U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia, Repeating Venezuela Effort

[Joanne98]

May 6th 2008, by Nikolas Kozloff - CounterPunch
Having avoided any meaningful coverage of Bolivia since the election of Evo Morales in December, 2005, the international media is now obliged to play catch up. Yesterday, the Andean nation of 9.1 million held a crucial vote which could pave the way for secession of the resource-rich Santa Cruz region.

In a challenge to Morales’ authority, more than 80% of voters approved a referendum which would allow more powers for Santa Cruz, an area which is responsible for about 30 percent of Bolivia's gross domestic product while making up about a quarter of the country's population. Morales, who rejected the autonomy vote as illegal, called on the opposition to engage in a dialogue with his government.

Fundamentally, the Santa Cruz imbroglio is a struggle over oil and gas.

The mixed race elite in the lowlands wants more local control over the resources while Morales, who has the support of indigenous peoples in the highlands, wants the wealthier eastern regions to contribute more to the poorer west.

Affluent leaders in Santa Cruz are particularly incensed by a new draft constitution which would limit large land holdings. In a repudiation of the constitutional reforms, the people of Santa Cruz voted yesterday to give their region more control over land distribution, as well as rich oil and gas reserves.

So what happens next?

The Santa Cruz referendum has set an ominous precedent: three other eastern provinces, Tarija, Pando, and Bendi, which also possess large fields of crude oil and natural gas, have said they too will vote on greater autonomy. If voters there move to repudiate the central government as well, it could set up a civil war scenario leading to national breakup.

The Secret Hand Behind Secession

If political tensions were not high enough, Morales escalated matters further when he accused the U.S. of backing eastern secessionists. Warning that he would take “radical decisions” against foreign diplomats who become involved in Bolivian politics, Morales remarked “I cannot understand how some ambassadors dedicate themselves to politics, and not diplomacy, in our country. That is not called cooperation. That is called conspiracy."

Meanwhile, Vice President Álvaro García accused the U.S Embassy of financing "publications, trips, and seminars" to help Morales' opposition develop "ideological and political resistance" to the administration.

Morales has some just reason to be paranoid. As I document in some detail in my current book, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan), Morales’s socialist agenda, coca-style nationalism and hostility to economic neo-liberalism has hardly succeeded in ingratiating himself amongst the Beltway elite. The Bolivian leader’s increasingly close ties to Venezuela and Cuba have similarly set off the alarm bell for U.S. diplomats.

In an effort to rollback social and political change in Bolivia, the U.S has funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups through USAID and The National Endowment for Democracy. What’s more, USAID explicitly supports demands of the right wing for greater regional autonomy in the east.

It’s not the first time, however, that the U.S. has sought to encourage secessionist sentiment within South American regions possessing rich natural resources.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3416

[stimbox]

1. The Balkanization of South America begins... n/t

[canucksawbones]

3. begins...

screwing with latin America has been part of the US agenda since the 60's, read the shock doctrine.
This is just another crack at Bolivia after the Bechtel water scandal riled up the Bolivians enough to push back.

GK

[stimbox]

5. Duh, eh?

Don't need to read the shock doctrine, I'm fully aware of the shit the U.S does in South and Central America.
Look up balkanization and then get back to me, eh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization

[Vidar]

6. More like the 1840's, but you are correct. We've been fucking with them a long time.

[Miss Authoritiva]

2. Always check for oil and gas...

Whenever I read or hear of rumblings such as this, I always check out what oil and natural gas resources (including pipelines) the region or country has, if the US has any military bases in-country, and whatever influence (USAID, for example) the US may exert in the area.

This sounds a lot like the Kosovo "independence" movement transplanted to South America.

It still astonishes me that the US prefers to "do business" this way. If Iraq has taught us anything, it's that it's ultimately far less expensive and far less chaotic to negotiate oil and gas deals and then sign on the dotted line. China, Japan, India, Malaysia, and several European countries seem to do just fine with this approach.

