The Bush Administration Blocks the Door on a Bolivian Leader

The news here has been dominated for the past two days by the story that the US government has revoked the travel visa of a major MAS political leader, Leonilda Zurita, just as she was headed to the US for a multi-state speaking tour. Zurita, a back-up member of the Bolivian Senate, flew from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz Sunday night to catch her Monday morning American Airlines flight to Miami. On Monday, airline officials blocked her boarding.

On Wednesday the first official reactions from the Bolivian government were mild, including a statement from Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera that the government "wasn't worried that a Senator didn’t have a visa [to enter the US]." Officials at the US Embassy in La Paz refused to make an initial public comment.

That mild reaction ended yesterday when President Morales raised the issue in a formal and public event with members of the Bolivian diplomatic corps at the Presidential Palace. "It isn’t possible that people that who are working for a government are punished, like our sister Leonilda Zurita has been punished. Hopefully this is a mistake." Morales also called on the US government to stop confusing coca grower leaders with narcotraffickers.

Zurita, a well-known figure in Bolivia, has been a leader in the cocalero movement for fifteen years. In 2003 she was accused of "terrorism" by the government of ousted-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, served a brief time in jail in Cochabamba, and was released for lack of evidence. She has visited the US before, including talks at Harvard and other prominent US universities.

In my opinion, if this really was a deliberate and planned act by the Bush administration (as it appears to have been) then it is a wildly inept one.

Does the Bush administration believe that Zurita was going to smuggle in weapons of mass destruction under her broad Cholita skirt? Did it believe that in between packed university speaking visits, was she going to dump poison in public reservoirs? Did US officials think her visit would spark terrorist activity by secret Bolivian sleeper cells, perhaps with weapons hidden in saltenas?

By what possible leap of imagination is the back-up Senator from Cochabamba a security threat to the good people of California (one of the places she was scheduled to visit)? Nelson Mandela was a founder of the ANC, which never renounced armed struggle as an option in its multi-decade campaign to end South African apartheid. He has been to the US many times, apparently without incident.

I wrote in this space a week ago that moderates on both the Bolivian and the US side are trying to make it possible for the two countries to work out their relations cordially instead of in open conflict. I wrote that when coca leaders demanded rapid expansion of how much they could grow, that they were making the job of Bush administration moderates (there are a few, if just a few) even harder.

Now the Bush administration is taking a turn at making cordial relations hard. If the US and Bolivia are going to hit a rough patch in the road over coca, fine, that may be inevitable. But to create a rough patch out of nothing, by denying US entry to an elected Bolivian leader who is about as much of a security threat as my mother – that is either diplomatic ineptitude or a deliberate plan by someone in Washington to provoke a conflict.