Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

The work was advising a joint venture, errands like gauging risk and return, or squeezing ministerial face for a competitive edge. Life went on throughout the Congo war, and so did commerce. The trick is to find a niche on the ragged edges of the war. If you live in a place where capital markets are ropy, war torn countries are not a bad place to salt your long-term capital away. Some Israelis were in on the joint venture: Israelis don’t mind war, when the other side is helpless, and in this war almost everyone was helpless. A farmer’s rusty panga could be an overwhelming force. The Mai Mai used spears to great effect. Molars and penises served as weapons, for cannibalism and rape.

The war still smolders today, in Kivu, Ituri, and Katanga. It causes us no disquiet. But what if we got greedy for peace? What if peace changed from a heartwarming word to a remorseless objective like efficiency or profit? What if we demanded more and more?

Well, it’s happening, and it makes our rulers nervous. In the Wikileaks cable dump, American diplomats reticently quote a novel term, the right to peace. Officials from Spain and Russia invoke it. The UN Secretary General is heard to say it. The conjunction of two freighted terms sounds like heartwarming blather, but from the mouths of shrewd statesmen, it’s of import. Even the most aristocratic Hotchkiss/Harvard meathead will begin to think that something is afoot.

For our war machine and its government, peace is always trouble. In the run up to World War I our government sent a presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs,  to jail. His crime was opposing conscription. Socialist Charles Schenk was convicted of espionage. Schenk got a look at the Constitution, and pointed out that conscription looks a lot like unconstitutional involuntary servitude. Back then our antisemitism was for Jews, not Arabs, and we sent a few Jews up for twenty years. It seems they threw some leaflets out a window. In English and, insidiously, Yiddish, the alien anarchists denounced our invasion of Russia. They called for an end to arms production.

In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Smith Act to silence commie putschists and their nonaggression, and in the traditional patriotic frenzy that invariably cascades into backwoods slapstick, Mississippi took the concept and ran with it, crafting its own national security law. They convicted some Jehovah’s Witnesses of questioning the point of war. In this case, though, peace might not have been what tore it. In what was probably the crucial atrocity, the Dixie heretics also linked the origins of our Pledge of Allegiance to the convent-school rites of French Papists.  In Mississippi, that’s a clear and present danger.

This embarrassing arc of American history still bends toward idiocy, with every provincial rent-a-cop and stewardess a homeland security hero. Arabic lettering on a t-shirt gets you kicked off a plane and questioned (though nowadays Yiddish is mostly OK.) The nation teems with deputized authorities demanding fatuous reverence to our proletarian cannon fodder and their hopeless anti-terror snipe hunts.

It’s not quite classic Orwell: to patriotic Americans, war may not be peace, but peace is insidious war. The government charged a Vietnam War protester with sedition for grabbing the leg of the recruit who stepped on him. It seems the mere word peace can be seditious. “Make love for peace… We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know.” John Lennon’s mischievous wordplay triggered a federal investigation — and eventually, a traditional American lone nut came along and solved the nation’s problem.

The war on peace is heating up again. Led by Patrick Fitzgerald, hero of the wet-squib Scooter Libby trial, federal agents infiltrated peace groups, and squads of paramilitary commandos raided their homes.  The pretext was an edict criminalizing support for terror, an ingenious Ermächtigungsgestz that could put Jimmy Carter away. The guilty peaceniks were foiled by state-of-art security innovations: from their elite squadron of burly termagants to the FBI deployed fake lesbians as agents provocateur.

To observe the 2011 United Nations International Day of Peace, the US scheduled the launch of a Minuteman III ICBM. True to American traditions of hearty redneck defiance, we were to spend the day of global ceasefire plinking at the Marshall Islands, our backyard tin can target. But word got out, and with a week to go the government postponed the launch, spoiling some unsung Air Force Strangelove’s fun.

Peace was all right in the old days. Back then it was exclusively the bailiwick of states, a stateman’s concern that was above their subjects’ pay grade. The League of Nations’ remit was the peace of the world. The members were states, monolithic black boxes interacting for the peoples sealed inside. The scope of their covenant was international law and treaty. To safeguard peace, the covenant provided for dispute resolution: by arbitration, by a new International Court of Justice, or by unanimous decision of the Great War’s victors in Council. The League bound its member states into a defensive alliance. The League’s covenant mandated disarmament and arms control.

The covenant looked inside states for one purpose only. Its disarmament provisions were based on a shrewd appraisal of the danger of war profiteering: “The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections.”

Objectionable or not, war profiteering is the prerogative of America’s ruling class, and so Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman built us a top-quality enemy to fight. The two bankers were discreet stewards for Germany’s munitions, mining, and slaving interests.  Bush’s Nazi clients blew the League to smithereens.

The war made the allies nostalgic for peace. Perhaps they even idealized peace a bit, for they imagined it without misery. In June 1941, fourteen allies set out The Saint James Agreement, declaring:

the only true basis of enduring peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples in a world in which, relieved of the menace of aggression, all may enjoy economic and social security; and that it is their intention to work together, and with other free peoples, both in war and peace to this end.

The US had not yet joined the war and did not have occasion to sign on. But that summer, in The Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged to “lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.” The peace they promised to all men in all lands would let them “live out their lives in freedom from fear and want,” and it specifically included improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security. You could tell the commies had them running scared.

The United Nations first came on the scene not as an institution but as a group of belligerents. The Washington Declaration was their war cry. In the Washington Declaration the United Nations threw ‘human rights’ into the mix, more as a bonus of victory than of peace. Enumerated rights were then just a gleam in the eyes of Roosevelt’s Brains Trust, but rights were soon to take on a life of their own and complicate peace.

The Moscow Declaration of 1943 looked ahead to the end of war, to arms control and an international organization. The unnamed organization would keep the peace “with the least diversion of the world’s human and economic resources for armaments.” That principle carried through to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals defining the United Nations. Swords were to give way to ploughshares.  It was official. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference institutionalized well-being as part of peace.

The UN Charter was shot through with peace, as a purpose and a principle, but the institutional arrangements for pacific settlement of disputes left societies and associations out of it, focusing on states. Civil society was allowed a look in only on economic and social matters.

Peace waxed and waned. By 1984, the US had renewed its arms race. America planned to stud Europe with nuclear missiles. Europe reacted with mass protests for a nuclear freeze. The United Nations General Assembly weighed in with Resolution 39/11. Its Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace made explicit use of pervasive nuclear fears. The onus of peace-building was to fall on state policies and international dispute resolution, but the impetus had come from below. President Reagan blamed Soviet agents but he came to embrace arms reduction.

War returned to Europe and we bombed it to a frenzy in the Balkans, trying to help. The horn of Africa got out of hand too. America swaggered into the Somalia saloon to break it up and came back out through the window ass-up. This wasn’t what we had in mind at all.

Pacifists concluded that peace was too important to be left to the authorities. The Hague Agenda proposed the New Diplomacy, a collaborative process for citizens, pressure groups, and states. To put human and ecological needs ahead of national sovereignty and borders, they would “wrest peace-making away from the exclusive control of politicians and military establishments.”  The New Diplomacy dovetailed with the old pinko tradition of internationalism from below, which aimed to weaken states by linking different peoples across borders.

In 2000 the General Assembly adopted the Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace.  As the UN members redefined it, peace is not merely the absence of conflict. It’s a process, a treadmill of dialogue and conflict resolution. Fractious masses get involved. No more master strokes of deft diplomacy, no more parceling out nations on scraps of paper, fifty-fifty, ninety-ten — the Great Men of Yalta were dead, and the world they left us was bursting at the seams. The genial shipboard tea or walk in the woods was now to be supplanted by a bewildering welter of responsibilities, some defined in treaty law, some not. Tolerance. Solidarity. Cooperation. Pluralism. Cultural diversity. Dialogue. Understanding.

It could have been terribly cumbersome but the Supreme Court installed George Bush, scion of war profiteers and secret agents, the Saudis stuck a thumb in America’s eye, and that took care of the Culture of Peace.

The peaceniks saw it coming. They were ready. The world let the first illegal war slide: America milked universal sympathy to get a Security Council resolution authorizing nothing, and waved it like a banner as they marched off to war in Afghanistan. Worked like a charm, thanks to Americans’ blissful ignorance of the supreme law of the land. No one here knows what UN Charter Chapter VII says.  It never came up.

But when America tried that again, with Iraq, the world dug in its heels with the largest coordinated mass protest in history. February 15th, 2003 saw public assemblies in 794 localities worldwide.¹

In America a lot of militarist energy went into mocking pacifists as mournful chubbies holding candles, begging pardon for things they had no hand in. Jingoes derided as affectations their gentle demeanor and the compassionate sidelong inclination of their heads. America’s home-front warriors poked at their Achille’s heel: their inner peace was ineffectual here, in the land of war and death. But the new pacifists are hard-nosed guerreros wielding the disruptive potential of law and institutions against the American rogue state. Their brand of peace would drop a wrench into the works of our national meat grinder, impoverishing death merchants, dispossessing kleptocrats, and bringing murderous authorities to book. They set guns against butter in a battle to the death.

The UN set out to make peace an endless chore of states. To do it they went back to their Atlantic Charter roots. The UN Human Rights Commission got into the peace business with Resolution 2002/71. Peace was vital for human rights, they declared. War was a competing claim on resources that states need to improve living conditions, as required by social and economic rights. The Commission tied peace to development, subordinating guns to butter.

Making war and social justice an either/or choice helped consolidate dissent in the US. Now a common ideal brought the peace movement together with the more rambunctious sorts who besieged the WTO or spiked trees. Labor groups took up the antiwar cause. The peace movement gained troublemaking know-how, clever means of escalating pressure. United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) coalesced, clogging the streets of Washington in 2003, falling in with 3 million people worldwide in 2004, and sparking protests in 750 US cities in March 2005.² Without losing focus they opposed trade pacts, Israeli genocide, and the boot we keep on dark-skinned peoples’ necks. Now there was something for everyone in peace. The October 2011 protests explicitly link our Afghan war to current economic deprivation.

Peace as social justice means the outrage never ends. Peace as not-war had kept pacifists reactive, their impetus dependent on imminent rumors of war. Antiwar energy flags when wars stop, or as they drag on. In America, party loyalty undercuts opposition to the wars your party starts or inherits. Political opposition to the Iraq war was tamped down once it had served its purpose as a Democratic party cause célèbre.

The work of linking peace with social justice brought the movement in America in line with the rest of the world. In America, a comprehensive view of law and human rights was confined to two distinct elements of society: governing elites and native peoples. By contrast, outside the US, peace and social justice movements had long fought for all the same things. Their governments do not shout down the UN or the ICC, so their societies could see human rights entwining with humanitarian law. For the rest of the world, questions of war and peace naturally involve rights: civil and political, economic, social and cultural. The European Social Forum spilled a million antiwar demonstrators into the streets in their usual overwhelming variety. The Jakarta Peace Consensus planned a people’s war-crimes tribunal to combat malefactors including neo-liberalism, corporate looters, the WTO and the World Bank.

It was not unheard of in America to link injustice and war. Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” did just that, defining war as an enemy of the poor and rejecting the distinction between rights as a cause and peace. But then the Memphis police disbanded King’s security detail, a traditional American lone nut came along, and we heard nothing more of that for a long time.

Now, with peace propounded as a human right, legal experts worked to present peace and justice standards to the General Assembly. In 2006 a Spanish human-rights coalition met to write The Luarca Declaration on the Right to Peace.  The document left primary responsibility for peace with the UN and its member states, but it stepped back from war, as King did, to consider the desperation or predation that drives it, and linked war to the economic order. It defined human security in material terms as “instruments, means, and resources.” To permit mass participation it reaffirmed a right to truthful information. Since the most effective curb on war is populations dragging their feet, the Luarca Declaration asserted individual and collective rights of disobedience, objection, and denunciation.

The Luarca declaration spurred a hundred conferences and seminars in fifty cities worldwide. Local and regional governments signed on, along with universities and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The ferment spawned Right to Peace declarations in Bilbao, Barcelona, La Plata, Yaounde, Bangkok, Johannesburg, Sarajevo, Alexandria, and Havana.

In June 2010 the UN Human Rights Council formally requested a draft declaration from The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace. Four experts drafted the Santiago Declaration as a UN General Assembly Resolution.

When founding mother Virginia Gildersleeve wrote the soaring preamble of the UN Charter, the self-evident poesy of it left peace undefined. The Right to Peace movement now defined peace as the sum of all the specific requirements of UN charter documents and treaties. Since each UN body justified its mission as a means to the end of peace, it was easy to trace the legal authority back to the UN. UN members created the Human Rights Commission because rights and freedoms are requisite for peace. They created the World Health Organization and UNESCO because health and development are requisite for peace. They created the International Labor Organization because peace takes social justice. They created the Food and Agriculture Organization because hunger threatens peace. It’s all there in black and white in the constitutions of the UN agencies, adopted by the world by acclamation.

Peace then encompasses all state duties set out in the UN Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and evolving humanitarian law. Any lapse of the state through overreach or neglect violates the people’s right to peace, even absent war. Peace is a continuous series of popular demands, an unending test for the state, a regimen that saps the energy for war. Under this conception of the right to peace, the simple two-finger gesture holds our government to the detailed, objective standards of the civilized world. In a word or a sign, peace confronts our state with its manifold failure.

The Right to Peace provides a unifying framework for the growing body of treaty law that subordinates the state to its people. It has much in common with another effort at synthesis, a doctrine promoted by the UN Secretariat called Responsibility to Protect. But Responsibility to Protect is focused on averting the most serious crimes. By contrast, peace is a continuum. There is no threshold for minor failings. The Right to Peace means each state must always do its best. Oppression, exclusion, and impoverishment all compromise peace.

Peace so defined is a right for people and a duty of states. The Santiago Declaration sets out specific implications of the right to peace. Several of the declaration’s clauses mean trouble for our exceptional American state.

Article 2: People have a right to education that embeds peace in their culture, and helps them resolve conflicts. This provision is a straight forward affirmation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 26 (2). The disruptive impact of this demand is fairly clear.

This is the land of Columbine and Virginia Tech, where massacre is practically an intramural sport. Competence in peacemaking would be something of a wrench here too, where conflict resolution is the purview of jack-booted school police who reprove their errant charges with handcuffs and Tasers, and of the paramilitary commandos who besieged a school in the war on tasteless bathroom pranks. When the yellow school bus lets them out under the protective wing of the No Passing sign, our men in blue shoot them dead. Yet it’s not all strictness and discipline. For tiny tots there are exciting helicopter visits from the National Guard for sanitized war play (we don’t make them play at pulping their little Pakistani pen pals from drones, not until they’re older.)

Extracurricular brutality aside, peace as a subject of inquiry is suspect here. The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a standardized course of study for the children of the international technocratic elite. It covers science, math, and the humanities. Despite its suspicious foreign provenance, the IB’s comprehensive rigor won the endorsement of the rock-ribbed jingoes of George W. Bush’s Education Department. The IB is an optional curriculum for No Child Left Behind. Today US schools conduct more than 1,300 IB programs, more than any other country. But the coursework includes subversive matter such as human rights and peace. In Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Utah, and even in the shadow of the imperial capital, Fairfax County, Virginia, the IB has come under attack.

The IB is not Judeo-Christian enough for Pennsylvania youth. Or it’s anti-American. Or Marxist. So say a slate of school board crackpots pledged to defend American values against their pupils’ desire to get into a decent college.  In the Republican gentile-Chełm of Fairfax, Virginia, the IB stands accused of encouraging “disarmament, socialism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.” Peace and conflict studies were a particular sticking point, though experimental science also rankled. The Fairfax cosmopolites smelled international conspiracy in the IB’s fancy foreign books. In a woebegone town in Minnesota, parents fear the IB will suborn all the above-average children to atheism and one-world government.

In their struggle against popular demand, canny nativists have learned to attack the IB in technocratic terms. The Pennsylvania board took issue with the higher indirect costs of the small classes enjoyed by the ambitious minority. IB courses don’t pack their classrooms tight enough, it seems. Utah eccentric Margaret Dayton slashed IB funding out of a hazy sense that it was Not Invented Here (and to be fair, it does slight indigenous local traditions such as polygamy and messianic cults.) The problem is, she says, America is special. It needs special education.

Factional strife in provincial backwaters has confined peace education to more cosmopolitan cultural centers. The philosophical underpinning of peace has become one more class marker to stratify our society. A grounding in rule of law and world-standard governance is most sought after in exclusive private schools and in the segregated districts of the dominant class. The privileged students who learn it are absorbed into the ruling elite, where they can use peace as our government intended, as a weapon to attack other countries and justify our wars. The masses remain largely insulated from subversive ideas about social justice, dignity or development.

As a result, it falls to civil society to inculcate a culture of peace. UFPJ stresses education for its organizing cadres. The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace has drawn religious organizations into a consultation process. Armed with the Right to Peace, these sects can ground the sentimental notion of peace in dispassionate rights and rule of law. The result is a well-established threat to the state, the sort of thing that got the old-time Christians crucified. In Latin America, US clients exterminated bumptious exponents of liberation theology for decades. When the Berlin Wall fell, we let freedom ring with a mass murder of Salvadoran clergy by assassins we trained at Fort Bragg.  Just this year in US satellite Colombia, unknown assailants bagged us six priests. The Week of Peace had just ended when they chopped the last one up.  Inside America, repression is somewhat less straight forward.

Other articles are also problematic. Take Article 3: People must have freedom from fear and want. States must protect you from violence or threat of any kind. You cannot be reduced to desperation. This is pure old-time Americana. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

Or take Article 4: Our right to peace entails development, including freedom from unjust debt, and release from the sort of unfair order that leads to poverty and exclusion. We have a right to environmental safety, free from weapons that damage the earth.

Or Article 6: You must be permitted to resist oppression by breach of law or rights. War propaganda is prohibited – no more indoctrination in the glory or necessity of war.

Security, development, and freedom are always just around the corner. Our state is beavering away for peace, we’re told, but we can’t have it yet. The ill-will of a few dozen mad bombers on the other side of the world requires a globe-girdling police state, Soviet-style secret law, automated blanket surveillance, and abject deference to arbitrary authority. Resistance to war and oppression must be punished as a threat to our existence. So freedom from fear is a luxury we can’t afford.

As for freedom from want, don’t even think it. We’re tapped out, having gone deeper into debt to give bankers several trillion. The bankers needed it, you see, they ran their firms into the ground. The bankers took it home, every last trillion, and now you have to pay it back. So social security has to go. Kiss your right to health goodbye. A decent home and living? Maybe someday.

So after paying for the bare necessities of overwhelming, crushing might, a totalitarian police state, and state-sanctioned predatory fraud, there’s no money left for peace. The sheer spendthrift recklessness of putting human security first would ruin this state, which defines itself as anything but peace.

The Santiago Declaration has an answer to that objection. Under Article 7, States must disarm at their people’s demand, and fairly distribute the resources freed for equitable development, poverty reduction, and protection of the vulnerable. States may not delegate their war powers to private institutions.

But don’t the authorities know best? They have secret information. That dodge fails the test of Article 8: You have the right to information, to see war coming and to freely denounce it. States may not manipulate you into backing war. Your peaceful culture must not be suppressed.

When driving us to war in Iraq, the US government relied on suppression of information for a veneer of legitimacy. Its best trick was illegal collusion with its satellite Columbia, which held the UN Presidency at the time. Colombia accepted the IAEA report on Iraqi compliance with disarmament, and immediately turned it over to US officials, who took it home and censored it. US spooks cut out three-quarters of it and came back to pass out bowdlerized pap to an incredulous Security Council. The resulting preparatory fog of war concealed the profiteering that impelled the war and helped Colin Powell’s whoppers pass the laugh test.

To pull this stunt the US government flouted Articles 19 and 20 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR). The CCPR binds our state as treaty law, as we acknowledged when we signed up. It trumps our neo-Soviet secrecy rules. But the CCPR’s sole sanction is shame, and international disgrace was no deterrent to a government bent on war.

So the Santiago Declaration enlists the people to turn over our rogue state’s rocks. As the US went to war in Iraq, whistleblowers and foreign journalists gave the world a glimpse of what our government had to hide. Now independent entities such as Wikileaks help officials maintain their integrity and air the putrefaction of our wars. American activists such as David House risk vindictive prosecution to free our information.

You’d think there ought to be a role here for the authors of Pacem in Terris, with their universal viewpoint, but there is not. Ask the Catholics about cultural suppression. In Vatican doctrine, economic and social rights, the means of life, are as much a part of Catholicism as the right to life. But Catholic institutions and associations in America have been muzzled with respect to those bolshy rights. Perhaps it’s to do with the pyramid of priestly skulls down south. While the Catholic colleges do work of unique value, on UN reform and human rights – real advocacy, not foreign-service Pecksniffery – the laity by and large gets nothing out of human rights but monomaniacal fetus-hugging. The syncretic genius of the universal church makes room for lots of flag worship too. Say what you like about the Catholic Church, they certainly know how to ingratiate themselves with primitive cultures.

Consider Articles 9 and 10: Refugees and emigres must be protected when their human security is threatened. To safeguard their rights, they may participate in public affairs wherever they reside.

These articles would infringe quite drastically on American cultural identity. We love to torture migrants.  It’s the national pastime. It keeps us in touch with our genocidal folkways and helps insulate us from the global South’s dangerous ideas.

Under Article 11, victims have a right to know the truth, and a right to justice, including identification and punishment of those responsible, and redress, compensation and reparation. All their rights must be restored. This comes straight from the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, supreme law of the land.

Except… No. America’s Supreme Court³ fears that judicial redress might inhibit our courageous officials from using their authority. Authority here is understood to encompass murder, torture, and the highest crime, criminal aggression. In today’s America, justice is what our executive chooses to do.

Under Article 12, vulnerable groups must be protected. Vulnerable groups include individuals deprived of their liberty – even the bewildered children and dotards swept up in our terror dragnet. American public discourse distinguishes battlefield mayhem from torture as distinct technical problems. The Right to Peace says violence is violence. That includes even our venial violence to helpless captives – beating their hooded faces, gouging their eyes, slitting their genitals, drowning them, freezing them, pulping their flesh, asphyxiating them, leashing them, forcing them to masturbate, or raping them.

This provision really cramps our style. It fails to respect American culture in all its bestial glory. Our anti-terror gulag is run in precise accord with the exemplary domestic penal practices of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, which is organized into White Supremacist gangs meting out lethal beatings and rape.

So in each of its aspects, peace rubs our government the wrong way but our ruling class accepts it, as a means to the end of social control. Democratic party placemen tried to channel pacifist ferment for partisan advantage and turn it off for subsequent wars. They were thwarted by the comprehensive demands of the right to peace. Public resentment mounted despite the party’s efforts to silence or deride dissent. Democrats showed they never wanted economic rights with their attacks on social programs. They showed they had no use for civil or political rights when they tightened the grip of the police state. They held the UN Charter in contempt when they tore up their authorizing resolution to topple a sovereign state and render one side defenseless in Libya’s civil war. They came out for state predation and exclusion when they propped up criminal banks that loot wealth worldwide.

When you assert your right to peace, neither party measures up. Voting is a pointless waste of time. The right to peace itself offers much more effective recourse: to disobedience, conscientious objection, denunciation, and non-participation, as set out in Article 5. You have a right to conscientious objection on non-religious UN Charter grounds. You may publicly denounce armaments production or development, and withhold participation. The troops may disobey unlawful orders – and orders without UN authorization are illegal under US law.

Organized groups exercising these rights could paralyze an outlaw state’s war apparat. America’s overwhelming destructive capacity can stand against the world, but not against its people. The requisite repression would bleed this weakened state white. Jihadist terror opened a vein, sapping the nation with a frenzied response of repression, profiteering, and war. As the state lurches toward failure, all opposition becomes a threat. Mounting repression marks a brittle and exhausted state. Consider the state’s torture and degradation of Bradley Manning for allegations that amount to crucial protections of the Santiago Declaration: the human right of disobedience under Article 5(4); and the peoples’ right to information under Article 8(1) and (2). Or take the pressure on Canada to extradite Jeremy Hinzman for exercising his right to conscientious objection under Article 5(3). When presidential candidate Ron Paul objected to US militarism and war, statist media engaged in a concerted campaign to silence him and shunt him aside.

