In an article by Riordan Roett on Secretary of State Rice’s tour of Latin America, in the BBC Spanish site, Roett, touted to be "an expert on Brazil from John Hopkins University, stated:
"Por otra parte, para Riordan Roett, experto sobre Brasil de la Universidad John Hopkins de Estados Unidos, "el viaje de Rice, al igual que el de Rumsfeld el mes pasado a Brasil, es una acción defensiva del gobierno estadounidense.
"Tenemos cada vez más miedo de Venezuela, de la guerra en Colombia y ahora tenemos la crisis en Ecuador. El gobierno de Washington entiende ahora que después de aZos y aZos sin mayor interés debería prestar atención a América Latina"
Translation: On the other hand, for Riordan Roett, an expert on Brazil from John Hopkins University in the US, Rice’s tour, as was Rumsfeld’s last month to Brazil, is a defensive action by the US
"We are afraid of Venezuela, the war in Colombia and the crisis in Ecuador. The government in Washington now understands that after years and years of little interest, it should now turn its attention to Latin America".
Roett speaks about "defensive action by the US", "fear of Venezuela and the war in Colombia" and that the US should pay "more attention to Latin America".
I do have a certain level of knowledge about Latin America. I make this claim, not with hubris, but simply as a statement based upon my background and experience. For the life of me, I simply I cannot grasp the meaning of the comments made by this "expert", Roett. Can anyone else possibly comprehend his comments? I would like to ask Mr. Roett "What is the US "defending itself against?" Are we to believe that Venezuela has Weapons of Mass Destruction - the same claim that was made to justify the U.S. war in Iraq? Or perhaps he is referring Venezuela’s recent purchase of 100,000 rifles from Russia? Does this purchase of conventional weapons represent a "threat to the United States"?
Now if Mr Roett had said "Rice’s tour is an attempt to shore up the crumbling influence of the US in Latin America, after the failure of Rumsfeld’s diplomatic mission to Brazil a month ago", I would have understood that quite clearly, since it is based on facts with supporting evidence. It is much easier to believe that Mr. Roett’s statement is based on paranoia or with the conscious and deliberate aim of building a pretext for some sort of "intervention" at a future date, based on Bush’s "preventive war thesis".
It would be better for university experts such as Mr. Roett to exercise some in-depth, critical thought about what is happening in Latin America and the real reasons why Latin America’s presidents have been falling since 2000. Recent examples are: Jamil Mahaud in Ecuador in 2000. Fernando de la Rua in Argentina in 2001, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia in October 2003, Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador in 2005 and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002.
With the exception of Chavez, who was removed from power only for 48 hours by a US/CIA backed military coup in April 2002, all the other presidents listed above have one common thread in their policies which led them to be ousted by popular uprisings: in a word "neoliberalism".
To put this another way, Fernando de la Rua allowed the continued rape of Argentina by the US banks and corporations when it became abundantly clear that the country was bankrupt, owing US$140 billion to the IMF and the international banks. His policies left Argentina with only US$8 billion in international reserves, unable to service the debt and suffering from a negative GDP and climbing unemployment and poverty. The final straw came when all the dollars were shipped out of the country on 15th/16th December in armored trucks to the airport, effectively robbing millions of Argentinians of their pensions and life savings. We well-remember the stories of Argentinians lined up at the ATM machines staring at screen messages, "No funds available". There was no law to prevent this and banks such as Citibank, the Bank of Boston and HSBC were all involved in this robbery. On December 19th 2001 de la Rua resigned in the face of a 50,000 strong protest in front of the Casa Rosada.
The case of Sánchez de Lozada was similar in Bolivia. After days of violent protests in La Paz against the application of IMF austerity measures, as well as the privatization of water and the threat of selling off Bolivian gas interests, police killed around 78 demonstrators and injured many hundreds in a wave of brutal repression. Sanchez de Lozada resigned and this was accepted by the Congress and Senate and he flew off to….the US. He then blamed Chavez for allegedly financing the protests against him, and either could not see - or would not admit - that the inhuman neoliberal policies being implemented and the selling off of the country to US interests was really the root cause behind his downfall.
Jamil Mahaud, educated at Harvard, saw the local Ecuadorian currency, the sucre, collapse from 6,500 to the dollar to 25,000 in a year. He could not even make a US$96 million payment to service Ecuador’s external debt and so decided to dollarize the economy as the panacea to solve all the problems facing the country. You can’t sell out national sovereignty more than when your central bank suddenly becomes a limb of the Federal Reserve. Massive demonstrations in Quito led him to leave the country for….the US, as the US military said that they could not guarantee his physical safety. This sounds almost the same as the kidnaping of Jean Bertrand Aristide by the US military and flying him to the Central African Empire – the difference is that Aristide was a champion if the poor in Haiti in contrast to Mahaud in Ecuador.
