Antigua assault by Texas billionaire now engulfing other Caribbean nations. The story about Bush Texas crony "Sir" R. Allen Stanford buying up land in Antigua and attempting to take control of Leeward Islands Air Transport (LIAT) is having repercussions beyond Antigua and Barbuda. The Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves of the Unity Labour Party, a one-time Marxist professor at the University of the West Indies who is nicknamed "Comrade Ralph," has provided details to Stanford's attempt to acquire LIAT:
-Mr. Stanford and the Stanford Financial Group Limited has given a US$55 Million loan to liquidate the liabilities of LIAT, among other things. The other things include buying out Stanford's Caribbean Star. Essentially, Caribbean Star is loaning money to LIAT to buy out Caribbean Star and pay off all of its debts as well as LIAT’s.
- The loan will be repaid to an international entity of the Stanford Financial Group. One of Stanford’s companies will be handling the Initial Public Offer (IPO). Therefore, one of Stanford many companies could easily buy the loan, which his own company is handling, i.e., Stanford would fully own LIAT under the disguise of one of his companies.
- Repayment /interest will be handled by London Inter-bank interest rates rate plus 1% and must be repaid within 24 months. So the governments of the Caribbean are hoping that things will go well and the loan will be bought off.
- To guarantee the loan, the Barbados government will provide a US$30 million guarantee, Antigua and Barbuda government a US$20 million guarantee, and the St. Vincent and the Grenadines government US$5 million guarantee.
The optimum outcome for the Caribbean nations is that:
- Caribbean shareholder governments will have 60% of the new entity;
- Stanford Financial Group Limited 35%; and
- LIAT Employees 5%
However, political leaders in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are already smelling a rat. WMR previously reported on Stanford's ties to Bush and the GOP and U.S. ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Mary Ourisman, being a professional board member and wealthy contributor for the Bush administration. We have also learned that Stanford flew members of the U.S. Congress to Antigua on his private jet for junkets.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Friday, March 09, 2007
PRESIDENT BUSH TAKES HIS UNPOPULARITY TO LATIN AMERICA
Dear Readers:
Today US President George W. Bush heads off for a six day visit to a region of the world where his public popularity is even worse than it is at home in the US – Latin America. Alongside the expected red carpets and state parties, the Bush trip will be flanked from start to end with mass public protests and strategically placed sharpshooters to guard against attack. In this issue we take a look at Bush's visit and at the botched landscape of US/Latin American relations. We hope you will pass this issue along to others who might be interested.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
PRESIDENT BUSH TAKES HIS UNPOPULARITY TO LATIN AMERICA
Cochabamba, Bolivia: A January poll of 603 prominent Latin Americans (leading politicians, government officials, academics and journalists) found that 86 percent gave the Bush administration a fair or poor grade for its handling of the region. Poll after poll in the region shows that Bush's resounding unpopularity looks just as deep both on the street and even among self-described conservatives. It is likely that more people believe that professional wrestling is real than believe the Bush Administration is much of a friend south of the border.
To be sure, Bush has launched his trip with rhetoric as sunny as the South American summer into which he is headed. Bush told Colombian TV. "It's nothing more than to say we want to be your friends, and we've got a very strong policy of improving the lives of others. My trip is a chance to tell the people of Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil and Guatemala and Mexico that the United States cares deeply about the human condition."
South Americans aren't buying it.
In Bogotá, Colombia this week, a full three days before Bush was even set to arrive, more than 2,000 people filled the streets to protest his visit. More than 6,000 protested today in Sao Palo Brazil, Bush's first stopover. Similar greetings await him at most every visit ahead. In a region of the world that once named broad avenues after modern US Presidents, Mr. Bush is not even likely to score having a bus bench erected in his name.
THE ROOTS OF U.S. UNPOPULARITY
Why is Bush, and by association the U.S., so unpopular here? Certainly many Bush backers will argue that his antagonists in the region (and he has many) have made it standard practice to blame the U.S. for every ailment the region suffers – from economic catastrophe to natural disaster. There is some truth to this. It is the nature of politicians to look for ways to blame everyone but themselves. What, for example, hasn't Bush himself blamed on the attacks of 9/11? From the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, the US has been blamed for all manner of problems, including a good many that are homegrown.
But the tide of anti-U.S. sentiment keeps rising here, not because of false concerns, but real ones. Consider a few:
Economic Policies Rained Down from Above
Latin America, more than any region of the world, has suffered two decades of being used as a test lab for a radical experiment in the ideology of "unfettered capitalism will solve everything." It was an experiment directly sponsored by the US and its economic missionaries, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and it didn't turn out too well for the lab rats. Countries like Bolivia were coerced into "privatizing" their natural resources into the hands of powerful U.S. corporations such as Bechtel and Enron (close Bush allies, both), in exchange for essential foreign aid.
The people of those nations lost control of their most basic economic decisions and their public treasuries and individual purses suffered damaging losses. If there is a core reason behind the so-called "pink tide" that has swept one left-leaning government after another into office in the region, it is resentment against the forced economics of the so-called "Washington Consensus" that have left people here worse off, not better.
Bush's so-called "free trade" agenda is no more popular. US imports from an economy hundreds of times larger than many here flood out local products generating increasing unemployment, just as the US begins work on a southern wall aimed at keeping the unemployed from looking north for new options.
Human Rights on US Terms
Just this week, the Bush Administration released its global, 193-country, review of everyone else's human rights record but its own. The State Department report proclaims, "Across the globe, men and women are pushing for greater personal and political freedom and for the adoption of democratic institutions. They are striving to secure what President Bush calls 'the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." To many in Latin America this reads more like, "Do what we say, not what we do."
Aside from the obvious comparisons of that rhetoric against U.S. actions in Iraq and in Guantanamo (Latin America) there is the direct hand of the US right here in the region. Again, using Bolivia as an example, for more than ten years (until the Morales Administration suspended the practice last year) Bolivian anti-drug prosecutors received a special salary bonus directly from the U.S. government. To keep their foreign patrons happy, those prosecutors repeatedly mixed the innocent with the guilty to keep arrest figures growing ever-upwards.
More than 37,000 Bolivians were thrown into the government's decrepit jails in the last decade, under a law (also forced onto the Bolivia by the U.S.) that denied each one of them any chance of release for at least a year and a half, innocent or not.
The War in Iraq
Only three Latin American nations were a part of President Bush's original 49 member "Coalition of the Willing" when the Iraqi invasion was launched four years ago (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, all of which were led by close Bush allies at the time), committing a total of less than 1,000 troops. Two of them – Honduras and Guatemala – pulled their soldiers out little more than a year later. The Iraq war is deeply unpopular in Latin America. Latin American countries register some of the strongest public opinion against the war anywhere in the world. The percentage of people in favor of US withdrawal is 80% in Argentina, 67% in Brazil, 63% in Mexico and 62% in Chile.
The war, even though it is far away and only a tiny handful of solders from the region remain in it, is a region-wide symbol that the Bush Administration cares a good deal less deeply "about the human condition" than the President's pre-trip rhetoric seeks to claim.
THE CHAVEZ FACTOR
Much has been made in the U.S. press that Bush's trip to Latin America is really aimed at countering the growing regional influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. There is certainly no doubt that Bush and Chavez like one another about as much as a snail likes to be showered with salt. In his speech to the UN last fall, Chavez called Bush "the devil" and claimed that he could "still smell sulfur" behind the UN podium where Bush had spoken earlier. Bush administration officials, including then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, eagerly liken Chavez to Adolph Hitler.
Chavez does carry increasing weight in Latin America and he uses it without disguise to challenge US policy in the region. For example, Venezuela recently made huge loans to Argentina allowing it to payoff its debts to the IMF and divorce itself from the unpopular Washington-based lender. From the US perspective, Chavez is the new Fidel Castro, but with billions of dollars in national income to spread around as a result of being one of the world's leading oil suppliers in a time of spiked global oil prices. US aid to the region is quickly being surpassed by cash flowing from Caracas.
All of which brings me to my final point. If the Bush Administration thinks that a weeklong tour of Latin America by the most unpopular President in recent memory is a formula for challenging Chavez, then it has planned poorly. There are certainly some more moderate heads in the State Department than US policy would suggest and the trip may well be their brainchild. But this is not John Kennedy four and a half decades ago, who was mobbed by well-wishers and who proclaimed in Bogotá, "We must prove that free institutions can best answer their implacable demand for social justice, for food, for material welfare and, above all, for a new hope—hope for themselves and for their children."
Bush's visit will not be marked by well-wishers but by burning US flags and burning Bushes, torched in effigy. It will be up to the next U.S. President to pick up the pieces of the tattered relations and broken trust between the U.S. and its southern neighbors. There are many U.S. citizens, both at home and abroad, who are eager to see that happen.
________________________________________________________________
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE is an electronic publication of The Democracy Center, distributed on an occasional basis to more than 4,000 organizations, policy makers, journalists and others, throughout the U.S. and worldwide. Please consider forwarding it along to those who might be interested. People can request to be added to the distribution list by sending an e-mail note to: contact@democracyctr.org. Newspapers and periodicals interested in reprinting or excerpting material in the newsletter should contact The Democracy Center at contact@democracyctr.org. Suggestions and comments are welcome. Past issues are available on The Democracy Center Web site.
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER
SAN FRANCISCO: P.O. Box 22157 San Francisco, CA 94122
BOLIVIA: Casilla 5283, Cochabamba, Bolivia
TEL: (415) 564-4767
FAX: (978) 383-1269
WEB: http://www.democracyctr.org
E-MAIL: contact@democracyctr.org
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
Today US President George W. Bush heads off for a six day visit to a region of the world where his public popularity is even worse than it is at home in the US – Latin America. Alongside the expected red carpets and state parties, the Bush trip will be flanked from start to end with mass public protests and strategically placed sharpshooters to guard against attack. In this issue we take a look at Bush's visit and at the botched landscape of US/Latin American relations. We hope you will pass this issue along to others who might be interested.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
PRESIDENT BUSH TAKES HIS UNPOPULARITY TO LATIN AMERICA
Cochabamba, Bolivia: A January poll of 603 prominent Latin Americans (leading politicians, government officials, academics and journalists) found that 86 percent gave the Bush administration a fair or poor grade for its handling of the region. Poll after poll in the region shows that Bush's resounding unpopularity looks just as deep both on the street and even among self-described conservatives. It is likely that more people believe that professional wrestling is real than believe the Bush Administration is much of a friend south of the border.
To be sure, Bush has launched his trip with rhetoric as sunny as the South American summer into which he is headed. Bush told Colombian TV. "It's nothing more than to say we want to be your friends, and we've got a very strong policy of improving the lives of others. My trip is a chance to tell the people of Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil and Guatemala and Mexico that the United States cares deeply about the human condition."
South Americans aren't buying it.
In Bogotá, Colombia this week, a full three days before Bush was even set to arrive, more than 2,000 people filled the streets to protest his visit. More than 6,000 protested today in Sao Palo Brazil, Bush's first stopover. Similar greetings await him at most every visit ahead. In a region of the world that once named broad avenues after modern US Presidents, Mr. Bush is not even likely to score having a bus bench erected in his name.
THE ROOTS OF U.S. UNPOPULARITY
Why is Bush, and by association the U.S., so unpopular here? Certainly many Bush backers will argue that his antagonists in the region (and he has many) have made it standard practice to blame the U.S. for every ailment the region suffers – from economic catastrophe to natural disaster. There is some truth to this. It is the nature of politicians to look for ways to blame everyone but themselves. What, for example, hasn't Bush himself blamed on the attacks of 9/11? From the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, the US has been blamed for all manner of problems, including a good many that are homegrown.
But the tide of anti-U.S. sentiment keeps rising here, not because of false concerns, but real ones. Consider a few:
Economic Policies Rained Down from Above
Latin America, more than any region of the world, has suffered two decades of being used as a test lab for a radical experiment in the ideology of "unfettered capitalism will solve everything." It was an experiment directly sponsored by the US and its economic missionaries, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and it didn't turn out too well for the lab rats. Countries like Bolivia were coerced into "privatizing" their natural resources into the hands of powerful U.S. corporations such as Bechtel and Enron (close Bush allies, both), in exchange for essential foreign aid.
The people of those nations lost control of their most basic economic decisions and their public treasuries and individual purses suffered damaging losses. If there is a core reason behind the so-called "pink tide" that has swept one left-leaning government after another into office in the region, it is resentment against the forced economics of the so-called "Washington Consensus" that have left people here worse off, not better.
Bush's so-called "free trade" agenda is no more popular. US imports from an economy hundreds of times larger than many here flood out local products generating increasing unemployment, just as the US begins work on a southern wall aimed at keeping the unemployed from looking north for new options.
