In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s…to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen…Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, 2011 the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said “she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” the Washington Post reported. The CIA has an Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts in working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself…SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

Collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

At the same time, the report quoted participating analysts who believed that bullet points provided by Rumsfeld’s staff advanced a “political agenda,” that the program’s intent “…was to move everyone’s mouth on TV as a sock puppet” and that the program was “…a white-level psyop [psychological operations] program to the American people.” It also found a “preponderance of evidence” that one analyst was dismissed from the program for being critical of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, while another analysts said a CNN official told him he was being dropped at the request of the White House.

Nevertheless, the inspector general exonerated the Pentagon, stating that it complied with Department of Defense (DoD) policies and regulations, including not using propaganda on the US public, while also claiming that retired military analysts, many of whom were affiliated with defense contractors, gained nothing financially or personally for the businesses they were affiliated with.

The investigation was requested by Congress after the New York Times published a story revealing the Pentagon’s public relations program, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” (04/20/2008), which was subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting . The article showed how these analysts, many of whom had ties to military contractors, were used to help sell the war in Iraq, to push other Bush Administration foreign policy “themes and messages” and to act as a rapid response team to counter criticisms in the media. One official Department of Defense talking points document released while the Bush Administration was still trying to sell the need for a war with Iraq to the public states, “We know that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.”

According to the media watchdog Media Matters, between January 1, 2002 and May 2008 the analysts exposed in the Times article “collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR,” revealing the success and scope of Rumsfeld’s program. However, as Glen Greenwald pointed out, that figure is actually low because there were many more analysts that the Pentagon was using who weren’t mentioned in the article.

The inspector general issued an initial report in January 2009 which drew the same conclusions, but which was later recanted because “it was so riddled with inaccuracies and flaws that none of its conclusions could be relied upon.” This calls into question how forthright, accurate and independent an internal Pentagon audit can be, especially in light of the fact that even Republican Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) recently “blasted” the inspector general’s work—giving the office a grade of D-minus in a June 1 report.

This updated report on the use of retired military analysts relied heavily on interviews with Rumsfeld subordinates to ascertain guidelines, procedures and intent because of a lack of written policies. The report also stated that the Pentagon contracted with a private company to provide media reports – 48 in total – that tracked the commentary of military analysts receiving Pentagon assistance. Other significant findings included 147 organized events provided for the military analysts, sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantanamo and the likely receipt of classified information.

Keith Urbahn, spokesman for former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, told the Washington Times that “the New York Times should give back its Pulitzer” and the Wall Street Journal declared that the report was evidence that “the Pentagon wasn’t running a secret propaganda shop, and scores of decorated military officers weren’t rapacious pawns.” However, Scott Horton, contributing editor at Harper’s, has a different take:

The Department of Defense is permitted to run recruitment campaigns and give press briefings to keep Americans informed about its operations, but it is not permitted to engage in “publicity or propaganda” at home. The internal DoD review exonerating the practice of mobilizing and directing theoretically independent analysts apparently focuses on the fact that the program conforms with existing department rules, but it overlooks the high-level prohibition on “publicity or propaganda,” which was plainly violated.

And we already know that the Bush administration made a habit, if not a policy, out of lying to the American public. The Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, pointed out in January 2008:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq…[as] part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

And the military is no different. One example, reported by the The Washington Post in June 2006, noted that military “briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war.”

One issue that the Inspector General report did not deal with is the media’s role of enthusiastically turning to these military “experts” without disclosing their obvious conflicts of interest, as well as the mainstream media’s incestuous relationship with the Pentagon. For example, former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan proudly stated back in 2003 that:

I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance –’At CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war’ — and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.

Immediately after the New York Times Pulitzer-winning story was published the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which weekly monitors roughly 1,300 stories from 48 different media outlets, reported that there were only two related pieces of coverage that came out after the New York Times broke the story, and both of them were on the April 24th broadcast of PBS NewsHour. The Pew Research Center reported, “In the cable news universe, where many of these analysts worked, silence greeted the story.”

Yet the “ military-industrial-media complex” is not only a threat domestically, it is a threat abroad—as the Iraq war illustrates with the more than 1 million Iraqis killed, scores of people tortured and the country’s social service infrastructure in ruins.

This case of the U.S. government propagandizing its own people, and the media’s failure to serve as an independent watchdog, further undermines America’s democratic ideals. The world can’t afford to wait any longer for rigorous investigations, debates and reforms surrounding these matters.

Friedman, who commands a $75,000 speaking fee (more than most Americans make in a year), wrote in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree that when he did his first column as the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in 1989:

I certainly did not know anything about most of the issues the senators were quizzing [Secretary of State James] Baker about, such as the START treaty, the Contras, Angola, the CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe) arms control negotiations and NATO…I couldn’t keep straight whether the Contras were our guys or their guys, and I thought the CFE was a typo and was actually ‘cafe’ without the ‘a’.

One could only hope that over the 20 years that followed, the foreign affairs columnist who once referred to himself as the newspaper’s paid “tourist with an attitude” and boasted of eating 14 Big Macs in 14 countries as one of the perks of his job, has acquired more intellectual depth.

It turns out, in Friedman’s case, that hoping for intellectual growth amounts to wishful thinking.

Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to July 2006. In an interview with the late Tim Russert on CNBC (watch video clip), Friedman not only revealed this not to be the case, but boasted, yet again, of not even knowing what he writes about or supports politically:

We got this free market, and I admit, I was speaking out in Minnesota—my hometown, in fact—and guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative [sic]. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.

While honesty is an admirable quality in any journalist, Friedman’s bravado combined with his intellectual incompetence and hostility towards the use of facts unveils an enormous amount of hubris. Friedman, despite admitting “he did not know anything about” most political issues of national and global importance, and not being able to recall the name of or knowing the contents of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), still believes he belongs in such a prominent perch covering these issues at “the paper of record.” To make matters worse, it has been reported that President Barack Obama has sought out Friedman for foreign policy advice concerning the Arab Spring.

The fact that this three-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s writing qualifies as serious, award-winning journalism and punditry is why Belén Fernandez latest book, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is such an important read.

Fernandez writes that the point of her book “is to demonstrate the defectiveness in form and in substance of [Friedman's] disjointed discourse, and in doing so offer a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States.”

Fernandez analyzes and critiques Friedman’s journalism and punditry using his columns from 1995 to the present, and his five books, with some additional material gleaned from select interviews and public appearances.

The Imperial Messenger is divided into three sections: America, the Arab/Muslim World, and The Special Relationship [U.S.-Israel]. The book’s conclusion compares the work of Friedman to Dr. Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist at American University in Washington D.C., who blogs at www.quotha.net and whose writing and opinion has appeared in a number of alternative media outlets.

Friedman, who Fernandez concludes relies on “clichéd feel good nationalism” and the “reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality” serves as the perfect vehicle for making such an indictment of the American mainstream media.

McJournalism

In The Imperial Messenger, Fernandez deftly reviews some of Friedman’s signature theories and policy prescriptions from past years, and evaluates how they’ve stood the test of time.

Take for instance his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” highlighted in The Lexus and the Olive Tree — a theory which Friedman stumbled upon as he “Quater-Poundered [his] way around the world”: no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other. Sure, it’s got a certain ring to it, but never mind the facts: as Fernandez points out, Israel’s occupation and bombing of Lebanon, or NATO’s war against the former Yugoslavia. All of these states, together with the host of NATO members, are graced with the Golden Arches.

Freidman’s “Flat World Theory,” which he floated in his 2005 bestseller The World is Flat, was developed in collaboration with the vice president of corporate strategy at IBM. Friedman, who compares himself to Christopher Columbus for making this “discovery,” argues simplistically that globalization has leveled the playing field among people, countries and companies around the globe. The World is Flat was awarded the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

“The process of mutual aggrandizement in this case is straightforward,” writes Fenandez. “Friedman writes a book about globalization under the guidance of corporate executives, corporate executives hail book as blueprint for world, accolades propel Friedman’s fame to further reinforce elite power structures,” she writes. Friedman attributes his motivations to his professed desire to see “large numbers of people escape poverty”, evidence be damned.

Fernandez also notes that the same year when Friedman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “clarity of vision…in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat,” he wrote a column called “ Crazier than thou,” in which he noted “No, the axis of evil idea isn’t thought through—but that’s what I like about it.”

“Crazier than thou” was a response to criticism from Chris Patten, the European Union’s Commissioner for External Relations at the time, of the Bush Administration’s “absolutist and simplistic” and “not thought through” lumping of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an allied existential threat to world peace. Friedman goes on to suggest that Bush introduce these countries to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who’s “even crazier than you.” His assessment of Rumsfeld’s mental faculties is one of the few reasonable things he’s written. Friedman goes so far as to dismiss European and Arab concerns of civilian casualties in Afghanistan as “nonsense,” because according to him, Afghans would rather be blown up by our B-52′s than continue to live under Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

In 2009, Friedman compared Afghanistan to a “special needs baby” that the U.S., an unemployed couple, has decided to adopt. This “is merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator, and parent/babysitter,” writes Fernandez.

