And Now Rumsfeld Jumps In

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is taking a tour of South America this week and yesterday in Paraguay he joined in the Bush administration’s steady drumbeat of blaming Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez for the last five years of Bolivian political turmoil.

Here’s what Rumsfeld said, according to both the BBC and Reuters: "There is certainly evidence both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways." Both reports went on to note that Rumsfeld offered up no actual evidence to support his claim.

So now, from the man who helped sell us a quagmire in Iraq based on invented claims of weapons of mass destruction, we have the warning that what is really going on in Bolivia is political division imported from abroad. Rumsfeld, who famously told us, “death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war," is actually quite right that Bolivia’s political instability is, in good part, a product of foreign influence. He just has the sources of that influence wrong.

If the US is concerned about foreign sources of Bolivian political conflict, here are some better candidates to look at:

The Bechtel Corporation: Bechtel took over the public water system in Cochabamba in 2000 and raised water rates for the poor so high that the entire city shut itself down in a general strike for a week, forcing a major Bush corporate ally (Bechtel along with Halliburton was also the winner of one of those no-bid mega contracts to rebuild Iraq) out of the country. The water revolt also lit the fuse of every social rebellion since, because the people won. Here’s our report.

The World Bank: It was the World Bank that forced water privatization onto Bolivia to begin with, by making it a condition of all further water development assistance and debt relief as well. The Bank is just around the corner from the White House and shouldn’t be hard for Rumsfeld to find. Here’s our report.

The International Monetary Fund: In February 2003 the IMF ordered Bolivia to reduce its budget deficit by a draconian amount, as a condition of further aid (and the IMF blessing that controls virtually all foreign aid), despite repeated warnings that the taxes required would spark a public rebellion. Those predictions turned out to be utterly on the mark and 34 people died as a result of the violent, totally avoidable conflicts, the IMF’s policies set off. Here’s our report.

Foreign Oil Companies: Shell, Enron, Petrobras, Repsol, British Gas and British Petroleum are all among the ranks of foreign oil companies who negotiated behind-closed-doors sweetheart deals with the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, giving them effective control over Bolivia’s vast gas and oil reserves. The illegal contracts (they were never approved by the Congress, as required by the Constitution) are a huge source of resentment and at the heart of the public uprisings here in October 2003 in which Goni was forced out (his departure was not because of his policies but because of his violent repression against those who protested those policies). The gas issue was also at the heat of the uprisings here in May and June that led President Carlos Mesa to call it quits.

The US’ Own War on Drugs: For more than a decade the US has poured dollars and DEA agents into Bolivia in a “war on drugs”. Among the results have been thousands of innocents tossed into jail without trial in the name of giving the US Embassy good arrest statistics to show off to Washington. The famed alternative development projects that were supposed to be the positive side of the US effort are mostly a handout to wealthy Bolivian businessman. I know of one specific case (leaked to me by a USAID subcontractor) in which one of the wealthiest men in the region got thousands from the US for a palm heart processing factory and never even paid the campesino farmers who were his suppliers. Here's one of our reports.

Let’s be clear. Does the left in Bolivia have ties and kinship with Cuba and Venezuela? Absolutely. Are the influences from those two countries the reason for Bolivian political upheaval? Absolutely not.

For half a decade Bolivians have been reacting to a set of economic policies imposed on them from abroad, an economic course that they never chose and which has failed quite miserably on the facts.

The hand of the US, directly and through its corporations and the multilateral institutions it controls (the World Bank and IMF) is really the outside influence here and it should come as no surprise to Rumsfeld that it has provoked a reaction.

In the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld argued, “simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist." It was on that basis that Rumsfeld and Bush dragged the US into a war of choice in which more than 1,800 US servicemen and an estimated 25,000 Iraqis have died.

As he tours South America, once again weaving a tale of, “we don’t have proof but we think it is the case,” what new plan does the Bush administration have in mind and who will pay the price this time?