The War on Hope: How the US tried to stop Evo Morales
In the middle of the night on April 16, 2009, an elite Bolivian police unit entered the four-star Hotel Las Americas situated in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, a hotbed of opposition to the President Evo Morales’s government. Flown in from the capital, La Paz, the commandos planned to raid a group of men staying in the upscale lodgings. What happened in the early hours of that morning is still disputed, but at the end of the operation, three men who were asleep in bed had been killed in cold blood. Some say they were executed, while the Bolivian government claims its officers won out in a 20-minute firefight. In the aftermath, the story gained international attention when it was revealed that two of the dead were not even Bolivian. One was Michael Dwyer, a 26-year-old Irishman from County Cork, where he had been a bouncer and security guard before moving to Santa Cruz just six months earlier. Another, Árpád Magyarosi, was Hungarian-Romanian, and had been a teacher and musician before relocating to Bolivia at the same time. The third person killed in the operation was the ringleader of the group, Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, an eccentric Bolivian-Hungarian who had been born in Santa Cruz before fleeing the country during the US-backed dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the 1970s. His family moved to Chile before the ascent of another US-backed dictator in that country, General Augusto Pinochet, and resettled finally in Hungary. Rózsa was a supporter of Opus Dei, the right-wing Catholic sect, and fought in the Croatian independence war in the early 1990s, founding the paramilitary International Platoon that many believed was aligned with fascistic elements. Two journalists, including a British photographer, died in suspicious circumstances while investigating the platoon. In Santa Cruz on that night, two others, Mario Tadic, a Croatian, and Elöd Tóásó, also from Hungary, were arrested and remain in a high- security La Paz prison to this day. Two more suspects, both with Eastern European connections, were not at the scene and are still missing.
It transpired that the government had acted on intelligence indicating that these men comprised a cell of terrorists who were planning a program of war and violence in the country, which included a somewhat bizarre plan to blow up Evo Morales, the president, and his cabinet on Lake Titicaca, the biggest lake in the Andes and a major tourist attraction. The intelligence services, after a tip-off from an informer close to the group, had been following them for a number of months. They decided to act soon after a bomb exploded at the house of the Archbishop of Santa Cruz, Cardinal Julio Terrazas. The government appointed a seven-person committee to investigate the plot, headed by César Navarro, deputy minister for coordination with social movements and civil society, which spent the next five months until November 2009 looking into it. Among the items seized during the raid was Rózsa’s laptop in which investigators claim to have discovered emails between ex-CIA asset and Cold War double-agent István Belovai. “There are emails between Rózsa and Belovai, he was the brains behind it,” Mr Navarro told me in his office in the presidential palace in La Paz. “He would ask them logistical questions about escape routes, about whether the government or police would be able to get to them.” Belovai, who died in 2010, was a spook who called himself “Hungary’s first NATO soldier”. Rózsa is thought to have become friends with Belovai in the 1990s during the Balkan war.
At the time of the attacks, the attitude of the US embassy, revealed through the cables sent from La Paz to Washington, was one of incredulity at the government’s claims and worry about persecution of the opposition. One comment was headlined ‘“Terrorism” excuse for mass arrests?” The US embassy was concerned about “raising fears of possible arrests of members of the Santa Cruz-based political opposition”. Another cable did admit that in “an interview released posthumously, the group’s leader [Rózsa] advocated the secession of Santa Cruz department, Bolivia’s largest and most prosperous state”. The reaction from the opposition was no less sympathetic. The right-wing governor of Santa Cruz, Rubén Costas, accused the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government of “mounting a show” in the aftermath. The photos released by the government afterward told a different story. Rózsa and Dwyer can be seen posing with large caches of heavy weaponry including pistols and sub-machine guns, and a large rifle with telescopic sights. President Morales said the cell was planning to “riddle us with bullets”. A US embassy official met with a public defender assigned to alleged terrorist Tadic. She told the official that “the Santa Cruz leaders named by the government are most likely linked with the group” – these leaders were in fact intimately involved with the US embassy. Tadic, she said, had been stockpiling weapons and carrying out military training on rural properties outside Santa Cruz. She confirmed they were responsible for placing the explosive device in front of the cardinal’s house, while Tadic had testified that the next target was going to be Prefect Rubén Costas’ residence, and that Rózsa had advised Costas to strengthen his security gate to minimize the damage. The intent in targeting the cardinal and the prefect was to make it look like MAS supporters were carrying out the attacks.
The fact that the alleged terrorists were staying in a four-star hotel with no discernible day job suggested they must have had money coming from somewhere. The pictures of these foreigners partying in Santa Cruz – subsequently released – also show they were accepted and welcomed openly by some powerbrokers in the city – it seemed to go all the way to the top, even the prefect of the department. But none came more powerful than Branko Marinkovic, a local oligarch of Croatian origin, who had been a long-time friend of the US embassy and is now in exile in the US after being identified as one of those “most likely” to have been involved with the terrorist group. Juan Kudelka, Marinkovic’s right-hand man, said in March 2010 that he had been asked by Marinkovic to pass envelopes of money to Rózsa as part of the plan to support this terrorist group, called, he said, “La Torre”. Another suspect, Hugo Achá Melgar, a keen friend of a strange human rights group in New York, also soon fled to the US, where he was also welcomed with open arms. “[T]here are several factors that could induce the [government of Bolivia] to connect us to suspected extremist groups in Santa Cruz,” noted one US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks. “The petition of political asylum from alleged terrorist Hugo Acha and his wife, allocation of USAID assistance to a Bolivian organization suspected of funding a terrorist cell in Santa Cruz, and an implied [US Government] role based on the [Government of Bolivia’s] assertion that the Santa Cruz cell leader organized meetings and had contacts in Washington.” All of these assertions turned out to be true; in fact, the situation was worse than that. The US planned to bring the opposition from all over the country together in a supra-departmental business lobby in an effort to rid Bolivia of its socialist government.
At the time, the US embassy “reassured” Vice President Álvaro García Linera “that there was no US government involvement”, and President Obama vouched for that too when asked by President Morales soon after. But Mr Navarro, the investigator, still didn’t believe it. “The US didn’t not know,” he told me. When I brought Vice President Linera into the Financial Times office in London to speak to the union at the paper, he told me: “Nothing like this happens in Bolivia without the US knowing something about it.” Even if we assume the US embassy didn’t know of the cell, why would the US then provide a sanctuary to alleged funders of “terrorists” whose own public defender was telling the embassy that they were “most likely” guilty? The answer is long and complex and reveals the lengths to which the US has gone to undermine the democratically elected government of Evo Morales since it came to power in 2005.
Turning the tide
The raid and the deaths came at a pivotal moment in Bolivian history. At that time the poorest country in South America, it also had the highest proportion of indigenous people in the continent – 60 percent. In December 2005, there was a tectonic shift in the power structure of the nation, unheard of since independence from Spain, when the country elected its first ever indigenous president, the socialist trade union leader Evo Morales. It wasn’t a sudden development but followed decades of confrontation and public protests that had escalated in the previous five years. In 2000, the so-called “Water Wars”, centered in the city of Cochabamba in the middle of the country, had pitched the local communities en masse against the government and the World Bank which had overseen the privatization of the water industry and resultant soaring prices. Police had been instructed to arrest people collecting rainwater to avoid the new prices they could not afford. Over the next years, the indigenous movement, which is based around small micro-democratic communities, grew stronger. In 2003, mass protests spread and thousands of demonstrators went on to blockade La Paz before troops, allegedly under orders of the government, shot dead a score of protesters.
The presidential incumbent, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, more commonly known as Goni, was forced out and fled to Miami, where he lives to this day. It was in this ferment that Morales, a former cocalero (coca picker) turned trade union leader, and his party, MAS, came to power with a huge take of the popular vote. This turn of events, however, was not greeted kindly by the traditional elites in Bolivia and their international backers. The US had been sending its own political “experts” for years to try to avoid exactly this scenario: a 2005 documentary, Our Brand is Crisis, shows a team of slick campaign managers from Greenberg Carville Shrum, the political consultancy, successfully running Goni’s campaign as he defeated Evo Morales in the 2002 presidential elections. This time it was different: the US was powerless to stop Morales, causing serious worry among planners. Bolivia remains one of the most unequal societies in the western hemisphere, but the established state of affairs had made some people very rich. As the New York Times put it when describing Santa Cruz: “Scenes of extreme poverty stand in contrast here with the construction of garish new headquarters of corporations from Brazil, Europe and the United States.” On top of this, the land distribution has led some analysts to describe the set-up as akin to “semi-feudal provinces dominated by semi-feudal estates”. Five percent of the landowners control over 90 percent of the arable land. When MAS came to power it sought to deal with this egregious inequality, which is marked pretty consistently along race lines, with the poor landless peasants largely comprising the indigenous population. As always, the US supported the oligarchy, which in turn supported the continued slavery of the country to US corporations.
A land reform program was started by Morales to break up the huge rural estates that had long been controlled by a small elite and to redistribute land that was fallow to landless indigenous peasants. The government stipulated that private ownership of huge estates would only be acceptable if put to “social use”. But a plan like that was going to engender vociferous opposition from an entrenched elite that felt it was being usurped. One particularly illustrative case is that of Ronald Larsen, a 67-year-old American from Montana, who came to Bolivia in 1968 and who, by the time President Morales came to power, owned 17 properties throughout Bolivia (along with his sons), comprising 141,000 acres, or three times the size of the country’s biggest city. The new Bolivian government accused Mr Larsen of keeping indigenous Guarani farmers as “virtual slaves”, and tried to deliver seeds to them to help them escape from servitude. Mr Larsen responded: “These people, their main thing in life is where they’re going to get their next bowl of rice. A few bags of rice buys a lot of support.”1 The government reported that it was fired on as it tried to deliver the said rice.
The reaction to land reform from the east of the country, where the majority of natural resources and wealth is located, was near hysterical. A class of magnates – most of European descent – own many of the businesses there and, over the next three years, with their allies in the media luna (the crescent-shaped “opposition” area of the country) worked to bring down the new President Morales. The US government and its agencies, which had for decades exercised overwhelming economic and political power over Bolivia in tandem with these newly displaced elites, was not a benign player in this period. It actively worked to help the opposition and undermine the democratically elected government. The spider web of US control was, and is, extensive, with many US agencies created at the height of the Cold War still in place, civilized language hiding their use, first, as a tool against Soviet influence in the region, and now to undermine the democratic socialism of MAS. Despite vast natural gas reserves, these agencies, alongside transnational corporations and their local compradors in government, have conspired to keep Bolivia the second-poorest country, and among the most unequal, in South America.
When the MAS government threatened to upend that social order, it was logical that the US would be nervous. One of President Morales’ first acts in power was to shutter the CIA office that had until then, he said, been operating in the presidential palace. Morales’ claims that the various agencies that make up the US foreign policy apparatus have been giving covert support to the opposition are dismissed by the US government as “conspiracy theories”. Alongside the US government, a score of non-governmental institutions, some headquartered in New York, or US-ally Colombia, have been working to undermine the democratic government in Bolivia and continue to this day.
Paying clandestine visits
When I interviewed César Navarro, who headed the investigation of the April 2009 incident, in his office lined with pictures of Che Guevara and prominent members of Bolivian civil society, he spoke at 100 miles an hour, desperate to get all the information out as quickly as possible. “Rózsa didn’t come here by himself, they brought him,” he told me. “Hugo Achá Melgar brought him.” The prosecutor in the case had charged that one of Achá’s business cards was found in the backpack of one of the alleged terrorists. Further, it was claimed that Achá met with Rózsa on at least three occasions, while testimony from other terrorist suspects in custody implicated Achá as a financial supporter of the group. The Bolivian government has tried to request the extradition of Achá, who is currently in the United States, to no avail.
