Bolivia: The mopping-up continues

The pride of Ireland

Hey, remember back a year or so ago when US-sponsored far-right wing racists tried to start a civil war in Bolivia? Yeah, seems so long ago now, what with this habit of winners being able to write history books and losers (i.e. you guys up North) preferring to forget about their humiliating failures.

So anyway, another key player in the Santa Cruz illegality was finally tracked down and apprehended in La Paz. Here's the Erbol newswire (translated) with the story:

Ex-Right Hand Man of Branko Marinkovic Apprehended in La Paz

La Paz, July 22 (Erbol): Juan Kudelca Zalles, ex-right hand man of Branco Marinkovic, fue arrest on Thursday in La Paz due to his alleged connections with the terrorist group led by Eduardo Rósza Flores that was broken up on April 16th 2009 in Santa Cruz.

"Indeed Mr. Kudelca has been detained and in the next few hours will be presented to the judiciary as well as the elements or evidence that connects him (to the terrorist group) in a preliminary hearing" said the case procurator, Marcelo Soza in a brief press conference in La Paz.

In a previous declaration to authorities and media, Kudelca revealed that his ex boss Marinkovic used him to deliver money to Eduardo Rózsa in sealed envelopes.

"I took Branko Marinkovic's money to La Torre. On one of those occasions, Rolando Justiniano asked me to take the money to a journalist, Germán (....) who was in fact Rózsa. At that time I was not aware of this. I saw the man twice", said Kudelca in a previous declaration.

According the the government, the elite group named La Torre was created by the Santa Cruz prefecture during the first mandate period of prefect Rubén Costas and collected at least U$40m for its plan for autonomy, of which U$6m were apparently diverted to sustained the foreign mercenaries headed up by Rózsa.

But the now dead Michael Dwyer said they were just doing "a bit o' dis, a bit 'o dat". At the time you believed him, too (and I have the hatemail to prove "dat" one).

Branko has left the building and is very unlikely to return

Thanks due to reader 'JR' for passing on this report from Bolivia Weekly. The news concerns our favourite LatAm fascist Branko Marinkovic, chickenshit multimillionaire and coupmonger who fled Bolivia after his racist plot failed. Here's the first part pasted and make sure you click through for the rest.

Ex-Aid Testifies that Marinkovic Financed Accused Terrorists

On March 17th, former Santa Cruz civic leader Branko Marinkovic’s longtime personal assistant and right-hand man for 14 years Juan Judelka confirmed that Marinkovic was financing a group called “La Torre” that is accused of terrorist conspiracy. Judelka declared under oath before prosecutor Marcelo Soza in La Paz that Marinkovic had on several occasions given him money in closed envelopes to deliver to Hungarian-Croatian-Bolivian Eduardo Rozsa Flores who was shot by police in a raid on the Las Americas hotel in Santa Cruz on April 16th, 2009. The Bolivian government accuses the deceased Rozsa Flores of being an international mercenary paid by Santa Cruz leaders to assassinate President Morales.

Judelka said, “If I did not testify earlier it was because of pressure by Mr. Marinkovic’s lawyer, but in my testimony I said that I effectively carried money from Branko to the La Torre (accused terrorist cell led by Rozsa Flores), after that Mr. Orlando Justiniano asked me to take this money to a Mr. “Germán” who was really Rozsa Flores.” The Bolivian government is accusing the Santa Cruz state government of organizing the La Torre group during CONTINUES HERE

Message to Simone Rosemary: You still proud of that fawning interview you did with Branko, dumbass? For those with better sense of the obvious than the NYT's star in LatAm, this post by Duderino will remind you just what this piece of shit Branko was trying to do to Bolivia. Fortunately, democracy is alive and well in Bolivia thanks to Dr. Morales.

Branko has left the building

Our fave Bolivian racist fascist piece of crap, Branko Marinkovic, has 'done a Manfred'. Despite saying he'd never flee from justice Branko has upped sticks and transported himself and his family from Santa Cruz Bolivia to San Pablo, Brazil.

Simone Rosemary will be glad. No need to travel to the sweaty LatAm outposts for his next fawning interview with the guy.

Karma of the day

Branko Marinkovic is unwell.

According to this report, doctors attending our friendly fascist-racist coup monger say that he's in a lot of discomfort due to the contraction of his heart arteries, causing very stong shooting pains in his chest, both arms and up to his jaw.

Branko dude, if you don't have your health, you don't have much.