Even when it seems it can’t get worse, it does. Friedman suggested that the Bush Administration should make Iraqis “ Suck. On. This” as compensation for 9/11 (which Iraq had nothing to do with). “We can only assume that haughty refrains of sexual-military domination find resonance among audiences seeking to defy feelings of individual and/or national inadequacy,” writes Fernandez. “It is meanwhile not clear why Friedman subsequently purports to be scandalized by the sexual military goings-on at Abu Ghraib.”

Friedman also once suggested that if the Serbs don’t acquiesce to NATO demands the population should be pulverized with a “ less than surgical” bombing campaign, and if necessary, militarily-“pulverize” the country back into the 1300s. It can be assumed that Friedman either never bothered to read the Geneva Conventions, or shares the Bush Administration’s view that they are irrelevant.

Friedman often has a penchant for contradicting himself. One strong example of his contradictory positions can be gleaned from two columns on Indonesia, written just a year apart.

In a May 1998 column, Friedman describes Suharto’s regime in Indonesia as “possibly the most corrupt regime in the world today,” an analysis that bordered on accurate, though is still a little euphemistic, especially in light of the US-backed dictator’s genocide against the Timorese. But a year later, in another column, Friedman chastised the US Congress for blocking the sale of fighter jets and US-training to Indonesia’s military because the country is “too complex to be a pariah.”

Other examples of Friedman’s pearls of journalistic and political skills pointed out by Fernandez include suggesting that Washington recruit the Russian mafia in the fight against Osama bin Laden, flooding Iraq with counterfeit money, or reducing his benign criticisms of Israel, a country he noted “had me at hello,” solely to its continued illegal settlement building.

“Friedman’s accumulation of influence is a direct result of his service as mouthpiece for empire and capital, i.e., as resident apologist for military excess and punishing economic policies,” writes Fernandez. This comes through in the following quote from The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U. S. Air Force F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Fernandez’s The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is a meticulously researched book, written with wry wit and an unrelenting critical eye, that should be read by both Friedman’s fans and critics alike; not just for what it reveals about his journalism or the New York Times, but for what it says about the state of American journalism as a whole. In short, if New York’s “paper of record” wanted to start rectifying its own journalistic deficiencies, it would do well to start by replacing Friedman with Fernandez.

U.S. contractors in Latin America are paid by the Defense and State Departments to supply countries with services that include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, training, and equipment.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that our efforts to rein in the narcotics trade in Latin America, especially as it relates to the government’s use of contractors, have largely failed,” said U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, chair of the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight which released a report on counter-narcotics contracts in Latin America this month. “Without adequate oversight and management we are wasting tax dollars and throwing money at a problem without even knowing what we’re getting in return.”

Washington doled out $3.1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2009, with spending having increased 32 percent over the five year period. DynCorp International was the big winner, racking in $1.1 billion, or 36 percent of total counter-narcotics contract spending in the region by the Defense and State Departments. Other contractors benefiting from the spending include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC.

“The federal government does not have any uniform systems in place to track or evaluate whether counter-narcotics contracts are achieving their goals,” the report states.

The June 7th Senate Report was released less than a week after an international drug commission declared the “War on Drugs” a failure. The commission included former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker, and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria.

The lack of transparency, oversight and accountability by the Defense and State Departments on counter-narcotics contracts was brought to light last year in a May 2010 hearing McCaskill held in which the Defense Department provided incomplete accounting on how “Drug War” money was spent on private contractors. Remarkably, it was revealed that the Defense Department actually outsourced their audit to a private contractor for the hearing. In response, the frustrated Senator said at the time that she “will not hesitate to use subpoenas” in order to obtain accurate information.

This laissez-faire approach Washington takes with private contractors often leads to crimes and human rights abuses in foreign countries. For example, DynCorp, the company Washington has entrusted with a majority of taxpayer-funded counter-narcotics dollars, has been mired in scandals over the years, that include: employees allegedly having sex with teenage girls in Bosnia and selling them as sex-slaves; pimping out young “dancing boys” in Afghanistan; and spraying toxic chemicals in Colombia that drifted into Ecuador and is believed to have caused “massive health problems, numerous deaths and widespread environmental damage.”

In response to criticisms, a Pentagon Spokesman told the the L.A Times that counter-narcotics efforts “have been among the most successful and cost-effective programs” in decades and that “the U.S. has received ample strategic national security benefits in return for its investments in this area.” Some of these “benefits” might include U.S. military bases in Colombia, a law enforcement academy in El Salvador run by American “trainers” that critics fear could become another “School of the Americas“, and securing commercial access to oil. But one of these benefits definitely does not include significantly curtailing the amount of drugs reaching the United States, as the Rand Corporation’s Peter Chalk recently pointed out in his report on Latin America’s drug trade, an analysis sponsored by the U.S. Air Force.

Clearly the US-led war on drugs is failing as a policy to stop the production and trafficking of drugs. And it’s not as though there are not numerous viable solutions being provided by people across the hemisphere. Javier Sicilia, Mexican poet and leading activist against drug war-related violence in his country, told journalist Laura Carlsen of the Americas Program, “The United States must go back to the drawing board, listen to what citizens are demanding, and the United States should remember, as a democratic country, that sovereignty lies in the citizens, not in government officials.”

While there is an anti-drug war movement budding in Mexico, we need to grow our own here in the United States and to start making our demands for humane and nonviolent policy alternatives.

Trainings have mostly taken place in Mexico, but now Mexican troops and police are traveling to Colombia to receive training from “Colombia’s battle-tested police commandos,” the Washington Post reported on Saturday. The article also suggests that, in addition to asserting itself as a regional power, Colombia is acting as a proxy for Washington because increased U.S. military presence in Mexico is not politically viable.

White House Drug Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske, while meeting with Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos in Bogotá on January 18, said that Colombia “serves as a beacon of hope for other nations struggling with the threat to democracy posed by drug trafficking and related crime.”

A Beacon of Hope?

Kerlikowske’s deceptively rosy assessment of Colombia and the effectiveness of Plan Colombia is severely undermined by the facts on the ground.

Earlier this month, Colombian military judge Alexander Cortes and his family were granted asylum by Switzerland. They were forced to flee the country after receiving death threats as a result of Cortes’s ruling that the Colombian Army had been guilty of 55 instances of “false-positives”, during which soldiers killed innocent young men and dressed them up as rebels in the military district of Urabá, Antioquia Department, in March of 2007.

A February 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá released by WikiLeaks last year revealed that, despite thousands of extrajudicial murders committed by soldiers in the ‘false-positives scandal’, Colombian Army Inspector General Maj. Gen. Carlos Suarez, in charge of investigating the scandal, told an embassy official that then-President Álvaro Uribe continued “to view military success in terms of kills.” In addition, military policy rewarded soldiers with “bonuses, promotions and vacation days.” According to Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) annual human rights report released on Monday, “As of May 2010, the Attorney General’s Office was investigating 1,366 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings committed by state agents involving more than 2,300 victims. There have only been convictions in 63 cases.”

But these types of problems have plagued Colombia for decades. “The CIA and senior U.S. diplomats were aware as early as 1994 that U.S.-backed Colombian security forces engaged in ‘death squad tactics,’ cooperated with drug-running paramilitary groups, and encouraged a ‘body count syndrome,’ state declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in January 2009. This might account for why Colombia leads the world in cases of forced disappearances.

In 1997 the US Congress approved the “Leahy Provision” or “Leahy Law,” an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act which banned the US from giving anti-narcotics aid to any foreign military unit whose members have violated human rights.

Furthermore, Uribe, who currently teaches at Georgetown University, is being investigated by a Colombian congressional commission for using his country’s intelligence office, the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), to spy on supreme court justices, rival politicians, journalists, human rights organizations and other civil society groups. In addition, according to the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project, the DAS “was exposed for providing paramilitaries a hit list of 23 trade unionists and others. The majority of the individuals on the list have since been killed or displaced.”

Uribe, who in June was praised by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a “remarkable example of democratic leadership”, also saw some of his “most prominent political supporters” investigated for ties to paramilitaries. Now that his hand-picked successor and former defense minister is in power, Juan Manuel Santos Calderón can be expected to continue what Clinton calls “a great legacy of progress,” and which Washington continuously and groundlessly gushes over.

Mexico: From Bad to Worse?

In September, U.S. President Barack Obama praised Mexico for its “vast and progressive democracy.”

Human Rights Watch’s section on Mexico in Monday’s report paints a different picture of this country’s democratic institutions. The report documents that “while engaging in law enforcement activities, the armed forces have committed serious human rights violations, including killings, torture, and rapes,” and that 1,100 complaints of human rights abuses have been filed against the Army with Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission in the first six months of last year.

