In an exclusive
interview with the BBC’s Spanish service on Monday, Bolivia’s former president, Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, let shine his great analytical abilities, combined with an extraordinary discourse looking to create his version of “truth.” This meant not just linking the Bolivian political crisis to Colombian drug trafficking, but also giving a quite original version of the events that obligated him to resign and hide himself in Miami…
Narco-Trafficking
“There is a great division between regions, ethnic groups, and classes in Bolivia, and this has been sustained and financed by the drug trade… There is a great presence of Colombian narco-traffickers, who hope to be able to return to Bolivia and produce cocaine. I think that is the base of the problem,” he said, offering no further proof, in his BBC interview.
Goni seems to remember that his party’s fortunes (and those of many others) owe much to drug trafficking, beginning in 1986 with the Huanchaca case. Despite reports of the involvement of the DEA, Bolivia’s MNR-led government, and its then-interior minister Juan Carlo Duran, the case was never clarified. What’s more, in September 1995, during his first presidential term, the famous “narco-plane” case emerged. The airplane, carrying more than four tonnes of cocaine, caused a major scandal by implicating agents of the Special Force for the Fight Against Narcotics Trafficking (FELCN), as well as causing suspicions of both antidrug prosecutors (paid directly by the U.S. until 1996) and the congressional commission that investigated the case. Today, the case still has not been resolved.
Might Goni be referring to accusations of laundered narco-dollars among the “gastos reservados” (“secret expenses”) that financed his flight to Miami? But no, Goni does not confess his guilt, not in drug trafficking, not in genocide, not in anything…
“It is really just as serious if it was one person that would have died, or, as it turned out, if it was fifty”
Presenting himself as a victim of circumstance and defender of law and order, he assures that he resigned to avoid “more bloodbaths,” although for him it is “really the same, just as serious if it was one person that would have died, or, as it turned out, if it was fifty.” All he forgot to say was that “it is the same” because those who died were poor, and politicians and corporations don’t worry about them. Am I wrong?
What’s more, the poor man wants to come back. But not to appear at the “trial of responsibility” that the Bolivian people demand. Because despite that fact that such a trial is being blocked by all sides in order to protect him, he doesn’t feel that the right conditions exist to establish an “impartial investigation and a fair trial,” or to protect his people and clan. But above all, he says, “the truth must prevail.”
Now you can see… and although a website of politicians’ biographies labels him an “anglophile businessman who made his political debut during the transition to democracy,” Goni’s real language is Newspeak.