Achá’s story reveals a long trail that leads all the way to a set of plush offices in the midtown area of Manhattan. The husband of a prominent opposition congresswoman, Achá was the founder and head of a Bolivian version of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an American non- governmental organization (NGO) based in New York. Not very well known – but boasting Elie Wiesel and Václav Havel on its “international council” – the HRF was founded in 2005 by a character atypical of the NGO and human rights world. A rich playboy-cum-political talking head, Thor Halvorssen could be spotted on the Manhattan party scene, as well as giving his two-pennies-worth on Fox News.
His foundation is not typical either – Mr Halvorssen told The Economist in 2010 that he wanted his organization to break from the traditional NGO mold. First his group had an overt agenda, the magazine said, focusing “mainly on the sins of leftist regimes in Latin America”. But his tactics were different, too. “With the confidence of a new kid on the block,” the article continued, “he argues that the big players in human rights have become too bureaucratic, and disinclined to do bold things like pay clandestine visits to repressive countries.” From his midtown Manhattan office, Halvorssen said: “They work in these big marbled offices, where’s the heart in that?” It was in the dusty streets of La Paz that he wanted to be. In many ways, Halvorssen was merely a chip off the old block. HRF’s obsession with the “repressive” governments of, particularly, Venezuela and Bolivia was not something new to the family. Neither were clandestine activities. Halvorssen’s father, Thor Halvorssen Hellum, is a Venezuelan businessman, the head of one of the richest families in the country. In 1993, he was arrested and charged with homicide and other counts after a group of terrorists set off a series of six bombs around the capital, Caracas. It was named the “yuppie” terrorists plot because its planners were allegedly bankers and other gilded elite who hoped that the panic caused by the bombs would help them speculate on the stock market. The Houston Chronicle noted at the time: “Police have identified one alleged mastermind as Thor Halvorssen, a former president of telephone company CANTV, former presidentially-appointed anti-drug commissioner, and, according to officials, a former operative of the US Central Intelligence Agency in Central America.” Halvorssen Hellum eventually spent 74 days in prison before a superior court judge found him innocent of attempted homicide and all other charges related to the bombings. Many found the decision murky. And two hours after his release, another “human rights” NGO, the International Society for Human Rights, appointed him director of its Pan-American committee. During a CIA “anti- drug” campaign in Venezuela, which saw a ton of nearly pure cocaine shipped to the US in 1990, Mr Halvorssen Hellum, in his position as narcotics chief, was again in trouble. The New York Times reported that “[t]he DEA discovered that Halvorssen, who had his own links to the CIA, was using information from DEA cases to smear political and business rivals”.
Like father like son. Halvorssen Jnr’s own human rights project, the HRF, was set up, he said, to help in “defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy in the Americas”. HRF “will research and report on human rights abuses” and “produce memoranda, independent analyses, and policy reports”. But it is clear that the organization is set up, primarily, to malign the governments of Venezuela and Bolivia. It did have sizeable funds to carry out its tasks. The group’s financial accounts make interesting reading. In the year ending December 31, 2006, the first full year of operations, the group spent $300,518 on its programs. By the next year, ending 2007, this had more than doubled to $644,163. In 2008, this had gone down to $595,977, but it surged again in 2009 to $832,532, as political violence was reaching a head in Bolivia. Interestingly, in the year ended 2008, “general programs”, which was the highest spending category, was $85,525, or 14.4 percent of total spending on “program services”. By 2009, “general programs” spending was up 813 percent to $458,840, and comprised 55 percent of total spending. In the four years from 2006 to 2009, HRF has spent nearly $2.6 million on running costs. But where was the money going? We do know thanks to the WikiLeaks cables that when Branko Marinkovic, the oligarch, fled to the US from Bolivia, one of his first ports of calls was the HRF office in Manhattan. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they talked about. In its six years of operations, the group has released two 30-odd page annual reports, and 16 other reports on varying topics related to “repressive governments”. To be fair, the group did organize an Oslo human rights conference which, one Wall Street Journal journalist noted, was “unlike any human-rights conference I’ve ever attended”, because “there was no desire to blame … the US or other Western nations”.
In the same article, Mr Halvorssen laughed off claims that he, like his father, was in cahoots with the CIA, calling such claims “conspiracy theories”. But links between his group and Achá, the man accused of buying the tickets for the terrorists in Santa Cruz, were closer than he let on. Mr Halvorssen maintained that the Bolivian group was “inspired by HRF’s work” but is “a group of Bolivian individuals … a wholly independent group with a board of directors made up entirely of Bolivian nationals”. Really? Achá was briefing the US embassy on his problems all through the period and officers from the embassy met with him in “his capacity as head of Human Rights Foundation – Bolivia”, which the embassy was told was tightly linked to the New York-based organization. One cable notes that Achá’s outfit is “an affiliate of the larger Human Rights Foundation group” – the one headed by Mr Halvorssen.
The HRF group in New York naturally still denies any wrongdoing by Achá, and is, according to some, likely helping him in his efforts to remain in the US. Its spokesperson told the press that “Human Rights Foundation in Bolivia has carried out extraordinary work denouncing human rights abuses in that country, and unfortunately the response of Morales comes in the form of insults and unfounded accusations … We have carried out an internal review and have found no evidence that Mr. Acha is linked to the group that the government claims is carrying out separatist activities.” As WikiLeaks cables reveal, the group further accused President Morales of “vilifying the reputation” of HRF due to HRF–Bolivia’s reporting on the “destruction of democratic institutions, the grand human rights violations in Bolivia” and the “anti-democratic character of the Morales Administration”. It was a typical response. The Bolivian human rights ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) Waldo Albarracin, referring specifically to the Human Rights Foundation, told the US embassy: “they do not have the facts and so any opinion they have is just that, an opinion.”
Achá was at one point arrested on suspicion of being involved in the plot. The cables reveal the concern of the embassy over the arrest of this “Embassy contact and leader of a human rights NGO”. Achá had even given the embassy a copy of the warrant for his arrest, which he linked to his “investigations” into a massacre in the Pando department of Bolivia (carried out, in fact, by far-right elements of the opposition). But, like many of the opposition figures, he was successful in persuading the US to grant him political asylum. The cable ends by saying that “Acha is currently in the US”. Providing a sanctuary for Bolivian suspects would become a theme of US policy. In fact, the US had been active in his alleged terrorist education. According to the WikiLeaks cables, Achá had actually participated in a Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies “Terrorism and Counterinsurgency” course in Washington in late 2008 – one assumes to gain knowledge for his own violent “counter-insurgency” terrorism back in Bolivia. Included in the course’s mandatory reading were “Left Wing Terrorism in Italy” by Donatella della Porta and “Lenin on Armed Insurrection” by Tony Cliff.
Roger Pinto, a senator for the opposition party, Podemos, told the US embassy that the government “has evidence that Acha was involved with the alleged Santa Cruz cell”. He added that Achá was involved in trying to solicit funds for the group from opposition leaders in the media luna, the opposition stronghold, but only in order to “set up a self-defense force for the Media … not to assassinate the President”. Pinto contended that, among others, Achá had approached the mayor of the central city of Trinidad, Moises Shriqui, with Rózsa to enlist his support. Pinto said that Shriqui flatly refused to get involved and discounted the group as “a really bad idea”. Another opposition Podemos deputy, Claudio Banegas, told the US embassy that the congressional investigation into the Santa Cruz group had revealed that Achá did in fact have a relationship with the cell. His colleague said his involvement was “not at the top of the lighthouse, just at the bottom”. In another cable from La Paz, Achá is called a “human rights lawyer” and it is noted that political officers from the embassy met twice with him in Santa Cruz while he was investigating the September 2008 massacre of indigenous peasants in the Pando department of Bolivia. “He was preparing a report detailing a high degree of Morales administration involvement to provoke violence in Pando,” the cable added. Halvorssen never mentioned whether this “wholly independent group” had received funding from the HRF for the task, but his own group came to similar politically motivated and erroneous conclusions about the Pando massacre. Incidentally, Thor Halvorssen contacted the Financial Times soon after I asked for an interview with a résumé of my apparent “radicalism” and precipitated my departure from the paper. These “believers in freedom”, as mentioned, only believe in freedom when it benefits them.
La España Gloriosa
Bolivian people, and particularly the business community in the country, have always had a strong disdain for a central government they see as interfering and stifling. To this purpose, in most areas of the country, there are institutions called civic committees, which organize and represent business interests. They have become especially important in the opposition stronghold of the media luna. In Santa Cruz, where the Rózsa group was foiled, the civic committee has become the major non-governmental voice of opposition to Evo Morales. Its presidency has been held by some of the most powerful businessmen and politicians in the country, including Rubén Costas, the current governor of Santa Cruz. Its funding comes from 220 businesses in the department. In its internal report on civil society in Bolivia (which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reported that the two main columns on either side of the state are “the civic committees […] on the right, and the large labor organizations on the left”. There have been accusations that the Santa Cruz civic committee (SCCC) has members with fascist leanings involved in violence against indigenous citizens, particularly in the affiliated youth branch. Ignacio Mendoza, a senator in Sucre, who is part of the left-wing opposition to MAS, told me: “Against us there is the Santa Cruz Civic Committee and the Youth Union, which is a neo-fascist group. These groups always threaten.” In the New York Times, correspondent Simon Romero noted: “It is no surprise that many Bolivian supporters of Mr. Morales view Santa Cruz as a redoubt of racism and elitism.” He added: “This city remains a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the late Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco.”
This would appear to include the SCCC. At the conclusion of a series of interviews at SCCC’s offices, the group’s spokesperson inexplicably allowed me to download a tranche of files from the computer in the main office. These included racist cartoons of Evo Morales, as well as a poem lauding the old colonial country, Spain.
One reads (my translation):
The grand Spain with benign fate.
Here he planted the sign Of surrender.
And it did in its shadow An eminent people
Of clear front A loyal heart
There is also a letter titled Filial Espana (Spanish affiliate) sent by the president of the committee to the president of the far-right civic committee in Spain, Carlos Duran Banegas, thanking him for his support and help. Another folder includes a coat of arms for Germán Busch who was a president of Bolivia in the 1930s and was believed by many Bolivians to have Nazi tendencies. Reports by the fascist- linked grouping UnoAmerica also feature prominently on the SCCC computer. In fact, among the documents there are photos taken, one must assume, by an SCCC photographer of UnoAmerica delivering its report on Pando to the Organization of American States (OAS) in New York.
The computer files I retrieved were also full of unhinged documents calling Chávez and Morales terrorists. One reporter accurately noted that the SCCC is “a sparkplug of separatist agitation in the East”. Despite these leanings, the US taxpayer, through USAID, is funding members of this group. In the WikiLeaks cables, under the subtitle “Blowing Smoke”, an August 2007 dispatch makes fun of Bolivian government claims about USAID activities being used to help the opposition. But inadvertently this proved it. It noted: “[a]nother USAID contractor, Juan Carlos Urenda (a Santa Cruz civic leader) described the MAS accusations as an attempt to cast a smokescreen over the ‘serious problems in this country’.” A search in the trove of documents from the SCCC’s computer turns up the same Mr Urenda, USAID contractor, as the author for the SCCC of a long article lauding the history of the department’s autonomy struggle. A prominent lawyer in the east, in 1987 he published a book called Departmental Autonomies, which, he noted, “outlines what will be the fundamental doctrine of the process of autonomy”. He went on: “Conscious of the error of having structured the country in a centralized way, [Santa Cruz] has not ceased in its attempt to decentralize the state throughout its republican history.”
