US Interventionists Busy in Bolivia as Political Crisis Looms 

BY W. T. WHITNEY

 MAY 27, 2024
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Photograph Source: José Fuertes – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Delegates loyal to President Luis Arce dominated the 10th Congress of Bolivia’s Movement toward Socialism (MAS) Party held in El Alto in early May. They selected Grover García, chief of a governmental agency and formerly of a farmworkers’ union, to be MAS’s new leader, replacing former president Evo Morales in that capacity.

Another MAS gathering on June 10 takes place in Cochabamba to elect other Party leaders. One more, a “unity congress,” happens there on July 10, in territory friendly to Morales. He conditions his participation on the MAS Party and his own presidential candidacy for 2025 not being eliminated.

Division within the MAS Party is good news for the U.S. government. It had opposed MAS political power from the beginning of Morales’ progressive rule in 2006 until a U.S.-backed coup ousted him in 2019.

Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, retained popular support throughout his tenure. His government overcame repeated attacks from oligarchic, racist, separatist, and U.S.-allied political forces based largely in Bolivia’s eastern departments, notable for rich oil and gas deposits and industrial-scale agriculture. MAS governments, with Luis Arce as minister of economy and public finance, achieved social advances, reduced poverty, nationalized oil and gas extraction and production, carried out land reform, and elevated the status of Bolivia’s majority indigenous population.

The U.S. government has eyed immense lithium deposits in Bolivia and expressed concern about Chinese economic inroads; a commentator notes that, as of 2017, “China has become the principal contractor and financing source for Bolivia’s state-led national development project.”

That President Luis Arce’s secured a 55% majority vote on October 19, 2020 to restore the MAS Party to power is also worrisome to Washington officials. His government in October 2022 mobilized popular support to defeat an opposition uprising led by reactionary politicians in Santa Cruz and other eastern departments. The victory elevated Arce’s appeal to government officials and MAS activists alike.

Division between the Party’s two wings, widening over two years, is highly visible. Highway blockades, strikes and demonstrations carried out by “radical factions of the MAS movement led by former President Evo Morales” played out between January and March. Rising inflation, reduced gas and oil production, falling currency reserves, and shortages of fuel and food add to MAS’s vulnerability.

One goal of the 10^th MAS Party Congress was that of meeting constitutional requirements of orderly party function. Observers were on hand whose reports to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE in Spanish) would allow the Tribunal to certify the “resolutions of the Arcista conclave.” But an adverse ruling now and two more in the future would deprive the MAS Party of its “judicial personhood,” and rule out future election participation.

Democracy is at risk. Journalist Tatiana Castro claims social movements, “pillars that sustain the MAS in power,” are “fundamental for guaranteeing governability … [and] part of the democratic dynamics.”  Within the MAS Party itself, social movements are divided.

Those made up of urban residents and indigenous Aymara people of Bolivia’s high plateau region lean towards President Arce. Others supportive of Morales consist of federations of indigenous peoples in Bolivia’s tropical regions. Castro sees the two factions competing within the state apparatus not about ideology but over “perks, advantages, benefits, and nominations.”

President Luis Arce on May 18 warned that “the right is sharpening up for next year’s elections.” He denounced as “economic blockade” the Bolivian Senate’s recent refusal to authorize foreign loans. Meeting recently in the United States, extreme right-wing opposition politicians were “unifying against MAS,” he claims.

Morales warned that TSE recognition of the Arce-inclined El Alto Congress would signify “genocide against the indigenous movement.” He urged followers to “have patience,” to no longer resort to blocking highways, and to expect legal struggles.

Interviewed, Morales referred to an audio-recording of statements of U.S. chargé d’affaires in Bolivia, Debra Hevia. Her remarks, supposedly leaked on April 27, may be head here. They include mention that, “We have been working for a long time to achieve change in Bolivia, time is vital for us, but for it to be a real change, Evo and Arce have to leave power and close that chapter.”  A subsequent report attributes Hevia’s voice to artificial intelligence.

