1-8-07    Here is an interesting analysis- brilliantly written- on Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro’s team ups with Evo Morales's Bolivia today from The Wall Street Journal by Mary Anastasia O'Grady. In fact, Bolivia is on the verge of installing a "new" constitution that will hand their president total powers and will plunge their nation factually in to a totalitarian dictatorship. The Bolivian constitutional language mimics the new Venezuelan and Ecuadorean and oddly the Russian "constitutional" proposals.

This is called "alternative" or "sovereign" democracy. The “new” constitutional power grabs underway are part of providing a total framework for total state kleptocracy. It is a true oddity that global activist and offshore speculator George Soros, his paid minions and allied activists [often called political progressives] actively work to support this effort globally. It is also truly peculiar that the U.S. government's US AID has helped co-fund support for these new "alternative" democracies and their instruments of conversion from democracy to decidedly counter-democracy constitutions.

The Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) both refuse to factually analyze this counter-democracy "alternative" democracy movement and instead, hold vapid cocktail parties support groups and receptions for the performers while providing funds and program support for same.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded by the U.S. Congress and thus is genetically outside standard contractor analysis with its own cronies at US AID, is in fact in an alliance with Soros, the OAS, and the UN on these very undemocratic "alternative" democracies. Democracy's endowment deserves better and would do well to commence with the facts of their own goals and what money they are spending. Soros's own long-term paid professional pro-drugs actor/lobbyist, Ethan Nadelman, himself quite active in mind and money with some U.S. leaders such as Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, is deeply involved in Andean region activism to encourage anti-Colombia, anti-Bush, and pro alternative government efforts as are numerous pro drugs advocates for the built-in protections from law and order they seek in their “alternative” states. However, to gain full immunity for narcostate and narcoterror state status, called alternative democracies, first the effort must by pass normative democratic structures to legalize what should not be legalized.

Alternative narcotics laws are but the opening salvo in a much larger "alternative" world of self-enriching benefits for a small roster of murky global speculators and state kleptocrats in what is truly the ultimate marriage of convenience. The problem here is that with no citizen pre-nup available, this manage a deux deceptively benefits the few inside the statist politburo while forcing the remainder to mere serf-like, unfree standing.

The Journal article is terrific for its factual research and background, reminding that Fidel Castro's advice, as Evo Morales tells us, to slowly erode the structures of democracy and destroy rule of law as the best way to succeed, using the false guise of democracy's own tools to self destruct democracy in favor of totalitarianism.

To date, none have mourned the end of support in the Andean region for rule of law reforms. In fact, rule of law was easily beheaded in favor of the Castro-Chavez “one globe” plan. O'Grady writes, "Mr. Morales, who badly needs to maintain the appearance of public support so that the international community tolerates his takeover, had to be embarrassed by this outpouring of democratic opposition. He is trying to spin the constitutional crisis as a confrontation between races and economic classes." In other words, while trying to install a new "alternative constitution" to decriminalize crime and install undemocratic fascist governance, the Chavez-Castro-Putin-Morales deceivers seek to deceive the international community regarding their state take-overs of democracy and rule of law. Ecuador's Rafael Correa is following an identical path to Bolivia except his approach to the Ecuadorean Congressional retention of constitutional democracy is different from Morales's. Rafael Correa, unlike Morales, has simply and illegally stated that he will end the independence of their Congress and remove Congressional obligations to legislate and oversee law and order, handing total powers to himself.

No Ecuadorean to date has doubted Correa’s sincerity on this democracy-ending effort underway even as Correa announces daily to the media his intentions to proceed apace. Today, Rafael Correa’s well paid political actors will once again stage their well paid anti-democracy protests to force a seizure of democracy’s last tool: an independent Congress. It is impossibly naive and irresponsible to continue to ignore the facts regarding Chavez, Morales and Correa today.

O'Grady is completely correct in our opinion until the last line of the article. Where narcotics are concerned, demand reduction with a lessened focus on supply reduction is an outmoded argument: both reductions must be sustainably in place a deux due to the inherent psychotropic and addictive qualities of what the UN and the OAS correctly deem illicit drugs.

As to Bolivia, no amount of thinly veiled excuses- such as blaming increasing global drug addiction or aerial spraying- covers over the fact that Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa recklessly seek a totalitarian "alternative" regime in the Andes today to further their self enriching oil and mineral monopolies, financing their pet cronies/politburos. To be sure, these narcoterror statehoods are well underway, enhanced by Chavez’s paid operatives [sometimes called diplomats or advisors; we call them `minders’], increased military build up prepared for aggression, unchecked media propaganda through state controls and monopolistic media take-overs threatened to insure increased support for Chavez’s TELESUR state media and its rabid “news” content contractually provided by AL JAZEERA, and so-called  pro-Chavez "civil society or NGOs" - most of whom are not much more than paid per diem political street actors cum lobbyists. Our analysis however is that this is the thin veil- the drugs and thugs enabling criminal front-  for a much larger criminal geo-political effort engineered solely to benefit the Russo-Iranian-Venezuelan  axis. Democracy’s endowment needs to wake up before it sells itself out.