Amnesty International also released a report in December 2010, Mexico: Human rights violations by the military, in which the human rights organization criticizes the Mexican government for its inadequate pursuit of justice regarding allegations against the military. “There is a disturbing pattern of crimes committed by the military in their security operations, abuse that is being denied and ignored by both the civilian and the military authorities in Mexico,” says Kerrie Howard, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Americas programme.

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon, whose 2006 election was marred by allegations of irregularities and fraud, unleashed the military to take the lead in the fight against drug cartels, close to 35,000 people have been killed, while “collateral” civilian deaths increased 172 percent from 2009 to 2010.

“If the killings continue to increase at the current rate, that total will rise to about 75,000 by the time the government’s term in office ends in December 2012,” Eduardo Guerrero Gutierrez, a political scientist and security consultant, told Canada’s National Post.

The Latin American Herald Tribune also pointed out that, like in Colombia, Mexico’s military are using “false-positive” methods to cover up civilian deaths. Meanwhile, a WikiLeaks cable dated Jan. 29, 2010 reveals that Washington, at least privately, is concerned with widespread corruption, low prosecution rates, and human rights abuses.

Extinguishing a Fire with Gasoline

The decision to allow Colombia to train Mexican authorities and military personnel to aid the fight in the drug war is akin to throwing gasoline on a fire, given both countries’ records of human rights scandals and institutionalized impunity. Never mind the fact, as The Economist recently pointed out, that Colombia is still “the world’s biggest cocaine producer,” which calls into question the effectiveness of Washington’s military approach to combat drug trafficking, or whether this is even their objective.

“The use of Colombian military trainers in Mexico may also be a way to get around the US legal requirement, contained in the Leahy Law, to exclude rights abusers in Mexico from receiving training and equipment,” said John Lindsay-Poland, Research and Advocacy Director for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He also noted that, unfortunately, “the Leahy Law doesn’t put a filter on abuses by the trainers.”

According to “Drug Czar” Richard Gil Kerlikowske’s recent interview with CNN, this may mark part of the “next wave” of the Mérida Initiative, Washington’s $1.6 billion security package to bolster anti-drug efforts in the region.

“There is [the] Mérida [Initiative] and the [Obama] administration is working on the shifts for the next wave of what will happen with Mérida…Mérida is not just a Plan Mexico; it is about Central America as well,” he told CNN.

If that is the case, the resulting violence could light the whole region on fire.

“Those who intentionally target innocent civilians must be held accountable, and we will continue to support institutions and prosecutions that advance this important interest,” states the NSS, even while later admitting that the United States refuses to hold itself to the same standard by refusing to officially be party to the International Criminal Court, currently the main vehicle for prosecuting alleged crimes against humanity.

Charges of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities are just the latest in the list of imperial alibis Washington uses to promote its narrow foreign policy objectives of resource accumulation and global hegemony. This effectively fills the vacuum first created by the end of the Cold War, the subsequent near-disappearance of the use of state communism, and then later with the Bush administration’s ineffective brand management of the “Global War on Terror.”

The Obama administration’s predisposition toward humanitarian intervention, and the popularity the concept has taken in liberal circles, makes Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s new book The Politics of Genocide (published by Monthly Review Press) a timely and indispensable read.

Herman and Peterson challenge conventional narratives concerning so-called genocides and mass atrocities in countries such as Darfur, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – places supported for intervention by actors across the political spectrum (left, liberal, and right). The book uses a framework established by Herman and Noam Chomsky in the early 1970′s for a study they penned about U.S. mass killings in Vietnam entitled Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda. In it, Herman and Chomsky establish four categories of bloodbaths: “Constructive,” “Benign,” “Nefarious,” and “Mythical.” Herman and Peterson adopt these categories for The Politics of Genocide, where the authors use case studies to similarly illustrate how “U.S. officials, with the help of media and establishment intellectuals [produce] a stream of propaganda to divert attention away from U.S.-organized and -approved violence, and onto that of its enemies.”

Herman and Peterson’s first target, classified as a “Constructive Genocide,” is the U.S.-U.K. led sanctions against Iraq after the first Gulf War, something the authors label as “perhaps the largest genocidal act in the last thirty years.” These sanctions prevented Iraq from repairing its infrastructure which had been deliberately destroyed during the war’s massive bombing campaign.

According to a joint study carried out by the World Health Organization and UNICEF in 1999, these sanctions were responsible for the deaths of approximately 500,000 children under the age of 5, “more children than died in Hiroshima.” Dennis Halliday, the first UN Coordinator of Humanitarian affairs in Iraq resigned in 1998, having labeled the effects of sanctions “genocide.” But Herman and Peterson point out that “Iraq’s hundreds of thousands of victims were unworthy of official notice and therefore of no interest to the establishment media and intellectuals.” The authors reveal the media bias towards U.S. based-crimes by tabulating newspapers’ use of the word genocide for the Iraq sanctions regime and comparing it to cases in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. The table notes the estimated deaths per theater and the number of instances newspapers use the word genocide to describe the conditions of the locality to show the ratio of deaths to genocide usage. In Iraq the rate was 10,000 deaths to 1 use of the word genocide with 80 instances (with an estimated 800,000 deaths from the sanctions). Meanwhile Kosovo, with an estimated 4,000 deaths, genocide usage has a ratio of 12 to 1 with 323 instances.

The other “constructive” genocide the authors use is the more recent U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, where well over a million Iraqis have died. The invasion was illegal, a clear violation of the UN Charter that ensures force can only be used when authorized by the Security Council, while the authors also point out that under Nuremberg (which Obama cites in his NSS) the invasion would be classified as a “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” So the authors ask where were the R2P advocates in calling out for sanctions or military intervention to protect Iraqi civilians from mass atrocities. (The Bush administration even brazenly announced that it would execute a “Salvador option”, where it would employ the use of Death Squads to pacify the country as it had done during the Cold War in El Salvador in the 1980′s.)

One of the “Nefarious Genocides” that Herman and Peterson dissect is Darfur, “the 21st Century’s First Genocide.” Darfur is an “acceptable” focus on villainy for reasons including that its government is run by Muslim Arabs, there is oil in Sudan, and China has become a principal business partner of Khartoum. Herman and Peterson call it “the most successful propaganda campaign of its kind this decade.” Quoting Steven Fake and Kevin Funk, authors of The Scramble for Africa: Darfur Intervention and the USA, unlike “[e]fforts to halt Western-backed humanitarian catastrophes, such as the bloodbath in Iraq, or the Israeli occupation, [which] fail to attract corporate funding or sympathetic pledges from the Oval office,” Darfur activism thrives because it is “largely rooted in establishment-friendly ideals such as Western ‘purity of arms’…and the use of force in this case by self-designated benevolent Westerners to save darkskinned vicitms from their Arab tormentors.”

But while the deaths and suffering in Darfur is horrendous, it does not constitute genocide. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commented that the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” In fact, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, established by the UN Security Council with US support, ruled that the violence and killings carried out by Sudan’s Government did not amount to genocide. Furthermore, the authors point out that more than three times as many people died in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 than in Darfur. Another African theatre where the authors argue genocide has been politicized and distorted, and which may shock some readers, is Rwanda. “To a remarkable degree, all major sectors of Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside down,” write Herman and Peterson.

The authors reveal the role current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a U.S.-backed (and trained) former military officer of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), of fomenting the violence that spiraled into epic proportions between April and July in 1994. The RPF, formerly a wing of the Ugandan army (where Kagame formerly served as intelligence director) took part in the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda in 1990, displacing several hundred thousand Hutu farmers.

Herman and Peterson point out that noticeably missing was any kind of action by the UN Security Council, which took swift action when Iraq, no longer of use to Washington, invaded Kuwait that same year. The RPF has also been accused of carrying out the assassination of former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994, an act that many believe triggered the Hutus’ bloody response. It should also be noted that Kagame has come recently under fire for arresting and detaining an American lawyer who had filed a lawsuit against Kagame in Oklahoma City accusing the president of the former president’s assassination, and who has been representing a Rwandan and Kagame opponent against trumped up charges of genocide. Further evidence Herman and Peterson use to dismantle the simplistic, yet politically useful perpetrator-victim narrative includes International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda testimony and rulings.

