Police 'stop attempt on Morales'

BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8003117.stm

Bolivia's President Evo Morales says three foreigners have been killed after he ordered police to thwart a planned assassination attempt against him.

Security forces killed three alleged international mercenaries in the city of Santa Cruz, Mr Morales said.

He said intelligence reports had warned of a plot by a group comprising Irish, Hungarian and Bolivian attackers.

Arriving in Venezuela for a summit, Mr Morales said two people had been arrested over the alleged plot.

The three were killed in a half-hour shootout at the hotel in Santa Cruz, some 900km (620 miles) east of the capital La Paz, Mr Morales said.

Foreigners killed

"Yesterday, I gave instruction to the vice president to move to arrest these mercenaries and this morning I was informed of a half-hour shootout at a hotel in the city of Santa Cruz," said Mr Morales.

"Three foreigners are dead and two arrested."

He added that the alleged plot had been to kill him, the vice president and a cabinet minister.

Bolivian Police Chief Hugo Escobar said two Hungarians and one Bolivian were killed in the shoot-out.

Earlier reports suggested unknown assailants had attacked the home of the Roman Catholic Cardinal Julio Terrazas of Santa Cruz with dynamite.

Interior vice minister Marcos Farfan said Wednesday's blast, which caused structural damage but no injuries, a "terrorist" act.

General elections will take place in December

Apologies for not having written for a little while; I have had too many distractions lately.

For those of you who haven’t been following Bolivian politics in the last couple of months, you might not know that the approval through referendum last January of a new Constitution established that general elections would take place on December 6. This would give the current president, if he wins, one final term in office instead of the two the new constitution establishes. The acceptance of only one term was one of the last minute compromises Evo Morales had to make back in October in order to unblock the opposition’s refusal to let the constitutional referendum take place.

Now we come to another attempt to paralyse congress. For any public consultation to take place, Congress (or the now renamed plurinational assembly) has to enact a law calling for such consultation. But, as has now become customary, the opposition have dug their heels and refused to support the law, reaching the point of walking out of congress last week. The reasons are many but the real intention has always been to make the country as ungovernable as possible preventing, if possible, the elections from taking place.

Two are the main reasons why the opposition wouldn’t approve the law calling for elections in December. The first is that the law would give the vote to the various millions of Bolivians living abroad, a process that would take place through the embassies. The accusation from the opposition is that, the embassies being the institutional representatives of the state, would not guarantee the lack of electoral fraud. What? What other institution can possibly administer the electoral process abroad? I’ve always gone to my embassy…In any case, support abroad is the only hope the opposition has of denting the government’s majority so why oppose it, I wonder. But that’s another matter.

The second reason is that according to them the electoral roll is inaccurate and therefore a tool that permits the government to commit fraud. It is interesting that fraud is an accusation one constantly hears from the opposition when every single legal popular consultation since the election of Evo Morales has had international observers and been declared clean and fair. This, by the way, is more than can be said for previous elections and for the illegal autonomic consultations that took place in a number of opposition departments last year where the president of the civic committee of Santa Cruz is well known for his remarks about how in Santa Cruz they didn’t need any foreigners telling them how to organise a referendum. Fraud? Most definitely.

Back to the electoral roll. It is obvious that there are mistakes in it like in all of them but an audit commissioned by the electoral court to the Organisation of American States last year determined that Bolivia’s roll is 97 % accurate and as such, the best in Latin America. Yet, the only possible way out of this crisis has been for the president, who had joined the social movements in a hunger strike demanding that congress gives the people of Bolivia the right to go to the polls, to divert funds earmarked for a presidential plane to the creation of a new biometric electoral roll for the 4.3 million Bolivians with the right to vote.

So why the opposition? The answer has to be the same as always. This country’s opposition is an obstacle to democratic practice, not a guarantor of it. The opposition belongs to a different political era where votes could be bought and public office was a way to self-enrichment. The opposition’s strategy is not to shape or contribute to the process of change in Bolivia, it is to make the country as ungovernable as possible by any means necessary, including the paralysis of congress and the provocation of civil unrest, while denouncing as loudly as possible to any international institution that will listen, that the country is descending into dictatorship.

No wonder new graffiti near the house says “the electoral census is clean, the right is not”.

Breaking News: Fujimori is declared guilty

BBC Mundo
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/america_latina/2009/04/090407_1530_fujimori_fallo_2.shtml

En un fallo histórico, un tribunal peruano declaró al ex presidente Alberto Fujimori culpable de los cargos que enfrentaba por violaciones de los derechos humanos.

Fujimori estaba acusado de ser el autor intelectual de las matanzas de Barrios Altos, en 1991, y La Cantuta, en 1992, cometidas por un escuadrón del ejército conocido como el grupo Colina, y del secuestro de un empresario y un periodista.

El incidente de Barrios Altos dejó 15 muertos y el de la Universidad La Cantuta, diez.

Según los analistas, este fallo tiene repercusiones no sólo en Perú sino también más allá de sus fronteras, ya que se trata de la primera vez que un ex mandatario constitucional latinoamericano es juzgado por crímenes de lesa humanidad en su propio país.

Durante la lectura de la sentencia, los jueces de la sala penal especial de la Corte Suprema de Justicia dijeron que el fallo respondía a la "gravedad" de los hechos juzgados, los cuales se inscribían en un plan de desapariciones forzadas y asesinatos a cargo del Estado, las fuerzas armadas y el servicio de inteligencia.

Los magistrados también atribuyeron al gobierno de Fujimori el intento de ocultar los abusos cometidos durante su gestión, que "están probados más allá de toda duda razonable".

Participe: ¿qué opina del veredicto?
Rechazo

Fujimori, de 70 años, ha negado los cargos en su contra, y su defensa adelantó que apelaría una sentencia condenatoria.

Sus simpatizantes han acusado al tribunal que lo juzgaba de tener "motivaciones políticas".

Fujimori fue extraditado el 22 de septiembre de 2007 por las autoridades de Chile, país al que había llegado en noviembre de 2005 por su propia voluntad desde Japón.

El ex presidente renunció a su cargo en noviembre de 2000 desde Japón, la tierra de sus antepasados, y se refugió allí a raíz de un escándalo por la red de corrupción que había creado su asesor Vladimiro Montesinos, quien está en la cárcel.

Morales about the IMF: “the wolf can not keep the flock”

April 3, 2009/ Ennaharonline / AFP
http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2009/04/morales-about-imf-wolf-can-not-keep.html

The Bolivian President Evo Morales has denounced Friday the injection of more than 1,000 billion dollars through the IMF against the global crisis, saying that countries at the root of the crisis can not solve it, or his words, that “the wolf can not keep the flock.”

“It's like giving money to the wolves, or to entrust the care of the flock: the wolf is not going to keep the sheep, it will devour them,” Morales told the foreign press in La Paz, commenting on the decisions G20 in London to fight against the crisis.

“It is not possible that the countries of capitalism, which has caused the financial crisis, are now the same from where comes the solution,” said the Socialist leader, adding that few countries are at the origin of this financial crisis, but “180 must cope.”

Bolivia is experiencing the beginning of economic deceleration, and is 5% growth at best in 2009, against 6.5% in 2008.

“As long as we do not touch the structural points of capitalism, it will be difficult to resolve the financial crisis,” said Morales about the G20. “If we want to solve economic problems, we must first end the free market, then the speculative capitalism.”

Morales has challenged the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), accusing him of the award of credit conditions, as “the privatization of our natural resources, our basic services, to implement the business models that are part of the capitalist system.”

Posted by Bolivia Rising on Monday, April 06, 2009