Hugh O'Shaughnessy: Unasur will be Lula's show

[Judi Lynn]

Unasur will be Lula's show
At the meeting of South American leaders in Quito, the path forged
by Brazil's president, not Columbia's, will find most favour


Hugh O'Shaughnessy
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 August 2009 11.00 BST

It'll be Lula's day on Monday, high up in the Andes in Ecuador's poor but beautiful colonial capital of Quito.

He'll be the dominant figure when a majority of Latin American governments solemnly and forcefully declare their distaste for – indeed their rejection of – foreign governments' efforts to mess up their countries and turn them into a new battlefield where "the good guys" (whoever they may be), using real bullets, slug it out to the death with "the bad guys".

The occasion will be the meeting of Unasur, the Union of South American Nations, an energetic organisation of sixteen countries which wants to fix the continent's course towards a future of quiet self-respect and dedication to the effective reform of its vast social problems of inequality and racism. Under the Brazilian leader's aegis a raspberry will be quietly blown in Quito at those who posit the continuation of the phoney cold war of past decades.

This needless struggle pitted the supposed champions of western Christian civilisation, armed to the teeth and trained in the latest torture techniques, against Castroites, Sandinistas and Allendistas who might – by dint of outrageous exercises in political spin – be portrayed as latter-day followers of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and the sort of folk who were never happier than when breakfasting off freshly-grilled babies. Just as Lula himself had to suffer from the professional alarmists of Wall Street before he won the clean presidential elections that brought him to power, today it is Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia who are the particular victims of well-resourced campaigns of international vilification such as has never been mounted against, say, Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians or the regime in Egypt for its jerrymandered elections.

Now the leader of Latin America's largest country – with India, Russia and China one of the "Brics", the planet's most promising economies – and with Brasília likely to soon take a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, Lula can and does, laugh off the humiliations of yesteryear – which included being turned away from the doors of Labour party headquarters in Walworth Road for looking too scruffy. He has no hesitation in criticising the financial strategies which have brought US banks low, or in telling the US Navy to stop prowling round Brazil's massive new offshore oilfields or in saying that Washington's pussyfooting in Tegucigalpa must stop, the elected President Zelaya restored and the increasingly violent impostors bundled away.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/09/unasur-lula-brazil-ecuador

[Peace Patriot]

1. I hope Hugh O'Shaughnessy is right--that the peacemakers and the social justice advocates

are winning the day. But I am extremely worried about U.S. oil war plans in South America--and, whether or not democracy ultimately triumphs in that region--and I think it will--our war/oil profiteers can create hell on earth suffering and chaos before the struggle is over. Great suffering and chaos are already being inflicted on the poor in the U.S. client state of Colombia--and now in the U.S. client state of Honduras. Violent oppression against the poor is also occurring in Peru, a would-be, half-way-there U.S. client state. Peru still has enough of a democracy that they might be able to throw their U.S. 'free trade' enforcers out in the next election. Colombia is a fascist state run by narco-thugs and blood-spattered oppressors. Democracy there is a joke. And Honduras, well, their oligarchs can drag the president out of bed at gunpoint--basically for raising the minimum wage--and declare martial law, beat up and arrest reporters (even AP reporters!), shut down TV/radio stations with troops, and use live rounds on peaceful protesters, and death squads for selected activists, with calm in Washington DC--no particular effort to shut them down.

And all of this creation of client states, and larding them with U.S. tax dollars in military aid ($6 BILLION to Colombia alone), and bolstering an oppressor class of the rich beneficiaries of "free trade" and our military largesse, and winking at horrendous death squad activity (Colombia) and increasing death squad activity (Honduras) may have--and I think it does have--another goal: war against Venezuela, Ecuador and possibly to others, to commandeer their oil, and to smash to pieces the leftist democracy movement that has swept most of South America and half of Central America. Democracy means people acting in their own interests. That is no okay with our Corporate Rulers. They have already shown what horrendous lengths they will go to, to steal oil in the Middle East. There are many worrisome signs that they intend something similar in South America. And the psyops/disinformation campaign that precedes war--as with the WMDs in Iraq--is well under way with regard to some democratic leaders in South America, notably the presidents of countries with the biggest oil reserves--Venezuela and Ecuador, both of which are adjacent to (and in particular their oil provinces are adjacent to) the U.S. client state of Colombia, where the U.S. is installing seven more U.S. military bases.

