Blair and Billy are out for Iraqi blood, Mitch has 76,000 people sick in Nicaragua, and I want to harp on the past a bit more.
As you know, Bolivia's president Gen. Hugo Banzer came to power through a coup and ruled 1971-78; then was elected president in 1997. There are at least 300 deaths to be accounted for from his coup/dictatroial rule.
Pinochet's detention has, for the first time since I can remember, put the spotlight back on Banzer's crimes. Banzer was a key player in Operation Condor, a mechanism among southern cone dictators to capture and kill those who might oppose their regimes, that reached as far as Europe and the US.
Banzer has finally begun to respond to the outcry and attention. I translate below a snippet from the local paper. He was in Cochabamba yesterday to attend a Catholic Bishop's conference.
A note on language: in Spanish the use of the passive voice is a rich, ubiquitous, and can be very comfy. For example, instead of saying "I lost my watch", which defines YOU as the person reponsible, it is common to say "my watch was lost to me", or simply "my watch was lost", leaving issues of accountability ambiguous at best. Fine if it's a watch. Not so fine when it's 300 dead or disappeared. Here's the article:
[snip]
Ex-president Banzer explained to the Catholic Church last night ... and recognized that during the dictatorship fear and death were sown [passive voice]. "Recently there have been attempts [passive voice] to re-live old fights and re-open old scars from a period in which a global bi-polarism imposed an ideological war on us. [Note the agent: "bi-polarism" ... and this from a distinguished graduate of the School of the Americas.] Sometimes they [who?] sent us professionals of crime and terror, and they brought us arms, cast as irreconcilable ideology. Our small countries only put up [contributed] the dead, the wounded, and the destruction of social solidarity."
[snip]
In a recent missive I sent a quote from the head of the Bolivian armed forces, who insisted the insitution had nothing to answer for because, he said, we "have our own reality". And now we have dictator-as-vicitim. It leaves me breathless.
Tom
Tom Kruse Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: tkruse at albatros.cnb.net