Weeks earlier, an inflammatory article from the same leaking platform, El Radar, had already reverberated across Latin America. It explains that, “Information leaked from the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia, systematized… by the Center for Multidisciplinary Geopolitical Studies (CEGM) reveals a new U.S. plan.” The article includes a document titled: “Latin America in the Eye of the Storm. Possible Victory of the United States and Recolonization of Latin America (Plan Simón Bolívar).”

The origin of the Plan is unclear. Our Internet search for the CEGM provided no information. Article and document cite serious threats to U.S. worldwide hegemony posed by China, India, the BRICS alliance itself, and by “economic power [for Latin America] through trade with the two Asiatic giants, China and India.”

As regards the article’s recommendations for Bolivia: “the strategy would be focused on its natural resources and on consolidation of a servile, rightwing government,” and on break-up of the MAS political movement. It mentions “Debra Hevia, the new U.S. chargé d’affaires, who has been meeting with different parties and organizations throughout the country.”

A report elsewhere on the supposed Simón Bolívar Plan accuses Hevia of “having initiated a new phase of hybrid war whose politics are those of ‘regime change’ within the framework of the presidential elections of 2025.” Diplomat Hevia serves in place of a U.S. ambassador, absent in Bolivia since 2008. Evo Morales expelled the last ambassador Philip Goldberg, alleging interventionist activities.

Among revealing aspects of Hevia’s work and history are these:

• She worked at the State Department Operations Center that handles intelligence and counter-insurgency work.
• Stationed in Nicaragua, she helped arrange for opposition groups to join the failed coup attempt against the Daniel Ortega government in 2018.
• During an earlier stay in Bolivia she “sought to reconstruct the armed wing of the [fascist-inclined] Santa Cruz Youth organization” and arranged for funding the activities of Svonko Matkovik, “formerly jailed for anti-Morales terrorist activities.”
• Hevia’s husband, a Bolivian, is a former DEA agent.  He must have “reunited with his contacts and old acquaintances” on return to Bolivia,speculates reporter Martin Agüero. Morales expelled the DEA from Bolivia for interventionist activities in 2008.

Uncertainties prevail. The origin of revealing leaks attributed to the U.S. Embassy is obscure. With elections approaching, the two wings of the MAS Party are far apart.

Declaring the recently-completed MAS Congress to be invalid, the TSE on May 23 rejected the election of Grover García as party leader, leaving Morales in charge. The TSE had previously invalidated the Congress held by the Morales faction in October 2023.

García told a reporter that Evo Morales afterwards had been urged to join the more recent Congress. Morales reiterates that the gathering set for July 10 in Cochabamba will be a “unity congress,” although the TSE is unlikely to rule in its favor. Understating the matter, La Razón news service sees the MAS as “caught up in a vicious cycle.”

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

Bird Flu Is More Widespread Among Dairy Cows, Sewage Tests Suggest

Riley Griffin and Jessica Nix
Thu, May 23, 2024 




(Bloomberg) -- A Michigan farmworker who tested positive for bird flu is just the second person to have been infected since an outbreak in US cattle appeared in March. Surveillance of sewage suggests the virus may be more widespread among dairy cows than reported, raising workers’ risk.

Academic and industry-run labs have been leading the way toward more nuanced and complete information about the H5N1 virus’s range by analyzing wastewater. They found bird flu in sewage samples collected before the virus had been identified in US cows. They’re seeing signs in cities that are far from infected cattle herds. And they’re already giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention better information about where to focus its efforts.

While rarely seen in humans, the H5N1 strain has considered a pandemic threat for decades because it often jumps between species, sometimes causing lethal disease in people. As farmers resist testing, the US needs to expand its monitoring of sewage, particularly in rural areas around farms where the pathogen may be spreading, said Paul Friedrichs, director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.

“We’re going to need to do more work as a nation on how do we better structure wastewater surveillance in areas that don’t have or aren’t on a municipal wastewater system,” Friedrichs, a retired major general and joint staff surgeon at the Pentagon, said in an interview. “That’s the gap we’re going to have to figure out how to bridge.”

