Talk:Bolivia

Instead of negotiating with a non-violent Aymara movement based in El Alto, which now extends to the hillside neighborhoods of Upper Miraflores, Munaypata, Villa Victoria, Villa del Cármen, Villa Fátima and the Cemetery of La Paz, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada went on CNN to declare that the protests were being financed with foreign funds from well-intentioned NGOs, whose naïve sympathies with the plight of indigenous people has led them to support terrorist leaders like Evo Morales, who has visited Libya, and Felipe Quispe, an ex-guerrilla of the EGTK (Guerrilla Army Túpak Katari). According to Sánchez de Lozada, the alternative to his reign would be an "authoritarian, trade union dictatorship." Just as Álvaro Uribe accused human rights NGOs of supporting terrorism in September, so Sánchez de Lozada accuses indigenous rights NGOs of supporting terrorism in October. 

"Early returns indicated an 80 percent majority in favor of repealing the existing hydrocarbons law pushed in the 1990s by the hated Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (or "Goni"), whose political consultants were the star liberal Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and former presidential campaign manager James Carville. The Washington-based Greenberg firm represents British Petroleum, one of the multinationals with billions invested in Bolivia. BP supported the referendum, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as did US Embassy officials, because the possible alternative--an Indian-led revolution--was even worse." Tom Hayden, in The Nation, 21 July 2004

"If it appears after the election that Morales won the most votes and the parliament chooses not to recognize him as president, the country would descend into an ungovernable turmoil since the majority would feel cheated." 


 * Roger Burbach, "Bolivia's Radical Realignment. Morales Serves Notice of the New Latin America," CounterPunch, May 4, 2006.