It turns out that Mr Urenda was actually one of the founders of the SCCC’s pre-autonomy council and one of the area’s most prominent ideologues. This finding makes a mockery of USAID’s claim to be apolitical. As its own report noted: “it is clear that Bolivian civil society in the first columns on both sides [civic committees and labor organizations] are playing roles that are less social and more political and governmental.” Although they shy away from talking about direct aid, the top brass of the SCCC were full of praise for USAID when I talked to them. Documents from the computer also show extensive preparations for the Ferexpo 2007, a business show in the city, which US ambassador Philip Goldberg would attend. “USAID in Bolivia was supporting democratic organizations and tourism and fairs,” said Ruben Dario Mendez, the spokesperson. “They were interested in fomenting political participation. Evo doesn’t like that, he doesn’t like there to be freedom.”
It’s not just USAID that helps out. Mr Mendez noted that the Journalists’ Association of Santa Cruz has an agreement with the US embassy that helps them print books and put on events, an agreement which is not in place in other parts of the country. “In some cases the US helps us,” he said. “Anyone can submit a proposal to get help. I have attended events about political governance, about freedom of expression, human rights,” he added. “There was a new penal prosecution code, and a workshop on that has been carried out by USAID for years.” He was still optimistic about the ability of USAID to go about its work: “There are still organizations and people in Santa Cruz who believe in democracy. This was proved the other day when I went to the opening of a center for the support of democracy, USAID helped fund this, they work with the university president, and the vice-president of the civic committee helped set this up.” He obviously thought that USAID believed in his type of democracy. “We have a totalitarian system here, if there was a democratic government there wouldn’t be a problem here. The biggest problem in Bolivia is centralism.” (A view echoed in USAID’s reports.) The extensive cache of reports from both organizations on the office computer also reveals the links between the SCCC and the NGOs HRF and UnoAmerica. These were evidently being sent out as primers on the situation in Bolivia.
I found more evidence of US support for these right-wing opposition forces in Sucre, the judicial capital of the country, where in August 2006 President Morales announced the opening of the constituent assembly. It would spend six months redrafting the constitution with enhanced rights for indigenous communities, more economic control of the country’s resources, as well as land reform. It was eventually passed by a referendum in 2009. “Sucre is like the dividing line between the east and the altiplano [poorer indigenous west] so the idea was it was a place that could bring peace between the two peoples,” Mr Mendoza, the left-wing senator, told me as we sat in the local government headquarters. “But radical groups here connected themselves with Santa Cruz and all of a sudden it became about something bigger.” The whole process was marred by violence, as the opposition set out to scupper the process. “It all comes down to racism,” he added. “The constituent assembly was largely made up of indigenous farmers and that prompted racism. People were saying, ‘Whoever doesn’t jump is a llama’, acting superior to indigenous people and calling them llamas because they are from the altiplano.”
As the killings and lootings got under way, the US made no statement of condemnation. “They are setting fire to gas pipelines, and the US government does not condemn that?” asked Morales at the time. “Of course, they know they [the opposition groups] are their allies. So why would they denounce them?” He was right.
The tactics used by the SCCC mirrored those used in Chile when the US was trying to destabilize the government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s; he was eventually taken out in a US-backed anti-democratic coup. In Bolivia, there was the violence from the local youth groups but also strikes – this time organized by the business elites – designed to bring the country to its knees and keep goods from being delivered to the west of the country. The Confederation of Private Businesses called for a national shutdown if the government refused “to change its economic policies”. Altogether this was called a “civic coup”. It failed, but around the same time the US was trying to rejuvenate the opposition, according to evidence uncovered during my time there. While in Sucre, I talked to the civic committee for the department of Chuquisaca, in which the city sits, still an opposition stronghold. Félix Patzi, the president, described the civic committee’s role as keeping “an eye on government projects to make sure they follow through on their promises”. But the US embassy had been in contact with a staggering request, he recalled. “They made an offer years ago. They wanted to finance a meeting of all the civic committees in the country to bring them together in 2007,” he said. The idea was “to bring together the works of the different civic committees to encourage communication between them”. He added: “I don’t know why the US did it, but we heard from Santa Cruz that the idea was to create a national civic committee.” The US obviously knew (from its own internal documents) that such a national civic committee would be right wing and take on a political and governmental role. That must have been its intention. Mr Patzi said the Chuquisaca committee refused because it doesn’t receive outside funding, but, he added, “I don’t how many other civic committees have accepted money from the US.”
Back at the SCCC I talked to other officials who gave the impression of a tight relationship with the US. “We’ve always tried to work so that civil society in Bolivia has its own place to develop,” said Nicolas Ribera Cardozo, vice president of the SCCC. “We’ve always had a conversation with the US about it.” He said that in the past year-and-a-half as vice president he had had two conversations with the head of communications and publications at the embassy. “What they put across was how they could strengthen channels of communication,” he said. “The embassy said that they would help us in our communication work and they have a series of publications where they were putting forward their ideas.” But things were even better under Bush. “There were better programs under Bush; there were programs from USAID and DEA [the US Drug Enforcement Administration] to deal with narco-trafficking.” He added that the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy had “held informative workshops for young people about leadership”. For him it was not controversial that these programs were designed to help the opposition. “Of course they were opposition, it’s a liberal train of thought, you train people to be more aware, productive.”
The most controversial aspect of the SCCC is its youth branch, the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC), who have been called by one Bolivia analyst “paramilitary shock-troops”. They roam the streets of Santa Cruz in times of unrest and have been involved in violent attacks and atrocities against indigenous peasants, as well as damage to government buildings. The US embassy noted that the UJC “have frequently attacked pro-MAS/government people and installations”, adding, “Their actions frequently appear more racist than politically motivated. Several months ago, a group of mainly white Youth Union members attacked an altiplano migrant … The Youth Union has boasted to the press that it has signed up 7000 members to participate in the [civil defense militias] – the number is likely inflated but many of those who have signed-on are militant.” Another cable noted: “the Santa Cruz youth union seems to be radicalizing: one group waving Santa Cruz flags drove through town in a jeep emblazoned with swastikas.” In the aftermath of the Rózsa plot, the police apprehended Juan Carlos Gueber Bruno, reportedly an advisor to the UJC, and former SCCC activist, who was known as “Comandante Bruno”.
“Youth Union violence was basically in retaliation to a threat,” Mr Cardozo told me. “The youth groups did participate in these things but because they thought it was a threat and MAS started it.”
I also talked to Samuel Ruiz, president of the UJC, at the SCCC headquarters, surrounded by photos of previous presidents, including Marinkovic and Costas. “The committee was formed in 1952 as a means to protect this region, it was under attack from other regions and felt it needed to protect itself,” said Mr Ruiz. “The civic committee existed but it was felt it could do with a youth branch too.” Now the UJC has 3,000 passive members, and 500 active, according to its president. Asked three times if it has any indigenous people as members, he avoided the question twice. On the third time of asking, he replied: “What percentage? I don’t know. There are 20 representatives in different provinces that represent areas with indigenous people.” He complained that when Morales came to power he got rid of USAID and other US groups – a false claim. “It has had a huge impact,” he said. “When there were international agencies, Bolivia was much more peaceful, now we see loose arms and legs about the streets, there are kidnappings, it’s violent and dangerous whereas it wasn’t before.” The UJC had taken matters into its own hands. He said that the government was bringing people from Chile and Peru to train farmers in military combat, and that Venezuelan and Cuban doctors were actually providing military training. His paranoia about Cuban and Venezuelan influence was similar to that shown in the cables from US officials. He claimed that Morales sent campesinos to Santa Cruz to start violence at the height of the tension, even though the cables noted that Morales went out of his way to avoid casualties. “[M]ilitary planners have told us that President Morales has given them instructions not to incur civilian casualties,” one noted. “Field commanders continue to tell us they will require a written order from President Morales if asked to commit violence against opposition demonstrators.” Another said: “A senior military planner told [an embassy official] December 13 that President Morales wants the military to be careful to avoid violent confrontations with demonstrators if called upon to support Bolivian police.”
“We are monitoring government to see what they are doing,” Ruiz claimed. “But for example they are getting people from Peru to come and train campesinos who kill my friends, and they are training campesinos in war, what are we meant to do?” On the resulting violence against indigenous people, Ruiz said it was self-defense. “After last elections, Evo sent campesinos to Santa Cruz to start aggression; our organization sent out its people but only to defend itself … It’s not a direct threat,” he admitted, but it worried him because they were “training campesinos who can’t even read or go out and feed themselves”. Ruiz claimed the UJC has never had any weapons – which is also demonstrably false.
The cables also revealed US suspicions in the same period that “some Crucenos are reportedly forming fighting groups”. They would know, as they were funding them. “Sources reported that Crucenos are developing fighting/defense groups and are equipped with weapons such as long rifles and hand guns.” Ruiz claimed that fighting campesinos caused the Pando massacre. “The Venezuelans killed the indigenous people. There are photos … The Venezuelans infiltrated by entering through the Cuban doctors,” he said. “They went to Pando to form military strategy for organization, so it wasn’t chaos, but all the campesinos, armed people, were drunk, and the Venezuelans killed them by mistake because they didn’t know what side they were on, and they also shot in the leg a Bolivian journalist because they wanted them to stop filming.” The SCCC were also implicated in the Rózsa plot by Ignacio Villa Vargas, a local fixer and driver for the group, who said that a number of their members had been involved. But the SCCC believed that the Morales government organized the Rózsa plot. They did, though, admit to me that Rózsa had been to their offices, but they claimed that he was trying to infiltrate the committee on behalf of the government, disguised as a journalist. I was shown screenshots of supposed emails between Rózsa and Vice President Álvaro García Linera, which were clearly faked, dating from August 2008 and March 2009, just before the raid in the Hotel Las Americas.
The cables revealed by WikiLeaks noted that the opposition “are nervous to the point of paranoia”. They were also trying to cover their tracks with delusional conspiracy theories. As noted above, one of those suspected of involvement in the terror cell was retired president of the SCCC, Branko Marinkovic, one of the wealthiest men in Bolivia, who owns a vast soybean business and large tracts of land in the east of country. His parents were emigrants from the former Yugoslavia in the 1950s and Marinkovic became a successful businessman before moving into politics, a well-trodden route in the east of Bolivia. When the Morales government came to power and embarked on a land reform program that took fallow lands from their owners to give to landless peasants, men like Marinkovic had much to lose. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, Marinkovic predicted that Bolivia would soon be like Zimbabwe “in which economic chaos will become the norm”. (The head of the International Monetary Fund’s western hemisphere countries unit in the same year praised the Morales government for what he referred to as its “very responsible” macroeconomic policies.) But Marinkovic continued – “speaking English with a light Texas twang he picked up at Southern Methodist University” – with a veiled threat: “If there is no legitimate international mediation in our crisis, there is going to be confrontation. And unfortunately, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Bolivians.” This was just before the Rózsa-Flores plot was scuppered.
