Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Saturday that Bolivia does not need US help to control its coca crop, stepping up his anti-Washington rhetoric days after rejecting a US request to fly an anti-drug plane over the South American nation’s territory.
Morales also compared US counter-drug efforts in the country, including Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) flights, to espionage.
“It’s important that the international community knows that here, we don’t need control of the United States on coca cultivation,” the president told a gathering of coca farmers. “We can control ourselves internally. We don’t need any spying from anybody.”
PHOTO: AP
US embassy spokesman Eric Watnik said the DEA makes periodic requests to fly a plane transporting US and Bolivian anti-narcotics personnel around the country. The aircraft is not used for surveillance, he said.
Relations between Washington and La Paz have continued to deteriorate in recent weeks. Morales expelled the US ambassador last month, accusing him of supporting deadly protests organized by his conservative opposition. The former ambassador denies the allegations.
The US responded by ousting Bolivia’s ambassador and later placed the Andean country on an anti-narcotics blacklist, saying Morales has not sufficiently cooperated with international anti-drug efforts.
“We’ve certified Bolivia twice before under the Morales government, even though they have taken a very different approach to counter drugs, especially to eradication, than previous governments,” Thomas Shannon, the top US diplomat for Latin America, said on Thursday.
“But what we’ve noticed over the past couple of months,” he said, “was a declining political willingness to cooperate, and then a very precise attempt by the part of some of the government ministries to begin to lower the level of cooperation and try to break the linkages” between US and Bolivian anti-drug efforts.
Washington did not cut off anti-narcotics aid, but the decertification prompted US President George W. Bush to recommend suspending Bolivia’s special exemption from US tariffs under an Andean-wide act that Congress has just renewed for another year.
Bolivian business leaders say that losing the tariff exemptions would cost South America’s poorest country up to 20,000 jobs.
Bolivia is the world’s third largest producer of coca — the base ingredient in cocaine — after Colombia and Peru. The Andean trade preferences have also benefited the latter two countries and Ecuador.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema