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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories June 14, 2005 Forrest Hylton Stalemate in Bolivia Fred Gardner The Raich Decision: All Power to the Feds Steve Breyman Doing the Right Thing is Also Politically Expedient Paul Craig Roberts Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners   June 13, 2005 Gary Leupp Another Damning Document Dave Lindorff The Inca and Us John Stauber Mad Cow USA: the Cover-Up Begins to Unravel Fred Gardner Supreme Indignity: Medical Pot Doctors Respond to Justice Stevens Evelyn J. Pringle TeenScreen: the Lawsuits Begin Norman Solomon Letter From Tehran Winslow T. Wheeler Neo-Con Unfurls the Big Picture   June 10 / 12, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Thomas Friedman's Imaginary World Sharon Smith Torturers and Liars: Masters of Deception Brian Cloughley "Support Our Torturers!" Chris Kromm Home Cookin': Pentagon's Base Relignment Plan Would Increase South's Share Heather Gray A Day in Mississippi: Some Things Have Changed; Some Remain the Same Kevin Zeese What the Left Must Learn from 2004: an Interview with Josh Frank Mickey Z. The Pentagon Papers, 34 Years Later Gary Leupp A Review of Sison's "At Home in the World" Eli Stephens The Asshole in El Paso: Why Posada Carriles Matters Nick Dearden A Scottish Band in the Occupied Territories Oscar Olivera Recovering Bolivia's Oil and Gas Robert Fisk Screening "Kingdom of Heaven" in Beirut Michael Dickinson Oh My God!: Gunning for Blasphemers Poets' Basement Engel, Albert, Louise, Ford Website of the Weekend Gravity's Rainbow, Illustrated June 9, 2005 Len Colodny Felt Was Asked Under Oath in 1975 If He Was "Deep Throat" Christopher Brauchli From Baseballs to Hand Grenades Ron Jacobs Light a Candle; Curse the Darkness Dave Lindorff US Media Shamed by Brit Journalist Katrina Yeaw / Alex Schmaus Repression 101: Anti-War Students Sanctioned at SFSU Alan Farago Spin Machine Busts a Gasket in the Everglades: Fed Judge Whacks Jeb Saul Landau The Charmed Life of a Mass Murderer   June 8, 2005 Jim Hougan Strange Bedfellows Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA Alan Maass Is Bolivia on the Edge of Revolution? an Interview with Tom Lewis Jason Leopold Enron Lives!: Former Army Sec. White Wants Govt. Money for New Energy Scam Niranjan Ramakrishnan Exit Right, Advani: Unpardonable Acts of Statesmanship Dave Zirin The Rotting Soul of the 49ers Derrick O'Keefe Bush's Terrorist: the Case of Posada Carriles Diana Johnstone Non, Neen, Angelene! Why Defenders of the "Oui" are Wrong Website of the Day The Meatrix   June 7, 2005 Forrest Hylton Bolivia's Agony of the Stalement Continues Greg Moses / Susan van Haitsma Pushing Back the Violence Lenni Brenner What Madison Would Think About the Air Force Academy's Offical Fanatics Col. Dan Smith Liberation vs. Survival in Iraq Joshua Frank Dean at the DNC: the Establishment vs. the Elites Dave Lindorff Fair-Weather Allies: US Denies French Fighters Emergency Landing Rights Margot Veranes / Adrian Navarro Xenophobia in the Desert: Racist Fever Becomes Law in Arizona Michael Neumann Sharing Music: Property Gone Wild   June 6, 2005 Stew Albert Everybody Must Get Busted: Supremes Rule Against the Sick Paul Craig Roberts Federal Bureau of Entrapment Nicole Colson Inside Walter Reed Hospital Ali Khan Friendly Renditions to Muslim Torture Chambers Jason Leopold When Will Rumsfeld Be Indicted? Charles Walker Poff Rumsfeld, China and Hypocrisy Ramzy Baroud My Grandpa's Right of Return Rep. John Conyers Did Bush Deliberately Deceive America About Iraq? Evelyn Pringle TeenScreen's Top Pusher Gary Corseri 25 Reasons to Impeach Bush Website of the Day Save This 200 Year Old Burr Oak from Bible Thumpers with Chainsaws June 4 / 5, 2005 Alexander Cockburn France's Magnificent Non! James Petras The Centrality of Peasant Movements in Latin America Robert Fisk Who Killed Samir? Patrick Cockburn My Father, Claud Cockburn, the MI5 Suspect Rev. William Alberts When Pride in Power Corrupts: the Story of a Methodist President, His Bishops and an "Incompatible" Lesbian Minister Saul Landau 40 Interns and a Mule: Will the Dems Ever Take Advantage of the Republicans' Blunders? Mario Lamo Jimenez Dante with a Brush: Botero Immortalizes Bush Dave Lindorff What is the Media Running From? Lance Selfa Why Bush is Getting Away with Murder Tom Crumpacker On the Use of State Terrorism: the Posada Precedent Joshua Frank How Beltway Dems Sank Dean for America Fred Gardner Don't Bogart That Taxable Commodity Michael Dickinson Roll Out the Barrel: Blood, Oil and Baku Roger Martin We Can See, But Not Far Enough Reza Fiyouzat Welcome to the Third World Ben Tripp Romance: Advice from a Pro Graeme Greenback Pardon Me, While I Piss on this Bible Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Albert, Engel, Smith       June 3, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Welcome to a Has-Been Country Joseph Massad Witch Hunt at Columbia Jeff Halper The Process of Transfer Continues Tom Barry The Immigration Debate: Whose Side Are You On? Bruce K. Gagnon Bush Seeks Military Control of Space: "It's Our Destiny" Joshua Frank Bombing Iran: Facts Don't Matter Mickey Z. Deep Throat as Sideshow Gary Leupp "Peddling Lies About How They Were Mistreated" Website