Spellcheck Wednesday: It's a credibility thing, Enders

Spelling mistakes happen (hey, my keyboard dyslexia should be clear by now to regulars), but you kinda expect serious media outlets to make the effort and spell things correctly. Down on this side of the Darien Gap the classic offence is to spell Colombia with a 'U', making it out to be a university in the USA or part of a regional name in Canada. Here's an example with thousands more available. Typos of South American things can sometimes be put down to genuine mistakes. Here's an example from Reuters today with "La Oyoya" instead of the correct 'Oroya' (though admittedly they get the word right one line later). These are the ones that you shrug and go "yeah well, errar humanum est" and you know that when they correct, Reuters are straight with you and will mention in the leader that a correction has been made.

However there are others that speak volumes. For example, our old blue-eyed whitey pal John Enders is talking nonsense in The Miami Herald again today. Reader 'James' sent in this link to Enders' latest ball of crud published yesterday. James also said in his mail that;

Enders strikes again, this time with serious mis-representations about the new Bolivian constitution, community justice, conditions for modifying the constitution and Evo's re-election.

Well said James, but it is telling how Enders' bigoted attempts to sound like an authority on the region get blown asunder as he can't even spell the word "Quechua" correctly. Here's the excerpt from Ender's copy:

"...government's public administration school would begin training bureaucrats to speak Aymara, Quetchua and Guarani...."

The clear disrespect towards indigenous continues with his incorrect spelling of Guaraní (for those with an eye for accents). This guy cares so much about slagging down Evo Morales, but when it comes to anything approaching a fact on those strange brown people that surround him at every turn (bar of course his idea of the promised land, downtown Santa Cruz) he just shows himself for what he is; a dumbass.

A good reporter tells people facts and lays off his own prejudices. John Enders cannot do either of these. Pathetic work from a country that, due to the likes of John Enders, suffers from a near-complete lack of English language accounts on the reality of matters.

UPDATE: El Duderino rips the Enders piece to shreds right here.

Pleeease John Enders..PLEEEASE

Will you please

Abiding in Bolivia has the lowdown on Freshman-Discovers-Bolivia-Parte-Dos and why this idiot disguised as a journalist is such a vast embarrassment......so I had to join him in the final photocredit.

evolution

Last night in Brazil, the Argentine soccer player Maxi López (white skinned) called one of the Brazilians in the opposing side "a monkey". He was detained by police and not allowed to leave the country until he'd made an official declaration.

Meanwhile, the white-skinned Bolivian opposition can call Evo Morales "a monkey" any time they feel like it, even during public speeches, and if Morales seeks retribution he's accused of authoritanianism. Seems to me Brazil has evolved more quickly than Bolivia.

I applaud Brazilian authorities for stamping down hard on the merest hint of disgusting racist behaviour and I laugh in the face of ridiculous white gringo hacks like John Enders (stringer for the Herald) that use the racism card when clearly bigoted themselves.

Charts of the day are...

....all about the Bolivian economy, starting with the answer to yesterday's quiz.

And as most of you correctly called, it is in fact Bolivia that has added record reserves since Dr Morales took over the country. Congrats to all the correctos, but special congrats to reader "JW" who got the right answer in like greased lightning. He wins a special prize that, due to the circumstances, must remain a secret. All I can say is "you got your wish, JW :-)"

Meanwhile, check up on other parts of the Bolivian economy, we see that money supply is largely under control....

Particularly good to see M2 flattening and even dropping off this year, the sign of a well managed currency. The practical result of reeling in M2 is that inflation is coming down quickly from last year's peak...

...with the double-digit days of 2007 and 2008 now very much a thing of the past. And I'd like to remind you that the gov't forecast for GDP growth this year is +4%.

I never cease to be amazed by the good job the Evo gov't is doing with its economy. This is, of course, why the robotic and idiotic English media never mention the subject when talking about Bolivia. It must pain them no end to compare the neat an effective macroeconomic policies of a coca chewing indio to the unmitigated disasters of countless blue-eyed whiteys that screwed their own country in return for a fat personal bank account. Hey Enders...try reporting some facts next time, dumbass racist apologist.

Bolivia and the slaves of Santa Cruz: Anyone got an Italian phrasebook handy?

