What does Obama have planned next for Latin America?

clipped from: onlinejournal.com

Obama’s Latin American policy resembles Richard Nixon’s Operation Condor and its assassinations and covert operations.

He has deploy thousands of Marines and dozens of Coast Guard vessels to Costa Rica, more military bases in Colombia and Honduras, authorized a coup against Zelaya. He is more threatening than the benign George W. Bush.

Thee are increasing reports of political assassinations, illegal detention of opposition figures and journalists in Colombia, Panama, and Honduras.

Pinochet supporters of the Chilean Senate recently charged by Venezuela with interference in elections. Under President Sebastian Pinera, Chile has become
with Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica U.S. base to destabilize progressive-led governments.

The current doctrine is found in CIA manuals for “PBSuccess,”

Brazil’s leftist President Joao Goulart, overthrown in a 1964 coup, died.

Chile’s Eduardo Frei Montalva. PBSuccess’s “Study of Assassination” talks about the machine gun option, to kill Allende.

renewed low-key Operation Condor appears to have taken shape under Obama

And Obama’s decision not to rescind George W. Bush’s re-establishment of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet as part of the US Southern Command means that the United States can always resort to its old “gunboat diplomacy” to enforce its military might and will in Latin America.

For Obama, whose Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was a top officer in the armed forces of General Suharto, who carried out the CIA’s 1965-66 coup against President Sukarno and the Indonesian Communist Party, which saw almost one million accused Communists, as well as ethnic Chinese, systematically genocided, such re-imposition of covert activities in Latin America presents no moral dilemma to Obama, who first witnessed the CIA’s repression as an impressionable young boy of 7 and 8 years old while living in Jakarta. Soetoro was still a senior officer in Suharto’s army when Soetoro enrolled Barack Obama in 1967 as Barry Soetoro in Jakarta’s Fransiskus Assisi Catholic school. In 1967, the Indonesian army and its CIA handlers were still mopping up Indonesia’s left-wing opposition forces. Obama has studiously refrained from mentioning Indonesia’s CIA coup and has twice canceled presidential visits to the country.

CARVILLE'S BRAND

James Carville has backed political candidates in Latin America identifying with Bill Clinton’s militaristic and free market approach to the region.

Carville is also a virtual kingmaker in Latin America, Mexico’s Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil’s Fernando Enrique Cardoso

Colombia, Carville has offered his consulting services to Juan Manuel Santos, a former Minister of Defense and member of the governing Social Party of National Unity or Party of the U. Santos is sullied as Minister of Defense, armed forces killed
civilians and passed off as rebels

Santos, a militarist, favored U.S. free trade agenda. Bill Clinton supported the Colombian elite to the hilt, Plan Colombia, $1.3 billion aid package which waived human rights conditions. out of office Bill met with Uribe personally.

Carville advised Honduran Manuel Zelaya but was not aware and would not have agreed with Zelaya’s post-election turn to the left

Argentina, Carville advised Peronist Daniel Scioli who is linked to Kirchner. Kirchner was a critic of neo-liberal economic. Scioli doesn’t fit

Carville also advised Domingo Cavallo. Cavallo, a supply-side economist commitment to free-market and huge profits to foreign investors. His first stint in charge of Argenine economy was 1991 to 1996. He linked the Argentine peso to the American dollar, which in the beginning eliminated inflation, encouraged foreign investment, and spurred middle-class to splurge on overseas spending. eventually made for exporters harder to sell, unemployment and deficits rose.

In his second stint, he froze bank deposits which lead to a huge devaluation and increased his country’s indebtedness and inflate commissions to banks in exchange for agreement to renegotiate bonds.

Panama, advised Ernesto Pérez Balladares, former CEO at Citibank. Strategy to sell off state industries and reduce labor laws. unions demanded an end to the privatization protests erupted, rubber bullets.

Ecuadoran President Jamil Mahuad, dollarizing currency. prompted Indians civil disobedience. In January, 2000, he was forced out.

Bolivian Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada “Goni.” In 2002 against Evo Morales. In Goni's prior term, pursuing partial privatization of state enterprises. After Goni’s win, he decides to ship gas through Chile, sparking riots. Goni crumbled, fled.

Carville's latest stint is as environmental gadfly of BP. Carville’s associates have had ties to BP. Stanley Greenberg, during Goni, BP was at the center of the gas transmission deal involving Chile.

In Colombia, energy loom large

BP is a key player in Colombia. It is thinking about commencing exploratory drilling in offshore Colombian oil blocs. Colombia needs to give BP the boot. Antanas Mockus, is no radical either but he would be the first Green Party president in the world.

Sierra de Perijá

Tectonic framework of Colombia showing the main physiographic elements.

