By Larry Jones March 23, 2008
On March first the Bush funded Columbian Air Force invaded neighboring Ecuador and dropped bombs that killed at least 17 and wounded many others, including several Mexican students who were visiting an encampment of FARC rebels. President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela immediately sent weapons of war to their borders with Columbia. It was a tense moment.
Less than a week later, March 6, ONE MILLION Columbians led by the Movement of the Victims of State Crimes took to the streets to let the Columbian regime of President Alvaro Uribe, his patron George W. Bush, and the world know that state terrorism and paramilitary violence have failed and must stop.
One of the marchers was human rights activist Ivan Cepeda, whose father, a Columbian senator, was brutally killed in1994. The reason he was there, he said, was
“to tell the government that we don’t want any more paramilitaries, to tell the government that we don’t want any more violations of human rights of farmers who have been taken out of their lands, because they deserve a better future. We want democracy. This is a political defeat for the government of President Alvaro Uribe, who rejected this march, and he’s attacking it by saying it’s a march of guerrillas.”
For many years, and now under George W. Bush, the United States has looked to Columbia as a its major ally in South America. It especially does so now because Uribe opposes left leaning Ecuador and Venezuela, and also because of U.S. interest in oil, land, water, agricultural resources, ports and cocaine.
Since Columbia’s attack inside Ecuador the heads of state of Columbia, Ecuador, and Venezuela met at a summit in the Dominican Republic and cooled off the diplomatic and military crisis which Columbia had ignited. This prevented an immediate military explosion, but the ongoing reality is that right wing President Alvaro Uribe is cast against much of the rest of South America, which strongly opposes the U.S. regime of George W. Bush. Furthermore, many Columbians, especially the rural poor, oppose both Uribe and Bush.
Bush supports Uribe with $3 to 5 billion each year through Plan Columbia begun by Bill Clinton. Most of that money ends up with the military and the paramilitary groups closely connected to the government who are responsible for up to ten thousand civilian deaths each year. Their targets are those who oppose the government and opponents in the drug trade. Uribe has long had ties to cocaine trafficking. The rebel groups have also been charged by imperialist nations, especially the U.S., with involvement in the drug trade.
The Bush regime also seeks to get Venezuela put on its terrorist list after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said while in Brazil recently, “We do have to be concerned about terrorism. We have to be concerned about the safety and well-being of countries in the region.” To Bush’s desire to put Venezuela on his terrorist list, President Hugo Chavez said that Bush “can shove it”.. in his pocket”
It is a hopeful sign that in many parts of Latin America, the Bush regime is held in very low regard and actions against him squeeze out more political room for progressive forces to act.A
Ecuador is eager to rid itself of a U.S. air base in Manta. President Rafael Correa has told the U.S. that “We can negotiate with the U.S. about the base in Manta, if they let us put a military base in Miami, if there’s no problem, we”ll accept.”
In 2006 when the Bush regime sought to get the support of Ecuador for a so-called free trade agreement, Ecuadoran people took to the streets for days.
In Bolivia the allegedly non-political U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has pumped money into the hands of those who oppose the socialist leaning government of President Evo Morales. The U.S. Ambassador says that U.S. aid “is given to those who need it most.” That turns out to be those who oppose the programs of Morales. One worker for Morales” party who had just been beaten up by opposition goons, told a reporter that he was working on a new constitutional assembly “to redistribute wealth from natural resources and guarantee broader access to education, land, water, gas, electricity, and health care for the country’s poor majority.”
These are the things USAID should be doing, instead of helping to fund and strengthen the infrastructure of the right wing governors.
So it’s no surprise that there have been numerous demonstrations against the United States and its policies by the people of Bolivia, especially the poor.
BUSH’s 2007 LATIN AMERICAN TOUR
Just a year ago, President George Bush faced thousands of demonstrators and protestors on his five-nation Latin American tour. Police clashed with demonstrators in Brazil and with students in Colombia lobbing explosives at authorities.
In Sao Paulo a quiet demonstration of more than 6,000 students, environmentalists, and left-leaning Brazilians became violent as police fired tear gas and hit protestors with batons. Brazilian authorities announced at least 18 people were injured. After the clashes the protest carried on with fewer people as the marchers railed against Bush and the war in Iraq.
In the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 500 people yelled “Get Out, Imperialist!” as they marched to a Citigroup Inc. bank branch and burned an effigy of Bush. Protesters also targeted the U.S. Consulate in Rio de Janeiro, splattering it with bright red paint meant to signify blood.
