What a dick - as always

 And shame on the people laughing.

None of this nasty shit was necessary, but it was typical Trump.

That "Shield of the Americas" should be configured to shield Latin America from Trump.

And then mini-dick takes over...

Education is one of America's greatest failings

For my observations on the then-newly formed Bolivarian government in Venezuela in 2004, as a backdrop, background, for what is happening now, click here.

Isn't it time we brought the South on board?

I mean South America. And Central America.  We take the water from the rivers that flow south.  We enter trade agreements that stifle their economies. We deport their people when they try to reach the land of plenty and do what we can to discourage them from even trying.

Honduras is threatening to ditch a bilateral extradition treaty, furthering a pattern of snubs delivered against the United States by an array of Latin American leaders.

Anti-American rhetoric has been on the rise in the region.

[...]

Honduran President Xiomara Castro ordered her government to drop the U.S.-Honduras extradition treaty after U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu expressed concern over Honduran military officials meeting with Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, a prominent member of President Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle.

[...]

Padrino is under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly running a drug trafficking operation through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

[...]

Castro’s saber-rattling follows a week of heightened U.S.-Mexico tensions, with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declaring his relationship with the U.S. embassy on “pause” after Ambassador Ken Salazar said a judicial reform proposal “represents a risk for the functioning of Mexico’s democracy, and the integration of the American, Mexican and Canadian economies.”

  The Hill

"Saber rattling?" I hardly think that qualifies as saber rattling.

Seeking distance from the United States is ideologically consistent for regional leaders like Castro, López Obrador and others like Colombian President Gustavo Petro, all of whom to some extent embrace the historical vision of the United States as a post-colonial interventionist power in Latin America.

Historical vision? How about the historical reality?

Castro’s motivations could be more personal than historical.

In 2009, Castro’s husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was ousted as president of Honduras in a coup.

While the Obama administration was critical of the coup itself, the United States quickly moved to recognize a post-coup swift election that much of Latin America saw as de facto support for the coup.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the president who won that election, and Juan Orlando Hernández, his successor, both have direct links to the multinational drug trade. Hernández is serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking in the United States. Lobo’s son Fabio is serving a 24-year sentence, and Lobo had related corruption charges dismissed in Honduras this year but has been under U.S. sanctions for his alleged corruption since 2021.

It does seem a little odd to recognize drug traffic-linked people while complaining about their relationships with other countries' drug traffickers.

“Revenge was inevitable, as the U.S. abandoned [Zelaya] after the coup. Now, with his wife in power, they’re back with a vengeance, exposing the shortsightedness of U.S. policy during the Lobo and Hernandez years.”

[...]

Castro’s first big play on the global scene was to recognize communist China in 2023, dropping a longstanding diplomatic relationship with Taiwan.

China’s interest in Latin America is multifaceted — political and security interests are intertwined, if not secondary, to economic interests both in Latin America as a market and provider of raw materials, and as a gateway to the U.S. market.

Also short-sighted of the US to have been fucking around in and fucking up Latin American affairs for decades now.

China is not the only major power looking to Latin America, a region that’s rarely a high U.S. foreign policy priority under either Democratic or Republican administrations.

Putting it mildly.

“Our future is tied to this region, and we have seen in recent years all these nefarious actors, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, gaining a foothold. And we have to be able to counter that,” said [Eddy Acevedo, chief of staff and senior adviser on national security and foreign policy at the Wilson Center.]

Yeah, like maybe making Latin America a priority.  And maybe promoting more feminist ideas and less machismo.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let's do this

Actually, for US elites, that's not a positive thing.  They prefer ignorant citizens.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Typical Trump administration cross-purposes

Surely Nielsen knew what he'd tweeted just hours earlier.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The other reason they are coming here

Posada Carriles is dead at 90

We never have truly reckoned with the miseries we brought upon the people of Central America during the 1980s—the slaughter of priests and nuns; the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, soon to be named a saint of the Roman Catholic Church; the unpunished drug-running; all the money and blood and treasure that we expended on the Reagan Administration’s paranoia that a dying Soviet Union was making imperial inroads in this half of the world.

