Venezuelan Government To Launch International 9/11 Investigation

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | March 31 2006

Truth crusaders Walter and Rodriguez to appear on Hugo Chavez's weekly TV broadcast

Billionaire philanthropist Jimmy Walter and WTC survivor William Rodriguez this week embarked on a groundbreaking trip to Caracas Venezuela in which they met with with the President of the Assembly and will soon meet with Venezuelan President himself Hugo Chavez in anticipation of an official Venezuelan government investigation into 9/11.

Rodriguez was the last survivor pulled from the rubble of the north tower of the WTC, and was responsible for all stairwells within the tower. Rodriguez represented family members of 9/11 victims and testified to the 9/11 Commission that bombs were in the north tower but his statements were completely omitted from the official record.

Jimmy Walter has been at the forefront of a world tour to raise awareness about 9/11 and has still yet to receive any response to his million dollar challenge in which he offers a $1 million reward for proof that the trade towers' steel structure was broken apart without explosives.

Rodriguez said that he was told an FBI agent had asked the hotel him and Walter were staying in turn over a list of names of residents. Upon hearing this, the National Assembly provided armed military protection for the entirety of the trip. In addition, Walters said that CIA agents were seen surveilling the beach on which he and Rodriguez had handed out free DVD's a day earlier.

The US government attempted to sabotage the trip by putting Rodriguez, who has been decorated at the White House itself, and Walter on a no fly list.

Rodriguez (pictured above) and Walter are educating top Venezuelan officials on the evidence that 9/11 was a self-inflicted wound carried out by the military-industrial complex. They have also appeared on every Venezuelan television and radio station both private and state owned and have given huge presentations to major universities.

Upon visiting, Rodriguez said that the President of the Assembly, Nicolas Maduro's home was brimming with books, videos and documents about the 9/11 cover-up. Maduro, Venezuela's top legislator, intoned that he was ready to create an international investigative committee, looking into the "international crime scene" that is 9/11 and that this would be structured via Hugo Chavez's government.

Rodriguez and Walter are also set to appear on Hugo Chavez's weekly broadcast 'Alo Presidente' - which is often subsequently the source of major international headlines. If there is no coverage of this event then we know for sure that a blackout order is in place.

Rodriguez and Walter offered their full support for Charlie Sheen's recent public stance on 9/11 and were heartened by his efforts. The potential of a government level inquiry endorsed by Hugo Chavez dovetails with Sheen's call for an independent investigation to be carried out by political foreign nationals.

Though the establishment media will no doubt seek to demonize Chavez as a militant with an axe to grind, this is an exciting development and the next step on the road to a genuine investigation that will seek to uncover the truth rather than hide skeletons and whitewash as was witnessed with the staged Kean committee.

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Click here to listen to Rodriguez and Walter's interview on The Alex Jones Show. Please support our massive bandwidth costs by subscribing to Prison Planet.tv.
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A case for tailoring - and slowing - free trade in poor nations

by Robert B. Reich The New York Times
Fair Trade For All How Trade Can Promote Development By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton 315 pages. $30; £15.99. Oxford University Press.

It is not exactly a new debate. On my bookshelf sits "Which? Protection or Free Trade," edited by H. W. Furber and published in Boston in 1888. That was some 70 years after the British economist David Ricardo first suggested that the gains from trade exceed the losses regardless of whether trading partners are more or less economically advanced, as each nation shifts to where it has a comparative advantage. Most economists and policy makers now accept Ricardo's argument, although the popular debate over the merits of free trade continues.

The new and more interesting debate is about how the benefits of trade should be shared. During the 1990s, the so-called Washington consensus of officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United States Treasury Department thought the best way to spur growth in developing nations was for them to quickly lower their trade barriers and deregulate their markets. But that prescription has not worked especially well, even though it still shapes American trade policy. Apart from China and India, the gap between rich and poor nations has continued to widen. More than two billion people worldwide live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Trade talks initiated in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, were intended to redress the balance but have gone nowhere. The last major international meeting, in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico, ended in failure and recrimination, and there has been little progress since. The world's poorer nations think the richer ones are still offering a lousy deal.

In their provocative book, "Fair Trade for All," Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia, and Andrew Charlton, a research officer at the London School of Economics, argue that the poorer nations are right. A better deal would be for them to move toward free trade gradually, each according to its own particular circumstances. The authors urge richer nations to help poorer ones prepare themselves for trade, while dismantling their own trade barriers, which prevent developing nations from selling them many goods and services. Stiglitz is worth listening to. A winner of the Nobel in economic science in 2001 for his pioneering work in the economics of information, he was a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997 (during which time, in the interest of full disclosure, we frequently attended the same White House meetings), thereafter becoming chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. In other words, Stiglitz was in Washington when the Washington consensus was formed. He was a dissenter, however, and in recent years has been an outspoken critic of Washington's trade and global investment policies.

Stiglitz and Charlton show that standard economic assumptions are wrong when it comes to many developing economies. When markets in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere are opened, people often can't move easily to new industries where the nation has a comparative advantage.

Transportation systems that might get them there are often primitive, housing is inadequate and job training is scarce. They are vulnerable in the meantime because safety nets are weak or nonexistent. Most people lack access to credit or insurance because financial institutions are frail, so they are unable to start their own businesses or otherwise take advantage of new opportunities that trade might bring. Many poor countries are already plagued by high unemployment, and job losses in the newly traded sector might just add to it.

Hence, the authors argue, the pace at which poorer nations open their markets to trade should coincide with the development of new institutions - roads, schools, banks and the like - that make such transitions easier and generate real opportunities. Since many poor nations cannot afford the investments required to build these institutions, rich nations have a responsibility to help.

Without these other institutions in place, the authors say, trade by itself can do more harm than good. They point out that inequality increased after trade was liberalized in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay. Ten years after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, Mexico's real wages are lower than they were before, and both inequality and poverty have grown. Many of the manufacturing jobs that came to Mexico in the wake of Nafta have since been lost to China, partly because China invested heavily in education and infrastructure while Mexico, lacking tariff revenues, could not afford to do so.

According to Stiglitz and Charlton, every developing country that has succeeded in achieving rapid growth has protected its market to some extent until it was ready to dismantle trade barriers.

Moreover, they warn, one size does not fit all. Richer nations should not force all poorer nations to abide by the same market-opening rules and timetables. Poorer nations have different needs. They are at different stages of economic development (subsistence agriculture in much of Africa and parts of Asia, export-oriented agriculture in Latin America and other parts of Asia, early-stage industrialization elsewhere). They have different political and institutional capacities.

Richer nations should also help developing nations get a fair share of the benefits of trade, Stiglitz and Charlton write, by reforming themselves. They should no longer protect their own textile producers, subsidize their farmers, shield their maritime and construction industries, or impose fines on poor nations for allegedly "dumping" exports at below-market rates. More broadly, the authors suggest, all nations that have joined the World Trade Organization should make a commitment to giving complete free-market access to all developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves.

Surprisingly, though Stiglitz has spent some years in Washington, he does not answer the obvious next question: How can this commendable agenda be sold to richer nations? Their political leaders are in a bind since so many of their own citizens are also losing jobs and experiencing declining incomes and, rightly or wrongly, blaming globalization for their plight. This is one of the major reasons the antiglobalization movement is as strong in the developed world as in the developing.

While Stiglitz and Charlton nobly assert that trade agreements should be viewed as presumptively unfair if they bestow disproportionate benefits on richer nations, they fail to acknowledge that within richer nations free trade is already disproportionately benefiting the best educated and best connected. The wealthy are growing much wealthier while the middle class is being squeezed. In fact, the adjustment mechanisms the authors find lacking in most developing economies - good public schools, modern infrastructure and adequate social safety nets - are coming to be less and less available even in the United States. Free trade surely generates the gains Ricardo claimed for it. But until those gains are more widely shared - within richer countries as well as between richer and poorer - we can kiss any further round of trade liberalization goodbye.

Robert B. Reich is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former U.S. secretary of labor. He is the author, most recently, of "Reason."

Fair Trade For All How Trade Can Promote Development By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton 315 pages. $30; £15.99. Oxford University Press.

It is not exactly a new debate. On my bookshelf sits "Which? Protection or Free Trade," edited by H. W. Furber and published in Boston in 1888. That was some 70 years after the British economist David Ricardo first suggested that the gains from trade exceed the losses regardless of whether trading partners are more or less economically advanced, as each nation shifts to where it has a comparative advantage. Most economists and policy makers now accept Ricardo's argument, although the popular debate over the merits of free trade continues.

The new and more interesting debate is about how the benefits of trade should be shared. During the 1990s, the so-called Washington consensus of officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United States Treasury Department thought the best way to spur growth in developing nations was for them to quickly lower their trade barriers and deregulate their markets. But that prescription has not worked especially well, even though it still shapes American trade policy. Apart from China and India, the gap between rich and poor nations has continued to widen. More than two billion people worldwide live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Trade talks initiated in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, were intended to redress the balance but have gone nowhere. The last major international meeting, in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico, ended in failure and recrimination, and there has been little progress since. The world's poorer nations think the richer ones are still offering a lousy deal.

In their provocative book, "Fair Trade for All," Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia, and Andrew Charlton, a research officer at the London School of Economics, argue that the poorer nations are right. A better deal would be for them to move toward free trade gradually, each according to its own particular circumstances. The authors urge richer nations to help poorer ones prepare themselves for trade, while dismantling their own trade barriers, which prevent developing nations from selling them many goods and services. Stiglitz is worth listening to. A winner of the Nobel in economic science in 2001 for his pioneering work in the economics of information, he was a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997 (during which time, in the interest of full disclosure, we frequently attended the same White House meetings), thereafter becoming chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. In other words, Stiglitz was in Washington when the Washington consensus was formed. He was a dissenter, however, and in recent years has been an outspoken critic of Washington's trade and global investment policies.

Stiglitz and Charlton show that standard economic assumptions are wrong when it comes to many developing economies. When markets in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere are opened, people often can't move easily to new industries where the nation has a comparative advantage.

Transportation systems that might get them there are often primitive, housing is inadequate and job training is scarce. They are vulnerable in the meantime because safety nets are weak or nonexistent. Most people lack access to credit or insurance because financial institutions are frail, so they are unable to start their own businesses or otherwise take advantage of new opportunities that trade might bring. Many poor countries are already plagued by high unemployment, and job losses in the newly traded sector might just add to it.

Hence, the authors argue, the pace at which poorer nations open their markets to trade should coincide with the development of new institutions - roads, schools, banks and the like - that make such transitions easier and generate real opportunities. Since many poor nations cannot afford the investments required to build these institutions, rich nations have a responsibility to help.

Without these other institutions in place, the authors say, trade by itself can do more harm than good. They point out that inequality increased after trade was liberalized in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay. Ten years after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, Mexico's real wages are lower than they were before, and both inequality and poverty have grown. Many of the manufacturing jobs that came to Mexico in the wake of Nafta have since been lost to China, partly because China invested heavily in education and infrastructure while Mexico, lacking tariff revenues, could not afford to do so.

According to Stiglitz and Charlton, every developing country that has succeeded in achieving rapid growth has protected its market to some extent until it was ready to dismantle trade barriers.

Moreover, they warn, one size does not fit all. Richer nations should not force all poorer nations to abide by the same market-opening rules and timetables. Poorer nations have different needs. They are at different stages of economic development (subsistence agriculture in much of Africa and parts of Asia, export-oriented agriculture in Latin America and other parts of Asia, early-stage industrialization elsewhere). They have different political and institutional capacities.

Richer nations should also help developing nations get a fair share of the benefits of trade, Stiglitz and Charlton write, by reforming themselves. They should no longer protect their own textile producers, subsidize their farmers, shield their maritime and construction industries, or impose fines on poor nations for allegedly "dumping" exports at below-market rates. More broadly, the authors suggest, all nations that have joined the World Trade Organization should make a commitment to giving complete free-market access to all developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves.

Surprisingly, though Stiglitz has spent some years in Washington, he does not answer the obvious next question: How can this commendable agenda be sold to richer nations? Their political leaders are in a bind since so many of their own citizens are also losing jobs and experiencing declining incomes and, rightly or wrongly, blaming globalization for their plight. This is one of the major reasons the antiglobalization movement is as strong in the developed world as in the developing.

While Stiglitz and Charlton nobly assert that trade agreements should be viewed as presumptively unfair if they bestow disproportionate benefits on richer nations, they fail to acknowledge that within richer nations free trade is already disproportionately benefiting the best educated and best connected. The wealthy are growing much wealthier while the middle class is being squeezed. In fact, the adjustment mechanisms the authors find lacking in most developing economies - good public schools, modern infrastructure and adequate social safety nets - are coming to be less and less available even in the United States. Free trade surely generates the gains Ricardo claimed for it. But until those gains are more widely shared - within richer countries as well as between richer and poorer - we can kiss any further round of trade liberalization goodbye.

Robert B. Reich is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former U.S. secretary of labor. He is the author, most recently, of "Reason."

Fair Trade For All How Trade Can Promote Development By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton 315 pages. $30; £15.99. Oxford University Press.

It is not exactly a new debate. On my bookshelf sits "Which? Protection or Free Trade," edited by H. W. Furber and published in Boston in 1888. That was some 70 years after the British economist David Ricardo first suggested that the gains from trade exceed the losses regardless of whether trading partners are more or less economically advanced, as each nation shifts to where it has a comparative advantage. Most economists and policy makers now accept Ricardo's argument, although the popular debate over the merits of free trade continues.

The new and more interesting debate is about how the benefits of trade should be shared. During the 1990s, the so-called Washington consensus of officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United States Treasury Department thought the best way to spur growth in developing nations was for them to quickly lower their trade barriers and deregulate their markets. But that prescription has not worked especially well, even though it still shapes American trade policy. Apart from China and India, the gap between rich and poor nations has continued to widen. More than two billion people worldwide live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Trade talks initiated in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, were intended to redress the balance but have gone nowhere. The last major international meeting, in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico, ended in failure and recrimination, and there has been little progress since. The world's poorer nations think the richer ones are still offering a lousy deal.

In their provocative book, "Fair Trade for All," Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia, and Andrew Charlton, a research officer at the London School of Economics, argue that the poorer nations are right. A better deal would be for them to move toward free trade gradually, each according to its own particular circumstances. The authors urge richer nations to help poorer ones prepare themselves for trade, while dismantling their own trade barriers, which prevent developing nations from selling them many goods and services. Stiglitz is worth listening to. A winner of the Nobel in economic science in 2001 for his pioneering work in the economics of information, he was a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997 (during which time, in the interest of full disclosure, we frequently attended the same White House meetings), thereafter becoming chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. In other words, Stiglitz was in Washington when the Washington consensus was formed. He was a dissenter, however, and in recent years has been an outspoken critic of Washington's trade and global investment policies.

Stiglitz and Charlton show that standard economic assumptions are wrong when it comes to many developing economies. When markets in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere are opened, people often can't move easily to new industries where the nation has a comparative advantage.

Transportation systems that might get them there are often primitive, housing is inadequate and job training is scarce. They are vulnerable in the meantime because safety nets are weak or nonexistent. Most people lack access to credit or insurance because financial institutions are frail, so they are unable to start their own businesses or otherwise take advantage of new opportunities that trade might bring. Many poor countries are already plagued by high unemployment, and job losses in the newly traded sector might just add to it.

Hence, the authors argue, the pace at which poorer nations open their markets to trade should coincide with the development of new institutions - roads, schools, banks and the like - that make such transitions easier and generate real opportunities. Since many poor nations cannot afford the investments required to build these institutions, rich nations have a responsibility to help.

Without these other institutions in place, the authors say, trade by itself can do more harm than good. They point out that inequality increased after trade was liberalized in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay. Ten years after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, Mexico's real wages are lower than they were before, and both inequality and poverty have grown. Many of the manufacturing jobs that came to Mexico in the wake of Nafta have since been lost to China, partly because China invested heavily in education and infrastructure while Mexico, lacking tariff revenues, could not afford to do so.

According to Stiglitz and Charlton, every developing country that has succeeded in achieving rapid growth has protected its market to some extent until it was ready to dismantle trade barriers.

Moreover, they warn, one size does not fit all. Richer nations should not force all poorer nations to abide by the same market-opening rules and timetables. Poorer nations have different needs. They are at different stages of economic development (subsistence agriculture in much of Africa and parts of Asia, export-oriented agriculture in Latin America and other parts of Asia, early-stage industrialization elsewhere). They have different political and institutional capacities.

Richer nations should also help developing nations get a fair share of the benefits of trade, Stiglitz and Charlton write, by reforming themselves. They should no longer protect their own textile producers, subsidize their farmers, shield their maritime and construction industries, or impose fines on poor nations for allegedly "dumping" exports at below-market rates. More broadly, the authors suggest, all nations that have joined the World Trade Organization should make a commitment to giving complete free-market access to all developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves.

Surprisingly, though Stiglitz has spent some years in Washington, he does not answer the obvious next question: How can this commendable agenda be sold to richer nations? Their political leaders are in a bind since so many of their own citizens are also losing jobs and experiencing declining incomes and, rightly or wrongly, blaming globalization for their plight. This is one of the major reasons the antiglobalization movement is as strong in the developed world as in the developing.

While Stiglitz and Charlton nobly assert that trade agreements should be viewed as presumptively unfair if they bestow disproportionate benefits on richer nations, they fail to acknowledge that within richer nations free trade is already disproportionately benefiting the best educated and best connected. The wealthy are growing much wealthier while the middle class is being squeezed. In fact, the adjustment mechanisms the authors find lacking in most developing economies - good public schools, modern infrastructure and adequate social safety nets - are coming to be less and less available even in the United States. Free trade surely generates the gains Ricardo claimed for it. But until those gains are more widely shared - within richer countries as well as between richer and poorer - we can kiss any further round of trade liberalization goodbye.
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Robert B. Reich is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former U.S. secretary of labor. He is the author, most recently, of "Reason."

'Get off my crude-rich turf'

Caracas
Venezuela had a blunt message this week for Exxon Mobil Corp, one of the world's most powerful oil companies: get off my crude-rich turf.

Venezuela is tightening its squeeze on the oil industry, telling oil companies to give the state a greater share of profits - or get out.

Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez on Wednesday said Exxon Mobil was one of the companies that would "prefer to leave ... rather than adjust" to recent policy changes.

"We said we don't want them to be here then," Ramirez told the state TV broadcaster Venezolana de Television, adding if "we need them, we'll call them".

Exxon Mobil indicated on Thursday it had no plans to pull out.

"Exxon Mobil de Venezuela continues to have a long-term perspective of its activities in Venezuela," it said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The flap helped push the price of oil above US$67 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Thursday as the market reacted to the latest sign of tighter state-control of energy around the globe.

Venezuela is taking on "Big Oil" at a time when rising oil prices, political instability in the Mideast and Nigeria and new buyers in Asia have put the world's fifth-largest oil exporter in a winning position.

After snubbing Exxon Mobil, Ramirez said Venezuela has other eager partners, including state companies from Russia, Iran, China, India, as well as traditional oil companies.

Speaking to supporters about the nation's oil industry on Thursday, President Hugo Chavez said his leftist government was "recovering sovereignty in the management of our oil business".

"If you don't like it, get out"

Without specifically referring to Exxon Mobil, Chavez added, "Whoever doesn't like this business, then go somewhere else. They didn't like it? Go somewhere else."

The new climate in the oil market has given Venezuela the flexibility to diversify "away from Western investors and incorporate state-owned companies from allied countries ... more willing to abide by new, tighter terms," said Patrick Esteruelas, analyst at the Washington-based Eurasia Group.

The government has increasingly sought projects with state-controlled oil companies in friendly countries. Last year, Venezuela granted exclusive licensing rights to certify and quantify reserves in blocks in the Orinoco tar belt to seven companies, including China's CNPC, India's ONGC and Iran's Petropars. The only western oil major included was Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF.

The trend is driven by Chavez's distaste for corporate multinationals, which he accuses of looting his country's oil wealth over the years. He enjoys strong support for his efforts to take more industry profits for use in social programmes for the nation's poor.

Since taking office in 1999, his government has passed legislation requiring a majority government stake in all oil production projects, hiked taxes and royalties on oil companies, and begun to collect millions of dollars (euros) in what it claims are unpaid taxes from them.

New guidelines

On Thursday, Congress approved new guidelines to turn 32 privately run oil fields over to state-controlled joint ventures.

Among the terms faced by companies like Royal Dutch Shell plc and France's Total SA: a minimum 60% stake for the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) in each field, PDVSA controlling the boards of the new joint ventures and a jump in income tax rates from 34% to 50% and royalties from 16.6% to 33.3%. They will also see their potential drilling acreage slashed by almost two-thirds.

Experts say, however, that fears that Chavez, a close ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro, is seeking to drive out private investment are exaggerated because Venezuela needs the technological expertise of Western oil majors to develop its vast deposits in the Orinoco belt.

Few state oil companies have the expertise to upgrade the extra-heavy oil and tar-like bitumen found in the Orinoco into lighter, marketable oils.

Notably, Exxon Mobil continues to hold a 41.7% stake in the 120 000-barrel-day Cerro Negro heavy oil upgrading project in the Orinoco along with partners BP and PDVSA.

From Guatemala to Colombia

Mar 29
This article analyzes the role of militarization as a part of the control of territory, natural resources and people, and raises doubts about the so-called war on drug trafficking in mining districts. A comparison is drawn between Plan Colombia and the current situation in the gold mining region of San Marcos, Guatemala.

In San Marcos, the same region where the People of Sipakapa maintain their resistance to Canadian-US company Glamis Gold’s Marlin gold mine, the participation of United States military forces in searches for weapons and opium poppy crop fumigations has recently been announced as part of the Plan Maya Jaguar.

Just as terrorism apparently abounds around oil fields, it seems as though the worst hotbeds of drug trafficking are located where powerful mining interests are to be found. Whatever the pretext, the recent news from the highlands of San Marcos in Guatemala should be cause enough for reflection about what really lies behind militarization and the so-called regional integration initiatives, which amount to nothing more than the continuation of the historic process of exploitation and control in Mesoamerica: control of territory, control of resources and control of Peoples.

Marlin: UnderMining Indigenous Territory in San Marcos

In the highlands municipalities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipakapa, San Marcos, lies the infamous Marlin project, a gold mine that since late last year is being exploited by Montana Exploradora, S.A., a subsidiary of the Canadian-US transnational mining company Glamis Gold Ltd. Supported by the World Bank and the governments of Guatemala and Canada, business as usual continues despite the strong opposition at the national, regional and local levels, reaching its height with the People of Sipakapa’s overwhelming rejection of mining activities in their territory, expressed in a community consultation process that took place on June 18, 2005.

As is pointed out in a public declaration dated March 4 from Sipakapa that is being circulated and supported by numerous organizations (‘We Demand the Closure of the Marlin Mine’), "far from being an issue affecting solely the Mayan Sipakapense and Mam Peoples of San Marcos, the mine will affect the entire western highlands region of Guatemala because this area has been destined to become a mining district."

According to Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) facts compiled by Luis Solano and the Central American Inforpress Report, in the highlands of San Marcos alone there are currently 16 mining licenses (one for prospecting, 14 for exploration and one for exploitation), along with three more exploration licenses being processed. Eleven municipalities of San Marcos are directly affected, among them Tacaná, Ixchiguán and Tajumulco.

Chronicle of the Weapons Searches Foretold

On March 7th, the Siglo Veintiuno newspaper published an article (‘En marco de Plan Maya Jaguar, EEUU se involucra en allanamientos’) in which Minister of the Interior Carlos Vielmann announces the ‘support’ of Unites States military forces for the searches planned by various national governmental institutions for Tajumulco, San Marcos. The announced objectives of the actions were to disarm the population, eradicate opium poppy crops and resolve both the problem of drug traffic and the territorial conflict between Tajumulco and Ixchiguán.

According to reports, because of the opposition of the local population, the Guatemalan and US military forces could not enter Tajumulco and had to stay along the road outside of town, conducting useless weapons searches in passing vehicles. Despite this, it is still worthwhile to reflect upon the same issue addressed by a recent communiqué of the National Front in Defense of Public Services and Natural Resources (‘Más cara la cura que la enfermedad’): "First of all, even if foreign troops were not involved, it is quite frankly absurd to announce beforehand where searches are going to take place, because this alerts anyone with something to hide and allows them to hide it somewhere else."

It is also worth taking a look at the mention of the resolution of the decades old territorial conflict between Tajumulco and neighbouring municipality Ixchiguán as a goal of the military intervention. According to the same Siglo Veintiuno article, because of an eviction this past February in the village Once de Mayo, Ixchiguán, part of the ongoing land conflict, in the same village "a temporary substation was installed by joint forces (95 police and 50 soldiers), with orders to protect the people and keep watch over the conservation and safekeeping of any property that might be at risk."

Perhaps these were the same orders behind the brutal and deadly intervention of military and police forces in Nueva Linda? Will these forces protect the Sipakapense people and keep watch over the conservation and safekeeping of any property that might be at risk due to the mining company? Do they keep watch for all the indigenous Peoples and communities whose territories are at risk because of landowners and transnational companies?

The one thing that is certain is that in Guatemala joint forces have proven their commitment to guard property. This was made abundantly clear on January 11, 2005, when they murdered Raúl Castro Bocel, a local indigenous Kaqchikel inhabitant who had been participating in the protest in Los Encuentros, Sololá, blocking the transport of a cylinder destined for the Marlin mine. More than a thousand soldiers and hundreds of police agents guarded the cylinder, while in a press conference in the capital city, Guatemalan President Berger declared, "we have to protect the investors."

Glyphosate – ‘Use with Precaution’

Aside from the searches for weapons in Tajumulco, the past few months have also witnessed reports about the so-called US military ‘support’, both in terms of personnel and in terms of small aircraft and other equipment, for the fumigations of opium poppy crops in the highlands of San Marcos. Although the negative impacts of these fumigations on the environment, other crops and health have been documented again and again, reactions to the news have been very scarce.

On February 16th of this year, in El Periódico (‘Combatirán cultivos de amapola por la vía aérea en San Marcos’), journalist Luis Ángel Sas cited Minister of the Interior Carlos Vielmann regarding the imminent fumigations. Vielmann declared that they were just waiting for the arrival of the aircraft from the United States in order to start fumigating with Glyphosate some 200 hectares of land. He announced that the poppy crops were identified in the municipalities of Tajumulco and Tacaná during a low flight over the region the previous Friday. National Civil Police director Erwin Sperisen was quoted as warning that if vegetable or other subsistence crops "are found within the poppy plantations, then they will inevitably be affected."

In the same article, Gustavo Mendizábal, Norms and Regulations unit chief of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock pointed out that the use of Glyphosate is permitted, but that "it is recommended that it be used with precaution. It is a chemical that acts upon contact and directly attacks broadleaf plants. It does not cause harm to people." To his credit, Sas also explained that in Colombia, where the same Glyphosate and the same type of aircraft are used to fumigate coca and poppy crops, there have been many denouncements of the impacts the fumigations cause in people, such as vomiting, head and stomach pains, diarrhea and possible long term effects such as cancer and deformities in newborns.

In fact, on June 13, 2003, the Superior Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca, the second highest court in Colombia, declared that the Glyphosate fumigations to eradicate coca and poppy crops violate collective rights to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment and to public security and health. Both the State Council and the Constitutional Court had already emitted sentences banning fumigations in indigenous territories and demanding the fulfillment of the Environmental Management Plan required by the Ministry of the Environment. These decisions set important precedents, officially recognizing the risks and impacts of Glyphosate fumigations on health, the environment and Peoples’ rights.

Nevertheless, on June 14, 2003, in an outright violation of the country’s own judicial system, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced that while he remains president, the fumigations will continue. On another occasion he added that whoever opposed the fumigations anywhere in the country would be considered a sympathizer of terrorism.

Of the few opinions that have been made public in Guatemala, it appears that even organizations that have not been afraid to criticize the government’s position on other issues such as mining have gone mute when it comes to the fumigations. Very few organizations have taken a stance and none have questioned the plans. Without denying the tremendous power and control that the drug trafficking cartels do command, nor the fact that it is probable that the government will accuse anyone who criticizes the fumigations with supporting drug trafficking, is it really possible that no one at all has doubts as to whether asking the United States military to come help dump a bunch of Glyphosate on communities’ crops, negatively affecting their environment and health, is really the best way to combat drug trafficking?

Earlier this year, on February 19th, the issue was taken back up in a Prensa Libre article (‘Tajumulco e Ixchiguán, en la mira’), announcing upcoming fumigations in the municipalities of Tajumulco and Ixchiguán. The news item appeared again on the front page of the same newspaper on March 2 (‘Trasiego de anfetaminas’), quoting, alongside declarations by the Minister of the Interior as to the urgent necessity of a grand scale antinarcotics operative in San Marcos, the director of the US State Department’s Americas Antinarcotics Program, Antonio Arias, about a recent report on the subject and his "fear" that drug trafficking "makes Guatemala’s borders vulnerable due to the traffic of chemical drugs." Although, according to media reports, the opium poppy plants are bought, transported out of the country and processed in laboratories in Mexico; thus, it is irresponsible to report about a fear of chemical drug traffic (drug trafficking) as a justification for the fumigation of poppy crops (production).

Plan Maya Jaguar – Fumigations, Weapons and Cyanide?

Both the searches in Tajumulco and the fumigations that have been announced for various municipalities of San Marcos form part of Plan Maya Jaguar, a program of joint operations of Guatemalan and US military forces supposedly with the objective of combating drug trafficking in Guatemala.

Established in Guatemala in 1998, Plan Maya Jaguar has been extended several times since the first joint operatives were carried out in the country. At the same time, the Southern Command has also carried out the short-term so-called "humanitarian" New Horizons (Nuevos Horizontes) program in Guatemala, a US military project that has been denounced in several Latin American countries as being an attempt to give the forces a pretty face, so that communities get used to the presence of foreign troops. In fact, that is how Victor Manuel Gutiérrez describes Plan Maya Jaguar in his article (‘Guatemala: Estados Unidos y nuestra política’), explaining that the Plan "makes this [military] occupation official and permits the displacement of foreign military and intelligence apparatus throughout our national territory with no control whatsoever."

On December 6, 2005, the National Congress passed a decree to extend Plan Maya Jaguar until 2008, following another extension years before that prolonged the Plan until 2005. Ever since Plan Maya Jaguar was initially established, it has been for all of Guatemala; however, all of the recent announcements about the Plan’s joint activities have been about operatives located specifically in the highlands of San Marcos.

In its communiqué, the National Front of Struggle in Defense of Public Services and Natural Resources asks about the geographic location of the military intervention: "Why do they come precisely to San Marcos, department in which the population of one of its municipalities, in an open and participatory consultation beautifully demonstrating their dignity, rejected mining exploration and exploitation? What will follow in this interventionist race? The destruction of opium laboratories in Río Hondo, Zacapa?"

Perhaps there will be a different pretext (maybe it is Osama’s hideout?) for Río Hondo, where last year the population, in another beautiful exercise in dignity, rejected a hydroelectric dam project in their territory, in a locally initiated municipal consultation. Whatever may happen in Río Hondo, it is no coincidence that the zone being militarized is precisely the region for which a mining district is planned.

As Inforpress summarizes in their prologue to Luis Solano’s recent book (‘Guatemala, petróleo y minería en las entrañas del poder’), "the extractive industries have been a target of military intelligence worldwide, since two of the most coveted prime materials – oil and gold – are key for the model of the international reproduction of capitalism." Furthermore, they note, "from the capital invested in these industries, there has been a flow of financing to sustain State terrorism."

Plan Colombia, Now Playing in a Community Near You

It is clear that the militarization of mining districts is not a phenomenon unique to San Marcos. In fact, this department is only starting to see the beginning of a pattern well-known in Izabal, there from the 1960s to the 80s the International Nickel Company (INCO, at that time with controlling interest in EXMIBAL), together with a series of repressive dictatorships, attempted to continue their mining business at all cost. However, although militarization accompanies mining all around the world, it is worth taking a closer look at the Colombian example for the parallels in the drug war pretext.

