Why I Love Cochabamba

Tuesday evening. The last day of Bolivia's only four-day weekend all year – Carnival. As the sun heads for the horizon I head with my dog Simone up into the steep green hills behind my house. It's a half an hour walk uphill to my secret meadow. I go there often early in the mornings when the rest of my house is still asleep.

Tonight I went at sunset. Pale blue sky. A chorus a singing birds that drowned out all sound from the city a mile below. Simone hoping I might throw rocks for her to chase. Sitting on the ground with wild grass everywhere, growing up to my seated eye level, tipped with pale red wisps. Watching the crack between night and day and the colors change in Bolivia's wide sky.

On my way back down the hill – past the kids still bombing each other with water. I was spared in both directions. It might help if you avoid eye contact with people holding water balloons. I'm not sure yet. Past the "locales" where chicha is being sold and drunk in abundance and where the ever-more-wobbly dancing shows it.

I finally hit the little heart of my own neighborhood. It is a combination soccer field and basketball court, joined with a small children's playground off to the side. Add two small stores and a throng of my neighbors drinking chicha with traditional wooden bowls dipped in large red plastic buckets. No escaping here.

"Jaime, Jaime, toma!" Not one to be rude at such things I accept a good three-cup sized bowl full to the brim. One does not sip chicha, like a glass of Chardonnay at a San Francisco wine and cheese. One guzzles it in as few gulps as possible, with twenty people watching you and egging you on. Thankfully there is an escape clause. Before you finish you are supposed to dump some on the ground for La Pachamama, mother earth. It is a tradition that has saved my ass more than once when a Bolivian party turns it attention to the noble game, "Make that gringo drink!"

My neighbors are impressed that the neighborhood gringo knows the rituals of chicha (the only other gringos who live near are a colony of young Mormon missionaries, so the competition about foreigners knowing drinking rituals is really not that rough). After filling the bowl from the bucket I slowly slide it full circle, clockwise, around the bucket's lip. Then before raising it to my own lips, I look one of my more sober neighbors in the eye, tip the bowl in her direction, and say "salud", or "your next buddy." I refill the bowl and hand it to her and then run for home against the cheerful demands that I stick around and polish off a few more big bowls.

Sunsets and birds. Neighbors and the rituals that have survived. It is moments like these that remind me that I live in one of the most wonderful places in the world.

Water, Water Everywhere – Once Again, “The Curse of Carnival”

It is that time of year again here in Cochabamba (and everywhere else in Bolivia), Carnival, when the nation turns its attention to the urgent task of throwing balloons and buckets of water at other people. My daughter Mariana (3) and I have been right in the thick of it, waging major squirt gun wars with other kids in our neighborhood – well, when she isn’t squealing with delight over squirting Daddy square on in the butt. Mariana has excellent aim, punctuated by her trademark mixing of English and Spanish –“Yo voy a get you wet!”

In honor of Carnival we bring you, once again, our ever-popular 1999 story, “The Curse of Carnival”. Below is a snippet and a link to the full story. Enjoy!

The Curse Of Carnival

I am not leaving my house. The streets of Cochabamba have turned into a battle zone. Throughout the city people have armed themselves with everything from small pistols to long barreled rifles. From behind walls the unsuspecting are attacked with small hand-held bombs. No one is safe from attack. Okay Mom, don't panic! There is one other detail I need to mention, the weapon of choice is not bullets, it's water, by the gallons. It is Carnival week in Bolivia and the entire city of Cochabamba has turned into an all out, non-stop, no-holds-barred, water war. Read the rest of the story here.

Watching Goni Run – Up Close

A month ago I got my first look at an amazing new documentary, Our Brand is Crisis. The film, by New York filmmaker Rachel Boynton, offers a stunning up-close look at how James Carville and company ran Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada’s winning 2002 Bolivian presidential campaign. Here is a link to today’s New York Times article on the film.

