Tag Archives: Cuba

COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Maybe it was a plan that went horribly wrong, something they could no longer control. Was the Corona virus or COVID-19 spread intentionally? What if this virus was used against China as a weapon of choice to destabilize China’s economy and push back against China’s growing influence? We don’t know for sure, but it is possible. Investigations are ongoing. Nothing has not been confirmed. But what has been confirmed is what history has taught us given the facts on how the use of biological warfare for various purposes, against many peoples and nations has been happening for some time. One of the most well-known incidents of biological warfare occurred in 1763, the British Empire had planned and successfully managed to spread smallpox virus to the Native Americans during the Pontiac Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Chief Pontiac of the Ottowa launched an attack on Fort Detroit, a British military base. Other nations joined the rebellion including the Senecas, the Hurons, Delawares, and Miamis. As the war raged, an Indian delegation asked the British to surrender, but they refused, however, the British offered gifts including food, alcohol and material items that included two blankets and a handkerchief from people who had smallpox. Although the American Indians had experienced the disease in the past, the idea was to spread the disease among the Native American populations in an attempt to push back the rebellion or to defeat it once and for all. Another example of biological warfare was when Imperial Japan before and during World War II had a bio-weapons program that managed to drop numerous bombs on a number of Chinese cities from airplanes killing an estimated 580,000 Chinese people with bombs that were made of infected fleas, some even contained cholera and shigella during the Sino-Japanese war between the 1930′s and 1940′s.

In 1981, the CIA with help from U.S. military had launched an operation against Cuba by unleashing a strain of Dengue Fever also known as “hemorrhagic fever’ effecting more than 273,000 people killing 158 including 101 children. On September 6, 1981, The New York Times reported on Fidel Castro’s comments regarding the U.S. government in particularly, blaming the CIA for the outbreak when he said that ”we urge the United States Government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the C.I.A. will or will not be authorized again- or has already been authorized – to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals and our people.” The report said that the “epidemic of dengue fever that has made 340,000 people ill and has killed about 150″ but the State Department under-then President Ronald Reagan stated that “Mr. Castro’s charges of possible United States involvement in the epidemic were ”totally without foundation.” The State department quickly blamed the Castro’s revolution as a failure:

The Cuban Government has always tried to blame the United States for its failures and its internal problems,” the department said. ”The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces like the United States than to admit those failures

Dr, Ronald St. John, chief of communicable diseases for the Pan American Health Organization was interviewed by the New York Times said that “for the first time, so-called dengue-2 spread to Cuba.” Dr. St. John claimed that it is common in Southeast Asia and that it produces “the same symptoms as the other three” and that ”if you get a wave of dengue-1, dengue-3 or dengue-4 and then another wave of type 2, this is a bad combination.” Dengue-2 causes you too loose body fluids causing shocks that can lead to eventually death. Convenient for the CIA who saw it as an opportunity to cause panic on Cuba which is located in one of the most hot and humid regions in the world. However, The New York Times managed to downplay Cuba’s accusation’s by ending the story by blaming the spread of the disease on returning Cuban troops from Africa and other people from other parts of the Caribbean who might have brought Dengue fever into Cuba:

Some State Department officials believe the introduction of dengue-2 into Cuba is a result of the return to Cuba of troops who had been stationed in Angola or elsewhere in Africa, where the strain is found. But Dr. St. John said dengue-2 had been found in other parts of the Caribbean and might have been carried to Cuba from there or elsewhere overseas

Reports suggested that Cuba had a very small number of cases in 1944, and again in 1977. The 1981 outbreak was blamed on covert flyover operations conducted by the CIA with military owned airplanes, you know, the same airplanes that were most probably used against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to transport weapons and other materials to the Contras around the same time. Since the 20th century, the U.S. has been the leader in developing various biological and chemical weapons through the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories based at Fort Detrick, Maryland since the late 1940′s, around the start of the Cold War. The U.S. biological warfare program that supposedly ended in 1969 developed a handful of biological weapons ready for use including anthrax, Q-fever and botulism and conducted research in hopes of weaponizing diseases including smallpox, Hantavirus, Lassa fever, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever and the bird flu among them. An article from August 6, 2019 on Fort Detrick from the UK’s ‘The Independent’ titled ‘Research into deadly viruses and biological weapons at US army lab shut down over fears they could escape’ last August. Ironically, Secretary of State and Neocon Mike Pompeo called it the “Wuhan virus” since they blame China for the outbreak, but it seems that the U.S. had its own problems when it comes to their own labs who conduct research with the most deadly viruses:

America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility. Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War. But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax

The story was basically about the CDC who inspected Fort Detrick and found problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water. The article says that Fort Detrick continued its research for defensive purposes to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” although the U.S. declared that it abandoned their biological weapons program since 1969:

Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin. The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health. In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa 

Sooner or later, the truth will come out. I believe that the U.S. government knows how COVID-19 began and where it was going. The U.S. government and major corporate arms manufacturers and the rest of the Military-Industrial Complex is no stranger to biological weapons adding to their arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons at their disposal which makes them, much more dangerous. The truth about COVID-19 will eventually come out. In the meantime, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a war against Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela is in the works and a coming economic crisis with an election coming this November seems like 2020 will be the year of a perfect storm.

US Again Complicit in an Illegal Coup, This Time in Bolivia

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Pen and watercolor of Bolivia’s Evo Morales. (Flickr/Arturo Espinosa)

By Marjorie Cohn

Source: Consortium News

Once again, the United States is complicit in an illegal coup d’état in Latin America, this time in Bolivia. On Nov. 10, a right-wing, anti-indigenous group seized power after the Bolivian military’s removal of President Evo Morales, who had declared victory in the Oct. 20 presidential election.

The United States’ fingerprints are all over the coup. Advisers from the U.S. Southern Command have been stationed on Bolivia’s border with Argentina, Ivanka Trump made a surprising visit to an Argentine province near the Bolivian border in September, the pro-U.S. Organization of American States (OAS) cast unfounded doubt on Morales’s election victory, and the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy provided suspicious grants to Bolivia.