The New York Times also noted that Croatian news services had investigated claims that Marinkovic “sought to raise a paramilitary force with mercenaries from Montenegro, where his mother was born”. Marinkovic denied the claims, but there is no doubt he was pushing for a break-up of the country in the same way Yugoslavia had been split in the 1990s. On September 1, 2008, Marinkovic flew to the US, and when he came back just a week later the east of the country was in open revolt. At around the same time, US ambassador Philip Goldberg met in secret with the governor of Santa Cruz, Rubén Costas (the meeting was captured by a news organization). Initially Marinkovic filed a lawsuit against two government officials for “slander” for linking him with the Rózsa-Flores plot. His attorney declared that he “is in Santa Cruz, will stay in Santa Cruz, and will remain in the country”, to prove he had no links to the terrorist cell. Except now he is in hiding. The UJC president divulged that he was in the US. “The government has already cast him as guilty and he can’t defend himself from here so he asked the US for political exile and they granted it to him.” Like Achá. He added that he didn’t know if Marinkovic had ever met Rózsa. Maybe it’s not so surprising. “The US has had a very good relationship with Branko Marinkovic,” said Mr Navarro, MAS minister. “When he was head of civic committee they shared their opposition to the president.” Marinkovic once jettisoned plans to visit Argentina due to distrust of the Morales-allied Kirchner government, fearing that he might be arrested there and extradited to Bolivia. During one of Marinkovic’s trips to the US, he, contrariwise, participated in strategy meetings with political consultants Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and other polling and consulting firms, according to WikiLeaks cables.
When I had finished talking to the SCCC, I asked if there was anyone else I should speak to. The spokesperson recommended former general Gary Prado, who is infamous for being the man who captured Che Guevara and handed him over to his executioners. At the time Prado was a young captain in the Bolivian army. “Where do I find him?” I asked. “He usually has coffee over there in a little café about 4pm every day,” I was told. I subsequently found out that Gary Prado is under house arrest, but as it is not enforced he moves around freely. I head along to his house in an upmarket neighborhood of Santa Cruz. “I am under house arrest but I go to work every day so there’s not much point in that,” he said. Mr Navarro had told me there was “a group of retired generals who have advised the civic committee in the event of a government attack on them”. Prado is alleged to be among them. The government has drawn attention to a meeting Prado had with Rózsa at his house. “I gave an interview to Rózsa- Flores just like I’m giving to you, he came here to this same room, we had an interview about the guerrilla Che Guevara in Bolivia, he took a picture with me here, and that’s all the contact I had with him.” Rózsa apparently thought he was the new Che Guevara, as well as the new Hemingway. But from what Prado does know, he doesn’t believe that Rózsa planned to assassinate Morales. “There was no intent of assassination, never, absolutely not,” he said. Asked why they bought in foreigners, he replied: “They were brought to Santa Cruz by some people probably to try to create a group of mercenaries to defend Santa Cruz.” Then he added that the cell was “probably created to justify political repression”. He would not offer a guess on who bought the mercenaries in. The US, he added, merely “promote seminars about democracy and freedom”.
The massacre that wasn’t
In May 2008 political turmoil rocked Bolivia and threatened civil war. Santa Cruz held an autonomy referendum, which the government claimed was a move to secession by the eastern province. Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz, had said in the run-up that the vote – which was not legally sanctioned by the National Electoral Court or recognized by the OAS – would “give birth to a new republic”. (This is the same governor whom terror suspect Mario Tadic told authorities had met with the terror cell’s leader three times and vaguely discussed “organizing something”.) As things hurtled out of control with mass protests and violence, President Morales refrained from annulling the plebiscites which took place in other departments and called a recall referendum on his own mandate. He won resoundingly, with two- thirds of the national vote. At this point, desperate and bewildered, the opposition went on strike, and sent out the UJC (the far-right youth group) to attack government buildings and local indigenous people. The defeat at the polls led the opposition to unilaterally declare “autonomy” in four of the country’s eastern provinces. One of the platforms of the autonomy movement was the rejection of central government control over profits from the country’s natural gas reserves concentrated in the region. In the Bolivian context, therefore, the term was used as a euphemism for increased control over taxation, police and public works. If autonomy was granted in the form Santa Cruz wanted, Morales’ extensive reforms would be impossible – which was obviously the aim of the request.
The strategy of the autonomy movement was to take complete control of the media luna, provoke a national crisis to destabilize the government, and convince the army to remain neutral or move against Morales. The mayor of Santa Cruz, Percy Fernández, had already called on the military to overthrow Morales’ “useless government” just before the August referendum. In this heady tumult, in September 2008, 13 indigenous peasants in the Pando department of Bolivia were massacred in violence erupting across the region between pro- government and opposition forces. The atrocity remains relatively uncontroversial – unless you are the HRF, Achá, or the Bolivian opposition. A report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) placed the blame for the killing of the peasants at the hands of people working for the local prefecture, which was led at the time by the opposition politician Leopoldo Fernández. Fernández is still in jail in La Paz, after being arrested, in the aftermath, on charges that he was involved in ordering the attack. The US embassy, in the WikiLeaks cables, noted that he was being held “under dubious legal pretext”.
The UN report unequivocally called it a “massacre of peasants” and a “grave violation of human rights”, concluding that the massacre was committed by personnel from the local road service office, members of the Pando civic committee and others linked to the prefecture. The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) also sent a delegation to investigate, headed by Argentina’s undersecretary for human rights who concluded that the Bolivian government had acted fairly and it was the opposition that was responsible for the murders. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet called an emergency meeting in Santiago of UNASUR to discuss the Bolivian crisis. The resulting Declaration of La Moneda, signed by the 12 UNASUR governments, expressed their “full and decided support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales”, and warned that their respective governments “will not recognize any situation that entails an attempt for a civil coup that ruptures the institutional order, or that compromises the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia”. Morales, who participated in the meeting, thanked UNASUR for its support, declaring: “For the first time in South American’s history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems without the presence of the United States.”
But men like Achá and his “affiliate” HRF saw it differently. In October, a month after the massacre, HRF dispatched their own team to Bolivia to investigate – not the massacre but the “arbitrary detention” of “opposition members and at least one journalist”. HRF’s sources in Bolivia, presumably Achá, were telling it how serious the situation was. “Preliminary research done by our staff and reports sent to us from Bolivian civil society advocates suggest that the recent arrests of journalists and members of the opposition in Bolivia are politically motivated,” said Sarah Wasserman, chief operating officer of HRF. The report from Achá, as mentioned by the US ambassador, posited that the MAS government had actually initiated the murders. And the HRF went on to link the massacre to a speech by government minister Ramón Quintana exhorting government sympathizers to take Pando governor Leopoldo Fernández “to the end of the world” and “give him an epitaph: Prefect, rest in peace and live with the worms. “The speech preceded violence that erupted on September 11, 12 and 13 in Pando, where more than 20 people were murdered for political reasons,” they noted. The report by the Bolivian “affiliate” of the HRF blames the massacre on Morales and his national executive officers. “The deterioration of the rule of law, individual rights … do not allow the existence of a democratic system,” the report concluded. “In Bolivia, with this background, it outlines the installation of a regime despotic and dictatorial presided by Evo Morales.”
To be fair, there were other NGOs which came to a similar conclusion. One was the aforementioned UnoAmerica, another “human rights” group based in Colombia, whose logo shows crosshairs in the ‘o’ in their name. It was founded in 2008 by Alejandro Peña Esclusa, who is now detained in his home country, Venezuela, for allegedly being found with detonators and 2lb of explosives in his home. The Venezuelan government claims he has close ties to the CIA, and was involved in the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed Hugo Chávez. In one video, Esclusa is seen insisting on a plan for massive protests across Venezuela, making the government unable to control it. “It is a more efficient mechanism that generates a political crisis and a crisis of instability that forces the regime to withdraw the reform,” he says. UnoAmerica became heavily involved in Bolivia after the Pando massacre, sending a team on a five-day mission to investigate what had happened. To conduct the investigation they partnered with NGOs from Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay and Venezuela (whose names read like a Who’s Who of fascists in Latin America). Taking part from Argentina was El Movimiento por la Verdadera Historia, or Movement for the True History, a group which seeks to bring to justice “subversives” working against the US-backed fascist junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and murdered an estimated 30,000 people. One of its Argentina delegates was Jorge Mones Ruiz, an intelligence officer of the Argentine army in Bolivia during last dictatorship. (The government also claimed that the Rózsa cell had links with fascist groups in Argentina, which go by the name of carapintadas or “painted faces”.)
The joint report concluded that “the government of President Evo Morales had planned and executed the violent acts”. It claimed it had “sufficient information to demonstrate the responsibility of the Evo Morales administration in the so called Pando Massacre”. The WikiLeaks cables revealed that the US embassy was receiving highly questionable intelligence like this from Achá and other contacts in the opposition, without applying the constant cynicism it reserved for MAS statements. In conversation with a political officer from the embassy, one contact “alleged the MAS deliberately fomented unrest in Pando in September to justify a military siege, depose Prefect Leopoldo Fernandez, and arrest opposition-aligned leaders to swing the balance of power to the MAS in the Senate”. It is not countered. Another cable noted after the September 2008 violence in Pando: “the government illegally jailed Prefect Leopoldo Fernandez and violently detained over forty more, many of them prominent political opposition members.” The UN had said that Fernández’s jailing was not illegal.
We’ll take care of him
The most active of the many US agencies working in Bolivia is USAID, the main foreign aid arm of the US government. USAID poured money into the country: between 1964 and 1979, it contributed more than $1.5 billion, trying to build a citizenry and investor climate conducive to US corporate needs. For nearly half a century it has carried out its ostensible goal of providing “economic and humanitarian assistance” – a gift “from the American people”. The agency operates around the world in a similar capacity, and invests billions of dollars annually on projects that span from “democracy promotion” to “judicial reform”.
Its operations are controversial. The Morales administration has continually said that it uses its money to push the strategic goals of the US government under the cloak of “development”, claims denied by the US government. The Bolivian government also derides the lack of transparency, in comparison with EU aid money, for its programs. Mark Feierstein, USAID assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, put its raison d’être bluntly in December 2010 when he said: “USAID’s programs are not charity … they are not only from the
American people, as the agency’s motto says, they are for the American people.” As an aside, Mr Feierstein was a key campaign consultant to the former president Lozada (Goni) who fled to the US to avoid facing trial for the massacre of protesters in La Paz. There is now an attempt to prosecute him under the Aliens Tort Statute for his role in the murders. (Feierstein has never expressed regret about the campaign; in fact, the same firm did polling for Morales’ opponent, Manfred Reyes Villa, in 2009.)
Like other methods and agencies used to control democracies in Latin America and around the world, it is hard to pin down USAID. But on-the-ground interviews, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and the WikiLeaks cables have made it possible to unearth the strategies this agency uses to keep its stranglehold on Bolivia, at the same time providing a template for how it is used across the region to undermine left-wing democratic governments. There is no doubt how USAID personnel felt about Morales before he came into power, and one young American student heard first-hand their plans for him. In the summer of 2005, he found himself in La Paz learning Spanish on a break from university when the powder keg of political resistance in the city blew up. President Carlos Mesa – who had taken over from Goni in 2003 after the massacre of protesters in La Paz – had just stepped down. The student decided to go on a bike trip. “Basically I went down the ‘Death Road’, the world’s most dangerous road, with some other gringos,” he said, not wanting to be named. “There were some folks from the US embassy and USAID on the trip. I remember them having a discussion on the road down to [the city of ] Coroico, talking about not wanting Evo to get into power. They said something along the lines of, ‘We can’t let Evo get into power’.”
