El Gaviero

The Bolivia Information Forum has a short summary of the report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) which looks into the violence that occurred last year in Pando department: bif-briefing-march-2009 (PDF).

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Couple of items today catch my eye:

Clinton fesses up to the Mexicans and says the “‘insatiable’ appetite in the United States for illegal drugs is to blame for much of the violence ripping through Mexico,” according to Reuters. And then she promises more guns: “Washington plans to ramp up border security with a $184 million [...]

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I’ve had a long absence from the blog here, and I hope you will forgive me. I have a good reason, though: I’ve been trekking through the jungles of eastern Peru and northern Bolivia for over a week now. Internet access has been sporadic at best, but I am finally in a midsize city, and [...]

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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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Berlin-based impresario and old friend Timeblind was in town for a few days, in which we got together and reminisced about the old days in Minneapolis and New York City. It was refreshing to speak English rapidly about eclectic subjects that most of my friends down here don’t follow–particularly the American economic collapse, among others. [...]

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Otto at Inca Kola News condemns the recent seizure of former V.P. Cardenas’s home and the assault of his wife and kid. So did I, yesterday, but perhaps not forcefully enough. Otto says:
The episode reminds me that Bolivia’s democracy is still in its infancy. There’s a whole section of its population that have never been [...]

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An excellent post about the U.S. assuming its responsibility in the world drug epidemic. Basically, it calls upon our benighted country to grow up! Read the whole thing, for sure, but here are some snippets:
I was raised in the New York State wine country, and my father made his living supplying the wineries. No one [...]

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Earlier this month, indigenous activists seized former Bolivian vice president Victor Hugo Cardenas’s home on the altiplano in retaliation for his campaigning against the newly passed constitution. Both Bolivian president Evo Morales and vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera paid lip service to the seizure, until now:
“The new constitution has absolute respect for private property,” Linera [...]

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In an otherwise informative article from the Guardian–which discusses the 6,000-plus drug-related dead in Mexico last year, the new shipping route for cocaine between South America and West Africa, and the generally acknowledged failure of the “war on drugs”–the paper’s editors screwed up the headline: “Cocaine Production Surge Unleashes Wave of Violence in Latin America.”
I’ve [...]

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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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