Aside from this tie, it is also worth noting that over the past couple of years there have been many signs of closer links between Mesoamerica and Colombia, now more than ever with the naming of Colombia as a country with ‘observer’ status in Plan Puebla Panama. Also, there are frequent joint military operations involving Colombia, the United States and Central American countries under the guise of joint ‘security’, including, of course, the combat of drug trafficking and terrorism. In fact, during the recent visit of Colombian President Uribe to Guatemala this past January, the two governments signed a Security Agreement and decided to create a binational commission to exchange information and coordinate actions within the framework of the global ‘struggle’ against drug trafficking.

According to a CERIGUA bulletin, during his visit in the country, Uribe declared that "in the event that Guatemala should negotiate its inclusion in ‘Plan Colombia’ of US assistance for the combat of drug trafficking and other security problems, the Guatemalan government authorities can count on the collaboration of Colombia."

"In military cooperation agreements such as Plan Colombia, they prioritize mining and oil exploitation zones for the so-called combat of drug trafficking," explained Colombian State mining company Workers’ Union (SINTRAMINERCOL) President Francisco Ramírez in a presentation to the Colombian organization CENSAT. "Plan Colombia supposedly combats drugs but really what it does is position military and paramilitary groups that will protect the oil and mining infrastructure of North American and European companies."

"One thing to highlight is that as part of Plan Colombia they said that three anti-narcotics bases would be constructed. The first is in the South of Bolivar, a so-called anti-narcotics base that protects an oil field belonging to the Bush family, the mine that small miners are disputing with AngloGold and Conquistador Gold Mines, and Oxy’s Caño Limón Coveñas oil pipeline. In the North of Santander and in Tolima [where the other two bases are located], it’s the same story."

In his book ‘The Profits of Extermination,’ Ramírez details some of the atrocious human rights violations in mining districts up until 2002, for example the 535 registered homicides and the more than 35 thousand people forcibly displaced by Colombian and US paramilitary operations in the South of Bolivar, home to one of the three bases built ‘to combat drug trafficking’. He points out that since the government of Alvaro Uribe came into power, an indigenous person is murdered every five days, mostly in areas of natural resource exploitation.

"In the mining districts, on average between 1995 and 2002, every year there have been 828 homicides, 142 forced disappearances, 117 wounded, 71 people tortured, 355 death threats and 150 arbitrary detentions. There have also been 433 massacres," continues Ramírez.

One War, Many Faces

Although these details from Colombia, where an open conflict has continued for decades, may seem to compare more to Guatemala during the 1980s than Guatemala today, the psychological and social effects of military intervention or even just a military presence in the current context cannot be easily discarded, nor can the efficiency of low-intensity war.

"They have programmed our death, studying us, studying when we have gold, when we have minerals, studying our psychology, how we will react," emphasized Doctor Juan Almendares of the Mother Earth Movement of Honduras during his presentation to the Resistance to Mining working group at the V Week for Biological and Cultural Diversity, a Mesoamerican event that took place in Colotenango, Huehuetenango, Guatemala, this past March 6-9.

In the past few weeks in Guatemala, there have been denouncements and worries in reaction to the news that came out in Inforpress’ Central American Report on March 3 (‘Empresas canadienses inician exploraciones de uranio’), regarding two mining exploration licenses granted by MEM on January 16th to Gold-Ore Resources, a Canadian transnational mining company that has been exploring in Central America for years. According to the syndicate formed by Gold-Ore along with Pathfinder Resources and Santoy Resources, two more Vancouver-based companies, they have been exploring for uranium in Central America since at least January 27, 2005, when a press release announcing the formation of the syndicate was released.

The precise location of their explorations were not known until February 16, 2006, when the syndicate announced in another press release that the companies were exploring for uranium in the municipality of Esquipulas, in the department of Chiquimula, where the two licenses now cover 32% (169 square kilometers) of municipal territory. According to the Inforpress article, Vice Minister of Energy and Mines Jorge García said "that he did not have knowledge of the uranium exploration projects, [although] when he saw a copy of the licenses, he expressed his preoccupation for the issue."

García is not the only one who should be worrying. According to the facts compiled by Luis Solano and Inforpress, the issue is not only uranium exploration in Esquipulas, but also the many mining exploration licenses granted in some ten departments of Guatemala for minerals including the platinum group and/or rare earth minerals. Several of these licenses are scattered over the highlands of San Marcos, including in the municipalities of Tacaná, Ixchiguán and Tajumulco.

"These companies research gold, but they also research strategic minerals. But they just don’t have any reason to tell us, until now that they have publicly announced it in Guatemala. From Chiapas to Costa Rica, we are countries with strategic resources," explains Doctor Almendares.

"We are important for war."

The Diabolical Trinity – CAFTA, PPP and Plan Maya Jaguar

Although it is clear that militarization and mining walk hand in hand, it is also worth mentioning what they have to do with other regional initiatives, such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). Continuing to use mining as an example, one can see how the different aspects of regional integration complement each other as tools in a regional control strategy.

"Plan Maya Jaguar, together with Plan Puebla Panama and the Central American Free Trade Agreement, constitute a diabolical trinity," considers the National Front for Struggle in their communiqué. "The three together form an articulated malignant scheme: CAFTA in the economic aspect, the PPP in infrastructure and the Plan Maya Jaguar as the military component."

In reality, CAFTA does not only represent the economic component; more than that, it represents the international consensus of the neo-colonial powers, establishing both national and international policies and laws in favour of transnational corporations. Around the world, the Canadian and US governments and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, together with the transnational companies themselves, have driven a series of mining legislation and policy reforms, defining the content in line with the neo-liberal model.

"The traffic of influences for the ratification of laws has been one of the most common forms of impunity of the transnationals involved," denounces Inforpress in its prologue to Luis Solano’s book.

Free Trade Agreements consolidate this impunity and guarantee, by way of the chapters dealing with the ‘rights’ of investments and the respective supernational tribunals, that there will be serious consequences if any government entity should attempt to change anything that might affect the investments. It is also interesting that while an international movement has been active in opposing the United States’ CAFTA, Canada – home to most of the world’s global mining companies – has been negotiating a Free Trade Agreement for years with four Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

In turn, Plan Puebla Panama is a set of regional initiatives for the construction and integration of the infrastructure needed by transnational corporations. The mining industry requires great quantities of water and energy and good highways that lead directly to good ports. All of these aspects are key components of the PPP, which integrates the infrastructure according to the logic of international trade, business and investment in a series of projects financed by International Finance Institutions. In the end, they are loans that will be paid by the future generations of Mesoamerica.

"The PPP is a strategic plan for the circulation and commerce of material goods, but also of resources (water, genes, etc.). And this always carries along with it a military strategy," explained Dr. Almendares in Colotenango. "The struggle against mining is within this framework of a military and geopolitical strategy."

Transnational corporations will gain nothing with all the laws, infrastructure, or even the control of territory and resources, if they do not also control the Peoples. Thus, using once again the example of Colombia, Francisco Ramírez describes militarization as the third phase, "to give a military response to whoever opposes mining exploitation."

In the case of the highlands of San Marcos, the conclusion here is that the objective of Plan Maya Jaguar is exactly that.

#####

Sandra Cuffe works with Rights Action (Derechos en Accion), an organization which carries out and supports community development, environment, emergency relief and human rights work in Honduras, Guatemala, Chiapas (Mexico), Haiti and elsewhere. For more information, to make tax-deductible donations or to get involved, contact Rights Action:
info@rightsaction.org, 416-654-2074, www.rightsaction.org Photo from Colombia.indymedia.org

Uruguay Repays IMF Debt Due in 2006

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay
Uruguay said Thursday it will repay $630 million to the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule, clearing all its 2006 obligations to the agency in a sign of the country's improving economic health.

The South American nation, which still owes the IMF $1.6 billion in outstanding debt, is working to leave behind the deep economic crisis that began in 2001 as recession struck neighboring economic powers Argentina and Brazil.

The early payments will save Uruguay $8.4 million in interest, Economy Minister Danilo Astori told a news conference.

He was flanked by a top IMF official, Agustin Carstens, who lauded Uruguay's progress since the crisis, saying the country had embarked on a "successful" economic restructuring plan that was triggering robust growth for the third straight year.

Astori did not rule out other payments ahead of schedule to the IMF if economic conditions allow. Uruguay and the IMF reached a three-year lending accord in 2005 as part of ongoing plans to revitalize the country's economy.

Authorities are predicting Uruguay's gross domestic product will expand 5.7 percent in 2006, adding to the 6.6 percent growth in 2005 and a record 11.8 percent jump in GDP in 2004.

Meanwhile, Astori described the early repayment as part of efforts by economic planners to improve debt portfolios and save interest.

The move by Uruguay follows in the footsteps of Brazil and Argentina -- which undertook far more ambitious moves to shed their IMF obligations.

In December, Brazil paid off its total $15.5 billion debt, the largest payment ever made by a member country to the IMF.

In January, Argentine President Nestor Kirchner announced early and full repayment of $9.75 billion in debt to the IMF, calling it a step by Argentina to gain a measure of "financial independence" from international lenders.

Washington wary of Chavez's military deals

by Patrick Markey
CARACAS, Venezuela
Strengthening his military with helicopters, planes and rifles, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has Washington fretting over regional stability, but defense analysts dismiss U.S. concerns about a possible arms build-up.

The U.S. government, which portrays Chavez as a oil-wealthy tyrant bent on undermining democracy, is locked in a simmering dispute with the left-wing former soldier and has moved to block arms sales it believes will inflate his 80,000-strong military beyond its requirements.

But defense analysts say Venezuela needs to modernize its army and they doubt the hardware opposed by Washington has the offensive capability to tip the balance of power when Colombia, Brazil and Chile are more potent forces in the region.

"If any other country in Latin America were acquiring these weapons, the U.S. wouldn't say boo," said Tom Baranauskas, a defense analyst at U.S. consultancy Forecast International. "Because it's Venezuela, it has got caught up in politics."

The clash over weapons is one of the latest to roil relations between Washington and Chavez, who has been at odds with the U.S. government over his socialist revolution in the world's No. 5 oil exporter and his ties to Cuba and Iran.

His state coffers bulging because of high crude prices, Chavez has purchased 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles and at least 10 Russian MI-type helicopters. Caracas has pushed back delivery dates of the rifles, but the first three helicopters arrived last month.

Chavez has signed a $2 billion deal with Spain to buy 10 C-295 transport aircraft, two CN-235 maritime surveillance planes, four patrol boats and four Navy corvette warships. He also wants some Super Tucano light trainer aircraft from Brazil.

U.S. officials are holding up the Spanish and Brazilian aircraft deals because they involved U.S.-made technology and needed Washington's approval.

While some of Venezuela's wish list appears exaggerated, so far most purchases would replace aging equipment and could be used to fight drug trafficking from neighboring Colombia, military analysts said.

"The army expenditure is the most necessary," said Anna Gilmour, Americas Editor with Jane's Country Risk. "The previous FAL rifles were nearing obsolescence and so the 100,000 rifle purchase is less significant than it might seem."

Since he came to office seven years ago, Chavez has steadily steered Venezuela away from its traditional military reliance on the United States. He has suspended cooperation with the U.S. drug agents and training with U.S. military.

An avowed enemy of U.S. President George W. Bush, Chavez accuses Washington of plotting to invade or oust his government to gain control of Venezuela's oil reserves, a charge U.S. officials dismiss as populist rhetoric.

A concern for U.S. officials is that Chavez has ordered his military to train hundreds of thousands of reservists for a war of resistance against an invading force. Critics say the new force could be used to repress domestic opposition and they question how those recruits will be armed.

Venezuelan soldiers also have been sent to Cuba to train in civilian-military coordination.

Washington, which says Chavez may have sheltered Colombian Marxist FARC rebels, is concerned that AK-103 ammunition or weapons will fall into guerrilla hands. U.S. officials so far have provided no clear proof of the charges Chavez backs the FARC.

"What you have got are significant changes within the armed forces in terms of its weapons systems, in terms of its war-fighting doctrine, in how it understands the international environment in which the Venezuelan armed forces operate," a senior U.S. State Department official said.

"From our point of view this is worrisome and requires us to call a timeout as we try to figure out whether or not continued sales of U.S. weapons to Venezuela or U.S. components, is in our interests," the official said.

While Chavez has warned he could seek new fighter planes from China or Russia to replace U.S.-made F16 aircraft, so far Venezuela's purchases are limited to equipment analysts say poses little threat compared with the military capability of Brazil, Chile or Colombia.

"I don't think anyone believes Venezuela can launch an attack using transport planes," said Enrique Obando at the IDEPE security think tank in Lima. "Venezuela is buying light rifles, transport aircraft, helicopters. There is no real comparison."

Venezuela has the highest crude reserves in the world

A report published by The Wall Street Journal on its front page raised eyebrows on Wednesday for its claim that new technology has allowed multinational energy companies to reassess the amount of recoverable reserves in oil-rich countries.

According to staff reporter Russell Gold, deposits once dismissed as “unconventional” oil that could not be recovered economically are now, thanks to rising global oil prices and improved technology, being counted as recoverable reserves.

“That recalculation”, writes Gold, “has vaulted Venezuela and Canada to first and third in global reserves rankings, respectively, although Venezuela’s holdings in extra-heavy crude are a rough guess”.

The report asserts that Vene-zuela’s reserves in heavy and extra-heavy crude – 235 billion barrels approximately – are easier to be developed from a technical point of view than in other countries, due to their physical location.

A press release issued by Pe-tróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), the state-run oil company, indicated that these new findings ratify the importance of Vene-zuela as the country with the highest crude reserves worldwide. PDVSA has been working with 6 multinational companies on its Proyecto Magna Reserva, designed to assess and certify reserves at the Orinoco Tar Belt.

In an interview with The Daily Journal, Bob Tippee, Editor-in-Chief of The Oil and Gas Journal, said that for Venezuela to exploit these heavy reserves, it will have to invest a massive amount of money intro the country’s energy infrastructure, something Tippee sees as a looming problem.

Multinational British Petroleum’s 2004 Statistical Review for World Energy estimated Venezuela’s total reserves at 77,2 billion barrels, or 6.5% of the world total.

Venezuela disagrees with Colombia over free trade agreements with USA

Venezuelan Executive Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel has replied to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's "discrepancy" on free trade agreements with the USA.

The Colombian President argues that it was alright for Venezuela not to enter into a bilateral agreement because it has oil, whereas the Colombian economy needs the agreement with the USA.

* Rangel says Venezuela begs to differ and admits a " cordial discrepancy" with Colombia on the matter of individual free trade agreements.

Venezuela has been calling on individual Latin American countries not to sign in the name of continental integration, stating that the only beneficiaries are US multinationals.

The USA attempted to get a continental free trade agreement signed by 2005 but failed and instead embarked on individual treaties.

Chile was the first country that signed up. Peru is expected to sign on the dotted line shortly, followed by Ecuador despite widespread protests.

President Uribe insists that free trade agreements depend on the characteristics of each country's economy and Venezuela is different because it doesn't need treaties.

Rangel has rejected US President Bush's accusation that the Venezuelan government is lacking in respect towards the institutions and freedoms, quipping that Bush should be questioned, using his own parameters ... "take Guantanamo, tortures, permanent aggressions ... bad example."

Hey Man! There’s Only One Way to Learn the Truth. You Gotta Keep Trying

A Letter from Oaxaca, Mexico, By George Salzman

March 30, 2006

Friends,

Hey man! There’s only one way to learn the truth.

Keep an open mind (but as Betrand Russell said, not so open that your brains fall out), search for honest people who are well-informed, listen to (and/or read) what they think, and try to evaluate it critically. No one “knows it all”, but some people know an awful lot. Just do your best to understand, and keep at it. None of us is born stupid, but we’re all born ignorant. It’s an uphill struggle from then on — the struggle to become a fully human human being that starts at birth.

There’s a host of my “truth-teller heroes,” as I call them — Joe Bageant, Robert Fisk, Amy Goodman, Mark Bruzonsky, James Herod, William Blum, Judy Norsigian, Alberto Giordano, Howard Zinn, Walter Davis, Rigoberta Menchu, Bill Templer, Harold Pinter, John Pilger, Alan Nairn, Uri Avnery, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, George Wald, Subcomandante Marcos, Peter Kropotkin, Kurt Weill, Albert Einstein, John Perkins, Upton Sinclair, Anuradha Roy, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ignacio Chapela — an incomplete list of course and in no particular order, just pulled together rummaging through my website and memory for a few minutes.

It’s so damn hard to know the truth because we’re inundated with the unending streams of lies that governments put out (if you know an exception, tell me) and the near-total control of media by corporate interests, which unendingly toot the ideology of big money and publish all the governments’ lies. That’s why truly authentic media are essential.

Now, when you find a “truth-teller hero” who fires up your blood and adrenaline with hope and enthusiasm, and does the same for many many people, there’s an unmatchable combination of qualities. Authentic journalist and guitarist Alberto M. Giordano is such a person. The Narco News website, which he founded and which first hit the internet newsstand on April 18, 2000, is everything a grassroots authentic news source ought to be. Of course I’m jealous of him. While I laboriously struggle to complete yet another ponderous essay, trying to size up what made Hitler and the Third Reich tick, there’s Al with his acquired gang of young (and some not so young) fired-up investigative reporters and joyous musicians shining the light of truth in the darkest corners of the U.S.-led so-called “drug war.” They’re covering the Zapatista’s “Other Campaign” and, over-extended, also reporting from many other parts of América Latina. A truly promethian effort for a not-very-large group of authentic journalists, dedicatedly not-for-sale. The truth never is.

So today, when I got the e-mail from Al saying they need bucks, I thought “Oh shit! Not again. I already sent in my $1,000 pledge for this year.” But, instead of hitting the delete key, I read on, and was inspired to send another kilobuck to help keep them on the road. What the hell. What can I do with the money after I die? Check out Al’s message, and then do what you can for the world your great-grandchildren will inherit, if there still is a biosphere then that humans can live in.

Make a donation online, via this website:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send a check, made out to “The Fund for Authentic Journalism,” to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

-George Salzman

When Even Water is Not a Human Right

by John Ross
An Indian Peoples Have Even Fewer Rights Than the Rest of Us ...

Once upon a time, there was a little orphan girl ('huerfana') who had to walk over many mountains each day to fetch water ('itzu') because the water was very far away" Esperanza Garcia, a Purepecha Indian grandmother in the tiny Michoacan mountain town of Santa Cruz Tanaco tells the story that her mother told her. "One day, the huerfana made friends with a humming bird ("Tzintzun") and he led her to a secret spring right here in the forest. The women were so happy because now they didn't have to walk two mountains to fetch the water that they married the huerfana to the spring and when they plunged her in the water, a long serpent leaped up and that was the stream that brought the water to our town." Esperanza frowned at the dry littered streambed that runs by her house. "Now the stream is dead because they have cut down all the trees and again we have to walk for hours to bring water." Clear cuts in the Purepecha mountains have devastated forests and water sources.

Women in the third world walk an average of six kilometers each day to fetch water, according to U.S. environmental researcher Talli Newman. But Indian women are not just fetchers of water but its protectors. "Like the corn, we are born from the water" explains Maria de la Cruz, a Tzotzil Mayan mother and community leader from San Felipe Ecatepec just outside San Cristobal de las Casas in the highlands of Chiapas--the Mayans are the People of the Corn according to their sacred book, the Popul Vu.

De la Cruz lives a hundred meters from a Coca Cola bottler that extracts 1.7 million liters of water each year from the local aquifer, leaving 70% of the households in Ecatepec without running water. The bottler's yearly extractions are equivalent to what five indigenous villages in the highlands are allotted each year. "Yes, we are made from the water but I can't even bathe" De la Cruz laughs bitterly. Chiapas is home to Mexico's largest rivers yet 68% of its 1.3 million Indian people do not have potable water.

A quarter of all Mexico's water has its source on Indian lands yet many indigenous communities have no access to the precious fluid. The Mazahua women of Villa de Allende out in Mexico state are so exercised by these inequities that they have even formed an army--the Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women In Defense of The Water (unrelated to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.)

Mazahua land lines the banks of the Cutzamala river system, the main outside water source for Mexico City 100 miles east. 16,000 cubic liters a second rush by their lands and yet eight of their villages have no water lines, a demand for which the Mazahuas have sought redress since the 1980s when the Cutzamala system was inaugurated. Repeatedly rebuffed by water authorities, the Mazahuas have threatened to shut off the valves that speed water uphill to the Mexican capital. In response, the National Water Commission (CONAGUA) sent 500 state police to occupy their villages.

"They take our men by the hair," Comandanta Victoria Martinez of the Mazahua Army tells reporters, " but now they will have to confront the women."

This month (March), the Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women In Defense of The Water marched up to Mexico City to present their case to the World Water Forum convoked for that bone-dry megalopolis March 16th-22nd.

Mexico City was a pertinent place to hold the fourth World Water Forum (WWF), an every-three-years conclave organized by the World Water Council, the "non-government" creation of industrialists, big agriculture, and water profiteers who preach privatization and mercantilization of water.

Once set in the heart of a five lake system, the Aztec island of Tenochtitlan was a water wonderland, overflowing with canals, fountains, aqueducts, and floating farms ("chinampas.") But the European conquerors were horse people with little respect for a water-based culture so they cut down the trees on the surrounding hillsides and silted in the lakes.

Today, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City has dried up. What little remains in its aquifers is being pumped out at twice the rate that it can be replenished and the metropolitan area's 21.3 million residents receive just 184 liters per capita each year, one twenty fourth of the national average. Service is so poor in the ragged colonies at the edge of the city that cockroaches run out when the faucet is turned on. In other impoverished "colonias", the only available water source is cistern trucks ("pipas") sent by the political parties and the people are forced to sell their vote for a gulp of clean "agua."

Water is a class issue in Mexico as well as one of gender and race. While the luxuriant green golf course of the elites receive abundant daily waterings, the poor have a hard time just slaking their thirst.

Indeed, the sprinklers were on at the Banamex convention center in the ritzy Polanco district this March 16th when the WWF opened its doors to the public--Banamex, Mexico's oldest bank, is now wholly owned by Citigroup. Just to make the corporate tone perfectly patent, among the sponsors of this edition of the WWF was the Coca Cola Corporation of Atlanta, Georgia, which, according to the NGO War On Want, sucks up 282 billion liters of the world's public water each year.

Mexican president Vicente Fox, once the president of Coca Cola operations here and in Central America, opened the session by paying lip service to the Indian roots of water by quoting from the Popul Vuh and the poetry of Aztec king Nezahualcoytl. Fox was followed to the podium by CONAGUA director Cristobal Jaimes--before Fox appointed him to the CONAGUA job, Jaimes, the owner of Mexico's largest dairies and a major water bottler, was the nation's number one industrial consumer of water.

Moving the threads behind the scenes at the fourth World Water Forum was Aquafed, the lobbying front for world water privatizers, representing such conglomerates as the French Suez, Aguas de Barcelona, Biwater, and Thames River. Another powerful lobbyist running the show at the WWF was the Washington-based "public relations" hucksters Bursen & Marsteller, publicists for such bloody dictators as Haiti's Baby Doc, Guatemala's Rios Montt, and the killer Argentinean juntas. Bursen & Marsteller organized the accompanying exposition where space was available to water conservation groups for $600 a day. The Great Unwashed were invited to shell out $120 for each day's admission.

The Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women In Defense of the Water did not bother to pay an admission. Availing themselves of sympathetic souls in the NGO community, they stormed past the ticket takers and went looking for CONAGUA's Jaimes ("I cannot solve your problem" he had told them once before.) Repelled by security guards, the comandantas formed a picket line and began to shout "Queremos Agua!" ("We Want Water".) With their wooden rifles, sheathed machetes, long skirts, farmers' sombreros, and a look so stern that it could stop traffic, the women terrified the organizers. "This is what happens when we let them get away from their 'metates' (Indian corn grinders)" CONAGUA sub secretary Cesar Herrera sneered in earshot of a La Jornada reporter.

But for the most part, the defenders of public water stayed on the outside, gathering in marches (20,000 on the WWF opening day), alternative forums, and even a Latin American Water Tribunal. Indigenous peoples from the North and the South of the Americas came together to compare notes. Hopis from New Mexico brought a gourd of their sacred water. "Water is a gift from our mother earth. It does not belong to us" pronounced Josephine Mandanin, an Ojibwa water caretaker. Dine (Navajo) spokesperson Waleigh Jones of the Black Mountain Water Coalition told of how the Peabody Coal Company constructed a 200-mile pipeline that brings massive amounts of Indian water to its strip mine. As in Mazahua territory, 50% of those living along the pipeline have no access to drinking water.

With its giant river systems, Latin America is the world's most important water source but has the smallest per capita consumption on the planet, according to World Bank data presented at the WWF. The defense of water in the heart of the southern continent crystallized in Indian territory in 2000 when the majority Aymara and Quechua population of Cochabamba, Bolivia rose up against the transnational Bechtel Corporation which had taken over management of the local water system and raised rates 300%. Tens of thousands camped out in the plaza of that Indian city for a month until Bechtel finally packed it in. "The war in defense of our water showed us the power of those down below," recalled Oscar Oliviera, a director of the movement to defend Cochabamba's water who testified at the alternative tribunal.

But Oliviera warned that the privatizers of water now have their sights trained on another indigenous water source - Paraguay's Guarami basin, the earth's largest reserve of sweet water. Under the pretext of Bush's Terror War, U.S. troops have established a garrison strategically sited close by the Triple Frontier (Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina) near the spectacular Iguazu falls.

"We must be vigilant of those who would make water into a merchandise. Water is a fundamental human right," Oliviera emphasized.

The struggle to include water as a fundamental human right in the WWF's final statement was carried to the forum floor by Bolivia's water secretary (no other country has a secretary of water) Abel Mamani, a popular leader from the all-Aymara city of El Alto which has been locked in a titanic battle with the French conglom Suez, doing business in Bolivia as Aguas Ilumani, for years. Insisting that he would not sign the final declaration if water was not declared a universal human right, Mamani was joined by Venezuela, Cuba, and Uruguay (and to a lesser extent by Honduras, France, and Spain) but the revolt was quickly squelched. "The right of water is not relevant to this forum," the World Bank's Jamal Shagir told the press. Laic Fouchon, president of the World Water Council, labeled Mamani's remarks as "discourteous and disagreeable" because the Bolivian had pointed out that 2,000,000 babies die every ear from a lack of clean water.

According to the final declaration of the fourth World Water Forum, water is not a fundamental human right for the world's people in general and Indian people in particular. Although they are the source of so much of the Americas' water, indigenous peoples received no mention in the forum's final document.
*
John Ross is on deadline for "Making Another World Possible--Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006" to be published this fall by Nation Books. He has no time to talk.

Coup veteran closes in on Peru's left flank

by Marina Jimenez
Populist Humala is poised to follow wave of socialist electoral wins in Latin America

His only political experience is a failed coup. He comes from a family that espouses an eccentric philosophy of remaking the government around descendants of the Incan Empire.

And yet Ollanta Humala, a radical populist, is rising in popularity, and is now the favoured candidate to become Peru's next president in the election on April 9.

If the retired army lieutenant-colonel wins, he would become at least the eighth Latin American leader to take office since 2000 from the left, including the leaders of Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Venezuela, with strong leftist contenders in Mexico's and Nicaragua's presidential races later this year.

Mr. Humala, 43, is riding a wave of regional discontent with the neo-liberal policies of privatization and free trade. While the Andean country of 27 million has experienced solid economic growth for five consecutive years -- 7 per cent last year -- the benefits have not filtered down to the poor majority living in the shantytowns and the highlands.

"Humala is saying 'we need a new model.' He is using the rhetoric of [Venezuelan President] Hugo Chavez and [Bolivian President] Evo Morales, though he has toned it down a bit," Max Cameron, a political scientist from the University of British Columbia, said in a phone interview from Peru. "Peruvian politics is a wonderful soap opera with lots of scandal and drama, and volume is always at maximum. It's rough and dirty."

Mr. Humala, whose background is mestizo, or mixed race, and who has distanced himself from his family's racist creed, is capitalizing on the country's disenchantment with the status quo. His closest rival is Lourdes Flores, a fiscally conservative, pro-business candidate who cannot shake her image as a member of the rich, Lima-based elite.

The latest opinion survey by pollster Apoyo shows Mr. Humala, of the Union for Peru (UPP), with 33 per cent of voter support, and Ms. Flores, 46, with the National Unity party (UN), with 27 per cent. Unless one candidate wins 50 per cent plus one vote, the election will go to a second round in May. Ms. Flores is favoured to win the second round, but with a third of voters still undecided and momentum building for Mr. Humala, there is a strong chance he could be the winner.

There are 20 presidential contenders and 3,000 congressional candidates for 120 seats in a country with a colourful history of political drama and deep social inequities: illiteracy remains at 35 per cent in remote Andean towns, and one in every two Peruvians has no access to proper medical care.

Alberto Fujimori, a political unknown, was elected president in 1990, defeating Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's most celebrated writer, as the country struggled with hyperinflation and the havoc wreaked by the Shining Path, a Maoist insurgency.

When Mr. Fujimori fled the country 10 years later, he was discredited as an authoritarian ruler undone by a corruption scandal. He is currently in prison in Chile awaiting extradition, after he tried to return to Peru to run for re-election. Mr. Humala led a coup against Mr. Fujimori in 2000, and was briefly imprisoned.

No wonder a recent United Nations report found major disillusionment in Peru with the political system. Only 5 per cent of those surveyed felt democracy was working well, 73.2 favoured authoritarianism and 90.4 think politicians are to blame for the demise of democracy.

"There is a general sense that the legislature here is useless," Prof. Cameron said. "One congressman is a bigamist. Another used his position to put family members in prominent positions. And congress just voted for a pay raise and now make 18 times the average per capita income."

Mr. Humala's candidacy falls less into the market-friendly leftist camps of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and more closely resembles that of Mr. Chavez and Mr. Morales.

Venezuela's charismatic strongman is given to florid, four-hour speeches filled with anti-U.S. rhetoric, while Mr. Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, is leading a campaign to legalize coca plants.

Mr. Humala said he would suspend eradication of coca, the prime ingredient for cocaine, which Washington has spent millions of dollars trying to get rid of in the Andes. He suggested baking 27 million loaves of bread from coca leaves every day for school breakfasts.

Mr. Humala has also called for a renegotiation of oil and gas contracts with foreign investors, and promised to call a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution, something Mr. Chavez also did. (The Venezuelan leader also led a failed coup before becoming president.)

Mr. Humala wants to raise taxes and redistribute income to the poor. Critics, however, say that will scare off foreign investment and that a more prudent strategy would be to trim the bloated bureaucracy and diversify the economy. About 90 per cent of Peru's budget goes to public-sector salaries and debt servicing.

Even as the region becomes a counterpoint to unpopular U.S.-backed policies, it is unclear how Mr. Humala would adapt if he actually held elected office. Some, though, are clearly worried.

In a recent warning, Mr. Vargas Llosa admonished Peruvians not to vote for Mr. Humala: "How is it possible that, after 10 shameful years of the dictatorship of Fujimori and [his now-imprisoned former spy chief Vladimiro] Montesinos, in which [the country] was looted and plundered in the most degrading manner, a third of the population wants to return to authoritarianism, to the systematic violation of human rights and a subjugated press?"

With reports from Reuters and Associated Press

Rich and poor

Peru's rich and varied heritage includes the ancient Incan capital of Cuzco and the lost city of Machu Picchu. Despite vast stores of copper, silver, lead, zinc, oil and gold, Peru's progress has been held back by corruption and the failure of successive governments to deal with social and economic inequality.

A small, white elite of Spanish descent controls most of the wealth and political power, while indigenous peoples are largely excluded from both and make up many of the millions of Peruvians who live in poverty.

z Population:28 million

z Average annual income: $2,801

z Population below poverty line: 54%

z Literacy rate: 87.7%

z Life expectancy: 69 years

z Ethnicity: American Indian 45%; mestizo (mixed American Indian and white) 37%; white 15%; black, Japanese, Chinese and other 3%

z Religions: Christian 83% (81% Roman Catholic); other or unspecified 17%

z Languages: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara

z Area: 1.28 million square kilometres (about equivalent to Manitoba and Saskatchewan combined)

SOURCE: BBC, CIA WORLD FACT BOOK

UK BBC television's Newsnight announces 'Inside Latin America' week

by Karen Rosine
BBC television's Newsnight is to broadcast a series of films, interviews and cultural performances in a specially commissioned Inside Latin America week starting April 3.