Meanwhile, the much heralded meeting with US envoy Tom Shannon and Evo Morales went ahead as planned this week. Their meeting at the Presidential palace started right on time at 8am...and Shannon was out the front door at 8:30am. Seems like Dr. Morales has better things to do these days. Mind you, if Bolivia began to tell the USA about its strong economy and give advice on how to grow in a sustained way, control inflation, maintain a strong banking system and get the thumbs up from the IMF, the meeting could have lasted hours and Shannon might actually have learned something.

But we wouldn't want one side talking down to the other and trying to appear all superior now, would we..........?

Bolivia Mercenaries update

El Gaviero has two posts that neatly sum up in English the latest happenings in the investigation into the mercenary terrorist cell dismantled in Santa Cruz.

• This post sums up the latest arrests and the backbround to what the terrorists were planning.

• This post links the fascists to local Santa Cruz leaders and also to Human Rights Foundation, a very dubious NGO that has some nasty rightwingers behind it, including our old friend the bipolar Alek Boyd.

Two recommended reads to keep you fully up to date. Nice work from blogmeister MG and good to see El Gaviero back and regular, too.

Bolivia: Two arrests and one telescope

Foreword: I prepared this post last night for publication this morning. Later I went over to Bina's place and found she had already covered both subjects...and better than me, too. So if this subject interests you make sure you hightail it over to Bina's and read more and better with a ton more linkies, too.

Late yesterday Bolivian police made two more arrests as they try to mop up the terrorist cell built to certainly force an armed separation of Santa Cruz and most likely assassinte Evo Morales. PL reports that Juan Carlos Gueder Bruno, aged 48 and member of the far-right wing UJC in Santa Cruz (remember the guys with the the Swastikas on their rides?) along with an un-named second person thought at this moment to be a Paraguayan national known as "El Capitan" (the captain) who is known as an arms smuggler and supplier

Intriguingly, the official investigator into the terrorist cell said last night that he would be in a position to provide the names and positions of the people who were funding the group and would be making an announcement today, Wednesday. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, more photos of the defeated terrorists have emerged. Elod Tóasó is one of the two people in the Santa Cruz mercenary gang that didn't die in the shooting. He is presently in a jail cell somewhere in Bolivia waiting his turn to be heard, but when this photo was taken he was hanging out at the expense of the Santa Cruz lodges in one of the swankiest hotels in Santa Cruz, the five star Buganvillas. According to the hotel owners, Tóasó and cohorts were there for a couple of months and they all used false names, too.

Now I don't know about you.........

.......and I'm not the greatest expert on firearms in the world.......

....but that telescope looks like a serious piece of kit to me. Especially as we see it held by a Croatian war veteran who was trained in sniper warfare and likely knows what it means to put a bullet through the head of another human being at long range. So will you all just cut it out with all this innocent victim BS, yeah? This gang:

1) Was in Bolivia to do dirty work.
2) Got caught and are now either dead or in jail.
3) Deserving of nobody's sympathy unless you happen to be fascist apologist scum.

The end.

Slowly but surely they're homing in on the Santa Cruz secret lodges

The Toborochi Tree of Santa Cruz flowers in May.
Masonic lodges are known to like symbolism. Just sayin'.

El Gaviero today picked up on reports from Bolivia that dead mercenary gang leader, Eduardo Rozsa Flores, was hired under a false name by the Santa Cruz COTAS telephone company. Why is this significant? Let me count the ways:

1) Why hire somebody under an assumed name if there's no skullduggery going on?

2) Note that arsenal of weapons found after the shootout and death/arrest of the gang of five? Yep, they were found hidden at a trade fair in the COTAS stand (the C-4 wisely in the fridge, considering the heat this time of year). Funny that, innit?

3) Remember those secret, unofficial and non-associated masonic lodges in Santa Cruz I wrote about last week? Well surprise surprise, it's well-known that COTAS is controlled by the very same people that head up those two "Toborochi" and "Caballeros del Oriente" lodges.

4) Some claim that COTAS is under one lodge's control, some claim the other. Some note that the two lodges split with each other after a spat in the early 1980's, other say they've mended relations and work in cahoots nowadays. Some say that Ruben Costas heads up Caballeros del Oriente, but nearly everyone says that Branko Marinkovic is the head guy at Toborochi.

So slowly but surely, the investigation is, unsurprisingly, homing in on the secret societies that run Santa Cruz and the fascists running those groups. The same secret societies that have been the subject of confessions from ex-members saying that they are actively trying to destabilize their country.

Nuff said. That poor sap Dwyer really had no idea of the trouble he was letting himself in for.

