Pablo Stefanoni reports in
Pagina 12 about the removal of shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missiles that belonged to the Bolivian military. The Argentinian paper claims to have access to classified documents that reveal that the missiles were taken out of Bolivia in early October by a C-130 U.S. military cargo plane.
The paper notes that both Bolivian President Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé and Army Commanding General Marcelo Antezana said that the missiles were destroyed in Bolivia. They qualified the missiles as obsolete and dangerous.
The missiles, also known as Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS), have been the object of a campaign by the U.S. government to eradicate them. According to the U.S. State Department, since 2003 the agency “has enabled the destruction of over 13,000 MANPADS in 13 countries in Africa, Central America, Eastern Europe, and South East Asia,” including 100 missiles that belonged to Nicaragua.
In the particular case of the Bolivian missiles, the type in question was the HN-5, a Chinese copy of the ubiquitous SA-7 GRAIL (Strela-2), which was made in Russia. Pagina 12 reports that the entire Bolivian stock of 28 missiles was taken out of the country.
Email this page
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Facebook
Google