In fact, the officials went further. “There were two things that were said, one was ‘We can’t let Evo get into power’, and then something along the lines of, it struck me, it was harsher than that, it was something along the lines of, ‘We’ll have to take care of him’. It was ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted that we have to take him out, which I don’t think is what they meant. But when they said it I thought, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe they are saying this, they don’t even know me’.” The conversation continued as the group descended the mountain. “I’m assuming they thought I was sympathetic,” he said. “This was right in the middle of the protests and the president resigning, so a lot of the tourists had fled Bolivia, so perhaps they thought I was there because I was working for some sympathetic capacity, maybe working for an international corporation, or related to the embassy or something. It shocked me at the time. One, it seemed weird to have this conversation in public, because not everybody is sympathetic. And two it seemed like they were meddling in democracy, people that shouldn’t be involved in those things, the US embassy and USAID shouldn’t have anything to do with voting a president into power or not.”
But involved they were and would remain as Morales eventually did take power.
Much important work has been carried out on this topic by the investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood in the period before MAS came to power, but his Freedom of Information Act requests stopped being answered when he asked for information about projects after the election of 2005. What Bigwood unearthed from before 2005 supports the testimony of the American student. Early on, the MAS party was fingered as a problem for the US that had to be dealt with. In a declassified July 2002 letter from the US embassy, a planned USAID political party reform project was outlined which aimed to “help build moderate, pro- democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical [MAS]”. The next section, presumably more open on details, was redacted. A series of emails from USAID functionaries in Bolivia also detailed attempts to form relationships between the US government and indigenous groups in the coca growing region of the Chapare (the sector from which Morales emerged) and the eastern departments, aiming, as Bigwood explained, to “create a common USAID-guided front against … the MAS”. A few years into the MAS government, USAID made itself so unpopular in the Chapare region that its local leaders in 2008 suspended all projects funded by the agency. They said they would replace the funding with money from Chávez’s Venezuela. In Pando, the mayors signed a declaration in 2008 also expelling USAID. “No foreign program, least of all those from USAID, will solve our problems of poverty, physical integration, family prosperity and human development while we ourselves don’t decide the future,” it said.
I managed to procure documents that relate to the operations of projects since 2005, and they show a similar effort to weaken the power and popularity of the MAS government. The USAID tactic is not the overthrow of the government, but the slow transformation of Bolivian society from its participatory democracy to the type of democracy it had before: controlled by the US and good for investors. The Bolivian example is important because it provides a template of how USAID tries to control Latin American democracies that have “got out of control” and make them work “for the American people”, or American business interests.
Of course, USAID pitches itself as something completely different. In one cable from La Paz, the ambassador wrote: “We will continue to counter misunderstandings about USAID’s transparency and apolitical nature with reality.” But the reality is that the agency is not transparent or apolitical. And its own internal documents reveal as much. USAID maintains it is transparent with the money it invests in the country, but the Bolivian government claims large sums are being handed out without its knowledge, in contravention of usual aid etiquette. In the WikiLeaks cables, Morales tells the US he wants to start an “open registry to monitor aid”, but it was not supported by the US. The Bolivian government’s estimate that 70 percent of aid money is unaccounted for appears overstated, but there is clear evidence that money was being spent without the knowledge of the government.
After one spate of criticism of USAID programs by Morales, the US ambassador noted that the country “cannot afford to risk USD120 million in assistance” from the agency (it works out as about $12 for every Bolivian). In another, it is noted: “we’re spending about $90 million annually to further social and economic inclusion of Bolivia’s historically marginalized indigenous groups and to support democratic institutions and processes, including decentralized governance.” But an American journalist living in La Paz was present at an emergency meeting called by the US embassy to explain USAID’s activities to foreign journalists, after another round of criticism. She was given a breakdown of spending by USAID. “This information was given to the small group of reporters gathered to use as background in stories,” she told me. It outlined $16.8 million to USAID health programs, $19.2 million to integrated alternative development (alternative to coca production), $15.3 million to environmental and economic development programs, and $22 million to counter-narcotics. It added up to $73.3 million. But the ambassador had said in the cable that $120 million was invested in Bolivia per year. Where was the other $50 million going?
Internal evaluation documents give an indication of why some projects are best kept secret. I procured a host of documents on USAID “democracy promotion” programs in Bolivia in the period after the Morales government was elected. In one, outlining the goals and success of its “administration of justice” programs which have run in the country for 17 years – “among the largest in Latin America” – the group was explicit about where its money was going. “USAID/ Bolivia programs include support to promote decentralization and municipal strengthening, support to Congress and political parties,” it noted. There is no mention of which political parties it is “supporting” but this is candid language that the group and the US embassy have never used in public. (Morales has said that one mayor told him that USAID offered him $15,000 to $25,000 to oppose the president.) Decentralization in this context is also a euphemism for strengthening the opposition. One of USAID’s central functions in Bolivia, ramped up since 2005, has been moving power away from central government, an effort which clearly chimes with the interests of the opposition in the east.
The justice project was conceived by USAID and Bolivian officials before the 2005 election that brought Evo Morales to power, and coordinators admit that “the personnel changes at the higher echelons” of the government “completely changed the atmosphere” in which it worked. The project hoped to open a training school for public defenders, but in mid-2007 it was suspended, “a prime example of the project being ‘overtaken by events’ that were completely outside the control of … USAID,” the evaluation noted. Internally, USAID was very critical of the Morales government on the subject, commenting that the Bar Associations of Bolivia have been “significantly weakened in the past few years” by the government’s policies. As is customary in projects of this kind, USAID paid subcontractors to carry out their functions, enhancing the already intricate web of institutions and clouding accountability. This project was run by Checchi and Company Consulting, set up in 1973 by economist and Democratic donor Vincent Checchi, which then brought on board the State University of New York and Partners of the Americas. One of the main ways USAID exerts influence – in this justice program but also through its other activities – is through training programs. These programs school young Bolivians in the “American way”.
In Sucre, I spoke to Ramiro Velasquez, an administrator in the local government offices who has worked for a USAID-funded program in the city. He said it was set up by a consultancy firm, funded by USAID, which has a subsidiary called Fortalecimiento Identidad de Democracia, or FIDEM. “They were looking for Bolivian operators in every department to do their work,” he said. “FIDEM was looking for an NGO to do the work and they would look for operators. They were in La Paz, Oruro, Potosi, and Sucre.” Mr Velasquez was asked to be an operator and told they wanted him to run courses on “democracy and participation”, a program eventually shut down by the Morales government. “This project was aimed at young people,” he said. “So to get young people, you had to get into universities and social movements and state institutions, even the church.” In the end 600 young people signed up. The courses took on two phases with the first workshops an opportunity to select around 20 young people to move on to La Paz for the second phase, carried out by FIDEM and another NGO. It was called “leadership training”, ostensibly to create a new generation of Bolivian leaders. But they had to have the right opinions. “They were teaching about democracy but not the type of democracy Evo and Bolivians have,” he said. “They were teaching them about representative democracy not participatory democracy … It was clearly to create leaders for the opposition.”
The cables from La Paz support such a conclusion. One visiting official went to a “civic education project funded by USAID through the NGO FIDEM and implemented by the Santa Cruz binational center”. Its aim was to grow a “civic responsibility” arm in addition to its educational and cultural activities. “The project was reaching 21,000 (out of 150,000) residents in the marginalized neighbourhood ‘Plan 3000’ which is widely thought to be a MAS stronghold,” it added, as if to explain why it was a good thing. The local residents were “enthusiastic” about the initiative, it noted. The same cable registered that Santa Cruz residents were “determined as much as possible to halt democratic back-sliding. Their main request to us is to report accurately to Washington and the international community what is really happening in Bolivia.” Vice President García Linera repeatedly told the US embassy he opposed democracy programs like FIDEM’s, because they strive to “win the hearts and minds”, presenting a vision of democracy that differs from the government’s. It was true. FIDEM works in eight of the nine departments in Bolivia (three of which are governed by democratically elected MAS prefects) providing the kind of state-building training and technical assistance that USAID and other donors provide worldwide. The work – regional development planning, service delivery, financial planning and more – is technical and non-political. Its focus on departmental authorities was planned to weaken MAS, as was admitted in the cables: “MAS’s goals [is] strengthening municipal governments to the detriment of departmental governments, thus weakening one of the MAS’s main sources of opposition.”
Also in Sucre, I talked to the MAS mayor, Verónica Berrios Vergara, who has been under concerted attack since taking her position in 2008. The city had been the venue of intense violent unrest in 2007 when the constituent assembly, given the responsibility of writing a new constitution, was placed there. In 2008, an opposition candidate was voted into the position of mayor in Sucre, but was disqualified because he was under a criminal charge. Ms Vergara took his place on a decision of the municipal council, causing an outbreak of violence and unrest. “Vested interests were behind the anger of the opposition and that led to us living the most difficult moment in Sucre in many years,” she told me. She said various explosives were thrown at the mayor’s headquarters and the dissidents tried to kill her on a number of occasions. “One of the questions we asked ourselves at the time is where these students got the money from, because they had the money to buy lots of explosives. They don’t even usually have enough for rent and food, where did they get the money for them from?” She began to cry as she recounted her experiences at the sharp end of the turmoil in Bolivia. “I do fear that these groups are still waiting in the wings and at any point they could come out and do something to me,” she said. “This is really about racism and also that this local government and national government are threatening business interests.” She believed that USAID was behind the funding to some of these groups: “The fact that the Rózsa affair was taking place at the same time and there were question marks over USAID’s work and suggestions they were trying to overthrow the government leads me to question where the money was coming from.” At the time it sparked violence in the streets of the city, which Ms Vergara thinks USAID was behind. “They are in union with the opposition and media to stand in the way of the government’s development plans in the country.”
Building democracy an investor-friendly business climate
USAID had another reason to dislike President Morales and his government: they weren’t good for business. The investment climate in Bolivia, which had been open for business to US transnationals for decades, was turning into a more hostile place. Their fears were shared by their natural allies among the oligarchy of European descent in the east of Bolivia. Both were increasingly scared of the economic
program of the Morales government, which has provided a model for developing countries around the world: achieving high growth, as well as reductions in poverty, while part-nationalizing key industries. The Bolivian government, even when composed of ruthless dictators, maintained an investor-friendly business climate, which saw US mining companies, such as Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp, take advantage of the vast natural resources in the country as the Spanish had done before them. Bolivia’s major exports to the United States are tin, gold, jewellery and wood products. For a long time, foreign investors were accorded national treatment, and foreign owners of companies enjoyed virtually no restriction. Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Bolivia grew to $7 billion in stock during 1996–2002, nearly all of which went to the business interests in the east.
Concern about nationalization crops up frequently in the cables from La Paz. “There is … rampant speculation about President Morales’ traditional May 1st speech, in which he is expected by many to announce nationalization of companies based in Santa Cruz, potentially including Cotas or food industries,” one reads. “If the latter, many expect Branko Marinkovic’s cooking oil and other companies to be taken in the name of ‘food security’.” The cables from La Paz do not pull punches when outlining their opposition to the economic thinking of the MAS government. One advisor to Morales, an economics professor is, one cable notes, “steeped in out- dated socialist economic theories and has yet to accept the practical realities of a globalized economy”. It adds that he “may be beginning to understand the real impact of free trade on job creation”, but, unforgivably, “he appears to believe that markets in Venezuela and China serve as alternatives to US markets. He has told Bolivian exporters to seek markets outside the United States, unconvinced that the US is crucial to their trade.” It notes that he recently returned from Venezuela after negotiating an agreement to buy Bolivian soy. “Additionally, he has regularly antagonized other businesses, telling them that the President’s Dignity Tariff, a new lower price meant to provide cheap electricity to Bolivians is a done deal, remarking that the private sector should either get on board or suffer.”