The Bolivian mercenary terrorist cell and how they were funded: A primer for journalists

I've been moaning to a couple of mailpals this last 24 hours that know the mediaworld about the ongoing harassment (there is no other word) I'm getting from English language journalists about this Bolivian mercenary Evo assassination death terror squad thing. I mean, when (as one example of many) I write a polite but direct reply to the WSJ's hack in LatAm telling him that I don't want to be famous, I have no wish to be interviewed or mentioned in his rag and ask him specifically not to write again and he then sends not one but two more mails, the lack of respect oozes through his pores.

My pals (who know the world of media) don't really understand why I should be bugged like this, either. For one thing, I just ran a couple of posts on the issue...no biggie. For another, it's not as if the blog coverage here on Martin Dwyer was some kind of unearthly secret, either. It just happened to get out there first via this humble corner of cyberspace, but it's all public domain stuff anyway and any decent reporter wouldn't need to waste his salaried time on a free-to-access blog and its unpaid blogger. So rather than put up with this shit any longer, here are a few pointers for those that would rather drink FruityRumPunch and regurgitate other people's work than actually do their own investigation (I mean...perish the thought). What follows are pointers to the real big story that will unfold in the next few days but I'm not going to spoonfeed you the thing. And by the way, all links are in Spanish (one's in Portuguese in fact) so you need to know a bit more than "Quiero una cerveza" to get to the bottom of it.

1) This is the link to an ABI report that has an un-named source (who was clearly a witness to the closed session committal hearing of the two terrorist survivors in La Paz yesterday) saying that the terrorist cell was being funded by the Santa Cruz secret masonic lodges. These lodges are not affiliated to the official Bolivian Freemasons because the official people don't like how they were formed, what they say and what they do in their meetings.

2) This is the link to a page on which you can find Reymi Ferreira's 1994 study of the Lodges of Santa Cruz, 100% essential background reading into these pieces of shit.

3) This link and this link are where you can read that since 1994, the Toborochi lodge (one of the two secret lodges under question here) has been taken over by Branco Marinkovic, the opposition leader, oil magnate and thoroughly unlikeable racist turd who has been organizing both legal and illegal resistance to the government of Evo Morales these last few years.

4) This is the link to a video interview with an ex-secret lodge member who decided to betray them because he saw they were working to illegally destabilize Bolivia.

You also note along the way just how many times the word "Croatia" comes up in polite conversation. Branco is Croat blood, so was the leader the mercenaries. His cohorts with the exception of Dwyer all fought in the Croatian war and the same battalion (and according to shared tattoos also trained in the same training centre). If you check out this link you'll even find out the term for the region, "media luna", was co-opted from Croatian history. Also, take a wild guess as to where the expelled US Ambassador to Bolivia, Phillip Goldberg, was stationed in the 1990's.

The rest is up to you, hackos, but all roads lead to the same place and the same person, who is also a person with extreme both racist and anti-communist sentiments, a lot of money and a lot to lose under Evo's land reform. The next one of you to bug me with your inane line of questioning (with the notable exception of the three reporters who were polite and respectful... you know who you are because I mentioned that your good manners were appreciated in my replies) gets flamed on the blog, including name, name of editor, e-mail address and the rest.

Bolivia goes to the polls tomorrow

In a couple of pretty classless moves to try and affect the vote tomorrow, foreign press are getting in on the Whack-An-Evo game. Firstly CNN, which tried its very hardest to lay out the non-existent terrorist trail between Bolivia and Iran. CNN also wheeled out the usual biased, uninformed bullshit about the narcotrafficking in Bolivia. His Evoness himself said that "everyone knows what CNN's orientation is."

Secondly, El Pais interviewed racist leader the Santa Cruz thugs, Branko Marinkovic. Not one difficult question about his UJC hit-squad or a mention of how they terrorize and beat up indigenous locals. Nothing about the attempted coup or how he's refused to answer court orders to explain his role in last year's insurrection. All El Pais threw to the shit were softballs, but even then he couldn't help but show his non-democracy. At the end, Branko signs off with, "The government must understand that it can't govern against the will of half the country."

Now even if that "half the country" thing were true it would be a call to ignore a democratically elected administration, but this illusion of a country torn in half has long since been proven false. As seen in this post at the time of the recall referendum, the only place in the whole country with significant opposition majority is Santa Cruz, and then it's not even the region but the city we're talking about. It's like supposing a political spat between New York and the USA means "A Country Torn in Half".

But never, mind, because media can bleat all they like; tomorrow Evo wins by legal, decent, honest and truthful democratic one-person-one-vote means. So screw the racist scumbags and the lapdog media they ride in on.