Human Rights on US Terms
Just this week, the Bush Administration released its global, 193-country, review of everyone else's human rights record but its own. The State Department report proclaims, "Across the globe, men and women are pushing for greater personal and political freedom and for the adoption of democratic institutions. They are striving to secure what President Bush calls 'the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." To many in Latin America this reads more like, "Do what we say, not what we do."
Aside from the obvious comparisons of that rhetoric against U.S. actions in Iraq and in Guantanamo (Latin America) there is the direct hand of the US right here in the region. Again, using Bolivia as an example, for more than ten years (until the Morales Administration suspended the practice last year) Bolivian anti-drug prosecutors received a special salary bonus directly from the U.S. government. To keep their foreign patrons happy, those prosecutors repeatedly mixed the innocent with the guilty to keep arrest figures growing ever-upwards.
More than 37,000 Bolivians were thrown into the government's decrepit jails in the last decade, under a law (also forced onto the Bolivia by the U.S.) that denied each one of them any chance of release for at least a year and a half, innocent or not.
The War in Iraq
Only three Latin American nations were a part of President Bush's original 49 member "Coalition of the Willing" when the Iraqi invasion was launched four years ago (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, all of which were led by close Bush allies at the time), committing a total of less than 1,000 troops. Two of them – Honduras and Guatemala – pulled their soldiers out little more than a year later. The Iraq war is deeply unpopular in Latin America. Latin American countries register some of the strongest public opinion against the war anywhere in the world. The percentage of people in favor of US withdrawal is 80% in Argentina, 67% in Brazil, 63% in Mexico and 62% in Chile.
The war, even though it is far away and only a tiny handful of solders from the region remain in it, is a region-wide symbol that the Bush Administration cares a good deal less deeply "about the human condition" than the President's pre-trip rhetoric seeks to claim.
THE CHAVEZ FACTOR
Much has been made in the U.S. press that Bush's trip to Latin America is really aimed at countering the growing regional influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. There is certainly no doubt that Bush and Chavez like one another about as much as a snail likes to be showered with salt. In his speech to the UN last fall, Chavez called Bush "the devil" and claimed that he could "still smell sulfur" behind the UN podium where Bush had spoken earlier. Bush administration officials, including then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, eagerly liken Chavez to Adolph Hitler.
Chavez does carry increasing weight in Latin America and he uses it without disguise to challenge US policy in the region. For example, Venezuela recently made huge loans to Argentina allowing it to payoff its debts to the IMF and divorce itself from the unpopular Washington-based lender. From the US perspective, Chavez is the new Fidel Castro, but with billions of dollars in national income to spread around as a result of being one of the world's leading oil suppliers in a time of spiked global oil prices. US aid to the region is quickly being surpassed by cash flowing from Caracas.
All of which brings me to my final point. If the Bush Administration thinks that a weeklong tour of Latin America by the most unpopular President in recent memory is a formula for challenging Chavez, then it has planned poorly. There are certainly some more moderate heads in the State Department than US policy would suggest and the trip may well be their brainchild. But this is not John Kennedy four and a half decades ago, who was mobbed by well-wishers and who proclaimed in Bogotá, "We must prove that free institutions can best answer their implacable demand for social justice, for food, for material welfare and, above all, for a new hope—hope for themselves and for their children."
Bush's visit will not be marked by well-wishers but by burning US flags and burning Bushes, torched in effigy. It will be up to the next U.S. President to pick up the pieces of the tattered relations and broken trust between the U.S. and its southern neighbors. There are many U.S. citizens, both at home and abroad, who are eager to see that happen.
________________________________________________________________
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE is an electronic publication of The Democracy Center, distributed on an occasional basis to more than 4,000 organizations, policy makers, journalists and others, throughout the U.S. and worldwide. Please consider forwarding it along to those who might be interested. People can request to be added to the distribution list by sending an e-mail note to: contact@democracyctr.org. Newspapers and periodicals interested in reprinting or excerpting material in the newsletter should contact The Democracy Center at contact@democracyctr.org. Suggestions and comments are welcome. Past issues are available on The Democracy Center Web site.
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER
SAN FRANCISCO: P.O. Box 22157 San Francisco, CA 94122
BOLIVIA: Casilla 5283, Cochabamba, Bolivia
TEL: (415) 564-4767
FAX: (978) 383-1269
WEB: http://www.democracyctr.org
E-MAIL: contact@democracyctr.org
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A predator becomes more dangerous when wounded by Noam Chomsky
Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources
In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.
In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq.
Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.
For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.
Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.
To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.
Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".
Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.
Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilise Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up - in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.
Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join US efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as repressive as possible, fomenting disorder while undermining reformers.
It is also necessary to demonise the leadership. In the west, any wild statement by President Ahmadinejad is circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. It's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says Israel shouldn't exist - but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine, calling for normalisation of relations with Israel if it accepts the international consensus of a two-state settlement.
The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless. Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.
In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington's response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer. The following year, the EU and Iran reached an agreement that Iran would suspend enriching uranium; in return the EU would provide "firm guarantees on security issues" - code for US-Israeli threats to bomb Iran.
Apparently under US pressure, Europe did not live up to the bargain. Iran then resumed uranium enrichment. A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system.
· Noam Chomsky is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy
La gira del etanol
Raúl Zibechi
La gira latinoamericana que el presidente George W. Bush emprendió esta semana puede trastocar la relación de fuerzas en la región, de modo particular en Sudamérica. El punto crucial es la visita a Brasil, donde el 8 y 9 de marzo Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva y Bush acordarán un vasto plan para la expansión de la producción de etanol a partir de la caña de azúcar. Luego, en Uruguay, el presidente estadunidense y Tabaré Vázquez consolidarán el acercamiento comercial por el que ambos gobiernos vienen trabajando hace más de un año.
En Colombia, la visita puede contribuir a fortalecer al gobierno de Álvaro Uribe, que está empantanado por sus relaciones con los paramilitares, y a diseñar una política hacia el nuevo gobierno del ecuatoriano Rafael Correa, quien declaró que no renovará el convenio por la base militar de Manta, que resulta estratégica para el Plan Colombia. En Guatemala, donde se realizarán elecciones en septiembre, el posible triunfo de la premio Nobel Rigoberta Menchú es motivo de preocupación para Washington. Por último, la previsible inestabilidad política en el México de Felipe Calderón será uno de los temas con el que cerrará su gira.
Cuando Bush y Tabaré Vázquez estén reunidos en la residencia presidencial de Colonia, a escasos 50 kilómetros, en Buenos Aires, Hugo Chávez encabezará un acto antimperialista que cuenta con el apoyo de Néstor Kirchner y de buena parte de los movimientos sociales de Argentina. Nunca había sido tan evidente la existencia de dos posiciones entre los gobiernos progresistas y de izquierda de la región. Pero en esta ocasión, pese a lo que proclaman los medios de la derecha, no se trata de ningún exceso de escenificación de Chávez ni una falta de tacto del venezolano. Por el contrario, la situación que provoca la gira de Bush justifica la realización de un acto que, en los hechos, no es sólo un repudio a Bush, sino una clara toma de distancia de Vázquez y Lula.
La alianza entre Estados Unidos y Brasil para la producción de etanol es lo que explica la opción de Chávez a emplearse a fondo en un acto que va a disgustar a algunos socios del Mercosur. Brasil es el primer productor mundial de etanol, y con Estados Unidos controla 72 por ciento de la producción mundial. Pero mientras el etanol estadunidense, producido con maíz, tiene baja productividad y dispara el precio del alimento, la producción de caña de azúcar es cinco veces más eficiente y coloca al país sudamericano a la vanguardia mundial en la producción del energético. Un acuerdo de largo plazo con Brasil permitiría a Estados Unidos tres objetivos centrales: diversificar la matriz petrolera, reduciendo su dependencia de las importaciones de Venezuela y de Medio Oriente; debilitar a Venezuela y a sus aliados, y frenar la integración regional motorizada por los hidrocarburos que había cobrado vuelo en 2006. Este plan reaviva los mismos objetivos que tuvo que aplazar Bush en noviembre de 2005, cuando fracasó el ALCA en la Cumbre de Mar del Plata.
No es casual que Chávez haya criticado frontalmente el etanol como alternativa al petróleo. "Lo que Estados Unidos pretende es imposible. Para sostener con etanol su estilo de vida habría que sembrar con maíz cinco a seis veces la superficie del planeta Tierra", dijo en su programa semanal. Agregó que la expansión de los cultivos tendrá impacto sobre los alimentos, que serán más caros, sobre los suelos, que se degradarán más por el uso de agroquímicos, a la vez que fortalecerá "la tendencia al monocultivo para alimentar las plantas de etanol". Fidel Castro, en conversación telefónica con Chávez, dijo que "la idea de usar alimentos para producir combustibles es trágica, es dramática", ya que "nadie tiene seguridad de adónde van a llegar los precios de los alimentos cuando la soya se esté convirtiendo en combustible".
Sus argumentos coinciden con las críticas de los movimientos sociales. A finales de febrero, un manifiesto firmado por varios movimientos latinoamericanos, entre ellos el MST de Brasil y Vía Campesina, sostiene que "el actual modelo de producción de bioenergía se sustenta en los mismos elementos que siempre causaron la opresión de nuestros pueblos: apropiación del territorio, de los bienes naturales, de la fuerza de trabajo". Pero lo que los dirigentes venezolano y cubano no podían decir en voz alta, por razones diplomáticas, lo dijeron los movimientos. El manifiesto señala que el acuerdo del etanol "es una fase de la estrategia geopolítica de Estados Unidos para debilitar la influencia de países como Venezuela y Bolivia en la región". En suma, se trata de boicotear la integración regional y obras tan importantes como el gasoducto del sur.
Si consideramos que la actual coyuntura que vive la región es sumamente delicada es porque puede producirse una inflexión de larga duración que afectará tanto a los pueblos como a los gobiernos de izquierda. Hilando fino, el problema no es ni Bush ni Estados Unidos. Ellos hacen su juego, como siempre lo hicieron. Con el proyecto del etanol emerge una nueva-vieja alianza: la de las elites globales, que se expresa en algunos gobiernos de la región.
Entre los principales promotores de la Comisión Interamericana de Etanol, lanzada en diciembre, figuran dos personajes claves: Jeb Bush, ex gobernador de Florida, a quien muchos acusan del fraude electoral que facilitó el acceso de su hermano a la presidencia en 2000, y el brasileño Roberto Rodrigues, presidente del Consejo Superior de Agronegocios de San Pablo y ex ministro de Agricultura en los primeros cuatro años del gobierno de Lula.
Rodrigues fue el hombre del agrobusiness en el gobierno brasileño, está dispuesto a deforestar la Amazonia y a expulsar a millones de campesinos de sus tierras para acelerar la acumulación de capital. Los brasileños votaron por Lula, no por el tándem Bush-Rodrigues.
_____________________________________________
Servicio Informativo "Alai-amlatina"
Agencia Latinoamericana de Informacion - ALAI
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La gira latinoamericana que el presidente George W. Bush emprendió esta semana puede trastocar la relación de fuerzas en la región, de modo particular en Sudamérica. El punto crucial es la visita a Brasil, donde el 8 y 9 de marzo Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva y Bush acordarán un vasto plan para la expansión de la producción de etanol a partir de la caña de azúcar. Luego, en Uruguay, el presidente estadunidense y Tabaré Vázquez consolidarán el acercamiento comercial por el que ambos gobiernos vienen trabajando hace más de un año.
En Colombia, la visita puede contribuir a fortalecer al gobierno de Álvaro Uribe, que está empantanado por sus relaciones con los paramilitares, y a diseñar una política hacia el nuevo gobierno del ecuatoriano Rafael Correa, quien declaró que no renovará el convenio por la base militar de Manta, que resulta estratégica para el Plan Colombia. En Guatemala, donde se realizarán elecciones en septiembre, el posible triunfo de la premio Nobel Rigoberta Menchú es motivo de preocupación para Washington. Por último, la previsible inestabilidad política en el México de Felipe Calderón será uno de los temas con el que cerrará su gira.
Cuando Bush y Tabaré Vázquez estén reunidos en la residencia presidencial de Colonia, a escasos 50 kilómetros, en Buenos Aires, Hugo Chávez encabezará un acto antimperialista que cuenta con el apoyo de Néstor Kirchner y de buena parte de los movimientos sociales de Argentina. Nunca había sido tan evidente la existencia de dos posiciones entre los gobiernos progresistas y de izquierda de la región. Pero en esta ocasión, pese a lo que proclaman los medios de la derecha, no se trata de ningún exceso de escenificación de Chávez ni una falta de tacto del venezolano. Por el contrario, la situación que provoca la gira de Bush justifica la realización de un acto que, en los hechos, no es sólo un repudio a Bush, sino una clara toma de distancia de Vázquez y Lula.