As for “Benign Bloodbaths,” the authors turn to Israel as one of their examples. From Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, which resulted in approximately 15,000 to 20,000 deaths, to its recent assault on Gaza in late December 2008 which caused destruction “ten times greater than an earthquake,” Washington’s strongest ally in the Middle East enjoys the ability to commit war crimes and what could be considered acts of genocide with impunity from justice and serious scrutiny in the media. Herman and Peterson turn their attention to treatment of the Goldstone Report as an example to support their argument. The report found that the Israeli onslaught was a form of collective punishment and that it caused “the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses.” The authors note that “there was no one within the establishment prepared to argue that Gaza Palestinians also possess a right to defend themselves or that other states bear a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.’” The other “Benign Bloodbaths” the authors cover, for which Washington bears responsibility, include East Timor, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Finally, the “Mythical Bloodbath” addressed is the Račak massacre, where Kosovo Serbs allegedly massacred dozens of ethnic Albanian civilians on January 15, 1999. The authors argue, with the aid of cited testimony, reports and articles, that this massacre never happened, and that the media storm it created provided a pretext for Washington and NATO to launch air strikes in former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia territory. One of the more interesting figures responsible for manufacturing the “massacre” whom Herman and Peterson write about is William Walker, “a veteran U.S. administrator of Reagan-era wars in Central America” who helped cover-up the Jesuit murders in El Salvador. Walker served as an official for the Organization of Security Cooperation of Europe in Kosovo at the time and was the first to report the “massacre” to then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

I would have liked this slim, yet very informative book to use this definition and apply it on a case-by-case basis to specifically determine whether the atrocities that they scrutinized qualified as genocide or acts of genocide. Instead the book often relied on comparing the magnitude and treatment of the aforementioned atrocities to show that those committed by Washington or U.S. client states were downplayed or whitewashed (and were largely more egregious), while the ones committed by U.S. enemies or targeted states were exaggerated and manipulated in order to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives and maintain our woeful global status-quo regarding international peace and justice. But the book clearly shows the politicization of the term genocide and the dangers and contradictions behind humanitarian intervention and the “responsibility to protect.”

“Just as the guardians of ‘international justice’ have yet to find a single crime committed by a great white northern power against people of color that crosses their threshold of gravity, so too all of the fine talk about the ‘responsibility to protect’ and the end of impunity has never once been extended to the victims of these same powers, now matter how egregious the crimes,” Herman and Peterson astutely point out.

Until we address and correct these inadequacies, biases and contradictions within the global hierarchy, international justice system and current human rights regime history will continue to be littered by the corpses of the innocent, whether genocide is the goal or the alibi. This book can be used as a reference by activists and policy makers to help us right these wrongs. We can’t afford to wait.

In an interview with CBS about his new film Stone remarked about America’s obsession with empire, maintaining global hegemony, and the paranoia that accompanies such obsessions, saying, “We’re a sick country.”

And as if on cue, the mainstream media has published a flurry of attacks on the documentary, consequently supporting Stone’s arguments in the film about ideological biases and misinformation tainting media coverage about the region, while revealing symptoms of this “sickness” he mentions, such as intellectual impotence, pathological lying, and ideological blindness.

One spectacular example is courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which published a hit piece by Ron Radosh entitled “To Chávez, With Love.” In it, Radosh remarkably calls out Stone for not mentioning the economic successes of Chile under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet during the 1970′s as a point of comparison to show how Venezuelan society under Chavez is suffering. For Radosh and the editors at the WSJ, a bloody regime that would kill, torture and/or disappear a filmmaker like Stone is not only a success, but a model to be duplicated. Sick indeed.

On the other end of the minuscule ideological spectrum represented in the U.S. mainstream media is a blog post by Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Peretz, who uses the same title as the WSJ piece, actually praises Rodosh, calling him a “brave historian.” In a healthy society one could accuse Radosh of being brave, in a perverse sort of way, for thumbing his nose at decency and morality by publicly praising a murderous regime because you would expect widespread condemnation to follow. That, sadly, is not the case.

Peretz goes on to call the democratically elected Latin American presidents interviewed in Stone’s documentary “tyrants”, while calling Stone’s work “trash,” nothing more than ideological-drivel and intellectual laziness. But how could we question the judgement and intellect of a journalism professional with 36 years at The New Republic, whose acute foreign policy judgements include urging former President Bush to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein in a letter (which he co-signed) written by The Project for the New American Century and sent to Bush 9 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks?

The Village Voice also gets into the fray with a vacuous review by critic Karina Longworth. Longworth, who in the past was honest enough to admit that she “know[s] very little about journalism,” displays that she knows even less about Latin American politics and Washington’s historical relationship with the region. Longworth was upset that Stone would allow the leaders of these “regimes” to have a voice stating their positions, something seldom seen in the U.S. media (one of Stone’s and the film’s main complaints). She later mocks the idea that the United States might have anything to do with the political and economic underdevelopment of the region. The Village Voice would better serve its readers by leaving Longworth to review movies such as Macgruber, which unlike South of the Border she thoroughly enjoyed.

Tom Gregory, a self-described Democrat and contributor to another “lefty” outlet, the Huffington Post, writes, “Stone wears the cynicism of a man looking for relevance.” First, who the hell is Tom Gregory? Second, while he goes on to accuse Stone of spoon-feeding viewers propaganda, he is the one guilty of spreading propaganda, such as his false assertion that Chávez is “anti-semetic”, a charge based on a bulletin by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles which misquoted Chávez. The media unfortunately perpetuated this lie because reporters and editors couldn’t be bothered with fact-checking information they published, or with amply correcting their mistakes and amending subsequent public misperceptions created after the fact. Gregory, obviously, is no different.

As you can imagine Forbes, the Washington Times, and the New York Post are among other outlets that joined the circus of attacks and misinformation. But the New York Times seems to have taken particular umbrage to Stone’s new film, maybe for being featured in it for its editorial celebrating the short-lived military coup against Chávez in 2002. Larry Rohter and his review “Oliver Stone’s Latin America” attempts to fact check Stone (a practice the newspaper unfortunately didn’t employ during the Bush Administration’s march to war in Iraq) and set the reader, and potential viewer, straight.

One “questionable assertion” Rohter takes issue with is “Stone’s contention that human rights, a concern in Latin America since the Jimmy Carter era, is ‘a new buzz phrase,’ used mainly to clobber Mr. Chávez.” But human rights is, in fact, a new “buzz phrase” (or imperial alibi) used selectively by Washington and media outlets like the New York Times against countries deemed Washington’s adversaries. Human rights is now dangerously being used as a potential excuse for intervention through doctrines such as the U.N.’s “Responsibility to Protect.” But for Rohter to know this he would actually have to read publications other than the New York Times.

Rohter also decides to draw attention to an ongoing dispute over the responsibility of the deaths of 19 people during the Washington-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002. He pits an anti-Chávez film X-Ray of a Lie against Stone’s assertions which borrow from a film sympathetic to Chávez called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. But while Rohter focused on this dispute he missed, or deliberately ignored, an opportunity to examine the big picture issue regarding his employer’s coverage of the coup, its lack of coverage of the Bush Administration’s role in it, and its continued hostile coverage of Venezuela’s president. I guess self-criticism and reflection is not in Rohter’s job description, nor a policy in general for journalists at the “newpaper of record”.

Rohter, later in his article, labels Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “Chávez acolyte”, an insulting and inappropriate label revealing his ideological biases, and then tries to defend Bechtel’s role in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) scheme to privatize Bolivia’s water system, which led to price gouging, and as a result a country-wide uprising which chased the multi-national corporation and its consortium out of the country.

Finally, Rohter lazily cites a review from his colleague at the Times, who called Stone’s film a “provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism,” and Entertainment Weekly‘s quip that the film was “rose-colored agitprop.” Conspicuously missing are voices supporting Stone’s documentary and point of view. But that is what Stone’s been saying all along.

Honest criticism of Stone’s film should be welcome. It is certainly debatable whether South of the Border will be a popular and effective “101 introduction to a situation in South America that most Americans and Europeans don’t know about.” I hope it is. I hope that it reaches a broad audience and moves viewers to seek out more information on the history and current events of Latin America. But the reviews aforementioned do little more than expose the ideological biases that dominate the U.S. media and the laziness that afflicts journalists today.

These failures of the media are part of the reason why America is ailing.

“We asked for this information from the State Department and the Defense Department (DoD) more than three months ago. Despite our repeated requests, neither Department has been able to answer our questions yet,” said U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill at a Senate hearing on May 20.

The Defense Department, which could only provide an estimate of how much of $5.3 billion it spent on counternarcotics operations in the last decade, actually outsourced what turned out to be an incomplete audit to a private contractor.

Contractors such as DynCorp and Northrop Grumman working in South and Central America are paid to spray drug crops, work with foreign militaries and police, offer intelligence and operational support, and conduct public relations assignments.

McCaskill, who said “there is almost no transparency,” added that she “will not hesitate to use subpoenas.”

Meanwhile, the United Nations is pushing for a new international convention to regulate Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC’s).

“This industry, which deals with heavy weaponry in conflict zones is less regulated than the toy industry,” said José Luis Gómez del Prado, chair of the UN’s Working Group on the use of mercenaries, in April.

The Working Group, worried about the “increased privatization of war and security,” urged Washington last August to allow more public oversight with its use of PSMC’s, especially those contracted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

One requirement included in the proposed legal framework for PMSC’s would be the termination of immunity agreements covering private security personnel. This would affect Washington’s controversial new base agreement with Colombia which grants diplomatic immunity to US military personnel and private defense contractors.

