El Gaviero

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The invaluable Bolivia Information Forum shipped October’s news briefing today. There are a couple of items from it that are interesting (along with another item from elsewhere):

President Evo Morales has disbanded the Unit for Tactical Resolution for Crisis (UTARC), a specially trained police force that was involved in the Santa Cruz terror-cell take-down earlier this [...]

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El Duderino links to a Democracy No! debate between the execrable Lanny Davis, who is whoring himself out to the pro-coup business community in Honduras, and NYU historian Greg Grandin. Davis’s behavior in the debate is shameful; unfortunately, Grandin’s not so effective in countering him. But at one point in the debate Grandin urges viewers [...]

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El Gaviero has just flown back to New York City, and boy is he tired. Unfortunately for him, the Bolivian news cycle never stops, and he now finds himself playing catch-up! Luckily for you all, other bloggers never rest. So here’s a round-up on the news from Bolivia:

Otto’s got a great translation of a damning [...]

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To celebrate the life of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who was assassinated 90 years ago today, here’s another look at a entry I posted last year after visting the Zapatista autonomous town of Oventik, in Chiapas, Mexico.
The city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, located in the Joval valley of the Chiapas highlands, was named [...]

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In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nick Buxton rightly takes Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg to task for his adoration of disgraced ex–Bolivian president Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, whom he and colleague James Carville helped elect in 2002 (as documented in 2007’s Cocalero 2005’s Our Brand Is Crisis–thanks anon). Goni’s neoliberal policies and privatization schemes [...]

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Yesterday, former Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín died. Others noted this, so I thought I’d best get up to speed on his place in the history of Argentina (of which I don’t know much). Turns out he’s a legendary statesman in that country’s history, being the first elected president after the 76-83 military junta. During his [...]

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Morales penned an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, defending Bolivia’s production and use of coca leaves. I couldn’t agree with him more. In it, he mentions the U.N.’s stance on coca–and once again Banzer (he of the torture rooms) rears his ugly head:
In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the [...]

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This has been kicking around for a while, but the BBC has a detailed article out now about newly discovered torture cells from the 80s that are currently being excavated by the Morales administration–in the basement of the Ministry of Interior. The horrific story comes from the Banzer era in Bolivia (repeated, remarkably, under the [...]

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