La alianza entre Estados Unidos y Brasil para la producción de etanol es lo que explica la opción de Chávez a emplearse a fondo en un acto que va a disgustar a algunos socios del Mercosur. Brasil es el primer productor mundial de etanol, y con Estados Unidos controla 72 por ciento de la producción mundial. Pero mientras el etanol estadunidense, producido con maíz, tiene baja productividad y dispara el precio del alimento, la producción de caña de azúcar es cinco veces más eficiente y coloca al país sudamericano a la vanguardia mundial en la producción del energético. Un acuerdo de largo plazo con Brasil permitiría a Estados Unidos tres objetivos centrales: diversificar la matriz petrolera, reduciendo su dependencia de las importaciones de Venezuela y de Medio Oriente; debilitar a Venezuela y a sus aliados, y frenar la integración regional motorizada por los hidrocarburos que había cobrado vuelo en 2006. Este plan reaviva los mismos objetivos que tuvo que aplazar Bush en noviembre de 2005, cuando fracasó el ALCA en la Cumbre de Mar del Plata.
No es casual que Chávez haya criticado frontalmente el etanol como alternativa al petróleo. "Lo que Estados Unidos pretende es imposible. Para sostener con etanol su estilo de vida habría que sembrar con maíz cinco a seis veces la superficie del planeta Tierra", dijo en su programa semanal. Agregó que la expansión de los cultivos tendrá impacto sobre los alimentos, que serán más caros, sobre los suelos, que se degradarán más por el uso de agroquímicos, a la vez que fortalecerá "la tendencia al monocultivo para alimentar las plantas de etanol". Fidel Castro, en conversación telefónica con Chávez, dijo que "la idea de usar alimentos para producir combustibles es trágica, es dramática", ya que "nadie tiene seguridad de adónde van a llegar los precios de los alimentos cuando la soya se esté convirtiendo en combustible".
Sus argumentos coinciden con las críticas de los movimientos sociales. A finales de febrero, un manifiesto firmado por varios movimientos latinoamericanos, entre ellos el MST de Brasil y Vía Campesina, sostiene que "el actual modelo de producción de bioenergía se sustenta en los mismos elementos que siempre causaron la opresión de nuestros pueblos: apropiación del territorio, de los bienes naturales, de la fuerza de trabajo". Pero lo que los dirigentes venezolano y cubano no podían decir en voz alta, por razones diplomáticas, lo dijeron los movimientos. El manifiesto señala que el acuerdo del etanol "es una fase de la estrategia geopolítica de Estados Unidos para debilitar la influencia de países como Venezuela y Bolivia en la región". En suma, se trata de boicotear la integración regional y obras tan importantes como el gasoducto del sur.
Si consideramos que la actual coyuntura que vive la región es sumamente delicada es porque puede producirse una inflexión de larga duración que afectará tanto a los pueblos como a los gobiernos de izquierda. Hilando fino, el problema no es ni Bush ni Estados Unidos. Ellos hacen su juego, como siempre lo hicieron. Con el proyecto del etanol emerge una nueva-vieja alianza: la de las elites globales, que se expresa en algunos gobiernos de la región.
Entre los principales promotores de la Comisión Interamericana de Etanol, lanzada en diciembre, figuran dos personajes claves: Jeb Bush, ex gobernador de Florida, a quien muchos acusan del fraude electoral que facilitó el acceso de su hermano a la presidencia en 2000, y el brasileño Roberto Rodrigues, presidente del Consejo Superior de Agronegocios de San Pablo y ex ministro de Agricultura en los primeros cuatro años del gobierno de Lula.
Rodrigues fue el hombre del agrobusiness en el gobierno brasileño, está dispuesto a deforestar la Amazonia y a expulsar a millones de campesinos de sus tierras para acelerar la acumulación de capital. Los brasileños votaron por Lula, no por el tándem Bush-Rodrigues.
_____________________________________________
Servicio Informativo "Alai-amlatina"
Agencia Latinoamericana de Informacion - ALAI
info@alainet.org
URL: http://alainet.org
Organización popular para defenderse de depredadores, colonizadores y explotadores. Ecuador: «Agua Tierra y Vida»
En Patricia Pilar, del Ecuador que nace, donde el pueblo resiste a la construcción de la Presa Baba y a la destrucción de su habitat y su medio ambiente, surgió la organización AGUA TIERRA Y VIDA, de la decisión de organizaciones de Intag, Angamarca, Morona, Zamora, Sucumbíos, Guayaquil, Santa Elena... Conozcamos su voluntad de organización y lucha, su proyecto de vida para defender el agua y la tierra que son de todas, de todos...
Declaración fundacional
El agua es vida, constituye un bien natural y el acceso a ella es un derecho humano.
El acceso a la tierra, como fuente de trabajo y producción, es también un derecho fundamental de la sociedad.
Por tanto, privatizar el agua, convirtiéndola en mercancía, y acaparar la tierra para el goce de unos pocos es atentar contra la vida de las mayorías.
Esto es lo que viene dándose en nuestro país, sobre todo en las dos últimas décadas, bajo el imperio del neoliberalismo que, en este campo, significa la privatización de bienes naturales y empresas públicas a favor de monopolios multinacionales y de la oligarquía criolla, con la complicidad de gobiernos, autoridades judiciales, congresos antisociales y vendepatrias.
Como consecuencia de lo dicho, ha crecido la ruina, el empobrecimiento y la marginalidad de las comunidades urbanas y rurales, de los pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes, de los montubios y los cholos peninsulares.
En tanto, se multiplica la emigración masiva del campo a la ciudad, y de todo el país hacia Estados Unidos, España, Italia, a dondequiera que se vislumbre una posibilidad de escapar de la miseria y el desempleo, aunque para ello se destrocen las comunidades y las familias.
Por lo demás, esta situación se ha generalizado en el Continente, desde México hasta la Patagonia, en el extremo sur, mediante sistemas que se aplican por igual en todo lado y del que hoy, afortunadamente, van saliendo los pueblos gracias a su acción y al concurso de gobiernos que se orientan hacia la soberanía, la justicia y la democracia plena.
Tales sistemas son:
MENOSPRECIO A LOS PROPIETARIOS ANCESTRALES DE LOS BIENES NATURALES, CUYO CONSENTIMIENTO JAMÁS BUSCAN NI PIDEN LOS PRIVATIZADORES. ESTO OCURRE PARTICULARMENTE EN LA EJECUCIÓN DE MEGAPROYECTOS, SUPUESTAMENTE ENCAMINADOS AL DESARROLLO.
REPRESIÓN Y CRIMINALIZACIÓN DE LOS LÍDERES COMUNITARIOS POR MEDIO DEL JUICIO FABRICADO, LA CÁRCEL, LA PERSECUCIÓN ECONÓMICA Y EL ASESINATO.
DEPREDACIÓN DE RECURSOS NATURALES, DESTRUCCIÓN DE BOSQUES Y MANGLARES, CONTAMINACIÓN DE RÍOS, AIRE Y SUELOS. OTORGAMIENTO DE LICENCIAS AMBIENTALES COMO MERO FORMULISMO, QUE NADIE SUPERVISA Y QUE JAMÁS SE APLICA.
CONCESIÓN DE SERVICIOS BÁSICOS COMO EL MANEJO DEL AGUA POTABLE A FAVOR DE EMPRESAS MULTINACIONALES, IGUAL QUE EN EL CASO DE LA BECHTEL, EL PULPO NORTEAMERICANO QUE OPERA LO MISMO EN GUAYAQUIL, DONDE SE CAMUFLA COMO INTERAGUA, QUE EN EL IRAK DESTRUIDO POR LAS TROPAS DEL IMPERIO.
COMPLICIDAD DE GRANDES MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN, CUYOS INTERESES ESTÁN FUSIONADOS CON LOS DE LA BANCA PRIVADA O LOS GRANDES EXPORTADORES.
La irracionalidad de esta situación salta a la vista. Basta ver el ejemplo de la creciente industria del agua embotellada en el Ecuador, cuyo consumo popular se ha generalizado y que cuesta más que la gasolina. O este otro ejemplo conocido, según el cual la Coca Cola, gigantesca empresa mundial, despilfarra diez litros de agua para obtener uno de su bebida, mientras grandes provincias y regiones ecuatorianas perecen de sed, como ocurre en Manabí, Tungurahua, Loja o la Península de Santa Elena.
En cuanto a la tierra, unos pocos agroexportadores van constituyendo latifundios mediante el despojo a los pequeños propietarios o la compra de sus parcelas a precios miserables.
Esta situación no puede continuar:
¡BASTA YA DE ACEPTAR SUMISOS EL SAQUEO Y LA EXPLOTACIÓN POR PARTE DE LOS AMOS DEL PAÍS!
¡BASTA YA DE CREAR HIJAS E HIJOS DESTINADOS AL HAMBRE Y AL ÉXODO!
Por eso desde PATRICIA PILAR, rincón de Patria que se ha convertido en símbolo de lucha al levantarse contra la Presa Baba, ALZAMOS NUESTRA BANDERA DE REBELDÍA Y CONSTITUIMOS EN ESTA FECHA LA ORGANIZACIÓN DENOMINADA AGUA TIERRA Y VIDA, con la participación combativa de organizaciones sociales de Zamora-Chinchipe, Morona-Santiago, Imbabura, Cotopaxi, Guayas, Manabí y Los Ríos.
Al nacer nos comprometemos a luchar activamente y unidos por la liberación del pueblo ecuatoriano, contra el imperialismo y el neoliberalismo.
Estamos convencidos de que no se puede privar a un pueblo de sus propios medios de subsistencia para alimentarse y vivir con dignidad, no como mendigos.
El Estado está obligado a garantizar a todos el acceso al agua y a la tierra, así como a mantener políticas de soberanía alimentaria.
Estamos igualmente convencidos de que el gobierno de Rafael Correa, con el apoyo y la participación de todo el pueblo, posibilitará el nacimiento de la Patria Nueva que siempre nos negaron los amos del país.
Y para ello debemos exigir la pronta realización de la Asamblea Constituyente de plenos poderes y en ella, la participación de los sectores marginados de la decisión política pero no de proveer de alimentos a todas y todos. De allí que en este encuentro fundacional, hemos adoptado las siguientes resoluciones:
ORGANIZACIÓN DE IGUALES
1. Construir una organización de iguales: participativa, unitaria, democrática, justa, libre, patriótica, defensora de la Soberanía Nacional y la dignidad de los pueblos y nacionalidades del Ecuador y solidaria con las luchas y demandas de los sectores agrarios y pueblos de Nuestra América y el Mundo.
ACCESO AL AGUA SIN DUEÑOS
2. Luchar para que se reconozca como política de Estado el acceso al agua segura, en cantidad y calidad suficiente a toda la población; proteger, fortalecer y promover los sistemas comunitarios de distribución de agua para el consumo humano, riego y saneamiento, y el manejo comunitario y la protección de las cuencas hídricas bajo las premisas de preservación, conservación, uso y recuperación, ésto es, gestión integral del agua. Evitar cualquier forma de privatización y exigir que bajo ningún concepto se realicen acuerdos, tratados o concesiones a proyectos hidroeléctricos y mineros para el uso del agua o del subsuelo con fines mercantiles.
AGUA: ELEMENTO INALIENABLE E IMPRESCRIPTIBLE DE ACCESO EQUITATIVO
3. Trabajar y luchar en unidad para que en la Nueva Constitución se declare al agua como elemento vital de dominio público, inalienable e imprescriptible. Promover un nuevo modelo de gestión del riego que garantice el acceso equitativo al agua y también la productividad de la tierra.
SOBERANÍA ALIMENTARIA
4. Trabajar y luchar en unidad para que el Estado y la Nueva Constitución reconozcan integralmente la soberanía alimentaria como eje transversal de las políticas públicas.
FRENAR CRECIMIENTO DE LATIFUNDIOS CON ACCESO A LA TIERRA PARA EL CAMPESINADO POBRE. REDISTRIBUIR EL ESPACIO HABITABLE.
5. Frenar el crecimiento de los latifundios y combatir los mecanismos de fracturación que permiten el tráfico de tierras. Defender el acceso a la tierra al campesinado pobre, el derecho ancestral y derecho consuetudinario de la tenencia de la tierra. Trabajar por la redistribución justa y equitativa del espacio habitable para poner un alto a la especulación inmobiliaria.
PROTECCIÓN NACIONAL DE LA TIERRA ANCESTRAL Y ÁREAS PROTEGIDAS ENTREGADAS A PRIVATIZADORES.
6. Trabajar y luchar en unidad para que el Estado conjuntamente con las comunidades y sus organizaciones revise las concesiones y adjudicaciones de las cuencas hidrográficas, territorios, tierras ancestrales y áreas protegidas otorgadas o por otorgar a empresas privadas de capitales nacionales y extranjeros para su uso y explotación minera o de cualquier índole, a costa del desalojo humano, la destrucción y contaminación del hábitat y el medio ambiente.
Declarar éstas nulas en caso de que el Estado no haya obtenido el consentimiento pleno y total de las poblaciones afectadas, sin presión de ninguna especie, o que se haya dado bajo procedimientos irregulares y lesivos al interés de las comunidades.
El derecho a la propiedad de la tierra no da derecho a la destrucción de la naturaleza para satisfacer mezquinos intereses.
DEFENDER LOS INTERESES NACIONALES Y LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS Y COLECTIVOS
7. Expulsar del Ecuador a las compañías que afecten los derechos humanos y colectivos de las poblaciones, la soberanía y los intereses nacionales de las presentes y futuras generaciones.
ECUADOR ESTADO SOCIAL DE DERECHO Y JUSTICIA. NUEVA CONSTITUCIÓN CON SOBERANÍA, INMUNIDAD E INEMBARGABILIDAD DEL ESTADO ECUATORIANO DE TODAS Y TODOS.
8. Luchar para que en la Nueva Constitución se reconozca la soberanía, la inmunidad e inembargabilidad del Estado Ecuatoriano con el fin de evitar que a nivel internacional se lo enjuicie por tomar medidas soberanas que benefician a sus habitantes y a las generaciones venideras.
Luchar para que en el artículo uno de la Constitución se reconozca al Ecuador como un Estado Social de Derecho y Justicia.
BASTA DE CRIMINALIZAR NUESTRA LUCHA Y DIRIGENTES. BASTA DE CRÍMNES DESARMANDO A PARAMILITARES Y PARAPOLICIAS.
9. Poner fin a la criminalización de los dirigentes de las comunidades y organizaciones que luchan por el agua, la tierra y la vida. Demandar el archivo de todos los procesos judiciales iniciados en su contra y exigir garantías para su seguridad personal y familiar.
Desarmar las organizaciones paramilitares y parapoliciales, encubiertas como ‘compañías de seguridad’, las mismas que agreden a los dirigentes y a las comunidades que luchan por la defensa de sus legítimos derechos.
Requerir el esclarecimiento y sanción a los responsables de los asesinatos y atentados contra la integridad de los dirigentes campesinos y sociales del Ecuador.
DISOLVER INSTITUCIONES DEL ESTADO QUE SIRVEN A FAMILIAS OLIGARCAS.
10. Luchar y trabajar en unidad para disolver las instituciones del Estado que fueron creadas para servir a reducidos grupos de poder oligárquico, como la CEDEGÉ, realizando una auditoria económica, técnica, social y ambiental y estableciendo responsabilidades y sanciones por los daños ambientales y sociales ocasionados.
Promover la creación de nuevos organismos de desarrollo que pongan fin al neoliberalismo, respondan a un modelo de igualdad, equidad y justicia social y que cuenten con la participación activa de las organizaciones sociales.
REPARACIONES INTEGRALES DEL FMI, BM, BID... POR COAUSPICIAR MEGAPROYECTOS LESIVOS.
11. Exigir reparaciones integrales a los organismos internacionales como el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), Banco Mundial (BM), Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), y otros, y a los gobiernos financistas de los megaproyectos que han tenido un precio inaceptable en materia social y ambiental.
Demandar de éstos el reconocimiento de los daños ocasionados y la revalorización de las tierras para el pago justo de indemnizaciones a las comunidades afectadas.
DEUDA EXTERNA YA FUE CANCELADA A USUREROS
12. Demandar de los organismos financieros internacionales el reconocimiento del pago de más de 125.000 millones de dólares como cancelación definitiva a la deuda externa ecuatoriana y sus servicios.
FIN DEL PLAN COLOMBIA. SOLIDARIDAD CON LOS CAMPESINOS ECUATORIANOS DE FRONTERA NORTE Y CON CAMPESINOS COLOMBIANOS. BASE DE MANTA SIN TROPA EXTRANJERA.
13. Solidaridad con nuestros compatriotas de la frontera Norte ante la agresión química y militar de la que son objeto por parte del gobierno uribista de Colombia y del denominado Plan Colombia.
Nos unimos a la voluntad nacional de impedir la intervención ecuatoriana y extranjera en el conflicto interno que vive ese hermano país. Apoyamos la justa lucha del campesinado colombiano por paz y justicia.
Reiteramos la demanda de poner fin a la ocupación militar extranjera de la Base de Manta.
SOLIDARIDAD CON CUBA
14. Unir nuestra voz a la exigencia universal para que los EEUU pongan un fin al criminal bloqueo contra Cuba.
Agradecer la solidaridad del pueblo cubano con nuestro país cuando comparte sus logros en educación, salud y deporte con nuestros jóvenes becarios, nuestros enfermos y nuestros deportistas.
SOLIDARIDAD CON VENEZUELA Y BOLIVIA
15. Solidaridad con el gobierno bolivariano de Venezuela y sus organizaciones agrarias, así como con el gobierno popular de Bolivia y su lucha por un nuevo orden de justicia social, ambos agredidos por las fuerzas oligárquicas y terratenientes internas y por el imperialismo norteamericano.
UNIDAD EN LA ORGANIZACIÓN
16. Llamar a las organizaciones agrarias y populares que luchan por el agua y la tierra para la vida, a integrarse a esta propuesta.
DELEGACIÓN Y LUCHA
17. Delegar a la Secretaría Ejecutiva de ATV, junto a la Coordinación Nacional, para que tomen las acciones pertinentes con el fin de legalizar nuestra organización, implementar su sede en Quito, organizar la defensa de sus integrantes, difundir sus documentos y contactar con organizaciones fraternas y solidarias.
Organizaciones Participantes:
Junta Parroquial de Cuellaje Cotachi,
Junta Parroquial de Peñaherrera Cotacachi, Asamblea de Unidad Cantonal del Cantón Cotacachi, Coordinadora Zonal de Intag. IMBABURA.
Frente de Defensa del Río Angamarca - Movimiento Indígena y Campesino de Cotopaxi. COTOPAXI.
Coordinadora Campesina Popular de Morona Santiago. MORONA.
Comuna Bajadita de Colonche, Junta Administradora de Agua Potable Unión y Progreso de Chanduy, Comuna Montañita, Consorcio de Juntas de Agua Potable del Guayas, Consorcio Nacional de Juntas de Sistemas Comunitarios de Agua Potable. PENÍNSULA DE SANTA ELENA.
Club Social Unión y Progreso de Flor de Bastión, Movimiento Mi Cometa. GUAYAQUIL.
Comité Recinto La Morena, Centro Agrícola de Quevedo, Centro Agrícola de Valencia, Cooperativa Babahoyo, Comité Cívico de Quevedo, Cooperativa Higuerones, Cooperativa Nueva Unión, Comunidades Afectadas por Daule Peripa, Derechos Humanos de Vinces, Derechos Humanos de Quevedo, Federeración de Pesqueros de la Provincia de Los Ríos, Comité Biprovincial contra la la Represa Baba, Coordinadora por la Defensa de la Vida y la Naturaleza de la Cuenca del Río Guayas-COORDENAGUA, Comunidades Eclesiales de Base de Los Ríos. LOS RÍOS.
Invitados fraternos:
Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos-CEDHU, Fundación Pueblo Indio-FPIE, FIAN Ecuador, UBV, Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Quevedo-UOCQ, Acción Ecológica, Confeunassc, Acuerdo Nacional Constituyente-ANC, Alianza PAIS, Altercom, Observatorio de Servicios Públicos y el escritor Jaime Galarza Zavala.
Declaración fundacional
El agua es vida, constituye un bien natural y el acceso a ella es un derecho humano.
El acceso a la tierra, como fuente de trabajo y producción, es también un derecho fundamental de la sociedad.
Por tanto, privatizar el agua, convirtiéndola en mercancía, y acaparar la tierra para el goce de unos pocos es atentar contra la vida de las mayorías.
Esto es lo que viene dándose en nuestro país, sobre todo en las dos últimas décadas, bajo el imperio del neoliberalismo que, en este campo, significa la privatización de bienes naturales y empresas públicas a favor de monopolios multinacionales y de la oligarquía criolla, con la complicidad de gobiernos, autoridades judiciales, congresos antisociales y vendepatrias.
Como consecuencia de lo dicho, ha crecido la ruina, el empobrecimiento y la marginalidad de las comunidades urbanas y rurales, de los pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes, de los montubios y los cholos peninsulares.
En tanto, se multiplica la emigración masiva del campo a la ciudad, y de todo el país hacia Estados Unidos, España, Italia, a dondequiera que se vislumbre una posibilidad de escapar de la miseria y el desempleo, aunque para ello se destrocen las comunidades y las familias.
Por lo demás, esta situación se ha generalizado en el Continente, desde México hasta la Patagonia, en el extremo sur, mediante sistemas que se aplican por igual en todo lado y del que hoy, afortunadamente, van saliendo los pueblos gracias a su acción y al concurso de gobiernos que se orientan hacia la soberanía, la justicia y la democracia plena.
Tales sistemas son:
MENOSPRECIO A LOS PROPIETARIOS ANCESTRALES DE LOS BIENES NATURALES, CUYO CONSENTIMIENTO JAMÁS BUSCAN NI PIDEN LOS PRIVATIZADORES. ESTO OCURRE PARTICULARMENTE EN LA EJECUCIÓN DE MEGAPROYECTOS, SUPUESTAMENTE ENCAMINADOS AL DESARROLLO.
REPRESIÓN Y CRIMINALIZACIÓN DE LOS LÍDERES COMUNITARIOS POR MEDIO DEL JUICIO FABRICADO, LA CÁRCEL, LA PERSECUCIÓN ECONÓMICA Y EL ASESINATO.
DEPREDACIÓN DE RECURSOS NATURALES, DESTRUCCIÓN DE BOSQUES Y MANGLARES, CONTAMINACIÓN DE RÍOS, AIRE Y SUELOS. OTORGAMIENTO DE LICENCIAS AMBIENTALES COMO MERO FORMULISMO, QUE NADIE SUPERVISA Y QUE JAMÁS SE APLICA.
CONCESIÓN DE SERVICIOS BÁSICOS COMO EL MANEJO DEL AGUA POTABLE A FAVOR DE EMPRESAS MULTINACIONALES, IGUAL QUE EN EL CASO DE LA BECHTEL, EL PULPO NORTEAMERICANO QUE OPERA LO MISMO EN GUAYAQUIL, DONDE SE CAMUFLA COMO INTERAGUA, QUE EN EL IRAK DESTRUIDO POR LAS TROPAS DEL IMPERIO.
COMPLICIDAD DE GRANDES MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN, CUYOS INTERESES ESTÁN FUSIONADOS CON LOS DE LA BANCA PRIVADA O LOS GRANDES EXPORTADORES.
La irracionalidad de esta situación salta a la vista. Basta ver el ejemplo de la creciente industria del agua embotellada en el Ecuador, cuyo consumo popular se ha generalizado y que cuesta más que la gasolina. O este otro ejemplo conocido, según el cual la Coca Cola, gigantesca empresa mundial, despilfarra diez litros de agua para obtener uno de su bebida, mientras grandes provincias y regiones ecuatorianas perecen de sed, como ocurre en Manabí, Tungurahua, Loja o la Península de Santa Elena.
En cuanto a la tierra, unos pocos agroexportadores van constituyendo latifundios mediante el despojo a los pequeños propietarios o la compra de sus parcelas a precios miserables.
Esta situación no puede continuar:
¡BASTA YA DE ACEPTAR SUMISOS EL SAQUEO Y LA EXPLOTACIÓN POR PARTE DE LOS AMOS DEL PAÍS!
¡BASTA YA DE CREAR HIJAS E HIJOS DESTINADOS AL HAMBRE Y AL ÉXODO!
Por eso desde PATRICIA PILAR, rincón de Patria que se ha convertido en símbolo de lucha al levantarse contra la Presa Baba, ALZAMOS NUESTRA BANDERA DE REBELDÍA Y CONSTITUIMOS EN ESTA FECHA LA ORGANIZACIÓN DENOMINADA AGUA TIERRA Y VIDA, con la participación combativa de organizaciones sociales de Zamora-Chinchipe, Morona-Santiago, Imbabura, Cotopaxi, Guayas, Manabí y Los Ríos.