At least 32 people have been killed and hundreds injured since the coup began. Sacha Llorenti, Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, told Democracy Now!, “We are going through not just a coup d’état, but a violent one.” Indeed, it has resulted in “the rise of a far-right regime of terror,” professor Gabriel Hetland wrote in The Washington Post.

Morales — Bolivia’s first indigenous leader in a country where 65 percent of the people are indigenous — received 10 percent more votes than Carlos Mesa, the second-place candidate who has close ties to the U.S. government. Mesa was in regular communication with U.S. officials who were trying to destabilize Morales, U.S. government cables published by WikiLeaks reveal.

The day after the election, the U.S.-funded OAS sought to delegitimize the election results. “The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls,” it stated.

But the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) published a comprehensive statistical analysis on Nov. 8 that found no evidence of fraud or irregularities in the election and determined that the results reflected highly similar patterns from past elections. Other research conducted by CELAG (Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica) confirmed CEPR’s findings and identified insufficient evidence to support the assertions in the OAS statement.

CEPR Co-director Mark Weisbrot noted in an op-ed for Market Watch, “The OAS isn’t all that independent at the moment, with the Trump administration actively promoting this military coup, and Washington having more right-wing allies in the OAS than they did just a few years ago.”

The OAS was established during the Cold War to prevent the proliferation of leftist governments. USAID considers OAS a critical tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries” such as Bolivia.

The Nov. 10 military coup led to the forced resignation of Morales, who received asylum in Mexico. Right-wing politician Jeanine Añez declared herself interim president, and Donald Trump immediately recognized her illegitimate claim to the presidency. Añez then issued a decree immunizing the military from criminal liability “for carrying out necessary actions in their legitimate defense while performing their constitutional duties.” Morales supporters accused Añez of giving soldiers “carte blanche” to shoot demonstrators. Bolivia’s human rights ombudsman and reporters have documented widespread injuries and fatalities from gunshots.

U.S. Involvement

During Morales’s nearly 14 years in office, his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party reduced poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent. It cut unemployment by 50 percent and nearly tripled the per-capita G.D.P. “It’s indisputable that Bolivians are healthier, wealthier, better educated, living longer and more equal than at any time in this South American nation’s history,” Anthony Faiola wrote in The Washington Post.

There was discontent about Morales seeking a fourth term among some sectors in Bolivia, who thought there should be space for new leadership. But Morales had a strong record of establishing policies to help the people of Bolivia, which angered the U.S. government, Western corporations and the corporate media, “who function as ideological shock troops against leftist governments in Latin America,” Alan MacLeod wrote at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

The U.S. and Argentine governments helped to engineer the Bolivian coup, Stella Calloni reported in Resumen: Latinoamerico. She cited the presence of advisers from the U.S. Southern Command on the Argentine border with Bolivia.

Calloni also documented “the surprising trip of Ivanka Trump” to the Argentine province of Jujuy near the Bolivian border on Sept. 4-5. Accompanied by 2,500 U.S. agents and Undersecretary of State John Sullivan, Ivanka Trump was ostensibly there to “visit” a small NGO dedicated to furthering women’s rights, and she delivered an “aid” package of $400 million for “road works.” Alicia Canqui Condori, national representative of MAS, said that, “in Jujuy Donald Trump’s daughter had met with Gov. Gerardo Morales to plan what happened in Bolivia.”

Moreover, according to Calloni, Bolivian Gen. Williams Kaliman, who “suggested” that Morales resign after the election, traveled to the United States 72 hours after the coup began and he received $1 million from the U.S. embassy in Bolivia. Like many Latin American strongmen over the years, at least six of the top military leaders involved in the coup, including Kaliman, were trained at the notorious U.S. Army School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Months before the coup, Bolivia concluded a $2.3 billion deal with a Chinese consortium to mine lithium. Bolivia has 70 percent of the world’s supply of lithium, which is used in car batteries, electronic devices and weapons systems. “The idea that there might be a new social compact for the lithium was unacceptable to the main transnational mining companies,” Vijay Prashad wrote. U.S. and Canadian companies sought to make a lithium agreement with Bolivia but they could not meet Morales’s conditions. “Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms,” according to Prashad. “He had to go.”

Meddling in Latin America

U.S. complicity in the Bolivian coup follows in a sordid tradition of meddling in the political and economic affairs of Latin American countries. “For many years, the US government has provided overt financial support to opposition political parties and civic groups, including to many of the groups that have been engaged in violent insurrections and coup plotting since at least 2008,” Thomas Field wrote in Jacobin.

One key vehicle that the U.S. government uses as a cover for its imperialist policies is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). After disturbing revelations of covert CIA operations in the second half of the 1970s, NED was established under President Ronald Reagan. “The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities,” William Blum wrote in 2005. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein concurred, stating in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Although ostensibly a private, nonprofit organization, NED is largely funded by the United States. “In effect,” Blum noted, “the CIA has been laundering money through NED.”

Peter Haberfeld, a retired lawyer and labor organizer who has studied the “Pink Tide” governments in Latin America, documented NED grants in Bolivia. He told Truthout that “between 2016 and 2019, NED gave grants to over 30 organizations for ‘democracy promotion’ in Bolivia. The grants total $3,209,887.”

Haberfeld said the grants were officially earmarked for “lofty objectives such as expanding participation by women, youth, media and entrepreneurs in a vibrant political process, particularly in connection with elections,” but cautioned “it is wise to be suspicious.” Haberfeld cited author Neil A. Burron, who wrote in “The New Democracy Wars: The Politics of North American Democracy Promotion in the Americas,” that “democracy promotion is typically formulated to advance commercial, geopolitical and security objectives that conflict with a genuine commitment to democracy development.” Burron noted, “For the U.S., the political manipulation of democracy promotion in support of a North American-led regional order is a continuation of long-standing forms of intervention [that have been] used as a license to meddle in the domestic affairs of others.”