USAID had a plan to deal with this. One of the most important components of the justice project is “promotion of legal security”, through which “it was hoped that the business and investment climate in Bolivia would be improved”. The principal donor for this purpose was USAID and the project was budgeted $4.8 million over five years. It chimed with the sentiment in cables from La Paz, one of which noted, the “key areas of concern in Bolivia currently are democracy, narcotics, and protection for US investments”(my emphasis). The justice project sought “reforms in the commercial and administrative law areas” as well as “business organization assistance and training”. For this purpose, USAID funding would help develop a civil, commercial and administrative law curriculum for law schools in Bolivia. In a sign of the penetration of USAID into the highest echelons of the justice system, USAID and the Bolivian Supreme Court jointly published a document called Civil and Commercial Justice in Bolivia: Diagnosis and Recommendations for Change, which urged the creation of a specialized commercial law jurisdiction. It would “enhance the investment climate of Bolivia”, while the “establishment of a good business climate is essential to attracting investment” and will “maintain and improve its competitiveness”. It noted: “This component was important to the overall success of the … project due to the fact that it enlisted enthusiastic support from many private sector actors, while also furthering the goal of improving the investment and business climate in Bolivia.” The agency worked with its “partner organization”, the National Chamber of Commerce, in order to replicate and strengthen arbitration centers through local chambers of commerce (big donors to civic committees). “If Bolivia wants to attract foreign investment … then it will need legal security for investors,” it noted. “Should there be an opportunity to continue the work in this area, it would be of high importance for the development of Bolivia.” Their natural allies in this task were organizations like CAINCO, a business confederation in Santa Cruz. In the aftermath of the Rózsa shoot-out, another suspect, Alejandro Melgar, who was a key figure in CAINCO, fled the country. Eduardo Paz, the president of CAINCO, was also an investor in the Santa Cruz civic committee. One cable noted that “The main impact [of nationalization] has been to halt new investment in the [energy] sector, which Bolivia needs to meet domestic demand and fulfil contractual obligations to Brazil and Argentina.” It added that “[as] a political measure, however, the ‘nationalization’ remains wildly popular.” It was also successful. In June 2011, Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, raised Bolivia’s credit ratings by one notch, praising President Evo Morales’ “prudent” macroeconomic policies which allowed for a steady decline in the country’s debt ratios.
The truth was that the US embassy was fearful for US mining investments, despite high-level Bolivian officials giving “repeated assurances that the Morales administration will respect existing US mining interests”.
Threats that the Bolivian government would nationalize the mining industry – including taking over a smelter owned by Swiss company Glencore (which had been sold by ex-president Goni) – scared them. “We continue to urge the [Government of Bolivia] to respect existing mining concessions and to limit tax and royalty hikes,” one cable noted. In other words, create a good “business climate” at the expense of the population. The US embassy viewed the Morales administration as contrary to its interests. “Strengthening and supporting democracy in Bolivia is our mission’s primary concern,” notes another cable. But in the next line it says: “Although the ruling MAS party and President Evo Morales were elected with a clear majority in fair and open elections, their actions since assuming power have often displayed anti-democratic tendencies.” Elsewhere the cables note the “overwhelming victory” of MAS in elections. Despite this, the US called Morales a “leader with strong anti-democratic tendencies” who “manipulates the media”. His closest advisors were compared to “back alley thugs”.
In fact, the democratic credentials and popular mandate of the MAS government are among the most stellar in the world. First elected to the presidency in December 2005 by 54 percent of the popular vote, nearly double the 29 percent of his nearest rival, Morales was re-elected in December 2009 by 67 percent of the public vote, more than double the percentage won by his nearest opponent, Manfred Reyes Villa. In between these landslides, Morales won the recall referendum called in the face of the “autonomy movement” in August 2008 with 67 percent of the public voting for him to be returned. Just five months later, in January 2009, Morales won the constitutional referendum with 61 percent voting in favor, to 39 percent against. In 2014, he won yet another landslide. But the embassy was disparaging of these achievements, saying Morales was “like a struggling student in the areas of economics and international relations decision-making”. It also noted his apparent desire to become a dictator: “[As] an admirer of Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Morales probably is drawn by the longevity of their time in power and seeks to emulate their ‘success’.” It was rubbish. The referendum in 2009 stipulated a two- term limit for the presidency. On the occasion of a foreign dignitary visiting, the ambassador pushed him “to encourage Morales to follow a democratic path”, alongside, of course, pushing him “to respect US mining interests to take advantage of free trade”.
The cables are full of fear about US investments. “One US investment which is vulnerable is San Cristobal mine, which is 65 percent owned by Apex Silver,” said one cable. “San Cristobal would be particularly hard-hit by a bill currently in Congress, which would increase mining taxes. Although the Bolivian government claims to want a fifty-fifty split of profits, the proposed tax increases actually result in, on average, a 60 percent government take of profits.” Although fantastically rich in silver and other mineral wealth, in the past the Bolivian people had never benefitted and stayed poor.
Trading bribes
The US was also using trade deals as leverage in trying to get MAS to change its economic outlook. In September 2008, President Bush suspended the crucial trade preferences that Bolivia enjoyed – alongside Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA). The country has lost millions of dollars in exports because of this punitive action. The ostensible reason was Bolivia’s uncooperative attitude to coca eradication in the country, but political and economic motives were thought to be highly relevant. A Reuters article written a few weeks afterward noted that “the decision came one day after five leading US business groups urged the Bush administration and Congress to consider ending trade benefits for both Bolivia and Ecuador because of what they described as inadequate protections for foreign investors in both countries”. The next month, in November, President Morales announced that the DEA would be expelled from the country. For decades, hundreds of DEA agents swarmed the northern Pando and Beni regions, destroying coca crops and, in the process, becoming implicated in massacres of the indigenous cocaleros. Largely given a free rein to carry out military operations or eradication by successive governments eager to please their masters, the former cocalero Morales wasn’t so easy to convince. He charged that the DEA was carrying out “political espionage”, and “financing criminal groups so that they could act against authorities, even the president”.
The goal of the DEA, one cable noted, “is to provide assistance to achieve US goals while keeping the [government of Bolivia] out in front”. In 2008, Morales suspended DEA operations in Bolivia and expelled its 37 agents in the country. He named Steven Faucette, the regional agent of the DEA in Santa Cruz, as a spy, saying that he had made trips to cities in the media luna provinces of Beni and Pando with the objective of financing the civic committees which were committed to carrying out a “civic coup”. The US was also using its aid as leverage to keep the DEA in Bolivia. “The Ambassador suggested that if eradication is to be stopped and USG involvement in the Chapare ended … we could begin shutting off our multi-million dollar assistance programs now,” one cable noted. Many had long said that the DEA was acting as a front for the CIA in Bolivia. (The agency refused my request for information through the Freedom of Information Act, as did the National Security Agency.) The cables are full of criticism of Morales for failing to heed the US’s call for areas it specified to be cleared of coca. It also called the EU effort “relatively modest and narrowly-focused”.
But the US preoccupation with eradication in Bolivia, evidenced in the cables, is strange. According to one cable, the DEA estimated that “less than one percent of cocaine seized in the US can be chemically traced back to Bolivia”. One percent. The US was also alone in blocking a UN resolution on making the coca leaf sacred in 2011. The tension surfaced even though the Morales government was being largely compliant. The cables present successes like 133 factories being raided in El Alto during the first 10 months of 2008. During the first full year of Morales’s tenure, the amount of coca grown in Bolivia increased around 5 percent. In Colombia, the US ally, it jumped 27 percent in the same period, according to UN statistics.
The opposition I talked to, interestingly, were all in support of the DEA. The spokesperson for the SCCC said that during his time as a journalist working on the topic of narco-trafficking, he saw the DEA and the US embassy dealing with the issue properly: “They were teaching us about how the drugs workers work, how they buy drugs, it helped us.” Another vital US agency which works in Bolivia is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 to “promote democracy”, but with a history of doing the opposite. In Bolivia it has focused on potentially recalcitrant indigenous areas, promoting the “American way” to the young. I obtained the proposals for various Bolivian projects granted money by the NED. The tactic of “training civil society” to gain a stranglehold on communities around Bolivia was exactly the same as that used by USAID projects. One project, Observancia, which ran from 2008 to 2009 and cost $54,664, was typical. It worked in eight municipalities in the country and helped in the “training of municipal functionaries and civil society”. The aim was to create future “municipal candidates” who would be “inserted into government programmes”. Another project, from 2006 to 2007 and costing $48,000, focused on Uriondo, Tarija, which sits in the media luna opposition stronghold. The grant was given at a politically tumultuous time. The report mentioned that the area of Tarija has the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the country, and the project wants “to increase the capacity” and “strengthen local government” of Uriondo, particularly by improving how the media communicates with the locals. Other projects look to “encourage political citizenship among young people”.
In one project in Totora, Cochabamba, the proposal notes that the population are mostly Quechua speaking and a lot more “politicized” than in Uriondo, adding that “there exists … an obstinate opposition to what they term as ‘neoliberal’, and they reject any advances from such parties”. Finally, it noted that the people of Totora organize themselves through a model of “corporativism” – the imposition of “a logic of the majoritarianism”, which rejects a form of democracy respectful of any differences. “This prompts us to consider that in the future we should include democratic values, in all sectors of society, not just as a citizen’s exercise when voting for their electoral representatives, but also with the logical respect that democracy has in other contemporary global societies,” the proposal noted. But the fact that the people of Totora organize themselves into collectives and make decisions collectively is common among indigenous groups throughout the country. The organization writing the proposal, however, concluded that this is in fact undemocratic and that they should introduce programs that demonstrate how undemocratic this form of democracy is compared with “other global societies”.
Another project called for better election monitoring. It suggested “revising the referendum votes for 2008 and 2009, where, in some regions, participation is registered at 100 percent and where the vote in favor of President Morales is of a similar percentage, something which does not have antecedents”. This accusation is questionable because in many departments people vote collectively – a tradition within many indigenous groups.
One project awarded $36,450 to the Bolivian National Press Association. Its ostensible aim was to defend freedom of expression “through the supervision and documentation of violations and threats against journalists” and “improve the professionalism and impartiality of Bolivian journalists”. However, its focus is trained on the government, in keeping with US embassy fears about Venezuelan influence. “The [National Press Association of Bolivia] denounces that the action the government of Morales has taken, something which has never happened under a democratic government, total control of the National Company of Bolivian Television (ENTB), when he integrated the directors with state ministers.” In another project, in Totora, it was noted that they were “expecting – in the coming months – the installation of a community radio transmitter, financed by the Venezuelan government, which forms part of a communications network which that regime has been promoting”. A later section called 2008 “the worst year for freedom of expression since the return to democracy” with “one dead and over a hundred attacks”. The Santa Cruz UJC and its allies committed a number of these attacks. In one case: “A police officer sprayed pepper spray at a journalist who approached the Vice President of the Santa Cruz Youth Union.” The NED criticized Evo Morales for denouncing La Razon newspaper, even though coverage of the president Morales in that newspaper has been overtly racist for years, with racist caricatures and racist commentary.