It wouldn’t occur to a provincial like Paul to stand on his rights. Yet taxpayers like Paul who object to the use of their taxes for war would have recourse to Article 5(6): states must provide them with alternatives compatible with peace. Declining to pay taxes to the war machine, that is the A-bomb of peace. Libertarians, like all Americans, are trained to recoil from the UN as an overweening alien authority, but the rules of the so-called New World Order subject states to humans. In America, human rights are strictly diplomatic weapons, used by our state to club disobedient countries. By contrast, the Santiago Declaration uses human rights as intended, to help people resist overreaching states.

War, like peace, takes constant work. The population has to be brutalized every day. The preparatory propaganda for the Iraq war effectively demonized Saddam Hussein with nightmarish tales of torture from captured pilots. This proved to us that Saddam was a cowardly animal. The government knew that when our turn came to be cowardly animals, all loyal Americans would turn on a dime and torment the designated victims. The state maintains our bestiality with human sacrifice by lethal injection. Crowds celebrate each new sacrifice outside the prison, and party activists cheer the death toll in political rallies.

To America’s dominant religious tradition, war is sacred.  The right kind of war fulfills the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, lifting a curse, renewing heaven and earth, annihilating unbelievers, and uniting obedient Christians with their god. This is no outcast cult. Its worshipers include leading legislators, presidential candidates, senior special forces staff, and an Air Force hierarchy that coercively proselytizes cadets. Their final battle’s coming: they’ve poured out the sixth bowl. Their enemy is peace. We are the mirror image of Iran, with vulnerable humanists struggling to appease a hostile blood-and-soil theocracy.

Death and suffering, that’s the critical national resource. The state has harnessed them to generate power. Death and suffering power this state. We’re the wasting assets being depleted. But weak nations and powerless peoples have begun to form a sort of cartel. They want to take control of death, constrict supply and raise its price. The Right to Peace is an OPEC for blood.

1. Bennis, Phyllis, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power, Northampton MA, Interlink Publishing Group, 2006, p. 261.
2. Bennis, op. cit., p. 63-67
3. Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 2087 (2011) Kennedy, J., concurring

In contrast the same opinion makers, plus their academic counterparts, project images of the United States and the European Union as stable societies, with steady economic growth, incremental expansion of social welfare programs, resolving issues via consensual compromises and practicing sound fiscal policies.

In recent times, the better part of the current decade, these images have taken on the character of ideological dogmas – they no longer correspond to reality. In fact, a good argument can be made that the roles have been reversed: the US and EU are in perpetual crises and Latin America, at least most of the major countries, have experienced stability and growth which is the envy (or should be) of Washington pundits and financial commentators.

This ‘role reversal’ has been recognized by many US, EU and Asian investors and multinationals, even as respectable journalistic hacks for the Financial Times, NY Times and Wall Street Journal still write about vulnerabilities, imbalances and other weaknesses while grudgingly acknowledging the dynamic growth of the region.

Progressive opinion is equally at fault, focusing on the ‘advances’ of the left regimes but overlooking the underlying dynamics affecting most of the region and thus losing sight of the new points of conflict and contention.

We will proceed to outline the contrasting realities between the crises ridden “North” (US/EU) and the sustained growth of the “South” (South America). The analysis will raise questions of whether the South American experience is transferable to the North and what ‘structural adjustments’ would be necessary to pull the US and EU out of the downward spiral of stagnation and violent conflicts which have characterized these regions for the better part of the past decade.

The Lost Decade, US and EU Style

The Latin American countries during the 1980’s experienced a deep and persistent crises, manifested in negative growth, increased poverty levels and heavy indebtedness, which allowed creditors (like the IMF) to impose harsh and regressive austerity measures and “structural adjustment” policies which came to be known as neo-liberalization. These included the privatization of most strategic, lucrative public enterprises, and the ending of any semblance of state-directed industrial strategies.

For the peasants and the working and middle class the short-lived neo-liberal “boom” of the 1990s was a continuation of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. The neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were based on fundamentally flawed structural foundations and polarizing income and public expenditures involving huge transfers of income to capital and downward pressures on wages and welfare. The neo-liberal regimes went into a deep crisis early in 2000 provoking major popular upheavals. The outcome resulted in a new set of political configurations and social power equations, which evolved into new post-neo-liberal regimes, at least in most of the major countries in Latin America.

In contrast and, in part thanks to the profitable opportunities opened by the debt crises and neo-liberalization of Latin America in the 1990s (and in the ex-Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Baltic/Balkan states) the US and EU prospered. In Latin America over 5,000 lucrative extractive resource-based industries, banks, tele-communications and other industries passed into the hands of foreign private MNC and local capital. High returns on bonds and loans and rents from technology transfers enriched the Northern capitalists even as poverty multiplied in the South. The 1990s was the “golden age” of Western capital as profits rose and leftist parties and the traditional urban trade unions appeared unable to withstand the ‘wave’ of predatory capitalism capturing the commanding heights of the economy.

The very successes of the US and EU countries, the enormous easy gains from pillage, speculation, and exploitation led to the dominance of financial capital and the belief in an irrevocable “new world order”. The dominance of the US and EU was built on their military superiority backed by pliant, collaborative, neo-liberal client regimes. The ‘new order’ lasted less than a decade: the economic crises of 1999/2000 smashed the illusions of a century of imperial grandeur. As markets collapsed so too did the Latin American oligarchic electoral regimes (dubbed “democracies”) which along with the financial elite and the military formed the triple alliance that defined Western supremacy. The final blow was the economic crises of 2001-2002 in the US and EU which steeply eroded their capacity to intervene and prop up their collapsing Latin clients ousted by rebellious masses.

The first decade of the new millennia has been the “lost decade”  of the North.   Over the course of the past eleven years the North has witnessed stagnation and recessions which have not given way to recoveries. The capitalist states temporarily saved the bankers but were powerless to set in motion economic growth.

The credit rating of the US economy was downgraded by the risk agencies. Unemployment and underemployment hovers close to one-fifth of the labor force, figures comparable to stagnant Third World countries. Social programs  are severely slashed in the US and throughout the European Union, reversing decades of incremental gains. Trade and budget deficits in the US have become chronic, while private and public lenders are becoming increasingly reticent to lend in the face of deep-seated recessionary tendencies.

The financial sector in the US and EU is rife with large scale fraud, swindles, mismanagement and falsified balance sheets, conditions previously prevalent among Latin economies. Wars proliferate. Military spending far exceeds productive investments, draining the US economy in a fashion reminiscent of the weapons spending during the reign of the warlords of Africa and the military dictators of Latin America.

In the EU, faced with brutal cuts in wages, pensions and jobs millions of workers and unemployed youth in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy have taken to the streets. General strikes threaten the stability of increasingly isolated regimes, reminiscent of the popular rebellions which resulted in regime changes in Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the US, public protests reflect deepening private discontent: over 75% of the population expresses negative views of the Congress and 60% of the White House. Deepening political alienation of the US electorate is comparable to the loss of popular faith in Latin governments during the “lost decades”, 1980-2000.

Both the US and the EU have been radically transformed for the worse during the lost decade of the current century. Economically, politically and socially the ‘North’ has been “Latin Americanized”: social instability, economic stagnation, political alienation, growing class inequalities and poverty is presided over by corrupt political elites.

Signs of the Better Times: Latin America

Recently the finance minister of Brazil raised the possibility that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) might take a hand in a “rescue plan” to prop up the crises-ridden economies of Europe. While the statement had greater symbolic rather substantive consequences, it does reflect a certain reality: while the North plunges into deeper, unending crises, the Latin economies are doing reasonably well.

Except for the Latin countries still under US dominance, especially Mexico and most of Central America, the rest of Latin America has not only avoided the crises afflicting the North but have been growing at a healthy rate, three times that of the US over the decade. The new millennium, especially between 2003-2011 (except for a brief interlude in 2009) has been a period of high growth, general prosperity, booming exports, rising imports, greater inter-regional co-operation, and large scale poverty reduction.

Brazil alone has reduced the number of poor by 30 million. Regular elections, relatively honest and competitive, result in stable legitimate transfers of political power. Except for US-backed coups in Honduras and intervention in Haiti and Venezuela, violent seizures of power have disappeared over the past decade. Regional institution–building has prospered with the advent of UNASUR and a Latin American regional bank.  Because of fiscal controls and banking regulations, both results of the lessons learned from the crisis of the lost decades (1980-2000), Latin America was only slightly affected by the US-EU financial crash of 2008-2011.

Latin American trade has doubled, especially with Asia, aided by China’s double digit growth. Demand for agro-mineral commodities has tripled. The key to this new export-powered growth is Latin America’s growing economic independence. This has led to the diversification of its markets, taking advantage of new opportunities and reducing their dependence on the US. Latin America’s emphasis on economic growth, new markets and investments has led it to avoid entanglements in the proliferating and costly colonial wars which engage the US and EU.

While the US and EU print more money and increase indebtedness to cover trade deficits, Latin America has quadrupled its foreign reserves. These cushion any downturns and avoid any dependence on the IMF, architect of the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Within Latin America, the issue of poverty reduction has been tackled with varying degrees of effectiveness. With Venezuela under President Chavez leading the way the general direction has been toward increasing social payments, by increments in most cases, but with greater efforts in others. Except for Mexico, nothing resembling the social cuts of the US-EU has taken place in Latin America. The most striking structural advances have occurred in Venezuela and to a lesser degree in Argentina. They have significantly increased the minimum wage and pensions and increased welfare payments to the most vulnerable (single mothers, the disabled, those in extreme poverty).

With the exception of Colombia (the US’s principle military ally in the region) which is still the murder capital of the world for human rights advocates, trade unionists and peasant activists, human rights violations have declined. While the US-EU have vastly increased their human rights violations geometrically via multiple colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and clandestine death squad ‘operations’, Latin America’s overseas human rights violations are largely limited to its occupation forces in Haiti – at the behest of the US and EU. Nevertheless repression of popular movements, especially indigenous peoples and peasant movements and students has increased in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere as the high growth policies on community rights and social expenditures.

Because of Latin America’s current political stability and dynamic growth, institutional and corporate investment is pouring into the region. In contrast the US and EU are suffering from disinvestment and declining rates of private investment. In other words, the development of Latin America is the other side of the coin of the US-EU under-development.

Latin America: New Contradictions

The class struggle is still the motor force in the social progress of Latin America. But unlike EU-US, Latin America’s class struggle is directed at increasing social and monitory wages, even if incrementally, as part of an offensive strategy to capture a greater share of rising income. In the US and EU the class struggle is ‘defensive’: an effort to stop declining income shares, limit job losses and cuts in pensions.

While militant class action including land occupations, street demonstrations and strikes are still part of the repertory of working class social weapons, they take place within the political parameters of democratic institutions. In Europe the elites have increasingly ignored mass street protests and strikes, largely pursuing austerity policies dictated by non-elected domestic and foreign bankers and creditors.

The limitations and ‘contradictions’ affecting all Latin American countries are located in the internal class inequalities. As national income has increased and exports boom, the inequalities between the ruling investor class and the mass of wage earners has increased. While initially the problem of class inequality was papered over by the general rise in living standards and employment, over time the employed and productive classes are no longer satisfied with incremental gains which barely surpass inflation rates. The rising standards of living have raised expectations. The percentage of poor may have declined but subsisting just above $4 dollars a day is increasingly unacceptable. Growth brings forth its own set of contradictions and a new set of demands. Formerly excluded classes included in the system, but exploited, have only their class organizations as their weapons to advance their socio-economic interests.

This is clearly the case in contemporary Chile where long term growth is accompanied by deeply entrenched inequalities comparable to the worse in the OECD. Beginning in July 2011 massive student protests over the high cost of public and private education and low levels of social expenditures have detonated mass activity from trade unions covering the gamut of economic sectors from teachers to copper miners.

The new and explosive issue confronting rulers and ruled in most of high growth Latin America is raising incomes for whom? The class issues are front and foremost in the current period and immediate future.

Growth, stability and democratic class struggles characterize most of the major countries, but not all. In several countries, the authoritarian and violent legacy of the dictatorial regimes continues robust. Colombia’s practice of murdering trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists and human rights activists continues unabated: over 30 trade unionists were murdered during the first eight  months of 2011.

Honduras’ ruling regime, product of a US-backed coup and its allies among the paramilitary private armies of landowners, have killed scores of peasants and dozens of pro-democracy political and social activists.

Mexico’s killing fields are notorious: over 40,000 people have been killed by the police, military and drug gangs in a ‘war on drugs’ promoted by Obama and implemented by President Calderon.

What these three retro-regimes have in common is that they continue to follow the dictates of Washington, remain highly militarized states, with a strong US military and police presence in the form of bases, overseas advisers, and an intrusive role in setting policy. All three have failed to diversify markets and continue with a high degree of dependence on the stagnant US market. All have secured, or are in the process of signing, bi-lateral free trade agreements at the expense of exploring greater links with the dynamic Asian markets.

The three retro-regimes have never experienced the kind of popular rebellions and resultant center-left regimes which have emerged in most of Latin America. In Mexico pro-democracy candidates were twice defrauded of electoral victories, first in 1988 and later in 2006. In Honduras, a progressive liberal democratic President seeking to diversify markets was ousted by a military coup backed by the Obama regime in 2010. In Colombia, the murder of 5,000 activists and leaders of the pro-democracy Patriotic Union between 1984-86, the subsequent assassination of several thousand social activists, blocked a democratic opening. The abrupt termination of peace negotiations in 2002 and the total militarization of the country (2002-2011) funded by $6 billion in US military aid precluded the emergence of the political and social changes, which have dynamized the rest of Latin America’s sustained growth and opened the door for ‘democratic class struggle’.

While most of Latin America has forged ahead, thus far largely avoiding the instability and economic crises of the US and EU, past legacies and present inequities present a new set of structural impediments to the consolidation of long-term growth and political and social stability. The biggest structural contradiction is found in the high growth/increasing inequalities, socio-economic model based on the “3 ½ alliance”: foreign capital-national capital-the developmental state and the co-opted trade union/peasant leaders.

The profits and investments of this power configuration has been driven by the growth of agro-mineral exports, rising commodity prices, easy consumer credit and state regulation of financial markets. The economic returns on growth have been disproportionately appropriated by the “big three” with incremental payoffs to a minority of better paid organized workers. The ‘residuals’ are used to “lift the poor” from abject poverty to subsistence.

These growing inequalities have been “papered over” by the general rise of income, easy credit and improved public services. But rising incomes have set in motion a new set of class conflicts which will be exacerbated when the prices of commodities decline and the governments can no longer fund incremental improvements. Even today, severe conflicts have emerged between predator mining and timber, multi nationals and Indian/peasants in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. These sometimes violent struggles between the state/MNC and peasants in the “periphery of the countryside” can detonate a larger conflict in the central cities, if export revenues decline.

The second contradiction is between the “marginalized working poor” and a new class of local middle and business class investors who have invested their “savings” in shares of the foreign and locally-owned mining companies. Conservative and closely aligned with the rapacious multi-nationals, these new middle class investors have enriched themselves on the bases of unregulated plunder of natural resources and contamination of the adjoining rural communities. If, and when, commodity prices nose dive, the regimes will face a bankrupt hysterical middle class looking for a political savior where none exist, at least among the existing civilian parties.

The rightward drift of the center-left regimes and their opportune links to big business especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay has led to corruption in high places. Liberalization and exorbitant executive salaries has been accompanied by “unofficial payoffs” to public officials. Corruptions has eroded the social ethic of center-left politicians and replaced it with the ethos of “bringing in new and bigger investments”, whatever shortcuts and payoffs it requires. Corruption at the top spreads downwards greasing the wheels for foreign investors, but certainly lowering the trust and loyalties of employees and formal and informal workers not in the ‘magic circle’, a bribe takers and givers. “Patronage” and poverty reduction payouts can limit the fallout from corruption in high places among poverty-funded recipients. However, in time of economic downturn, it can turn social protests toward political regime change.

The third contradiction is found between the high level of dependency on commodity exports (which heretofore have been the dynamic element of growth) and the relative and absolute decline of manufacturing exports and production. The growth of income from commodities has led to the appreciation of the currency which has lessened the competitiveness of nationally produced manufactured products, leading to a sharp decline in profits and even bankruptcy.

Asian manufacturer-exporters – especially in China and to a lesser extent India and Korea – are increasingly penetrating Latin markets with lower cost finished products “de-industrializing” the Latin economies. In some cases, Latin American capitalists are looking to investing in Asia to lower costs and exporting back to their “home markets”. Brazilian industry, which has been hardest hit, has initiated “protectionist” measures including tariffs, 65% local content rules and state subsidies to counter the de-diversification of the economy.

The fourth contradiction is found precisely in the successful economic growth and high returns, which has attracted both speculative and “takeover” capital as well as productive investments. Speculative capital will flee and destabilize the financial system at the first sign of slowdown. Foreign ownership will lessen the government’s ability to leverage investment decisions in time of crises. Productive investments respond to expanding markets. They do not create them.

In summary, Latin America’s decade long dynamic growth has certainly out-performed the US and EU on a whole series of important economic, social and political dimensions. Yet, out of this growth have emerged a new set of contradictions and the need to correct increasingly grave “imbalances”: popular demands for a shift in income distribution, industrialist pressure for a rebalancing of the economy from dependence on finance and commodities to manufacturing and the urban poor demand improved social services especially in public health care and crowded classrooms.

These changes require a structural adjustment in the power structure. The economic imbalances reflect the growing concentration of political power among the extractive capitalists, bankers and local middle class investors of the major cities. Public employees, labor, the urban poor, the peasants and environmentally concerned Indians and ecologists, are marginalized from the key economic posts. They need to once again take to the streets with new independent movements which raise two basic questions: What kind of growth and growth for whom?

Lessons of Latin America: Listen Yankees and Eurocrats

Can the positive lessons of the dynamic Latin American experience provide a ‘model’ for the US and Europe? Is the “model”, in whole or part, transferable to the North or are the two regions so different that the lessons are not applicable?

Granted there are vast historical, cultural, economic and political differences between the regions yet some lessons from the Latin America’s decade of dynamic growth provides new ideas to counter the negative, self-defeating economic formulas put forth and practiced by US and EU experts, economists and policymakers.

Let us start from the beginning. The rise of Latin America was precipitated by a deep economic crisis, the breakdown of the economy, large scale unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle class. The crises led to the total discrediting of what has been called alternately the “free market”, “neo-liberal” and “de-regulated” capitalist model. So far so good: the US and EU likewise are experiencing a prolonged and deepening economic crises which has bankrupted Southern Europe, plunged the US into a double dip recession and led to a 20% un and underemployment rate. The entire “political class” in the US and Europe is largely discredited. From there forward the regions diverge.

In Latin America, the crises led to mass protests, popular uprisings and regime changes. Post neo-liberal center-left regimes, under mass pressure, subsequently launched employment generating investments and aid poverty reducing public works programs. Argentina, facing a financial crisis similar to Greece, Portugal and Spain today, defaulted on its foreign debt – channeling public revenues into reviving the economy. Because financial speculation linked to Wall Street and the City of London precipitated the crises, the Latin regimes instituted financial controls and regulations which limited financial volatility. The new regimes, influenced by the commodity boom, diversified their trading partners, entering dynamic Asian markets, reaping high returns and stimulating local consumption and public investments. What lessons can the crises-ridden US and EU learn from the Latin America’s successful recovery and expansion?

First, the beginning of a successful response depends on a political transformation. Regime change, a complete break with the ‘neo-liberal’ free market, and the political leaders and parties who are totally embedded in failed institutions and policies. Regime change presupposes the eruption of dynamic mass organizations, new, old, improvised and organized, capable of moving from protest and resistance to political power.

The object is to rebalance the US and EU economies from “financialization” and “militarism” to large scale, long term investments in manufacturing, applied technology, civilian infrastructure and social services. Direct public investments and loans applied to concrete employment-generating projects; total rejection of trickle down, monetary policies which never move from private banks to public works.

The entire militarist- Zionist-permanent war mentality is entirely vulnerable to change: doing so, will create jobs, the top priority for over two-thirds of the US public. The “war on terrorism”, the banner of the warlords in office, is considered a priority by only 3% of Americans. Once again the shift from militarism to the civilian economy in Latin America was a result of popular civilian upheavals via the street and the ballot box.

Of course, the Latin American republics had an easier time in rebalancing their economic priorities from failed military rulers and discredited neo-liberal policies. Citizen movements in the US and EU imperial states will have a harder time in closing down hundreds of military bases, ousting militarist politicians backed by powerful domestic and foreign lobbies and converting the empires to productive republics. Yet, Latin American exporters have prospered by avoiding entanglement in overseas imperial wars. They continue to pursue new markets in the Middle East and elsewhere instead of destroying adversaries of Israel as the EU and US have done through colonial wars in Iraq and Libya and sanctions against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

The contrasting performance between Latin American republics and Euro-American empire builders is striking. The US and EU should shed their self-centered images of “successful” developed countries and outdated stereotype of Latin America as a collection of “volatile”, coup prone underdeveloped countries. The US is in deep trouble and it is heading into a deeper, less manageable economic crisis with few resources to counter it. Internationally it is increasingly isolated and in conflict with potential economic partners. Washington sides with Israel, alienating over 1.5 billion rich and poor Islamic peoples, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and all points east, west and south. It antagonizes Brazil via financial pump priming, overpricing the real (Brazilian currency) without helping US recovery.
Domestic and international failures multiply as the crisis deepens and nothing proposed by the blighted incumbents and besotted opposition offers any programmatic solution.

As in Latin America during the first years of this decade we need a popular rebellion: we need a profound regime change; we need to think of productive public investments not monumental loss of capital via Wall Street speculation and the waste of public resources via expenditures in weapons of destruction.

Colombia stands at the crossroads: it can follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, narco-President Alvaro Uribe and remain a military dependency, a lone outpost of the US Empire in South America. Colombia can remain at the margin of the most dynamic world markets and at war with its people or via a new socio-political leadership it can effect a profound reorientation of policy and consummate a transition toward greater integration with the dynamic markets of the world.

Colombia has all the objective ingredients (material and human resources) to be part of the dynamic new order. But first and foremost it must shed its role as the militarized vassal of the United States and an object of exploitation by a rentier oligarchy. Colombia must cease backing US coups (Honduras, Venezuela) and threatening its neighbors (Ecuador).

Colombia cannot develop its productive forces and finance the modernization of higher education and upgrade technical training and expend billions on the hundreds of thousands of military, paramilitary, police and intelligence operatives. The military repressive apparatus is directed at repressing the most productive, creative and motivated sectors of the labor force. Prosperity depends on civil peace which depends on the profound demilitarization of the Colombian state. The connection between economy and military is clear. China spends one tenth of the US military budget but grows five times faster. Brazil’s independent foreign policy and realignment with the Asian market has led to high growth, while Mexico, as a satellite of the North American Free Trade Treaty, is a stagnant, failed state.

De-Militarization: The Specificities of Colombia

Colombia is the most militarized society in Latin America, with the highest number of civil society victims. “Militarism” in Colombia includes the largest active military force operating within state boundaries and being the largest recipient of military financing from the greatest militarist power in the world. As a subordinate client of the US Empire, Colombia has the worst human rights record, as far as the killing of journalists, trade unionists, peasant activists and human rights advocates.

State and para-state violence, however, is not random; over 4 million Colombian farmers, peasants and rural intermediaries have been forcibly dispossessed and their lands seized by big landowners, narco-traffickers, generals and businesspeople allied with the government. In other words State terror and mass dispossession is a peculiarly Colombian method of “capital accumulation”. State violence is the method to secure the means of production to increase agro-exports at the expense of family farmers.