The latest casualty has been Lucio Gutierrez also from Ecuador. In his case, he was also on the verge of trying to privatize all services and utilities and attempting to sell off Petroecuador to Chevron-Texaco (Does the name Condaleeza Rice ring a bell?) and to the Exxon corporation, after having acted unconstitutionally by appointing replacing judges in the Supreme Court with his own henchmen. His demise may have been illegal as explained in Geopolitical analysis. Ecuador: Institutional coup d’etat to hinder Latin American integration?. Nevertheless, the common thread which has led to the downfall of all these presidents has been the application of lethal doses of neoliberal medicine from the IMF doctors and the surgeons of the global corporate empire. I can only conclude that "experts" like Mr. Roett are in someone’s pocket being paid to utter complete untruths about the reasons for the recent Rumsfeld and Rice diplomatic missions to Latin America. No expert could possibly be so dumb and paranoid to make such statements. I also criticize the BBC either for outright complicity (The BBC is, after all, built on the same capitalistic, colonizing system that poses the ongoing threat to Latin America) - or for naivete’ in publishing this charade. Certainly, freedom of speech is to be respected. While their reporting on the subject of Rice’s tour appears to be well presented, they obviously have little concern for fact-finding or the Truth. As such, they have given up all pretense of journalistic integrity. The real core issues are not investigated or reported. If they were, it would blow the lid off the US’ real intentions in the region. "America for the Americans" as James Monroe said in 1823. Monroe’s reductionistic use of the term "America" does not include Latin American, however.
The BBC report also does not even mention the question of oil. To do so would have forced them to address the relationship between the threats constantly made by U.S. State Department against Venezuela and the U.S./British invasion of Iraq. This is the key to the whole tenet of US foreign policy in this century but without building more refineries (the last one was built in the US some 27 years ago) there is no way of converting crude into gasoline to solve the constant price hikes where minimum wage workers are pumping flame at U.S. gas stations. After all, oil supplies have to be secured somehow. Mr Roett mentions the war in Colombia, a country that has been at war with itself for at least 200 hundred years. In the 19th century there were 12 civil wars in Colombia, including the 1899-1902 1000 day war. The current situation is a continuation of injustices and exploitation which have existed since the Spaniards reached what they called New Granada in 1499. Now, the oldest guerrilla movement in the world, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), are the modern day product of the five century-old exploitation taking place, thanks to U.S. "Intervention" in the so-called "war against drugs".
So….why is Mr. Roett "wary" of the war in Colombia. To be quite frank, the US has fanned the flames in this war-torn country using Plan Colombia to further its interests and militarize an already heavily armed and violent country. The war in Colombia should have "experts" such as Mr. Roett concerned when you take into account that this year alone, the Colombian regular army has suffered three military defeats at the hands of the FARC, which controls 60% of the country. This movement is in reality an uprising of peasant farmers who are taking up arms against the U.S.-backed oligarch governments in Bogotá.
There is very little chance of reconciliation in Colombia or peace. The last time there was a truce in 1986 and the Patriotic Union was formed, the death squads paid by the oligarchs (Colombia is effectively been run since colonial times by 23 families) wiped out the main party leaders, including two presidential candidates in four years. Why? Because the U.S. and the Uribe regime know full-well that the Patriotic Union could have won these elections. This is the sort of thing which should worry Mr. Roett, since the US is backing the killers who pay the paramilitary death squads, and not just "a civil war in Colombia" or a U.S. "War on drugs". Calling this turmoil and bloodshed a "War in Colombia, can mean anything.
It is worrying that the US public does not have access to more information about the actions of this and other Washington administrations’ real motives for their foreign policy in Colombia, et. al. Most US citizens are aware that the US is always involved somewhere abroad in some sort of conflict and the real reasons for spending tax payers’ dollars in this way is never fully explained. There are always corporate-press "experts" like Riordan Roett to explain use sound-bites to explain what the "concerns" of the US are in Latin America. Does anyone really believe that there is any threat to the US or its people from Hugo Chavez or the Venezuelan people? These tales are dreamed up simply to serve US interests in some nefarious way. In the case Venezuela it can easily be boiled down to one, simple, household word - "oil". Riordan Roett and those who pay for his keep would have the U.S. public believe that the problems in the "Banana Republics" (note: racism) are far too complex for the average U.S. citizen to comprehend. The same deceptive strategy is used with regard to the "complexity" obfuscations used to deny the Palestinian people their right to self-determination and independence. But we know that these problems are not complex at all. They are as easy to understand as the words, "greed", "theft", "power", "exploitation" and "dominance".
© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com
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Carlos Herrera is also a regular writer on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela at VHeadline