You don’t say!…Well, actually, Bolivian news agency ABI does say, and so do I, translating:
The prefect of Santa Cruz, Ruben Costas, secretly met on Monday with the US ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg. The meeting comes nine days after Costas’s radical speech, in which he insulted President Evo Morales and announced a series of measures that skirt the edges of the constitution.
Although there was no official mention of what the two discussed, the meeting occurred amid the beginning of the measures with which Costas and his colleagues of the so-called “Media Luna” region sought to put pressure on the Morales government, which was ratified with two-thirds of the popular vote at the polls (67.4%).
According to a report by the Gigavision network, the encounter took place in the Prefectural Palace, a location where the press was barred from entering.
The TV report informed that the Costas-Goldberg meeting went on for at least an hour and 30 minutes, and proved the encounter had taken place with images taken before and after.
And here is one of those images:
Note the caption: “No details given of the meeting”.
Now, would a perfectly above-board meeting be so goshdarn secretive as to lock out the media and give no details of what was said? If you think it could, you must be drinking some bad Kool-Aid. El Duderino has already noted some of Costas’s more egregious hijinks leading up to the referendum, and following it too. Now it appears that Goldberg was not only aware of what was going to happen; for all we know, he handed Costas the playbook for the next steps at that hush-hush meeting. Why else the auspicious timing?
And besides, it’s not as if they haven’t done this sort of thing before.
