Cartoonist Carlos Latuff nails what’s really going on in Bolivia. Just change the “Brazilian” to “US” and you’ll understand what’s going on in the US media, too.
What do you bet Juan Forero* wrote this garbage in the WaHoPo today? It smells like his poison pen at work:
IT BECAME clear long ago that President Evo Morales’s attempt to import Hugo Chávez’s model of authoritarian socialism to Bolivia had polarized his country along ethnic and geographic lines — risking its disintegration, or civil war. Rather than compromise, Mr. Morales only intensified his efforts to force through a new constitution concentrating power in his own hands and privileging highland indigenous communities at the expense of the rest of the country. The result is that Bolivia stands at the brink of a civil conflict that could destabilize an entire region.
Notice that the unsigned editorial (the last refuge of journalistic scoundrels? You bet!) takes the blame-Evo tone to set the scene for what’s happening down there right now. It’s also blowing out of proportion a situation which is not at all as you’re being led to think; the fact that the army has been sent in to retake the public sectors from the autono-fascists is not being reported, nor is the army’s arrest of the fugitive prefect of Pando (that’s law and order, folks!), nor is the fact that the South American Union, Unasur, is firmly behind Evo, who is emphatically NOT out to “destabilize an entire region”. So who IS out to destabilize the region? Take a wild guess; they appear nowhere in this piece, but they are behind it!
The next paragraph is only half-factual…
One of the five provinces that have rejected the president’s policies is now occupied by the army under martial law after fighting that has killed as many as 30 people in the past few days. Militants on both sides are resorting to force. In the province of Santa Cruz, anti-government demonstrators have sacked and occupied government offices. Anti-Morales forces have also interrupted deliveries to Brazil of natural gas, the country’s most valuable export. Opposition governors deserve blame for tolerating — at least — violence by their supporters.
…and 100% obscurantist. Note how a massacre perpetrated by the opposition in Pando is boiled down (reductio ad absurdum) to “fighting” and “militants on both sides”. No, cowardly crapagandist, the culprits are known, and Aporrea has their names up already. It’s not “militants on both sides”, it’s militants on ONE side–the “autonomist” side. The opposition prefects in question don’t deserve blame for “tolerating” violence, but for ORDERING it. And the recently booted scumbassador from the US, Philip Goldberg, also deserves blame for aiding and abetting it. But do you think he gets a mention here?
Yet Mr. Morales remains Bolivia’s chief provocateur. Emboldened by his victory in a recall referendum in August, he attempted to schedule another referendum on his constitution, which would greatly increase his own authority. He ignored the fact that opposition governors also won reconfirmation in landslides — and that the constitution itself was illegally ratified by a rump assembly from which the opposition had been excluded. Instead, Mr. Morales launched another of his anti-American campaigns. He ordered U.S. aid workers to leave a coca-growing province where they had been working on development programs, then expelled the U.S. ambassador, a respected professional, on the spurious grounds of fomenting rebellion.
Oh yes, he does, but of course, he’s out of context too. Top-secret meetings with the fascist prefects in the middle of the night, with the media locked out, are not the hallmark of the “respected professional”, but of a SPOOK, people. Goldberg is the chief provocateur in fact, but the finger of blame gets pointed right at Evo. Who, of course, is portrayed as the Monster of the Coca. Never mind that Bolivian coca barely ends up in gringos’ noses anymore (and that the marching powder all comes from do-no-wrong Peru and Colombia); the vast majority of it is used in legitimate medicinal and traditional ways. Shit, what are all these unsexy facts when Evo must be demonized at all costs?
Notice, too, that they get all the facts about the new Bolivian constitution wrong. The constituent assembly was not a “rump”, it was the more-than-half remaining after the “autonomist” traitors (who were elected to do a job, people!) tried to sabotage it by not showing up for work. They figured that if they fucked off, the project would be fucked up, and things would revert to the same old same old. They figured wrong; this constitution got written without them, and it will pass without them too.
And of course, yesterday’s Unasur meeting is also taken completely out of context, and the actual happenings ignored, while Washington’s usual suspects get castigated:
A summit meeting of Latin American leaders in Chile yesterday was trying to lay the groundwork for a negotiated settlement. For that to happen, Mr. Morales will have to accept that he cannot impose his agenda on the eastern half of Bolivia but must work toward the constitutional compromise that he previously rejected. Mr. Chávez is doing his best to escalate the crisis, even threatening to intervene militarily in Bolivia. But the United States has leverage, as well. Bolivia receives more than $100 million annually in American aid, and some 30,000 jobs in South America’s poorest country depend on the renewal of trade preferences that expire in December. The administration and Congress should link the trade concessions to an accord between Mr. Morales and the opposition that ends the use of force by both sides and preserves a liberal democracy.
Sadly, I expect no better from the Washington Whore Post anymore. “Liberal democracy”, like “liberal media”, is an utterly meaningless term nowadays.
Is it any wonder the locals now have no use for the US’s “democracy”, just as I have no use for its mainstream media–except maybe as something to mock, ridicule and piss on? Which is, when you think about it, exactly what they do to other countries’ actual democracy?
*I’ve since been informed that it wasn’t Forero, it was that other ignorant dickweed at the WaHoPo–Jackson Diehl. Figures. If it wasn’t the shitty hack, it was the hacky shit.
