Got Missiles?

The Associated Press published an interesting report today on the ongoing political scandal over the US taking control of 28 Bolivian anti-aircraft missiles just prior to Evo Morales's election as president.

A move has been gaining steam in the Bolivian Congress and elsewhere to try former President Eduardo Rodriguez for having handed the missiles over to the US government during his brief tenure last year. With the US government letting Rodriguez hang out to dry, the ex-president is starting to sing.

According to AP, the missile handover was part of a Bush administration plan to strip Latin American countries (well, some of them) of weapons the administration feared might somehow fall into the hands of "terrorists." Rodriguez says the US offered Bolivia $400,000 to destroy the 28 hand-held rocket launchers and that they were outdated anyway. But Rodriguez says that he has no idea how the missiles got handed over to US authorities.

While the US refuses to make a formal comment about how they actually got the missiles, Rodriguez says the Bush administration was clear in private why it was in such a rush to get its hands on them last October. He claims that US Ambassador David Greenlee told him after Morales' election victory, "If we didn't get the missiles out when we did, we weren't going to get them out."

Here's a link to the AP story.