President Evo Morales has responded to recent overtures by the Obama Administration to normalize relations by threatening to expel the U.S. Agency for International Development from Bolivia, adding to his list of U.S. government officials he has thrown out of the country.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela recently traveled to Bolivia to accelerate talks on an agreement to re-establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries.
His trip also set the stage for a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca on the margins of the Organization of American States General Assembly in Lima, Peru, to discuss normalizing relations.
Those relations were severed in 2008 after Morales expelled U.S. ambassador to Bolivia Phillip Goldberg, along with DEA agents who were working to control cocaine trafficking into the United States. Since then, coca production in Bolivia and the resultant trafficking in cocaine has dramatically increased.
Morales is also demanding an overhaul of U.S. assistance programs in Bolivia, insisting that officials from his administration be handed over the funds to decide who benefits - a direct contravention of U.S. law.
Morales's latest anti-American broadside directed at USAID came at a conference of coca growers in which he was re-elected president of the union. He claimed the development agency was funding local farmers to protest against government agricultural policy.
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