Reports: Croats in Bolivia face accusations of extremism

[Judi Lynn]

Reports: Croats in Bolivia face accusations of extremism
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:29:56 GMT
DPA

Belgrade - Croatian officials were assessing reports of Croats living in Bolivia being accused of being "extremists" and trying to break up Bolivia after a failed attempt to kill Bolivian President Evo Morales, Serbian media reported Monday. Last week, an elite Bolivian police squad killed three members of an alleged terrorist group suspected of planning attacks on Morales. One of those killed was a Hungarian nationalist who had fought as a mercenary for the Croats in the 1992-95 war in the then Yugoslavia.

Bolivians have since alleged that Croats living in Bolivia of trying to break up Bolivia in the same way they have broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s, according to the Belgrade daily Blic.

"We are going to assess the situation in Bolivia and consider sending a diplomatic note. The Croatian government cannot be responsible for what its former fighters are doing now," Croatian Vice Premier Jadranka Kosor was quoted as saying in the report.

Blic reported that authorities in Bolivia had linked alleged terrorists to a rich Bolivian businessman of Croat descent who is advocating for the autonomy of rich provinces.

The businessman, whose father is a Croat and mother is Montenegrin, allegedly organized the terrorists and brought in Montenegrin mercenaries, according to Blic.

More:
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/265043,reports-croats-in-bolivia-face-accusations-of-extremism.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Website link to Irish extremist blog

Monday, April 20, 2009
Website link to Irish extremist blog
By Scott Millar

EDUARDO Rozsa Flores, the alleged leader of the "foreign mercenaries" killed in Bolivia, linked his website with an extreme right-wing blog in Ireland, the Irish Bulletin.

Both sites promote the neo-fascist ideas of the Third Position, which mixes some aspects of left-wing politics with ideas of racial identity, cultural separation and religion.

Individuals adhering to Third Position see themselves as the "intellectual elite" of the extreme right. The philosophy was developed into a unified political grouping — The International Third Position — by members of the British extreme-right alongside Italian neo-fascist terrorists who had fled to Britain in the 1980s.

In recent years, Third Position adherents have attempted to blend their ideals with anarchism.

Mr Flores was the leader of the Hungarian Nationalist Anarchy Party. Adherents have voiced strong opposition to socialist governments in Bolivia and Venezuela, and Third Position has taken hold in opposition movements in these countries.

~snip~
Among the founders of the International Third Position is Italian Roberto Fiore. He fled to Britain in the wake of the 1980 Bologna railway bombing, which killed 85 people.

The bombing was initially blamed on Marxist guerrillas but had in fact been perpetrated by neo-fascists as part of a so-called "strategy of tension" to promote political instability in order to undermine left-wing political parties.

There have been repeated allegations of links between supporters of Third Position and state security agencies, including the CIA.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/idsnqlkfid/

[Judi Lynn]

2. Bolivia “Assassins” ‘Fought in Balkan Wars’

Bolivia “Assassins” ‘Fought in Balkan Wars’
Zagreb | 20 April 2009 |

Two members of a mercenary gang said to have plotted to kill Bolivian President Evo Morales were veterans of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, reports say.

A Bolivian judge jailed two suspects in an alleged plot to kill President Evo Morales as investigations continue.

Judge Betty Yaniquez told reporters there is enough evidence to imprison the survivors of a shootout with police. Three other members of an alleged band of assassins were killed in a raid by police on Thursday in the lowland eastern city of Santa Cruz.

Prosecutor Edward Mollinedo says the suspects, Elot Toazo and Mario Tadik Astorga, are being held on terrorism charges, but refused to be provide more detail. Representatives for the suspects could not be reached.

Tadik Astorga, 58, a Bolivian-Croatian who apparently fought in the Balkans, and Toazo, a Hungarian computer science expert, were being transferred to a jail in La Paz.

