While browsing the State Department’s Website for an open source photo of Evo Morales to accompany Sasha Chavkin’s WPR Briefing on the Bolivian constitutional referendum, I came across this archived country description for Bolivia, from March 2006:
By the following March, that same passage had been updated to read as follows:
Now in case you’re thinking that that’s the difference winning a presidential election makes, think again. Morales won the Bolivian presidency in December 2005, a fact noted just a few paragraphs later in both versions of the document.
I know that relations between the U.S. and Morales have never been exactly peachy, but still, calling the president of another country an “illegal-coca agitator” in an official diplomatic document hardly seems like the right way to get them back on the good foot.