Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 25,
2005
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
January 26, 2005
A Not-So-Magical Reality
Latin
America and the US
By
TONI SOLO
When George Bush and Tony Blair start
talking loudly about defending "freedom" and "democracy"
and "ending poverty", people everywhere had better
watch out even more keenly than usual for their ever more precarious
liberties and economic resources. The US regime and its allies
are committed to genocidal aggression, unlawful judicial procedures,
debilitating "aid" blackmail and "free trade"
extortion as their main foreign policy tools. They have demonstrated
they will do whatever is necessary to get what they want.
People in Central America in
the 80s and in Colombia for over forty years have already lived
out the future in Iraq and other targets of international corporate
greed. Iraq was already destroyed economically by UN sanctions
and US-uk aerial bombardment through the '90s. But events in
Fallujah confirm that the country faces mass population displacement
over the next few years, just as millions of people in Colombia
have been displaced. That population shift will create an even
more desperate pool of semi-skilled and unskilled labour compelled
to accept low wages incapable of providing a decent life.
Apart from losing the benefits
of its oil, Iraq's cultivable soils will be ravaged by chemical
pesticides and herbicides and planted with "green desert"
GM crops to enrich foreign corporate agri-business, as is happening
throughout Latin America. Its water resources will be debilitated
and privatized just as is happening to water resources from the
Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Together with these social and
environmental catastrophes, the conditions imposed through "free
trade" policies, by the World Bank, the IMF, and by "aid"
programmes will create and sustain a continuous crisis of political
institutions meant to prevent reforms that benefit the poor majority.
Constant interference by the
US and its allies in the internal affairs of resource-rich poorer
countries purposefully creates instability so as to cripple countries'
abilities to deal effectively with mass poverty. In Latin America,
the example of US illegality and contempt for basic legal norms
is creating the conditions for renewed tyranny and dictatorship.
Ruthless opportunists like Presidents Uribe in Colombia, Gutierrez
in Ecuador, Toledo in Peru and Mesa in Bolivia and the US proxies
running Central America right now, are all too ready to copy
the Bush regime's freefall into criminality if they get the chance.
Trinidad, Sonia,
Granda: criminal abduction as State policy
Recent events in Colombia are
emblematic of that criminality. In January 2003, US agents helped
Ecuadoran security forces kidnap Simon Trinidad in Quito. Trinidad
was a negotiator for the Colombian FARC armed opposition to the
Colombian government during peace negotiations during the Presidency
of Uribe's predecessor Andres Pastrana. Trinidad was taken illegally
to Colombia from Ecuador and subsequently extradited to the United
States on a trumped up charge of having smuggled 5 kilograms
of cocaine.
By contrast, Salvatore Mancuso,
for whom the United States has ostensibly sought extradition
since 1997 from Colombia in connection with a shipment of 19
tons of cocaine, moves freely in Colombia. In June last year,
Mancuso was invited to address the Colombian National Assembly.
He did so in July with two other chiefs from the AUC paramilitary
death squads as part of the spurious "peace negotiations"
between the AUC and the government. Colombian President Alvaro
Uribe is a long time supporter and collaborator of the death
squads as well as having been identified by the US authorities
as involved in narcotics in the early 1990s.
In February 2004 another FARC member, Nayibe Rojas Valderrama,
known by her nom de guerre "Sonia", was captured in
Cartagena del Chairá. In gross violation of basic legal
norms she was taken secretly to a naval vessel at sea where she
was interrogated by agents of the US Drugs Enforcement Agency.(1)
Then in December last year in the Venezuelan capital Caracas,
Ricardo Granda another leading FARC representative during the
failed peace negotiations with Andres Pastrana was kidnapped
and taken across the border to Colombia.
The Colombian government admitted
it had secretly paid members of the Venezuelan security forces
to help carry out the crime in support of members of the Colombian
security forces acting illegally inside Venezuela. The kidnapping
has led to an acute diplomatic crisis with the Venezuelan government.
These high profile cases only emphasize the routine violation
of basic rights by the Colombian authorities against ordinary
trades unionists, rural workers organizers, human rights defenders,
indigenous peoples organizations - anyone working to defend people's
basic rights.
US hall of
mirrors: Colombia and Iraq
Despite over US$3 billion of
US taxpayers' money in military aid, despite the support of the
drugs dealing paramilitary death squads and despite constant
recourse to flagrant illegality, President Uribe is losing the
war against the FARC just as the US is losing the war against
the Iraqi resistance. The High Command of the FARC's eastern
region claim to have killed over 1300 Colombian army soldiers
in 2004 for the loss of 245 of their own fighters.(2) Just as
in Iraq, abundant US funding, wholesale human rights abuses and
the militarization of vast areas of the country have failed to
defeat popular resistance.
Fighting on that scale indicates
clearly that the FARC control large parts of the national territory.
They represent a highly organized, belligerent force with a central
command recognized by the government in various negotiations.
The Bush regime sustains the war because they could hardly care
less how many die in Colombia so long as their corporate backers
get to extract the country's natural resources and exploit its
repressed labour force. The "war on drugs" and the
"war on terror" mask corporate imperialism that takes
billions of US taxpayers' money to subsidize the profits of a
few multinational corporations. Little has changed in a hundred
years, except for the worse.