Al nacer nos comprometemos a luchar activamente y unidos por la liberación del pueblo ecuatoriano, contra el imperialismo y el neoliberalismo.
Estamos convencidos de que no se puede privar a un pueblo de sus propios medios de subsistencia para alimentarse y vivir con dignidad, no como mendigos.
El Estado está obligado a garantizar a todos el acceso al agua y a la tierra, así como a mantener políticas de soberanía alimentaria.
Estamos igualmente convencidos de que el gobierno de Rafael Correa, con el apoyo y la participación de todo el pueblo, posibilitará el nacimiento de la Patria Nueva que siempre nos negaron los amos del país.
Y para ello debemos exigir la pronta realización de la Asamblea Constituyente de plenos poderes y en ella, la participación de los sectores marginados de la decisión política pero no de proveer de alimentos a todas y todos. De allí que en este encuentro fundacional, hemos adoptado las siguientes resoluciones:
ORGANIZACIÓN DE IGUALES
1. Construir una organización de iguales: participativa, unitaria, democrática, justa, libre, patriótica, defensora de la Soberanía Nacional y la dignidad de los pueblos y nacionalidades del Ecuador y solidaria con las luchas y demandas de los sectores agrarios y pueblos de Nuestra América y el Mundo.
ACCESO AL AGUA SIN DUEÑOS
2. Luchar para que se reconozca como política de Estado el acceso al agua segura, en cantidad y calidad suficiente a toda la población; proteger, fortalecer y promover los sistemas comunitarios de distribución de agua para el consumo humano, riego y saneamiento, y el manejo comunitario y la protección de las cuencas hídricas bajo las premisas de preservación, conservación, uso y recuperación, ésto es, gestión integral del agua. Evitar cualquier forma de privatización y exigir que bajo ningún concepto se realicen acuerdos, tratados o concesiones a proyectos hidroeléctricos y mineros para el uso del agua o del subsuelo con fines mercantiles.
AGUA: ELEMENTO INALIENABLE E IMPRESCRIPTIBLE DE ACCESO EQUITATIVO
3. Trabajar y luchar en unidad para que en la Nueva Constitución se declare al agua como elemento vital de dominio público, inalienable e imprescriptible. Promover un nuevo modelo de gestión del riego que garantice el acceso equitativo al agua y también la productividad de la tierra.
SOBERANÍA ALIMENTARIA
4. Trabajar y luchar en unidad para que el Estado y la Nueva Constitución reconozcan integralmente la soberanía alimentaria como eje transversal de las políticas públicas.
FRENAR CRECIMIENTO DE LATIFUNDIOS CON ACCESO A LA TIERRA PARA EL CAMPESINADO POBRE. REDISTRIBUIR EL ESPACIO HABITABLE.
5. Frenar el crecimiento de los latifundios y combatir los mecanismos de fracturación que permiten el tráfico de tierras. Defender el acceso a la tierra al campesinado pobre, el derecho ancestral y derecho consuetudinario de la tenencia de la tierra. Trabajar por la redistribución justa y equitativa del espacio habitable para poner un alto a la especulación inmobiliaria.
PROTECCIÓN NACIONAL DE LA TIERRA ANCESTRAL Y ÁREAS PROTEGIDAS ENTREGADAS A PRIVATIZADORES.
6. Trabajar y luchar en unidad para que el Estado conjuntamente con las comunidades y sus organizaciones revise las concesiones y adjudicaciones de las cuencas hidrográficas, territorios, tierras ancestrales y áreas protegidas otorgadas o por otorgar a empresas privadas de capitales nacionales y extranjeros para su uso y explotación minera o de cualquier índole, a costa del desalojo humano, la destrucción y contaminación del hábitat y el medio ambiente.
Declarar éstas nulas en caso de que el Estado no haya obtenido el consentimiento pleno y total de las poblaciones afectadas, sin presión de ninguna especie, o que se haya dado bajo procedimientos irregulares y lesivos al interés de las comunidades.
El derecho a la propiedad de la tierra no da derecho a la destrucción de la naturaleza para satisfacer mezquinos intereses.
DEFENDER LOS INTERESES NACIONALES Y LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS Y COLECTIVOS
7. Expulsar del Ecuador a las compañías que afecten los derechos humanos y colectivos de las poblaciones, la soberanía y los intereses nacionales de las presentes y futuras generaciones.
ECUADOR ESTADO SOCIAL DE DERECHO Y JUSTICIA. NUEVA CONSTITUCIÓN CON SOBERANÍA, INMUNIDAD E INEMBARGABILIDAD DEL ESTADO ECUATORIANO DE TODAS Y TODOS.
8. Luchar para que en la Nueva Constitución se reconozca la soberanía, la inmunidad e inembargabilidad del Estado Ecuatoriano con el fin de evitar que a nivel internacional se lo enjuicie por tomar medidas soberanas que benefician a sus habitantes y a las generaciones venideras.
Luchar para que en el artículo uno de la Constitución se reconozca al Ecuador como un Estado Social de Derecho y Justicia.
BASTA DE CRIMINALIZAR NUESTRA LUCHA Y DIRIGENTES. BASTA DE CRÍMNES DESARMANDO A PARAMILITARES Y PARAPOLICIAS.
9. Poner fin a la criminalización de los dirigentes de las comunidades y organizaciones que luchan por el agua, la tierra y la vida. Demandar el archivo de todos los procesos judiciales iniciados en su contra y exigir garantías para su seguridad personal y familiar.
Desarmar las organizaciones paramilitares y parapoliciales, encubiertas como ‘compañías de seguridad’, las mismas que agreden a los dirigentes y a las comunidades que luchan por la defensa de sus legítimos derechos.
Requerir el esclarecimiento y sanción a los responsables de los asesinatos y atentados contra la integridad de los dirigentes campesinos y sociales del Ecuador.
DISOLVER INSTITUCIONES DEL ESTADO QUE SIRVEN A FAMILIAS OLIGARCAS.
10. Luchar y trabajar en unidad para disolver las instituciones del Estado que fueron creadas para servir a reducidos grupos de poder oligárquico, como la CEDEGÉ, realizando una auditoria económica, técnica, social y ambiental y estableciendo responsabilidades y sanciones por los daños ambientales y sociales ocasionados.
Promover la creación de nuevos organismos de desarrollo que pongan fin al neoliberalismo, respondan a un modelo de igualdad, equidad y justicia social y que cuenten con la participación activa de las organizaciones sociales.
REPARACIONES INTEGRALES DEL FMI, BM, BID... POR COAUSPICIAR MEGAPROYECTOS LESIVOS.
11. Exigir reparaciones integrales a los organismos internacionales como el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), Banco Mundial (BM), Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), y otros, y a los gobiernos financistas de los megaproyectos que han tenido un precio inaceptable en materia social y ambiental.
Demandar de éstos el reconocimiento de los daños ocasionados y la revalorización de las tierras para el pago justo de indemnizaciones a las comunidades afectadas.
DEUDA EXTERNA YA FUE CANCELADA A USUREROS
12. Demandar de los organismos financieros internacionales el reconocimiento del pago de más de 125.000 millones de dólares como cancelación definitiva a la deuda externa ecuatoriana y sus servicios.
FIN DEL PLAN COLOMBIA. SOLIDARIDAD CON LOS CAMPESINOS ECUATORIANOS DE FRONTERA NORTE Y CON CAMPESINOS COLOMBIANOS. BASE DE MANTA SIN TROPA EXTRANJERA.
13. Solidaridad con nuestros compatriotas de la frontera Norte ante la agresión química y militar de la que son objeto por parte del gobierno uribista de Colombia y del denominado Plan Colombia.
Nos unimos a la voluntad nacional de impedir la intervención ecuatoriana y extranjera en el conflicto interno que vive ese hermano país. Apoyamos la justa lucha del campesinado colombiano por paz y justicia.
Reiteramos la demanda de poner fin a la ocupación militar extranjera de la Base de Manta.
SOLIDARIDAD CON CUBA
14. Unir nuestra voz a la exigencia universal para que los EEUU pongan un fin al criminal bloqueo contra Cuba.
Agradecer la solidaridad del pueblo cubano con nuestro país cuando comparte sus logros en educación, salud y deporte con nuestros jóvenes becarios, nuestros enfermos y nuestros deportistas.
SOLIDARIDAD CON VENEZUELA Y BOLIVIA
15. Solidaridad con el gobierno bolivariano de Venezuela y sus organizaciones agrarias, así como con el gobierno popular de Bolivia y su lucha por un nuevo orden de justicia social, ambos agredidos por las fuerzas oligárquicas y terratenientes internas y por el imperialismo norteamericano.
UNIDAD EN LA ORGANIZACIÓN
16. Llamar a las organizaciones agrarias y populares que luchan por el agua y la tierra para la vida, a integrarse a esta propuesta.
DELEGACIÓN Y LUCHA
17. Delegar a la Secretaría Ejecutiva de ATV, junto a la Coordinación Nacional, para que tomen las acciones pertinentes con el fin de legalizar nuestra organización, implementar su sede en Quito, organizar la defensa de sus integrantes, difundir sus documentos y contactar con organizaciones fraternas y solidarias.
Organizaciones Participantes:
Junta Parroquial de Cuellaje Cotachi,
Junta Parroquial de Peñaherrera Cotacachi, Asamblea de Unidad Cantonal del Cantón Cotacachi, Coordinadora Zonal de Intag. IMBABURA.
Frente de Defensa del Río Angamarca - Movimiento Indígena y Campesino de Cotopaxi. COTOPAXI.
Coordinadora Campesina Popular de Morona Santiago. MORONA.
Comuna Bajadita de Colonche, Junta Administradora de Agua Potable Unión y Progreso de Chanduy, Comuna Montañita, Consorcio de Juntas de Agua Potable del Guayas, Consorcio Nacional de Juntas de Sistemas Comunitarios de Agua Potable. PENÍNSULA DE SANTA ELENA.
Club Social Unión y Progreso de Flor de Bastión, Movimiento Mi Cometa. GUAYAQUIL.
Comité Recinto La Morena, Centro Agrícola de Quevedo, Centro Agrícola de Valencia, Cooperativa Babahoyo, Comité Cívico de Quevedo, Cooperativa Higuerones, Cooperativa Nueva Unión, Comunidades Afectadas por Daule Peripa, Derechos Humanos de Vinces, Derechos Humanos de Quevedo, Federeración de Pesqueros de la Provincia de Los Ríos, Comité Biprovincial contra la la Represa Baba, Coordinadora por la Defensa de la Vida y la Naturaleza de la Cuenca del Río Guayas-COORDENAGUA, Comunidades Eclesiales de Base de Los Ríos. LOS RÍOS.
Invitados fraternos:
Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos-CEDHU, Fundación Pueblo Indio-FPIE, FIAN Ecuador, UBV, Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Quevedo-UOCQ, Acción Ecológica, Confeunassc, Acuerdo Nacional Constituyente-ANC, Alianza PAIS, Altercom, Observatorio de Servicios Públicos y el escritor Jaime Galarza Zavala.
Matar por dinero - El negocio de los mercenarios en IraK
Funcionarios iraquíes reconocen que hay más de 236 empresas privadas, extranjeras y nacionales, que cumplen tareas de seguridad en el país. De ellas, 200 son consideradas ilegales, no sólo por carecer del registro correspondiente sino también por desconocerse sus «funciones». La mayoría de ellas está implicada en actos terroristas que luego se cargan en la cuenta de la resistencia.
No importa su origen ni de que países provienen: son una masa de hombres bien adiestrados en el oficio de matar por dinero que en número de 100 mil cumplen las más diversas misiones en Irak. Los llamados contratistas forman parte de ese bien organizado negocio en el que la administración de George W. Bush ha convertido a ese país árabe desde su invasión y posterior ocupación en marzo de 2003.
Sus obligaciones laborales están enfocadas en la seguridad personal de políticos iraquíes y estadounidenses, hombres de negocio, empresarios y abarcan el cuidado de instalaciones petroleras y militares u otros servicios. Muchas de estas prestaciones, aunque poco se habla de ellas, están ligadas con menesteres antes reservados a las fuerzas castrenses, tales como la construcción de bases, intendencia, interrogatorios y en combates.
En el ámbito iraquí son acusados de intervenir en operaciones secretas de los organismos de inteligencia norteamericanos y en otros trabajos sucios destinados a promover el terror, el miedo, las diferencias religiosas e, incluso, la organización de escuadrones de la muerte para sembrar el caos. Peruanos, chilenos, colombianos, hondureños y ecuatorianos, sudafricanos, irlandeses, estadounidenses, iraquíes, rusos, filipinos, turcos, nepaleses, hindúes, ucranianos, entre otros, componen la variada gama de nacionalidades de esos elementos especializados en las tenebrosas artes de la subversión.
