror).

The other way they are destroying American writing is the tortured syntax that is required in order to convey their astonishingly deceitful ideas to the American public. For instance, that Myanmar and Venezuela "were determined to have 'failed demonstrably' to meet their obligations under international counternarcotics requirements." No matter that the Bush Junta was "determined to have 'failed demonstrably'" in preventing the proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction," by outing and disabling the entire CIA counter-proliferation network, Brewster-Jennings (headed by Valerie Plame). Or that it was "determined to have 'failed demonstrably'" in meeting its obligations to the people of the Gulf Coast before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, or to the people of Iraq, whose society the Bush Junta deliberately destroyed. These determinations to 'fail demonstrably' require strange thinking patterns by war profiteering corporate news monopoly reporters--in order to make Bush Junta policies and actions appear to be reasonable--which then infect all areas of the "news" with tortured syntax. The success of democracy in Venezuela and Bolivia, for instance (I don't know about Myanmar), which has resulted in revulsion at the murderous U.S. "war on drugs" by these populist governments, and their rejection of immensely hypocritical and extremely destructive U.S. counternarcotics "aid," gets turned around--by this syntax--into a "failure" to meet their "obligations" to slaughter poor peasants in the Andes Mountains. Substitute "Iraq" or "Iran" and their "obligation" to supply the U.S. with oil, and you begin to understand why American sentences have to be structured upside down, backwards and inside out, in order to make Bushite policy seem logical.

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Viva Chavez! Viva Morales! Viva la revolución!