[Peace-discuss] US Secretly Targeted Evo Morales Of Bolivia

[David Johnson]

US Secretly Targeted Evo Morales Of Bolivia

Description: WENDERSON ARAUJO VIA GETTY IMAGES

 <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Educate!
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/bolivia/> Bolivia,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/evo-morales/> Evo Morales,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/imperialism/> Imperialism,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/war-on-drugs/> War On Drugs 
By Ryan Grim and Nick Wing,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/operation-naked-king-evo-morales_55f70d
a2e4b077ca094fdbe1> www.huffingtonpost.com
September 16th, 2015

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WENDERSON ARAUJO VIA GETTY IMAGES

The United States has secretly indicted top officials connected to the
government of Bolivian President Evo Morales for their alleged involvement
in a cocaine trafficking scheme. The indictments, secured in a U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration sting called “Operation Naked King,” have not
been previously reported.

Morales, a former leader of Bolivia’s coca growers union, has long been at
loggerheads with the DEA. In 2008, Morales expelled the agency from the
country and embarked on his own strategy of combatting drug trafficking,
acknowledging the traditional uses of coca in Bolivian culture and
<http://ain-bolivia.org/2012/12/bolivian-drug-control-efforts-genuine-progre
ss-daunting-challenges/> working cooperatively with coca growers to regulate
some legal activity and to promote alternative development elsewhere.
Morales’ plan has been effective at reducing cultivation, according to the
United Nations.

But that doesn’t mean the DEA accepted its eviction quietly. In fact, the
agency went after members of Morales’ administration in an apparent effort
to undermine his leadership.

The sealed indictments, revealed last week in a
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/carlos-toro-dea-informant-lawsuit_55e60
6f2e4b0c818f619825a> lawsuit filed by long-time DEA informant Carlos Toro,
target Walter Álvarez, a top Bolivian air force official; the late Raul
García, father of Vice President Álvaro García Linera; Faustino Giménez, an
Argentine citizen and Bolivian resident who is said to be close to the vice
president; and Katy Alcoreza, described as an intelligence agent for
Morales. Toro said in the court document that he played an integral role in
securing the indictments as part of the DEA’s undercover investigation into
the alleged Bolivian cocaine trafficking ring, which the agency ran out of
its office in Asuncion, Paraguay.

We could find ourselves faced with a narcostate that supports the
uncontrolled cultivation of coca.U.S. General James T. Hill

Toro filed suit against the federal government in the U.S. Court of Federal
Claims in September, asking for $5 million in unpaid compensation for his
more than 25 years of work for the DEA. A one-time senior official with the
Medellin cartel, he went public about his career in a
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/09/carlos-toro-dea-informant_n_701946
6.html> series of interviews with The Huffington Post, and subsequently with
CBS News. He has been involved in the investigation, arrest or prosecution
of major figures, from Colombian drug trafficker Carlos Lehder to Panamanian
dictator Manuel Noriega, to top members of Mexican cartels.

Spokespeople for the State Department, Department of Justice and DEA
declined to comment. However, previous media reports in the region have
accused top officials in the Morales administration of being involved in
international cocaine trafficking. Rene Sanabria and Oscar Nina, both former
top anti-drug officials in the Morales administration, have been
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-31747018> arrested for drug
trafficking. Nina was arrested this March and Sanabria was arrested in
Panama and extradited to the U.S. in 2011; his defenders suspect the arrest
was politically motivated.

This week, the Obama administration announced that it’s planning to
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/14/presidential-determi
nation-major-drug-transit-or-major-illicit-drug> officially “decertify”
Bolivia – a bureaucratic move which amounts to an accusation by U.S.
officials that Bolivia is not sufficiently cooperative in combating drug
trafficking.

Morales on Tuesday addressed the decision to withhold U.S. funds for drug
control purposes, calling it a political maneuver by a nation committed to
ineffective anti-drug tactics.

“I think it is a political action exerted by the State Department of the
United States,” he said during a press conference at the government palace,
according to an English translation of a
<http://www.la-razon.com/nacional/Morales-responde-Obama-antidroga-estadouni
dense_0_2345165539.html> report in Bolivia’s La Razon. “But if we are
honest, U.S. policy is a failure in the fight against drug trafficking in
the world.”