The week of programming, to be broadcast at 10.30 p.m. on BBC Two, April 3-7, will look at various aspects of life in Latin America in the run up to the first round of the Peruvian elections on April 9.

It will also focus on how America has lost influence in its own backyard, the implications of the leftward swing across Latin America and the rise of indigenism.

* Many of the films and interviews broadcast in the week will also be shown on BBC World, News 24 and BBC Four.

Gavin Esler will present from Lima for Newsnight, BBC World and for the BBC World Service. He will look ahead to the forthcoming Peruvian elections and candidates, including Ollantu Humala, the hardline left-wing president contender. Gavin will look at the countries that have embraced left-wing governments and that are challenging US influence on the continent and will also interview key political figures.

Greg Palast reports from Venezuela on April 3 examining how President Hugo Chavez was able to bankroll the continent's leftist governments and challenge the previously unquestioned influence of the US in the region.

The report will also include a new interview with President Chavez.
...

Mr. Danger and Socialism for the New Milennium

by Maria Paez Victor
A Discussion of the Current State of Venezuela

[A talk prepared for the "Walter Gordon/Massey Symposium", Toronto March 15, 2006]

Throughout most of its history, there has been very little interest in North America about Venezuela except as a supplier of oil. With the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999, all this changed. He ushered in the Bolivarian Revolution, founded on ideas expounded in the 19th Century by Simón Bolívar, the great The Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Perú. Its basic principles are: that natural resources are for the benefit of all citizens, the state is guardian and promoter of civic and social human rights, and the citizens are fundamental protagonists in political life. Its foreign policy is based on Latin American and Caribbean integration and solidarity. With the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela has become the most exciting, innovative, and progressive developing country in the world.

What is the context of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution? Why is Mr. Danger so opposed? What has been the role of the Venezuelan elites? What has the Chávez Government achieved? And, is there a cautionary tale for all democracies?

What is the context of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution?

On June 1, 2002 in a speech at West Point, US President George Bush made an unprecedented assertion that the US has the right to overthrow any government in the world that is seen as a threat to its security. (1)

This may have been startling news to the world including Canada, but not to Latin Americans. Since 1846 the United States has carried out no fewer than 50 military invasions and destabilizing operations involving 12 different Latin American countries.(2)Yet, none of these countries has ever had the capacity to threaten US security in any significant way. (3)The US intervened because of perceived threats to its economic control and expansion. For this reason it has also supported some of the region’s most vicious dictators such as Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, and Pinochet. (4)

To this scenario, President Bush’s administration has added unprecedented militarization (5)plus arrogant political interference that surpasses historical precedents. Never has US – Latin America relations been more abysmal. As one analyst has stated, “Only under Bush has Latin America found itself as estranged from the US as it is today, a result of Bush’s… shrill regional policy which has brought alienation to unprecedented heights.” (6)

The Bush administration does not accept the democratically expressed will of the Venezuelan people. They have clearly chosen President Hugo Chávez and his government in nine free, transparent and internationally observed elections and referenda, during the seven years since he was first elected. President Bush supported the 2002 bloody coup against the government of President Chávez, financed and supported a devastating oil lockout that cost the country $14 billion in export revenues and numerous opposition maneuvers, disturbances and a recall referendum. (7)And they continue to finance the opposition there. (8)

Recently, his administration has stepped up its aggressive stance against Venezuelan democracy. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has compared President Chávez with Hitler (9) and US Director for National Intelligence John Negroponte stated that Venezuela is the main security challenge in this Hemisphere (10).US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice told a Senate committee last February 16th that Venezuela is “a particular danger to the region” and that she is “working with others to try and make certain that there is a kind of united front ” against Venezuela. (11)To this President Chávez has responded by saying; “Mister Danger, you form your front and we will form ours.”

Why is Mr. Danger so opposed?

The main reason behind President Bush’s aggression towards this small country that has minimal armed capacity is quite obvious: oil. The United States has become increasingly dependent on oil imports and feels that its security is threatened. Venezuela is the 5th largest oil exporting country in the world and is sitting on the largest oil reserves in the hemisphere and perhaps, of the world. (12).It supplies the US with 1.2 million barrels daily; supply that has not been in any danger of stopping – until President Bush came along. Indeed, it has been a very convenient trading arrangement for both countries. The insecurity of the United States, real or imagined, has lead it into invasions and armed conflict in the Middle East to shore up its supply of oil. (13)Given the rhetoric and actions of its leaders, is it any wonder that President Chávez should question the intentions of the United States towards him and his government?

There is also another reason for the Bush administration’s aggressive stance towards Venezuela. President Chávez has made possible a new political and economic reality in his country that directly challenges globalization and neo-conservative policies (or neo-liberal as they are referred to in Latin America) pushed by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the profit drive of multinational corporations. The so-called Washington Consensus consisting of privatization of public services, deregulation, lifting of tariffs, unrestricted investment flows and free access of large corporations to public contracts and domestic markets, were measures foisted onto Latin American government by making them conditions of international loans and even by threats. (14)

Touted as instruments of development, they have been a spectacular failure by almost any indicator.
• Between 1960-80, income per person in Latin America grew by 82% whereas in the next 20 years, it grew only by 9% and in the last 5 years, it has grown by only 1%. (15)
• In just one decade, the number of poor increased by 14 million. (16)
• From 1990 to 2002, US banks and multinational corporations remitted $1 trillion in profits, interest payments and royalties from Latin America (17)
• In the 1990s, more than $178 billion of state-owned industries were privatized, more than 20 times the value of privatization in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (18)

None of his could have occurred without the willing collaboration of Latin American elites and their satellite middle classes. Venezuela, in particular, has the most Americanized middle class in the continent by virtue of the penetration of the oil industry early on. (19)The sham 40 year elite-driven democracy left oil rich Venezuela in 1998 with
• 80% of its population in poverty (20)
• 75% of arable land in the hands of 5% of the population (21)
• crumbling schools and hospitals (22)
• 70% drop out rate
• 7% illiteracy rate (23)and 60% to 70% of the people without access to basic medical care. (24)
In the last 25 years, oil-rich Venezuela had the largest increase in poverty in Latin America. (25)

What has been the role in all this of the Venezuelan elites?

In Western society, we are used to associating middle class struggles with progressive, liberal, democratic movements, with the historic “bourgeois” revolutions against ancient regimes. It comes as a shock to see the Venezuelan middle classes – less than 20% of the population- fiercely fighting in an ugly racist manner for their unearned privileges against the very poor majority of their own country. (26)

A far-sighted study of Venezuela’s elites in the 1960’s (27) by US sociologist Frank Bonilla has the insightful title of The Failure of the Elites. It details how oil companies and others in the US community in Venezuela acted as a socializing agent to produce leaders for Venezuela in business, politics, the armed forces, and the police. (28)Thus, Venezuela’s elites lost the capacity to operate as instruments of national affirmation the more they became partners with US foreign capital and multinationals. As one Venezuelan aptly stated: “Their country is money.” (29)Bonilla describes an elite whose perspective was totally devoid of a role for the mass of the people; that had little or no sustained contact with them and in no sense felt pressured to meet the needs of the population. (30)Analysts observing the Venezuelan situation ten years later described the majority of the population as “spectators to politics, marginal recipients subject only to the bounty of election campaigns.” (31)

As historian Eric Hobsbawm (32) indicates, the French Revolution’s most formidable legacy was that it set up models and patterns of political upheaval for the general use of rebels anywhere. Likewise, Venezuelans have set up a model of electoral revolution for participatory democracy that has reverberated throughout Latin America and indeed, the entire developing world. This is a “peaceful” revolution, or as we Venezuelans affectionately call it, “la revolution bonita”, the pretty revolution, which is now a viable and visible alternative, a new model. It challenges US hegemonic ideology promoted by the neo-conservatives who control all the state powers in the US.

What has the government of President Chávez achieved?

By using oil revenues for the public good, the government of President Chávez has done what previous elite-dominated governments failed to d provide for the basic political, economic, and social needs of the population. Oil revenue is now used for universal health services, education at all levels, clean water, food security, micro credits, support for small and middle range industry, land distribution and deeds for de-facto owners (33),worker cooperatives, infrastructure, such as roads and railways and support for independent community radio. Most importantly, there is promotion of citizen participation in all government programs including policy consultation. (34)This has never been done before in Venezuela and is rare throughout the developing world. The marginalized spectators are now political protagonists. (35)As President Chávez has asserted: “Si queremos acabar con la pobreza hay que darle poder a los pobres.”(If we want to get rid of poverty we must give power to the poor.) (36)This is very different from the taint of “populism” where people are no more than beggars in a patronage relation to leaders. (37)This reflects the views of philosopher Jurgen Habermas who sees public discourse and participation as the essence of democracy in a pluralistic world. (38)

The results have been spectacular:
• Venezuela has been declared free of illiteracy by UNESCO (39)
• Infant mortality has been significantly lowered (40)
• 70% of its citizens previously marginalized now have free health services in their community (41)
• Almost half the population is studying (42)
• Poverty has dropped to 37% in 2005 (43)
• And, as for the economy it grew by 9.4% in 2005, the highest in Latin America, with most of this growth occurring in the non-oil sector (increased by 10.3% while the oil sector increased 1.2%). (44)

President Chavez’s foreign policy is based on the idea of Latin American integration as urged long ago by Simón Bolívar. Venezuela is trading oil for goods, oil for physicians with Cuba, and investing in joint ventures with its neighboring nations. It has given preferential oil prices to impoverished Caribbean countries (45),has set up PetroSur –a consortium of state oil companies- and TeleSur, a regional TV that will allow Latin Americans to broadcast to each other unmediated by CNN. (46)The achievements of its domestic policies and the solidarity-based foreign policy of the Chávez government take on profound significance in contrast to the effects of the Washington Consensus, which created unprecedented loss and misery in the region. (47)

President Chávez is fulfilling his promises to his people and this is reflected in his electoral victories and consistently high opinion poll ratings, which any other elected leader would envy. The latest poll by a US firm indicates that 6 out of 10 Venezuelans will vote for him in the coming December elections. (48)The 80% of the population that had been left in poverty now have become a serious constituency of the government. What Venezuela has accomplished in so short a time, is a testament to political will, massive popular participation and the investment of national income in the needs of its people and those of the region.

The bedrock of the Venezuelan government is its Constitution, created by an elected constitutional assembly, with widespread public consultation and ratified in a referendum. Lauded as the most progressive constitution in Latin America, it has some elements that make it unique in the world. (49)It guarantees the rights of women as well as children; full rights over land, culture, and language to Aboriginal peoples, includes environmental rights, and enshrines public participation. It also guarantees social human rights such as the right to health care, education, work, and food. And thus, it has given the state a role not just as guardian, but also as a promoter of civic and social rights. It is unique in that it recognizes the right of housewives to social benefits, it specifically uses both female and male nouns and pronouns thereby asserting the active role of women, and it gives constitutional parity to all international human rights treaties signed by Venezuela.

This is the very same Constitution that the leaders of the 2002 coup suspended with the support of President Bush.

No government is perfect, certainly not one like Venezuela’s that has inherited a weak, inefficient state bureaucracy, which is battling underdevelopment, which is struggling to maintain the rule of law amidst a culture of corruption and where key and powerful elements of civil society are anti-democratic and are backed by the powerful US superpower. (50)Nevertheless, government of President Chávez has not once suspended constitutional guarantees despite extreme provocation of a coup d’etat, irresponsible media calls to violence and racism, crippling lockouts and street riots. And while rights abuses may occur, as they do in the region, Venezuela’s record on human rights is excellent compared to Colombia, Peru, Honduras or México and other neighboring countries. (51)They are certainly not in the league with those committed by the US. In Venezuela, there are no illegal political prisoners, no secret prisons, no displaced populations, no practice of torture, no illegal detentions, and Venezuela has invaded no country.

There is no reputable human rights organization saying that human rights abuses are worse under the government of President Chávez nor that it has carried out any systematic repression of political dissent. (52)In fact, with the support of the International Development Bank, Venezuela is undergoing a comprehensive judicial reform to modernize and correct a judicial system that had long been disreputable. (53)

As for Mr. Danger, acting more as an autocratic leader of an empire than as an elected president of a great republic, he has shown little respect for human rights even those of his own fellow citizens and has disregarded fundamental international agreements and principles. The UN Commission on Human Rights has denounced the prison at Guantanamo Bay and called for its closure. (54)The appalling photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison shocked Americans and others alike yet no high-level officer has been held accountable. (55)Europeans discovered that the US has used their air space to fly prisoners to secret prisons in Eastern Europe to be tortured (56),and the US Attorney General has stated that it is all right for President Bush to order torture of prisoners and widespread wiretapping of US citizens. (57)The Bush Administration seems to violate with impunity international law and the fundamentals of due process such as habeas corpus, the right to an attorney, or trial by peers. As Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Assistant Secretary of State has said, “ The Bush Administration… asserts the power of indefinite detention based on its subjective judgment about who is a threat. An American government that preaches freedom and democracy to the world claims the power of tyrants as its own” (58)

The world’s democratic leaders are not doing much to defend the very principles that are the lifeblood of democracy and peace. It seems that only President Hugo Chávez has had the courage to warn the world that Mr. Bush is indeed, Mr. Danger.

The majority of Venezuelan citizens are judging President Chavez’ government, not by some ideal concept of democracy, revolution or socialism, but by the wasteland of their recent history. Neither are they following any model from Russia, China or even Cuba.(59)The previous supposed democracy was only a façade for plunder and abuse by wealthy upper classes that reaped the benefits of the nation’s immense oil wealth caring very little for the impoverished majority. In contrast, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution is distinguished by eager citizen participation, which closes any gulf between politicians and the people they are to serve and it is the foundation for the socialism of the XXIst Century that we Venezuelans hope to develop.

And now for the cautionary tale for democracies.

Here is the morale of the story: when a country’s elites disengage from the majority of the population, they fail to lead and will find that the majority will go their own way.

Despite the best efforts of Mr. Danger to derail them, the humble Venezuelan people are going their own way and they deserve the chance to determine their destiny in a peaceful and democratic manner.

Argentina & Uruguay Say NO to the SOA!

by Por coyote
SOA Watch Breaking News & Update March 28, 2006 Argentina & Uruguay abandon SOA! Critical victory for human rights organizations across the Americas We are thrilled to tell you that in the past week the government of Argentina decided to stop sending soldiers to train at the School of the Americas, and the government of Uruguay affirmed that it will continue its current policy of not sending soldiers to the SOA/ WHINSEC!

We are thrilled to tell you that in the past week the government of Argentina decided to stop sending soldiers to train at the School of the Americas, and the government of Uruguay affirmed that it will continue its current policy of not sending soldiers to the SOA/ WHINSEC!

These decisions are a critical victory for all those struggling for human rights, justice and military accountability across the Americas! Argentina and Uruguay are the second and third countries to take this vital step; they join Venezuela, which announced in January of 2004 that they would no longer send soldiers to the school.

This past Friday, Roy, Carlos and Lisa met with the Defense Minister of Uruguay, Azucena Berrutti. Minister Berrutti is a former human rights lawyer. During the long dictatorship in Uruguay she defended numerous political prisoners.

Lisa Sullivan writes:

"From the beginning of the conversation, Minister Berrutti told us that there was no need to explain the atrocities of the SOA, as she, and the people of Uruguay, were fully aware of this reality, having experienced first hand the horrors of the tortures, detentions, imprisonments and 'disappearances' caused by its graduates. Over and over here in Latin America we have been humbled and realize that we do not need to explain these things to our public, but rather they have much to tell us, to put faces and emotions on the statistics which we have memorized so efficiently...."

Minister Berrutti shared with Carlos, Lisa and Roy some very good news: during the year President Tabaré Vázquez has been in office, no military personnel from Uruguay have been sent to the SOA, and none will be sent under this current administration.

Yesterday, the three SOA Watch activists and the head of the Mothers of the Disappeared met with the defense minister, Nilda Garré, whose husband was disappeared during the repression in Argentina. Minister Garré agreed that after the one Argentinean soldier currently at the SOA/ WHINSEC finishes his classes, no more Argentinean soldiers will be sent to the School of the Americas. Read the whole update from Lisa, Carlos & Roy.

The tide is turning in Latin America! All across Central and South America, governments and citizens are rejecting SOA-style military "solutions" to social problems. Across the Americas, support for the School of the Americas is eroding every day. Add your voice to this movement for justice! March, rally and lobby to close the SOA in Washington, DC April 23-25! (see below for more info).

www.soaw.org/new

A voice for the poor grows stronger in Mexico election

by Jo Tuckman, Globe Correspondent
Populist message resonates in race for presidency
MEXICO CITY
Andrés Manuel López Obrador tirelessly presses his campaign promise at rally after rally up and down the country: He'll listen and respect all Mexicans if he is elected president but ''the poor come first."

n a country where more than half the population is poor and many more feel neglected, the message is getting through. Latin America's political swing to the left appears to be on the verge of reaching the doorstep of the United States.

As the July 2 election approaches, polls this month suggest that the former Mexico City mayor and candidate of the left-of-center Party of Democratic Revolution, or PRD, is consolidating his lead, with support from about 40 percent of voters and a 10-point edge over his only two main rivals.

The son of a shopkeeper in a tiny provincial town in the swampy southeastern state of Tabasco, López Obrador went on to serve as mayor of Mexico's enormous capital from 2000 until he stepped down in July 2005 to run for president.

''He appears to stand for something transcendental, he's offering esperanza [hope]," says George Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William & Mary whose book about López Obrador, titled ''The Mexican Messiah," is being printed. ''The Mexican people are looking for a savior."
...

Washington opening another front?

by Juana Carrasco Martin
Bush administration appears to be initiating harassment of Evo Morales’ government

Even before Evo Morales won the presidential elections on December 15, 2005 and took possession on January 22, his government entered one of Washington’s exclusion lists, in this case one of "populism," an epithet that serves the White House and the U.S. State Department, in charge of issuing warnings, to denote an executive that does not please or suit them.

One then hears talk of a situation unfavorable to investments, economic problems in sight, nationalism and anti-Americanism, attacks on democracy, threats to U.S. security, non-advisable relations and other phrases of a probable equation that is not at all favorable to U.S. interests.

It would not appear to be heartening for the North that the first indigenous president of a country with a majority indigenous population has gained the executive seat with the support of those who wish for and need a new and distinct constitution that recognizes the rights and development needs of everyone, an improved distribution of assets, sovereignty and independence, one that will re-found the country. Neither is it satisfied with the just claim to nationalize resources that were privatized at the cost of greater poverty for those disfavored by fortune (there is already talk of taking control of the assets of 10 companies managing strategic sectors like telecommunications, oil, railroads, electricity and the national airline. Nor do they like the accompanying look by Bolivians towards their equals in Latin America, in search of relations that include solidarity – another vituperative word in Washington – as an essential component.

Thus the attacks have not been long in coming in order to add salt to the pepper that oligarchic sectors in the interior of the country are also scattering on a Revolution that they see coming.

This became apparent at the end of February when a U.S. entry visa was withdrawn from Senator Leonilda Zurita of the MAS (Movement Toward Socialism), the party of President Evo Morales, she herself being a indigenous woman and one of his closest collaborators, with the absurd argument that she is involved in acts of terrorism. Leonilda Zurita had participated in a conference at the invitation of a U.S. university. That action was qualified by many as a reprisal and discrimination affecting the dignity of the Bolivian people.

Then came the de-certification by the U.S. army of the Joint Force against Terrorism (FCTC) through the reshuffle of its commander and the non-acceptance of the Bolivian nominee, which made President Morales affirm that they rejected "coercion, threats and intimidation... we do not accept the veto… Bolivia has its dignity… and no commander is going to be changed at the request of the U.S. armed forces."

And the most recent, during the night of March 23, two powerful explosions in two modest hotels in La Paz led to the death of two people and injuries to 11. The attack was committed by a U.S. citizen Claudius Lestat D’Orleans, and Uruguayan Aida Ribeiro Acosta.

Immediately, President Evo Morales stated: "It is not admissible that when we are in that transformation to a democratic and cultural revolution in order to live well, there should be that class of attack," and attributed the criminal action to an oligarchic and external groups. "The U.S. government is fighting terrorism and is sending us U.S. citizens to engage in terrorism in Bolivia," he affirmed in Santa Cruz.

For his part, Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca ratified the political nature of the aggression, which he blamed on economic groups prepared to create an environment of democratic instability. Coincidentally, a few days before the explosions, the Bolivian leader had said: "We are never going to renegotiate the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States," and proposed as an alternative the Trade Treaty of the Peoples (TCP), alleging that it was just and reasonable to regard as unacceptable that certain foreign enterprises should invade Latin American countries with their subsidized products, which he added was something totally discounted by Bolivia.

Currently, Bolivia can export textiles, timber products and jewelry to the United States without tariff charges through the Andean Trade Promotion and Eradication of Drugs Act, which expires in December this year. Washington’s idea is to replace it with just the so-called Free Trade Agreement.

Added to these circumstances and backed up by the statements from top Bolivian leaders, the explosives attacks coincide with the preparatory phase of the Constituent Assembly, when political parties and social organizations are taking part in intense activities with a view to deciding their candidates in the agency that is to determine the new constitution, one that will re-found a Republic of greater socioeconomic opportunities and give access to the land to those who work it, the basic services that are inalienable human rights, and government representation. Those elections are programmed for Sunday, July 2.

Moreover, the national police have affirmed that the couple were planning to plant another explosive device in the offices of the Chilean consulate in La Paz, which would have caused a diplomatic conflict with that neighboring country, when another of the intentions of the Evo Morales government is to attain a definitive agreement over a sea exit, which will break with Bolivia’s landlocked status imposed by the War of the Pacific (1879-1883).

If the hand of the CIA, the U.S. sinister espionage and dirty warfare agency, or that of another security institution in the empire is behind the attack, it is a matter to take into account when the double game of the carrot and the stick to remove Evo Morales from the presidency or, at least, to neutralize him, is already evident.

In that context, we agree with this description by analyst Jorge Luis Ubartelli, in an article published in Rebelión, that Washington has three objectives: to isolate Bolivia from Venezuela and Cuba as the principal elements of an anti-imperialist axis; to oblige the country to negotiate integral agreements of subjection – the FTA being the immediate case – with the United States in unequal conditions; and to prepare the conditions to destabilize the Bolivian government if it fails to achieve the first two.

There is no doubt that the Bolivian front is within U.S. strategic plans for this hemisphere and that the latter will not hesitate to utilize any means of keeping it in the fold.

An uninhibited rampage of insane falsification against Venezuelan democracy

by Arthur Shaw
Over 400 owners, editors and journalists of the capitalist media and propaganda network throughout the western hemisphere met, or more correctly, conspired March 17-20 in Quito (Ecuador), for what they called their Midyear Meeting of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) to review and to plot bourgeois propaganda and psychological warfare operations against "populist" masses of Latin America and the Caribbean, who are struggling for democracy, national sovereignty, and a higher standard of living.

The IAPA defends a contradiction that is correctly called "bourgeois democracy;" the poles in this opposite -- the bourgeoisie and democracy -- struggle against one another.

IAPA, in practice, denies the possibility of democracy if the bourgeoisie doesn't exercise power. Thus, it denies the possibility of free speech and free press where the bourgeoisie doesn't exercise power.

Venezuela is a country where the bourgeoisie does not exercise power. The IAPA sometimes criticizes bourgeois regimes that restrict press freedom, but the IAPA members generally bury or ignore stories about bourgeois regimes in their publications, but stories about non-bourgeois governments … which are almost always false … are blown up and rammed down the throats of the public..

These IAPA representatives of the capitalist press of the western hemisphere conspired … in comfort … at Hotel Swissotel in Quito which charged the visiting owners of the capitalist media the full rate, but the journalists and editors, the professional liars of the bourgeois media, got a discount rate of US$110 a day.

In consideration of the full rate that the media big shots paid, the accommodating management of the hotel set aside a VIP lounge in its Montreaux Room of the Hotel so that the capitalist owners of the media and high-ranking Ecuadorian government officials (including Ecuadorian President Alfredo Palacio) would not have to fraternize with riff-raff, trash, or the socially "populist" journalists and editors whom the media owners employ in their propaganda operations.

On Saturday, March 18, the Committee on Freedom of the Press & Information of IAPA met from 9:00 am to review and put the final touches on the game plan for the defamation of Venezuela.

A series of panel discussions followed Saturday from 9:30 am - 4:00 pm (with numerous breaks for coffee, liquor, and the restrooms) during which the participants discussed restrictions on the bourgeois press in various countries.

For IAPA, the non-bourgeois press doesn't count, so it's OK for the state to restrict it.

The IAPA was not interested in press freedom in the United States. When it discussed the massive infringements, corruption, and restrictions on free speech in the USA, the IAPA tends to trivialize and apologize for the manifest contempt of the ruling GOPs for the First Amendment of the US Constitution which, among other things, protects free speech and press.

The 400 or so IAPA participants groveled like dogs before the propaganda representatives of the USA dictatorial regime in Washington which murders journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan, trains death squads in Latin America that murder and torture journalists, throws journalists into jail and keeps them there, edits the journalistic content of the submissive US bourgeois media to assure "national security" and "antiterrorist" compliance, surveilles the telephones and computers of journalists; criminalizes the reporting of crimes and other illegal acts by the Bush regime to the media, classifies vast about amounts of formerly public information to conceal the activities of the government and bribes journalists into writing false but favorable stories about the Bush regime. All of these restrictions … and more … on the press in the USA were skillfully rationalized and trivialized and apologized away by the bourgeois and imperialist propagandists, many of whom appeared to be either drunk or high by 1:00 pm, Saturday. (They would have had an even better time if they had met in Colombia.)

After the assembled disciples of Joseph Goebbels lined up and paid homage to the US propaganda apparatus, they turned their vile attentions to the main event, the defamation of Venezuelan democracy.

After nearly a full day of coffee, liquor, and restrooms, the IAPA delegates were in a receptive frame of mind. From 2:30 - 4:00 on Saturday a "special panel" on press freedom in Venezuela took over, composed of David Natera, Correo del Caroni, Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela; Marcel Granier, Radio Caracas TV, Canal 2, Caracas, Venezuela; and Bruce W. Sanford, Baker & Hostetler, Washington, D.C.

* This "special panel" did not disappoint the hundreds of representatives of the bourgeois media who had flocked to and descended on the hotel in Quito, possessed by an insatiable and indiscriminate craving for tales against democracy and revolution in Venezuela.

Among the highlights of the presentation of the "special panel" were tales about "censorship and harassment" against the media and journalists in Venezuela., about the so-called "Content Law" and how it allegedly affects the free exercise of journalism, about how "journalists," under investigation for crimes, suffer persecution, and about regulatory hassles that the sniveling bourgeois media has to contend with in Venezuela.

The special panelists competed with one another to find out who could tell the biggest and the longest lies about Venezuela. Not to be outdone, numerous members of the audience, listening and watching the panelists, jumped into the orgy of lies and misrepresentation. A virtual struggle emerged between the panel and audience to exhibit excellence in the deliberate falsification of information about Venezuela. Although the audience boosted numerous gifted liars and dishonest individuals, it could not outperform the carefully selected panel.

This large mass of bourgeois media owners, editors, journalists went on such a wild and uninhibited rampage of lying and insane falsification against Venezuelan democracy that even IAPA President Diana Daniels, vice president of The Washington Post Company … for a moment … looked appalled.

An encore performance of Saturday's show was rescheduled for Sunday, the next day, but, by then, much of the material had gone stale and some delegates spent all of their time Sunday in the restrooms...

The IAPA rapped up on Monday, March 20, with the approval of the usual cheeky resolutions about Venezuela, rehashed from the October 2005 IAPA meeting in Indianapolis, and a big closing luncheon … fit for millionaires … to celebrate and rejoice over the anti-Venezuelan resolutions and to honor the despicable Cuban pro-imperialist journalist-in-exile Carlos Alberto Montaner.

The Miami-headquartered IAPA is a kind of NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. That is, the IAPA is a money laundering vehicle through which funds flow from US imperialism to Latin American and Caribbean propaganda outlets that oppose non-bourgeois regimes, like Venezuela … however democratic they are … or outlets whose support is necessary in order to perpetrate US frauds, like FTAA and CAFTA, on the region.

The money must be real good because a multitude of hemispheric capitalists in the communications field has stampeded to the trough or, more correctly, the IAPA pigsty.

Today, the IAPA has a membership in excess of 1,300, representing newspapers, TV, radio, and magazines from the North to the South Poles, with a combined newspaper and magazines circulation of 43,353,762.

In Venezuela alone, the IAPA has 29 members (with 19 of them in Caracas) which collectively constitute the totality of the Venezuelan capitalist media.

(These are only the public members, IAPA also has close ties to secret members which try to “false flag” or “misdirect” the public, pretending to be “left” or “revolutionary” and the like.)

Millions of dollars flow every year to these parasites or harlots.

A special organization called “IAPA Press Institute” coordinates the propaganda line of the various media in Venezuela and in Latin America against democracy and revolution in Venezuela.

The influence and presence of the CIA is pervasive within the IAPA. The whole setup seems to be more a matter of coordination and direction under the aegis of the CIA and IAPA, rather than direct ownership by US imperialists. However, US imperialists, as either shareholders or creditors, do own big pieces of the Latin American media.

The line of the CIA and IAPA-coordinated propaganda of the Venezuela bourgeois media is clear. It’s nothing short of what is called a full-court press in basketball. The bourgeois media attacks Venezuelan democracy on all four of the fundamental democratic principles -- sovereignty, the electoral principle, accountability, and the principle of the rule of law. Accountability is the special province of the IAPA because in a democracy, the free press and independent judiciary are two of the main institutions of accountability. So, IAPA propaganda devotes a lot of negative attention to the press and the judiciary. Needless to say, a lot of journalistic resources are spent trying to brainwash the Venezuela people that their democracy does not respect free and fair elections which the electoral principle upholds. Sovereignty is not overlooked but it gets the least amount of attention of the four principles from the bourgeois media.

In Quito meeting of the IAPA, something peculiar seemed to have emerged with regard to the principle of the rule of law as it relates to journalism. The Venezuela bourgeois media seems to be manufacturing a brand new “journalist privilege” which elevates reporters and their capitalist employers above the law. Thus, a journalist can go out and commit crimes, including murder, and then dare the state to prosecute him. If the state doesn’t prosecute him, then the journalist commits more crimes.

On the other hand, if the state prosecutes him, the entire bourgeois media, in Venezuela and through the hemisphere, screams “stop persecuting and restricting of the free press.”

* Thus, a reporter/media owner can attend a meeting in Panama with a handful of conspirators to plot the murder of State Prosecutor Danilo Anderson.

After Anderson is murdered, the “journalist” can say either she didn’t attend the meeting or, if she did, she was there only as a journalist.

Cuban Medical Brigade attended to 73% of earthquake victims in Pakistan

Prime Minister of Pakistan expresses gratitude for aid gesture in meeting with representatives of the Cuban doctors

You have all left a strong impression on the lives, on the way of thinking and in the hearts of the Pakistani people, affirmed Shaukat Aziz, prime minister of that nation, to a delegation of the Cuban medical brigade that has been providing aid to earthquake victims since October 14, 2005.

At the end of the encounter, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz wanted a photo with the Cubans.During the encounter, which took place in his work office in Islamabad, Shaukat Aziz stated that he would like to extend those thanks to President Fidel Castro Ruz because it was his gesture that made it possible for 73% of the patients of this disaster to be attended by Cuban doctors and paramedics.

GW strike group will head south for training

by Jack Dorsey
NORFOLK
The Navy will send an aircraft carrier strike group, with four ships, a 60-plane air wing and 6,500 sailors, to Caribbean and South American waters for a major training exercise, it was announced Monday.