Very measured
As in smaller countries in the region, such as Haiti, the US embassy in Bolivia wielded huge power through the second half of the 20th century, often more than the sovereign government itself. The US embassy in La Paz is the second largest in Latin America (slightly
smaller than in Brazil), despite the country having a population of just 9 million people. Through the last 50 years, the US had supported coups to get “their” dictators in place (Hugo Banzer), lent public relations specialists to get “their” presidents in place when democracy returned (Goni), and sent their brightest economists to “restructure” the economy in their image (Jeffrey Sachs). Now, the US provides sanctuary for “their” presidents wanted for crimes against humanity (Goni, again). But such a situation could give rise to complacency. And the election of the democratic socialist government of MAS in Bolivia marked the first time the country threatened to break free of US control. As such, relationships with ambassadors from the US became increasingly strained as the power dynamic switched around, and the sovereign government issued orders to the embassy, not the other way around. Maria Beatriz Souviron, Bolivian ambassador to the UK, told me: “The US ambassador before Morales had a lot of influence over the politics in our country, even pushing to take domestic decisions at some points.” She added: “We want some sovereignty in our country and to make our own decisions. And of course the former ambassador [Goldberg] was involved with the opposition.”
The MAS government accused ambassador Philip Goldberg of “subversive actions” which included a “disinformation campaign” in the lead-up to the recall referendum, as he tried to unite the opposition. In late 2007, the US embassy began moving openly to meet with the right-wing opposition in the media luna. Ambassador Goldberg was photographed in Santa Cruz with a leading business magnate who backed the autonomy movement, and a well-known Colombian narco-trafficker who had been detained by the local police. Morales, in revealing the photo, said the trafficker was linked to right-wing paramilitary organizations in Colombia. In response, the US embassy asserted that it couldn’t vet everyone who appeared in a photo with the ambassador. Goldberg was expelled because of his meetings with opposition figures at the most on-edge period of the battle with the MAS government. In 2008, he was photographed having a secret meeting with opposition governor Rubén Costas. The US embassy liked Costas. In one cable it was noted: “Costas’ willingness to work with the United States would make him a solid democratic partner.” It also praised his “politically savvy use of the media to advance the interests of the media luna”.
This government anger at US embassy interference culminated in September 2009 when ambassador Goldberg was expelled from the country. He has still not been replaced, the US embassy having to make do with the diplomatic downgrade of a chargé d’affaires. The US retaliated by expelling the Bolivian ambassador to Washington. “The US embassy is historically used to calling the shots in Bolivia, violating our sovereignty, treating us like a banana republic,” said Gustavo Guzman, the ambassador who was expelled from Washington. Goldberg had an interesting history, which made him a curious appointment by President George W. Bush in October 2006. Between 1994 and 1996 he had served as State Department desk officer for Bosnia and as special assistant to the late Richard Holbrooke, who had been instrumental in brokering the Dayton Accords and then the NATO military campaign against Serbia in 1999. From 2004 to 2006, Goldberg served as chief of mission in Pristina, Kosovo. In other words, he was used to dealing with countries that were breaking up into their constituent parts.
The leaders of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee certainly liked him. “My overall impression of Goldberg is that he was very measured politically,” said its vice president. “Compared to the two ambassadors that preceded. They were very openly political, they got involved a great deal, and compared to them Goldberg was measured.”
The US embassy had been overtly hostile to Morales from the start, and the previous two ambassadors had openly tried to halt his rise to power. In 2002, when Morales narrowly lost his first presidential bid, US ambassador Manuel Rocha, the first Bush appointment, openly campaigned against him, threatening: “If you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of US assistance to Bolivia.” In 2003, the second Bush appointment, David N. Greenlee, was put in place, and he had a long history with Bolivia. He served in the Peace Corps in Bolivia, 1965–67, and met his wife in the country. Later he served as a political officer at the US embassy in La Paz, 1977–79, dealing with issues, one think-tank noted, such as communism, military coups and Operation Condor, the continent-wide terror network set up by General Pinochet with the help of the US government. He returned as deputy chief of mission, 1987–89. When back as ambassador, Greenlee openly tried to scupper MAS’s ascent. In March 2003, for example, he sent a letter to Carlos Mesa, then president, alleging, falsely, that MAS was planning a coup in the summer. The MAS government hoped that things would change with President Obama’s election, but MAS officials say it has been no different. In fact, President Obama is now thought to have deployed special operations forces to Bolivia, while he supported the illegitimate post-coup election in Honduras. “President Obama lied to Latin America when he told us in Trinidad and Tobago that there are not senior and junior partners,” said President Morales in 2009.
While in La Paz I arranged an interview with the US chargé d’affaires, John S. Creamer, who has served in embassies in Nicaragua, Argentina and Colombia. I was not allowed to record the interview, but took notes. “The Bush administration took a heavy toll on perceptions of the US, that’s an empirical fact,” he said. He denied knowing of the various foundations – HRF and UnoAmerica – but is “sceptical” they were involved in the Rózsa plot. It became clear later that the US embassy is aware of these groups, and is being briefed by them. Mr Creamer told me there was “growing opposition” from within MAS against the leadership, an interesting observation, as it is a strategy that the government itself is increasingly wary of. “Evo is now scared that the new tactic is the opposition infiltrating the government and MAS, in order to take power from within,” Mr Mendoza, the Sucre senator, had told me. The embassy is obviously still in close contact with the radical elements in the east, as Mr Creamer defends the violence of the UJC and other radical opposition elements, arguing self-defense. “It’s natural to defend yourself,” he said, as we finish.
The international community have also been accused of supporting the break-up of the country. I talked to the British ambassador, Nigel Baker, in La Paz, who seemed to agree with the autonomists. “I think the long-term destiny for Bolivia … is some form of federalist structure,” he said. “The topography of the country, the different character of different peoples in different parts of the country, different economic structures, all work in favor in Bolivia of greater autonomy.” He thought the US had entirely benign intentions: “I think historical record will show that the US was operating correctly in Bolivia and trying to work with all political groups, people of all political colors, to work with and strengthen Bolivian democracy.” The WikiLeaks cables reveal that opposition politicians were openly approaching the US embassy for support in elections. One opposition politician “stands out as a potential national opposition leader,” one cable noted, before adding that in a meeting with embassy officers he had “privately expressed his interest in obtaining US support to run for the presidency”.
One the major concerns for the US after Morales came to power was Bolivia moving out of its traditional sphere of influence and making alliances and economic deals with other countries: thumbing its nose at its traditional patron. Among the people consulted by USAID for one its projects was Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, a former president of Bolivia who controversially decommissioned the country’s only air-defense system, purchased from China, putting Bolivia under the basic military control of the US. It was people like this the US was used to dealing with. But Morales no longer countenanced such servility. At the same time, China embraced the MAS government openly (largely because of the lithium reserves, no doubt), and did not seem as intent to undermine the democratically elected government as the US was. They also provided an alternative source of investment, worrying US planners. And it wasn’t just China. In 2008, it was announced that Bolivia had signed a deal with state-owned Russian gas company Gazprom to explore and produce natural gas in the country. State-owned oil and gas company, YPFB, which was nationalized by the MAS government, signed the deal to exploit South America’s second-largest reserves, concentrated in the southeast.
Bolivia also announced more military purchases from China and Russia, after the US blocked Bolivian purchases of Czech aircraft. Most worryingly for the US, Venezuela and Cuba were also increasing their presence, a fear constantly discussed in the cables. One cable from La Paz noted: “Cuban and Venezuelan advice, interference, and assistance continue to be a serious concern.” The concern is listed as “Cuban doctors and newly inaugurated hospitals bring medical care to isolated communities”, while Venezuela provided micro-credit financing to small businesses. Unlike USAID, of course, “Venezuelan funding is pouring into the country with no transparency or accountability, further damaging the democratic process.” Venezuelan funding for the media was a particular “issue of concern”, which, we have seen, was being fought as a proxy war through the NED’s programs. One cable worried “that media will be sold without public knowledge, changing the opinion-leader landscape in the country”, i.e. the anti-Morales bias. The cable even noted that the main newspaper, La Razon, has a “generally anti- [government of Bolivia] stance”.
In February 2008, a story broke about a Fulbright scholar in Bolivia who had been asked to spy on Cubans and Venezuelans in the country. John Alexander van Schaick said that he was told by regional security officer Vincent Cooper at the US embassy “to provide the names, addresses and activities of any Venezuelan or Cuban doctors or field workers” he came across while he was in Bolivia.7 His account was supported by similar testimony from Peace Corps members and staff who were all told by Mr Cooper to gather information on Cuban and Venezuelan nationals. Three days after the story broke, it was announced that Mr Cooper would not be returning to Bolivia. Morales called it the “expulsion” of a “man who conducted North American espionage”, an accusation with some justice. Many believed it was the tip of the iceberg. “We had a mutual friend, and [van Schaick] approached me in December 2007,” Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, the American journalist living in La Paz who broke the story, told me. “It took a couple months to get a hold on the Peace Corps angle, I had heard lots of rumors, but hadn’t been able to substantiate them. The Peace Corps duty director went on record at the time saying Vincent Cooper came and gave these inappropriate instructions to the group.”
The volunteers were in a moral quandary about what to do. “Some kids were worried about the message coming from the embassy, one girl was planning on living with a Cuban family; she wondered if she would have to collect information on them,” said Friedman-Rudovsky. The director and the Peace Corps staff complained to the US embassy, remonstrating that they couldn’t act like an intelligence service for the US government. Four months later, however, van Schaick received the same instructions. “In general, not much has changed in terms of US-Bolivia since Obama came into power,” said Friedman-Rudovsky. The ambassador never admitted it had happened; he merely commented that if these instructions had been given, it went against US policy. But it was the first ironclad proof of the US using its agencies to gather information in the country. “Every time Morales speaks on US-Bolivian relations in terms of US meddling in Bolivian affairs, he refers to this story, it’s the only story with definitive proof of spying,” said Friedman-Rudovsky. In the aftermath, the Bolivian foreign minister asked the US to establish exchange programs because the current US programs “are not transparent and we are suspicious when scholarship students are asked to spy on us”. The US did not comply.
Another controversy erupted in 2008 when a police unit called the Special Operations Command (COPES) was implicated in a domestic surveillance scandal after it was revealed that the unit had been used to collect intelligence on areas outside its remit of narco-trafficking. The unit was funded by the US, and was ultimately answerable to the US embassy. The idea that no one there knew what was going on is hard to countenance. It was disbanded soon after.
There had been a long lineage for this kind of subterfuge. In 1997 testimony to Congress, James Milford, deputy administrator of the DEA, said: “The Intelligence and Special Operations Group (GIOE) is one of Bolivia’s most successful drug enforcement programs. It was developed four years ago as a result of cooperation between DEA and the Bolivian National Police [and was] responsible for handling sensitive intelligence and conducting the most important complex criminal investigations in Bolivia.”
