Mamani Conde: U.S. Trying to Bribe Bolivian Social Movements?

June 7, 2005
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Dear Colleague,

A major scoop has come our way, thanks to our friends at the El Alto
Press Agency (Agencia de Prensa Alteña). We reprint and translate Julio
Mamani Conde's report for you today, in The Narco News Bulletin. In it,
the Bolivian authentic journalist reveals that, according to social
leaders from the indigenous metropolis of El Alto as well as his own
investigations, a Bolivian government agency connected to the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been attempting
to bribe El Alto neighborhood leaders in exchange for political
concessions.

Mamani Conde reports:

"Leaders of remote neighborhoods of the city of El Alto have complained
that representatives of the government agency Democratic Initiatives,
who work with resources from the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), offered much needed equipment for their
neighborhood committees' social centers, on the condition that their
committee presidents lift the general civic strike now in its 15th
day."

...

"According to the leaders, people working for the current
administration offered some of the leaders between 200 and 500
bolivianos ($25 to $65 dollars, several weeks' income for many El Alto
families) if they would propose the suspension of the indefinite
civic/labor strike."

Read the full report, here:

http://www.narconews.com

Acting Publisher Luis Gómez is in La Paz investigating, together with
Julio Mamani Conde, the extent of USAID's interference in what is
clearly an internal Bolivian affair. Of course, if recent experience in
Venezuela is any guide (where, as we have reported here, USAID, the
National Endowment for Democracy, and other benign-sounding organs of
U.S. policy, have bankrolled nearly the entire coup-plotting elite
opposition), this may just be the tip of the iceberg of USAID's sleazy,
underhanded subversion of the struggle of the Bolivian poor. USAID
claims to fund "international development," but when that development
(gas nationalization and industrialization) doesn't follow Washington's
plan for Latin America, the agency will stoop to bribery of
neighborhood leaders to prevent it.

Further results of Mamani Conde and Gómez's investigations are eagerly
awaited...

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster [at] narconews.com

Narco News is supported by:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 241
Natick, MA 01760
http://www.authenticjournalism.org

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