Morales: `Job is to take care of poor'

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Mon, Feb. 19, 2007
MIAMI HERALD EXCLUSIVE
Morales: `Job is to take care of poor'
In an exclusive interview, Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke of his focus on the poor, his admiration for Fidel Castro and also signaled respect for private investment.
BY TYLER BRIDGES
[email protected]

LA PAZ - Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke fondly of Cuba's Fidel Castro, expressed gratitude for the support of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and vowed to continue what he called his ''peaceful, democratic revolution,'' in an exclusive interview with The Miami Herald on Sunday.

Morales also rejected the view of many analysts that he has shifted to the left at the behest of Castro and Chávez.

''I'm here to resolve problems,'' he told The Miami Herald during an hour-long interview at the presidential residence. ``Those who say I've moved left or I've moved right have it wrong. My job is to take care of the poor.''

Bolivia is South America's poorest nation, with nine million residents. But Morales has attracted outsized interest abroad because he is the first self-identified Indian to lead Bolivia since it became a nation 200 years ago.
(snip)

Morales' efforts to give Indians a bigger role in government and a greater share of the economic pie have exacerbated tensions between the light-skinned descendants of the Spanish elite and inflamed regional tensions between the free market-oriented east and the socialist tendencies of western Bolivia.
(snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16730665.htm

[Vidar]

1. This should be th goal of every government. The rich can care for themselves.

[slackmaster]

3. "The" goal?

Taking care of the poor and otherwise needy is an honorable goal to be sure, but it's only one of many responsibilities of a government.

[Demeter]

2. k&R

[High Plains]

4. I'll be in Bolivia tomorrow to check out the coca economy.

Should be quite interesting. I'm set to get into the fields in the Chapare and the Yungas, meet with government officials, and try to get a meeting with the US embassy, but I'm not holding my breath. I've spent the last week in Peru doing similar things. If anyone is interested you can check it out online at www.stopthedrugwar.org

I'm sitting at an internet cafe in Cusco where I have just closed a deal to rent this connection for the whole day for $5. Machu Picchu yesterday. Que increible! And, the Incas used coca to keep their teeth strong (no milk for them; the llamas produced only enough for their young). There were some scraggly stunted plants growing at Machu Picchu. It's really too high for coca to prosper, but the Incas grew it up there anyway.

[rman]

5. kick for the cause

[Peace Patriot]

10. Thanks for the link, High Plains! Do keep us posted on the South American

democracy revolution--just about the best thing that has ever happened in the western hemisphere--since the original Bolivarian revolt, and our own. I am anxious for details!

[Peace Patriot]

6. The Miami Herald's job is to cater to rich, rightwing Miami Cubans.

Thus to the bias in this article....

Yes, they let Morales speak in his own words, in quotation, but his words are sandwiched between hit lines and false framings:

First ten words of the article: "Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke fondly of Cuba's Fidel Castro...."

Were those the first words out of his mouth? "Hi, I'm Evo Morales and I'm fond of Cuba's Fidel Castro."?

Not likely, unless the reporter Tyler Bridges' first question was, "Who are you and what do you think of Fidel Castro?"

I'd like to see Bridges' notes. Did he set Morales up, so that this was the first thing out of his mouth? Or, did he just lay in wait to ask about Castro, and then moved that response (whatever it was--what does "fond of" mean?) up to the lead line of his article.

More likely they talked about Morales' election and his huge popularity in Bolivia, his background and current government policies, and the Castro question was THEN sprung on him, with that lead in mind from the beginning.

----

Second sentence of the article: "Morales also rejected the view of many analysts that he has shifted to the left at the behest of Castro and Chávez."

Morales is a grass roots labor organizer, and a leader of the awesome, grass roots socialist movement in Bolivia, which rose up against Bechtel Corp., when it privatized the water in Cochabamba and then jacked up the prices to the poorest of the poor, even trying to charge poor peasants for collecting rainwater! The Bolivians revolted against this tyranny and threw Becthel out of their country.

