The American military presence in Colombia as of 2000, from a report by Adam Isacson
BBC has footage of the city of Santa Cruz from August 19th.
Rory Carroll and Andrés Schipani , The Guardian:
Violent protests against President Evo Morales have shaken Bolivia and cut the Andean nation in half, with rebel provinces blocking government attempts to regain control and tensions running dangerously high between the country’s Indian majority and inhabitants of the richer and whiter eastern provinces.
Militia groups armed with clubs and shields took to the streets last week to impose a strike which paralysed much of the eastern lowlands and deepened a political crisis. Youths opposed to Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, beat up senior police commanders in front of television cameras, underlining the brazen challenge to central government authority.
…Protesters have halted beef supplies to the west, blockaded highways and made moves to create a new police force to assert their push for autonomy from the capital, La Paz….
The eastern lowlands however, which have the richest gas reserves and farmland and a freewheeling capitalist spirit, see Morales as a power-hungry autocrat with ruinous economic policies. They are especially enraged by an attempt to redistribute land and to funnel gas revenues away from the provinces and into a state pension fund for those aged over 60, seen as a populist ruse to weaken the provinces. ‘If there is inflation, it is because the elderly poor are now having money to eat chicken,’ one man grumbled on television.
La Jornada has an impressive video on the coup that occurred in Bolivia 28 years ago, showing the connections of narcotrafficking and neo-Nazism to reactionary politics…. including the nascent coup of today. There are a number of other interesting videos. On the front page of La Jornada is an interview of a couple of journalists explaining how difficult it is to report the news. One is reporting for Quechua-language Catholic TV. She was stalked and threatened with assault and death.
There’s plenty of American firepower in the vicinity should the US decide to take an active role in a coup against Evo Morales.