The Secretary of State has recommended that the application [for the pipeline] be denied…I agree…This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but [on] the arbitrary nature of a deadline.

Obama even hinted at his future support of the pipeline: “[there may be] development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico.” These deceptive words used by the President made me think:  Is the president heavily influenced by Big Oil or is the statement he made in the 2008 campaign, “I don’t take money from oil companies” true?

The election campaign of 2008 was a hard-fought campaign on all sides, mostly which involved lots of corporate sponsors since all the “frontrunners” were awash with money. Then-Senator Barack Obama raised $745 million dollars and spent $730 million dollars. $916,162 of those dollars came from the Oil and Gas industry according to OpenSecrets. A FactCheck.org post continued this message, nine months before the Presidential election was held, noting that Obama received over $66,000 dollars from employees at ExxonMobil, Hess, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum (BP). In addition, the post noted that “two oil industry executives…bundl[ed] money for Obama” one of which was a multi-billionaire. A Reuters article in May 2008 noted that BP contributed more to Obama’s campaign than it had contributed to federal candidates since the late 1980s. Even with these contributions, one may be unsure of Big Oil’s real impact on Barack Obama.

Steve Coll’s new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Empire, sheds light on part of that impact, especially on ExxonMobil’s role in the election. According to Coll, in the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama “spoke most pointedly about ExxonMobil…[and] offered none of the nuanced support he had voiced to Chad’s dictator Idriss Deby [in 2006]” about the inviolability of international oil contracts.  Even with this aggressive tact, he seemed to exploit the unpopularity of ExxonMobil for his own benefit. He pushed the idea of American ‘energy independence’ even though, according to Coll, it is “not achievable [or] desirable.” In addition, every time he used the word “ExxonMobil” it seemed to work in his favor. But, according to the Washington Independent, individual Exxon, Chevron and BP contributors preferred Barack Obama. At the same time, he boldly declared that “we must end the age of oil in our time.” Still, the Washington Post wrote in January 2008 that “one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers on the Middle East [Daniel Shapiro]… registered to lobby for several corporate clients…including…the American Petroleum Institute.” Also, three political aides on the Obama’s campaign payroll were lobbyists for corporations such as BP. Still, after his victory over John McCain in the Presidential election, ExxonMobil changed its approach to the political arena.

As Obama was entering the Presidency, Eric Foner, of The Nation Magazine, called him “Our Lincoln” and Time Magazine named him “Person of the Year.” Just like the online game, Oiligarchy, made by Mollenindustria, President Obama became “oiled,” and would work in the interest of Big Oil due to its campaign contributions to his presidential election campaign.

In May 2009, Obama appointed Steve Koonin, the former Chief Scientist of BP, to be second Undersecretary for Science in the Department of Energy (he was confirmed shortly after by the U.S. Senate). The next year, Koonin became a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  Also, the former contact employee for Goldman Sachs, Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama’s Chief of Staff for 21 months, lived for five years in a “rent-free…D.C. apartment of…Rep. Rosa DeLauro…and her husband, Stanley Greenberg,” whose firm was the creator of “BP’s…green…slogan “Beyond Petroleum.”” At the same time, Goldman Sachs had a huge investment in BP, which it sold in early 2010 for an unknown reason, pocketing “slightly more than $266 million” according to Raw Story, an independent news site. Currently the company owns about 2% of BP’s stock.

This connection of Obama to Big Oil is not based around stocks, rather around policy that has been enacted or pushed. In the early days of his administration, a cap-and-trade bill failed in Congress. According to an online site about cap-and-trade this policy has its problems. Ralph Nader says it would cause a war “between interest groups seeking billions in carbon credit handouts and the regulator[s].” The Institute of Energy Research states it will hurt jobs, “make Canadian oil more expensive than oil from the Middle East…[and] create…incentives to import more oil from the Middle East.” The political magazine, Corporate Knights continues this criticism. They remark that “the President has not stood up to the climate-denial machine” and has been increasingly silent on the issue of a changing climate. At the same time, they wonder why Obama is not doing “far more to defend the science” of global warming.

In November 2009 the pro-Big Oil policy was evident once again. According to AlterNet, Obama and “his administration [were]…vocal and active proponents” of an Iraqi law that permitted new oil contracts in the country, which are also called protection sharing agreements (PSAs). The law offered oil companies “a 75 percent stake” in oil development, “reduced the amount the foreign companies pay in taxes…allow[ed]…them to use private security forces to protect their facilities” and let foreign companies to “hire and train [non]Iraqi workers and…transfer…needed technology.” At the same time, the law made companies pay “reimbursement fees for capital and operational expenses…[and] den[ied foreign] companies [from]…book[ing] reserves.”  Under this agreement, different corporations were given the ability to drill in Iraqi oil fields: BP, ExxonMobil and Shell Oil Company got sweet deals in Iraq, drilling in areas with 4-18 billion barrels of oil. Other foreign oil companies won out as well, but these American companies were some the big bread winners and the Obama Administration’s support of the law is no coincidence.

The next year, the international environmental NGO, the Bellona Foundation, noted a Presidential decision that missed the headlines. President Obama, one month before the explosion of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig reversed a “20 year moratorium…open[ed much of]… the Atlantic coast line, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling…[and] at the same time [he] reject[ed]…some sites that had been propose[d in]…Alaska, California and Oregon.” Then less than thirty days later, the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill began. The aftermath showed the collusion of policy with Big Oil. Even, Sarah Palin, roundly denounced by “liberals” for her seemingly crazy statements told a Fox News show, “I don’t know why the question isn’t asked…if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration.” Recently, others have even suggested that “the Obama administration went easy on BP before the 2010 oil spill in return for a pledge to support cap-and-trade legislation.” Two years later, Black Agenda Report came out with an article attacking Obama’s inaction: “Barack Obama and his Democrats passed no new laws, promulgated no new executive decisions to regulate Big Oil…the damages recoverable from BP’s holdings [were restricted to]…its Gulf revenues [not revenues on other continents]… [which] ensur[ed]…BP’s reckless operations in the gulf of Mexico [would]…continue.”

After the spill occurred, President Obama and his administration quickly worked to clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In that process, a dispersant named Corexit was poured into Gulf, 2 million gallons by mid-June 2011, with the green light from Obama and his administration. But everyone didn’t follow the administration line. According to Democracy Now!, “many lawmakers and advocacy groups sa[id]…the Obama administration [was]…not being candid about the lethal effects of dispersants.” At the same time, residents on the Gulf Coast were outraged that Kenneth Feinburg’s “$20 billion government-administered claim fund [would]…subtract money cleanup workers earn by working for the cleanup effort.” Also this claim fund was seen as an “effort to limit the number of lawsuits against BP.” Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst of the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the time, boldly said the government was “sock puppets for BP in this cover-up…by hiding the amount of spill [which]…sav[ed] [BP] hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines.” In addition to this corruption, many numbers of EPA and OSHA Administrators said the chemical was safe, but it was not. Kaufman went even further saying that the company, BlackRock is run by Larry Fink who has connections to “Mr. Geithner, Mr. Summers and others in the administration.” He concluded that the go ahead to disperse Corexit was part of a cover-up to hide BP’s use of “the volume of oil that has been released” into the Gulf from the American public.

The string of pro-Big Oil policy continued despite the “biggest investment in stimulating a green economy in history,” the creation of more green jobs, tax credits for wind energy, money for environmental maintenance, and greening federal buildings in the stimulus bill according to TreeHugger. For one, no one in BP has been criminally charged for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. A community fund to pay victims of the spill was set up, but there was no real damage to BP’s profits. Even a prosecution has started against BP but the trial was delayed by Judge Barbier until January 14, 2013, conveniently after the November presidential elections. In mid-2011, when the debt-ceiling crisis was occurring, the “Obama administration gave $12.4 million in research grants to oil and gas companies…to help the industry improve the way it drills for oil and gas” according to Daily Beast Contributor Daniel Stone. At the same time, Democrats in Congress were decrying a deal which would not cut subsidies for oil companies (about a year later, Obama would support gutting those subsidies). As the year continued, his policy was still deeply connected to Big Oil despite what was said in the articles of “clean capitalist” magazines like Corporate Knights.

Earlier that year in March 2011, President Obama began a war in Libya. Officially its purpose  was to “assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations…Security Council…to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe…[and stop] all attacks against civilians…[by] target[ing]…air defense systems, command and control structures…of Gaddafi’s armed forces.” As a result, this war was advertised by the Obama Administration as a humanitarian war. But the real reason for war was not humanitarian reasons, it was oil. Antiwar.com lays it out clearly. In 2008, Gaddafi threatened the oil companies in Libya and then made an agreement that promised billions of barrels of oil with tough conditions to American oil companies. At the same time, the U.S. government plotted to stop the Russian oil company Gazprom from gaining Libyan oil. When the Libyan revolution began, Gaddafi refused to step down.  The 2008 agreement and the plot to stop the Russian oil company, connected to Vladimir Putin, was threatened. In addition, University of London Professor Gilbert Achar noted that a huge massacre in Libya would cause an “embargo on Libyan oil” which would hurt the volatile oil markets. This revealed the real reason for entering a war into Libya: Oil. Representative Ed Markey at the time also said the war was because of oil.

The connections of the war to oil are different depending on what source the information comes from. Black Star News in an April 2011 post echoed the positions of antiwar.com and Gilbert Achar. They argued that the war occurred because “America wants to control Africa’s oil supply…[and protect] U.S. oil companies and others are presently invested in Libya; these companies include Marathon, Hess, Conoco, Gulf, Occidental, British Petroleum (BP).” The post finally gets to the punch: “This [war] is about oil and power, not saving people.  It’s about maximizing profits.” Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation had a different analysis. He noted that “Libya’s new leaders…plan to favor their NATO backers [one of which is the United States] when handing out access to Libya’s oil.” Peter Dale Scott goes even farther, saying that the war was about protecting the declining “global petrodollar economy” which Gaddafi threatened just like Saddam Hussein did before the Iraq invasion in 2003. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the war was about oil (it cost over $1.1 billion dollars, according to Politifact) and was in Big Oil’s interest.

In the month of the Libya war beginning, March 2011, President Obama made a speech at Georgetown University officially about “America’s energy security.” In the speech, Obama touted the use of alternative energy, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and oil all together, later called the “all-of-the above” strategy. More importantly, he announced a goal to cut America’s dependence on oil by one-third through his “all-of-the above” energy plan. However, he noted that to achieve this plan, America’s oil supply would have to be increased through expediting drilling permits for oil companies. Yet again, the President was on the side of Big Oil. He remarked casually that after new supposedly “higher standards” had been put in place, the government had “approved 39 new shallow-water permits…seven deepwater permits…two permits last year for every new well that the industry started to drill” offshore. The influence of Big Oil in government was apparent once again as the discussion switched back to the aftermath of the Gulf Oil Spill. In the speech, Obama revealed that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was sent by him down to “the BP offices [where]…he essentially designed the cap” that supposedly stopped the oil from leaking into the Gulf. If this doesn’t sound like collusion between BP and the national government, I don’t know what is.

A few months later in June 2011, President Obama made a rash decision. He decided to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. One news outlet, the Cable News Network (CNN) considered this an “economic stimulus…[in a time of] a looming supply  shortage…a wake up call to OPEC…[or] a warning shot to speculators in the oil market.” Other times in his administration he has tapped the national reserve, especially in times of “crisis”. This reserve was about 695.9 million barrels as of February 2012, which is about 36 days of oil consumption. Even though this is true, the releasing of oil just keeps America’s addiction on oil, which doesn’t solve any problems. It just keeps things at the status quo.

In late 2011 the policy of helping Big Oil continued. The infamous Keystone XL pipeline was proposed by TransCanada. It would be a pipeline that would snake across the western United States and would consist of drilling in dirty tar sands and overtopping the largest aquifer in the world, the Ogallala Aquifer. Environmental activists and other politicians opposed the action while others stood their ground, saying the pipeline would create jobs. An opinion posted on the Qatari-based news service, Al Jaazera, by a Tar Sands activist Bill McKibben expresses his frustration with the Obama Administration four months before the project was rejected. In his opinion, there were numerous “indication[s] from this administration…that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for [this] project…[even] the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review [which]…considered itself a “major client” of TransCanada.” This collusion of business and government to McKibben was “simply corrupt [and] potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years,” an ongoing crime that President Obama didn’t even try to stop.

The Keystone XL pipeline’s rejection seemed a lapse in pro-Big Oil policy. But the pipeline was not delayed in January 2012 because of environmental considerations, but due to “the arbitrary nature of the deadline.” Even though there was a review done, it occurred with the help of one of TransCanada’s major clients. However, this was not a powerful pro-Big Oil development.  The powerful move was the renewed support of the “All of the Above” energy policy which was touted back in March 2011. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama touted the same energy policy based in the nationalist idea of “energy independence.” In February 2012, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communications Director, justified such a policy by numerous statistics one would expect under a Republican administration:

Since 2008, U.S. oil and natural gases production has increased each year…[and] imports of foreign oil have decreased…[and] the Obama Administration put in place..new standards that ensured that [oil] drilling continued [after] the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

These were not the only justifications for this new energy policy. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf, hundreds of drilling permits for the region were approved by the Obama Administration. These numbers were higher than what Obama spoke of in March 2011. 308 permits were approved for “deep water drilling activities…and…113 permits for shallow water wells in the Gulf of Mexico.” More evidence of government collusion with Big Oil is the permitting of oil drilling “at levels seen before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill” on land and in the water. This resulted in “more oil produced [in 2011] in this country…since 2003.” This was conveniently made possible because America has more “oil…rigs at work in the field than the rest of the world.” While this seems like an overstatement, this phenomenon led the government to another conclusion. Obama allowed the “further exploration in the Arctic” and he established “an interagency Alaska working group…[to] review…Shells proposed exploration…in the Arctic.” For many environmentalists, this may be a betrayal of the initiatives in his administration that have helped the planet (pushing solar, wind, biofuels a little bit). Arctic exploration is not the only place the President pledges his support. Obama has allowed the building of dozens of pipelines in his term of office and has pledged to work with “TransCanada…to expedite the necessary federal permits” for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The next month, those permits were expedited. Obama signed an Executive Order on March 22nd, 2012 titled “Improving Performance of Federal Permitting and Review of Infrastructure Projects”. The Executive Order told all Federal Agencies and departments to “significantly reduce the…time required to make decisions [on]…permitting and review of [Federal government] infrastructure projects.” Also it mandated that all steps be taken “to execute Federal permitting and review processes with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring the health, safety, and security of communities and the environment while supporting vital economic growth.”  Even though there is talk of a safe community and the environment, this was meant to expedite the Keystone XL pipeline and future pipelines.

How can a full analysis occur if time is limited and “economic growth” is promoted? In the speeches he made the same day, March 22, his support of the pipeline is evident. He told a crowd, mostly of his supporters, in Maljamar, New Mexico that “we’ve announced our support for more [pipelines] including” the Keystone XL pipeline.  He repeated the same message at Ohio State University and in Cushing, Oklahoma. Cushing is where the President explained his justification for approving this leg of the pipeline, echoing the themes of his executive order:

There’s a bottleneck…here because we can’t get enough…oil to our refineries fast enough… TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to…refineries down on the Gulf Coast.  And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape…and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done…So the southern leg of it [is] a [government] priority…The northern portion…[is] going to…[be] review[ed] properly…if [the government approves this pipeline]…we going to see jobs and growth…all across the country.

The following month, after the pro-pipeline speeches, Obama tried to act all tough against the oil and gas industry. According to an April 18th CNN Article, he required “drillers to capture emissions of certain air pollutants from new wells.” But under his direction, the Environmental Protection Agency allowed companies to “burn the pollutants [in question]…until the start of 2015” in a “nod to industry concerns [that the]…rules were being enacted too quickly.” This is not only a pro-Big Oil move, but it shows he weighs the concerns of the common American lower than that of Big Oil.

This month, the Obama Administration made what the independent blog site, Firedoglake, called “a deeply corrupt move.” Companies that used hydraulic fracturing (fracking) only needed to “disclose what chemicals they use after the well has been drilled.” This was giving in to Big Oil, thanks to meetings at the White House after the original rule was proposed three months earlier. Lobbyists representing those interests helped change the rule to their liking. As Firedoglake put it, the decision “to side with big oil over the American people and basic common sense” is pathetic. This decision is a further sign that Obama is an “oiled” president.

This corrupted nature comes back again when you look at Obama’s stance on speculation. His response has been weak-handed. He has said that should be investigated by Attorney General Eric Holder, “but nothing [really] has happened [because]… he seems to kind of accept the logic [that] we need to produce more domestic oil…and alternative energy sources” according to Paul Jay of the Real News Network.  In addition, Jay notes that Obama “doesn’t…talk…about the issue of speculation, about position limits [or about] the financialization [of oil].” Fidelity Investments continues this idea saying that “Obama would like to crack down…but he doesn’t talk about it often…or have enough friends in Congress [and that]…Obama’s attack on oil speculators…[is] doomed to join his legislative Wish List to Nowhere.” But this is not an issue isolated to Obama. The lack of action on these issues goes from the President to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and lack of a meeting of the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, created by the Dodd-Frank Act, since 2009. Then Fidelity gets to the punch: “Obama can’t keep his eye on the crude [oil] bubble for very long.”

