Our People in La Paz

In Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene offers a fictious peek into the world of how citizenship and presumed loyalty to kin and country is invoked to have foreign nationals visiting a country for honest reasons engage in the sneaky business of espionage.

For many people, the novel and later motion picture seemed like only the stuff of which best-sellers and block-busters were made. In other words, that sort of thing - the psuedo-conscription of ordinary people into "the secret service" - did not really happen. Did it?

Over the years, small, almost invisible and therefore easily forgettable stories of how the CIA would lurk around idealistic Peace Corps volunteers and alumni as well as unsuspecting graduate students would pop up - ever so briefly - from time to time. In fact, even when a relatively well documented example arose such as the publication of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, most ordinary people barely took even a passing notice.

Well, it will be interesting to see if and how that long-standing trend of good ole Yankee Doodle Denial will hold form with the news that United States Embassy officials in La Paz, Bolivia have been actively attempting to recruit the aforementioned ordinary people to help them keep tabs on the movements of Venezuelans and Cubans in that long-impoverished South American country suddenly energized by emergent and dignified democracy and also polarized by hostility and fear-mongering by an politically and economically endangered reactionary elites.Here are a few links to the story:

ABC News (broke the story)


Peace Corps Members Asked to Spy


Asked to Keep Tabs on Cubans in Bolivia


Asking Fulbright Scholars to Spy


'This man's asking me to spy'


Scholar: U.S. Sought Help in Bolivia


Of course, after reading this example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same, this writer cannot help but think of how we have yet another glaring example of what former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson describes as "blowback," that process by which the dirty tricks of the U.S. government unknown (or ignored) by the U.S. people makes them tempting targets for elements bent on exacting some measure of revenge for Yankee hubris.