Bolivia's new U.S. ambassador faces tough assignment

Guzman will be interesting to watch. When he told Morales he wasn't qualified to be ambassador, Morales replied: "If you don't believe you can be ambassador, how do you think I'm president?" Bolivia's first indigenous president told him.

<clips>

WASHINGTON - A journalist whose shoulder-length hair and casual clothes give him the air of a poet, Gustavo Guzman doesn't seem the type to go mano a mano with the U.S. government.

Just months ago, he was writing a book and editing academic texts. But now he's the new ambassador from Bolivia, whose leftist president, Evo Morales, is drawing deep concern from the Bush administration.

Guzman, 49, has taken the assignment with grace and self-deprecation, explaining that Morales turned to him after his first choice refused.

"My life has been fatally linked to chance," he said during an interview in Spanish in the Bolivian Embassy in Washington.

Guzman studied economics and literature before stumbling into his father's journalism footsteps. He went on to be founding editor of the periodicals La Prensa and El Pulso, pursuing an analytical form of journalism with both publications.

Suddenly, though, Guzman is no longer just an influential left-leaning observer of Bolivia's volatile politics. He's one of its key participants, organizing what he hopes will be Morales' first trip to Washington and trying to assuage the U.S. government's concerns over the spread of coca cultivation in Bolivia and Morales' opposition to a free-trade pact.


http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/16527960.htm

Bolivia. What they give a flying fuck about is having well-funded fascist paramilitaries on the payroll to kill all these peasants and leftists who are getting uppity in South America and winning elections on platforms of self-determination, independence and social justice.

Gustavo Guzman is a good man and a fine writer. I hope he explains this in clear terms to the S.O.B.'s in this Junta who are funding destabilization of these countries with billions of our taxpayer dollars, and who would just as soon put a bullet in Evo Morales' head as negotiate with him.

Yeah, you're damned right I'm pissed. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan Indians slaughtered in Guatemala by the same gang of criminals, in the '80s, with Reagan's direct complicity, and thousands more innocent people slaughtered in Nicaragua, El Salvador and other countries. Every time a just and democratic government arose in Latin America, U.S.-funded death squads, assassinations, torture and 'disappearances' was the U.S. answer. And global free piracy is the Clinton version of the same thing. Kill them slowly. And if that doesn't work--and it isn't, it's being rejected in country after country--you can be sure it's back to the death squads, who are even now in preparation, with $1.5 billion from the Bush Junta (our money--over several years) to the Colombian military (and fascist paramilitaries).

The main hope I see is that this peaceful, democratic, leftist (majorityist) revolution that is sweeping Latin America will continue its good work on regional solidarity and cooperation, so that no leader can be picked off, and no democratic country can be destabilized, without a wall of opposition from the others, and so that talks on a South American Common Market and common currency are accelerated, to insulate Latin America from U.S./global corporate predator interference. I find it encouraging that Colombian President Uribe refused to participate in U.S. plots against Hugo Chavez, that the OAS has done a lot of hard work on transparent elections, that there are now three countries--Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador--who are leading the Bolivarian revolution (self-determination for South America), that other countries--Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay all have leftist governments (with Argentina having been through the destruction of World Bank/IMF/"free trade" and having come out the other end, with Venezuela's help, and with Brazil having led the third world revolt at the WTO meeting in Cancun). These are all good signs. And Peru and Paraguay will likely to next to elect good leftist governments. Strength in numbers.

Of negotiations with multinationals, Evo Morales has said: "We want partners, not masters." The Bush Junta does not want partners, as we know. But it's possible that some of the multinationals involved might see the necessity of justice for the poor in Latin America, much as they may dislike it, particularly if these nations stick together.

Morales has also said: "The time of the people has come."

Washington Post: :eyes:

Bolivia's U.S. Envoy a Rebellious Choice

By DAN KEANE
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 23, 2006; 3:36 AM

~snip~
As editor of the Bolivian magazine Pulso, Guzman's coverage of the October 2003 killings of 60 people during anti-government protests sparked a successful effort to oust then-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who fled to Washington. Now Guzman will press for his extradition in the killings. U.S. officials said that's unlikely, doubting he'd face a fair trial.