(Remember Reagan’s worry about how close to Houston El Salvador was? That was a weird time. The last stand of the domino idiocy.)

Hell, Ollie North is still a public figure, warning Americans that Ritalin may be the cause of all these school shootings. But, at the very least, we should acknowledge our own complicity in those events and, every time a newspaper refers to Posada as a “militant” or a “hardliner,” refer to him in our own minds as the terrorist he was.

  Charles P Pierce

Continue reading.

Also, from YWA July 2013:



No longer.

Tillerson in Latin America

On the first day of a trip to Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Jamaica, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson extolled the virtue of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring it “as relevant today as it was the day it was written” in 1823.

At the heart of the doctrine and Tillerson’s odd invocation thereof is the notion that Latin America and the Caribbean are some sort of U.S. protectorate. In effect, the doctrine asserts that the United States has an ownership claim to influence throughout the Americas and that it has the right and responsibility to exclude other external actors.

  American Progress

I bet that went over well.

As President Donald Trump’s nativist policies and politics demonize countries to our south at every turn, Tillerson has little choice but to try an antiquated assertion of authority. In this environment, partnership born of shared interest and mutual respect is a tough sell even for an oilman like Tillerson.

[...]

All of these countries are predisposed to work with the Unites States as we share common interests and, at least until recently, common values. Working with these and other countries across the region is essential to advancing U.S. national security interests. Their cooperation is fundamental to confronting illicit flows in the Americas and is essential to addressing the existential threat posed by global climate change. They are key markets needed to revitalize, high-value U.S. manufacturing and other job-creating export sectors.

We'll fix that.

In just the past two months, the Trump administration has systematically turned its back on some of the most vulnerable countries in the region—Haiti, Nicaragua, and El Salvador—when it terminated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 300,000 individuals from those countries.

In his State of the Union address, President Trump outlined policies that seek to physically wall the United States off from our neighbors to the south; radically reduce legal migration from countries across the Americas; and leave at least 5 to 6 million migrants from the Americas subject to deportation.

In recent weeks, the president has reportedly referred to countries in the Americas (and Africa) as “shithole countries” and badmouthed Mexican and Colombian anti-drug cooperation, even as Tillerson sat across the table from Mexican counterparts trying to fortify such cooperation.

These are not the makings of respectful partnership.

Trump does not have the makings of a respectful person. Nor do any of his cabal.

Alienation

The Most Notable Loser will do wonders for unity in the rest of the world.

Mexico has been trying to diversify its trade partners since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, its biggest export market.

[...]

Mexico, seeking closer ties with the rest of Latin America, expects to finish negotiations on a trade deal with Argentina involving cars and agricultural products around the end of the year.

  Reuters

Actually, I think The Most Notable Loser may be the best thing that could happen to Mexico. Wean that country from ties to the US that has stolen their land, their water, and their laborers for many, many decades. 

Under [a proposed trade] deal, Argentina could gain part of the lucrative grains market in Mexico, Latin America’s No. 2 economy, Baker told Reuters.

In 2015 Mexico imported $2.3 billion worth of U.S. corn and $1.4 billion of U.S. soy. But Baker said those numbers will likely decrease under a renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement called for by Trump.

US farmers are not going to be happy, are they?

Mexico, in turn, could export cars to Argentina, he said.

“We have a very strong manufacturing industry and Argentina is an important market for us,” Baker said.

Mexico sells around 80 percent of its exports to the United States, which has been the source of roughly half the foreign direct investment in Mexico in the last two decades.

Bloomberg has a new article about Trump's desires to renegotiate NAFTA and how it might backfire. Read it here.

And National Review has an article written by a farmer with his take on the proposed renegotiations. Yeah, he's not happy. (Gee, I wonder if he voted for Trump.) Read it here.

An excerpt:

As I drive my combine down row after row of soybeans that I always expected to sell to Mexico, I worry.

[...]