Some defense analysts suggested that the unusual two-month-long deployment, set to begin in early April, could be interpreted as a show of force by anti-American governments in Venezuela and Cuba.

The mission was sought by the U.S. Southern Command, which has its headquarters in Miami and is responsible for all military activities in Latin America south of Mexico.

The Navy was last in the region in force in January 2003, when it used the bombing ranges at the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for the final time.

Led by the aircraft carrier George Washington, the deployment also will include the guided missile cruiser Monterey, guided missile destroyer Stout – all from Norfolk – and the guided missile frigate Underwood, based in Mayport, Fla.

“The presence of a U.S. carrier task force in the Caribbean will definitely be interpreted as some sort of signal by the governments of Cuba and Venezuela,” said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a pro-defense think tank in Washington.

“If I was sitting in the Venezuela capital looking at this American task force, the message I would be getting is America still is not so distracted by Iraq that it is unable to enforce its interests in the Caribbean,” Thompson said.

The objective of the deployment is to support the Southern Command’s maritime security in its area of responsibility, the Navy said, which includes 32 countries: 19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean.

The Navy, citing security requirements, declined to say which nations the carrier group would work with or which ports it might visit.

“Each ship will make two or three port visits in the region throughout their two-month deployment, but at this time no announcements are being made,” said Lt. Cmdr. Chris Loundermon, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command.

Called Partnership of the Americas, the exercise will focus on “unconventional threats, such as narco-terrorism and human trafficking, and improving training levels in a variety of mission areas,” the Navy said in a news release.

Stephen Johnson, a former State Department and senior policy analyst for Latin America at The Heritage Foundation, said such training exercises are relatively common in the region for the United States , albeit smaller ones.

“It’s a chance to show the flag and let our friends know we care,” he said.

As far as the exercise also sending a message to Latin American countries opposed to U.S. policies, particularly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, “there is a challenge for us not to be threatening and reignite hostilities in the region,” Johnson said.

However, there also is increasing concern Venezuela has begun to amass new weapons – from rifles to helicopters – possibly including Russian Su-27 or Chinese J-10 aircraft .

Tom Baranauskas, a Latin American defence analyst with Forecast International, said Venezuela has plans to procure 138 naval vessels, from small patrol craft to larger ones capable of carrying surface-to-air missiles.

It also wants to buy 30 transports and gunship helicopters for the army, he said.

Venezuela has always announced plans for acquiring new military hardware, even before Chavez came to power in 1998, but couldn’t afford it , he said.

“That was before the oil prices went up,” Baranauskas said. “Now the money is available, and there is a pretty nice pool to buy this stuff from.”

Thompson, with the Lexington Institute, said that although the Caribbean is a natural training area for the United States , “we don’t have a task force there very often because of the political sensitivities.

“So the fact we are doing it now will be interpreted by Castro and Chavez as indicative of some sort of U.S. plan, or initiative, or whatever you want to call it ,” said Thompson, referring to the Venezuelan leader and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

He said U.S. military interests in the region “waxes and wanes” depending on the political rhythms.

“ Right now, in addition to the persistent irritation of Castro, we have a very anti-American government in Venezuela, and we have a chronic guerrilla insurgency and narcotics problem in Colombia.

“Needless to say, the Venezuela issues intersect rather powerfully with our energy dependence.”

Norfolk-based Navy officials said the last time an aircraft carrier was in that region was summer 2004, when the Ronald Reagan sailed around South America after it left Norfolk to join the Pacific Fleet. However, that was a relatively quick trip to get the ship to its new home in San Diego.

The Navy drastically cut back sending its carrier groups, as well as all other warships, to the Caribbean for training when it agreed to abandon the island of Vieques near Puerto Rico in May 2003. Such training activities have since moved to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.

Likewise, a yearly exercise in the area, called UNITAS, has been scaled back in recent years. UNITAS is a multinational naval deployment exercise. Every year since 1960, U.S. Navy ships have circumnavigated the South American continent, participating in maneuvers with local navies.

L ately, however, fewer than four U.S. ships have participated. Instead of an exercise that once lasted as long as six months, it now is relegated to a month or two and is conducted in phases.

Louis Farrakhan: The United States should lift the blockade

by Nidia Diaz
The leader of the Nation of Islam, an African-American religious/socio-political organization, visits the island • In order for there to be no repeat of New Orleans, delegation came to learn from Cuba’s experience in natural disaster prevention

The demand for the U.S. government to “lift the blockade and provide justice for the Five” Cuban anti-terrorist fighters held in U.S. prisons was made public by African-American religious leader Louis Farrakhan during a press conference in Havana, right before ending his visit to Cuba.

The top leader of the Nation of Islam, a religious/socio-political organization, explained to Cuban and foreign reporters at the International Press Center on March 27 that after the devastating Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, they wanted to visit the island due to its experiences accumulated over the last 47 years in successfully confronting the devastating consequences of those natural phenomena.

He recalled the sadness that he felt in learning that the Bush government had rejected the selfless aid offered by the Cuban government at the time, consisting of sending 1,100 doctors to New Orleans to help the victims in situ.

“We do not want bear witness again to what we saw in New Orleans. People did not know what to do, where to turn and the government failed them.” That is why they were in Cuba, he said, to learn from the Cuban experience and to return and meet with mayors and the community and make an assessment, draw up a prevention plan and prepare people so that the same thing does not happen again when devastating hurricanes strike.

According to Farrakhan and the delegation accompanying him, it was an encouraging lesson to see how in Cuba, the situation of each citizen is known, house by house, block by block, and how everybody knows where to go when the time comes. All of that, he added, has enabled Cuba to prevent the loss of human lives and decrease preventable material losses.

He added that he was impressed that the Cuban people, who in spite of living with many deprivations because of the policy of blockade imposed by the U.S. government, have a “level of humanity that makes it immensely rich.”

By visiting Cuba, he said, he was able to learn about the Revolution’s original ideas, which are much more humanistic that those of all the religions he knows about. “All religions can learn from the experience of Cuba,” where the government guarantees health and education free of charge to all of its citizens, while in his country, any medical student finishes his studies with a debt of no less than 100,000 or $150,000.

In that sense, he noted that the Cuban Revolution offered 500 scholarships to young people from the United States to study medicine free of charge, the only requirement being that when they finish, they go back to their communities to help their people.

Farrakhan said that in his country, with all of its enormous power, there are 30 million functional illiterates, 40 million people who do not have medical insurance and millions who live below the poverty line.

He reaffirmed his commitment to telling the truth about Cuba to the U.S. people, about how the Cuban people prepare for natural contingencies; about the miracle of Operation Miracle; about the training of young people who were on the streets and are now social workers. The U.S. people, he said, would be better if they were more informed.

“If we are not too proud and arrogant in the United States,” there is a lot to be learned from Cuba.

In response to a foreign reporter’s question, he noted that the U.S. government loves to get involved in the internal affairs of other countries. “We are always concerned about creating problems for governments who do not like our policies, who do not like the interests of transnational corporations, of the bankers.”

Thus, he said, “it is not hard for me to realize that our government in very busy in the case of Cuba to create problems for the Cuban Revolution,” by paying its agents on the island.

Further on, he condemned Washington’s policy of “sucking the blood of the peoples without sharing its riches and its advances with the poor and weak of the Earth.”

In that sense, he noted that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and thus the entire world is rising up against the U.S. government.

The Nation of Islam delegation, which visited Cuban at the invitation of the National Assembly of People’s Power, met with high-ranking government officials and toured place of economic, social and cultural interest.

Venezuelan Government grants scholarships to Bolivian students

As part of the policy undertaken by the Venezuelan Government to cooperate with Bolivian President Evo Morales, 1,000 Bolivian students will receive a scholarship from Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation (Fundayacucho) to complete university studies.

As explained by Fundayacucho president Jorge Arreaza, the youngsters will arrive in Venezuelan in 2006-2007. A total of 470 people are expected to arrive this year, in addition to 550 people in 2007.

The official failed to list the fields of study, but underscored that they will make a technical career, official news agency ABN reported.

Bolivian students will receive a monthly allotment of USD 280 for a total amount of USD 280,000. According to Arreaza, the money comes from extraordinary sources, because it has not been included in the entity ordinary budget.

"It is our duty to lend Bolivia a hand as they start a transformation process for them not to face the same troubles that we had to overcome," he underscored.

Is Coca the New Hemp?

...
Ironically, Washington itself is partly responsible for the rise of the man once vilified as a "narco terrorist." In the 1990s, when the Andean country had become one of Latin America's biggest coca producers, the Americans experimented with a new approach to the drug war in Chapare, promising the government generous development aid in return for its agreement to eradicate the coca plantations. The aid was intended to encourage the farming of alternative products, such as pineapples, bananas, coffee and oranges. Washington was so pleased with the program that it held up its alliance with La Paz as a global model.
...

Bolivia's wealthy lowlands threaten to split

by Martin Arostegui
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia
President Evo Morales is in danger of losing control of Bolivia's wealthy eastern lowlands, where opposition to his socialist agenda is growing and local authorities are demanding autonomy from the central government based at La Paz in the impoverished western highlands.

Ninety percent of Bolivia's hydrocarbon reserves are located between Santa Cruz and Tarija, where Mario Cossio, the newly elected governor, has been seeking support from neighboring Paraguay and Argentina to declare a separate state.

"The east will inevitably move toward independence within a year," said Arturo Mendivil, a lawyer and popular radio host in Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest urban center, with a population of 1.5 million.

The Quechua and Aymara Indian communities that dominate the western Andes and form the bedrock of Mr. Morales' support still harbor an egalitarian culture and welcome the socialist economic policies of Bolivia's first Indian president, the lawyer said.

White immigrants have mixed more easily with native Indian Guaranis in the eastern plains and forests, by contrast, "creating a European-style entrepreneurial society that has turned Santa Cruz into a corporate center and economic powerhouse," said local historian Miguel Angel Sandoval.

Racial and ethnic divisions are another source of friction. Santa Cruz beauty queen Gabriela Oviedo caused an uproar when, as Miss Bolivia 2004, she told journalists in Miami that "not all Bolivians are dark, short and poor. In Santa Cruz, we are tall, fair-skinned and educated."

Mr. Morales' Movement to Socialism (MAS) won elections in December with more than 60 percent of the vote in the high Andes. But MAS captured barely a third of votes in the four lower departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando, where elected governors favor local independence and are now the bastion of the right-wing Podemos party.

"What we should really fear is armed confrontation," Mr. Morales told the Santa Cruz chamber of commerce last month. He called on the local business leadership to back his project for a new constitution, promising to include provisions for limited local government.

Although a Santa Cruz supermarket owner, Salvador Ric, has joined Mr. Morales' Cabinet, most eastern businessmen are suspicious of MAS, which plans to nationalize the region's gas fields.

"I would give my life for the nationalization of natural resources," Mr. Morales said last Tuesday in the oil town of Camiri, where he announced that the nationalization measures would become effective July 12.

The Santa Cruz elite also blame the government's refusal to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States for a loss of agricultural markets.

"Bolivia on the verge of civil war," read a recent banner headline in the Santa Cruz newspaper El Mundo, during tense negotiations in which regional leaders threatened to boycott a constitutional assembly unless they were allowed to conduct binding referendums on self-rule.

"We are prepared to die to defend our process of autonomy," said eastern parliamentary deputy Roxanna Gentile.

Eastern youth groups signed up volunteers for an armed militia, and indigenous leaders in La Paz called for violent takeovers of eastern institutions during the negotiations. MAS militants were beaten on Santa Cruz streets and forced out of local labor unions.

Eager to avoid bloodshed, the government finally agreed to a compromise on the constitutional assembly. But easterners still fear that they will not be able to block the president's plans to nationalize hydrocarbon deposits and seize large private landholdings.

Mr. Morales also has been attacked by eastern indigenous leaders who resent MAS efforts to control their communities. While trying to rally support from the main Guarani Indian organization in Santa Cruz last week, he was heckled off the stage with calls of "usurper," "liar" and "thief."

Real estate on the brink of seizure

President Hugo Chávez promised to deliver 150,000 houses by the end of 2006. Now, he is prepared to issue a decree "to regulate and expropriate, if needed" dwellings in the secondary sector intended to be sold "at stratospheric levels."

"Government as such must be exercised; power as such must be exercised to the benefit of everybody instead of safeguarding individual interests, " Chávez warned during his TV and radio show "Aló, Presidente" No. 250, broadcast from Valles del Tuy, in central Miranda state, in one of the "new towns" that are being built.

During the show, Minister of the Interior and Justice Jesse Chacón told Chávez that the prices of houses in the secondary sector soared above the actual value as soon as the Ministry of Housing started to buy them for residents of high risk areas.

"If John Doe in Caracas has five houses, including one of his own and another four put on sale, and wants to cash in on present circumstances to sell for 100 million a house that actually costs 40 or 40 million, no way, compadre, this is regulated. If he is reluctant to make a deal, then we can enforce a decree on expropriation in the public interest and pay the real value," the ruler explained.

He asked the ministers who composed the housing command to carry out a quick survey of the market.

"If there is need to order stiff pricing, then let us do it sooner than later. If there is need to seize the houses of those people who have them on sale and do not want to sell them except for fabulous, atmospheric, stratospheric prices, then, let us do it. We cannot stop, always within the legal framework," he clarified.

Almost at the end of the five-hour show, Minister of Housing and Habitat Luis Figueroa reported that he, along with his counterparts of Finance and Light Industries, as well as the National Integrated Customs and Tax Administration Service (Seniat,) and the Banks Superintendence started to discuss an initiative with the Real Estate Chamber to "monitor or make prices steady."

March of democracy

Interview with Jaime Gazmuri, Vice-President, Chilean Senate.


...
How are Chile's relations with its neighbours? Have the disputes been resolved?

A top-level delegation from Chile was present at the swearing-in ceremony of the newly elected President of Bolivia, Evo Morales. Morales indicated a strong desire to improve relations. The rapprochement process had started much earlier. A task force has been set up to look into bilateral issues. As you know, Bolivia has territorial claims on Chile. Bolivia has a key role to play in the subcontinent because of its location. Many countries in the continent want to export through the Pacific Ocean. Their goods have to pass through Bolivia to enter Chilean ports.

We have a close relationship with Argentina now. All our differences were resolved in the 1990s. President Lula da Silva of Brazil and our former President Lagos are close friends. Chile has been playing an important role in United Nations peacekeeping operations in recent times. In Haiti, the U.N. force was under a Chilean general. The peacekeepers ensured fair and free elections in February.

Peru is unhappy with the recent defence acquisitions of your government.

There is no arms race with Peru. We replaced four old frigates and four old submarines with new ones. We have a very transparent defence budget. We have an agreement with Argentina to create a system to analyse each other's defence budget. We have proposed the same to the Peruvian government.

How are your relations with Venezuela and Cuba?

Our President was in Venezuela. We want to have good relations with President Hugo Chavez. However, his national priorities are different from ours. With Cuba we have normal relations. It could be better perhaps. We oppose the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

How would you characterise the political orientation of your government?

It is a centre-left government, a contemporary version of a social-democratic government. We have a very open economy. The opening of the economy started during the Pinochet regime. We decided to continue with this but it was our democratic choice. A small economy cannot survive in a globalised world. The free trade agreements we signed are very favourable to us. We do not say that we are an example for all countries, but we may be an example for small countries.

We follow fiscally conservative policies but at the same time we implement very active social policies in health, housing, education, poverty reduction and income distribution. We are aware that the state has an important role to play.

Venezuela, US In Talks To End Air Dispute

US aviation officials on Monday met for talks with Venezuelan authorities to resolve a dispute over international aviation rights after Caracas threatened to suspend flights by US airlines.

A five-member delegation from the US Federal Aviation Administration arrived in Caracas over the weekend to carry out technical inspections of Venezuela's aviation safety standards and attempt to reach an agreement.

Venezuela's INAC aviation agency warned in February it would curtail flights by American Airlines, Continental Airlines and Delta Air Lines from March 30 if the FAA did not lift decade-old restrictions on Venezuelan airlines flying to US airports.

"It's a matter of public confidence and trust that safety oversight organizations work together," FAA representative Mike Daniels told reporters during a meeting with INAC in Caracas.

The threat of an airline showdown has fueled tensions between left-wing President Hugo Chavez and the United States, which receives about 15 percent of its energy imports from Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter.

Venezuela says that it has made significant progress in aviation safety since it was first downgraded to a category 2 by the FAA in 1995, a move which imposed restrictions on Venezuelan airline services to US airports.

Caracas believes it has since complied with international standards and should be restored to a category 1 rating to allow its carriers to compete on those routes. Officials say they could suspend the ban depending on the FAA talks.

"The government has shown willingness to temporarily suspend the measure, depending on the atmosphere during the talks," Infrastructure Minister Ramon Carrizalez told reporters. "We are here to discuss this and the aviation authorities are going to verify we are in compliance."

Washington has warned it will respond in kind to any move to ban flights by US carriers to Venezuela.

Venezuela's government is caught up in a heated diplomatic squabble with the administration of US President George W. Bush, who Chavez constantly attacks for his "imperialist" foreign policies and free-trade proposals for the region.

US officials want their Latin American allies to help curb Chavez, a close ally of Cuba who Washington says has become a negative influence by using his country's oil wealth to spread a message of socialist revolution.

Colombia's Lethal Concoction, by Aijaz Ahmad

Fire in the plains, Fire in the mountains: Oil, narcotics and counter-revolution makes an explosive combination.

COLOMBIA is the country that has given to the world the one novelist whose name has come to be identified in the global imagination with Latin America itself: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Never to be mistaken for history itself, One Hundred Years of Solitude is nevertheless the most fabulous fictional meditation on Colombian history. `Magic realism' was invented initially to capture the oddities of the social structure that had ensued out of the peculiarities of colonial settlement in that country, so different from the class formations and social structures of the European bourgeoisie for which the High Realism of the European novel was appropriate.

This is the fourth part of a series on Latin America.

Colombia is also the principal source of cocaine and related lethal narcotics for the United States market, giving rise to a network of drug-trafficking cartels comprised of an immensely rich narco-bourgeoisie. It is out of the services he rendered to this narco-bourgeoisie and its American cohorts that the current President Alvaro Uribe Velez rose to great riches and unrivalled political power. After Venezuela and Mexico, Colombia is the third largest source of Latin American oil for the U.S. (it accounts for some 3 per cent of U.S. consumption) even though most of the country's oil resources remain uncharted so far. Colombian coffee is still the most popular and the cheapest - by some accounts, the best - of Latin American coffees consumed in the U.S., but the relative importance of coffee has now been supplanted by heroin trade and the hunger for oil. We might add that, contrary to popular perceptions, the U.S. imports for its domestic consumption more oil from Latin America than from West Asia. Colombia shares with Venezuela and Ecuador the Venezuela-Orinoco belt, which is widely suspected of having perhaps the largest pool of hydrocarbons in the world. The future of U.S.-Venezuelan relations, hence of Venezuelan oil for U.S. consumption, is uncertain. The importance of Colombian supplies, present and future, rises proportionately.

The U.S. has trained more officers for the Colombian army than for any other army in Latin America, excluding Israel and Egypt, which are in a class by themselves. Colombia is also currently the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Under cover of "war on drugs" (President Bill Clinton's ploy) and "war on terror"(more favoured by President George W. Bush), the Colombian state has received massive infusions of foreign largesse since 2000 when Plan Colombia was first devised by the Clinton administration. This has not only come from the U.S., but also from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and so on - totalling between $7 billion and $10 billion, depending on how you calculate it. During this period, U.S. military aid has averaged $500 million per annum and has increased each year. Indeed, 80 per cent of all U.S. aid has been for military purposes, which includes high technology weapons transfers and equipment for an armed force of roughly 270,000, nursing paramilitary squads of the type used previously in Nicaragua and El Salvador, stationing not only the U.S. military but also a large number of privately contracted U.S. personnel for military purposes.

All this is ostensibly for controlling the traffic in narcotics and defeating the domestic insurgencies. However, Colombia, which shares a porous 1,370-mile border with Venezuela, has also served as the staging-ground for infiltration and destabilisation attempts in that country. It is quite clear that, if and when the U.S. decides to invade Venezuela, Colombia shall serve as a key advance base.

Funding the Colombian state is the other face of the existing and potential role of transnational corporations in the Colombian economy, not to speak of the converging interests of Colombian and transnational traffickers of heroin and cocaine. In an indifferently industrialised country, the U.S. foreign direct investment already amounts to about $5 billion and the roster of the transnational corporations, mostly American, which are active in Colombia includes Exxon-Mobile, Occidental Petroleum, Canon-Limon, Birmingham-Alabama, Coca-Cola (with 17 plants), Chiquta, Dole and Del Monte, as well as British Petroleum.

U.S. military aid alone provides immense profit-making opportunities for U.S. companies. Early in 2003, the U.S. Department of State reported that there were 17 primary contracting companies active in supplying for military and biochemical operations in Colombia, initially receiving $3.5 billion. Among these, DynCorp, a U.S. military contractor and a Fortune 500 company, has a $600 million contract for aerial spraying to eliminate coca crops, the source for cocaine - an activity that also contaminates food crops and leads to skin diseases among the population in affected areas. The herbicide that is sprayed is manufactured by Monsanto.

In a similar vein, $98 million were offered to Colombia for the purchase of surveillance and attack helicopters for the single purpose of protecting the pipelines owned by the U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum against guerilla attacks. What is given as "aid" by the U.S. government thus returns to the coffers of the U.S. arms manufacturers that supply the helicopters for safeguarding a U.S. oil company.

As elsewhere in much of Latin America, class polarisation in Colombia is extreme and getting worse under the more recent neoliberal dispensation dictated by the IMF and carried out enthusiastically by what Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls the "rancid oligarchy" that passes for the government of Colombia. In 1990, when the most severe phase of neoliberal policies began, the ratio of income between the richest and the poorest 10 per cent of the population was already 40:1. Ten years later, in 2000, that disparity doubled to 80:1. Thirty-seven landed magnates own half of Colombia's farmland, and the richest 3 per cent own three-fourths of it, while roughly 60 per cent of the population subsists on mere 3 per cent of the arable land. Indeed, 61 per cent of registered rural property is owned by less than half a per cent of the population. President Uribe as well as 70 per cent of the Congressmen belong to that select group.

No wonder that the current government is in the process of passing legislation that will eject 3 million more people off the lands (in a country of 44 million, of which one million are of indigenous origin) and will allow the establishment of privately owned plantations of African palm on the ancestral lands of Afro-Colombians. This kind of plantation agriculture, combined with large-scale cattle ranching and direct exploitation of forests, does little to create rural employment and forces masses of people into rural destitution and/or jobless migration into the urban slums.

Smokescreen for class war

The power of the landed oligarchy converges with and is often indistinguishable from the power of what we have termed the narco-bourgeoisie, those who make billions of dollars from the production and trans-border trade of narcotics and who wield enormous political and financial power in Colombia. The U.S. government has claimed for many years that its military aid to Colombia, and to Peru and Bolivia as well, is part of its "war on drugs" which it is waging in order to eliminate the production and sale of narcotics at its very source, and that Colombia is the largest recipient of military aid because it is also the largest producer of the cocaine available on the U.S. market. Tens of thousands of hectares of land in the Andean and Amazon regions have been "fumigated" on the pretext of eradicating the production of coca-leaf used to manufacture the narcotics. The Bush administration has gone further and claims that the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" are one and the same, since the armed guerillas and the popular movements of landless peasants and indigenous peoples who resist the U.S. military and corporate power in Colombia are themselves, in the parlance of the U.S. government "narco-terrorists." This would seem implausible, even on the face of it, and the idea that the U.S. is waging a war against narcotic drugs in Latin America is just about as credible as the idea that the U.S. is bringing peace and democracy to West Asia, notably Iraq, Palestine and Iran.

The so-called "war on drugs" got going seriously in the mid-1990s and then rose to spectacular proportions with the promulgation of Plan Colombia in 2000. Ten years and ten billion dollars later, the price of cocaine on the streets of the U.S. has only gone down, which is the surest sign that the supply is more plentiful than ever. At the other end of the world, the Taliban had successfully halted the cultivation of the poppy crop in Afghanistan but under the puppet Hamid Karzai regime foisted there by the U.S., Afghanistan has again become the world's primary supplier of heroin. It has also been well documented that the U.S.-sponsored mujahideen who fought against the Soviet Union supplemented the funds they received from the U.S. and the Gulf Sheikhdoms with production and sale of heroin, to the tune of $2 billion annually. Furthermore, thanks to Pakistan's own involvement in that jehad, a large network of heroin factories cropped up in the North West Frontier Province, Baluchistan and even Karachi, where heroin addiction became a vast social menace. Between Colombia at one end and Afghanistan at the other, Kosovo has also become a notable producer of narcotics after the forces of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) battered and occupied that little corner of the former Yugoslavia. In short, there is no historical evidence that allies and clients of the U.S. have ever moved to eradicate production and trade in narcotics. Plenty of evidence exists to the contrary.

We also know that the drug barons of the Andean countries were a great covert source for the U.S. to fund the "contras" and other paramilitary forces that the U.S. fielded against the Central American revolutions, principally in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Similarly, and closer to home, drug barons are intimately connected with the entire power structure of the Colombian state, as well as its military and paramilitary forces, upon whom the U.S. relies for counter-revolutionary warfare inside the country as well as the region as a whole. Significantly, the military and paramilitary operations which are supposedly serving the "war on drugs," and now the "war on terror," are largely concentrated not in the northern region where the power and production facilities of the narco-bourgeoisie are mainly located but in the southern regions, closer to the Venezuelan border, where much of the anti-government and anti-U.S. guerilla activity is concentrated. The so-called "war on drugs" would then seem to be mere smokescreen, first of all, for a fully fledged and classic war of counter-insurgency against the guerilla armies and the anti-imperialist mass movements. Secondarily, the spraying of vast tracts of cultivated land with chemicals that destroy not only the coca fields but also all other crops while spreading skin diseases among the farming populations can also be understood as a kind of biological-chemical-bacteriological warfare against the farming communities, forcing them to evacuate the land so that the great landed magnates and the U.S.-based agribusinesses may occupy them at some future date. A technologically induced mass eviction of the peasantry, as it were. The ravaging of land and people alike is thus part and parcel of a counter-revolutionary strategy as well as a most ferocious form of class warfare. Why this counter-revolution?

Colombia's insurgency

Unlike Brazil which has a massive and politically very mature movement of the landless, and unlike Bolivia where movements of the impoverished indigenous people have now succeeded in capturing the government, any large-scale popular alliance of poor peasants, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, outside the umbrella of the guerilla movements, is in Colombia still very much in the early stages of formation. However, Colombia does have the western hemisphere's oldest and largest guerilla movement, which has functioned continuously since the mid-1960s. It is now said to administer half of the national territory and to have varying levels of presence in virtually all the municipalities of the rest of the country. At the centre of it all is of course the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejercito del Pueblo, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP) but there are other groups as well, such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL). FARC is, however, by far the largest, and we shall therefore concentrate on this one.

FARC has its origins in the communist-led movements and "self-defence groups" of the 1940s but in its present form it dates its own origins to May 27, 1964, to be precise - when the Colombian army, armed and instigated by the U.S. through the Latin American Security Operation Plan, began its operations against those rural collectives in the south western zone of the country. The Security Operation Plan was itself part of a continental - and indeed global - offensive that led to U.S.-inspired military coups in countries as diverse as Brazil and Indonesia during the 1960s as well as Chile in 1973. Initially, FARC grew slowly but with the advent of the brutal neoliberal policies of the 1990s it began to expand very rapidly so that, by the end of the decade, its power extended to perhaps as much as half the country. It concentrated on the main productive areas, such as the coffee, banana and petroleum regions, while also penetrating the urban centres and building up forces in rural districts surrounding those centres. Within the guerilla territory, FARC runs schools, medical facilities and popular judicial institutions while providing protection to peasants, trade unions, women's associations, and so on. A remarkable feature of its base among the peasants is that tens of thousands of such peasants are said to have migrated into the FARC-controlled but embattled guerilla zones, seeking protection against the savagery of the state in the zones that the state controls.

In 2002, peace negotiations between FARC and the Colombian state broke down as a result of changed U.S. policy and the latter resumed its countrywide military offensive against FARC. FARC was said to have well over 100 military fronts, with each front having 300 to 600 combatants. Some two-thirds of these combatants are of peasant origin while over 40 per cent of its fighters and commanders are said to be women. The hardening of the U.S. position at that point was itself significant, and it brought to bear even greater military and paramilitary force upon the guerillas. Plan Colombia, initiated in 2000 while the negotiations were still going on, had concentrated on an all-round building up of the Colombian armed forces but had also restricted the number of U.S. personnel who could be stationed on Colombian territory. The idea was to press the guerillas very hard militarily, force them onto the negotiating table and offer to include them in the existing political system in lieu of their agreement to disarm.

A study by RAND Corporation then criticised the Clinton administration and the Colombian government for trying to contain and even perhaps accommodate the guerillas who were negotiating at the time for land reform and democratic transformation. Instead, the study urged an all-out attack to eliminate the guerillas as well as their social base through a scorched earth policy against the civilian population living in guerilla territory. Under Bush, then, a new Plan Patriota was announced, the guerillas were now dubbed "narco-terrorists," and the U.S.-Colombian forces were ordered to eliminate physically all high officers of FARC and force the escapees into the forests of the Amazon. If Mao Zedong had once likened the guerilla to a fish who swims in a sea of people, the Bush policy in Colombia, like the earlier U.S. policy in Vietnam, was to "drain the sea" by waging war against the broad populace of the guerilla-held regions.

Before proceeding any further we need to comment briefly on the implications of the term "narco-terrorists." The official position of the U.S. systematically ignores the role of the drug barons, the paramilitary forces, the ruling oligarchy and the numerous officials of the Colombian state producing narcotics and running clandestine trafficking networks. Instead, it claims that the FARC guerillas are the main source of cocaine and thrive on profits from the drug trade.

The fact of the matter is that in the FARC strongholds of the south coca production was quite widespread among small farmers hit hard by the legacies of civil war and petty scale of the landholdings. Some of those farmers are certainly involved in small-scale production of cocaine and its sale to larger networks. However, as the cocaine trade became more lucrative, coca production spread to all parts of the country. The northern and central regions, which are the stronghold of the U.S.-sponsored paramilitaries, are the main zones for cocaine factories and drug-trading cartels, from which the whole of the Colombian power structure benefits. In reality, even U.S. military personnel is known to have sometimes participated in smuggling cocaine out of Colombia. FARC, on its part, makes no secret of the fact that it allows farmers in its areas to do with their coca what they wish, including the production of cocaine locally; as with all other businesses in its zones, it collects a tax on cocaine production. No reliable figures on the scale of this tax are available but it is sometimes suggested that it may amount to several hundred million dollars annually.

Some high U.S. officials have challenged the claims of their own government. For instance, Donnie Marshall, the former Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and James Milford, the former Deputy Administrator, have said that there is no evidence that the guerillas participate in the drug trade by producing it or by selling it to the smuggling syndicates, while they have confirmed that the U.S.-sponsored paramilitary personnel raise their funds through extortion and by protecting cocaine factories in areas under their control.

Similarly, Klaus Nydholm, the Director of the United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) has said of the guerrillas that, "In some areas they are not involved at all. And in others they actively tell the farmers not to grow coca." Briefing the media in 2001, Nydholm explicitly said, "We do not consider the FARC drug traffickers. We believe that it is still a matter of guerilla organisation with political objectives." By contrast, he says of the government-controlled zones that, "In some of the coastal towns it can, sometimes, be hard to tell whether a man is a paramilitary chief, a big coca planter, a cocaine laboratory owner, a rancher, or a local politician. He may be all five things at a time."

death squads

Indeed, the forces that got recruited into the paramilitary units in more recent years, in a clandestine operation conducted but never acknowledged by the Colombian army, arose out of much older structures dating back to the 1960s. At that time the landed magnates organised death squads against the peasant rebels and by the 1980s, those very death squads had been transformed into the private armies of the narco-barons. Reorganised into paramilitary units, they now coordinate closely but secretly with the regular army and methodically kill not only the guerillas but also trade union personnel, peasant leaders, left-wing intellectuals and so on. In fact, these units form a key link between the narco-bourgeoisie and the regular armed forces.

