“Evo Morales Incites Genocide of the Peruvian Police Force”

In a June 13 article in the online version of the Bolivian state-run newspaper Cambio, Peruvian president Alan Garcíais
quoted as accusing international communism of attempting to create
chaos in Peru. Recent examples of chaos might include helicopter
attacks on indigenous protesters in the Peruvian Amazon in order to
safeguard foreign exploitation of resources; one result of attributing
his country’s internal problems to an international communist
conspiracy is that García and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez are
shown to share the same fundamental belief that history has not, in
fact, ended.

Chávez’ reluctance to accept the end of history was documented in an
August 2006 article by Johns Hopkins professor Francis Fukuyama in the Washington Post.
In the article, predictably entitled “The End of Chávez,” Fukuyama
asserts that “Chavismo is not Latin America’s future — if anything, it
is its past”; whether García will receive a similar reminder entitled
“The End of the Cold War” remains to be seen. Allegiance to outdated
historical models has meanwhile been observed among other sectors of
the global population such as my grandfather, who exhibited unwavering
commitment to the idea that his nursing home companions and their
oxygen tanks were involved in a Soviet plot.

Fukuyama outlines the circumstances
that have enabled Chávez to pretend that he is a substitute for the end
of history: “The answer is oil, oil, oil.” This answer might of course
prove appropriate for a number of other contemporary questions, as
well, such as what controls the behavior of liberal democracies with
market economies. Fukuyama goes on to illustrate the unsustainable
nature of Chavez’ high self-esteem:

Last December, a bridge on the road connecting the
Venezuelan capital to its international airport collapsed, diverting
traffic into the mountains and stretching a 45-minute journey into one
lasting several hours. A two-lane emergency highway now bears this
traffic; renovation of the bridge is still months away. The bridge
epitomizes what is happening to Venezuela today: As Chávez jets to
Minsk, Moscow and Tehran in search of influence and prestige, the
country’s infrastructure is collapsing.”

Not addressed in the parable are that Chávez presumably had to take
the same mountain road as everyone else to get to his jet, or that the
Mdairej bridge in Lebanon—the highest in the Middle East—had also
collapsed around the same time as this article was published, albeit at
the hand of nations that had already surpassed history.

As for Chávez’ accomplice in postponing the end of history, Fukuyama
argues that “it will soon dawn on [Evo Morales] that his country’s
natural gas is not a fungible commodity like Venezuelan crude oil,” and
that his “only real customer is Brazil, which he has already alienated
through his nationalization of the heavily Brazilian foreign energy
investments.” Alan García meanwhile maintained a different perspective
on foreign intervention, and told Morales to shut up earlier this month after the Bolivian leader declared that the US was scheming to install a military base in Peru.

García explained his choice to paraphrase King Juan Carlos of Spain,
whose claims to fame included telling Hugo Chávez to shut up, as being
based on the fact that Morales should concern himself with his own
country: “[M]étete en tu país y no te metas en el mío.” Such
concerns resurfaced with the indigenous protests in the Amazon, which
the Peruvian government retroactively decided had been encouraged by a letter Morales sent to the Congreso de Indígenas
held in the Peruvian city of Puno at the end of May. In the letter,
Morales had excused his absence from the meeting and had implied a
replacement of the end of history with the following sequence: resistencia – rebellion – revolución.

According to Peruvian prime minister Yehude Simon,
the sending of letters encouraging revolution was unacceptable. The
United States had also demonstrated its opposition to traditional modes
of correspondence in Latin America over the years, and had preferred
orchestrating coups and training death squads. Attempts to charge
Morales with additional unacceptable behavior were thwarted when it was
discovered that Nicaragua and not Bolivia had granted asylum to
Peruvian indigenous leader Alberto Pizango; not categorized as
unacceptable was Peru’s decision to grant asylum to former Bolivian
ministers before they could be tried for genocide.

The genocide charges were incurred following street protests in
Bolivia in 2003, which had begun in response to natural gas
exploitation and the failure of the current Bolivian government to tell
the US to shut up. Alan García has since applied alternate
interpretations of genocide to similar situations, and is quoted in the
Cambio article of June 13 as accusing indigenous extremists of enacting a “genocidio de policías”
in Peru. As the police are one ethnic group that has been historically
underrepresented as genocide victims, we can only assume that new
criminal forms are part of the end of history.