Posted on 01/24/2006 6:50:00 PM PST by MillerCreek
Posted on Tue, Jan. 24, 2006
LATIN AMERICA
Bolivian praises coca and CastroEvo Morales' first day as president of Bolivia included meeting leaders of Cuba and Venezuela and the swearing-in of a leftist Cabinet.
BY JACK CHANG, Knight Ridder News Service LA PAZ, Bolivia -
Newly inaugurated Bolivian President Evo Morales began his historic, five-year term Monday by meeting with leaders from Cuba and Venezuela, two of Latin America's harshest critics of U.S. policy, before swearing in a Cabinet largely made up of political radicals.
His Cabinet choices included a former housekeeper turned union activist as justice minister and a hardline advocate of nationalization as energy minister.
At one point, he gave Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez a portrait of South American independence hero Simón Bolívar constructed from coca leaf, the main ingredient in cocaine. Despite U.S. objections, Morales has long defended its cultivation.
"Let's strengthen together and grow powerful together," Morales told Chávez. "For these Bolivian people let's fight together."'
And in an interview with Univisión anchor Jorge Ramos, Morales said he "admires and respects" Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Asked if he considers Castro a dictator, he shot back: "Fidel is a democratic man."
The day was one meeting after another that seemed destined to increase U.S. anxiety over Morales, a peasant leader who has promised to be a "nightmare" for the United States.
Morales woke before dawn, then sat down at 7:30 a.m. with Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage, who attended the president's inauguration on Sunday.
FIGHTING ILLITERACY
The men discussed how Cuba, which has exported thousands of teachers around the world, can help Morales' government fight illiteracy, which runs about 20 percent in the impoverished Andean country.
Morales didn't specify whether he reached any agreements with Lage.
Around 10 a.m., Morales walked down to the cavernous atrium of the presidential palace and swore in his 16-minister Cabinet, using the same raised-fist salute he used in his inauguration.
Morales' Cabinet includes Bolivia's first indigenous foreign minister, David Choquehuanca Cespedes, who, like Morales, is an Aymara Indian.
MILITANT ACTIVIST
Also sworn in were Abel Mamani Marca, a militant activist who helped bring down two previous governments over privatized water contracts, who will become water minister, and Walker San Miguel Rodríguez, a prominent Bolivian attorney without previous military experience, who will be defense minister. A former mining union leader was selected as minister of mines.
Andrés Solíz Rada, a former socialist member of Congress who as a journalist often wrote disparagingly of the U.S. role in Bolivia, was named energy minister. He will be in charge of renegotiating Bolivia's contracts with foreign companies that are exploring Bolivia's vast natural gas supplies.
NOT WIDELY KNOWN
The head of the domestic workers' union, Casimira Rodriguez, a Quechua Indian, was named justice minister. Rodríguez, a former housekeeper herself, led street protests that culminated in the enactment of the Household Worker Law, which grants domestic workers protection from mistreatment and near slave conditions. Few of the Cabinet members are widely known, even in Bolivia.
With thousands of admirers outside the presidential palace chanting his name, Venezuelan President Chávez arrived around noon and signed a series of bilateral agreements with Morales, including a deal to trade Bolivian soy for Venezuelan diesel fuel.
Both leaders, who hugged each other several times, said they were united in fighting "neoliberalism," meaning U.S.-backed economic policies promoting free trade and tight fiscal policy.
Venezuela is the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, while Bolivia claims Latin America's second biggest natural gas reserves. Venezuela's state-owned oil company opened an office in La Paz on Monday.
FIRMS WORRIED
Although the 46-year-old Morales has worried energy companies by threatening to "nationalize" Bolivia's natural gas resources, some observers expect a more measured approach from the new government, said Chris Garman, the Latin American director for the Eurasia Group, a New York-based consulting firm.
"His rhetoric is going to vary according to the audience he speaks to," Garman said.
How do YOU know that the U.S. "drug war in South America is a total disaster"?
I'm curious as to how you can substantiate that, and why.