The film is a portrait of how a team of savvy, Machiavellian US political consultants parachuted into a country they knew nothing about and designed a strategy to return one of the nation’s most disliked political figures to the country’s highest office. When polling and focus groups show that Goni is unlikely to win any more than a quarter of the vote, the visitors from the US implement a strategy to knock down the support of anyone who might win more than that – in this case then-Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa.

As someone who spent a good deal of my life engaged in US political campaigns, I was not surprised at how calculated it all was. Like it or not, that is standard operating procedure in political campaigns. What I was stunned by was that Goni and his US handlers let themselves be filmed close-up doing it. Bolivians I know who have seen the film are stunned to see such overt manipulation in action, especially at the hands of foreigners.

I admit that one of my favorite parts was watching Goni complain about the perpetual campaign problem of having Bolivians put fine confetti (mixtura) in his hair. It doesn’t even come out when you shampoo, he complains on camera. This provoked a suggestion from my wife that perhaps Goni antagonists in the US might want to sneak up on him occasionally at his Bethesda Maryland home-in-exile and put a new supply of bright pink confetti in his hair.

Levity aside, the biggest impression I got from the film was how utterly out of touch Sanchez de Lozada was with average Bolivians. That came to a head in February 2003 when, under pressure from the IMF to reduce Bolivia’s budget deficit, Goni opted for a tax increase on the working poor instead of on foreign oil producers. The politics that led to that and the 34 deaths that resulted are documented on our book, Deadly Consequences.

Boynton’s film opens with raw footage of the bloody conflicts provoked by Goni’s tax proposal. It is lucky for Carville and his colleagues that they are masters at the art of rationalization. They will surely need to employ a heavy dose of it to excuse themselves of responsibility for the deaths that were the end product of their program to manipulate Goni’s one point victory at the polls.

A Note to Readers: Our Brand is Crisis opens this week in New York and elsewhere but I have yet to find a solid schedule of where it is playing. If anyone has one, please post it as a comment to this post.

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.

Evo and Coca: The Rock and the Hard Place

For those trying to follow the pivotal issue of coca here in Bolivia this week, it has been like watching a three year old giving it all she has on a swing. There has been a lot of moving back and forth.

As I have written in this space several times in the past few weeks – coca is the first issue that will define the relationship between the new Morales government and the US government. I heard that loud and clear on my trip to Washington, from the halls of the US Congress to meetings with progressive advocacy groups. There a lot of issues up for US/Bolivia discussion, from trade to gas, but on coca the US Congress will take an actual vote, probably sometime this spring, on foreign aid that is tied to coca eradication in Bolivia. When that happens the dialogue ends and the rubber starts to hit the road.

That makes the events here this week all the more important.

Time for the DEA to pack?

The confusing back and forth of Bolivian policy toward coca leapt to the surface this week when a national congress of the six major coca grower unions convened here in Cochabamba. That Congress voted to continue having President Evo Morales as its union leader. It then approved a resolution calling for all organizations that receive direct funding from the US government to leave the Chapare, the coca-growing jungle region outside of Cochabamba.

The obvious question then was – what was the position of President Morales? Was it the official position of the Bolivian government that USAID, the DEA and their subcontractors all needed to pack up and take new residence in the city? That might be good news for the local Burger King but not for the US anti-drug war.

Initially, it appeared that this was exactly the position of the Morales administration. The presidential media spokesman was quoted by the media here Wednesday saying that the US agencies needed to leave. Then the President of the Senate (a member of Morales' MAS party) announced publicly that press coverage of the media spokesman's comments didn't accurately describe the government's position. According to the Senate head, the real position of the government was that it was time for the Bolivian and US governments to start a dialogue about how "institutions [from the US] that had completed their work ought to begin to leave."

Amidst the confusion, an emergency meeting was called last night, bringing together President Morales, Vice President Garcia Linera, US Ambassador David Greenlee, and a few others. It is unclear who called the meeting. What is clear is that following it the position of the Morales government changed one more time. Morales announced that the DEA and the others were welcome to stay as long as they respected the law. "Everyone has a right to be in our country, respecting our dignity and national sovereignty, respecting the people," Morales said.

