The kidnapping of Evo Morales

The 'kidnapping' of the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has made international waves
as the following New York Times articles demonstrates. The US fears that Snowden was on board
were unfounded, this former spook remains at Sheremetryevo Aeroport in no-man's-land with his passport revoked. However, the US has now lost any support it had over the Morales incident, and it will actually be easier for Snowden to find haven; expect Ecuador to grant it. Also, Ecuador has found a bug in its London embassy, planted by the CIA - which has infiltrated the UK intel forces. Sad that the UK will be left to take the blame for the bug, hopefully the truth will emerge and both Ecuador and the UK will be better able to thwart the CIA/NSA and other US spy agencies.

Helmut Fohringer/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, speaking to reporters at an airport near Vienna. France and Portugal had blocked his plane.

By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ALISON SMALE

Published: July 3, 2013

CARACAS, Venezuela — The geopolitical storm churned up by Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American intelligence contractor, continued to spread on Wednesday as Latin American leaders roundly condemned the refusal to let Bolivia’s president fly over several European nations, rallying to his side after Bolivian officials said the president’s plane had been thwarted because of suspicions that Mr. Snowden was on board.

Calling it a grave offense to their entire region, Latin American officials said they would hold an emergency meeting of the Union of South American Nations on Thursday.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina said the episode had “vestiges of a colonialism that we thought was completely overcome,” describing it as a humiliating act that affected all of South America.

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador said in a post on Twitter that the situation was “extremely serious” and called it an “affront to all America,” referring to Latin America.

The diplomatic and political tempest over Mr. Snowden and his revelations of far-reaching American espionage programs has swept up adversaries and allies from across the globe.

Tensions emerged right away between the United States and the two major powers Mr. Snowden has fled to, China and Russia, over their refusal to detain him and turn him over to the American authorities.

The discord soon spread to some of America’s closest allies in Europe. After newspaper reports based on documents Mr. Showden compiled as a contractor for the National Security Agency showed that the United States had been spying on an array of embassies and diplomatic missions, including the European Union’s offices in Washington, Brussels and New York, the outrage rattled prospects for a trans-Atlantic free-trade agreement.

The United States and Europe have emphasized the importance of the trade talks, saying they would create the world’s largest free trade zone and stimulate growth. But on Wednesday, France said it would be wise for the talks to be suspended for two weeks to give Washington time to supply information about its spying program.

Hours later, José Manuel Barroso, the head of the union’s governing commission, announced a compromise in which trade talks could start as planned, but only if the United States opened talks at the same time on its intelligence operations.

Seeking to keep the trade talks on track, President Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany later responded with an agreement that security officials from their countries would hold a “high-level meeting” in coming days, Ms. Merkel’s spokesman said in a statement.

In a telephone call to President Obama on Wednesday evening, the chancellor noted that a visit to Washington by senior officials from the German government and its intelligence services offered the chance for an “intensive discussion” of concerns over the scope of American intelligence activities, data protection and privacy, the statement said.

But French officials, speaking to reporters, made it clear that they would still favor delaying trade talks if there was no movement from the Americans on the espionage by next week.

And now, the uproar has encompassed Latin America as well.

“In some sense, it parallels ironically what the N.S.A. is doing,” said Faiza Patel, a co-director of the liberty and national security program of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a research and advocacy organization. “The N.S.A. is reaching its tentacles aross the world.”

Mr. Snowden and his disclosures have touched different chords in each region. In Europe, Ms. Patel noted, they have provoked memories of the police states created by fascism and communism, with their heavy-handed surveillance of their own people. In Latin America, she said, they have touched on a wellspring of resentment over the legacy of colonialism and American power, as well as the region’s own history of secretive dictatorships.       

The latest burst of outrage came in response to the diversion of a plane carrying Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, as he was flying home from Moscow on Tuesday. He had attended a meeting of nations that export natural gas and had told Russian television that he was open to giving asylum to Mr. Snowden.

Mr. Snowden has been holed up at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow for more than a week, hoping to receive a positive response to the asylum requests he has made to several countries, and Mr. Morales’s remark may have set off suspicion that he was bringing the fugitive aboard.

After taking off from Moscow, Mr. Morales’s plane sought permission to land in France to refuel, according to Carlos Romero, the minister of government in La Paz, Bolivia. But France refused and denied the plane permission to enter French airspace, Bolivian officials said. Portugal had previously refused to let the plane land for refueling in Lisbon.

Mr. Morales was given permission to land in Vienna, where he spent the night. Officials said that as a new flight plan was being drawn up, Italy also denied permission for Mr. Morales’s plane to use its airspace. Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said the refusals stemmed from “unfounded suspicions that Mr. Snowden was on the plane.”

