Bolivia Burning: US provokes uprising
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 09:45:10 -0600


November 16, 2001
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Dear Colleagues,

Today, Narco News translates a series of articles from the Bolivian press
that indicate the beginnings of an uprising by Civil Society against
US-imposed drug policies in this nation of 8 million people.

Below, please find our summary today's Narco News Press Briefing on the
crisis in Bolivia.

The full briefing is now posted to Narco News:

http://www.narconews.com/

Bolivia Burning:

A Nation on the Verge of U.S.-Provoked Uprising

A Narco News Global Alert
By Al Giordano

Bolivia is one of only three countries (with Colombia and Perú) in the world
where the coca plant - source for cocaine and crack - grows.

Bolivia is the only one of these three countries with no groups on the U.S.
State Department's list of "terrorist organizations."

But today, U.S.-imposed drug policy is sowing the seeds of a violent storm
in Bolivia that, although entirely preventable, is leading toward a
rebellion that the hypocrites in Washington will later label as "terrorist"
even as U.S. policy creates the phenomenon.

The fall of Bolivian General Hugo Banzer last summer - who came to power
decades ago through a military coup - has provided Civil Society in Bolivia
with a renewed hope to restore democracy, justice and human rights to this
impoverished South American nation.

Indeed, just one year ago, Narco News broke the information blockade in the
English-language press when social movements throughout Bolivia shut down
the country's highways through citizen blockades and forced the Bolivian
government to sign agreements with the populace that it has now broken. One
of the results of our coverage was that the only English-language news
correspondent in Bolivia, AP's Peter McFarren, had to resign in disgrace
because we reported his own conflicts-of-interest with the Bolivian regime.

Unfortunately, neither the end of the Banzer dictatorship nor the fall of a
corrupted journalist have brought change to Bolivia or to the media blockade
of hard news from the country.

Every sector of Civil Society in Bolivia seeks to bring democracy to the
nation. The indigenous want equal rights and autonomy. The coca growers want
a drug policy for Bolivia that is decided by Bolivians and not imposed by
the United States. A quarter-million retirees in this country of 8 million
citizens - one out of every 30 Bolivians - have recently been denied their
pensions because the government has squandered the nation's budget on the
unwinnable drug war. The urban unions have repeatedly joined the rural
farmers in social protest of the situation. Residents have repeatedly risen
up against government plans to export Bolivia's water to copper mines in
Chile as it attempts to privatize this natural resource and force Bolivians
to buy their own water from private companies. Teachers and students alike
have united in opposition to Bolivia's illigitimate government and the
impositions from the North.

In other words, the Bolivian regime of President Jorge Quiroga faces
opposition from every sector except two: the brutal military forces and the
United States government, which, in the latest atrocity, is directly funding
a "paramilitary" model of the kind it created, years ago, in Colombia, in
order to attempt to stamp out the surge of democracy with repression.

Yesterday, three unarmed peasant farmers were assassinated by Bolivian
soldiers on the nation's major highway. The farmers have begun blockades of
the country's roads to demand that the government comply with land use
agreements (known as the INRA law) it signed last year but has now broken.

This, as 4,000 Bolivian army troops were forced to retreat from unarmed
peasant farmers who have just installed a blockade on the Cochabamba-Santa
Cruz highway, the nation's main thoroughfare.

As the United States media pats itself on the back, claiming to have
"rediscovered foreign news" in the wake of the September 11th tragedy, it
continues to ignore the immediate history taking place in Bolivia, which
will have profound consequences for all América.

Narco News thus begins anew our regular Press Briefings from Bolivia,
translating the work of Latin American and other journalists so that the
US-sponsored atrocity-in-progress will not occur hidden from the eyes of the
rest of the world.

In the coming days, Narco News will make an important announcement regarding
our coverage of the Bolivian Crisis. Stay tuned as the hand of history, once
again, thunders from the mountains of Bolívar and U.S.-imposed drug policy
meets its Waterloo on the high plains of Bolivia.

We begin today's press briefing with reports from the BBC (the only
English-language news agency to report on yesterday's murder of three
civilians by military troops) and reports translated from the Bolivian press
on the growing blockade, the grievances of the nation's 250,000 retirees
from whom the drug war has robbed their pensions, the unrest among other
sectors of Civil Society, the direct U.S. sponsorship of and payment for a
new paramilitary strategy to commit atrocities against unarmed civilians,
and the talk among the population of the need to turn their peaceful protest
into an armed struggle if the imposition does not stop.

The people of Bolivia want democracy. They want to make their own decisions
on drug policy, economic policy and every other kind of policy. It now falls
upon Civil Society in the United States and the rest of the world to stop
Washington from its dirty work of preventing democracy in Bolivia.

>From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Publisher
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com/
Reporting on the "war on drugs" from Latin America
narconews@hotmail.com

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