Below is an excellent commentary on what REALLY happened at the OAS yesterday, and how the OAS told Bush and Rice to shove it!

John

--- narconews wrote:

> Bush and Rice Encounter the New OAS Pro-Democracy
> Buzzsaw
>
> Yesterday, United States President George W. Bush
> and his Secretary of State Condoleezza
> Rice went to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to deliver
> lofty but worried speeches to the assembly
> of the newly independent Organization of American
> States (OAS, in its English initials).
>
> It was the first OAS meeting inside the United
> States in 31 years, a fact that Secretary Rice
> noted when she reminisced: "The last time the OAS
> met in the United States, some 31
> years ago, it looked a lot different than it does
> today. Of the 23 member states, 10 were
> military dictatorships."
>
> While taking that walk down amnesia lane, she and
> Bush kept mouthing the word
> "democracy" as if dropping the name of an important
> friend who they really don't know
> that well. The irony was not lost on the Latin
> American delegates. There, in Florida (hardly
> a poster state for electoral "democracy" after the
> last two simulated presidential elections,
> rife with Floridian fraud, in the U.S.) Rice waxed
> poetically about the times of dictators but
> neglected to recall that every one of those tyrants
> was installed and forcefully propped up
> by her own government – from Chile to Argentina, to
> Brazil to Bolivia to Uruguay to
> Paraguay, where a Washington-authored plot named
> "Operation Condor" slammed the
> boot down upon South American dreams of freedom.
>
> Even in the so-called "democracies" of that era,
> such as Mexico and Venezuela, the violent
> repression against authentically democratic and
> civil rights movements, the assassination
> of their leaders and journalists, the censorship of
> their press, the training of their military
> brass in torture techniques at the US's "School of
> the Americas," and the maintenance of
> keeping a few in power while the majorities suffered
> were the daily bread of U.S. policy.
>
> Indeed, many of the same U.S. officials found today
> in the Bush administration, including
> key members of Rice's own staff, were directly
> involved in the 1973 Chilean coup, the
> military waves of terror from Sao Paulo to San
> Salvador, the CIA-sponsored cocaine
> trafficking to form a slush fund for paramilitaries
> in Nicaragua in the 1980s… and yet
> there she was, speaking of once upon a time in
> América, as if her administration had any
> kind of authority at all to speak of "democracy" and
> instruct Latin Americans how to
> practice it.
>
> The Latin American nations yesterday, at that
> Florida meeting, rejected the Orwellian
> vision of Bush and Rice, with their newfangled turn
> of phrases in which "democracy," to
> them, means setting up new ways to impose their will
> upon the democratic aspirations of
> their neighbors to the South.
>
> Countries that only a few years ago could have been
> counted on to back any U.S. venture
> in the Organization of American States – countries
> like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and even
> Mexico, which in this blessed year of 2005 has
> finally halted its lurch away from Bolívar's
> country called América and stood together again with
> the South American and Caribbean
> nations – told Bush and Rice that they don't accept
> their version of making impositions
> and calling it "democracy."
>
> And the new chairman of the Organization of American
> States, José Miguel Insulza, of
> Chile, rebuked the U.S. proposal to create
> mechanisms of force over individual nations.
> (Remember just a few weeks ago when the Commercial
> Media told you that Rice claimed to
> have struck a deal to elect Insulza, as Narco News
> alone explained to you that Insulza had
> been elected, to the contrary, to stand up in favor
> of Latin American democracy against
> the anti-democratic aspirations of the Bush
> administration?
>
> If you missed that report, "Democracy Triple Play:
> Ecuador to Mexico to the OAS: the
> Smackdown of Condoleezza's Agenda Came on the Week
> of Her Latin American Tour"
> (Narco News, May 1, 2005), here's the link:
>
> http://narconews.com/Issue37/article1277.html
>
> It should now be clear, again, which journalists
> were telling you the truth and which were
> not. Insulza, in words as clear as the new day
> dawning in América, said aloud at the OAS
> meeting: "We can never use any mechanism without the
> consent of the country. If the
> states don't want something, then nothing will be
> done."
>
> Or, as Brazilian Secretary of State Celso Amorim
> said, standing up to Rice and Bush at the
> same OAS session in Fort Lauderdale, boomed:
> "Democracy cannot be imposed. It is born
> from dialogue."
>
> Democracy Comes Down from the Hills in Bolivia
>
> At the very moment that Rice and Bush prattled on in
> Fort Lauderdale yesterday, Luis
> Gómez reported to you from La Paz that
> half-a-million citizens from that nation had
> descended upon the administrative capital and shut
> it down cold.
>
> Gómez was there – your authentic journalist, now
> three-and-a-half years with Narco
> News, and its acting publisher - in the streets,
> where a democracy from below surges
> upward even as it comes down from the hills of the
> majority who still live in earthen or
> cardboard shacks.
>
> Gómez and our news team were with these multitudes
> that still struggle and worry each
> day whether their children will get to eat a dinner
