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Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia. The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story."It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the...

On Wednesday, November 24, Iranian demands that female nurses don the hijab in response to Iran’s providing $1.2 million for funding of the new El Alto city hospital in Bolivia sparked a national outcry among women’s rights advocates within Bolivia. In an international teleconference in La Paz held between Bolivian President, Evo Morales, and Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to celebrate the hospital’s opening, nurses were shown wearing hijabs as part of their new uniform regulations.

LA PAZ, Bolivia, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Iran is clinching deals for trade and technical cooperation with Latin American countries with the aim of securing a foothold after the current tour of the region by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran has already fostered strong bilateral ties with Nicaragua and Venezuela, but Ahmadinejad's current tour of Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela is producing a whole series of new contracts that encompass increased trade and economic cooperation, technical assistance in the energy and mining sectors and uranium prospecting. During his one-day visit to the Bolivian capital Tuesday Ahmadinejad and Bolivian counterpart Evo Morales signed...

The Argentinean prosecutor who ferreted out Iranian links to Argentina's largest terror attack warned Wednesday of Teheran's growing terror network in Latin America. "The Iranians are moving fast," assessed Alberto Nisman, who has secured Interpol backing for the arrest of several Iranians, including former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, for ordering the July 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community offices in Buenos Aires. "We see a much greater penetration than we did in 1994." He said that Iran, particularly through Lebanese proxy Hizbullah, has a growing presence in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, using techniques it honed in Argentina before the...

SNIPPET: "Lula and Chavez have established a "strategic relationship," and recently agreed upon a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan oil venture worth billions of dollars. Lula and Chavez have joined with Daniel Ortega, the returned Nicaraguan Marxist dictator, to form an anti-U.S. Latin American military alliance - all with Russian assistance - funded by the region's abundant oil reserves. Brazil is engaged in its own arms build-up and Lula is determined that Brazil will become at least a first-rate regional power. Unfortunately, Lula is establishing Brazil as an anti-American military power by aligning with nations hostile or potentially hostile to the U.S. Lula...

Bolivia's president participated in a tribute to the guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was captured and killed by Bolivian soldiers 42 years ago while trying to foment revolution in the Andean nation. President Evo Morales, a close ally of the leftist governments in Venezuela and Cuba, has often expressed admiration for Guevara, an Argentinian who joined in Fidel Castro's successful revolution in Cuba and has become an icon for many on the left. Guevara is "invincible in his ideals," Mr Morales said at a ceremony in Vallegrande, the town in central Bolivia where the murdered rebel's body was displayed...

Why is ACORN's chief organizer friendly with the Marxist anti-American governments of two South American countries? Within ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis's storied rogues gallery of a rolodex may be found contact information for then-Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzman and for Sabine Kienzl, a professional propagandist employed by the Venezuelan embassy. The listing for Guzman contains what appears to have been a direct office telephone number.An ACORN insider I spoke with confirmed the authenticity of the rolodex which I have seen. Erick Erickson of the website RedState recently did an excellent job unveiling the rolodex.Both Bolivia and Venezuela are now headed...

MEXICO CITY -- A 44-year-old Bolivian drug addict and alcoholic who describes himself as a church minister was the sole person responsible for the brief hijacking Wednesday of a commercial jetliner, a Mexican official said. The suspect -- Josmar Flores Pereira -- told authorities he hijacked the Boeing 737 jet because the date -- September 9, 2009, or 9/9/9, and 666 reversed -- held some significance for him, said Genaro Garcia Luna, the secretary for public safety. "He said that because of that divine reference he wanted to alert Mexico City of an earthquake," Garcia told reporters. Flanked by two...

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous beret is gone. His iconic beard is filthy and matted against skeletal cheekbones. One bushy eyebrow arches over his half-open eyes. As a Bolivian country surgeon methodically saws off his lifeless hands, Che appears vaguely amused. Gustavo Villoldo, a stocky figure in green army fatigues, stands just inside the tiny laundry room where the Cuban revolutionary's corpse rests atop a sink. For five months, the CIA operative has led soldiers hunting Guevara through the rough crags and valleys of southern Bolivia. Less than 24 hours ago, his team had captured and executed him in a village...