The Rock and the Hard Place

Morales critics on the right will be quick to site this as evidence of government incompetence. Critics on the left will cite this as a dangerous sign of kissing up to Uncle Sam. On both, everyone is free to reach his or her own judgment. That however misses a larger and more important point. On the hot potato issue of coca the Morales government is stuck in a very difficult position between a rock and a hard place.

The rock, in this instance, is the cocaleros, Morales' chief political base, one of the most organized social movements in the country, and a group of people eager to expand production of their crops. The hard place is the US government, which for years took a hard line on coca eradication but more recently, with a bit of a wink and a nod, has accepted the limit of "one cato per family", about 1600 square meters.

Keeping both sides happy amidst heightened hopes on the one side (for more coca production) and heightened wariness on the other, is one of the biggest challenges Morales faces. This is especially true as a handful of moderates within the Bush administration have stuck their necks out recently in favor of talking with Morales instead of demonizing him. There are clearly other, more right-wing, figures in the Bush administration eager to chop of their diplomatic heads. The cocaleros could easily hand them the axe.

What to do About Coca Headed for the Drug Market?

Morales and Bolivia suffer from some basic facts. One is that it is plain myth that all of the coca grown here is headed solely for traditional uses such as chewing, the production of bagged coca tea, and others. One reliable study may soon report that more than half of the coca grown here is unaccounted for in legal usage, raising the question – what happens to the rest of it?

From afar it looks like the Morales strategy for dealing with that excess is three-fold. First, contain that excess production by jawboning the coca-growers to voluntarily stick with the 1600 square meters per-family limit [the cocaleros want to raise that to 1600 square meters per family member, a major jump]. Second, support interdiction of illegal coca or coca paste at the border. Third, develop alternative markets that can use up that excess in legal ways.

That last objective, an important one, raises a pretty simple question for me. Why doesn’t the US start allowing the import of commercially-produced Bolivian coca tea? Let's be clear. One, you would be hard pressed to find a gringo who has visited here who hasn't tried it and loved it (including some well placed Bush supporters, I'll add). Two, coca isn’t cocaine until you totally alter it chemically. Three, Coca Cola is already allowed to import the leaves for its production. Four, there is potentially a huge market for it among herbal tea drinkers in the US. Last, anyone who claims that cocaine-makers in the US will start tearing up those little Lipton-sized bags to get the half teaspoon of ground-up leaf out and turn it into white powder ought to try doing that for a box or two.

All that said, this remains the tough spot in which Morales is trying to make coca policy and there is little doubt that he is making that policy personally. An even if the US manages to maintain a softer line against coca than it has in the past, history still hangs heavy around its neck. "It's pretty hard to accept a conciliatory message when you've been shot," notes Kathy Ledebur of the Andean Information Network, explaining the deep Chapare animosity toward the US government and the Bolivian anti-drug forces it backs.

Negotiating a way forward with coca growers on one side of him and the Bush conservatives on the other is going to take huge political skill. The days ahead will see if Morales can pull that off.

Febrero Negro and Ana Colque Remembered – Three Years Later

It was exactly three years ago today, on a rooftop in La Paz, that Ana Colque, a 24-year-old single mother and student nurse, was assassinated by Bolivian military sharpshooters. Colque was one of 34 people killed during the two days of protest and repression in La Paz known as Febrero Negro, the direct product of economic belt-tightening demands from the International Monetary Fund. She had climbed to the rooftop, dressed in nursing whites, to come to the aid of an unarmed handyman shot and killed an hour before.

The story of Febrero Negro is an important one to remember – both because of the losses suffered (and still suffered three years on) and because it is an x-ray view into how the IMF functions in poor nations and the tragedies it leaves in its path.

