The Bush Family's Bad Latin Real Estate Investment

[Judi Lynn]

The Bush Family's Bad Latin Real Estate Investment
Submitted by dlindorff on Fri, 2008-05-02 19:34.
By Dave Lindorff

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon charicature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.

Given that President Bush, once he leaves office on January 20, 2009, will no longer have the diplomatic immunity conferred upon heads of state, or the Constitutional protection against indictment by domestic prosecutors, it makes sense that he would be looking for a safe haven from the long arm of the law.

More:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33192

[acmavm]

1. One can only hope. How nice it would be to see justice really exist and

prevail and that pointy-earred criminal freak hauled off from the pig farm in chains to a cell with Cheney, Rice, Wolfie, Feith and the rest.

[glowing]

2. Funny how things work sometimes.. Sometimes there seem to be

angels helping out... A progressive in a nation of criminals.. let's hope they continue protecting.

[Octafish]

3. There'll always be Bolivia.

Especially the natural-gas rich departments.

Autonomy poll threatens to derail Bolivia's revolution

Referendum is elite's tactic to block fairer treatment of indigenous highlanders

Rory Carroll in Santa Cruz and Andres Schipani in Ascension de Guarayos
The Guardian, Saturday May 3

This was supposed to be the moment Bolivia's democratic revolution became carved in stone: a new constitution transferring power from a white elite to the indigenous majority.

Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, swept to power two years ago with a historic mandate to "refound" Bolivia and tomorrow, May 4, was the date set for a constitutional referendum. It is not going to happen. The vote has been suspended. The constitution is trapped in political quicksand and may not escape.

Instead, tomorrow will herald a very different referendum in South America's poorest country. The region of Santa Cruz, a conservative opposition stronghold, is poised to vote for autonomy from the central government and shove the revolution deeper into the mire. The ballot is not legally binding but will boost opposition attempts to control farmland and gas reserves and be seen as a repudiation of Morales.

"We thought Evo would be Bolivia's Mandela and walk the country out of its apartheid past," lamented Jim Shultz, of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Centre, a thinktank sympathetic to government aims. "But two years later he's an embattled president facing rebellion in significant parts of the country."

A Europeanised elite which seemed destined for eclipse has successfully blocked the promised transformation, with the autonomy vote its latest tactic. "Evo had a historic opportunity but he lost it," said a satisfied Oscar Ortiz, president of the senate and a leading opposition figure. "The government project is now in limbo." The constitutional assembly tasked with drafting a new social contract bogged down because the Morales coalition lacked a two-thirds majority and failed to win over the opposition. A draft was approved but, in such disputed circumstances, the electoral court shelved the referendum. No new date has been set.

The opposition seized the initiative by calling an autonomy referendum in the rich region of Santa Cruz. The government has called the vote illegal and urged a boycott, leaving a question mark over turnout but little doubt that the opposition will win a large majority. Morales allies said the opposition was using dangerous tactics to defend its economic interests. "Promoting institutional fragmentation is a means to destabilise the government and spread ungovernability," said Gabriela Montano, the president's representative in Santa Cruz. After the referendum the opposition is expected to claim the right to control local government, taxes, courts, police and natural resources but stop short of secession. The government will claim the vote was meaningless. As so often happens in Bolivia, both sides will probably edge back from the precipice and negotiate, said analysts.

But for the government time is running out to transform the country. Its glum mood is a far cry from 2006 when a former llama herder and coca farmer with a shock of boyish hair electrified Latin America and the wider world by becoming the first Aymara president. Morales won an outright majority, by Bolivian standards a historic mandate.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/03/bolivia

These turds think they have the means, motive and opportunity to escape justice.

What they fear is what you dish out, Judi Lynn: The Truth.

[Turbineguy]

4. Check out the dandy airport:

at Mariscal Estigarribia.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Unbelievable, isn't it? Good grief!

Carved right out of the jungle, in the country with the fewest miles of paved road per capita in South America.

Wikipedia:

Mariscal Estigarribia is a town in the Boquerón Department, Paraguay.


Military base
Mariscal Estigarribia is home to an airport which some media reports claim is a US military base set up to provide access to the strategic Triple Frontera region.

400 US troops arrived in Paraguay in July 2005, shortly after the Paraguayan Senate granted US troops diplomatic immunity. Hundreds of US military personnel are rotated though Paraguay each year, though the military has stated that the total number in the country will not exceed 10-20 at any time.<1>

According to the Clarín Argentinian newspaper, Mariscal Estigarribia would be a strategic location for a military base because of its proximity to the Triple Frontera between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina; the Guarani aquifer; and Bolivia (less than 200km_ at a time when "Washington's magnifying glass goes on the Altiplano and points toward Venezuelan Hugo Chávez—the regional demon according to Bush's administration—as the instigator of the instability in the region".<2>

The US and Paraguayan governments deny that the US military is establishing base at Mariscal Estigarribia.The US government said "...limited, short-term deployments of U.S. military personnel are scheduled to take place for a series of joint exercises with the Paraguayan military between July 2005 and December 2006. Most personnel deployed will not remain in Paraguay for more than 45 days."<3>

A Brazilian weekly news magazine, CartaCapital, published an investigative article on April 25th, 2008, that dismisses what it calls a conspiracy theory about the base. A reporter actually visited it, interviewed Paraguayan military personnel in the area, as well as the airport director, and reached the following conclusions: i) the base was built by the military in the 1970s on Alfredo Stroessner's orders; the air strip is indeed capable of receiving heavy aircraft, including the C-5 Galaxy, but no US personnel is anywhere to be seen, and no signs of military security are present; the airport is in the middle of nowhere, without infra-structure that could support ongoing military operations (as opposed to sporadic exercises like the one that took place with US Armed Forces between 2005 and 2006 in Paraguay); there are no signs of recent investment, US or Paraguayan, to modernise facilities; and the civilian administrator of the airport was actually eager to clinch deals to increase revenue. The only foreign entity that uses the basis regularly is British CDS Oil & Gas. The air strip is indeed big: 3,5 km length, 40 m width, all 35 cm-deep concrete. The reporter concludes that if there are any plans to lease the base to the US military, they have not been implemented to any extent yet and may have become unlikely to be given the recent election of Fernando Lugo. This essentially means that, when US personnel are expelled, in 2009, from the Eloy Alfaro air base in Manta, Ecuador, South America will be the only continent without permanent US military presence in the form of a base.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariscal_Estigarribia

(Right next to Bolivia, where the racists are attempting to pull away from their host country, taking out all the oil and natural gas, and productive farmland, leaving the vast majority of indigenous people, whom they forbade to even walk on the sidewalks until a revolution in 1952, high and dry, hoping and praying the Bechtel Corporation won't return and attempt to charge them for trying to catch the very rain in rain barrels, as they did before, when they ALSO claimed they owned the water in the lakes, rivers and streams.

Without any real doubt, _Bush was expecting to be able to use that Mariscal Estigarribia base as a place from which he could bully the indigenous Bolivians if they attempted to keep the racists Santa Cruzians from taking over the country. They do have their own little regional organization of terrorists they call their Youth Union, which terrorizes indigenous people, even killing them. That must be so appealing to _Bush and bring up tears in the eyes of John Negroponte as it must remind him so clearly of his beloved death squads.)

[Joanne98]

6. Good God!!!

[formercia]

7. Moon Ranch

and the illegal drug production should be shut down as well.

[Turbineguy]

8. But....

denied with dignified scorn:

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Jan/12-623470.html