Human Rights Watch, an internationally respected group, compiled a study of human rights violations in Colombia that concluded that half of Colombia's 18 brigade-level army units were directly linked with these paramilitaries in a regime of widespread terror. The report called the paramilitaries the additional "Sixth Division" of the Colombian Army. This covert role of the armed forces has been confirmed by a leading figure in this parallel organisation who told Le Monde Diplomatique: "We were born paramilitaries. The weapons sent to us in June 1983 . . . had government stamps on them."

Colombia no longer has a mass party of the democratic left thanks to this terror. About 4,000 political activists get killed in Colombia every year, a number that includes priests, teachers, journalists, lawyers, indigenous community leaders, directors of agricultural cooperatives, members of women's groups, and members of a wide array of trade unions, from hospital workers to electrical workers. Of all the trade unionists killed around the world each year, two-thirds tend to be from Colombia. Even The New York Times was constrained to say: "Colombia is by far the world's most dangerous country for union members." The war against guerilla armies and political activists has taken perhaps as many as 300,000 lives and has created the third largest refugee problem in the world. It has also displaced over a million people within Colombia itself in addition to over three million peasants displaced from their lands through other means and who now wander through Colombia's cities. It is in this climate of terror and dispossession that hundreds of thousands have sought refuge in guerilla-administered areas.

The U.S.-sponsored counter-insurgency operations have used such forces across Latin America, and indeed across the world, in its operations for over half a century or more. As Noam Chomsky points out, "In 1962, John F. Kennedy in effect shifted the mission of the Latin American military from `hemispheric defence', a residue of World war II, to `internal security', a euphemism for war against the domestic population." Chomsky then goes on to quote the distinguished diplomat Alfredo Vazquez Carrizosa, the President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights: "Washington took great pains to transform our armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads," decisions that "ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine." This was not "defence against an external army, but a way to make the military establishment masters of the game . . . with the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and exterminate the social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment."

More recently, President Uribe (the only President in Latin America to participate in Bush's "coalition of the willing" for the invasion of Iraq) has got Colombia's Parliament to pass a Bill which will integrate the paramilitaries into the official structure of the Armed Forces while offering them near-immunity for their murderous crimes and permitting them to keep their loot and drug profits. The U.N. and other organisations have condemned this law. The New York Times has said in its editorials that, "It should be called the immunity for mass murderers, terrorists and major cocaine traffickers law." The power of these paramilitaries, headed by a coalition that calls itself that calls itself the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), can be gauged from the fact that, according to Le Monde Diplomatique, they control 35 per cent of the Colombian Parliament and, according to the Colombia's government accounting office, at least a million hectares of land. They continue to seize more and more land, in collusion with drug barons and army units, and, thanks to the new law, are now openly moving into the cities to prepare for the next elections in which Uribe shall again be a candidate. The U.S. government, meanwhile, fully endorses such actions of the Colombian government. Colin Powell, the then Secretary of State, declared that his government is "firmly committed to President Uribe and his new national security strategy." Brent Scowcroft, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, has argued that, "Colombia's oil reserves of 2.6 billion barrels - only slightly less than OPEC [Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] members Qatar, Indonesia and Algeria - could serve as a major source but will remain untapped unless stability is restored." He was of course referring to only the known reserves. Much of the oil-rich region remains uncharted and the eventual size of the reserves is likely to be much greater.

U.S. military expenditure and training is concentrated largely in the oil rich areas of Colombia, particularly Aruaca and Putumayo, which are in the guerilla heartland. The paramilitaries have also been very actively engaged in the oil regions, effectively running a number of towns, and working closely with the oil trans-national corporations. British Petroleum, for example, financed the paramilitaries for protection of their pipelines, and was condemned for this by the European Parliament.

For his part, Uribe has passed new legislation greatly lowering the royalties trans-national corporations have to pay for Colombian oil, down to 8 per cent, has extended leases indefinitely, and has effectively privatised the state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol, leading to a situation where the Colombian government buys oil from foreign companies such as Occidental Petroleum at market rates. The guerilla armies have carried out over 2,000 attacks on those pipelines over the past decade, and the confrontation between them and the U.S.-sponsored Colombian army escalates continually.

We thus see that narco-trafficking meshes with the giant oil company interests, the regular armies converge with formally covert paramilitaries, and "war on drugs" serves as a cover for an elaborate and brutal war of counter-insurgency against the western hemisphere's largest and most enduring guerilla armies. Since much of it happens near the Venezuelan border and military bases in Colombia pose a dire threat to all its neighbours, mainly Venezuela but also Ecuador which too is seething with popular movements. It is only a matter of time before this combustible combination leads to an explosion of massive proportions.
*
Part I

Part II


Part III

Part IV - Colombia's Lethal Concoction

The Accidental Revolutionary, by James Wolcott

Hugo Chavez calls him "Mr. Danger." He is a man of action, a man of conviction, a man of motor oil. By wiping out on his bike in a mighty cloud of dust, Mr. Danger has managed to unify an entire hemisphere.

"Has Latin America ever had such a unifying figure?" marvels Nick Miroff (via TomDispatch).

"At political rallies, his visage is held aloft as a beacon to regional independence and self-determination. He's helped forge new trade partnerships to spur economic growth and alleviate poverty. And his leadership has fanned a gale-force electoral trend that's sweeping the hemisphere to topple one pro-Washington government after the next.

"Who is this grand inductor of Latin American leftism? ...Blue-collar Brazilian Lula Ignacio da Silva? Bolivia's coca-farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales?

"¡Epa! It's George W. Bush, the accidental revolutionary.

"In the past five years, the swaggering Texan has inspired a leftward surge that is uniting Latin America and threatening to knock Che Guevara right off all those natty t-shirts.

"When Che's ill-fated insurgency ended in the jungles of Bolivia with his death in 1967, his vision of a single, unified, socialist continent remained utterly unfulfilled. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictators would rule much of Latin America over the ensuing two decades, and many of Che's followers would be tortured and killed in efforts to overthrow them.

"As democracy returned to the region at the end of the Cold War, most Latin American governments rushed to embrace the 'Washington consensus' -- market-oriented liberalization policies that cut social spending and privatized national industries in order to pay down national debts. But the formula, pushed on the region by successive American presidents, largely failed to deliver the goods and left entire governments bankrupt and beholden to foreign lenders. For Latin America's angry, marginalized, impoverished masses, already-threadbare social safety nets only unraveled further.

"'The macroeconomic proposals of the Washington consensus have not been working,' says Guillermo Delgado, professor of Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. 'That model was supposed to create prosperity and, after so many years, such prosperity has not been seen and class polarization has grown deeper.'

"Sensing an opportunity, new social and political movements in the region began marshalling their forces. Then George W. Bush came along, combining Yankee hubris with a Che-worthy radicalizing touch.

"Bush has since presided over one of the most significant political re-alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. If Cold War-era 'domino theory' has been a bust in the Middle East, it's working with textbook precision in Latin America."

9/11 and the thirst to overthrow Saddam Hussein led to neglect of our southern neighbors, despite Bush's enjoyment of laying a little Spanish on his audiences.

"But Latin America's leftward shift stems from more than White House distraction," Miroff avers, a verb that's really catching on. "It's not that the United States is acting aloof with its neighbors; rather, we're the worst-behaved homeowner on the block. We fly the biggest flag, make the loudest demands, and on top of it all, we don't even like having guests over. Sure, the United States has treated Latin America as its 'backyard' for two hundred years -- but now, Bush's own party wants to fence it off.

"House Republicans recently approved a plan to erect a 2,000-mile, Israeli-style barrier that would wall off Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The plan isn't expected to survive a Senate vote, but it sums up the current state of north-south relations quite well. And it's been a godsend for the presidential campaign of left-wing Mexico City Mayor Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leading candidate in the July 2nd elections and a frequent Bush critic.

"For Lopez Obrador, the border fence proposal is proof that NAFTA is faltering and that outgoing President Vicente Fox was on the wrong end of the rope in his faux-ranchero friendship with Bush. Fox had staked his presidential reputation on securing an immigration accord with the Bush administration, and his failure has made excellent fodder for Lopez Obrador's campaign. His election victory in July would leave the last domino leaning right on Washington's doorstep."

I would say that given the stupendous size and organizational muscle of the demonstrations this weekend, that's a helluva large domino leaning across the capitol, one that might crush a lot of politicians should it fall.

Bachelet Decision Triggers Split

Santiago, Chile
The continuance of Chilean troops in Haiti, which the government of President Michelle Bachelet is slated to ratify before the UN Security Council on Monday, is still uncertain, according to legislative media outlets.

The issue has run into strong opposition by ultraconservative members opposing the government, before the Senate looks into it in June, when the dateline to withdraw nearly 1,000 troops in Haiti will expire.

The administration of Bachelet sent Foreign Affairs Under Secretary Alberto Van Klaveren to the UN to confirm before the Security Council the Chilean stance to continue with its forces and collaboration in the process to guarantee democracy in Haiti.

Bachelet´s decision was agreed with Haitian President-elect Rene Preval when he attended her inauguration ceremony on March 11 and with Argentina and Brazil in recent talks.

Opposition Senators Jorge Arancibia and Sergio Romero made it clear the Bachelet administration must respond to all questions triggering the issue.

Both officials have demanded to elaborate "a very detailed report" on the cost that decision represents for Chile, as the initial agreement for the UN full financing of the mission fell short.

UN peacekeepers in Haiti include more than 6,000 troops, 1,400 police and 350 civilians, together with 800 local workers. Chileans account for 700 of the military presence.

Evo Morales Denies Rift with US

La Paz
Bolivian president Evo Morales affirmed that relations with the US are fine, thus denying rumours of a possible bilateral rift after a Bolivian statement over the terrorist attacks in La Paz by an American citizen.

"As far as I know, there has not been any fracture, because it means there would be no contacts. But contacts go on, and we hope to strengthen relations after the talks with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Chile," Morales said.

Morales´ statements came after the media warned of "clear signs of deterioration" in the relations with the White House, due to the Bolivian government statement after the attacks against two hotels, when a US national was arrested as alleged author of the crime.

Between 500,000 to 2 Million Take to the Streets of L.A. To Demonstrate Against Anti-Immigrant Bill

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to demonstrate against a new anti-immigrant bill being considered by Congress. Stretching for 26 blocks, the crowd of over half a million people marched peacefully in what was possibly the largest gathering in the city's history. Some estimates put the crowd total at around two million.

The rally was organized by numerous unions, religious organizations and immigrant rights groups and publicized through Spanish-language media. Many of the demonstrators wore white to symbolize peace and chanted "Sí se puede!" (Yes we can!)

* Demonstrators speaking on the streets of Los Angeles.

At a mass rally, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa addressed the crowd in Spanish. Villaraigosa, who is the city's first Latino mayor said: "We are in favor of an immigration reform, but not in criminalizing our children." The House of Representatives approved legislation in December that would criminalize 11 million undocumented immigrants and make it a crime for priests, nuns, health care workers and other social workers to offer them help. Several cities, including Los Angeles, have passed resolutions against the House legislation and some, such as Maywood, have declared itself a "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants.

The Senate is considering similar legislation today. Demonstrations are planned near the Capitol, including a prayer service with immigration advocates and clergy who plan to wear handcuffs to demonstrate the criminalization of immigration violations.

The Roman Catholic Church and other religious communities have launched immigrant rights campaigns in recent weeks. Hundreds of thousands of people staged demonstrations in more than a dozen cities. 50,000 people took to the streets in Denver. 20,000 rallied in Phoenix in what may have been the city's largest protest ever. In Atlanta, An estimated 70,000 immigrant workers took part in a work stoppage on Friday in Atlanta.

* Javier Rodriguez, longtime immigrant rights activist and spokesperson for the March 25th Coalition Against HR 4437, the umbrella group that organized Saturday's march.
* Dolores Huerta, pioneering social activist. Co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America with Cesar Chavez.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: Here are two demonstrators speaking Saturday.

DEMONSTRATOR: [translated from Spanish] I think the proposition is unfair. We are human beings. We have to be treated with dignity. That's all we want -- dignity.

DEMONSTRATOR: [translated from Spanish] Our children are fighting for this country in Iraq. Why discriminate? It's not fair! Say no to 4437! No!

AMY GOODMAN: At a mass rally, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa addressed the crowd in Spanish.

ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA: [speaking Spanish]

AMY GOODMAN: Villaraigosa is Los Angeles’s first Latino mayor. He went on to say: "We are in favor of an immigration reform, but not in criminalizing our children." The House of Representatives approved legislation in December that would criminalize 11 million undocumented immigrants and make it a crime for priests, nuns, health care workers, and other social workers to offer them help. Several cities, including Los Angeles, have passed resolutions against the House legislation, and some, such as Maywood, have declared itself a "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants.

The Senate is considering similar legislation today. Demonstrations are planned near the Capitol, including a prayer service with immigration advocates and clergy who plan to wear handcuffs to demonstrate the criminalization of immigrants.

The Roman Catholic Church and other religious communities have launched immigrant rights campaigns in recent weeks. Hundreds of thousands of people staged demonstrations in more than a dozen cities. 50,000 people took to the streets of Denver, 20,000 in Phoenix in what may have been Phoenix’s largest protest ever. In Atlanta, an estimated 70,000 immigrant workers took part in a work stoppage Friday.

We go now to Los Angeles to speak with longtime immigrant rights activist, Javier Rodriguez, spokesperson for the March 25 Coalition Against 4437, the umbrella group that organized Saturday's march. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Javier.

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: Thank you, Amy. It is wonderful to see you after this Saturday, let me tell you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened on Saturday, why so many people took to the streets?

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: People, since around the early January, were waiting for the call to convene massively here in Los Angeles. And what happened was not necessarily beyond our expectations, and I am speaking about us, the organizers in this major coalition in Los Angeles. We were looking at the process. And let me say that this was a three-week process, organizing process. And we saw the indicators, Amy. And the indicators definitely told us that it was going to be big. How big? That was the only guessing point. We knew we were going to have a million. After that, we didn't know how much.

AMY GOODMAN: How many do you estimate now came out this weekend?

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: We estimate anywhere between a million and a million and a half.

AMY GOODMAN: And Javier, what are you demanding? What are your major objections to the legislation? The House passed it; the Senate is considering it. And what are you demanding in its place?

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: This is the same -- basically the same demand as back in 1984, in the 1980s, when we were able to successfully get the Simpson-Rodino bill into law, which gave amnesty to approximately 3 1/2 - 4 million undocumented workers. And the battle cry then was: Amnesty, legalization, protection for all the undocumented. And we were able to get that. Now, in this case, the conditions have changed. And they are 12 million.

And they -- “they,” meaning all of those immigrants without the so-called legalization, the so-called protection so that they can say, “I am somebody,” they are us. They are the American people already. They are interwoven into society. But, of course, they are the most exploited. So the main demand, the main demand is legalization for the 12 million undocumented. And that was the message of hope that was sent out on the call approximately three weeks ago on March the 8th.

AMY GOODMAN: Javier, we're also joined on the phone by Dolores Huerta, pioneering civil rights activist, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America. Can you talk about the significance of these protests, having been involved in many? This clearly is one of the largest California has seen.

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, Amy, I want to say that, well, the people who deserve an awful lot of credit for the great turnout, as in Chicago and also in Los Angeles, were all of the media, the Spanish-speaking media, just took on this cause. They coordinated it. They made sure that people knew that the demonstration was going to be happening. They did sometimes four-hour-long programs so people could call in and get information. And it really shows you the power of media, especially progressive media like yourself and what the Latino radio stations did, “El Cucu” y “El Piolin” and all of these great radio broadcasters, to bring people together.

But I believe that it is having some impact. We know we still have a long way to go. As we know, the Specter bill and, of course, Senator Frist has come out and said that he's going to be, you know, for walls across the border and as much punitive measures as can be enacted. But the other bills are really punitive because they call for anywhere from one to 20 years of prison for anybody who has been deported and comes back into the country. The so-called guest worker visas that they are talking about issuing also include a waiver of any rights that one has in the United States, which of course undocumented in this country, although they don't get welfare benefits or anything like that, but they do have some protections in terms of unpaid wages, etc. So those both are very, very punitive.

We are supporting the McCain-Kennedy bill -- although there are some provisions in that also that, you know, need to be cleaned up -- now, because the McCain-Kennedy bill does have provisions that will allow for a legalization procedure in that legislation. So these demonstrations are having an impact right now. We see a little bit of wavering, not enough in the Republican Party. We've definitely got to go on, and the labor unions and the religious groups, the student groups and community groups that came together for this fantastic march that was held here, the largest march, as you said, in L.A. history, but they're going to be continuing to meet so that we can then go on further and take further actions, because we really can't stop until we stop this really onerous legislation that is now being considered.

AMY GOODMAN: Dolores Huerta. Let me go back to Javier Rodriguez. What do you think of President Bush's guest worker program proposal?

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: Amy, let me say the following. The guest worker program, the unofficial guest worker program has been in effect since 1986. It is workers coming in without the regularization. What the president wants, as well as the president of Mexico, is to regularize the workers but, again, without any rights whatsoever.

Can I refer back to the mobilization, Amy? The mobilization was essentially hatched with a strategy. And that strategy included essentially two things: one, the organizing of the network of the infrastructure in the state of California (and we played –- we began to develop that, to put that in place); secondly, it consisted of a political and media strategy. The political was to send the message of hope and, of course, to stand to stop the Sensenbrenner bill because of its horrendous and macabre clauses, fascist clauses.

And the other, it was the media strategy. We knew the cultural psychology of our people. We knew the cultural psychology of the media. And we went after the strong, large media that exists in the L.A. County area. And we went after not only the disk jockeys in the area, which some of them -- a couple of them at least and one of them, in particular, has the number one spotting. He's had it for a couple of years in this area. And this is the Spanish language media in competition with the English-speaking disc jockeys. Now, we went after them, but, as I said, also, television, also the print media.

And we sent a message to them through our first press conference that it was with them, we appealed to them that -- and it was -- the message was accepted, little by little, gradually. But on the second week, they came in full speed ahead. The disc jockeys, we were able to organize a press conference in which approximately 13-15 of them participated. And then from that moment on, it was magic. The rest of the media and then the rest of the community, the rest of the organizations, it began to galvanize.

And as I said, the indicators were definitely there. The buses began to exhaust from the, from the rental agencies. The people in the communities, the organizations began to call the disc jockeys, began to be interviewed sporadically by the Spanish-language media. And other, many, many other indicators, many anecdotes that began to tell us: yes, we were going to have a successful march.

But the objective of the march, the main objective was to integrate, inject the undocumented community, the immigrant community and the immigrant rights organizations, the community organizations, labor and other folks, other sectors, especially the students also, which definitely mobilized into the national debate, in order to pressure Congress with the amount of people rising. And --

AMY GOODMAN: And do you have a sense in the Senate right now, that they have heard your call today?

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: Well, the -- let's say again some of the indicators in the language that is being projected now, including President Bush, yes, it has begun to shift a little.

AMY GOODMAN: I was in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend. And I was talking to a woman who said her friend who is a minister who works with undocumented workers is terrified, because under the new law, she feared that she could be put in jail for working with people who don't have the papers they're supposed to have.

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ: You know, let me say this, Senator -- your senator -- Hillary Clinton mentioned something that was poignant, and that is that Sensenbrenner and the Republicans, if this law passes, they're going to arrest Jesus. Well, in our case, we're going to, not that we're going to -- we think the parallel is the following. If this bill passes, if this bill becomes law, any of those clauses become law; in the conciliation period, they're going to arrest la Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Javier Rodriguez, we're going to have to leave it there, thank you for being with us, spokesperson for the March 25 Coalition, speaking us to from Los Angeles. And Dolores Huerta, pioneering civil rights leader, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America.

Q&A: US immigration debate

Illegal immigration is a deeply divisive issue in the United States, and a hot political topic ahead of the November mid-term elections. As Congress wrestles with reform of current laws, the BBC News website answers some key questions.

How big is the problem?

There are thought to be about 11.5 million illegal immigrants in the United States, and each year some 500,000 to a million more enter the country, mostly through the 2000-mile (3,200-km) southern border with Mexico.

Many of these people are poorly educated, unskilled workers, yet in their thousands they fill the sort of jobs that most native-born Americans will not take, at least not for the same price.

Much of California's agriculture relies on migrant labour, for example. But some argue these jobs would be filled, even without illegal immigrants.

What most agree on is that at present, the US system is failing all its stakeholders: foreigners who want to enter the country, citizens who expect it to prevent illegal border crossings and employers who look to it for workers to fill jobs.

Why is the debate so charged?

Polls suggest that a majority of Americans see illegal immigration as a very serious problem for the US, and it is likely to be one of the key issues on which the public will judge politicians running for office in the November mid-term elections.

Strength of feeling on the issue was illustrated in March 2006 when hundreds of thousands of activists marched in California to protest against plans to criminalise undocumented workers.

It has also been reflected in the rise of Minutemen groups - citizens who have taken it upon themselves to police the US borders, and to confront illegal workers in cities around the US.

The issue is also politically awkward for Mr Bush's Republican party, because it brings into conflict two of its core constituencies - social conservatives and the business lobby.

Several key players in the immigration debate are likely candidates for the White House in 2008.

What are the key issues?

The political debate over immigration reform is crystallised around several key issues.

These include the enforcement of the country's land borders and existing laws on immigration, changes in the law to deal with people already in the country illegally, and how to offer a regulated route into the US for what the business community says are much-needed workers.

Some advocate greatly expanding physical barriers, like fencing, that already exist along some 100 miles of the border near cities - and bringing in tougher penalties for businesses caught employing illegal migrants.

Plans for various guest worker programmes, and provisions allowing the millions of illegal immigrants already in the US to remain legally, are also being hotly debated.

What stage is Congress at?

Last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill stuffed with tough new criminal measures and enforcement proposals, triggering the recent wave of demonstrations ahead of the Senate debate on the issue.

The Senate's judiciary committee has been working frantically to come up with proposals that strike a balance between enforcement and putting current undocumented workers on the path to citizenship.

But senators from across the political spectrum have put forward a number of competing proposals.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has introduced an enforcement-only bill. Senators John McCain, a leading Republican, and Ted Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, have plans that give illegal immigrants an eventual path to US citizenship.

Republican Senators John Cornyn and Jon Kyl - from the border states of Texas and Arizona - want a guest-worker programme, but would make foreign workers eventually go home and re-apply there to return.

Whatever legislation emerges from the Senate will have to be reconciled with the House bill before it can be signed into law by the president.

Immigration Debate Heating Up in Senate

WASHINGTON
Mar 26
Founded by immigrants and praised as a haven for the oppressed, the United States now is struggling to decide the fate of as many as 12 million people living in the country illegally.

The Senate takes up the emotional debate on the heels of weekend rallies that drew hundreds of thousands of people protesting attempts to toughen laws against immigrants. Among the ideas that President Bush and members of Congress are considering:

-Erecting a fence on the Mexico border to deter illegal immigration.

-Treating people who sneak across the border as felons to be deported.

-Allowing foreigners to stay in the country legally as custodians, dish washers, construction workers and other low-paid employees.

-Allowing those working in the U.S. a path to citizenship.

-Requiring them to get in line behind everyone else back in their home countries who want to become Americans.

On Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up the issue and Bush headlines a naturalization ceremony for 30 new citizens at Constitution Hall. Demonstrations are planned near the Capitol, including a prayer service with immigration advocates and clergy who plan to wear handcuffs to demonstrate the criminalization of immigration violations.

Bush is going to Mexico this week for a meeting with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday it's important that Mexico "recognize the importance of defense of the borders and of American laws."

Protests raged across the country over the weekend, led by more than 500,000 people who marched through downtown Los Angeles on Saturday in one of the largest demonstrations for any cause in recent U.S. history. Marchers also took to the streets in Phoenix, Milwaukee, Dallas and Columbus, Ohio.

The president, working hand-in-hand with the business community that relies on cheap labor, is pressuring Congress to allow immigrants to stay in the country legally if they take a job that Americans are unwilling to do.

Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., also supports the idea and has vowed that his committee will advance a bill to the full Senate on Monday, even if they have to work "very, very late into the night."

"If they're prepared to work to become American citizens in the long line traditionally of immigrants who have helped make this country, we can have both a nation of laws and a welcoming nation of workers who do some very, very important jobs for our economy," Specter said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has said that whether or not a bill gets out of the Judiciary Committee, he is opening two weeks of debate on the issue Tuesday. He has offered a plan that would tighten borders, add Border Patrol agents and punish employers who hire illegal immigrants because he says the most important concern is improving national security in an age of terrorism. His bill sidesteps the question of temporary work permits, but he has said he's open to the idea.

Democrats have said they will do everything they can to block Frist's bill. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said Sunday that legislation creating tougher enforcement does not do enough.

"We have spent $20 billion on chains and fences and border guards and dogs in the southern border over the last 10 years," Kennedy said on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "And it doesn't work. What we need is a comprehensive approach. I think President Bush understands it."

Where Kennedy and Bush differ is on the question of what to do with foreigners who are already living and working in the United States. Kennedy and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have a bill that would allow those immigrants to apply for citizenship once they pay taxes and a fine and learn English.

Critics like Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., say that would give amnesty to people who have broken the law by entering the country without permission.

"It's a slap in the face to every single person who has done it the right way, and to everybody who's waiting out there to do it the right way," Tancredo said. "It's bad policy. And it's also, I think, for the Republican Party especially, bad policy."

Bush wants to give foreign workers a guest permit to stay for a specific amount of time to do a job, without a path to citizenship. Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., propose to let employed illegal immigrants stay for five years but then leave, pay fines and apply to re-enter the country.

If the Senate can agree on the bill, the work won't be over to get legislation to Bush's desk to become a law. The House passed a bill last year that increases penalties for illegal immigration activities, requires employers to verify the legal status of their employees and provides $2.2 billion for a seven-mile wall across the border. But it did not address the guest worker issue.

"La Gran Marcha" - From Anonymous on MRR Blog

Los Angeles, Alta California
Mar 26
Yesterday's march and rally for immigrant rights in downtown Los Angeles is the largest in the city's history. Never has the "City of Angels" seen so many demonstrators filling the streets of the city's center. The sleeping giant has finally awaken giving rise to a new immigrant civil rights movement of unprecedented proportions.

The leadership of the various participating groups demonstrated extraordinary organizational skills. Much credit goes to the over 700,000 marchers, that included entire families, for their superb orderly behavior. There was not one act of violence even though the vile "Minutemen Vigilantes" had made threats against "La Gran Marcha" on their websites.

The size of the pro-immigrant march and rally surprised the world and the nation. A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department made a statement on Thursday, to the local media, that they expected between 10,000 to 15,000 to participate in the march. What a surprise they received on Saturday! The LAPD is now reporting that over 500,000 participated but the true number is actually over 700,000. AnswerLA.org, an organization with a lot of experience in organizing mass marches and rallies, estimate that over 1 million participated. The Aztlan Research Institute, however, utilizing sophisticated crowd counting methodologies, estimates a figure of over 700,000.

What does the immense success of "La Gran Marcha" mean to Mexicanos and other Latinos? It simply means that we now have the numbers, the political will and the organizational skills to direct our own destinies and not be subservient to the White and Jewish power structures. It means that we can now undertake bigger and more significant mass actions to achieve total political and economic liberation like that being proposed by Juan José Gutiérrez, President of Movimiento Latino USA. Juan José Gutiérrez is proposing that the coalition that organized "La Gran Marcha" meet in Arizona or Texas on April 8 to "organize a mass boycott (huelga) against the economy of the USA" to take place on May 5 or 19.

A major reason for the great success of "La Gran Marcha" was the strong participation of labor unions and the Catholic Church. This same alliance contributed to the success of Lech Walesa's "Solidarity Movement" in the Republic of Poland. This can be done in Aztlan as well. If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan.

The great success of "La Gran Marcha" also means that the time has come to organize and politicize our great number of youths that are just festering in many of our school districts. The walkouts in Los Angeles of thousands of Mexican and Latino students from Huntington Park, South Gate, Southeast, Jordan, Montebello, Garfield and Roosevelt High Schools on Friday, one day before "La Gran Marcha", only shows that they are now ready to be mobilized and advised on how they can improve their educations. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villagairosa, a Los Angeles Unified School District victim himself before he turned his life around, is already undertaking a bold moved to wrestle control of the district from a Jewish dominated school board and a White superintendent that are just fleecing the schools of much needed funds. School board Jews like Julie Korenstein, Marlene Canter, David Tokofsky, Jon Lauritzen and Mike Lansing are just enriching themselves and their cronies through crooked deals involving school construction projects, and contracts with so called consultants and vendors. The LAUSD is the second largest in the nation, next to New York, with a multi-billion dollar annual budget. It has an overwhelming Mexican and Latino student population. Jews have their own private schools so why are 5 Jews out of 7 school board members interested in governing the school district? The answer is all too obvious. La Voz de Aztlan has interviewed LAUSD teachers that complained that they have to buy, with their own money, pencils, paper and other school supplies that the district should provide. Something has to done and Mayor Villaraigosa is on the right track

We thank the many marchers for the sacrifice they made on Saturday. Many came from as far as San Diego and San Francisco. They came in on buses, trains, trucks, RV's , motorcycles and autos. Some came the night before and slept in their vehicles. Entire families arrived from Fresno, San Jose and Coachella. One family of eight included a grandmother, father, mother, daughters, and sons. One section in the march consisted of at least 20 on wheel chairs. They all came to Los Angeles and made history. This great city will never be the same!
...

LA Blogs and La Gran Marcha

Martini Republic takes local blogs to task today for their (our) anemic coverage of La Gran Marcha yesterday. Joseph is probably right but it's interesting, we didn't find round the clock posts about the significant event on MR's angeleno blog either.

But there was chatter. Matt Szabo noted that there wasn't a single arrest, Loteria Chicana explained why she wasn't at the march (and what the March does or doesn't mean) while Franklin Avenue discussed the power of the Spanish-language media this morning (not to mention our dear editor's post this AM). Not local, but Slate points out that Los Angeles Latino Power put immigration issues on the front page of just about every major paper across the nation.

In a bid to be fair and balanced (or cruel and unusual), we'll also link to this photo essay at freerepublic.com. We apologize if this classy and high-minded discourse on the complex issues of immigration by cinnamon girl makes you throw up in your mouth a little.

Update: Okay, okay. We couldn't let free republic be the last word. Wash your brains out with the first person reports from the folks at la indy media.

Sustaining Equality and Justice in the Struggle for Socialism

by Daniel Finn
Every socialist has surely indulged in speculation about an ideal society from time to time. The realities of our own society certainly encourage such flights of fancy. But they should not be considered entirely fanciful: without imaginative thinking, it is quite impossible to see how the world might be changed for the better. Yet without any practical grounding, such exercises cannot take us any nearer to the “realistic utopia” that should be our goal.

If equality and justice are taken to be goals of the socialist movement (as they certainly must), we can find a concrete starting point by considering the dilemmas these goals pose for the socialist movement itself. In a world riven by hierarchies, how can the movement avoid creating its own hierarchies—or minimize them if they prove unavoidable? Confronted with opponents willing to use any methods to stop a movement for radical change, how can that movement triumph without perpetrating its own grave injustices? If we can answer these questions, we will have moved towards laying the basis for a society that converts these aspirations into reality.
...

A Book: The Case for Privatization

Myths and Reality - Edited by Alberto Chong and Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes
Stanford University Press

In Argentina, president Nestor Kirchner seems happy to see a major private foreign company (France-based Suez) leave after investing millions of dollars in a privatized water company. In Bolivia, president Evo Morales is preparing to denationalize several privatized companies and increase state ownership in the key eneregy sector. And in Venezuela, president Hugo Chavez is not only seizing private property, but building a whole array of new state companies aimed at competing with the private sector on everything from technology to aviation.

Does this mean the end of privatization, the concept that swept Latin America with such fervor in the 1990's?

It shouldn't, at least not based on the historic evidence of its success or failure in the region, argues a group of well-respected economists in Privatizion in Latin America: Myths and Reality. The book looks at the performance of state companies before and after privatization in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru.
...