El periódico The Washington Post en su versión electrónica, que cita un censo del Comando Central estadounidense, reveló que al menos 100 mil asalariados operan en el país árabe contratados por el gobierno de loa Estados Unidos. La cifra cuadruplica a los existentes en 2003; de ellos 48.000 trabajan como soldados privados, indicó un informe de la Oficina General de Contabilidad (GAO, en inglés). El Departamento de Trabajo norteamericano admite que 650 de esos empleados murieron desde el comienzo de la guerra, la mayor parte de nacionalidad desconocida y con funciones también ignotas.
Negocios y compañías
El jefe de Operaciones Militares en el Ministerio del Interior iraquí, Mohamed Niama, cifra en 236 las empresas privadas, extranjeras y nacionales, que cumplen tareas de seguridad en la nación del golfo Pérsico. Resulta significativo que la mayor parte, 200, sean consideradas ilegales por desconocerse sus funciones y carecer de registro legal. Niama reconoce que la mayoría de sus propietarios están implicados en actos terroristas.
La contratación de esos expertos se extiende por todo el país, pero en Bagdad adquiere singular predominio por la falta de seguridad prevaleciente, la cual obliga a políticos y empresarios a recurrir a esos mercenarios extranjeros "para impedir infiltraciones" de nacionales, comentó el vocero del Congreso de Diputados. En enero pasado el presidente del Parlamento, Mahmud Mashhadani, expresó que una comisión de seguridad contratará los servicios de una empresa sudafricana para su protección y la del resto de los diputados.
Otra modalidad, muy en boga para las autoridades iraquíes, es la de utilizar como guardaespaldas a familiares, amigos o personas del mismo grupo étnico o confesional. Un ejemplo: la ministra de Derechos Humanos, Uichdán Salem, contrató por su cuenta a 20 escoltas, recomendados por sus familiares o conocidos por ella. Las grandes empresas contratistas tienen su asiento en Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos; en este último país se estiman en tres decenas las compañías dedicadas e ese lucrativo negocio.
Una de esas empresas es la Blackwater Security Consulting Company, especializada en contraterrorismo y combates urbanos, y una de las mayores con operaciones en Irak: cuenta con un ejército multinacional calculado en tres mil miembros. La firma está considerada como la mayor base militar privada del mundo, con campos de entrenamientos sofisticados, decenas de aviones, 20 mil soldados entrenados y vínculos muy estrechos con las altas esferas del Pentágono y la Casa Blanca. El negocio de la contratación abarca, además, a otras empresas que se encargan de proveer pertrechos bélicos al ejército de los Estados Unidos y de ayudar en la "reconstrucción" como las corporaciones Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman y la notoria Halliburton.
Informaciones indican que la inmensa mayoría de las compañías destinadas a la producción de armamentos triplicaron las acciones desde el comienzo de la ocupación de Irak y sus utilidades crecieron en más del 10 por ciento. Analistas consideran que el aumento de los activos de estas corporaciones está ligado en parte al alza del presupuesto de la Secretaría de Defensa. Desde 2001 las asignaciones para la defensa crecieron en más de 50 por ciento, de 300.000 millones a 455.000 millones en 2007.
En 2005 oficiales de la CIA revelaron al Washington Post que el 50 por ciento del presupuesto de la institución, 20 mil millones de dólares, se destinó a pagar contratistas privados. Un libro publicado por el Brookings Institution refiere que el fenómeno de la contratación genera al año unos 100.000 millones de dólares y según estimados, trepará el doble para 2010.
Ilegalidades, violaciones y maltratos
La total impunidad con que operan los contratistas en el país árabe convierte a esta fuerza, la segunda mayor en hombres después de las tropas norteamericanas de ocupación (140.000 hombres), en una maquinaria de destrucción y muerte. El analista diplomático Pedrag Simic vaticina que en la medida en que los aliados de la coalición se retiren, más mercenarios tomarán sus puestos. Para el Ejército y el gobierno estadounidenses el negocio es muy ventajoso si se tiene en cuenta que son simples asalariados en busca de fortuna y que al morir no entran en la gruesa lista oficial de bajas, ni se ven envueltos en discusiones legales o presionados por la opinión pública.
Estos soldados de fortuna se arriesgan a morir en Irak por salarios que ascienden hasta los mil dólares por día, impagables en sus naciones. En reciente visita a países latinoamericanos, el Grupo de Trabajo de la ONU sobre el uso de mercenarios determinó que las contrataciones son posibles gracias a enormes irregularidades y vacíos legales existentes, como es el caso de Perú. José Luis Gómez del Prado, miembro del grupo de trabajo, dijo que más de mil peruanos brindan sus servicios en condiciones inciertas en el país árabe, donde predomina el riesgo para sus vidas, largas jornadas y viven hacinados.
El experto manifestó la total falta de transparencia en las contrataciones por la inexistencia de controles sobre la forma en que son reclutados o las condiciones en que laboran. Un informe publicado por el diario limeño El Mercurio denunció que la violencia no es el único riesgo que corren los peruanos en Irak, sino también sufren maltratos, discriminaciones y vejaciones por parte de la empresa empleadora estadounidense Triple Canopy.
Aunque el fenómeno del mercenarismo no es nada nuevo, éste creció con la llegada de Bush padre a la Casa Blanca, cuyo hijo lo hizo florecer a niveles insospechados con su llamada guerra contra el terrorismo en 60 o más países a los que identifica como "rincones oscuros" del mundo. Como otras tantas regulaciones, la administración estadounidense convirtió en letra muerta la Convención Internacional contra el Reclutamiento, la Utilización, Financiamiento y Entrenamiento de Mercenarios, aprobada por la ONU en 1989 y rubricada hasta ahora por 28 países.
Juan Carlos Díaz Guerrero
Why Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (GONI) should be sent back to Bolivia
For more than three years, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada has put forth a well-developed and, to date, successful, strategy for his defense. Knowing well that it would be in the United Status that his fate—whether or not he would be returned to Bolivia for trial—would be determined, Sanchez de Lozada has worked hard to discredit the judicial process underway in Bolivia, and to cast himself as a victim of a cruel political persecution. He has intended to create in the U.S. a climate adverse to his extradition, making arguments in certain circles so that the U.S. authorities would deny fulfilment of the request for his extradition. To date, the truth as told by the victims is not even heard outside of Bolivia, much less so in the circles of power where the extradition matter will be decided.
We will look at some of the most frequent arguments which are utilized by the allies of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.
1.) Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his ex-ministers will not receive a fair trial in Bolivia because the Bolivian justice system is corrupt.
According to Transparency International, the Bolivian government was considered, during the second term of the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the second most corrupt in the region. Now, it no longer carries this dishonorable distinction.
This corruption has always favored the rich and powerful, and the victims in this case have neither money nor political power except for their just cause.
Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada constructed during his presidency a grand system of power which controlled and today still controls various levels of the judicial branch. This system was affected by the fall of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, but has still not been dismantled, as various judges are still aligned with him.
Even after Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled the country and resigned the presidency, his political party, in December 2004, secured with the approval of Congress—the same Congress that had elected Sanchez de Lozada as President--various judgeships in the Supreme Court. The Congress of that time also elected the current Attorney General, Mario Uribe who, according to various press accounts is a member of Sanchez de Lozada’s MNR political party (National Revolutionary Movement), a claim which Uribe has never denied.
Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was responsible for much of the corruption that existed in Bolivia, both directly in certain cases and indirectly in the maintenance of a political and economic system that promoted corruption.
In any case, the corruption that may continue to exist in Bolivia would never favor the victims who have nothing to offer, but rather would favor those with money, including Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada himself.
2.) The process against Sanchez de Lozada and his ex-ministers is a political vengeance of Evo Morales and his government. If this were not so, why aren’t others included in the trial, such as Evo Morales, Felipe Quispe and other social movement leaders, for their participation in the events of September/October 2003?
Those involved in the trial can categorically affirm that the process has advanced not because there has been political influence on the part of any government official, but only for the work of the victims and a collection of people committed to the struggle against impunity.
In the immediate aftermath of the events of September and October 2003, Evo Morales did present one of the six police reports, but later took no other legal action, and nor could he because he lacked procedural legitimacy by not being one of the direct victims.
On October 14, 2004, the national Congress authorized the Trial of Responsibility for Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and his ex ministers by more than a two-thirds vote of all of its members. The Congress which authorized the trial consisted of a majority of members of both houses who were aligned with the political parties which had formed the Sanchez de Lozada government. When he resigned, his allies in Congress did not. The authorization granted by Congress at that time was not motivated by political revenge, but rather, by the fact that the evidence of bloody repression was so overwhelming that even Sanchez de Lozada’s own political allies had to vote in favor of the trial.
The overwhelming majority of the Bolivian people see the trial as an historical necessity and an absolutely just cause, and so political leaders frequently speak in support of this action. However, the political discourse of these leaders does little to assist in the advancement of the trial.
The work of the investigation has been eminently legal in nature, and has been developed objectively. Although from the first moment, the functionaries of the Ministry of Public Affairs, who were related to the government and power structure of Sanchez de Lozada, contaminated much of the evidence, and endeavored to destroy the possibility of a successful trial. Currently, however, the government’s work on the case is being handled by the commission of district attorneys, among others Milton Mendoza, who is described, according to agencies of USAID, as the best prosecutor in Bolivia.
The civil parties to the case have always requested a broad and thorough investigation, that all involved be investigated, and that all those responsible be judged and sentenced, no matter who they are or what position they hold in Bolivian society. In this context, politicians from Sanchez de Lozada’s government, police authorities, syndicate leaders, and military leaders—everyone except Sanchez de Lozada himself, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, ex-Minister of Defense, and Jorge Berindoague, ex-Minister of Hydrocarbons—have all properly submitted themselves to the Bolivian authorities with regard to the trial.
As of now, 11 ex ministers of Sanchez de Lozada’s government, the High Military Command from the period of the massacre, and Sanchez de Lozada himself have all been indicted, not because a political persecution is underway, but because the investigation shows that these individuals have responsibility for the events of September/October 2003. At no time during the investigation did even one of the indicted persons offer evidence that the leaders of social movements were authors of or responsible for the massacre, including among them the ex-Minister of the Interior and the members of the High Military Command who in those days had access to privileged intelligence.
It should be noted that even the current President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, submitted himself to the investigation even though at the time he was serving in Congress as a Representative. Although he was eligible for parliamentary immunity, he did not seek refuge in this, and made his declaration voluntarily.
It is said among allies of Sanchez de Lozada that President Mesa, who succeeded Sanchez de Lozada, issued a Supreme Decree granting amnesty to everyone except Sanchez de Lozada, his ministers and members of the military, a claim used to show evidence of a political persecution and the legal inequities faced by the defense. While it is true that that amnesty was granted for some crimes, like blocking roads, (which Sanchez de Lozada had severely penalized with a decree issued only a month prior to the beginning of the massacre), there has never been amnesty for the kinds of crimes for which Sanchez de Lozada is being investigated, not for him nor for anyone: crimes of genocide (in the form of bloody massacre), homicide, torture, threats against the media, resolutions in contrary to the Constitution and the law. No one received amnesty for these crimes, and anyone would have been investigated who had been identified as responsible for these acts, including, obviously, social movement leaders and Evo Morales himself.
3.) It does not seem that the actions of September/October 2003 could be described as genocide. Why is this crime being named?
Article 38 of the Bolivian Penal Code, dated August 23, 1972, establishes the crime of genocide as actions committed by:
One who, with the intention of destroying, totally or partially, a national, ethnic or religious group, to kill or wound the members of this group, or submit members of this group to inhumane conditions, or who imposes measures to impede their reproduction, or who violently displaces children and adults, and shall be punished with 10 to 20 years.
This sanction applies to the author or authors, or others directly or indirectly responsible for bloody massacre.
If those responsible are public authorities, or public servants, the penalty shall be increased by 100 to 500 days.
The kind of genocide referred to in Bolivian law is distinct from genocide as defined by international law. Sanchez de Lozada is being investigated for genocide according to the internal penal code of Bolivia.
This is a confusion that Sanchez de Lozada has been able to exploit, making it look as if the charges against him have been magnified, and that his enemies are trying to compare his actions to the genocide in Rwanda. Clearly the events are not the same, but according to Bolivian law, what Sanchez de Lozada authored was a massacre, which is a crime for which he must respond.
4.) If crimes were committed in September/October 2003, isn’t it possible that these were individual actions? That they were simply errors committed by poorly trained soldiers? The president is not responsible for every error committed by individuals acting in moments of conflict, confusion and fear.
