Okay, you say…so where’s the funny? Other than that snarky, crypto-racist use of “colorful” to describe an elected president who happens to be indigenous, maybe? Hang on, hang on, I’m getting to it…Bolivian President Evo Morales had a blunt message for the visiting U.S. Pentagon chief on Monday: Latin American nations will pick their own friends and business partners, including Iran, regardless of U.S. opinion.The colorful leftist leader delivered an hourlong welcome to delegates at a regional defense conference that included U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Morales never mentioned Gates by name. But most of the speech, and all of the applause lines, were clearly directed at the Pentagon chief and former head of the CIA.Bolivia is more democratic and representative than the United States, Morales said, and democracy would improve in the entire region if the United States stopped interfering.He mentioned the spread of Iranian and Russian business and other ties in Latin America, and said it is not the U.S. place to complain.“Bolivia under my government will have an agreement, an alliance, to anyone in the world,” Morales said. “Nobody will forbid us,” he said to applause.
That’s the beginning of it. CIA honcho Robert Gates, completely tone-deaf, is trying to tell Bolivia (where even the poorest people know the score by heart) what tune the US wants it to sing. STILL. But wait, there’s more:Gates did not directly respond, and didn’t seem fazed by the one-hour monologue. A day earlier he had warned that countries doing business with Iran should remember that Iran is under international sanctions over its nuclear program. He also questioned whether Iran has the technical capability to help another nations develop civilian nuclear power.“As a sovereign sate Bolivia obviously can have relationships with any country in the world that it wishes to,” Gates said Sunday. “I think Bolivia needs to be mindful of the number of United Nations Security Council resolutions that have been passed with respect to Iran’s behavior.”
Here’s where the AP reporters–three of them for one lousy story!–get funny with us, too. The US can deny all it likes, but anyone who’s been following me, Otto, or El Duderino in recent years knows that Philip Goldberg has, indeed, pushed for a putsch. And on more than one occasion. Why else all those secret midnight meetings with prominent (and putschist) opposition “leaders”? And why else would Goldilocks the Failure fall up…and straight into a cushy intel desk job in Washington? And while we’re on the subject of espionage, the DEA isn’t merely “suspected” of it. They are proven to be in it to their eyeballs. Ask former DEA agent Celerino Castillo if you don’t believe me. The DEA is not only a nest of spies, it’s also a drug smuggling cartel big enough to make all of Colombia blush with shame.But wait…our three amigos still have a few punchlines left:Morales ticked off a history of attempted coups, alleged election- and vote-tampering, military meddling and vague conspiracies involving the United States. Some of it is based in truth, although the U.S. denies that a former ambassador tried to engineer a coup against Morales in 2008, as he alleged Monday.Morales kicked out the then-U.S. ambassador in 2008, and the two nations have not normalized diplomatic relations since. Morales also expelled the U.S. DEA on suspicion of espionage.
Notice that they don’t supply a single fact or statistic to back up that contention. How much exactly IS “vastly more…than would be needed”, Messrs. AP reporter-dudes? And why no mention of the top cash crops of Colombia and Peru…neither of which is coffee?Well, let’s not waste time waiting for a cogent answer there, kids, there’s more horseshit still waiting in the Augean Stable that is AP’s LatAm bureau:He denies that coca grown in Bolivia feeds the worldwide demand for cocaine, although the country produces vastly more of the crop that would be needed for its traditional and legal medicinal use in Bolivia.
And the AP, like the good presstitutes they are, lick it all up and don’t even bother to report the fact that ample, clear evidence to the contrary has, in fact, been produced by the alternative media, the blogosphere, and the state-funded and community media all over Latin America. Hell, all I’ve had to do is translate a few of those articles to demonstrate that the US and the AP are both lying. Or if that’s not enough, I can also refer you to Machetera, who’s done an excellent job of unpacking what really happened in Honduras.But here’s the final jab from our trio of bumblers, and it too is a doozer:Morales also alleged U.S. involvement in coup attempts or political upheaval in Venezuela in 2002, Honduras in 2009 and Ecuador in 2010.“The empire of the United States won,” in Honduras, Morales said, a reference to the allegations of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya that the U.S. was behind his ouster.“The people of the Americas in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, we won,” Morales continued. “We are three to one with the United States. Let’s see what the future brings.”U.S. officials have repeatedly denied involvement in all of those cases and critics of the United States have produced no clear evidence.
Actually, Correa did, although he also says he does not believe President Obama is involved. Hilariously, the AP themselves reported this, although it all seems to have gone down the memory hole now!And there is plenty of history to bear him out that the US, and particularly the CIA, has long been behind Ecuador’s apparent instability. Philip Agee, the late former CIA agent, has written extensively about it in his book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary. One of Agee’s postings was to Ecuador. The CIA’s modus operandi was to co-opt a country’s police and military forces, and sponsor opposition parties, non-governmental “civil society” organizations, and the like. And where no suitable “civil society” orgs existed, it invariably ginned up some fake ones to make it look as though there was extensive opposition to a popular leader who wasn’t toeing the proper line. By doing so, the CIA created–and still creates–pretexts for coups, which are then passed ofEcuadorean President Rafael Correa called a Sept. 30 police revolt over benefit cuts a coup attempt in disguise, but he did not accuse the United States of being involved.
f as mere “revolts”, like the failed September 30 putsch in Ecuador. This one, predictably, was passed off as a police revolt, aided and abetted by a USAID-corrupted indigenous group, CONAIE. I’ve written about them before; here’s another blogger’s viewpoint, which seems to buttress mine quite nicely.And oh yeah, Evo is quite right about the Honduran coup, too. That one was backed by Washington, and there was no disguising where the sympathies lay. But you’ll never hear that from the AP. They can assign three reporters to one story and still not tell you what you really need to know. All they’ll do is make up bad fiction for the benefit of the CIA. Woe betide you if you believe a word of it.Viva Evo, FU CIA…and FOAD, AP.