Concerned about lost income, dairy farms have resisted efforts to test cows and workers, potentially concealing the true scope of the virus’s spread.

Viruses are often excreted in feces, which prompted scientists to turn to wastewater early in the pandemic to track Covid’s spread, hunt for new trends and spot the emergence of concerning variants. Although it’s unable to show whether the source is infected humans, animals or products like milk, wastewater surveillance paints a more complete picture of where pathogens are emerging across broad geographic areas.

In Texas, for example, 19 out of 23 wastewater sites were found to contain traces of the virus between early March and the end of April, according to Texas Wastewater Environmental Biomonitoring. Meanwhile, the state has some 400 dairy farms, and just 14 herds have tested positive for bird flu to date, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Other Biden administration officials, who asked not to be named while describing the federal response, said they’re worried about the time it took the government to first spot the outbreak in cattle, which likely began in late 2023 after contact with sick migratory birds. That monthslong delay shows the limitations of US pandemic preparedness efforts and a disjointed public-health system, the officials said.

Friedrichs said the US should seek the help of additional wastewater experts and operations to develop “a more robust national picture.”

Tracking Technology

Specialists in the field include Verily, the Alphabet Inc. life-sciences unit that began working with Stanford University and Emory University to monitor wastewater during the pandemic. With funding from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and others, Verily expanded testing for more than dozen viruses to 190 sites, and in October, it was tapped to support the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System that includes hundreds more facilities.

Since it was first detected in US cattle in March, bird flu has been found in 52 herds from nine states. However, before the first reported case, Verily’s top wastewater scientist Bradley White noticed a strange trend: influenza A, a viral category that includes H5N1, was spiking in parts of the country. White had a hunch the surge was driven by bird flu, and developed a test for genetic signatures typical of H5N1 and its H5 cousins.

Using the assay to look back through old wastewater samples, White found an H5 virus had been present in Amarillo, Texas, as early as February — weeks before the White House was first alerted of the emerging outbreak. That shows the potential for wastewater surveillance as an early warning signal for bird flu, White said.

It appears bird flu has “run its course” in Texas, he said, as overall influenza A levels appear to be declining in the state. Verily announced this week that it had expanded its search for H5 markers to all 190 sites in an effort to better track the outbreak.

Recognizing the need for more monitoring, the CDC is also putting an additional $3 million into wastewater analysis, part of a $93 million package aimed at improving H5N1 surveillance. The agency said in 2022 that it had put more than $100 million toward testing for Covid in wastewater, and expected the funds to last for an additional three years. In March, it made a fiscal 2025 budget request for an additional $20 million to test sewage for emerging diseases.

The CDC is also starting a project to check sewage at 10 new locations close to livestock, and launching a study that would help distinguish whether human or animals were responsible for virus detected in wastewater. Last week, it launched an online wastewater data dashboard tracking influenza A. Between late April and mid-May, only two of six Michigan-based wastewater sites on the CDC dashboard showed moderate levels of influenza A.

Potential Mutations

Concern about H5N1 soared about two decades ago when a strain of the virus began running rampant in poultry, occasionally infecting people. Health officials worldwide began looking for signs of human-to-human transmission that might have signaled a potential pandemic before the outbreak finally subsided. While some human cases have been severe, even deadly, the two farmworkers infected in the recent US outbreak both had mild symptoms and recovered. No transmission between people has been seen.

H5N1 infections in cows can lead to decreased milk production and may raise their risk of other conditions, like pneumonia. Pasteurization kills the virus, and there’s no evidence of danger from commercial milk, cheese or ice cream.

Health officials are particularly concerned about tracking the virus on dairy farms where infected cows frequently come in contact with workers, and mutated viruses may find opportunities to infect humans. The dangers the virus has shown in the past raises the stakes for wastewater monitoring.

“The risk is the longer this outbreak continues, the more opportunities there may be for a spillover jump from an animal species to a human,” said Al Ozonoff, an infectious disease scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The next event experts worry about is, he said is “some viral evolution which creates an opportunity for human-to-human transmission.”

