Re-engaging Latin America’s Left? US relations with Bolivia and Ecuador from Bush to Obama
Resumen: In Washington, there was no doubt that the political rise of Evo Morales threatened US inter- ests in Bolivia. “People talk about him as if he were the Osama bin Laden of Latin America,” said Inter-American Dialogue expert Michael Shifter to the New York Times just before Mo- rales’s election (Rieff 2005: 72). In fact, during his campaign Morales promised to become a “nightmare” to the US – an assessment explicitly shared in Washington (Brinkley 2005). Con- sequently, before the 2002 presidential elections, then US Ambassador Manuel Rocha had openly threatened a possible withdrawal of US assistance if the Bolivian people dared to elect Evo Morales (Gratius/Legler 2009: 206). The main US concern was not so much anti-US rhe- toric and Morales’s criticism of “neo-liberalism” and free trade, but rather his conceptualization of the coca/drug issue.
As the leader of Cochabamba’s coca growers, his personal history had been shaped by resistance to the US-driven policy of coerced coca eradication. In his cam- paign, Morales had promised to legalize the cultivation and trade of the coca leaf. This directly threatened what had been, since the late 1980s, “Washington’s overriding policy focus” (Cran- dall 2008: 102): Bolivian cooperation in the US-driven “War on Drugs” that was based, to an important extent, on the criminalization of the coca leaf (as the prime source for cocaine) and the coerced eradication of coca plants. Both with a view to counternarcotics and to Bolivian politics in general, the US was used to enjoying direct access to and influence on the Bolivian government (cf. Gamarra 1999; Lehman 1999).
Palabras claves: Bolivia, bilateral relation, United States, Evo Morales Ayma, Drug policy
Auto/es: Jonas Wolff
Editorial: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (2011)
Descargar