It's good, occasionally, to take a trip down memory lane. It helps to put things into perspective. Hugo Chavez ought never to have been elected president. By rights, he ought to be growing old in a jail cell somewhere. Well, it's been seventeen years, maybe he’d be in a half-way house by now. As an army officer in 1992, he led a military revolt against the legal, constitutional government of Venezuela, and attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president of the time, Carlos Andres Perez. He gambled that once the shooting started, the minister of defense and the rest of...

The push for conversion to plug-in electric cars will do nothing to stop carbon emissions, a report by the GAO warns, throwing cold water on a push by Democrats to get more plug-ins on the road. In fact, the problem could be made worse as demand goes up at coal-fired electrical plants. Plus, the need for batteries may just have the US changing the dictators to which we’re chained, as IBD reports...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else. "If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

A BOLIVIAN television news channel has been left red-faced after falling for a hoax that saw it claim pictures from the hit TV show Lost were actually the last moment of Air France flight AF447 before it plunged into the ocean on June 1. Internet footage shows a Periodistas Asociados de Televisión (PAT) newsreader describing several shots from inside the plane as it broke in half. The shots show passengers being sucked out of the back of the plane into midair.

A poor, agrarian, landlocked country in South America with a nearly 100 percent Christian population is hardly the place one would expect to become a hotbed of Islamic extremism in the Western Hemisphere. But a recent report by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it's so. There are only 1,000 Muslims in Bolivia, a country of 9.7 million people, but the connection between some of the community’s religious leaders and Iran — as well as with fundamentalist factions in the Palestinian territories — has U.S. officials and terror experts keeping a...

A poor, agrarian, landlocked country in South America with a nearly 100 percent Christian population is hardly the place one would expect to become a hotbed of Islamic extremism in the Western Hemisphere. But a recent report by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it's so. .... One Muslim leader named in the OSC report is Mahmud Amer Abusharar, founder of the Centro Islamico Boliviano (CIB) in Santa Cruz. Abusharar emigrated from the Palestinian territories in 1974 and claims to have built Bolivia’s first mosque in 1994 so that he would...

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press. The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran's nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

MOSCOW, May 22 (RIA Novosti) - Bolivia may order weaponry worth several million dollars from Russia in the near future, a deputy foreign minister said on Friday. Sources earlier reported that Bolivia had expressed interest in buying a number of Russian-made Mi-17 multipurpose helicopters to combat terrorism and drug trafficking. "As to purchases of military equipment, we are interested not only in helicopters, but also in other kinds of weaponry," Hugo Fernandez told a news conference at RIA Novosti. "Agreements on the list of military equipment which we would like to purchase have not yet been reached, but we will...

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Bolivia’s Chacaltaya Glacier, once known as the world’s highest ski run at 17,388 feet, has completely melted away, serving as a vivid example of the effects of climate change on the glaciers around the globe. “Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists.” - Dr. Edson Ramirez, Institute of Hydraulics and Hydrology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres In 1999, Ramirez, the head of a team of researchers studying the glacier since 1991, believed that the glacier would continue to exist until 2015, but the rate of melting tripled in the last ten years, and the once popular tourist destination...

Globovision of Caracas reports news that we hope is inaccurate, and which will be denied by former President Carter. The Venezuelan television network states that he has accepted an invitation to participate in the cultivation of coca with left wing Bolivian president Evo Morales, who grows it in Boliva. "Given that President Morales has been to my property, and evidently has harvested some peanuts, I hope that on my next visit I can go to El Chapare, where he is going to take me to harvest some coca leaves," responded Carter, which also drew a smirk of happiness from Morales....

We, the Heads of State and Government of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela, member countries of ALBA, consider that the Draft Declaration of the 5th Summit of the Americas is insufficient and unacceptable for the following reasons: - The Declaration does not provide answers to the Global Economic Crisis, even though this crisis constitutes the greatest challenge faced by humanity in the last decades and is the most serious threat of the current times to the welfare of our peoples. - The Declaration unfairly excludes Cuba, without mentioning the consensus in the region condemning the blockade and isolation...

