Between April 27 and 30, 1992, in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the X International Conference for Drug Control (IDEC) was held. The event was important for Bolivia, since a year earlier the country had managed to enter the Alternative Development program.
Jaime Paz Zamora, then president of Bolivia, highlighted his government’s efforts to fight drug trafficking and promote the country’s entry into the 21st century. Similarly, he mentioned the fat cats of the 1980s who had accepted the program known as Los repentados (a judicial measure that allowed drug traffickers to serve short sentences in Bolivian prisons).
Everything seemed to be going great. Since inflation had been brought under control in the 1980s, coups were a thing of the past, and now we projected the image of a democratic and civilized country to the world.
However, at that same time, from the Chapare – but with the support of US NGOs, Argentine publicists, money from drug trafficking and Cuban terrorist training – Evo Morales began his subversive actions. Let’s see.
In his book, El impostor, Nicolas Márquez recounts how the NGOs, mostly founded by socialist militants, at the beginning of the 90s, had to resort to the figure of Evo Morales to rearticulate themselves. Of course, they could not miss their “anti-Yankee” slogans. But no longer around the workers’ causes, but around the fight against drug trafficking, which they baptized as the “new gringo colonialism.” The fight against the drug cartels was, very artificially, ideologized in a Marxist key by those old socialist militants of the years before the Soviet collapse.
However, Morales’s panegyrists were not content to romanticize the fight against drug trafficking. That is why, years later, they made Evo the “leader” of the Bolivian indigenous people. Something needs to be clarified here, characters such as journalists Andrés Gómez and Amalia Pando also participated in this theatrical production, but also “intellectuals” such as Carlos Mesa. If their actions were premeditated, or if they were just useful idiots, only they know.
All this farce was key so that a simple thug – whose only motivation was to defend the parcels that supplied raw material for the cartels – became a kind of liberator of the oppressed.
In the words of Carlos Sánchez Berzaín (Bolivian jurist and politician):
Evo Morales is not an indigenous like his propaganda and the official design of his image presents him. He is a mestizo coca grower who uses the denomination and indigenist discourse to cover up his true nature as the top leader of the illegal coca growers in Bolivia, a country whose democracy he has destroyed. He is the ruler who – after the National Revolution of 1952 – has committed the most abuses and has the greatest confrontations with the Bolivian indigenous people whom he persecutes, divides and seeks to deprive of their original lands to expand the cultivation of illegal coca as in the case of the Isiboro Secure National Park Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS).
Evo is not a connoisseur of political theories, he himself admitted his null taste for reading. He is just an opportunist who knew how to profit, at the same time, from the socialist militants and the drug traffickers.
But the relationship between the Latin American left and the illegal drug business was not born in Bolivia, much less with Evo, but has a long history, even since the dawn of the Cuban Revolution. For example, Huber Matos, one of the historic commanders of the Sierra Maestra, denounced on several occasions that Fidel Castro was trafficking marijuana among the Cuban combatants themselves.
The Sao Paulo Forum has used indigenist discourse to blow up the democracies of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. It is a façade to cover up a criminal organization born in Havana and hand in hand with Castro. It is not a way to vindicate the indigenous people, besides in the region we are all mestizos, but a pretext to establish drug dictatorships.
“The opinions published here are the sole responsibility of their author.”
