There is a tumult in Bolivia – and the United States and its consumption of cocaine are right at the heart of it, along with charges that the Bush Administration was attempting to topple the government of the first indigenous Bolivian ever to lead that country, Evo Morales.
Written by former Bolivian diplomat Manfredo Kempff Suárez on the eve of Bolivia’s passage of a new left-wing constitution, this op-ed illustrates the tremendous fissures in this Andean nation.
“One issue is, for example, the furious and ill-mannered attack on the United States that President Morales launched the day before yesterday in Congress, obliging U.S. Chargé d’affaires Kris Urs, with true dignity, to walk out of the legislature. … Didn’t the president announce that after the triumph of President Obama, he would improve relations with the United States? … And what about the coca? What about this harmful by-product is so profitable? How can the president hope to carry on a good relationship with Obama if coca farms are expanding indiscriminately and the production of cocaine continues to poison half the world?”
By Manfredo Kempff Suárez*
Translated By Liz Essary
January 24, 2009
Bolivia – La Razon – Original Article (Spanish)
It seems that tomorrow could be a day of mourning for many Bolivians, because those of us who don’t accept that mess of disjointed papers that they’ve named the Constitution hold that we’re gambling with the future, and embarking on it with a handicap. For years now – since 2003 – we’ve been warning against a Magna Carta that’s been drawn up by pastors, coca producers and resurrected leftists, joined by some of the ignorant statesmen who revolve around the president at the Palace. So going back over the text of this huge and delusional tome is neither appealing nor useful. Tomorrow we might add just a little more bile, since mine is running short. [Bolivians did indeed pass the new Constitution on the day this article was published ].
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