Ecuadoran Supreme
Court: now you see it, now you don't
Meanwhile, in Ecuador, President
Gutierrez is manouevring to centralize power in the Presidency.
In December before the holiday recess, his political allies'
used their small majority in the Ecuadoran congress to dismiss
all the judges in the country's Supreme Court. They were able
to do that only because they had previously unconstitutionally
taken over the Executive Council of the Congress in an election
in which not a single opposition deputy was present, a circumstance
assisted by police who physically prevented opposition deputies
from participating.
Currently, broad sectors of
opinion throughout Ecuador are protesting the actions of Gutierrez's
congressional allies demanding that the President and his cronies
respect the Constitution. The crisis results from attempts by
Gutierrez' opponents in November 2004 to indict him for misusing
public funds to finance his presidential election campaign. Despite
losing overwhelmingly in last year's municipal elections, Gutierrez
is determined to use his allies' majority in Congress to suppress
debate on measures likely to be rejected by a majority of people
in Ecuador. Among the disputed measures are a bilateral "free
trade" deal with the US, legal immunity for US military
operating in Ecuador and deeper involvement in US-Colombian military
operations along the Ecuador-Colombia border against the FARC.
US hypocrisy:
the deafening sound of silence
Typically, the US has kept
mum about Gutierrez' unconstitutional antics. The routine double
standard that characterizes global US policy applies with a vengeance
in Latin America. Anti-democratic forces throughout the continent
get a benevolent nod of approval from the US government and its
local ambassador-proconsuls. So in Colombia, narcotics dealing
terrorists like Mancuso and his fellow mass-murderers, "terrorists"
according to the US, openly flaunt their crimes with impunity.
US representatives say nothing.
At the same time, government opponents are murdered wholesale
by Mancuso's followers and by his fellow paramilitaries. The
US funds and trains the killers, both directly through "sub-contractors"
and indirectly through the Colombian army. Similarly, when the
Venezuelan Congress votes through changes in the Supreme Court,
US officials openly cry outrage at a "threat to democracy".
When a whole Supreme Court is disappeared in Ecuador, US representatives
request anonymity to observe lamely, "It was reflective
of how weak the democratic institutions are here."(3)
Nicaragua:
US embassy saddled wrong horse, rides backwards
The turmoil that has racked
the Andean countries may not be so acute in Central America,
but Nicaragua is suffering similar political chaos resulting
from crude US intervention. US ambassador Barbara Moore seems
not to have read her own embassy's 2003 USAID country plan for
Nicaragua which states, "In order to achieve the regional
strategic objective of More, Responsive, Transparent Governance,
USAID/Nicaragua will concentrate its efforts on strengthened
rule of law," Moore seems to interpret this to mean meeting
with President Bolaños and opposition politicians behind
closed doors to organize strategy against a possible win by the
Sandinistas in the 2006 presidential election and to support
IMF demands for water privatization.
Right now the Sandinista party
- the FSLN - controls almost all Nicaragua's municipal authorities,
including the capital Managua which it held comfortably in the
recent municipal elections. There is nothing transparent or legal
about a US ambassador directly organizing the political life
of Nicaragua or any other country. The fact that they do so as
a matter of course only reflects the die-hard hypocrisy of the
US State Department.Moore's main problem is that her predecessor,
Oliver Garza, picked yet another loser in the long list of US
deadbeat nags in Latin America when he helped shoo in Enrique
Bolaños in 2001.
Bolaños is probably
the most isolated leader in all of Latin America. A handful of
deputies support him in the National Assembly. His recent threat
to declare a state of emergency met a damp response from both
the police and the army. Desperate for support, he has had to
turn to the Organization of American States who solemnly declare
that they are "monitoring" the situation. Bolaños'
only rock-solid support is in the US embassy. Washed out as President,
he is probably resigned to having to put on a brave face until
the elections in 2006.
Bolaños only managed
to avoid indictment for mis-use of public funds in 2004 by invoking
his presidential immunity. In December his Finance Minister Luis
Eduardo Montiel resigned, averring the impossibility of working
with a President whose office directly manages up to 40% of the
national budget on a discretionary basis.(4) Montiel said he
was never able to get the President or his advisers to address
the confusion of capital investment items with operational costs
- presumably another victory for Ambassador Moore-style transparency.
There have been many twists
in the long running whodunnit about why Nicaragua remains the
second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti. The latest
search for an exit, inspired by a deal between the Sandinista
FSLN and the Liberal PLC, the other largest bloc in the legislature,
involves a dramatic shift in power from the Presidency to the
National Assembly. The move is possibly unique in Latin America.
Ambassador Moore is energetically
seeking to head off the initiative, but for now her favoured
bet, Bolaños, is lame. The usual economic threats from
the US and its prosthetic aids, the IMF and the World Bank, may
well have less effect than usual on the country's politicians
who must be acutely aware of events elsewhere in Latin America.
