America's refusal to extradite Bolivia's ex-president to face genocide charges

[Judi Lynn]

5. Reference to James Carville's strategy group for Goni's re-election:

America's refusal to extradite Bolivia's ex-president to face genocide charges

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But there's another important aspect of this case that distinguishes it from the standard immunity Washington gifts to itself and its friends. When he ran for president in 2002, Sánchez de Lozada was deeply unpopular among the vast majority of Bolivians as a result of his prior four-year term as president in the 1990s. To find a way to win despite this, he hired the consulting firm owned and operated by three of Washington's most well-connected Democratic party operatives: James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum. He asked them to import the tactics of American politics into Bolivia to ensure his election victory.

As detailed by a 2006 New York Times review of a film about the Democratic operatives' involvement in Bolivia's election, their strategy was two-fold: first, destroy the reputations of his two opponents so as to depress the enthusiasm of Bolivia's poor for either of them; and then mobilize Sánchez de Lozada's base of elites to ensure he wins by a tiny margin. That strategy worked, as he was elected with a paltry 22.5% of the popular vote. From the Times review:

"'(The film) asks a more probing question: whether Mr Carville and company, in selling a pro-globalization, pro-American candidate, can export American-style campaigning and values to a country so fundamentally different from the United States …
"'It's a very explosive film in Bolivia because it shows close up a very deliberate strategy,' said Jim Shultz, an American political analyst in Bolivia who recently saw the film with a group of friends. 'The film is especially explosive because it's about a candidate – so identified with the United States and so hated by so many Bolivians – being put into office by the political manipulations of US consultants.'
"Mauro Quispe, 33, a cabdriver in La Paz, said he saw slices of the film on the television news, and it raised his ire. 'I was stunned,' he said. 'He was being advised by the Americans, and everything they said was in English.'"

More:
http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/

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After 1992 Carville stopped working on domestic campaigns, stating that he would bring unneeded publicity. He then worked on a number of foreign campaigns, including those of Tony Blair - then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom - during the 2001 general election; Ehud Barak of Israel's Labor Party (at the suggestion of Clinton, who had grown frustrated with Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigence in the peace process) in the 1999 Knesset election; and the Liberal Party of Canada. In 2002, Carville worked as a Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS) strategist to help American-educated Bolivian Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada win the presidency in Bolivia, which was portrayed in a documentary Our Brand Is Crisis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carville