Who are these "many analysts" who say he has "shifted to the left"? Morales is a NATIVE leftist--and a strong one. He hasn't "shifted." The people of Bolivia voted for a strong leftist and gave him a huge mandate to nationalize the country's resources, and reform the corrupt rightwing government. Any "analysts" who say he has "shifted toward the left"--on his own, or at anyone's behest--don't know what they're talking about, or are being paid to frame the Andean democracies as the "axis of evil." What does this phrase mean? It means they have oil, gas, minerals and other resources that global corporate predators want to control.

----

"The first self-identified Indian to lead Bolivia since it became a nation 200 years ago."

Is this some remnant of "self-identified leftist"--a typical corporate news phrase to marginalize peoples' movements? Do they want a DNA test? Do they want him to produce his birth certificate? Morales is 100% Andes Indian. And no DNA test is needed. You just have to look at him. "Self-identified Indian"!?

----

So, now they've appealed to every prejudice of the rightwing Miami Cubans--the most politically retrograde community in the U.S., often aligned with the fascist forces in Latin America who throw leftists and peasants out of airplanes, and torture and 'disappear' them, and who, for instance, slaughtered 200,000 Mayan Indians in Guatemala in the 1980s, with Reagan's direct complicity, and who have been cooking up plots to assassinate Castro and invade and destroy the leftist majority in Cuba for more than forty years now.

Having set up this context--Morales as the enemy--they let him put in a few words on his own behalf. "My job is to take care of the poor."

Jeez.

----

The rest of the article is not as bad as the lead, and is worth reading, but it's not all that great either. I suspect that the editors may have dickered with the lead, but who knows these days, about the honesty of journalists--we've had so many examples of dishonest journalism serving the causes of war and theft by the rich. The EFFECT, in this case, is to demean, marginalize and help to disenfranchise and disempower the PEOPLE WHO ELECTED Morales (and Chavez, for that matter), and their incredible grass roots movement for change. The purpose is to make it seem like some sort of "dictator" is causing all this democracy to happen. If people are actually electing politicians who represent the poor, there must be some "strongman" behind it, some evil force. The bogeyman meme runs right through the article. You have to read past it--read between the lines--to get any kind of idea of what's really happening in Bolivia.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Glad you pointed out the source. The truth has to go through a horrendous maze

in the Herald process, if it concerns anything in Latin America or the Caribbean. It all has to be filtered and modified for their readership since the days Cuban American National Foundation founder, and Miami despot, Jorge Mas Canosa declared war on the Herald for daring to print material which didn't stroke him the right way, and he turned his crowd loose on them, with death threats, bomb threats, signs on city buses questioning the Herald's integrity, human feces smeared all over the Herald newspaper vending machines throughout the city, and finally, publisher David Lawrence and his wife having to resort to hiring bomb specialists to help them every day before they dared to start their own cars.

Since that time, after David Lawrence left, the Miami Herald has groveled at the feet of the powerful right-wing Cuban elite, and the truth is almost beside the point.

Everything, EVERYTHING there whcih relates to Cuba, even remotely, is wildly rearranged to please the audience. It IS a complete disgrace.

[Peace Patriot]

8. Thanks for that background, Judi Lynn! I didn't know what the hell was wrong

with the Miami Herald--how it got so bad on Latin American political topics. It is (was!) a Knight-Ridder paper (R.I.P. to the last independent news service in the USA!), and has been a cut above the other war profiteering corporate news monopolies on some other topics I have followed. But on Cuba or the resurgent Latin American left, they are completely untrustworthy. Now I know why. Again, thanks!

[Judi Lynn]

9. There's an article which details it well, from 12 years ago, before Mas Canosa did every one a favor

and died.

May/June 1992 | Contents
TRYING TO SET
THE AGENDA IN MIAMI

Bashing the Herald is only part of Jose Mas Canosa's strategy

by Anne-Marie O'Connor
O'Connor, who is based in Miami, is Latin America and Caribbean correspondent for Cox Newspapers.

http://archives.cjr.org/year/92/3/miami.asp





Jorge Mas Canosa was in the Bay of Pigs, but he never got out of his boat. Real hero, there.
He expected he was going to be the next President of Cuba, after the U.S. obliterated all the opposition.