NED was complicit in the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, manipulated the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, heavily funded the 2002 failed coup attempt against socialist President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and supported the opposition to progressive President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in the 1990s. Between 1990 and 1992, NED donated a quarter-million dollars to the Cuban-American National Foundation, the violent anti-Castro group based in Miami.

In 2018, under the guise of “democracy,” “human rights” and “entrepreneurship,” NED funneled more than $23 million to opposition groups in Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton called Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua the “Troika of Tyranny” in November 2018. A few months later, in April 2019, the U.S. government orchestrated another unsuccessful coup in Venezuela. Juan Guaidó, Washington’s chosen puppet to seize power from President Nicolás Maduro, was funded by NED.

Trump not only took aim at the progress President Barack Obama had made toward normalization of relations with Cuba, he has escalated the U.S. economic war on Cuba and unleashed untold numbers of lawsuits that threaten to destroy the fragile Cuban economy.

The Obama administration, led by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supported the 2009 coup in Honduras. The fraudulent election following the coup was financed by NED and the State Department, ushering in a repressive and militarized regime. Conditions deteriorated, leading to the exodus of thousands of Honduran children fleeing north.

U.S. Complicity Is Illegal

U.S. complicity in the coup in Bolivia is illegal under both U.S. and international law. The United Nations Charter prohibits the use of or threat to use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another nation. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the right to self-determination.

The Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the U.S. is a party, forbids any country from intervening in the internal or external affairs of another country. The OAS charter declares that, “Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it, and has the duty to abstain from intervening in the affairs of another State.”

The Foreign Assistance Act forbids the United States from assisting a country “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

There has been global condemnation of the coup. Sixty-four organizations of jurists, lawyers, NGOs, social movements and trade unions from around the world, including the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild, sent a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, urging her to strongly condemn the human rights violations resulting from the coup.

Fourteen members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying they were “deeply concerned” about the contribution of the Trump administration to the “escalating political and human rights crisis” in Bolivia.

Over 800 scholars, activists and public figures published an open letter demanding that the United States and the international community halt all support to the right-wing, anti-indigenous regime that took power after the military coup.

Veterans For Peace condemned the racist coup in Bolivia and demanded an end to U.S. intervention in Latin America:

Veterans For Peace stands in solidarity with the Indigenous majority in Bolivia who are resisting the racist, right-wing takeover of their democracy. We demand that the coup be stopped and democracy restored in Bolivia. As military veterans who have been used and abused in too many unjust wars, we demand an end to 200 years of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

The situation in Bolivia is volatile and there is danger it could devolve into civil war. This is the time to urge senators and Congress members to end all U.S. support for the illegitimate regime, demand free and fair elections with all political parties represented, and insist that fundamental human rights of all Bolivians are protected.

Bolivia’s New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Washington-recognized interim government which just ascended to power via US-backed military coup in Bolivia is already shifting the nation’s foreign policy into alignment with the US-centralized empire, severing important ties with two governments which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob.

“Bolivia’s caretaker government isn’t wasting any time overhauling its foreign policy, announcing Friday that it will expel hundreds of Cuban officials and break ties with longtime ally Venezuela,” The Miami Herald reports. “In a series of statements, Bolivia’s new foreign minister, Karen Longaric, told local media that about 725 Cubans — including doctors and medical staff — would begin leaving Bolivia on Friday.”

“In that same interview she also said she’d be recalling Bolivia’s diplomatic staff from Venezuela,” Miami Herald adds. “Later, asked if she would maintain ties with Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, she said, ‘Of course we’ll break diplomatic relations with the Maduro government.’”

Of course they will.

This news comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. US foreign policy is essentially an endless war on disobedience, in which governments that refuse to bow to US interests are toppled by any means necessary and replaced by governments who will.

International affairs are much easier to understand once you stop thinking in terms of separate, sovereign nations and start thinking in terms of alliances and empire. What we are witnessing can best be described as a slow-motion third world war between what amounts to an unofficial globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States and its military on one side, and all the nations which have refused to be absorbed into this empire on the other. Nations which allow themselves to be absorbed are rewarded with the carrot of military and economic alliance with the empire, and nations which refuse are punished with the stick of invasions, sanctions, trade wars, and coups, with the ultimate goal being total unipolar global domination. The bigger the imperial blob grows, the stronger and more effective it becomes in undermining the interests of unabsorbed nations like Venezuela and Cuba.

Nothing takes precedence over this agenda of unipolar hegemony. As long as a nation remains loyal to the empire, it can fund terrorists, butcher Washington Post columnists, and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world without fear of any retribution of any kind from the US-centralized empire. As a leaked State Department memo explained in 2017, so far as the empire is concerned human rights violations are nothing more than a strategic narrative control weapon with which to attack unabsorbed nations, and to be ignored when they are perpetrated by absorbed nations.

It should therefore also surprise no one that this same Washington-recognized government installed via US-backed military coup is now murdering demonstrators who object to it.

As of this writing there have been five protesters confirmed to have been killed by gunfire in Cochabamba, where security forces are cracking down on demonstrations with extreme aggression against majority-Indigenous demonstrations in support of the ousted president Evo Morales.

The narrative managers at The New York Times are reporting on the events in Cochabamba with the obnoxious insinuation that it may actually be Morales and Bolivia’s Indigenous population who are to blame for current tensions. Here are a couple of excerpts from NYT’s latest contribution to the narrative matrix titled “Ethnic Rifts in Bolivia Burst Into View With Fall of Evo Morales” (emphases mine):

Mr. Morales’s nearly 14 years in power represented a breakthrough for the three-quarters of Bolivians who are either of Indigenous descent or identify as members of Indigenous groups. But he also reinforced his base of support with explicit appeals to racial identity that many Bolivians found threatening and polarizing.