As a result of all of these connections to Big Oil, it wouldn’t be a surprise that the President gets money from them. Even though this is true, Republicans receive most of the money from them resulting in ThinkProgress’s derogatory name: the “Grand Oil Party.” But, the facts are undeniable: Big Oil has given to the Obama reelection campaign. The ExxonMobil Corporation has already given Obama $14,914 and Chevron Corporation has given him $9,750; still both corporations favor Mitt Romney for President in terms of money. In addition, Koch Industries, which is usually considered a Tea Party financier, is also an oil refining company, has given Obama a measly $1,000. Not surprisingly, after the administration’s response to the Gulf Oil Spill, BP favors Obama’s reelection. More money was given to him than contributions to Eric Cantor and John Boehner combined. Overall, OpenSecrets details that President Obama is the 12th biggest recipient of money, out of the top 20 recipients in the oil and gas industry.  He has received $181,957 in his campaign coffers. This comes at a time after Obama supposedly led the effort to end Big Oil’s big tax breaks, which was defeated in the Senate due to their influence. In recent times, however, especially in the past year, it has become evident that Obama is on the side of Big Oil, more than ever.

Big Oil (the “supermajors”) is the world’s five or sometimes six biggest publicly-owned oil & gas companies including American-based Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips Company British-based Royal Dutch Shell and BP and French-based Total S.A. Of the American companies, Obama seems to be on their side completely and overall on Big Oil’s side. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s eight years in office was much more on the side of the oil companies, but Obama still has a significant stake. What benefits the powerful oil corporations in America will, in turn, benefit the other world players. If such companies have headquarters in the United States like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, this is firmly the case. President Obama is on the side of Big Oil and is subsequently an “oiled” President. Until the President admits that he is more on the side of the world’s large oil corporations than the middle class, he will continue rhetoric that seems to speak for all Americans.

The most glaring and obvious question is: why?

Since President Felipe Calderón declared “war” against some of the region’s murderous drug cartels in 2006, some 50,000 Mexicans have been butchered. Activists, journalists, honest law enforcement officials but also ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire, the vast majority of victims, have been the targets of mafia-controlled death squads, corrupt police and the military.

Underscoring the savage nature of another “just war” funded by U.S. taxpayers, last week The Dallas Morning News reported that “23 people were found dead Friday–nine hanging from a bridge and 14 decapitated–across the Texas border in the city of Nuevo Laredo.”

The arcane and highly-ritualized character of the violence, often accompanied by sardonic touches meant to instill fear amongst people already ground underfoot by crushing poverty and official corruption that would make the Borgias blush, convey an unmistakable message: “We rule here!”

“The latest massacres are part of a continuing battle between the paramilitary group known as the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel,” the Morning News averred. “The violence appears to be part of a strategy by the Sinaloa cartel to disrupt one of the most lucrative routes for drug smugglers by bringing increased attention from the federal government.”

According to investigators the “two warring cartels are fighting for control of the corridor that leads into Interstate 35, known as one of the most lucrative routes for smugglers.”

But as Laura Carlsen, the director of the Americas Program pointed out last month in CounterPunch, “In a series of ‘Joint Operations’ between Federal Police and Armed Forces, the Mexican government has deployed more than 45,000 troops into various regions of the country in an unprecedented domestic low-intensity conflict.”

The militarization of Mexican society, as in the “Colossus to the North,” has also seen the expansion of a bloated Surveillance State. Carlsen averred that when the Army and Federal Police are “deployed to communities where civilians are defined as suspected enemies, soldiers and officers have responded too often with arbitrary arrests, personal agendas and corruption, extrajudicial executions, the use of torture, and excessive use of force.”

But expanding the surveillance capabilities of secret state agencies as the State Department proposes in its multimillion dollar gift to the Israeli-founded firm, Verint Systems, far from inhibiting violence by drug gangs and the security apparatus, on the contrary, will only rationalize repression as new “targets” are identified and electronic communications are data-mined for “actionable intelligence.”

Indeed, The New York Times reported last summer that “after months of negotiations, the United States established an intelligence post on a northern Mexican military base.”

Although anonymous “American officials” cited by the Times “declined to provide details about the work being done” by a team of spooks drawn from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA and “retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s Northern Command,” they said that “the compound had been modeled after ‘fusion intelligence centers’ that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups.”

Such developments are hardly encouraging considering the role played by “fusion centers” here in the heimat. As the ACLU has amply documented, “Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints, and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”

In Mexico, the results will be immeasurably worse; with corruption endemic on both sides of the border, who’s to say authorities won’t sell personal data gleaned from these digital sweeps to the highest bidder?

Only this time, the data scrapped from internet search queries, emails, smartphone chatter or text messages grabbed by bent officials won’t result in annoying targeted ads on your browser but in piles of corpses.

Guns In, Drugs Out: Iran/Contra Redux

While Obama administration officials hypocritically washed their hands of responsibility for failing to clamp-down on what journalist Daniel Hopsicker christened The New American Drug Lords, an old boys club of dodgy bankers, shady investment consultants, defense contractors and other glad handers, the violence following drug flows north like a swarm of locusts is fueled in no small part by arms which federal intelligence and law enforcement allowed to “walk” across the border.

Indeed, as Hopsicker pointed out in MadCow Morning News: “Ten years ago Miami Private Detective Gary McDaniel, a 30-year veteran investigator for both Government prosecutors and attorneys for major drug traffickers, educated me on the basics of the drug trade.”

Every successful drug trafficking organization (DTO) needs four things to be successful,’ he said. He ticked each one off on his fingers: ‘Production, distribution, transportation, and–most important of all–protection’.

To McDaniel’s list we can add a fifth element: intelligence gleaned from the latest advances in communications’ technologies.

If all this sounds familiar, it should.

During the 1980s, as the Reagan administration waged its anticommunist crusade across Central and South America, the CIA forged their now-infamous “Dark Alliance” with far-right terrorists (our “boys,” the Nicaraguan Contras), Argentine, Bolivian and Chilean death-squad generals and the up-and-coming cocaine cartels who had more on their minds than ideological purity.

By the end of that blood-soaked decade, with much encouragement from Washington, including a get-out-of-jail-free card for their dope dealing assets in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department, the region was on its way towards becoming a multibillion dollar growth engine for the well-connected.

Does history repeat? You bet it does!

As Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported:

A top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug organization and his army of assassins in Juarez, Mexico–responsible for a surge in violence in that city that has led to thousands of deaths in recent years–may well have been supplied hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons through an ill-fated US law-enforcement operation known as Fast and Furious.

But which agency has the wherewithal to guarantee that weapon flows from the United States fall into the right hands? More than a few analysts believe that Fast and Furious was an “intelligence” gambit overseen by the CIA.

Indeed, Narco News reported:

When it comes to prime intelligence targets, they don’t come much better than the leaders of Mexican drug organizations, who have their tentacles planted deep inside Latin American governments due to the corrupt reach of the drug trade. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that part of the reason that ATF’s Fast and Furious makes no sense in terms of a law enforcement operation is because it wasn’t one at all. (emphasis added)

“In fact,” Conroy wrote, “it may well have been co-opted and trumped by a covert U.S. intelligence agency operation, such as one run by CIA, that is shielded even from most members of Congress–possibly even the White House, if it was launched under a prior administration and parts of it have since run off the tracks on their own.”

Conroy revealed that enforcer, Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, who was arrested in February by Mexican authorities, “is now the subject of a 14-count US indictment unsealed in late April in San Antonio, Texas, that also charges the alleged leaders of the Sinaloa organization (Joaquin Guzman Loera, or El Chapo; and Ismael Zambada Garcia, or El Mayo) and 21 other individuals with engaging in drug and firearms trafficking, money laundering and murder in ‘furtherance of a criminal enterprise’.”

According to officials, Marrufo was allegedly responsible for the murders of some 18 patients at a Juárez drug treatment center in 2009. However, the significance of the gangster’s arrest may be overshadowed by the additional disclosure that his close associates, Eduardo and Jesus A. Miramontes Varela “worked for the Sinaloa Cartel when they became informants for the FBI in 2009.”

“Under Fast and Furious,” Conroy wrote, “the nation’s federal gun-law enforcer, ATF, in conjunction with a task force composed of several other federal agencies, including the FBI, allowed nearly 2,000 weapons to be smuggled into Mexico.”

Amongst the firearms allowed to “walk,” according to multiple published reports, were AK-47 assault rifles, Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, .38 caliber revolvers and FN Five-seven automatic pistols. Most of the arms purchased with ATF and Justice Department approval went to the Sinaloa or other drug cartels and have since turned up at some 170 crime scenes in Mexico.

While field level investigators objected to the operation and voiced their opposition to higher-ups in ATF, they were smacked-down by senior supervisors David Voth.

Responding to strong objections from his own agents, Voth wrote a threatening email to disgruntled officers in March 2010:

I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors, or other adolescent behavior. I don’t know what all the issues are but we are all adults, we are all professionals, and we have an exciting opportunity to use the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box. If you don’t think this is fun you are in the wrong line of work–period!

Fun? Try telling that to the families of U.S. Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata or the families of hundreds of unnamed Mexican victims who turned up dead, murdered with weapons supplied by the U.S. government.

Conroy also informed us that “deadly weapons were allowed to ‘walk’ across the border, where they were put into the clutches of criminal organizations, such as those overseen by alleged Sinaloa enforcer Marrufo, so that US law enforcers could supposedly later trace the trail of those guns to the so-called kingpins of Mexico’s criminal organizations.”

There was just one small catch. “A Feb. 1, 2012, memo drafted by staff for [U.S. Senator Charles] Grassley and [U.S. Rep. Darryl] Issa, thickens the plot, indicating that there were, in fact, two FBI informants involved with purchasing weapons from [Manuel Celis] Acosta, [presumably the "main target" of Fast and Furious] and ATF had no clue that these so-called ‘big fish,’ the high-level targets of Fast and Furious, were, in fact, working for a sister agency.”

According to that Congressional memo:

During the course of this separate investigation, the FBI designated these two cartel associates as national security assets. [essentially foreign-intelligence agents, or informants]. In exchange for one individual’s guilty plea to a minor count of ‘Alien in Possession of a Firearm,’ both became FBI informants and are now considered to be unindictable. This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious–to target these two individuals and bring them to justice–was a failure. ATF’s discovery that the primary targets of their investigation were not indictable was ‘a major disappointment’.

Brilliant, right? If one were to fall for “conspiracy theories,” one would almost believe that U.S. secret state agencies, like their Mexican counterparts, were favoring one narcotrafficking gang (the Sinaloa cartel) over their rivals, the equally violent and sinister group Los Zetas or the Juárez cartel founded by self-described “Lord of the Heavens,” Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

In fact, it wasn’t only the ATF-DEA-FBI that allowed guns to “walk” across the border into the hands of state-connected killers. To the list of the clueless, add the Pentagon.

In an earlier report, Conroy disclosed, citing State Department cables published by the secrecy-shredding web site WikiLeaks, that grenades used to attack the Televisa TV station and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in 2008-2009 “involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico.” A second cable confirms that “U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.”

Narco News also reported that the State Department cables confirm “that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.”

Indeed, “bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Mérida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.”

But what if that is precisely the goal of U.S. policy planners and their masters, corrupt American financial institutions like Wachovia Bank or the defense contractors who reap billions from the slaughter?

In that case then, the so-called “War on Drugs” is really a war over who controls the drug flow and the fabulous profits derived from the illicit trade.

Back to the Future

While Colombia continues to be the principle source of processed cocaine entering Europe and the United States, despite some $7.5 billion dispensed to that country’s repressive military and police apparatus under Plan Colombia, wholesale distribution of narcotics entering the U.S. are now controlled by Mexican DTOs.

It is a demonstrable fact that Plan Colombia failed to stop the tsunami of narcotics entering the U.S. and that “success” or “failure” in that enterprise was besides the point. As multiple analysts and investigative journalists across the decades have documented, U.S. intelligence agencies, principally the CIA, have cultivated ties and operational links to DTOs and their ruling class enablers, favoring cartels that advanced U.S. geopolitical goals whilst targeting those perceived as liabilities.

As researchers Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle pointed out in Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia: “Among the compradores, short-term arrangements were made on coca production that paved the road for longer-term agreements of all kinds, one of which supported the emergence of the narco-bourgeoisie, whose business operations had remained relatively independent.”

Villar and Cottle averred:

Emerging narco-capitalism permeated Colombia’s financial system, creating financial connections throughout the Colombian economy. The active participation of banks in the cocaine industry greatly strengthened financial connections among the narco-bourgeoisie. The Cali cartel metamorphosed into numerous legitimate business enterprises such as pharmaceutical companies and real estate firms to operate the cocaine trade, whereas the Medellín cartel focused on money-laundering.

This production and distribution system was highly unstable however, and “created fierce competition among traffickers with connections to the Colombian ruling class,” Villar and Cottle wrote. “The Medellín cartel waged a desperate battle against enterprises that refused to enter into an alliance with them. All manner of underhanded methods, from blackmail to murder, were employed in this battle. The violent liquidation of rival enterprises, many who collaborated with the CIA, provoked retaliation from the United States which declared a war on drugs that targeted Pablo Escobar.”

As with Plan Colombia, under terms of the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. Congress has authorized some $1.6 billion for Mexico and Central American states blown away by the narcotics hurricane. However, much of the funds doled out to Mexican military and police organizations never leave the United States. Instead, as with other “foreign aid” boondoggles these funds flow directly into the coffers of giant U.S. defense firms and will be used to purchase aircraft, surveillance equipment and other hardware produced by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex.

As in Colombia during the 1990s, a similar consolidation process, accompanied by spectacular levels of violence, is currently wracking Mexican society as drug gangs vie for control over the lucrative distribution market and are said to control 90% of the trafficking routes entering the U.S.

According to some estimates, approximately $49.4 billion annually pour into the accounts of major DTOs, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported back in 2007. However, most studies of global drug trafficking fail to analyze the benefits accrued by major U.S. financial institutions — banks, the stock market, hedge funds, etc. — who have been the direct beneficiaries of the $352 billion in annual drug profits “absorbed into the economic system,” as The Observer reported in 2009.

“In a nutshell,” Villar and Cottle wrote, “the war of drugs and terror is part of a counterrevolutionary strategy designed to maintain rather than eliminate the economic conditions that allow the drug trade to thrive.” That pattern is being replicated today in Mexico. “From Reagan to Obama, U.S. covert intervention has, paradoxically, only accentuated the social violence and systematized the production and distribution of cocaine.”

Corporate grifters, profiting on everything from weapons’ sales to surveillance kit have names. In the context of the Mérida Initiative, one firm stands out, the Israeli-founded spy shop Verint Systems Inc.

Drugs, Terror, War… Whatever

Like the “War on Terror,” the “War on Drugs” is predicated on the fallacy that “persistent situational awareness” obtained through the driftnet surveillance of electronic communications will give secret state agencies a leg-up on their adversaries.

Better think again! As Villar and Cottle pointed out, “the 1994 discovery of a computer owned by members of the Cali cartel offered clues on the complexities of the system and illustrated the technological sophistication of Colombia’s narco-economy.”

Indeed, the $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe “networked with half a dozen terminals and monitors and six technicians overseeing its operations,” and its “custom-written data-mining software cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange’s traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials.”

That network was “set up by a retired Colombian army intelligence officer,” a fact which the Colombian government denied despite strong evidence to the contrary. And when Colombian officials “established a toll-free hotline for information about the Cali cartel leaders,” Villar and Cottle reported that a “former high-level DEA official said: ‘All of these anonymous callers were immediately identified, and they were killed.”

By today’s standards, that IBM mainframe is a throwback to the stone age. With advanced communications and encryption technologies readily available to anyone, and with any number of dodgy spy firms specializing in everything from the mass harvesting of information from social networks to the installation of malware on personal computers and GPS smartphone tracking as the WikiLeaks Spyfiles revealed, only a fool — or a State Department bureaucrat — would believe that a weaponized spy kit won’t fall into the hands of billion dollar organized crime groups. Yet that’s exactly what Washington plans to do.

In the NextGov report cited above, we were informed that the State Department’s “Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in a contract notice published late Friday, said it will fund what it called the Mexico Technical Surveillance System for use by that country’s Public Security Secretariat to ‘continue to help deter, prevent and mitigate acts of major federal crimes in Mexico that include narcotics trafficking and terrorism’.”

The contract proposal specifies that “all awards will be based on the following criteria in order of importance for 1) Technical Approach/Understanding/Personnel, 2) Corporate Experience, 3) Past Performance and 4) Price. Technical merit (captured in the three (3) technical evaluation factors enumerated above, taken together) is significantly more important than cost/price.”

But as NextGov reported while the procurement, at least on paper, is “competitive,” the State Department “came close to ruling out any other bidder except Verint with the caveat that ‘the new equipment must function seamlessly with the existing in a single system or be entirely replaced’.”