Note: The following text is a quote: YOU ARE HERE: Home > Reports > Consular Affairs Bulletins > Report Warden Message: La Paz, Bolivia Kidnapping Awareness CONSULAR AFFAIRS BULLETINS Americas - Bolivia 21 Apr 2009 Printer Friendly Email Article RELATED REPORTS 3 Apr 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: POSSIBLE BOLIVIA SOCIAL UNREST 6 Mar 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: BOLIVIA CIVIC PARADES MARCH 6 13 Feb 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: BOLIVIA ADVISES CARNAVAL VIGILANCE 6 Feb 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: BOLIVIA DEMONSTRATION FEBRUARY 7 22 Jan 2009 WARDEN MESSAGE: BOLIVIA DENGUE FEVER OUTBREAK U.S. Embassy La Paz issued the following Warden Message on April 21: Express...

Journalist-turned-Croatian independence fighter Eduardo Rosza-Flores was asked in an interview a few years ago with the Hungarian edition of Elle Magazine if he would ever assassinate someone for a cause. "Only if [that person] comes to kill others," said Rozsa, according to an English version of the transcript posted on one of his blogs. "To protect and save the lives of my friends." The question now is whether Rozsa, a Hungarian-Bolivian, felt that way about Bolivian President Evo Morales. Rozsa was killed early last Thursday morning in a hotel room in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. The government...

Just two days after US President Barack Hussein Obama shared a controversial and landmark handshake with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has released a study analyzing the flowering alliance between the increasingly anti-Western Latin America and the virulently anti-Israel Iran. The study was conducted at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), a non-governmental organization dedicated to Israeli intelligence and terrorism issues. According to the study, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is using anti-Western Hugo Chavez as a springboard into several Latin American countries, such as Bolivia, Nicaragua, and...

Obama denies claim of US plot to kill Bolivian president: Official 19 Apr 2009, 2134 hrs IST, AFP PORT OF SPAIN: US President Barack Obama denied at the weekend trying to assassinate Bolivian President Evo Morales, despite claims of such a plot, a US administration official said on Sunday at the close of a summit of American leaders. "The president made clear his administration policy of not supporting any such activity," the official with Obama at the summit in Trinidad and Tobago said. He declined to be identified. Obama made the denial Saturday during a meeting with South American leaders...

Mystery deepened on Friday surrounding the breakup of a suspected assassination plot against Bolivian president Evo Morales that left three dead, as opposition leaders cast doubt on the government's story and said it was using the plot to influence coming elections. The hazy details of what happened on Thursday, in accounts by Bolivian authorities, seem lifted from the pages of a Hollywood script. An alleged plot against the president and other top officials was broken up by an elite police squad. Three men were killed in their underwear after a half-hour shootout at a hotel. Allegedly among the dead were...

Mystery deepened on Friday surrounding the breakup of a suspected assassination plot against Bolivian president Evo Morales that left three dead, as opposition leaders cast doubt on the government's story and said it was using the plot to influence coming elections... An alleged plot against the president and other top officials was broken up by an elite police squad. Three men were killed in their underwear after a half-hour shootout at a hotel... The dead are believed to be 49-year-old Eduardo Rózsa Flores, Santa Cruz-born son of a Hungarian father and Bolivian mother; Árpád Magyarosi, a Romanian-born Hungarian; and Michael...

SANCKAJAWIRA, Bolivia -- Evo Morales' opponents have figured out one thing as they look ahead to presidential elections this year: To beat Bolivia's first Indian leader, you need to run an Indian. Morales' supporters have come to the same conclusion - and shown no reluctance in attacking an indigenous politician for suggesting he might challenge their champion in elections expected in December. When Victor Hugo Cardenas, a native Aymara like Morales and a former vice president, hinted he would run, the response was brutal: A mob of Aymaras violently evicted Cardenas' family from their house here on Lake Titicaca's shore,...

A 3-year-old Bolivian girl whose parents thought was dead and were preparing to bury remained in a coma but was improving Friday, while her mother and stepfather were being held on abuse charges, a hospital official said. The girl is suffering from a head injury, contusions throughout her body and burns on her face, said Jose Carlos Camacho, director of Hospital Universitario Japones in Santa Cruz. "She is improving," Camacho told CNN on Friday. "Yesterday she was able to take liquids orally. She is waking up but remains critical." The girl's parents thought she was dead and held a six-hour...