In Colombia, state and para-state extermination replaces the market and “contractual relations” in effecting economic transactions. The unequal relations between a militarist state and popular civil society movements has been the principal impediment to a transition from an oligarchical political regime to a pluralistic representative democratic electoral system.

Colombia combines 19th century forms of elite representation with highly developed 21st century means of military repression: a case of combined and uneven development. As a result we find ‘unbalanced growth’; an overdeveloped military, police, paramilitary apparatus and underdeveloped social and political institutions willing and capably of engaging in negotiations through reciprocity and compromises within a civic framework.

The state culture of “permanent war” undermines the conditions of trust and reciprocity and raises unacceptable risks to any social and political interlocutors.

Within the militarized state – especially because of its deep-rooted links to regional US military institutions – only “negotiations” which reinforce the current socio-economic order and political institutional arrangement are acceptable. Even recognized “peace mediators” engage in one-sided “negotiations” demanding unilateral concessions from insurgents and rarely make demands for reciprocal concessions from the State.

Most Latin American countries which have gone through a transition from dictatorial rule to electoral politics have respected opponents; only Colombia has murdered the entire political leadership and activists – from the Patriotic Union – who converted from armed to electoral struggle. No other Latin American (or European or Asian) opposition has experience the state violence inflicted on the Union Patriotica (UP): the murder of 5,000 activists including Presidential and Congressional candidates.

South America’s current center-left regimes, their thriving economies and the free and open social movement struggles, are a product of social upheavals (between 1999-2005) which ended ‘militarized politics’. Popular revolts in Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela cleared the way for the Center-Left. In Brazil, Uruguay and Chile social movements helped displace rightwing regimes.

As a result of mass struggles and popular uprisings, center-left regimes pursue relatively independent economic policies and progressive anti-poverty programs. They have raised living standards and provide political and social space for continued class struggle.

Colombia is one of the few countries which have failed to make the transition from a right-wing militarist regime to a center-left welfare and development model, because unlike the rest of Latin America it has yet to experience a popular uprising, resulting in a new political configuration.

Peace Settlements: Central America or Indo-China?

“Peace settlements” produce winners and losers and reflect the external and internal correlation of forces. The process of negotiation, including who is consulted in setting priorities and making concessions, is central to the future trajectory of the “peace process.”

Recent history provides us with two diametrically opposed ‘peace processes’ with dramatically different consequences: the Indo-Chinese peace settlement of 1973-75 and the Central American peace settlements of 1992-1993. In the case of Indo-China and more specifically the Vietnamese-US peace settlement, the National Liberation Front (FLN), secured the withdrawal of the US military forces, the dismantling of US military bases and the de-militarization of the state. The NLF agreed to a process of political integration based on the recognition of certain basic socio-economic and political reforms, including agrarian reform, the repossession of farms by millions of displaced peasants and the prosecution of civilian and military officials charged with crimes against humanity. The FLN negotiators made political concessions but were in close consultation with their mass base of peasants, workers and professionals. They upheld the principle of democratizing the state and demilitarizing society as essential conditions for ending the war.

Over the past 35 years, Vietnam has evolved from an independent socialist toward a mixed public-private capitalist economy, transiting toward higher growth and higher living standards but increasing inequalities and greater corruption.

In contrast, the Central American peace agreements signed by the guerrilla leaders led to the end of armed conflict and the incorporation of the insurgent elite into the electoral system. However, there were no basic changes in the military, economic and social system. None of the mass popular organizations were consulted. The bulk of the armed fighters, both popular insurgents and paramilitary mercenaries, were discharged and became an army of “armed” unemployed. Over the past 20 years, criminal gangs have taken over large swathes of Central America, while the ex-Farabundo Marti guerrilla elite and their Guatemalan/ Nicaraguan colleagues, have become affluent businesspeople and allied with conservative electoral politicians. They are protected by private bodyguards and oblivious of the conditions of 60% of the population living below the poverty-line. The “peace accords” in Central America served as a vehicle for social mobility for the guerrilla elite. They did not end the violence. Every year more people meet a violent death than were killed during the years of civil war.

The Vietnamese and Central American peace agreements took place during different international moments. In the 1970’s the Soviet Union and China provided broad international material and political support to the Vietnamese. During the Central American peace negotiations, the Soviet Union disintegrated, China was turning to capitalism and Cuba was facing a “special period” of economic crises because of the loss of Soviet aid and trade.

Clearly the change in the international correlation of forces influenced but did not determine the unfavorable results in Central America. In less than a decade after the disastrous Central American peace accords, Venezuela, under President Chavez, proceeded to defeat a coup and advanced toward a socialist transformation. Popular revolts overthrew neo-liberal rulers in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere. The end of the USSR did not end successful class struggles in Latin America.

The reactionary political correlation of forces of the 1990’s has changed dramatically. By 2011, only Central America, Mexico and Colombia remain as islands of reaction in a sea of resurgent leftism and popular struggles in South America, North Africa and South Asia.

The Central American peace settlement, with its acceptance of the militarized state, linked to agro-mineral export elites and narco-criminal gangs has become a monument for a failed “peace process”. The Vietnamese peace settlement, while far from perfect, at least has provided peace, security, agrarian reform, and higher income for the peasantry and workers.

No doubt Colombia has historical and structural differences with Central American and Indo-China.

The armed social movements in Colombia have a specific history which preceded the Central Americans insurgents by many years and has developed political ties with certain regions and social movements which have endured over time. Unlike Central American and Vietnam insurgents they are also not dependent on “external” supporters. Above all the failed experience with “political reconciliation” in Central America has caused Colombian insurgents to raise significant conditions regarding the peace process, namely demilitarization and socio-economic reforms (agrarian reform and land recovery for the dispossessed). “Peace at any price” will only lead to new and equally virulent forms of violence, as is the case today in Mexico with 10,000 killings a year 7,000 murders a year in El Salvador and an equal amount of homicides in Guatemala.

The Vietnam experience of peace via social justice and de-militarization seems to ensure a modicum of prosperty. Certainly the international correlation of forces has dramatically improved. Latin America has replaced neo-liberal puppet regimes. The Latin American economies have found dynamic Asian markets independent of the US. Popular revolts in the Middle East and Asia – from Tunisia to Afghanistan are forcing the US military to retreat. The international and regional context is very favorable if Colombia can take advantage of it. The method and modes of struggle, those which unite popular movements without distinction, should be openly discussed and resolved without exclusions. The insurgency is part of the solution, not the problem. The key to a successful dialogue is the demilitarization of the state-ending the US military presence, terminating Plan Colombia and converting military spending to economic and social development.

The official explanation to these crimes is also well known; Bacrim, an acronym which stands for “Criminal Gangs”, a term created from the Colombia establishment including its omnipresent corporate media apparatus to depoliticize the constant violence unleashed against union leaders, peasants and community activists, Human Rights defenders or anyone humane enough to point at the extremely unequal and unjust structures of power and wealth which rely heavily on repression. However, no matter how much effort is put into misleading public opinion about the nature of this violence, the crimes are so systematic and their effects always turning out for the benefit of the elite that a simple class analysis debunks the façade of these “gangs” supposedly acting on their own, and expose the mutual benefit relation between armed thugs and political power in Colombia, an acute representation of present-day fascism in Latin America.

In a country overwhelmed with unemployment and poverty — nearly 70% — and 8 million people living on less than U$2 a day who daily look for their subsistence in garbage among stray dogs or selling candies at street lights and city buses, is also shockingly common and surreal to see fancy cars — Hummers, Porsches — million dollar apartments, country clubs and a whole bubble of opulence just in front of over-exploited workers, ordinary people struggling merely to make ends meet, or at worst, children, single mothers, elderly, and people with disabilities, without social security and salaries, much less higher education and decent housing. For instance, in Cartagena, a Colombian Caribbean colonial city plagued with extreme poverty, beggars, child prostitution and U$400 a night resorts, you can pretend to feel in Miami Beach or a Mediterranean paradise, and in less than five minutes away you can also visit slums which would make devastated Haiti look like suburbia. The same shockingly contrast can be experienced in all major cities in Colombia. Thus, in order to keep vast privileges of a few amidst infrahuman conditions of the majority, the elite needs to have an iron grip on political power, and once its power is contested or mildly threatened by the collective action of social movements, democratic parties and conscious individuals, a selective burst of state violence is unleashed effectively dismantling any kind of peaceful organizing by fear and demoralization. The high levels of attrition suffered by activists raising moderate democratic banners such as the right to assembly, collective bargaining, freedom of expression and reparation from political violence, are the result of decentralized state repression carried out by death squads led by high state officers⁵ who supply them with intelligence and economic resources extracted from defrauding public treasury and money laundry in the narcotics chain, where social investigators claim that most of the profit accounts for institutional economy, the banks and the state.⁶

This elaborated repressive strategy differs from the one perpetrated by the military juntas the ruled Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, among others, where public forces exercised directly the political violence against dissidents without pretentious democratic credentials, such as the ones constantly regurgitated by the Colombian establishment, making it more difficult to expose its deep dictatorial mechanisms that have disappeared more than 30000 Colombians⁷ in the last years of US backed “counterinsurgency” policies, far surpassing Pinochet’s reign of terror.

In this place where dominant class reactionism have dumped thousands of disappeared into mass graves, killed union leaders at the highest world rate, and forcefully displaced millions of peasants already surpassing Sudan figures, is easy to expect political idleness and fear from the masses amid savage neoliberal policies and primitive capital accumulation. This state of matters posits a basic question, as James Petras puts it: “How does one pursuit equitable social policies and the defense of human rights under a terrorist state aligned with death squads and financed and advised by a foreign power, which has a public policy of physically eliminating their adversaries?”⁸ Some in Colombia already found and an answer in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that constitutes the basis for all modern states:

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.⁹

In the light of the exposure of the Colombian hybrid state which pits formal democracy and excessive privileges for a few against brutal repression and poverty for the majority, is also feasible to comprehend the existence of an armed conflict, beyond the official construct of terrorism. This class confrontation has resulted in a “polarization of civil war proportions between the oligarchy and the military, on one side, and the guerrilla and the peasantry, on the other,”¹⁰ , and is mostly funded by US government using taxpayers money to back a rogue state and a comprador elite that prefers to wage dirty war against its own population rather than yield some political power and moderate social reforms. Modernity hasn’t arrived in Colombia, where few can enjoy excesses and vices of promised ‘civilization’ in fancy restaurants and country clubs, and most still live in 1789.

In times when president Obama justifies his “humanitarian intervention” and escalation of the Libyan civil war by having public opinion to believe NATO and US bombs are there to protect civilians, and when the International Criminal Court applies selective justice as it rushes to levy charges against Gaddafi for alleged crimes that pale in comparison to the ones daily committed by the Colombian regime, the international community is turning a blind eye to crimes against humanity in the shameful custom of double standards and insulting those truly resisting, with their teeth, the savagery and abuse of power.

1. Euclides Montes. “Ana Fabricia Córdoba: A death foretold”. Guardian. June 13, 2011.
2. Red de Derechos Humanos del Suroccidente Colombiano ‘Francisco Isaias Fuentes’. “Atentado y amenaza en contra del líder comunitario Manuel Antonio Garcés Granja y detención arbitraria de dos testigos del atentado”. July 18, 2011.
3. Red Latinoamericana y del Caribe para la Democracia. “Alerta: asesinato de miembro de liga de mujeres desplazadas”. 22 July 2011.
4. Simon Romero. “Death-Squad Scandal Circles Closer to Colombia’s President”. New York Times. May 16 2007.
5. Garry Leech. “Exorcising the Ghost of Paramilitary Violence: Reclaiming Liberty in Libertad”. Colombia Journal. September 21, 2009.
6. Brittain, James (2010). Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia. New York: Pluto Press. 129.
7. Kelly Nicholls. “Breaking the Silence: In search of Colombia’s Disappeared”. Guardian. December 9, 2010.
8. James Brittain, op. cit., Foreword by James Petras.
9. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations. 1948.
10. James Brittain, op. cit., p 144.

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.

On April 26, 2011, Venezuelan immigration officials, relying exclusively on information from the Colombian secret police (DAS), arrested a naturalized Swedish citizen and journalist (Joaquin Perez Becerra) of Colombian descent, who had just arrived in the country. Based on Colombian secret police allegations that the Swedish citizen was a ‘FARC leader’, Perez was extradited to Colombia within 48 hours. Despite the fact that it was in violation of international diplomatic protocols and the Venezuelan constitution, this action had the personal backing of President Chavez. A month later, the Venezuelan armed forces joined their Colombian counterparts and captured a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Guillermo Torres (with the nom de Guerra Julian Conrado) who is awaiting extradition to Colombia in a Venezuelan prison without access to an attorney. On March 17, Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) detained two alleged guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), Carlos Tirado and Carlos Perez, and turned them over to the Colombian secret police.

The new public face of Chavez as a partner of the repressive Colombian regime is not so new after all. On December 13, 2004, Rodrigo Granda, an international spokesperson for the FARC, and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, whose family resided in Caracas, was snatched by plain-clothes Venezuelan intelligence agents in downtown Caracas where he had been participating in an international conference and secretly taken to Colombia with the ‘approval’ of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bogota. Following several weeks of international protest, including from many conference participants, President Chavez issued a statement describing the ‘kidnapping’ as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and threatened to break relations with Colombia. In more recent times, Venezuela has stepped up the extradition of revolutionary political opponents of Colombia’s narco-regime: In the first five months of 2009, Venezuela extradited 15 alleged members of the ELN and in November 2010, a FARC militant and two suspected members of the ELN were handed over to the Colombian police. In January 2011 Nilson Teran Ferreira, a suspected ELN leader, was delivered to the Colombian military. The collaboration between Latin America’s most notorious authoritarian right wing regime and the supposedly most radical ‘socialist’ government raises important issues about the meaning of political identities and how they relate to domestic and international politics and more specifically what principles and interests guide state policies.

Revolutionary Solidarity and State Interests

The recent ‘turn’ in Venezuela politics, from expressing sympathy and even support for revolutionary struggles and movements in Latin America to its present collaboration with pro-imperial right wing regimes, has numerous historical precedents. It may help to examine the contexts and circumstances of these collaborations:

The Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia initially gave whole-hearted support to revolutionary uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere. With the defeats of these revolts and the consolidation of the capitalist regimes, Russian state and economic interests took prime of place among the Bolshevik leaders. Trade and investment agreements, peace treaties and diplomatic recognition between Communist Russia and the Western capitalist states defined the new politics of “co-existence”. With the rise of fascism, the Soviet Union under Stalin further subordinated communist policy in order to secure state-to-state alliances, first with the Western Allies and, failing that, with Nazi Germany. The Hitler-Stalin pact was conceived by the Soviets as a way to prevent a German invasion and to secure its borders from a sworn right wing enemy. As part of Stalin’s expression of good faith, he handed over to Hitler a number of leading exiled German communist leaders, who had sought asylum in Russia. Not surprisingly they were tortured and executed. This practice stopped only after Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin encouraged the now decimated ranks of German communists to re-join the ‘anti-Nazi’ underground resistance.

In the early 1970s, as Mao’s China reconciled with Nixon’s United States and broke with the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy shifted toward supporting US-backed counter-revolutionaries, including Holden Roberts in Angola and Pinochet in Chile. China denounced any leftist government and movement, which, however faintly, had ties with the USSR, and embraced their enemies, no matter how subservient they were to Euro-American imperial interests.

In Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, short-term ‘state interests’ trumped revolutionary solidarity. What were these ‘state interests’?

In the case of the USSR, Stalin gambled that a ‘peace pact’ with Hitler’s Germany would protect them from an imperialist Nazi invasion and partially end the encirclement of Russia. Stalin no longer trusted in the strength of international working class solidarity to prevent war, especially in light of a series of revolutionary defeats and the generalized retreat of the Left over the previous decades (Germany, Span, Hungary and Finland) .The advance of fascism and the extreme right, unremitting Western hostility toward the USSR and the Western European policy of appeasing Hitler, convinced Stalin to seek his own peace pact with Germany. In order to demonstrate their ‘sincerity’ toward its new ‘peace partner’, the USSR downplayed their criticism of the Nazis, urging Communist parties around the world to focus on attacking the West rather than Hitler’s Germany, and gave in to Hitler’s demand to extradite German Communist “terrorists” who had found asylum in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s pursuit of short term ‘state interests’ via pacts with the “far right” ended in a strategic catastrophe: Nazi Germany was free to first conquer Western Europe and then turned its guns on Russia, invading an unprepared USSR and occupying half the country. In the meantime the international anti-fascist solidarity movements had been weakened and temporarily disoriented by the zigzags of Stalin’s policies.

In the mid-1970s, the Peoples Republic of China’s ‘reconciliation’ with the US, led to a turn in international policy: ‘US imperialism’ became an ally against the greater evil ‘Soviet social imperialism’. As a result China, under Chairman Mao Tse Tung, urged its international supporters to denounce progressive regimes receiving Soviet aid (Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, etc.) and it withdrew its support for revolutionary armed resistance against pro-US client states in Southeast Asia. China’s ‘pact’ with Washington was to secure immediate ‘state interests’: Diplomatic recognition and the end of the trade embargo. Mao’s short-term commercial and diplomatic gains were secured by sacrificing the more fundamental strategic goals of furthering socialist values at home and revolution abroad.

As a result, China lost its credibility among Third World revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, in exchange for gaining the good graces of the White House and greater access to the capitalist world market. Short-term “pragmatism’ led to long-term transformation: The Peoples Republic of China became a dynamic emerging capitalist power, with some of the greatest social inequalities in Asia and perhaps the world.

Venezuela: State Interests versus International Solidarity

The rise of radical politics in Venezuela, which is the cause and consequence of the election of President Chavez(1999), coincided with the rise of revolutionary social movements throughout Latin America from the late 1990s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century (1995-2005). Neo-liberal regimes were toppled in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina; mass social movements challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy took hold everywhere; the Colombian guerrilla movements were advancing toward the major cities; and center-left politicians were elected to power in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay. The US economic crises undermined the credibility of Washington’s ‘free trade’ agenda. The increasing Asian demand for raw materials stimulated an economy boom in Latin America, which funded social programs and nationalizations.

In the case of Venezuela, a failed US-backed military coup and ‘bosses’ boycott’ in 2002-2003, forced the Chavez government to rely on the masses and turn to the Left. Chavez proceeded to “re-nationalize” petroleum and related industries and articulate a “Bolivarian Socialist” ideology.

Chavez’s radicalization found a favorable climate in Latin America and the bountiful revenues from the rising price of oil financed his social programs. Chavez maintained a plural position of embracing governing center-left governments, backing radical social movements and supporting the Colombian guerrillas’ proposals for a negotiated settlement. Chavez called for the recognition of Colombia’s guerrillas as legitimate ‘belligerents” not “terrorists’.

Venezuela’s foreign policy was geared toward isolating its main threat emanating from Washington by promoting exclusively Latin American/Caribbean organizations, strengthening regional trade and investment links and securing regional allies in opposition to US intervention, military pacts, bases and US-backed military coups.

In response to US financing of Venezuelan opposition groups (electoral and extra parliamentary), Chavez has provided moral and political support to anti-imperialist groups throughout Latin America. After Israel and American Zionists began attacking Venezuela, Chavez extended his support to the Palestinians and broadened ties with Iran and other Arab anti-imperialist movements and regimes. Above all, Chavez strengthened his political and economic ties with Cuba, consulting with the Cuban leadership, to form a radical axis of opposition to imperialism. Washington’s effort to strangle the Cuban revolution by an economic embargo was effectively undermined by Chavez’ large-scale, long-term economic agreements with Havana.

Up until the later part of this decade, Venezuela’s foreign policy – its ‘state interests’ – coincided with the interests of the left regimes and social movements throughout Latin America. Chavez clashed diplomatically with Washington’s client states in the hemisphere, especially Colombia, headed by narco-death squad President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). However, recent years have witnessed several external and internal changes and a gradual shift toward the center.

The revolutionary upsurge in Latin America began to ebb. The mass upheavals led to the rise of center-left regimes, which, in turn, demobilized the radical movements and adopted strategies relying on agro-mineral export strategies, all the while pursuing autonomous foreign policies independent of US control. The Colombian guerrilla movements were in retreat and on the defensive – their capacity to buffer Venezuela from a hostile Colombian client regime waned. Chavez adapted to these ‘new realities’, becoming an uncritical supporter of the ‘social liberal’ regimes of Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Vazquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile. Chavez increasingly chose immediate diplomatic support from the existing regimes over any long-term support, which might have resulted from a revival of the mass movements. Trade ties with Brazil and Argentina and diplomatic support from its fellow Latin American states against an increasingly aggressive US became central to Venezuela’s foreign policy. The basis of Venezuelan policy was no longer the internal politics of the center-left and centrist regimes but their degree of support for an independent foreign policy.

Repeated US interventions failed to generate a successful coup or to secure any electoral victories against Chavez. As a result, Washington increasingly turned to using external threats against Chavez via its Colombian client state, the recipient of $5 billion in military aid. Colombia’s military build-up, its border crossings and infiltration of death squads into Venezuela, forced Chavez into a large-scale purchase of Russian arms and toward the formation of a regional alliance (ALBA).

The US-backed military coup in Honduras precipitated a major rethink in Venezuela’s policy. The coup had ousted a democratically elected centrist liberal, President Zelaya in Honduras, a member of ALBA, and set up a repressive regime subservient to the White House. However, the coup had the effect of isolating the US throughout Latin America – not a single government supported the new regime in Tegucigalpa. Even the neo-liberal regimes of Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama voted to expel Honduras from the Organization of American States. On the one hand, Venezuela viewed this ‘unity’ of the right and center-left as an opportunity toward mending fences with the conservative regimes; and on the other, it understood that the Obama Administration was ready to use the ‘military option’ to regain its dominance.

The fear of a US military intervention was greatly heightened by the Obama-Uribe agreement establishing seven US strategic military bases near its border with Venezuela. Chavez wavered in his response to this immediate threat. At one point he almost broke trade and diplomatic relations with Colombia, only to immediately reconcile with Uribe, although the latter had demonstrated no desire to sign on to a pact of co-existence.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Congressional elections In Venezuela led to a major increase in electoral support for the US-backed right (approximately 50%) and their greater representation in Congress (40%). While the Right increased their support inside Venezuela, the Left in Colombia, both the guerrillas and the electoral opposition lost ground. Chavez could not count on any immediate counter-weight to a military provocation.

Chavez faced several options. The first was to return to the earlier policy of international solidarity with radical movements; the second was to continue working with the center-left regimes while maintaining strong criticism and firm opposition to the US backed neo-liberal regimes; and the third option was to turn toward the Right, more specifically to seek rapprochement with the newly elected President of Colombia, Santos, and sign a broad political, military and economic agreement where Venezuela agreed to collaborate in eliminating Colombia’s leftist adversaries in exchange for promises of ‘non-aggression’ (Colombia limiting its cross-border narco and military incursions).

Venezuela and Chavez decided that the FARC was a liability and that support from the radical Colombian mass social movements was not as important as closer diplomatic relations with President Santos. Chavez has calculated that complying with Santos political demands would provide greater security to the Venezuelan state than relying on the support of the international solidarity movements and his own radical domestic allies among the trade unions and intellectuals.

In line with this Right turn, the Chavez regime fulfilled Santos’ requests – arresting FARC/ELN guerrillas, as well as a prominent leftist journalist, and extraditing them to a state which has had the worst human rights record in the Americas for over two decades in terms of torture and extra-judicial assassinations. This Right turn acquires an even more ominous character when one considers that Colombia holds over 7600 political prisoners, over 7000 of whom are trade unionists, peasants, Indians, students;  in other words, non-combatants. In acquiescing to Santos requests, Venezuela did not even follow the established protocols of most democratic governments: It did not demand any guaranties against torture and respect for due process. Moreover, when critics have pointed out that these summary extraditions violated Venezuela’s own constitutional procedures, Chavez launched a vicious campaign slandering his critics as agents of imperialism engaged in a plot to destabilize his regime.

Chavez’s new found ally on the Right, President Santos, has not reciprocated: Colombia still maintains close military ties with Venezuela’s prime enemy in Washington. Indeed, Santos vigorously sticks to the White House agenda: He successfully pressured Chavez to recognize the illegitimate regime of Lobos in Honduras- the product of a US-backed coup in exchange for the return of ousted ex-President Zelaya. Chavez did what no other center-left Latin American President has dared to do: He promised to support the reinstatement of the illegitimate Honduran regime into the OAS. On the basis of the Chavez-Santos agreement, Latin American opposition to Lobos collapsed and Washington’s strategic goal was realized. A puppet regime was legitimized.

Chavez’s agreement with Santos to recognize the murderous Lobos regime betrayed the heroic struggle of the Honduran mass movement. Not one of the Honduran officials responsible for over a hundred murders and disappearances of peasant leaders, journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists are subject to any judicial investigation. Chavez has given his blessings to impunity and the continuation of an entire repressive apparatus, backed by the Honduran oligarchy and the US Pentagon.

In other words, to demonstrate his willingness to uphold his ‘friendship and peace pact’ with Santos, Chavez was willing to sacrifice the struggle of one of the most promising and courageous pro-democracy movements in the Americas.

And what does Chavez seek in his accommodation with the Right?

Security? Chavez has received only verbal ‘promises’, and some expressions of gratitude from Santos. But the enormous pro-US military command and US mission remain in place. In other words, there will be no dismantling of the Colombian para-military-military forces massed along the Venezuelan border and the US military base agreements, which threaten Venezuelan national security, will not change.

According to Venezuelan diplomats, Chavez’s tactic is to ‘win over’ Santos from US tutelage. By befriending Santos, Chavez hopes that Bogota will not join in any joint military operation with the US or cooperate in future propaganda-destabilization campaigns. In the brief time since the Santos-Chavez pact was made, an emboldened Washington announced an embargo on the Venezuelan state oil company with the support of the Venezuelan congressional opposition. Santos, for his part, has not complied with the embargo, but then not a single country in the world has followed Washington’s lead. Clearly, President Santos is not likely to endanger the annual $10 billion dollar trade between Colombia and Venezuela in order to humor the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s diplomatic caprices.

Conclusion

In contrast to Chavez’s policy of handing over leftist and guerrilla exiles to a rightist authoritarian regime, President Allende of Chile (1970-73) joined a delegation that welcomed armed fighters fleeing persecution in Bolivia and Argentina and offered them asylum. For many years, especially in the 1980s, Mexico, under center-right regimes, openly recognized the rights of asylum for guerrilla and leftist refugees from Central America – El Salvador and Guatemala. Revolutionary Cuba, for decades, offered asylum and medical treatment to leftist and guerrilla refugees from Latin American dictatorships and rejected demands for their extradition. Even as late as 2006, when the Cuban government was pursuing friendly relations with Colombia and when its then Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his deep reservations regarding the FARC in conversations with the author, Cuba refused to extradite guerrillas to their home countries where they would be tortured and abused. One day before he left office in 2011, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied Italy’s request to extradite Cesare Battisti, a former Italian guerrilla. As one Brazilian judge said – and Chavez should have listened: ”At stake here is national sovereignty. It is as simple as that”.

No one would criticize Chavez’s efforts to lessen border tensions by developing better diplomatic relations with Colombia and to expand trade and investment flows between the two countries. What is unacceptable is to describe the murderous Colombian regime as a “friend” of the Venezuela people and a partner in peace and democracy, while thousands of pro-democracy political prisoners rot in TB-infested Colombian prisons for years on trumped-up charges. Under Santos, civilian activists continue to be murdered almost every day. The most recent killing was yesterday (June 9,2011), Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader of community-based displaced peasants, was murdered by the Colombian armed forces. Chavez’s embrace of the Santos narco-presidency goes beyond the requirements for maintaining proper diplomatic and trade relations. His collaboration with the Colombian intelligence, military and secret police agencies in hunting down and deporting Leftists (without due process!) smacks of complicity in dictatorial repression and serves to alienate the most consequential supporters of the Bolivarian transformation in Venezuela.

Chavez’s role in legitimizing of the Honduran coup-regime, without any consideration for the popular movements’ demands for justice, is a clear capitulation to the Santos – Obama agenda. This line of action places Venezuela’s ‘state’ interests over the rights of the popular mass movements in Honduras. Chavez’s collaboration with Santos on policing leftists and undermining popular struggles in Honduras raises serious questions about Venezuela’s claims of revolutionary solidarity. It certainly sows deep distrust about Chavez’s future relations with popular movements who might be engaged in struggle with one of Chavez’s center-right diplomatic and economic partners.

What is particularly troubling is that most democratic and even center-left regimes do not sacrifice the mass social movements on the altar of “security” when they normalize relations with an adversary. Certainly the Right, especially the US, protects its former clients, allies, exiled right-wing oligarch and even admitted terrorists from extradition requests issued by Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Mass murders and bombers of civilian airplanes manage to live comfortably in Florida. Why Venezuela submits to the Right-wing demands of the Colombians, while complaining about the US protecting terrorists guilty of crimes in Venezuela, can only be explained by Chavez’s321 ideological shift to the Right, making Venezuela more vulnerable to pressure for greater concessions in the future.

Chavez is no longer interested in the support from the radical left: His definition of state policy revolves around securing the ‘stability’ of Bolivarian socialism in one country, even if it means sacrificing Colombian militants to a police state and pro-democracy movements in Honduras to an illegitimate US-imposed regime.

History provides mixed lessons. Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the Soviet people. Once the Fascists got what they wanted they turned around and invaded Russia. Chavez has so far not received any ‘reciprocal’ confidence-building concession from Santos’ military machine. Even in terms of narrowly defined ‘state interests’, he has sacrificed loyal allies for empty promises. The US imperial state is Santos primary ally and military provider. China sacrificed international solidarity for a pact with the US, a policy that led to unregulated capitalist exploitation and deep social injustices.

When, and if, the next confrontation between the US and Venezuela occurs, will Chavez, at least, be able to count on the “neutrality” of Colombia? If past and present relations are any indication, Colombia will side with its client-master, mega-benefactor and ideological mentor. When a new rupture occurs, can Chavez count on the support of the militants, who have been jailed, the mass popular movements he pushed aside and the international movements and intellectuals he has slandered? As the US moves toward new confrontations with Venezuela and intensifies its economic sanctions, domestic and international solidarity will be vital for Venezuela’s defense. Who will stand up for the Bolivarian revolution:  the Santos and Lobos of this “realist world” or the solidarity movements in the streets of Caracas and the Americas?

For those not familiar with the international labor scene, Colombia not only leads the western hemisphere in anti-union sentiment, it has a unique and horrifying way of expressing that sentiment. Last year alone, 51 Colombian labor activists were brutally murdered, many of them by what were reported to be government-sponsored death squads. As Trumka wryly pointed out, would this trade agreement be moving forward if 51 CEOs had been killed?

When it comes to workers’ rights, you have your old-fashioned, garden variety “anti-unionism” as seen in places like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina (with 3.5 percent union membership, it’s the lowest of any state in the U.S.), and then you have your infinitely more toxic, government-sanctioned anti-unionism as seen in places like Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia.

Ironically, this Colombian trade bill comes on the heels of one of the Obama administration’s most impressive pro-labor decisions—i.e., the NLRB’s astonishing announcement that it was prohibiting the Boeing Corporation from moving a major part of its 787 Dreamliner passenger plane manufacturing operation from Washington state to South Carolina.

The Boeing announcement came as a genuine shocker. After decades of timidly and gingerly pecking away at corporate violations of federal labor and safety statutes—seemingly terrified at the prospect of angering Big Business or rocking the economic boat—the NLRB pouncing on a corporation as well-lubricated and integrated into the military-industrial complex as Boeing is came as… well, a mind-blower.

The NLRB’s decision made eminent legal sense. It was based solely on the fact that Boeing’s move was being done primarily “in retaliation” for its Seattle workers (most of whom are members of the IAM—International Association of Machinists) going out on strike, something that Boeing management tends to frown on.

As it happens, acting in retaliation for a strike is a clear violation of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act). After Boeing more or less declared (in internal memos and public interviews) that it was making the move as a form of payback, the NLRB’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said he had no choice but to rule against it. You either enforce the law, as written, or you don’t. He did the right thing.

Of course, reaction to the Boeing decision was predictable. Not only did business groups across the country react with hysteria and outrage, but South Carolina’s Republican senators, Jim DeMint and Lindsay Graham, both vowed dramatically to declare war on organized labor (as if this were breaking news… as if they hadn’t been staunch anti-union pilgrims their entire careers).

While it remains to be seen if the Boeing decision sticks—and, given the pro-business posture of the federal appellate courts, many observers predict it won’t—it was nonetheless a wise and gutsy call, not to mention a much needed salvo across the bow of corporate America.

The problem with the Colombian trade deal is that it’s pure window dressing, not worth the paper it’s written on. Organized labor doesn’t believe for one minute that the Colombian government will abide by the language included in that treaty. Despite the glib assurances provided by Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos, no one—not Colombian business interests, not American banks and private investors, not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, not the National Association of Manufacturers—wants to see Colombia’s working class gain power. And if the provisions of that treaty were enforced, they would definitely gain power.

You don’t murder 50 union organizers one year and then, the very next year, sit down and draft a high-minded document that makes it sound as if you’ve been fundamentally pro-labor all along. To believe that could happen, you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb and a presidential candidate.

But the trade agreement was never in doubt; it was assured of passing. The Republicans staunchly supported it, the Democrats gutlessly went along with them, and Obama was eager, pen in hand, to sign it. The corporations will profit from the agreement, the oligarchies will be made stronger by it, and the only losers will be the Colombian people.

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.

Not so with the other amendments. The ruling class has figured out how to make the Bill of Rights irrelevant.

The First Amendment now means we have the right to assemble in cages far away and out of sight of our political leaders at their conventions. (If dissent falls over in a cage does it make a sound?) Freedom of speech now only has real meaning and impact if there are millions of dollars of TV and radio advertising behind it.

The Fourth  Amendment was KOed in the phony war on drugs but its body is still kicked about the ring in the phony war on terror. Waking up each day in America means learning how many new ways we are spied upon and not free. Now there’s an ever-growing number of places where we are not secure in our persons and effects — homes, phones, vehicles, cameras, computers, airports and, soon, bus and train stations and malls. (I absolutely draw the line at my favorite station — the Magnum roller coaster station at Cedar Point.) I fantasize about tens of millions of crazed Fourth Amendment fetishists. You’ll only pull that probable cause from my cold dead hands.

The Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments are a nightmarish parade of absurdities where it’s entirely possible to be an illiterate Afghan goat herder kidnapped by a criminal gang ( “He was Osama bin Laden’s yogurt man!”) and sold to the American military for a lottery-like pay out and then be jailed and tortured (if tortured to death, stop here)  without charge or trial and, years later, stood up in a show trial held out of sight on an island nation (which Americans have always been taught hates freedom and democracy) and have the torture-induced false confession used as evidence against you and then, when you are miraculously found not guilty, you can continue to be held and put into however many jeopardies it takes to keep you locked up forever and then thrown into solitary confinement in a Supermax prison, like 25,000 Americans, where your mind will be destroyed in a most definite cruel and unusual punishment, and all of this is just a pit stop to your ultimate destination on a gurney where you can, finally, wrongfully, legally, be tortured to death in a  “botched” execution. And your kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture and death will be proudly used by politicians to drum up money and votes. It may not be George Mason and James Madison’s cup of tea but it hits the spot with the Tea Party, most of the United States Congress and President Obummer — and these highly evolved superior beings are all that matter.

And yet the Second Amendment seems immune from any encroachment. But I put it to you that we don’t know how strong the Second Amendment muscle really is because it never gets a decent workout. And here’s how to exercise it: I urge all animal liberationists, eco-warriors and every Latino and  Muslim in America to assemble the vast, but perfectly legal, arsenals that many on the white right have always had. Then we will see how well-tolerated the Second Amendment is, something the Black Panthers learned long ago. I expect that we would see vegan compounds — bloody Rutabaga Ridges and Bac-Os — being stormed by the ATF and FBI.

***

My favorite headline about the Arizona shooting came from the  January 8 Trentonian which threw in everything but the kitchen sink: “Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot in head in terrorist attack: federal judge, 9/11 girl killed; is Sarah Palin responsible?”

Here’s a quote from the article:

Giffords is known in her southern Arizona district for her numerous public outreach meetings, which she admitted in an October interview with the Associated Press can sometimes be challenging.

‘You know, the crazies on all sides, the people who come out, the planet earth people,’  she said following an appearance with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Tucson, where Mullen was questioned by a woman who wanted the military to start ‘building cities instead of destroying them.’ ‘I’m glad this just doesn’t happen to me.’

Right. The crazies, the planet earth people who would rather see money spent building cities than destroying them. The crazies who don’t like mountaintop removal and fracking and unconstitutional wars and extra-judicial assassinations and indefinite detention and giving away the public treasury to thieving bankers, or the ongoing spectacle of Senate warmongers like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman pushing for turning Iran into thousands of bloody Safeway parking lots.

McCain was quoted in the same Trentonian article from Colombia, America’s favorite human rights abuser in Latin America, where he was visiting its president. Arizona is a mere anti-union “right to work” state but oh what a free market paradise Colombia is — there, right wing death squads successfully compete against labor organizers by routinely killing them. I’m sure Sen. McCain was raising (Arizona?) hell about all those murdered union organizers. It’s more likely that the senator was ascertaining how well American tax dollars are being spent to exterminate leftist guerillas under the cover of a bogus “war on drugs” and ginning up trouble against Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela next door.

******

The United States Congress feels no urgency about the following: On January 7 the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced there are 14.5 million unemployed Americans, 8.9 million others who are working part-time but who want full-time work, 1.3 million who looked for work in the preceding 12 months but not in the four weeks leading up to the employment survey and 1.3 million discouraged workers who have given up looking for work altogether — for an official grand(ly understated) total of 26 million unemployed or under-employed. Contrariwise, the United States Congress moved heaven and earth in one week in 2008 to prop up insolvent zombie financial institutions with a potential $20 trillion, according to SourceWatch, of which the bankers took millions for Christmas bonuses and kicked back a tiny amount as the Congressional bribes known as campaign contributions.

Trillion$ to pay off the gambling debts of zombie banksters, 26 million Americans without jobs. A joke of a country. A lawless country — with more repressive laws than ever — socially, morally and financially bankrupt, that rightly commands no loyalty or respect. Fast action and trillion$ for bankers,  millions of jobless Americans fighting for every little scrap they can get, whether it’s food stamps or unemployment benefits. That’s the priorities of the sanctimonious corruptatons in the United States Congress who call for civility in public discourse while they spend trillions of more dollars on the slaughter of innocent people in unconstitutional wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Arizona shooter is presented as an aberration while the CIA and young men at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada kill hundreds of times more civilians in Pakistan (over 2,000 murdered since Obama took office) in their computer-guided drone strikes.

The Arizona shooting will evolve from ruling class hand wringing about the rabid right’s rhetoric to concrete actions against Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, eco-activists, Hugo Chavez, the FARC, Iran, Hezbollah and any entity effectively resisting the American empire.

*********

I fluctuate every day, sometimes every hour, between hope and despair. My hope is the destruction of the American empire — my despair is that it might not happen in time for millions of people. At this moment, I’m unexpectedly bullish on its demise. I’m totally confident, for the next ten seconds, that something this arrogant, bankrupt and nakedly hypocritical is creating the courageous and determined people all over the world — in the jungles and deserts and even in the belly of the military beast itself — who will bury it, and have a good laugh doing it. Hallelujah, brother!

Oops — too late. Back to the shit. This country is in permanent lockdown. We have the right to dream and the right to blow off steam but not the ability to change anything. Every day we slog on, on fire but insensate, through the perfectly calibrated Hell of America where nothing positive can happen for the vast working class majority unless it first, and mostly, benefits a tiny minority of rapacious parasites. The money is for THEM, the mainstream news is for THEM, all the worry and concern and action in government is for THEM, everything is for THEM and we are of no consequence.

Dictators of the world, come visit America and see how it’s really done: Here the slaves believe they are free because they can buy iShit in ten different colors. Here it’s a way of life that the majority NEVER gets what it wants whether it’s universal single-payer health insurance, an end to wars or an end to bailing out the rich. Behold the narcissistic obedient subjects, with their phenomenal tolerance for dark-skinned pain and death, who have the exact government they deserve — watch them work until they drop because Wall Street fleeced them of tens of trillions of dollars in fraud-filled pump and dump asset bubbles. Behold the Marlboro Man dreams floating above the foundational cowardice of the American working class, ignorantly proud that, unlike the French and Greeks and Tunisians, they would never cause any trouble for their capitalist masters. Behold the Extermi-Nation, where the only honorable place to be is six feet under or the penitentiary.

Martin Luther King knew it then, Bradley Manning knows it now. Listen up, Obummer: Manning is closer to King than you have ever been and will ever be.

The twin nemesis of Latin America’s quest for more equitable and dynamic development, US imperial and local oligarchic power have been subject to profound changes over the past decade.  New capitalist classes both at home and abroad have redefined Latin America’s relation to world markets, seized opportunities to stimulate growth and forged cross class coalitions linking overseas investors, agro-mineral exporters, national industrialists with a broad array of trade unions, and in some countries peasant and Indian social movements.  Parallel to these changes in Latin America, a new militarist and financial political configuration engaged in prolonged wars, colonial occupations and widespread speculation has weakened the structural economic links – dominance – between  US imperial economic interests and Latin America’s dynamic socio-economic classes.

In the present conjuncture, these basic changes in the respective class structures – in the US and Latin America – define the contours, constraints and ‘reach’ of the imperial classes as well as the potential autonomy of action of Latin America’s leading socio-economic classes.

Notions which freeze Latin America in a time warp such as “500 years of exploitation” or which conflate earlier decades of US political-economic dominance with the present, have failed to take account of recent class dynamics, including popular insurrections, mass electoral mobilizations and failed imperial-centered economic models which have redefined the power equation between the US and Latin America.  Equally important, fundamental changes in market relations and market competition has lessened US influence in the world market and opened major growth opportunities for new and established sectors of Latin America’s capitalist class, especially its dynamic export sectors.

Understanding imperialism, especially the US variant, requires focusing on class relations, within and between countries and regions, the changing balance of power as well as the impact of fundamental changes in world market relations.  Equally important the private economic institutions of imperialism (banks, multi-national corporations, investors) are contingent on the composition and policies of the imperial state.  Insofar as the state defines its priorities in military and ideological terms and acts accordingly, by channeling resources in prolonged wars, the imperial policymakers weaken their capacity to sustain, finance and promote  overseas private economic interests.  As we shall analyze and discuss in the following sections, the US has suffered a relative loss of political and economic power over key Latin American regimes and markets as its military commitments have widened and deepened over time.  The result is a Latin American political configuration which has changed dramatically over the past two decades.

Latin American Political-Economic Configurations and US Imperialism

The upsurge of social movements, the subsequent ascent of center-left political regimes,the dynamic economic growth of Asian economies and the consequent sharp increase in prices of commodities in the world market has changed the configuration of political power in Latin America and between the latter and the US between 2000-2010.

While the US exercised almost absolute hegemony during the period 1980-1999, the rise of a militarist caste promoting prolonged imperial wars in the Middle East and South Asia and the rise of relatively independent national-popular and social-liberal regimes in Latin America has produced a broad spectrum of governments with greater autonomy of action.

Depending on the criteria we use, Latin American countries have moved beyond the orbit of US hegemony.  For example, if we examine trade and investment, all the major countries, independent of ideology, have to a greater or lesser degree diversified their markets, trading and investment partners.  If we examine political alignments, we find that all the major countries have joined UNASUR, a regional political organization that excludes the US.  If we examine policy divergences from the US on major regional issues, such as the US embargo on Cuba, its efforts to isolate Venezuela, its proposed military bases in Colombia, Washington remains in splendid isolation, to the point that the new Colombian President Santos, chooses to “postpone” implementation in favor of maximizing billion dollar trade and diplomatic ties with Venezuela.

If we focus on ideological divergence between the US and Latin America, particularly on global issues of free trade, military coups and intervention, we find a variety of positions.  For example, Brazil opposes US sanctions against Iran and supports the latter’s program of uranium enrichment for peaceful uses.  If we focus on joint US-Latin American military exercises and support for the Haitian occupation, most Latin countries – with the exception of Venezuela – participate.  If we examine the issue of bilateral trade and regional trade agreements, the US proposals on the latter were voted down, while several countries pursue (so far with little success) the former.  On a rather fluid measure of ‘affinity for neo-liberal’ ideology, in which a mixture of elements of statism, deregulated markets and social welfare co-exist in varying degrees, we can draw up a tentative 4-fold division between “left”, “center left”, “center right” and “right”.

On the “left” we can include Venezuela and Bolivia which have expanded the public sector, economic regulations and social spending.  On the “center-left” we can include Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador, which have increased social spending, public investment and increased employment, wages and reduced poverty, while vastly increasing private national and foreign investment in agro-mineral export sectors.  On the center-right we can include Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, which embrace free market doctrines, with mild poverty programs and an open door to foreign investment.  On the right we find Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all of whom line up with Washington on most ideological issues, even as they may be diversifying trade ties with Asia and Venezuela.

Internal shifts in class power within Latin America and the US have spurred divergences.  Latin America has witnessed greater policy influence by a more ‘globalist elite’ less tied to the US, and an emerging ‘nationalist bourgeoisie’, and greater pressure from reformist working class and public employees trade union.  In contrast within the US industrial capital has lost influence to the financial sector and exerts little influence in shaping economic policy toward Latin America beyond rearguard ‘protectionist’ measures and state subsidies.  The US ruling political elite, highly militarized and Zionized, shows little capacity to engage in launching any major new initiatives toward recapturing markets in Latin America, preferring massive military expenditures on wars and paying tribute to their Israeli mentors.

As a result of major socio-political shifts within the US and Latin America and the singular importance of dynamic changes in the world market, there are four axis of power operating in the Western Hemisphere.

A.     The emerging economic power of Brazil and the growth of intra-regional trade within and between Latin American economies.

B.     The dynamic expansion of Asian trade, investment and markets leading to a long term, large scale shift toward greater economic diversification.

C.     The substantial financial flows from the US to Latin America in the form of “hot money” with destabilizing effects, as well as  continued substantial investment, trade and military ties.

D.     The European Union, Russia and the Middle East as real and potential influentials in particular settings, depending on the countries and time frame.

Of these 4 ‘vectors of power’, the most significant in recent times in reshaping Latin America’s relation to the US, and more importantly in opening up prospects for 21st century capitalist growth, is the boom in commodity prices and demand – the dynamic of the world market.  On the ‘negative side’, the prolonged US-EU economic crises has limited trade and investment growth and encouraged greater Latin American integration and expansion of regional markets.  A serious threat to Latin America’s growth, autonomy and stability is found in the US currency devaluation and subsequent overvaluating of Latin currencies (especially Brazil) imposing constraints on industrial exports and prejudicing the manufacturing sector.  Equally important US and EU manipulation of interest rates – downward – has driven speculative capital toward higher interest rates in Latin America, creating destabilizing “bubbles” which can derail the economies.

US Empire Strikes Back:  Protectionism, Devaluation and Unilateralism

By the middle of 2010 it was clear that the US economy was losing the competitive battle for markets around the world and was unable to reduce its trade and fiscal deficit within the existing global free trade regime.  The Obama regime, led by Federal Reserve head Bernacke and Treasury Secretary Geithner unilaterally launched a thinly disguised trade war, effectively devaluating the dollar and lowering interest rates on bonds in order to increase exports and, in effect, ‘overvalue’ the currency of their competitors. In other words the Obama regime resorted to a virile “bugger your neighbor policies”, which outraged world economic leaders, provoking Brazilian economic leaders to speak of a “currency war”.  Contrary to Washington’s rhetoric of “greater co-operation”, the Obama regime was resorting to protectionist policies designed to alienate the leading economic powers in the region.

No longer in a position to impose non-reciprocal trade agreements to US advantage, Washington is engaged in currency manipulation in order to increase market shares at the expense of the highly competitive emerging economies of Latin America and Asia, as well as Germany.

Equally prejudicial to Latin America, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates leads to heavy borrowing in the US in order to speculate in high interest countries like Brazil.  The consequences are disastrous, as a flood of “hot money”, speculative funds flow into Latin America, especially Brazil, overvaluating the currency and provoking a speculative bubble in bonds and real estate, while encouraging excess liquidity and public and private consumer debt.  Equally damaging, the overvalued currencies price industrial and manufacturing out of world market competition, threatening to “de-industrialize” the economies and further their dependency on agro-mineral exports. 

US’ resort to unilateral protectionism tells us that the decline in US economic power has reached a point where it struggles to compete with Latin America rather than to reassert its former dominant position.   Protectionism is a defense mechanism of an empire in decline. While Washington can pretend otherwise, the weapons it chooses to arrest its loss of competitiveness in the short run, sets in motion a process of growing Latin America integration and increased trade with Asian economies, which will deepen Latin America’s economic independence from US control.

Latin America’s Center-Left and the US:  Economic Ties Trump Geopolitical Strategies

The consolidation of Latin America’s center-left regimes has had major consequences for US policy; namely, a reconciliation between arch-adversary Venezuela and Washington’s foremost ally, Colombia. The power of the market, in this case over $4 billion in Colombian exports to Venezuela, has trumped the dubious advantage (if any) of being Washington’s military launching pad in Latin America.

The election of Lula’s chosen candidate, Dilma Rousseff, as President of Brazil, the likely re-election of Chavez in Venezuela and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, means that Washington has little leverage to reverse the dynamic diversification and greater autonomy of Latin America’s leading economies.  Moreover, as the political rapprochement between  Venezuela and Colombia, including the mutual extradition of Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers demonstrates, closer economic relations are accompanied by warmer political relations, including a tacit pact in which Colombia abjures from supporting the right wing opposition in Venezuela, while the latter does likewise toward the Left opposition to Santos. 

The larger meaning of this obscuring of ideological boundaries is that Latin America’s economic integration advances at the expense of US prompted ideological divisions.  The net result will be the further and of the US as the dominant actor in the Southern Hemisphere.  At the same time it should be remembered that we are writing about greater capitalist integration, which means the continued marginalization of class based trade unions and social movements from strategic economic policy making positions.

In other words, the decline of US hegemony is not matched by an increase in working class or popular power.  As both decline, the big winner is the rising business class, mostly, but not exclusively the agro-mineral, financial and manufacturing elites linked to the Latin American and Asian markets.

The prime destabilization danger now includes US currency wars, the growing potentially volatile extractive exports and the high levels of dependence on China’s (and Asian) appetite for raw materials.

Imperial Wars, Free Trade and the Lumpen Legacy of 1990’s

One of the paradoxes leading to the current eclipse of US hegemony in Latin America is found in the very military and economic successes in the 1990’s.  A broad swathe of North and Central American and the Andean countries has witnessed the rise of what we call “lumpen political-economic power” which has devastated the formal economy and legitimate political authority. 

The concept of “lumpen” is derived from ‘lupus’ or Latin for ‘wolf’ a metaphor for a ‘predatory’ actor, or in our context, the rise of a political and economic class which preys upon the public and private resources and institutions of an economy and society.  The lumpen power elites are based on the creation of a dual system of legitimate and illegitimate political authority backed by the instruments of coercion and violence.  The emergence and formation of a powerful lumpen class of predatory capitalists and their accompanying military entourage is what we refer to in writing of the “process of lumpenization”. 

Today “lumpenization” no longer merely entails the overt violent organizers of illicit production, processing and distribution of drugs but an entire array of ‘offspring’ economic activity (kidnapping, immigrant smugglers, etc.) as well as large scale long term interaction with ‘legitimate’ economic institutions and sectors, including banking, real estate, agriculture, retail shopping centers, tourist complexes, to name a few.  Money laundering of illicit funds is an important growth sector, especially providing important flows of capital to and from major US and Latin American financial institutions. 

Today over three-quarters of Mexico’s territory and governance is contested by over 30,000 organized armed lumpen led by centralized political-economic formations.  Central America is a major transit point, production center and terrain for bloody lumpen struggles for power and revenue collection.  Colombia is the major center for ‘raw material production’of drugs, marketing,and import and export center under the leadership of powerful lumpen capitalists with long standing ties to the governing political, military and economic elite.  The lumpen economy has supply chains further south in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay and distribution networks through Venezuela and Brazil as well as multi-billion dollar money laundering and financial links in the Caribbean, the US, Uruguay and Argentina.

Several important issues to keep in mind in discussing the lumpen political economy include: (1)the growth in size, scope and significance over the past 20 years (2) the increasing economic importance as the ‘legitimate’ economy goes into crises (both cause and consequence) (3) the increasing public cynicism as previously thought of “legitimate” economic and political actors (capitalists) engage in multi-billion dollar financial swindles and are “bailed” out by political leaders.

The ‘boom’ in lumpen political-economic growth can be dated to the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, coinciding with several major historical events in the region. These include:  the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement; the US-oligarchy defeat of the revolutionary movements in Central America and the demobilization but not disarmament of the paramilitary and armed militia; the total militarization and para-militarization of Colombia especially with the advent of Plan Colombia (2001) and the end of peace negotiations; the deregulation of the US financial system in the mid 1990s and the growth of a financial bubble economy.

What is striking about all the countries and regions experiencing ‘deep lumpenization’, is the profound disarticulation of their economies and smashing of their social fabric due to free trade agreements with the US (Mexico and Central America) and the large scale US military intervention during their civil wars (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia).  The US politico-military intervention left millions without work and worse, destroyed the possibility of reformist or revolutionary political alliances coming to power and carrying out meaningful structural changes. 

The restoration of US backed neo-liberal-militarist collaborator regimes left the young unemployed peasants and workers with three choices:  (1)submit to degradation and poverty (2) emigrate to North America or Europe (3) join one or another of the narco-trafficking organizations, as a risky but lucrative route out of poverty. 

The timing of the rise and dynamic growth of lumpen power coincides with the imposition of US free trade and political victories in the aforementioned regions.From the early 1990s forward lumpen power spreads across the region fueled by NAFTA decimating the Mexican small producers and the US imposed Central American “peace accords” which effectively destroyed the chances of socio-economic change and dismantled but did not disarm the militias and paramilitary gunmen.

Case Studies of Lumpen Dual Power:  Mexico

Mexico, unlike the other major economies of Latin America, did not experience any popular upheavals or center-left electoral outcomes during the late 1990s or early 2000.  Unlike Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, in which new center-left regimes came to power imposing regulatory controls on financial speculation, Mexico witnessed electoral fraud and signed off on NAFTA, deepening its ties to Wall Street .As a result it experienced a series of financial shocks, undermining its capacity to launch a more diversified trading and investment model. 

Unlike Argentina, which launched state directed employment generating investment policies, Mexico, under US tutelage, relied on emigration and overseas remittances to compensate for the loss of millions of jobs in agriculture, small and medium manufacturing activity and retail sales.  While popular uprisings and mobilization in Latin America led to the rise of center-left regimes capable of securing greater independence in economic policy from the US and the IMF, the Mexican elite literally stole elections in 1988 and 2006, blocking the possibility of an alternative model.  It successfully repressed alternative peasant movements in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero unlike the successes in Bolivia and Ecuador. 

While the center-left regimes captured the economic surplus from the agro-mineral sectors and increased public and private investment in production and social spending, Mexico witnessed massive illegal and legal outflows of investments into speculative ventures in the US: an outflow of over $55 billion between 2006-2010.

Regional migration within Latin America fueled by high growth, led to rising income; overseas immigration depleted Mexico of skilled and unskilled labor; in some cases, ‘return migration’from the US of deported gang members, with arms and drug networks, fueled the growth of  lumpen power.  With the severe recession,  US immigration policy led to the closing of the border, the massive deportation of Mexican immigrants and the decline of the major source of foreign earnings:  remittances. 

Pervasive and deep corruption throughout the cupula of the Mexican political and economic system, combined with the decline of the legitimate economy, the absence of channels for popular redress and Washington’s insistence that militarization and not social investments was the solution to rising crime, led to the huge influx of young recruits to the growing network of lumpen-capitalist directed narco enterprises.  With almost all US and Mexican financial institutions and arms vendors as willing partners and an unlimited pool of young recruits with a ‘lean and hungry look’, Mexico evolved into a fiercely contested terrain between a half dozen rival lumpen organizations,and the Mexican military, with nearly 30,000 deaths between 2006-2010.

Lumpenization:  Central America

Drug gangs dominate the streets of the major cities and countryside of all the countries which were militarized during the US backed counter-revolutionary wars between the 1960s to early 1990s.  US proxy military dictators and their civilian clients in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras decimated civil society and particularly the mass popular organizations.  In El Salvador over 75,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were uprooted, driven across borders or into urban shanty towns. In Guatemala over 200,000 mostly Mayan Indians were murdered by the US trained “special forces” and over 450 villages were obliterated in the course of a scorched earth policy.  In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent US financed and trained counter-revolutionary (“contra”) mercenary army killed and maimed close to 100,000 people and devastated the economy.  In Honduras, the US embassy promoted and financed in-country and cross-border counter-insurgency operations which killed, uprooted and forced thousands of Honduran peasants into exile.

Highly militarized Central American societies, in which US funded and armed death squads murdered with impunity, in which the economy of small producers was shattered and ‘normal’ market activity was subject to military assaults, led to the growth of illegal crops, drug and people smuggling. 

With the so-called “peace agreements”, the leaders of the insurgents became “institutionalized” in elite electoral politics,while large numbers of unemployed ex-guerillas and demobilized death squad militia members found no place in the status quo.  The neo-liberal order imposed by the US client rulers with its free market ideology built “fortress neighborhoods”, hired an army of private “security” guards, while the productive bases of small scale agriculture were destroyed. 

Millions of Central Americans faced the familiar “routes out of poverty”: outmigration, forming or joining criminal gangs, or attempting to find an economic niche in an unpromising environment.  Outmigration for semi-educated former members of armed bands led to their early entrée into armed groups, deportation back to Central America, swelling the ranks of narco traffickers in their “home country”. 

Highly repressive immigration policies implemented in the new millennium closed the escape valve for most Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty.  Former guerrilla fighters and their families, abandoned by their former leaders embedded in electoral parties, turned their military experience toward carving a new living, as security guards for the rich, or as armed traffickers competing for ‘market shares’ with, and against, the discharged death squad militia members.

Between 2000-2010 the annual number of homicides exceeded the number of deaths suffered during the worst period of the civil wars of the 1980s.  US imposed peace agreements, and the neo-liberal order which resulted, led to the total lumpenization of the economy and polity throughout the region, the practice of electoral politics and even the election of “center-left” politicos in El Salvador and Nicaragua notwithstanding.  Lumpenization was a direct consequence of the ‘scorched earth’ and ‘mass uprooting’ counter-insurgency policies which were central to US re-establishing dominance in the region.  Economic and personal insecurity and social misery were the price paid by imperial Washington to prevent a popular revolution.

Case Study:  Colombia

The ties between the world centers of finance and the most degenerate and blood curdling ruler in the Western Hemisphere were most evident in the slavishly laudatory puff-pieces published in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal in praise of President Alvaro Uribe, while over 3 million Colombians were driven off their lands, several thousands were murdered, over a thousand trade unionists, journalists and human rights activists were killed.  Two thirds of his Congressional backers were financed by narco-traffickers. Incarcerated death squad leaders identified top military officials as their primary supporters.  All of Colombia’s Presidents collaborated closely with US military missions and all were financed and associated with the multi-billion dollar drug cartels, even as the Pentagon claimed to be engaged in a “war against drug trafficking”.

Landlords and their financial and real estate backers organized private militias, which terrorized, uprooted and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants, others fled to the urban slums, or across the border to neighboring countries.  Others joined the guerrillas, and still others were recruited by the death squads and military.  With the advance of the guerrilla armies and then President Pastrana’s opening to peace negotiations, President Clinton launched a $5 billion dollar military scheme, “Plan Colombia” to quadruple Colombia’s air and ground forces and death squads.  With Washington’s backing, Alvaro Uribe, a notorious narco-death squad politico, so identified by US officials, took power and launched a massive scorched earth policy, murdering and displacing millions of peasants and urban slum dwellers in an effort to undermine the vast network of community organizations sympathetic to the agrarian reform, public investment and anti-military program of the guerrilla movements.

Mass terror and population flight emptied whole swathes of the countryside; livelihoods were destroyed and landlords, in alliance with drug cartel bosses and Generals, seized millions of acres of land. 

For the financial and respectable mass media, the massification of terror mattered not: the insurgents were ‘contained’, driven back, put on the defensive.   They trumpeted the killing of key guerrilla leaders:  foreign corporate property was secure.  Rule by Uribe, the military and the narco-death squads secured US power and influence and created an ideal “jumping off” location for destabilizing the democratically elected Venezuelan President Chavez.  The latter was especially important by the mid 2000s when Washington’s internal assets attempted coup and lockout were resoundingly defeated in 2002-03. 

Having gained strategic territorial advantage over the guerrillas, Washington, in collaboration with Uribe, moved to shift the balance of power between the narco-death squads and the state: a disarmament and demobilization and amnesty was proclaimed.  The result was detailed revelations of the deep structural links between narco-death squads and the Uribe police state regime, up to, and including, family members and cabinet ministers.  While ‘nominally’ the cartels are in retreat, in fact, they have become decentralized. Equally important, top politicos and military officials continue to collaborate in the production, processing and shipping of billion dollar cocaine exports … with major US banks laundering illicit funds.

Rule of Lumpen-Capitalism in the Imperial System

Drug trafficking has deep roots in the economies of North and South America and has profound ramifications throughout their societies.  One cannot understand the tremendous growth of US banking and financial centers if not for the $25 to $50 billion dollar yearly income and transfers from laundering drug funds and double that amount from illegal money transfers by business and political leaders directly and indirectly benefiting from the drug trade.  Lumpen capitalists, their collaborators, facilitators paramilitary mercenaries and military partners play a major political role in sustaining the imperial system.  Washington’s major influence and principle area of dominance resides in those countries where lumpen power and death squad operations are most prevalent; namely, Central America, Colombia and Mexico. Both phenomena are derived from US designed ‘scorched earth’ counter-insurgency strategies that prevented alterations, modifications or reforms of the neo-liberal order and blocked the successful emergence of social movements and center-left regimes as took place in most of Latin America.

The contemporary imperial system relies on lumpen capitalists, their economic networks and military formations in practically every major area of conflict even as these collaborators are constant areas of friction.

As in Afghanistan and Iraq today, and in Central America in the recent past, and in Latin America under the military dictatorships, the US relies on drug traffickers, military gangsters engaged in extortion, kidnapping, property seizures and the pillage of public property and treasury to destroy popular movements, to divide and conquer communities and above all to terrorize the general public and civil society.

The singular growth of the financial sector especially in the US is in part the result of its being the massive recipient of large scale sustained flows of ‘plunder capital’ by lumpen rulers and their economic partners via ‘political crony’ privatizations, foreign loans which never entered the local economy and other such forms of pillage characteristic of ‘predator’ classes.

The deep structural affinities between Wall Street speculators and Latin lumpen-capitalists provided the backdrop for the ascendancy of a new class of lumpen financiers in the imperial financial centers:  bogus bonds, mortgage swindles, falsified assessments by stock ratings agencies, trillion dollar raids on state treasuries define the heart and soul of contemporary imperialism.

If it is true that the promotion and financing of lumpen warlord capitalists was an essential defense mechanism at the periphery of the empire to contain popular insurgencies, it is also true that the growth of lumpen capitalism severely weakened the very core of the imperial economy; namely, its productive and export sectors leading to uncontrollable deficits, out of control speculative bubbles and massive and sustained reductions of living standards and incomes.

Lumpen classes were both the agencies for consolidating the empire and its undoing:  tactical gains at the periphery led to strategic losses in the imperial centers.  Imperial policy makers’ resort to terrorist formations resulted from their incapacity to resolve internal contradictions within a legal, electoral framework.  The high domestic political cost of long term warfare led inevitably to the recruitment of mercenary lumpen armies who extracted an economic tribute for questionable loyalty.  Lacking any popular constituency, mercenary armies rely on terror to secure circumstantial submission.  Having secured control, local warlords preside over the rapid and massive growth of drugs and other lumpen economic practices.

The alliance of empire and lumpen capitalists against modern secular and traditional insurgencies brings together high technology weaponry and primitive clan based religious-ethnic racists in Iraq and Afghanistan and deracinated psychopaths in the case of Colombia, Mexico and Central America.

For Washington military and political supremacy and territorial conquests take priority over economic gain.  In the case of Colombia the scorched earth policy undermined production and lucrative trade with Venezuela.  Imperial ascendancy had similar consequences in Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

When Lumpen Power becomes a Problem for the Imperial State

Lumpen capitalism develops a dynamic of its own, independent of its role as an imperial instrument for destroying popular insurgency. It challenges imperial collaborator regimes. It displaces, threatens, or cajoles foreign and domestic capitalists.  In the extreme, it establishes a private army, seizes territorial control, recruits and trains networks of intelligence agents within the armed forces and police, undermining imperial influence.  In a word lumpen organized military capitalism threatens the security of imperial hegemony: newly emerging predators threaten the established collaborators.  The imperial attempts to use and dispose of lumpen counterinsurgency forces have failed; the demobilized paras become the professional gunmen of a “third force” – neither imperial nor insurgent.  The decimation of the reformist center-left option, which took hold in Latin America, precludes a socio-economic alternative capable of integrating the young combative unemployed, stimulating the productive economy, diversifying markets and escaping the pitfalls of a US centered neo-liberal order.

The divergence of priorities and strategies between Latin America’s center-left and Washington has as much to do with economic and class interests as it has with ideological agendas. For the US security means defeating the rising power of lumpen military economic formations in their remaining ‘power bases’.  For Latin America, security concerns are secondary to diversifying and boosting market shares within Latin America and overseas.  Lumpen power is currently under the political control of domestic rulers in Latin America; it is out of control in US clients.  The US solution is military; the Latin approach is greater growth; social expenditures and police repression especially in Brazil.  The Latin solution has greater attraction, evident in Colombia’s break with the US military base and encirclement strategy toward Venezuela.  Colombia’s new President opted for $8 billion dollar trade deals with Venezuela’s Chavez over, and against, costly million dollar military base agreements with the US.

Clearly the US economic decline in Latin America, as a direct result of its reliance on military and lumpen power, is in full force.  The driving force of accelerated decline is not popular insurgency but the attraction and lucrative opportunities of the economic marketplace within Latin America and beyond for the local ruling classes.  Insofar as militarism defines the policies and strategies of the US Empire there is no remedy for the challenges of lumpen power in its ‘backyard’.  And Washington has nothing on offer to recapture a dominant presence in Latin America.  The world market is defeating the empire. Latin America’s twenty-first century capitalists are leading the way to further decline in imperial power.

While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into failed drug eradication schemes in target countries through ill-conceived programs such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, in the bizarro world of the “War on Drugs,” corporate interests and geopolitics always trump law enforcement efforts to fight organized crime, particularly when the criminals are partners in crimes perpetrated by the secret state.

Since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón turned the Army loose, allegedly to “dismantle” the drug cartels slowly transforming Mexico into a killing field some 28,000 people, primarily along Mexico’s northern border with the U.S., have lost their lives. Countless others have been wounded, forced to flee or simply “disappeared.”

Writing in The Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins tells us that “cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state.”

“Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs,” Jenkins writes, “rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics–demand always evokes supply–so traduced as in Washington’s drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it.”

Judging the results, one might even think the drug war solely exists as the principle means through which wealthy elites organize crime.

Scenes from the Atrocity Exhibition

• December 13, 2009: The Observer reported that “drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he saw evidence that “the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.” The Observer informed us that this “will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis.” Costa told the British newspaper that “in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.” Although the UN’s drug czar declined to identify the countries or banks that benefited from narcotics investments, he said that “inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”

• February 26, 2010: Responding to charges by left-wing critics and academics, Mexican president Felipe Calderón was forced to counter evidence that his government’s “offensive” against narcotraffickers has left the “largest and most powerful of the cartels relatively unscathed,” the Los Angeles Times disclosed. Critics accused the government of favoritism towards the Sinaloa cartel, claiming it “has been allowed to escape most of the government’s firepower and carry on with its illegal business as usual.” During a news conference, Calderón said such charges were “absolutely false.” The president said the suggestion was “painful,” and went on to say: “I can assure you that this government has attacked without discrimination all criminal groups in Mexico … without taking into consideration whether it’s the cartel of so-and-so or what’s-his-name. We’ve fought them all.” Edgardo Buscaglia, an academic expert on organized crime challenged the president and said that arrest figures “skew heavily” toward the other cartels. “By his calculation,” the Times reported, “of more than 53,000 people arrested in drug-trafficking cases in the three years since Calderón took office, fewer than 1,000 worked for the Sinaloa organization.” Commanded by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel crime boss placed 937 on Forbes 2010 survey of the world’s billionaires with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. A similar modus operandi is standard practice where foreign policy and corporate concerns of America’s wealthiest clients overseas override efforts by law enforcement to choke-off the flow of narcotics. In Colombia, secret state agencies such as the CIA have long-favored drug organizations that have served as intelligence assets or death squads. Examples abound. Consider the “untouchable” status enjoyed by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers’ Cali cartel. During the 1980s, at the height of America’s Central American interventions, cocaine shipped into the United States as part of the U.S. government’s “guns-for-drugs” arrangement with Nicaraguan Contra rebels, was principally supplied by Cali traffickers. When Medellín drug lord Pablo Escobar’s group was brought down, the CIA, DEA and the Pentagon’s Delta Force relied on operatives funded by the rival Cali faction and Los Pepes, a vigilante group founded by drug lord Carlos Castaño and his brothers Fidel and Vicente. Los Pepes had operational links to the Colombian National Police, especially the Search Bloc (Bloque de Búsqueda) hunting Escobar, and acted on intelligence provided by the CIA/DEA/Delta Force to execute their missions. After Escobar’s death, the Castaño brothers launched the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a notorious right-wing death squad. The AUC in coordination with the Colombian Army, carried out multiple attacks and massacred thousands of leftists, trade union organizers and peasant activists. In 2001 under pressure from human rights groups, the U.S. State Department designated the AUC a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” This didn’t however, prevent U.S. corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, Occidental Petroleum, Coca-Cola or the Drummond Company from allegedly hiring out AUC paramilitaries to murder trade union and peasant activists. In 2007, Chiquita pled guilty in federal district court and paid a $25 million fine under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 for funding the AUC. Dole Food Company now faces similar charges. In 2002, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Carlos Castaño and accused him of trafficking some 17 tons of cocaine into the United States.

• March 9, 2010: The National Security Archive published a series of documents linking the U.S. secret state to Mexico’s dirty warriors and drug cartel operatives under official protection by a CIA-allied intelligence agency. Following reporting by Peter Dale Scott that “both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was ‘an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,’ on matters of ‘terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence’,” the National Security Archive disclosed that Nazar Haro’s corrupt Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) was responsible for the disappearance, torture and murder of left-wing activists during the 1970s and ’80s. The Archive revealed that “there is a deep connection between the former Mexican intelligence service and the country’s drug mafias. As DFS agents took command of counterinsurgency raids in the 1970s, they often stumbled upon narcotics safe houses and quickly took on the job of protecting Mexico’s drug cartels.” Researchers Kate Doyle and Jesse Franzblau told us although “the DFS was disbanded in 1985 following revelations that it was behind the murder of DEA agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena, and Mexican journalist Manuel Buendia,” of the 1,500 agents who suddenly found themselves unemployed, many “found their training in covert activities and brutal counterinsurgency operations easily adaptable to the needs of the criminal underworld.” In 2006, the National Security Archive and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley disclosed that declassified U.S. documents “reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría.” As we now know, when he served as Interior Secretary in the Díaz government, Echeverría oversaw the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student activists just days before the Summer Olympics were staged in Mexico City. “The documents,” Morley wrote, “detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named ‘LITEMPO.’ Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide ‘an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges’.” These, and other disclosures reveal that “one of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create,” Peter Dale Scott wrote back in 2000. “From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a ‘license to traffic;’ DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance.” Evidence suggests that similar protection and management of the global drug trade persists today.

