Bolivia official reports plot to kill president

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Bolivia official reports plot to kill president
37 mins ago

LA PAZ, Bolivia – A top Bolivian official says conservatives have plotted to pay one of President Evo Morales' peasant supporters to kill him.

Government Minister Alfredo Rada says "extreme right" elements hoped to take advantage of Morales' frequent visits to rural areas, where the socialist leader is often swarmed by large crowds of admirers under only minimal security.

Rada said Monday that plotters planned to convince a poor farmer that Morales had betrayed the social movements that drove his rise to power and then pay the man to kill the president.

He did not provide evidence for the plot, but said an investigation was continuing.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that Morales had told him of an assassination plan.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081222/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_bolivia_morales

[patrice]

1. I don't know why some people think Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine is sooo extreme.

It doesn't take a "conscious" consipracy to make this sort of thing happen. The inertial patterns are ALREADY there at work and have been for a long time.

[madeline_con]

2. Agribusiness and Agrarian Elites Foment Coup in Bolivia

Agribusiness and Agrarian Elites Foment Coup in Bolivia
Roger Burbach


Like many third world countries Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations.

With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta--including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets.

As in most other countries affected by the food crisis, the overall rise in food prices is attributable to the workings of the free market—when the price of one or several commodities goes up, the consumers turn to other food stuffs, thereby driving up these prices as well. In an effort to halt the effects of this unregulated market, the government has enacted price controls and even prohibited the export of beef, most of which is produced on haciendas. But these measures have been largely ineffective: A black market flourishes as agrarian commercial interests openly flaunt the central government's price controls, even directly exporting commodities like beef and cooking oil at higher prices to the neighboring countries of Chile and Peru.

This is taking place as Bolivia's first Indian president, Evo Morales, is facing a sustained challenge by a right wing movement for autonomy that is integrally linked to the very agribusiness corporations that are profiting from the upsurge in food prices. Based in the eastern province of Santa Cruz, a powerful agrarian bourgeoisie is determined to upend the government's agrarian reform program and to halt Morales'

efforts to more equitably distribute the wealth that flows from Bolivia's oil and gas fields. Its ultimate goal is to topple Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) that backs him.

The corporate dominated agro-industrial complex in Santa Cruz is centered on the growing, processing and export of soy beans. Two of the world's largest agribusiness multinationals, ADM and Cargill, play a major role in the regional economy. They are primarily exporters of Bolivian soybeans and sunflower seeds while ADM co-owns with a Bolivian firm the largest vegetable oil processing plant, Sociedad Aceitera del Oriente. (1) Giant agribusiness corporations like John Deere have commercial outlets in Santa Cruz as Bolivia manufactures no heavy agricultural machinery. Multinational companies supply most of Bolivia's agrichemicals, while Monsanto and Calgene are promoting genetically modified seeds. Peruvian and Colombian agribusiness interests have also set up processing plants in Santa Cruz, including the Romero Company from Peru which has joint international operations with Cargill, while large soy growers from the neighboring Brazilian state of Mato Grosso have settled on Bolivian lands.

The agrarian bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz is orchestrating the movement for provincial autonomy in order to seize control of the region's extensive resources from the national government. The referendum on autonomy that was unconstitutionally voted on and approved in Santa

Cruz on May 4, 2008 would allow the provincial administration to write its own contracts with multinationals and to exercise direct control over the police and law enforcement agencies. Autonomy would also enable the province to override national legislation promoted by Morales and MAS on agrarian reform and the control of public forests and subsoil rights, including natural gas and oil.

more: http://www.cubanow.net/pages/loader.php?sec=19&t=2&item=5103

[Judi Lynn]

3. Bolivia’s Morales Target of Assassination Plot, Minister Says

Bolivia’s Morales Target of Assassination Plot, Minister Says
By Jonathan J. Levin

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Bolivian intelligence services discovered a plot to assassinate President Evo Morales, Government Minister Alfredo Rada told reporters in La Paz.

Rada said a “peasant or common person” was to be paid to assassinate the Bolivian leader during a visit to the Chapare, a rural region in central Bolivia, according to remarks broadcast on La Paz-based Radio Fides. Rada didn’t say how intelligence services learned of the plot.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aAEUhTQSnToQ&refer=latin_america

[burrowowl]

4. K&R

Hopefully Obama will stop U$ giving to extreme right groups.