…

“Racism exists in Bolivia; it existed before Evo, and it will never disappear,” said Michelle Kieffer, an insurance broker, as she sipped a cappuccino in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of the country’s administrative capital, La Paz.

“While Evo started an important discussion,” she added, “he also manipulated the race issue, and that has caused disunity. And now people of different races look at each other with suspicion.”

Right. Gotcha. Maybe it’s the impoverished brown-skinned people who are in fact the real fascists, and not the literal Christian fascist coupmongers whose US-backed government takeover they are protesting. Thanks, NYT.

Morales won re-election by over ten percentage points last month, and his previously-elected term wasn’t scheduled to end until January. He was commanded to resign during a current term by the military despite fully acquiescing to demands for a new internationally supervised election. Now it’s being reported that the popular leftist party to which he belonged, MAS, may be banned by the Jeanine Añez-led interim government from participating in the next elections.

Despite all this the western mass media are continuing their cartoonishly ridiculous pattern of resisting the use of the word ‘coup’ when reporting on Bolivia, except to admonish people for using that word as in the case of recent narrative management pieces by The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, and The Economist.

“Supporters of the coup in Bolivia can’t call it a coup,” US politician Lee Carter recently noted. “The US has a law preventing us from sending foreign aid to a new government if it was installed by a coup. So they come up with absurd claims that the military forcing Evo out somehow isn’t a coup.”

And the western mass media are falling right in line with the government forces in refusing to use this word, despite the ousting of a government by the military being exactly the thing that a coup is. This is because in a plutocracy, plutocrat-owned media is functionally the same as state media. Reporters for plutocratic media know what they are and are not permitted to say without being told, so they advance narratives which favor the status quo upon which their plutocrat employers have built their respective kingdoms. This is the status quo of the US-centralized empire, which just absorbed Bolivia and pivoted its foreign policy against the unabsorbed governments of Venezuela and Cuba.

Suddenly West is Failing to Overthrow “Regimes”

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By Andre Vltchek

Source: New Eastern Outlook

It used to be done regularly and it worked: The West identified a country as its enemy, unleashed its professional propaganda against it, then administered a series of sanctions, starving and murdering children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups. If the country did not collapse within months or just couple of years, the bombing would begin. And the nation, totally shaken, in pain, and in disarray, would collapse like a house of cards, once the first NATO boots hit its ground.

Such scenarios were re-enacted, again and again, from Yugoslavia to Iraq.

But suddenly, something significant has happened. This horrific lawlessness, this chaos stopped; was deterred.

The West keeps using the same tactics, it tries to terrorize independent-minded countries, to frighten people into submission, to overthrow what it defines as ‘regimes’, but its power, its monstrously destructive power, has all of a sudden become ineffective.

It hits, and the attacked nation shakes, screams, sheds blood, but keeps standing, keeps proudly erect.

What we are experiencing is a great moment in human history. Imperialism has not yet been defeated, but it is losing its global grip on power.

Now we have to clearly understand ‘Why?’, so we can continue our struggle, with even greater determination, with even greater effectiveness.

First of all, by now we know that the West cannot fight. It can spend trillions on ‘defense’, it can build nuclear bombs, ‘smart missiles’ and strategic warplanes. But it is too cowardly, too spoiled to risk the lives of its soldiers. It either kills remotely, or by using regional mercenaries. Whenever it becomes clear that the presence of its troops would be required, it backs up.

Secondly, it, the West, is totally horrified of the fact that there are now two super-powerful countries – China and Russia – which are unwilling to abandon their allies. Washington and London do all they can to smear Russia and to intimidate China. Russia is being provoked continuously: by propaganda, by military bases, sanctions and by new and newer bizarre mass media inventions that depict it as the villain in all imaginable circumstances. China has been provoked practically and insanely, ‘on all fronts’ – from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and the so-called ‘Uyghur Issue’, to trade.

Any strategy that could weaken these two countries, is applied. Yet, Russia and China do not crumble. They do not surrender. And they do not abandon their friends. Instead, they are building great railroads in Africa and Asia, they educate people from almost all poor and desperate countries, and stand by those who are being terrorized by both North America and Europe.

Thirdly, all the countries in the world are now clearly aware of what would happen to them, if they give up and get ‘liberated’ by the Western empire. Iraq, Honduras, Indonesia, Libya and Afghanistan, are the ‘best’ examples. Submitting themselves to the West, countries can only expect misery, absolute collapse and the ruthless extraction of their resources. The poorest country in Asia – Afghanistan – has totally collapsed under NATO occupation.

The suffering and pain of the Afghan and Iraqi people is very well known to the citizens of Iran and Venezuela. They are not giving up, because no matter how tough their life is under sanctions and the West-administered terror, they are well-aware of the fact that things could get worse, much worse, if their countries were to be occupied and governed by the Washington and London-injected maniacs.

And everyone knows the fate of the people living in Palestine or Golan Heights, places which have been overrun by the closest ally of the West in the Middle East, Israel.

Of course, there are other reasons why the West cannot get any of its adversaries to kneel.

One is – that the toughest ones are left. Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea (DPRK), Iran, Syria and Venezuela are not going to run away from the battlefield. These are the most determined nations on earth. These are the countries that have already lost thousands, millions, even tens of millions of their people, in the fight against Western imperialism and colonialism.

If one is following the latest attacks of the West carefully, the scenario is pathetic, almost grotesque: Washington and often the EU, too, are trying hard; they are hitting, they are spending billions of dollars, using the local mercenaries (or call it ‘local opposition’), and then they quickly withdraw after wretched but anticipated defeat. So far, Venezuela has survived. Syria survived. Iran survived. China is fighting horrible Western-backed subversions, but it is proudly surviving. Russia is standing tall.

This is a tremendous moment in human history. For the first time, Western imperialism is being not only defeated, but fully unveiled and humiliated. Many are now laughing at it, openly.

But we should not celebrate, yet. We should understand what and why this is happening, and then continue fighting. There are many, many battles ahead of us. But we are on the right track.