--With assistance from Ilena Peng.

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Donald Trump’s Assault on the Wages of American Workers

BY LAWRENCE WITTNER

 MAY 21, 2024
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Image by Mika Baumeister.

Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.

Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers holding two or more jobs to support their families―the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Raise the Wage Act. If enacted, the legislation would have gradually increased the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour over a six-year period. But, instead of supporting the legislation or proposing an alternative, the Trump White House announced that, if the Senate passed the House bill, Trump would veto it. Consequently, the measure died in the Republican-controlled Senate. According to the AFL-CIO, the legislation would have raised the pay of 40 million American workers.

That same year, Trump’s Department of Labor succeeded in rolling back planned wage increases for millions of workers by restricting eligibility for overtime pay. In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, the Labor Department had issued a rule substantially raising the income level below which workers were paid time and a half for work done beyond 40 hours per week. But the Trump Labor Department, seizing on a delay in implementation occasioned by a judicial decision, lowered the level by more than $20,000, thus depriving 8.2 million American workers of the right to overtime pay secured under Obama.

In August 2018, Trump canceled a scheduled 2 percent pay raise for millions of civilian federal employees, leading to criticism even from some Republicans. This action, plus other administration assaults on the rights of public employees, led to a massive flight of workers from government service. By the fall of 2019, there were 45,000 vacancies in the Department of Veterans Affairs alone. To fill these vacancies, the Trump administration hired large numbers of temp workers at low wages and with minimal benefits.

Yet another administration policy that undercut workers’ wages emerged with the Trump Labor Department’s issuance of a “joint-employer” rule. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been fashioned to ensure that businesses using staffing companies or subcontractors would be accountable for complying with basic workplace protections. Even so, the Trump administration’s joint-employer rule substantially limited liability for wage and hour violations, thereby making it harder for workers to hold all parties accountable. As a result, U.S. workers lost an estimated $1 billion annually thanks to subcontracting or wage theft by employers.

Of course, not all Trump administration attempts at holding down wages succeeded. In 2017, the Trump Labor Department proposed that employers could simply pocket workers’ tips, as long as the workers were paid the minimum wage. Economists estimated that this policy would lead to the loss of $5.8 billion per year in tips for workers, 80 percent of whom were women. But after the discovery that Trump’s Secretary of Labor had gone to great lengths to hide his department’s findings about how harmful the new policy would be, Congress stepped in and amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit employers from seizing the tips of their employees.

Another Trump administration failure occurred in connection with reducing the wages of farmworkers, some of the most exploited, lowest-paid workers in the United States. In mid-2019, the Labor Department proposed a new regulation that would change the rules of the H-2A visa program, used by agricultural employers to hire migrant farmworkers for seasonal work―for example, by President Trump’s wineries. As one of the rules changes would lower wage rates for H-2A farmworkers and, consequently, for their U.S. counterparts, the United Farm Workers challenged it in federal court and, ultimately, prevailed.

Although the “real wages” (after adjusting for inflation) of American workers did rise during Trump’s presidency, the rise was minimal. According to a 2020 Congressional report, during Trump’s first three years in office, workers’ “real average hourly earnings increased by an average of just 0.9 percent.” Admittedly, there was a very substantial jump in real average earnings in the fourth year. But this jump reflected the fact that, in 2020, a disproportionate number of low-wage workers lost their jobs thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and, therefore, were not included in wage calculations.

And even these minimal wage gains usually reflected factors other than administration actions. Responding to the failure of the federal government to ensure adequate wages for workers, many states and cities enacted minimum wage raises, fueling wage growth for the most poorly-paid. Indeed, a study by the National Employment Law Project found that the median wage for low-wage workers climbed much more sharply in states that raised their pay floors than in states that didn’t. In addition, a surge in strike activity by teachers and by unionized workers at major U.S. companies during 2018 and 2019 increased wages for yet another portion of the nation’s workforce.

Overall, then, far from sparking a wage boom, the policies of Trump and his administration depressed the wages of American workers.

Dr. Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press.)