Karl-Heinz Grundböck, a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry, said that the Austrian border authorities carried out a routine check of the passports of everyone aboard Mr. Morales’s plane after it landed and that they were also granted permission to search the plane to ensure that Mr. Snowden was not aboard. “The rumors were just that,” Mr. Grundböck said.

But in La Paz, officials said no search had taken place, contending that it would be improper to search the plane of a head of state. As for the forced diversion of the flight, the vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, equated it to a kidnapping.

“Yesterday was one of the most shameful pages in the political history of some countries in Europe,” Mr. García Linera said in La Paz on Wednesday.

French officials apologized on Wednesday, saying they had never meant to block Mr. Morales from their airspace and reversed the decision after learning that the Bolivian president was aboard.

“There was conflicting information about the passengers who were on board,” said the French president, François Hollande. “When I knew it was the plane of the Bolivian president, I immediately gave permission for it to fly” over French territory, he said.

Some Latin American officials blamed the United States, insisting that the Obama administration had instructed its European allies to stop Mr. Morales’s plane on the suspicion that it carried Mr. Snowden, who is wanted on charges of violating espionage laws for divulging secrets about American surveillance programs. The White House declined to comment on whether the American government had anything to do with the plane’s diversion.

At the State Department, a spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, declined to say whether American authorities had asked other countries to deny airspace to the Bolivian plane. “I would point you to them to describe why they made decisions if they made decisions,” Ms. Psaki told reporters.

After European nations eventually cleared Mr. Morales to fly, he took off from the Vienna airport about 11:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the foreign minister of Ecuador, Ricardo Patiño, said on Wednesday in Quito that his government had discovered a hidden microphone in the office of its ambassador in London. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who has been acting as an adviser to Mr. Snowden, has been living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for more than a year, given asylum there to escape extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on sexual assault allegations.

Mr. Patiño, whose country is a possible asylum destination for Mr. Snowden, said that the device was linked to a private British security firm and that he was asking British authorities for help in finding out who was behind the bugging.

27 December New York Times article

In today's New York Times - what is finally a focused and objective article on Bolivia, though, sadly, about cocaine which is not what Bolivia is about; one would hope that the NYT would spend time writing about the birdlife, orchids, indigenous festivals, social improvements under the MAS government, chocolate farming, mineral resources, coffee production - the list of positive things is endless, why all the attention on some stupid drug that people do to make themselves think they are cool?

 

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Coca Licensing Is a Weapon in Bolivia’s Drug War

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Augustine Calicho, 45, separating the seeds from dried coca leaves in Villa Tunari in the Chapare region of Bolivia. More Photos »

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Published: December 26, 2012   

TODOS SANTOS, Bolivia — There is nothing clandestine about Julián Rojas’s coca plot, which is tucked deep within acres of banana groves. It has been mapped with satellite imagery, cataloged in a government database, cross-referenced with his personal information and checked and rechecked by the local coca growers’ union. The same goes for the plots worked by Mr. Rojas’s neighbors and thousands of other farmers in this torrid region east of the Andes who are licensed by the Bolivian government to grow coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

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Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Meri Pintas, 30, center, harvesting coca leaves with her children in the Yungas region of Bolivia. Thousands of legal coca patches are intended to produce coca leaf for traditional uses. More Photos »

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Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

A counternarcotics agent explained the eradication process to coca growers whose patch was two rows over the legal limit. More Photos »

President Evo Morales, who first came to prominence as a leader of coca growers, kicked out the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2009. That ouster, together with events like the arrest last year of the former head of the Bolivian anti-narcotics police on trafficking charges, led Washington to conclude that Bolivia was not meeting its global obligations to fight narcotics.

But despite the rift with the United States, Bolivia, the world’s third-largest cocaine producer, has advanced its own unorthodox approach toward controlling the growing of coca, which veers markedly from the wider war on drugs and includes high-tech monitoring of thousands of legal coca patches intended to produce coca leaf for traditional uses.

To the surprise of many, this experiment has now led to a significant drop in coca plantings in Mr. Morales’s Bolivia, an accomplishment that has largely occurred without the murders and other violence that have become the bloody byproduct of American-led measures to control trafficking in Colombia, Mexico and other parts of the region.

Yet there are also worrisome signs that such gains are being undercut as traffickers use more efficient methods to produce cocaine and outmaneuver Bolivian law enforcement to keep drugs flowing out of the country.

In one key sign of progress in Bolivia’s approach toward coca, the total acres planted with coca dropped 12 to 13 percent last year, according to separate reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. At the same time, the Bolivian government stepped up efforts to rip out unauthorized coca plantings and reported an increase in seizures of cocaine and cocaine base.

