For the last several days, the flow of the Internet and a few irresponsible journalists have been warning us that Bolivia is being threatened by "peacekeeping" forces made up of Chilean, Paraguayan, and Brazilian troops led by U.S. commanders and soldiers. It has also been speculated that Peru disagrees with this plan for international intervention to "defend threatened democracies," and is willing to enter into a military conflict with Chile to settle old scores from history. I think we must be clear here: the purpose of all this, of building up a scenario of sub-continental war, is to provoke uncertainty, anxiety, and doubts among the Bolivian population going into the December 4, 2005 elections. It is also possible, though unlikely, that an attempt is being made to provoke a civil conflict between the "trade unionist west" and the "enterprising east" in order to break out of a "disastrous impasse."
On the one hand, it would seem that the horsemen of the Apocalypse, embodied in Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, are sending messengers to provoke fluctuations in voter preference polls for Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), whose possible electoral victory is quite worrying to the U.S. State Department. And so, as long "Tuto" Quiroga and Samuel Doria Medina, candidates for the PODEMOS ("We Can") and UN ("National Unity") coalitions, seem to enjoy the Bolivian electorate’s preference, we can supposedly relax. The other preference (for MAS) would mean entering into fear and paranoia about the possibility of a conflict widened to involve the entire Southern Cone. Well, a few sociological paradigms would say that it is more the fear of the threat of a violent event than the fear of the event itself.