Most within the farm industry initially supported President Carter’s embargo on grain exports to the USSR 40 years ago. Although they knew that the embargo would harm their markets, they felt patriotism demanded support for an action that the Carter administration believed would advance American interests during a particularly tense time in the Cold War. As the Soviet Union ignored the embargo and continued its aggressive actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere, farmers realized that the grain embargo had harmed them without deterring those actions. To be asked to tighten your belt in order to support your country in a generation-defining conflict is one thing. To be asked to sacrifice your industry to a statistical artifact is quite another. Farmers aren’t willing to risk their economic well-being because the trade deficit is higher than some hypothetical future administration might like.

  National Review

I think this is probably the bottom line of any worker in America: fuck the country, I need to make a living.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Neeeeeext

Trump has chosen his Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

[General John] Kelly, 66, whose military career spanned more than four decades, retired earlier this year as the chief of U.S. Southern Command. In that post, where he oversaw military operations in most of Central and South America, he publicly clashed with the Obama administration on its plans – which were never executed – to close Guantanamo Bay and dismissed as “foolishness” concerns that the military’s treatment of detainees at the facility had cost the U.S. the moral high ground in the War on Terror.

[...]

Kelly [is] the third general tapped by the president-elect, in addition to Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who will serve as Trump’s national security adviser, and retired Gen. James Mattis, who Trump said Thursday he intended to nominate as his Defense Secretary. Concerns about the number of military officials in Trump’s cabinet may harm the prospects of another military man, retired Gen. David Petraeus, whom Trump is considering for secretary of state.

[...]

[Kelly] never endorsed a candidate [in this year's presidential election.] Whoever won, Kelly said, shouldn't doubt they're “getting anything but the absolute best military advice, completely devoid of politics.”

  Politico

Other than the politics of war, that is.

Kelly’s son 2^nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly died in 2010 when he stepped on a landmine on a tour of duty in southern Afghanistan, and Kelly remains one of the most senior U.S. military officers to lose a son or daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan. He has also opposed the Obama administration’s decision to open combat roles to women.

The son's death will surely have an impact on Kelly's willingness to advocate for more war.  Whether negatively or positively isn't clear.

Kelly was in charge of Guantánamo for three years until he retired last year.

As the head of U.S. Southern Command, Kelly’s first and only four-star assignment, he was prepared to carry out a directive to shut down the prison complex. At the same time, the general made no secret of the fact that he believed the president’s goal was misguided. “They’re detainees, not prisoners,” Kelly told Military Times.

[...]

SOUTHCOM, as it’s known, gave Kelly purview not only of Guantanamo Bay but also the massive criminal network that has metastasized from the trafficking of drugs, weapons and people throughout South America, Central America and the Caribbean.

[...]

But perhaps most important to Trump, Kelly is an expert on Latin America — and he is decidedly not one of Obama’s guys.

[...]

And he spoke to Congress in very stark terms about the perceived vulnerability of America’s borders.

[...]

[One] source close to Kelly said the general has “better relationships in Latin American than the State Department does.”

  Military Times

Yeah, that's probably not hard to do.

Actually, Kelly seems like a good fit for DHS. But this concerns me:

“Unless confronted by an immediate, visible, or uncomfortable crisis our nation's tendency is to take the security of the Western Hemisphere for granted,” the general wrote in prepared remarks for the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe this is a mistake.”

Tempered perhaps by this:

Beyond his call to build a wall, Trump has promised to impose an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration. When asked about those plans earlier this year, Kelly told Military Times that while he supports enhanced border security, that alone won’t address the underlying reasons people flee Latin America en masse.

[...]

"Obviously, some form of control whether it's a wall or a fence. But if the countries where these migrants come from have reasonable levels of violence and reasonable levels of economic opportunity, then the people won’t leave to come here.”

In his final statement to Congress as the head of Southern Command, Kelly addressed the role of human-rights education and training, calling it essential to U.S. objectives not only in Latin America but wherever America seeks to gain influence. Governments should be accountable to their citizens, he said.

Let's hope he thinks that about our government.