Description:
http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/55f72d4d140000770
02e5a0a.jpegANDEAN INFORMATION NETWORK

Morales went on to tout Bolivia’s recent successes in reducing coca
production, and cited Colombia — which has,
<https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2015/July/colombia-survey-2014_-un
odc-study-shows-significant-increase-in-coca-leaf-production-in-high-density
-areas.html> according to the United Nations, seen a significant increase in
coca cultivation over the past year, despite U.S. support  – as an example
of U.S.-backed failure.

“I could mention many countries in the world where there is this problem and
how it has grown with U.S. presence,” the president said. “They’re using the
fight against drug trafficking for clear political purposes.”

While the White House identified Colombia as a major illicit drug producer,
it wrote that the nation has “demonstrate[d] highly effective leadership in
countering illegal drug trafficking and transnational crime,” calling the
country a “strong partner on counternarcotics.” As evidence, the
administration pointed to high levels of recent crop eradication and drug
seizures.

Morales and the DEA have a long history of animosity. Morales, a member of
the Aymara indigenous group and a one-time coca grower, first rose to power
in Bolivia as the head of a federation of coca growers unions. The union
gained much of its strength by organizing in response to human rights abuses
carried out by the DEA-backed anti-drug group known as UMOPAR, starting in
the 1980s. In 2005, Morales led nationwide protests that toppled the
government of former Bolivian President Carlos Mesa.

Morales became president himself in 2006, and has twice been re-elected by
wide margins. When he was first campaigning, Bolivians in the coca-growing
region of the Chapare, where the president got his start, recalled his rise
as a response to the U.S.-led drug war. Jaimie Rojas, then a 74-year-old
newspaper vendor in Villa Tunari, a town in the Chapare, had known Morales
since he was in his early 20s. “He was able to unite the people and have
them all turn back UMOPAR,” he said of Morales
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2005/05/dispatch
_from_bolivia.html>  in a 2005 interview.

“The war made the American government’s intentions clear to the people of
Chapare. Behind the war on drugs there are other interests. Interests in
natural resources, and in dismantling the unions in the Chapare,”
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2005/05/dispatch
_from_bolivia.html> said Feliciano Mamani, a leader in Morales’ political
party and a coca grower.

Many indigenous Bolivians, including Morales, defend coca production as a
traditional right. After all, Bolivians have used coca leaves in a variety
of ways for thousands of years. But coca is also the essential ingredient in
cocaine, and the nation’s close relationship with the plant has made it the
world’s third-largest producer of the drug, behind Peru and Colombia.

They accuse me of everything. They say Evo is a drug trafficker, that Evo is
a narcoterrorist.Bolivian President Evo Morales

The U.S. government and the DEA made no secret of their displeasure when
their longtime nemesis, Morales, was elected. “If radicals continue to
hijack the indigenous movement, we could find ourselves faced with a
narcostate that supports the uncontrolled cultivation of coca,”
<http://usregsec.sdsu.edu/docs/GeneralHillMarch2004.pdf> General James T.
Hill, a U.S. army commander with the Southern Command, told the House Armed
Services Committee in March 2004, referring to Morales’ movement.

“I don’t think there’s an attractive or viable future by becoming a
narcostate,” John Walters, then the Bush administration’s drug czar,
<http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/bolivia/legalization.htm> told The New
York Times the next year, when it appeared Morales was on his way to
victory.

Morales used the accusations to his political benefit.  “They accuse me of
everything,” Morales said at a campaign rally, according to the
<http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/bolivia/legalization.htm> same Times
article. “They say Evo is a drug trafficker, that Evo is a narcoterrorist.
They don’t know how to defend their position, so they attack us.”

Description: <span class='image-component__caption'
itemprop="caption">Bolivian President Evo Morales, pictured here, expelled
both the U.S. ambassador and the DEA from his country in 2008.</span>CREDIT:
AIZAR RALDES VIA GETTY IMAGESBolivian President Evo Morales, pictured here,
expelled both the U.S. ambassador and the DEA from his country in 2008.

There is a running joke in Bolivia and other Latin American countries that
goes like this:

Q: Why has there never been a military coup in the United States?

A: Because there’s no U.S. embassy in the U.S.

In September 2008, Morales made sure there wouldn’t be one in Bolivia,
either, and
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20080910/bolivia-us-ambassador/>
kicked U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg out of the country.