More:
http://balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/18286 /

[Judi Lynn]

3. It looks likely this guy is the Croat to whom Blic was referring: Branko Marinkovic

In Bolivia, a Croat and a Critic Is Cast in a Harsh Light
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: September 26, 2008

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia



THE documentary on Bolivian state television opens with grainy images of leaders of the Ustashe, the fascist movement that ruled Croatia during World War II. The movie, part of a propaganda campaign against one of President Evo Morales’s most vocal critics, then shows black-and-white photos of emaciated victims in concentration camps, followed by the question, “Who is Branko Gora Marinkovic Jovicevic?”

Tapping a pack of Camel Lights on his desk, Branko Marinkovic, the 41-year-old scion of a cooking oil and cattle ranching empire, is understandably displeased at being associated with Nazis who fled to South America. After showing the documentary to visitors, he keeps glancing at his laptop’s screen saver, a photo of the console of his private plane. His uneasy gaze betrays his thoughts: he would rather be somewhere else.

But Mr. Marinkovic is in Bolivia, and trying to answer the question posed in the crude propaganda film: Who is Mr. Marinkovic?

For many people in the tropical lowlands, Mr. Marinkovic, whose parents emigrated here in the 1950s from the former Yugoslavia, is an example of entrepreneurial resilience and leadership in the face of radical policies championed by Mr. Morales. In his own words, he made the leap from business to politics to resist a “descent into intolerance and hatred” against light-skinned Bolivians like himself.

But for Mr. Morales and the social movements that support him, Mr. Marinkovic is the kind of magnate who symbolizes all that is wrong in rebellious eastern Bolivia. Attacks against him have intensified since his foray into politics after he was elected president last year of the powerful Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, a group seeking greater autonomy for the lowlands from the central government in La Paz.

Officials in Mr. Morales’s government accused him of becoming one of Bolivia’s richest men partly through illegal land grabs in areas inhabited by Guarayo Indians, a charge he has contested in court. Seizing on his origins and foreign-sounding name, some here have called him a foreign meddler. (Mr. Marinkovic holds both Bolivian and Croatian citizenship.)

STATE news media also suggest that Mr. Marinkovic is seeking to foment a civil war to create a breakaway country in the lowlands, much as Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia. They also insinuate that Mr. Marinkovic’s late father, Silvio, was connected to Ustashe members who fled to South America along with their Nazi patrons.

~snip~
This city remains a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the former Spanish dictator Franco.

Another group, the Santa Cruz Youth Union, is a quasi-independent arm of the committee led by Mr. Marinkovic.

“We will protect Branko with our own lives,” Juan del Mar Paz, a member of the Youth Union’s board, said in an interview at its headquarters in an office here next to that of Mr. Marinkovic. “Branko is a visionary leader standing up to the dictatorship of the altiplano.”

Drawing such admiration from cadres that enter into violent clashes with impoverished migrants in Santa Cruz’s slums has opened Mr. Marinkovic to claims that he is indifferent to the racism suffered by highland indigenous groups.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/world/americas/27bolivia.html?n=Top/News/World/Countries%20and%20Territories/Bolivia&pagewanted=all

The article, and others, indicate Marinkovic studied engineering and finance at various Texas universities.

Edited to add photos of Marinkovic:

http://cache.daylife.com.nyud.net:8090/imageserve/0apf0lBbve4ww/610x.jpg

http://www.radioiyambae.com.nyud.net:8090/images/stories/civivcos_crucenos.jpg

http://static1.mundoanuncio.com.nyud.net:8090/img/2008/8/22/11636030993.jpg

[Judi Lynn]

4. Marinkovic named in this article: Bolivia Deepens Probe Into Assassination Plot

Bolivia Deepens Probe Into Assassination Plot
By Soledad Alvarez

LA PAZ – Investigators are trying to trace the source of the financing for a dismantled cell that was apparently plotting to kill socialist President Evo Morales, the head of Bolivia’s national police said.

Gen. Victor Hugo Escobar said that police want to know how the alleged plotters could afford to lodge in expensive hotels and to determine whether they were acting on their own or at the behest of others.

The group was dismantled Thursday in a pre-dawn raid at a hotel in the eastern city of Santa Cruz. Three of the putative would-be assassins died in a shootout with police and two others are in custody.