You "getting (your) chocolate" has nothing to do with cocaine and the coca farmers in Bolivia, unless you are "getting (your) chocolate" along with your cocaine. Or from the same source.
And all that cocaine would not be possible without all those coca leaves being grown by all those "peasant farmers" such as Evo Morales. In Bolivia, chiefly, although it's hardly the only country responsible.
Some drug enforcement and eradication is far better than none. I've yet to ever encounter any bureaucracy that did not experience waste and fraud and mismanagement. But it's failure of humanity not failure of some distant thing called the bureaucracy itself.
With any effort involving drugs, sex and money, there are inevitable aggresses upon the ethics involved, if not outright horrid violations of decency and human life. Something as complex an operation as the DEA approaches the spanse of the military, certainly a paramilitary operation. I can understand that it would be rife with problems.
However, I find it completely objectionable to demean the United States for engaging in anti-drug measures, attempting, nearly, the impossible. We made it to the moon, almost to mars, as a species, we can eventually accomplish reasonable things as to smugglers, "druggies" and murderous cartels.
The worst offense I find is the willingness by some here to blame not only the United States for a generalized "drug problem" while alleging that those who produce and traffic in drugs are aimless, simple cultures or whatever. They grow and produce narcotics, they who do are responsible for their deeds just as individually those who fall victim to using the drugs. But the blame first rests to my view on those who produce the drugs and traffic them. Rid the world of those, you rid the world of most if not all narcotics given their agricultural root.
South America not only replaced "Pablo," but it also is far more populated now than it was when he had his nasty rule there. More people equals more of everything, more bad deeds, more drugs being grown by more people, more cocaine being produced on more land by more cartels. We also have more people in the United States and worldwide. Among those, we have more who abuse/use drugs. More people worldwide equates with more of everthing human and related.
The DEA and the U.S. hardly made that happen. The "blame the U.S." methodology aids and assists those who assume no responsibility for harming others, including the U.S., and at least after 09/11, some people do now recognize the complicity between narcotics and terrorism. Terrorism relies on funding sources and narcotics rely on terrorism to sell their product. Thus, a marriage made in Hell. In which Bolivia is inherently involved.
DISCUSSION ABOUT: Bolivia, Evo Morales, Cocaine, Castro and Terrorism
This thread was not originally intended for the "moral absolutes" area of discussion, but it has taken a turn into a moral one, with a few persons arguing the moral relativism of the "unblamable drug cartels" while attempting to also blame the United States for the use of drugs -- which, in my view, fulfills the best hopes of the cartels themselves: "that the U.S. is inherently bad and the poor peasants are right and good to uprise and conquer the evil U.S."
I paraphrase but am quite concerned about the issue of narco terrorism. And that South and Central America are emerging as the second home to Hamas, with a partnership between politico-terrorists and narco-terrorists certainly underway.
Sadly, some on this thread reduced the issue to the argument that they want their "chocolate" and the rest, "why care".
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To be included in or removed from the MORAL ABSOLUTES PINGLIST, please FreepMail either MillerCreek or wagglebee.
Oh, so now *I* am responsible for "turning Mexico and South America communist"?
Are you eve familiar with history? They've been communist far longer than even **I** have been alive, much less educated to any point to be able to write my opinions.
Try something intelligent. I'm still waiting to read something that is from you.
Very nice mugs. I forgot to ping you to this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1566302/posts
It's about the segment that 60 Minutes is doing on Richard Paey this Sunday.
Thanks!
Oh, so NOW I'm "a kid" because you want your chocolate and think Bolivians are harmless in the cocaine narco business?
You are still insane.
And you still haven't read the article that this thread was intended upon, have you?
Why have you maligned the thread and yet contributed nothing more than nasty malignments here? You have not read the article, you've forced some sort of word pugalism based upon your wants and needs for "chocolate" and yet don't recognize this thread isn't even about "chocolate" nor about your work experience anywhere.
It's about Evo Morales, narco terrorism and the nation of Bolivia.
Unless you are Evo Morales, your desire for a ready supply of chocolate and other negative and irrational statements about me have nothing to do with the thread.
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