LA PAZ (Reuters) – Emboldened by a new leftist constitution, Bolivia President Evo Morales on Saturday handed over ownership of farmland seized by the state from wealthy estate holders to poor indigenous people. Morales handed out around 94,000 acres of lands recently confiscated from five big ranches in Bolivia's wealthy eastern lowlands, a stronghold of his conservative political opponents. The ranchers have been accused of employing workers in conditions of semi-slavery. [...] "It is not that these lands were not in production, but that they were the site of human rights violations against the Guarani, who will now be their...

Bolivian President Evo Morales has ordered the expulsion of a US diplomat he accused last week of colluding with opposition groups in recent unrest. He said Francisco Martinez, a political officer at the US embassy in La Paz, had links to groups involved in violent opposition protests. President Morales ordered the US ambassador to leave the country six months ago over similar allegations. The US government has denied the latest allegations as baseless. Since his election in 2006, Bolivia's first indigenous president, a leftist who came to national prominence as a leader of the country's coca farmers, has frequently accused...

SNIPPET: "On January 6, 2009, Hugo Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador in Venezuela. Immediately after, the terrorist group Hamas publicly congratulated the "courageous step taken by the Venezuelan president." Three weeks later, after repeated anti-Semitic speeches by Venezuelan officials, the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas was brutally desecrated. The perpetrators were later caught by the police, but they were undoubtedly encouraged by the official discourse. These facts are not coincidental. They are the natural result of the many political and economic agreements signed between Chávez and the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who promised to "wipe Israel off the face...

MEXICO CITY – Iran is exploring ways to expand anemic trade with Mexico as part of stepped up efforts to deepen ties with Latin America, a top Iranian diplomat said Thursday. Annual trade between Mexico and Iran is a mere $50 million, compared to $2 billion with Brazil, said Ali Reza Salari, Iran's deputy foreign minister for the Americas. "We are here to investigate, why so low?" Reza Salari told reporters in Mexico City, where he was to meet with diplomats and business leaders. "With Mexico, there is absolutely no political problem between us. No cultural problems. It shows we...

UYUNI, Bolivia: In the rush to build the next generation of hybrid or electric cars, a sobering fact confronts both automakers and governments seeking to lower their reliance on foreign oil: almost half of the world's lithium, the mineral needed to power the vehicles, is found here in Bolivia - a country that may not be willing to surrender it so easily. Japanese and European companies are busily trying to strike deals to tap the resource, but a nationalist sentiment is building quickly in the government of President Evo Morales, an ardent critic of the United States who has already...

Bolivia's President Evo Morales on Friday nationalized the Chaco oil company, managed by Anglo-Argentine Panamerican Energy. "Little by little, we are taking back our companies," Morales said in Chaco's offices in the central town of Entre Rios, after signing the nationalization decree. The leftwing president has had his government take over several companies in Bolivia's important gas and oil industry, as well as others in telecoms and mining, since taking power in 2005. The nationalization of Chaco took place just two days before a referendum on a new constitution Morales has championed. If passed, as expected, the revised basic law...

Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, says he is breaking off ties with Israel in protest against its war in Gaza, which has left more than 1,000 Palestinians dead. Morales said on Wednesday that he would seek to get top Israeli officials, including Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, charged with "genocide" in the International Criminal Court. The Bolivian president also dismissed the United Nations and its "Insecurity Council" for its "lukewarm" response to the crisis and said the general assembly should hold an emergency session to condemn the invasion. "Considering these grave attacks against ... humanity, Bolivia will stop...

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone kicked a soccer ball and chewed coca leaves with Bolivia's leftist president Tuesday during an interview for a planned documentary. Stone's meeting with President Evo Morales is likely fodder for the director's documentary on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close ally of Morales. Bolivian government photos showed Morales and Stone chewing coca and kicking a ball around the lawn of the presidential residence in La Paz. Coca leaves are revered in Bolivia as a mild, traditional stimulant, but are better known abroad as the main ingredient in cocaine.

Written by Evo Morales Ayma, President of Bolivia Today, our Mother Earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years. Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather: the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps; the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas, where approximately 60% of the world population live; the increase in the processes of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources; a higher frequency in natural disasters that the communities of the earth suffer;...