The UK Guardian reported that Bush is no more popular in Argentina, where a protest by several thousand demonstrators turned ugly. In the coastal city of Mar del Plata, where he was attending a regional summit, protesters set fire to a bank, looted stores and battled riot police.
Earlier, the tone was struck by the former football (soccer) star Diego Maradona, who wore a “Stop Bush” T-shirt to an anti-Bush “counter-summit” that drew some 4,000 protesters from around the world and easily eclipsed the official summit in the public’s attention. “I’m proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this human trash, George Bush,” said Maradona.
Maradona’s anti-Bush sentiment was replicated across a country driven to a near standstill by tens of thousands of people angry at the Iraq war and the US president’s push for a region-wide free trade deal. Hospital and subway workers went on strike in Buenos Aires.
Except for the right wing Uribe government in Columbia, the Bush Regime has almost no solid allies in South America.
U.S. INTERVENTION A LONG DARK STORY
This, of course, fits with the long history of the United States” meddling in Latin America. Rooted in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the U.S. has always looked upon Latin America as an area in which the U.S. can operate and intervene to the exclusion of all others. On the political website of Richard Pond we find this accurate explanation of just what was the so-called doctrine of President James Monroe.
“The U.S. lays imperialist claim to hegemony over the Americas, and reserves the right to intervene in Latin American countries” internal affairs whenever they threaten U.S. interests. It give the U.S. the right to intervene with elections in these countries, overthrow their regimes, terrorize them, train their police in the art of torturing dissidents, etc.
Monroe put it more delicately, but that is what he and presidents who succeeded him have actually meant.
GOOD NEIGHBORS?
Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” was allegedly to stop any imperialist aims toward Latin America. He said the U.S. was to be the kind of neighbor “who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”
This had a really nice ring to it, but now look at these pictures, and there are many more, which tell the real story.
Nicaraguan dictator Samoza with Roosevelt, 1939
Cuban dictator Batista with FDR,1942
The truth is that Roosevelt supported the dictatorships in Latin America and was able to implement imperialist goals despite this pleasant sounding good neighbor policy.
ALLIANCE FOR “PROGRESS”
After the U.S. supported bloody dictator in Cuba, Fuglencio Batista, was overthrown by a righteous popular uprising in 1959 led by Fidel Castro’s forces, the U.S. could not accept the defeat and furthermore was concerned about the example Cuba had set for the rest of Latin America. Remember this was right in the middle of a rather hot Cold War.
In this context, John F. Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress. This policy was supposed to bring free market solutions to poverty. Actually the generous dollars sent to Latin America under the Alliance mostly ended up in the hands of militaries and paramilitaries, many trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia in counter insurrection techniques and torture. Their mission was to prevent communism from taking hold in any Latin American country. So numerous dictators remained close friends of the U.S. so long as they professed anti-communist views.
Stephen Rabe, author of The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America, has said that the democratic and reformist emphasis of the Alliance for Progress was increasingly sidelined in favor of a preference for authoritarianism and militarism. Very true, but the academic language hides the fact that such authoritarianism and militarism actually meant death squads, murder, rape, and burning homes of villagers.
One Latin American poet, Ricardo Arjona, put the peasants” plight this way
“The “stars and the stripes” have appropriated my flag
our freedom is nothing more than a prostitute,
if the external debt has taken away our “splendor”
the hell with geography, borders are gone”
CHENEY AND EL SALVADOR
In 2004 VP Dick Cheney debated John Edwards and looked for a good example from the past to compare what the administration wanted in Iraq. He cited El Salvador. He said terrorists were defeated and “El Salvador is a lot better now.”
But many remember how US arms were used to viciously slaughter peasants in their battle against oppression of a U.S.-backed dictatorship, how nuns were raped and murdered by government supported death squads, how Archbishop Oscar Romero, who came to support the peasants cause, was assassinated while saying mass. The atrocities were numerous and dripped with blood. Today El Salvador is NOT better. The U.N has declared that half the country lives in poverty today.
So Cheney’s use of El Salvador as an example of what the Bush regime wants for Iraq is right on target. That’s exactly what happening in Iraq right now. And it’s the same approach the Bush regime is using in Latin America.
This vicious octopus which reaches its tentacles into every part of the world must be stopped, and we should be in the forefront mobilizing the masses of discontented and disgusted Americans to do just that.