On drugs:

The immigration crisis that peaked in 2014, when tens of thousands of women and children streamed to the U.S.-Mexico border, was the direct result of the surge in drug-related violence gripping Central America, Kelly told Congress at the time. And Americans' demand for those drugs was to blame, he said.

[...]

Kelly is fiercely opposed to illegal and recreational use of drugs, though he makes some exception where there is emerging evidence to suggest medical benefits may exist. Notably, marijuana has shown some promise in mitigating the anxiety some military personnel face as a result of post traumatic stress. Kelly is OK with that. But he opposes widespread legalization of pot, saying it undermines efforts to curtail the distribution of hardcore drugs like heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine.

[...]

“We know how to influence people. I just don’t think we have any kind of a drug-cessation program to speak of. Consequently, the drugs are imported and consumed. I think if Americans understood that doing a little blow on the weekend — on a college campus or here on Capitol Hill — isn’t harmless, if they understood what it’s doing to Honduras or El Salvador, or what it was doing to Colombia, I think they’d responsibly realize that this is not a good thing.”

Perhaps General Kelly's greatest flaw is to overestimate Americans' concern for Latin American countries.

"I've learned that, in many cases, people say ‘I want ground truth’ and they don’t really mean it. There are warts all over this organization, as there are in many organizations, but you just have to tell truth to power and let the chips fall where they may. I know a lot of people may read that, if you put it in your story, and say 'easy for him; he’s a four-star.' But I would say some of the most challenging periods in my life, as a Marine officer, have been fairly recently, where you get into that civilian-military thing and the truth is not always welcome. It can cause some heartburn when you get a call from certain people in Washington who say 'it’s probably not a good idea to go down that road anymore.' But I say 'hey, that’s the truth. I'm at a congressional hearing, and they asked me a question. What am I going to do, lie?'"

Ask Clapper.

So, that's three generals in the administration, so far.

 

Perhaps with Petraeus, who's still dangling in the wings.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE

Mexico Is in Emergency Trump-Protection Mode

Trump's surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton has shaken Mexico, pushing the beleaguered peso to record lows and forcing the government into crisis mode as it seeks to protect bilateral trade.

[...]

Authorities in Mexico have unveiled new measures to provide support to Mexican citizens living in the United States, including phone hotlines, following Donald Trump's win in last week's US presidential election.

[...]

Acting to help Mexicans avoid "abuses and fraud" in the US, Mexico's foreign ministry said on Wednesday it will expand the availability of mobile consulate services to reach more migrants in their communities.

It will also establish a 24-hour telephone line for questions about immigration, and provide more appointments for migrants to get passports, birth certificates and consular identification cards.


  alJazeera

Good luck with that.

The news comes as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador agreed to join forces and seek support from Mexico to forge a joint strategy in response to Trump.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in Brazil

Back to Venezuela

Brazil down.  Now Venezuela.  Funny, isn't it, that in all the reporting on the economic crises in Latin American countries there isn't any mention of the part that US banksters played in destabilizing the world economy.

In a bleak assessment of Venezuela's worsening crisis, the senior [US intelligence] officials expressed doubt that unpopular leftist President Nicolas Maduro would allow a recall referendum this year, despite opposition-led protests demanding a vote to decide whether he stays in office.

But the two officials, briefing a small group of reporters in Washington, predicted that Maduro, who heads Latin America’s most ardently anti-U.S. government and a major U.S. oil supplier, was not likely to be able to complete his term, which is due to end after elections in late 2018.

They said one “plausible” scenario would be that Maduro’s own party or powerful political figures would force him out and would not rule out the possibility of a military coup. Still, they said there was no evidence of any active plotting or that he had lost support from the country’s generals.

  Reuters

Hmmm. They admit there's no evidence of any plotting against Maduro, and yet they suggest possible coups and "predict" he won't last out his term. That's interesting.

Also - "unpopular leftist president" - unpopular with whom might be an informative detail.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in Brazil

It is a little odd that such extreme levels of political instability have received relatively little attention, given that Brazil is the fifth most populous country in the world, it’s the eighth largest economy, and whatever happens there will have reverberations for all sorts of markets and countries, including the United States. The situation in Brazil is actually fairly complicated, much more so than the small amount of media attention devoted to it in the U.S. has suggested.