“It’s fascinating to look at a country that kicked out the United States ambassador and the D.E.A., and the expectation on the part of the United States is that drug war efforts would fall apart,” said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, a Bolivian research group. Instead, she said, Bolivia’s approach is “showing results.”

Still, there is skepticism. “Our perspective is they’ve made real advances, and they’re a long way from where we’d like to see them,” said Larry Memmott, chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy in La Paz. “In terms of law enforcement, a lot remains to be done.”

Although Bolivia outlaws cocaine, it permits the growing of coca for traditional uses. Bolivians chew coca leaf as a mild stimulant and use it as a medicine, as a tea and, particularly among the majority indigenous population, in religious rituals.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rojas placed a few dried leaves into his mouth and watched the sun set over his coca field, slightly less than two-fifths of an acre, the maximum allowed per farmer here in this region, known as the Chapare.

“This is a way to keep it under control,” he said, spitting a stream of green juice. “Everyone should have the same amount.”

Mr. Rojas is a face of a changing region. He makes far more money growing bananas for export on about 74 acres than he does growing coca. But he has no intention of giving up his tiny coca plot. “What happens if a disease attacks the bananas?” he asked. “Then we still have the coca to save us.”

The Bolivian government has persuaded growers that by limiting the amount of plantings, coca prices will remain high. And it has largely focused eradication efforts, of the kind that once spurred strong popular resistance, outside the areas controlled by growers’ unions, like in national parks.

The registration of thousands of Chapare growers, completed this year, is part of an enforcement system that relies on growers to police one another. If registered growers are found to have plantings above the maximum allowed, soldiers are called in to remove the excess. If growers violate the limit a second time, their entire crop is cut down and they lose the right to grow coca.

Growers’ unions can also be punished if there are multiple violations among their members.

“We have to be constantly vigilant,” said Nelson Sejas, a Chapare grower who was part of a team that checked coca plots to make sure they did not exceed the limit.

But there is still plenty of cheating. Officials say they are going over the registry of about 43,000 Chapare growers to find those who may have multiple plots or who may violate other rules.

“The results speak for themselves,” said Carlos Romero, the minister of government. “We have demonstrated that you can objectively do eradication work without violating human rights, without polemicizing the topic and with clear results.”

He said that the government was on pace to eradicate more acres of coca this year than it did last year, without the violence of years past. A government report said 60 people were killed and more than 700 were wounded in the Chapare from 1998 to 2002 in violence related to eradication.

But even as Bolivia shows progress, grave concerns remain.

The White House drug office estimated that despite the decrease in total coca acreage last year, the amount of cocaine that could potentially be produced from the coca grown in Bolivia jumped by more than a quarter. That is because a large amount of recent plantings began to mature and reach higher yields; new plantings with higher yields replaced older, less productive fields; and traffickers switched to more efficient processing methods.

Yet the glaring paradox of Bolivia’s monitoring program is that vast amounts of the legally grown coca ultimately wind up in the hands of drug traffickers and are converted into cocaine and other drugs. Most of those drugs go to Brazil, considered the world’s second-largest cocaine market. Virtually no Bolivian cocaine ends up in the United States.

César Guedes, the representative in Bolivia of the United Nations drugs office, said that roughly half of the country’s coca acreage produces coca that goes to the drug trade. By some estimates, more than 90 percent of the coca in Chapare, one of two main producing regions, goes to drugs.

Two Chapare farmers explained that they generally sell one 50-pound bag of coca leaf from each harvest to the government-regulated market. The rest, often 200 pounds or more, is sold to buyers who work with traffickers and pay a premium over the government-authorized price. One of the growers said he recently delivered coca leaf directly to a lab where it would be turned into drugs.

The central question is how much coca is needed to supply traditional needs. Current government policy permits about 50,000 acres of legal coca plantings, although the actual area in cultivation is much higher. The United Nations estimated there were 67,000 acres of coca last year.

Whatever the exact figure, most analysts agree that far more is produced than is needed to supply the traditional market.

The European Union financed a study several years ago to estimate how much coca was needed for traditional uses, but the Bolivian government has refused to release it, saying that more research is needed.

The push to reduce coca acreage comes as the Morales government is lobbying other countries to amend a United Nations convention on narcotics to recognize the legality of traditional uses of coca leaf in Bolivia. A decision is expected in January.

On a recent morning just after dawn, a squad of uniformed soldiers used machetes to cut down a plot of coca plants near the town of Ivirgarzama.

They had come to chop down an old coca patch that had passed its prime and measure a replacement plot planted by the farmer. The soldiers determined that the new plot was slightly over the limit and removed about two rows of plants before going on their way.

“Before, there was more tension, more conflict, more people injured,” Lt. Col. Willy Pozo said. “This is no longer a war.”

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky contributed reporting from Ivirgarzama, Bolivia.