William F. Wechsler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics and Global Threats, used his testimony at the Senate to connect the ‘war on drugs’ with the ‘war on terrorism.’

“Terrorists associated with Islamic Radical Groups (IRGs), as well as narcoterrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), operate sophisticated networks designed to move not only weapons, drugs, and other materials, but people as well. A wealth of intelligence reporting has linked many IRG members to both drug trafficking and alien smuggling. The DoD, through extensively coordinated projects with Federal law enforcement agencies, has developed collaborative and effective methods for detecting, and monitoring, the movement of illegal drugs,” said Wechsler. “Such trafficking, in which terrorists with transnational reach commonly engage, is a present and growing danger to the security of the United States, our forces abroad, and our allies.”

This should cause particular concern in the region given President Obama’s expansion of covert special forces operations in the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Furthermore, contractors that are working in intelligence gathering could be shielded from public or Congressional oversight due to potentially classified designations to their operations.

Unfortunately, McCaskill’s tough stance with the Defense and State Departments is more a matter of fiscal concern rather than operational mission. She believes that private contractors’ “efforts are crucial to the success of the United States’ mission in Latin America.”

There needs to be both national and global efforts to legally reign in an industry which was recently exposed for teaching torture to Mexican Police just a day after the ‘war on drugs’ was officially expanded in Mexico through the Merida Initiative, a joint security agreement between the U.S. and Mexico.

To think that the toy industry is more heavily regulated is no laughing matter.

"The mining industry in Canada is too powerful a lobby," said Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) John McKay.

Sixty percent of the world’s mining corporations come from Canada. According to a report by InfoMine, Canadian mining corporations listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange had 1,010 projects in South America, 578 in Mexico, 703 in Africa, 376 in Asia and 345 in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea in 2009. Canada also accounts for 19 percent of global mining exploration spending, which totaled at $13.2 billion. Gold, silver, copper and nickel are among the minerals the industry scours the globe for. In Canada the industry employs 193 registered lobbyists.

McKay’s bill, C-300, would empower the Canadian federal government to investigate complaints of human rights and environmental abuses leveled against mining companies. If the Ministers investigating a company find it guilty of violating social and environmental standards laid out in the bill, the company, if receiving support from the Canada Pension Plan or Export Development Canada could lose funding from the respective organizations.

"It’s limited, but a positive step forward overall," said Sakura Saunders, editor of www.ProtestBarrick.net, a website that provides research and organizing information around mining issues, with a focus on Canadian Mining giant Barrick Gold. "But this bill is simply putting ethical guidelines on the investment and promotion of mining, oil and gas projects in developing countries. It treats the Canadian government as an investor rather than a government."

Dirty Business

Sarah Knuckey, a lawyer at the center for human rights at New York University School of Law, testified at a parliamentary hearing in Ottawa in November that security guards working at a mine in Papua New Guinea, owned by Barrick Gold, are guilty of gang raping local women.

"The guards, usually in a group of five or more, find a woman while they are patrolling on or near mine property. They take turns threatening, beating and raping her," said Knuckley. "In a number of cases, women reported to me being forced to chew and swallow condoms used by guards during the rape."

Amnesty International issued a public statement on December 9, 2009 revealing that local police at the same mine in Papua New Guinea violently evicted local families and burned down and destroyed at least 130 buildings and houses. Barrick initially denied the allegations, but after the conclusions of Amnesty’s local investigation were released the company was forced to accept the findings.

Barrick was also recently accused of failing to comply with environmental standards in Chile and of anti-union discrimination in Argentina.

On November 27, 2009 another Canadian company made headlines when a Chiapan anti-mining organizer, Mariano Abarca Roblero, was assassinated. One employee and two former employees of Calgary-based Blackfire Exploration Ltd. were arrested for the murder. Other local anti-mining activists have also reported receiving death threats. Documents were later released revealing that the company was bribing the local mayor. 

"We have obtained documents – which Blackfire admits are genuine – that clearly show payments of US$1,000 a month going directly into the Mayor of Chicomuselo’s bank account on the understanding that municipal authorities would keep community members opposed to the mine under control," explained Rick Arnold, coordinator for Common Frontiers-Canada. 

Less than a month later, two anti-mining activists were killed in El Salvador within a week of each other, where Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Co. has been facing resistance to a proposed gold and silver mine in the area. The company is currently using a US-based subsidiary and provisions in the Central American Free Trade Agreement to sue El Salvador’s government for refusing to grant the company permission to commercialize the potentially destructive El Dorado mine.

"The company’s presence continues to create violence and conflict by their continued insistence on opening the mine despite widespread community opposition," said Alexis Stoumbelis, Executive Director of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). "At this point, the only ethical thing for Pacific Rim to do is to leave El Salvador and to withdraw their lawsuits against the Salvadoran government."

Pacific Rim refuses to acknowledge that the violence is related to their widely unpopular project.

"The violence in Mexico and El Salvador are the logical and tragic outcome of a system that delivers millions of dollars to unethical people running unethical and even criminal companies with no oversight whatsoever," said Carlos Zorrilla, director of Defensa y Conservacion Ecologica de Intag (DECOIN). 

Zorrilla is no stranger to anti-mining violence. He had to go into hiding because of his organizing against Copper Mesa Mining Corp. (formerly Ascendant Copper). The United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights investigated his case. The company was also accused of using paramilitaries to intimidate local anti-mining community members. Copper Mesa, along with the Toronto Stock Exchange, are now being sued by three local Ecuadorians.

Finally, the Honduran government is investigating claims that Canada´s Goldcorp Inc. contaminated the Siria Valley with toxic heavy metals from its San Martin mine, which local villagers and NGO’s claim has caused health problems with the local population and killed livestock. The Guardian reports that two studies from scientists at Newcastle University supports the complaints against the mining company. What is uncertain, yet probably unlikely, is whether the new right-wing, and to many around the globe illegitimate administration, will continue with the investigation. It should be noted that Goldcorp supported the coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya by busing workers to pro-coup marches.

And these are just a few recent incidents, with more operations across the globe, from Burma (Myanmar) to Guatemala, drawing the ire of human rights and environmental activists, as well as the effected communities.

A Long Shot That Still Comes Up Short

In light of this bloody history, one of the C-300 bill’s shortcomings is that it would not stop mining companies found guilty of abuses from continuing their operations. It would just take away one slice of their funding. 

"We need legal reform in Canada and the scope of this bill is quite limited," said Karyn Keenan, a Program Officer with Halifax Initiative Coalition. "[But] Law reform in Canada happens in an incremental way…and that’s just the reality."

CISPES’s Stoumbelis has a harsher assessment of the bill. She points out that it does nothing to address the unjust global political and economic system which allows countries like Canada to exploit other nations, their people, and its resources with impunity.

"The idea of corporate social responsibility is a weak framework, in my opinion, because it doesn’t fundamentally change the balance of power. Under the current neoliberal model, the right of a corporation to make a profit is upheld over the rights of an individual or a community to have safe water and land on which to farm," said CISPES’s Stoumbelis. "Toughening regulations, while necessary, doesn’t go far enough to challenge these fundamental inequalities. It doesn’t seem possible to have any form of mining that is good for the environment or for developing sustainable industries or economies in Latin America or elsewhere, and with the state of the global climate, it seems like we should be looking more at alternatives than at regulation."

In 2007 the Canadian government created roundtable sessions with representatives from the mining industry and activists and academics from civil society to address the lack of oversight for an industry with an infamous global reputation of human rights abuses and environmental destruction. Two years later, the result of the roundtable’s recommendations was the creation of an oversight mechanism that allows an "independent" corporate social responsibility (CSR) counselor to investigate allegations against mining companies–but only if the accused company gives consent to be investigated. The appointed "independent" investigator, Marketa Evans, who just happens to be "founding director of the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre – named for and funded by Peter Munk, founder of Canada’s Barrick Gold," answered critics of the policy masquerading as reform by telling The Toronto Star that "My hypothesis is that companies will want to participate in a review." 

MiningWatch Canada, a Canadian non-profit committed to aiding mining reform efforts, responded by pointing out, "Collectively, the voluntary guidelines proposed by the Government of Canada do not reflect, nor do they ensure respect for, all international human rights norms and practices that may be affected by Canadian mining companies operating abroad." 

Currently, the conservative Harper government believes Bill C-300 is unnecessary, and is looking to maintain the status quo. Trade Minister Stockwell Day said at a press conference on January 13 more voluntary standards coupled with shareholder pressure is all that is needed.

"One of the compelling factors that exists today is the very awareness that can be so easily transmitted if a company seems to be going offside in some area, shareholders demand that," said Day. "There is very little tolerance among shareholders for wrong practices." 

The Harper government launched a new corporate social responsibility website to help Canadian companies "raise the bar for excellent CSR-related practices in the extractive industry." But recent testimony and reports suggest that the "bar" is starting on the ground.