The Democracy Center’s investigative report on Febrero Negro, Deadly Consequences can be read here in full. For our readers interested in Bolivia, globalization and the on-the-ground impacts of institutions like the IMF, the report is one you must read. We encourage you to take some time this week and know a history paid for in blood and fire. The book is dedicated to Ana Colque’s son, Luis Colque, who was not quite two when his mother was killed on February 13, 2003.

For our readers in Cochabamba, The Democracy Center and the Cochabamba Assembly on Human Rights will be hosting a public information event on Febrero Negro this week. Please join us for a brief film and comments, as well as a chance to meet new people:

Thursday, February 16th -- 7pm
La Republica Bar
On Calle Ecuador between Espana and 25 de Mayo
Entrance Free

The New Dirty Word: Populism

It is an odd thing really. As Latin Americans elect a wave of new political leaders from the left, voices on the right have begun to settle on a new line of attack against them. From Madrid to Washington a new alarm bell is being sounded – "Beware the Populists!"

In an interview covered today in the Bolivian daily La Razon, the former conservative president of Spain, José María Aznar, warned against the rising "populist tide" in Latin America. Specifically citing Bolivia, Aznar warned:

"I hope that this populist tide can be stopped. Someone has to stop it. Someone has to say that this isn't the way."

Earlier this month in Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said virtually the same thing in a speech before the National Press Club:

"We've seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome."

"Populism" it seems, to some, has become a dirty word.

The on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia, defines the word "populism" this way:

Populism is a political philosophy or rhetorical style that holds that the common person's interests are oppressed or hindered by the elite in society, and that the instruments of the state need to be grasped from this self-serving elite and used for the benefit and advancement of the people as a whole.

I am Californian and in my home state being a "populist" is considered a good thing. A century ago it was the populists in my home state (Republicans, by the way) who took on the mighty railroads and championed political reforms such as the initiative process, to put power into the people's hands.

It was, of course, another Republican radical, Abraham Lincoln, who enshrined populism into US national theology: "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Tranalate that into Spanish and it sounds like Evo Morales on the stump.

So, if a government shouldn't be popular, what should it be? Unpopular?

Well, the Bush administration is certainly giving that a shot, currently breaking records for unpopularity. And Anzar's political party got tossed out by voters the last time it went to the polls in Spain. But I am not sure having unpopular governments is really the way to go either. Bolivia tried unpopular governments – a string of them – Hugo Banzer, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and others, administrations elected with less than a quarter of the popular vote. In Bolivia, unpopular didn’t work out so well. Maybe a government with a 2 to 1 victory deserves a chance.

The real alternative to populist governments is rule by the nation's elite. Governments of, by, and for the elite tend to have more formal education and dress tidier. Unfortunately, in Bolivia, they have also had a tendancy to hand over the keys to the house (water, gas, airlines, etc.) to foreign corporations. That makes the elites better off but not the people. In Bolivia, that has evertything to do with why the political parties that have served the political elite for half a century are now as dead as the stegsaurus.

Rumsfeld is the architect, and Anzar was a major backer, of a war supposedly being faught to promote democracy. Populism, it seems, is what some people call democracy when it doesn't turn out the way they'd hoped.

New York Times Article and Video Report on Coca

As I have written here over the past few weeks – it is clear that the first concrete negotiation that will land in the middle of the complex Bolivia/US relationship is over coca. For twenty years the US had been actively engaged in a forced eradication program to block coca leaf production. With the election of Evo Morales, who rose to political power as a leader of the coca growers, Bolivia’s long policy backing the US “war on drugs” is tossed clearly in the air. It will be the major issue to define the relationship between the Bush administration and the government of Evo Morales over the next few months.

Today’s Sunday New York Times has a worth-reading article on the issue and a more interesting nine minute video that goes with it: Bolivia Shifts the Drug War Debate. Both can be found here.