No, the events of September and October 2003 were not isolated actions, mistakes or errors in judgment, but rather, measured actions which obeyed a specific strategy designed to break the citizen resistance through means of terror.
The investigation shows that here were repeated bursts of gunfire, and sharpshooters killing select targets. The intention was not to exterminate the masses, but rather, to kill a few people as a way of terrorizing the population and forcing the people to obey out of a sense of vulnerability.
Sanchez de Lozada never indicated that the armed forces were acting on their own account. On the contrary, he declared that they were acting according to his orders. On October 11, 2003, Sanchez de Lozada promulgated Supreme Decree 27209 which ordered the militarization of the gas plants and the transport of hydrocarbons. This decree safeguarded the actions of the military, expressly signaling in the third article that : “whatever harm to property or persons that might be produced as an effect of fulfilling the objective of this supreme decree shall be compensated and guaranteed by the State” and in this manner, anticipated the massacre.
5.) The civilian protesters were breaking the law. They deserved the punishment they received, as they were looking for a fight. As President, Sanchez de Lozada had no other option. He had to break the blockades so that food and gas could arrive to the citizens.
Many innocent people died, and not only those who were protesting. This was the intention, in fact, of the operation of terror executed by the military.
Legitimate violence should be exercised in a measured and rational manner, but in this case, the violence was simply disproportionate and directed to cause harm and terror. It is said that the military were guarding service stations and the transportation of hydrocarbons. In Villa Ingenio and Apana, which are the most dramatic examples, the military did not protect service stations nor guard cisterns. There were not even blockades taking place in these areas; but the unarmed civilian population was attacked without notice.
One of the saddest aspects of this dramatic, painful and undignified history is that two young children—Marlene Nancy Rojas, age 8, and Alex Llusco Mollericona, age 5, were both killed by the precise actions of sharpshooters.
6.) The events of September and October 2003 were instigated by drug traffickers, communists and other enemies of democracy.
There exists no evidence of this. According to police intelligence reports, cited by the ex-authorities of Sanchez de Lozada’s government, no armed groups, guerillas nor anything like it were detected in the area during this period of time.
7.) Sanchez de Lozada was democratically elected. He should not have been removed from office in this way.
Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, in September and October of 2003, did not act in a democratic fashion, and rather, acted illegally. From the perspective of the Bolivian people, it was inconceivable that he could continue being President when he was responsible for the deaths of more than 60 people, a consequence of lethal military operations against an unarmed civilian population.
There is no prescribed process for terminating the presidency of one who has killed his own people. In this case, Sanchez de Lozada resigned, and as he left he was not attacked and no attempt was made on his life. Because of his actions, the Bolivian people are pushing for a trial of responsibility, and it has been three years so far with no sanction for those responsible. The trial would be a fulfillment of democratic principles.
8.) The Bolivian government is skipping the necessary step of formally notifying Sanchez de Lozada and his two ex-ministers of the trial. It is not legal to declare these men “rebeldes” if they have yet to be formally notified of the trial.
The significance of notification is not the formality itself, but rather the fact that those to be indicted are aware of the reports against them, so that they might assume a defense. In this case, Sanchez de Lozada and Sanchez Berzain are clearly aware that there exist complaints against them—they have presented documents in the case and made petitions. Sanchez de Lozada has appeared in a CNN interview admitting to being aware of the investigation. Sanchez Berzain has a proxy who has participated in the investigation and has made various petitions on his behalf. Furthermore, the Ministry of Public Affairs has sent these men a formal written notification via mail. There is a variety of evidence which confirms that these men are aware of the complaints, and that, with malicious intent, they have not assumed a defense so that the legal action might expire within a certain time limit and they will remain unpunished.
Because of the failure of the U.S. government to fulfill the Bolivian government’s formal request to notify the three men of the trial—a request they received over a year and a half ago—the Bolivian government and civil parties involved in the trial have moved to request the declaration of “rebeldia” in order to overcome this obstruction of justice.
9.) The extradition treaty between Bolivian and the U.S. states that this treaty does not apply to political crimes and therefore, is not relevant to the case of September and October 2003.
The nature of political crimes is difficult and controversial to assess. From a classic perspective, it is understood that political crimes are those which act against the constituted political order, and include crimes such as sedition. Sometimes, common crimes are committed for political purposes, such as a kidnapping committed in order to obtain funds to arm a subversive political organization.
The massacre, homicide, woundings and other crimes committed in September and October 2003 are not political crimes, and were not committed to threaten the established political order. Rather, they are common crimes.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Does the Israeli Tail Wag the American Dog? By Kathleen and Bill Christison
If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests.
A quarter century ago, the executive director of AIPAC —the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—established an analytical unit inside the organization to write in-depth advocacy papers for policymakers. The year was 1981, the president was Ronald Reagan, and AIPAC had just lost a hard-fought battle in Congress over the sale of AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia. The AIPAC leader was an energetic former congressional aide named Thomas Dine, who used the setback to build AIPAC into a formidable political force. Over the next few years, Dine quadrupled AIPAC’s grassroots membership as well as its budget and aggressively expanded contacts with Congress and policymakers. He set out to supply politicians with analyses geared toward advancing Israeli interests, in the stated belief that anyone who wrote papers read by policymakers would effectively “own” the policymakers.
This was a seminal moment in the decades-long growth of the lobby’s influence on US Middle East policy, often to the detriment of US national interests. Many have characterized the relationship between what the United States does in the Middle East and what the lobby wants it to do as a case of the Israeli tail wagging the US dog. Israel and its US supporters, although constituting the junior partner in the relationship, are seen as virtually dictating policy to whatever administration and Congress are in power. There are myriad examples of this dynamic, most notably Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which dragged the US into a disastrous intervention, and Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002, during which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly and repeatedly defied President George Bush’s demand for a withdrawal. Others maintain that the tail-wagging is the other way around: that the United States, as the superpower, patron of Israel, and its major aid donor, is unmistakably the senior partner and the dog that wags the tail. The question, therefore, is which is the accurate assessment, or is the cynical view of Israeli commentator Michel Warschawski correct, that “there is neither a dog nor a tail, but one global war of re-colonization, and one aggressive monster with two ugly heads”?
Silence Broken
Despite the growing power of the Israel lobby, and the growing convergence of US and Israeli efforts toward global and regional Middle East domination, public debate over the size and substance of the lobby’s role in US policymaking was almost non-existent until two political scientists, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University, issued an 81-page report in March 2006 analyzing lobby strength. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, and Walt, Belfer Professor of International Affairs, are leading proponents of the realist school of foreign policy, which argues that states act to further military and economic power rather than pursue idealism and ethics. Their report sparked widespread interest when it was published in abbreviated form in the London Review of Books. Defining the lobby broadly as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction,” Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that the thrust of US policy in the Middle East is overwhelmingly the result of the lobby’s activities. They observe that, while other lobbies and interest groups have also demonstrated an ability to skew policy, “no lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”
The report aroused instantaneous and vocal opposition from the very individuals whom the authors identify as members of the lobby. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a vociferous advocate of Israel, called the authors “liars” engaging in “crass bigotry” and likened their arguments to neo-Nazi propaganda, filled with “thinly veiled charges of Jewish control of American thought” reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Abraham Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League (ADL) charged that the report’s main thesis “is the embodiment of classic, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.”
Most criticism from Israel’s strongest advocates fails, however, to address the principal points of the Mearsheimer-Walt study: that influential elements in the United States—non-Jews as well as Jews—who have as a primary objective the advancement of Israeli interests have gained undue influence over US Middle East policy and use this influence to tilt policy toward Israel in ways that are contrary to US national interests. Instead, critics argue off the point, raising straw men that distract from the report’s main thesis.
The accusation that Mearsheimer and Walt are “anti-Semitic” is the charge most commonly heard from supporters of Israel across the political spectrum. Not coincidentally, it is also a line of attack long used by the lobby to silence and indeed attack anyone who dares question Israeli policies or the United States’ close ties to Israel. The question of anti-Semitism was addressed during a major debate in New York in September that pitted Mearsheimer and two allies against a former Israeli official and two policymakers from the Clinton administration, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. These three opponents of Mearsheimer, although clearly supporters of Israel, are generally regarded as centrists, neither particularly hard-core like Dershowitz nor rightwing, but all three echoed Dershowitz in charging that the report “lowers itself to the level of anti-Semitism” or “has connotations of anti-Semitism,” simply because it discusses the role of some Jews in positions of power and influence.
This debate around anti-Semitism is a diversion from the main issue and is undoubtedly intended as such. The New York panel spent fully one-third of its allotted time examining whether Mearsheimer and Walt are anti-Semitic before getting to any substantive analysis of the report’s conclusions and evidence. Criticism of former President Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid follows the same pattern. Critics charge poor scholarship or hint at anti-Semitism because Carter uses the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Many, including the Democratic Party leadership, have criticized the book, but few have provided evidence to support their charges or seriously examined the evidence behind Carter’s thesis.
A member of the New York panel who spoke in support of the Mearsheimer-Walt report, New York University professor Tony Judt, has written about the crippling effect that Americans’ induced fear of being labeled anti-Semitic has had on public discourse about anything relating to Israel and ultimately on policy. During the panel discussion, he highlighted the phenomenon by observing that, although there are “hundreds of distorting lobbies” in the US, the Israel lobby is the only one that not only acts energetically in pursuit of its cause, “but acts constantly and very effectively to silence criticism of its cause.” In a similar vein, Mearsheimer observed in an interview with Mother Jones that the main reason the strong affinity between the US and Israel continues is the absence of open and candid discussion about the relationship. There would be far less sympathy for Israel, he said, if Americans knew what Israelis are doing in the occupied territories. “In essence, America’s present relationship with Israel could not withstand public scrutiny.”
Jimmy Carter’s book makes a major effort to provide more scrutiny, but its success is so far uncertain. Scott Ritter, who worked closely with Israel as a military intelligence officer and as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, reiterates both Judt’s and Mearsheimer’s observations in his new book Target Iran. While many nations maintain active lobbies in the US, he writes, none has “the scope and clout” of the Israel lobby and none operates in its “brazen manner.” Ritter foresees a potentially catastrophic US-Israeli confrontation with Iran and believes the only way to avoid this will be by bringing the nature of the US-Israeli relationship into the national discourse, fundamentally re-examining why the US operates in “continued national impotence as another nation, Israel, dictates national security policy for all America.”
In a 2003 critique of Israel and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the New York Review of Books, Judt touched on what Mearsheimer and Walt later laid out as their principal thesis. Judt wrote that Israel continued “to mock its American patron” by building illegal settlements even as the US was pushing the “Roadmap” peace plan calling for a freeze on settlement construction. Israel had reduced the powerful president of the United States, he said, to a “ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line.” Its behavior “has been a disaster for American foreign policy.” The United States’ unconditional support for Israel “is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.”
James Abourezk knows the lobby well. A US senator from South Dakota from 1972-1978, Abourezk says, from his experience in Congress, that “the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear”—fear that “anyone who does not do what Israel wants done” will be defeated by the lobby. Abourezk reinforces the point about the lobby’s efforts to silence. “Even one voice is attacked,” he writes, “on grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.” Jimmy Carter has described a similar phenomenon in recent commentaries, noting that AIPAC’s “extraordinary lobbying efforts” have silenced all debate in policymaking councils, in Congress, and in the media about Israeli policies.
Abourezk describes pressure tactics that were already in full swing before AIPAC set out to “own” policymakers, and Carter has made it clear that the lobby’s stranglehold on discourse and on decisionmaking has tightened. The pro-Israeli tilt that has, to one degree or another, been characteristic of most administrations and most Congresses since Israel’s creation was clearly not Dine’s invention or a phenomenon that emerged only in the 1980s. But Dine institutionalized the process, strengthening it significantly.
In 1984, in addition to the internal analytical unit, AIPAC spun off another body, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), that remains a pre-eminent think tank—one that has placed its analysts in policymaking jobs in several administrations. Dennis Ross, who was the senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from WINEP and returned there after leaving government service. Martin Indyk, an original member of AIPAC’s analytical unit and WINEP’s first director, entered a senior policymaking position in the Clinton administration from there. Mearsheimer and Walt correctly describe both men as situated “at the core of the lobby.”
This assertion addresses a critical aspect of the lobby question by emphasizing the reality that the lobby has in recent decades actually become a part of various administrations. The lobby is also not confined to the formal Jewish-American organizations such as AIPAC and the ADL and think tanks like WINEP and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, but also includes numerous individuals who work on Israel’s behalf and encompasses the very large fundamentalist Christian right. The Christian right strongly supports Israel’s continued control over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem as the essential prerequisite to the so-called Millennium, when they believe Jesus Christ will reappear. During the last several years in particular, the Christian right has used its vast numbers to lobby both the administration and Congress in support of Israel’s policies and in opposition to any proposal that would require Israeli concessions.