Yet Canada´s powerful mining lobby is still fighting back. Canadian law firm McCarthy Tetrault´s answer to Bill C-300 was a veiled threat by suggesting that if Bill C-300 passes it would "encourage mining companies to locate in jurisdictions with less regulation, and no commitment to CSR efforts." 

Karen Spring, an activist with Rights Action, a human rights organization that works with communities effected by mining in Central America, although highly critical of the bill agrees with Saunders that despite the its shortcomings, and even if it doesn’t pass, it has served a purpose. 

"The strengths of the bill, in my opinion, is the public campaign on the part of the Canadian public and NGOs that are supporting the bill in drawing a lot of critical attention to the mining companies," said Spring. "The campaign is educating the Canadian public about the poor practices of Canadian mining companies abroad, and at the same time, giving Canadian citizens a direct way of getting involved with the struggle against the human rights violations these companies are committing abroad."

But Spring notes that the campaign supporting Bill C-300 has overshadowed a stronger legislation, the International Protection and Promotion of Human Rights Act, or Bill C-354. Proposed by New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Peter Julian, the bill would allow foreigners to sue Canadian companies in Canadian courts for human rights abuses, regardless of where the abuses take place. It replicates the United States’ Alien Tort Claims Act, which survivors of torture in other countries have used to sue their torturers in US courts. 

"If the Canadian government is at all interested in putting respect of human rights, and of life itself, above protecting and promoting the rights of their companies to make money overseas, then they will adopt measures such as bill C-300," said Ecuadorian anti-mining activist Zorrilla. "One is left to wonder how many more deaths it will take to convince the Canadian Parliament- and people- that something needs to be urgently done to reign in their corporations and prevent all these tragedies.

“If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering,” said UC-Berkeley’s Marshall Burke, the study’s lead author.

The study, “Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” published online last week by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), states that there are “strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war.” Using climate model projections it estimates a “roughly 54% increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030, or an additional 393,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars.” The study, which uses data between 1981-2002, shows that a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature “represents a remarkable 49% increase in the incidence of civil war.”

“We were definitely surprised that the linkages between temperature and recent conflict were so strong,” said co-author Edward Miguel, professor of economics at UC-Berkeley and faculty director of UC-Berkeley’s Center for Evaluation for Global Action. “But the result makes sense. The large majority of the poor in most African countries depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and their crops are quite sensitive to small changes in temperature. So when temperatures rise, the livelihoods of many in Africa suffer greatly, and the disadvantaged become more likely to take up arms.”

The study comes on the heels of statements by scientists from the Global Carbon Project that if we don’t drastically reduce our carbon emissions the world is on course for a 6 degrees Celsius increase in temperature by the end of the century. Of course if this doomsday scenario comes to fruition we won’t have to worry about wars in Africa—the human race, along with all other forms of life, will be nearly wiped off the face of the earth.

While the study focused solely on temperature change, experts have argued that other climate change factors, such as changes in precipitation levels, water scarcity, lack of arable land and migration are also contributing to conflicts. The Los Angeles Times published an article on Friday appropriately asking, “Have the climate wars of Africa begun?” The article examines recent tribal fighting in Kenya over water and pastures, which the UN believes is responsible for at least 400 deaths this year. Libya, another war torn country, is dealing with longer rainy seasons, rising sea levels and increases in flooding. Climate change is also believed to be a contributing factor in the escalation of violence in Darfur. Writing in the Washington Post, Ban Ki Moon, secretary general of the United Nations, noted, “Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”

Another recent study conducted by a group of military experts contracted by the Institute for Environmental Security in The Hague supports the US researchers’ claims linking climate change to war.

“Failure to recognise the conflict and instability implications of climate change and to invest in a range of preventive and adaptive actions will be very costly in terms of destabilising nations, causing human suffering, retarding development and providing the required military response,” retired Indian air marshal AK Singh, who chairs the institute’s military council, told South Africa’s Mail & Guardian Online.

Nana Poku, Professor of African Studies at the UK’s Bradford University, told the BBC that the US-based study makes the case for “climate debt,” an idea growing in popularity around the world “that rich countries should pay reparations to poor countries for the climate crisis.”

“I think it strengthens the argument for ensuring we compensate the developing world for climate change, especially Africa, and to begin looking at how we link environmental issues to governance,” said Poku . “If the argument is that the trend towards rising temperatures will increase conflict, then yes we need to do something around climate change, but more fundamentally we need to resolve the conflicts in the first place.”

Pacific Rim Mining Corp., using its Nevada-based subsidiary Pac Rim Cayman LLC, filed a Notice of Intent on Dec. 9 through provisions in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that allow transnational corporations to sue governments over laws and decisions that often put public interests ahead of corporate profits.

“We reject Pacific Rim’s claims. Giving over [exploitation] permission would be a death sentence from the country and the arbitration can’t be accepted because it is the mining company that should be sued,” the National Table Against Metallic Mining, and umbrella group of social movements and NGO’s, responded in a statement.

The company and government have 90 days to settle the dispute before the case goes before an arbitration tribunal, while the 90-day period ends just 5 days before the country’s presidential election. The company is looking for permission to begin mining for gold and silver at its El Dorado mine in the department of Cabañas, about 40 miles outside of San Salvador. The lawsuit threat also comes as the government is debating new mining laws.

“They’re either using the threat of a lawuit as leverage or it could be a strategy to help ARENA win the election,” said Burke Stansbury, of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a member of the Stop CAFTA Coalition. The right-wing, ruling Arena party is supportive of new mining laws that loosen restrictions for the industry, but has been delaying any actions because of upcoming local and national elections.

Timothy McCrum, the company’s lawyer in the dispute, in a conference call for investors co-hosted with Pacific Rim President and CEO Tom Shrake, noted a case filed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (which served as a model for CAFTA) he believes serves as a precedent that should work in the company’s favor. The dispute, between California-based Metalclad Co. and the Mexican government, ended with the Mexican government forced to pay the company $15.6 million in damages because it refused to grant Metalclad permission to build a toxic waste site in an area designated as an ecological preserve.

Andrew Gussert, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign (CTC), said his coalition opposes these provisions that were originally introduced in the North American Free Trade Agreement’s Chapter 11 investor rules.

“They’re ways to circumnavigate laws that cost these corporations profits. And these laws are mainly public interest laws dealing with environmental, health and labor standards,” Said Gussert. “That’s why we have to roll back these investors rights provisions, because we don’t want corporations to have more rights than people.

But the mining opposition, which includes social movements, the Catholic Church, NGO’s, local lawmakers and environmentalists, may have an unlikely ally–President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama, in a February letter to the Wisconsin Fair Trade Coalition (an affiliate of CTC), clearly stated his opposition to these “investor rights” provisions in free trade agreements.

“With regards to provisions in several FTAs that give foreign investors the right to sue governments directly in foreign tribunals, I will ensure that this right is strictly limited and will fully exempt any law or regulation written to protect public safety or promote the public interest,” said Obama, who voted against CAFTA while in the Senate.

Obama added that “we should add binding environmental standards so that companies from one country cannot gain an economic advantage by destroying the environment. And we should amend NAFTA to make clear that fair laws and regulations written to protect citizens in any of the three countries cannot be overridden simply at the request of foreign investors.”

Destroying the Environment

In 2005, hydrogeologist Robert Moran conducted a technical review of Pacific Rim’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the El Dorado Mine Project, concluding the company’s study was incomplete and lacked necessary data and testing.

“The El Dorado EIA, unfortunately, presents baseline data that are incomplete and which do not allow a reader to adequately evaluate the pre-mining water quantity conditions. To a lesser extent the baseline water quality data are also inadequate, especially with respect to ground water quality” wrote Moran. “The contents of the El Dorado EIA and the related public review process indicate clearly that neither the general public nor the Salvadoran regulators have been adequately informed regarding the possible environmental or socioeconomic impacts to the local populations.”

According to a study sponsored by the Catholic organization Caritas-El Salvador and the non-governmental Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), local water supplies will be contaminated by mercury, cyanide, arsenic, zinc and aluminum, and can be expected to cause health problems for local populations.

“It is estimated that Pacific Rim will use 7,300 tons of cyanide in the El Dorado site in Cabañas,” said a staff member of U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities, a solidarity network that has been active in supporting anti-mining advocacy. “The left over cyanide would bring illness and contamination to the people living near and down river from the mining sites. Also open pit process uses 900,000 liters of water day, which is what a family consumes in 20 years.”

The Center for Research on Investment and Trade has also concluded in a study that intensive water use and contamination by the mining industry in El Salvador would devastate the country’s agricultural sector and in turn threaten food security as well as the livelihoods of campesino farmers.