What I liked about the film in particular is that it gets down to the next level of complexity, where too few reports do. It shows the important role that the coca leaf plays in Bolivian culture and treats seriously the idea of industrializing coca for broad, totally positive products and markets, such as coca herbal tea. For that reason alone, I hope readers will encourage people to invest nine minutes and have a look.

While on the subject of coca, here are two other on-line resources that people should know about:

The Coca Museum in La Paz: The on-line partner of the popular museum in La Paz, filled with scientifically based information on coca, its properties, history, and uses.

The Andean Information Network: AIN produces a lot of thoughtful, research based reports on coca in Bolivia and US policy toward it.

Clearing Up the Facts: The New York Times on Military Aid to Bolivia

I have been talking on-line today with Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy, a Washington DC-based group that tracks US military spending in Latin America. Adam was one of the people interviewed for and quoted in yesterday’s New York Times article on the Bush administration’s plans to cut military aid to Bolivia, which I wrote abut yesterday here on the Blog.

Adam is not especially happy with the Times piece and thinks it leaves readers with some very serious misimpressions. Adam writes on his organization’s Blog today:

Yesterday’s New York Times article on Bolivia ("Bush Budget Would Cut Military Aid to Bolivia by 96 Percent") creates a few impressions about U.S. military aid trends in Bolivia that need further clarification. Since I'm cited in the article, I've received a number of e-mails indicating a need to clear up these impressions.

According to Adam, some of the key facts one would not know to be true reading the Times article include:

1. All military and police aid to Bolivia is not going down by 96 percent in 2007. In particular, counter-drug aid is being cut much less drastically.

2. Bolivia is one of twelve Western Hemisphere countries in the same situation, along with Barbados, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay and Venezuela.

3. Bolivia will continue to send students to the former School of the Americas.

Readers interested in the detail on this should look at Adam’s full posting here.

US Threat to Cut Military Aid to Bolivia is a Good Thing Twice

According to today's New York Times, the Bush administration's proposed budget for the coming fiscal year includes a drastic 96% cut in US military aid to Bolivia. The Times reports this as a threat to Bolivia's new government and a great deal of the article is spent speculating about how the cut might provoke Bolivia's military leaders to do dangerous things: "But the cut holds the potential to anger Bolivia's powerful military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups."

In fact, the threat should really be seen as a double victory for Bolivia.

Just Saying No to US Immunity for Human Rights Violations

First, the reason for the threatened US cut is because Bolivia has stood firm against the demand from the Bush administration that it grant US officials and soldiers immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Bolivia is one of 139 nations that signed the Treaty of Rome, which set up the Court in 1998. A respected Bolivian judge, Renee Blattmann, also sits as a member of it. 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."

That is a possibility not to the liking of the Bush administration, which fears that members of the US military and the administration itself could be prosecuted over acts such as torture in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration has been pressing its opposition to the ICC and in 2002, the GOP-led Congress approved the American Service Members Protection Act, which prohibits the United States from providing military aid to any nation that does not agree to grant the US immunity. It is that law that the administration is citing for the reason for the new cut aimed at Bolivia.

The position of the new Bolivian government could not be more clear. A year ago, now-President Evo Morales labeled US sanctions as "blackmail" and threatened nationwide protests over the issue. Sacha Lorenti, the new ambassador designate to the US and then president of Bolivia's National Human Rights Assembly, also said last year, "Bolivia would be the only country in the world to agree to such a pact that also has a judge on the court. We believe in the fundamental principles of international law."

Here is an article on the topic I published last year with Bolivian journalist Luis Bredow, which included my interview with Lorenti.

Just Saying Goodbye to the School of the Americas

Second, according to the Times report on the Bush cut, nearly half of the money Bolivia would lose, $792,000, would be to finance sending Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia (somewhere between 50 to 100 officers per year).

This is very good news for Bolivia. The School, nicknamed "The School for Assassins" by its opponents in the US religious community, is a notorious training ground for the worst in military behavior. According to the group School of the Americas Watch, the SOA's graduates include the perpetrators of both the El Mozote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador and the assassination of that country's Archbishop, Oscar Romero (among many other examples).

