Bolivia – The Speaker News Journal

Bolivian city famous for its carnival announces emergency action to clean up a major environmental disaster on lake that has become a ‘sea of plastic’

March 29, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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The city of Oruro, a major mining and tourist center with a World Heritage carnival celebration, is responding to videos showing Lake Uru Uru chock-full of plastic waste, which has resulted from urban dwellers dumping their trash into drainage canals.

Mayor David Choque announced a major clean-up of the lake on April 8–9 with the participation of a recycling firm, and asked the country’s environmental ministry to participate by providing logistics assistance.

The situation of the lake caused alarm when the environmental devastation on some 25 acres of the lake’s edge showed it mostly solid with plastic containers and the lake as a whole covered with garbage and mining residue contamination that includes arsenic and heavy metals.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Mercosur meeting that promised incorporation of Bolivia to the group results in an invitation to Uruguay to ‘jump ship’

March 27, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Argentinian president Alberto Fernandez, who has spent the last weeks leading up to the current Mercosur virtual summit promising to work to incorporate Bolivia into the bloc as a member-in-full, took a complaint from the Uruguayan president and flippled into an invitation to leave the group.

Uruguay’s Luis Lacalle Pou said, “It should not be a burden, we are not willing to make it a corset in which our country cannot move, that is why we have talked about flexibility,” in a speech referencing Argentina’s opposition to negotiations outside the group.

The speech was fiery and so was Fernandez’s response, “We don’t want to be anyone’s burden. For me, it is an honor to be part of Mercosur … If it is a burden, the easiest thing is to abandon ship.”

Uruguay is one of the four founding remembers of the 30-year-old group. Bolivia has been in observer status since the 1990s and its president announced at the summit, the country’s “immediate willingness to carry out the tasks necessary to assume full membership,” a step that requires the approval of Brazil.

The meeting will continue on April 22.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Photos of Bolivian ex-president in prison keep making the media, daughter charges ‘psychological and physical torture’

March 26, 2021March 26, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Jeanine Añez is held by Bolivian courts as a “flight risk” and because of fear she might “interfere with investigations,” but her daughter Carolina Ribera says that by allowing pictures of the jailed former leader prison authorities are interfering with her mother’s privacy in actions that amount to psychological and emotional torture, and “physical harassment.”

Ribera says the ruling MAS party is using her mother as a political trophy and “so they believe they have the right to violate her in all those ways.”

“It is a type of harassment to take her pictures clandestinely, without her authorization, to Photoshop it, edit, and to publish it in all the networks and to tell lies about her. It is because of this that my mother is suffering physical and emotional torture,” said her daughter in a television interview decrying a widely published picture of her mother on her prison bed, eating. The picture was later shown to be Photoshopped with the addition of fries and a Burger King bag. This was relevant because Añez has claimed health issues with high blood pressure and, according to a Bolivian verification site, she was eating an avocado and not fried fast foods.

“She is feeling harassed in this form because this generates certain rejection, certain discomfort in the condition in which she is because she feels invaded,” charged her daughter.

Añez is being held in La Paz’s Miraflores Women’s prison among high-security inmates who are serving sentences of more than 8 years.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Uproar after Bolivian congressmen given gift of ‘Viagra’ for Father’s Day

March 22, 2021March 20, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Male members of the Bolivian lower house of congress received a packet of generic Sildenafil, the main ingredient in the ED pill Viagra, as they entered Congress Thursday, an early gift anticipating Bolivian Father’s Day Friday. It is believed the gift came from the MAS ruling party.

Opposition congresswoman Samantha Nogales called the gift “unacceptable, and a highly machista act,” while Senator Andrea Barrientos denounced the act in a tweet, “In times when we should speak of joint responsibility of care, of equity, of stability, public resources are spent on Viagra. A shame.”

The pills were wrapped in a crafts-tie made of construction paper which many of the men hung around their necks. Other congressmen, however, said they felt insulted, calling for an investigation of the use of funds.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Jailed former Bolivian president taken to clinic with out-of-control blood pressure

March 18, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Jeanine Anez, accused of insurrection that allowed her to become president, was taken by ambulance from the La Paz woman’s prison to a private clinic for treatment. She was at the central prison instead of receiving the usual treatment for a former head of state because the government says she is being accused of crimes committed before she assumed the presidency, namely being a part of a purported coup d’etat. She claims political persecution.

