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--$43 million to coup-supporting, rightwing groups in Honduras alone, through John McCain's "International Republican Institute" via USAID, where more than a hundred anti-coup activists have been murdered and many more beaten, tortured, raped, threatened and unjustly imprisoned;
--millions more of our tax dollars to recruit and "train" rightwing students for destabilization campaigns against leftist (majorityist, democratic) governments, and to fund campaigns such as the presidential recall election in Venezuela in 2004 (which Hugo Chavez won, hands down) and the white separatist riots and murders in Bolivia in 2008 (which got the U.S. ambassador and the DEA kicked out of Bolivia);
--$6 billion to the Colombian military which has waged a campaign of thousands of extrajudicial murders of union leaders, teachers, peasant farmers, community organizers, human rights workers, journalists, political leftists and others, and has furthermore displaced 2 to 3 million peasant farmers--one of the worst human displacement crises on earth;
--millions more of our tax dollars to the Peruvian military and police (which used a helicopter gunboat to mow down indigenous who were protesting the rape of the Amazon forest--"free trade for the rich" enforcement dollars);
--millions more in black budget operations to fund psyops such as the "suitcase full of money" caper out of Miami (to slander/embarrass the leftist presidents of Argentina and Venezuela), and the "miracle laptop" in Colombia (alleged to contain "evidence" that the leftist presidents of Ecuador and Venezuela were helping FARC guerillas obtain a "dirty bomb");
--and this does not begin to exhaust the oppressive, fascist, violent purposes to which our tax dollars are being devoted in Latin America alone, often into the pockets of private contractors such as Dyncorp, DAI and Blackwater.
The U.S. is up to no good in Latin America, and nothing has changed under the Obama administration that I can see. In fact, U.S. policy may be getting worse--with the successful rightwing military coup in Honduras, and the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement, recently disclosed, for a dramatic escalation of the U.S. military presence in Colombia, adjacent to Venezuela's northern oil region.
This matter of "handing out communications equipment to opposition groups" in Cuba is not an innocent matter--the U.S. just trying to be helpful. It is part of a plan for overthrowing the Cuban government, after the two elderly Castro brothers die, and undoing all of the gains of the Cuban people, including their superior medical care system (free to all), their superior educational system (free to all) and other basic decencies of life for all Cuban, and to rip off these people like U.S. corpo-fascists are doing everywhere else they can get their vulture talons into the government. It is also part of a regional plan, for U.S. dominance of the Central America/Caribbean/northern South America region, including toppling the other leftist governments in Central America adjacent to Honduras--Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala--and gaining control, possibly by war, of Venezuela's oil reserves, facilities and shipping in the Gulf of Venezuela and northern Venezuelan provinces.
It is notable that the U.S.-supported coup government in Honduras, after conducting a so-called election under martial law (which the rightwing 'won') did not wait for that 'elected' government to take power, but--with no legitimacy whatsoever as a government--has already withdrawn Honduras from the ALBA trade group--a regional trade group, organized by Venezuela, to empower the smaller countries of the Central America/Caribbean region with barter trade agreements and collective clout in resisting U.S. economic bullying. They looted the ALBA funds (to which Honduran workers had contributed) and peremptorily withdrew, losing considerable benefits for Honduras' poor (for instance, cheap oil from Venezuela, which permitted the Zelaya government to lower the price of bus tickets for poor workers). The U.S. is supporting these actions--and brutal repression--with multi-millions of our tax dollars.
The U.S. has almost always been on the wrong side of every struggle for democracy and social justice in Latin America, throughout our history. It may be a psychological bar to serious reform of U.S. policy in Latin America--as well as serious reform within the U.S. itself (our own democracy)--to hold the delusion that it has ever been otherwise. I can only think of a couple of exceptions to outright perfidy in U.S./Latin American policy (FDR, JFK and to some extent Carter). It is otherwise a tale of murder, mayhem and gross exploitation, supported by the U.S. government and military, and paid for by us. We, too, have been oppressed, but it has been on the whole less visible (except for the slaughter of so many of our soldiers in Vietnam) until recently, with the Bush Junta. Now it is quite overt. We are being used as "cannon fodder" for corporate resource wars, as our corporate rulers have looted our country and us, leaving most of us with shit jobs or no jobs, and broken and looted infrastructure.
I suppose that it is dreaming to expect the Obama administration to overturn the grossly immoral and anti-democratic U.S. policy in Latin America, in his first year in office, after eight years of a fascist junta here and no doubt entrenchment of Bushwhack moles throughout our agencies and military, and a thick dossier of U.S. evil in Latin America over the last century. He should never have promised a new policy of "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America, because either he is powerless to deliver it or he didn't mean it. It fooled a lot of people, here and there. The people there are onto it now; the people here mostly are not. When moderate leftists like Lula da Silva are disgusted with the Obama administration (and believe me, he is), and are actively resisting and defying U.S. dictates, you know, a) that U.S. policy hasn't changed, and b) that it will fail in its ill-intended goals without the use of force. Force is all the U.S. has any more. That is why the SEVEN new U.S. military bases in Colombia and all the rest of this U.S. military buildup in the region. We have nothing good to sell to people. The global corporate predators and war profiteers who rule over us intend to destroy as many Latin American democracies as they can, take their resources and enforce slave labor upon them. Honduras is the prototype. Colombia is the weapon.
I have just learned that two of the seven people killed at the CIA assassination base in Afghanistan were Blackwater mercenaries. The drone plane assassinations have killed some 700 Afghan civilians. Who knows how many innocent civilians, or mere patriots fighting the invasion of their country (not terrorist plotters) the U.S. "paramilitaries" have killed? Afghanistan is suffering a similar U.S. syndrome--that all we have to export is war, mayhem, death and domination. Winning "hearts and minds" is no more possible in Afghanistan than it was in Vietnam, or than it will be in Venezuela, or Cuba, or Bolivia, or Ecuador. All the U.S. seems able to do is kill, terrorize and subdue by force, at the cost to us in vast amounts of money we don't have and "blowback."
It is not reform that we need. Reform, in any case, has been blockaded by Diebold & brethren, and by vast, entrenched and lethal corruption. What we need is a rebirth--as has occurred in most of Latin America--of the very institutions of democracy. Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have not just established honest and transparent elections and elected leftist governments, they have rewritten their constitutions in an open, participatory process and submitted them to the voters. Those are the most advanced democracies--demonized here as "dictatorships," as big a "Big Lie" as has ever been told. This is what we need--a fundamental re-thinking of our founding principles, especially with regard to our corporate rulers and the military.
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