U.S. government has secretly targeted Bolivian President Evo Morales with a drug sting code-named Operation Naked King. The report, just released by The Huffington Post today, draws on court documents filed by a longtime DEA confidential informant, Carlos Toro. It appears to confirm Morales’s long-standing suspicion that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, has sought to undermine Morales’s government.
In 2008, Morales expelled the DEA from Bolivia, accusing the agency of bribing police officers, violating human rights, covering up murders and destroying infrastructure. Morales then embarked on his own strategy of combating drug trafficking by working cooperatively with coca growers to diversify crops and promote alternative development. His government’s efforts were largely effective: The United Nations announced last month the cultivation of coca leaf in Bolivia has fallen to a 13-year low. Despite that victory, the DEA announced this week plans to officially decertify Bolivia—a bureaucratic move that would cost Bolivia financial assistance, and amounts to an accusation by the DEA that Bolivia is not sufficiently cooperative in combating drug trafficking.
Nick Wing talking:
we learned through the complaint filed by Carlos Toro that there are a number of sealed indictments against officials who are either connected to or actually in the top ranks of the administration, of the Morales administration. And we don’t know a whole lot exactly about what the evidence against these individuals is, but we do know that there was enough to secure these indictments. And we have also known for a while that the U.S. is interested in trying to connect the Morales administration to cocaine trafficking. I would point out that the previous—two of the previous drug czars for Bolivia have been implicated in sort of the top ranks of some sort of drug-trafficking scandals, and it’s been known for a while that members of the military and particularly the police have also been involved in this. So we’re not exactly sure what the evidence against these individuals is or what the status of this case is right now, but we do know that there was enough to get a sealed indictment against them.
Evo Morales, is a former coca grower. Morales, for a long time, has accused the DEA of really being an arm for sort of Western imperialism and colonialism and being in the country really to undermine his leadership and undermine his role and his role as someone who is trying to cut down the growth of coca in Bolivia. So, he would say that this is an effort—I’m guessing that he would say this is an effort to further undermine him and to try to link his administration to a cocaine-trafficking ring, which then they could use to say that not only is his—are his efforts to cut down production ineffective, but they’re also corrupt. Now, I’m guessing the DEA would say this is just an honest effort to take cocaine off of the global marketplace. But there would probably be a big disagreement there between the two of them.
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Kathryn Ledebur, director of Andean Information Network based in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Nick Wing, reporter for The Huffington Post and the author of the article, “Operation Naked King: U.S. Secretly Targeted Bolivia’s Evo Morales in Drug Sting.”
— source democracynow.org