That is all that I mean by "nuanced." Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were stupid if not insane. Some of the shit they pulled in LatAm was unbelievable--the clowns they supported in the Venezuela 2002 coup attempt, the Rumsfeldian "miracle laptop" business in Colombia, bombing Ecuador, ludicrous things like the CIA "suitcase full of money" caper out of Miami (trying to frame Chavez in Venezuela and Fernandez-Kirchner in Argentina on corruption charges--resulting in both being elected by big margins), and trying to dictate to people like Lula da Silva and Nestor Kirchner (when the Bushwhack dictate was sent down to LatAm leaders that they must "isolate Chavez," Kirchner replied, "But he's my brother!"
. The Bush Junta really blew it. They chose to act like vengeful bullies in LatAm at the onset of the biggest democracy movement that has hit the world since 1776!
Anyway, Panetta has all this ugly clownishness, murderousness and overt offensiveness to counter, in order to regain dominion over South America and retain the U.S. "circle the wagons" region of Central America/the Caribbean, on behalf of U.S. transglobal corporations and war profiteers. Thus, we saw mafioso/death squad president, Alvaro Uribe yanked off the stage, and the milder rightwinger (rival to Uribe), Manuel Santos, vetted and installed in Colombia. Santos' first act in office--first day, even before he was inaugurated--was to make peace with Venezuela. (He has also--quite incredibly--called for the legalization of drugs.) That was Panetta's doing, believe me. (His first visible travel as CIA Director was to go to Bogota! --likely to oversee that transfer of power.) (The drug legalization idea is probably a long range Big Pharma plan to monopolize the trade.)
Panetta is subtler and smarter. There is no question about it. He is more of a realist about the utter contempt in which the U.S. is held in LatAm AND about the effective alliance that has been forged by the leftist leaders. He has been very careful to give a democracy gloss to both "divide and conquer" coups--Honduras, Paraguay--and has significantly toned down the Bushwhacky rhetoric against leftist leaders such as Chavez. He is lethally smart--and much more effective than the Bushwhacks.
We who follow events may see right through the crapola that was pulled in Honduras and Paraguay to depose elected leftist presidents--but those kind of coverup tactics give the rightwing (and the corporate media in LatAm, which is as bad if not worse than ours) reasonable-sounding "talking points"; they help confuse the "middle" (such as it is), and while they don't fool the left (the poor majority)and their leaders in LatAm, they DO fool a lot of people HERE.
Bottom line: The more stupid and brutal shit that the Bush Junta did in LatAm, the more leftist governments got elected; and now we are losing leftist governments, to wily, fake "constitutional crises," with a false veneer of democracy painted over them. The new and unprecedented leftist alliance is in crisis because they can't seem to stop these coups (the way they did to the Bush Junta coup attempt in Bolivia in 2008--another really ugly Bush Junta project, using white separatists). The U.S. has now struck a serious "divide and conquer" blow, not just to LatAm democracy in Honduras and Paraguay, but to the Brazil-Venezuela-Argentina-Ecuador-Bolivia alliance and its new organizations (Unasur and CELAC).
That is Panetta's goal--to break up the overarching democracy revolution that has occurred and its economic/political alliance. The Bush Junta got side-tracked, trying to get rid of Chavez (at Exxon Mobil's behest) and probably because they were so incredibly dirty on the cocaine trade and war profiteering. They quite stupidly failed to grasp how popular Chavez is, in Venezuela and in the region, and among the region's other leftist leaders. True, they succeeded in getting a whole lot of trade unionists murdered in Colombia, to further U.S. transglobal interests, but they turned Colombia into a pariah, and steadily lost ground for U.S. interests almost all the way to the U.S. border (leftists elected in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and very nearly in Mexico). I attribute the reverses we've seen in LatAm democracy lately to Panetta.
Clinton was more visible on Honduras but I think Panetta was calling the shots--how to turn a crude Bushwhacky instrument--the Honduran coup (designed by the Bush Junta and unfolded only six months into the Obama administration)--into an installed rightwing government? Answer: a fake election. Then that useful template (the "constitutional crisis" was re-used in Paraguay. Both of these events are so close to what Panetta did in Colombia in his first weeks as CIA Director--conferring a sort of legitimacy on corporate-friendly rightwing rule (in that case, by removing an obvious malefactor, Uribe)--that I am convinced that this is his policy (also Bush Sr. policy--and quite tricky in that respect, because part of what Panetta was doing in Colombia was covering up Bush Junta crimes which posed some peril to Junior--and still does, in my opinion).
Anyway, I am in no way being an apologist for Panetta or for U.S. policy in LatAm. But I think it's very important to try to look at things realistically, to make educated guesses at what is really going down and to try to figure out what our rulers are up to and the internal disputes that they have.
Unfortunately, we are the peons of an Empire and have zero say over what that Empire does--but we ARE affected by its actions, and are forced to pay for its actions one way or another, and, in our common humanity, we see other peoples greatly affected by our government's behavior and by the behavior of the transglobal corporations and war profiteers that it serves. We need to understand the "court," so to speak--just as the subjects of past kingdoms needed to suss out the factions around the king, for their own survival, if nothing else. We have more obligations as the citizens of a once great democracy--as the inheritors of traditions that once inspired the world--but our current position is little more than serfs and slaves to powers quite beyond our control. We NEED to understand those powers and it is a complex business--far more complex than the subjects of earlier empires ever faced. One of the complexities is the difference between the Bush Junta and the Obama (Panetta) administration, in LatAm and other places. If we don't see that difference then we are at risk of being fooled by it (thinking, for instance, that Obama policy in LatAm is "better" than Bush's. Cosmetically, it is. In substance, it isn't).
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read
