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"The consensus in Washington is that we have the right to do all kinds of things in Latin American countries that we would never permit here. The new governments there do not agree. They also think they have the right to an independent foreign policy. Brazil's foreign minister went to Iran this month, where he publicly defended Iran's right to enrich uranium, and announced that expanding commercial and other ties to Iran were "a foreign policy priority" for Brazil. The State Department and US media ignored these statements because they came from Brazil, but when Venezuela does the same thing, it is considered impermissible." --Mark Weisbrot (later in the article)
Why this screaming hypocrisy and two-facedness in the Bushwhack and corpo/fascist 'news' monopoly treatment of Brazil and Venezuela? Because Venezuela is the target of a Bushwhack war plan to instigate a fascist secessionist civil war in Venezuela's oil rich northern province of Zulia (on the Caribbean, adjacent to Colombia), and Brazil--where US global corporate predators operate more freely than in Venezuela--is not such a target. Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, has said that the Bushwhack reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean is a threat to Brazil's oil reserves on the Atlantic coast as well, but obviously that is a long range goal; Exxon Mobil & brethren will order the demonization of Brazil's leader opportunistically, when the time comes. Right now, it's Chavez, Chavez, Chavez.
They're looking for a "domino" with which to begin the defeat of the leftist democracy movement in Latin America. They tried Bolivia. Bolivia and all of South America fought back on the split up of Bolivia by the white separatists in the gas/oil rich eastern provinces. Evo Morales evicted the US ambassador and the DEA for complicity in that dirty rotten plan, with the full backing of the new South American Common Market--UNASUR. But their main target is, and always has been, Venezuela--and likely Ecuador, both adjacent to Colombia, and vulnerable to death squads, mercenaries and military forces--fattened by $6 BILLION in US taxpayer military aid--crossing their borders in support of secessionist coups, and in coordination with US naval and air forces along their Caribbean and Pacific coasts.
Colombia--where thousands of union leaders and others have been murdered by the Colombian military and its death squads--colluded early this year on a US/Bushwhack effort to pull Ecuador and Venezuela into a hot war with Colombia. Colombia also colluded on a plan to draw Chavez into hostage negotiations with the FARC guerrillas and then hand Chavez a diplomatic disaster, with dead hostages. Chavez, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, largely defeated those schemes, but those events made it crystal clear who the Bushwhacks' main targets are. (I am increasingly of the opinion that land-locked Bolivia was a test case for the fascist secession strategy. Bolivia was the most vulnerable, given its very racist, rich, white separatist minority. But the US war plan there was never very viable, and when Paraguay elected a leftist president this year, cutting off the most likely route for US/Colombian support troops to the Bolivian separatists, the secessionist movement descended into rioting and random murder and lost all credibility. The Bushwhacks could revel in the chaos and death--a side benefit for them--and study the strategic situation, and the South American reaction, for their grander scheme of grabbing Venezuela's and probably Ecuador's oil, using Colombian forces and coastal access.)
Weisbrot writes:
"These are the kinds of double standards that the Obama administration will have to abandon if it wants a new relationship with Latin America. The left governments of Latin America have all reached out to our new president-elect with great hopes and expectations. It will now be up to our new government to break with the past, and respect the sovereignty and dignity of our neighbors to the south. That's all they are asking for."
That is my hope as well. But Obama's appointments do not point that way. Her has Hillary Clinton as SoS. He husband prepared the way for Oil War II-South America with "Plan Colombia" (billions of US tax dollars to support and militarize that narco-fascist government). She had, as her chief political strategist, Mark Penn, a paid agent of the Colombian government. She clearly supports the Colombian "free trade" deal (reward for murdering thousands of union leaders), though she denied it during the campaign. And Obama appointed Chiquita International's death squad attorney, Eric Holder, as chief law enforcement officer of the U.S. These appointments do not bode well for "the sovereignty and dignity of our neighbors to the south," nor even for simple respect for human life. Where oil is concerned, we have learned that our national political establishment is as immune to human suffering and the rule of the law as Hitler was.
I applaud Weisbrot--a very influential writer--for making the effort. But I do not feel optimistic that Obama can--or even wants to--change two hundred years of almost continual U.S. carnage and rapine in Latin America. And, right now, our national political establishment is more desperate than ever, for oil fields to exploit, and for other riches that they can easily steal. The "sovereignty and dignity" asserted by the people of South America--with a vast leftist democracy movement that is moving into Central America as well--stand in their way. The likelihood is that the Obama administration, like every U.S. administration before them--with the exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal--will do everything in its power to crush it, by direct or by devious means.
I don't think that our corpo/fascists will succeed. And that might deter Obama and his corpo/fascist operatives--not morality, but rather reality. The South Americans have achieved unprecedented cooperation among themselves. Every 'divide and conquer' strategy of the Bushwhacks has failed. With the weapon of the Bushwhacks' Financial 9/11, they might gain back some ground for our global corporate predators, but it will be limited ground. The South Americans have tasted self-rule, and they are never going back. And if Obama proceeds with the Oil War II plan, or winks at a Rumsfeld-orchestrated private war, the result will be permanent alienation between the northern and southern halves of our hemisphere, and further curtailment and banning of U.S. corporations and financiers. South America will proceed to develop its trade with the "global south"--a perfect example being Brazil's foreign minister visiting Iran (as Weisbrot points out). Financial interests in Asia, Africa and other regions, and amongst South and Central American countries, will benefit, and our corps and financiers will be further frozen out. We cannot change this situation by outright or devious force--not in Latin America, where democracy has a firm hold. Respect and cooperation are the only option. The war "option" will only make things worse. And that is the most that I think we can hope for--that Obama respects REALITY.
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