The US had long-established law enforcement agencies in Bolivia operating under the guise of drug enforcement; these agencies could be used for different purposes, and no one could actually verify whether they were gathering intelligence. Later, President Morales alleged that the CIA had tried to infiltrate state-run oil firm YPFB through marketing director Rodrigo Carrasco, who had attended a number of “training courses” in the US, which involved intelligence, security and politics. Carrasco had been a member of COPES. In the aftermath, the US embassy still complained that the “threat to expel the CIA from Bolivia means that any one of us can be (mis)identified as a spy and kicked out should we do – or be falsely accused of doing – anything that displeases Evo”. Spying was definitely taking place on a large scale. All through the cables there are allusions to “sensitive reporting” which is a euphemism for spying. One cable noted that a MAS official whom “many political analysts” consider “a radical” is “railroading controversial legislative measures”, before adding: “Sensitive reporting indicates that Ramirez may be very vulnerable on corruption and human smuggling charges.”
Being a softy
When in Sucre, I talked to Enrique Cortes, a professor at one of the universities in the city and a specialist in US-Bolivian relations. “Bolivia is still dependent,” he said. “This position of dependency was from the beginnings of when the nation was created, we were always dependent on an international monetary system lately led by the US.” He added: “There was a triangular relationship between the state, oligarchs and transnational organizations and these oligarchs responded to international money. When they lose power they use force to stop history from developing. Within that fits Rózsa-Flores and the Pando massacre, and Leopoldo.” The move to democracy, he said, may not be permanent, and could be scuppered. “There was the fascist process, dictatorship, but it’s not over. With Carter began the phase of controllable democracies, but now we think a new phase has opened. And this new phase is characterized by vital resources, and wanting control over these vital resources. So that’s the central conflict with the US.” He thought that the US could still put a brake on the process initiated by MAS to greater independence. “A coup is not the only way to put brakes on this. History shows there are other strategies, such as penetrating the popular organizations, and social movements using agencies like USAID.” But coups have been the traditional US tactic in the country.
Declassified documents released in 2008 exposed US financial and political support for the military coup led by right-wing general Hugo Banzer in 1971, who ruled until 1978 (before making a comeback, democratically elected this time, from 1997 to 2001). The State Department at the time denied supporting the three-day coup that left 110 dead and hundreds more wounded. Banzer’s dictatorship was a nightmare for organized labor and anyone who disagreed with his restructuring of the economy in the interests of foreign capital. He arrested 14,000 Bolivians without due process, and 8,000 more were tortured. Some 200 people were thought to have disappeared. Banzer had been trained at the notorious School of the Americas in Panama (Fort Gulick) and at Fort Hood in Texas, before becoming a military attaché in Washington. The declassified documents show that the Nixon administration had signed off $410,000 to be made available for politicians and military officers willing to take out the left-leaning dictator Juan José Torres. At a meeting in July 1971, the 40 Committee – chaired by the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and overseeing covert operations around the world – discussion focused on giving this money to opposition figures who, the understanding was, would undertake a coup. Under-Secretary of State Alexis Johnson said: “What we are actually organizing is a coup in itself, isn’t it?” The plan was approved and the same day that the coup began in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, a National Security Council staffer reported to Kissinger that the CIA had transferred money to two high-ranking members of the opposition.
A month earlier, Nixon and Kissinger had discussed the possibilities for dealing with the Bolivian leader who was leaning too far left.
Kissinger: We are having a major problem in Bolivia, too. And –
Nixon: I got that. Connally mentioned that. What do you want to do about that?
Kissinger: I’ve told [CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Thomas] Karamessines to crank up an operation, post-haste. Even the Ambassador there, who’s been a softy, is now saying that we must start playing with the military there or the thing is going to go down the drain.
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: That’s due in on Monday.
Nixon: What does Karamessines think we need? A coup?
Kissinger: We’ll see what we can, whether – in what context. They’re going to squeeze us out in another two months. They’ve already gotten rid of the Peace Corps, which is an asset, but now they want to get rid of [US Information Agency] and military people. And I don’t know whether we can even think of a coup, but we have to find out what the lay of the land is there.
Fast-forward 40 years and not much had changed. The WikiLeaks cables reveal that as the political turmoil was peaking, the US embassy was contemplating the eventuality of a military coup. One noted that “there are strong indications the military is split and could be reticent to follow orders”. Another complained that: “A strong commitment to institutionalism would require a rock-solid constitutional argument before commanders would participate in any action that could be considered ‘political’.” There is no doubt that these feelings were being communicated from within the military to the US embassy. “[Armed Forces Commander General Wilfredo] Vargas had been, publicly and privately, a supporter of US-Bolivian military relations,” one cable noted. “Although he continues to cooperate enthusiastically with us at a working level, even giving awards to three [Military Group] officers December 13 his public comments in the last few months have irritated Bolivian military officers and raised eyebrows within the Embassy.” (The Military Group is part of the US Department of Defense.) But there were reasons for optimism. “Evo does not have a network of personal friends within the military (although his Presidency Minister Juan Quintana does),” one cable noted. “[T]he military is leery of taking on any role considered remotely political. The military fears above all a repeat of the bloody military- civilian conflicts in El Alto in 2003, which brought down the Goni government.” The Goni government – supported by the US, where he is now in exile.
Finally, we are told that Commander Vargas is too unreliable to count on. “Vargas remains an enigma,” the cable noted. “Some commanders suspected, at least before his December 8 comments, that he might be sympathetic to a coup. He is widely characterized as an ‘opportunist’”. The cable added wryly: “We cannot expect him to stand behind his assurances.”
In a piece of bare-faced historical revisionism, USAID said that between 1985 and 2003 “fundamental economic and political rules of the game were liberalized”, adding, “organizations with a pluralistic view of democracy grew and flourished – especially in response to the availability of donor assistance”. It noted that, “Corporatist civil society organizations dominated citizen participation in the public sphere between 1952 and 1985”, which was the moment when the Bolivian government “began to change the direction of Bolivia’s economic policies and democratic practices”. Soon, as the fairytale went, “Pluralistic civil society then emerged, and was active – especially at the level of communities.” What that period, in fact, describes is the “Shock Doctrining” of the Bolivian economy and wider society. President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, who had been a supporter of US- backed dictator Hugo Banzer, ruled from 1985 to 1989 and instituted a neoliberal recipe to help put the staggering economy back on its feet. He repressed labor unions, sacked 30,000 miners, and privatized most of the state-owned companies. The broken society he and his successor Goni created would provide fertile ground for the Morales administration to grow in.
As its framework for the definition of civil society, USAID uses the work of Larry Diamond, a professor at Stanford University and fellow at the Hoover Institution where he coordinates the project on Democracy in Iran. He was a senior advisor on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the founding co-editor of the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy. He has worked for the State Department, World Bank and USAID. In other words, the perfect intellectual to design democracy in Bolivia.
US weapons and military had been found in Bolivia. In June 2007, Donna Thi Dinh, a 20-year-old American woman, was detained at La Paz airport after arriving on a flight from Miami. The authorities found 500 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition in her luggage. Ms Thi had initially claimed to customs that she was carrying cheese. She was met at the airport by the wife of a military liaison at the US embassy in La Paz. US ambassador Philip Goldberg said that the bullets were for training and sport shooting and she did not realize that she had to declare them. This might be true, but at the very least it shows the impunity with which Americans felt they could act in Bolivia. Bolivia’s director of migration, Magaly Zegarra, noted: “the fact that a North American citizen, related to the embassy, is carrying ammunition on a North American aircraft coming from Miami, a city where terrorists from all over Latin America are protected by the government, especially their teacher, as [Luis] Posada is called by the terrorists, and make a mockery of all [justice] mechanisms, is questionable.” In another incident, in March 2006, Triston Jay Amero, a 25-year-old from California, set off 300 kilos of dynamite at two hotels in La Paz. He was carrying 15 different identity documents. Two years later, security services uncovered the presence of two fake American journalists photographing presidential vehicles.
The US military itself was also using Bolivia as a base. In June 2010, it was revealed that the Obama administration was expanding the role of US special operations forces around the world in a “secret war” to combat al-Qaeda, with the Washington Post noting that they were placed in 60 to 75 countries, with about 4,000 personnel available in countries aside from Iraq and Afghanistan. Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation, based on “well-placed special operations sources”, that Bolivia was one of those countries. The role of the joint special operations command forces was to launch “pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes”, but this was ambiguous. “While some of the special forces missions are centered around training of allied forces, often that line is blurred. In some cases, ‘training’ is used as a cover for unilateral, direct action,” Scahill wrote. A special forces source told him: “It’s often done under the auspices of training so that they can go anywhere. It’s brilliant. It is essentially what we did in the 60s,” adding, “Remember the ‘training mission’ in Vietnam? That’s how it morphs.” US armed forces did occasionally pop up in Bolivia. In 2008, just weeks before the raid on Hotel Las Americas, Iraq war veteran Lieutenant Commander Gregory Michel was arrested after he pulled a gun on a prostitute in Santa Cruz. The US embassy managed to secure his release on grounds of “diplomatic immunity”. The WikiLeaks cables also show that C-130s and helicopters owned by the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) at the US Embassy were being used to transport “eradicators and troops”. Elsewhere, the embassy noted allegations that the DEA, US military and Bolivian national police headed Bolivian anti-narcotics efforts “from a US military base” in the Cochabamba department. In reference to this, the cable noted: “The US supports Bolivian anti-narcotics efforts at the Chimore Airport and has offices there, but there are no US military bases per se in Bolivia.” Per se. The WikiLeaks cables reveal an embassy concerned about renewing “mil- mil” (military to military) cooperation and establishing a “Status of Forces” agreement. But the Bolivian government was reticent about signing up – also refusing to ratify an “Article 98” which excuses US nationals from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, a common demand made by the US, a rogue nation intent on not abiding by international law.
But, as the US knows, Bolivia is still captive to the American military. A cable noted: “Bolivia has not spent any money on ammunition in two years, and the capacity to quickly move troops remains in doubt.”
Saying thank you
In early 2006, a cable from La Paz noted “the billions of US dollars of assistance in the past few decades”, and said that the ambassador observed that the US government “would sometimes appreciate a good word or thanks” from President Morales. To this day, the Morales government and his party, MAS, have not “thanked” the US for its support, because since 2005, and before, that support has been designed to finish them, and by extension democracy, in Bolivia. In many ways, Bolivia is the most democratic country in the world now. When you walk around the country you sense the involvement of the citizenry in the politics of their local community as well as on a national level, in a way that is markedly absent in the US or UK. There is a simple formula for US foreign policy in Latin America and beyond: support democracy if the people vote the right way. If they don’t, and the political party threatens to upset the “natural” order of things and with it the business interests of America and other foreign companies, then a program of subversion and destabilization gets under way. This investigation is focused on Bolivia in the specifics, but the general patterns have been replicated from Venezuela to Ecuador, from Brazil to Peru.
Another cable noted: “Evo Morales’ election in December 2005 was a political earthquake in Bolivia, sweeping aside political expectations that have defined Bolivian politics for generations and at the same time breaking open fissures and offering up new possibilities.” It is these new possibilities that scare the US government, the threat of the “virus of a good example”, a government that can provide for its citizens while growing the economy. Even Bolivia’s admirable lead on climate change is dismissed by the US embassy as a “vehicle for raising [Morales’s] and Bolivia’s international political stature”. The US is slowly losing the ownership it has had over Bolivian society for decades. For the first time
in living memory, the Bolivian people are deciding their own destiny according to their needs, ideas and hopes – not those of the US. For this reason, war has been declared on Bolivian democracy, alongside any other democracy that does not see its raison d’être as supporting US interests to the detriment of its own people. But it was not just the indigenous people of Latin America who were proving a problem for the racketeers. When the financial crisis hit, its own indigenous population stopped being so easy to exploit as well. The racket abroad meets the racket at home.v