The US Seeks to Blame Chavez for Bolivian Turmoil

As Yogi Berra supposedly once said, it feels like deja vu all over again.

Five years ago, as Bolivia was similarly wracked by political turmoil during the Cochabamba water revolt, Bolivian government spinners sought desperately to blame the protests on “narcotraffickers”. The Associated Press reporter at the time, who just happened to be a close friend of the President’s spinner, pedaled the bogus analysis in AP dispatches all over the US. We were supposed to believe that Bechtel’s massive water rate hikes had nothing to do with those protests at all.

Now the US government is playing the same false blame game. This morning’s Miami Herald reports on the efforts by the US’s lead diplomat for Latin America, at the OAS meeting in Florida, to blame Bolivia’s current troubles on…Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Here’s the article.

Here’s the portion about Roger Noriega's comments:

Noriega also sparked an exchange of barbs with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Alí Rodríguez when he seemed to hint that Chávez was somehow responsible for the worsening situation in Bolivia. Some Latin American and U.S. officials have long alleged that Chávez has provided financial assistance to Bolivian opposition leader Evo Morales. ''Chávez's profile in Bolivia has been very apparent from the beginning,'' Noriega said when asked about Chavez's role in the turmoil in Bolivia. ``His record is apparent and speaks for itself.''

The US government seeking to blame Chavez for the current Bolivian unrest is no more accurate than the efforts by the Bolivian government to blame drug traffickers for the water revolt five years ago.

In both cases – then and now – the culprit is a set of global economic policies pushed onto Bolivia by the US through its two chief vehicles of policy export – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It was the World Bank that coerced Bolivia to privatize its water, setting in motion rate hikes and a public rebellion (see article). It was the IMF that coerced Bolivia to privatize its gas and oil a decade ago, sewing the seeds for the current unrest.

Here’s how I tried to explain it in an article published by the New York Times on its Web site this morning:

“The bottom line is that Latin America is in open rebellion of the economic policies of the Washington Consensus," said Jim Shultz, director of the Democracy Center, a group in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba that is critical of free market reforms in the country. "Sometimes it happens in the ballot box. Sometimes it happens on the street, like in Bolivia. It is in essence the same rebellion."

If the White House is looking for where to place the blame for sewing the seeds of what is happening in Bolivia today, it need not look far. The World Bank and IMF headquarters are both just around the corner.