The making of Bolivian history does a funny thing to journalists. Those who are in Bolivia spend most of their time in the streets, with furtive trips home or to the nearest internet cafe, to send off the latest story or update. And those of us outside of Bolivia often end up spending more time at the computer and on the phone than usual, trying to keep up with the rapid development of events, forwarding news coming live from the streets, and piecing together what we can from the hundreds of reports circling the globe on thin copper wires (or, more and more, bouncing around in wave form, but I must admit that I really like copper wire).

Narco News, as usual, is at the forefront of the reporting, and hundreds, if not thousands of people are going to the website for the first time, having heard rumors of the democracy-from-below that is flourishing in Bolivia in these weeks, and hungry for more information. Many of these readers may not know much about the context in which current events unfold, or the people doing the unfolding. For that reason I am posting an article I wrote in late April – ancient history when it comes to Bolivia – which is an attempt to look a little closer at the movers and shakers and history makers of Bolivia. Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone doing reporting, translation, webmastering, and everything else that allows these stories from below to emerge and propagate.

The Financial Times really has blown it. Normally I find that they provide more reasonably balanced and accurate reporting than almost any other English-language daily of its size and scale. Why is this? Because it’s where policy-makers go for news – that is to say, policy-makers who actually give a damn about what is going on beyond the White House’s press statements and PR-company-run “messaging.” So the truth-to-propaganda ratio is usually heavily skewed in truth’s favor. But not this week.

On March 13 they ran UK correspondent Andy Webb-Vidal’s flaccid piece of “reporting” titled “Bush Orders Policy to “Contain” Chávez.” With a headline like that, the blatant inaccuracies and vague allegations it contained should have come as no surprise, particularly when viewed along with Webb-Vidal’s new location, oligarch central – that is to say, Miami....