[...]

[I]t is the case that the Brazilian political class and [the] highest levels of its economic class are rife with very radical corruption. That has been true for a really long time. [...] Remember, Brazil is a very young democracy. It only exited military dictatorship in 1985. And so you finally have the maturation of [the] institutions applying the rule of law. And so, for the first time, political and economic elites are being held accountable for very serious political and economic corruption. The corruption is pervasive in essentially every influential political faction in Brazil, including all of its political parties.

[...]

[T]here’s been a—what has been, until recently, an impressive judicial investigation that has resulted in the arrest and prosecution of some of the country’s richest and most powerful figures—something that you would never see in the United States—billionaires being hauled off to jail for bribery and money laundering and tax evasion and corruption, and sentenced to many years in prison. And virtually every political opponent of President Rousseff is implicated by this corruption, and many of the people in her party are, as well.

[...]

President Rousseff herself is [...] one of the only significant politicians in Brazil not to be implicated in any sort of corruption scheme with the objective of personal enrichment. Everyone around her, virtually, including those trying to bring her government down and accuse her of corruption and impeach her, is implicated.

[...]

[A]t the same time as you have this massive corruption investigation, you also have an extremely severe economic recession, as the result of lowering gas prices and contraction in China and a variety of other factors. [...] [Until 2008-2010, millions] of people were being lifted out of poverty. And what this recession has done has been essentially to reverse all of that and to reimpose huge amounts of suffering, borne primarily by Brazil’s lower and working classes. And so there’s an enormous amount of discontent and anger towards President Rousseff and towards her Workers’ Party.

[...]

[W]hat you [...] see is this young democracy in Brazil that is now being threatened as a result of this [threatened impeachment- an] opportunistic and exploitative attack on the part of the country’s richest media outlets and richest factions to essentially undo the result of four consecutive democratic elections by trying to remove a democratically elected president—she was just re-elected in 2014—on totally fictitious grounds of pretext.

[...]

[T]he more they’ve investigated, the more people have turned state’s evidence, the more corruption has been discovered, to the point where even if you now do impeach Dilma, it’s almost impossible to envision somebody who could take her place who isn’t far more implicated in that corruption than she is.

[...]

You can’t really understand Latin American politics, in general, and the ongoing instabilities and difficulties that almost every country in South America is still plagued by without talking about the central role that the United States has continuously played for decades in trying to control that part of the hemisphere.

In Brazil, like in so many countries, they had a democratically elected government in early 1960s, which the United States disliked because it was a left-wing government—not a communist government, but a left-wing government—that was devoted to the distribution of wealth for the social welfare, for opposing United States’ capitalistic interests and attempts to interfere in Brazil. And the Brazilian military, in 1964, staged a coup [supported by the US] that overthrew that democratically elected government, and proceeded to impose on Brazil a really brutal military dictatorship that served the interests of the United States, was allied to the United States for the next 21 years.

  Glenn Greenwald

We'll be back.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Cleaning Up Clinton

Clinton's role in the aftermath of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's ouster has come under greater scrutiny since the March 3 assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Critics argue that the U.S. push for new elections in the months after the coup helped legitimize the actions of the Honduran military, destabilize the country and pave the way for the extreme violence that followed. Killings of activists like Cáceres and others have become devastatingly common. But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year's paperback edition.

[...]

Months of protests against the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti followed. While virtually all Latin American governments condemned the coup and called for Zelaya's restoration, Clinton and the U.S. pushed for elections to bring in a new government.

[...]

Zelaya was overthrown just three weeks after Clinton's visit to Honduras for the OAS meeting at which Cuba's membership was debated.

[...]

"We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future," Clinton wrote [in the 2014 hardcover edition of Hard Choices].

  Huffington Post

We do a lot of that. Why doesn't the world thank us?