That pretty much “levels the playing field” for the Israeli firm and the suite of surveillance tools it offers, the Reliant Monitoring System, which “intercepts virtually any wired, wireless or broadband communication network and service.” Indeed, the State Department plans to “triple the capacity of the current Verint system from 30 workstations to 107,” according to NextGov. Given the spooky nature of the company, no doubt El Chapo is drooling over the prospect.

As James Bamford pointed out in The Shadow Factory and in a series of recent articles in Wired Magazine, “Verint was founded in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations.”

As Antifascist Calling disclosed back in 2008 (see: “Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying”): “When Comverse Infosys [now Verint] founder and CEO Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended ‘vacation’–$57 million to be precise.”

Alexander, a veteran of Israel’s ultra-secretive Unit 8200, the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency, fled to Namibia because he faced a 32-count indictment by the Justice Department over allegations that he masterminded a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options which allowed the enterprising corporate grifter to embezzle some $138 million from company shareholders.

As I wrote back then:

Despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America’s surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America’s spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.

But as we know, software and the spy trojans embedded in their code are “neutral.” What can be used by law enforcement agencies such as Mexico’s Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) and the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI) can also be handed over by corrupt officials to their presumed targets, the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juárez, Knights Templar, Tijuana or Los Zetas narcotrafficking cartels, all of whom have ties to Mexico’s narco-bourgeoisie, police and the military.

It wouldn’t be the first time that “retired” Israeli military officers or “ex” Mossad men were exposed as trainers for some of the drug world’s most notorious killers.

Nearly a decade ago, investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood revealed in Narco News that drug gangster and far-right political actor Carlos Castaño, the future founder of the blood-soaked Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, “was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called ’562.’ Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.”

Bigwood reported that Castaño’s IDF trainers emphasized instruction in “urban strategies,” which included the use of fragmentation grenades, RPG-7s as well as “complementary courses” on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Narco News informed us that “not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there–soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.”

A future that encompassed the wholesale massacre of Colombian peasants, union organizers and left-wing activists as the AUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA-anointed Cali cartel, founded by Iran/Contra drug kingpins, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, engaged in a brutal war to the death with Pablo Escobars’ Medellín cartel in the 1990s.

According to declassified CIA, DEA and State Department documents published by the National Security Archive in 2008, “U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 1993 provided key evidence linking the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.”

Documents published by the Archive “include two heavily-censored CIA memos describing briefings provided by members of a ‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ of CIA investigators to members of U.S. congressional intelligence committees and the National Security Council. The Panel–which included personnel from the CIA’s directorate for clandestine intelligence operations–had been investigating the possibility that intelligence shared with the Medellín Task Force in 1993 ended up in the hands of Colombian paramilitaries and narcotraffickers from the Pepes. That investigation concluded on December 3, 1993, the day Escobar was killed.”

“The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today’s ‘para-political’ scandal,” said Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project. “The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history.”

While both the Cali and Medellín cartels have faded into history, cocaine processed on an industrial scale continues to flood out of Colombia and other “legs” of the Crystal Triangle. Control over that distribution network, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, much of which finds its way into U.S. banks, is the source of the bloodshed currently tearing Mexico and Central America to pieces.

Is history repeating itself when it comes to favoring one drug gang over another? The answer is yes. According to a 2010 National Public Radio report, “an NPR News investigation has found strong evidence of collusion between elements of the Mexican army and the Sinaloa cartel in the violent border city of Juarez.”

“Dozens of interviews with current and former law enforcement agents, organized crime experts, elected representatives, and victims of violence suggest that the Sinaloans depend on bribes to top government officials to help their leader, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, elude capture, expand his empire and keep his operatives out of jail.”

Sound far-fetched? As Bill Conroy reported last year in Narco News, court pleadings in the case of accused Sinaloa capo Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla “demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.”

“According to Zambada Neibla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the informant [Humberto] Loya Castro, negotiated a quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.”

“The alleged deal,” Conroy averred, “assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition–such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world.”

Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder why, if Zambada Neibla’s allegations are so much hot-air, would U.S. prosecutors invoke “national security” under provisions of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) “in his trial in an attempt to assure certain sensitive and/or embarrassing evidence is not made available to Zambada Niebla’s attorneys”?

As Narco News disclosed, “Perhaps any deal that might exist between the Sinaloa leadership is limited to Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, perhaps it was put in place by a US intelligence agency under the guise of law enforcement, or through some secret pact cobbled together by the US State Department that does not have to be honored by the Justice Department because it applies only in Mexico. In this case, the devil is in the details, and in all those scenarios, the cloak of national security could easily be invoked to prevent evidence of the pact surfacing in a court of law.”

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a “drug war” that favors one group of cut-throats over another to obtain leverage over corrupt politicians, along with an endless source of funds for intelligence-connected black operations, the Verint deal seems like a slam-dunk.

After all, with powerful communications’ intercept technologies in the hands of the Mexican secret state, “national security,” on both sides of the border, is little more than code for business as usual.

A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

— President Ronald Reagan, 1987¹

On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.

Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?

Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?

Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?

The president then continued in the same fashion by saying: “We possess many tools … and using these tools over the past three years, I believe — I know — that we have saved countless lives.” Obama pointed out that this includes Libya, where the United States, in conjunction with NATO, took part in seven months of almost daily bombing missions. We may never learn from the new pro-NATO Libyan government how many the bombs killed, or the extent of the damage to homes and infrastructure. But the President of the United States assured his Holocaust Museum audience that “today, the Libyan people are forging their own future, and the world can take pride in the innocent lives that we saved.” (As I described in last month’s report, Libya could now qualify as a failed state.)

Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it.

Mr. Obama closed with these stirring words; “It can be tempting to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to man’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that there is nothing we can do.” But Barack Obama is not one of those doubters. He knows there is something he can do about man’s endless capacity for cruelty. He can add to it. Greatly. And yet, I am certain that, with exceedingly few exceptions, those in his Holocaust audience left with no doubt that this was a man wholly deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize.

And future American history books may well certify the president’s words as factual, his motivation sincere, for his talk indeed possessed the quality needed for schoolbooks.

The Israeli-American-Iranian-Holocaust-NobelPeacePrize Circus

It’s a textbook case of how the American media is at its worst when it comes to US foreign policy and particularly when an Officially Designated Enemy (ODE) is involved. I’ve discussed this case several times in this report in recent years. The ODE is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The accusation has been that he had threatened violence against Israel, based on his 2005 remark calling for “wiping Israel off the map”. Who can count the number of times this has been repeated in every kind of media, in every country of the world, without questioning the accuracy of what was reported? A Lexis-Nexis search of “All News (English)” for for the past seven years produced the message: “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results.”

As I’ve pointed out, Ahmadinejad’s “threat of violence” was a serious misinterpretation, one piece of evidence being that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”² Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place remarkably peacefully. But the myth of course continued.

Now, finally, we have the following exchange from the radio-TV simulcast, Democracy Now!, of April 19:

A top Israeli official has acknowledged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Iran seeks to “wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The falsely translated statement has been widely attributed to Ahmadinejad and used repeatedly by U.S. and Israeli government officials to back military action and sanctions against Iran. But speaking to Teymoor Nabili of the network Al Jazeera, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted Ahmadinejad had been misquoted.

Teymoor Nabili: “As we know, Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran policy is to exterminate Israel. Ahmadinejad’s position and Iran’s position always has been, and they’ve made this — they’ve said this as many times as Ahmadinejad has criticized Israel, he has said as many times that he has no plans to attack Israel. …”

Dan Meridor: “Well, I have to disagree, with all due respect. You speak of Ahmadinejad. I speak of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, Shamkhani. I give the names of all these people. They all come, basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right. But ‘It will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor that should be removed,’ was said just two weeks ago again.”

Teymoor Nabili: “Well, I’m glad you’ve acknowledged that they didn’t say they will wipe it out.”

So that’s that. Right? Of course not. Fox News, NPR, CNN, NBC, et al. will likely continue to claim that Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, threatened to “wipe it off the map”.

And that’s only Ahmadinejad the Israeli Killer. There’s still Ahmadinejad the Holocaust Denier. So until a high Israeli official finally admits that that too is a lie, keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has never said simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we historically know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of various political stripes. In a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”³

Let us now listen to Elie Wiesel, the simplistic, reactionary man who’s built a career around being a Holocaust survivor, introducing President Obama at the Holocaust Museum for the talk referred to above, some five days after the statement made by the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister:

How is it that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons — to use nuclear weapons — to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.

“Nuclear weapons” is of course adding a new myth on the back of the old myth.

Wiesel, like Obama, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. As is Henry Kissinger and Menachim Begin. And several other such war-loving beauties. When will that monumental farce of a prize be put to sleep?

For the record, let it be noted that on March 4, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama said: “Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”⁴

Postscript: Each time I strongly criticize Barack Obama a few of my readers ask to unsubscribe. I’m really sorry to lose them but it’s important that those on the left rid themselves of their attachment to the Democratic Party. I’m not certain how best to institute revolutionary change in the United States, but I do know that it will not happen through the Democratic Party, and the sooner those on the left cut their umbilical cord to the Democrats, the sooner we can start to get more serious about this thing called revolution.

Written on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, 2012

Two simple suggestions as part of a plan to save the planet.

1. Population control: limit families to two children

All else being equal, a markedly reduced population count would have a markedly beneficial effect upon global warming, air pollution, and food and water availability; as well as finding a parking spot, getting a seat on the subway, getting on the flight you prefer, and much, much more. Some favor limiting families to one child. Still others, who spend a major part of each day digesting the awful news of the world, are calling for a limit of zero. (The Chinese government announced in 2008 that the country would have about 400 million more people if it wasn’t for its limit of one or two children per couple.⁵

But, within the environmental movement, there is still significant opposition to this. Part of the reason is fear of ethnic criticism inasmuch as population programs have traditionally been aimed at — or seen to be aimed at — primarily the poor, the weak, and various “outsiders”. There is also the fear of the religious right and its medieval views on birth control.

2. Eliminate the greatest consumer of energy in the world: The United States military.

Here’s Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Mass. in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million — and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.⁶

The United States military, for decades, with its legion of bases and its numerous wars has also produced and left behind a deadly toxic legacy. From the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in the 1960s to the open-air burn pits on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, countless local people have been sickened and killed; and in between those two periods we could read things such as this from a lengthy article on the subject in the Los Angeles Times in 1990:

U.S. military installations have polluted the drinking water of the Pacific island of Guam, poured tons of toxic chemicals into Subic Bay in the Philippines, leaked carcinogens into the water source of a German spa, spewed tons of sulfurous coal smoke into the skies of Central Europe and pumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the oceans.⁷

The military has caused similar harm to the environment in the United States at a number of its installations. (Do a Google search for <"U.S. military bases" toxic>)

When I suggest eliminating the military I am usually rebuked for leaving “a defenseless America open to foreign military invasion”. And I usually reply:

“Tell me who would invade us? Which country?”

“What do you mean which country? It could be any country.”

“So then it should be easy to name one.”

“Okay, any of the 200 members of the United Nations!”

“No, I’d like you to name a specific country that you think would invade the United States. Name just one.”

“Okay, Paraguay. You happy now?”

“No, you have to tell me why Paraguay would invade the United States.”

“How would I know?”

Etc., etc., and if this charming dialogue continues, I ask the person to tell me how many troops the invading country would have to have to occupy a country of more than 300 million people.

Yankee karma

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Every once in a while someone opposed to immigration will make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to the last is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions and policy. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador, the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras. And in Mexico, although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land.

The end result of all these policies has been an army of migrants heading north in search of a better life. It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and right-wingers.

1. Washington Post, March 5, 1987.
2. Associated Press, December 12, 2006.
3. President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University, Transcript, Washington Post, September 24, 2007.
4. Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference, White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 4, 2012.
5. Washington Post, March 3, 2008.
6. The Pentagon v. Peak Oil, TomDispatch.com, June 14, 2007.
7. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1990.

Born in Mexico, Hernández Rojas arrived in the United States at the age of 16. For more than 27 years, he lived and labored here, where he married and had five children. In May 2010, after losing his construction job, he was arrested for shoplifting. When a background check showed that he was in the country without official sanction, the police turned him over to federal authorities, who deported him to Mexico. Not willing to accept exile from his wife and children, Hernández Rojas quickly crossed back into the United States, but Border Patrol agents intercepted him in a remote area as he tried to head home.

At the detention facility, an agent allegedly assaulted and injured Hernández Rojas, which led him to express a desire to file a complaint. That same agent reportedly was one of two who drove him back—alone—to the port of entry in San Ysidro (the southernmost portion of San Diego) to deport him again. It was there, just a few feet from the actual boundary with Mexico, where the night-time, deadly assault took place, one involving over a dozen agents.

A San Diego County Medical Examiner’s report concluded that Hernández Rojas’s death was a case of homicide. It was due to a heart attack—one induced by the shocks from the taser. (According to an Amnesty International report, 334 people died in the United States after being shocked with a taser, a supposedly non-lethal device, or a similar conducted-energy weapons between June 2001 and August 2008.) The 42-year-old father also sustained broken ribs; several loosened teeth; bruises all over his body and head, and injury to his spine.

What allowed the beating and electrocution to go legally unchallenged was the uncritical acceptance of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) account of events by authorities at various levels. According to the agency’s official story, agents did what they did because an un-handcuffed Hernández Rojas “became combative,” and the use of batons and the taser was necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety.”

The blatant nature of the brutality, the cover-up of what transpired, and what appear to be clear violations of the law have helped to provoke widespread outcry. From press conferences, to an online petition and myriad news reports, pressure is mounting on federal authorities to conduct a far-reaching investigation of Hernández Rojas’s death.

More broadly, advocates—such as John Carlos Frey, a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter involved with the making of Crossing the Line at the Border—point to an institutional culture of impunity that allows killings by Border Patrol agents to go virtually unexamined outside the agency. Frey also highlights the rush to recruit ever-more agents in the aftermath of 9-11, and lowered standards of recruitment and training, in trying to explain “at least eight documented cases of extreme use of force against unarmed and non-combative migrants resulting in death” at the hands of the Border Patrol since May 2010.

Whether or not relatively new agents recruited and trained under less rigorous criteria are responsible for the deaths is not known as the CBP hasn’t even released the names of the agents involved. But, perhaps more importantly, the effect of such a line of argument is to suggest that better qualified agents are the answer to the problem.

No doubt, rigorous screening of applicants and good training, and some sort of public oversight mechanism, are very preferable to the lack thereof. But in privileging such factors, what gets obscured is the every day violence—and death and suffering—that federal boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus brings about through its normal practices.

Over the last couple of decades, many thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to traverse the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and enter the United States—in order to find work, or rejoin loved ones. U.S. authorities have also sent millions into exile abroad, many of them long-standing U.S. residents with almost non-existent ties to their countries of birth. In the process they have separated hundreds of thousands of children from parents. They have also reduced the life spans of many deportees: in a particularly egregious case, one of the first individuals “removed” to Haiti after the Obama administration resumed deportations to the earthquake-ravaged country in 2011 lost his life to cholera soon after his arrival.

The law and the institutionalized nature of the practices that produce these outcomes help to obscure the violence they embody—and the related death and suffering. But just because many do not see the violence for what it is—as death-producing—does not mean it is anything less.

From the very establishment of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, killing people and denying life has been central to what the international divide is all about. After all, its foundation necessitated a war of conquest and the dispossession of the Native and Mexicano populations in the borderlands. And, in the face of so many who refuse to accept the original injustice, its maintenance has required various forms of violence on a regular basis ever since. More broadly, in a world of profound inequality, one predicated on the production of differences such as those based on race, class, and nation, the boundary reflects and helps reproduce who gets what in terms of rights and resources, and the very nature of life and death—and the various states in between.

Anastasio Hernández Rojas was born on the wrong side of the boundary dividing people and places of privilege from those of disadvantage. Like countless others in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class, he thus became disposable. When U.S. authorities deported Hernández Rojas to Mexico and deprived him of his right to be with his family, they effectively denied his right to live. And when they beat and tased him to death, they did so as well.

Realizing justice—achieving true accountability—for Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s murder requires that we go far beyond the parameters of his particular case. It necessitates that we contest the very socio-territorial arrangement that made him disposable in the first place. Otherwise, we will end up affirming and strengthening a boundary that grants life to some, and consigns others to death.

In what was hailed as an historic event, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay, Mexican Secretary of National Defense Guillermo Galvan, and Mexican Secretary of the Navy Mariano Mendoza recently held the Inaugural Meeting of North American Defense Ministers. As part of a framework they agreed to, “ Develop a joint trilateral defense threat assessment for North America to deepen our common understanding of the threats and challenges we face. Explore ways to improve our support to the efforts of civilian public security agencies in countering illicit activities in our respective countries and the hemisphere, such as narcotics trafficking. Explore how we can collaborate to increase the speed and efficiency with which our armed forces support civilian-led responses to disasters. Continue to work together to strengthen hemispheric defense forums.” The ministers also committed to enhancing cooperation in the fight against transnational criminal organizations. The trilateral defense meeting is part of the ongoing efforts to establish a fully integrated North American security perimeter.

