Morales resigns and flees Bolivia amid right wing coup

[Judi Lynn]

7. If you had bothered to watch and learn what has been happening in Bolivia you would be embarrassed

by what you have written.

You won't know until you start doing your homework how wildly confused you are about Bolivia, Evo Morales, the vast majority of indigenous Bolivians who have been profoundly abused since the Spanish invaded up until this very moment, how the indigenous people were not even allowed to vote until after a revolution in 1952, as well as not even being allowed to walk on the sidewalks with any member of the small elite sector of white fascists which has controlled the whole country since they first seized control.

Clearly you always buy everything you read, and that's what the military/industrial power structure wants. If you imagine corporate media has been shoveling out facts about Latin America, you are going to be astonished once you get serious and start doing your homework.

A good starting point on learning about propaganda and the media would he to read any of the widely available material you can find on line, or in libraries about the "father of propaganda" in the U.S., Edward Louis Bernays. Jump right in there and start informing yourself, Almost everything you think you know has always been wrong starting when he assisted the US government by helping to "mold public perception" while Eisenhower's C.I.A. overthrew Iran's President in 1953, and started in, in deep seriousness, in the Americas in Guatemala by eliminating a progressive President Jacobo Arbenz.

You have so much to learn. Until then, you might want to do a little research first before trying to attack "leftists" in the Americas. They are living in worlds far, far different from your American Dream, among people who've been suffering intensely, and continue to need a racist, fascist free nation, and the chance to obtain education, medical treatment, housing, utilities, in many cases, safe working conditions, and non-slave wages, all of which are, of course never mentioned in the corporate media dictation you are reading and believing you are informed.

The numbers of US citizens who are AWAKENING are increasing. You will be overtaken by people who are conscientious, humane, and intelligent.

Help yourself by doing the homework needed to be relevant.

On edit:

For people who want to know more about propaganda, here's the opening you can use to start thinking about the quality of information you are likely to get from corporate media, and have been getting for decades. Wikipedia's info. on Edward Bernays:

Edward Louis Bernays (/bərˈneɪz/; German: [bɛɐ̯ˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 ? March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life.[4] He was the subject of a full length biography by Larry Tye called The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self.

His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" and his work for the United Fruit Company connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.[5][6]

. . .

United Fruit and Guatemala
See also: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
The United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) hired Bernays in the early 1940s for the purpose of promoting banana sales within the United States. Promote them he did, by linking bananas to good health and to American interests, and by placing them strategically in the hands of celebrities, in hotels, and other conspicuous places. Bernays also argued that United Fruit needed to put a positive spin on the banana-growing countries themselves, and for this purpose created a front group called the Middle America Information Bureau, which supplied information to journalists and academics.[50]

United Fruit shut down the Middle America Information Bureau in 1948 under the new presidency of Thomas Dudley Cabot. Bernays resented this change but stayed on with the company, for a reported annual fee of more than $100,000.[51] Bernays worked on the national press and successfully drummed up coverage of Guatemala's Communist menace.[52]

The company became alarmed about the political situation in Guatemala after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman became president in March 1951. On March 21, 1951, Bernays told United Fruit's head of publicity, Edmund Whitman, that Guatemala could reprise Iran's recent nationalization of British Petroleum:

We recommend that immediate steps be undertaken to safeguard American business interests in Latin American countries against comparable action there. News knows no boundaries today. . . . To disregard the possibilities of the impact of events one upon another is to adopt a head-in-the-sand-ostrich policy.

He recommended a campaign in which universities, lawyers, and the US government would all condemn expropriation as immoral and illegal; the company should use media pressure "to induce the President and State Department to issue a policy pronouncement comparable to the Monroe Doctrine concerning expropriation." In the following months, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and the Atlantic Monthly had all published articles describing the threat of Communism in Guatemala. A Bernays memo in July 1951 recommended that this wave of media attention should be translated into action by promoting:

(a) a change in present U.S. ambassadorial and consular representation, (b) the imposition of congressional sanctions in this country against government aid to pro-Communist regimes, (c) U.S. government subsidizing of research by disinterested groups like the Brookings Institution into various phases of the problem.[53]

Per Bernays's strategy, United Fruit distributed favorable articles and an anonymous Report on Guatemala to every member of Congress and to national "opinion molders".[54][55] They also published a weekly Guatemala Newsletter and sent it to 250 journalists, some of whom used it as a source for their reporting.[55] Bernays formed close relationships with journalists including The New York Times reporter Will Lissner at and columnist Walter Winchell.[52][53] In January 1952 he brought a cohort of journalists from various notable newspapers on a tour of Guatemala, sponsored by the company. This technique proved highly effective and was repeated four more times.[55] In June, 1954, the US Central Intelligence Agency effected a coup d'état code-named Operation PBSUCCESS. The CIA backed a minimal military force, fronted by Carlos Castillo Armas, with a psychological warfare campaign to portray military defeat as a foregone conclusion. During the coup itself, Bernays was the primary supplier of information for the international newswires Associated Press, United Press International and the International News Service.[56][57]

Following the coup, Bernays built up the image of Guatemala's new president Carlos Castillo Armas, giving advice for his public appearances both in Guatemala and in the US. In 1956, Bernays produced a pamphlet comparing the Communist way and the Christian way.[58]

In 1959, United Fruit dispensed with all external advisors including Bernays.[59]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

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A Banana Republic Once Again?
Submitted by Brendan Fischer on December 27, 2010 - 11:55am

. . .