BASINS

1: Guajira Basin; 3: Cesar-Ranchería Basin; 5: Maracaibo Basin; 7: Lower Magdalena Valley Basin; 8: Middle Magdalena Valley Basin; 12: Upper Magdalena Valley; 13: Cauca Valley

SIERRAS

2: Sierra Nevada de Sta. Marta; 4: Sierra de Perijá; 6: Mérida Andes; 9: Eastern Cordillera; 10: Central Cordillera; 11: Western Cordillera; .

FAULTS

SCDB: Southern Caribbean deformed belt; OPF: Oca-El Pilar Fault System; SMBF: Sta. Marta-Bucaramanga Fault System. Location of Figure 2 is shown.

COLOMBIA & VENEZUELA

From World War Four Report
by Bill Weinberg



The Colombian department of Arauca, heartland of that country's oil industry, is one the most violent. It lies just across the Rio Arauca, an Orinoco tributary, from Venezuela's own Orinoco Basin oil heartland of Apure-Barinas states.



The main oil field in Arauca is at Cano-Limon, run by California-based Occidental Petroleum in a joint partnership with the Colombia state company Ecopetrol. Many of the 800 U.S. military advisors in Colombia are assigned to Arauca, and since last year they have been overseeing a new Colombian army unit specially created to police Cano-Limon against guerilla attack

"In early 2003, US personnel embarked on their first major non-drug initiative, a plan to help Colombia's army protect an oil pipeline and re-take territory

Now, a leader of Colombia's oil workers union claims that the U.S. military is actually transforming Cano-Limon into a base intended for launching attacks against Venezuela. Oscar Canas Fajardo, advisor to Colombia's Central Workers Union, or CUT, speaking with Venezuelan journalist Alfredo Carquez Saavedra

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, etc.), "South America--the Next Swamp?," warns that even as the U.S. is "draining the swamp" in Afghanistan, "ideological killers are regrouping with the aid of leftist governments and drug lords" in the western hemisphere. The principal "leftist government" in question is, of course, that of Hugo Chavez.

Writes JINSA: "A British newspaper reports that the IRA is conducting mortar training in the Venezuelan jungle for the Marxist Colombian FARC.

he British newspaper account JINSA cites is from the London Sunday Times of March 13. It concerns three accused Irish Republican Army militants who jumped bail and disappeared following their conviction in Colombia last year on charges of providing the FARC with mortar training. ... have established a training camp on Venezuelan territory in the Sierra de Perija, a branch of the Andes whose divide forms the international border heading north from Arauca.

2005 began with a dramatic deterioration in Colombia-Venezuela relations following the Colombian government's admission that it sent bounty-hunters to abduct FARC representative Rodrigo Granda Escobar in Caracas, ... and State Department spokesmen began accusing Venezuela of providing a safe-haven for Colombian guerillas. Chavez, in turn, accused Washington of trying to foment war between Venezuela and Colombia, and even plotting to assassinate him.

Despite these tensions, Chavez is inviting new multinational investment for the oil zone--and even an ambitious trans-border project with Colombia. In August 2001, Texaco, PDVSA and Ecopetrol signed a memorandum of understanding for a feasibility study on a new pipeline linking natural gas fields of La Guajira, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, to Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela's main export terminal.

he new pipeline connecting ChevronTexaco's gas fields in the Colombian department of La Guajira to Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo would have to cross the Sierra de Perija, where Uribe and JINSA now claim a FARC-IRA training camp is operating. La Guajira itself is among Colombia's most violent regions, with a string of assassinations of indigenous leaders by presumed paramilitary forces reported already this year. The new pipeline may carry war and human rights abuses to Venezuela as well as gas.

On April 4, hundreds of representatives of the Bari, Yukpa and Wayuu indigenous peoples from the Venezuelan side of the Sierra de Perija, clad in traditional dress and wielding bows and arrows, marched in Caracas to demand a halt to coal mining operations near their traditional lands.

The coal is currently transported by truck to Maracaibo, the port and regional capital, but there are plans to construct a rail line for this purpose, as well to build a deep sea port in the Gulf of Venezuela, just to Maracaibo's north. The new gas pipeline would be another artery through this same conflicted border zone.

AMAZON WATCH Challenging US military aid to Colombia

Earthhope
Democratic Underground.com
ENERGY BULLETIN

another text on plan colombia

May 2001
by Carlos Fazio

Uruguayan-Mexican journalist and writer

This phenomenon has allowed the consolidation of an emergent, rich and violent class that in alliance with the traditional native oligarchy has today shaped Colombia as a criminal, mafia-type state.

At the same time, on the demand side there has been no progress either. The U.S. drug market has 14 million consumers and is growing.

But this line of analysis would be weakened without considering the other underpinning of the White House's "war on drugs": its military component.