But Pacific Mining CEO Tom Shrake dismisses concerns of long-term environmental damage as “preposterous.” On his conference call with investors he also accused NGO’s of employing “masked armed gunmen” to “chop down trees planted in our reforestation program.” His lawyer McCrum also took shots at the Catholic Church’s opposition to the company’s mine, as well as its criticism of free trade agreements like CAFTA. He said that the church “has allowed itself to be influenced by NGO’s,” has segments that are “almost radically left-leaning,” and that members of the church opposed to mining are not “acting consistent with Catholic doctrine.”

Carlos Peraza Alarcón, a member of Comunidades Unidas, calls mining projects like Pacific Rim’s El Dorado mine a “project of death.”

“These projects, if played out as planned, will destroy most of our resources just to satisfy the interest of a small group of people,” said Alarcón.

Meanwhile, this conflict presents a President Obama with an opportunity to show Latin America that he has the “audacity” to stand up to corporate power, and in the process begin to repair relations with the people of the region while forging a path to the creation of fair trade agreements. Salvadorans, Americans and the rest of the hemisphere will have to wait until after Jan. 20 to see if hope actually translates into change on this issue.

The new constitution gives nature the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution” and mandates that the government take “precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”

“I think a lot of eyes will be on Ecuador this weekend” said Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Margil and other members of the Defense Fund were invited as a result of their environmental litigation and legislative work with municipalities in the United States. They made several trips to Montecristi over the last year where they worked with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly on drafting legally enforceable Rights of Nature, which Margil believes marks a watershed in the trajectory of environmental law.

Dr. Mario Melo, a lawyer specializing in Environmental Law and Human Rights and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama-Ecuador, said that the new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.

“In this sense, the new constitution reflects the traditions of indigenous peoples living in Ecuador, who see nature as a mother and call her by a proper name, Pachamama,” said Melo.

Challenging Corporate Power

Ecuador’s leadership on this issue just may have a global domino effect as the Defense Fund is now fielding calls from other countries such as Nepal, which is currently writing its first constitution. This could begin to make neoliberal development models obsolete and have a tremendous impact on multinational corporations, especially those in the extractive industries, from entering new markets and conducting “business as usual”.

“I expect them to fight it,” said the Defense Fund’s Margil. “Their bread and butter is being able to treat countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels. Multinational corporations are dependent on ravaging the planet in order to increase their bottom line.”

The class-action lawsuit in Ecuador against Chevron is a testament to Margil’s forecast. Tens of thousands of Ecuadorians accuse the California-based company of dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon (when it was formerly Texaco), and as a result causing massive environmental destruction and widespread health problems. Chevron, which could be forced to pay as much as $16 billion, refuses to take responsibility and calls the action a “shakedown.”

“The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company,” a Chevron lobbyist who asked not to be identified told Newsweek in July. “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this-companies that have made big investments around the world.”

Chevron is lobbying Congress to squeeze Ecuador on the issue by threatening to withhold the renewal of the Andean Trade Preference Act. Chevron took similar measures in 2006 by lobbying for the exclusion of Ecuador from Andean Free Trade Agreement negotiations as retribution for the lawsuit–something Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) criticized at the time in a letter to then U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman.

Jorge Daniel Taillant, President of the Center for Human Rights and Environment (in Argentina), recently wrote, “The crude reality of the Chevron lobbyist comment, brings home what few politicians or oil industry representatives want to admit, that our societies have been unsuccessful in properly balancing our need for oil and containing the negative impacts that this industry has on our natural and social environment.”

It is this lack of success, as vindicated by the symptoms of global warming, and which are becoming all too apparent, that for Margil emphasize the urgent need to try something different, like what’s being proposed in Ecuador. But even this might not be far enough.

Populist Greenwashing?

For all of the hope and tangible progress the Rights of Nature articles in Ecuador’s proposed constitution represent, there are shortcomings and contradictions with the laws and the political reality on the ground.

Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, who has been a tireless defender of Pachamama against transnational mining companies such as Canada’s Ascendant Copper (which recently changed its name to Copper Mesa Mining Corp.), takes a more skeptical approach to the proposed laws.

“It sounds great,” said Zorilla, “but in practice governments like [President] Correa’s will argue that funding his political project, which will bring ‘well being and relieve poverty’, overrules the rights of nature because the best technology will be used and mining and other extractive industries will be, of course, sustainable.”

The articles place the responsibility of carrying out these laws largely to the government, though it does give citizens and communities legal recourse if its determined that the government is failing in its responsibilities.

“It comes down to the government doing what is the will of the people,” said an optimistic Margil.

But Zorrilla, along with many other critics from social movements, point to Correa’s refusal to include in the constitution a clause mandating free, prior and informed consent by communities for any development project that would of affect their local ecosystems, as well as the Correa Administration’s embrace of an extractive economic model of development, although one with greater State control.

“They aren’t issues you can reconcile,” said environmental lawyer Melo. “On various occasions, President Correa has stated his will to amplify border-region projects for the extraction of natural resources, especially petroleum and metals, and this can only be done in Ecuador at the cost of natural resources important for their biodiversity, since they are the source of rivers and the homes of local communities. The Constitution Project, on the contrary, promotes a development model oriented towards ‘good living’ (buen vivir), which means living in harmony with nature and strengthening environmental rights for this end. This contradiction, between Correa’s statements and buen vivir, will probably provoke an intensification of socio-environmental conflicts in the coming years.”

Despite any shortcomings, the eyes of the world should stay on Ecuador beyond this weekend’s vote when the constitution will most likely pass. If history is any indicator, Ecuadorians will fight for the Rights of Nature, with or without President Correa.

Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, a banana worker, was assassinated while working at a farm owned by a subsidiary of Del Monte. Cruz Hernández’s Union of Izabal Banana Workers (SITRABI), was one of six Guatemalan unions who, along with the AFL-CIO, filed a complaint allowed through labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on April 23, charging that the Guatemalan government was not upholding its labor laws and was failing to investigate and prosecute crimes against union members–which include rape and murder. The complaint states that violence against trade unionists has increased over the past two years (since CAFTA was ratified) and that the Guatemalan government may be responsible for some of the violence. The violence from this year alone includes 8 murders, 1 attempted murder, 2 drive-by shootings, and the kidnapping and gang rape of a top union official’s daughter who was targeted because of her father’s union work.

“There is a climate of terror for trade unionists,” said Thea Lee, the chief international economist at the AFL-CIO, in an interview with Bloomberg News. “But so far the Bush administration hasn’t lifted a finger to enforce any of the labor chapters.”

The timing of Cruz Hernández’s murder, just five days after the complaint was filed, is disturbingly reminiscent of a fellow SITRABI member’s murder. Marco Tulio Ramirez, the union’s Secretary of Culture and Sports, was assassinated by assailants wearing ski masks on company property just two days after the Ministry of Defense (MOD) ruled in September 2007 that a military unit should be disciplined for raiding a union office and interrogating officials. SITRABI met several times with the MOD and other government officials to discuss the military intimidation the months leading up to the ruling. According to the AFL-CIO complaint, his murder has never been investigated.

While the Bush Administration was offered an opportunity to informally discuss the complaint with Guatemala’s Colom, the only words concerning CAFTA were about “how it was working.”

“And by the way, we talked about blueberries,” added President Bush. “And-so that blueberries are able to come off-season here to the United States, which is a positive development for Guatemalan farmers.”

While it is unclear how blueberry exports will lift one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere out of poverty, American unions have long argued that free trade agreements which encourage corporate investment without strengthening and enforcing labor laws and human rights protections will keep working families in developing nations mired in poverty and fear. This subsequently drags down the standard of living for workers here in the U.S..

“Guatemalan workers are being targeted for their union activity,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. “Without the freedom from fear to join unions and bargain collectively, how can we expect any workers to benefit from a trade agreement?”

The complaint alleges that five employers, four of which are companies that export goods to the U.S., are failing to abide by Guatemalan laws protecting collective bargaining, freedom of association and other labor protections. According to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, the complaint will initially be handled through government-to-government consultations. If no resolution can be reached, an arbitration panel consisting of independent experts and labor specialists will rule on the dispute. CAFTA requires countries to enforce their own labor laws or face fines of up to $15 million.

The Violence of Free Trade

Violence carried out to protect the interests of foreign capital in Guatemala is nothing new. The CIA orchestrated a coup in 1954, largely on behalf of the interests of the United Fruit Company, to overthrow the democratic government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Arbenz’s “crimes” against capitalism included land and labor reforms. The coup sparked a 36-year civil war marked by military dictatorships, death squads, and genocide that left hundreds of thousands Guatemalans murdered, tortured and disappeared. While Peace Accords were signed in 1996 putting an official end to the violence, unofficially it continues.

“Violence is commonplace in our country. The main source of the violence is the national civilian police force,” said Pepe Pinzón, general secretary of General Guatemalan Workers’ Centre (CTGT). “Government and employers collude with each other, which undermines the population and leads to widespread breaches of trade union rights. It is highly organized and all the more difficult to combat when the source is the government itself.”