But the newly minted diplomat is optimistic about his mission to sell a skeptical U.S. government on Bolivia's transformation.

"We are building here, with great energy, a new democracy," he said. "And I believe the U.S., its government and its Congress cannot fail to accompany us in our task."

Experienced Washington hands predict he'll have a difficult time.

"The challenge for any ambassador from Bolivia is really going to be to try and get the (Bush) administration to act in a civil manner toward a government that it didn't choose, which is not really their track record, I'm afraid," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director for the Washington-based Center for Policy and Economic Research.
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/23/AR2006082300255.html

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:


I also like "a government that it (the Bush Junta) didn't choose..."

How about the people of Bolivia choosing their government? Nice idea, democracy, but not very profitable, I guess.

That remark by Weisbrot was excellent--he is always spot on!! and I liked Guzman's remark too:

The challenge for any ambassador from Bolivia is really going to be to try and get the (Bush) administration to act in a civil manner toward a government that it didn't choose, which is not really their track record, I'm afraid," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director for the Washington-based Center for Policy and Economic Research.

For his part, the pony-tail wearing Guzman doesn't intend to lose his antiestablishment roots.

"If I have to put on a tie, I'll put on a tie," Guzman said, laughing. "But I'm not going to cut my hair."

:rofl:

Don't :puke: when you see the picture of Dr. Death with Evo.

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It really was a dramatic and hopeful beginning that cold January weekend a year ago when Bolivia got a new President.

Atop thousand-year-old, pre-Inca ruins at Tiahuanaco, Evo Morales stood dressed in colorful indigenous vestiges that took museum curators to assemble. In a ceremony that hadn't been held in 500 years, he received a blessing of his powers from leaders of the indigenous communities of Bolivia's highlands. His formal inauguration before the Bolivian Congress the next day drew nearly a dozen heads of state, from Chile to Slovenia. Knock-off copies of the new president's red and blue horizontal striped sweater sold briskly on the Internet. His picture graced page one of the Washington Post. "Evo Mania" took Bolivia and the world by storm.

In the year since, Bolivia has become a global travel destination for journalists, filmmakers, and political seekers who think they might find some kind of new democracy in the making here. If they look with open eyes they can see close-up some hard lessons about the challenge of converting people's hopes into political reality.

Gas Wars and Rewriting The National Magna Carta

When Morales was elected in December 2006, with a historic majority that was twice that of any president in decades, he had a clear mandate from the Bolivian people to do two things. The first was to reverse, full-speed, twenty years of market-driven economic reforms that had privatized much of the nation's resources – from water to gas – into foreign corporate hands. The second was to initiate a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the nation's constitution and its most fundamental political rules.

Last May 1, on International Workers' Day, Morales stepped out onto the balcony of the Presidential Palace in La Paz – just across from where a predecessor had been hung to death from a lamppost sixty years before – to deliver on promise number one. Before a massive crowd cheering from below, Morales announced a presidential decree "nationalizing" the vast oil and gas reserves that had been privatized into the hands of corporations like Enron a decade before. "For more than 500 years, our resources have been pillaged," Morales declared. "This has to end now." Then, in a grand gesture that was pure domestic political photo-op, Morales sent Bolivian troops to the nation's gas fields to "protect" them.

Foreign media declared that Bolivia had "seized" the assets of foreign companies. Others declared that Morales had "been conned by Castro and Chavez". From afar it all looked pretty radical. But closer up the plan was mostly moderate stuff – buying back a majority stake in the pieces of the energy industry that Bolivia sold off far too cheap in the 1990s; upping taxes on foreign oil companies; and renegotiating contracts to get a fair prices for the nation's wealth under the ground. Confiscation and seizure it wasn't.

http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/2007/01/year-of-evo-challenges-of-governing.html