Let them try. We know how to fight. We know how to prevail. We have already fought fascism in many of its forms. We know what freedom is. Their ‘freedom’ is not our freedom. Their ‘liberty’ is not our liberty. What they call ‘democracy’ is not how we want our people to rule and to be ruled. Let them go away; we, our people, do not want them!

Freedom Rider: U.S. Wages War Against the World

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

The U.S. “troika of tyranny,” Trump, Bolton and Pompeo, are making things up as they go along, seeking to bend the planet to their lawless will.

“The activists who chose to protect the Venezuelan embassy from Guaido and the other Venezuelan traitors are showing us the way to move forward.”

This columnist has spent many years predicting a United States war on Iran. There is now a president who may finally make good on that long expressed threat. Donald Trump is deep in the thrall of Saudi Arabia and Israel, the two nations that pose the greatest risk to Iran. He happily does their bidding and is in a position to bring the sick neocon fantasy to reality.

But the U.S. excels at nothing except creating misery for millions of people and raising the risk of an all out hot war.  Cuba recently instituted rationing after Trump returned to the bad old days of strict sanctions enacted against that nation. More than 40,000 Venezuelans have lost their lives as a result of the crushing sanctions imposed on that country. Iran suffered catastrophic flooding but not one country would provide them with needed aid because U.S. sanctions prevented them from doing so.

“More than 40,000 Venezuelans have lost their lives as a result of the crushing sanctions.”

Aside from starving civilians and depriving them of medical care, the U.S. can’t do much else that doesn’t create dangerous consequences. The latest regime change attempt failed miserably and exposed the limits of U.S. power.  The Venezuelan coup attempt was a complete farce . Hand-picked puppet Juan Guaido never had more than 25 soldiers on his side, and those few were tricked into showing up for what amounted to a photo-op.

In the interim, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo have proven themselves to be the worst in a long line of bad foreign policy decision making. First they accused Iran of some unspecified aggressive act and sent a fleet of ships to make their case for a war of aggression. Then Pompeo scheduled meetings with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to be followed by talks with Vladimir Putin himself. But he chose to cut short his time in Russia in order to meet with Europeans and enlist their support for action against Iran.

“Hand-picked puppet Juan Guaido never had more than 25 soldiers on his side.”

All of the bluster, meeting changes and dispatching navy vessels to the Persian gulf prove one important point. The U.S. “troika of tyranny,” Trump, Bolton and Pompeo, are making things up as they go along. They picked a trade fight with China that they could not win. They want regime change in Iran and Venezuela but they won’t get the results they want even if they carry out military attacks.

In the meantime they fall back on the old tricks of false flags, in this case blaming Iran for a mysterious and conveniently timed oil tanker explosion in the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi puppets are obviously part of the plan and right on cue claim to have been sabotaged .

The United States has willing vassals such as the NATO member states. It has the biggest military in the world. It can attack Venezuela or Iran but faces serious consequences should it do so. Iran and Venezuela have friends, namely Russia and China. Those two countries have developed a strong alliance in order to protect themselves from the crazed and unpredictable Americans.

“They fall back on the old tricks of false flags.”

The U.S. continues to up the ante with phony requests to attack Venezuela allegedly coming from the dupes who thought the United States would put them in power. It isn’t coincidental that the activists protecting the Venezuelan embassy were expelled at the same time.

The evil war mongers are very stupid but that it isn’t a cause for celebration. Unintended consequences have already lead to two world wars and millions of dead.  Unfortunately no one who ought to educate the public on this subject are doing what they should. The corporate media always support presidents at war. Even supposedly liberal outlets have spent years demonizing Russia, Venezuela and Iran. In so doing they have made the population ignorant and or blood thirsty. Democrats in congress are equally imperialist and will say nothing as the government plans a humanitarian catastrophe. At most they will mutter that Trump must ask for their approval before killing thousands of people. Instead they carry on the discredited Russiagate story but oppose none of the things that actually make the Trump administration so dangerous.

“At most Democrats will mutter that Trump must ask for their approval before killing thousands of people.”

But Russiagate and phony claims of a constitutional crisis were intentionally created for this moment. When the United States most needs détente and a lessening of tensions, the lies meant to make Russia look like an aggressor are repeated and make war more likely.

Only the people can lead the United States away from disaster. The activists who chose to protect the Venezuelan embassy from Guaido and the other Venezuelan traitors are showing us the way to move forward. Leftish Democrats won’t help us. The media will continue to lie in service to the state. The “resistance” aren’t angry about anything except a faux scandal. Those of us who want peace will have to say so and demand that our representatives work for the people and not for the cause of war and suffering. There will be no saviors for this country or for the rest of the world. We can only rely on ourselves.

The Triumph of Evil

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(Museum of the Revolution, León, Nicaragua)

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Today (April 17) I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.”

Nicolas Maduro Moros was elected president of Venezuela in 2013 and again in 2018. Previously he served as vice president and foreign minister, and he was elected to the National Assembly in 2000. Despite Washington’s propaganda campaign against him and Washington’s attempt to instigate violent street protests and Maduro’s overthrow by the Venezuelan military, whose leaders have been offered large sums of money, Maduro has the overwhelming support of the people, and the military has not moved against him.

What is going on is that American oil companies want to recover their control over the revenue streams from Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Under the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez, continued by Maduro, the oil revenues instead of departing the country have been used to reduce poverty and raise literacy inside Venezuela.

The opposition to Maduro inside Venezuela comes from the elites who have been traditionally allied with Washington in the looting of the country. These corrupt elites, with the CIA’s help, temporarily overthrew Chavez, but the people and the Venezuelan military secured his release and return to the presidency.

Washington has a long record of refusing to accept any reformist governments in Latin America. Reformers get in the way of North America’s exploitation of Latin American countries and are overthrown.

With the exceptions of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Latin America consists of Washington’s vassal states. In recent years Washington destroyed reform governments in Honduras, Argentina and Brazil and put gangsters in charge.