The kind of blunt pressure on decisionmakers that Abourezk describes is only one way in which the organized lobby operates. The bond between Israel and the US has always had its grounding as much in soft emotions as in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Over the years since Israel’s creation, there has been a pervasive atmosphere in which Israel is simply assumed to be so close to the US, its interests so closely intertwined with American interests, that it is accepted almost as a part of the US.
The lobby reinforces this sentiment, channeling it into institutional ways of involving ordinary Americans in supporting Israel. Jeffrey Blankfort, a northern California radio host and long-time commentator on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and other Middle East issues, points out, for instance, that 1,700 unions in the US own more than $5 billion of Israel bonds. This effectively obliges the unions to support Israel, Blankfort believes, making the American labor movement a part of the lobby. It is one reason that the organized left in the United States has opposed making the Palestine issue part of the anti-war movement. Many states and universities also invest in Israel bonds, as well as in Israeli companies, giving these local governments and institutions an interest in supporting Israel’s policies in order to keep the Israeli economy going.
The pervasiveness of the lobby’s influence makes Tony Judt’s reference to the US president as a “ventriloquist’s dummy” particularly apt. As Walt pointed out in a Mother Jones interview, no matter what Israel does, the United States continues to support it. “They continue to build settlements even though every president since Lyndon Johnson has thought that was a bad idea. They spy on us routinely. They’ve given or sold American military technology to other countries. Also…they have conducted a wide variety of human rights violations, and yet none of those activities ever slows down American support.” For the last several decades, AIPAC has frequently involved itself directly in the legislative process, writing legislation relating to the Middle East and pushing a series of anti-Arab, pro-Israeli resolutions that state the stance of the Senate and the House on various issues, such as Israel’s construction of the separation wall and Israel’s summer 2006 attack on Lebanon. AIPAC often boasts that it vets and exerts influence over presidential candidates. During the 2004 presidential campaign when Howard Dean issued a mild and seemingly non-controversial call for an “even-handed” US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was roundly condemned by the lobby and by fellow Democrats, and he quickly dropped the call. Long-serving congressmen who deviate are targeted for electoral defeat. In the 1980s, Representative Paul Findley and Senator Charles Percy, who had each served multiple terms in Illinois, were defeated through the efforts of AIPAC after both spoke out in favor of negotiating with the PLO. More recently, Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney has twice been the target of AIPAC’s electoral interference.
The list goes on. Israel and its lobby have been the policy initiators, the US the follower, in Israel’s 1967 war, its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its 2002 invasion of the West Bank, its 40-year settlement-construction enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territories, its disproportionate attacks on Palestinians, its assault on Lebanon. The scope of the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking councils has been unprecedented during the current Bush administration, and there is strong evidence that neo-conservatives inside the administration—whose ties to Israel’s right wing are undeniable—were the architects of the invasion of Iraq and of the administration’s push to “transform” the Middle East and spread “democracy” throughout the region. Mearsheimer and Walt assert that the Iraq war was “at least partly intended to improve Israel’s strategic position”—a reality that would seem to be confirmed by the fact that some of these same neo-cons authored a strategy paper, entitled “A Clean Break,” in the mid-1990s for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq that was later pushed when the neo-cons entered the Bush administration. The strategy was designed explicitly to assure Israel’s regional dominance, to undermine the Oslo peace process, and to relieve Israel of pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians.
One of the authors, David Wurmser, remains in government as Vice President Richard Cheney’s Middle East adviser; the others, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, were closely involved in Iraq war planning as, respectively, an adviser to the Pentagon and an undersecretary of defense. Almost all the other neo-cons, both Jews and non-Jews, have also compiled long records of advocacy on behalf of Israel. These include Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous rightwing, pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington.
In response to the lobby’s pressure on legislators and policymakers, the US has given Israel massive amounts of military and economic aid over the years. Mearsheimer and Walt cite statistics from the US Agency for International Development indicating that between 1976 and 2003, the US gave Israel a total of $140 billion in aid, in constant 2003 dollars. One economist, Thomas Stauffer, who has long tracked aid to Israel, put the figure much higher in 2002, estimating a total of $240 billion in the preceding 30 years, adjusted to current dollars. Israel now receives an automatic $2-3 billion annually in grant aid, mostly military, in addition to large increments of additional aid to compensate for the cost to Israel of such actions as the Lebanon war and the Gaza withdrawal.
Defining the National Interest
The truly important part of the debate over the lobby’s power swirls around the issue of national interests—what constitutes national interests, who determines them, and whether real national interests are harmed by the lobby. A group of commentators and analysts on the left who are highly critical of Israel’s policies have nonetheless been dismissive of the notion that the lobby has particular influence over policy. Their arguments center on the issue of what actually constitutes the US national interest. Noam Chomsky has frequently indicated that Middle East policy is determined largely by what he calls the “tight state-corporate linkage” where domestic power is concentrated—in other words, the military-industrial complex working in cooperation with the government, whose special interests, Chomsky believes, ultimately define US national interests. The Israel lobby has some impact on determining policy in Chomsky’s estimation, but to a far lesser extent and generally only insofar as the lobby’s interests conform to corporate-government interests.
Chomsky and the other left critics of the lobby study essentially believe that US policy has always been directed at the advancement of US imperial and corporate interests, and that Israel, far from leading the US into harmful policies and foreign adventures, has always done the US bidding. The US would pursue its imperial objectives even without Israel, and it has pursued these in areas outside the Middle East, such as Chile, Indonesia, Central America, and elsewhere, without benefit of any lobby. The Israel lobby, in this view, functions as merely a handy adjunct to US policy, not an agent with any control or particular influence.
One thing this argument ignores, however, is that the lobby and its close ties to US arms makers strengthen the ability of the military-industrial complex to control what are defined as US national interests. The Israel lobby holds unquestionable sway over many individual congressmen and executive branch officials, including in the White House, making it difficult for anyone to influence the alleged national interests of the US in ways that the lobby might feel weakened Israel’s uniquely special relationship with the US. Any debate involving this taboo subject, even indirectly, would almost certainly be quashed before it started, buried under paeans for Israel from both Republicans and Democrats.
Afif Safieh, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission in Washington, makes another point. He calls the approach of Chomsky and others on the left a “mechanistic” view that does not allow for the fact that each situation has its own specificity, the specificity in this case being that the junior partner can often “hijack” and “monopolize” decisionmaking on Middle East issues. The left’s argument comes from a kind of determinism that assumes US policy has rarely if ever deviated from a clearly laid-out imperial strategy designed to promote corporate interests.
But simply because the US overthrew a government deemed inimical to American business interests in Chile or supported a dictator in Indonesia where the oil industry had interests does not prove that whenever Israel has attacked Arab countries, as with Egypt in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982, it was acting to serve the United States or was, as Chomsky has alleged, performing a “huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism.” Israel in no way serves to ensure US access to or control over the Middle East’s oil resources, nor does it work in conjunction with the oil industry.
There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the US military-industrial-financial complex with Israel’s military, industrial, and financial interests, as Chomsky and others on the left contend, but rather than a relationship in which Israel does the bidding of the US corporate-government conglomeration, in reality the entanglement is much more one between two independent players. And the lobby essentially functions to sustain and manipulate the entanglement. Blankfort maintains that the influence of the lobby “is actually underestimated. Not only does it keep Congress in thrall to its demands on issues pertaining to Israel and the Middle East in general, it also serves, less conspicuously, as a powerful lobbying force for maintaining America’s high levels of military spending and for integrating the Israeli arms industry with that of the US.” This integration, Blankfort says, “goes a long way to explain why there has been no significant opposition to the annual military budget from any sector of Congress.”
Israel and its lobby work hand in glove with the US arms industry to advance their combined, usually compatible interests. The relatively few powerful, wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic US and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of US arms corporations. As globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in Congress and tell them credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their districts will be lost. The lobby does not simply passively support the desires of the military-industrial complex. It actively twists arms in Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of certain “national interests” that many Americans believe is wrong.
A Two-Headed Monster
As Tony Judt noted, much of the rest of the world now “no longer credits our good faith.” Strong US support for Israel has long roiled Arab public opinion, but since the collapse of the peace process and the start of the Palestinian intifada and Israel’s harsh crackdown in September 2000, opinion polls in Arab and Muslim countries have repeatedly shown strong and growing distrust of the United States, linked principally to US support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and more recently to the Iraq war. Hostile attitudes reach into the 70-80 percent range in many Arab countries. Similar, although not as strong or pervasive, distrust of the US emerges in polls in Europe. The growing anti-US sentiment resulting from the close US relationship with Israel is a principal emphasis in the Mearsheimer-Walt report. The authors point out at the opening of their report that Bush administration policies, heavily influenced by the Israel lobby, have helped produce a “resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman.” The United States’ “unwavering” support for Israel, they write, has “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized US security.” They believe the US has actually set aside its own security to advance the interests of another state.
The obvious result has been more terrorism against the US and its allies. Osama bin Laden’s videos and taped statements from the 1990s talk about the Palestinians and his anger with the US because of its alliance with Israel. His anger and that of other radical Islamists is on behalf of Muslims who have been killed and exploited by the US, Israel, and the West for decades, and Palestinians are perhaps the most prominent among these. His anger is shared by millions of the oppressed, and he can attract the radicals among them to his struggle on the basis of his stance as a defender of Palestinians and all oppressed Muslims. This is a danger to the United States, arising directly from the strong US-Israel tie and the lobby’s strenuous efforts to sustain it, that cannot be underestimated.
The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged US interests—that is, not what should be real US national interests, but the selfish and self-defined “national interests” of the political-corporate-military complex that, in conjunction with the lobby, dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the US and of Israel—groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy. The “aggressive monster with two ugly heads” that Michel Warschawski speaks of is a reality.
This convergence of manipulated “interests” has a profound effect on US policy choices in the Middle East. If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests. In the face of the massive human rights violations being committed against Palestinians today, the failure to recognize this reality is where those who belittle the lobby’s power and accept US Middle East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy are particularly dangerous.
Bill Christison is a former senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
(This article was first published by - Journal of the Mental Environment - March/April 2007)
Americans Have Lost Their Country By Paul Craig Roberts
The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.
This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues--principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by “scholars” in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.
The entirety of their success in miring the United States in what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on the power of propaganda and the big lie.
Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally false expectations. The regime’s occupation of Iraq has failed in a military sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began blaming Iran for America’s embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in Iraq.
Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi Shi’ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi’ite. Bush’s accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.
On the basis of this absurd accusation--a pure invention--Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack forces off Iran’s coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and other US bases in countries contingent to Iran.
In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.” He said a plausible scenario was “a terrorist act blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran.” He said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already articulating a “mythical historical narrative” for widening their war against Islam.
Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?
There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the MIddle East.
The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US ambassador to Afghanistan.
Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq’s oil resources.
The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. “Israel’s enemies” consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s theft of Palestine.
The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for “a new Pearl Harbor,” and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts emerged.
The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the corporate media, from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the “Rapture Evangelicals,” from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the military- industrial complex whose profits have prospered. But the fact remains that the dozen men named in the second paragraph above were able to overthrow the US Constitution and launch military aggression under the guise of a preventive/preemptive “war against terrorism.”
When the American people caught on that the “war on terror” was a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime’s warmongering. However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration.
We are witnessing the triumph of a dozen evil men over American democracy and a free press.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues--principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by “scholars” in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.
The entirety of their success in miring the United States in what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on the power of propaganda and the big lie.
Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally false expectations. The regime’s occupation of Iraq has failed in a military sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began blaming Iran for America’s embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in Iraq.
Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi Shi’ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi’ite. Bush’s accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.
On the basis of this absurd accusation--a pure invention--Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack forces off Iran’s coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and other US bases in countries contingent to Iran.
In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.” He said a plausible scenario was “a terrorist act blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran.” He said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already articulating a “mythical historical narrative” for widening their war against Islam.
Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?
There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the MIddle East.
The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US ambassador to Afghanistan.
Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq’s oil resources.
The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. “Israel’s enemies” consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s theft of Palestine.
The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for “a new Pearl Harbor,” and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts emerged.
The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the corporate media, from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the “Rapture Evangelicals,” from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the military- industrial complex whose profits have prospered. But the fact remains that the dozen men named in the second paragraph above were able to overthrow the US Constitution and launch military aggression under the guise of a preventive/preemptive “war against terrorism.”
When the American people caught on that the “war on terror” was a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime’s warmongering. However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration.
We are witnessing the triumph of a dozen evil men over American democracy and a free press.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
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