Paraguay, Bolivia sign agreement on security, defense

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Xinhua

UPDATED: 10:20, March 21, 2007

Paraguay and Bolivia have signed a data-exchange agreement on security and defense issues, the newspaper ABC Color reported on Tuesday.

The agreement was signed in Bolivia's administrative capital La Paz by Paraguayan Minister of Foreign Affairs Ruben Ramirez Lezcano and his Bolivian counterpart David Choquehuanca as well as senior military officials from both nations.

The agreement envisages a gathering of senior military officials of both sides on September 10-12, the fourth meeting of this kind, said the newspaper based in the Paraguayan capital Asuncion.

These foreign ministers have also entered negotiations on proposed agreements on anti-arms trafficking and the treatment of those indicted or found guilty of kidnapping.




Read more: http://english.people.com.cn/200703/21/eng20070321_359638.html

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You may remember _Bush's Defense Department's arrangement made with senior Bolivian military officials to remove missiles from Bolivia's stock, in the days before the election in which Evo Morales wasa elected.

There were also all the threats delivered by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice to Bolivia prior to the election, telling them that if they elected Morales, they could expect drastic cuts in foreign aid, most of which had always gone to Bolivia's military, which they appear to have thought would turn the senior military officers against Morales in advance of the election.

Good to see the intimidation did not work.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. We maintain a military base in Paraguay

A 'Cooperative Security Location', that appears to function as our base of operations against independent nations in the region. It includes one of our top of the line signals interception facilities.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Thanks for the news about this. Very, very interesting. I hope to find out more about it

and probably will, since there's an unnatural amount of US activity in that area.

People really need to know what is being done in our names. I'm sure the people in Paraguay are very conscious of what the U.S. is doing there.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Another important development--Paraguay is joining the Bank of the South,

created by Venezuela to get its neighbors out of the clutches of the World Bank/IMF (tool of Bushites and global corporate predators)--one of the most far-thinking things that Hugo Chavez's government has done.

(Posted here by Judi Lynn)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2776517

The center/right government of Paraguay must be terribly worried--politically--about the big leftist movement in their own country (inspired by the Bolivarian revolution), and also worried--militarily--about the out-of-control rightwing paramilitaries in Colombia (no doubt the tools of the Bush Junta for destabilizing the Andean democracies). It is quite remarkable that Paraguay is joining with Bolivia for mutual defense. Against whom? Against what? I think the answer is: against the Bush Junta and its murderous, drug trafficking proxies. And, in Colombia, the rightwing president, Uribe, feels compelled to distance himself from the ballooning scandal of those paramilitaries. And all of this is in the context of Bush being publicly lectured, throughout the region, from Brazil to Mexico, on the sovereignty of Latin American countries.

The times they are a-changin'.