• March 16, 2010: Wachovia Bank, a subsidiary of banking giant Wells Fargo & Co., signed a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the federal government. Wells admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report some $378.4 billion in suspected money laundering transactions by narcotics traffickers between 2004-2008, “a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product,” Bloomberg Markets magazine revealed. Cash laundered by drug mafias were used to purchase a fleet of planes that subsequently shipped some 22 tons of cocaine into the United States. Wells paid the government $160 million to resolve the case. American Express Bank and Western Union also agreed recently to huge settlements with the government for similar offenses.

• May 19, 2010: Retired Mexican Army General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro was shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged robbery attempt. El Universal reports that police claimed that a thief wanted to “steal the general’s watch” and shot him several times in the chest. In 2007, after a six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, chief of the Juárez cartel and self-described “Lord of the Heavens,” Acosta Chaparro was released from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal. According to documents published by global whistleblowers WikiLeaks in 2009, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands unit, allegedly hid “several million dollars” of funds controlled by Acosta Chaparro and his wife, Silvia through a firm known as Symac Investments. WikiLeaks wondered whether Mexican authorities would “want to know whether the several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero, stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business.” According to reports cited by WikiLeaks, Acosta Chaparro was “already the subject of multiple allegations not only that he was a narcotrafficker but also that he had played a leading role in the dirty war of police and army against rural guerillas on his patch between 1975 and 1981. He was accused of organising the seizure, torture and murder of peasants who were suspected of helping the rebels and, with particular persistence of overseeing ‘flights of death’ in which well-tortured detainees were taken up in helicopters and pushed out over the ocean while still alive.” Despite these serious charges, WikiLeaks informs us that “no action was taken at all [and] Chaparro’s funds might still be managed by the former representative of Julius Baer, Mexico Curtis Lowell Jun in Zurich.”

• June 7, 2010: Guerrero State Attorney General Albertico Guinto announced that 55 bodies were found deep in an abandoned silver mine outside Taxco, The Christian Science Monitor reported. In various states of decomposition, the victims showed signs of torture before being killed. “It was like a quicksand, but filled with bodies,” Luis Rivera, the chief criminologist investigating the scene told The Washington Post. The recovery of the remains took nearly a week, “a task made more difficult” by the fact that some cadavers were mummified, others were dismembered by the fall and at least four of the victims had been decapitated. “There are headless bodies, but some of the heads don’t match the bodies,” Rivera said. Based on wound analysis of the corpses, investigators theorized that “many of the victims were alive when they were thrown down the mine shaft.”

• June 12, 2010: The Narco News Bulletin reports “a special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations.” A “former U.S. government official who has experience dealing with covert operations,” told journalist Bill Conroy that “black operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it’s a big scoop, but it’s nothing new for those who understand how things really work.” Perhaps we should recall how “things” have worked in the recent past. Back in 2003, the Brownsville Herald reported that Los Zetas, formerly the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel, “feature 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the Mexican army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of this battalion’s deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of defense.” According to the U.S. Defense Department, some 513 Mexican Special Forces soldiers received training at the School of the Americas, and about 120 “graduates” joined the Special Air Mobile Force. Luis Astorga, a drug trafficking expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City told the Herald: “There is a higher level of danger with the type of knowledge that these people have, their arms capacity, their knowledge of techniques and specialization in (drug) traffic operations. Traffickers traditionally don’t have that; they pay other people for those services.” Is history repeating itself under the Mérida Initiative? A former DEA official told Narco News in 2005 that “A lot of the Zetas came from former Mexican police offices or the military … So they come from a diverse background. Some of them have prior training from the DEA, FBI and the U.S. military, as well as other agencies.”

• June 28, 2010: Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the leading candidate for governor in the state of Tamaulipas was gunned down in one of the highest profile assassinations since a presidential candidate was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1994. Four others, including local lawmaker Enrique Blackmore, were also killed when their campaign van was sprayed with machine gun fire by unknown assailants. Cantu had vowed to crack down on drug gangs if elected.

• July 15, 2010: A powerful car bomb explodes on a crowded street near a federal police headquarters in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. Four are killed, including a police officer and doctor lured to the scene.

• July 15, 2010: Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker revealed that the pilot “of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA) from St. Petersburg, FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico’s Yucatan several years ago,” Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, “had been released from prison less than two years after being arrested.” Readers will recall that the DC-9 and another American-registered plane, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) that spilled “4 tons of cocaine across a muddy field,” Hopsicker reported, were used in CIA “rendition” (torture) flights and had been purchased by Mexican drug gangs with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank. “The shocking news was delivered via an international headline stating that a pilot named Carmelo Vasquez Guerra had been arrested in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau on a twin-engine Gulfstream II carrying… what else? 550 kilos–a half-ton–of cocaine.” According to Hopsicker, the drug pilot was arrested–and released–from three countries “under mysterious and unexplained circumstances.” Seeking answers to the pilot’s series of seemingly miraculous escapes, Hopsicker drolly observed: “Maybe there is an innocent explanation for everything. Maybe drugs just show up, unbidden, like unwanted guests. And maybe Carmelo Vasquez Guerra didn’t escape each time he got busted. Maybe he just ‘released himself on his own recognizance‘.”

• July 18, 2010: In the wake of the massacre of 17 people attending a birthday party in the northern city of Torreon, The Christian Science Monitor revealed that inmates from a prison in the nearby city of Gomez Palacio were the authors of the crime. “According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director … to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards’ weapons for executions,” said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman from the attorney general’s office. After the atrocity, inmates drove back to their cells.

• July 20, 2010: Following the Juárez car bomb blast that killed four, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Arturo Sarukhan, downplayed it’s significance and claimed, though disturbing, violence “has not yet reached the level of terrorism,” The Washington Post reported. “Terrorism,” the U.S. ambassador said, “refers to the acts by groups with political objectives that seek to control the government.” But what if those with “political objectives” and limitless funds from the illicit trade already control the state’s security apparatus?

• July 25, 2010: Of the more than 28,000 people killed since December 2006 when President Felipe Calderón “hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel battle,” nearly 6,300 (a quarter of the total) were murdered in Ciudad Juárez, The Nation reports. Under a three year deal, the United States has bankrolled the Army offensive with some $1.4 billion in funds under the Mérida Initiative. Journalists Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy wrote in response to Ambassador Sarukhan’s statement: “We are supposed to believe in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, but that they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism?” Bowden and Molloy aver, “This, despite numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives being used in recent attacks in the states of Michoacan, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other places in Mexico. And that ‘armed commandos’ dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008.” According to expert Diego Valle, the steep rise in homicide rates correlate directly to increased military operations against some cartels. In his recent study, Statistical Analysis and Visualisation of the Drug War in Mexico, Valle writes that “military operations in Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Veracruz and Durango have coincided with increases in homicides and attempts by the Sinaloa cartel to take over drug trafficking routes from rival cartels. After the army took control of Ciudad Juárez it became the most violent city in the world.”

• July 27, 2010: Building on alliances forged during the Cold War amongst right-wing political gangs and drug traffickers, cartel operations in Central America have soared, The Washington Post informs us. Since 2006, drug networks in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world.” According to United Nations data, cocaine seizures in Central America “nearly quadrupled” between 2004 and 2007. “Over the past two years,” the Post reports, “two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives.” In Honduras, where a U.S.-sponsored coup toppled a democratically elected president in 2009, Mexican cartels have established “command-and-control” centers to coordinate cocaine shipments by sea and air to North America and Europe. In El Salvador, that country’s leftist president has said that the violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), have forged a working relationship with drug cartels that could eventually help the group mature into “an international syndicate.”

• August 22, 2010: Journalist Bill Conroy reports in The Narco News Bulletin that despite surging violence in Ciudad Juárez, the murder-plagued city “where some 10,000 small businesses have closed their doors since 2008 due, in large part, to a wave of burglaries, kidnappings, extortion and murders that has washed over the city during the past two and a half years,” why is the violence not affecting the entire city? Conroy writes “there is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juárez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people.” According to a report obtained by Narco News from the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, or REDCO, “there was only one homicide carried out in the maquila industrial zones” since 2008. “That’s right,” Conroy avers, “just one murder in this huge swath of Juárez that is dotted with maquila plants operated by huge corporations such as General Motors, Delphi, Motorola, Visteon, TECMA and Honeywell. Maquiladoras, also known as twin plants, are Mexico-based factories owned and/or operated by foreign companies that benefit from the cheap labor and favorable tax treatment.” REDCO officials refused to comment to Narco News. However, Conroy writes, TECMA executive vice president Toby Spoon told ABC’s El Paso affiliate KVIA that “If they [the narco-trafficking organizations] got the maquila industry, or American companies or foreign companies, if they became targets of this, it would just take it to a whole different level, and nobody wants that.” Isn’t that an interesting statement! “So it would appear, based on that comment,” Conroy writes, “that the narco-trafficking organizations, the Mexican government and the maquila factory owners have some sort of unspoken alliance of convenience that assures protection for the maquila factories and their professional employees.” Indeed, Narco News discovered that “at last three security zones have been set up in Juárez that are guarded by Mexican soldiers who assure safe passage for Maquila executives commuting from El Paso to the Juárez factory sites. In addition, the maquila industrial zones themselves, according to media reports, are under the close watch of Mexican state police as well as private security guards employed by the maquilas.” This is the same Army and federal police force that is seemingly “powerless” to halt the slaughter of Juárez citizens by ubiquitous, yet invisible, drug gangs which have transformed that city, and northern Mexico, into a free-fire zone. Curious indeed!

• August 25, 2010: A wounded Ecuadorean migrant stumbled to a Mexican Marine checkpoint in the northern state of Tamaulipas and leads officials to a blood-splashed room. Inside, authorities discover the bodies of 58 men and 14 women, allegedly murdered by Los Zetas, or another cartel seeking to discredit their rivals. “Years ago,” IPS reported, “Los Zetas found a gold mine: kidnapping undocumented migrants.” The UN estimates that some half million undocumented migrants from Central and South America “cross Mexico from south to north every year in their attempt to reach the United States.” And more than 10,000 were kidnapped between September 2009 and February 2010 according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. According to multiple press reports, the migrants were killed after they refused to serve as forced labor for Los Zetas.

• August 26, 2010: A veteran officer with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service (CBP), a satrapy within the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery. “Three other defendants,” the Center for Investigative Reporting disclosed, received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Juárez.”

• August 27, 2010: “Federal prosecutors,” The Nation revealed, “have used top leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), known as the most violent gang in the US and Central America, as secret informants over a decade of murders, drug-trafficking and car-jackings across a dozen US states and several Central American countries.” Former California state senator Tom Hayden told us that “the informants are identified as Nelson Comandari, described by law enforcement as ‘the CEO of Mara Salvatrucha,’ and his self described ‘right hand man,’ Jorge Pineda, nicknamed ‘Dopey’ because of his drug-dealing background.” According to The Nation, Comandari’s grandfather “was Col. Agustin Martinez Varela, a powerful right-wing Salvadoran who served as an interior minister during El Salvador’s civil wars. Comandari’s uncle, Franklin Varela, was a central informant in the Reagan administration’s scandalous investigation into the activist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador [CISPES].” In his 1998 written testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, retired DEA Special Agent Celerino Castillo III told Congress that “while our government shouted ‘Just Say No !’, entire Central and South American nations fell into what are now known as, ‘Cocaine democracies’.” Castillo testified: “On Jan. 18, 1985, [retired CIA officer Felix] Rodriguez allegedly met with money-launderer Ramon Milan-Rodriguez, who had moved $1.5 billion for the Medellin cartel. Milan testified before a Senate Investigation on the Contras’ drug smuggling, that before this 1985 meeting, he had granted Felix Rodriguez’s request and given $10 million from the cocaine for the Contras.” Contra drug operations were coordinated by the CIA out of El Salvador’s Ilopango airport and protected from prying eyes, and U.S. law enforcement investigators, by troops drawn from by Col. Varela’s interior ministry. According to the National Security Archive’s Oliver North File, “Mr. North’s diary entries, from the reporter’s notebooks he kept in those years, noted multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras. A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law enforcement authorities.”

• August 28, 2010: The bullet-ridden body of Roberto Suarez Vasquez, the lead investigator probing the murder of 72 Central- and South American migrants was found on a highway not far from where the massacre took place.

• August 31, 2010: The entire 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border will be monitored by Predator drones. Part of a $600 million package passed by Congress earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the border was now “safer than ever.”

• August 31, 2010: Some 3,200 Mexican federal police, “nearly a tenth of the force,” have been fired this year “under new rules designed to weed out crooked cops and modernize law enforcement,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Amongst the 465 cops arrested in early August, federal authorities took four commanders into custody after 250 subordinates in violence-plagued Ciudad Juárez publicly accused them of corruption.

• September 6, 2010: The Los Angeles Times reports that “drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, rob the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” The newspaper disclosed that “the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They’ve hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico’s biggest natural gas fields.” Times’ journalist Tracy Wilkinson writes that “the world’s seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war.” A series of kidnappings and murders in the gas-rich region has curtailed production. Pemex officials refused to comment and have sought to “repress information on the kidnappings.” Despite a massive outcry by Mexico’s citizens against moves by the Calderón administration to privatize Pemex, which generates some $77 billion in annual revenue, Chevron’s Latin American operations chief Ali Moshiri told the Houston Chronicle that the company wants to make Mexico “a big part of our portfolio.” In this light, violence against Pemex workers and crippled production is nothing more than an odd coincidence, right?

• September 8, 2010: Speaking at the elite Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed that Mexico’s drug cartels “increasingly resemble an insurgency with the power to challenge the government’s control of wide swaths of its own soil,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Comparing Mexico to Colombia, Clinton’s comments reflect past U.S. claims that Colombia’s well-entrenched drug mafias were part of a leftist “narcoguerrilla” strategy to topple the government. This is a mendacious comparison given rich evidence that for decades Colombia’s leading mafia groups are allied with extreme right-wing forces in that country’s political establishment. Declassified U.S. documents revealed that former President Álvaro Uribe, enjoyed close ties to drug-linked paramilitary organizations. A darling of the Pentagon and the American secret state, according to multiple press reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, when Uribe was mayor of Medellín, the epicenter of Pablo Escobar’s narcoempire, the now-dead mafia boss’s former lover Virginia Vallejo, told the Spanish paper El País: “Pablo used to say, that if it weren’t for that blessed little boy [Uribe], we would have to swim to Miami to get drugs to the gringos.” According to Vallejo, when Uribe was the director of Colombia’s Civil Aviation authority, he granted dozens of licenses for runways and hundreds of permits for planes and helicopters, on which the drug trade’s infrastructure was built. The 1991 document by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Uribe was a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels.”

• September 9, 2010: 25 people, including women and teenagers ranging in age from 15 to 60, were murdered in Ciudad Juárez by Juárez cartel gunmen, the El Paso Times reports. The operation was allegedly mounted against their rivals in the Sinaloa drugs organization, apparently in retaliation for a kidnapping. The well-coordinated attacks took place in different parts of the city. Despite thousands of Mexican Army troops and federal police stationed in the city, the attacks took place with impunity. Since 2008, more than 6,400 Juárez citizens have been killed. While President Calderón claims that 90 percent of victims are connected to drug organizations, evidence suggests that like the 72 migrant workers slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August, most of the victims had no ties to the murderous trade.

• September 10, 2010: Seeking to calm a “diplomatic furor” over recent comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Mexico “resembled Colombia” during the heyday of cartel power, President Obama disputed Clinton’s assertion, the Los Angeles Times reported. In what could generously be described as a replay of President Ronald Reagan’s repeated denials that right-wing Nicaraguan Contra “rebels” were deeply mired in cocaine trafficking, Obama said that “Mexico is a great democracy, vibrant, with a growing economy,” the president told the Spanish-language La Opinion newspaper. “And as a result, what is happening there can’t be compared with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago.” Human rights abuses are widespread. According to Amnesty International, political dissidents, environmentalists, trade union activists and indigenous human rights defenders are routinely disappeared, tortured or murdered with impunity.

• September 12, 2010: An in-depth Washington Post profile of convicted U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer Martha Garnica, sentenced in August for drug smuggling and human trafficking along the border, revealed that “the number of CBP corruption investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year.” The Post reports that “corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period.” The vast majority of cases involve “illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border.” Although Garnica received a 20-year sentence for her crimes, not a single criminal indictment has been issued by the U.S. Justice Department for crimes committed by top corporate officers of Wells Fargo-owned Wachovia Bank, who admitted earlier this year to laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for Mexico’s ultra-violent drug mafias. Aside from Bloomberg Markets magazine’s comprehensive investigation, neither the Post, nor other U.S. “newspaper of record” reported on the bank’s “deferred prosecution agreement” with the federal government.

• September 15, 2010: Writing in The Nation, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill revealed that the private security firm Blackwater “have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations.” According to Scahill, “former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique ‘Ric’ Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their ‘deniability’ as a ‘big plus’ for potential Blackwater customers.” While Blackwater’s mercenary network was originally created to service CIA black ops, Prado wrote an email to a Total Intelligence executive (a Blackwater cut-out) with the subject line, “Possible Opportunity in DEA-Read and Delete,” a pitch to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Nation reports “that executive was an eighteen-year DEA veteran with extensive government connections.” Prado explained that Blackwater “has developed ‘a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.’ He added, ‘These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’ on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus’.” According to Scahill, the executive wrote back and suggested that “one of the best places to start may be the Special Operations Division, (SOD).” Scahill writes that “the SOD is a secretive joint command within the U.S. Justice Department, run by the DEA” and serves “as the command-and-control center for some of the most sensitive counternarcotics and law enforcement operations conducted by federal forces.” As we have seen with other clandestine operations run amok in the drug war, “deniable” assets, especially when they are “foreign nationals” with no direct ties to the U.S. government, have a funny habit of lending their well-compensated “expertise” to drug traffickers. One is reminded of the case of Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, a former IDF lieutenant colonel. Klein’s private security firm, Spearhead Ltd., produced training videos and tutored drug lord Carlos Castaño’s AUC in the fine art of murder. In 2001, Klein was convicted by a Colombian court for his firm’s work with right-wing death squads and the enforcement arms of several drug trafficking organizations. According to Democracy Now!, Klein was “accused of training Mafia assassins” and “suspected of involvement in the explosion of a Colombian airliner in November 1989.” Given Blackwater’s sensitivity to human rights (just ask Baghdad residents!) one can be certain that the mercenary firm’s interest in the drug war will assure Mexico’s citizens that help is on the way!

The Grim Road Ahead

It should be clear: the “War on Drugs” like the “War on Terror” is a colossal, multibillion dollar fraud perpetrated on the American people.

North Americans consume drugs and line the pockets of state-connected killers; Latin Americans do the dying. Low-level dealers and the poor who buy their illicit products are rewarded with wrecked lives, devastated communities and one-way tickets to prison.

U.S. banking and financial elites reap whirlwind profits and are handed virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards by federal prosecutors and courts that levy fines regarded as little more than chump change by the banks. The CIA and their far-flung network of private contractors siphon-off illegal proceeds from the grim trade laundered through U.S. and European financial institutions.

The U.S. secret state, seeking geopolitical advantage over their imperialist rivals deploy drug mafias and right-wing terrorists as plausibly deniable intelligence assets, just as they have for decades.

Congressional banking and intelligence probes are killed. Black operations in areas of strategic interest to U.S. policy planners spread death and destruction, particularly where rich petrochemical and mineral reserves owned by other people are lusted after by American multinationals.

Corporate media collaborate in this charade; pointing the finger at black and brown citizens, white elites on both sides of the border escape scrutiny. It is far easier to demonize black and brown youth as “predators” than to take a hard look in the mirror at a ruling class that are the real American drug lords.

And still we wonder why Mexico is slowly transformed into a killing field.

Chavez reacted by breaking off relations with Colombia, leading to a further worsening of the relations between the two nations, but sent his foreign minister to attend Santos’ inauguration anyway. Uribe’s response was to announce that his government was lodging a formal accusation against Venezuela in the Inter-American Committee of Human Rights and another formal charge against President Chavez personally to the International Criminal Court, one day before Juan Manuel Santos inauguration. Furthermore, Uribe, reportedly, announced he would be prepared to testify to the ICC against Hugo Chavez.

However, after intense diplomatic activity undertaken by [Union of South American Nations] UNASUR, Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s Foreign Relations Minister, Nestor Kirchner, UNASUR’s President, and Brazils’ President, Lula, the latter two very publicly meeting with both Hugo Chavez and Juan Manuel Santos at various separate meetings, managed, in a matter of few days, to turn what looked like an inexorable slide to disaster, into one of the most extraordinary political turnarounds from the brink in recent Latin American history.

At his inauguration, Juan Manuel Santos stunned the world by announcing that his administration would be seeking to repair and normalise Colombia’s relations with Venezuela and Ecuador as a matter of priority. And in stark contrast to the prevailing attitude under Uribe, Santos declared “The word war is not in my dictionary when I think about Colombia’s relations with its neighbours” (a far cry from Uribe’s warmongering). Furthermore, Santos had previously indicated his willingness, under certain conditions, to even talk to the Colombian guerrillas. More surprises were to follow: Santos ordered the handing over of Raul Reyes’ ‘magical laptops’ to the government of Ecuador.

Some in the British media such as the Guardian, the Economist, the BBC and, of course, the ubiquitous Human Rights Watch, enthusiastically accepted the evidence publicised by the Colombian authorities at the time. The attitude of the US corporate media was significantly worse. As is well known, but not widely publicised by the corporate media, Ronald Coy, Head of Colombia’s technical police, admitted to an official investigation both that the data in the laptops had been manipulated before it was subjected to judicial review and that no emails had been found in them (this did not prevent the Guardian‘s Latin American correspondent, Rory Carroll, from reading several emails from the magical laptops, as he reported at the time).

We shall very soon see how much of Mr Hoyos’ “evidence” to the OAS is left standing after Ecuador’s expert analysis of the ‘magical laptops’ takes place. The Venezuelan government has consistently denied any such charges and to this day, apart from regular media repetition of Uribista “false positives,” no serious evidence of any kind has been produced to substantiate the allegations that Venezuela harbours guerrillas and guerrilla camps in its territory or that it gives them resources and weapons.

Venezuela and Colombia share 1,375 miles of very porous border. Colombia’s internal conflict has the unfortunate dynamic of spilling over into other countries in the form of guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, refugees, and immigrants escaping from the conflict (about 5 million Colombians reside permanently in Venezuela). It is estimated that overall, Colombia’s military have over 300,000 soldiers — proportionately one of the largest in the region, and seven times larger than the armed forces of Venezuela — and have benefited from US$7 bn in military aid — the second largest in the world — which are nevertheless incapable to controlling their own domestic terrain in which there are about 8,000 armed guerrilla fighters, many thousands of active illegal paramilitary forces and a great deal of drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine in the world is produced in Colombia, and most of cocaine production takes place in Colombia, according to UNODOC about 50%. Furthermore, Venezuela finds itself geographically sandwiched between the largest producer and the largest consumer of cocaine in the world, Colombia and the United States respectively.

After Santos’ inauguration, events have developed at neck-breaking speed. Assisted by Nestor Kirchner, the Foreign Ministers of Colombia and Venezuela met last Sunday in Bogota, and they announced that Presidents Santos and Chavez would be meeting at a special summit on Tuesday 10 August in Colombia. Chavez immediately seized the opportunity offered by his Colombian counterpart and called upon the guerrillas to seek a political solution: “The Colombian guerrillas do not have a future by way of arms… moreover, they have become an excuse for the [US] empire to intervene in Colombia and threaten Venezuela from there,” he said on Sunday. He also called upon them to show their commitment to a peace accord through “decisive demonstrations, for example, that they liberate all those they have kidnapped.”

It is clear that Santos wanted to repair relations with Venezuela and Ecuador and that he was willing to accept UNASUR’s good offices to facilitate his meeting with President Chavez. However, the most significant aspects of this development is that Santos was determined to seek the improvement of Colombia’s relations with Venezuela and Ecuador, partly because it wanted to end Colombia’s regional isolation, but also because the almost complete cessation of trade with Venezuela was making Colombia’s economy scream (their mutual trade had declined by 73.7%). It is also clear that Uribe knew this and all his last-minute rabid attacks on Venezuela seemed to have been aimed more at Santos than Chavez. Uribe desperately tried to torpedo the Colombo-Venezuelan rapprochement because he knew it was in the offing.

Uribe’s desperate efforts mirror the actions of powerful forces in Washington which have been vigorously lobbying to declare Venezuela a “state that sponsors terrorism,” “a narco-state” (view which is specially strong in SOUTHCOM and the US Congress — and which, therefore, seem to favour a ‘military’ solution to the US ‘Venezuelan problem’. SOUTHCOM has been busily installing US military bases everywhere in the region and has even resuscitated the IV Fleet (which was decommissioned in 1950). The US has deployed 20,000 soldiers in Haiti after the earthquake and has also stationed massive military forces in Costa Rica (7,000 soldiers, 200 helicopters and 46 warships until the end of December 2010). Thus, labeling Venezuela a ‘sponsor of terrorism’ is not just right-wing rhetoric, it may have very serious military consequences. Regional leaders are very alarmed about these developments and have expressed serious concern.

A normally omitted dimension of Colombo-Venezuelan relations is the attitude of Venezuela’s right wing. In every Venezuela-Colombia spat under Uribe’s two presidential mandates, they have sided enthusiastically with Uribe. They did so again this time but were unwittingly wrong-footed by Santos’ announcement. When it comes to opposing President Chavez, Venezuela’s right wing seem to have no sense of proportion, thus, for instance, the governor of the state of Táchira, Cesar Perez Vivas, a member of COPEI, went as far as to appeal to Chavez not to make the US military bases in that country a precondition for the normalisation of relations with Colombia. Venezuelan TV broadcaster, Alberto Nolla, suggested that during the crisis unleashed by the Uribe’s actions, the Venezuelan right wing media was more strident in their support for Uribe than the Colombian media had been during the same period. Any cursory look at the main right-wing newspapers such as El Universal and El Nacional and TV channels such as Globovision confirm this conclusively.

What is totally unprecedented is the fact that the US administration was de facto reduced to the role of spectator (specialists confirm this). The U.S. were supportive of the accusations against Chavez at the OAS (…”our concerns about the links between Venezuela and the FARC that we have not certified Venezuela in recent years as fully cooperating with the United States and others in terms of these antiterrorism efforts,” stated U.S. ambassador to OAS) but were clearly sidelined by UNASUR’s brinkmanship which managed to bring the rapprochement between Colombia and Venezuela. It is Santos, Chavez, and UNASUR (especially Brazil) who have been doing the running (“Brazil’s government has made it clear that it would like the matter to be taken up within UNASUR, without the influence of the United States. It proclaimed South America a “region of peace” and affirmed that problems between countries should be first dealt with bilaterally.) This reality shows first the growing assertiveness and independence of the region from U.S. influence, but secondly, it shows that underlying this political reality there is the growing independence of the region from traditional economic centres and a steady distancing from the U.S. The Tectonic plates have dramatically shifted and most Latin American leaders feel they have averted an almost certain Uribe-US driven war.

It remains to be seen how far this summit takes the two countries. They have decided to fully restore their relations in every field and the two presidents have established five commissions within the framework of a statement of principles signed by them. They include a commission for debt; another for the economic collaboration between the two countries; one for the development of a plan of investment in their common border; another for the joint undertaking of infrastructural works; and a security commission. Both heads of state undertook a commitment to collaborate in the struggle against drug trafficking, paramilitary and illegal armed activity. Colombia has sent the President of Colombia’s Congress, Armando Benedetti, to assist the process of full restoration of relations between the two countries. The OAS reacted by applauding the diplomacy of Santos and Chavez. There has been popular rejoice in both countries. Not all the issues pending between the two nations were, however, addressed, such as the U.S. military bases in Colombia, the urgent need for a peace process in Colombia, and the charges leveled by Uribe against Venezuela to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights and against President Chavez personally to the International Criminal Court.

The dogs of war have been kept at bay, at least temporarily. Peace has broken out. The full restoration of relations between Venezuela and Colombia is indeed very positive. However, the array of forces set against the implementation of such a broad peaceful agenda is also pretty formidable. For start it is led by the U.S. and it also involves powerful economic groups in most countries in the region, such as the separatists in the Eastern of Bolivia, that nearly overthrew Morales’ government in 2009; the Venezuelan right which managed to actually oust Chavez in 2002 -but who the people returned to power-; the Colombian oligarchy itself; the extremely wealthy and powerful Chilean Pinochetista bourgeoisie; the right in Argentina; the very wealthy Guayaquil entrepreneurs; and so forth. All of whom in one way or another favour the US militarisation of the region as a solution of last resort in the face of radical social movements and progressive governments in the continent. In the meantime the U.S. militarisation of the region continues apace.

It is in the interest of Latin America, very well represented on this historic occasion by UNASUR, to help the Colombian oligarchy to loosen the too uncomfortable US embrace in which Uribe got them into. On the other hand there are the U.S. hegemonic interests in the region and its growing oil dependency from fiercely nationalist governments which are asserting their independence collectively. Washington’s political and military strategists must be stunned by the extraordinary rapprochement between Santos and Chavez.

Uribe’s insane efforts to bring about a war with Venezuela, underscores the ‘predicament’ the U.S. finds itself in: faced with the rebellion of its Southern neighbours, unable to win politically, and incapable of offering anything such as development, progress, investment or even the American Way of life (which is crushingly coming to an end in the United States itself), has decided to resort to war to maintain its backyard under subjection. Latin America has opted for democracy, social progress, national sovereignty and peace. On this occasion even the staunchest pro U.S. Colombian oligarchy have sided with the South, not the North. We shall see who beats the other in the historic arm-wrestling underway.

Fight Back!: Josh, can you tell us about the “Free Ricardo Palmera” group?

Josh Sykes: The “Free Ricardo Palmera” group was a facebook group administered by three activists with the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera. Professor Palmera is a political prisoner in the United States. He was a leading peace negotiator with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP). Since he was first arrested on a mission to meet with a United Nations representative in Ecuador and then extradited to the U.S., the National Committee has worked for his freedom. The extradition and imprisonment of Palmera, a true freedom fighter, goes against Colombian sovereignty and is a slap in the face to the Colombian people. Palmera is a good man who was railroaded in an attempt by the U.S. to criminalize the national liberation struggle in Colombia. The facebook group was one of many ways the National Committee got out information about the struggle to free Ricardo Palmera. When facebook shut it down it had more than 700 members from around the world, with many from the U.S. and Latin America. It was a good resource for us and we are working to get it back.

FB: Why was the group shut down?

JS: Facebook’s reason was that it violated the ‘terms of use’ so they shut it down on June 30. They said that it was obscene, that it attacked people, or was hateful. Nothing could be further from the truth. They also threatened the administrators of the group with having their profiles disabled if we continued to “abuse” facebook features – which we never did. Of course it wasn’t really about any of those things. We are a group advocating justice. Ricardo Palmera’s human rights are being violated. He is in solitary confinement [at the SuperMax prison in Colorado] with no human contact. He is held under ‘special administrative measures’ where the U.S. government says journalists cannot interview him, we are not allowed to visit him and when American supporters write letters they are returned saying Palmera is not permitted to read them. Palmera is currently on ‘trial by video’ in Colombia and he is shackled from head to ankle and threatened with electric shock if he moves too quickly. He cannot possibly get a fair trial this way. We continue to demand, “Free Ricardo Palmera!”

One possibility is that facebook is censoring views they don’t like. They’ve shut down a number of groups operating in solidarity with the Palestinian people, for instance. Another possibility is that the U.S. State Department put pressure on the bosses at facebook to shut us down, just like they put pressure on the U.S. judges during the trials and sentencing of Professor Palmera. In any case, facebook is acting like the Colombian government’s death squads trying to shut people up for speaking out against the rich and powerful.

FB: What are the latest developments?

JS: There is what facebook calls an appeals process, which is nothing more than a run-around. Today facebook disabled the accounts of myself and the two other administrators of the Free Ricardo Palmera group, Angela Denio and Tom Burke, with no warning and no reason given. We are appealing that too. Meanwhile, we are asking that people stand up and oppose this blatant censorship on the part of facebook.

Call facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg at (650) 543-4800 and demand that the Free Ricardo Palmera group, and the accounts of the three administrators, be reinstated. Join the protest group here. Demand an end to facebook’s censorship. Stop the attacks on progressive causes and activists.

The Elections: Guns, Elites and Terror

Elections are a process (not merely an event) in which prior political conditions determine the outcome. During the previous eight years of outgoing President Uribe’s and Defense Minister Santos’ rule, over 2 million, mostly rural poor, were forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums. The Uribe-Santos regime relied on both the military and the 30,000 member paramilitary deathsquads to kill and terrorize entire population centers, deemed “sympathetic” to the armed insurgency, affecting several million urban and rural poor. Over 20,000 people were killed, many, according to the major Colombian human rights group, falsely labeled “guerrillas”. Santos, as Defense Minister, was directly implicated by the Courts in what was called “false positives”. The military randomly rounded up scores of poor urban youth, shot them and claimed a resounding victory over the FARC guerrillas.

Several of the most important captured paramilitary deathsquad leaders testified that over 60 of the congress people backing Uribe – Santos were on their payroll and they “ensured” votes from regions under their control. Faced with damaging testimony, Uribe-Santos double-crossed their narco-deathsquad comrades and “extradited” them to the U.S. where the judicial process excluded evidence linking them to the mass killings at the behest of Uribe-Santos.

Over two thousand trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists and congress — people critical of Uribe-Santos — were murdered by deathsquad hit-men serving the regime. The world’s major trade union confederations have sent missions and published reports condemning Colombia as the most dangerous country for workers’ representatives.

In other words, all the social sectors with social and political grievances against the regime were terrorized, many of their local opinion leaders, killed, displaced or driven into exile … undermining the possibility of sustained independent socio-political organization.

Pervasive state terror led to few local leaders surviving, undermining the electorate’s capacity to exercise a free and independent organization.

On election day, the regime mobilized over 350,000 military and police officials, many involved in the decade long repression, to “oversee” the elections and to remind the voters of the force behind the “official candidate.”³

The electoral outcome was far from the “mandate” of the Colombian people as claimed by the mass media. The ‘winner’ was the “abstentionists” with 56% of the electorate, the position advocated by the FARC. Now clearly the majority of the abstentionist vote did not reflect support or sympathy for the FARC; rather, it reflected disaffection with the regime’s violent repression, massive dispossession of millions and its total failure to deal with the under- and unemployment affecting 40% of the economically active population.

In fact, Santos received 30% of the vote of the electorate, hardly a mandate. If we examine the social-ecological background of the voters, it is clearly a mandate from the elite. The highest levels of abstention were among several distinct groups. Among the shanty towns and rural areas suffering from repression and neglect, abstention rose to over 80%. In contrast, in the middle and upper class sectors of the major cities, over 60% voted for the candidate of the regime. Uribe-Santos tried to explain away the massive abstention by citing the weather (rain) and the World Cup soccer matches. However, the low turnout took place throughout the country, in dry and inclement weather. And the games did not occupy the entire day of voting. The mass media systematically ignored the horrendous crimes under Defense Minister Santos, his indictment in the “false positive” murders, his long term large scale association with the death squads and with the Uribe regimes promotion of narco trafficking. They ignored his support for de-regulating the financial system, resulting in the defrauding of hundreds of thousands of Colombian small investors.

Comparing Colombia to Venezuela

Yet the Financial Times favorably compares Colombia under Uribe-Santos against Venezuela under Chavez, “Crackers about Caracas? Latin American should be bonkers about Bogota instead”. According to the FT, Venezuela under Chavez is said to be unsafe, authoritarian and economically in decline. The editors of the FT, echoing the rest of the media, claim Colombia is a prosperous democracy, with a system of checks and balances; with safe and peaceful neighborhoods … except when the neighborhoods of the poor protest unemployment or the rural villagers march against land grabs by the landlord funded gunmen. The FT fails to mention the resurgence of paramilitary gangs terrorizing the Colombian countryside,⁴ but instead they focus on street crime in Caracas.

The Venezuelan government, contrary to the US media, promotes community based social movements which would be targets of military raids in Bogota.

The only “paramilitary” groups in Venezuela are cross-over’s from Colombia, pursued and punished by the Venezuelan National Guard. In Venezuela trade unions participate in the management of major industrial plants, unlike Colombia where they are murdered including workers in the major Coca Cola,coal, oil and banana industries.

Behind the media lies and falsifications about Colombia’s election and its political leaders are several basic considerations.

1. Uribe-Santos are feverent free market advocates, eagerly pursing a free trade agreement held up in the US Congress because of their killing fields.
2. Uribe-Santos are unconditional clients of the Pentagon, receiving $6 billion in aid and handing over 7 military bases, under US jurisdiction to threaten Venezuela, Ecuador and any other country the Obama regime deems hostile to US domination.
3. Uribe-Santos recognized the Honduras regime, product of a US backed military coup in mid 2009 – contrary to the rest of Latin America.

The fact that the mass-media have so enthusiastically embraced a regime with the worst human rights record since the fall of the military dictators of the 1970’s-1980’s⁵ is indicative of the right turn under the Obama Wall Street regime. According to the White House and media, death squad democracies like Colombia now qualify as “role models” for Latin America. The problem is that neither the vast majority of Latin America citizens, nor most of the democratic parties in the region are buying: they prefer democracies without deathsquads, foreign military bases and narco-dealing Presidents. At present, the White House’s three leading allies in the region, Colombia, Peru and Mexico produce and sell 80% of the cocaine in the region. Will this appear in the media’s salutations to newly elected presidents?

1. FT 6/23/2010 p. 8.
2. FT 6/22/2010.
3. La Jornada 5/30/2010.
4. La Jornada, 5/28/2010.
5. La Jornada, 6/17/2010.

“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.

When narco-presidents are embraced by the leaders of North America and Europe, it is evident that criminals have become respectable the respectable have become criminals.

But other voices from other regions have put the past and present war criminals on trial. In Argentina, the Generals of the disappeared are spending their last years behind bars. Arrest warrants against Israeli military commanders have been issued in Spain, Dubai and elsewhere. Tony Blair, complicit in Bush’s genocidal war in Iraq runs from a citizens’ arrest in Malaysia for his war crimes. Colombia, the US and Israel, the epicenters of state terror, stand alone in the General Assembly of Nations, condemned but not yet on trial. Their days of impunity are ending. Unending wars, rampant corruption, massive financial swindles – the inner rot – are eroding the outward facades of military power.

Writers and intellectuals have a role to play in hastening this process by exposing the lies that sustain the killing machines. Let us proceed:

Lies of Our Times

Democratic Security Doctrine (neither democratic nor for personal safety):

The corruption of language accompanies every great political crime. The notion of “Democratic Security” is no exception. In the current Colombian context, murdering leaders of social movements to secure the re-election of a party of political assassins is democratic. “Security” is the euphemism for hidden cemeteries of unmarked graves of unnamed persons. “Freedom of the Media” exists when it solemnly announces another “major military triumph”… the killing of unarmed peasants cultivating their fields.

Economists are “experts” when they proclaim that the economy is growing … only the people are suffering. Politicians are “statesmen” when they declare they are “one with the people” – except for the 4 million forcibly dispossessed and the 300,000 family members of the dead and disappeared; the dead and dispossessed have yet to appreciate the One who affirms he is “with the People”.

When el Presidente states that war is peace, militarization is security, inequalities are social justice: only those who fail to understand these Official Truths need fear a midnight knock on the door.

The Official Definition of Terrorist

This is a person or persons who fail to understand that the road to peace is through billions spent on warplanes, helicopter gun ships, military bases and subcontracting military advisers and mercenaries.

Enemies of peace talks

According to el Presidente, those human rights groups who oppose killing adversaries and who propose dialogues instead of monologues are the enemies of peace; only monologues ensure that there is one “official truth” and no other.

The Price of Prosperity

According to el Presidente and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), poverty, unemployment and low wages are the price of democracy and prosperity … but only the workers and peasants pay the price and only the rich prosper.

A Novel Definition of Sovereignty

According to el Presidente, ceding territory to a foreign imperial power to build seven military bases operating with their own laws and jurisdiction is the new definition of sovereignty. Sovereignty equals foreign occupation.

The New Definition of Subversion

According to el Presidente, humanitarian accords and initiatives for peace are pretexts for subversion; their advocates know in advance they will be rejected by the State. Instead, dehumanizing the enemy and the advocates of peace facilitates the bombing of subversive villages, the ‘real’ enemies of peace.

On Praise and Condemnation

What does it tell you about a President when he is condemned by all the human rights groups and social movements and praised by all the financial newspapers and military institutions?

A President with World Records

There is no doubt that President Uribe will enter the Guinness Book of World Records.

El Presidente is backed by more narco-congress members than any other President or Prime Minister in the world (including Afghanistan).

El Presidente presides over the displacement of more people (4 million refugees) in the shortest time (8 years) than any President in the world. (It took Israel over half a century).

El Presidente has allowed more US military bases than all the Latin American presidents combined. El Presidente presided over the killing of more trade union activists and leaders than any other leader in the world (1,500). For every first in death and dispossession, President Uribe deserves a new award, an Ignoble Prize.

But he is not alone. Three US Presidents, Democrats and Republicans, Clinton, Bush and Obama provided billions of dollars in arms, and hundreds of advisers to promote 30,000 narco death squad killers and 300,000 soldiers who are instrumental in Uribe’s achievement of “world records”.

Let us remember, and punish, past and present crimes against humanity, but let us also move ahead in the quest for dialogue among those willing because they are the majority who believe in peace through Justice.

The times we live in reflect that in Latin America and the Caribbean the confrontation between historic forces is getting worse.

─ Raul Castro

On February 23, 2010 incarcerated Cuban Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike, despite the efforts of Cuban medical personnel to treat him and prevent the ending of his life. Over the past several years Zapata Tamayo identified himself with Cuban opponents of the Revolution who are directed by and sustained from Washington. His political “awakening” followed a career in petty crimes such as burglary and fraud that escalated into more serious offenses of assault landing him several separate stints in prison.

Zapata Tamayo’s death quickly became the pretext for an orchestrated and deeply cynical campaign by the US government and its European imperialist allies – echoed in the big-business media – to slander Cuba around human rights, torture, and political prisoners.

On Capitol Hill calls have increased to halt the supposed efforts by the Obama Administration to “improve” relations with the sovereign Cuban state and to instead step up open political hostility and action. Proposed Congressional legislation to end travel restrictions to Cuba for US citizens, never very warm in the first place, are likely to go into deep freeze. On March 11, 2009 the European Union Parliament strongly condemned Cuba over the death of Zapata Tamayo by a vote of 509 to 30 with 14 abstentions. The EU resolution further mandates its “High Representative” and “Commissioner” to “immediately to begin a structured dialogue with Cuban civil society and with those who support a peaceful transition in Cuba,” that is, to openly establish political collaboration with would be clients (many of whom already are on Washington’s payroll) who aim to overturn – “peacefully” of course – the Cuban Revolution and sovereign government. (The Cuban government has begun a vigorous counter campaign. The March 1, 2010 online edition of Granma International answers the factual distortions and false assertions on Zapata Tamayo’s life and death as a “political prisoner” in the article “For Whom is Death a Useful Tool?” by Enrique Ubieta Gomez.¹

Of course, the crocodile tears shed by imperialist governments, institutions, and media over the death of Zapata Tamayo stands in great contrast to the relative silence and lack of action over the numerous (no one knows exactly how many?) detainees – often picked up arbitrarily and not charged, let alone tried, for anything – that have been tortured and beaten to death in the “democratic” custody of US, British, Canadian, and other secret European “facilities” in the so-called “war on terror.

The US government openly spends dozens of millions of dollars in direct financial and other material “aid” to its Cuban clients and agents inside Cuba. Obviously this is a violation of Cuban law. The Cuban government – as the sovereign product of the Cuban Revolution –is under no legal or moral obligation to tolerate such activity from the conduits of a foreign power currently committed to its destruction. In fact it would be the height of naïve irresponsibility to not act rigorously and firmly against such mercenary subversion. Accordingly, there are several dozen individuals in Cuban jails, all of whom have been convicted in Cuban courts with all their legal rights protected, including right to legal council and defense. It should be added that the convictions were based on incontrovertible evidence of acts of receiving material and financial aid and direction, that is, of being mercenary clients and agents, of US government agencies, not “conspiracy” charges as in the gambit used by US prosecutors when they lack evidence of actual deeds, as in the case of the Cuban Five.²

Of course, the death of Zapata Tamayo is not a cause for any happiness or satisfaction for any Cuban revolutionary or defender of the Cuban Revolution. It is particularly a cause for regret and frustration because it is an inevitable byproduct of US policy. The normalization of US-Cuban relations would bring with it the definitive end to the current US policy of “regime change by any means possible.” When that happens opponents of the Revolution like Zapata Tamayo can present and attempt to win support for their views in a legal framework and not as agents of an aggressive foreign power.

In any case Cuban President Raul Castro has repeatedly offered to exchange all the imprisoned agents and clients of Washington in exchange for the Cuba Five.

As I will demonstrate in this essay, many months before Zapata Tamayo’s death it had already become clearer that the Obama Administration had no hidden desire or perspective of normalizing US relations with Cuba or fundamentally alleviating, let alone ending, Washington’s economic and political war against the revolutionary socialist island. In fact the Obama-Hillary Clinton team is – after some peripheral adjustments in the opening months of the new Administration – continuing the firmly bipartisan, half-century long policy of overturning the sovereign Cuban government. This policy, set in place shortly after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, remains the longest unchanged foreign policy position of the US government in the history of US diplomacy.

The expectation that a fundamental change in US Cuba policy was in the works with the new Obama Administration was asserted by many conservatives and ultra-rightists, some of whom fantasized in horror that Obama was a secret supporter of the Cuban Revolution. The illusion, from the other end of the bourgeois political spectrum was shared as well by many liberals and leftists who fantasized in wishful thinking that Obama planned to end US sanctions and hostility. Among the former, it is still seen as useful to present Obama as a barely closeted commie. Among the latter, on this and virtually every other central domestic and foreign policy orientation of the current Administration, a sobering up, at varying pace and degree, is taking place.

McCaffrey’s Signal

On December 22, 2009 retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey wrote a letter to Wayne Smith, a prominent voice in US academic, think-tank, and diplomatic circles who advocates an end to the US embargo of Cuba and the normalization of US-Cuba relations. In the letter McCaffrey withdrew from a scheduled January 2010 delegation of fellow dignitaries to Cuba Smith was organizing. McCaffrey cited comments by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez sharply denouncing the behavior of President Barack Obama following the fiasco of the December 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, as the ostensible reason for his withdrawal from the trip.

McCaffrey has visited Cuba before, met top Cuban leaders including Fidel and Raul Castro, and declared publicly and before a US Congressional panel that Cuba represented no “military threat” to US “national security.” His Congressional testimony brought him harsh criticism from Cuban-American elected officials who defend the heirs and interests of Cuba’s former ruling classes that were ousted in the 1959 Revolution and other policymakers who oppose any “liberalization” of US anti-Cuba policy. McCaffrey had long spoken out formally, and with some force, against the longstanding US policies of overt “regime change,” employing trade and travel sanctions, political hostility, and military intimidation. McCaffrey aligned himself with a significant, growing minority in US ruling circles who have argued for “engagement” as the best way to advance the goal of ending, once and for all, the Cuban Revolution and its political resonance and influence worldwide and, in particular, across the Americas.

McCaffrey is no mushy, naïve bourgeois politician. He has a “distinguished” military career defending the interests of US imperialism in combat action from the 1965 US invasion of the Dominican Republic to multi-medalled “service” in Vietnam to the first Gulf War. In that latter war McCaffrey’s command oversaw one of the most despicable examples of war crimes in recent decades, when US forces bombed and shot to death many thousands of unarmed, fleeing Iraqi troops – abandoned by their officers following military rout by US forces – who had shed their uniforms and were attempting to return to Iraq from Kuwait, along what became known as the “highways of death.” The defenseless, forcibly conscripted, massacred former soldiers were buried in mass graves after the slaughter. Among the soldiers participating was the future Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who no doubt picked up a few pointers on the morality of the merciless targeting of unarmed innocents.

McCaffrey has a direct, intimate connection with US policy in Latin America, going back to his early participation in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. The liberal Democratic Lyndon Johnson Administration dispatched over 40,000 Marines and 82nd Airborne troops to that impoverished island to abort an increasingly powerful popular uprising that threatened to overturn the military dictatorship that had seized power overthrowing the elected, Constitutional government of Juan Bosch. At least 2000 Dominican civilians were killed in the US invasion, which aimed at averting what Johnson called a “second Cuba.” Under President William Clinton from 1994-96 McCaffrey was Commander-in-Chief for Southern Command of the US Armed Forces with the charge of coordinating “national security operations” in Latin America. Next, still under Clinton, he became the so-called “Drug Czar.” Of course, the pretext of combating drug trafficking has become finely tuned over the decades as an increasingly central rationalization for US intervention in the Americas and political campaigns against governments in conflict with Washington. This has been further deepened under the Obama Administration as it has moved in 2009 to implement the Bush Administration plan to greatly expand direct US military presence on the ground in Colombia with seven military bases there and to reactivate the Fourth Naval Fleet off the waters of Latin America, six decades after being disbanded. Both moves were rationalized in terms of the “war on drugs.”

By itself, McCaffrey’s announcement may seem to have limited significance. But McCaffrey is a savvy bourgeois political operative who never functions as a lone wolf. He is a disciplined figure who can read the tea leaves. So his action should be understand and viewed in its proper context, which is the downward trajectory of US policy toward Cuba under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as 2009 unfolded and ended, following a period of false expectations and widespread illusions that a change was coming. More precisely, after the initial months of his Administration, which found the Obama team on the defensive and isolated, Washington has subsequently pushed back and registered a certain amount of progress in asserting its positions and strengthening its allies in Latin America, while tamping down expectations of significant change in US policies towards Cuba.

The successful – for Washington – outcome of the June 2009 coup in Honduras gave impetus to the US pushback. After its isolation at the San Pedro Sula Summit of the OAS, Washington took advantage of the coup in Honduras to step up its fight to regain political leverage under the Obama Administration. The White House and State Department formally opposed the coup even as political operatives close to the Administration worked on behalf of the coup makers. Once the US government became a central player in diplomatic maneuvers and intrigue after the June 28 coup, it was guaranteed that any process that unfolded would skew in the most demobilizing, conservative manner possible. All of this culminated in the farcical signed agreement on October 30, 2009 which was presented as facilitating the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya to his presidential post but which actually did no such thing. With the signed document in hand, Washington and what they called the “de facto” regime brusquely shunted Zelaya aside and announced they would support the outcome of the November 29, 2009 elections held under the auspices of the coup regime and significant repression and closing of democratic political space.

Obama Pushes Back

During the period when General McCaffrey canceled his trip to Cuba, a sharp sequence of events unfolded which underlined this shift:

• On November 19, 2009 Obama chose, in a clear provocation, to publicly correspond with Yoani Sanchez, the so-called “dissident blogger,” the latest wholly manufactured, financed, and highly promoted darling and tool of both liberal and conservative anti-Cuba forces in US bourgeois media, academic, and political circles. This was done as an answer to the repeated invitations of Cuban president Raul Castro for direct dialogue between the United States and Cuban governments where every question and political difference would be, as put by Raul Castro, “on the table.”

• On November 30, 2009 a document was issued accusing the Cuban government of persecuting an Afro-Cuban doctor and, in general, practicing institutionalized racism. The initiative was under the direction of Carlos Moore, a longtime and notorious Afro-Cuban counter-revolutionary activist who presents himself as a fighter against “racism” in Cuba. Moore has a long history of working with US-based counter-revolutionaries that are creatures and dependencies of US government and intelligence agencies. The document, “Acting On Our Conscience: A Declaration of African-American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba,” was signed by a number of prominent “progressive” African-American academics and figures such as Prof. Cornell West, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ruby Dee Davis, Prof. Ron Walters, and Prof. James Turner. In response to this slanderous “Declaration” defenders of revolutionary Cuba’s exemplary role in fighting racism inside Cuba as well as its amazing record in combating colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid in Africa went into action.³

• Washington-Havana talks on legal rules and procedures governing immigration, that had been scheduled for December 2009 following their unilateral termination by the Bush Administration in 2003, were pushed back by the Obama Administration after an initial meeting in July 2009. (The talks resumed on February 19, 2010.) During that period and since Washington has stonewalled Cuba’s offer to expand bilateral negotiations to reach accords on the issues of combating drug trafficking and terrorism as well as collaboration and cooperation towards Hurricane preparedness and relief.

• On December 5, 2009 Havana police arrested one Alan Gross, formally an employee of an outfit calling itself Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI). DAI is a major for-profit mercenary business employing 350 full-time staff in its central office in Washington, DC suburbs and operating in over 60 countries. In line with the contemporary US policy of utilizing so-called “subcontractors,” operating as “private” for-profit corporations, as proxies for promoting and implementing US government policy. (DAI’s website calls the US State Department’s Agency for International Development its “principal client.”) Gross is being held in a Cuban prison accused of spying. This policy of manufacturing “front” organizations with elaborate business structures is nothing new for US and other imperialist intelligence services, although the practice has multiplied considerably in recent decades. This so-called “privatization” of US intelligence and operational tasks has, in fact, become rampant and brazenly open. (There are tens of thousands of employees of such “contractors” working for US military and intelligence agencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other action fronts in the so-called “war on terror.”) It has the advantage of establishing degrees of separation, and what spook jargon calls “plausible deniability,” from the US government source of political direction and financing, although few in the world are taken in by the elaborate charade. Perhaps most important for the individuals heading up these myriad fronts – most of whom are themselves graduates from direct government “service” in military, intelligence, or other such fields – is the lucrative material rewards involved, as these relationships are a “legal” cash cow. Gross and DAI were nabbed handing out highly sophisticated satellite cell phones and computer equipment as part of open US polices to finance individuals and groups that will work hand-in-hand with Washington to subvert and eventually destroy the Cuban Revolution under the guise, of course, of innocently promoting “democracy” and “human rights.” The 2008 Federal US budget openly allocated $45 million for this purpose. (These are separate from covert funding operations.) In that budget DAI received nearly 10% of the mercenary money. In the past much of these funds were handed to rightist Cuban-American outfits based in Florida, who tended to just pocket the money for personal use. The botched DAI operation seems to indicate that the Obama Administration was moving towards new methods to get money and equipment directly to their mercenary clients inside Cuba, without the gusano middlemen and their sticky fingers. So far the Obama Administration has issued perfunctory statements of “concern.” The above-mentioned Wayne Smith, who was the chief of the US Interests Section in Havana when it was established under the Carter Administration in the late 1970s, told the Miami Herald that if Gross distributed satellite phones and other high-tech equipment, it will be hard for Washington to argue his case. “If he was caught with simply a cell phone, even if he didn’t have proper documents, they would have just expelled him… I’m struck by the fact that the United States has not raised hell over this. If I were down there handling the case, and the guy hadn’t done much, I’d be making noise. Maybe he was up to something he shouldn’t have been up to.”

• Following the Christmas Day 2009 attempted terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines plane headed to Detroit in the US from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Washington made all citizens of Cuba, along with a number of other countries, subject to enhanced searches and harassment at US customs checkpoints on the basis of Cuba being on the US State Department list of states that “sponsor” and “support” terrorism. The degree of hypocrisy and mendacity involved here by Washington is breathtaking. Thousands of Cuban citizens have died in terrorist attacks launched from US soil against Cuba since the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution. These attacks have either been directly organized and promoted by US government agencies or winked at and tolerated by US authorities over the years. Perhaps the most notorious incident in a long and sordid history was the October 6, 1976 terrorist destruction of a Cubana Airlines craft and the murder of all 73 passengers aboard, which included the 24 members of Cuba’s juvenile national fencing team, which had just won all the gold medals at Central American and Caribbean athletic games. The two organizers of that crime, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posadas Carriles – both former operatives of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – are currently living freely in the United States. There is not an iota of factual evidence tying Cuba to any act of terrorism in the United States or anywhere else. The fact that the Obama Administration has refused to remove Cuba from this list is a clear indication of its continuation of the essential core of US anti-Cuba policy.

• In the “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, given on February 2, 2010, US “Director of National Intelligence” Dennis Blair stated, “Cuba has demonstrated few signs of wanting a closer relationship with the United States. Without subsidized Venezuela oil shipments of about 100,000 barrels per day, the severe economic situation would be even worse. President Raul Castro fears that rapid or significant economic change would undermine regime control and weaken the revolution, and his government shows no signs of easing his repression of political dissidents.” Translated from sophistry into English, Blair is lamenting the fact that the Cuban government has refused to surrender to Washington’s demands and do US imperialism the favor of liquidating the Revolution themselves in exchange for all the charms and benefits of US domination.

“We Send Doctors, Not Soldiers”

It should be noted that the social catastrophe in Haiti has complicated Obama’s anti-Cuba push back in the Hemisphere. Inside the United States, there has been a near-total blackout of Cuba’s medical solidarity with Haiti – a truly inspiring history – where the Cuban medical personnel and brigades, who were already on the ground before the earthquake providing, free of charge, much of the medical care existing in Haiti, were the first responders in the disaster. The Cuban teams, reinforced with doctors from Cuba, Haitians and other from the Hemisphere trained in Cuba, set up the first open-tent clinics and operating facilities that have already served tens of thousands. This is widely known and acknowledged in the Caribbean, Latin America, and worldwide. Cuba, by far, has the most, and the most effective, personnel and programs actually providing medical aid to the Haitian people. As Fidel Castro wrote, “We send Doctors, not soldiers.”

The Obama Administration, on the other hand, has rapidly poured in troops and essentially seized the Haitian Airport at Port au Prince, while slowly getting medical equipment, supplies, and food, not to speak of on the ground functioning medical facilities, to the people and operational. In the initial days and weeks, US and “Western” resources went primarily to rescue UN personnel, foreign diplomats, and “western” tourists and citizens, criminally failing to provide minimal assistance to devastated working-class Haitian neighborhoods. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was forced on the defensive as outrage mounted internationally over the heavy-handed US military role which prioritizes the landing of troops at the airport and seaports while forcing some aid shipments to travel overland via the Dominican Republic. According to the Associated Press, for every dollar in US “aid,” 33 cents goes to the US military while 9 cents is for food, 9 cents is to transport the food, 5 cents to pay Haitians working on recovery, 1 cent goes to the Haitian government, and ½ cent to the government of the Dominican Republic. We should all be very grateful, however, that the Western imperialist hyenas, who have looted Haiti for centuries, and, with Washington in the lead, imposed the blood-soaked tyranny of the Duvalier family protecting a system where 1% of the Haitian population controls 50% of its wealth, has magnanimously agreed to cancel $290 million of Haiti’s $890 million international debt!

(Towards the end of February 2010 the US government announced the withdrawal of those doctors under its direction, the closing of its last field hospital inside Haiti, and the departure of the highly publicized US Navy Medical Ship Comfort from its Haitian dock. Of course the medical needs of the earthquake survivors are multiplying rapidly as the legions of homeless living in “tent communities” in horrid conditions including massive rain are facing diarrhea, malaria, and all the disease produced by such conditions on top of constant undernourishment and hunger. In addition it is estimated that up to 30 percent of those who received emergency surgery in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake will need follow up operations. While Washington withdraws its minimal direct medical assistance the Cuban medical mission in Haiti is expanding.)

From Trinidad to Turtle Bay

The first months of the Obama Administration found Washington playing defense on the “Cuba Question” at a series of hemispheric meetings under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS), a body traditionally dominated by the US government. Obama came face to face with the political ground lost by Washington in the Bush years that needed to be made up under his Administration.

In two successive OAS “Summits” held in April 2009 in Trinidad and June 2009 in Honduras, the Obama Administration was embarrassingly isolated. Washington came under remarkably open pressure over its anti-Cuba policy which formally united every other government in the OAS, and dominated the agenda, much to Obama and Clinton’s chagrin. Nevertheless at the June Summit, hosted by the soon-to-be-ousted Honduran President Zelaya, the Obama-Clinton diplomatic team was able to prevent a formal vote openly condemning US policy although it was forced to retreat and acquiesce to the abrogation of the 1962 OAS resolution expelling Cuba.⁴

Washington’s isolation and near-humiliation over Cuba at the OAS Summits was squared a few months later on October 28, 2009 when, for the 18th consecutive year, and with the most lopsided vote yet (187 for the Cuban resolution and 3 siding with Washington with 2 abstentions) the UN General Assembly voted on, as the resolution put it, the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” Washington was only able to get 2 other votes this year – Israel and Palau, while losing El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan from the 2008 vote. It is surely a delicious irony – and a powerful symbol of how utterly isolated US anti-Cuba policy is (and how embarrassing for Washington’s diplomacy and political authority) that even the US-created, sustained, and dependent governments of Afghanistan and Iraq felt compelled to vote for Cuba!

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriquez’s UN presentation was a factual, devastating indictment of the grotesque reality of US sanctions, which extend to life-saving medicines and technologies that are even partially manufactured or developed in the United States:

Alexis García Iribar was born in Cuba, in the province of Guantánamo. He suffered from a congenital cardiopathy known as persistent arterial duct. At the age of 6 and after successive deferrals and hemodynamic complications, he had to be submitted to an open-heart surgery on March 9, 2009, because the government of the United States prevents the US companies NUMED, AGA and Boston Scientific from selling to Cuba the ‘amplatzer’ and ‘embolization coil’ devices required to perform a catheterization that will spare children from this type of surgery. I could mention another 12 cases of children between the ages of 5 months and 13 years who have had to undergo a similar procedure in the course of the last one and a half years – two of them underwent surgery after last January 20.

Cuban children suffering from lymphoblastic leukemia whose bodies reject traditional medicines can not be treated with the American product “Elspar” (Erwinia L-asparaginase), created specially to treat intolerance. Consequently, the life expectancy of these children is reduced and their suffering increases. The U.S. government forbids Merck & Co. to supply this medication to Cuba.

Cuba has not been able to acquire Gene Analyzer Equipment – indispensable to study the origin of breast, colon, and prostate cancer – which is manufactured by the company Applied Biosystem (ABI). Lactalis USA, a supplier of dairy products, was fined $20,000 by the US government.

Since the election of President Obama, there has been no change whatsoever in the implementation of the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba. The blockade remains intact.

US ambassador Susan Rice found herself tangled up in Turtle Bay (the Manhattan neighborhood where the UN is located) where she defended, in a lonely place, US policy with childishly knee-jerk rhetoric: “Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard. The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress. We will not respond in kind to painfully familiar rhetoric that we have heard in years past.”

What a stupid joke! Of course it is Washington that is continuing its “Cold War” against revolutionary Cuba. It is Washington that refuses to accept – 50 years later! – the actuality of the Cuban Revolution and Cuba’s right to self-determination. It is Washington not Cuba that claims a right to subvert, intervene, and harbor and protect terrorists so as to bring about a return to US domination. The surreal remarks of Rice register how tied up in knots Washington finds itself politically as it flails about furiously from its isolated diplomatic corner. But embarrassment and diplomatic isolation are far from sufficient to bring about a change in US policy. Washington under Obama is determined to change the unfavorable political relationship of forces that accumulated over its Cuba policy across the Americas under the years of George W. Bush’s Administration.

Obama Advances Bipartisan US Policy Aims in Latin America

Under Obama’s leadership Washington has made some progress toward its bipartisan political goals in Latin America. Obama was aided by the initially widespread hopes and illusions in him in Latin America and worldwide as well as in the United States by many self-described “progressives.” While, after one year, these are being increasingly discarded, the initial illusions were a useful cover for the Obama Administration as it pushed forward an agenda in essential continuity with its predecessor in Latin America and internationally.

Under the Bush Administration there were concerted, failed efforts to subvert and overturn the government and proletarian state in Cuba and the left-wing, anti-imperialist governments in Venezuela and later Bolivia that came to power amid massive popular struggles. None of this worked out very well for Washington. All of its targets were politically strengthened and the policy had virtually no support in Latin America. The governments of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, in close alliance with revolutionary Cuba which provided tremendous solidarity in the form of large-scale medical and educational assistance, successfully resisted US-backed military coups and counter-revolutionary plots and subversion and carried out significant policies in favor of working people.

Under the new Obama Administration there was a tactical diplomatic shift — a necessary retreat in form, more of a regrouping. The bellicose rhetoric and in-your-face confrontationism of the Bush years were ratcheted down somewhat. Ambassadors were again exchanged with Venezuela and Bolivia. At the OAS Summit in Trinidad, Obama was photographed shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Nevertheless, the aims of US policy were unchanged. (And, in recent months, alongside the shift to direct contention again with Cuba, there has been a ramping up of political hostility, demonization, and destabilization against the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela. Corporate media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and the increasingly bellicose and conservative editorial page of the Washington Post have echoed, albeit more harshly, the US State Department government line painting a picture of Venezuela in utter economic and social chaos with a repressive government lashing out at dissent and “dropping the mask of democracy.”)

On Cuba Obama quickly adjusted US policy on some secondary questions – in the face of the mounting Hemispheric and near-unanimous international opposition to the US economic, financial, and commercial embargo – in order to more credibly defend and promote the core policy aim which remains the overturning of the revolutionary government, the destruction of the social relations and conquests of the Revolution, and the restoration of capitalism and US domination.

Obama fulfilled his campaign promise to end existing travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans; has eased somewhat the ability of some Cuban academics, musicians, artists, and scientists to visit the US and some similar US categories and individuals to legally travel to Cuba at the invitation of Cuban society. Also, there has been a slight US liberalization in granting so-called “people to people” licenses. Nevertheless, so far, the Obama moves still are far from taking us to where the policy on exchanges and licenses was under Clinton and the first several years of the George W. Bush Administration.

These anorexic measures, doled out with an eyedropper, are presented by Obama and Clinton as bold moves begging for a Cuban response. They are saying in essence: “We’ve done our bit, now you must basically commit suicide and end the Revolution in exchange.”

Colombia

Over the course of the first decade of the new millennium the political and moral deterioration of the armed guerrilla movement of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) became more pronounced and apparent, to the great advantage of the Colombian officer corps and capitalist political parties. Their political consolidation took place under the leadership of Alvaro Uribe. (This entire development was candidly analyzed by Fidel Castro in a remarkable small book, Peace in Colombia, which is a treasure trove of the Marxist method and principles.)

In this framework, on October 30, 2009 the US and Colombian governments signed an agreement to significantly expand the US military presence there in seven military bases. This puts potentially large-scale US military forces directly on the ground for future political contingencies in the heart of the South American continent. Colombia territory has become the wedge by which Washington hopes to regain on-the-ground military striking power, under the cover of fighting “drug trafficking,” on the South American continent. This military presence will aim to threaten and intimidate governments in conflict with Washington and to counter the inevitable explosions in popular struggles and revolutionary bids for power that are built into the contemporary reality of economic crisis and class and social polarization throughout the Americas.

Endgame

There is no question that if Cuba were to drop its revolutionary political orientation and become more responsible to the interests and dominance of world capitalism and imperialism, then Washington would change course and establish full diplomatic relations and end all sanctions in a New York minute. But short of Cuban political capitulation, what will end the US economic and political war against Cuba? There are three factors which can be looked at separately, but which are totally intertwined, playing upon and off each other.

First and foremost is independent mass pressure inside the US, that is, independent of the maneuverings, machinations, and intrigues of the bait and switch game on Capitol Hill. This first factor is weak today, although that can change. And while there is a vibrant, committed core of Cuba solidarity activists in cities across the United States, as a national movement it is decentralized and diffuse. Of course the “Cuba Question” is not at this time a pressing issue in US politics. There is no imminent or clearly building momentum towards direct US aggression. Widespread sentiment against the US embargo in US public opinion exists, and there is even a small but significant layer of US public opinion that is consciously sympathetic to the example, legacy, and historic leadership and of the Cuban Revolution, particularly among Blacks. There is furthermore great, broad interest in Cuba, and the prospects of visiting there, among ordinary US citizens. Preventing people from seeing the actual Cuban reality as opposed to the hell painted by imperialist propaganda is, of course, a major reason US authorities strain to maintain travel restrictions.

Second is Hemispheric and world pressure. In formal diplomatic terms it’s hardly possible for Washington to be more isolated in its Cuba policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, among Washington’s imperialist allies who are also its dog-eat-dog competitors on the world capitalist market, opposition to the US embargo at the UN has more to do with antagonism towards US attempts to impose its economic and financial policies extraterritorially than with any sympathy for revolutionary, socialist Cuba. The above-cited EU Parliament vote strongly condemning Cuba is a truer reflection of the class and political antagonism of European imperialism. In the Americas while popular solidarity with Cuba is very widespread and is a big factor weighing on the postures of even conservative governments, it is certain that as social and political polarization deepens in the wake of growing economic crisis, antagonism towards Cuba – the permanent example and inspiration for all Hemispheric forces fighting for social justice – consciously fostered and demanded by Washington, among certain governments and political tendencies is bound to grow. There are many delicious contradictions within the actuality and dynamics of the Cuban Revolution’s place in Latin American history and contemporary politics.

The third factor is divisions within the US ruling class. This factor totally flows from and is dependent on factors one and two. Short of a victorious social revolution inside the United States bringing working people to political power, it is the political representatives of the US “Establishment” that will make the decision to end the five decades of economic and political war against the Cuban Revolution. So far we have only seen tactical divergences from within an utterly united policy of defeating the Cuban Revolution and destroying Cuban socialism.

If Obama and Clinton had any illusions that the Cuban government under Raul Castro would be less inclined to promote revolutionary internationalism and solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity against the policies of world capital, they have had enough time to shed them.

Despite years of stupid speculation and assertions about splits and divisions between Raul and Fidel Castro, it seems fairly clear that Washington no longer views as serious or real that anything fundamental has changed in the Cuban leadership and political orientation, either within Cuba or in its foreign policy, under Raul Castro’s Presidency. Cuba remains revolutionary and Marxist. Revolutionary continuity is the reality in Cuba.

Therefore so does continuity remain the reality of US policy under Barack Obama.

1. See also the March 3, 2010 speech by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
2. For more information on the case of the Cuban Five, in US prisons for over 11 years, framed-up and convicted on trumped up “conspiracy” charges, for their heroic activities infiltrating Miami-based Cuban-American organizations involved in terrorist acts against Cuba, and the international campaign to free them.
3. See the counter-petitions “In Solidarity With the Real Anti-Racist Movement in Cuba,” and “Declaration of African American Activists, Intellectuals and Artists in Continued Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution,” and the article, “Latest Attack on Cuba Falsifies History of Fight Against Racism in Cuba.”
4. See my articles, “Trapped in Trinidad,” and “Slipping and Sliding in San Pedro Sula.”

As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.