Excuse-for-a-hack and racist apologist John Enders is put to shame by this BBC report. This is exactly the same place that the dumbass working for the Miami Herald pretended to report about, but somehow totally missed the racism and feudalism of the people he held up as the shining bastion of free markets and capitalism.

Here below is the first part of the report (click through for the rest, it's only fair on the Beeb). But watch out for the name of the person the BBC interviewed to give the ranchers' side of the story, a certain Eliane Capobianco. Capo? Bianco? Whatever could it all mean? LOL!

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Outrage at 'slavery' in Bolivia

A senior UN official recently described as "unacceptable" the alleged forced labour of indigenous people by landowners in Bolivia. The BBC's Andres Schipani reports on the contentious issue of "slavery" from the eastern province of Santa Cruz.

Teresa Barrio was born on a patch of scrub on a Bolivian plantation. This is where she has lived and worked. This is where she expects to die. But she has no affection for this place.

The 65-year-old grandmother knows little of other people's lives but she knows her own has been harsh: toiling in fields for a pittance, sleeping in a mud hut, losing sight in one eye and losing five of seven children to disease.

There is no cash in the pockets of her ragged skirt, nor, she says, does she feel free to leave the vast farm where she has worked hard all her life.

"All my life I've been here and at the end of it I have nothing and have nowhere else to go," she says.

Her hamlet of 13 Guarani families - all workers on the plantations near the town of Camiri in Alto Parapeti region in the eastern province of Santa Cruz - built a school but ranchers destroyed it, she says

"They didn't want us to learn, they want things to be like they always have been," Teresa's granddaughter, Deisy, says.

Beside the ruins is the replacement school - five desks beneath a blue tarpaulin draped from an algarroba tree.

Over the past two years, Bolivia's government and several indigenous groups, have been giving a controversial name to Teresa's type of existence - slavery.

CONTINUES HERE

John Enders: Let's not be too harsh on the poor guy.

After posting last week on the lamentable job of explaining Bolivia done by a certain John Enders in The Miami Herald, I received the following left in the comments section from...da man 'imself!

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A response: First, I find your comment about "blue-eyed whitey" offensive and racist. Second, you seem to confuse the opinion piece on the blog with the Herald piece on the media in Bolivia. I stand by both. And third: If you have to stoop to ugly personal attacks, it usually means your argument isn't very strong. John Enders

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So I was going to post a really stinging retort below the comment. But decided not to. Then I was going to write a whole long take-down of the dude yesterday, but life got in the way. So here we are today and it's time to say something. But, y'know what? I just can't bring myself to crank up the full metal jacket snark on him. The problem is that I pity him.

For one thing, by the looks of this comment he left both above and at Justin Delacour's Latin America News Review, it's clear that he doesn't really understand how the interwebnetpipes works. At LANR he felt obliged to leave a link to his own purple prose thinking that it hadn't been given fair airing. He doesn't seem to realize that if you click those blue linky things that bloggers leave you're magically tranported to the article of reference.

For another thing, he seems to think I confused his Herald article with his blog post. Err...no. Read the post again Johnnyboy (without moving your lips if possible) and you'll see that a clear distinction is made and the two pieces of writing are defined as different. It's a little disconcerting to note that The Miami Herald is hiring journalists who don't have the rudimentaries of reading comprehension sorted out yet...not surprising, though.

But the thing that really made me feel sorry for the guy was the way he's all 'it's a sin!" offended by what he believes is a racist remark, i.e. "blue-eyed whitey". To start with, he must have had his LatAm head buried in the sand to miss the Lula remark the other week and all the feedback it caused. If you work in a shop or a factory in Mali or Norway or China or somewhere and didn't catch Lula's "blue-eyed whitey" reference it's forgiveable...but a journalist that supposedly covers LatAm? Ouch.

For another thing, the thin skin displayed by Johnnyboy doesn't augur well for his future as a rough'n'tough journalist (nor his past, actually...his oeuvre is rather sparse) as squealing "not fair!" is less likely to bring sympathy and more likely to bring outright ridicule, from both readership and other journos...just a headsup for the future there, Johnnyboy.