> even as billions of dollars of nearby
> natural resources – gas, oil, mineral ores,
> agricultural plenty, and even their millenarian
> coca leaf and its proud traditions of struggle - are
> being siphoned away from their
> ancestral lands as a result of decades of imposition
> from above.
>
> As Gómez described, much like John Reed or Charles
> Horman or Mario Menéndez before
> him once reported from other Latin American lands at
> hours of moral crisis:
>
> "This morning there were more people in the streets
> than before, possibly more than ever
> before in the recent history of social mobilizations
> in Bolivia. Perhaps half a million people,
> perhaps more, according to the calculations of a
> leader from District 8 of El Alto.
>
> "The public school teachers arrived earlier at the
> Plaza de los Héroes. Today is Teachers'
> Day in Bolivia, and there were more than 30,000
> educators in the streets. It was just after
> 10:00 in the morning and they went out alone to shut
> down central La Paz. A half hour
> later the two immense marches from El Alto arrived,
> one made up of the city's southern
> districts and another from the north.
>
> "The mineworkers' federation arrived, as did the
> factory workers, the students, followed by
> the peasant farmers from the communities south of La
> Paz, and the neighborhoods from
> La Paz's eastern slopes, which form the border with
> El Alto. They were all there, together
> with Aymara peasant farmers from several
> provinces…."
>
> In the afternoon, the Mexican-born Gómez, alone
> among the foreign press corps in
> Bolivia, reported to you that Bolivian President
> Carlos Mesa "appears close to resigning."
> Gómez reported:
>
> "…according to a source within the Catholic Church
> who asked to remain anonymous,
> Carlos Mesa has a resignation letter ready and could
> present it, at latest, tomorrow night."
>
> Five hours later, by 10 p.m., Gómez's informed
> prediction became a reality. And the next
> few days in Bolivia will bring the final
> confrontation between imposed power from above
> and authentic democracy from below: Today, Tuesday,
> June 7, 2005, the people are
> coming down from the hills again, and our team is
> (again) reporting it, blow by blow, here
> on Narco News and its Narcosphere. I already know,
> beforehand, where the fastest, most
> accurate, information about what is happening will
> be available. And I'm very proud to say
> it is at www.narconews.com.
>
> An Hour to Protect Our Journalists
>
> But, kind reader, I would not be honest with you if
> I didn't add that these are the minutes
> and hours when I worry most about the safety and
> security of our journalists: these
> moments of immediate history, when imposed power
> from above has its back against the
> wall. These are the kinds of moments when the
> violent coups of years ago happened.
> Because when authentic democracy advances, as it did
> in Venezuela in 2002 and 2004, as
> it did in Mexico this year of 2005, and as it
> bubbles up right now from under indigenous
> Aymara bowler hats in El Alto and the hopeful eyes
> of coca growers, miners, teachers,
> students, senior citizens, farmers and people in all
> the other hot spots of Bolivia, these are
> the moments when those who are losing power have
> historically become the most
> dangerous.
>
> We all need – we being you and I and other members
> of Civil Society – accurate reporting
> from Bolivia this week. We need it like we need air
> and water and food, for authentic
> democracy requires not only a free press, but also a
> courageous press, to be able to
> function. "Without truth," the Proverbs section of
> the Bible says, "the people perish."
>
> I write you from another part of our América, from
> the place where I am here clearing the
> brush for the permanent campus for the Narco News
> School of Authentic Journalism, a
> place with no phone line and no cell phone service
> (yet), but where I have just shimmied
> up a palm tree to install a satellite dish so as to
> be able to speak with you once again at a
> moment of truth.
>
> And to be totally truthful with you – to tell you
> the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
> the truth – I confess that right at this moment I
> worry about our journalists and about our
> América and about our hopes and dreams for a more
> authentic democracy and a more
> authentic journalism. Because, as everybody knows,
> we don't have the millions of dollars
> that the corporate and institutional newspapers and
> simulator "press freedom"
> organizations have to protect their own, and only
> their own, commercial journalists.
>
> Our coffers are low, too low, which is why I have
> had to shimmy up palm trees to get the
> word to you from the swelter here where it is 90
> degrees in the shade, without an air
> conditioned office, without a company car (or any
> car), without any of the accoutrements
> that less-than-honest corporate reporters are
> provided. For we don't spend your
> donations on such luxuries: we spend it thriftily,
> on just the truth, the whole truth… and
> getting the facts to you.
>
> Luis Gómez and our team in Bolivia have none of
> those luxuries either. And yet day after
> day, hour after hour, they walk at street level
> tapping and adding to the surging power of
> the authentically democratic movements of real
> people who are making real history. They
> and we do this job free of the control by which the
> bureaucratic press flaks of Embassies
> and such that so effectively spin the dishonest
> "news" coverage by our commercial rivals.