[Mudoria]

5. A poor farmer?

So, they were going to talk a poor farmer into going all Rambo and assassinate the President? I mean does the farmer know one end of gun from the other? Does he get free $25 coupons to attend the Local Assassins Guild Training Night for Dummies? When they cook up propaganda in the back rooms in Caracas and La Paz they need to hire better fiction writers. All you can say about this is:

:rofl:

[Peace Patriot]

6. As a matter of fact, that is just what the U.S. military and the CIA has done,

time and again--trained locals in Latin America to torture and assassinate leftists. It's not laughable. It's horrible. They are still doing it at the School of the Americas, and--no doubt in my mind at all--at training camps in Colombia. There could also be a plot to kill Morales and blame it on a disgruntled indigenous as a patsy, and what Bolivian officials got wind of was merely the set up (not the real assassin).

You dismiss rotten U.S. intentions and activities in Latin America, in collusion with local fascists, too lightly. The U.S. training locals to kill leftists has happened over and over again--in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Chile, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Guatemala, and, most recently in Colombia, which is receiving $6 BILLION in Bushwhack military aid, where thousands of U.S. forces are present, where Blackwater has been training Colombians to fight in Iraq, and where thousands of union leaders, small peasant farmers, human rights workers, political leftists, journalists, and others have been murdered by rightwing death squads with very close ties to the Colombian military and government, including the recruitment of uninvolved youth for jobs and then killing them and dressing their bodies up as narco-traffickers or leftist guerrillas, to up the Colombian military's "body count," to impress the Bushwhacks and the U.S. Congress.

What do you think all that Bushwhack military aid has been for? To stop the cocaine traffic?
:rofl: :wow: :rofl:

[Judi Lynn]

7. More on the story: Bid to assassinate Bolivian president foiled

Deccan Herald
Bid to assassinate Bolivian president foiled

~snip~
He said the plotters' idea of using a worker or peasant as the shooter was intended to "disorient the security services," given that poor and working class Bolivians constitute the bulk of Morales' support.

According to the minister, the conspirators had planned to assassinate the Leftist leader at a rally in Andean west or the coca-growing region of Chapara, where Bolivia's Indian majority is concentrated.

After killing Morales, the assassin was to say he resorted to violence because "the president betrayed the peasant social bases that brought him to power by having reached accords with the right," the interior minister said.

Rada said security around the president had been tightened last week after the government got wind of the alleged plot.

Bolivians are scheduled to vote next month on a new constitution aimed at empowering the country's long-oppressed Indian majority and narrowing the gap in wealth between the richest and poorest fifth of the population.

http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Dec232008/foreign20081223108383.asp?section=updatenews

[Judi Lynn]

8. Mission Accomplished: How Bolivia Defeated Illiteracy

Mission Accomplished: How Bolivia Defeated Illiteracy
December 23, 2008 By Supriyo Chatterjee

The government of Evo Morales has achieved in three years what the regimes of the past two centuries could not: freeing Bolivia from the shame of illiteracy. With this, the second poorest nation in Latin America after Haiti becomes only the third in the continent to achieve full literacy, after Cuba in 1961 and Venezuela in 2005.

A formidable social mobilisation allied to pedagogical and material help from Cuba and Venezuela meant that 819,417 people (99.5% of the illiterate population) became literate through 28,424 centres in the nine provinces of the country and with the help of 130 Cuban advisors and 47 from Venezuela.

Cuba donated 30,000 television sets and the same number of videos, sets of 17 cassettes and manuals for facilitators and 1.2 million primers. Cuba and Venezuela also donated 8,350 solar panels since many of the marginalised people lived in areas lacking electricity.

Bolivians themselves contributed 46,457 facilitators and 4,810 supervisors. They used the Cuban audio-visual ‘Yes, I can' method. The literacy campaign had a distinctly "woman's face" as 85% of the illiterate population was female. The programme, carried out by the National Alphabetisation Programme of Bolivia, cost $36.7 million.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20031