Edward L. Bernays, Chiquita, and the CIA-backed Guatemalan Coup
Chiquita's most famous act of interference with Central American politics is its role in toppling Guatemala's left-leaning government in 1954. For the first half of the 20th century, Chiquita poured investment capital into Guatemala, buying the country's productive land and controlling shares in its railroad, electric utility, and telegraph industries; as a result, the Guatemalan government was subservient to Chiquita's interests, exempting the company from internal taxation and guaranteeing workers earned no more than fifty cents per day. At the time of the 1944 Guatemalan revolution, Chiquita was the country's number one landowner, employer, and exporter.

In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected with 65% of the vote, and Chiquita perceived his agrarian land reforms as a threat to their corporate interests. Chiquita, with the help of the father of modern public relations, Edward L. Bernays, waged a propaganda war and managed to convince the American public and politicians that Arbenz was secretly a dangerous communist who could not be allowed to remain in power. With McCarthy-era hysteria in full swing, President Eisenhower secretly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the democratically elected Arbenz in a 1954 covert operation. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc "Liberation Army" under the command of an exiled Guatemalan army officer, and used them in conjunction with a diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign. At the time, the American public was told that Guatemala was undergoing a "revolution;" the CIA's involvement was long suspected and fully revealed when the agency released thousands of documents in 1997. The overthrow precipitated a 40-year civil war that killed over 200,000 people, and "disappeared" another 100,000.

In the Bernays biography The Father of Spin, Larry Tye writes that Bernays began working as Chiquita's public relations counsel in the early 1940s, peddling bananas by claiming they cured celiac disease and were "good for the national defense" (the company had lent its ships to the U.S. military in WWII). As the Guatemalan government became concerned with the needs of its impoverished majority, Bernays began a PR blitz to spin the left-leaning government as covertly Communist. He urged Chiquita to find a top Latin American politician to condemn Guatemala's actions, and hire a top attorney to outline the reasons for outlawing the land reforms. Bernays planted stories in major newspapers and magazines on the "growing influence of Guatemala's Communists," prodded the New York Times to assign reporters who were sympathetic to his cause, and even managed to obtain coverage in liberal journals like The Nation. In 1952, Bernays brought a group of journalists to the region at Chiquita's expense to "gather information," but with everything the press saw and heard carefully staged and regulated by their host. When articles supportive of Chiquita's claims were printed, Bernays would offer to help distribute reprints of the article to top government officials and other writers, and to help get a Congressperson to reprint the article in the Congressional record. Bernays also set up a network of "intelligence agents" to "undertake a private intelligence survey" of the "political and ideological situation" in Guatemala, and fed reports from these phony agents to the press as warnings from an "authoritative source" or an "unnamed intelligence official." Throughout the conflict, Bernays remained a key source of information for the press. As the invasion began, he gave major U.S. news outlets the first reports on the situation.

One of Bernays' fellow PR men quoted in The Father of Spin notes that Chiquita's executives were initially unsupportive of Bernays' PR efforts, but not because they were uncomfortable with media manipulation; instead, "they wanted to do business the old way, to foment a revolution and get Arbenz the hell out of there." Bernays managed to convince Chiquita executives to take his more subtle and clever approach.

In addition to Bernays' carefully planned PR campaign, many indicators suggest Chiquita played a more direct role in convincing the U.S. to overthrow Arbenz. The company had very close ties to the CIA-- former Chiquita executive General Walter Bedell Smith, who was later named to the board of directors, was a former Director of Central Intelligence, and the Dulles brothers (Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and then-current Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles) had provided legal services to the company through their association with the New York-based law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Notorious spymaster E. Howard Hunt, who headed the CIA's Guatemalan operation (and was later jailed for his role in the Watergate break-in) insisted in later years that lobbying by Chiquita persuaded the Eisenhower Administration to get involved in Guatemala.

Bernays' carefully planned campaign successfully created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in the U.S. about the Guatemalan government, compelling a U.S. intervention that advanced Chiquita's interests and was internationally condemned. In turn, the overthrow fueled an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in Latin America about U.S. intentions in the region, and Che Guevara's wife Hilda Gadea later wrote "it was Guatemala which finally convinced [Guevara] of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism." The U.S.-led regime change precipitated four decades of military rule and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Guatemala.

More:
https://www.prwatch.org/news/2010/12/9834/banana-republic-once-again

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