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Gone, But Not Forgotten

Why Bolivians want the United States to extradite their exiled ex-president

By Wes Enzinna

When, on Oct. 15, 2003, Filomena León was shot in the back by military soldiers in the Bolivian town of Patacamaya, near El Alto, she had no reason to believe hers would be anything other than an anonymous death in the Andes. “I was in front of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind, into my spine,” León,… return to article

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    as the Catholic Church testified in a public statement. “

    Wow! The Catholic Church can talk? Or was this a “spokesperson” for the Catholic Church. We all know how reliable such people can be, odd that the *person* was not identified, only the organization. . .

    “Sánchez de Lozada has a fortune estimated at $50 million, largely garnered through the privatization of the country’s state-owned mines.”

    Now this is the real story. It is a shame that the rich can steal from the poorest of the poor and then leave the country behind. I would rather we give the ex prez clemency but require that the bulk of the money he took from Bolivia be returned, somehow. (Call it *real* reparations, as opposed to the bogus reparations some chatter for here.)

    United States Posted by wolf on May 2, 2007 at 12:39 PM

    ‘“Sánchez de Lozada has a fortune estimated at $50 million, largely garnered through the privatization of the country’s state-owned mines.”

    Now this is the real story. It is a shame that the rich can steal from the poorest of the poor and then leave the country behind. I would rather we give the ex prez clemency but require that the bulk of the money he took from Bolivia be returned, somehow...’

    In fact, Lozada should be stripped of all his ill-gotten assets, I mean cleaned out. And the banks, etc that allow looting heads of state (Marcos comes to mind, among others) to deposit or store the stolen millions are, as far as I’m concerned, accomplices after the fact in that very looting. They sure as hell profit from it! Secrecy laws attached to banking are problematic, but on the other hand, this is a high-profile individual with a hell of a lot of lucre to stash. Shouldn’t be too hard to spot the movement of that kind of cash, it’s not like he brought it in via money belt.

    Hell, you could use the powers expanded under the damn USA Patriot Act to trace the dough, I suppose, although I despised the unbelievably rapid passage of that law following 9/11. Even if it were to be blessedly repealed, good police work in the absence of high-level interference would likely suffice. IF you could avoid the interference, that is.

    Clemency I’m not too hip to, actually. Let Lozada stand trial; one can hope he’ll get at least as fair a trial as any other former government official of the opposing party would have received back when Lozada himself was at the helm.

    Good for the goose, good for the bloody gander.

    As for whether the charges are due to partisan revenge (i.e. “politics"), evidence and legal precedent are better determinants of whether a trial ought to occur or not. Because, in the end, it’s easily presumed that politics is involved; how could it not be? That doesn’t negate the legitimacy of an indictment per se, just because the former rival party is now the party in power. Whether the Morales government has an adequate case against Lozada for homicide or not is for the Bolivian courts to decide, not the US State Dept, who would be the ones to shield him if he escapes extradition. If Lozada fears for the objectivity of the trial, my question to him is, how did the courts run when you were in charge? Was it in a biased manner, placing factional dominance ahead of due process in their operation? (Somehow I think the honest answer would be “yes"). If so, then I have not much sympathy. If he helped set up a rigged game, it’s no injustice if he pays the price when his now-installed rivals use that same rigged game against him. It would be obviously better if that sort of manipulation weren’t a factor, but if it is, Lozada helped create the very conditions he tried to escape by running.

    And if he gets convicted, how about doing away with all that special treatment crap reserved for government crooks and leading mafiosi… put him in general population, no special cell, no special food, etc. Maybe it’ll make the next SOB think twice…

    Philippines Posted by Kuya on May 4, 2007 at 1:42 AM
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