U.S. Threatens Bolivia in Effort to Secure Criminal Court Immunity

U.S. Threatens Bolivia in Effort to Secure Criminal Court Immunity
Commentary/Analysis, Luis Bredow and Jim Shutz,
Pacific News Service, Mar 03, 2005

U.S. efforts to pressure countries to grant U.S. troops immunity from international court prosecutions appear to be backfiring in some Latin American nations.

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia--The U.S. government is demanding that the Bolivian Congress approve an agreement that would grant immunity to U.S. troops and officials accused of human rights violations, exempting them from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. That effort, which includes a threat to withhold financial aid and access to free trade, seems to be backfiring.

Bolivia is one of 139 nations that have signed the Treaty of Rome, which set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998. A respected Bolivian judge, Renee Blattmann, also sits as a member of the court. The treaty's goal, according to its Preamble, "is to establish an independent permanent International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole."

It was in the ICC that the former Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was tried for crimes against humanity. The United States, alongside China, Iraq, Libya and others, is one of just seven nations to vote against the treaty. Many believe that the war in Iraq and cases of U.S. torture have made the United States vulnerable to criminal charges of international human rights violations.

The Bush administration has been pressing its opposition to the ICC. In 2002, the U.S. Congress approved the American Servicemembers Protection Act, which prohibits the United States from providing military aid to any nation that does not agree to grant U.S. soldiers and officials immunity from the ICC.
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http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=40d8f93957008266edbc544c21df75be

Slobodan Milosevic was tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

The ICC only came into existance in 2002, and it has no jurisdiction over crimes that occurred before then.

You shouldn't have a thing to worry about...

is creating havoc:

Coca, Drugs and Social Protest in Bolivia and Peru
03 Mar 2005 14:02:00 GMT

Source: NGO latest
International Crisis Group


International Crisis Group - Belgium
Website: http://www.crisisgroup.org

Quito/Brussels, 3 March 2005: Coca cultivation is expanding in Bolivia and Peru, where weak states and a flawed U.S. drugs policy have produced social unrest and instability.

Coca, Drugs and Social Protest in Bolivia and Peru,* the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the increasing importance of the two countries as centres of cocaine production in the Andes, and how the policies emphasised in Bolivia and Peru in pursuit of the U.S.-led war on drugs are aggravating social tensions with potentially explosive results.

"The way the war on drugs is currently pursued is not proving effective, undermines regional governments' stability, and worsens the perception pushed by opposition groups that they are submissive to Washington", says Markus Schultze-Kraft, Crisis Group's Andes Project Director.
(snip)

The lack of clarity as to the extent of permitted coca crops for traditional purposes and the lack of viable economic alternatives for local farmers are the major obstacles to all attempts to cut production. Efforts at forced eradication should not leave farmers without alternatives, as experience has shown they will then return to planting coca. U.S. drug control assistance should shift its emphasis from eradication to a rural development policy aimed at promoting poverty reduction, land reform, infrastructure enhancement, and alternative/rural development.
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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/218607/110985898189.htm

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Adding article:

Jungle Fever
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
by Chris Floyd

"War": a potent, pliable word. Under the rubric of "war"--which implies dire emergency, imminent threat, the abandonment of normal life and the normal rule of law--there is no limit to the moral erosion that can occur. The previously unthinkable becomes routine practice: for example, a respectable democracy funding mercenary armies and terrorist forces in foreign countries, like the jihadists in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua--and now the "Expeditionary Task Force" in Bolivia.

There, the Bush Regime is paying--lock, stock and barrel--for a band of local mercenaries taking part in Bolivia's campaign to eradicate coca production in the jungle region of Chapare, the Washington Post reports this week.

The mercenaries are attached to regular army units, so they are not, officially, "paramilitaries." But the many human rights charges they've spawned--murders, beatings, rapes, torture, illegal detentions--sound like that old sweet song of yesteryear, when Reagan-Bush proxy armies prowled the Latin American night, killing tens of thousands of innocent people to keep Yankee investments and American-backed elites safe from riff-raff.

The coca plant has been cultivated in Chapare since time immemorial, used as a healing medicine and pain reliever. In the second half of the 20th century, the sale and manufacture of its powerful derivative, cocaine (along with various opium derivatives), were taken up by organized crime and its allies in the Western security services as a high-yield money-maker. The Mob used the profits to buy political influence and augment its already-considerable infiltration into the "legitimate" business world; elements in the security agencies used the money to fund various covert and terrorist operations.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd0703.html