“She has gotten sick–unbalanced,” said the prison warden, referring to what others have said is unbalanced blood pressure. “Doctors will let us know the situation.”

By Milan Sime Martinic

Latin American Leftists not-so-hot on global warming

March 18, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Unlike in the US and Europe, the political left in South America is often mum on climate change, says an analysis by Americas Quarterly, which identifies a trend of diverging goals between leftist leaders and environmentalists in the region.

The report notes how Bolivia’s Evo Morales opened up the Tipnis Protected Area for energy exploration, and how in 2019 his country matched Brazil’s pro-deforestation record of President Bolsonaro with massive torchings inthe Amazon. Mexico’s Lopez Obrador and Venezuela’s Maduro are singled out as actively indifferent to environmental concerns, and former far-left Brazilian president Lula’s lack of criticism of Bolsonaro’s active deforestation. In all cases, says the report, environmental conditions have worsened considerably over the last years.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Imprisoned Bolivian president says government is violating her rights as a woman and former head of state as government ups the charges and judge orders her held for 4 months

March 15, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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In appeals for oversight to the UN, the EU and the US, former Bolivian President Jeanine Anez, charged with sedition, says the government is ignoring her human rights. Former president Evo Morales has called on Twitter for punishment and those he says conspired in a coup to take him out of office in 2019.

Prosecutors now say she is not being held as an ex-president but for her actions prior to assuming the office; they have added new allegations that she forced the presidents of the upper and lower houses of Bolivia to resign so that she could take over as next-in-line.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Police in Bolivia arrest former President Jeanine Añez; she claims ‘political persecution’

March 13, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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The former interim caretaker was arrested in the middle of the night at her home in the Amazonian region of Beni under accusations of sedition, terrorism, and complicity in a “coup” that ousted former President Evo Morales. The courts said she was considered a “flight risk.”

In turn, she accused the government of political persecution, “It accuses me of having participated in a coup that never happened,” she tweeted.

Añez assumed the presidency as the constitutional next-in-line after Morales, his vice-president. The presidents of the upper and lower houses of Congress, and the president of the Senate resigned following a countrywide revolt that questioned his claim to have won the country’s 2019 elections. She was the second vice president of the senate.

Her charge was to run the country until new elections were held; she held office for one year and was the country’s second woman president, handing over power to Luis Arce of Morales’s political party after a landslide victory in elections held in October 2020.

By Milan Sime Martinic

At least 7 dead in confrontation after 4 story fall at university in Bolivia

March 3, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Packed tightly and fighting, hundreds of students at the Public University of El Alto pressed and shoved against a railing that collapsed as the balcony appeared to crumble at the base, dropping 11, leaving a mounting death toll, and at least 4 young people in intensive care. The dead range in age from 19 to 27.

The tragedy came after a call to an extraordinary general student assembly which bucked biosecurity regulations and agglomerated protesting young people on a high hallway protected by a balustrade that gave way.

One woman can be seen in video footage lunging toward another young woman who is pressed into the railing as it gives way, dropping her from a height of over 50 feet. Various videos shows her in a pile of bodies at the bottom, and the lounging woman trapped by the weight of other students on her feet while she hangs precariously upside-down and is pulled to safety.

Investigations are under way into the decision to congregate so many people, the nature of the confrontation, and structural faults in construction.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Tourists damage 1500-year-old Gate of the Sun and rock monoliths in Bolivia’s ancient city of Tiwanaku

February 27, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Four women and one man from the eastern city of Santa Cruz were charged with damaging the carved stone relics of the civilization that flourished for five centuries on the site, forerunner of the Inca empire. The pre-Columbian ruins are part of the country’s most important archaeological treasures.

After seeing what they described as “suspicious activity,” caretakers said the group splashed the structures with an oily substance that stained surfaces and that experts say would attract gases into the stone, causing internal changes and deterioration.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Bolivian town wants to charge woman for calling town “ugly”

February 19, 2021 by The Speaker Editors

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Authorities in the tourist town of Uyuni, famous for its salt flats, are demanding the extradition (from one department to another) and prosecution of a Bolivian singer who goes by the pseudonym Frances P. The musician in a social media post said the town was so ugly she would not move there even for $3,000,000.

Bolivian law has a “duties of tourists” clause that prohibits “discriminatory comments.” Bolivia has in the past arrested a newscaster for making derogatory comments about another city.

By Milan Sime Martinić