NYT: Barring of Bolivian Plane Infuriates Latin America as Snowden Case Widens

[MADem]

27. He was in Belgium, I think.

He might have enjoyed a bit of "plausible deniability" cover owing to the fact that he was out of town.

Easy for Hollande to "get involved" after the crisis has passed.

My guess is that the bottom line is that the entire European community didn't want Evo to open the plane door and dump Snowden on the tarmac with an EU asylum request clutched in his hand. The situation was made more confusing by Evo joking in Moscow about giving Snowden a ride, and Evo's pilots wanting to deviate from their flight plan and get fuel in places where they were not granted clearance to land. His pilots wanted to refuel in Lisbon, and asked TWICE to go there, and Portugal said no. They asked to refuel in Spain, and Spain said no (these requests were made from Russia, before they left). Spain said "Gas up in the Canaries" and that's how they filed their flight plan. Then they tried to deviate while in the air.

The incident could have been prevented had the pilot programmed in an earlier fuel stop, and not tried to take the a/c to the outer edge of its capability. I'd also be interested in knowing if there really was a "fuel gauge" issue, or if the whole drama was more about boosting Evo's international profile. If that's what he was going for, he certainly pulled it off, for the moment, anyway.

This has also given a few South American countries with significant internal problems (petty border fights, bad economies, high unemployment, etc.) an external boogeyman to focus on--pay no attention to your shrinking paycheck, shake your fist at USA instead! Never mind that there are no goods on the shelves, blame USA for disrespecting this guy in Europe! Yell "colonial" and "imperial" to beat the band--it's better than focusing on "No jobs," and "Low wages."