CTGT is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), an organization that represents 168 million workers in 155 countries and territories, and has 311 national affiliates. The ITUC promotes and defends workers’ rights through international campaigns. The organization sent a letter to President Colom on Wednesday expressing outrage over Cruz Hernández’s murder and the continuous and unabated harassment and violence directed at fellow trade unionists.

In January, the ITUC organized an international trade union conference in Guatemala to end impunity. President Colom gave the opening speech and offered a firm commitment to combat impunity and corruption, “wherever it is found, even in my own family!” The letter urged Colom to follow through with his promise and take the necessary steps to protect the rights and lives of workers in Guatemala.

The U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report released in March offers unexpected support to the claims made by Pinzón and the ITUC, while it also gives credence to the AFL-CIO CAFTA complaint.

According to State Department there were a number of “credible allegations” last year that PNC members carried out rape, murder, torture, kidnappings and other criminal activities. The Guatemalan government determined that PNC personnel were responsible for murder in 16 cases that were investigated. But impunity more often than not trumps justice as, “The PNC routinely transferred officers suspected of wrongdoing rather than investigating and punishing them.”

In addition, the State Department pointed out that Guatemala’s “ineffective legal system” made the enforcement of labor laws highly unlikely, something reported repeatedly year-after-year in previous reports. Some common practices of employers against workers include firing workers for union activity, blacklisting union organizers, and other forms of illegal threats and harassment. Meanwhile Guatemala’s government came under criticism for applying anti-terrorism regulations against unions and trade unionists.

Rewarding Colombia

The ongoing violence against workers in Guatemala makes it clear that talk of free trade improving human rights in developing countries is lost in translation. Free trade has done nothing but exacerbate poverty and inequality, while rewarding governments for sustaining repressive conditions that allow corporations to exploit vulnerable, and often powerless workers. No country in the world exemplifies this hostility towards workers’ rights more than Colombia, a country that the Bush Administration is currently trying to reward by pressuring congress to pass a free trade agreement.

According to the U.S. Labor Education on the Americas Project, Colombia accounts for more than 60 percent of trade unionists killed worldwide. There have also been at least 17 murders of trade unionists just this year, which according to a report released last month accounts for an 89 percent increase of murders during the same time period from 2007. There are also an estimated 2.5 million children working in Colombia and more than 26 million internally displaced people.

As for the notion that U.S businesses working in Colombia can only improve conditions, Chiquita Brands International Inc. was forced to pay the U.S. Justice Department a $25 million settlement last year for giving over $1 million to the right-wing terrorist organization United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Even more damaging is the fact that Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, at the time assistant attorney general, knew about the company’s relationship with AUC and did nothing to stop it.

But a free trade agreement with Colombia will require President Álvaro Uribe, who was recently implicated in a 1997 massacre of 15 Colombians by paramilitaries, whose cousin has been charged with working with right-wing death squads, and whose “most prominent political supporters” are being investigated for ties to paramilitaries, to ensure that his government uphold all labor laws.

“We have observed that in some cases the employees of private military and security companies enjoy an immunity which can easily become impunity, implying that some States may contract these companies in order to avoid direct legal responsibilities,” said Jose Luis Gomez del Prado, Chairperson-Rapporteur of the U.N. Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries in a statement before the Human Rights Council.

The alleged human rights abuses are not just against civilians from the countries in which they operate, but also against there own employees. These “soldiers of misfortune” are often recruited from vulnerable populations in developing countries, such as Honduras and Ecuador, countries the U.N. group visited last year to conduct investigations. The massive unemployment, low wages, fragile governments and the history of violent conflicts in these countries make their populations an ideal labor pool. In addition, the report expresses worry about the “phenomenon” of Latin American governments outsourcing domestic security and military functions to the private sector and the use of such operations to “protect” oil and mining companies.

“There needs to be international regulations as well as domestic regulations in these countries,” said Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Tree, who has been monitoring this “out of control” industry for years in its role in the “War on Drugs” in Latin America, said that the lack of regulations and oversight is due to the fact that that it’s been under the radar for years and just coming to light because of the Iraq War. It’s estimated that there may be as many as 50,000 mercenaries working in Iraq—making it the second largest force in the so-called “coalition of the willing.” Many of them may end up fighting alongside U.S. soldiers in combat situations.

“The number of personal security specialists we utilize in Iraq alone is more than all the Diplomatic Security agents we have globally”, said Gregg Starr, a State Department official in testimony before Congress in June of 2006.

Although there has been some reporting on high profile companies, the issue still may not be garnering the attention it deserves as no media outlets have reported on the U.N. report.

According to the Working Group, there may be as many as 280 private security companies operating illegally in Honduras. A number of Honduran nationals working in Iraq, for a subsidiary of the Illinois-based Your Solutions Inc., are believed to have suffered “irregularities in contracts, harsh working conditions, wages partially paid or unpaid, ill-treatment and isolation, and lack of basic necessities such as medical treatment and sanitation.” Some former employees have filed labor and criminal claims against the company with Honduran authorities.

Another scandal unearthed against the company in the Working Group’s report involves illegally training Chilean recruits for Iraq in Honduras. The report states that in September 2005 the company brought 105 Chileans, some ex-soldiers, into the country under tourist visas. The Chileans, alongside their Honduran counterparts, were then sent to a former army base in the municipality of Lepaterique to receive training. The former base, now a development center of the Honduras Forestry Development Corporation, was once used by Washington in the 1980s to train mercenaries of a maybe not-so-different sort—namely Contras, Honduras’s infamous death squad Battalion 316, and Argentina’s 601st Intelligence Battalion, a “counter-terrorist” unit initiated under Operation Condor.

The possibility for industry changes in Honduras may be slight as the Working Group pointed out a “campaign of harassment, death threats and slander against the [human rights organization] Associacion para una Sociedad Mas Justa (Association for a More Just Society).” On Dec. 4, 2006 Dionisio Díaz García, a lawyer and journalist with the Tegucigalpa-based AJS, was shot in the head while driving in his car to court where he was scheduled to represent a group of security guards who had their labor rights violated.

In a statement, the AJS wrote: “These companies have resorted to intimidation, smear campaigns, and open hostility toward AJS workers. On Monday, December 11, a board member and staff of CRWRC-Honduras partner group Genesis received a text message stating, ‘You are the next.’”

In Ecuador conditions are more of the same: immunity, impunity, exploitation and human and labor rights violations. The report expressed concern that private security companies were using the U.S. military base in Manta to recruit employees for foreign operations (Iraq and Afghanistan) and to conduct aerial spraying and other counter-narcotics operations under “Plan Colombia”.

“A transnational private security company was performing counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics tasks from the military base in Manta,” said the U.N.’s Gomez del Prado, adding that these functions should be carried out exclusively by U.S. military personnel.

Manta has become a political lightning rod as Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has threatened to not renew the “Agreement of Cooperation” with the U.S. (which expires in 2009) that allows Washington to use the Air Force base. The agreement also grants immunity to U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors—a clause which the Working Group views as problematic. The report and its documentation of abuses of the use of the base along with public opinion firmly on the side of Correa may make it even easier for him to kick Washington out when the agreement expires.

Jeffrey Shippey, a former DynCorp International employee at Manta created a ghost company, Epi Security and Investigations, and recruited more than 1,000 Colombians and Ecuadorians to work in Iraq. The report noted that the company wasn’t registered in Quito nor with local provisional authorities. NGO’s told the Working Group that the company allegedly was using Chilean instructors and former Colombian military personnel.

Shippey wrote in an advertisement promoting his company at the Iraq Job Center Web Site that, “These forces have been fighting terrorists for 41 years and … have been trained by the U.S. Navy Seals and the U.S. DEA to conduct counter-drug/counter-terror ops in the jungles and rivers of Colombia.”

Another virtue of his mercenaries is that they get paid considerably less than their U.S. counterparts. In July 2005, Shippey told the Los Angeles Times, “The U.S. State Department is very interested in saving money on security now. Because they’re driving the prices down, we’re seeking Third World people to fill the positions.”

Adam Isacson, Director of Programs at the Center for International Policy, worries about the stories that haven’t come to light yet. He mentioned a report translated on his website about Colombians working in Iraq for a subsidiary of Blackwater USA who had their return tickets taken away from them when they complained that they would only get paid $1,000 a month after being promised $4,000. They were essentially held hostage.

“It was almost slavery,” said Isacson. “Lord knows how many more cases there are.”

Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, said that there are other consequences that we might not see for years. One of the most worrying is that these people may take this training and use it for violent criminal activities. An example of this is the story of the “Zetas”, a group of Mexican paramilitary commandoes trained by U.S. special-forces to fight drug gangs. Many members of this group now work for the notorious Gulf Cartel, which is believed to supply large amounts of cocaine to the U.S.

“Don’t train people if you don’t know what side they are going to fight for at the end of the day,” said Tree.