of the Day Tattoo on My Heart: Warriors of Wounded Knee, 1973     June 2, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts The Slave Traders of the Gitmo Gulag Forrest Hylton Bolivia: the Agony of Stalemate Mike Whitney Post-Mortem on the 4th Amendment: Warrants without Judges Brian Cloughley Anarchy in Afghanistan; Ignorance in America Mazin Qumsiyeh A Two-State Solution is No Solution Russell D. Hoffman High Tension at San Onofre Norman Madarasz "Le Jolie Mois de Mai": the Meaning of the French "Non" Norman Solomon War Made Easy: from Vietnam to Iraq David Price The Shallowness of Deep Throat Website of the Day Fallujah on Film     June 1, 2005 James Petras Beyond Hypocrisy: the Deeper Meaning of Posada Justin Delacour Framing Venezuela: US Media Bias Against Chavez Edward Jay Epstein Was "Deep Throat" a Fictoid? Omar Barghouti / Lisa Taraki The AUT Boycott: Freedom vs. "Academic" Freedom Dave Lindorff When War Goes Off the Script Kevin Zeese Reality Check: Who to Believe on Iraq War and Gitmo? Jason Leopold When Presidents Lie William S. Lind Wreck It and Run     May 31, 2005 Sen. Mike Gravel Thank You, Mark Felt: We Need a New Deep Throat David Krieger US Nuclear Hypocrisy Tad Daley The Nuclear Me-Too Club Joshua Frank Pelosi at AIPAC: Israel Comes First Richard Gott Chavez Leads the Way Norman Solomon Time to Get Serious About Impeachment Tom Segev Our Man in the Territories Walter Brasch Killing Americans with Secrecy Diana Johnstone The French "Non"     May 28 / 30, 2005 Alexander Cockburn There's Their Way or the Galloway Richard Lichtman We Wuz Framed! the Consolations of George Lakoff Sharon Smith The Road to Abu Ghraib Paul Craig Roberts Bush Opts for Civil War in Iraq Dave Lindorff Whigged Out: the Dems Have Become Merely a Vestigial Opposition Party Ramzy Baroud Muslims Were Desecrated, Not Just Their Holy Book Brian Cloughley Why Are Nukes OK for You, But Not for Us? Fred Gardner Advice from a Lawyer About Medical Pot Lee Sustar Chavez Gets Proactive Joshua Frank Isikoff Comes Clean: "Nobody in the US Said a Word, Until the Riots" Justin E.H. Smith What About the People? a Report from Romania Jackie Corr A Montana History Lesson on Assfulness Michael Kimaid Bush as Ahab Toufic Haddad Lessons from the Reversal of the AUC Boycott Justin Taylor The Fear of Paul Virilio Amir Butler Searching for a Saladin Ben Tripp Insomnia and Sarcasm Poets' Basement Albert, Engel, Davies and Louise   May 27, 2005 Gary Leupp It Really is a Crusade! Daniel Estulin Infiltrating Bilderberg 2005 Kevin Zeese Iraq Withdrawal Vote: If Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones Can See the Light, Why Can't Nancy Pelosi? Robert Fisk Mubarak's Goon Squads Dave Zirin Why Pat Tillman's Parents Are No Longer Silent Website of the Day Stuckists                                                   Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

June 14, 2005 This Time Things May Be Different The Crisis in Bolivia By RICHARD GOTT When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the mid 16th century on the immense plains of the bleak plateau that forms the westerly part of what is now Bolivia, they paused for a while at a settlement not far from the rim of a great canyon. At 12,000 feet they found it too cold, and they made their permanent base in the relative shelter of the slopes below and founded the city of La Paz. The village of El Alto on the high plateau, which 30 years ago was home only to the capital's international airport, has now become a huge metropolis of nearly a million Indians, driven there over the past 20 years by the irresistible force of neo-liberal economics. The prevailing economic system, devised by United States' economists in the 1980s, succeeded in destroying the country's agricultural system and its embryonic industries, and closing down the state-owned tin mines ­ once the source of the wealth of Spain. This predictable disaster brought hundreds of thousands of workless but highly politicised families to live permanently at the gates of the capital city, from where they have been able to hold it to ransom at will. Others migrated to the lower regions of the country, to the Chapare, to grow the profitable crop of coca leaf, the base of cocaine. Only one road connects La Paz with the outside world, and it has been controlled since the middle of May by the irate Indians of El Alto. Every capital city in Latin America is much the same: a tiny enclave of unbelievable privilege surrounded by a gigantic swamp of poverty. But nowhere is this clash of cultures so vivid, so dramatic, and so desperate as between the wealthy canyon of La Paz, home to the heirs of the original white settlers, and the freezing high plateau of El Alto, housing the breeze-block shanties of the expropriated indigenous population. The demands of the Indians have been uncompromisingly radical. They make no mention of work or food, education or health. They have only two specific requests: a new constitution that would recognise the part that they should play in the government of the country (in which they form more than 60 per cent of the population of 8 million), and the return to the hands of the state of the country's reserves of oil and gas. Oil was first nationalised in Bolivia in 1937, a year before