According to US national security adviser John Bolton, a neoconservative war monger, the governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua will soon be overthrown. New sanctions have now been placed on the three countries. Washington in the typical display of its pettiness targeted sanctions against the son of the Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. https://www.rt.com/news/456841-bolton-russia-venezuela-threat/

Ortega has been the leader of Nicaragua since for 40 years. He was president 1985-1990 and has been elected and reelected as president since 2006.

Ortega was the opponent of Somoza, Washington’s dictator in Nicaragua. Consequently he and his movement were attacked by the neoconservative operation known as Iran-Contra during the Reagan years. Ortega was a reformer. His government focused on literacy, land reform, and nationalization, which was at the expense of the wealthy ruling class. He was labeled a “Marxist-Leninist,” and Washington attempted to discredit his reforms as controversial leftist policies.

Somehow Castro and Ortega survived Washington’s plots against them. By the skin of his teeth so did Chavez unless you believe it was the CIA that gave him cancer. Castro and Chavez are dead. Ortega is 74. Maduro is in trouble, because Washington has stolen Venezuela’s bank deposits and cut Venezuela off the international financial system, and the British have stolen Venezuela’s gold. This makes it hard for Venezuela to pay its debts.

The Trump regime has branded the democratically twice-elected Maduro an “illegitimate” president. Washington has found a willing puppet, Juan Guaido, to take Maduro’s place and has announced that the puppet is now the president of Venezuela. No one among the Western presstitutes or among the vassals of Washington’s empire finds it strange that an elected president is illegitimate but one picked by Washington is not.

Russia and China have given Maduro diplomatic support. Both have substantial investments in Venezuela that would be lost if Washington seizes the country. Russia’s support for Maduro was declared by Bolton today to be a provocation that is a threat to international peace and security. Bolton said his sanctions should be seen by Russia as a warning against providing any help for the Venezuelan government.

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Pence have added their big mouths to the propaganda against the few independent governments in Latin America. Where is the shame when the highest American government officials stand up in front of the world and openly proclaim that it is official US government policy to overthrow democratically elected governments simply because those governments don’t let Americans plunder their countries?

How is it possible that Pompeo can announce that the “days are numbered” of the elected president of Nicaragua, who has been elected president 3 or 4 times, and the world not see the US as a rogue state that must be isolated and shunned? How can Pompeo describe Washington’s overthrow of an elected government as “setting the Nicaraguan people free?”

The top officials of the US government have announced that they intend to overthrow the governments of 3 countries and this is not seen as “a threat to international peace and security?”

How much peace and security did Washington’s overthrow of governments in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and the attempted overthrow of Syria bring?

Washington is once again openly violating international law and the rest of the world has nothing to say?

There is only one way to describe this: The Triumph of Evil.

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” — William Butler Yeats

US plotting coups in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua?

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

The US wants all nations worldwide colonized, their resources looted, their people exploited as serfs, including ordinary Americans.

Sovereign independent governments everywhere are targeted for regime change—by coups d’état or wars.

That’s what imperialism is all about, a diabolical plot for unchallenged global dominance by whatever it takes for the US to achieve its aims, Republicans and undemocratic Dems allied for the same geopolitical objectives.

Humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, and democracy building are code words by both right wings of America’s war party for wanting fascist tyranny replacing governance of, by, and for everyone equitably everywhere—legitimate governments replaced by US-controlled puppet ones.

Post-9/11 alone, the US orchestrated coups in Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, Ukraine, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The so-called Arab spring was made in the USA. Uprisings were orchestrated. Nothing was spontaneous. CIA dirty hands were involved in replacing unpopular regimes with despotic ones considered more reliable.

Spring never bloomed, just the illusion of change for the better. It was pure deception. Everything changed in targeted countries but stayed the same.

In Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere things worsened, notably in Occupied Palestine. No spring bloomed there or anywhere else in the Middle East.

Plan Colombia was and remains all about Washington’s aim to control Latin America, eliminating opposition to regimes it controls, plotting coups against ruling authorities unwilling to bend to its will, along with pursuing anti-Sino/Russian regional policies.

Since Soviet Russia’s dissolution, the US escalated wars on humanity, using NATO as a killing machine. Republicans and Dems colluded to thirdworldize America, banana republicanize it, wrecking the economy, handing its wealth to Wall Street, war-profiteers and other corporate predators.

Both right wings of duopoly governance mock democratic values and rule of law principles they abhor, governing under a police state apparatus, hardened over time, risking global war to achieve its aims.

Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia are the remaining sovereign independent Latin and Central American nations.

Trump regime hardliners want fascist tyranny replacing their legitimate governments. In early January, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino turned truth on its head, saying the US “support[s] the people of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in restoring democratic governance and their human rights”—notions Washington abhors.

Venezuelan Bolivarian social democracy is the Trump regime’s top Latin American target for regime change. Pompeo made US intentions clear.

He turned truth on its head, saying President Nicolas Maduro is “illegitimate and the United States will continue . . . to work diligently to restore a real democracy to that country,” adding, “We are very hopeful that we can be a force for good to allow the region to come together to deliver that.”

Fact: Last May, Maduro was overwhelmingly re-elected by a two-thirds majority.

Fact: Scores of international observers from 30 countries monitored the election, judging it open, free and fair.

Fact: Venezuela’s political process is the world’s best.

Fact: It’s polar opposite America’s money-controlled system, one-party rule with two right wings, ordinary people having no say over how they’re governed.

Fact: US democracy is pure fantasy. Venezuelans have the real thing, why Republicans and Dems want its government toppled, their eyes on the prize—the world’s largest oil reserves they want handed to Big Oil.

On January 10, Maduro was inaugurated for a second six-year term, saying he’s committed to continue “fight[ing] for social and economic prosperity and to build 21st century socialism”—despite relentless US political, economic, financial, and propaganda war against the country’s social democracy.