This is the point at issue, right now, between the Bushwhack toady, Uribe, in Colombia, and the other leaders of the continent. Although Uribe won't show his face at UNASUR, he did bother to tour around South America, talking to the leaders who were not consulted by the Obama administration and trying to sell them on Colombia/U.S. benevolent intentions. But his sometime rival, Defense Minister Manuel Santos--the "Donald Rumsfeld" of South America--is the one running for president--Uribe has been termed out (unless he pulls off another back room deal to stay in office), and Santos is a much worse threat to the peace of the continent than Uribe. Santos is chafing at the bit to invade Ecuador and Venezuela, kill all the leftists, install dictators like himself, and steal their oil. Uribe is bad, very bad. Santos is worse.

I understand the reasons why South America's leaders have sought to include Colombia in UNASUR, and have frequently made peace gestures toward Uribe including trade and infrastructure development projects. Civil authority in Colombia is in great peril from the Colombian military, from its procurer in Washington, Defense Minister Santos ($6 BILLION in military aid; seven new U.S. bases), and from paramilitary death squads closely associated with the military and members of the government. The other leaders want to bolster civilian authority--however bad it is. But the seven new U.S. bases may reach the limit of their tolerance. I think there may be a move to throw Colombia out of UNASUR, and to get down to serious preparation of a "common defense," proposed by Brazil last summer (and which Santos has been obstructing). Peace, social justice and economic development are all well and good--and they are the main strengths of South America right now--but when Hitler starts massing forces on the border of your peaceful country, you had better be prepared for what comes next. And Santos is a potential Hitler, believe me. He is extremely arrogant, violent, contemptuous of democracy, and ambitious to dominate the region by force.

These seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia are an affront to the leadership of South America, to whom Obama spoke of peace, respect and cooperation. None of them were asked their opinion of it. They were neither consulted nor even warned. It caught them by surprise. But I think that it is more than an insult. I think it is a gauntlet thrown. The Pentagon and fascist right in the U.S. want another oil war. They can't stand it that all those oil profits in Venezuela and going for schools and medical clinics, and toward regional cooperation and development. They want it. They think it is theirs. They think that Latin America is their "back yard." There are many other motives for this planned war, but that is the biggest one--to wrench control of the biggest oil reserves in the hemisphere from the people of Venezuela and Ecuador. A secondary but important motive is to destabilize the continent and topple all the democracies--to stop them from getting together in organizations like UNASUR where their combined strength bolsters the sovereignty and strength of each country in asserting its peoples interests vis a vis U.S. and European global corporate predators.

UNASUR, for instance, came to Evo Morales' aid, when the Bushwhacks tried to topple him last year. They brought economic pressure on the U.S. funded and organized white separatists and helped Morales keep the peace--and totally backed him when he threw the U.S. ambassador and the DEA out of Bolivia for colluding with the secessionists. Our corpo/fascists don't want to see that kind of unity and strength in South America. They want to break its back.

Are these seven new U.S. bases just an insult, a warning and a threat? Maybe--to Obama, and maybe to Clinton. But they have been in power only six months, after eight years of Bushwhackism including the placement of Bushwhack moles throughout the government (and in ambassadorships in Latin America, who are still there). They may be headed out in 2012, if the war profiteers give the word to Diebold & brethren that Oil War II is on. Even if they want peace, can they achieve it? Can anybody stop the U.S. war machine, now that it has been hijacked for corporate resource wars? I do not feel at all benign about this. I don't think Obama being president is enough to stop another war--now or somewhat later. We have not solved that problem. It is perhaps too big to solve--too far gone, too out of control. We are now a country that is run by the "military-industrial complex," as Ike warned us about. Our being broke doesn't seem to have given it any pause at all. Seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia! $6 BILLION in military aid to Colombia alone! An occupation of one country, and an on-going war in the other--at the cost of trillions of dollars that we don't have. We have reached the point of Forever War. And the warmongers probably think they can just fold South America into the general resource war that we waging with the world. They've created their demon--"Chavez the dictator." (He is not. He is one of the better people ever to be elected president of a country.) They've put the probable strategy in place (funding/creation of fascist secessionist groups in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.) Now they're putting the war assets in place--the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean; the fascist coup in Honduras, with its strategically located U.S. military base; the dramatically increased militarization of Colombia, which is directly adjacent to Venezuela's and Ecuador's oil provinces.

I hope UNASUR maintains its strength and unity in the face of this great danger. They have been extraordinarily adroit, thus far--for a young organization--in seeing to the interests of their region. They have a lot going for them, and only one enemy--the U.S., or, rather, the global corporate predators and war profiteers who rule over us.