Chávez vows 150,000 homes for the poor

CARACAS
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on Sunday vowed to build 150,000 homes for the poor this year -- and warned that the state might expropriate some houses if people try to sell them for too much money.

Speaking at a new public housing complex on the outskirts of the capital of Caracas, Chávez said the government has built 15,921 homes in the first three months of 2006 and would speed construction to finish 150,000 by year's end to attack an acute housing shortage.

''We're going to work very hard, without rest -- Saturdays and Sundays,'' he said.

Chávez also said that if necessary, he would support a proposal by Caracas city leaders to regulate the prices of second homes, complaining of market speculation and saying the state would expropriate homes if owners are asking exorbitant prices.

If an owner holds off on selling a home while asking twice its value, Chávez said, ``we'll apply a decree to expropriate it for public use and we'll pay him what the property is really worth.''

Chávez, who is up for reelection in December, says solving the country's housing crisis is a key pillar of what he calls his socialist revolution.

Caracas is surrounded by cinder-block shantytowns built on steep, often unstable hillsides. Heavy rains and mudslides in the past year have swept away parts of some neighborhoods, leaving hundreds homeless.

Chávez said 60,000 homes should be built by midyear -- a significant increase from several months ago, when officials said they aimed for 80,000 homes in all of 2006.

Chileans reject giving Bolivia sea access

Santiago
Most Chileans reject relinquishing sovereignty over Bolivia's former coastal region, despite La Paz's demand for renewed sea access, according to a survey published Sunday by the daily La Tercera.

On the other hand, an overwhelming majority - 90 percent of those polled - favor reestablishing diplomatic relations with the neighboring country, which were suspended in 1978, and 88 percent feel that any maritime accord negotiated with Bolivia should be subjected to a plebiscite.

Some 75 percent responded positively to a solution to the territorial dispute if it would not involve ceding sovereignty, and 69 percent said they did not agree with any possible return of former Bolivian territory to La Paz.

In addition, 62 percent of those polled said they were against Bolivia giving up other portions of its territory to Chile in exchange for reacquiring a sovereign corridor to the Pacific Ocean.

The telephone survey, said La Tercera, was conducted on Thursday and Friday among 427 Chilean citizens over age 18 in the country's eight major cities. It has an error margin of 5 percent.

The longstanding dispute between Chile and Bolivia – which stems from the 19th-century War of the Pacific in the region, which Bolivia lost - resurfaced this week with the celebration of the "Day of the Sea" in the landlocked country.

Bolivian President Evo Morales called for a special meeting of the Organization of American States to discuss the matter, a request that was categorically rejected by Santiago.

The survey found that if some sort of territorial exchange were arranged, 63 percent of those polled said Bolivia should compensate Chile with a swath of territory equivalent in size to the land and sea area Santiago would be returning to La Paz.

On other questions, 83 percent of those polled think that the disputed territory was always Chile's and was simply recovered in the 1879 war.

Some 89 percent believe that the territory is now Chilean due to the 1904 treaty signed by both countries and 50 percent do not think that the lack of ocean access has limited Bolivia's economic development, while 43 percent admit that it has.

Fifty-five percent said that the best thing is to maintain the status quo regarding the littoral region, 41 percent say that some change should be made and 74 percent said they did not feel that a corridor to the sea would be a fair solution for Bolivia.

The survey found that 51 percent do not feel that giving Bolivia sea access would allow the two countries to fully integrate themselves.

Fifty-six percent said that the presence of Chilean then-President Ricardo Lagos at Morales' January inauguration and the presence of the latter at the inauguration of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on March 11 were clear attempts to iron out the countries' mutual differences.

But 68 percent said they disagreed with the shouts of "Sea for Bolivia" by people attending a ceremony honoring Morales held by Chilean leftists in Santiago.

During the "Day of the Sea" festivities on Thursday, Morales said he would ask for a debate on maritime access in a special session of the OAS.

But Chilean Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley said Friday that the controversy is by nature bilateral and "does not require other interventions."

He added that Chile is "more than agreeable to holding a fruitful dialogue with Bolivia, with an open agenda and without exclusions." The OAS has not voiced an opinion since 1979 about Bolivia's territorial demand.

Bachelet: joining Mercosur would be “back stepping”

The recently inaugurated Chilean president Michelle Bachelet said that for Chile to become a full member of Mercosur would mean “back stepping”.

“That’s why we are so enthusiastic and push so hard for a Free Trade Association of the Americas, FTAA”, added Ms Bachelet in a long weekend interview with Buenos Aires daily La Nación.

“The difficulty has always been that Chile has economic reforms in place. Becoming a full member of Mercosur would mean back stepping on those reforms”, she underlined.

“What is needed is a basic FTAA, in which minimum conditions are equivalent for all countries, and from there on keep advancing. An FTAA of this kind would enable all countries to join. That’s why we are enthusiastic and push hard for TFAA”, added the Chilean president.

Mercosur, basically a customs union launched in 1991 fifteen years ago this Monday March 27, experienced an encouraging advance during the first few years and rapidly became a reference for the region.

However, problems began to emerge with the so called asymmetries, (different degrees of development of the members’ economies) and more serious, Mercosur lack of capacity to address and overcome those challenges.

Meantime Washington in the mid nineties launched the idea of a free trade association, on the lines of the North American Free Trade Association, Nafta, extending from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

But some South American countries fearing greater US influence and penetration, and Washington’s reluctance to eliminate farm aid and subsidies have stalled discussions and encouraged suspicions.

Ms Bachelet also highlighted that Mercosur members must urgently find a way out to the current situation otherwise “some people might begin to question the merits of the agreements which are not honoured or simply ignored”.
“Chile can’t stop advancing and Mercosur can’t be restricted to a tariffs controversy, we would like to see Mercosur in a wider context”, indicated President Bachelet.

But in spite of the differences analysts believe the Chilean president is committed to regional integration.

“It’s too premature to forecast the Bachelet administration’s emphasis, but she does want closer links with the region, but not with the restrictions Mercosur imposes. However this does not mean there are other ways of advancing integration”, said economist Patricio Mujica.

“In Chile we’re very satisfied with economic policies and the trade agreements achieved, for example the free trade accord with United States or with the European Union”, he added.

But Ms Bachelet attitude is quite pragmatic in spite of Monday’s non celebration of the Mercosur anniversary and the different approach with Argentina regarding the FTAA.

“We are strategic allies of Argentina for thousands of reasons. But as in any political coalition or even inside a family, there can be differences. But with respect and trust you can address all issues no matter how delicate they can be”.

Latin leaders balk at US 'wall'

by Danna Harman
The proposed 700-mile barrier is to be a big issue at Thursday's North American summit.

NOGALES, MEXICO
Some envision a wall. Others, a fence - or even a "virtual" fence of cameras, lighting, and sensors along the US-Mexican border. Whatever form it will take, the US is discussing, planning, and, in some places, already building it - much to the fury and frustration of neighbors south of the border.

As Mexican President Vicente Fox prepares to meet Thursday with President Bush and Canada's new prime minister, Stephen Harper, in Cancún, the proposed 700-mile, $2.2 billion barrier is a major point of contention - not just for the US and Mexico, but for the US and the whole region.

Regional leaders - whose countries in 2004 received some $45 billion sent home from immigrants in the US - have met three times recently to discuss how best to oppose it.

"At a moment when relations between the US and Latin America are at their lowest point since the end of the cold war, this fence proposal is viewed as a terrible affront," says Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

"It is hard to imagine any other symbol that more strongly reinforces the image of the "ugly American" and is more sharply at odds with the "good neighbor" concept."

It's not just the barrier, but other issues as well in proposed US immigration reform legislation that irk regional leaders and caused hundreds of thousands of people to protest in multiple US cities over the past few days.

The US Congress passed a tough immigration bill in December that would make it a felony for illegal immigrants to be in the US, impose new penalties on employers who hire them, and erect a fence along one-third of the border's total length.

At present, just over 80 miles of federally enforced barriers and fencing are erected at strategic points on the border, mainly in Texas and California.

This week, the Senate will debate a comprehensive bill that is expected to include guest-worker provisions and avenues for legal residency, while at the same time beefing up border security. So far, a draft of the bill calls only for expanding and reinforcing fencing in Arizona - the border state with the most illegal immigration traffic - and adding 200 miles of vehicle barriers there, but more extensive fencing elsewhere is still under discussion.

"No country that is proud of itself should build walls," Fox told reporters when he last met Bush one year ago, and a month after the House began talks on approving a fence. "[I]t doesn't make any sense."

Since then, as the debate has continued in the US over what kind of fence is needed and where, Fox has called the proposal everything from "stupid" and "discriminatory" to "shameful," and heralded illegal migrants as "heroes" who will in any event find ways to cross the border.

Last year 1.2 million illegal immigrants were apprehended by the border patrol as they tried to cross into the US, and it is frequently estimated that close to the same number make it. Last year was also a record year for deaths. In 2005, 473 would-be immigrants died en route, many victims of thirst, heatstroke, exhaustion, or exposure when they tried to cross less carefully guarded desert areas.

Currently, 11.5 million to 12 million illegal immigrants live in the US, according to estimates in a report released this month by the Pew Hispanic Center. Of these, an estimated 6.2 million, or 56 percent, are Mexicans. Another 2.5 million, or 22 percent of the total, come from other Latin American countries.

The money these people send home is vital to the region's economy. In 2005, legal and illegal immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean sent home $45 billion in remittances, double the total of a decade earlier, according to the Social Outlook 2005 report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a UN regional body. Mexican workers alone sent home a record $17 billion.

So while Fox might be the regional leader most concerned with, and vocal about, US immigration policy - he is far from the only one.

Spearheaded by Mexico, and galvanized by the fence proposals, foreign ministers and other top officials from Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama as well as Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic met March 15 in Guatemala and vowed to coordinate their lobbying efforts against the US bill if it should pass in the Senate.

Guatemalan Vice President Eduardo Stein, in turn, called the bill "an affront to Latin America by a government that claims to be our partner, but which apparently only wants our money and our merchandise, and that sees our people as an epidemic."

This was the third time representatives from these 11 countries have gathered to discuss the US bill. In early January, they convened in Mexico City and put out a joint statement saying that "incomplete measures that only involve the stiffening of immigration policies do not represent an integral solution for dealing with the challenges posed by the phenomenon of migration."

In February, the group met again in Cartegena, Colombia, and devised a plan to identify key US senators to reach out to on the issue. Both the Mexican parliament and the five- nation Central American Parliament have condemned the proposed fence and are calling on the Senate to throw it out.

"Our message is that we are your neighbors, we are your friends. This is a common challenge," Carlos de Icaza, Mexico's ambassador to the US, told reporters in Washington last week. "And we are part of the solution, not only part of the problem."

Venezuela suspends planned sanctions on US flights: US diplomat

The Venezuelan government has decided not to impose restrictions on U.S. airline flights to and from Caracas, which were due to take effect next Thursday, the U.S. ambassador to Caracas told media there on Friday.

INAC, Venezuela's national civil aviation agency, said in February that it would restrict flights by Delta Airlines, Continental Airlines and American Airlines as part of a long-term dispute with the United States over airline security.

Ambassador William Brownfield said that the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) would send a technical team to Venezuela at the end of this week, which would stay "until the problems are solved and they have reached a deal with the INAC, settling the problems that have been outstanding for nearly 10 years."

Venezuela's punitive measure was apparently taken in reprisal for a 1995 ruling by the U.S. Federal Aviation administration (FAA) to downgrade Venezuela to a category-two country because of security concerns, which ended U.S.-bound flights by Venezuelan airlines.

According to the ruling, Venezuelan airlines could only offer services to the United States if they used aircraft and crew members on loan from approved airlines.

The Venezuelan government has been complaining to the U.S. air authorities about their refusal to lift the sanctions.

The INAC has argued that Venezuela had restructured and modernized its airlines, and that the process had been certified by the International Civil Aviation Organization in June 2004, and therefore, it deserved to be returned to a category-one status airline for security.

45,000-strong British journalists' union praises new media in Venezuela

by Rob Sewell
The annual delegate conference of the National Union of Journalists, meeting in Liverpool, once again yesterday pledged “its solidarity with all those in Venezuela who are resisting American imperialism and building a society orientated towards socialism."

The 45,000-strong union, the most important body of journalists in Britain, gave its support to the solidarity work of the Hands Off Venezuela campaign and agreed to the

1) building of links with the UNT trade unions,

2) promoting the gains made by the Venezuela workers,

3) publicizing the union’s opposition to any interference by the USA in Venezuelan internal affairs.

The motion which came from the Book branch of the union was moved by Sylvia Courtnage and seconded by Steve Jones, both of whom outlined the successes of the Chavez government and the need for the union to maintain its position of solidarity with Venezuela.

The annual conference also welcomed the launching of Vive TV and Telesur “in an effort by the Venezuelan people to counteract US sponsored misinformation across Latin America and as a vehicle to extend education, culture, arts and progressive ideas throughout the continent.”

This resolution, submitted by the London Central branch, was seconded by journalist Ian Bruce from the BBC. He praised the new media in Venezuela in its efforts to provide an alternative viewpoint to the opposition-dominated media.

The resolution went on to instruct the National Executive to build solidarity with and send messages of support to these new broadcasting bodies.

Once again, British journalists have sided with the revolution in Venezuela. Hopefully this growing support will become increasingly reflected in the British media.

Brazil Seizes Passports of Credit Suisse Bankers

Brazilian police arrested the head of Credit Suisse Group's private banking unit in Brazil and seized the passports of six other bankers as part of a four- month investigation into money laundering and tax evasion.

Peter Schaffner, 48, Credit Suisse's chief for private banking in Brazil, was arrested and detained in Sao Paulo as he tried to board a plane to Zurich. Schaffner and four other of the executives from Switzerland's second-largest bank are Swiss and two are Brazilian, according to federal police.

Credit Suisse, which has been in Brazil since 1990, said in an advertisement in Brazilian newspapers today that it's cooperating with the probe and doesn't expect any effect on its banking relationships. Police raided Credit Suisse's private banking unit in Sao Paulo on March 21 and seized files and computers to determine whether the bank illegally transferred funds overseas and engaged in racketeering, according to police.

``Throughout this investigation strong signals were obtained that the suspects were acting in an illegal manner, sending large sums of money abroad that came from suspicious origins,'' said a statement from Brazil's federal police.
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Argentina Credit Rating Raised by S&P on Debt Level

Argentina's credit rating was raised for the second time in a year by Standard & Poor's, which cited falling debt levels and increased investment.

New York-based S&P lifted the nation's long-term foreign currency debt rating to B, the same level as Uruguay and one step above Bolivia, from B- with a stable outlook. The rating is five levels below investment grade.

The upgrade reinforces many investors' view that the economy has recovered in Argentina five years after the government defaulted on $95 billion of bonds, said Vitali Meschoulam, a fixed-income strategist at HSBC Securities USA in New York. Yesterday Argentina sold dollar-denominated bonds to international banks for the second time since the default.

The rating change is ``further confirmation that Argentina's economy is on the right track,'' Meschoulam said.

Higher ratings in Argentina are emblematic of improved credit quality across Latin America as interest rates fall and increased exports of commodities such as oil, copper and soybeans bolster international reserves. Moody's Investors Service said this week it may lift the credit rating for Chile, ranked along with Mexico the highest in the region at Baa1. Last month, S&P raised Brazil's credit rating to BB, two levels below investment grade, from BB-.

Brazil, where the inflation rate was as high as 4,900 percent in June 1994, may achieve investment grade by the middle of next year, Nelson Rocha Augusto, president of Rio de Janeiro-based BB DTVM, Latin America's largest asset manager, said in an interview. Brazil's annual inflation rate was 5.5 percent in February.

Economic Growth

Argentina's economy grew 9.1 percent last year and has expanded more than 25 percent in the past three years, helped by record exports of commodities such as soybeans and oil. The country in December used about one third of its central bank reserves to pay off its entire debt with the International Monetary Fund, reducing its need to tap international credit markets.
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Chavez Frias accepts CNE president's decision not run for second term

by Patrick J. O'Donoghue
Speaking at the re-launching of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) subsidiary Pequiven, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias has praised National Elections Council (CNE) president, Jorge Rodriguez.

Rodriguez announced on Friday that he would not be standing for re-appointment.

* "He (Rodriguez) seems to me to be tremendously honest, brave and courageous ... an integral Venezuelan ... he has been subject to public ridicule and perverse attacks ... they never did that to the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) when it was run by drunks."

Rodriguez himself states that the opposition cannot now use him as an excuse for not taking part in December's presidential elections.

Under his leadership, Rodriguez says the CNE has eliminated many vices inherent in the Venezuela's electoral system and criticizes the opposition for failing to rise to the occasion. His withdrawal, Rodriguez states, marks the end of a stormy period in Venezuelan history.

The opposition is over the moon about Rodriguez' decision, even though some are trying to keep it low key, saying the retirement of one person will not change things.

Opposition Shadow CNE, Sumate wants a meeting with the international team of experts (Capel) that studied Venezuela's electoral system for nine months, coming up with a mostly positive report.

President Chavez Frias recalls that when he was in the opposition there was no chance of demanding conditions to participate in elections ... "the opposition are the ones placing traps ... I think that the only way to stop them from shrieking is to hand them the CNE."

It is highly possible that Rodriguez will be offered a government post as President Chavez Frias reshuffles his cabinet for the challenge of the presidential elections.

Indigenous-led uprising challenges FTA, U.S. domination

Ecuadorian Indigenous organizations are in the leadership of the most recent uprising in that country, which began on March 13. Tired of being lied to, exploited and excluded, they have taken on the courageous road of challenging the Free Trade Agreement that is secretly, behind closed doors, being negotiated with the United States by President Alfredo Palacios.

The treaty with the U.S., already signed by Colombia and Peru, is scheduled to be finalized on March 23 in Washington, D.C.—but not with the acquiescence of the Ecuadorian masses.

Their demands also include the termination of the government’s contract with U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum, rejection of Ecuador’s participation in Plan Colombia, the ousting of U.S. troops from Manta military base and the convening of a Constitutional Assembly.
...
The police have used brutal force to prevent demonstrators from reaching the government palace and the cathedral in the capital, Quito. On March 20, in response to the government’s failure to respond to their demands while escalating repression, CONAIE renewed the actions and started a general Indigenous uprising, calling for broadening it into a national peasant and popular uprising. Their slogan is “shuk shunkulla” (one heart), “shuk makilla” (one fist), “shuk shimilla” (one voice).

Venezuela Announces New Mission: Mothers of the Barrio

Caracas, Venezuela
Mar 24
by Simone Baribeau
In a country where abortion is illegal, and poverty and teen pregnancy rates are high, the government’s announcement of the beginning of a new social program, Misión Madres del Barrio (Mission Mothers of the Shanty towns) is welcome news.

“This is a very important mission…and the faster they start it, the better,” said Delvalle Rodriguez, a homemaker and mother of seven, who lives in La Bandera, a barrio in the south of Caracas.

The mission will have three focuses: lowering drug use among young people, fighting unintended pregnancies in girls, and offering aid to mothers who live in extreme poverty.

All were critical issues to the neighborhood, according to Rodriguez and her granddaughter’s caretaker Ludíz Leiva, herself a homemaker and mother of two. “There are lots of girls who get pregnant…many many girls…and drugs, well, that is sold everywhere. You see it everywhere. Where you go, where you walk, where you pass through, they sell it. They’re lost,” said Rodriguez and Leiva, finishing each others sentences.

The other element of the mission directed specifically at mothers. “With this mission, we want to give a hand to mothers who are in need, and homemakers without a fixed income,” said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, when he announced the program yesterday in a barrio in the state of Vargas.

According to Chávez, the government will pay 80 percent of minimum wage, or about $180 per month to mothers who live in extreme poverty.

Chávez originally made the announcement that 200,000 low-income homemakers would receive a salary by this summer last month, saying that their economic contributions to the country should be recognized. “These women [do] so much work ironing, washing, making food, cleaning and raising their kids,” he said.

“It’s a good idea because sometimes homemakers don’t have a husband and others have them, but [the husbands] don’t have work. It’s sad. Living around here is sad. I have a husband, but my husband doesn’t have a job…So this seems good to me,” said Rodriguez, who was holding her two year old granddaughter on her lap.

But the announcement of the program was met with skepticism as well. “Sometimes these things start out well, and then end badly. And that’s worse [than if there had been no program at all],” Leiva said.

Since several million women in Venezuela live in poverty, only a relatively small percentage of the country’s low-income homemakers will receive a salary, a prospect which left the women concerned about whether or not they’d be able to access the program.

“[This] needs to be a program for the people who need it the most, because this [could be like] when they were giving out food here,” said Rodriguez. She said she had received the short end of the stick when the government had been giving out food in the area, only receiving free food once, while others received it over a dozen times. She blamed those managing the programs for the problems. “The president wants for the programs to be done well in this area, what happens is that people running them don’t know how to do things well…There’s no control.”

Since the end of 2003, Venezuela has implemented dozens of social missions aimed at alleviating poverty through expanding access to education, health care, low cost food, and cultural activities. These missions are generally credited with being a contributing factor in the popularity of the president, which exceeded 70 percent in a recent poll.

Venezuela to Boost Petrochemical Offerings

CARACAS, Venezuela
Venezuela will sharply increase production of petrochemicals in the next several years to become a world leader in the industry, President Hugo Chavez said Saturday.

Chavez remarks came as state petrochemical firm president Saul Ameliach announced a plan to increase output from 11.5 million metric tons (12.7 million tons) to 32 million metric tons (35 million tons) a year by 2012.

"Venezuela has what it takes to be a world power in petrochemicals, and we're going to be just that," Chavez said at a swearing-in ceremony for new board members of Corporacion Petroquimica de Venezuela SA, commonly known as Pequiven.

Ameliach announced investments of nearly $5.4 billion in 22 petrochemical projects, including construction of new plants and upgrades to existing ones. Officials previously had spoken of plans to invest some $3.9 billion in the next six years.

Chavez began the event helping to shovel out cement to start construction on a new plant that will produce ammonia and urea in the north-central state of Carabobo.

Chavez rattled off a long list of products that oil-producing Venezuela can manufacture with its petrochemicals, from fertilizers to plastics. He said Pequiven aims to increase its earnings tenfold, from $1.2 billion today to some $12 billion within six years.

Chavez, who says he is leading Venezuela toward socialism, evoked a phrase that he ascribed to Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, saying Venezuela's petrochemical industry "has started to walk with its own legs ... and later it will fly with its own wings."
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Venezuela’s Sexual Revolution Within the Revolution

by Rachel Evans and Maurice Farrell
...
“Only three countries in Latin America provide free HIV drugs — Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. We fought to have HIV drugs distributed for free before [the 1998 election of Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez. It was a hard fight, but we won universal access a short time before Chavez was elected. When elected, Chavez advanced — rapidly — the program of universal access...."
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Dirty game against Cuba announced in Miami

Mar 24
Attempt to ignore Cuba’s decision to donate earnings that legitimately should go to our country to victims of Hurricane Katrina

In its on-line edition last night (Thursday) and its printed edition today, the U.S. newspaper El Nuevo Herald published an insidious article titled "U.S. and Cuba clash over World Classic earnings," which, citing a so-called spokesman for baseball’s Major Leagues, attempts to ignore Cuba’s decision to donate to the victims of Hurricane Katrina earnings that legitimately should go to our country for having won second place in the tournament, which would not be handed over to Cuba by virtue of the criminal and shameful laws of the blockade.

As our people and public opinion know, our baseball players’ noble gesture of solidarity in handing over the Classic prize money to those affected by Katrina was not a new decision announced by President Fidel Castro on Tuesday when he welcomed home our glorious baseball team. On December 14, the Cuban Baseball Federation (FCB) sent a communiqué to the organizers of the World Classic stating that, in the face of the U.S. Treasury Department’s refusal to authorize Cuba’s presence in the event using the argument that our country could not receive earnings because it would go against the irrational Plan Bush for Cuba, it had been decided to donate any earnings corresponding to Cuba to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The letter from the Cuban Baseball Federation stated: "It is not the money that OFAC puts forward as the reason for our interest in competing. We are the federation of a poor but dignified country. Our only purpose is to cooperate so that baseball continues to develop and so that in the near future it will be re- included in the Olympic Program. We have never competed for money.

"With the intention of providing options, the Cuban Baseball Federation would be willing for any money that belongs to it from participating in the Classic to go to:

"— Victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans."

Although we are aware of the intentions and interests behind the Miami newspaper, we do not know the level of representation of Mr. Patrick Courtney, the self-titled spokesman for the Major Leagues, whom we know had no participation in the intense and serious negotiations that the Cuban Baseball Federation sustained in recent months with the organizers of the World Classic, and which finally facilitated our team’s successful participation in the extremely challenging sports event.

In a letter sent December 16 to the FCB, Mr. Paul Archey, vice president of the Major Leagues and the event’s main organizer, said, "We appreciate your offer to allocate any earnings generated by the Cuban Baseball Federation’s participation in the World Classic to the benefit of victims of Hurricane Katrina." He also stated that, based on Cuba’s proposal, a new application would be made to the State Department for a license allowing our national team’s presence in the tournament.

In late January of 2006, the U.S. government saw itself obliged to authorize Cuba’s participation in the Classic in face of the convincing proposal for a solution presented by the Cuban Baseball Federation and the broad international reaction against the cynical goal of excluding our nation from the event.

That is when the complicated preparatory process to guarantee the presence of our baseball players in the Classic was rapidly initiated, a process that included the signing of agreements between the Cuban Baseball Federation, the players and the event’s organizers.

On February 15, in a letter addressed to the Cuban Baseball Federation’s president, Mr. Paul Archey, vice president of the Major Leagues, stated: "Responding to the additional points that you have raised with us with respect to the Federation’s concerns around your participation in World Baseball Classic, we have sought the counsel of the United States State Department. After consultations held with the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the State Department has authorized us to make the following commitments in a collateral letter with a mandatory effect:

— Within a period of 120 days after the tournament’s conclusion, the WBCI will send all the participating federations a balance of account of the disposition of any cash prizes and any non-assigned net income. Said account balance will include documents certifying that the WBCI has donated all of those funds to internationally-known charity organizations such as the American Red Cross and the Katrina Fund."

To whom do the non-assigned funds correspond if not to the Cuban Federation, prevented from having access to them because of the absurd and criminal blockade? What do the State Department and the Classic’s organizers have to say about this agreement approved with the Cuban Federation? Who is lying?

While this new, anti-Cuba dirty game is being carried out from Miami, the victims of Hurricane Katrina continue to suffer government neglect and the disastrous consequences of being displaced in other states throughout the country.

Cuba reiterates its solidarity with them and its disposition to give them the prize money legitimately won on the playing field by our athletes, radiating courage, discipline and respect for the Puerto Rican and U.S. American publics who cheered them on in the stadiums. The Cuban team’s visit to the areas where the Major League organization is building housing for Katrina’s victims reflected the sense of solidarity and the humane magnanimity of our ballplayers and their support for the Cuban Baseball Federation’s decision.

The manipulators and the faint-hearted might choose to ignore Cuba’s honorable gesture; but not the peoples.

WAR MAKING 101 - A USER'S MANUAL

by Stephen Lendman
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
I've lived through seven decades and can remember the late 1930s before WW II began. In fact, I began my formal education in kindergarten within days of when Hitler sent his Wehrmacht across the Polish border in an act of illegal aggression and began that near six year horror. I was too young to understand it then, and I can barely remember that fateful "first Pearl Harbor" on December 7, 1941. Franklin Roosevelt wanted in on that fight and did all he could to goad the Japanese to attack us. He knew with enough prodding they would, and when it came, we knew about when and where it would happen. We were ready to mobilize and join the battle, we did it, and nothing's been the same since.

FDR at least took the country to war as the Constitution says we must. On December 11,1941 he asked the Congress to make that declaration against Japan and also Nazi Germany in response to Hitler's declaring it against us. It was the last time a US Congress would ever use the constitutional authority it alone is allowed in Article I, Section 8 of that sacred document. The Founding Fathers thought that authority so important they codified it. They believed that on what is the single most important issue a nation ever faces, that awesome power should never placed in the hands of a single person. They wanted only the Legislative Branch to have it and only exercise it after careful, deliberative debate. That Branch still has it if it so wishes, but for the last 65 years it decided in its infinite indifference to abrogate it's authority and allow the President to usurp it and use it at his pleasure and choice. We've seen the result - a mess without end. We've had war after war after endless war (including the ones fought by others we encouraged and financed plus all the CIA covert mischief and abuse) with no end in sight and in every instance since WW II against designated "enemies" that never threatened or attacked us or had any intention to. Doing that by direct intervention based on no provocation, as we have, is called illegal aggression, which is exactly the crime the Nazis were tried for at Nuremburg. In the words of the Tribunal: "To initiate a war of aggression....is not only an international crime, it is the supreme crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." The worst of those found guilty in that Tribunal were hanged. Think any of our leaders will ever meet the same fate as they should, of course? Fat chance, even though the worst of ours are as guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as were the worst Nazis.

THE RESULT OF THE CONGRESS SCRAPPING THE MOST IMPORTANT CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY IT ALONE HAS

Here's one definition of a dictator or at least one practicing to become one. It's a head of state able to decide alone with unchallengeable authority whether or not to take a nation to war for any reason. Here's an add-on to that definition. If a leader does it for any reason other than to respond to an attack by another nation or clear evidence an attack is coming, that leader is also a war criminal. Noam Chomsky believes every US president since WW II was and is a war criminal. Ditto, so do I.

This essay will concentrate on the current "war criminal in charge." With some background for the historically uneducated, I'll then fast forward to the present and take you into the heart of the beast we better get to know well and quickly before it eats us alive. I'll lay out what I call a war maker's manual, step by step or rule by rule, from when we were new at this ugly business and still learning to the present. Ready? Here we go.

I can't match the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu who wrote his masterful Art of War 2400 years ago and won't even try. But I've seen the modern day script played out enough times and think I've gotten the hang of it now. First, some basic rules:

A. Get the language right. It's not enough to say Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Venezuela are threats to our national security. We have to say or imply it's the new Hitler Saddam, the "crazed Arabs and mullahs" running Iran (sorry - they're Persians, not Arabs, and only changed the country's name to Iran in 1934......you can call them "crazed Arabs" though, who'll know the difference besides the Iranians), the demonic Taliban who beat up on defenseless women, or the "demagogue" Hugo Chavez "awash in oil money and trying to destroy democracy and destabilize the region"........he happens to have the most vibrant democracy in the Western Hemisphere and is selling the country's oil at a discount to poor nations and poor US communities in need. Think Exxon-Mobil would do that?Now you're getting it.

B. Always pick on a much weaker target country, the weaker the better, preferably defenseless and unable to fight back. It's then best to soften them up in advance by stealth bombing or sabotaging their strategic infrastructure. It's also best to pick on a weak nation of color (we almost always do - Yugoslavia was a rare exception), and best of all is to pick on a Muslim nation of color. Arab nations (and Persia/Iran) qualify as they're not quite white enough, not at least the "crazed Arab ones."

C. When you "pull the trigger", strike the target with overwhelming force. You know the new "Militaryspeak" language - "shock and awe." Who dreams up this stuff? You can bet it's a big PR firm, ad agency or something out of a Hollywood bad dream factory. The target country may be defenseless, and likely is, but you gotta hit 'em like a using a howitzer to kill a gnat even though a strong wind will do the trick. The reason for the "blitzkrieg" approach is it not only grinds your enemy to dust and fast, it also scares hell out of all other nations worried they may be next or in the queue and moving up.

D. There's one other element peculiar to today in the US that's not a rule but a resurrection of sorts from the First Crusade 900 years ago. Back then Pope Urban II, who no doubt believed he got his marching orders from the Almighty, launched his assault against Islam and Muslims in his holy Crusade to regain control of the sacred city of Jerusalem. When his forces finally got into the city they weren't very nice to the Muslims, Jews and even Eastern Christians living there.

It's timely for this essay to note that the Vatican has begun to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a late March conference that portrays those holy wars as having been fought with the "noble aim" of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. I'm sure all Muslims around the world will understand, forgive and forget.

Students of Western Civilization might also recall that Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 for "glory" (that's French for empire) and to restore Islam to its genuine teachings (I guess meaning to bring those misguided souls back to their Christian roots). The Little Corporal didn't fare much better there than he did at Waterloo or that a latter day Napoleon wannabe is now doing in Iraq. It's a shame he's not still around to explain that to our current "head dreamer of empire." But I doubt it would do much good as below I explain the only authority our warrior president listens to.

The point from my brief history lesson is to connect it to our own present situation. For the first time ever, we now have a president, at least the first one admitting it publicly, who also believes the Almighty speaks to him, tells him what to, and he's just following orders from that higher authority. I don't think he's kidding when he says God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. I wonder if that same God told him to steal from the poor and give to the rich. I also wonder what God he's referring to. It's not the one I was brought up to believe in and the principles I was taught to think are pretty sacred in the Ten Commandments, especially the core "golden rule" one.

NOW LET'S GO THROUGH THE STEPS/RULES

Rule No. 1- Develop a tradition of militarism over time. It takes many years of practice to hone skills and perfect them. The US has followed this practice and incredibly has been at war (real war with mass slaughter) internally and/or abroad every year without exception with one or more adversaries since its inception.

No other nation today is more addicted to war than the US. It seems like it's always been that way, and it has. Of course, you'd never know it from the sanitized history we're taught up to the highest levels in all our schools - even the best of them like the two esteemed universities I was lucky enough to attend. I later understood their mission was to program my mind, teach me acceptable doctrine to "make me a good citizen." It's part of the package called "The American Way." Fill their heads with mush and make 'em believe the sun is out when it's really dark and pouring rain. They did teach me how to learn though, and I've tried to use that skill ever since to discover and understand what they should have taught me but never did.

Militarism and empire go way back to our Founding Fathers including the one we call the Father of the country. Some Father. He referred to the nation as a "rising empire", and he helped build it during and after the Revolutionary War. During that conflict he not only dispatched the British (they really just decided it wasn't worth it and left), he waged a second war against our native Indians, all of whom he thought of as subhumans (American Untermenschen). He called for their total annihilation and sent General John Sullivan and 5,000 troops to attack the noncombatant Onondaga people in 1779 with orders to destroy all their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds and orchards. He also stole Indian land from the Onieda people who aided him when he was most in need at Valley Forge. I guess it was his way of showing gratitude. The guy we're taught to revere was a racist and genocidist. With that kind of Father what could we expect from the "offspring." I'll bet they're still teaching George's military tactics to the recruits at West Point and telling these impressionable kids that "Father knew best."

George's tradition was handed down and became more robust over time. Along the way to the present day, we expanded the frontier west and south and slaughtered about 18 million of our native people in the process. Their only offense was they happened live on the land we wanted, so we stole it from them. It didn't matter that they'd been there for about 20-30,000 years. How could we let a "little tradition" stand in the way of "progress" and "development." Once we had it all from coast to coast (including the half of Mexico we also stole), we set our sights offshore for conquests and easily found a few. In our beneficence to our southern "neighbor" we let the Mexicans keep half their country, but only because the majority population was in the southern half, and we didn't want all those dark-skinned people "diluting" our white Anglo-Saxon majority.

As fate would have it we spared Canada. But it was touch and go for our northern neighbor as we coveted their land too, and it may only have been our attention diverted to other "adventures" plus a few cooler heads that kept us from taking it. During our so-called War of 1812, there were those in the US more interested in annexing territory in "British North America" than fighting the British over their naval blockades, interception of our ships and impressment of our seamen. We were humming "O Canada" again in the 1920s, when the "Canucks" as now were friendly allies with no hostile intention toward us or anyone else. We actually drew up serious war plans to invade the country and occupy it. I'm not kidding. Why? The same reason we invaded Iraq or at least one of them. To steal their oil, and back then we had plenty of our own and lots more we'd find. We also had a similar war plan approved in 1919 to attack Mexico and steal their oil too. We want everyone's oil and most everything else they have as well. One day we may change our mind and just declare both countries and all others (or just their resources, markets and cheap labor) US property by an act of Congress or a Presidential directive or decree. Our neighbors (and all other nervous nations) shouldn't worry though. Whenever we conquer or colonize we make it clear we come as friends to help them. In the old days it was to bring them civilization. Now that "help" comes in our special style of "friendship" at the barrel of an M1A1 tank or sights of a cruise missile or nuclear bomb. But "it's for their own good, to bring them democracy and freedom" and the rest of the tired old rhetoric. It was shameless bunk back then just as now.

Fast forward a bit to WW II and its aftermath when the US emerged as the only nation left standing as the world's sole superpower. The Soviets may have developed "the bomb", but the war so devastated them (along with most of Europe and East Asia) it took about 15 years of redevelopment for them to regain even a semblance of normalcy. The US was now free to run amuck and took full advantage. What "amuck" we've run since needs much more space than I have here. So fast forward again to the current era and let Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter explain more recent US policy and its incurable addiction. He did it eloquently when he said "US foreign policy can be defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in." He said that during the Clinton years. He had a lot more to say about the Bush administration in his 2005 Nobel lecture and acceptance speech when he called the invasion of Iraq "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." He went on to say the US "quite simply doesn't give a damn about the UN, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant."

YOU GOTTA SHOW YOU MEAN BUSINESS

That brings us to Rule No. 2 - When you're the meanest, toughest, baddest guy in the neighborhood, you gotta show it by beating up on a weakling occasionally. Otherwise no one will take you seriously, and someone else might try to challenge your supremacy. That's how a local godfather does it in my city of Chicago. It works the same on the global stage as it does on the South Side here.

I can hardly improve on Harold Pinter's eloquence so I'll just add to it by calling the Bush-Cheney administration an unchallengeable practioner of reckless and outrageous policies at home and abroad and being the most reactionary, statist and psychopathic
administration in our history. It stands alone in its brazen uncompromising methods, fanatical extremism, bold and deceptive rhetoric and almost pathological insistence on secrecy. In sum - they're crazy and out-of-control. How's that Harold? It all came out after 9/11 that we now know was an event much different than the official explanation we were given. On that fateful day, the mask came off, the ugly face of a threatening tyranny could be spotted, and the bombs began falling.

So what's going on with us? Was this warped proclivity always there but never understood or quite so visible as now? Or is there something in our DNA that makes us like a modern day out-of-control Sparta? Is it a "bad seed?" Is it curable? Not a chance with the crowd running wild in Washington now declaring they'll throw nuclear bombs around like hand grenades in future wars and are already doing it below the radar in the two we're now fighting - that's right two ongoing wars, the other one being in Afghanistan which in case you hadn't noticed is still "hot" and killing US and other occupying forces. And that one has no end in sight either.

THEY PUT THEIR PLANS IN WRITING AND WE CAN ALL READ THEM - AND SHUDDER

Rule No. 3 - Write it all down clearly and in detail. That way everyone can read it and understand you mean business. What better way to scare shaky allies and intimidate and deter other nations thinking about defying us to forget about it or we'll beat up on them. It works most of the time.

The Bush-Cheney crowd try to make it work every time and since 9/11 have kept practicing to let everyone know they're not kidding. We believe 'em. But just to make sure no one forgets they just updated their September, 2002 National Security Strategy with more belligerent language than the original. The original, in case you didn't know or forgot, lays out an "imperial grand strategy." It's nothing less than a declaration of "preventive war" (the term "pre-emptive" is used incorrectly as that can only apply in a defensive action against a known impending attack) against any nation or force this administration decides is a threat to our national security. It doesn't mean it is, just that we say it is. That threat includes any nation we label "unstable" or a "failed state" (whatever that is). And a little add-on to the original NSS was their FY 04 Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan. It laid out a plan to "own outer space" (think the Martians will buy it), weaponize it with the most advanced and destructive weapons and technology including nuclear ones, and develop and place out there unmanned space vehicles to surveille the entire planet.

And there are two more gems everyone should know about. One is the May, 2000 DOD Joint Vision 2020 that outlined a plan for "full spectrum dominance." That's code language ("Militaryspeak" again) meaning total control over all land, sea, air and space and using any means including nuclear war to achieve it and keep it. The other jewel is the Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 that claims a unilateral right to declare and wage future wars using first strike nuclear weapons. Anyone nervous? You'd better be because the Bush administration declared a permanent state of war against "bad guys" we call "terrorists." I have my own definition of what each of those terms means and it's lots different from theirs. Dick Cheney gave us his message when he declared a "global war on terrorism" that may last for decades and may include in our target queue dozens of countries (the number keeps changing, but they have plenty in mind and don't plan to run out).

THEY'RE NOT KIDDING AND IT JUST GOT WORSE

Rule No. 4 - Just in case anyone still misunderstands, ratchet up the rhetoric, make it even meaner and tougher and start beating the war drums to announce you're planning to demonstrate your seriousness. That should get everyone's full attention.

If all this doesn't scare you, then you didn't read the morning papers right after the ides of March (amazing they didn't choose that day when another noted warning was made, went unheeded and led to a bad ending for a guy whose initials were JC - no, the other one). On March 16 we learned that an updated National Security Strategy outlined the first full statement of US strategic goals since the original 2002 document written in the run-up to the Iraq war and which, in fact, was a declaration of war against that country six months before it began. The new Strategy identifies Iran as the "single country" that may pose the biggest threat to the US and reaffirms our unilateral right to take preventive military action against them. It denounced Tehran as an "ally of terror" and "enemy of freedom" along with daily accusations they're trying to acquire nuclear weapons and even use them. It also audaciously claims "we may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran."

Iran never attacked any other nation or even threatened to. It endorses a negotiated settlement (didn't we use that ploy with Saddam) but warns of "confrontation" if that effort fails. Sound familiar? Haven't we heard that song before? The clincher will be when we call the Iranian mullahs and/or President Ahmadinejad "Hitler." And haven't we overdone that one too? Can't we let the old brute stew in his special hell without degrading his ignominy by equating all our other designated "bad guys" with him? And shouldn't the public have caught on to this snake oil sales pitch by now? You're giving them too much credit. They never get it or understand in this nation the renowned author and social critic Gore Vidal calls the "United States of amnesia." The equally renowned author and my fellow Chicagoan, Studs Terkel, calls our malady a "national Alzheimer's disease." Sadly, it's true. The public can't recall last week's headlines let alone the events of months or years past or heaven knows any knowledge or sense of history - the real kind, that is, not the mythology we're fed in school or through the corporate media.

The updated document goes further and claims the right to take preventive action against any nation we designate an enemy state or any undefined terrorist group we say seeks to acquire WMD. Again, it doesn't matter if it's true, only that we say it's true. And we never explain what WMD is, so I will. Only nuclear weapons so qualify, not chemical or biological. The war hawks want you to think all three types do, but all weapons experts know otherwise. The latter two types can only cause havoc over a small area while only the former can really cause mass destruction not only on its target but over a vast area affected by deadly toxic radiation fallout that can never be remediated.

The report goes on to warn us that while al-Qaeda has been "significantly degraded" since the Afghan war it's also been dispersed and decentralized which now poses new challenges. And it claims the "fight in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry." I wish someone would explain what that means.
And there's more:

Besides Iran, clearly number one in the target queue, the document also lists North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe as "despotic systems." It specifically labels Syria an ally of terror and enemy of freedom - meaning Israel wants us to do their dirty work by ousting their leader and replacing him with someone more subservient to Israeli and Western interests.

It says the US must "isolate enemy elements" but engage those willing to give up violence (read: they're violent because we say they are, but we'll forgive them if they surrender their national sovereignty to the "Godfather").

It specifically singles out Venezuela and Hugo Chavez as "a demagogue awash in oil money (who is) undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize the region." This stuff is breathtaking, and allow me to translate it. First, though let me thank and commend President Chavez for being one of the few world leaders with the courage and backbone to respond to the reckless US policy and vicious lies about him and all else by pointing his finger at the real king of destabilizers and state terrorists. In comments he made on March 19 during his regular Sunday TV program, Hello, President, for ordinary Venezuelans to call and speak to him directly, ask a question and get his response, he called George Bush "Mr. Danger", the world's greatest terrorist, a coward, murderer, immoral and sick among other things. The man's very perceptive.

Now the translation of the NSS comments on President Chavez. What they're saying is that the Chavez extraordinary reforms bringing the Venezuelan people vital social benefits like free health care and education they never had before; his most vibrant democracy in the Americas; his innovative trade agreements that are fair to all participating countries and his opposition to the US promoted exploitive ones; and his beneficent policy of helping his neighbors, other developing countries, and some poor communities in US cities like selected neighborhoods in my own city of Chicago by selling them discounted oil (or heating oil to US cities - again, think Exxon-Mobil would do that?) are not in the interests of the US or the giant transnational corporations who want the right to exploit the country and every other developing one as well for their own benefit. That means no social programs for the people, just opportunities for US giant transnationals to have open and free access to plunder for profit. We call that "free trade." I call it "the American way." Hugo Chavez and the great majority of Venezuelans justifiably want no part of it. Neither should we.

It also emphasizes the need to enhance the administration's post-conflict capabilities and to create a "civilian reserve corps" to rebuild countries after a war ends - meaning after we destroy them by illegal aggression we'll award big no-bid contracts to the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild them......shoddily..... and steal the US taxpayers blind while doing whatever it is they're doing. We do know Halliburton is expert at building US military bases and "torture-prisons."

Finally, it states a policy to promote nuclear power abroad to provide "reliable, emission-free energy." I love this one too. This is a sales pitch for General Electric and all other US corporations that will profit big time if we can convince other countries to let US corporations build nuclear power plants for them and all the rest that goes with them. And, oh yes, these plants most definitely are not emission-free. Where I live in Chicago is testimony to that. I'm surrounded by 11 nuclear power plants, many of them aging (as are most others) and all of them have a disturbing history of safety violations caused by aging and shoddy maintenance (another common problem in many other cities). Even without a serious accident (which will happen one day), these facilities (and all others everywhere including any newly built ones) discharge enough deadly toxic radiation daily in their normal operations to contaminate the food we eat (even organic food), the water we drink and the air we breathe into our lungs. And if one of these plants ever has a core meltdown and metropolitan Chicago is downwind from the fallout, the city and suburbs alone will become uninhabitable for the next 4.5 billion years (forever) and would have to be evacuated quickly with all possessions left behind and lost (including our homes) except for what we could carry in suitcases or in the trunks of our cars if we own one which I don't. This is the kind of madness our government is trying to sell the US public and the world. But no matter. They'll do that and anything else to help their corporate friends......even if it kills us.

SELLING WAR - IT'S NOT HARD TO DO

Rule No. 5 - After putting your intentions clearly in writing and showing you mean business, the next step is scaring the public by choosing a "target country" and convincing them it threatens our security and welfare. You explain you're trying to reason with it, but if it won't listen, force may be necessary as a last resort. But not to worry. We'll only do this for our own safety and security. If you do this well enough (and these guys are experts, they've had so much practice), you hope the public will go along with your madness even if things don't go well and despite what your real objectives are.

With two out-of-control wars on their hands, why would they ever want to start another one? We don't have enough troops to handle Iraq and Afghanistan, there's growing discontent in the ranks including desertions in the thousands, and our military spending is off the charts and running up massive budget deficits even the new Fed chairman is alarmed about. He and other experts know they're only sustainable by "the kindness of strangers" that one day may become less kind as well as the wholesale shredding of our social safety net to fund wars. For me that's a clinical definition of insanity, but that doesn't deter this crowd. The war drums are beating loudly and the demonizing of our new number one public enemy is clearly Iran. In mid-February Secretary of State Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the US would "actively confront" Iran and asked for an extra $75 million in funding for anti-Tehran propaganda and support for opposition groups outside the country. And she just turned up the heat a notch or two more by accusing Iran of lying about its (nuclear) activities and calling the country "a central banker to terrorism" - an overused false, deceptive and demonizing line she and others have used before.

Of course, this is all part of "the big lie" and prepping of the public for the "fun and games" they have in mind. What's never mentioned and what the sleepwalking public doesn't understand is there's only one "king" and undisputed world champion of "terrorism" (the state-sponsored most deadly kind of all) and central banker of terrorism. There may be a few other bit players around that come and go, but the US for at least many decades has been financing the most widespread and egregious terrorist activities on the planet - mainly its own, but it spreads it around when it can get other willing co-conspirator nations to join in. I'll let some of the worst of them go unnamed, but the reader need only check what nations have become part of our "coalitions of the willing" in victim countries now under the heel of the oppressive US boot. And then they can add a few more to that list like our closest of all allies in the Middle East and a few more in South and East Asia.

The issue with Iran has nothing to do with the furor over that country's wanting to develop its commercial nuclear industry, having the right to enrich its own uranium and even the right to develop weapons to defend itself against really hostile enemies. They'd be crazy and irresponsible not to want to want an adequate defense. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is in full compliance with it, and has every legal right to enrich its uranium. But that doesn't cut it with the "Godfather" because Iran won't sell out its sovereignty to the US and our oil and other corporate interests. India, Pakistan and Israel, on the other hand, are nuclear outlaws, have known stockpiles of nuclear bombs, and have not signed the NPT. But they know "who's boss", show proper deference, can build and stockpile nuclear bombs (maybe even use a few) and they're valued and trusted strategic allies. It follows that attacking Iran is quite acceptable because the "Godfather" tolerates no disobedient "outliers", and such behavior must be severely punished to oust their leaders, replace them with more "friendly" ones, and deter other nations from showing the same independence or notion of moving that way.

WELCOME TO THE MODERN NUCLEAR AGE UNMASKED

Rule No. 6 - First the rule and then the message from it. The rule is: when you've got 'em, use 'em. Of course, that means using whatever most destructive or high tech weapons you have, especially if the target country only has lesser ones. It also means: what's the point of having 'em if you can't or don't use 'em. The message then is: toxic radiation is good for you. That must be what they're selling because the US has now stated its intent to use industrial strength nuclear bombs in any future wars if it chooses to. Can they really sell this line of sheer madness? They're trying, and I don't hear anyone screaming about it yet.

Waging war by illegal aggression is bad enough, but doing it recklessly in another so-called "shock and awe" attack with so-called "bunker-buster mini-nukes" that aren't mini is reckless and insane. The rhetoric about them is false and deliberately deceptive. These bombs are industrial strength and can be made to any potency and likely would be from one third to two thirds as powerful as a Hiroshima bomb. They're designed to penetrate a designated target and explode underground for supposed protection. The DOD falsely claims this fantasy. They deceptively state that these weapons are safe to use because only the protected target is destroyed while the toxic radiation from the detonation is contained underground. Baloney. This is just another shameless lie. Some of it will be contained, but any bomb this powerful will release most of its toxic and lethal radiation into the atmosphere contaminating a vast area depending only on how many targets are struck, where they are, and by how many nuclear bombs. Let's be clear what will happen if this attack goes ahead as planned or any other like it they may have in mind. It will likely be Hiroshima and Nagasaki x you pick the multiple - anywhere from double to infinity. And the result will be many thousands of innocent people murdered, many more thousands poisoned by toxic, lethal radiation and a vast area irremediably contaminated for the next 4.5 billion years. Think it's worth it, never mind unjustified, egregious and a gross breach of international law.

Should this administration be insane enough to do this (and after the announcement of March 16 it looks more likely than ever), the entire Middle East may boil over, and the US will have descended even deeper into its hellish sinkhole of endless (and now full-scale) nuclear war, massive destruction and killing, and nation bankrupting levels of endless spending with no end in sight. Doesn't this crowd understand this? They must, but that doesn't deter the damn fools. They're often wrong but never in doubt. Haven't they ever heard the great lyrics to folk singer Pete Seeger's Vietnam era ode to the damn fool of that period - "Waste deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says push on." And don't they remember the memorable Stanley Kubrick 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, that even I saw back then, and I dislike movies. Kubrick portrayed a nuclear Doomsday Machine. The film's subtitle was "how to stop worrying and love the bomb." Anyone believing that then or now can only love great suffering and large-scale death and destruction instead of life. But you can bet these guys will convince a lot of people it's worth it - for what and whom. Them maybe, but not us.

AND NOW THE NEXT STEP - THE MOVE FROM A REPUBLIC TO TYRANNY

Rule No. 7 (the last one) - Your manual is almost complete, and you're about to become as expert at this game as the big boys actually playing it. The only step left is to do at home everything you want to do abroad without having to nuke the public to sell it. Scaring hell out of them should do the trick.

We may find out and sooner than we think if it'll work. But this time we may be getting in over our heads and headed for the abyss if the alarm sounded by retired General Tommy Franks proves true. A few months after he retired he gave an interview to Cigar Aficionado magazine (a most unlikely venue - maybe he envisioned the world going up in smoke) and made what to some was an astonishing statement. He said if another terrorist attack occurs in the US "the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." He went on to say such an attack will result in our losing our "freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years......(and that Bush)..... will likely declare martial law......."

Have I ruined your day? Fasten your seat belt, it gets worse. For some time now, a number of US government officials and private "terrorism" experts are on record predicting it's just a matter of when, not if, the US will be struck again. Some say it will be worse than 9/11. And on June 6, 2003, the AP quoted a US government report that "there is a high probability that al-Qaida will attempt an attack with weapons of mass destruction in the next two years." Now I'd never advise anyone believe anything said by any government official. But those of us, including myself, convinced our own government was behind or complicit in the first 9/11 attack, should take this warning very seriously. It means if that conclusion is true (and again, I believe it is) this warning and General Franks' grim assessment may, in fact, be advance word of what's ahead. We should heed that warning and be prepared as best we can. One astute observer I heard comment said in all seriousness that for anyone with enough resources a prudent option today would be to have "a second passport and a little property in Vancouver." He added we should think out our escape route in advance and be ready to take it.

HERE'S THE NIGHTMARISH SCRIPT YOU CAN PRACTICE LOSING SLEEP OVER

Rule (or reality) No. 8 - The script is written and the plans are ready to go. Here's how it's likely to play out.

I've discussed this scenario before in another essay, but it deserves repeating here with some added embellishment to scare you even more. I began by suggesting we're being set up (as well as being given fair warning if we can read the tea leaves) for a planned major strike against us. I then went on to say.......You know the drill by now. A major attack happens on US soil, the Bush administration and complicit corporate media hype what happened, scare the public and get them mad enough to demand retribution. If they haven't yet attacked Iran, they blame this on them so they now have public and outside support to do it claiming secret intelligence they can't reveal and it's (nuclear) bombs away - and George Bush's approval rating skyrockets just like after 9/11, and the Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress in November. Karl Rove couldn't plan it any better.

And there's one more thing I didn't write before but will add here. Tommy Franks' assessment and vision will become reality, the Constitution will be suspended, martial law will be declared and we'll have crossed the Rubicon and passed from a republic (what's left of it) to tyranny just as it happened in ancient Rome and more recently in Weimar Germany. We're no different or safer than they were. It works the same in every country, and we should understand nothing is more fragile than our sacred freedom and liberty. It can easily be taken from us without our knowledge or with our compliance when we think it guarantees us security. The reputed old Chinese proverb and curse (likely derived from another source) said "May he (or you) live in interesting times." It didn't mean "let the good times roll and all is well in the world." Whether of Chinese origin or not, I'll settle for the curse and say it surely applies to today in this country like never before in our history.

I've tried to use this essay to warn everyone reading it how deadly serious the times we're now living in are. We must understand that, spread the word, enlist the support of others, and desperately try to head off the impending disaster I think lies ahead if we all don't act in time. It's really that serious.

I could end this a lot of ways. I usually do it either inspirationally or with a warning. This time it's the latter because the situation is grave, and the time is short. What's at stake is nothing less than saving the republic (again what's left of it) and our sacred Constitutional rights. Unless enough of us are willing to fight for both and do it soon, there may be nothing left to fight for. Understand the threat, get mad, energized and heed Pogo's advice and wisdom that "we've met the enemy and it's us." Now what are we gonna do about it?" It's our move next.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog address at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Peru, a “worrisome democracy” says UN report

A United Nations report shows most Peruvians so disappointed with democracy that they would prefer the return of an authoritarian regime.

The report was released just days before a presidential election which has a populist, ultra nationalist former Army colonel leading in the public opinion polls.

“Democracy in Peru” published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) shows that 73.2% of Peruvians argue in favour of authoritarianism and 90% are convinced that politicians are to blame for the demise of democracy.

"The most urgent, most frequent complaint is the need to impose authority" in a country where 35% of citizens have no idea what democracy is and another 21.3% don't answer says report coordinator Luis Vargas Aybar.

Statistics do not mean that Peruvians reject democracy, but that they "are unhappy with this kind of democracy so out of touch with their needs".

"It does not mean that 70% of Peruvians want an authoritarian government; people call for a democracy that delivers order and authority; democracy is not at odds with authority in the framework of the rule of the law" said Vargas.

An overwhelming 67.2% are convinced that "the rich are almost always exploiters" and only 9.7% believe that "thanks to them we have jobs".

"This point reveals once again the elementary conclusion that there is no democracy without development and equality, and no democracy can call itself as such when poverty is widespread, and undermining its foundations".

The UN report describes the Peruvian case a "worrisome democracy", although it praises "the endurance and realism of the Peruvian people”.

Actually 54% of Peruvians live in poverty, a figure that jumps to 70% in rural areas according to official statistics.

The report surveyed 11,116 people from urban and rural areas of every Peruvian province and socioeconomic level, with only 3.5% satisfied with the country’s performance.

Discouraging is that 61% of interviews, mostly young people, would leave for another country if they had the chance, according to the U.N. report.

However, "it isn't the poorest people who want to leave", because “poor people expectations are less that those of the rich, as a result of social inequality".

Peru will be electing a new president and congress next April 9, with public opinion polls showing the nationalist-populist former Colonel Ollanta Humala leading with 32% vote intention. He’s closely followed by conservative candidate Lourdes Flores with 28% preferred by the system and the business community and who was leading the polls until two weeks ago. A distant third is Social democrat Alan Garcia with 21%. The undecided are still significant but they tend to support Humala.

Pollsters are finding what they describe an ethno-political vote in a country where a majority of the population is indigenous and feel boosted by the recent victory in Bolivia of Indigenous Evo Morales.

If no candidate garners 50% plus one vote next April 9, a run off is scheduled in May.

Evo Continues Suspicious of US Position

Bolivian President Evo Morales reiterated Friday that he considers the participation of a US citizen in two terrorist attacks here as suspicious and demanded that the US play a role in the investigation.

In a brief press conference the president said he had received no official communication of annoyance from the US about his comments on the two terrorist bombings that caused two deaths here.

He insisted that it is suspicious that for the first time in history a North American came to Bolivia to kill innocent people and added "I hope they [terrorists] don´t keep coming."

President Morales again asked that the US Embassy assist in a thorough investigation of the antecedents and relations of Lestat Claudius de Orleans, the terrorist now in a high security prison outside La Paz.

Minister of Interior Alicia Munoz also noted that De Orleans is key to the case, and he had admitted receiving money from the US.

Morales, who discards the notion of insanity despite De Orleans´ performance for the media, said he believes the attacks are by foreign agents at the service of sectors of the oligarchy affected by Bolivia´s present process of change.

Revolution in Bolivia: a special case

Bolivian vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera and President Evo Morales at news conference in La Paz.

Evo Morales is Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state in 500 years. The day before his inauguration on Jan. 22, a huge assembly of Bolivia’s indigenous people, who represent two-thirds of the country’s population, ceremonially granted him power.

Morales is also the first Bolivian president to win an absolute majority of the vote, 54 percent.

In a pre-election interview, Morales’ running mate for vice president Álvaro García Linera — a sociologist, author and former political prisoner — outlined constraints operating on a Morales government. The presidency, he suggested, is but one instrument of power. Opposition forces control the Legislature, judiciary, military, bureaucracy and police. The “Evo project,” he predicted, will take 20 or 30 years. Only then might a Bolivian form of “collective socialism” evolve.

Morales has sought cabinet and military leaders who are free of foreign influences. He renounced 57 percent of his presidential pay, making possible a 7 percent hike in teachers’ salaries. His government has dealt with flooding and landslides affecting 60 percent of the country, secured debt cancellation from Japan and Spain amounting to $200 million, and obtained financial backing for highways to Chile and Brazil.

At the same time, beginning with the acceptance of a congratulatory telephone call from President Bush on inauguration day, Morales has avoided confrontations with Washington. On Feb. 13, leaders of the coca growers’ union demanded the departure of U.S. narcotics agents. In retaliation, U.S. officials refused to issue a visa to a prominent Morales ally, Sen. Leonida Zurita. Morales backed the U.S. position, with his vice president noting, “We are working hard [for] an appropriate relationship” with the U.S.

The Morales government is cooperating with U.S. efforts to block cocaine distribution, although it supports farmers’ rights to grow coca for ritual and medicinal purposes. It continues to accept U.S. oversight of the Bolivian Air Force unit associated with the nation’s police.

Morales has taken pains to express support for private property in conversations with landowners and natural gas operatives embroiled in separatist agitation in the states of Santa Cruz and Tarija. He reminded them of investment opportunities in nearby iron and magnesium mining operations, and has agreed to a national vote on autonomy in the two regions.

The specter of a military takeover is omnipresent, given Bolivia’s history of 180 coups since 1825. The military is reportedly divided. Part of it identifies with the popular movement, while another part opposes it. Some worry about separatists teaming up with U.S. troops nearby in Paraguay. They reportedly resent U.S. plans to pare down its $150 million annual aid for Bolivian military projects, after the Bolivian government joined 12 other Latin American nations in refusing to exempt U.S. personnel from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.

Responding to its populist base, the new government has announced plans for a July 2 vote for delegates to a Constituent Assembly set to convene Aug. 6. Control and distribution of oil and natural gas resources will be on the agenda, as well as democratization of elections and women’s role in politics. Observers speculate that the Morales forces are holding off on major change until the Constituent Assembly is under way. The government is working toward full indigenous representation at the assembly.

Morales also faces challenges from the left. Morales’ own political party lagged behind other groups in setting the stage for his victory. Before the elections, the leader of the Confederation of Bolivian Workers called for a “Bolivian Hugo Chávez” to lead the struggle. The union has generally withheld support for the new government. In February, Morales responded to left critics: “If I am not advancing enough, then push me.”

Hugo Blanco, the charismatic Peruvian peasant leader of 40 years ago, attended Morales’ inauguration. He recently highlighted special characteristics of Bolivia’s struggles. Much more is involved there than overturning a government, he suggested. It involves “refounding” a nation. Indigenous peoples missed out on the nation’s first founding, and now their turn is approaching, and that of the entire population.

Coca: A hazard or a cultural icon?

by Niko Kyriakou
The war against coca – the plant used to make cocaine – has become a defining issue for U.S. policy in South America, yet many people outside South America know little about the plant the U.S. is fighting against.

In a meeting with newly elected Bolivian President Evo Morales earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought renewed cooperation between the two countries to counter drug trafficking, but it was the coca leaf that captured headlines.

Morales, a former coca farmer who calls himself pro-coca but anti-cocaine, ended his half-hour meeting with Rice by giving her a guitar decorated with real coca leaves sealed under lacquer.

While the gesture bears a mark of humor, in the context of Morales’ wider stance on coca, the message seems designed to point out the importance of the plant to South American culture, and not – as it is often perceived in the United States – to illicit markets.

Morales still serves as head of the coca farmers’ union that lifted him to power. He has increased the allowed level of coca cultivation to about 1,600 square meters per family since taking office last December. At his inaugural dinner, Morales served coca wine, coca cake, and coca cookies.

In Bolivia’s Andean neighbor Peru, presidential candidate and retired Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala announced in mid-March that if the left-wing Humala wins Peru’s presidency in April, he plans to serve poor children bread made from flour containing five percent coca.

While coca gains top-level approval in various parts of Latin America, in the U.S. coca remains taboo. If a U.S. politician were to suggest giving children coca it would be seen not just as political suicide, but as a criminal act.

And that difference in perspective reflects a vast gap between U.S. and South American experience of a substance with a known history stretching back long before Christopher Columbus’s landfall, times when the Incas controlled much of the continent.

For thousands of years, coca has been a rich source of nutrients for poor South Americans.

