Ambassador Warren Austin has made clear that the Bolivians are "oppressed", a people who labor under the "yoke of Moscow". Had he actually visited the streets of our fair capital, La Paz, he would find rather the opposite of this fact. The Bolivian people are not oppressed--indeed, they are more free than they have ever been in the history of Bolivia, thanks to the strength of our Bolivarian revolution. A scant two or three years ago, 90% of Bolivia could not even cast a ballot in the sham elections held on an irregular basis between recurring military juntas. Today, Bolivia has banished this old regime, of corrupt, extractive big bosses, and replaced it with one, as the Americans might say, of the people, for the people, and by the people.

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The Americans see fit to question our elections--we know that they were clean and challenge them to prove otherwise. The Americans see fit to question our devotion to freedom--knowing that the Bolivian is in some ways more free than even the American! And they actively promote counterrevolution, stating that Bolivia is not even independent, calling upon the Bolivian people to rise up against their supposed tyrants, and expressing a surety that our revolution will be shortly snuffed out.

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We have never expressed hostility against the United States, and in fact our association with the revolutionary regimes of Moscow and Beijing is representative of the way in which they have abandoned us, the Bolivian people, and the people of Latin America generally, to the hands of tinpot dictators and big multinational capitalists. We bear no animosity towards the Americans, who have begun making, slowly but surely, the steps towards their own kind of socialism, and certainly not to the American people, who are subject to the will of the capitalist class that sees Bolivia as a threat to their business interests in South America.

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To this bourgeoisie, however, we say: We are coming. We in Bolivia will not rest until every American concession is wrenched away, until every country in the Americas is free from your undue influence. The people of Latin America are yearning out for freedom, in Colombia, in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua; in Costa Rica, they have already embraced it. Until the Yankees are willing to deal with us on an equal and fair basis befitting sovereign, independent and socialist states, they will find no solace here. And we remind them that every Latin American they kill, every Puerto Rican, every Argentine, and every autocrat they install, only instills in us a greater resolve to retain our precious freedoms first wrenched from the Spanish by our beloved founder, Simon Bolivar.