Maybe it's true: If a big country has a big army, a big military budget, and state-of-the-art psyops and intelligence operations, it has an insatiable urge to use them.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Don't forget the degree to which the U.S. "meddled" (I'll say!) in Bolivia with Hugo Banzer

As you read more, in other sources, concerning other Presidents, you will see this is just one guy they used against the people of Bolivia. This small sketch of Hugo Banzer was written in 1995, too early to include the fact he also ruled from 1997 to 2001, when he died of cancer:

COLONEL HUGO BANZER
President of Bolivia
In 1970, in Bolivia, when then-President Juan Jose Torres nationalized Gulf Oil properties and tin mines owned by US interests, and tried to establish friendly relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, he was playing with fire. The coup to overthrow Torres, led by US-trained officer and Gulf Oil beneficiary Hugo Banzer, had direct support from Washington. When Banzer's forces had a breakdown in radio communications, US Air Force radio was placed at their disposal. Once in power, Banzer began a reign of terror. Schools were shut down as hotbeds of political subversive activity. Within two years, 2,000 people were arrested and tortured without trial. As in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, the native Indians were ordered off their land and deprived of tribal identity. Tens-of-thousands of white South Africans were enticed to immigrate with promises of the land stolen from the Indians, with a goal of creating a white Bolivia. When Catholic clergy tried to aid the Indians, the regime, with CIA help, launched terrorist attacks against them, and this "Banzer Plan" became a model for similar anti-Catholic actions throughout Latin America.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html

(If I'm not mistaken, this was the era of Richard M. Nixon, as the U.S. President who engineered this crap. (Don't forget his fine work in Chile, etc.)

[Judi Lynn]

7. American Rancher at Odds With Bolivian Government

May 9, 2008
American Rancher at Odds With Bolivian Government
By SIMON ROMERO
CARAPARICITO, Bolivia

~snip~
Mr. Almaraz, a bearded official who shows up at meetings chewing coca leaves, said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by naming the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”

Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”

At stake is the 37,000-acre Caraparicito ranch, which Mr. Larsen bought in 1969 for $55,000, and other holdings of more than 104,000 acres, according to government estimates. Mr. Larsen, who as a protective measure transferred ownership of almost all his land to his three sons, who are Bolivian citizens, declined to say how much land his family owned.

With his reserved demeanor, Mr. Larsen, a descendant of Danish immigrants to the American Midwest, makes it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world to light out for Bolivia in the 1960s, after he got bored working for a year as a manager at a J. C. Penney department store.

“A buddy of mine in the Peace Corps told me Bolivia was a good place to invest,” he said. “When I got here you could buy land as far as you could see.”
(snip)

Within months of his arrival in 2004, he won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant, after compensating for his American-accented Spanish at the finale by shouting, “Viva Bolivia!” before a stunned panel of judges. Shortly afterward, he was cast as himself in a Bolivian comedy about cocaine smuggling entitled “Who Killed the White Llama?”

Now Duston is focused on guarding the family’s land, ahead of his marriage to Claudia Azaeda, a talk show host and former beauty pageant winner. Depicted in newspaper cartoons as a gun-slinging “Mr. Gringo Bolivia,” he basks in the showdown with Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian who is Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said in an interview on the porch of the 19th-century ranch house at Caraparicito, amid the howls of his two pet spider monkeys, Harley and Tuto.

He vehemently asserted that ranch hands and their families were free to come and go, after the Larsens and other ranchers were faced with government claims that ranches in their region held their Guaraní workers in servitude; the government has used the charge to move ahead with land seizures.

The reality of life at Caraparicito and other ranches may be more complex than either side suggests. At Caraparicito, workers get work contracts, food, clothing, housing and education for their children at a two-room schoolhouse on the ranch. But wages remain dismally low with senior farmhands earning less than $6 a day.
(snip)

In 2004, the French energy giant Total discovered one of the largest unexploited natural gas deposits in Bolivia, called Incahuasi, on the ranch. The rights to such discoveries automatically go to the government in Bolivia.

But Mr. Larsen said he believed that one reason the central government was so interested in his land was because of its natural gas. President Morales could bypass the province of Santa Cruz in reaching deals related to the natural gas field if he is able to settle Indians on the land who are sympathetic to his government.
(snip)

Juan Carlos Rojas, the director of Bolivia’s land reform agency, said the battle got personal when Mr. Larsen issued a veiled threat against him and other officials when the American rancher referred to a well-known incident in the 1980s in which he shot dead three intruders inside his home.

“Larsen made it clear that he was above the law,” said Mr. Rojas, who emerged from another standoff at Caraparicito in April with his face bloodied from a rock-throwing exchange. Echoing comments by Mr. Morales, he said Santa Cruz’s newly approved autonomy was “illegal” in his view.

“The last I looked, the Larsens were living in Bolivia and not the Republic of Santa Cruz,” Mr. Rojas said. “Despite Ronald Larsen’s resistance, we are going to get into his ranch.”

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/world/americas/09bolivia.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=world