[I]ndeed, the entire two-page discussion of the Honduran coup  [...] disappeared from the paperback edition.

[...]

"Before she was called on it, she was holding it up as a signature achievement," [writer Greg Grandin] said.

[...]

More than 100 environmental and land rights activists like Cáceres were killed in Honduras from 2010 to 2015, according to the British organization Global Witness. The country became the homicide capital of the world for several years, with a murder rate topping 90 per 100,000 at its peak in 2011, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

[...]

"Hillary [Clinton] and the State Department only wanted the kind of 'stability' that was convenient for them regardless of what was happening on the ground,” Cáceres' nephew Silvio Carrillo said in an email to HuffPost. "This has not changed today and it is the reason you now have had governments operating with impunity."

Asked about the omission of the coup passage from Clinton's memoir, Carrillo accused her of "attempting to scrub away the blood she's helped to spill along with the Department of Defense and the Department of State."

Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But [Berta] Cáceres [herself had said]: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”

The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest.

[...]

We still don’t have a clear idea of the events surrounding Cáceres’s murder. There is one witness, Gustavo Castro, a Mexican national, activist, and journalist, who was with Cáceres when gunmen burst into her bedroom. Berta died in his arms. Castro was himself shot twice, but survived by playing dead.

The Honduran government—that “unity government” Clinton is proud of—has Castro in lockdown, refusing him contact with the outside world.

  The Nation

I suspect he will not survive.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We've Had a Lot of Jokers in the Job Ourselves

Television comic and self-styled outsider Jimmy Morales has been elected as Guatemala’s next president, riding a wave of popular anger against the political class after huge anti-corruption protests helped oust the last government.

  Guardian

US in Latin America: Wikileaks Cables

When Greece’s left government decided to hold a national referendum on the troika-imposed austerity program, the European Central Bank retaliated by restricting liquidity for Greek banks. This triggered a prolonged bank closure and plunged Greece further into recession.

 Though Greek voters ended up massively rejecting austerity, Germany and the European creditor cartel were able to subvert democracy and get exactly what they wanted: complete submission to their neoliberal agenda.

 In the last decade and a half, a similar fight against neoliberalism has been waged across the breadth of an entire continent, and mostly outside of the public eye. Although Washington initially sought to quash all dissent, often employing even fiercer tactics than those used against Greece, Latin America’s resistance to the neoliberal agenda has in large part been successful. It’s an epic tale that’s gradually coming to light thanks to continued exploration of the massive trove of US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

[...]

Much of the story of the US government’s efforts to contain and roll back the anti-neoliberal tide can be found in the tens of thousands of WikiLeaked diplomatic cables from the region’s US diplomatic missions, dating from the early George W. Bush years to the beginning of President Obama’s administration.

The cables — which we analyze in the new book, The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire — reveal the day-to-day mechanics of Washington’s political intervention in Latin America (and make a farce of the State Department mantra that “the US doesn’t interfere in the internal politics of other countries”).

  Jacobin

Read more.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Shocked!

Bolivia is calling for investigations into cables leaked by WikiLeaks that reveal the U.S. had plans in 2008 to either topple the government of Evo Morales, or allow his assassination.

“This requires an in-depth investigation.” said Bolivia’s minister of the presidency, Juan Ramon Quintana, “We need to do an investigation to subsequently take decisions with regard to the United States government.”.
  Telesur

No. No, you don't. Just take decisions based on what you already know, and you'll be fine. To wit: The US had plans to assassinate Castro. The US had plans to assassinate Hugo Chavez. The US had plans to assassinate Salvadore Allende. The US had plans to assassinate Sukarno. The US had plans to assassinate Patrice Lamumba. The US had plans to assassinate Jacobo Arbenz. The US had plans to assassinate Mohammed Mosaddegh.

You get the picture.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

US Mainstream Journalism, Latin American Policy, and Democracy

(And, PS, Evo Morales - with his "pragmatic socialism" - has been re-elected in Bolivia.)

(Eleven years [after the US sponsored coup on the Venezuelan democratically elected president Hugo Chávez], upon Chávez’s death, the Times editors admitted that “the Bush administration badly damaged Washington’s reputation throughout Latin America when it unwisely blessed a failed 2002 military coup attempt against Mr. Chávez” [the paper forgot to mention that it, too, blessed (and misled its readers about) that coup]. The editors then also acknowledged the rather significant facts that Chávez’s “redistributionist policies brought better living conditions to millions of poor Venezuelans” and “there is no denying his popularity among Venezuela’s impoverished majority.”

If you think The New York Times editorial page has learned any lessons from that debacle, you’d be mistaken. Today they published an editorial expressing grave concern about the state of democracy in Latin America generally and Bolivia specifically. The proximate cause of this concern? The overwhelming election victory of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

[...]

[D]espite how popular [socialist leaders] are with their own citizens and how much they’ve improved the lives of millions of their nations’ long-oppressed and impoverished minorities, they are depicted as grave threats to “democracy.”

[...]

Even as [the Times editors] admit that “it is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with indigenous roots, remain at the helm” – because “during his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly” - they nonetheless chide Bolivia’s neighbors for endorsing his ongoing rule: “it is troubling that the stronger democracies in Latin America seem happy to condone it.”

[...]

But the real reason the NYT so vehemently dislikes these elected leaders and ironically views them as threats to “democracy” becomes crystal clear toward the end of the editorial (emphasis added):

This regional dynamic has been dismal for Washington’s influence in the region. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, the new generation of caudillos [sic] have staked out anti-American policies and limited the scope of engagement on development, military cooperation and drug enforcement efforts. This has damaged the prospects for trade and security cooperation.

You can’t get much more blatant than that.

  Glenn Greenwald

No, you can’t. We have, as a nation, become blatant and overt about our perceived right to rule the world in any fashion and by any means we choose.

Greenwald, however,  admits in this article that there are “legitimate criticisms to be made of each of” Latin America’s socialist leaders and reminds us that there is no “guarantee against tyranny” by democratic elections:

It is, for instance, democratically elected U.S. leaders who imprison people without charges for years, build secret domestic spying systems, and even assert the power to assassinate their own citizens without due process.

[...]

But the very idea that the U.S. government and its media allies are motivated by those flaws is nothing short of laughable. Many of the U.S. government’s closest allies are the world’s worst regimes, beginning with the uniquely oppressive Saudi kingdom (which just yesterday sentenced a popular Shiite dissident to death) and the brutal military coup regime in Egypt [...] And, of course, the U.S. supports Israel in every way imaginable even as its Secretary of State expressly recognizes the “apartheid” nature of its policy path.

[...]

That’s because “democracy” in U.S. discourse means: “serving U.S. interests” and “obeying U.S. dictates,” regardless how how the leaders gain and maintain power.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

US - Laltin American Relations - Still Crap

Russia’s defense minister says the country is planning bases in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and just last week, Putin’s national security team met to discuss increasing military ties in the region.

“They’re on the march,” Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) said at a Senate hearing earlier this month. “They’re working the scenes where we can’t work. And they’re doing a pretty good job.”

  The Hill

Yeah, I wonder why.

Our Latin American foreign policy hasn’t exactly been designed to win the favor of those countries.

The U.S. military says it has been forced to cut back on its engagement with military and government officials in Latin America due to budget cuts.

Yeah, that’s it. That’s why Latin America isn’t our friend. Our military budget is too low.

Iran has opened up 11 additional embassies and 33 cultural centers in Latin America while supporting the "operational presence" of militant group Lebanese Hezbollah in the region.

[...]

China is making a play for Latin America a well, and is now the fastest growing investor in the region, according to experts. Although their activity is mostly economic, they are also increasing military activity through educational exchanges.

Clearly we need a bigger military budget.

Some experts warn against being too alarmist, and say Russia, China and Iran do not have the ability or desire to project military power beyond their borders.

[...]

According to Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), there are 10 countries in Latin America that currently have no U.S. ambassador because they either haven’t been nominated yet or confirmed, a sign that the region is seen as a low priority.

WTF? ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.