As the old song says, they've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. They've also got lots of natural gas in Bolivia as well as a socialist president in Evo Morales, who has promised to nationalize the industry. They used to have rather too many old Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Paraguay, and they still have enormous reserves of underground water in the north of that country, right where Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil meet.
A very curious story has been bubbling up in the Latin American press and a few blogs over the last couple of weeks. Today for the first time the Guardian is reporting it cautiously as a set of rumours first floated by the state-controlled Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Is George W. Bush -- or his dad, or his daughter, depending on which source you read -- buying / already the owner of a hundred-thousand-acre ranch in northern Paraguay?
Some have speculated that he might be trying to wrestle control of the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water reserves, from the Paraguayans.Rumours of Mr Bush's supposed forays into South American real estate surfaced during a recent 10-day visit to the country by his daughter Jenna Bush. Little is known about her trip to Paraguay, although officially she travelled with the UN children's agency Unicef to visit social projects. Photographers from the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color tracked her down to one restaurant in Paraguay's capital Asunción, where she was seen flanked by 10 security guards, and was also reported to have met Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, and the US ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Reports in sections of the Paraguayan media suggested she was sent on a family "mission" to tie up the land purchase in the "chaco".
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Last week the Paraguayan news group Neike suggested that Ms Bush was in Paraguay to "visit the land acquired by her father - relatively close to the Brazilian Pantanal [wetlands] and the Bolivian gas reserves".
Gosh, I hear you exclaim. I haven't thought twice about Paraguay since Alfredo Stroessner, host and protector of Josef Mengele and other notable fascists, enthusiastic participant in Operation Condor, was deposed in 1989.
I hadn't either until this story began to surface. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder whether Paraguay still had any particular ties to the U.S. or whether those would signify much anyway. Then I read a curious paragraph in the Wikipedia entry on Paraguay, a section titled "U.S. Military Controversy." Well: I read that paragraph last week. It was there last week. It isn't there any more.
Here it is, from the Google cache (google Wurmser Paraguay):
U.S. Military ControversyIn 2006, a classified memo was leaked that revealed the United States has interest in an air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay. This memo, authored by David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, [1] notes that both Wurmser, and Maloof had met the American neo-conservatives to discuss a plan to attack "terrorists" in the natural reserve rich South American region. About 500 US troops landed in at the air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay in July 2005, after Paragua's senate voted to authorize immunity from the International Criminal Court. American occupation of this base would put the Bolivian gas fields at center stage of the region.
Gosh. Now, why do you think that paragraph would have disappeared this week? The Guardian also notes the arrival of the Marines last year, although its report fails to mention that curious vote in the Paraguayan senate, authorizing U.S. troops' immunity from the ICC:
The US presence in Paraguay has been under scrutiny since May 2005 when the country's Congress agreed to allow 400 American marines to operate there for 18 months in exchange for financial aid.At the time many viewed the arrival of troops as a sign that Washington was trying to monitor US business interests in neighbouring Bolivia, after the election of Evo Morales, a leftwing leader who promised to nationalise his country's natural gas industry.
Hmmn. So what are we to think, do you think? Me, I don't like to think of self as a tin-foil hatter, but this is curious, yes?
For me, the news that Jenna Bush had become a UNICEF ambassador was already a disconnect of baroque proportions, and Jenna as any kind of secret political emissary seems to me to lift this story right off into the rococo. But then, as Scott Fitzgerald once said, the rich aren't like us, so what would I know?
None of my old links to the translation of the original Prensa Latina story is working any more, but you can read a summary of the first rumours at Political Cortex.
So what is going on? The Bushes are looking for a retirement home? Preparing a counter-terrorism base in South America? Or a base for "pre-emptive" action against uppity socialists like Morales? Thinking natural gas? Water? Forced eradication of Bolivia's coca crops, an American demand that Morales is also defying? Immunity for American troops? For American politicians on the run?
Gee. In Paraguay, it seems, it's just like the bad old days. Maybe.
Hat tip to Toedancer, Faith, and Debra at breadnroses.ca.
Very interesting.
I am far from being surprised of these manigances, Bush the octopus and his family is the most powerful family in our times, thanks to the forever stupid american voters.