Today, use of the leaf is so common that in Bolivia, for example, police carry out U.S.-funded coca eradication programs with wads of coca in their mouths, Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. told The Daily Journal.

Coca leaves are often chewed or made into a tea rich in calcium, iron, and vitamin A, said Tree, adding that by contrast, coffee “leeches all the vitamins out of your body.”

Coca also has health benefits as a salve for arthritis and gout, as toothpaste, and as a cure for altitude sickness.

Even the U.S. embassy in Bolivia recommends on its Web site that travelers consume coca tea to help alleviate altitude sickness.

“A tall cup of coca offers less stimulation than a cup of Starbucks coffee,” added Tree, a critic of the U.S. “war on drugs.”

“What would happen in the U.S. if you banned coffee?” Tree said. “Imagine the kind of upheaval you would have. Coca and cocaine are worlds apart. It’s like trying to compare coffee to methamphetamine.”

Medical opinion generally maintains that coca leaf, unlike cocaine, is neither addictive nor harmful. Nevertheless, the U.S. perception of coca as a dangerous drug warrants billions of dollars in spending on anti-coca programs.

The Bush administration recently asked Congress to renew an annual budget of roughly $340 million for arms, training, and services to help fight the drug war in South America.

The Andean Counterdrug Initiative, a State Department program and a follow on to Plan Colombia, provides assistance to Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia as well as lesser amounts to Venezuela, Brazil, and Panama.

A State Department report released March 1 found that despite billions of dollars spent on combating coca in Colombia, 90 percent of all cocaine imported into the U.S. still comes from that country.

In addition, the report found that production had increased in Peru over the last year.

To be sure, the world’s top three coca producers – Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia – earn untold sums through the sale of coca for illicit uses. While the amount is hotly debated, it is easy to overlook coca’s importance to the legal economies of these three large producers, and to the culture of those who depend on it.

Sponsor of terrorism: the United States

Imagine a group of five CIA officers dispatched to a foreign country to investigate and report on an Al Qaeda cell planning a series of major bombings in the United States, including hotel and shopping mall bombings. Then, imagine the outcry if the five CIA agents were arrested by the nation where they were assigned and hit with trumped up charges, found guilty before a kangaroo court, and sentence to life terms in prison for espionage. The United States would demand revenge and likely take military action against the host country. The harboring of terrorists was the justification used by the Bush administration to attack Afghanistan.

The above scenario is exactly what occurred to five Cuban intelligence agents dispatched to Miami to report on the activities of Cuban exiled terrorists who were planning a series of terrorist bombings against foreign tourists and Cuban civilians in Cuba during the 1990s. In September 1998, five Cubans -- Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, Ramon Labanino Salazar, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, Fernando Gonzalez Llort, and Rene Gonzalez -- were arrested in Miami, and after the longest federal trial in U.S. history, were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage by a jury that was tampered with by the Department of Justice and FBI. They have been put in solitary confinement and some have not been allowed to see their wives and mothers because the Bush administration is denying them visas to travel to the U.S. Furthermore, the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, DC has been restricted to a 12-mile radius within the nation’s capital -- they are not permitted to speak at symposia on behalf of their jailed agents beyond Washington. However, yesterday, this editor attended a symposium at George Washington University Law School in DC on the plight of the "Cuban Five."

After the federal trial judge in Miami rejected the defense request for a change of venue to Fort Lauderdale from Miami because of the nature of Miami’s rabid, right-wing Cuban exile community, the defense appealed the decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which, on August 9, 2005, issued a 93-page opinion on the venue issue. Unanimously, a three judge panel ruled that the Cuban Five did not receive a fair trial in Miami. This was the first time a court reversed a decision based on venue. Immediately, the Bush Justice Department ordered an appeal of the decision to an en banc panel of the 11th Circuit (12 of the 13 judges on the court, one judge recused himself).

According to Leonard Weinglass, the attorney for Guerrero, "Miami is home to over 600,000 exiles that harbor a ’state of war’ mentality against the Cuban government. Even the U.S. government, in a pretrial motion in another case one year later, argued to the Court that it was ’virtually impossible’ for a fair trial to be held in Miami in a case that touched upon Cuban issues."

Weinglass added, "for forty years this country has hosted a network of terrorism in Florida directed at Cuba; it has recruited them, trained them and armed them, and when Cuba repeatedly asked if the United States, the host country, to rein in these terrorists, they were met with inaction, and so Cuba sent a group of people here to monitor the activities of the terrorist network in Florida, and when they for too close, the FBI stepped in and arrested the Five, and prosecuted them before the exiled community in Miami, and they were sentenced to life terms in prison."

In fact, many individuals close to this case report that southern Florida is a virtual independent right-wing republic acting with its own foreign policy, a foreign policy that is pampered and supported by southern Florida’s Cuban GOP congressional delegation, particularly Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Weinglass said, "this case is more easily understood if you think of the case of Orlando Bosch, a member of that terrorist network, who planted a bomb on a Cubana airline in 1976, which exploded in midair, killing 73 people. Mr. Bosch applied for residence in the United States after that episode, and the Justice Department and the INS deemed him an undesirable person, pointed to 30 years of terrorist activity including the bombing, and asked that he be barred from entry in the United States. But Orlando Bosch had a friend in Florida, a young man who wanted to be governor: his name was Jeb Bush . . . He intervened with his father who was then the President of the United States, and George Bush Sr. overruled the Justice Department and the INS and granted Orlando Bosch’s residence in the United States. He now walks as a free man in Miami, Florida. He walks as a free man, while the Five, who had no guns, no explosives, created no harm in the United States, did not involve themselves in any classified information here, did not interfere with national security, are serving life in maximum security prisons here in the United States. The next time the Bush administration moralizes about the war on terrorism, remember Orlando Bosch, and remember the Cuban Five."

It is also noteworthy that when Bosch and his CIA-trained team bombed the Cubana airliner off of Barbados on October 6, 1976, the director of the CIA was none other than George H. W. Bush. Bosch was assisted by Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born and naturalized Venezuelan terrorist who has been protected by Governor Bush in Florida and George W. Bush in Washington. On May 22, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ruled that Carriles would continued to be held in custody in El Paso after trying to illegally enter the country from Mexico and not be extradited to Venezuela for the terrorist bombing of the Cubana aircraft. The Venezuelan embassy in Washington reacted by stating, "We again call on the White House to honour its international treaty obligations and either extradite or prosecute Luis Posada Carriles for 73 counts of first degree murder." Recently declassified U.S. government documents show that Posada worked for the CIA at least from 1965 to 1976. Official investigations by the governments of Cuba, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana (several Guyanese perished in the bombing) concluded that the Cubana plane was downed in a terrorist attack. The United States never investigated the incident.

A Barbados official investigation found that their Trinidadian colleagues had discovered links between a Venezuelan in Trinidad involved in the bombing and the CIA. Chapter VIII of the report states: "one of the Venezuelans -- Mr. Lozano -- told the Trinidad and Tobago police chief that he was a member of the US Central Intelligence Agency, that his boss was a man who lived in Caracas and whose name was Luis Posada Carriles; that he had been three times to the US embassy in Barbados during the few hours that they [he and his Venezuelan bombing colleagues] were in that country after the plane blew up, hours they needed to do two things: go to the US embassy, and stop off at the hotel [Holiday Inn] to call a Caracas telephone number belonging to Luis Posada Carriles and another number belonging to Orlando Bosch Avila."

U.S. terrorism, directed by George H. W. Bush when he was CIA director, brought down a civilian jet liner off of Barbados. That makes Bush and his son, who continues to protect the bombers, no better than Osama Bin Laden -- or does it place them in the very same agent provocateur camp?

This editor arrived for Navy duty in Barbados less than a year after the Cuban exiles bombed the Cubana plane. The government of Barbados called for help from the US Naval Facility to assist in rescue operations. Rescue operations soon became an operation to recover bodies, including those of women and children. US Navy personnel who were scuba divers, as well as Navy corpsmen, assisted in the recovery operations. They were traumatized by what they saw but even more troubling was the what they later discovered -- the their own government aided and abetted in the terrorism. It was something my Barbadian friends often mentioned -- how could the U.S. assist in a terrorism operation in a friendly country like Barbados? I also became aware of the activities of Gerald Bull’s Space Research Corporation near Grantley Adams International Airport. My Bajan friends in the government told me that it was a CIA operation to shoot rockets into the ionosphere for purposes of weather modification -- the ultimate goal was the steerage of Caribbean hurricanes to hit Cuba. An Intel Corporation activity near the deep water careenage in Bridgetown turned out to be a CIA front operation aimed at derailing leftist political parties in nearby islands like Grenada, Dominica, and St. Lucia. The Barbadians were incensed at these activities. As a U.S. Naval Officer with a Top Secret and Crypto/NATO COSMIC security clearance, I had no answer for them at the time. But I do now.

I agree with Seymour Hersh’s prediction that George W. Bush, after he leaves office, should be snatched by foreign law enforcement officers and whisked away to stand trial for war crimes. But it should not stop with Dubya -- his father and brother Jeb should also be hauled off to stand trial before an international court of justice -- for aiding and abetting terrorism. Let’s not forget Poppy Bush’s involvement in the terrorism bombing off the coast of Barbados and the September 21, 1976 car bombing on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. Manuel Contreras, the Chilean intelligence head who planned the bombing, was being paid by George H. W. Bush as a CIA asset at the time of the car bombing.

The anti-terrorist Cuban Five team had uncovered plans by members of the Cuban exiled community in Florida, who were protected by Jeb Bush and his family, to launch terrorist attacks against civilian targets in Cuba. Poppy Bush provided three ex-US Air Force militarized Cessna aircraft to Jose Basulto, an ex-CIA veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who founded the group "Brothers to the Rescue," a coordinating activity for the terrorist attacks on Cuba.

On October 7, 1992, Cuban exiles from Florida launched an armed seaborne attack against the Varadero Meilia Hotel in Cuba. The terrorists were later arrested by the FBI but released on orders from the Poppy Bush White House. On January 7, 1993, Tony Bryant, the leader of the terrorist group "Commandos L," announced plans to bomb more hotels and other targets in Cuba and warned foreign tourists to "stay away from Cuba." On November 7, 1993, Humberto Perez, spokesperson for the terrorist group Alpha 66, said "we consider anyone staying in a Cuban hotel to be an enemy."

On March 11, 1994, Miami-based terrorists fired on the Guitart Cayo Coco Hotel in Cuba. In November 1994 Posada and five accomplices smuggled weapons into Cartagena de Indias in Colombia to assassinated President Fidel Castro during the 5th Ibero-American Summit. The Coast Guard during the 1990s intercepted a number of vessels with armed men heading from Florida to Cuba. The FBI released all of thdetained terrorists. On April 12, 1997, a bomb exploded in the Melia Cohiba Hotel in Havana. On July 12, 1997, bombs exploded in the Capri and Nacional hotels. The GOP-connected Cuban American National Foundation gave unconditional support to these terrorist bombings in Cuba. On October 4, 1997, bombs exploded in the Triton, Chateau Miramar, and Copacabana hotels. The latter explosion killed a young Italian tourist, Fabio di Celmo. The same day, a bomb exploded at the Bodeguita del Medio restaurant. On October 27, 1997, the US Coast Guard stopped a vessel west of Puerto Rico that was manned by well-armed mercenaries. It was on its way to Venezuela’s Margarita island with the intention of assassinating Fidel Castro during the Nov. 7, 1997 Ibero-American Summit. The vessel was registered to a Florida company whose chairman is a member of the board of directors of the Cuban American National Foundation. The mercenaries confessed about their intention to assassinate a foreign head of state but were acquitted in December 1999 following a rigged trial.

On July 12 and 13, 1998, Posada told the New York Times that he organized the bombing campaign against Cuban hotels and restaurants and that the Cuban American National Foundation and its chairman Jorge Mas Canosa was in charge of providing the funding mechanisms for the attacks. On November 17, 2000, a group of terrorists headed by Posada were arrested in Panama for planning to assassinate Fidel Castro at the 10th Ibero-American Summit. On October 22, 2002, Miami’s Nuevo Herald revealed ties between the Cuban terrorist group Comandos F-4 and former members of the Venezuelan National Guard and the April 2002 coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. F-4 trained Venezuelan and Cuban commandos involved in the coup in "open fields in Homestead." In January 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that Rodolfo Frometa, chief of Comandos F-4, announced in Miami the creation a of Cuban-Venezuelan "civic-military alliance" to overthrow Presidents Chavez and Castro and that 50 mercenaries were receiving military training "in a polygon located in The Everglades." On March 29, 2003, Orlando Bosch called for a march in Miami to support George W. Bush’s military attack on Iraq. On March 22, 2004, Florida GOP Rep. Lincoln Diaz Balart called for the assassination of Fidel Castro.

On June 16 and 17, 1998, Cuba received an FBI delegation and turned over to them documents and other evidence pointing to the involvement of 40 terrorists in the United States in bombings and other attacks. The FBI took the information but obviously used it to determine that Cuba had obtained it from their agents in the United States -- three months later the Cuban Five were arrested in Miami. The Cuban-American terrorists were allowed to continue their terrorist activities against Cuban civilian targets.

Now we have this information from La Paz, Bolivia, where leftist Evo Morales recently took over as President. An American named Claudio Lestad, a.k.a. Triston Jay Arnero, formerly of of New Orleans, Washington state, and Placerville, California and his Uruguayan girlfriend were arrested for bombing two La Paza hotels, killing two Bolivian couple who were doctors and injuring at least seven other people. California authorities say that Arnero has a troubled past as a youth and was in and out of juvenile correctional facilities. Court records indicate that upon release from juvenile detention, Arnero wanted to move abroad to work at an oil refinery. Lestad also uses several aliases, including Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo. An Israeli citizen caught in Trinidad last year and investigated for detonating bombs in the country also used various aliases. The FBI investigated that incident but pressured Trinidad to release the man and he flew back to Israel. President Morales said, "This American was putting bombs in hotels . . . the U.S. government fights terrorism, and they send us terrorists." Bolivian authorities said the two were planning a bombing attack at a third hotel when they were caught and had been responsible for other hotel bombings around the country that did not cause any injuries. Bolivian police also said that Arnero was also planning to bomb the Chilean consulate in La Paz. The US Embassy in La Paz responded, "We’re concerned about remarks made by the president and we have expressed those concerns to the Bolivian government." The embassy said nothing about the involvement of an American in terrorist attacks. Morales called on the Bush administration to stop sending terrorists to Bolivia to "disrupt democracy."

Bush I and II: International terrorists and war criminals

Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said the bombings were designed to halt and destabilize reforms that Evo Morales and his government are trying to introduce in the country.

Some right-wing news outlets in the United States began to spin the story that Arnero is a follower of the neo-cons’ favorite bogeyman, Osama Bin Laden, a fairly amazing claim considering Arnero insists he is a Wiccan high priest. [Note: this is how we must wade through the neo-con/Bush propaganda purveyors, they are actually terrible spinmeisters and their lies, such as this about Arnero and Bin Laden, are extremely transparent]. One other issue of importance is that the Cuban Five story has been totally ignored by the US media. Cuba turned over the very same documents on terrorist activities in Florida that it gave to the FBI to The New York Times. The Times never published the documents or admitted it even had them. WMR will attempt to obtain these documents from the Cuban government and we will definitely publish them.

Water Activists Turn On The Taps And Turn Up The Pressure

by Patrick Bond
On March 16 in Mexico City, thousands of grassroots water warriors marched against an equivalent number of establishment delegates from governments, corporations and international agencies at the World Water Forum.

The activists, opposed to what they term the 'commodification' of water, were stopped a kilometer away from their establishment opponents. But as the Washington Post reported, 'Youths in ski masks attacked journalists and fought with police, smashing a patrol car and hurling rocks during largely peaceful Water Forum protests involving about 10,000 marchers.'

The Post continued, 'Many of the battles over water in Mexico don't involve people who would otherwise be considered radicals. Those on the front lines are residents of low-income neighbourhoods in Mexico City who get in fistfights over water-truck deliveries, or housewives who can no longer stand the stink of untreated sewage flowing beside their homes. And then there are the Indian families whose crops are ruined by the diversion of water to feed a nearby city, while their children go without safe drinking water.'

Here in South Africa, there are millions who can tell stories of water 'delivery drought'. Rural areas are underserviced due to lack of operating subsidies which mean that a large percentage of taps installed in the post-apartheid era are now dry. And for those lucky to be on municipal water grids, mass disconnections due to unaffordability affect more than 1.5 million South Africans each year, even the government admits.

According to Desmond D'Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, 'Across the metro, low-income people and even whole blocks of flats are having trouble paying their rates, and quite a few have had their water cut off recently. I've negotiated for some reconnections, but the amounts outstanding are vast. People simply can't afford the rates. Council is even reneging on a pre-election promise to write off arrears.'

Water warriors here also decry the new 'pre-paid meter' technology that leads to self-disconnection. Conlog, a firm directed by the late ANC leader Joe Modise once he retired as minister of defense in 1999, is manufacturing these devices, which Johannesburg activists backed by the Freedom of Expression Institute will argue in court next month are unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Conlog is installing them across the African continent. Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee activists have taken the lead in ripping out pre-paid meters - both water and electricity - and periodically marching to municipal offices to trash the hated technology.

And as part of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, with its focus on public-private infrastructure partnerships, state-owned Rand Water - which supplies bulk water to Johannesburg - is helping a Dutch company and the World Bank privatise water in Accra, Ghana. That country's National Coalition Against the Privatisation of Water is already in close contact with the Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum, helping coordinate protests.

The highest profile citizens' campaign against commodified water was in Bolivia six years ago, when the people of the third-largest city, Cochabamba, fought the US firm Bechtel, backed by the World Bank. As of two months ago, the new Bolivian water minister in Evo Morales' indigenous-led government is Abel Mamani, a neighbourhood activist veteran of another water war, in El Alto, who cut his teeth battling the French water company Suez.

Mamani made five points in a speech last week:

* Water is a fundamental human right and a pre-requisite to the realization of other human rights;

* Water belongs to the earth and all living beings including human beings and it is the duty of everyone to protect access to water for all forms of life and for the earth itself;

* Water is a public good and therefore its management needs to be in a sphere that is public, social, community-based, participative and not based on profit;

* Water should not be privatised and should be withdrawn from all free trade and investment agreements; and

* There should be profound change in the organization of the World Water Forum to allow majority and decisive participation in the negotiations by the poorest and those who most need water.

Bolivia is just one of the sites where the balance of forces has shifted left; other major battles - not always victorious - have been fought in Manila, Jakarta and Detroit. Biwater was kicked out of Dar es Salaam last year, to the regret of its advisor, the Adam Smith Institute, funded by British taxpayers.

Civil society movements and governments have forced Suez to retreat from major cities ranging from Atlanta to Buenos Aires to Montevideo in recent months. The firm's bid to retain the Johannesburg Water contract for another 25 years will be considered by council in June, but after mass protests in Soweto, Orange Farm and other townships, is by no means secure.

The goals of progressive civil society activists, generally, are 'decommodification' of water, improved access by poor people, better conditions for water workers, and more appropriate eco-management of water. The latter should include penalties for hedonistic consumption.

Additional campaigns are waged against megadams, inappropriate irrigation, fish destocking, water pollution, bulk water diversions, bottled water, abuse of water by golf courses and extractive firms like Coca Cola and Nestle, and looming water scarcity. On one crucial battleground, control of water by the World Trade Organisation, activists appear to have just won, by exempting water from the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services.

As the Mexico confrontation shows, protesters are linking up with vigour. Back in 1992, after the Rio Earth Summit and a Dublin water conference both advanced the principle that water is 'an economic good', privatisation began in earnest. Within a few years, a broad-based international front of community, consumer, environmental and labour organisations emerged to fight back.

The formal privatisation of water slowed during the late 1990s, in part because it became so difficult for the big British, French, German, Spanish and US firms to realise profits across the Third World, not least thanks to rising social resistance. Nevertheless, municipalities and water supply agencies are still being pressured by the World Bank to adopt commercial principles, including pricing water high enough to at least to cover operating/maintenance costs, at a time of declining subsidies.

No one disputes that with at least 2.6 billion people lacking adequate sanitation and 1.1 billion lacking access to improved water sources, there is an urgent need for dramatic improvements in investment, management and affordability. Third World states shrunk during the past quarter-century of sustained structural adjustment, addled by debt payment outflows, capital flight and foreign aid cutbacks. So the resources required for water and sanitation can not often be found.

Still, the primary strategy adopted by water advocates has been to defend the state as the key institution for delivering water. There are vast problems with relying on state agencies (whether national or municipal), yet in most societies it remains the institution which can best redistribute and organise resources.

Some water-delivery NGOs such as WaterAid, members of Freshwater Action Network or South Africa's Mvula Trust do find themselves occasionally accused of betraying mass popular movement sentiments over water prices, standards and institutional delivery systems. While expanded community control is generally an objective of progressive activists, a primary concern is that decentralization should not replace a serious state commitment to subsidizing poor people's water. Unlike what most NGOs can provide, an operative state's grid service is more likely to offer purified, high-pressure water in sufficient quantities to serve gender equity, public health and other broader eco-social goals.

Critics argue that some NGO interventions lubricate neoliberalism, because installing inadequate collective tap systems - usually without sufficient sanitation - contributes to further state shrinkage. The general trend towards private outsourcing, including some examples of NGO delivery, has been destructive, because standards are lower, prices are higher, disconnections are more common, maintenance is worse and accountability is harder to establish.

The struggles against commodified water often erupt on global platforms, such as the triannual World Water Forum - at The Hague in 2000, Kyoto in 2003 and Mexico City in 2006 - and related meetings of the water establishment such as WTO summits. There, activists have battled a series of enemies:

* the Global Water Partnership (created by the World Bank, UN Development Programme and Swedish aid);

* the Marseilles-based World Water Council (founded by Suez, Canadian aid and the Egyptian government and joined by 300 private companies, government ministries, and international organisations);

* the International Private Water Association (privatisation firms plus the World Bank, US Credit Export Agency and Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development);

* the World Bank itself (which in $20 billion worth of 1990s water projects imposed privatisation as a loan condition in a third of the transactions);

* Mikhael Gorbachev's Green Cross (in ongoing dispute with Council of Canadians over global-scale water rights and property rights in the UN);

* Aquafed (a federation set up by a former Suez managing director); and

* the World Panel on Financing Infrastructure.

The latter was chaired by former IMF managing director Michel Camdessus during 2002-03, with major multilateral development banks, Citibank, Lazard Freres, the US Ex-Im Bank, private water companies (Suez, Thames Water), state elites (from Egypt, France, Ivory Coast, Mexico, and Pakistan) and two NGOs (Transparency International and WaterAid). It proposed much greater amounts of public subsidies for privatisers, via a risk insurance mechanism to safeguard companies like Suez against currency crises which devastated the firm's Argentina operations after 2001.

Some of the strongest critics of neoliberal water policies are citizens'/consumers' organisations (especially the Council of Canadians in Ottawa and Public Citizen in Washington); trade unions (Public Services International and their affiliates); indigenous people's movements; environmental groups (led by the International Rivers Network and Friends of the Earth); and think-tanks (e.g., the PSI Research Unit at Greenwich University, Polaris in Ottawa, the TransNational Institute in Amsterdam, the Agriculture and Trade Policy Center in Minneapolis, the Municipal Services Project in South African and Canadian universities, Parivartan and the Centre for Science and the Environment in New Delhi, Food and Water Watch in Washington, and the International Forum on Globalization in San Francisco).

From the struggles have emerged inspiring leaders, intellectuals and politicians, including Accra campaigners Rudolf Amenga-Etego (who was awarded the 2004 Goldman environmental prize) and Alhassan Adam, Canadians Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (who won the 2005 Right Livelihood Award) and writer Varda Burstein, Paris-based Danielle Mitterrand, Cochabamba movement leader Oscar Olivera, Washington-based water watchdogs Maj Fiil-Flynn and Sara Grusky, Olivier Hoedeman and Satoko Kishimoto of 'Reclaiming Public Water' at the Transnational Institute, filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, European campaigner Ricardo Petrello, anti-dam strategists Paddy McCully and Lori Pottinger, and extraordinary Indian women like Sunita Narrain, Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva and Shiney Varghese. South Africans who are well-known internationally include Bryan Ashe and Lianne Greef of the SA Water Caucus, Dale McKinley of the national Campaign Against Water Privatisation, Wits sociology researcher Ebrahim Harvey, Anil Naidoo (based in Ottawa), trade unionist Roger Ronnie, and Sowetans Trevor Ngwane and Virginia Setshedi.

The World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, as well as regional Social Fora, have provided spaces for water activist assemblies during the early 2000s. Email listserves such as 'water warriors', 'reclaiming public water' and 'right to water' permit information exchange and coordination. A People's World Water Forum was held in Delhi two years ago, preceded by the 2001 'Blue Planet' conference in Vancouver, as well as periodic European gatherings.

Because the water movements have generated superb examples of cooperation across borders, campaigns against commodified services will continue to serve as a model for global civil society. If in the short-term here in South Africa activists can reconnect water to Durban's poor and working people and disconnect Suez from Johannesburg and Rand Water from Accra, over the longer-term, the world desperately needs to link their visions, programmes and projects to similar processes, in the next set of 21st century water wars.

Bolivian Workers Take Over Airline

La Paz
Mar 24
Employees of Bolivian Lloyd Airline (LAB) took over the central offices of the privatized corporation Friday in Cochabama, in protest for judicial suspension of official intervention.

LAB technical union leader, Hugo Bascope, confirmed the measure against corrupt management by the private administration, run by controversial entrepreneur Ernesto Asbun.

At least 700 workers from all levels are occupying the offices to prevent Asbun´s attempt to close the virtually bankrupt company.

In parallel, LAB pilots announced the symbolic takeover of Santa Cruz International Airport, although they assured this will not affect either flights or functioning of the terminal.

President Evo Morales said the government will comply with the Constitutional Court decision to suspend intervention but recalled this intervention was motivated by desire to save LAB, which owes nearly 150 million dollars.

The judicial decision was announced when Congress began debates on legislation to reorganize and refloat the airline, owned by Brazilian Vasp for a decade and which the government considers an example of the failure of the privatization policy.

U.S. Ambassador Stranded by Chavez Rally

CARACAS, Venezuela
Mar 22
A raucus rally supporting leftist President Hugo Chavez stranded the U.S. ambassador and his delegation inside a social club for more than two hours Wednesday, officials said.

About 200 chanting Chavez supporters burned an American flag, set tires ablaze and blocked the gates of the Italian-Venezuelan social club during the visit by Ambassador William Brownfield to San Juan de los Morros, about 50 miles southwest of Caracas, said U.S. Embassy spokesman Brian Penn.

Harvard Study: US Foreign Policy & The Israel Lobby

update: 4/2/2006
Professor Critical of Jewish Lobby Loses Job
*
If there is one positive to be taken from the Madness of the past five years, it's that the people and groups responsible have exposed themselves like never before. We must all be taking detailed notes during this period, so that once they are stripped of the power they now tenuously hold, they never regain it.

Here is a link to the study in question:
Scholars' Attack on Pro-Israel Lobby Met With Silence
By Ori Nir
March 24, 2006
WASHINGTON — In the face of one of the harshest reports on the pro-Israel lobby to emerge from academia, Jewish organizations are holding fire in order to avoid generating publicity for their critics.

Officials at Jewish organizations are furious over "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a new paper by John Mearsheimer, a top international relations theorists based at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In their report — versions of which appear on the Kennedy School Web site and in the March 26 issue of the London Review of Books — the scholars depict "the Israel lobby" as a "loose coalition" of politicians, media outlets, research institutions, Jewish groups and Evangelical Christians that steers America's Middle East policy in directions beneficial to Israel, even if it requires harming American interests.

Despite their anger, Jewish organizations are avoiding a frontal debate with the two scholars, while at the same time seeking indirect ways to rebut and discredit the scholars' arguments. Officials with pro-Israel organizations say that given the limited public attention generated by the new study — as of Tuesday most major print outlets had ignored it — they prefer not to draw attention to the paper by taking issue with it head on. As of Wednesday morning, none of the largest Jewish organizations had issued a press release on the report.

"The key here is to not do what they probably want, which is to have this become a battle between us and them, or for them to say that they are being silenced," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "It's much better to let others respond."

Pro-Israel activists were planning a briefing for congressional staffers to be held Thursday. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering releasing a letter in response to the new paper, congressional staffers said.

Some of the arguments made in the new paper are reminiscent — both in content and style — of ones routinely found on virulently anti-Israeli Web sites, both on the extreme right and on the extreme left, pro-Israel activists said. For example, Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "the main driving force behind the Iraq([search]) war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud"; Israel "is becoming a strategic burden" on the United States and "does not behave like a loyal ally"; "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around," and that in Israel, "citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." The paper argues that "thanks to the lobby, the United States has become the de-facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians."

Like no other lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt argue, pro-Israel forces have "managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest." The tentacles of that lobby, the paper argues, reach far into Washington think tanks from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution to the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. It argues that pro-Israel views pervade the editorial boards of the liberal New York Times and the conservative Wall Street Journal.

The study left pro-Israel activists fuming, albeit behind the scenes. "The truth is that this really wouldn't be worth spending any time discussing if not for the fact of where these people are located and what their reputations are," said Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He pointed out that the paper contains no new revelations or insights, is riddled with factual errors and makes arguments that the ADL is accustomed to dealing with from extremists on the margins of America's political arena. Jacobson said that he had prepared a rebuttal to the study, but for the time being it is only being used for internal ADL purposes.

"In these kinds of things you're always trying to debate how important will it be in terms of the impact, if you give it more attention," he said. "The amount of attention we will give it will depend on how it plays out" in the public domain.

At least one leading pro-Israel luminary, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, author of "The Case for Israel," is attempting to confront Walt and Mearsheimer. He has challenged the scholars to a debate; the two, prodded by Harvard's campus newspaper The Crimson, accepted, "under the appropriate circumstances."

Mearsheimer and Walt also seem to be resisting further publicity.

"I don't have an agenda in the sense of viewing myself as proselytizing or trying to sell this," Mearsheimer told the Forward. "I am a scholar, not an activist, and I am reticent to take questions from the media because I do believe that this is a subject that has to be approached very carefully. You don't want to say the wrong thing. The potential for saying the wrong thing is very great here."

Mearsheimer was hosted on National Public Radio Tuesday for a full hour, to talk about Iraq, but did not make any mention of the controversial paper he co-authored. "To have a throwaway line or two on public radio to promote yourself is a bad idea," he told the Forward, following his NPR appearance. "I prefer to take the high road, although that is not always easy." Since publication, Mearsheimeradded, he and Walt also turned down offers from major newspapers, radio and television networks to lay out their thesis.

The abstract of the report posted on the Kennedy School Web site appears to soft-pedal Mearsheimer and Walt's argument. It states that the authors argue that America's commitment to Israel is "often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives," though in fact the report works to undercut the notion of Israel as a dependable ally that shares the values of the United States.

While the paper has generated little attention in the mainstream media or policymaking circles, it has produced a buzz within the academic community and among advocates on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinian activists and Arab affairs scholars sent the article to many people by email, but the controversy rarely strayed beyond the realm of Internet blogs.

Several editors, foreign affairs reporters and columnists for major American newspapers contacted by the Forward did not know about the study. They didn't sound especially interested when told about the report's findings.

"We might take a look at it, to see if there is any interest from a lobbying point of view," said David Meyers, managing editor of Roll Call, a Washington-based publication that covers Capitol Hill. A senior editor with one of America's largest daily newspapers, who asked not to be quoted by name, said: "We don't get excited about academic papers unless they tell us something new, and this one doesn't."

Given the relatively low publicity, pro-Israel activists said they are not worried about the short-term impact of the study. The main concern voiced by pro-Israel advocates was that the study would become a major archival resource on the role that American supporters of Israel play in shaping the government's Middle East policy.

"We live in a Google age," said Jennifer Laszlo-Mizrahi, a public relations expert who heads The Israel Project, an organization devoted to improving Israel's image in the media, "and in this age things like this can take a life of their own."

http://www.forward.com/articles/7548
The House has had it with the Israel Lobby