All five were suspected of being “directly responsible” for the bombings of Cardinal Julio Terrazas’ house on Wednesday and Deputy Autonomy Minister Saul Avalos’s house three weeks ago, Escobar told Bolivian television immediately after the operation.

Hours later, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera told reporters the five were “international mercenaries” preparing attacks on Morales and other senior officials.

Documents found by police “speak of preparations for an assassination, for an attack against the lives of the president and the vice president of the republic,” Garcia Linera said.

One of those killed in Thursday’s raid was Eduardo Rozsa Flores, 48, the Bolivian-born son of Hungarian Jews who successively converted to Christianity and then Islam and acquired Croatian citizenship while fighting for the Croats in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The news Web site Bolpress says that Rozsa had ties to Branko Marinkovic, a second-generation Croatian-Bolivian who is one of the Andean nation’s richest men and formerly led the Santa Cruz Civic Community, main promoter of a movement for “autonomy” from La Paz.

Escobar described Rozsa as the leader of the “mercenaries.”

More:
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=332195&CategoryId=14919

[Judi Lynn]

5. Google translation of BolPress article: History of a Nazi colony that survives in Bolivia

Lunes, 20 de abril de 2009

History of a Nazi colony that survives in Bolivia

Leandro Albani

(Resumen Latinoamericano-ABN) .- arrived in Bolivia covered by the Vatican, by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and United States (U.S.) after World War II and settled in what later was called the region of the Crescent, an area rich hosting the most bitter opposition leaders against the change process that leads Evo Morales.

They were Nazis, brought money stolen from their homeland and their future generations in promoting the ideas of genetic superiority and intellectual, why always remained outside of the Bolivian people and their families grew by only marriages between them.

Have large business and industry, billed millions of dollars a year, the institutionalized exploitation and servitude as a form of profit, the extensions of their land and join thousands of hectares statutes encourage separatists to divide Bolivia, with the largest hydrocarbon resources are in the regions they inhabit.

His past marked by genocide and repression, and now control the political power of departments like Santa Cruz, Beni and Tarija, financing and creating groups clash known as Youth Union, which attacked and beat up villagers who are part of the originating nations.

Branko Marincovic is its most visible representative, who conveyed and disseminated to anyone who wants to hear the contempt felt against President Evo Morales and what it represents: the resurgence of indigenous peoples and peasants that after 500 years deepen the process of change that includes and makes visible as never before.

Most of them are children and grandchildren of Croats who were forward in their home country policies Adolf Hitler, and now it does not tremble when a call to sedition and conspiracy against the Government.

During the day on Thursday in Bolivia revealed a pattern of attacks and assassination plans that resulted in the death by the police and implicated three accusations aimed at the financing of these facts from the departmental authorities and civil of Crescent.

The story of the arrival in the Andean nation of mainly Croatian Cologne after World War II left to analyze why the industry is wielding a fierce opposition against Morales and the majority that now supports it.

In an article published in April 2008 in the Bolivian Information Agency (ABI) and signed by Fortunato Esquivel is a summary of where this community comes calling at Croatian Bolivian lands.

Also relates to the separatist leaders of departments with former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, expelled by the government after meetings with known leaders of the opposition to destabilize the country.

In his recounting, Esquivel explained that the April 10, 1941 the Nazis entered Zagreb, capital of Croatia, and then appointed as the new State führer Ante Pavelic, head of a political movement called the fascist and terrorist Ustacha.

To collapse the Nazis in the closing days of World War II, leaders of this organization began a flight that went to Austria to Italy by Benito Mussolini and later to South America, after negotiations between the Vatican and that upheld the USA.

These people are always moved by the integrated loot stolen money from bank deposits and certificates of shares, plus cash and gold jewelry that is estimated at an amount exceeding $ 200 million at the time.

Among those who stepped on the Southern Cone were ³ Klaus Barbie, Ante Pavelic, Adolf Eichmann, Henrich Muller, Franz Stangl and others that in total exceeded 30,000 people, many of them settled in Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and the Bolivian jungle where almost all changed their names, such as Klaus Barbie, who used the Klaus Altman, Esquivel says in his article.

