Bolivian President Evo Morales on Thursday threatened to close the US embassy as leftist Latin American leaders joined him in blasting Europe and the US after his plane was rerouted over suspicions US fugitive Edward Snowden was aboard.
Morales, who has accused Washington of pressuring European nations to deny him their airspace, warned he would “study, if necessary, closing the US embassy in Bolivia.”
“We don’t need a US embassy in Bolivia,” he said. “My hand would not shake to close the US embassy. We have dignity, sovereignty. Without the US, we are better politically, democratically.”
Morales arrived home late on Wednesday after a long layover in Vienna.
He said his plane was forced to land there because it was barred from flying over four European nations over groundless rumors that Snowden was aboard, sparking outrage among Latin American leaders.
The Bolivian president’s air odyssey began hours after Morales declared in Moscow he would consider an asylum application from Snowden, who is holed up at a Moscow airport as he seeks to evade US espionage charges for revealing a vast Internet and telephone surveillance program.
In a show of support, the presidents of Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Suriname met with Morales in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the incident.
They demanded that the four European countries — Spain, France, Italy and Portugal — explain their actions and apologize, saying that the treatment of Morales was an insult to Latin America as a whole.
The slight to Morales “offends not just the people of Bolivia, but all of our nations,” they said in a statement after the emergency meeting.
“The worst thing is that they are treating us like children rather than show humility and say ‘we made a mistake,’” Uruguayan President Jose Mugica said.
At a rally before the meeting, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro claimed that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had ordered the four European nations to deny access to Morales’ plane.
“A minister of one of these European governments personally told us by telephone that they were going to apologize because they were surprised, and that those who gave the order to aviation authorities in this country ... were the CIA,” he said.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said the leaders would “take decisions and show that we won’t accept this sort of humiliation against any country of [Latin] America.”
“Imagine if this happened to a European head of state, if this had happened to the president of the US. It probably would have been a casus belli, a case for war,” he said. “They think they can attack, crush, destroy international law.”
Correa had called for a larger summit gathering leaders of the Union of South American Nations, but the leaders of Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru did not attend, although they too condemned the incident.
In an implicit criticism of his absent peers, Correa said: “If what happened doesn’t justify a meeting of heads of state of our South America, what justifies one?”
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos voiced support for Morales, but warned on Twitter against “converting this into a diplomatic crisis between Latin America and the EU.”
Morales earlier urged Europeans to “free themselves from the US empire.”
The US consulate’s walls in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz were sprayed with red graffiti, one reading “Gringos Obama out,” while about 100 protesters burned flags and threw rocks at the French embassy in La Paz on Wednesday.
France has since apologized for temporarily refusing entry to Morales’ jet, with French President Francois Hollande saying there was “conflicting information” about the passengers.
The Bolivian government has lodged a complaint with the UN and said it planned another to the UN Human Rights Commission.
Russia has joined Latin American leaders in condemning European nations over the incident.
Whistle-blower Snowden, a former contractor with the secretive National Security Agency, is meanwhile thought to remain in legal limbo in an airport transit zone.
The 30-year-old has filed asylum requests in 21 countries, including several European and Latin American nations.
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
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to