Fewer Gringos Like These, Please
When I lived in Germany, the one constant I tried to be aware of was the fact that I was a guest in the country. Imagine what the outcry would be if, for example, a Bolivian moved to Montana, purchased land on the cheap and acted like he was above the law. Unfortunately, it appears that the reverse is true. Meet Ronald Larsen and his son, Duston:
Tensions here erupted one day in February when Alejandro Almaraz, the deputy land minister, arrived before dawn at the entrance to Mr. Larsen’s Hacienda Caraparicito to carry out an inspection, a step usually taken before the government seizes ranches and redistributes them among indigenous farmers.
Both sides differ as to what happened, but everyone agrees that some violence ensued. “I didn’t want this guy making any trouble, so I shut him up with a shot at one of his tires,” Mr. Larsen was quoted as saying last month by La Razón, Bolivia’s main daily newspaper.
Mr. Almaraz said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by identifying the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”
Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”
If you want to see the definition of an Ugly American, I think this is it:
“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said.
I have always believed that the issue as to where one is in one's life is not where you are, but how far you've come. regardless of how one feels about Evo Morales - and I'm the first to say my feelings about him are mixed, what he has accomplished is striking in and of itself, especially considering where he started.
How this plays out - and to some extent this seems like a somewhat microcosmal view of the larger issues straining Bolivian society - remains to be seen, of course, but I don't think that the ugly rhetoric helps matters.