Despite the Trump regime’s all-out efforts to mobilize international opposition to his legitimate rule, delegations from over 90 countries attended the inaugural ceremonies—including from Russia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Mexico, El Salvador, Iran, Turkey, and Ireland’s Sinn Fein.

Representatives from US colonized EU nations were absent, a spokeswoman for foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini lied saying that “the presidential elections were not free nor fair”—a falsified statement, serving US imperial interests.

Representatives from the African Union, CARICOM, the Arab League, the ALBA Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas, OPEC, and the UN also attended.

In his inaugural address, Maduro said, “I tell the people. This presidential sash is yours. This power is yours. It does not belong to the oligarchy or to imperialism. It belongs to the sovereign people of Venezuela.”

He denounced the diabolical aims of “the most powerful empire in history,” urging dialogue to serve Venezuelan interests, including UN support for “peace, mutual recognition, harmony, (and) coexistence of different political visions,” adding: “I would like to sit down with the opposition, stop the sterile, useless, unnecessary conflict, talk about economic issues; with the experience of the UN we can achieve it.”

Trump regime hardliners falsely call genuine democracies dictatorships, how neocon John Bolton reacted to Maduro’s inauguration, saying the US “will not recognize” his legitimacy to rule.

The US-controlled Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered in Washington, reacted the same way. Most of its member states support longstanding US plans for regime change.

The US-controlled 13-nation Lima Group issued a statement, refusing to recognize Maduro’s legitimacy.

Caracas slammed what it called a “humiliating subordination” to US imperial interests—applying to all nations allied with Washington against Venezuela’s social democracy and sovereign independence.

On January 12, State Department deputy spokesman Palladino openly called for regime change, saying, “It is time to begin the orderly transition to a new government.”

Previous US orchestrated coup attempts failed—against Hugo Chavez and Maduro. Will the Trump regime try again in the new year?

If unable to succeed by coup d’etat, will an attempt be made to assassinate Maduro? If economic, financial, political, and other tactics fail, will military intervention be the Trump regime’s fallback option?

Will Iran be targeted the same way in the new year? Imperialism isn’t pretty.

Endless US belligerence and state-sponsored terrorism is virtually certain ahead, the way hardliners in Washington always operate—hostile to peace, stability, equity and justice at home and abroad.

The Troika of Tyranny: The Imperialist Project in Latin America and Its Epigones

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By Roger Harris

Source: CounterPunch

Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are today threatened by US imperialism. The first salvo of the modern Age of Imperialism started back in 1898 when the US seized Cuba along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.

The Age of Imperialism, as Lenin observed, is characterized by the competition of the various imperial powers for dominance. That inter-imperialist rivalry led to World War I. Lenin called those putative socialists who supported their own national imperialist projects “social imperialists.” Social imperialism is a tendency that is socialist in name and imperialist in deed. Imperialism and its social imperialist minions are still with us today.

US Emerges as the World’s Hegemon

The United States emerged after World War II as the leading imperialist power. With the implosion of the Socialist Bloc around 1991, US hegemony became even more consolidated. Today the US is the undisputed world’s hegemon.

Hegemony means to rule but even more so to dominate. As the world’s hegemon, the US will not tolerate neutral parties, let alone hostile ones. As articulated in the Bush Doctrine, the US will try to asphyxiate any nascent counter-hegemonic project, no matter how insignificant.

In the Caribbean, for instance, the US snuffed out the leftist government of Grenada in 1983 in what was code named Operation Urgent Fury. Grenada has a population smaller than Vacaville, California.

The only powers that the world’s hegemon will tolerate are junior partners such as Colombia in Latin America. The junior partner must accept a neoliberal economic regime designed to serve the interests of capital. Structural adjustment of the economy is demanded such that the neoliberal “reforms” become irreversible; so that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Colombia recently joined NATO, putting that junior partner’s military under direct interaction with the Pentagon bypassing its civilian government. The US has seven military bases in Colombia in order to project – in the words of the US government – “full spectrum” military dominance in the Latin American theatre.

Needless-to-say, no Colombian military bases are in the US. Nor does any other country have military bases on US soil. The world’s hegemon has some 1000 foreign military bases. Even the most sycophantic of the US’s junior partners, Great Britain, is militarily occupied by 10,000 US troops.

The US is clear on its enemies list. On November 1, US National Security Advisor John Bolton, speaking in Miami, labelled Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba the “troika of tyranny.” He described a “triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua.”

Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are targeted by US imperialism because they pose what might be called the “threat of a good example;” that is, an alternative to the neoliberal world order.

These countries are suffering attacks from the imperialists because of the things they have done right, not for their flaws. They are attempting to make a more inclusive society for women, people of color, and the poor; to have a state that, instead of serving the rich and powerful, has a special option for working people, because these are the people most in need of social assistance.

Sanctions: The Economic War against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba

The US imperialist rhetoric is backed with action. In 2015, US President Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to US security” and imposed sanctions. These sanctions have been extended and deepened by the Trump administration. The US has likewise subjected Cuba to sanctions in a seamless bipartisan policy of both Republicans and Democrats for over half a century. Now the US is the process of imposing sanctions on Nicaragua.

Unilateral sanctions, such as those imposed by the US, are illegal under the charters of both the UN and the Organization of American States, because they are a form of collective punishment targeting the people.

The US sanctions are designed to make life so miserable for the masses of people that they will reject their democratically elected government. Yet in Venezuela, those most adversely affected by the sanctions are the most militantly in support of their President Nicolás Maduro.

Consequently, the Trump administration is also floating the option of military intervention against Venezuela. The recently elected rightwing leaders Bolsonaro in Brazil and Duque in Colombia, representing the two powerful states on the western and southern borders of Venezuela, are colluding with the hegemon of the north.

The inside-the-beltway human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, fail to condemn these illegal and immoral sanctions. They lament the human suffering caused by the sanctions, all the while supporting the imposition of the sanctions. Nor do they raise their voices against military intervention, perhaps the gravest of all crimes against humanity.