The country's impoverished majority are now so immiserated, not
much more can be done to them that hasn't been done already.
Toledo goes
El Greco: long faces in Lima
That pattern repeats itself
in Peru and Bolivia. The US puppets in those countries follow
the same dysfunctional patterns as their patrons in Washington.
Although their countries' institutions perhaps tend to work better
than those in the United States. This month, President Toledo
of Peru accepted an investigation into electoral fraud by his
party. His sister is under house arrest. His Minister of Defence
is under investigation for misuse of public funds. His Interior
Minister has resigned.
Just as in Ecuador, public
opposition is widespread to a government supported "free
trade" deal with the US. To underscore resistance to Toledo's
policies, over the New Year, former army officer Antauro Humala
with 150 supporters captured a police station in Andahuaylas,
about 450km south of the capital, Lima. Soon quashed, the revolt
was symbolic of nationalist resentment at Toledo's failure to
resolve the needs of Peru's poor majority and his perceived subservience
to foreign, especially Chilean, influence.
Tin men, straw
men. Oz in La Paz : "if we only had a brain...."
In Bolivia, the widely predicted
consequences of President Mesa's attempt to manipulate the results
of last July's referendum on the use of the country's gas resources
have come about. Mesa cannot get his energy legislation through
Congress because opposition politicians led by Evo Morales and
his MAS party have imposed their own interpretation of the referendum
result in the country's legislative assembly. Mesa is squeezed
between the IMF and giant energy multinationals on the one hand
and by a new wave of mass demonstrations, roadblocks and hunger-strikes
mounted by Bolivian trades unions and other organization of the
popular movement on the other.
After trying to raise fuel
prices at the end of December to satisfy IMF demands, President
Mesa is struggling to keep his administration together. Four
Ministers have resigned following a censure motion in the Bolivian
congress. Mesa has had to retract the fuel price rises. That
debacle follows his decision to annul a contract with French
water multinational Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux following a highly
effective civil strike organized by the federation of local community
organizations in the city of El Alto, just 14km from the capital
La Paz. Now, in the resource-rich eastern province of Santa Cruz,
Mesa faces an attempt by local politicians to declare autonomy.
Creme de la
creme: Jean Brodie takes over the State Department
Perhaps the mess Colin Powell
is leaving behind in Latin America is by way of bequeathing a
poisoned blouse to his successor, manipulative schoolmarm Condoleezza
Rice. Like Jean Brodie, the Mussolini-worshipping prima donna
teacher in Muriel Spark's novel, Rice has no qualms about sending
young people off to die for fascism, the US variety, in Iraq
or Colombia. Her likely deputy, former US Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick, is another fictional dead ringer, this time
for Flannery O'Connor's fake blind preacher Asa Hawkes. But instead
of Hawke's bogus spiel "If thine eye offend thee, plucketh
it out!" Zoellick's invitation to everlasting economic life
is a mordant "trade-in-your-sovereignty!" discourse
with the "or else..." menacingly unspoken.
Under Condoleezza Rice, the
State Department will help the Pentagon steadily develop the
already long planned aggression against Venezuela and deepen
US military involvement in Colombia. The two things inevitably
go together. From Rice's second in command, Robert Zoellick,
one can expect a renewed and even more zealous focus on enforcing
progress in the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Zoellick, former Olin Professor
of National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy, will have little
difficulty integrating a more complete military dimension to
his "free trade" evangelism. His main job in Latin
America will likely be to drum up solidarity among the Andean
countries for US moves against Venezuela and to wave sticks and
carrots at Presidents Lula, Kirchner and Vazquez in Brazil, Argentina
and Uruguay, respectively, to encourage them to mind their own
business. Chile's President Lagos is already fully on board the
plutocrat "free trade" gravy train.
The current chaos in so many
Latin American countries is a result of incessant, direct and
indirect, US and allied intervention. The catastrophic effects
of that intervention on ordinary people in Latin America are
of no importance to characters like Rice and Zoellick nor to
the ruthless multinational corporate crooks to whose interests
they lend a political front. In their different ways, the Venezuelan
and Cuban governments and the FARC and ELN armed movements in
Colombia represent the main resistance to those interests.
So, over the next four years,
the US and its allies will seek to destroy the government of
President Chavez in Venezuela and at the same time attempt a
final solution to the conflict in Colombia. The regimes in Washington
and Bogota do not have to defeat Venezuela in some once-and-for-all
showdown. They will try and slowly bleed Venezuela's revolution
to death, just as they did in Nicaragua and as they have so far
miserably failed to do in Cuba. It's no exaggeration to think
that humanity's future may depend on the outcome of the developing
conflict.
Toni Solo is an activist based in central America - contact
via www.tonisolo.net.
Notes
1. El estado colombiano y los
agentes gringos secuestran a "Sonia". Dick Emanuelsson.
Aporrea, 19/01/05.
2. http://www.anncol.org/side/1116
17/1/2005
3. Ecuador's president treads
swirling political waters, STEVEN DUDLEY Miami Herald 18/1/2005
4. ?Un Ministro de Hacienda
debe tener respaldo absoluto? La Prensa, 21/12/2004
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