Bolivian President-elect Evo Morales will follow up his meeting with Cuban President Fidel Castro with a trip to Venezuela today to see leftist President Hugo Chavez, his spokesman, Alex Contreras, said.
But Morales starting his international travels with visits to Castro and Chavez, the region's fiercest critics of Washington, does not mean he is opposed to developing ties with the US, Contreras said on Sunday.
Morales, who will head to Europe later this week to start a world tour, would have gone to Washington had he been invited, Contreras added.
The leftist Bolivian leader's close ties with Castro and Chavez "do not aim at an axis of evil; rather, to an axis of good," the spokesman said.
In reaching out to Havana and Caracas, Contreras said, Morales was consolidating "diplomatic, bilateral relations of respect,'' not relations based on "imposition ... [or] conditions.''
Morales, who takes office on Jan. 22, has criticized Washington for trying to impose its will on Bolivia and other Latin American countries.
Contreras said Morales was prepared to talk with US officials as long as diplomatic conditions are different from what they have been before.
If that doesn't happen, "unfortunately, relations with the United States can deteriorate badly,'' he said.
Officials in Washington have expressed concern about the growing relationship between Morales, Chavez and Castro -- part of a Latin American tilt to the left.
They are also worried about Morales' opposition to US-led efforts to eradicate coca cultivation in his Andean nation.
Coca is used to make cocaine but also has traditional uses among Bolivia's Indians.
Morales has eased his anti-US rhetoric after winning the Dec. 18 election, saying that while he supports coca growing he opposes cocaine trafficking.
Morales plans to spend only about six hours in Venezuela's capital before starting a tour of several European countries, South Africa, China and Brazil, Contreras said.
His trip to Caracas comes at the invitation of Chavez, who called Morales while he was in Havana according to Contreras. Morales returned to Bolivia from Cuba on Saturday.
Contreras also said Morales, who flew to and from Havana on a plane sent by Castro, had declined an offer from Castro to use a Cuban government jet on his world tour.
"There is great concern, especially on the part of Fidel, over the question of the security of the president-elect,'' said the spokesman, who added that allies in Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, were also worried about his safety.
He declined to be more specific about possible threats to Morales, but MAS leaders consider the US government a likely eventual enemy of Morales because of his pro-coca stance and his ideological links to Caracas and Havana.
Morales had thanked Castro for the offer of the plane, Contreras said, but preferred to take commercial flights and rely on "the security of the people.''
From Caracas, the 46-year-old Morales will fly to Madrid for a meeting tomorrow with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Unlike his trip to Cuba, where he was accompanied by a party of 60, Morales will go to Venezuela and on the rest of the tour with a small party including his economic adviser Carlos Villegas.
Contreras said Chavez has already offered aid to Morales' government, including a program to provide identity documents to thousands of Bolivian peasants, with the goal of boosting suffrage in rural areas.
Chavez ``has offered to make available to Bolivia all the technology and human resources for such a plan,'' Contreras said.
The regime in Havana also plans to offer free eye operations to as many as to 50,000 poor Bolivians needing them, as well as 5,000 university scholarships for Bolivian students to study in Cuba.
From Spain, Morales will fly to France and Belgium, but a visit to Holland was canceled.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS