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#bolivian coup
despazito · 7 months
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germany's green party after the country phases out all nuclear energy to save the planet and becomes the EU's largest coal consumer
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cupidhaseul · 1 year
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behind the bastards used to be my fave podcast then i realized how many times robert evans mentions his opinions on very controversial events as fact which lead me down a rabbit hole of finding out his employer (bellingcat) is funded by the cia's propaganda fund and suddenly everything made sense
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afloweroutofstone · 5 months
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The leftist Bolivian government of Evo Morales’ MAS party cut all diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 to protest their occupation of Gaza. When a right-wing coup overthrew the Bolivian government in 2019, the coup government re-established relations. When democracy returned in 2020, the majority of the Bolivian people elected the MAS party back into power under new leadership. Yesterday, the MAS government once again ended its diplomatic relations with Israel in protest of their occupation of Gaza.
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don-lichterman · 2 years
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Bolivian ex-President Anez jailed for 10 years for mounting coup | Politics News
Bolivian ex-President Anez jailed for 10 years for mounting coup | Politics News
Ex-President Jeanine Anez found guilty of orchestrating a coup that brought her to power in 2019. A Bolivian court has found former President Jeanine Anez guilty of orchestrating a coup that brought her to power during a 2019 political crisis and sentenced her to 10 years in prison. Anez, 54, was convicted on Friday of making “decisions contrary to the constitution” and of “dereliction of…
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zvaigzdelasas · 5 months
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Former leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales called Sunday on his country's government to sever ties with "Israel" and declare it a "terrorist state" in light of the massacres it is committing in occupied Palestine and its continuous aggression on the Gaza Strip. "When we came to power after winning the elections in September/December 2005, we severed our ties with Israel due to our pacifist and anti-imperialistic principles," Morales wrote on X. He recalled that after the US-backed November 2019 coup, Bolivia obeyed "the orders of the [US] empire" and restored its relations with the Israeli occupation.
22 Oct 23
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radiofreederry · 10 months
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Happy birthday, Che Guevara! (June 14, 1928)
One of the 20th Century's most impactful revolutionaries, Ernesto "Che" Guevara grew up in a well-off family with left-wing sympathies in Argentina. As a young medical student, Guevara embarked on a trek across Latin America which would change him forever, as he came to see the plight of the poor and destitute firsthand. He was further radicalized by his experiences in Guatemala, where he witnessed the coup carried out by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company against progressive President Jacobo Arbenz. This event galvanized Guevara's view of the United States as the world's foremost imperial power, one which had to be opposed and fought to achieve economic and social freedom for Latin America, and cemented his commitment to armed revolution as a force for social change. To this end, he joined the forces of Fidel and Raul Castro, and became a leading figure in the Cuban Revolution. During the revolution Guevara helped to established schools and medical facilities for campesinos, and helped lead the revolutionaries to victory in the Battle of Santa Clara. After the revolution, Guevara played a major role in the new Cuban government, overseeing land reform and literacy campaigns. However, he soon felt a desire to continue his revolutionary activities, traveling abroad to support revolutionary movements in Africa and South America. While in Bolivia leading the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla, he was captured and executed by the Bolivian government.
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
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hotvampireadjacent · 2 months
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Good lord. I knew the oil industry was drenched in blood but I didn’t know that literally. Still reading opens veins of Latin America. How the oil barons keep control over Latin America and sometimes literally instigating coups and wars for their own advantage.
One specific example is the Chaco war of 1932-1935. “Huey long shook the United States on may 30,1934 with a violent speech according standard oil of New Jersey of provoking the conflict and of financing the Bolivian army so that it would appropriate the Paraguayan Chaco on its behalf. It needed the Chaco- which was also thought to be rich in petroleum- for a pipeline from Bolivia to the river. “These criminals,” Long charged, “have gone down there and hired their assassins.” At Shell’s urging, the Paraguayans marched to the slaughterhouse: advancing northward, the soldiers discovered standard oil’s perforations at the scene of the dispute. It was a quarrel between two corporations, enemies and at the same time partners within the cartel, but it was not they who shed their blood.” (Page 163)
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leftistfeminista · 7 months
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The Real Life Handmaid's Tale of Pinochet's Chile
Nieves Ayress Moreno, a MIRista militant after being severely tortured at Villa Grimaldi, was transferred to a prison run by Catholic Nuns. She had become pregnant from repeated rapes by Junta guards. "Dr. Mery, a military doctor who practiced at the Catholic University, and who told me that I should be proud to have a "son of the fatherland." Despite her health being in danger, her only hope of an abortion, under Chile's ultra-strict "pro-life laws" was to appeal to the Pope himself. A revolutionary feminist woman, in a prison run by Catholic nuns, forced to give birth. It is a nightmare out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale come to life.
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STATEMENT OF LUZ DE LAS NIEVES AYRESS MORENO
In New York, State of New York, United States of America, on ____ days of the month of August of the year two thousand, Mrs. Luz de las
Nieves Ayress Moreno (born in Chile under the name Luz de las Nieves Ayress Moreno, Chilean citizen, legal profession, domiciled in New York, New York, USA, passport No. 6.347.871-7) of legal age, who demonstrated her identity with your passport, and states:
I make this statement to be presented as evidence in the cases pending against General Augusto Pinochet and his subordinates in Chile. I make this statement under oath and with full knowledge of the crime of perjury.
The facts are the following: I was born in Santiago, Chile on October 5, 1948. I joined the Bolivian National Liberation Army, an arm of the Socialist Party in Chile, in 1968, and in 1973 I was still a militant and ELN activist, working with women and children in the towns. I was also an art and journalism student at the University of Chile. After 1973, I was a member of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left of Chile (MIR).
A few weeks after the coup, I was at the house of the mother of a friend of mine who was in prison, when, around 10 pm, a group of police officers arrived and arrested me. They handcuffed me and took me first to the Carabineros NCO School, and, after two or three days, to the National Stadium. (At the stadium, the carabinieri would tell me that my friend's mother had named me in the hope of saving her own daughter.) At the NCO School, they beat me and slapped me. They also touched my body, threatened me with sexual advances, and insulted me. The prisoners were kept in some cells that were in the back of the School, in the stables.
In March 1974 I was transferred to the Women's Prison on Vicuña Mackenna Street, in Santiago, which was under the administration of an order of jailer nuns. Here I was in free conversation, and I stayed in a patio with the other political prisoners; they kept political prisoners apart.
In April I found out that I was pregnant, and this was confirmed by Dr. Mery, a military doctor who practiced at the Catholic University, and who told me that I should be proud to have a "son of the country." My pregnancy caused great controversy. By now my case was internationally known, due to the efforts of my mother and family to denounce what was happening to me, and also because a woman who was imprisoned with me in the Vicuña Mackenna women's prison had managed to get a my statement I was interviewed by the International Red Cross, the Kennedy Commission, Amnesty International, the International Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS), the United Nations High Commissioner, by Bishop Aristía of Santiago, a Dr. Phillippe , and by Cardinal Raul Silva Henríquez, who came to see his niece, who was also in prison. A group of military wives came to visit me, and they promised me my freedom if I didn't make any more statements about my pregnancy and my torture, and they threatened to take away my son once he was born.
The nuns offered to help me request permission for an abortion. I was not a religious, but because I was in a prison run by religious, I had to submit a request to the cardinal, and from the cardinal to the Pope. In Chile, abortion is punishable by law for five years and one day. I was physically very ill, and if I had a clandestine abortion in prison I could die, and for this reason I decided to have the child. After having survived months of torture and detention, I was not going to give the military the pleasure of killing me. However, in April or May, I started having a lot of pain in my belly, and losing blood clots. I miscarried spontaneously. I received no medical care during the pregnancy or miscarriage.
I never had a legal process. General Bonilla, who took an interest in my case, sent an officer to interview me in jail about my pregnancy and the sexual abuse and other torture I had suffered. In this interview, the officer told me that at one point there were three different lawsuits against me, but that the lawsuits were so contradictory to each other that the military courts declared themselves incompetent in my case. Later there was an order to transfer me to the Pisagua concentration camp, with the penalty of firing squad, but General Bonilla blocked it; he did not agree with the treatment of male and female prisoners. However, I was sentenced to imprisonment "by virtue of the state of siege."
Two dams, M .D. and María Emilia Tijaux, were with me in the women's prison, and they are witnesses of the weak state in which I found myself. Eventually my case got too complicated because of all the controversy it was causing, and since I had no official conviction from the court, in March of 1975 I was transferred to Tres Alamos.
In Tres Alamos, where I remained until December 1976, I was again subjected to rape, threats, insults, and other psychological torture. Comandante Pacheco, who was in charge of Tres Alamos, constantly abused me, subjecting me to sexual harassment for almost two years. He liked to walk around the concentration camp with me next to him. I was very weak, and I fainted frequently. I stayed in a cell with eight other companions. Another prisoner, Marcia Scantlebury, was also badly abused by Comandante Pacheco.
In the spring, I don't remember what month, they transferred us prisoners from Tres Alamos for a month to Pirque, in the mountains, because a group from the UN Human Rights Commission was coming to Chile, and they wanted to avoid a visit to Tres Alamos. It was to give a good image before the UN delegation. I was very depressed, and I felt anxious. He ate and cried a lot. The beauty of the place somehow broke me psychologically.
After a month they took us back to Tres Alamos. We continue to organize ourselves to do craft work to sell abroad. Three babies were born, and we all took care of them. My mother and my aunts would visit me in Tres Alamos. At this time my mother was making arrangements for me to go to Germany.
In December, I was expelled from Chile by the dictatorship with 17 compañeros and compañeras. The dictatorship published a special decree to expel us, leaving us with no right of return. On this list were Gladys Díaz, Víctor Toro, Luis Corbalán, and 15 other colleagues. Many international organizations, such as the Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner, and "CIME", UN HIGH COMMISSIONER and the solidarity of the peoples of the world, helped to get me out. In Berlin I had acquaintances, and I stayed with Nuria Nuñez, and also with Gilde Botay. During this time I was dedicated to publicly denouncing what was happening in Chile, and I traveled a lot.
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Leverage Season 3, Episode 16, The San Lorenzo Job, Audio Commentary Transcript
Marc: Hi I'm Marc Roskin, director of the season finale.
John: John Rogers, executive producer and co-writer of this part of the season finale.
Scott: Scott Veach, the co-writer of this part of the season finale.
Aldis: Aldis Hodge, actor, Hardison, yeah that guy.
Christian: I'm Christian Kane, I play Eliot Spencer.
Chris: Chris Downey, executive producer. And this is part two of our season three season finale, The San Lorenzo Job.
John: Starting with the brief flashforward, which I think has become the kind of signature of the season finale.
Christian: I like it.
John: The little jump forward, the little ‘this is what you're gonna see.’
Aldis: Yup, yup.
John: And this is the reset scene, this is the last time you guys are in the bar for the year.
Christian: Yup.
John: And just to remind everyone - cause we didn't know if they were gonna show them back to back - exactly what we're doing, what the stakes are, and why they're going.
Chris: Now the origin of this one was Scott, you came in with the one liner, where they steal a country?
John: Well it was two, because I had that saint story, remember when I was a kid?
Chris: Oh, right.
John: And Scott had come in nicely enough with the exact same he wanted to do, which was-?
Scott: Yeah, when I was a computer scientist, I had a friend from Nigeria, who told me that in Nigeria, when they were kids, one of the things they do is they sit around and argue about who could coup the country if it came to it.
[Laughter]
Scott: And they used twinkies, and they'd put twinkies down and argue over what the right pathways are. And I was telling John this and we were saying it would be great for Leverage to coup a country, and that dovetailed with something you'd already been thinking of.
John: That dovetailed with the saint story, the Simon Tepler story about The Revolution Racket, which I read when I was 12. And the whole idea of somebody taking over a country just because somebody pissed them off just stuck with me for 30 years.
Christian: Right, yeah.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: And so that was- alright, well that's insanely ambitious and impossible to write, let’s bang that out in a week.
[Laughter]
Marc: And you believe it!
Christian: Yeah, you do.
John: And that's the fun of having, you know, Scott is experienced in computer science and technology and I'm a conspiracy geek, you know there’s- we don't do anything in this episode that you couldn't really do.
Christian: So let me ask you a question, you're saying that someone actually stole a country before?
[Laughter]
John: It’s come close.
Christian: There you go, exactly that’s what I'm- yeah.
John: And then- it was picking the country, making sure we found it. What was great was we found- like, don't want to go Africa, can't shoot in Africa, can’t duplicate it. Can't go to Latin America, can't shoot the geography. So finding a European country, and it turns out I knew somebody who specialized in journalism of small countries. She had written about the smallest countries in the world, and so I knew there were some countries kicking around that were this small.
[Ice rattling in a glass]
Chris: And there was another source- piece of source material for this that was very helpful, which was a documentary called Our Brand Is Crisis. Which was a great- if you get a chance, a great documentary about how James Carville's team went down to Bolivia, I guess in 2002?
John: I think so.
Chris: And basically won the Bolivian election for an ousted president, and there were kind of horrible consequences that followed from it.
Scott: Yeah.
[Laughter]
Chris: And we got a lot of great stuff from that.
John: Yeah. And that's the trick is to just, you know, you don't really have to make stuff up, the real stuff out there, you just gotta dig deep enough. This actually is great- this is digitally treated, you just shot the footage.
Marc: Yeah. I mean every time you're in this room and you see these screens, it’s always green screen, so the visual effects department having to labor.
Christian: But it's great, it really shows the distance between us and him right there, you know.
Aldis: Yeah.
Marc: Yeah, we gave it that glitchy techno feel.
John: It was also nice how you dropped in, “At ease.”
Christian: Yeah.
John: That was I just-
Christian: Thanks man.
John: No, I noticed that, my brother would do that when-
Christian: You know, I used- I was talking to you, I used kinda a little bit of George Clooney in The Peacemaker for this scene. I just kinda-
John: You know what? Underrated movie, by the way.
Scott: Very true, very true.
Chris: That is, it’s true, it’s a really good movie.
Christian: Absolutely, absolutely, it's one of my all time favorites.
John: I love that flick.
Christian: And I just used the fact that it doesn't make any sense to- anyway.
Chris: It’s one of the first times we saw somebody from Eliot's past, and I thought- and we’ll get to it later-
John: Who's not dead.
Christian: Right.
[Laughter]
Chris: But the camaraderie, it was like it opened up the character in a lot of ways. I thought it was great.
John: Yeah, this guy met bad guys and good guys. It’s interesting, cause we wanted to crack open Eliot for this season, but the character doesn't lend himself to long bits of exposition.
Christian: Right.
John: So we had to do it through indirect means. And then we find out Hardison was a ninja next season.
[Laughter]
Christian: That's right.
Aldis: Yes we do.
John: Raised by his nana, his nana was like a shogun. No, that was all a nice beat. And considering you guys were all acting to a green screen that was very emotional, very nicely done. This staging was a bitch, by the way, cause you had three and two.
Marc: Three and two, and a lot of page count.
John: Yeah.
Marc: A lot of page count.
John: And it's tough because page count- shooting a lot of pages in here means it's not a place you have to go to that you have to light, that you have to shoot in a different way than you're used to, you know the set. But this set requires you to have five humans in it.
Marc: Right.
John: And so there's this sort of cancellation of the advantages. No, nice beat by Tim there, just “Oh, we fucked up.”
Christian: And by the way, Goran was nice enough to come in that day and sit over to the side; he's actually in the room with us reading.
John: That was his first day!
Chris: Yeah, I think that was his first day.
Marc: It was his first day during his wardrobe fitting.
Christian: Yeah.
John: Yeah, and we had not met him, and he came in and sat off to this side and did the mocking speech, and I remember thinking, “Ah that’s it! That’s it right there!”
[Laughter]
Christian: No, it was perfect.
John: You could actually see the whole cast like, “Oh, I get who this guy is.”
Aldis: Ahhh.
John: No, he's fantastic in this.
Scott: Yeah, he looks the part.
John: Absolutely you could do him with Saint.
Scott: Oh yeah.
John: Yeah, you could [unintelligible mumbling] absolutely.
Chris: Yeah, he hasn't really played bad guys. I mean the most-
John: No, this was his first real bad guy.
Chris: First real bad guy.
John: He said it was why he took it, so he could get a chance to do it. It's also nice why he said, “You used to,” to Eliot, just a reminder again to the audience of some history there, some past there. And, you know, kind of a center of gravity of emotion there.
Christian: Yeah. This was actually really tough.
John: Yeah, cause he’s not- he’s holding it in.
Marc: Yeah, cause you feel at fault.
John: No, it was a- Hardison kind of playing straight ahead, Parker not dealing with emotion well, and then straight to the “ciao.” And then the hatred. The hatred.
Chris: And we did it a bunch of times, too, cause I remember we did it a number of times.
Christian: Yeah, it was tough.
Marc: Beautiful San Lorenzo.
Christian: I didn’t want to screw it up.
John: Beautiful scenic San Lorenzo.
Christian: That was actually before the first episode- that was one of the first scenes up, it was like we just had-
Chris: Yeah.
John: It was a cold start.
Marc: See the digital background there, beautiful stuff.
Chris: And great music here, that we’re not listening to.
John: Yes.
Marc: Oh yeah.
Chris: But I've been hearing it in my head from Joe LoDuca.
John: What was really fun was that Joe LoDuca, because I said this was the Mission Impossible episode I always wanted to write-
Chris: Yeah.
John: He put a little Schiffer in the score here. It was really- he put a little 1960’s Mission Impossible in the score.
Scott: Yeah.
Christian: I gotta be honest with you though, her in that dress, I don't think people are gonna be listening to the music.
[Laughter]
John: You know the people who care are. And this is the Schnitzer Theater.
Marc: Schnitzer Auditorium.
Aldis: Yeah.
Marc: Downtown Portland.
Chris: Oh boy, does that look great.
John: And this was the location that kept on giving.
Christian: Yup.
John: We walked in here on scout and at this point the finale- this part of the finale was not yet written, because I knew- we'd done the rough draft, but I was up in Portland scouting locations. And I knew we had to do it- we had to rewrite based on what we could get, and that was the layout of the original script.
Scott: Yeah.
John: We were just so lucky to get that auditorium. And this was great, James Draper from Mad Men, kind of the vibe there, that was the name check.
Chris: Sure, and the suit is very much Our Man In Havana.
Scott: Yes, it really sells it.
John: Our Man In Havana is definitely- that's one of the movies we talk about that nobody ever has seen. Alec Guinness, Our Man In Havana is a great flick.
Christian: Again Nadien Haders, but I gotta believe Tim had a lot to do with this as well.
John: Yeah, Tim likes a hat.
Scott: He does.
Aldis: Likes a hat.
Marc: And this guy was great. Humberto.
Scott: He was amazing.
Aldis: Yeah, he was.
Marc: He was just fantastic. Again another tall guy between Alistar, Humberto, and Goran, Nadine went through every extra large dress shirt and coat in Portland.
Christian: Big and tall.
Aldis: Big and tall store.
John: About two days in I was like “Humberto, with 8 months and 2 million dollars, I could make you governor of Oregon.”
Christian: Yeah, right, exactly.
[Laughter]
John: He's got that- and he's a local Portland actor, he showed up for auditions it’s like, wow this guy has got it!
Chris: Well I think Lana had been sitting on him for a while, she was waiting for the right part.
John: And this was a ton of fun, this is of course, all the people who work on the show we’re taking photos of.
Aldis: Yup.
John: And also again, the two of them as peers, you know, planning it. We don’t show you what's on the screen, it’s horrible. Assume it involves half of a clown outfit.
[Laughter]
Chris: The wrong half.
John: What's the right half? 
[Laughter]
John: And this was great cause when we were shooting this Tim was like, “What is this?” And we said “The Music Man” and he said, “Ahh, The Music Man.” And he got it, he really laid into exactly how to play this. Because it’s not mocking, he’s not joking.
Christian: Right, right.
John: He's gotta sell this guy on this.
Chris: Come along with me, I'm gonna take you.
John: Absolutely The Music Man in this scene, and Girl Friday in the later one.
Chris: Yeah.
John: When they're trying to get rid of Ralph Bellamy.
Scott: And it’s this guy's reaction that really sells it, too. He believes it so we believe it.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: No, and then the sort of pitying looks from Aldis and Gina are lovely.
Aldis: The sparkle in his eye.
John: There you go, now we make a dream in order to betray people. This is the most deeply cynical episode we've ever done.
[Laughter]
John: Even I was morally troubled by this episode.
[Laughter]
John: Because I realized about three quarters of the way through, I said, “Wait, we took the only decent man in the country and we corrupted him in order to get- to win this election.”
Christian: Right, right.
Chris: Watch the documentary, man.
[Laughter]
Christian: You know what, don't forget, though, we're still criminals. That's the whole thing.
Aldis: We do.
John: I know. I'm always the first to say the Leverage crew are not good guys, they are protagonists. But there are times even I am like, “Wow, I found this amusing, there's something wrong with me.”
Christian: Yeah. [Laughs]
Marc: This is the lovely library room in the Governor Hotel.
Aldis: Yup.
John: Beautiful ceiling.
Marc: Beautiful ceiling.
John: Comes dressed with books, nice.
Marc: And Alastair Duncan is just fantastic.
John: Oh man, and that was- we were really lucky, cause we were so focused on Vittori, and so focused on Moreau. This isn't a big character role, and he anchors it, he really nails it.
Chris: And I always love the “Just sign it.” That’s my favorite bit.
Scott: Oh yeah.
Marc: This was- if you remember John, this was a ten page day.
John: Yes.
Scott: Oh my god.
John: Yes, this was a ten page day. Other shows do not shoot ten pages. Movies shoot three.
Christian: Yeah.
John: But average on other shows is five, six?
Marc: This was just a bear. But these guys were all just so prepared.
Christian: You know, it was just one of those things where we said, “Ok look, we got the two scripts came together, we got the first- the first and second part of the season finale,” and everyone said, “Let’s just buckle down and knock this out of the park.” And everyone ran full speed ahead the whole time, nobody fell, nobody slowed up. For three weeks straight.
John: You guys absolutely proved yourself. And that's the thing the boys, Goran, Tim, and Alastair showed up with the blocking kind of in their heads, cause we had that room-
Marc: When you get to that moment I said, “How do you want to do this? Tim, do you want to do this in pieces?” And he said, “Let's do all five pages.”
John: Yeah, so we shot like a play.
Christian: Yeah.
Marc: Yeah, so each take was five pages.
John: And just shot from different coverage. Yeah, incredible.
Marc: It was brilliant.
John: No, great local actors. By the way, I like to say, this is some of the best extra acting work I've seen in a television show.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: All the extras are fantastic.
Chris: And here's a pairing I always enjoy.
John: You love a good Parker and Eliot.
Chris: You guys together.
Christian: Yeah, it's fun.
Marc: Another high angle on the tombs, another great set that we built.
Christian: Like Hardison just makes me mad, but she actually, like, annoys me.
[Laughter]
Marc: This is the Frankenstein set reconstructed.
Aldis: Oh, yeah.
John: And she enjoys annoying him. Actively.
Christian: Yeah, that's it.
John: Hardison doesn’t, Hardison doesn't realize what he's doing to piss you off, she actively enjoys annoying you.
[Laughter]
Chris: And you'll tease her, that's what I like, too.
John: And the funny thing is the off screen thing is reversed. No one makes Beth crack up like you do, because I was there when you shot that god damn fashion thing.
Christian: It’s true, it’s tough for us to do a scene together, we always end up laughing.
John: And that was the little frustration bit where she doesn't understand humans can't crawl through steam.
Christian: Right, right.
John: Very nice beat. I forget where the bit that she can tell how deep she is by echo came from, but-
Scott: Right here, oh yeah.
John: It's one of those bits that I think we threw as a joke in the room and then it wouldn't go away.
[Laughter]
John: Like no, no, that's how she works. She's not totally human. She's got some manticore DNA in there. Exactly.
Scott: Echolocation.
John: She's got some echolocation going on.
Marc: This is a great scene. I loved how you guys wrote Sophie just getting more involved and involved in playing a part.
John: Watching someone-
Christian: Sophie always gets over involved in everything!
John: But this is unique in- we talked about when we were plotting out the scene, it wasn't just the rescue. It was the idea that this actor and this character had to be super sympathetic, but also when you're someone who can win strangers over, watching someone do it this badly is like watching someone play solitaire and not seeing the red ten.
Christian: Right.
John: You know, it's like how can anyone suck this much, and that’s what really sucks her in.
Christian: Right, and that's why everyone loves Sophie, is the simple fact-
Aldis: She has a heart.
Christian: That like- it's like Angel, it’s the vampire with a heart. She's the world's best grifter, you can't be a grifter and have any sort of a heart, and she has a heart. And it's a beautiful character.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: Goran plays this perfectly. This is a great pairing, Alastair doing the comedic sort of classic British character actor thing.
Marc: Right.
John: And Goran starting to play the chess game. Starting to realize something’s wrong. This was lovely. Just this little- and we tried to figure out what would she do that isn't overly intimate, that's just right?
Marc: Enough to give you a sense.
Chris: And they have really nice chemistry together.
John: They have great chemistry together, great chemistry. When he calls her “dear” later in the script you totally buy it, that he’s just sucked into the con.
Chris: Yeah.
Marc: And this is, of course, Moreau-
John: Nice crane up there.
Marc: Yeah, realizing that something’s up.
John: And it's interesting, cause we'd originally put them way farther back in the room, remember? So you had to pick them out. But that close up actually works better, cause it just announces to the audience that the game is on. And this again, this is our fable, okay? This is us taking every element of real elections that we don't like and exaggerating them that little bit more. But the idea that they would fixate on the beautiful girl touching him? Absolutely believable.
Christian: Right.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
John: And the fact that you could sweep up a media by announcing, sort of, a glorious engagement? Absolutely believable.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: You know, it’s all about controlling news cycles.
Marc: That’s my first toilet shot.
[Laughter]
Christian: Nice.
John: First one?
Marc: Yeah, very clean toilet.
Aldis: Is that a first for Leverage as well?
Marc: Yeah, I think so.
Aldis: Congratulations, Roskin. Boom.
John: That was also a lot of fun, is we designed the tombs, and then realized we hadn't figured out any way to get stuff back and forth.
Christian: Right.
John: So yeah. But that's always the better way to start, write backwards. He's great, by the way, absolutely fantastic.
Christian: He's great.
John: And believable as a military man, and somebody that he could have known.
Marc: There's just a subtle moment here that's just so great. You know, when the general says, “Would you leave your people behind?” And this exchange between you and Beth, it just- my eyes always well up, right here. Just, she has no idea what's being said, but it’s just so effective.
Christian: Wow.
John: Yeah, you should do this for a living.
[Laughter]
Christian: I know.
Aldis: You awed yourself, didn't you?
Christian: I did, a little bit, yeah.
Aldis: Do it again, dammit.
Christian: I hadn't seen this yet, and then she comes in.
John: And also you've forgotten. I mean that’s the thing, these things ran at ten pages a day, sixteen hours, it's blinding.
Christian: Yeah, that's exactly it.
John: And her play there, that- the little scene out on her, just she’s bugged.
Christian: Yeah.
John: That is not the Parker from first season.
Christian: No, it’s not.
John: Beth’s done a really great job of modulating Parker forward through all three years.
Scott: Without losing the core, which is always tricky.
Aldis: She has some of the best facial reactions, too, to express her character.
John: Yeah. It's never not Parker, but you can see Parker evolving. 
Scott: Evolving, yeah.
John: This is fantastic, he's so hapless.
Marc: And Gina did a great job here.
John: With the accent and just dropping it in.
Marc: Yeah. “We're getting married!”
John: And look how delighted-
[Laughter]
John: And the extras sell it. They really do, like, “Everyone loves a wedding!”
Christian: That's so great.
John: “It’s so delightful, that nice boy is getting married.” You know, it absolutely works. Love the smiles, love those people.
Marc: What I love about a lot of this episode is the pairing between Tim and Aldis, and not having him in a van.
Aldis: Thank god!
Christian: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris: Yeah, there was no van here.
Aldis: Thank god.
Marc: There are so many great moments-
John: You're in a suit looking fine.
Scott: Yeah, yeah.
Aldis: That van, boy.
Scott: An expensive suit.
Aldis: Rented it out for the day.
John: And this was a lot of fun, too, was the controlling information through the phones, through the screens people got their information from.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: And it actually was started because Bill Cosby had been announced dead on Twitter for like the third time. And for, like, four hours I was going, “Oh god, Bill Cosby's dead!” 
[Laughter]
John: And I realized like, “Wait no, Bill Cosby’s not dead.”
Christian: Right.
John: But he is actually, for all intents and purposes, dead to everyone who's reading those.
Scott: For those four hours.
Christian: Yeah, wow.
John: For those four hours, until he makes the announcement.
Christian: Wow.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: And that's really what bore part of- the birth of part of this episode.
Scott: Well he even has that line: “I only need them to believe it for a few hours,” or something.
John: Yeah, exactly, that's why we threw it in. We only need it for ten minutes. And this speech is fantastic, and this is- Goran did a lot of work on this speech.
Marc: Yes.
John: And this is also one of the reasons I love you guys is, this is not fancy directing. This is just park on the actors, and let them work.
Marc: But of course we had to have a crane to reach them.
[Laughter]
John: Well, that's not my problem.
Aldis: Oh that's right, you guys were downstairs while we’re upstairs.
Chris: Well there's the crane, that's right, that’s right.
John: Yeah, because you had the crane up from that shot up to him, and then you shot it with that, oh wow.
Marc: We got it.
John: And just Nate running an enormous bluff here.
Marc: Yes.
Chris: And also, this is a rare episode because it’s two adversaries in the show; usually we’re in the shadows, we’re undercover, we’re playing somebody. Here it's just out in the open a chess match.
Marc: Yup
Chris: Between these two people. Which is not something we’d done before.
John: Yeah, the first one, they stayed under until they could get the Davids. The second one, he got busted by Shepard, but he was playing from an underhand.
Chris: Right.
John: Yeah, this is the first time it’s like, yeah this guy could serve us our lunch.
Christian: That's what I was saying; it was very strange for me, because I came up to John I was like, “Dude, what am I gonna- how do I play it?” Cause he knows Eliot’s in town. He knows what I do ‘cause I used to do it for him. He's gotta be scared a little bit, and that's what- Goran was and his character was not. And he knows we’re there, and it's very much out in the open and we've never done that before.
Scott: And we always called it a chess match, but what's kinda cool about it is that when it's out in the open it kinda has the flavor of a slug fest, too.
Christian: It does, exactly.
Scott: Toe to toe, just taking swings.
Christian: That’s exactly what it is, a street fight.
Chris: But the great thing is we had a political campaign. So we had rules, we had a clock, I mean, it gave us a structure for the whole con.
John: Yeah, I love that acting beat there. Just the little look away, the down- also I like that hat a lot, I'm not gonna lie.
Christian: Yeah.
Marc: And the campaign’s growing, we have more posters and people.
John: We had a very specific timeline on the campaign room. We had three phases: the despair phase, the growing phase, and the triumph phase. And we had to make sure- because we have ADs, first ADs work hard. They have to pack that room to make it look different each time. Yes, and this is Girl Friday. He's Ralph Bellamy, and he's just gonna be pushed around and manipulated.
Chris: That's a great line.
Christian: Wow.
John: And again, the campaign promise: “How is a campaign promise not like a lie?” “It's complicated!”
Aldis: Yeah.
[Laughter]
John: Deeply cynical, deeply cynical stuff.
Chris: Great comic timing on that.
John: Yeah well, Tim’s a funny guy, That’s why we’re very blessed, all you guys can land a joke. You know, that's- you don't get that lucky all the time. And then the little snarky look from her. And again, that attitude that character would not have had first or second year. Really both the characters, and the actors have driven the characters. This is what- by the way, what he's- the rough estimation he’s doing is called the Fermi Problem, something that I was taught back in my physics days, is you just do order of magnitude guesses.
Scott: Right.
John: And it allows you to just make good, order of magnitude guesses without having to grind out the actual math and boring the audience. Like I am right- now!
[Laughter]
Marc: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: And now you've hit stop, and now you're back in it.
John: There's some physicists out there in their underwear just freaking out because I said Fermi Problem.
[Laughter]
John: This was a ton of fun. That was a street in Portland!
Marc: This is all exterior Portland, yes.
John: Yeah that's done on Ankeny. That's fantastic! That's done on cobblestone! That's fantastic, yeah. And just putting up posters. And we got a lot of photos of the Italian elections actually, and used those as the models for the poster style and density and stuff. And this was Aldis working hard, second unit.
Aldis: Yes, indeed.
John: “Now loosen the tie, it's later!”
Aldis: Yeah, small little room, dig it. 
Chris: And there's his- what's in his cabinet? Incoming cabinet?
Marc: Yes, incoming cabinet.
John: Yup, doing the JFK short sleeve thing. It was great, it was a ton of fun.
Christian: Was that supposed to be me putting that poster up?
John: No, no, no, that is the locals who are so filled with joy at the chance to be liberated.
[Laughter]
John: It also had a really pretty light cause we ran out of light and blew it out from the side.
Marc: This is a great graphic that Derek built for-
[Laughter]
Marc: For the campaign.
Aldis: Light it on fire!
John: What's crazy is it should be over the top, but if you looked at this year's election, it wasn't!
Scott: Yeah!
Marc: It wasn't as bad!
Chris: No, not at all.
Christian: I was just gonna say it's totally, exactly what's going on.
Scott: Not even this year’s election-
Chris: This is very restrained.
Scott: Yeah, like even the 60’s there were the nuke- the kid- the little girl with the flower ad.
John: The daisy ad, only aired once.
Scott: Yeah, and then the nuclear bomb explodes, it’s crazy.
Chris: Oh, and child labor!
John: By the way, that was great casting, that kid. “Alright now look sad, now look like they beat you! Alright, that's perfect.”
[Laughter]
John: No, we're not gonna beat him, no, sorry.
Christian: Such a beautiful shot, by the way, Roskin.
Marc: Thank you.
Christian: And again were back in that-
Chris: Oh, that made me laugh.
John: That's a great joke.
Chris: That made me laugh very hard.
Aldis: That kid had fun that day.
John: That's a lovely joke.
Marc: And Alastair plays that well.
John: And this was a ton of fun, figuring out exactly what Parker and Eliot were up to, their two cons.
Christian: Yeah.
John: And I'll give Chris- Chris was the one who came up with the scandal, this scandal right here. Cause we couldn't figure out what this scandal could be.
Scott: Yeah.
John: The conversation between Vittori and Nate is basically the conversation we had in the room. And then Chris said, “I got what’s worse than sex.”
Chris: What’s worse than money or sex?
John: Yeah, the only thing that America can't forgive.
[Laughter]
Scott: That's right.
John: And this puppy was found on the street, right?
Christian: Yup, yup,
John: And then was - rubber glass by the way - and then was adopted-
[Laughter]
Chris: You don't see it bouncing.
John: Yeah, you don't- yeah.
Christian: Yeah.
John: This is a great scene. Goran is- what I love is Goran-
Marc: The Canadian accent is really nice.
John: [Doing a Canadian accent] It was really nice, oh jeez.
Scott: This got a huge reaction in the screening.
Christian: Did it really?
John: Yes.
Marc: Huge.
John: Well because it’s-
Christian: Such a good little puppy!
[Laughter]
John: Just the boldness of it, just the sheer stones of it, yeah.
Marc: And the reactions of either of the guys playing on the other side.
Chris: When you put the glasses on, I always have fun playing with the glasses.
John: Well, what I love is Goran is playing it actually kind of amused at the move that's being made.
Christian: Yeah, cause he's well he's looking at Eliot!
John: While Alastair is freaking out. Yeah, he's like this is actually-
[Laughter]
Scott: This is great, that's great.
John: Yeah. “I think I hate you.” “I'm ok with that.” No Nate is- Nate Ford is not a good man. We've said this. And this was actually Goran’s favorite piece.
Marc: Yeah, this was like great. This was like ok, it's a game of chess match, but here are the questions to all the- yeah, this was great.
Christian: You gotta feel like he’s- you gotta feel like Moreau’s like, “Wow, after all these years, an adversary that's worth the fight.”
Scott: Yeah.
John: That’s kind of it, you know.
Christian: You know, like how many times he's just run over people, all of sudden: hey, we get to fight.
John: That's what he says to Nate, he says, “Make it interesting.” He's kinda looking for this.
Christian: Yeah, yeah.
John: It's not until it starts to go against him.
Christian: Out of sheer boredom of the other people he's just rolled over.
John: I adore this scene.
Chris: I love this scene between these two so much.
John: They play it so well. You could do a series with these two, absolutely.
Marc: Yes.
John: You could do a series of the American con woman who helps the guy get elected and then helps him run his tiny European country.
Scott: Oh yeah, let's go sell that!
John: We’ll sell that, done!
Chris: And John where did the whole handshake bit come from? Cause I know I had written it a bit differently, that opening- but the handshake paid off so well. Where'd you come up with that? The western gesture and all that.
John: I had read a book by an FBI- this is what you do on Leverage. I had read a book by an FBI profiler, and he also did some hostage negotiation. And it- in the book it talks about always gesturing with an open right hand. Because you just trust it, you know, and it always just stuck with me.
Chris: It plays so well here as a, you know, getting the guy up scene. And it paid off so well at the end.
John: Yeah, it really- big applause when he does it at the end. We did a live screening, which is when we talk about applause.
Chris: And this obviously is our homage to the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960.
[Laughter]
Scott: Yeah, right.
Chris: Which was famous.
John: If we could've had him sweat, we would've.
Marc: Again in the Schnitzer Auditorium, same building.
Christian: Yup, late night.
John: Yeah that was the last night of shooting, right?
Aldis: Yeah, it was.
Marc: And Alastair again, is just fantastic with this.
John: Bailing this.
Marc: And so is Humberto. But him playing the- taking the effect of the nicotine cream was just classic.
John: And the list of ways to kill people, don't do that. If you ever think about doing that, the nicotine thing, don't. That’s very dangerous.
Christian: Yeah, very dangerous.
John: Leave it up to people who are very good at almost killing people like Eliot Spencer.
Chris: Would it kill you?
Christian: Oh god, yeah.
Chris: Too much- the nicotine?
John: Oh yeah, fuck yeah.
Aldis: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Wow.
John: Absolutely. This- we probably should have changed this a little more.
[Laughter]
John: We usually change it in the show. This one we were kinda moving kinda fast, we should've done-
Marc: Look at that crowd there.
John: How many people are in that crowd?
Marc: About 80.
[Laughter]
John: And we turned them into 2,000; that’s Mark Franco, doing visual effects.
Marc: Doing some tiling.
Christian: That's not our biggest one, our biggest one was the baseball game.
John: Yup. Biggest one, we filled it with like 30,000 people.
Aldis: Oh, yeah.
Christian: Baseball game in season two.
Marc: “Vote for me!”
[Laughter]
John: So delightfully cheesy.
Christian: Parker.
John: And then the match cut over, that’s nice.
Marc: Yeah.
Aldis: Eliot almost killing a guy with nicotine.
Marc: He's got rubber gloves on, though.
John: He does, because he's careful.
Chris: That's right.
Marc: This is my favorite look.
Scott: He plays this perfectly.
John: And again it's one of those, one of the reasons doing the television is, you're moving so fast the actors have to create a lot, and there you go!
[Laughter]
Chris: “Wait who's that? I wanna talk to you later.”
Christian: Hey c'mon man, that's my move!
John: He’s charming, you know, but that’s- having a charming bad guy, ‘cause you need to like him for the end.
Christian: Oh, yeah.
John: No the- and this local, again local- almost all local actors in this one.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: That’s fantastic.
Chris: And they had to make up an accent for a non-existent country. Which folks, for an actor, is not the easiest thing in the world.
John: Yeah we actually wound up- I'll say it, we wound up basing it on Malta, which was a British colony until the 60’s, and really filled- the government structure filled a lot of requirements for us. But we made it Italian, because it's kind of a good European accent. So we made it close to Italy.
Chris: Oh, this is great.
John: Yeah, this is great. Huge- tell me you couldn't make that guy governor.
Christian: Oh absolutely.
John: Absolutely, maybe that'll be my hiatus project.
[Laughter]
Scott: Why do I think you're not kidding?
Christian: “Listen, we've got another job for you.”
John: No, this- and him storming over. Now it’s not fun anymore, now he's gonna kill you people.
Marc: Yes.
Aldis: Ah, he's breaking the rules
Scott: Yup.
John: And wow, without that staircase? What a great set.
Aldis: It was all right there.
Marc: Chandelier, staircase.
John: That looks like Europe. And then it had the matching mini balconies here to shoot across, it was great.
Marc: Yeah, it just gave us so much. This was just the- I love this, just the unspoken-
John: He's not gonna threaten them.
Marc: Just “I'm here.”
John: Just- and that's what also is kinda fun is when we talk about Hardison wanting to run his own crew sometimes, he's still being schooled; these are the rules we play by.
Christian: “Hey, how's it going.”
John: “How's it going? Sup!” Now these are the rules you play under. Nate is trying to tell him if you're gonna run a crew, these are the stakes.
Aldis: Yeah.
Christian: Look at how beautiful that is.
Aldis: That is. Where are those actually captured from?
John: I dunno, that's stock- from Stocksylvania.
[Laughter]
Scott: Stocktopia.
John: Sanstockington. Yeah, no, and this was a ton of fun. And of course the UN is always this effective when they monitor elections. They are pretty tight, actually, when they do it; they're pretty effective.
Marc: Yeah.
John: And this sort of walk by. Yeah, that's not a friendly look.
Aldis: “I'm still gonna kill you.”
Marc: Campaign’s growing.
John: Yeah, phase three, this was great. And this was also kinda the- we had to show that Sophie was genuinely interested, she wasn't just game invested.
Scott: Right, yeah.
John: She's actually come to like the country and really believe in this guy. Cause he- and we lucked out, the actor was really super charming; Humberto was fantastic.
Scott: And this fits perfectly with her ambition; she easily could've been a princess of a country in an alternate life.
John: And then we establish in the backstory.
Chris: Well we play her, we play aliases of her as princesses, so yeah.
John: Backstory explained she was married to royalty at one point; she knows this world better than he certainly did. That's the first time you see Moreau pissed off. And the president actually, he's a results-oriented guy.
Chris: Oh I love this shot. This is just great, the two of them, the expanse of the office.
John: This looks like West Wing.
Scott: Yeah, it really does.
John: It's gorgeous.
Christian: People have to understand- and this is the scariest moment because if he starts losing it, he starts pulling triggers. It’s a very, you know, Moreau doesn't lose it. He's losing it.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: And that's when he realizes, “Oh, I know how to handle this.”
Marc: Dave Connell did this beautifully.
John: Yeah, the- and this was a lot of fun. Also tracking exactly what information Hardison leaked at any given time. We had a whole timeline of who knew what, and when the people of San Lorenzo knew, when Nate knew it. Not quite as complicated as some of the other ones, but pretty brutal. And here we go, I love the starting gun.
Marc: That's a oner! Pressed for time.
John: Just the- we stuff on the TV, we see the reaction, and then Nate steps in the foreground.
Marc: Boom, we told that story.
John: Yup, that's all the information you need to know. And peek around, and just- and again, it was important in the writing - reset to the audience what every character's goal is, and where you see them next so you don't have to do the math.
Christian: Right.
John: And “age of the geek.”
Chris: In the story development process, at one time they won the election, and part of the episode was them governing. And John, I think what you struggled with in kinda figuring it out, was making the election the ultimate end.
John: Yeah, the election was a big enough story and that's something we hit every now and then in the writers room. You don't know how big the story actually is until you actually outline it. And then you have eight acts worth of cards up there and then you go, “Oh, alright.” The story has told you how long it needs to be. This was a ton of fun, the idea that he'd be doing press conferences from in prison - that delighted me to no end.
Marc: Right.
Chris: And very Mission Impossible.
John: Very Mission Impossible.
Chris: All the scenes with him, every time I see that, it takes me back to Mission Impossible.
John: I'm not gonna lie, this is our Mission Impossible episode, absolutely. And yeah, he's venal, this- Alastair is great.
Marc: Alastair, yeah, this is the bad side of Alastair, really bad, you know, take them all out.
John: And this was part of the fun was figuring out how the ending unrolled, was the chess match of what would a bad guy do to control information? And how would you use control of information against them? Using your opponent's strength against them is great. And by the way, big ups to these actors who were working background here, because the little look he throws, just a reminder this is not a good thing. It's a nice choice, nice choice picking up the single on that. 
Marc: Yeah.
John: Oh and this was a ton of fun. Whenever you have- I think a lot of the Leverage audience knows at this point, whenever you see people and you can't see their faces? We’re in there somewhere.
Scott: I think we need to do a double reverse reverse, just to reset the clock.
Chris: We may need to go the other way on it.
John: Yeah, maybe in season four.
Chris: Oh and once he brings Nate in here, this- the scenes with the three of them coming up are some of my favorites in the whole two part finale.
John: Well again, that was right there when he says, “We're not gonna release the results.” You have to set up each time, you know, exactly how the mechanism of the con is gonna work.
Marc: Here Sophie's first instinct is to call for Eliot for help.
Aldis: Boom, ting!
[Laughter]
John: There you go, I've actually seen somebody knock the top champagne glass off a stack of champagne glasses with the champagne like that.
Christian: Oh, yeah.
Aldis: Wow.
John: And we had a big discussion that day of exactly how this would happen, exactly how she would do it. And we were like, “We'll just put the cork in the dude's eye and swing to him.” And it looks great!
Christian: It does look great, absolutely.
John: And then she just brains the dude, no elegance on the second one.
Marc: And now we're back to our opening scene.
John: Yup, which is- you know, there was a time we talked about doing every episode like that.
Chris: I- you know I like it when it’s the finale, I like when we make it special.
John: Yeah, for a while we kinda did that jump.
Chris: You see it a lot, it's in The Hangover, it’s in, you know what I mean? It's done a lot now.
John: Yeah, but you know there is something for promises.
Christian: I enjoy it, like John says, it’s become a signature for the finale.
Chris: Yeah, I think so too.
Marc: This was a great speech. The writing on this was great, and she really delivered it.
John: That was Scott, that was the writing- he was the one who really dug in on who her character was, you know, while I was mucking around with plotting.
Scott: And taking over Oregon?
John: Oh, yes.
Scott: I mean San Lorenzo.
John: San Lorenzo. While I was doing my how you would actually take over a government thing. He was doing the- well you were the one who came up with the whole idea of she's Avita.
Scott: Yeah, right.
John: And that's exactly how she would go about winning their hearts, and what speeches she should make.
Scott: Yeah, cause having the chance to be Avita, that seems like the one thing that would be a true draw for her.
John: The one thing she wouldn't be able to resist.
Scott: Yeah, right.
John: And this is- now of course the audience knows she's not dead, but the fun of it is playing it out.
Marc: And these three just killed this scene.
Chris: So you said- you did all- all of this- all five pages?
John: We pretty much did the entire half act in one take, every setup.
Marc: Every set up. They went through five pages of dialogue each take.
Chris: Wow.
Scott: That’s crazy.
John: Just- and that's why you have such great coverage of this. You just kept parking the camera, moving it around and parking it. And they found this, I mean we got in there at lunch that day, and just walked the scene.
Christian: Oh this is the one you were talking about where they had their blocking down when you got there?
John: Well they had a good idea, and then they saw the room.
Marc: But it was really- you know, instead of- we do so many bits where we break things up in our show, cause we’re always cutting away to somewhere else, but you know, Tim said, Let's go through all five,” and these guys were like, “Alright, I'm in.” And they just fell into stride.
John: That was kinda those great actor- cause actors are all a little competitive. So when Tim said, “Let's do all five pages,” you saw Goran and Alastair look at each other like, “Alright yeah, yeah, we’ll do all five pages, yeah we’re prepped.”
[Laughter]
John: “We don't need sides, I'll see your five.” It’s great, and it really comes across in this scene. And that little smile.
Scott: Isn't that the speech that got a huge spontaneous applause in the screening?
Marc: Yes.
Scott: Yeah, that was awesome.
John: The- oh no it's coming up, the “I have the guns, I have the government, I have the-”
Scott: No, “I bought an election.” Isn't that coming up?
Marc: Yeah.
John: The- yeah, the “I have the guns, I have the government.”
Marc: Right here.
John: It’s like “No, no, I have a 24 year old genius with a smartphone and a problem with authority.”
Scott: That’s it! That’s it.
John: That got a giant applause break.
Aldis: That guy! This guy!
Scott: Who is that? Oh it's you.
Christian: Nice.
John: And I'll say actually, it's heavily influenced by Cory Doctorow's book, Little Brother. 
Aldis: Oh.
John: About teenagers in a near future America who are oppressed by Homeland Security and strike back by using teenage geek culture and technology.
Christian: Wow.
Marc: It’s like our own little book club here.
[Laughter]
John: What do you guys think I do?
Chris: Read books.
John: What do you guys think I do? While you’re off touring the fucking world with your guitar, meeting beatiful girls. And you’re off doing your own thing?
Christian: Yeah, I get real quiet when all that stuff comes up.
John: I fucking read all the time, that’s my job.
[Laughter]
John: Some of us have homework forever, that's our job, that's our life.
Christian: I read two books, which is Call Of The Wild by Jack London and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
[Laughter]
John: That was it.
Aldis: Everybody’s read The Alchemist, it's a great book.
John: Well there you go, there's your books from them.
Aldis: I'm rereading it for like the third time!
Scott: Marc, what did you think of The Alchemist?
Marc: I loved it.
John: No, this was a ton of fun.
Aldis: Age of the geek!
John: Age of the geek. You know, as we established, there's only, you know, X number of people in the country; it's not that hard to email all of them.
Chris: Right.
Aldis: Yeah, no.
John: Particularly since these small countries have controlled ISPs. Or governmental ISPs. This is a great show down. And sitting Tim here is actually great staging, cause it gives you three levels, three eye lines. Playing with information, playing with access to information is a crucial part of this. Alastair’s turn here, by the way, as he starts to slowly panic is kind of what anchors the scene.
Christian: Yes, he did such a great job.
Marc: Now it's like, “Where the hell did he come from?”
John: Yeah “Oh hey, yeah I fucked you.”
Marc: “Oh, and we stole your security.”
John: Now this was tricky, cause this was a series of nested flashbacks, and the first time we did post, we put the flashback process on the big Guillermo scene.
Christian: Oh yeah?
John: When he does the speech after Sophie’s been assassinated.
Christian: Oh, right.
John: But it made- it took all the emotional weight out of it.
Chris: Right, cause it felt like it already happened.
John: So it's actually one of the few times we do a flashback without this filter on it.
Chris: Yeah, that's true. And it works.
John: Yeah, it absolutely works. And also the line from season one: “We be the cavalry.” You're giving it, like, an Eliot signature here.
Christian: Yeah, yeah.
John: Something that Eliot says all the time. That's the fun of season three is you get to start to fill out the previous lives of these guys that they've had in the past.
Chris: And down.
Christian: That’s awesome.
Aldis: If you're asking, we hit them really hard.
Christian: Yeah, we did, we hit them really hard.
John: Yeah, you beat the hell out of the stunties.
Chris: You hit them hard?
Christian: We hit them hard.
John: Well they were wearing those things!
Christian: They were wearing helmets, and if you hit them softly you couldn't see the movement. So I said alright- they can't see it coming, so I was like, “I'm gonna have to hit ya.” And they were like, “Alright.”
John: Oh and this is Gina, by the way, wearing the pack.
Christian: Yeah.
John: Gina took the squibs.
Scott: Oh really?
John: Yeah, that's why she has the dress on, and that's why we could do it in closeup. Cause if it was a stuntie, we could do it with just the dress, but with Gina we could put the packs under the sweater, and we just ruin the sweater.
Christian: Yeah, she did the stunt, I was very very proud of her.
Scott: And those hurt, right?
Christian: Oh yeah.
John: Yeah those things are scary.
Marc: This was a great speech.
Christian: You turn them around, you’re dead. People don't realize that, that's actually a bullet coming out.
John: No, Gina was a fucking trooper. Yeah, this was a great speech, he nailed it. The slow push in on him. We were joking the night we were shooting this, like, “This scene will be recreated on San Lorenzo television, like, 20 years from now.”
[Laughter]
John: With actors when they do the documentary. And there will be people like, “You know Rebecca Ibanez wasn't alive.” “Oh you're one of those people are you?” “She wasn't a real person!”
Chris: This guy has a real arc in this show.
John: Yeah, he does.
Chris: This is not something we typically do.
John: This was the thing, it's like and now he is complicit in our crime. We’ve taken the only-
Chris: No, no, but it takes the fact that he has this arc, that he's become worthy of the office that we've manipulated. I think it really takes away from the fact that the mark in this episode are the people of San Lorenzo. That's the difference!
[Laughter]
John: But we’re doing it for them!
Chris: It's not right, but we've given them a worthy leader.
John: We were actually joking about the fact that after he did that scene, I said, “Michael Vittori’s reign of genocide began that night.”
[Laughter]
John: “Oh, oh we didn't think this out at all.”
[Laughter]
John: “20 years of terror.” “Oh, that was a bad move on our part.”
Chris: Well, watch the documentary.
Scott: Yeah, exactly.
John: This is great, this was the chess match.
Marc: Yeah.
John: Where it literally became Alastair is the chessboard, and the two of them squaring up on him.
Scott: Yeah.
John: And the two windows behind them.
Chris: And there you go! there’s the shot, what's he gonna do? Who’s he gonna go with?
Scott: Bachelor number one or bachelor number two?
[Laughter]
Marc: “How big of an estate?”
John: “How big of an estate?” No really, I've been watching a lot of noir lately and he's just doing it perfectly, he's just doing a throwback to a 40’s character actor here. Just playing- really underplaying it.
Chris: Yeah the, “I'm shocked! Shocked that there's gambling in this going on here!”
John: “Gambling in this establishment!” He's absolutely playing Casablanca.
[Laughter]
John: He could not be more Claude Rains at this moment. No, and then the flashback to the very beginning of the episode to set it up. This law was in place in the United States up until the 1830s, by the way.
Marc: There you have it.
John: James Madison actually considered using it at one point. Seizing the assets of his political opponents.
Scott: Really?
John: Yes, absolutely.
Scott: Very useful law.
John: Not one we have now, thank goodness. Very useful law for us.
[Laughter]
John: And that moment kinda blows by, actually.
Christian: Yeah, wow.
John: “The guys coming in are honest, so I need a corrupt man.” The entire plan depends on using the most corrupt man.
Marc: Bye!
Chris: Waving goodbye.
John: This is great. And what I love also here is they're playing it like, “We will gun your ass down if you don't give up the desk.”
Christian: Yup, it’s strong arm, it is.
John: What I also love here is the moment, like, “Wait, did we just spring a war criminal in order to win?”
[Laughter]
John: Yeah, kinda. But he's our war criminal.
Scott: Yeah, he's a good war criminal.
John: Yeah, exactly. The blood on the shirt is a nice touch. Nadine really killed that.
Marc: Yeah.
John: And the reveal. And now the gloat, the crucial gloat.
Marc: Bad guy has to suffer.
John: Bad guy must suffer, our guys must gloat, we must see the victims rewarded. She looks great in that shot, that’s again, very classic 1960’s.
Aldis: When does she not look great?
Scott: I was about to say, unlike usually?
John: Well just, you know, she looks very exactly that 60’s spy vibe there, you know.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: Also fun, we stumbled across that last line of, “Damien Moreau will never leave San Lorenzo.” I think we actually wrote it on the set.
Chris: Well she says it in the garage.
John: Yeah she says it earlier, and I think we were on set going, “Oh wait.” And we tossed it out, yeah.
Marc: This is our first scene we shot with Goran, and that's what we see.
John: We locked him in a cell.
Christian: For some reason I'm just unconvinced that a little cage like that is gonna hold Damien Moreau, I'm just saying.
Chris: Nooo.
John: What? No. By the way, this- I love this. This is just so over the top and perfect and right.
[Laughter]
John: I was actually in New York when Princess Di died, and I remember going-
Chris: But look how much information you pack in one shot here.
John: Yeah, exactly. You know she's been sainted.
Chris: You have a shrine to her, everyone knows she's dead, you have what's happening in San Lorenzo, we pan up and-
Aldis: Yet again, she's at her own funeral.
Scott: Yeah that's a great one.
Chris: And we begin our scene. I mean that is a great shot.
John: That is a great shot.
[Laughter]
John: And there she is, in the ridiculous hat.
Christian: Wow.
[Laughter]
Christian: Really a great shot.
John: That’s- well that's the trick, we expect the audience to keep up on these episodes.
Aldis: Yeah.
Christian: She has a habit of showing up at her own funerals, doesn’t she?
Aldis: Yeah she does, bad habit.
John: It’s a character trait now; it's a feature, not a bug. No, and it's a lovely speech.
Christian: It's the actress, it's the old off broadway actors. “Do they like me? Do they love me? Who showed up?”
John: Exactly. This was great, by the way, was finally take the sting out of the relationship, only to utterly subvert it 30 seconds later. But the two of them are such good friends, and the characters had come to a new parity this season, they really acted the hell out of this. She's wonderful in this.
Aldis: By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, there goes Tim's hat again. Another hat.
Marc: And again a oner.
John: And a oner.
Scott: Yeah, that's right.
Marc: Gary Camp walking backwards.
Aldis: Yeah, the work that Gary Camp actually does.
John: Yeah, we should pay him more than you, is that what you're saying?
Aldis: Nah, I'm saying the audience-
Christian: I'm pretty sure he does.
Marc: This is a great line.
John: The “I don't travel with luggage.”
Marc: “I don't travel with luggage.”
John: All right-thinking men don't travel with luggage. Luggage is for women. Men buy shit when they get there, I'm just saying.
Christian: Oh Parker does.
John: Yeah this was a ton of fun, figuring out what everyone's tie up for the season was.
Aldis: Yeah.
John: Of course Parker stole shit, she's Parker! Not gonna leave the country and not-
Aldis: Kinda a shame that Hardison didn't steal gold bars.
John: Actually in the original version of this we were at the estate.
Chris: Yeah.
John: When we originally broke it, we wound up going to the estate, and then we realized we couldn't find an Italian estate in Portland, that was a little tricky. Ton of fun, was this just a random room? This was a meeting room we made a bedroom.
Marc: Yes.
John: And at one point we had Gina outside the window.
Marc: Yeah.
John: That was not such a good idea.
Marc: Well.
John: Well there's a tiny ledge out there.
Aldis: Ahaha, and wait for it, wait for it!
Chris: Oh this is a classic.
Aldis: Boom! Knocking the boots! [Sing-songy] Bow chicka bow bow.
John: The little zoom in there you go.
Christian: Bwooooo!
Aldis: Bwooo!
[Laughter]
John: And fans across America scream.
Scott: Yeah.
John: That’s great. No, they didn’t have sex, they just cuddled.
Christian: Right.
Aldis: Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.
Scott: Didn't you tell me she read that and she thought it was a joke, she didn't think it was real?
John: Yeah she thought we were giving her a fake ending.
Chris: Oh c’mon.
John: Like nope, you guys did it!
Aldis: You did it!
Chris: Season three, we’re moving on.
Christian: Season three! Thank you so much guys, some of the best writing, the best directing I've ever had man, it's just unbelievable.
Aldis: Thank y’all for staying until the finish.
John: Marc, you directed the hell out of those, that was fantastic.
Chris: Yeah, these are-
Christian: Awesome!
Marc: Had a lot of help.
Aldis: Roskooni!
Chris: These are -
John: Alright, season four coming up.
Christian: Come on!
Aldis: Peace, people!!
Marc: Stay tuned.
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Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro Is Afraid of Going to Jail, and He’s Right to Be
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“I’m letting the scoundrels know,” President Jair Bolsonaro told supporters last year, “I’ll never be imprisoned!”
He was shouting. But then, Mr. Bolsonaro tends to become animated when talking about the prospect of prison. “By God above,” he declared to an audience of businesspeople in May, “I’ll never be arrested.” As he spends “more than half” of his time dealing with lawsuits, he surely feels well armed against arrest. But there’s desperation in his defiance. The fate of the former Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez, who was recently sentenced to prison for allegedly orchestrating a coup, hangs heavy in the air.
For Mr. Bolsonaro, it’s a cautionary tale. Ahead of presidential elections in October, which he’s on course to lose, Mr. Bolsonaro is plainly worried he too may be arrested for, as he put it with uncharacteristic understatement, “antidemocratic actions.” That fear explains his energetic attempts to discredit the election before it happens — such as, for example, gathering dozens of foreign diplomats to fulminate against the country’s electronic voting system.
Yet however absurd the behavior — and forcing ambassadors to sit through a crazed 47-minute diatribe is certainly on the wacky end of the spectrum — the underlying motive makes perfect sense. Because the truth is that Mr. Bolsonaro has plenty of reasons to fear prison. In fact, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the charges against the president and his government.
Continue reading.
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playitagin · 9 months
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1987-Butcher of Lyon
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In France, former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie (a.k.a. the "Butcher of Lyon") is convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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Nikolaus Barbie (25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991) was a German operative of the SS and SD who worked in Vichy France during World War II. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon. After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for his anti-communist efforts and aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the dictatorial regime on how to repress opposition through torture. 
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In 1972, it was discovered he was in Bolivia. While in Bolivia, the West German Intelligence Service recruited him. Barbie is suspected of having had a role in the Bolivian coup d'état orchestrated by Luis García Meza in 1980. After the fall of the dictatorship, Barbie lost the protection of the government in La Paz. In 1983, he was arrested and extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Although he had been sentenced to death in absentia twice earlier, in 1947 and 1954, capital punishment had been abolished in France in 1981. Barbie died of cancer in prison in 1991, at age 77.
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weabooweedwitch · 1 year
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Oh so you're telling me Elon Musk wants to introduce an overpriced verification system that would only be applicable and beneficial to the wealthy elite like celebrities and influencers and he also wants it done by November 7th, the day before the midterm elections? Surely you don't mean happy go lucky Bolivian coup funding Shanghai tesla factory workers having to sleep on the floor emerald mine Musk is trying to pull some heinous shit with devastating social and political consequences! He would neeeeever!!
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mariacallous · 1 year
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The United States needs to accelerate its energy transition—and quickly. The only problem? It needs vast quantities of raw materials to do so, and it will have to negotiate with other countries to acquire them in time.
Washington will likely need to turn to South America for lithium, a material needed to produce the rechargeable batteries that drive the energy transition. But the progressive governments of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—known as the lithium triangle because they have the world’s largest lithium reserves—resent more than a century of U.S. intervention. As global demand soars, all three governments plan to strengthen state control over the industry. They are looking for ways to process their lithium domestically and partner with companies from nations other than the United States—especially China, the international leader in lithium operations.
If the Biden administration truly wants to diversify its global supply chains to electrify the U.S. car market, it must abandon the archaic, punitive policies in Latin America it inherited from previous administrations and engage constructively with the lithium triangle governments.
To date, U.S. lithium extraction companies have failed to make significant headway in the region. Albemarle’s operation in Chile is the exception, but it is facing increasing regulation under the country’s leftist government. A history of U.S. intervention and support for military dictatorships in all three lithium triangle countries and their neighbors hasn’t helped Washington’s cause.
In 1971, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano summarized concerns about U.S. policy on the region’s natural resources, writing that “[u]nderdevelopment in Latin America is a consequence of development elsewhere” and “Latin Americans are poor because the ground we tread is rich.” Lithium triangle governments and their supporters fear this dynamic persists today. In March, as he was proposing a sovereign regional alliance on lithium, Bolivian President Luis Arce said, “We don’t want our lithium to be in the [U.S.] Southern Command’s crosshairs, nor do we want it to be a reason for destabilizing democratically elected governments or foreign harassment.”
The first U.S. administration committed to a green energy transition is ill-prepared to engage productively with lithium triangle governments. Take Bolivia, which has the world’s largest untapped lithium resources but, at present, few economically viable reserves. Since the 2005 election of former Bolivian President Evo Morales, the United States has had a strained relationship with the country, impeding U.S. companies’ ability to negotiate lithium contracts there.
Morales, an Indigenous leftist leader, has long critiqued U.S. intervention in Bolivia. During his tenure, he did not seek out partnerships with U.S. companies to extract lithium. “We need partners, companies that respect the Bolivian rules,” Morales said on a trip to Spain in 2009, as he sought talks with lithium extraction companies. “Companies that come to invest are welcome, but not to do politics.” In 2018, his government signed a contract for lithium processing and battery production with Germany’s ACI Systems. Then, in early 2019, Bolivia signed a joint venture agreement with China’s Xinjiang TBEA Group to build processing plants.
In 2019, just as the projects with ACI Systems and TBEA were about to launch, Morales was ousted in what his party considers a U.S.-backed coup, resulting in the projects’ suspension. His ouster was fueled by election fraud claims alleged by the Organization of American States (OAS), supported by the U.S. State Department; researchers, economists, and media outlets including the New York Times later disputed those claims. Before the OAS report, domestic allegations of fraud had led to protests across the country; but the opposition used the report to accelerate unrest and violence, with support from police, the military, and the international community.
“There was a coup … because we nationalized our natural resources and started the [lithium] industrialization process,” Morales claimed. A year later, Arce—Morales’s former economy minister—was elected president, ending the repressive interim presidency of right-wing politician Jeanine Añez. Arce has since echoed Morales’s arguments about the role of lithium in Morales’s forced resignation.
The reason behind Morales’s ouster is still contested, and even progressive publications have questioned lithium’s role in it. But all three lithium triangle presidents consider Morales’s ouster, which was welcomed by the Trump administration, to be a coup. Some U.S. lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also called it a coup.
The democratically elected Arce government expected to receive support from the Biden administration. Instead, the administration followed its predecessor’s lead and denounced Añez’s 2021 arrest on charges of terrorism and sedition. A few months later, the administration excluded Bolivia from its Summit for Democracy, angering the country and its ally, Argentina. At the summit, Argentinian President Alberto Fernández said, with U.S. President Joe Biden watching, that Latin America had “lived through a difficult time” recently, especially “Bolivia, our dear sister republic that suffered a coup endorsed by a large part of the international community and by the OAS.”
Biden officials’ decisions regarding Latin America frequently anger all three lithium triangle governments, which prioritize regional solidarity. For instance, the three governments have condemned the continued blockade and sanctions against Cuba, as well as its exclusion, along with Nicaragua and Venezuela, from last year’s Summit of the Americas. Arce boycotted the meeting, saying “Washington’s veto shows that, despite rhetoric in favor of democracy and human rights, [U.S.] officials have no genuine will to change their hostile policy toward governments with dignity that do not subordinate themselves to [U.S.] interests.” Fernández and Chilean President Gabriel Boric also criticized Washington’s decision to exclude the countries.
The Pentagon’s tactics to secure lithium contracts in the region have further exacerbated tensions. Lithium triangle governments want to keep the U.S. armed forces out of their politics. But Gen. Laura Richardson, the head of U.S. Southern Command, recently said she had met with embassies and U.S. lithium companies to discuss investing in the region and to “box out our competitors” after claiming China and Russia have invested in the region “to undermine the United States and to undermine democracy.” In March, after Richardson told the U.S. Congress that China was “taking resources away from these countries and from their people,” Carlos Ramos, the director of Bolivia’s state lithium company, balked at her assertion. “We’re taking care of our strategic resource to avoid any possibility of foreign depredation,” he said.
Meanwhile, lithium triangle governments have increasingly emphasized sovereignty over their natural resources. The Arce administration has made state-driven lithium extraction and battery production a national priority, seeking to ensure it does not repeat the region’s history of dependency on other countries to extract, process, and export high-value resources such as silver, tin, and copper. Chile’s constitution, which is being rewritten and whose changes must be approved by a referendum, will most likely follow Bolivia’s model and create a state-owned company to establish strategic partnerships and regulate private lithium investment.
But the lithium triangle knows it can’t process its lithium alone; it needs partners to fund and build infrastructure and appropriate technology. China, which does not have such a fraught history in the region, is stepping in to fill the gap. China already dominates global lithium markets: It produces approximately three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, while the United States produces only 8 percent. Half of the 2021 growth in the global electric vehicle market took place in China, while the United States accounted for only 10 percent.
It is no surprise, then, that after long negotiations with six international companies, Bolivia signed a contract in January to partner with Chinese consortium CATL, the largest lithium ion battery producer in the world, to build direct lithium extraction processing plants and accompanying infrastructure in Bolivia. Two U.S. companies had responded to the Arce administration’s call for proposals for lithium partnerships—including EnergyX, run by Alamo Rental Car heir Teague Egan, which has no lithium experience—but were unsuccessful.
U.S. policy toward lithium triangle countries should be based on respect for the countries’ national sovereignty and the decisions of their democratically elected governments. A good start would be for Washington to promote the active participation of all Latin American governments in regional and international fora, rather than excluding some, and to provide more opportunities to collaborate on climate change and the global energy transition. Furthermore, U.S. civilian leaders, rather than military officers, should lead diplomacy. The Biden administration should also create incentives for U.S. companies to purchase batteries produced by all three lithium triangle countries. And finally, if the U.S. companies do manage to win contracts on lithium triangle soil, they should ensure that those countries—and especially the local communities that live near lithium flats—benefit financially from lithium production.
Lithium triangle governments affirm consistently that they “want partners, not bosses.” Washington needs to move beyond ingrained, historical patterns of conflict and intervention, and forge productive partnerships with these nations based on a shared priority: the clean energy transition.
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afloweroutofstone · 1 year
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take man, give us a take: how do you feel about "color revolutions", either specifically or as a concept
Not a very useful concept. It started as a term to group together a handful of non-violent revolutions in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet period (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Georgia, etc.) As time went on people kept adding more and more Eurasian revolutions and revolts to the grouping even though they had increasingly little to do with each other. The prospect of such a revolution occurring in their own country, combined with a perception of US support for these protests (sometimes true and sometimes not), led Russian and Chinese media elites to begin using the term to describe basically any protest movement in a country they’re allied with. US media elites helped them run the concept into the ground by describing random protest movements in Russia/China/etc. as color revolutions (remember the “Snow Revolution” in Russia that didn’t change anything?)
Now fucking everything is a color revolution. People called the Yellow Jackets in France a “color revolution,” and those protesters didn’t even know what they were protesting for. People called the 2019 Bolivian coup a “color revolution” even though it doesn’t resemble the concept at all, it was a violent and elite-led takeover of the state
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whatisonthemoon · 1 year
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Hitler’s Shadow Reaches toward Today
https://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/14/hitlers-shadow-reaches-toward-today-2/
From the Archive: The key role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s U.S.-backed coup is denied by the mainstream U.S. press, which can’t believe the U.S. government would collaborate with such unsavory characters, but that isn’t the real history, as Robert Parry reported in 2010.
By Robert Parry (Originally published on Dec. 17, 2010)
The U.S. government protected Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie in the years after World War II and later unleashed the infamous Butcher of Lyon on South America by aiding his escape from French war-crimes prosecutors, according to a report issued by the National Archives in 2010.
The report, entitled “Hitler’s Shadow,” concentrates on the decisions by the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps to use Barbie and other ex-Nazis for early Cold War operations, but other work by investigative journalists and government investigators has shown how Barbie’s continued allegiance to Nazi ideology contributed to the spread of right-wing extremism in Latin America.
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▲ Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie.
With his skills as an intelligence operative and his expertise in state terror, Barbie helped shape the particularly vicious style of anti-communism that dominated South America for most of the Cold War. He also played a role in building a conduit for drug proceeds to fund right-wing paramilitary operations, including Ronald Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
In 1980, Barbie used his perch in Bolivian intelligence to organize an alliance of military leaders and cocaine barons to overthrow Bolivia’s democratically elected leftist government in a bloody coup. Though fitting with Washington’s distrust of left-wing populist governments in South America, the so-called Cocaine Coup had other long-term consequences for the United States.
Bolivia’s coup regime ensured a reliable flow of coca to Colombia’s Medellin cartel, which quickly grew into a sophisticated conglomerate for smuggling cocaine into the United States. Some of those drug profits then went to finance right-wing paramilitary operations, including the CIA-backed Contras, according to other U.S. government investigations.
Barbie reportedly collaborated, too, with representatives of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church as they worked with Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup regime to organize anti-communist operations in South America. By then, the region had become a center for Moon’s global money-laundering operations. In 1982, Moon began pouring hundreds of millions of his mysterious dollars into the right-wing Washington Times newspaper to influence U.S. politics.
Eventually, as Bolivia’s corrupt Cocaine Coup government crumbled and Barbie’s identity became well known, French authorities finally secured Barbie’s return to France to face a war-crimes trial in 1983. (He died in 1991.)
The Butcher of Lyon’s role in these South American anti-communist activities caused brief embarrassment for Moon’s church and some right-wing Americans. But the Nazi collaboration didn’t draw much attention from the U.S. news media, which was already shying away from critical reporting on the Reagan administration’s unsavory alliances in Central and South America.
A Long Continuum
Indeed, the Right’s growing dominance of Washington opinion circles can be viewed as a continuum dating back to those days right after World War II, when U.S. priorities switched quickly from prosecuting Axis war criminals to seeking their help in crushing leftist political influence in Western Europe and Asia.
Suddenly, U.S. intelligence agencies were freeing Nazi and Japanese war criminals from prison and exploiting their talents to neutralize labor unions, student groups and other left-wing organizations.
Though the National Archives report deals with ex-Nazis in Europe, a similar program was underway in Japan where war criminals such as right-wing yakuza gangsters Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa were freed and allowed to become important political figures in Japan and later internationally by supporting a global crusade against communism.
In the 1960s, Kodama and Sasakawa joined with Rev. Moon and two right-wing dictators, Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek and South Korea’s Park Chung Hee, to create the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which also brought in right-wing leaders from Latin America and Europe, including ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis, according to authors Scott and Jon Lee Anderson in their landmark 1986 book, Inside the League.
So, with the Cocaine Coup in 1980, Barbie not only closed the circle, bringing together death-squad commanders, ex-Nazis, neo-Nazis and various sociopaths from around the globe, but he helped ensure that drug proceeds would be available to fund right-wing causes in the future.
“Hitler’s Shadow,” in effect, tells the first chapter of this right-wing restoration as U.S. intelligence agencies turned to former Nazi officials and SS officers to counter the perceived greater threat from the Soviet Union and Communist groups in Europe.
“Gestapo officers, who also held ranks in the SS, were in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps’s automatic arrest category after the war,” the report said. “Later, CIC used former Gestapo officers to garner useful intelligence for the postwar period on everything from German right-wing movements to underground communist organizations. Intelligence officers often overlooked the significant role Gestapo officers played in the murder of Jews, POWs, and the political enemies of the Nazis.”
The report notes that “approximately 1,200 newly released files relate to the penetration of German Communist activities and specifically to ‘Project Happiness,’ the CIC’s codename for counterintelligence operations against the KPD,” the German Communist Party.
Though Barbie notorious for personally torturing French partisans during the war may be the best known ex-Gestapo officer recruited by the CIC, others had similar histories.
For instance, Anton Mahler was the chief interrogator of Hans Scholl, a leader of the White Rose, a Munich-based student organization that secretly passed out leaflets urging Adolf Hitler’s overthrow and decrying German apathy in the face of Hitler’s crimes. Hans and his sister Sophie Scholl were convicted of high treason and beheaded in February 1943.
Mahler also served in Einsatzgruppe B in occupied Belarus as the group slaughtered more than 45,000 people, most of them Jews, the report said. Nevertheless, CIC deployed Mahler as an informant starting in February 1949 and soon made him a full-time employee.
Regarding Barbie, the report builds on a 1983 investigation by a Justice Department investigator who confirmed suspicions that U.S. intelligence had worked with and protected this hunted war criminal who was accused of executing 4,000 people and shipping 7,000 Jews to concentration camps.
“In the spring of 1947 a CIC agent named Robert S. Taylor from CIC Region IV (Munich) recruited Klaus Barbie, the one-time Gestapo Chief of Lyon (194244),” the new report said. “Barbie helped run a counterintelligence net named ‘Büro Petersen’ which monitored French intelligence.
“In 1948 Barbie helped the CIC locate former Gestapo informants. In 194950, he penetrated German Communist Party (KPD) activities in CIC Region XII (Augsburg). He continued to work for the CIC in return for protection against French war crimes charges.”
Ratline to Bolivia
The story of Barbie’s escape to South America with the CIC’s collaboration was addressed in the 1983 report by Allan A. Ryan Jr., head of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations. Ryan’s 218-page report said that in 1951, the CIC helped Barbie evade French authorities and flee over a “ratline” to Bolivia.
Ryan said that a half dozen CIC officers participated in the cover-up of Barbie’s identity and excused their actions by claiming that the French arrest of Barbie could jeopardize the security of other CIC operations. To get Barbie to Bolivia, the CIC officers used a ratline run by a Croatian priest, Father Krunoslav Draganovich, Ryan wrote.
Ryan said the Central Intelligence Agency later rebuffed suggestions that Barbie be reactivated in the 1960s, but Barbie using the name Altmann held an official position with a state-owned shipping company that allowed him to move freely and even to travel to the United States. [For more on Ryan’s report, see Time magainzse, Time magazine, Aug. 29, 1983]
More significantly, Barbie became a figure in Bolivian intelligence and used that perch to coordinate with other right-wing intelligence services around the continent that were engaged in Operation Condor, a program of assassinating suspected subversives and other dissidents.
In the 1970s, these intelligence agencies had teamed up to give their assassination squads regional and even global reach, including the murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker on the streets of Washington in 1976.
For the Cocaine Coup in 1980, Barbie recruited Argentina’s feared intelligence service along with young neo-Nazis from Europe. The World Anti-Communist League arranged support from Moon and other Asian rightists.
For years, Moon had been sinking down roots in South America, especially in Uruguay after right-wing military dictators seized power there in 1973. Moon also cultivated close ties with dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the regimes buy weapons and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.
“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.
“As an international money laundry, the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”
Moon expanded his network of friends when Barbie helped pull together a right-wing alliance of Bolivian military officers and drug dealers for the Cocaine Coup. WACL associates, such as Alfredo Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives from Argentina and Europe who would help out in the violent putsch.
Barbie, then better known as Altmann, was in charge of drawing up plans for the coup and coordinating with Argentine intelligence. One of the first Argentine intelligence officers to arrive was Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla.
“Before our departure, we received a dossier on” Barbie, Mingolla later told German investigative reporter Kai Hermann. “There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against communism. From the dossier, it was also clear that Altmann worked for the Americans.”
The Cocaine Motive
As the coup took shape, Bolivian Col. Luis Arce-Gomez, the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, also brought onboard neo-fascist terrorists such as Italian Stefano della Chiaie who had been working with the Argentine death squads. [See Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall]
Still a committed fascist, Barbie started a secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight.
On June 17, 1980, in nearly public planning for the coup, six of Bolivia’s biggest traffickers met with the military conspirators to hammer out a financial deal for future protection of the cocaine trade. A La Paz businessman said the coming putsch should be called the “Cocaine Coup,” a name that would stick. [See Cocaine Politics]
Less than three weeks later, on July 6 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, U.S. undercover drug enforcement agent Michael Levine said he met with a Bolivian trafficker named Hugo Hurtado-Candia. Over drinks, Hurtado outlined plans for the “new government” in which his niece Sonia Atala, a major cocaine supplier, will “be in a very strong position.” [See Levine’s Big White Lie]
On July 17, the Cocaine Coup began, spearheaded by Barbie and his neo-fascist goon squad which was dubbed the “Fiancés of Death.”
“The masked thugs were not Bolivians; they spoke Spanish with German, French and Italian accents,” Levine wrote. “Their uniforms bore neither national identification nor any markings, although many of them wore Nazi swastika armbands and insignias.”
The slaughter was fierce. When the putschists stormed the national labor headquarters, they wounded labor leader Marcelo Quiroga, who had led the effort to indict former military dictator Hugo Banzer on drug and corruption charges. Quiroga “was dragged off to police headquarters to be the object of a game played by some of the torture experts imported from Argentina’s dreaded Mechanic School of the Navy,” Levine wrote.
“These experts applied their ‘science’ to Quiroga as a lesson to the Bolivians, who were a little backward in such matters. They kept Quiroga alive and suffering for hours. His castrated, tortured body was found days later in a place called ‘The valley of the Moon’ in southern La Paz.”
To DEA agent Levine back in Buenos Aires, it was soon clear “that the primary goal of the revolution was the protection and control of Bolivia’s cocaine industry. All major drug traffickers in prison were released, after which they joined the neo-Nazis in their rampage.
“Government buildings were invaded and trafficker files were either carried off or burned. Government employees were tortured and shot, the women tied and repeatedly raped by the paramilitaries and the freed traffickers.”
The fascists celebrated with swastikas and shouts of “Heil Hitler!” Hermann reported. Col. Arce-Gomez, a central-casting image of a bemedaled, pot-bellied Latin dictator, grabbed broad powers as Interior Minister. Gen. Luis Garcia Meza was installed as Bolivia’s new president.
The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.
Moon’s Throne
One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant (and former KCIA officer) Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza. After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”
According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.
Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Cuban-American smugglers based in Miami. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the Colombian border.
“The paramilitary units conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS sold themselves to the cocaine barons,” German journalist Hermann wrote. “The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.”
A month after the Cocaine Coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.
As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.
On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Ronald Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.
In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, “God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.”
Flush with Cash
In the early 1980s, cocaine kingpin Suarez his coffers now overflowing with cash invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the Contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony in 1987 by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.
Sanchez-Reisse testified that the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, Argentine intelligence officers, including Sanchez-Reisse and other veterans of the Cocaine Coup, trained the fledgling Contra forces.
But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so pervasive that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point. “The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann reported.
The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too. Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.
SS veteran Barbie was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1991 at the age of 77.
But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from its role in the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself as a key friend of the new Republican administration in Washington.
A guest at Reagan’s First Inauguration, Moon made his organization useful to the new President and to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who would later become a paid speaker for Moon’s organization. Where Moon got his cash was not a mystery that American conservatives were eager to solve.
“Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking,” wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson.
While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities including many businesses that insiders say lose money Moon’s spokesmen have denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.
In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, “I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing.” [Clarin, July 7, 1996]
Nevertheless, Moon’s organization did its best to disrupt the work of U.S. investigative reporters and government investigators looking into the connections between the drug trade and right-wing paramilitary operations such as the Nicaraguan Contras.
In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of Contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under attack from Moon’s Washington Times. An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the Contras was disparaged in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: “Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”
When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, uncovered additional evidence of Contra-drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. “Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,” declared the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.
Despite the attacks, Kerry’s Contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of Contra units were implicated in the cocaine trade.
“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989.
Mysterious Contra Backer
In 1998, CIA’s Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed the earlier allegations of extensive cocaine trafficking by the Contras, including significant ties to Bolivia’s traffickers. Hitz also cited a partially redacted document referring to a “religious” group cooperating with the Contra-cocaine trade.
“There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups,” read an Oct. 22, 1982, cable from the office of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. “These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”
In 1982, the CIA quickly shut down any further reporting on this drug deal, citing the role of U.S. citizens. “In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further,” CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982.
During the Inspector General’s investigation, Hitz conducted a follow-up interview, with Contra-connected drug trafficker Renato Pena, who described the redacted U.S. religious organization as a Contra “political ally that provided only humanitarian aid to Nicaraguan refugees and logistical support for contra-related rallies, such as printing services and portable stages.”
Moon’s religious-political groups, some based in the United States, were extremely active supporting the Contras in the early 1980s, suggesting that Moon’s Washington Times might have had more than an ideological reason to attack investigators exploring Contra drug trafficking.
To this day, the Washington Times remains a reliably right-wing voice in the U.S. capital. [Moon died on Sept. 3, 2012.]
Still, the CIA’s shielding of the name of that “religious organization” and similar protective behavior represented a continuation of a long-standing pattern in which U.S. intelligence covered up for right-wing and neo-Nazi criminality, a dark history that began with the likes of Klaus Barbie and has extended “Hitler’s Shadow” to modern times.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
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cathkaesque · 1 year
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What's your favourite book you've read this year?📖👀
SHIT I think you sent me this when I was absolutely delirious with Covid. Toss up between Long Honduran Night and Coup on the Bolivian coup. I have been big on my anti coup resistance which is important because basically all important political questions are being settled in Latin America
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