But the clincher was the way that he spread his lies about the Morales opposition forces in Santa Cruz by labelling them some sort of capitalist upholders of freedom and ignoring all the racist, fascist, xenophobic garbage and stench around them but takes offense if somebody dares to label him as "whitey" (a skin colour that, on the whole, gets the better end of the deal when the subject is prejudice).

So rather than whack into the guy too much I'm going to leave him be. He's already got a nasty bruise and we don't want to go making the poor dear feel any worse now, do we? Sorry if I've disappointed you by going all softy, readers.

Bolivia: Stop Stupidity

Well waddya know? Enders is a blue-eyed-whitey. Hoodathunkit...

When The Miami Herald starts a report with.....

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LA PAZ, Bolivia -- With some newspapers and broadcast outlets relentlessly exposing the government's shortcomings, President Evo Morales and his supporters say the privately-owned media have sided with his opponents yada yada continues here

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....you just know you're in for a deception-filled feast of fun about Bolivia. What follows those opening lines is pretty much as you'd expect, laying heavily on anti-Evo BS, slipping cute words like 'autocrat' in there and trying to make out that all the opposition press has been doing in Bolivia is highlighting cases of government corruption. No mention about the racism or support for illegal separatists, or revisionist histories about the Pando Massacre or the innocent chats Ruben Costas enjoyed with then US ambassador Goldberg. All those squeaky-clean reporters have have doing is fighting the good fight against graft.

But the name of the journalist caught my eye, John Enders. It rang a bell so I Googled it. It turns out it rang a bell for a different reason (another John Enders was involved with developing the polio vaccine), but I did chance upon our John Enders' sparse little blog. In it we find out just how little he knows about Bolivia when he opines:

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In Bolivia, socialist Evo Morales is a smart fellow and, like most Latin American radicals, doesn’t necessarily believe all of his own rhetoric. He is caught between those who want to return the country to the statist ways of the 1950s and those eastern Bolivia business interests who seek to create a capitalist mecca. Evo already has learned he cannot dictate radical change to his people without widespread and violent opposition. Washington should give him limited support for social reforms, continue to maintain contacts with the opposition and wait for a more moderate, transitional figure in Bolivia to surface as Morales’ successor.

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Say whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Let's do a bit of deconstruction on his views about Bolivia and Evo:

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In Bolivia, socialist Evo Morales is a smart fellow

Well, yes he is

and, like most Latin American radicals, doesn’t necessarily believe all of his own rhetoric.

Got some proof of that, John? I'd say he's come to power calling the same tune all the way and has kept his promises, too. What makes you think Evo says one thing and believes another? An example, please.

He is caught between those who want to return the country to the statist ways of the 1950s

Errr, no. He has the democratic majority vote support of people who are fed up with being ripped off by big business. We're talking about the country that made collecting rainwater illegal to make sure Bechtel's concession on the privatized water supply got maximum bang-per-buck. We're talking about the country that has put eight point five billion dollars in its currency reserves since nationalizing the oil&gas industry. Previously that cash just left the country in its abject poverty. The Morales government's "statist ways" include giving an old age pension to its senior citizens for the first time ever. Get that? EVER.

.........and those eastern Bolivia business interests who seek to create a capitalist mecca.

ROFL! Create a capitalist mecca? OH MY GOD! Don't you mean "create a new Kosovo"? The eastern Bolivians of which you speak have majority control over one city, not a whole region. They are racist, fascist, nazi-worshipping thugs that use indigenous populations as slave labour (that's not my opinion, that's The United Nations' opinion). That your idea of capitalism around Oregon way, John?

Evo already has learned he cannot dictate radical change to his people without widespread and violent opposition.

Evo has learned that to finally reach a level of emancipation for ALL Bolivians, the 10% of people that have hoarded 90% of the pie for generations kick and scream. As for "widespread", you make it sound like all the country hates his reforms. Errr....check every single national vote again, Johnnyboy.

Washington should give him limited support for social reforms, continue to maintain contacts with the opposition and wait for a more moderate, transitional figure in Bolivia to surface as Morales’ successor.

...and why the devil should they do that, Enders? Come on, why not elaborate on why the USA should keep its nose stuck in other country's affairs?

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Enders' journalism and opinions, after "30 years of covering Latin America", show the insight of a fruitfly. And thus, John, you receive this week's coveted award. Enjoy it, dumbass: