Latin American presidents plan an emergency meeting today to discuss the diversion to Austria of a plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, the Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations has said (via Reuters).
The Bolivian plane, which was taking Morales home from Moscow, was stranded and searched in Vienna on suspicion that it might be carrying fugitive US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden. A search determined that Snowden was not onboard and the plane eventually left Vienna about noon on Wednesday.
"We have been told that an emergency meeting of Unasur is going to be held today," Sacha Llorenti Soliz told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday. No time for the meeting was mentioned.
"What's at stake here is … the dignity of Bolivia and the dignity of Latin America," he said, adding that the presidents of Peru, Ecuador and Argentina had all spoken with Morales about the incident.
The Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, told a news conference in Geneva that he had not received any request for such a meeting.
哥伦比亚总统Juan Manuel Santos在日内瓦告诉记者，他尚未接获会议要求。
Summary
事件概要
• A jet carrying the Bolivian president is on its way home after being forced to land at Vienna airport because of the refusal of some European countries to let it pass through their airspace. Eva Morales was returning from a visit to Moscow. He called it "an excuse to scare, intimidate and punish me".
• Morales was stranded at the airport for 14 hours amidst suspicions that the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was onboard. Both the Bolivian and Austrian authorities insisted he was not on the plane, although the extent to which the Austrian police officers searched the jet was unclear.
• An Austrian official told AP that Morales' aircraft asked controllers at Vienna airport to land because there was "no clear indication" that the plane had enough fuel to continue on its journey. This tallies with audio posted online purporting to be of a conversation between the jet pilot and the control room at the airport.
• The Austrian government said it was given permission by Morales to search the plane but Bolivia's vice-president Alvaro Garcia denied this, saying the jet was entitled to immunity. He said Morales had been "kidnapped by imperialism", while the Bolivian foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, accused France and Portugal of putting the president's life at risk by cancelling authorisation for the plane.
• Bolivia's ambassador to the UN Sacha Llorenti Soliz France, said Portugal, Spain and Italy "violated international law" by blocking Morales's plane, adding that "the orders came from the United States". AP quoted French and Spanish officials denying that they had refused entry but Spanish officials did not comment on the Bolivian claim that they made searching the plane a condition of refuelling in the Canary Islands.
• A number of South American leaders voiced outrage at the incident, including the Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner and Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador.
一些拉美领导人对该事件表示愤慨，其中包括阿根廷和厄瓜多尔总统。
• Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patino says Ecuador has found a hidden microphone inside its London embassy, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is living, and it will disclose today who controls the device. He described it as "another instance of a loss of ethics at the international level in relations between governments".
