"...the U.S. Military's Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the Pentagon's arm in Latin America and responsible for all U.S. bases the region, and Florida International University (FIU) have partnered in the creation of a so-called 'Strategic Culture' Initiative, a center that hosts workshops and issues reports on the 'strategic culture' of different Latin American countries. At present, reports have been issued from (LINKS)
Argentina; Bolivia; Brazil; Chile; Colombia; Cuba; Ecuador; El Salvador; Guatemala; Haiti; Nicaragua; Peru; and Venezuela."(SNIP)
"The use of the term 'culture' in 'strategic culture' studies is key, as it is the central organizing concept of anthropology. By reframing corporate-military strategy as 'culture,' FIU-SOUTHCOM intentionally draws upon the legitimacy and integrity of anthropology and other social sciences to depoliticize and bolster its case for military occupation of the Americas." http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/2775-coup-university-southcom-and-fiu-team-up-on-counterinsurgency(my emphasis)
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The list of FIU-SOUTHCOM's so-called "experts" for this aggressive, militaristic re-framing of narratives about Latin American countries--for the purpose of Pentagon-enforced U.S. "free trade for the rich"--is truly a "Rogue's Gallery" of liars, whores, assassins, war profiteers and golpistas. Do read the list and descriptions of the participants.
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The article concludes with a passionate call for the anthropology profession to investigate and disavow the Pentagon's use pseudo-social science to destroy democracy in Latin America:
"Further investigation of the interlocking actors in the non-profit-military-academic-industrial complex is warranted, as is focused research on FIU-SOUTHCOM event participants and "strategic culture" reports, in order to expose the ways that U.S. military pseudo-social science is threatening democracy and self-determination throughout the hemisphere. And just as members of the American Anthropological Association have come together as a discipline to oppose the army's Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists and other social scientists are beginning to mobilize to stand up to SOUTHCOM's latest use of the academy and anthropological concepts in the service of remilitarization that threatens the lives of people we live with, work with, and study throughout the hemisphere."http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/2775-coup-university-southcom-and-fiu-team-up-on-counterinsurgency----
Well worth reading. I repeat, the Pentagon never sleeps. And I have warned about this repeatedly. The Pentagon has a war plan in Latin America. We have seen evidence of it in its placement of war assets around Venezuela, the reconstitution of the U.S. 4th Fleet (mothballed since WW II) in the Caribbean, the fascist coup in Honduras (with the plane carrying the elected president out of the country, at gunpoint, stopping for refueling at the U.S. air base in Honduras), the U.S./Colombia bombing/raid on Ecuador in 2008 and other events. The propaganda arm of that war plan has been in operation for some time. This new FIU-SOUTHCOM project is merely a more formal and visible component of it. All very alarming, in my opinion. I don't think the next war--in the Forever War being perpetrated by our U.S. multinational corporate/war profiteer rulers--is going to be in the Middle East. I think it's going to be in Latin America--to rein in the leftist democracy movement that has swept the region and force Latin America back into "U.S. backyard" status--a region of slave labor and resource theft (especially the oil resource).
This war plan is, for the moment, concentrated in a "circle the wagons" area including Central America, the Caribbean and the northern rim of South America (Colombia and Venezuela, especially Venezuela's northern oil provinces and Caribbean coast oil facilities, which are now monitored by the USAF from the Dutch islands right off Venezuela's oil coast). Colombia is already occupied by the U.S. military. In fact, President Obama and Sec of State Clinton left the Bushwhack ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, in place, until quite recently, apparently to cement U.S./Colombia military arrangements, with a secretly negotiated and secretly signed military agreement, extending the Pentagon's presence to at least seven more military bases in Colombia, and granting total diplomatic immunity to all U.S. soldiers and all U.S. military 'contractors,' no matter what they do in Colombia. This secret military agreement was recently declared unconstitutional, by the Colombia supreme court, and may have had a hidden, secondary purpose (to cover up war crimes in Colombia by the U.S. military and/or its 'contractors'), but with former Defense Minister Santos now as president and the fascists in control of the government, it will likely eventually be approved by the legislature. Santos is "making nice" with Venezuela, for the moment but I don't trust him at all. I think he's the Pentagon's boy.
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