The SOA's Bolivian graduates also include former dictator Hugo Banzer and Army Captain, Robinson Iriarte de La Fuente. It was Iriarte de la Fuente who, in April 2000 during the Cochabamba water revolt, was captured on film shooting live rounds into an unarmed crowd. A seventeen-year-old boy, Victor Hugo Daza, was shot and killed with a bullet through the face. Video of the shooting, posted by PBS, can be seen here.

The other funding that would be lost to Bolivia, according to the Times, would be for "civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment" – in other words tear gas and other anti-riot gear that the US has long contributed to Bolivian governments. Something most Bolivians would also not consider much of a loss.

A Victory Twice Over

What this all comes down to is not that soldiers denied a trip to Georgia will suddenly start plotting an anti-Morales coup. In reality, the threatened cut from Washington is a double victory. Bolivia stands form in its commitment to global human rights (alongside such radical states as the UK, Italy and Iceland) and in exchange it no longer sends it soldiers to learn the latest techniques in interrogation, from the administration that has made interrogation and torture a double package of its own.

The good news will be if the US remains true to its threat and cuts off that aid.

Deciphering the Bush Administration's Mixed Signals on Bolivia

Few foreign relationships will be as crucial to the new Bolivian government as that with the US. The US is a major source of Bolivian foreign aid and has a dominant role with two international lenders on whom Bolivia is also greatly dependent, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

All this makes the Bush administration's opening moves toward Bolivia all the more important to watch and to understand. For whatever reason, the Bush administration isn't making that code breaking an easy task.

In the run up to Bolivia's vote, US officials openly vilified Evo Morales and MAS as Marxist puppets of Venezuela and Cuba (here's an article). In August a senior Pentagon official blamed Bolivia's recent uprisings on “reactivated underground networks" of Cuban agents.

As the Bolivian election neared, the US cooled its rhetoric deliberately, not wanting to repeat the episode of three years earlier when the then-US Ambassador virulently and publicly attacked Morales, nearly doubling his support in election polls.

At last month's inauguration, the Bush administration was represented by the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Tom Shannon, who Morales cordially acknowledged during his speech before heads of state and the Bolivian Congress. By all reports, the new US/Bolivia relationship got off to a genuinely cordial beginning. That led, last week, to President George Bush calling President Morales to congratulate him on his victory.

So what did it mean a day later when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the National Press Club in Washington to, once again, sound administration alarm bells about Morales and Bolivia. In his speech Rumsfeld likened Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolph Hitler:

"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld added. "He's a person who was elected legally - just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally - and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."

Of Morales directly, Rumsfeld said:

"We've seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome."

This is not the language of a diplomatic thaw.

After a week in Washington, and conversations with people in the administration, the Congress, the Bolivian government and other close observers, the situation appears to be this. The Bush administration is split, with moderates on one hand interested in developing decent relations with the new Bolivian government (in part to keep Morales from developing even tighter relations with Venezuela). On the other side are hardliners who see Morales and MAS as enemies of the US that the Bush administration should oppose and undermine at every turn. This split within the administration is verified by a memo leaked to The Democracy Center from within the Southern Command of the US army.

It could be that Rumsfeld's comments were part of an internal game to counteract the call from Bush to Morales or it could be a deliberate administration strategy to play both sides.

One thing that is clear is that the first issue that will shift the emerging US/Bolivia relationship from diplomatic talk to hard negotiations is coca. The "war on drugs" is the US government's key diplomatic interest in Bolivia and it wants Morales to maintain a hard line against expansion if the nation's coca crop. Morales, the long-time leader of the nation's coca growers, is under pressure from his political base to allow an expansion of that crop. In his inaugural address Morales called for a dedicated fight against "narcotrafficking" but not oppression of poor coca farmers. The weeks ahead will tell us how he intends to do both and how the US will react to it.