A year ago, on October 17, the then-president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (a.k.a. "Goni") resigned and fled his country for Miami, after a storm of public protests against his deals to sell Bolivian gas to foreign companies and an even greater torment after Goni's troops massacred Bolivian civilians who had protested against the gas deals.
Last night, at 12:30 a.m., 126 members of the Bolivian Congress (out of 140, making the vote against Goni a crushing 90 percent on the second roll call) voted that Goni and members of his cabinet can now be subjected to trial as civilians for their alleged roles in the deaths of more than 80 civilian protestors during what is known throughout Bolivia as the "Black October" of 2003.
The gauntlet was thus thrown down to the Bush administration in Washington, which, according to U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee responding to Bolivian journalists last night, has allowed the former president, Goni, to remain legally in the United States for the past year...
Read more, with instant translations from the Bolivian press, on The Narcosphere...
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/10/14/93626/924
So far the only news agencies in English to report the news are the BBC, reporting, "The Bolivian Congress has voted to put former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada on trial over the deaths of up to 80 people in October last year," and the faded UPI.
As of 9:20 a.m. on Thursday morning, the major North American news organizations - AP, CNN, the New York Times, and Goni's new hometown newspaper, the Miami Herald (a.k.a. Oligarch's Daily), etcetera - despite their large budgets and well-paid correspondents in South America and in the Andes, have so far remained silent... a silence that may have the intended result of allowing Goni just enough lead time to slip through the fingers of justice...
Developing...