Then, that November, Morales expelled the DEA,
<http://rawstory.com/news/2008/DEA_encouraged_drug_trade_says_Morales_1106.h
tml> arguing that the agency had committed human rights violations, covered
up murders and was routinely using its investigative powers to target
politicians and movement leaders who were challenging Washington’s
neoliberal agenda. Morales had made a campaign promise to nationalize the
country’s natural gas resources and use the proceeds to develop the economy
from the bottom up.

Responding to Goldberg’s dismissal, a State Department spokesman said at the
time, “The only overthrow we seek is that of poverty 
 No country has ever
improved the well-being of its citizens by antagonizing neighbors and
refraining from fruitful integration with the world’s democracies.”

Yet under Morales, Bolivia has boomed — with much of the benefit accruing to
the very poor — in a stunning success story.

By 2014,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/world/americas/turnabout-in-bolivia-as-ec
onomy-rises-from-instability.html?_r=0> the Times was writing about
Bolivia’s renaissance:

Tucked away in the shadow of its more populous and more prosperous
neighbors, tiny, impoverished Bolivia, once a perennial economic basket
case, has suddenly become a different kind of exception — this time in a
good way.

Its economy grew an estimated 6.5 percent last year, among the strongest
rates in the region. Inflation has been kept in check. The budget is
balanced, and once-crippling government debt has been slashed. And the
country has a rainy-day fund of foreign reserves so large for its relatively
small economy that it could be the envy of nearly every other country in the
world. The Times article notes that extreme poverty under Morales has
plummeted, despite — or, more likely, because of — his refusal to follow the
path the U.S. has urged.

The country’s triumph comes as it faces a foe greater than neoliberalism,
however. La Paz, which sits some 13,000 feet above sea level, depends on the
snowmelt from the surrounding mountains for its survival. As a result of
climate change, the snowpack is disappearing.

In the face of U.S. denunciations that Bolivia would become a narcostate
under Morales, the country has instead managed to reduce coca leaf
cultivation, especially over the past five years. According to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, total production of dried coca leaf
<https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2015/August/2014-bolivia-survey-re
ports-decline-in-coca-cultivation-for-fourth-year-in-a-row.html> fell 11
percent from 2013 to 2014, and has fallen by an
<https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Bolivia/Bolivia_coca_survey
_2014_web.pdf> average of nearly 10 percent each year since 2011.
Interdiction efforts targeting coca cultivation have also dropped
precipitously since the DEA’s dismissal in 2008, though confiscations of
cocaine continued to rise until 2013, when they dropped off significantly.
In 2014, confiscations of processed cocaine hydrochloride returned to
previous levels, though interdiction of coca leaves and cocaine base
remained low.

“[Drug trafficking] must be fought — we are convinced of that — and we are
doing so more effectively and more wisely,” Morales
<http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2014/10/evo-morales-boliv
ian-idol-201410171100284921.html> told Al Jazeera in a 2014 interview. “When
the United States was in control of counternarcotics, the US governments
used drug trafficking for purely geopolitical purposes 
. The US uses drug
trafficking and terrorism for political control 
. We have nationalised the
fight against drug trafficking.”

In 2009, Hillary Clinton warned of Morales and the late Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez’s
<http://archives.democrats.foreignaffairs.house.gov/111/led030309.pdf> “fear
mongering” in written testimony during her secretary of state confirmation
hearings. Yet Morales’ fears, it turns out, weren’t rooted in mere paranoia.
The DEA was, in fact, out to get him.

The revelation of Operation Naked King goes to show that Bolivian leaders’
paranoia was well justified, said Kathryn Ledebur, who runs the Andean
Information Network based in Bolivia. “US authorities frequently dismiss
Bolivian government denunciations about the DEA and US intervention as
absurd speculation, but these revelations show what is common knowledge on
the ground — there has long been an alarming lack of oversight of DEA
operations in Latin America, including recurring mission creep and a
violation of agreements with host countries,” she wrote in an email.

“Even before Morales’s election, high-ranking US officials warned his
policies on coca and drug control and rejection of American policy dictates
would plunge Bolivia into drug trafficking chaos. Yet, without the DEA or US
funding, Bolivia has consistently improved its track record, with the lowest
coca crop in the region and credible interdiction policies. There’s a lot of
cognitive dissonance for US drug warriors, and in this case, it appears some
worked to make their predictions appear true.”

 

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