The Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma (first from right) visited the European Parliament in May 2006 and had an exchange of views with the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, in a meeting presided by Elmar Brok, Chair of AFET Committee at the time (second from right). (EU Parliament photographic library, 15/05/2006).
If the plane of a European Union head of state or government, while passing over a Latin American country, had been forced to land by the country’s military and civil authorities, and then searched for 15 hours, say by the Bolivian police and secret agencies, the entire EU political establishment would have climbed at the rooftops shouting ‘thieves’. If this Latin American country was not so much liked by western financial giants, the repercussions could have reached a real economic embargo.
In real life however it was the plane of the Bolivian President Evo Morales this week that was forced to land in the Vienna airport and its passenger held in Austria for almost one day. During that time his plane was searched by Austrian police, possibly in collaboration with ally ‘experts’ who probably came for this purpose from Washington. During the search of the plane the western officials could have stolen the content of top-secret documents of President Morales and of course the documents related to his Moscow visit.
Intercepting Morales
Possibly the Europeans and their US allies had decided to force the Morales plane to land with or without Snowden aboard. Four EU countries, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal formed an impenetrable wall in their air space, not allowing Morales to go home as he planned. Later on four Latin American countries Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Uruguay joined Bolivia in asking explanations about the actual hijacking of Morales’s plane.
At the beginning the Europeans denied that this was a politically forced landing. The South Americans insisted however that the Europeans bowed to American demands and blocked the Morales plane. The reason was that the Bolivian leader a few hours before leaving Moscow, where he was on official business trip, had stated that his country may accord political asylum to Edward Snowden, if he applied for it.
Snowden is the hero of a modern time espionage story. He gives information to the Press about the US secret services surveillance and monitoring of half the earth’s population. The European Sting writer Elias Lacon wrote on 2 July: “The new chapter of this espionage story opened when the US National Security Agency ex-adviser, Edward Snowden, gave more information to the Press about an American operation designed to steal top-secret documents from the EU mission in the US. The NSA not only had managed to systematically monitor the internal electronic communications of the EU mission but they had filled the building with bugs”.
Bugged and obedient
The Bolivian leader stated the obvious, that the European countries obeyed the Americans and forced his plane to land in Vienna. The accusation was even more embarrassing because only days ago two major European media, Der Spiegel and The Guardian, revealed that the Americans had bugged the entire EU mission’s building in the US. It was not only that. There are more media reports that the Americans monitor every month hundreds of millions of telephone calls, SMSs, e-mails and every other type of communications in Europe.
The first to break the silence was the Spanish minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel García-Margallo. Speaking in a radio interview in Madrid he revealed that the Europeans “were told that Snowden was aboard the plane of Morales”. He didn’t clarify who ‘told the Europeans’ but you don’t need a crystal ball to understand where the demand came from. Incidentally Snowden was not found in the Morales plane by the Austrian and the American agents who searched it meticulously.
It is then true that the Europeans, despite the fact that the Americans bugged the entire EU mission’s building in the US and monitored all their electronic communications, they still bowed unconditionally to the American demand to block the Morales plane.
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