Liberal establishments such as the advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) try to distinguish themselves from hardline imperialists by opposing a military invasion in Venezuela while calling for yet more effective and punishing sanctions. In effect, they play the role of the good cop, providing a liberal cover for interference in the internal affairs of Latin American nations.

These billionaire-funded NGOs have a revolving-door staffing arrangement with the US government. So it is not surprising that they will reflect Washington’s foreign policies initiatives.

But why do some organizations claiming to be leftist so unerringly echo the imperialists, taking such umbrage over Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua while ignoring far greater problems in, say, Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras, which are US client states?

Most Progressive Country in Central America Targeted

Let’s take Nicaragua. A year ago, the polling organization Latinobarómetro, found the approval rating of Nicaraguans for their democracy to be the highest in Central America and second highest in Latin America.

Daniel Ortega had won the Nicaraguan presidency in 2006 with a 38% plurality, in 2011 with 63%, and 72.5% in 2016. The Organization of American States officially observed and certified the vote. Polls indicated Ortega was perhaps the most popular head of state in the entire western hemisphere. As longtime Nicaraguan solidarity activist Chuck Kaufman noted, “Dictators don’t win fair elections by growing margins.”

Nicaragua is a member of theanti-imperialist Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America with Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states. Speaking at the UN, the Nicaraguan foreign minister had the temerity to catalogue the many transgressions of what Martin Luther King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and express Nicaragua’s opposition.

These are reasons enough for a progressive alternative such as Nicaragua to curry the enmity of the US. The enigma is why those claiming to be leftists would target a country that had:

+ Second highest economic growth rates and the most stable economy in Central America.

+ Only country in the region producing 90% of the food it consumes.

+ Poverty and extreme poverty halved; country with the greatest reduction of extreme poverty.

+ Reached the UN Millennium Development Goal of cutting malnutrition by half.

+ Nicaraguans enjoyed free basic healthcare and education.

+ Illiteracy had been virtually eliminated, down from 36% in 2006 when Ortega took office.

+ Average economic growth of 5.2% for the past 5 years (IMF and the World Bank).

+ Safest country in Central America (UN Development Program) with one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America.

+ Highest level of gender equality in the Americas (World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2017).

+ Did not contribute to the migrant exodus to the US, unlike neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

+ Unlike its neighbors, kept out the drug cartels and pioneered community policing.

In April of this year, all of this was threatened. The US had poured millions of dollars into “democracy promotion” programs, a euphemism for regime change operations. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a cabal of the reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy, conservative business associations, remnants of the US-sponsored Contras, and students from private universities attempted a coup.

Former members of Ortega’s Sandinista Party, who had long ago splintered off into political oblivion and drifted to the right, became effective propogandists for the opposition. Through inciting violence and the skillful use of disinformation in a concerted social media barrage, they attempted to achieve by extra-legal means what they could not achieve democratically.

Imperialism with a Happy Face

We who live in the “belly of the beast” are constantly bombarded by the corporate media, framing the issues (e.g., “humanitarian bombing). Some leftish groups and individuals pick up these signals, amplify, and rebroadcast them. While they may genuinely believe what they are promulgating, there are also rewards such as funding,media coverage, hobnobbing with prominent US politicians, and winning awards for abhorring the excesses of imperialism while accepting its premises.

Today’s organizations that are socialist in name and imperialist in deed echo the imperial demand that the state leaders of the progressive movements in Latin America “must go” and legitimize the rationale that such leaders must be “dictators.”

They try to differentiate their position from the imperialists by proffering a mythic movement, which will create a triumphant socialist alternative that fits their particular sect’s line: chavismo without Maduro in Venezuela, sandinismo without Ortega in Nicaragua, and the Cuban Revolution without the Cuban Communist Party in Cuba.

The political reality in Latin America is that a rightwing offensive is attacking standing left-leaning governments. President George W. Bush was right: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” There is no utopian third way. Each of us has to determine who are the real terrorists, as the juggernaut of US imperialism rolls out a neoliberal world order.

Chaos: The New Imperialist Game Plan

For now, the coup in Nicaragua has been averted. Had it succeeded, chaos would have reigned. As even the most ardent apologists for the opposition admit, the only organized force in the opposition was the US-sponsored rightwing which would have instigated a reign of terror against the Sandinista base.

The US would prefer to install stable rightwing client states or even military dictatorships. But if neither can be achieved, chaos is the preferred alternative. Libya, where rival warlords contest for power and slaves are openly bartered on the street, is the model coming to Latin America.

Chaos is the new imperialist game plan, especially for Bolton’s so-called troika of tyranny. The imperialists understand that the progressive social movements in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are too popular and entrenched to be eradicated by a mere change of personnel in the presidential palace. Much more drastic means are envisioned; means that would make the bloody aftermath of the US-backed Pinochet coup in 1973 in Chile pale by comparison.

In Venezuela, for example, the opposition might well have won the May 2018 presidential election given the dire economic situation caused in large part by the US sanctions. The opposition split between a moderate wing that was willing to engage in electoral struggle and a hard-right wing that advocated a violent takeover and jailing the chavistas.

When Venezuelan President Maduro rejected the US demand to call off the elections and resign, he was labelled a dictator by Washington. And when moderate Henri Falcon ran in the Venezuelan presidential race on a platform of a complete neoliberal transition, Washington, instead of rejoicing, threatened sanctions against him for running. The US belligerently floated a military option for Venezuela, stiffened the suffocating sanctions, and tipped the balance within the Venezuelan opposition to the radical right.

The US is not about to allow Venezuela a soft landing. Their intent is to exterminate the contagion of progressive social programs and international policy that has been the legacy of nearly two decades chavismo. Likewise, for Cuba and Nicaragua. We should also add Bolivia in the crosshairs of the empire.

We’ve seen what Pax Americana has meant for the Middle East. The same imperial playbook is being implemented in Latin America. Solidarity with the progressive social movements and their governments in Latin America is needed, especially when their defeat would mean chaos.