Japan's cheap hand-me-down cars have flooded Bolivia's narrow streets, where empty cabs honk pleadingly for fares and lines at gas stations often stretch down the block. Now President Evo Morales has announced a ban on all imports of cars more than five years old, hoping to call time-out on an automotive binge that has given South America's poorest country a crash course in the joy, pain and traffic of car culture.

Latin America: Barack Obama hasn't even assumed the presidency, but already he's getting his marching orders from a slew of hostile leftist regimes to our south. This is a sign of trouble.In principle, a consortium of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries trying to solve the region's problems without the U.S. is a fine idea. But at a new summit in Brazil, participants couldn't get the U.S. off their minds. The financial crisis, the falling price of oil and the pickle in which the worst-managed economies in the region now find themselves blurred distinctions between democratic and authoritarian regimes, all...

Two tunnels were discovered in Nogales over the weekend by Nogales police officers, making a four-day total of three tunnels found in the border city. Elsewhere, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stopped 17 people from entering the United States using fraudulent Canadian citizenship cards at the Douglas port of entry. Officers patrolling an area near downtown Nogales discovered a tunnel east of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry about 6 p.m. Friday, said Mario Escalante, U.S. Border Patrol Tucson Sector spokes-man. Its opening was about 8 feet north of the border fence and hidden by weeds and a piece...

CALABOZO, Venezuela – The foremen bark out instructions in broken Spanish, saying "aqui" and "mas" as they direct crews to lay water pipes and smooth out cement. But on their lunch break, they switch into Farsi — the language of Iran. Their Iranian company is building thousands of apartments for Venezuela's poor. Iran is also helping to build cars, tractors and bicycles in Venezuela and has opened new embassies in Bolivia and Nicaragua.

Early signs are Obama has to guard his left Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political WriterFriday, November 14, 2008 (11-13) 17:44 PST -- As he prepares to enter the ring of White House politics, President-elect Barack Obama might need to perfect that left jab just as much as his right hook. Images View Larger Images Not only can the Democratic president-to-be expect the predictable shots from the conservative right, but eventually a pounding from the left if he doesn't deliver "change you can believe in" on issues that concern liberal voters - health care reform, an end to the war in...

Expanding Afghan War Awaits New President An expanded U.S. military involvement awaits a new U.S. president in Afghanistan where the unfinished business of September 11 has flared over the past three years into a major insurgency. A raft of assessments and reviews now underway in Washington point to a fundamental rethinking of the Afghan war. But whoever is elected Tuesday will face choices on the size of the military buildup, how to strengthen the central government, how far to go in dealing with insurgent sanctuaries across the border, how to help stabilize Pakistan, and whether and how to reconcile...

President Evo Morales has announced he is suspending "indefinitely" the operations of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Bolivia.Mr Morales accused the agency of having encouraged anti-government protests in the country in September. He did not say whether its staff would be asked to leave the country, as coca- growers have been pressing him to do. Bolivia's first indigenous president once served as the leader of the country's union of coca-growers.

LA PAZ : Bolivia's President Evo Morales proposed Saturday that leftist Latin leaders descend on Havana January 1 to stand strong and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution with ailing icon Fidel Castro. "It is my greatest desire to go there with the social movements, and with the anti-imperialist presidents, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution" which falls January 1, 2009, Morales declared on a visit to the eastern city of Santa Cruz. The first indigenous president of Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority, told a gathering of indigenous people from across the Americas that...

CARACAS, Venezuela — They don't call him President Bush in Venezuela anymore. Now he's known as "Comrade." With the Bush administration's Treasury Department resorting to government bailout after government bailout to keep the U.S. economy afloat, leftist governments and their political allies in Latin America are having a field day, gloating one day and taunting Bush the next for adopting the types of interventionist government policies that he's long condemned.

The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) decided at a meeting on Friday to set up a South American Parliament in Bolivia to promote the bloc's integration. Chilean President Michele Bachelet, also the UNASUR's temporary president, and Bolivian President Evo Morales opened the meeting in Bolivia's Cochabamba province which drew representatives from 12 countries in the region. "There are many tasks that the UNASUR is urged to accomplish, as part of the Latin American and Caribbean efforts," Bachelet said. Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia said that UNASUR members consider it necessary to promote the construction of the institutionalism and the...