So what was that about Irish Mercenary Michael Dwyer being unarmed again?

So, Michael Dwyer was some poor innocent unarmed traveller doing a bit o' dis and a bit o' dat?

Want to continue with your BS denial, Ireland?


Was "hard", now dead.

This below is a photo of the montage put on by Bolivian police today, including weapons and 58 photos of the mercenary terrorist cell that was plotting to kill Evo Morales and other political heads as well as destabilizing the sovereign state and forcing a breakaway of Santa Cruz from the rest of the country.

Also today, one of the men arrested earlier this week admitted having sold leader Eduardo Rosza Flores (ERF) a gun for U$1,000. He also said that ERF was plotting to kill the Prefects (i.e. governors) of Santa Cruz and Beni because they had been ineffective in the struggle for a separate state of Santa Cruz

Finally, here are close-up shots of the photo montage. Click on them to make them big, because they get very big and you an see all the details of Dwyer, Flores, the others and their guns....all in hotel rooms. It only remains to be seen whether the bigoted mailers and anonymous commenters this blogger has had the displeasure of reading these last two weeks (mostly Irish, according to IP numbers) have the guts and common decency to write again and apologize. You people aren't quite as disgraceful as examples of Irish as Dwyer, but you certainly aren't any credit to your nation.

Click to enlarge (they get very big)

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.

News Roundup (we scour the region and bring you the dregs)

Pimp My Vote

Bolivia: Bina has the latest on the Santa Cruz mercenaries story; very interesting stuff, too. Also nice to se El Gaviero posting regularly again, as MG gives us more English language insight to the ongoing ruckus.

Ecuador: Sunday. Election. Studmuffin wins. Nuff said.

Mexico: Swine Flu! This is not funny at all and possibly a big big story in the making with 30 cases confirmed in Mexico City, at least 16 deaths, schools shuttered and now CNN reporting seven cases in Texas, USA. For the record I thoroughly recommend eating elderberries (esp in its yummy jam form) as a flu preventative. And get your flu shots too, people.

Paraguay: According to this report, 75% of Paraguayan children were fathered by Fernando Lugo. I'm still trying to decide whether there's a slight exaggeration going on here :-)

Peru: For the wonks among us. Farid Matuk writes an excellent but slightly technical (not too bad, though...none of those funny symbols) report in English that examines a theme looked at here recently, but in more detail; the interrelation of Peru and Chile economic data. Fascinating stuff for those of us that find this stuff fascinating.....errr....like....dude.

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.