[Peace Patriot]

11. Clinton right up there with the worst of them, I see. Sigh. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

12. Background on Clinton's ties to the Cuban "exile" community:

TIME Magazine
October 28, 1996 Volume 148, No. 20

CLINTON'S CUBAN ROAD TO FLORIDA HOW POLICY WAS TURNED BY A FEW CUBAN AMERICANS, INCLUDING HIS SISTER-IN-LAW

DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

~snip~
Four years ago, senior State Department diplomats hoped Clinton would breathe fresh air into U.S.-Cuban relations. Miami's fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American community had long blocked any thaw, though the Pentagon had concluded that Havana posed no threat to the region, and Washington had made peace with almost all its cold war enemies. But half a dozen Cuban-American Democrats who raised huge sums for Clinton in 1992 convinced the new President he could win Florida in '96 if he became even more anti-Castro than Ronald Reagan or George Bush had been.

Senior Clinton aides call the cabal the "core group." It includes Maria Victoria Arias, a Miami lawyer married to Hugh Rodham, the First Lady's brother; and wealthy businessman Paul Cejas, who occasionally stays overnight at the White House. Arias telephones Hillary frequently and often sends Clinton clippings from Florida newspapers. In regular meetings at the Colonnade Hotel in Coral Gables or at Little Havana's Versailles Restaurant, the core group plans strategy and prepares appeals, which are sent by way of private notes to Clinton's top political aides. "When an issue comes up, we try to get a consensus and present a united front," says core-group member Simon Ferro, a Miami Democratic activist.

Clinton came to the Oval Office with his own Castro obsession. In 1980 he lost re-election as Governor partly because Cuban refugees rioted at an Arkansas Army post. As President he ordered the CIA to estimate the chances of an upheaval in Cuba during his first term: the agency said better than fifty-fifty. Clinton aides later pressed the cia to fund Cuban dissidents secretly. Burned by a dirty-tricks campaign against Castro in the '60s, the agency sidetracked the idea.

Clinton's foreign policy toward Cuba soon became snarled in bureaucratic battles between Administration hard-liners and moderates. In 1994 Castro allowed 33,000 Cubans to flee to South Florida, and the Administration began discouraging more escapees by detaining the rafters indefinitely at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The core group urged Clinton to punish Havana by halting airline flights to Cuba, but State Department moderates lobbied to maintain informal exchanges, including charter flights. Morton Halperin, the National Security Council's point man on Cuba, circulated a draft presidential speech offering carrots to Castro if he adopted reforms. Hard-liners, led by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Michael Skol, allied themselves with the core group and launched a guerrilla war against the conciliatory moves. Clinton shelved the carrots and embarked on the hard line.

By January 1995 the U.S. Atlantic Command chief, General John Sheehan, who had pressed to ease tensions with Havana, began badgering the White House to clear out the 20,000 Cubans at Guantanamo. Riots were possible, he warned, and by his staff's estimate, a permanent refugee camp would cost some $2 billion. Three months later, partly with that figure as ammunition, Administration moderates staged a policy coup. Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff began secretly talking to Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's legislature. The Guantanamo refugees would be sent to Florida. To stanch any new exodus, U.S. Coast Guard boats would intercept future rafters at sea and return them to Cuba on condition that the regime not punish them.

So that no one would catch on, Tarnoff had his wife book his airline ticket to Toronto, where he met with Alarcon in a hotel room to sign the deal. Tarnoff and Halperin were afraid the Cuban Americans might try to scuttle the talks. Indeed, a decision memo had to be sent to Clinton three times before he finally agreed to keep the negotiations secret from the core group. When the agreement was announced, however, angry Cuban Americans poured into the streets of Miami, and the core group retaliated by having Clinton oust Halperin as Cuba point man. The core group then hovered over every inch of policy. A Clinton speech in October 1995 announcing minor cultural exchanges took three months of vetting.
(snip/...)

http://www.hermanos.org/feb24/time.html