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BUSH BRINGS THE FALSE INTELLIGENCE GAME TO SOUTH AMERICA
On Tuesday the Rev. Pat Robertson called for the US government to suspend the Fifth Commandment and assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. While the Bush White House quickly distanced itself from the suggestion, the fact is that Robertson’s outburst builds on months of White House tale-spinning and conspiracy theories about South American politics.
From its highest levels the Bush administration has been trying to convince anyone who will listen that Chavez and Fidel Castro are trying to launch a Marxist rebellion right here in Bolivia.
After four years of largely ignoring Latin American politics the Bush administration wants back in the game and it using the same card that it used to get us into Iraq, false intelligence.
EVOLUTION OF A WHITE HOUSE TALE
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice started off the administration’s new tale of concern in February. In testimony before the Senate, commenting on the political rise of Bolivian socialist party leader Evo Morales, she announced, “We are very worried.” Since then, the White House’s rhetoric about the threat in Bolivia has continued to escalate, in ways remeniscent to the rhetorical run up to the invasion of Iraq.
In July, a senior pentagon official speaking off the record told the Associated Press that the recent citizen uprisings in Bolivia were the result of a joint effort by Chavez and Castro, “to steer this revolution toward a Marxist-socialist populist state.” Chavez was providing the cash, he explained, and Castro the direction and organization.
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FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, YES, BUT FROM WHERE
No US official has ever presented any actual evidence about all this foreign interference in Bolivia, despite repeated requests to do so from the press. But as we sadly know, in the Bush White House actual evidence is not required before the US acts. Hunches and accusations will do just fine. As Rumsfeld himself argued in the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, “Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
The US press is also up to its old game of swallowing the evidence-free bait. Yesterday a CNN report repaeated the Bush tale – hook, line and sinker: “
is spending Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to support other leftist leaders in the hemisphere, like in Bolivia, indermining US efforts to spread democracy.”
That said, I believe that the White House is right on the mark about two things. First, there is indeed a populist revolt underway in Bolivia and, second, that revolt is very much a product of foreign interference. The problem with the Bush-Rice-Rumsfeld picture is that the real sources come not from Havana or Caracas, but from Washington.
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It may well be that somewhere along the way we discover that some Venezuelan cash found its way into the coffers of activists here, though certainly it would be dwarfed by the US’s own years-long heavy hand in Bolivian politics (In 2002 the US Ambassador here famously threatened voters agasinst supporting a candidate not to the US’s liking.).
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http://www.democracyctr.org/newsletter/vol66.htm