On Barbie, the journalist writes that "was serving the CIA, tortured and was responsible for the deaths of at least three thousand Bolivian revolutionaries during the military regimes", and
knead "with great fortune, dirty business" and reach "to the army general ad honorem" and organize "the paramilitary group Los Angeles de la Muerte, the survivors now train civic youth brigades."

These sectors, which run the industries of oil and beer, livestock and agriculture, and maintains a system of speculative land use, "have become the most active in the plan to dismember the state," said Esquivel.

Secessionist groups illegal autonomy referendums passed, until recently also had the full support of Goldberg, who served as chief of mission to Yugoslavia to break the negotiations and impose the "Rambouillet Agreement" which resulted in the occupation of Kosovo, province of Serbia.

Marinkovic: separatism and racism

It advocates a so-called "Camba Nation" based on the superiority of race. Is accused of seizing tracts of land of irregular shape, studied engineering in the U.S. and is one of the strongest representatives of the opposition to the government of Bolivia Branko Marinkovic is the faithful image of the Cologne Croatian Nazi ideals which serve Bolivia.

In January 2009 the Spanish newspaper Público published a note about this character who acts as landlord, banker, industrial and political.

His family of Croatian origin, visited in eastern Bolivia after World War II and was able to build part of the powerful bourgeoisie Cruz, served mainly by the military dictatorships that plagued the Andean nation.

"Calls for autonomy, but is accused of secessionist want Balkanize Bolivia richer from his department. It is in the Croatian war with the Indians. It is the nemesis of President Evo Morales," said Public.

In this sketch detailing Marinkovic properties that include about 10,000 acres for each crop (rice, soybean, sunflower and corn), along with some 15,000 head of cattle, and his oil company moves IOL annually $ 100 million .

To this list we must add the property of the Bank Economic and annual revenues of approximately $ 300 million.

He was president of the Civic Committee for Santa Cruz and the figure comes to overshadow the prefect Ruben Costas, one of the staunchest opponents of the change process boliviano.

"If Evo Morales embodies the new spirit governing indigenous Bolivia and claiming to centuries of exploitation, Marinkovic is the guru who leads the souls of Cruz, concerned about maintaining their historical privileges," says Public.

The businessman, who was a fugitive until justice is investigated for illegal possession of land, not looking for half measures in his statements: "If we are attacked, which I think will not happen, they will have to go out beyond our city. This will assure" .

Known images of the past year youth brigades attacking and beating Cruz indigenous inhabitants of the region give reason to Marinkovic.

For a free white nation of Indians

"The grandchildren of these people are notorious genocidal formed in harsh and anti-racist ideologies," the journalist and writer Antonio Gil, referring to the generations of Croatian terror and pressure to maintain power in the Oriente Boliviano.

"They seek to create a white nation, industrious, enlightened, who have nothing in common with the colla a plateau they have to finance with their taxes every day. There are elements of the White House and the Pentagon looking welcomed the creation of a new country in the region. Or at least the constant threat of it, "he said.

Alberto Echazú wrote in the portal Bolpress that "first it must be pointed out very clearly that the oligarchy of which we are not talking or Santa Cruz in Bolivia, much less camba. Cruz is not, because its components are actually Croats, Germans and Syrian-Lebanese. Most of them children of immigrants escaped after the Second World War where he participated as thugs and agents of Hitlerism.

Some surnames are quite illustrative: Matkovic, Marinkovic, Teodovic, Kuljis, Dabdoub, Kreidler, Salek Kempf Elsner and Hecker.

These definitions can serve as a small example of a sector in Bolivia is now cornered and crouching, not by state repression and political persecution but because the change in the country limits its business for decades who were supported by managed the State.

And for this reason it is hardly remarkable that the region of the Crescent was named as an allusion to the Croatian Crescent in 1482 was the last European stronghold against the enslavement of the Ottoman Empire, but now where are the enemies to defeat nations that defend their ancient historic claims, and they were silenced for centuries ago.

http://www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2009041709