the Mexican wells were expropriated that were once Lord Cowdray's, and again in 1970. The shell of the state company, YPFB, still exists, and most Bolivians remain implacably hostile to foreign ownership, but private oil companies have kept coming back. When immense reserves of natural gas were discovered in the 1990s, some 50 trillion cubic feet at the last estimate, Bolivia became ever more attractive to external predators, its reserves second only to those of Venezuela. The government and the companies (British Gas and Spain's Repsol among them) were keen to get the gas out of the ground and down to the coast, to be shipped off to California. Others, notably the spokesmen for the Indian majority, thought that gas might be better used to fuel Bolivia's own industrial development. The government's attempts to secure the export of the gas through Chile, Bolivia's traditional enemy (ever since the Chileans seized the territory in the 1880s through which the gas pipeline would have run), ended in October 2003 when violent protests in El Alto led to the overthrow of President Sánchez Losada, Bolivia's last elected president. This week's events have been an almost exact replay, with the resignation of the stop-gap president, Carlos Mesa, after prolonged Indian demonstrations and road blocks had made the country ungovernable by his regime. Something new was required. The chief emerging protagonist in the next stage of Bolivia's drama is Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian from the high plateau who became the organiser of the coca growers in the Chapare, in the headwaters of the Amazon. From this base of desperate landless peasants and politicised former tin miners, he has become a national figure, allying the socialist rhetoric of the traditional Bolivian left with the fresh language of the indigenous population, now mobilised and angry. A man in his forties, a leftist of great charm and charisma, Morales leads the Movement Towards Socialism, and is an outspoken supporter of Castro's Cuba. He is also a favourite son of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, whose wider ambition has been to replicate the revolution of Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan who liberated the countries of the Andes from Spanish control in the 1820s and whose name is immortalised in that of Bolivia. The Americans have accused Chávez of providing Morales with assistance at the presidential election in 2002 (in which he came second), and this would hardly be unusual since all parties in Bolivia depend on external patrons, whether from Europe or the United States. Morales has certainly taken a leaf from Chávez's book in demanding the holding of a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new Constitution. This was Chávez's triumph in 1999, modernising and radicalising the country with a single blow before the forces of opposition could mobilise to prevent him. The crisis that came to a head on Thursday night, as the Congress met to accept President Mesa's resignation in the old colonial capital of Sucre (away from the protesters in La Paz), was a triumph for the Indians. The danger had been that the presidency would fall to Hormando Vaca Díaz, the president of the Senate and a wealthy white landowner from the lowland eastern region, centred on the city of Santa Cruz. He had the support of the largest parties in Congress but was opposed by the Indians. The area around Santa Cruz is the principal wealth-producer of the country, with the soya fields of agribusiness on the surface and oil and gas underground. This is the land of more recent white settlers, rich and racist, who have been vehemently opposed to the political emergence of the Indian majority in the western highlands, and to the Indian resistance that has emerged to challenge them in the lowlands. The organisation of the elite white groups has been asking for autonomy ­ some even argue for independence - and have unilaterally called for a referendum on this issue in August. Everyone knew that Vaca Diaz was unacceptable to the Indians, and, under pressure from the leaders of the armed forces and the Catholic Church, he declined the task. So too did Mario Cossio, the second constitutional choice. It fell to the third in line, Eduardo Rodríguez, the president of the Supreme Court and a man without political affiliation, to take up the challenge. Fresh elections will be held before the end of the year, and Morales's demand for a Constituent Assembly is on the agenda. If Morales eventually emerges as Bolivia's elected president, the entire relation of forces in the countries of the Andes will be changed, since comparable indigenous movements in neighbouring countries are also demanding their proper share of power. Yet there have been many false dawns. Observing events in Bolivia, an experienced Brazilian has suggested, is like "watching the train of history pass by on many occasions without the Indians ever securing a ticket to ride." Not since the end of the 18th century has such a seismic upheaval occurred among the continent's indigenous peoples. This time things may be different. Richard Gott is the author of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution and Cuba: a New History. He can be reached at: Rwgott@aol.com