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This is Prohibition deja vu all over again. It is NUTS.
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I tend to agree with Systematic Chaos that there are ulterior motives to the U.S. CREATING a war in Mexico, but I have a different take on the ulterior motives. Aside from war profiteering--i.e., creating wars to create the excuse for robbing us blind--the Pentagon is pursuing a plan basically to occupy the Central America/Caribbean region, as enforcer for a "free trade for the rich" U.S. fiefdom, and they likely plan to net in Venezuela's oil coast and northern oil region, through aggression (with Colombia's 40+ year civil war as the "front"), to fuel this globalization fiefdom and also to fuel the great big U.S. war machine. Mexico is the northern linchpin of this "circle the wagons" area, with the Colombia as the southern linchpin.
Here was the picture until recently: Leftist governments in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay in South America, and in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala and a number of smaller countries including Cuba in Central America/the Caribbean.
The South American leftist leaders led the way in creating UNASUR, in summer 2008, an all-South American (no U.S. membership) prototype "common market." Venezuela and Cuba led the way in creating ALBA around the same time--a Central American/Caribbean trade group to provide collective economic/political clout and mutual aid among the smaller countries of this region. Both trade groups challenge U.S. "free trade for the rich" policies and U.S. domination and aggression. UNASUR, for instance, in one of its very first acts, brought strong, 100% backing to Evo Morales, who was facing a U.S. funded/organized, white separatist insurrection in Bolivia. He had thrown the U.S. ambassador out of Bolivia. UNASUR backed him and helped him quell the riots and the secessionist movement.
This picture has shifted slightly toward the fascist end of the spectrum with the U.S.-supported rightwing military coup in Honduras and a rather strange election in Chile of a rightwing billionaire. (The outgoing Leftist president, Michele Batchelet, has an 85% approval rating, and I still don't understand how her successor didn't win.) In any case, while these were blows to the leftist democracy movement that has swept South and Central America, the picture is still very Leftist.
One of the coup generals in Honduras stated that, by their coup, they were "preventing communism from Venezuela reaching the United States." "Communism," in this case, means universal free medical care, universal free education through college, good jobs with decent wages and benefits, a nation's resources used to benefit the people who live there, strong labor and environmental laws, national sovereignty versus multinational corporations, and so on--basically good progressive government.
This general was talking to people like John 'death squad' Negroponte, Jim DeMint (first term Puke senator from SC--a Diebold touchscreen state--who seems to be running U.S. foreign policy in Latin America), John McCain (telecommunications interests in Honduras; funneled $43 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars to rightwing coup groups in Honduras through the USAID-IRI) and Hillary Clinton (her role seems to have been to try to fool the world that the U.S. was not backing the coup--she was being directly advised by Negroponte).
So the main purpose of the coup was to hurt Venezuela--to stop the march of its progressive, socialist ideas, its real as opposed to fake (corporate) democracy and its assertion of the sovereignty of Latin America countries up from the south through Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala--all with leftist leaders) to Mexico, where a leftist came within 0.05% of winning the last presidential election, to the very border of the Corporate Empire, where half the population has no health care, and where millions are becoming jobless and homeless, while the Empire pursues two wars, military domination of the world (with bases everywhere), and the rich get richer with bankster bailouts and other lavish perks.
The Honduran coup had several other U.S. purposes. The murder of about a hundred leftist leaders, and stomping hard on the strong leftist democracy movement that was developing in Honduras was likely among them. One other key political purpose was Honduras withdrawing its membership in ALBA. Mission accomplished (recently--just before the coup stepped down from its official position). And a key military purpose was to prevent a popular referendum on changing the Constitution, which might have led to Honduras evicting the U.S. military from its base in Soto Cano, Honduras. (The deposed, kidnapped, evicted president, Mel Zelaya, had proposed converting this U.S. air base to a commercial airport--badly needed in Honduras. The plane carrying the kidnapped Zelaya out of the country stopped at this U.S. air base for refueling. Nasty bit, that.)
Honduras has a long history of being used for U.S. aggression against its neighbors. It was the "lily pad" country from which the Reaganites launched death squads into Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s. So, with the whole region going leftist, this base of operations was/is vitally important to U.S. plans to destabilize and topple the elected leftist leaders in the surrounding countries (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala), and as a support base for the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (mothballed since WW II, recently reconstituted--summer 2008, same moment as UNASUR formalization), and as a strategically important war asset combined with the seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia, new U.S. military activity in Panama and U.S. military occupation of Haiti (one hundred miles off the Cuban coast) with the earthquake as the excuse.
When you consider these U.S. war assets on the map, it's hard not to notice that they surround Venezuela's oil coast and northern oil provinces. And there more than likely is a war plan in the Pentagon to take this vital asset--the biggest oil reserve in the world (twice the oil of Saudi Arabia)--into its "circle the wagon" fold.
So, back to Mexico: It is important that Mexico's leftist movement be prevented from winning the presidency. It was stopped very likely by U.S.-aided election fraud in 2005. But it is not an easy movement to defeat. It is huge. The U.S. "war on drugs" is used to militarize and nazify target societies--Colombia being the most obvious and egregious example. It has nothing whatever to do with stopping drug traffic, and has utterly failed to do so. It is a war profiteer boondoggle with a political purpose--FUNDING the rightwing forces in the military and police establishments, eroding civil rights and, if Colombia is any guide, providing cover for the murder of thousands of union leaders, teachers, community organizers, human rights workers, political leftists and peasant farmers. And its military purpose, of course, is to gain a U.S. military foothold in the country.
