That Kosovo, Goldberg, Bolivia Thing

It seems that about once a week or so I get another article launched into my in-box written based on the same theme:

The U.S. government has set out on a deliberate mission to carve Bolivia into separate pieces (a.k.a. "the Balkanization of Bolivia") and to lead that task the Bush administration sent in a man tailor-made for the job, the former Chief of U.S. Mission in Kosovo, U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Phillip Goldberg.

The logic used to back the claim is usually the same. The U.S. is looking for ways to undercut its leftist foe, Evo Morales, and promoting Santa Cruz autonomy is the plan. The U.S. is the reason that socialist Yugoslavia fragmented into pieces. It is the U.S. that is secretly behind the Bolivian autonomy movement. The C.I.A. is running the show. The real U.S. agenda is to seize control of the oil and gas resources located in Bolivia's rebellious eastern provinces.

That's usually how it goes, with a few moderations and variations depending on the writer.

Okay, let's be clear about a few things up front.

Does the U.S. government have a record of overtly and covertly intervening in Latin American politics? Well, take your pick of examples:

Chile in 1973: Courtesy of the Nixon administration, a nation that had been a democracy for many decades was plunged into the horror of dictatorship, leaving thousands of people tortured, dead and disappeared for the crime of their political beliefs.

Nicaragua in the 1980s: Even after the U.S. Congress had formally cutoff funding, the Reagan administration fueled the bloody war between the Contras and the Sandanistas, financed in part from secret arms sales to Iran.

El Salvador in the 1980s: For a decade the U.S. sent billions of dollars to support a regime so extreme in its right wing ideology that death squads associated with it were sent to kill the Catholic Archbishop, for the crime of speaking for peace.

Has the U.S. intervened in Bolivian politics?

Well, you could cite decades of conservative economic reforms pressed on Bolivia by Washington's economic missionaries, the World Bank and IMF. You could cite the fact that, until President Morales suspended the practice, the U.S. provided direct salary bonuses to 'War on Drugs' prosecutors here who met their end of the deal by putting thousands of innocents in jail. You could recall when one of Ambassador Goldberg's predecessors, Manuel Rocha, warned Bolivians publicly in 2002 not to vote for Morales.

So, it is with good reason that people are on the lookout for similar U.S. conspiracies in the current battlefields of Bolivian politics. The problem is that this particular conspiracy theory seems to lack real evidence to back it up. And promoting conspiracy theories based on weak or non-existent evidence doesn't make the U.S. more accountable for its interventions in Latin America. It discredits the charges of political intervention that are based on evidence.

So, let's take a closer look at: Goldberg + Bolivia =Yugoslavia Act II.

Let's begin by remembering a little Balkan history. I have been to the region four times in four years, to Croatia, Kosovo and Montenegro. I return again in June. My work there is with UNICEF and the United Nations Development Program, helping their staffs learn the finer arts of public advocacy on children's and environmental issues.

Everywhere I have been in the region, people do speak fondly of their lives during the Yugoslavia era. There was peace and there was a good deal of freedom. Citizens there were unique among people in the eastern block in their ability to travel abroad. But there is also wide recognition that deep ethnic divisions, going back well before the U.S. was even a nation, were also held in check by an authoritarian regime. When that regime ended with the death of Josip Tito in 1980 the ethnic conflicts erupted in a variety of separatist movements that split the nation apart.

Now it is certainly true that the U.S., which backed Kosovo independence, is mighty happy to have a massive new military base smack in the middle of a Muslim majority nation that likes the U.S. But saying that the U.S. engineered the disillusion of the Balkans is like blaming an onlooker for an automobile crash. The U.S. may have been present and may have had opinions, but it was not the force behind the wheel. Ethnic division took care of that.

And, in the 'Santa Cruz is Kosovo' rap, Slobodan Milosevic gets painted as the Morales of the Balkans, a President just trying to keep a fractured nation together in the face of foreign intervention. If Evo backers think that comparing him to Milosevic is some kind of favor, they might want to think again. Milosevic, by almost any standard you can conjure, was a tyrant and a human rights abuser of the first order. Evo's backers who tout the conspiracy and make the comparison should give Morales a little more credit. Evo has not, for example, sent Aymara and Quechua paramilitaries on an ethnic cleansing expedition into Santa Cruz to force the non-indigenous population across the border into Brazil.

Even if people are deeply critical of U.S. policy, especially under President Bush, should we then act as if any adversary of the U.S. is an honorable ally? Are people really going to lift Milosovic or Ahmadinejad onto a pedestal solely because they are critics of Washington? Shall we ask Iranian feminists what they think of that?

Then there is the Goldberg question.

Readers of this Blog know that I am not a fan of the current U.S. Ambassador. I confess, my opinion was largely shaped by watching him up close last year in a public forum for U.S. citizens in Cochabamba. His condescension toward Bolivians peppered his entire presentation. At one point he even made a joke out a woman being lynched in El Alto.

His diplomatic skills are also substandard. His own staff complained to me off-the-record of how he let the 'Ammo at the Airport' scandal fester into a national uproar, because he didn't see why a U.S. Army Colonel should apologize for bringing in 500 rounds via a relative's suitcase.

But is he the U.S.' secret weapon to divide Bolivia in half?

Goldberg certainly did serve in Kosovo, just as he did in South Africa. But the real item on his diplomatic resume that more likely led to his Bolivian appointment was not one of those. It was his stint in Colombia. For two decades the issue that U.S. governments have cared about in Bolivia has not been gas, or oil, or autonomy, or high altitude soccer. It's been coca. Conspiracy theorists don't need to look for hidden agendas in the U.S. plans for Bolivia. They can look at the issue that stands out right in public – the War on Drugs. Is it really a surprise that, in looking for an anti-coca warrior for Bolivia, the Bush administration looked for someone with experience at ground zero of that war, Colombia?

And finally there is the question; does the autonomy movement really need Uncle Sam as a patron to exist?

To be sure, there are plenty of legitimate governance issues wrapped up in the autonomy debate. Does anyone outside of La Paz really like the idea that his or her tax monies flow first to Plaza Murillo and then get sent back after a big bureaucratic bite is taken out? My Tiquipaya neighbors (a MAS stronghold) were complaining abut the same thing last Sunday at a neighborhood meeting held in the middle of a soccer field surrounded by cows.

But the furnace underneath the demands for autonomy in eastern Bolivia isn't imported from Washington. It is fully homegrown. When the big landowners in Santa Cruz see Evo they see 'land reform' and they see their land as the target. Autonomy is the vast block wall they are constructing to keep the Morales government out of their business. They didn't get the idea from Kosovo, or Phillip Goldberg, or the C.I.A. and they haven't needed help to promote it.

I don't believe that either bashing or cheerleading the U.S. has any real value as a sport. The U.S. is the most politically and militarily powerful nation on the planet (economically is now a question). Many of its actions have done and continue to do great harm in the word. The U.S. has done and is doing good things in the world as well.

That means it is crucial that we be able to tell the difference and put the public spotlight on what the U.S. does in the world that undermines democracy, fosters needless war, and diminishes social justice. If there is evidence more solid than conjecture that the U.S. is behind the autonomy movement in Santa Cruz, that it has Kosovo on its mind, and that Goldberg is the man on that mission – put it forward. We'll publish it here. We'll link to it here. We'll give it all the attention it deserves.

But in the absence of that, let's focus the attention of those watching on what the U.S. is doing in Bolivia. And there is plenty there to be told, evidence included.