This story smells

Josh Marshall links the following New York Times article about Bolivia, calling it One of the Stories You Need the Times For 04/28/09. The piece is by Simon Romero, titled Plot Foiled? In Bolivia, Truth Is Elusive 04/27/09.

Something about this story smells wrong to me. It opens with a dramatic story of a Bolivian Special Force group killing three people that Evo Morales' government claimed were plotting to assassinate him. For the average reader, this is going to bring to mind semi-official executions and death squads.

But then, this is the New York Times, the paper that front-paged Judith Miller's stories on Iraq's very scary "weapons of mass destruction" that were essentially nothing but propaganda pieces pumping the false claims that Dick Cheney and the neocons were using to gin up a war against Iraq. So the Times isn't above being played by some very dubious sources.

After the first three paragraphs describing the shooting, the story says:

"These terrorists were connected to an ideology of the extreme fascist right,” said Álvaro García Linera, a former Marxist guerrilla who is Bolivia’s vice president.

But the episode, with its dash of Balkan intrigue, remains far from an open-and-shut case of right versus left.

That's an interesting construction. I can rework it several ways. For instance:

"This Times newspaper was connected with a government-run disinformation campaign to justify invading Iraq," says a former reporter fired by the Times who now works for a rival newspaper.

This story, with it's touch of intrigue involving wealthy natural gas companies and their local allies who aren't able to scam as much money under the Morales government as from the previous ones, is far from an open-and-shut case of good reporting versus bad reporting.

As far as the particular incident described, this is the first time I recall hearing about it. And I don't keep up with Bolivian news daily, so I don't have any independent sense of the controversy. The article presents the incident as an unsolved mystery, and I don't have a solution for it.

And I'm not a news organization, just one of the many dirty hippie bloggers out there. But I did post several times last year about one of the most significant news stories in Latin American in 2008, which provides a very relative background that you will barely see a glimpse of in the Times story:

Oh, yeah, did you know the US is trying to start a civil war in Bolivia? 09/11/08

More on Bolivian conflict 09/14/08

South American solidarity with Bolivia 09/12/08

Bolivian developments 09/14/08

Bolivia and other points south of the border 09/15/08

UNASUR and Bolivia 09/16/08

The new phase in Bolivia 09/17/09

To summarize briefly, the democratically-elected Evo Morales government was highly unpopular with natural gas interests in the eastern part of the country. And the leaders of several of the provinces there did stage a secessionist movement, and a violent one. As one can see from the earlier posts and the numerous links there, this wasn't just some secret plot among a few conspirators. By last September, it had become an open, violent, separatist attempt.

Evo Morales and his government claimed all along that the separatist movement was orchestrated by the United States. I haven't seen clear proof of that. But the diplomatic actions of the Cheney-Bush government certainly showed sympathy for the separatists and hostility to Morales' democratic government.

The immediate crisis was resolved when UNASUR, an organization of South American countries (not including the United States), brokered a deal that brought the violent separatist attempt to an end. But this was not a split-the-difference equally kind of move. UNASUR was united in opposing the efforts of the separatists to split themselves off from the central government.

Here's what the readers of Simon Romero's New York Times article would learn about all that very relevant background:

It was 4 a.m. on April 16 in Santa Cruz, the city in the lowlands of Bolivia that is a bastion of opposition to that nation’s president, Evo Morales. ...

As the bullet-riddled bodies were shown on national television, the authorities claimed to have foiled a plot to kill Mr. Morales, a former coca grower reviled by Santa Cruz’s light-skinned elite. ...

Instead, it falls somewhere in that gray area of Bolivian politics, in which Mr. Morales’s claims of destabilization plots, now a regular feature of his government, and his opponents’ counterclaims that such plots are shams contribute to growing tensions between the central government and the rebellious lowlands.

In a move that angered political leaders in Santa Cruz, the central government last week ordered more than a thousand troops to the region. Juan Ramón Quintana, a senior aide to Mr. Morales, said the decision was made partly because of a concern over “the presence of terrorists that are a potential threat to the security of the Bolivian state.”

Meanwhile, the killings have raised a raft of nettlesome questions. Who backed such a group? How did officials detect them? Why did Mr. Morales send the police all the way from the capital, La Paz, to deal with them? ...

Mr. Rozsa Flores [the alleged leader of the assassination plot] went further in the interview, saying his goal was not toppling Mr. Morales, but achieving autonomy for Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s wealthiest department, or province. Envisioning a clash with La Paz over this issue, he nonchalantly described his goal as “declaring independence and creating a new country.” ...

Such assertions fit well into the way Mr. Morales’s government portrays Santa Cruz: as a region where powerful industrialists and bankers, some of them descendants of Croatian immigrants, want to secede from Bolivia in a rupture inspired by Yugoslavia’s disintegration. [my emphasis]

In other words, the typical reader will come away from this article thinking, oh, Bolivia's just a banana republic with each side making up excuses to kill the other. And to talk about the separatist claims and counterclaims, without giving the background of the violent separtist attempt last September, doesn't give a very adequate picture of the situation, to say the least. A reader not knowing that backgroud would think that the separatist talk from the mysterious Croatian guy killed in that raid was maybe just some crank shooting off his mouth.

Strange story. Smells quite a bit like a Judith Miller story.

Tags: bolivia