Bolivian government coca-leaf graffiti targeted at dissidents in Santa Cruz
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Argentina’s Cronista Comercial newspaper last week released an Argentine foreign ministry study, whose authors used various corporate-risk business models to forecast a 56% chance of civil war breaking out in Bolivia in the next few months.

It’s faster than anyone thinks.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News

At issue is the growing tyranny of Bolivia’s leftwing populist president, Evo Morales. His popularity numbers have dropped, and in Bolivia’s industrious, entrepreneurial, job-creating and mixed-race east, discontent with his Marxist remedies is growing.

Morales has tried to rewrite the Bolivian constitution to ensure his permanent grip on power, something he has not succeeded in doing so far. He’s abused foreign investors, striking out at energy investors first through a troop-filled mass expropriation last May Day, a significant day on the Marxist calendar. Now, there are fuel shortages in Santa Cruz, the same shortages that occur in every Marxist regime that attempts to set prices over markets.

While Morales was getting feted by the likes of glitterati like Bill Clinton in New York and Jimmy Carter in Plains, touted as the new radical-chic emblem of progressive “change,” Morales has already begun coercive measures worthy of Stalin.

He’s begun confiscating the land of his political enemies and instituting roadblocks on the eastern Santa Cruz region, as a means of economic warfare on whole classes of opponents. He’s also planning military bases as a means of preventing Brazil or Argentina from invading on the side of the democracy-loving easterners, an ominous development.

Bolivia’s bloggers have been watching this closely, and have added some perspective to the rather disturbing information.

Miguel Centellas, at Ciao! blog reports that civil war is not all that uncommon in this day and age, and explicitly cites some places where it has also happened. He says government efforts to arm new militias targeted at Santa Cruz are not a good development and the broad military base approach of Morales is a bad sign indeed. Read his well-linked piece about this here.

Miguel Buitrago, at MABB blog, reports that Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera seems to be worth watching. The leftist ex-guerrilla turned Bolivian vice president has been rabble rousing with entourages of troops as his means of stirring up class warfare against Bolivia’s middle class in Santa Cruz in the east. When confronted with it, he begged off and said his fiery words were taken out of context but he did nothing to repair the damage he had already done. In all, a disturbing picture. Miguel says that if civil war does break out, the best scenario is secession, a very sad thing. Read his well-linked post here.

Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linares, a soft-handed far-left intellectual who’s decided to get down there with ‘the people,’ going native. His aim? To stir them up against people in Santa Cruz
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News