Reply #2: Further context for the U.S/Pentagon's "circle the wagons" strategy... [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

In summer 2008, South America formed the all-South American prototype "common market" UNASUR, which was critically important in backing up Evo Morales' government in Bolivia against a U.S. funded/organized white separatist insurrection that summer. That same summer, the Bushwhacks reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, which Lula da Silva said "is a threat to Brazil's oil." (Everybody south of the border knows that it is a threat to Venezuela's.)

Meanwhile, Venezuela and Cuba had organized ALBA, a trade group to provide collective economic/political clout for the smaller countries of Central America/the Caribbean. Honduras's president, Mel Zelaya, brought Honduras in as a member--and Hondurans began to benefit almost immediately, especially from low priced Venezuelan oil, by which Zelaya could lower the price of bus tickets for poor workers.

The U.S. and its corporate rulers and war profiteers do not want to see this kind of cooperation and organization among its traditional victims in Latin America. And now, South America and Central America/the Caribbean are getting together to form a new organization without the U.S. and Canada as members--a rival to the OAS, which the U.S. has dominated since its creation. Here is a description of the recent all-Latin American meeting:

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The meeting in Mexico was identified as a Unity Summit because for the first time the 24 members of the Rio Group (minus Honduras, not invited because of the illegitimacy of its post-coup regime) - Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela - were joined by the fifteen members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM): Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. (Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname are members of both organizations.)

Ahead of the summit the Financial Times wrote, "The Mexican-led initiative, a clear sign of Latin America’s growing confidence as a region, will exclude both the US and Canada. Some observers believe it could even eventually rival the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which includes the US and Canada and has been the principal forum for hemispheric issues during the past half century."

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/50345
posted here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x31340

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The U.S. strategy has been to overthrow democracy in Honduras, to try to keep the region in line (a threat that worked on El Salvador's new leftist president, who recently made what was likely a U.S.-forced decision not to join ALBA) and to use Honduras as a base of operations against the surrounding leftist governments, and to place other war assets around Venezuela's oil region, quite possibly as a war plan (--it sure looks like a war plan to me), including "full spectrum" U.S. military capabilities in Colombia (with "total diplomatic immunity").

I repeat: The U.S. and its corporate rulers and war profiteers do not want to see this kind of cooperation and organization among its traditional victims in Latin America. And I think they are "circling the wagons" against it, in the Central America/Caribbean region, where they hope to topple or threaten/dominate those governments, enforce U.S. dominated "free trade for the rich" and continue to exploit resources and impoverish the majority, with the U.S. military as the "police force" for U.S. corps.

A South American "common market"--with the fabulous natural resources of South America--could alone rival the bankrupt U.S., if they stick together and exercise collective economic/political clout (--Simon Bolivar's dream of a "United States of South America) and provided that they continue to develop and empower their people--in the ways that Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador in particular have been doing: real democracy, national control of resources and use of resource profits for education, health care, land reform and local and regional development of every kind. This collective clout is already in progress, with the formation of UNASUR. I believe that it is U.S. policy--and a U.S. strategy--to prevent it from spreading north into the Central America/Caribbean region--to "circle the wagons" there, to establish and retain control there, and to push back for reassertion of U.S. economic/military control of the hemisphere from that position.

Their ultimate goal is to impose U.S. "free trade for the rich" everywhere--to reestablish U.S.-run globalisation. And for this, they need, a) control of Latin America (starting with the region closest to the U.S. and expanding from there), and b) a rich oil supply, which is sitting right there on the southern rim of their "circle the wagons" area, on the Venezuelan coast--the biggest oil reserves on earth, now being wasted on education and health care, when it could be used to fuel the great U.S. war machine and its global trade tankers.