Bomb Blast Hits Shultz Motorcade : No One Hurt as Dynamite Damages 4 Cars in Bolivia; Drug Dealers Blamed

The motorcade of Secretary of State George P. Shultz came under attack Monday when a remote-control bomb exploded as the caravan was traveling between the La Paz airport and the city center. No one was injured, but four vehicles, one carrying Shultz’s wife, were damaged.

Shultz had just arrived in Bolivia to deliver a speech strongly condemning narcotics traffickers and praising the La Paz government’s new efforts to eliminate the nation’s huge drug trade.

“The tactic of using violence . . . will not deter us,” Shultz vowed.

Two unknown groups claimed responsibility but offered no reason for the attack, according to a local television station. Bolivian Foreign Minister Guillermo Bedregal told reporters that he blamed drug traffickers. However, Charles Redman, Shultz’s spokesman, cautioned that Bedregal’s statement was only speculation and added that the explosion “probably was not intended to kill.”

Callers Claim Responsibility

Roberto Cuevas, news director of Channel 2 here, said a telephone caller reported that the bombing was carried out by the “Simon Bolivar Command.” A second caller said it was the work of the “Armed Forces of National Liberation.”

The attack occurred at 6:25 a.m. PDT as the motorcade passed an industrial area called Calacota. The road is steeply graded downhill, and the cars and vans in the motorcade were driving at about 25 miles an hour.

A Chevrolet van carrying five people, including a doctor and a nurse, had just passed the point of the blast when the bomb exploded, and an armored Plymouth sedan was just approaching. The secretary’s armored Cadillac limousine was about 100 yards ahead of these vehicles.

The force of the explosion blew out two of the van’s three side windows and broke the right rear passenger window of the limousine carrying Shultz’s wife, Helena, which was nearby. The blast also damaged windows on a Bolivian security car and the Plymouth sedan, which carried Redman and two other State Department public affairs officials.

Redman quoted security officials as saying the blast was caused by two sticks of dynamite buried in the hillside overlooking the two-lane road and was detonated by remote control. Police found electrical wires leading over a hilltop about 130 feet away.

Thrown Over Wall

Three hours earlier, a single stick of dynamite was thrown over the wall of the U.S. Embassy’s commissary in the nearby town of Chalaltaya. Windows were broken, but no one was hurt in that incident either. Officials said they could only speculate that the two explosions were related.

Immediately after the La Paz blast, which shattered a large boulder in a shower of smaller rock shards across the highway, the Shultz motorcade roared away. Instead of following the previously announced route to the hotel where Shultz, 67, was scheduled to meet with Bedregal, the vehicles were taken directly to the U.S. Embassy in one of the most crowded areas of central La Paz.

As the grim-faced secretary and the others from the motorcade scurried into the embassy, a dozen State Department security officers who had accompanied Shultz on the flight from Rio de Janeiro stood in a semicircle around the building’s front door, their Uzi submachine guns and shotguns plainly in view.

In spite of the ambush, Shultz did not change his schedule, saying through Redman that he would not be intimidated. According to the spokesman, Shultz told Bedregal and Bolivian President Victor Paz Estenssoro that “we don’t regard the incident as anti-American in any way but as anti-democratic and . . . an attack on civilization. It is a symbol of what we fight against.”

First Direct Attack

Redman said that although the secretary had been threatened many times during his tenure, this was the first time he had been directly attacked. It also was the first time that a U.S. official as high as Cabinet rank had been attacked since President Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt in March, 1981.

Redman also said there had been no threats to the embassy regarding Shultz’s visit before his arrival.

In Washington, State Department officials said a team of department security agents will fly to Bolivia today to help officials with their investigation of the bombings.

Although the blast was strong enough for the secretary to have heard it, he was never in any danger, according to U.S. security officials. Redman asserted that “the charge would have posed no threat to the secretary’s car,” even if it had been detonated as the vehicle passed by.

Shultz’s visit, part of a 10-day Latin American tour, was the cause of some opposition from farmers who resent efforts to fight drug trafficking through eradication of the coca plants from which cocaine is made.

One of the nation’s largest and most militantly leftist labor groups, the Bolivian Workers Council, had issued a declaration in Monday’s newspapers denouncing the secretary for allegedly interfering in the nation’s internal affairs.

But there were no demonstrations in the city, and the organization does not have a history of attacking civilians.

During his speech to business and political leaders, Shultz referred to the bombing incident, saying that he did not know whether he had been the target of drug dealers or terrorists.

However, he declared, “To both, I say, ‘You have picked the wrong people. . . . The enemies of decency and democracy will not get their way.’ ”

Shultz Pledged More U.S. Aid

Shultz also pledged more American aid to Bolivia, including the elimination of restrictions on U.S. assistance for foreign military and police training.

He said that “as the largest single market for illegal drugs, the United States has a . . . very special responsibility” to aid other nations in fighting narcotics trafficking. That includes revising “our own laws and procedures, which made it difficult to provide useful assistance to foreign military or police forces,” he said.

But the proposal seems likely to encounter resistance among U.S. liberal and human rights groups, which in the 1960s and 1970s helped obtain the congressional restrictions on such aid. At the time, it was alleged that U.S. police advisers were teaching brutal interrogation techniques, including torture.

Bolivian Leaders Praised

He particularly praised the leadership of Estenssoro and the Bolivian Congress for passing a comprehensive anti-drug law last month in the face of tough resistance from peasant farmers whose only income is from growing coca leaves, the base for cocaine.

Under the law, coca will continue to be grown in an area limited to about 26,800 acres in a region where Indians traditionally have grown the plant for chewing and for tea. Otherwise, all coca production must cease and the bushes will be eradicated over a varying period of time.

Shultz also expressed satisfaction over the arrest last month of a reputed Bolivian drug magnate, Roberto Suarez, by special anti-narcotics police forces called the Leopards.