On April 2, President Barack Obama hosted Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon for the sixth North American Leaders Summit. In a joint statement they reaffirmed their, “commitment to further develop our thriving political and economic partnership with a consistent and strategic long-term vision.” The leaders acknowledged that, “continued North American competitiveness requires secure supply chains and efficient borders. We remain committed to achieving this through co-operative approaches.” With respect to regulatory initiatives, they agreed to move forward trilaterally in areas such as “vehicle emission standards, railroad safety, the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Workplace Chemicals, and aligning principles of our regulatory approaches to nanomaterials.” They also announced the creation of the North American Plan for Animal and Pandemic Influenza. Following the leaders summit, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk engaged in discussions with Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast and Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy Bruno Ferrari, as part of the NAFTA Commission Meeting.

In their joint communique, the leaders recognized, “the growing regional and federal cooperation in the area of continental energy, including electricity generation and interconnection and welcome increasing North American energy trade.” They emphasized the need to deepen, “cooperation to enhance our collective energy security, including the safe and efficient exploration and exploitation of resources.” There was no mention of the Keystone XL Pipeline Project which would carry oil from western Canada to the Texas gulf coast. President Obama has blocked the plan pending further environmental review. While speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center following the leaders summit, Prime Minister Harper made it clear that even if the pipeline is approved, Canadian oil will be heading for Asian markets. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been pushing Mexico to further open up its oil sector to private investment. In February, they signed an agreement regarding, “the development of oil and gas reservoirs that cross the international maritime boundary between the two countries in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The leaders joint statement also noted that, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) provides an opportunity to further deepen our trade relationship and create jobs. The United States welcomes Canada’s and Mexico’s interest in joining the TPP.” During a press conference with his NAFTA counterparts, Obama confirmed that, “Consultations with our TPP partners are now underway on how new members can meet the high standards of this trade agreement, which could be a real model for the world.” The U.S. is spearheading TPP negotiations which also include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Japan has also expressed interest in being part of the TPP process. The door is also open for other countries to join which is why many consider it to be a building block for an Asia-Pacific free trade zone.

Robert Pastor who has been a leading advocate for deeper North American integration described the TPP as a flawed strategy. He explained Canada and Mexico’s decision to join, “as a defensive measure to ensure that they protect what they gained from NAFTA.” Pastor warned how, “the TPP will divert scarce political capital and attention from North America.” In contrast, the Council of the Americas are of the opinion that it would boost the integrated North American economy. They view the TPP as a “promising vehicle to support the updating of our bilateral and trilateral trading relationships within North America to the high standards of twenty-first century free-trade agreements.” While on a visit to the U.S. in March, Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast proclaimed that, “As neighbours and friends, we can and should build the TPP together. As like-minded allies, we can ensure that high standards are included in the TPP on such issues as investment, regulatory cooperation, state-owned enterprises and labour provisions.” If Canada and Mexico are accepted into the TPP fold, it could be used to renegotiate and expand NAFTA.

The U.S., Canada and Mexico have also agreed to launch a consolidated Central America Integration System-North America Security Dialogue to deepen regional coordination and cooperation. This includes working closer together in the fight against transnational organized crime, arms trafficking and money laundering. During the leaders joint news conference, President Obama praised Mexico’s courage in standing up to the drug cartels, and added, “today each of us reaffirmed our commitment to meeting this challenge together — because that’s the only way that we’re going to succeed.” President Calderon went on to say, “The security of North America is absolutely tied to each of its member states.” The Merida Initiative has expanded the U.S.-Mexico security partnership. It has provided military equipment, training, infrastructure development, along with border security and information technology enhancement. At the 2009 North American Leaders Summit, Prime Minister Harper announced Canadian support for Mexico’s fight against drug trafficking and transnational organized crime.

Mexico’s drug war is increasingly being seen as a continental problem that requires continental solutions which is further pushing the NAFTA partnership into a common security front. This is escalating the militarization of the borders, integration in areas of law enforcement and the military, as well as advancing the development of a North American security perimeter.

The U.S. military created Project Agile in Vietnam in 1961, to apply data processing techniques to the task of measuring the allegiances of every individual in the numerous hamlets of South Vietnam. Files were maintained on every aspect of every person’s life. Every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the Saigon government and carry ID cards. Those apprehended without cards were imprisoned or worse. At the time of registration, a full set of fingerprints was obtained, and the individual’s political beliefs were recorded. ²  By 1966, the U.S. military began studying the potential applicability of this program to cities and communities inside the U.S.

Although the LEAA was abolished in 1982, it had already begun to introduce military hardware and tactics into the daily programs of domestic law enforcement. LEAA’s emphasis included surveillance equipment and computer systems that compiled information on individuals such as criminal activity, biographical and physical data (scars, deformities, etc.), identifying numbers, social security numbers, operators licenses, skin tones, addresses and occupations. In addition, enormous amounts of money went toward police hardware including products such as infrared equipment, anti-sniper vans, helicopters, communication systems that enabled the police to write messages through their radios, lightweight portable video tape recorders, short landing and take-off planes, and filing systems.

LEAA was not merely designed to bolster the reputation of right-wing “law n’ order” forces inside the U.S. at a time during the 60s when there was little respect for law enforcement, but rather was empowered to create a completely new law enforcement infrastructure inside our own communities. Programs created by LEAA ranged from prison and community-based halfway houses to “Watch Your Neighbor” programs on our streets. The infrastructure was designed to render law enforcement needs a responsibility of our own communities – to make us all responsible for dealing with the prevention of crimes. Virtually nothing LEAA sponsored dealt with the root causes of crime, but rather, made the citizenry part of the detain, arrest and imprison aspects of law enforcement.

Today, while the U.S. military is building and maintaining bases throughout the world, it is providing an updated armamentarium of warfare hardware to our local “law enforcement” communities. Over the last two decades, for example, San Francisco has acquired “infrared scanning devices, combat helmets, chemical protective gloves, vehicles and even a boat as discarded hand-me-downs free of charge from the Department of Defense.” The Alameda County Sheriff’s department got an 85-foot patrol boat as well as a grenade launcher. Police departments are equipping themselves with 8 and 1/2-ton bulletproof tactical vehicles. Santa Barbara Sheriffs have taken four helicopters, and the San Joaquin County Sheriffs picked up a full-tracked tank last year even though it had previously received a mobile-command vehicle that it bought with federal grant money.³ The newest additions to this stockpile of hard-core weapons will be be surveillance drones.  The Federal Data Center in Utah has been designated as the information-gathering center of the U.S. surveillance empire: it will be responsible for gathering, maintaining and disseminating information nationwide.

Military infringement into domestic law enforcement has become an essential part of our border control policies, especially in the Southwest. “During the 1978-1992 period, U.S. immigration and drug enforcement policies and practices in the U.S.-Mexico border region became increasingly militarized. Developed during the 1980s for use in Central America and elsewhere, this doctrine is characterized by broad-ranging provisions for establishing social control over specific civilian populations, and its implementation has often been accompanied by widespread human rights violations.”⁴

Author Joey LeMay points out that “Counter-terrorism efforts abroad have expanded to include counter-terrorism efforts domestically” and that military-style tactics within the police force[s] have taken root since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.  “In September 2006, the U.S. issued the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, an overview of the practices and goals that were to be implemented and accomplished to curb terroristic efforts. The document details the ideological shift of combating attacks against the U.S.:

The paradigm for combating terrorism now involves the application of all elements of our national power and influence. Not only do we employ military power, we use diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement activities to protect the Homeland and extend our Defenses, disrupt terrorist operations, and deprive our enemies of what they need to operate and survive. We have broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.

Today’s favorite police toys include sound cannons (LRAD) to SWAT Teams, pepper gas, shotgun-style Taser projectors, and focused, invisible beams of waves that cause a severe burning sensation in the skin (AIS), the list goes on and on.

Only a police force that earns the people’s trust and respect can be effective. This is certainly the case in Afghanistan where the accelerated rate of U.S. militarization of the Afghani police force resulted in the contempt and antagonism of the entire Afghan people. As a result, the U.S. was forced to modify its strategy from containment to one of counter-insurgency.

The major problem with integrating military tactics into domestic police departments is that it transforms community participation in law enforcement into acts more common to warfare: renditions; torture; isolation cells; strip searches; racial profiling; and, the numerous excesses that identify U.S. imperial actions throughout the world. To the extent that police attempt to control the American people with drones and batons, rather than with cooperation and protection, they they are doomed to failure.

Once again in our communities, there is little credibility among community members for the legitimacy of police forces, Border Patrol, Homeland Security forces, etc. Many people fear the unleashed power of the police and react strongly to the implications of greater police power. The disrespect that the American people have for law enforcement is paralleled by the public’s contempt for Congress, the so-called Supreme Court and the Presidency. Our national preoccupation with arresting and imprisoning the largest domestic population in the world is a reflection of our murderous foreign policy.  Only when democracy is restored in the U.S. will we see an end to our ever-expanding, immune, and unaccountable police force.

1. “For fiscal year 1973, LEAA was allocated $841 million in crime-fighting funds, bringing the total funds awarded to LEAA to $2.43 billion. 85% of LEAA’s funding is directed to State Planning groups, which then turn over most of it to local law enforcement application. The remaining 15% is distributed by LEAA as it wishes.” (Hiken, Marti, Ed., “A Primer on LEAA,” October 1974, Published by the National Lawyers Guild, Seattle Chapter; officially presented to the community of Seattle and the city council
2. ibid.,  “Primer on LEAA” and Wikipedia
3. Schulz, G.W. and Becker, Andrew, California Watch, “If U.S. military doesn’t want it, cops will take it,” 3-31-12, p. 1A
4. Dunn, Timothy J., “Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978-1992.  “Dunn demonstrates that U.S. immigration and drug enforcement practices in the southwestern border region have coincided with many key features of low-intensity conflict doctrine. His findings are supported extensively by material from U.S. government documents, investigative reports from mainstream and alternative presses, interviews with federal law enforcement personnel in South Texas, and reports from human rights advocacy organizations. The study reflects a concern for human rights conditions in the U.S.-Mexico border region and is informed by the belief that the ‘official’ story is usually but one version of events and should not be accepted uncritically.”

While much of my focus has been on the U.S.-Canada Beyond the Border and the Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) action plans, the U.S. is also pursuing a similar agenda with Mexico. This includes working towards a common security perimeter. In 2010, the U.S. and Mexico issued the Twenty-First Century Border Management declaration. This established the Executive Steering Committee (ESC) to implement joint border related projects to enhance economic prosperity and security. In December of last year, the ESC adopted its 2012 action plan which sets goals in areas of binational infrastructure coordination, risk management, law enforcement cooperation, along with improving cross-border commerce and ties. A press release explained that through the ESC, “we are developing and managing our shared border in an integrated fashion to facilitate the secure, efficient, and rapid flows of goods and people and reduce the costs of doing business between our two countries.” The ESC meeting also acknowledged bilateral accomplishments in expanding the use of trusted traveler initiatives such as the Global Entry Program.

In May of 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon directed the creation of the High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Council (HLRCC). In February of this year, the HLRCC released a work plan whereby the U.S. and Mexico will seek greater regulatory alignment in the areas of food, transportation, nanotechnology, e-health, as well as oil and gas development standards. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce applauded the plan for enhanced regulatory cooperation between both countries. The terms of reference for the HLRCC also recognized that, “some regulatory challenges require trilateral cooperation among the three Parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the United States and Mexico intend to involve the Government of Canada when it is necessary to focus on issues of common interest in North America.” The U.S.-Mexico HLRCC has similar goals to the U.S.-Canada RCC. At some point, these dual-bilateral councils could come together to form a single continental regulatory regime.

In his article, the road to Washington runs through Mexico, Robert Pastor, who has been a leading proponent of North American integration, criticized Canada’s continental policy. He argued that, “Instead of collaborating with Mexico to persuade the United States to address shared problems and opportunities in North America, Canada has excluded Mexico and approached the U.S. on its own.” Pastor offered potential reasons for this strategy, “Some suggest Canadians fear being tainted by association with Mexico’s violence. Others believe its ‘special relationship’ with the United States gives it an advantage that it would lose if it allied with Mexico. And some think that two countries can walk faster than three.” He further elaborated on his position, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s insistence on bilateralism — or rather ‘dual-bilateralism’ because the U.S. has to deal with Mexico too — has not worked. Regulations will not be harmonized; a uniform set of customs forms and traveller IDs will not be implemented; a continent-wide transportation and infrastructure plan will not be contemplated without a clear vision and strategy by and for North America.”

Robert Pastor’s op-ed which appeared in the Toronto Star also conceded that, “Working the U.S. Congress by itself, neither Canada nor Mexico can secure its goals. Working together, with the support of the Obama administration, the three governments could design a seamless market and eliminate an expensive, inefficient tax based on rules of origin.” He recommended, “Instead of competing against each other to gain access to Asian markets, our three countries should focus on continental competitiveness and approach China together on issues related to currency, unfair trade practices and climate change.” He insisted, “If Canada were to change its ‘divide-and-be-conquered’ strategy to a ‘unite-and-govern together’ approach on the new North American agenda, Mexico and the U.S. would join, as they did with NAFTA. And Canada could achieve its goals and the continent’s at the same time.”

Pastor further lays out his plan to rejuvenate trilateral integration in his book, the North American Idea: A Vision of a Continental Future.

The Woodrow Wilson Center hosted an event in December 2011 entitled the Death of Trilateralism in the NAFTA Neighborhood, which examined the evolution of regional economic cooperation between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. During the proceedings, a panel agreed that the death of trilateralism has been exaggerated, but pointed out that, “dual-bilateralism, in which the United States works with Canada and Mexico separately, has become more common. Participants noted this is particularly apparent when dealing with regulatory, energy, and border issues. Countries are still, however, looking to harmonize and work toward trilateralism.”

The meeting called for greater regional engagement and emphasized, “the need to focus on issues such as regulatory cooperation, infrastructure, and border efficiency.” Discussions also centered around whether North America needed a grand new plan to move deep integration forward.

On April 2, President Barack Obama will host the sixth North American Leaders Summit which will include the participation of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. According to a statement by the press secretary, the meeting will, “focus on economic growth and competitiveness, citizen security, energy, and climate change.” While announcing the upcoming summit, Prime Minister Harper praised the NAFTA trilateral relationship, “Canada, the United States and Mexico have forged a strong partnership built on free and open trade and close cooperation on security.” He went on to say, “The government’s number one priority remains the creation of jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for all Canadians, particularly through trade, including with our close friends the United States and Mexico.” The NAFTA governments are looking to expand trade with other countries. This includes Canada and Mexico’s efforts to join the U.S., along with other nations already engaged in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks. The forthcoming North American Leaders Summit will be the first since 2009, which has caused some to question the current state of trilateralism.

When it comes to continental integration, the U.S. has shifted much of its focus to pursuing dual-bilateral agendas with both Canada and Mexico. This includes efforts to establish a North American security perimeter. At some point, these parallel initiatives could converge into one. While it is unlikely that the upcoming leaders’ summit will bring about any grand new plan, it could be used as a starting point to revive the whole trilateral process. With the NAFTA framework still intact, the vision for a North American Union has not been abandoned.

“Yeah, I could use a decent vacation,” I replied, figuring he’d pay for both of us since he had just set the world record for the most nose jobs in a 24-hour period.

“What vacation?” he said. “I’m setting up practice.”

“And give up catering to rich people with inflated bank accounts and deflated ethics?”

“Don’t have a choice. I’m getting laid off.”

Comstock had been a rainmaker for the Megabucks Happy Health Care Medical Center for the past decade. There was only one reason I could think of why he’d be laid off.

“Megabucks tired of paying your malpractice insurance?” I asked.

“Not just me,” he said. “Hospital’s laying off most of the staff, making the rest work overtime, and hiring outside contractors. They said it was hard to survive when the profit was down to only 20 or so million a year.”

“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” I said. “You planning to set up private practice to help the poor in Mexico?” I asked admiringly.

“Not a chance! Gonna get rich working for Megabucks!”

“You just said you were laid off.”

“Been laid off in the U.S.,” said Comstock while putting a frozen burrito into the microwave.

“Megabucks/Mexico just hired me. There’s cheaper labor down there.”

“You crazy?” I asked. “You’re the cheaper labor.”

“Obviously you don’t know American business,” said Comstock haughtily.

“Megabucks/U.S. closes its auxiliary operations, and then contracts with Mexican companies for a fifth of the cost in the U.S. They do the work, ship it back to the U.S., and Megabucks bills Blue Cross the full rate as if it was done locally.”

“So where do you fit in?” I asked.

“Just as before. Nose jobs. Breast augmentations. Tummy tucks. All the important medical procedures. But this time, I do it in Cancun.”

“To rich Mexicans,” I said disgusted.

“To rich Americans!” said Comstock. “If they want the best care, they’ll take their private jets to Mexico and then deduct the trip as a necessary business expense.”

“And what about the impoverished and middle-class Americans?”

“If they can sneak across the border, they can also get medical care.”

“What about prescriptions?”

“Megabucks contracted with some of the best drug dealers—I mean pharmacists and chemists—in Mexico. Quality is just as good and it’ll only be four or five times production costs. Unlike the U.S. there’s no TV advertising and six-figure MBAs and lawyers that require drugs to be 30 or 40 times production costs.”

“With prices that low, how do you know there won’t be mass rushes by Americans to grab everything they can?”

“Because there’s security! Every hospital and pharmacy has armed guards with the best automatic weapons smuggled through the God-fearing 2nd Amendment patriotic Southern states.”

“Is Megabucks outsourcing all its operations?”

“Keeping the ER. After tummy tucks and butt lifts, that’s the hospital’s ‘cash cow.’”

“So, then, it’ll have to keep some services like X-Ray and the lab,” I said. “Maybe even a doctor or two.”

“Too expensive,” said Comstock. “Megabucks will hire more residents and foreign-educated doctors, and work them 18 hours a day. More work, less time to complain. Residents will do anything to get experience to pass their boards. May even hire a couple of hospitalists. You know, the ones who graduated at the bottom of their class and can’t even get work in a Free Clinic.”

“I suppose they’ll also do the lab work?” I asked.

“Do you know some of those lab techs are making as much as $30,000 a year! Made sense to lay them off, too.”

“So how will the ER know a victim’s blood chemistry, or if there’s internal injuries?”

“Technology,” said Comstock. “They scan the blood here, and send digital X-Rays to Mexico. Mexican lab technicians—you know, the ones that don’t know about unions and will work for only a few bucks a day—will analyze everything, then text the results back to the U.S.”

“This sounds like it’s not only a way to maximize profits, but also a way to avoid dealing with the President’s health care reform program.”

“Obamacare!” spit out Comstock. “Nothing but socialized medicine.”

“Most countries have forms of socialized medicine,” I countered, “and they not only have good health care but affordable prices to their citizens.”

Comstock put his hands to his ears and began chanting, “We’re Number 1, We’re Number 1.”

“Number 37,” I corrected him. “The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. just below Costa Rico.”

“They’re all Commies,” replied Comstock. “Besides, that study is a decade old.”

“Last year, the independent Commonwealth Fund compared the nations of the United Kingdom against the U.S., and the U.S. ranked seventh of the seven.”

“Yeah, like Americans will go to Canada? It’s covered by snow and run by a queen who can’t even speak English.”

“You and Megabucks are crazy!”

“Possibly,” said Comstock, “but outsourcing is the American way. By the way, do you put ketchup or mustard on a burrito?”

The annual Meany-Kirkland award (named after the AFL-CIO’s first two presidents) was established in 1980. Previous winners include Zimbabwe union activist Wellington Chibebe, Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association, and the Independent Labor Movement of Egypt. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was joined by Leo Gerard, President of the United Steel Workers (USW) in making the presentation, and U.S. Congress members Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Mike Machaud (D-ME) also gave brief remarks.

Since 2006, Gomez Urrutia has lived in exile in Vancouver, Canada, forced to seek asylum after the Mexican government filed numerous criminal charges against him. The government not only went after him, they launched an ugly, aggressive attack on the union itself, freezing its bank accounts, declaring all strikes to be illegal (including sending in federal troops to break them up), and exhorting mine employers to replace Los Mineros with company-sponsored lackey unions.

Gomez Urrutia got himself put on the Mexican government’s hit list because of his response to a February 19, 2006, mine explosion that killed 65 miners. He publicly accused the Vincente Fox administration of committing “industrial homicide.” While his accusation may have been melodramatic, it was accurate. As for the criminal charges, not only have Mexican and international human rights and labor groups called them baseless, all but one has been subsequently dismissed by Mexican courts, and all government appeals have been denied.

The 2006 explosion at Grupo Mexico’s Pasta de Conchos coal mine will live forever in the sorrowful annals of labor history. Prior to the explosion, union officials had repeatedly warned the company of serious safety concerns, notably the prevalent odor of flammable methane gas. Those warnings were ignored and the work continued. After all, there was coal to be mined and money to be made.

Then, following the shattering explosion, and after just a few short days of rescue attempts, the government abruptly declared the rescue operation to be futile, and, with the miner’s wives waiting helplessly outside, ordered the mine to be closed and sealed. That was it. Those 65 bodies were entombed on the premises.

Los Mineros (a sister union to the USW), has a proud history of challenging the Mexican government on labor issues, many of which will doubtlessly sound familiar to American workers; e.g., safety and health concerns, declining wages, and the replacing of permanent employees with temps. In his press release Richard Trumka described Gomez Urrutia as a “truly courageous man who has shown us how difficult and how important it is to be an independent leader of a democratic union.”

Being named recipient of the Meany-Kirkland Award was a great honor. Too bad Gomez Urrutia wasn’t there to accept it. Alas, the Obama administration refused to grant him a travel visa. It’s true. His wife, Oralia Casso de Gomez, had to accept on his behalf. Just when we thought President Obama couldn’t be any more gutless or jelly-legged when it comes to defending the underdog, he goes and proves us wrong.

In an article from several months back, Robert Pastor, who has been a leading proponent of continental integration, emphasized that Obama’s jobs strategy should be a North American one. He explained how the U.S. can expand trade faster by focusing on its neighbours and also pointed out that few Americans realize just how dependent the U.S. is on Canada and Mexico. In order to facilitate this approach, Pastor recommended, “We should eliminate restrictive ‘rules of origin,’ which add a tax as high as the tariff that was eliminated by NAFTA, and combine, rather than duplicate, customs’ forms, personnel and frequent-traveler programs.” He also called on President Obama to, “expand his infrastructure fund to be a North American one, with contributions from all three countries.” Pastor went on to say, “The leaders of each nation should then instruct their transportation ministers to develop a North American plan for transportation and infrastructure that would include another trade corridor from the busiest transit point in Windsor, Ontario, to southern Mexico.” This sounds a lot like plans for a NAFTA superhighway.

In his op-ed, Robert Pastor also stated, “In 2009, the three leaders of North America pledged to meet the next year, but that still hasn’t happened. Obama should invite his counterparts to address the full North American agenda, beginning with a strategy to lift the continent’s economy and then addressing transportation, immigration, education and borders. The goal should be to forge a North American community.” Pastor may have gotten part of his wish as President Barack Obama will host the North American Leaders Summit in Honolulu, Hawaii on November 13, 2011 which will include the participation of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The meeting is expected to focus on economic, energy, environmental and security issues. The setting could also provide an excellent opportunity for the U.S. and Canada to release an action plan that stems from bilateral trade and security perimeter talks that were launched back in February. Both countries could also further discuss the pending Keystone XL oil pipeline which would span from western Canada to Texas. President Obama has now indicated that a final decision on the project may not take place until sometime next year.

While the U.S. and Canada have been busy putting the final touches on the proposed Beyond the Border agreement, a series of unwelcome distractions have caused the initiative to lose some of its momentum. In September, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency draft report recommended the use of fencing and other barriers on the northern border. This ties into an assessment from last year by the Government Accountability Office which warned that only a small portion of the Canadian border was under operational control and even went so far as to claim that it posed a greater threat than the southern border. Although the CBP denied that a fence is being considered at this time, it does reveal that in many ways, the U.S. still thinks in terms of a two border policy with the idea of a security perimeter around the U.S. and another one around North America.

The timing of a number of protectionist measures have also proven to be a stumbling block. First, there was the Buy American provision which is included in Obama’s jobs creation plan. This was followed by the announcement that Canadian travellers will have to pay a $5.50 tax when they enter the U.S. by air or sea. Not to mention the threat of new tariffs on container cargo entering U.S. ports from Canada. The moves prompted Roland Paris to ask in his article, Is There a Problem in Canada-U.S. Relations? He acknowledged that it is, “noteworthy that several of these irritants have appeared at this time, when Canada and the U.S. are negotiating the terms of a new partnership. We are left with unanswered questions: Is the White House still committed to elaborating and pursuing a renewed agenda of bilateral cooperation?” The protectionist actions go against what both countries are supposedly trying to accomplish. They have proved to be a source of contention and reinforce Canada’s perceived weakness when dealing with its American partner.

In their article, Sad but true: Canada and Mexico have no clout in Washington, Stephen Clarkson and Matto Mildenberger argued that both countries are more valuable to the U.S. economy than most people realize. They pointed out that, “although Canada and Mexico make extraordinarily large contributions to America’s economic strength, homeland security and international effectiveness, they have virtually no influence in Washington’s corridors of power.” One of the reasons given deals with the way, “the U.S. has shaped the governance structures within which continental policy processes play out ‒ including disempowering any institutions that could give the continental periphery a voice in affecting American policies.” When it comes to Canada’s lack of influence, they contend that it centers around its willingness to, “make almost any concession in order to get access to the U.S. market. Their resulting limp bargaining culture causes Ottawa’s negotiators to back off from confrontations, then claim the resulting compromises as victories.” There are fears that the same could happen with negotiations on a perimeter security agreement with the U.S., resulting in Canada giving up more than it gains.

When it comes to foreign policy matters, Clarkson and Mildenberger also noted that even though at times Canada and Mexico have proven to be an essential support for achieving U.S. aims, it still doesn’t translate into political influence. They added, “When it comes to security, Canada’s and Mexico’s land masses are a potential menace, since they could be used by terrorist organizations to infiltrate the United States. But this proximity also turns the Canadian and Mexican governments into Washington’s prime associates in its war on terrorism, as they are in its war on drugs.” In many ways, both of these wars have morphed together and are being used as the pretext for a North American security perimeter. Growing drug violence and insecurity have allowed the U.S. to assume more control over Mexican security priorities and intelligence operations. The Merida Initiative which promotes a perimeter security strategy continues to deepen U.S.-Mexico relations. At some point, Mexico could join the U.S. and Canada as part of a formal, common security perimeter arrangement.

There is no doubt that protectionist measures, along with other factors have put a bit of a damper on the pending U.S.-Canada security perimeter agreement. If the Beyond the Border action plan is not announced by the end of the year, the whole effort could collapse. From the Canadian government’s perspective, it is essential to get some sort of deal done before the election year primaries begin in the U.S. or risk possible failure. Despite all the delays and obstacles, it is believed that the overdue action plan will soon be released. Having said that, it is now expected that it will be more modest than what was initially envisioned and for the time being will avoid some of the more contentious issues. It is also likely to include built-in structures to ensure that things happen on schedule with a list of items that both countries will pursue over the coming years. This will result in a constant implementation process making the move towards a North American security perimeter an incremental one.

When it comes to continental integration, much of the focus has shifted to greater convergence bilaterally which over time could move back to a more trilateral approach. There is an overwhelming sense that one way or another, the U.S. is going to get a North American security perimeter on their own terms, one that its NAFTA partners will have to conform to, whether they like it or not.

The nativists, xenophobes, racists, and Republican Party activists and legislators who support the harsh new immigration bill (HB 56) targeting undocumented migrants in the state are delighted.

The flight of thousands of Latinos from the state regardless of legal status is not an unforeseen consequence of the legislation — it’s the entire point. As Lindsey Lyons, the mayor of Albertville, Alabama, put it in an interview with National Public Radio: “[W]e’re going to see an exodus of those moving to other states that don’t have any pending legislation.” The point is not immigration reform; the point is to make the growing Latino population go away.

For the law’s authors and backers, the state of Alabama is living a fantasy they have long wished, and worked, to see play out on a national level. Importantly, the fantasy of a vanishing Latino population is not strictly a legal one. It is, in fact, a cultural project, and it has a long history.

Culture, Power and Illusion

How do you make tens of millions of Latinos disappear from the national public sphere? This is a spectacular trick, on the order of illusionist David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of a live television audience. Copperfield’s 1983 deception relied on the cover of darkness and strategic manipulation of the audience’s perspective. The trickery that seeks the relative public invisibility of Latinos in the U.S. is performed in broad daylight using a combination of rhetorical manipulations and legislative measures.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric by now. The constant, drum beat-like association by anti-immigrant nativists of the terms “illegal” and “Mexican” and “immigrant,” amplified and reproduced in the news media and in demagogic political discourse, has created a semantic cloud obscuring the presence, in plain view, of diverse millions of Latinos in American public life.

A restaurant owner in my Minneapolis neighborhood who had emigrated (legally) from Ecuador told me about being questioned by police while taking a summer walk with his son. The police officers’ dogged assumption was that he was Mexican, and they seemed to believe that he had entered the U.S. illegally.

“I am from Ecuador,” he told me, “but all they could see was an illegal Mexican.” The Statue of Liberty, one might say, disappeared before his very eyes.

The public illusion in this instance results from cultural messaging that denies Latinos full cultural citizenship – the right to be different and to bring that difference into the public process. Theoretically, all citizens have equality under the law. In practice, however, public cultural norms are structured by an often unspoken hierarchy of values that privileges some citizens over others.

Think about how in a public meeting the fellow citizen who speaks an English accented by non-English phonetics might carry less moral authority with her audience than the fluent English speaker, despite being equally understandable and possessing the same legal rights. Or think of how a man wearing a West African dashiki might be assumed by many in a U.S. audience to be a non-citizen. Social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and age are reflected in recognition, or denial, of full cultural citizenship to different social groups.

Markers of cultural difference in the body politic can be, and often are, converted into signs of second-class status. This is an important intersection of culture and politics in the U.S., and one exploited actively by those who would make Latinos disappear from the public sphere.

The targeting of immigrants with the rhetorical hammer of “illegal,” pounds into place a chain of equivalences in the public mind. Where Latinos are concerned, the anti-immigrant anvil and hammer of “illegal” and “Mexican” seek to remake brown skin, the Spanish language, and other markers of Latino visibility as signposts of the outer boundaries of American public life. “They,” non-Latinos are being told, are not like “us.”

Behind the media sensationalism and electoral campaign posturing lays a politics of cultural containment and subordination, and of civic divisiveness. As the facile external markers of Latino identity are transformed into the civic equivalent of scarlet letters, Latinos are implicitly rendered less legitimate as public actors, and less visible as fellow citizens. In the process, any resources particular to their cultural heritage that they might bring to the national project are categorically segregated and expelled from the public sphere.

Spanish is preempted as a language of legitimate civic engagement. Regions of the country are subtly (and not so subtly) dispossessed of their rich Hispanic heritage in the minds of many Americans, who are encouraged to forget the pluricultural history etched into Spanish-language place names like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

The U.S. public’s ignorance about Puerto Ricans — who are born United States citizens since passage of the Jones Act in 1917, although without the right to vote in U.S. elections — is deepened and extended to another generation. Bilingualism becomes suspect, rather than being recognized as a tremendous national economic and cultural resource and a civic virtue. Important forms of public culture — murals, corridos, pachangas — are marked as Other. Voices critical of U.S. foreign policy — with personal experience of the human rights implications for Salvadorans, for Guatemalans, and others, of military funding or trade agreements — are silenced.

And my Ecuadorian-American neighbor finds himself caught up in a mass cultural deception that denies him full cultural citizenship, despite his undeniable legal rights. He is denied the power to define his own public presence, his own identity as a fellow citizen, and to be recognized as fully American.

Laws, Politics, and Culture

The dark magic worked by manipulative public rhetoric has its limits, thankfully. People can endure, and respond to, name-calling. And public discourse is never a one-sided affair. My Ecuadorian-American neighbor, for example, has undoubtedly told his story to many of his fellow local citizens, generating a retail-level awareness that counterbalances in some measure the wholesale misrepresentation of national realities by anti-immigrant sensationalism. Educators continue to teach Spanish, and student interest in the language has grown alongside the growing number of Americans who understand the political and economic and cultural value of bilingualism.

And at some point, the anti-immigrant talk begins to say more about the speaker than about the object of the speaker’s rancor. Of the 308 million heads counted by the 2010 Census, more than 50 million, or greater than 16%, identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. At some point, talking as if 16% of the nation doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist becomes a fool’s strategy.

This is where the policy mechanisms of the cynical anti-Latino vanishing act come into play. A confluence of xenophobic, nativist and Republican Party interests — having watched demographic changes unfold over the past two decades, and their electoral consequences begin to take hold — see an even greater need to contain Latino culture and subordinate Latino public involvement. They have learned that rhetoric alone will no longer do the trick.

Predictably, after the 2008 elections resulted in convincing victories for the Democratic Party with sizable margins of support among Latino voters, several Republican state legislatures have approved laws targeting undocumented immigrants in several states.

The Arizona state legislature in 2010 approved SB 1070, a law that criminalizes the failure to carry immigration documents and allows police to detain anyone suspected of being an undocumented migrant. (In order to make clear that the political and cultural target included Latino citizens, the Republican majority also passed a law banning the teaching of Ethnic Studies in the public schools.) In 2011, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, and South Carolina subsequently passed their own versions of the Arizona law, similarly promoting racial profiling and criminalizing social and economic interaction with undocumented immigrants.

Not to be outdone, Alabama passed HB 56, a law that, among other things, bars undocumented immigrants from attending state colleges, criminalizes “transporting, harboring, or renting property” to them, and requires public schools to verify the legal status of their students.

The laws bring state power — in the form of racial profiling — to bear on the cultural messaging that subordinates and marginalizes Latinos’ presence in the public arena. One measure of the cultural effect of the Alabama law: those Latino children who haven’t disappeared from the public schools now report they are bullied for being “illegals.”

All of these states share two key elements: First, state government is controlled by the Republican Party, and second, the 2010 Census found a dramatic growth rate among the Latino/Hispanic population that sooner or later could jeopardize Republican political dominance in the state.

Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama saw eye-popping growth rates for the Latino/Hispanic population, 96.1%, 147.9%, and 144.8%, respectively. Indiana’s growth rate for the Hispanic or Latino category was 81.7%, and Utah’s was 77.8%, nearly double the national growth rate for that sector of the population. In the case of Arizona, population growth among Latinos/Hispanics was a “mere” 46.3%, but what was likely more troubling for Republicans, racists and xenophobes, the Latino/Hispanic population had grown to represent approximately 30% of the state population.

It is difficult not to view these states’ anti-immigrant legislation as a preemptive effort to change the demographic facts for future elections, and prior to the inevitable moment in which comprehensive federal immigration policy reform provides a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million or more undocumented immigrants nationwide, principally from Mexico and Central America.

At the same time, the state-by-state anti-immigrant legislation can be viewed as a desperate effort to use the law to leverage an extended life for the cultural politics that has long sought to subordinate and diminish Latino participation in the public sphere.

Redefining America

The stakes of the present conjuncture are not just electoral and legal. The cultural parameters of U.S. public life are also in play. The long-term stakes are nothing less than the means and meaning of democratic public life in America, i.e., the question of who is allowed to speak, and how, and about what.

It is important to remember (and remind) that the cultural politics that denies Latinos equality in American public life has a long history. Current efforts to drive Latinos out of public life find common parentage in the assaults on Mexican-Americans that occurred after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexico war and called for Mexico to relinquish roughly half of its national territory to the U.S.

The 1848 Treaty included an option for U.S. citizenship for the many Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in U.S. territory, but xenophobic and racist sentiment conspired with economic interests to drive Mexicans off their land throughout the region, and to strip them of their mining stakes in California. One of the myriad ways these interests operated on the social body to excise the Mexican-American presence was the passage of legislation that directly targeted these would-be citizens.

The “Greaser” laws (as they were called by their proponents) included an 1855 anti-vagrancy statue in California that explicitly applied to “All persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood… and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.” This legislative assault on the public presence of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans was preceded by the 1850 Foreign Miner’s Tax, which levied an exorbitant monthly license fee on the mining claims of the foreign-born, with the practical effect of driving Mexicans and Latin Americans (and French and Germans) off their claims in the context of the Gold Rush. Of course, the xenophobic hostility stoked against Spanish-speakers made no distinction between native-born Californios and Mexicans.

The cultural politics that aims to make Latinos disappear cannot overcome the blunt object reality of a growing population. David Copperfield could make the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear, but when the sun came up the next morning, there it was. The difference is that Copperfield wasn’t attempting to change the meaning of Liberty.

Recent nativist attempts to update the 19th century “Greaser laws” for the 21st century will not, ultimately, make Latinos literally disappear. But the trickery in this instance changes the potential meaning of America, diminishes democratic possibilities, preempts current and future potential dialogue and social relationships. Cultural resources and perspectives that Latinos could bring to the common table are diminished and sidelined. Efforts to counter the inequality these laws promote must systematically engage the cultural dimension of the struggle over American democracy.

The US tale of the Iranian plot was greeted with unusual skepticism on the part of Iran specialists and independent policy analysts, and even elements of the mainstream media. The critics observed that the alleged assassination scheme was not in Iran’s interest, and that it bore scant resemblance to past operations attributed to the foreign special operations branch of Iranian intelligence. The Qods Force, it was widely believed, would not send a person like Iranian-American used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar, known to friends in Corpus Christi, Texas as forgetful and disorganized, to hire the hit squad for such a sensitive covert action.

But administration officials claimed they had hard evidence to back up the charge. They cited a 21-page deposition by a supervising FBI agent in the “amended criminal complaint” filed against Arbabsiar and an accomplice who remains at large, Gholam Shakuri.¹  It was all there, the officials insisted: several meetings between Arbabsiar and a man he thought was a member of a leading Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, with a reputation for cold-blooded killing; incriminating statements, all secretly recorded, by Arbabsiar and Shakuri, his alleged handler in Tehran; and finally, Arbabsiar’s confession after his arrest, which clearly implicates Qods Force agents in a plan to murder a foreign diplomat on US soil.

A close analysis of the FBI deposition reveals, however, that independent evidence for the charge that Arbabsiar was sent by the Qods Force on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Jubeir is lacking. The FBI account is full of holes and contradictions, moreover. The document gives good reason to doubt that Arbabsiar and his confederates in Iran had the intention of assassinating Jubeir, and to believe instead that the FBI hatched the plot as part of a sting operation.

The Case of the Missing Quotes

he FBI account suggests that, from the inaugural meetings between Arbabsiar and his supposed Los Zetas contact, a Drug Enforcement Agency informant, Arbabsiar, was advocating a terrorist strike against the Saudi embassy. The government narrative states that, in the very first meeting on May 24, Arbabsiar asked the informant about his “knowledge, if any, with respect to explosives” and said he was interested in “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia.” It also notes that in the meetings prior to July 14, the DEA informant “had reported that he and Arbabsiar had discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of other targets,” including “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country,” located “within and outside the United States.”

But the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to “attack” the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped “in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,” according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.

The most suspicious aspect of the administration’s case, in fact, is the complete absence of any direct quote from Arbabsiar suggesting interest in, much less advocacy of, assassinating the Saudi ambassador or carrying out other attacks in a series of meetings with the DEA informant between June 23 and July 14. The deposition does not even indicate how many times the two actually met during those three weeks, suggesting that the number was substantial, and that the lack of primary evidence from those meetings is a sensitive issue. And although the FBI account specifies that the July 14 and 17 meetings were recorded “at the direction of law enforcement agents,” it is carefully ambiguous about whether or not the earlier meetings were recorded.

The lack of quotations is a crucial problem for the official case for a simple reason: If Arbabsiar had said anything even hinting in the May 24 meeting or in a subsequent meeting at the desire to mount a terrorist attack, it would have triggered the immediate involvement of the FBI’s National Security Branch and its counter-terrorism division. The FBI would then have instructed the DEA informant to record all of the meetings with Arbabsiar, as is standard practice in such cases, according to a former FBI official interviewed for this article. And that would mean that those meetings were indeed recorded.

The fact that the FBI account does not include a single quotation from Arbabsiar in the June 23-July 14 meetings means either that Arbabsiar did not say anything that raised such alarms at the FBI or that he was saying something sufficiently different from what is now claimed that the administration chooses not to quote from it. In either case, the lack of such quotes further suggests that it was not Arbabsiar, but the DEA informant, acting as part of an FBI sting operation, who pushed the idea of assassinating Jubeir. The most likely explanation is that Arbabsiar was suggesting surveillance of targets that could be hit if Iran were to be attacked by Israel with Saudi connivance.

“The Saudi Arabia” and the $100,000

The July 14 meeting between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant is the first from which the criminal complaint offers actual quotations from the secretly recorded conversation. The FBI’s retelling supplies selected bits of conversation — mostly from the informant — aimed at portraying the meeting as revolving around the assassination plot. But when carefully studied, the account reveals a different story.

The quotations attributed to the DEA informant suggest that he was under orders to get a response from Arbabsiar that could be interpreted as assent to an assassination plot. For example, the informant tells Arbabsiar, “You just want the, the main guy.” There is no quoted response from the car dealer. Instead, the FBI narrative simply asserts that Arbabsiar “confirmed that he just wanted the ‘ambassador.’” At the end of the meeting, the informant declares, “We’re gonna start doing the guy.” But again, no response from Arbabsiar is quoted.

Two statements by the informant appear on their face to relate to a broader set of Saudi targets than Adel al-Jubeir. The informant tells Arbabsiar that he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia.” The FBI agent who signed the deposition explains, “I understand this to mean that he would need to use four men to assassinate the Ambassador and that the cost to Arbabsiar of the assassination would be $1.5 million.” But, apart from the agent’s surmise, there is no hint that either cited phrase referred to a proposal to assassinate the ambassador. Given that there had already been discussion of multiple Saudi targets, as well as those of an unnamed third country (probably Israel), it seems more reasonable to interpret the words “the Saudi Arabia” to refer to a set of missions relating to Saudi Arabia in order to distinguish them from the other target list.

Then the informant repeats the same wording, telling Arbabsiar he would “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can.” This language does not show that Arbabsiar proposed the killing of Jubeir, much less approved it. And the FBI narrative states that the Iranian-American “agreed that the assassination of the Ambassador should be handled first.”  Again, that curious wording does not assert that Arbabsiar said an assassination should be carried out first, but suggests he was agreeing that the subject should be discussed first.

The absence of any quote from Arbabsiar about an assassination plot, combined with the multiple ambiguities surrounding the statements attributed to the DEA informant, suggest that the main subject of the July 14 meeting was something broader than an assassination plot, and that it was the government’s own agent who had brought up the subject of assassinating the ambassador in the meeting, rather than Arbabsiar.

The government reconstruction of the July 14 meeting also introduces the keystone of the Obama administration’s public case: $100,000 that was to be transferred to a bank account that the DEA informant said he would make known to Arbabsiar. The FBI deposition asserts repeatedly that whenever Arbabsiar or the DEA informant mention the $100,000, they are talking about a “down payment” on the assassination. But the document contains no statement from either of them linking that $100,000 to any assassination plan. In fact, it provides details suggesting that the $100,000 could not have been linked to such a plan.

The FBI deposition states that the informant and Arbabsiar “discussed how Arbabsiar would pay [the informant],” but offers no statement from either individual even mentioning a “payment,” or any reason for transferring the money to a bank account. Furthermore, it does not actually claim that Arbabsiar made any commitment to any action against Jubeir at either the July 14 or 17 meetings. And when the informant is quoted in the July 17 meeting as saying, “I don’t know exactly what your cousin wants me to do,” it appears to be an acknowledgement that he had gotten no indication prior to July 17 that Arbabsiar’s Tehran interlocutors wanted the Saudi ambassador dead. The deposition does not even claim that Arbabsiar’s supposed handlers had approved a plan to kill Jubeir until after the Iranian-American returned to his native country on July 20.

Nevertheless, Arbabsiar is quoted telling the informant on July 14 that the full $100,000 had already been collected in cash at the home of “a certain individual.” Preparations for the transfer of the $100,000 had thus commenced well before the assassination plot allegedly got the green light.

The amount of $100,000 does not even appear credible as a “down payment” on a job that the FBI account says was to have cost a total of $1.5 million. It would represent a mere 6 percent of the full price. Bearing in mind that the DEA informant was supposed to be representing the demand of a ruthlessly profit-motivated Los Zetas drug cartel for a high-stakes political assassination well outside its purview, 6 percent of the total would represent far too little for a “down payment.”

The $100,000 wire transfer must have been related to an understanding that had been reached on something other than the assassination plan. Yet it has been cited by the administration and reported by news media as proof of the plot — and key evidence of Iran’s complicity therein.²

The Qods Force Connection

The FBI account of the July 17 meeting shows the DEA informant leading Arbabsiar into a statement of support for an assassination. The informant, obviously following an FBI script, says, “I don’t know what exactly your cousin wants me to do.” But the deposition notes “further conversation” following that invitation for a clear position on a proposal coming from the informant, indicating that what Arbabsiar was saying did not support the administration’s allegation that the assassination plot was coming from Tehran.

After the FBI evidently sought again to get the straight forward answer it was seeking, however, Arbabsiar is quoted as saying: “He wants you to kill this guy.” The informant then presents a fanciful plan to bomb an imaginary restaurant in Washington where Arbabsiar was told the Saudi ambassador liked to dine twice a week and where many “like, American people” would be present. “You want me to do it outside or in the restaurant?” asks the informant, to which question the Iranian-American replies, “Doesn’t matter how you do it.” At another point in the conversation, Arbabsiar goes further, saying, “They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, fuck ‘em.”

These statements appear at first blush to be conclusive evidence that Arbabsiar and his Iranian overseers were contracting for the assassination of Jubeir, regardless of lives lost. But there are two crucial questions that the FBI account leaves unanswered: Was Arbabsiar speaking on behalf of the Qods Force or some element of it? And if he was, was he talking about a plan that was to go into effect as soon as possible or was it understood that they were talking about a contingency plan that would only be carried out under specific circumstances?

The deposition includes several instances of Arbabsiar’s bragging about a cousin who is a general, out of uniform and involved in covert external operations, including in Iraq — clearly implying that he belongs to the Qods Force. Arbabsiar is said to have claimed that the cousin and another Iranian official gave him funds for his contacts with the drug cartel. “I got the money coming,” he says. Subsequently, in one of the most extensive quotations from the recorded conversations, Arbabsiar says, “This is politics, so these people they pay this government…he’s got the, got the government behind him…he’s not paying from his pocket.” The FBI narrative identifies the person referred to here as Arbabsiar’s cousin, a Qods Force officer later named as Abdul Reza Shahlai, but again, there is not a single direct quotation backing the claim. And the reference to “these people” who “pay this government” suggests that “he” is connected to a group with illicit financial ties to government officials.

This excerpt could be particularly significant in light of press reports quoting a US law enforcement official saying that Arbabsiar had offered “tons of opium” to the drug cartel and that he and the informant had discussed what the New York Times called a “side deal” on the Iranian-held narcotics.³ If these reports are accurate, it seems possible that Arbabsiar approached Los Zetas on behalf of Iranians who control a portion of the opium being smuggled through Iran from Afghanistan, while seeking to impress the drug cartel operative with his claim to have close ties to the Qods Force through Shahlai. But if the DEA informant then pressed him to authenticate his Qods Force connection, he may have begun discussing covert operations against Iran’s enemies in North America.

The only alleged evidence that Arbabsiar was speaking for Shahlai and the Qods Force is Arbabsiar’s own confession, summarized in the criminal complaint. But, at minimum, that testimony was provided after he had been arrested and had a strong interest in telling the FBI what it wanted to hear.

The deposition makes much of a series of three phone conversations on October 4, 5 and 7 between Arbabsiar and someone who Arbabsiar tells his FBI handlers is Gholam Shakuri, presenting them as confirmation of the involvement of Qods Force officers in the assassination scheme. But the FBI apparently had no way of ascertaining whether the person to whom Arababsiar was talking was actually Shakuri. After the October 4 call, for example, the FBI account merely records that Arbabsiar “indicated that the person he was speaking with was Shakuri.”

On their face, moreover, these conversations prove nothing. In the first of the three calls, the person at the other end of the line, whom Arbabsiar identifies to his FBI contact as Shakuri but whose identity is not otherwise established, asks, “What news…what did you do about the building?” The FBI agent again suggests, “based on my training, experience and participation in this investigation,” that these queries were a “reference to the plot to murder the Ambassador and a question about its status.”

But Arbabsiar is said to have claimed in his confession that he was instructed by Shakuri to use the code word “Chevrolet” to refer to the plot to kill the ambassador. In a second recorded conversation, Arbabsiar immediately says, “I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready, it’s ready, uh, to be done. I should continue, right?” After further exchange, the man purported to be “Shakuri” says, “So buy it, buy it.” Despite the obvious invocation of a code word, it remains unclear what Arbabsiar was to “buy.” “Chevrolet” could actually have been a reference to either a drug-related deal or a generic plan having to do with Saudi and other targets.

In a third recorded conversation on October 7, both Arbabsiar and “Shakuri” refer to a demand by a purported cartel figure for another $50,000 on top of the original $100,000 transferred by wire earlier. But there is no other evidence of such a demand. It appears to be a mere device of the FBI to get “Shakuri” on record as talking about the $100,000. And here it should be recalled that the account in the deposition shows that the transfer of the $100,000 had been agreed on before any indication of agreement on a plan to kill the ambassador.

The invocation of a fictional demand for $50,000, along with the dramatic difference between the first conversation and the second and third conversations, suggests yet another possibility: The second and third conversations were set up in advance by Arbabsiar to provide a transcript to bolster the administration’s case.

Terrorist Plot or Deterrence Strategy?

Even if Qods Forces officials indeed directed Arbabsiar to contact the Los Zetas cartel, it cannot be assumed that they intended to carry out one or more terrorist attacks in the United States. The killing of a foreign ambassador in Washington (not to speak of additional attacks on Saudi and Israeli buildings), if linked to Iran, would invite swift and massive US military retaliation. If, on the other hand, the Qods Force men instructed Arbabsiar to conduct surveillance of those targets and prepare contingency plans for hitting them if Iran were attacked, the whole story begins to make more sense.

Iran lacks the conventional means to deter attack by a powerful adversary. In its decades-long standoffs with the United States and Israel, amidst recurrent talk of “preemptive” strikes by those powers, Iran has relied on threats of proxy retaliation against US and allied state targets in the Middle East.⁴ The Iranian military support for Lebanon’s Hizballah, in particular, is widely recognized as prompted primarily by Iran’s need to deter US and Israeli attack.⁵

In one case in 1994-1995, Saudi Arabian Shi‘i militants carried out surveillance of potential US military and diplomatic targets in Saudi Arabia, in a way that was quickly noticed by US and Saudi intelligence.⁶ Although the consensus among US intelligence analysts was that Iran was preparing for a terrorist attack, Ronald Neumann, then the State Department’s intelligence officer for Iran and Iraq, noted that Iran had done the same thing whenever US-Iranian tensions had risen. He suggested that Iran could be using the surveillance for deterrence, to let Washington know that its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would be in danger if Iran were attacked.⁷

Unfortunately for Iran’s deterrent strategy, however, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was also carrying out surveillance of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and in November 1995 and again in June 1996, that group bombed two facilities housing US servicemen. The bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996, which killed 19 US soldiers and one Saudi Arabian, was blamed by the Clinton administration’s FBI and CIA leadership on Iranian-sponsored Shi‘a from Saudi Arabia, with prodding from Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, despite the fact that bin Laden claimed responsibility not once but twice, in interviews with the London-based newspaper, al-Quds al-‘Arabi.⁸

Hani al-Sayigh, one of the Saudi Arabian Shi‘a accused by the Saudi and US governments of conspiring to attack the Khobar Towers, admitted to Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier, who interviewed him at a Canadian detention facility in May 1997, that he had participated in the surveillance of US military targets in Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iranian intelligence. But, according to the FBI report on the interview, al-Sayigh insisted that Iran had never intended to attack any of those sites unless it was first attacked by the United States. And when Dubelier asked a question later in the interview that was based on the premise that the surveillance effort was preparation for a terrorist attack, al-Sayigh corrected him.⁹

With threats of an Israeli or US bombing attack on Iran, with Saudi complicity, mounting since the mid-2000s, a similar campaign of surveillance of Saudi and Israeli targets in North America would fit the framework of what the Pentagon has called Iran’s “asymmetric warfare doctrine.” If Arbabsiar spoke of such a campaign in his initial meeting with the DEA informant, he certainly would have piqued the interest of FBI counter-terrorism personnel. And this scenario would also explain why the series of meetings in late June and the first half of July did not produce a single statement by Arbabsiar that the administration could quote to advance its case that the Iranian-American was interested in assassinating Adel al-Jubeir or carrying out other acts of terrorism.

A plan to conduct surveillance and be ready to act on contingency plans would also explain why someone as lacking in relevant experience and skills as Arbabsiar might have been acceptable to the Qods Force. Not only would the mission not have required absolute secrecy; it would have been based on the assumption that the surveillance would become known to US intelligence relatively quickly, as did the monitoring of US targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-1995.

The Qods Force officials were certainly well aware that the Drug Enforcement Agency had penetrated various Mexican drug cartels, in some cases even at the very top level. US court proceedings involving Mexican drug traffickers who were highly placed in the Sinaloa drug cartel between 2009 and early 2011 reveal that the US made deals with leaders of the cartel to report what they knew about rival cartel operations in return for a hands-off approach to their drug trafficking. ¹⁰  Further underlining the degree to which the cartels were honeycombed with people on the US payroll, the DEA informant in this case was not merely posing as a drug trafficker but is reportedly an actual associate of Los Zetas with access to its upper echelons, who has been given immunity from prosecution to cooperate with the DEA.¹¹

When Did Arbabsiar Become Part of the Sting?

The Obama administration’s account of the alleged Iranian plot has Arbabsiar suddenly changing from terrorist conspirator to active collaborator with the FBI upon his September 29 arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He is said to have provided a confession immediately upon being apprehended, after waiving his right to a lawyer, and then to have waived that right repeatedly again while being interviewed by the FBI. Then Arbabsiar cooperated in making the series of secretly recorded phone calls to someone he identified as Shakuri.

For someone facing such serious charges to provide the details with which to make the case against him, while renouncing benefit of counsel, is odd, to say the least. The official story raises questions not only about what agreement was reached between Arbabsiar and the FBI to ensure his cooperation but about when that agreement was reached.

One clue that Arbabsiar was brought into the sting operation well before his arrest is the DEA informant’s demand in a September 20 phone conversation with Arbabsiar in Tehran that he either come up with half the $1.5 million total fee or come to Mexico to be the guarantee that the full amount would be paid.

Yet the FBI account of that conversation shows Arbabsiar telling the informant, without even consulting with his contacts in Tehran, “I’m gonna go over there [in] two [or] three days.” Later in the same evening, he calls back to ask how long he would need to remain in Mexico. Even if Arbabsiar were as feckless as some reports have suggested, he would certainly not have agreed so readily to put his fate in the hands of the murderous Los Zetas cartel — unless he knew that he was not really in danger, because the US government would intercept him and bring him to the United States. Making the episode even stranger, Arbabsiar’s confession claims that when he told Shakuri about the purported Los Zetas demand, Shakuri refused to provide any more money to the cartel, advised him against going to Mexico and warned him that if he did so, he would be on his own.

Further supporting the conclusion that Arbabsiar had become part of the sting operation before his arrest is the fact there was no reason for the FBI to pose the demand — through the DEA informant — for more money or Arbabsiar’s presence in Mexico except to provide an excuse to get him out of Iran, so he could provide a full confession implicating the Qods Force and be the centerpiece of the case against Iran.

The larger aim of the FBI sting operation, which ABC News has reported was dubbed Operation Red Coalition, was clearly to link the alleged assassination plot to Qods Force officers. The logical moment for the FBI to have recruited the Iranian-American would have been right after the FBI recorded him talking about wiring money to the bank account and casually approving the idea of bombing a restaurant and before his planned departure from Mexico for Iran. The only way to ensure that Arbabsiar would come back, of course, would be to offer him a substantial amount of money to serve as an informant for the FBI during his stay in Iran, which he would receive only upon returning. If Arbabsiar had already been enlisted, of course, it would also mean the keystone of the case — the wiring of $100,000 to a secret FBI bank account — was a part of the FBI sting.

FBI Trickery in Terrorism Cases

FBI deceit in constructing a case for an Iranian terror plot should come as no surprise, given its record of domestic terrorism prosecutions based on sting operations involving entrapment and skullduggery. Central to these stings has been the creation of fictional terrorist plots by the FBI itself. In 2006 the “Gonzales Guidelines” for the use of FBI informants removed previous prohibitions on actions to “initiate a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state or local offense.”¹²

Perhaps the most notorious of all these domestic terrorism sting operations is the case in which Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, leaders of their Albany, New York mosque, were sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for allegedly laundering profits from the sale of a shoulder-launched missile for a Pakistani militant group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.

In fact, there was no such terrorist plot, and the alleged crime was the result of an elaborate FBI scam directed against two innocent men.¹³  It began when an FBI informant pretending to be a Pakistani businessman insinuated himself into Hossain’s life and extended him a $50,000 loan for his pizza parlor. Only months after the informant had begun loaning the money did he show Hossain a shoulder-launched missile, and suggest that he was also selling arms to his “Muslim brothers.” It was a devious form of entrapment; the prosecutors later argued that Hossain should have known the loan could have come from money made in the sale of weapons to terrorists and was therefore guilty of money laundering.

The FBI approach to entrapping Hossain’s friend Aref was even more underhanded. Aref was never even made aware of the missile or the phony story of the illegal arms sale. But on one occasion, when he was present to witness the transfer of loan money, what was later said to have been the missile’s trigger system was left on a table in the room. Prosecutors then argued the theory that Aref had seen the trigger, which looks much like a staple gun, and thus had become part of a conspiracy to “assist in money laundering.”

Many other domestic terrorism cases have involved deceptive tactics and economic inducements deployed by the FBI to involve American Muslims in fictional terrorist plots. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s Law School found more than 20 terrorism cases that involved some combination of “paid informants, selection of investigation based on perceived religious identity, [and] a plot that was created by the government.”¹⁴ This history makes it clear that the Justice Department and FBI are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate terrorism cases against targeted individuals, and that misrepresenting these individuals’ intentions and actual behavior has long been standard practice. The trickery and deceit in past “counter-terrorism” sting operations provides further reason to question the veracity of the Obama administration’s allegations in the bizarre case of Manssor Arbabsiar.

•  This article was first published in Middle East Research
and Information Project (MERIP)

1. The full text of  of the “amended criminal complaint” is on line.
2. New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Reuters, October 12, 2011
3. New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Bloomberg, October 12, 2011
4. For an official US recognition of Iran’s “assymetric warfare doctrine” as a tool of deterrence of “any would-be invader,” see Department of Defense, Unclassified Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010, p. 1.
5. Michael Young, “Another Israel-Hezbollah War?” Middle East Security at Harvard, National Security Study Program, February 28, 2008
6. Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1997 and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 276.
7. Gareth Porter, “US Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran,” Inter Press Service, June 24, 2009.
8. Gareth Porter, “FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of Bin Laden Role,” Inter Press Service, June 25, 2009.
9. Gareth Porter, “US May Have Concealed Deterrent Aim of IranianPlan,” Inter Press Service, October 21, 2011.
10. New York Times, October 24, 2011.
11. So said ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella in his podcast of October 18, 2011, online
12. Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States
13. This account of the case is drawn from Petra Bartosiewicz, “To Catch a Terrorist,” Harper’s, August 2011
14. Targeted and Entrapped, pp. 50-52, fn 17

Through the museum, community projects, fairs, workshops and media, CEDICAM educates the public and campesinos, or small scale farmers, about the history of the Mixteca’s land, belief systems, traditions, architecture and agriculture and how they can help remedy current problems. They promote the use of traditional and appropriate technologies (sustainable and affordable tech) such as reforestation, development of corn seeds through selective breeding, sustainable water and soil preservation techniques, green composting, and milpas, an organic agricultural system that produces large yields and mixes a variety of crops, usually including maize (corn), beans and squash. CEDICAM also works with groups such as Witness for Peace to share knowledge with visitors that can benefit communities in other parts of the world.

For 10 days in September I was a member of one of the delegations to Oaxaca organized by Witness for Peace (WfP). Our itinerary was loaded with experiences like our meeting at CEDICAM, focusing on global trade, food sovereignty, migration, indigenous rights and agro-ecology (the application of ecological principles to agricultural techniques). WfP is an international grassroots organization founded in 1983 in response to U.S. Government-supported violence in Nicaragua perpetrated by Contra soldiers. They advocate peace, justice and sustainable economies by changing harmful U.S. Government and corporate policies. The WfP Oaxaca office opened in the Summer of 2006. During this period state violence against striking teachers seeking living wages and improved working conditions led to many deaths and human rights abuses.

Carlin Christy and Tony Macias, our delegation’s WfP guides and interpreters, also shared a wealth of information about the histories of Mexico, WfP and corporate globalization as well as practical skills to improve our group’s cohesion and functionality such as anti-oppressive practice and consensus decision making. All of the delegates also had much knowledge and a diversity of experience to contribute to these discussions and to our conversations with Oaxacan farmers and activists.

As explained by Eleazar, Mixteca means “place of clouds” because long ago it was an environment with regular rainfall and lush vegetation. Today it’s one of the poorest regions in Mexico and one of the most eroded areas in the world. The importation of goats, sheep, pigs and construction methods by the Spanish led to mass deforestation and soil erosion. More recently, some farmers use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery that damages and compacts soil leading to increased crop failures, water runoff and worsened erosion. Besides the ecological damage, a devastated local economy made worse by unjust free trade policies has forced many young farmers to emigrate. Eleazar and CEDICAM’s goal is to provide the community with hopeful alternatives to preserve the land and natural resources so that people don’t have to leave for the U.S. and elsewhere to support themselves and their families.

Before our arrival at CEDICAM we met with a variety of allied groups based in Oaxaca doing equally important and beneficial work on related issues but with differences in focus and approach. The first organization we visited was an NGO called Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA). According to Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa, a founding member of EDUCA, their focus is on two main goals, democratization of Oaxacan communities and the defense of rights of disenfranchised Oaxacans. One of their projects is “Our Rights Are Born From Our Roots” a campaign to train and organize communities through forums and media on the issue of rights; namely, self-determination, rights to land and resources, political rights of women and rights to education.

Another project, “The Initiative for Peace and Justice”, is a partnership with allied groups to create a truth commission for state-sanctioned crimes against activists. Miguel also shared recent data about Oaxaca State: its population is about 3.8 million people, it has over 500 municipalities, 16 indigenous groups and 8 major geographical regions. It’s the second poorest Mexican state after Chiapas with high child malnutrition and maternal death rates and approximately 76% living in poverty. The majority of work in Oaxaca is connected to agriculture and many farmers lost their livelihoods after the implementation of NAFTA in the 90s. He estimates that today about 60% of youth entering the job market are unemployed, forcing many to emigrate or enter the black market.

The next morning we visited Zaira de la Rosa Jiminez, Martha Miranda and Pete Noll of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, a group promoting food sovereignty through cultivation and distribution of amaranto, or amaranth crops. Amaranth is a plant related to quinoa and is indigenous to Asia and Mesoamerica (in fact, it is one of Mesoamerica’s oldest crops). Puente views amaranth as an ideal crop to help overcome the problem of malnutrition. It’s higher in protein than rice, wheat and corn, contains more fiber and less carbohydrates and is gluten-free. Amaranth is a practical and affordable crop because it’s highly drought-resistant, easily harvested, grows quickly and is easy to cook. After having had a chance to try amaranth in the forms of breakfast cereals, snack bars, and drinks, I would add that it’s also delicious.

That afternoon we met with farmers in the milpa system where the amaranth plants are grown with corn, zucchini, and pata de leon, a type of red flower used in Day of the Dead celebrations. At the end of the day we travelled to the library in Mazaltepec to meet with town authorities, campesinos, mothers, and their families. We discussed our respective backgrounds and their struggles as a community including protecting crops from GMOs, inability to compete with cheap subsidized corn from the U.S., and how that has contributed to economic problems forcing people in the community to emigrate.

Following Puente, we joined a large contingent from Red Autonoma para la Soberania Alimentaria (RASA), an autonomous network of people working for food sovereignty through training workshops, urban gardening and sharing of knowledge and resources. Representatives including Aerin Dunford, Lydia Zarate Ubieta and Jorge Narvaes Perez showed us some of the current projects of RASA members such as mushroom cultivation, a rooftop garden, a cornfield and apricot orchard on the city outskirts, and even invited us into the home of some of the RASA members where we had a feast featuring some of the best tortillas and oyster mushrooms I’ve ever tasted.

From there we returned to the central district of Oaxaca City where we met with Wilfred Mendoza, a member of the board of directors of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca (UNOSJO). They’re a prominent social organization which promotes sustainable economies, self-determination and respect for indigenous culture through media, technical assistance, fairs, educational workshops and conflict resolution for rural landowners. Wilfred sees agro-ecology as an ancient technology whose resurgence is essential for food sovereignty and a fundamental part of defending indigenous rights, a view shared by Beatriz Salinas and Esperanza Pilar Chagoya Minguer of the Center for Indigenous Rights Flor y Canto, whom we visited the next day.

Flor y Canto is a human rights center that promotes indigenous rights with a focus on women’s empowerment and the protection of natural resources through education, denouncement of rights violations, legal defense, and support of allied groups such as the People’s Committee for the Defense of Water. They see an extreme polarity between indigenous cultures that care for the earth and a capitalist system that commodifies and destroys the earth. Many laws are dictated by money and capital so one of Flor y Canto’s roles is to create spaces where solidarity and humanity are respected. By helping indigenous communities obtain water through well construction projects and legal defense of water rights, they’re also addressing the problem of emigration. The national water commission ConAgua charges for water at price levels beyond what many campesinos can afford. During drought years such as in 2006, waves of migrations occurred because farmers couldn’t access enough water to irrigate crops.

After our delegation’s meeting with CEDICAM, we travelled further out to the countryside to San Pedro Coxcaltepec where we had an opportunity to stay with a local family of subsistence farmers dealing with many of the issues we learned about throughout the previous week. While there we had an opportunity to speak to town elders, learn about different aspects of the local culture, learn more about the work involved in managing a milpa, as well as participate in the work by shoveling and mixing green compost. This was an especially valuable segment of the delegation because it gave us a glimpse into the daily experience of Oaxacan campesinos, revealed a sense of the beauty and challenges of life in the Mixteca, and gave us time to bond with the family. It’s one thing to read about struggles of farmers or even hear about them through allied advocacy groups, but to meet campesinos who express their concerns directly while sharing their hospitality (as we also did with Puente and RASA) is an empathic experience creating a personal connection to the issues we came to Oaxaca to learn about. This will undoubtedly inspire all of us in the delegation to make use of the knowledge passed on to us in our own lives and to share it with others. Given the current political and economic situation in America and most of the world, strategies for food sovereignty, education and community organizing will be increasingly important for all of us.

Two weeks after returning from the delegation I was at the Occupy Seattle demonstration where I had a chance encounter with a protester attending the rally because he was “tired of getting screwed by government.” I told him I was tired of everyone getting screwed by transnational corporations and financial institutions backed up by corrupt governments. He went on to say “Obama cares more about Mexicans than the American people,” to which I replied “I recently got back from Mexico where I heard firsthand accounts of how our government and Wall Street harms Mexican workers as much as American workers if not more. They wouldn’t need to migrate if they could support their families back home.” Rather than argue, he muttered “Well, they’ve been screwing all of us in the 99%…” before wandering back into the crowd, which wasn’t a bad outcome but sort of a letdown. I was ready to help him understand in greater detail how and why immigration and mass unemployment are both symptoms of neo-liberal policies at the core of economic crises in America, Mexico and around the world. It’s possible he simply didn’t feel like debating, but perhaps someone with a common but erroneous view that Mexicans (presumably immigrants) are a source of their problems was, in fact, with a few words and widened context, able to accept that they’re as much victims of an unjust system as ourselves.

Amidst the masses in Westlake Park, consisting of a diversity of ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds, I visualized the Occupation Movement strengthening their solidarity, not only within separate communities but with the global 99% uniting against the wealthiest 1% who benefit most from the current system and are the true source of the most pressing social-economic-environmental problems of our time. If this were to happen we might stand a chance to ensure a better world for future generations. La lucha sigue! (The struggle continues!)

But when the scanty evidence in the FBI account about what Arbabsiar actually proposed is interpreted in the context of Iran’s past strategy for deterring external attack, it suggests that Arbabsiar’s mission may have been to arrange for surveillance of, and contingency plans for, targets to be hit in the event that Iran is attacked by the United States or Israel.

Iran is relatively weak in conventional military strength, so it has relied heavily on unconventional means of deterrence by letting it be known that proxies in other countries could retaliate against U.S. and Israeli targets if those countries attacked Iran. The clearest example of that strategy was an Iranian-directed campaign of surveillance of U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-95.

The FBI account contains a series of references to operations said to be proposed by Arbabsiar that hint at just such an unconventional deterrent strategy.

The account says Arbabsiar’s interest in the first meeting with an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant included, “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia”. That reference makes it clear that the Iranian interest was not in Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir but in a more generic list of targets.

In a footnote, the FBI account says the “missions” discussed would have involved “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country”, located both in the United States and elsewhere.

There is not a single quote from any of that series of meetings between late June and mid-July in which Arbabsiar explains the nature and purpose of those missions, despite the fact that most, if not all, the meetings would have been recorded by the DEA informant under standard FBI procedure.

That signal omission may have been necessary to conceal the fact that Arbabsiar was proposing surveillance of various targets and contingency plans that would be carried out against the targets only in case of an attack on Iran by the United States, Israel or both.

The account has the DEA informant saying that it would “take the one  point five for the Saudi Arabia” and later adds that he would “go ahead and work on Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can”.

The FBI agent who signed the document then says, “I understand this to mean…that the cost…of conducting the assassination would be 1.5 million dollars.” But there is no actual evidence in the document that the figure had been discussed in connection with a proposal for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador.

Those allusions to “the Saudi Arabia” in the context of a discussion of multiple targets involving more than one country’s facilities suggests that the figure was for surveillance of, and contingency plans for, retaliatory attacks against a number of Saudi targets. By spring 2011, when Arbabsiar was asked to make contact with paramilitary forces in Mexico, according to the FBI account, Iran had reason to believe that the danger of an Israeli attack with U.S.complicity had increased significantly.

In November 2010, The Guardian had published the text of a November 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks revealing that U.S.and Israeli officials had discussed the delivery to Israel of GBU-28 “bunker buster” bombs that would allow an Israeli attack to penetrate underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

U.S. and Israeli officials in the meeting reported in the cable agreed that it would have to be done quietly to avoid any allegations that the U.S. government was helping Israel prepare for an attack on Iran. Then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright conceded to Newsweek that there was concern among military leaders about how the shipment would be perceived by the Iranians .

The decision to identify Saudi targets for attack in the United States and Mexico presumably reflected strong Iranian suspicions that the Saudi government was prepared to allow Israeli planes to use Saudi airspace to attack Iran, as had been reported by the Times of London and Jerusalem Post in June 2010.

A project to hire a Latin American drug cartel to carry out surveillance of a range of Saudi and Israeli facilities and prepare plans for retaliatory attacks if Iran itself were to be attacked would parallel a similar Iranian campaign involving U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994 and 1995.

By late 1994, the CIA station in Saudi Arabia was reporting that a number of U.S. targets in the country, including military bases and the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, were under surveillance by Iranians and their Saudi Shia allies, as reported in a Senate Intelligence Committee Staff report in September 1996 and other published sources.

It was generally believed within the intelligence community that this surveillance by Iranian allies in Saudi represented a terrorist threat.

But Ron Neumann, then director of the Office Northern Gulf Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, observed at the time that Iranian surveillance of U.S. targets had recurred whenever U.S.-Iran tensions were high, and could be defensive maneuvers on Iran’s part to deter an attack rather than signaling an intent to carry out terrorism.

After the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen in eastern Saudi Arabia in June 1996, the United States accused Iran of having ordered the attack, primarily on the ground that it had organised the surveillance of U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia.

In a striking parallel to the reports in recent days of sensitive intelligence linking Iranian government officials to the alleged assassination plot, the Washington Post reported in April 1997 that there was intelligence tying Hani al–Sayegh, a Saudi suspect in the Khobar Towers bombing, to Brigadier General Ahmad Sherifi of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Post story said that intelligence had “persuaded a growing number of officials in Washington and Ryadh of Iran’s direct involvement in the (Khobar Towers) attack”.

That intelligence consisted of a secretly recorded al-Sayegh phone conversation in Canada about his meeting with Gen. Sherifi two years before the bombing.

When al-Sayegh was interviewed by Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier in May 1997 in Ottawa, Canada, he admitted to having participated in the videotaping of another U.S. air base in Saudi Arabia as part of a surveillance programme initiated and directed by Sherifi.

But the FBI record of that interview, to which this writer was given access in 2009, shows that al-Sayegh stated very clearly to Dubelier that the surveillance work for the Iranians was not to prepare for one or more terrorist attacks but to identify potential targets for retaliation in the event of an attack on Iran.

When Dubelier later asked him a question which ignored that distinction, al-Sayegh repeated that it was not to prepare for a terrorist bombing.

Thirteen Saudis, including al Sayegh, were indicted in 2001 for carrying out the Khobar bombing, based entirely on alleged confessions by Shi’a activists detained – and presumably tortured – by the Saudis.

The indictment blamed Iran for directing the bombing, charging that the defendants had “reported their surveillance activities to Iranian officials and were supported and directed in those activities by Iranian officials”.

The 1994-95 Iranian effort in Saudi Arabia, which was apparently not expected to be kept secret from U.S. intelligence, suggests that Iranian officials may have been aiming for a similar effect in seeking a Mexican drug cartel to do surveillance and contingency planning on Saudi and Israeli targets.

The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.

But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.

The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq.

The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.

U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.

In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the January 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.

Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.

But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.

There is no indication in the FBI account of the   investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.

The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was  therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.

Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot.

But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday  afternoon”.

Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”.

On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.

Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s
militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.

Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.

In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.

Talking with reporters about the memo on April 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him  whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.”

In a news briefing in Baghdad July 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.

Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”.

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.

“While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani.

But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.

“I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.

Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.”

That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.”

Although the legal document, called an amended criminal complaint, implicates Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and his cousin Ali Gholam Shakuri, an officer in the Iranian Quds Force, in a plan to assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, it also suggests that the idea originated with and was strongly pushed by a undercover DEA informant, at the direction of the FBI.

On May 24, when Arbabsiar first met with the DEA informant he thought was part of a Mexican drug cartel, it was not to hire a hit squad to kill the ambassador. Rather, there is reason to believe that the main purpose was to arrange a deal to sell large amounts of opium from Afghanistan.

In the complaint, the closest to a semblance of evidence that Arbabsiar sought help during that first meeting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador is the allegation, attributed to the DEA informant, that Arbabsiar said he was  “interested in, among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia”.

Among the “other things” was almost certainly a deal on heroin controlled by officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Three Bloomberg reporters, citing a “federal law enforcement official”, wrote that Arbabsiar told the DEA informant he represented Iranians who “controlled drug smuggling and could provide tons of opium”.

Because of opium entering Iran from Afghanistan, Iranian authorities hold 85 percent of the world’s opium seizures, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency. Iranian security personnel, including those in the IRGC and its Quds Force, then have the opportunity to sell the opium to traffickers in the Middle East, Europe and now Mexico.

Mexican drug cartels have begun connecting with Middle Eastern drug traffickers, in many cases stationing operatives in Middle East locations to facilitate heroin production and sales, according to a report last January in Border Beat, an online news service run by University of Arizona journalism students.

But the FBI account of the contacts between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant does not reference any discussions of drugs.

The criminal complaint refers to an unspecified number of meetings between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant in late June and the first two weeks of July.

What transpired in those meetings remains the central mystery surrounding the case.

The official account of the investigation cites the testimony of the informant (referred to in the document as “CS-1″) in stating, “Over the course of a series of meetings, ARBABSIAR explained to CS-1 that his associates in Iran had discussed a number of violent missions for CS-1 and CIS-1′s purported criminal associates to perform.”

The account claims that the mission discussed included murdering the
ambassador. But no specific statement proposing or agreeing to the act is
attributed to Arbabsiar. “Prior to the July 14 meeting, CS- 1 had reported that he and Arbabsiar had discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of other targets,” the account states.

The targets are described as involving “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country…located either in or outside the United States”, without mentioning any discussion of the Saudi ambassador.

Both that language and the absence of any statement attributed to Arbabsiar imply that the Iranian- American said nothing about assassinating the Saudi ambassador except in response to  suggestions by the informant, who was already part of an FBI undercover operation.

The DEA informant, as the FBI account acknowledges in a footnote, had previously been charged with a narcotics offence by a state in the U.S. and had been cooperating in narcotics investigations – apparently posing as a drug cartel operative – in return for dropping the charges. The document is notably silent on whether the conversation was recorded.

A former FBI official familiar with procedures in such cases, who spoke to IPS anonymously, said the FBI would normally have recorded all such conversations touching on the possibility of terrorism.

The absence of quotes from any of those meetings suggests that they do not support the case being made by the FBI and the Obama administration.

The account is quite explicit, on the other hand, that the July 14 and July 17 meetings were recorded at FBI direction. Statements quoted from those transcripts show the DEA informant trying to induce Arbabsiar to indicate agreement to assassinating the Saudi ambassador.

The informant is quoted as saying he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia”. He declared that he “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information we can”.

At one point the informant says, “You just want the, the main guy.” And at the end of the meeting, he declares, “[W]e’re gonna start doing the guy”.

The fact that not a single quote from Arbabsiar shows that he agreed to assassinating the ambassador, much less proposed it, suggests that he was either  non-committal or linking the issue to something else, such as the prospect of a major drug deal with the cartel.

Arbabsiar’s quotes from a Sep. 2 phone conversation referring to the cartel as “having the number for the safe” and “once you open the door that’s it” could refer to a drug transaction that had been discussed, while the FBI account suggest those quotes refer to the assassination and “other projects” with the Iranian group.

At the July 17 meeting, the DEA informant presented a plan to blow up a restaurant to kill the mbassador, with the possible deaths of 100-150 people, eliciting a lack of concern on the part of Arbabsiar about such deaths.

During a visit to Iran in August, Arbabsiar wired two equal payments totalling $100,000 to a bank account in New York. But he was still under the impression that he was about to cash in on a deal with the cartel.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Arbabsiar had told an Iranian-American friend from Corpus Christie, Texas, “I’m going to make good money.”

There is also circumstantial evidence that Arbabsiar may have even been brought into the sting operation to help further implicate his cousin Gholam Shakuri in the terrorist plot.

Arbabsiar met with his cousin Shakuri in late September and told him that the cartel was demanding that he, Arbabsiar, go to Mexico personally to guarantee payment. That demand from the DEA was an obvious device by the FBI to get Shakuri and his associates in Tehran to demonstrate their commitment to the assassination.

The FBI account indicates that Shakuri told Arbabsiar that he was responsible for himself if he went to Mexico. That statement would have been a warning sign for Arbabsiar, if he still believed he was dealing with one of the most murderous drug cartels in Mexico, that he would be risking his own life for a group that was no longer taking responsibility for him.

Yet Arbabsiar flew to Mexico as if unconcerned about that risk.

After his arrest on September 29 Arbabsiar waived the right to a lawyer and proceeded to provide a complete confession. A few days later, he placed a phone call to Shakuri which was recorded “at the direction of federal enforcement agents”, according to the FBI.

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.

During a bilateral meeting in early August, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird discussed issues pertaining to the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere. Also high on the agenda was U.S.- Canada relations. This included the declaration, Beyond the Border: Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness issued by U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper back in February of this year. At a news conference following her meeting with Minister Baird, Secretary Clinton stressed that, “it’s critical that we ensure our border remains a safe, vibrant connector of people, trade, and energy. And today, the minister and I discussed other ways to expand trade and investment; for example, by reducing unnecessary regulations.” It is interesting that Clinton brought up energy as this is also an integral part of North American integration which is being further advanced through the U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue, as well as other initiatives.

Another issue that came up during Clinton and Baird’s meeting was the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. If approved, it would carry oil sands crude from the province of Alberta and pass through the U.S. states of Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas to delivery points in Oklahoma and Texas, at the Gulf of Mexico. While addressing a question at a joint news conference about delays on coming to a decision on the pipeline, Secretary Clinton said, “We are leaving no stone unturned in this process and we expect to make a decision on the permit before the end of this year.” Several months back, the Environmental Protection Agency expressed concerns about environmental impacts associated with the project, as well as the level of analysis and information being provided. With the State Department’s recent release of its Final Environmental Impact Statement, the Keystone XL pipeline has moved one step closer to a final decision. The review period will now go, “beyond environmental impact, taking into account economic, energy security, (and) foreign policy.” While there continues to be vocal opposition to the project, it is being touted as important for future U.S. energy security.

In May of this year, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a series of hearings which, among other things, examined legislation concerning the North American-Made Energy Security Act. The bill called on, “the President to expedite the consideration and approval of the construction and operation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.” With regards to oil consumption, it acknowledged that, “While a significant portion of imports are derived from allies such as Canada and Mexico, the United States remains vulnerable to substantial supply disruptions created by geopolitical tumult in major producing nations.” It goes on to say. “The development and delivery of oil and gas from Canada to the United States is in the national interest of the United States.” The bill also stated, “Continued development of North American energy resources, including Canadian oil, increases domestic refiners’ access to stable and reliable sources of crude and improves certainty of fuel supply for the Department of Defense.” In other words, more Canadian oil is needed to fuel the U.S. war machine. This all ties in with the perimeter security deal and further removing trade barriers. It is part of U.S. efforts to secure more access and control of Canadian resources.

The Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) was created at the same time as President Obama and Prime Minister Harper signed the Beyond the Border declaration. The RCC aims to further advance regulatory harmonization in a wide range of areas. While the border security and regulatory cooperation discussions are separate, they do go hand in hand. In June, the RCC held its first meeting which centered around the development of a joint action plan and the creation of working groups in key sectors. The Terms of Reference for the RCC establishes the mandate and principles by which it will carry forth. When an action plan is completed it, “will outline activities for a period of up to two years. At the end of the two-year period, Canada and the United States will review the work of the RCC and consider the adoption of a new Action Plan.” While this is a bilateral initiative, “The United States and Canada will seek, to the extent possible, to coordinate the RCC’s activities with the work of the U.S.-Mexico High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Council when the three governments identify regulatory issues of common interest in North America.” At some point, these dual-bilateral councils could come together to form a single continental regulatory body.

On August 15, 2011, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano met with Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, “to discuss the ongoing partnership between the United States and Canada to work collaboratively on our shared vision for perimeter security and strengthen information sharing to better combat cross-border crime, while expediting legitimate trade and travel.” The bilateral meeting was an opportunity to review progress being made on an action plan that is being developed by the Beyond the Border Working Group. The Toronto Star reported that Napolitano and Toews also discussed increasing joint border operations such as the Shiprider program which allows law enforcement officials from both countries to operate together. Secretary Napolitano explained. “We’re looking at expanding that kind of basic concept to other areas where we can do more by way of joint law enforcement operation, intelligence gathering and … joint policing.” This would also further build off of the Integrated Border Enforcement Team Program, a bi-national initiative which is comprised of both Canadian and American law enforcement agencies. Eventually, you could see the creation of a joint U.S.-Canada organization managing the border.

Following his meeting with Secretary Napolitano, Minister Towes also announced that Prime Minister Harper and U.S. President Obama will meet in early fall where they will be updated and provide further directions on plans for a North American security perimeter. There are fears that any deal reached could be lopsided with Canada giving up more than it gains. Over the last number of years, Canada has already enacted many U.S. security measures. As part of a continental security perimeter arrangement, Canada could be forced to comply with any new U.S. requirements, regardless of the risks they may pose to privacy and civil liberties.

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?