Los Tiempos Interview with Alvaro Garcia Linera

As the debate continues over the government’s raid of the Santa Cruz airport on Thursday morning, today’s Los Tiempos carries an interview with Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera that offers up the government’s version of events.

You can read the interview here.

Some highlights:

**Linera defends the use of troops on Thursday based on reports that there were people at the airport equipped with small arms who weren’t eager to surrender what the government claims is up to $250,000 pocketed personally by airport officials from the special “under the wing” cash payments demanded of foreign airlines.

** He dodges all of the Hugo Chavez/Venezuela questions. Separately, however, the government claimed elsewhere that the presence of Venezuelan soldiers captured by television cameras at the airport was “coincidental”, that they were there “to pick up Bolivian scholarship students.”

** He dismisses the “I am the only commander of the people” comments of Santa Cruz’s governor as rantings from the balcony.

** He characterizes the government’s decision to withdraw its troops from the airport as a move to avoid a direct violent conflict with organized Crucenos and charges that civic leaders there are looking for a martyr.

There are all kinds of conflicting reports about what actually happened at the airport on Thursday – as many as there are sources. Among the lingering questions:

1. Was the use of troops to retake the airport an overreaction to something that could have been settled administratively or necessary in the face of armed defenders of the airport administration?

2. Did the government troops that descended on the airport Thursday morning just break windows (as the government claims) or open fire, as others claim?

3. Were the Venezuelans filmed at the airport a part of the raid in some way, or was it really just a strange coincidence (which seems a stretch)?

More important than all these questions is this one: Will the incidents over the airport this week be the spark that finally ignites a year and a half of political tension into violent conflict – or will it be a wake up call to all sides, as was January in Cochabamba, to go back to the negotiating table?

At a rhetorical level, the government and the Santa Cruz leaders have both started to sound like a pair of drunken teenage boys, hurling insults at one another. Fortunately, for now, the testosterone on both sides seems to be verbal. What remains to be seen is if there is enough political maturity on both sides to keep it that way.