I don't in any way buy into this notion that the U.S. is threatened by "brown hordes" from the south. What the U.S.--or, more accurately, what the U.S. corporate rulers and war profiteers--are threatened by is social justice, and, of course, loss of U.S. corporate/war profiteer hegemony in the U.S., in the Latin America and in the world. If the U.S. were being justly ruled, there would be plenty for everyone--everyone would have health care, the fit would all have good jobs, the vulnerable would be well cared for and a strong middle class would be helping to spread progressive values everywhere, including, for instance, not losing the planet to corporate-produced global warming, nuclear disarmament, peace, demobilization of militaries, and real support for actual democracies like Venezuela, instead of propping up the sheiks of araby in the Middle East and other rotters.
The "brown horde" of Latin America is actually very progressive, very well informed, very well organized and very democratic--to make a broad characterization of the entire movement that has swept leftist governments into office in so many countries.
In Ecuador, for instance, the "brown mob" has enshrined the rights of Mother Nature ("Pachamama," in the Indigenous) into the country's Constitution as the law of the land. The right of Mother Nature to exist and prosper apart from human needs and desires. Imagine that!
All of these leftist governments have been similarly progressive, far thinking and fair and equitable on many other issues. Bolivia, for instance, banished the U.S. "war on drugs" and enshrined the coca leaf--and the right to chew it or make tea from it--in their Constitution. It is a traditional Indigenous medicine, and a highly nutritious leaf, essential to survival in the icy, high altitudes of the Andes (as distinct from cocaine, a highly processed, addictive drug). The Chavez government in Venezuela tried to get an equal rights for women and gays amendment passed by the voters (and lost in a very close--Venezuela is a Catholic country). The peasant farmers throughout Latin America--a huge campesino movement that is actually worldwide--as well as the Indigenous tribes who subsist on Nature in the Amazon--are a vital component of the Leftist movement, and are fighting battles all over Latin America for organic farming and help to small farmers and food producers, and against rapacious corporations like Monsanto, and toxic pesticide spraying (of coca leaf crops or anything else). A teachers' union movement, combined with a peasant farmers' movement, arose in Oaxaca, Mexico, circa 2005-2006, to challenge the fascist governor and sustained a strike and takeover of the city of Oaxaca for more than six months, before Calderon's federal police crushed it and covered up for the governor and his death squads.
These are not clueless, starving, angry "hordes" a la the French Revolution. And they are no threat to us, except that they might bump us out of our sleep and excite us once again as the democrats with a small d, and lovers of justice, and lovers of peace, that most of us North Americans are.
That we cannot stop the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs"--or any other U.S. war--is a symptom of our failed democracy. I would say that our first priority should be to get rid of the privatized, far rightwing controlled 'TRADE SECRET' voting systems that have been spread like a plague all over the U.S. That is a DOABLE campaign--since control over voting systems still resides at the local/state level. And these machines have been a final blockade to reform that MUST be peeled back before any other reform is possible. Transparent vote counting has been a main key to the success of the Left in Latin America, as well as long hard work on other election rules and democratic institutions.
I look to the south for inspiration--and not at all in fear. The Latin American leftist movement is a good movement, solidly based in democracy--in grass roots groups, unions and communities--and is very far thinking. And THIS is why the U.S. government--as toady to the corporate rulers and war profiteers--fears "communism from Venezuela reaching the United States," and why its corpo-fascist press stokes peoples' fears of "brown hordes" from the south mobbing our country and stealing our wealth. Did you ever meet a member of this "brown horde" who wasn't quietly working diligently and hard at some shit job and sending money back to his or her family, and causing no trouble whatsoever to anybody? Where is this "brown horde" mobbing on the border threatening to invade the U.S.? Yeah, there are gangsters in every society--including really big ones who take over governments (and took over ours for eight years)--but the typical immigrant from the south is only seeking work and doesn't even want to be here, wants to earn some money and return to family, community, village. They are no threat whatsoever compared, for instance, to the Pentagon and its war profiteers.
The U.S. has ravaged the countries closest to our southern border unmercifully--Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. Our corporations have stolen their land, polluted it, driven small farmers into urban squalor, set up cheap labor sweatshops and damaged or destroyed their sovereignty--their control over their own affairs. And that is not even to mention the horrendous violence the U.S. had directly inflicted or funded/assisted in the latter three countries, in essence wiping out an entire generation of political leadership, and in the case of Guatemala, slaughtering two hundred thousand Mayan villagers.
The remedy for migration from the south, of people looking for work--almost all of them--is leftist government, not "war on drugs" militarism and fascism, and xenophobia. Support democracy and fairness, and the migration will end. Give people the hope and the purpose of making their own society more equitable and democratic and they WILL create a more equitable and democratic society. That is what the leftist movement in Latin America is doing--quite peacefully and pervasively--despite U.S. efforts to prevent it. We should welcome it. We should learn from it.
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