- The Editors, ECrisis

 --------------------

 The Wall Street Journal

January 8, 2007                                                                                                     

THE AMERICAS

Coca Democracy

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
January 8, 2007; Page A16

Evo Morales is an anti-American extremist who wants to turn Bolivia into another Venezuela. That naturally alarms Washington, but not enough to halt its war on drugs, which is aiding the president -- and leader of Bolivia's coca-growing peasant movement -- in his bid to become a dictator.

In a recent interview with the Bolivian Catholic radio station Fides, Mr. Morales explained that in 2003, when he was at a conference in Havana, Fidel Castro told him "not to stage an armed uprising" but to "make transformations, democratic revolutions, what [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez is doing."

The process Fidel advised requires the slow dismantling of institutions that act as checks on the executive while maintaining the guise of democracy. This calls for healthy poll numbers even while the rule of law is being trampled. Mr. Chávez had oil revenues to keep the masses happy while he put a noose around democracy. But Evo isn't so fortunate and he can't push through a constitutional coup without popular backing. So to generate support he has relied heavily on his defense of coca growers against a U.S. policy that presses countries in Latin America to destroy their crops.

Since his inauguration last January Mr. Morales has been dutifully complying with the Cuban dictator's instructions. He has purged the military leadership, broken contracts with energy investors to signal his control over the sector, and pushed through an election for a constituent assembly that is charged with rewriting the highest law of the land.

So far so good. But the assembly election didn't turn out the way he had hoped. In the event, Mr. Morales's Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party won only 53% of the seats. Since the law requires a two-thirds majority to approve the new document, the president's party is looking at compromise with his political opponents in the drafting process.

Apparently this is the sort of thing Fidel did not counsel. So now the Morales government is insisting that ratification of the new constitution should require only a simple majority vote in the assembly or a simple majority in a national referendum.

To win on this point, Mr. Morales will have to run roughshod over the law and he has already begun. Over the Christmas holiday he unilaterally named four new justices to the Supreme Court's 12-seat bench. The president says these are legal recess appointments, but the opposition is crying foul because the MAS-controlled congress never initiated the nomination process that would have safeguarded the independence of the court. Bolivian democrats are worried that Mr. Morales will also try to alter the makeup of the constitutional court and the electoral council to favor his own objectives.

Things looks grim for democrats who believe that Mr. Morales is trying to remake the constitution in the image and likeness of Mr. Chávez's Venezuela, but they're not going down without a fight.

The center of the opposition movement is based in the energy-rich, agricultural lowlands of the eastern part of the country, where there is a long history of agitation in favor of more decentralized government. The Morales presidency, with its promise to expropriate and redistribute land, its heavy-handed intervention in the natural gas sector, and now its attempt at a constitutional coup, has heightened that sentiment and provoked a strong backlash against La Paz. In July, when Bolivians voted on the constitutional assembly, they also answered another ballot question regarding departmental (state) autonomy. In Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija, autonomy won hands down.

More recently the east took to the streets. On Dec. 15 the opposition organized a "townhall meeting" in Bolivia's largest city, Santa Cruz, to rally against Mr. Morales's power grab. Pro-Morales supporters blockaded a highway outside of the city so that buses carrying protestors could not get through. As many as 60 people were injured and most of the buses had to turn back. But the rally was a success. An estimated 800,000 people congregated under the city's Christ the Redeemer statue to demand that a new constitution be ratified only with a two-thirds vote in the assembly, and that the call for autonomy be respected.

Mr. Morales, who badly needs to maintain the appearance of public support so that the international community tolerates his takeover, had to be embarrassed by this outpouring of democratic opposition. He is trying to spin the constitutional crisis as a confrontation between races and economic classes. But he has to worry about places like the poor and largely indigenous city of El Alto, just above La Paz, where there is evidence to suggest that many who voted for him are unhappy with his unlawful intervention in the constitutional process and growing impatient with his failure to deliver on economic promises.

This is where U.S. drug policy comes in. Railing against the Yankees who want to destroy peasant income has proven extremely effective in keeping the Morales base -- the country's indigenous coca growers who brought him to power -- energized and his numbers afloat.

He reaffirmed this last month. As his opposition swelled he suddenly announced that he would authorize a near doubling of the number of hectares that may legally produce coca. Then last week he inaugurated a coca industrialization plant in the province of Cochabamba, financed by his government along with Cuba and Venezuela. According to press reports, Mr. Morales told the Cochabamba crowd that coca "never killed anyone" and that the U.S. "should have a law to do away with drug addicts."

Mr. Morales shouldn't wish too hard for that. If Washington policy makers ever decide to tackle the demand for cocaine and stop blaming supply, Mr. Morales's political career would be in jeopardy.