Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
|
 Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 1:02 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
The US Military Descends on Paraguay
Written by Benjamin Dangl, The Nation
Monday, 17 July 2006
While hitchhiking across Paraguay a few years ago, I met welcoming farmers who let me camp in their backyards. I eventually arrived in Ciudad del Este, known for its black markets and loose borders. Now the city and farmers I met are caught in the crossfire of the US military's "war on terror."
On May 26, 2005, the Paraguayan Senate allowed US troops to train their Paraguayan counterparts until December 2006, when the Paraguayan Senate can vote to extend the troops' stay.
The United States had threatened to cut off millions in aid to the country if Paraguay did not grant the troops entry.
In July 2005 hundreds of US soldiers arrived with planes, weapons and ammunition. Washington's funding for counterterrorism efforts in Paraguay soon doubled, and protests against the military presence hit the streets.
Some activists, military analysts and politicians in the region believe the operations could be part of a plan to overthrow the left-leaning government of Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia and take control of the area's vast gas and water reserves.
Human rights reports from Paraguay suggest the US military presence is, at the very least, heightening tensions in the country.
Soy and Landless Farmers
Paraguay is the fourth-largest producer of soy in the world. As this industry has expanded, an estimated 90,000 poor families have been forced off their land. Campesinos have organized protests, road blockades and land occupations against displacement and have faced subsequent repression from military and paramilitary forces.
According to Grupo de Reflexion Rural (GRR), an Argentina-based organization that documents violence against farmers, on June 24, 2005, in Tekojoja, Paraguay, hired policemen and soy producers kicked 270 people off their land, burned down fifty-four homes, arrested 130 people and killed Two.
The most recent case of this violence is the death of Serapio Villasboa Cabrera, a member of the Paraguayan Campesino Movement, whose body was found full of knife wounds May 8. Cabrera was the brother of
Petrona Villasboa, who was spearheading an investigation into the death of her son, who died from exposure to toxic chemicals used by transgenic soy producers.
According to Servicio, Paz y Justicia (Serpaj), an international human rights group that has a chapter in Paraguay, one method used to force farmers off their land is to spray toxic pesticides around communities until sickness forces residents to leave.
GRR said Cabrera was killed by paramilitaries connected to large landowners and soy producers, who are expanding their holdings. The paramilitaries pursue farm leaders who are organizing against the occupation of their land. Investigations by Serpaj demonstrate that the worst cases of repression against farmers have taken place in areas with the highest concentration of US troops.
Serpaj reported that in the department of San Pedro, where five US military exercises took place, there have been eighteen farmer deaths from repression, in an area with many farmer organizations.
In the department of Concepción there have been eleven deaths and three US military exercises. Near the Triple Border, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, there were twelve deaths and three exercises.
"The US military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups....
They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally,
Orlando Castillo of Serpaj told me over the phone.
"The US troops talk with the farmers and get to know their leaders and which groups, organizations, are working there, then establish the plans and actions to control the farmer movement and advise the Paraguayan military and police on how to proceed.... The numbers from our study show what this US presence is doing. US troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against 'terrorism.' "
Tomas Palau, a Paraguayan sociologist at BASE-IS, a Paraguayan social research institute, and the editor of a recent book on the militarization of Latin America, said, "The US conducts training and classes for the Paraguayan troops. These classes are led by North Americans, who answer to Southern Command, the branch of the US military for South America."
Like Castillo, Palau said there is an association between the US military presence and the increased violence against campesinos. "They are teaching counterinsurgency classes, preparing the Paraguayan troops to fight internal enemies," he told me. He said it's common knowledge that the US troops and the Paraguayan troops are conducting operations together. "All the Paraguayan press is talking about this."
The US Embassy in Asunción rejects all claims that the US military is linked to the increased repression against campesino and protest groups, either through exercises or instruction.
In an e-mail response to the charges, Bruce Kleiner of the Embassy's Office of Public Affairs writes that "the U.S. military is not monitoring protest groups in Paraguay" and that "the U.S. military personnel and Paraguayan armed forces have trained together during medical readiness training exercises (MEDRETEs) to provide humanitarian service to some of Paraguay's most disadvantaged citizens."
However, the deputy speaker of the Paraguayan parliament, Alejandro Velazquez Ugarte, said that of the thirteen exercises going on in the country, only two are of a civilian nature. According to BASE-IS, Paraguayan officials have recently used the threat of terrorism to justify their aggression against campesino leaders.
One group, the Campesino Organization of the North, has been accused of receiving instructions from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), that country's largest leftist guerrilla movement.
The FARC has also been accused of colluding in the kidnapping and murder of the daughter of former Paraguayan President Raúl Cubas Grau last year. A June 23 report from the Chinese news service Xinhua said that Colombia's defense minister, Camilo Ospina, spoke with Paraguay's attorney general, Ruben Candia, about the presence of the FARC in Paraguay.
Ospina said the FARC was consulting organized crime groups and "giving criminals advice on explosives" in Paraguay. Regarding the FARC connection in Paraguay, Paul Wolf, an international attorney in Washington who has studied the group closely and written about it, said, "Since the Colombian government hasn't shown any evidence or given any names, this can't be considered as anything but war propaganda."
Linking Paraguayan campesino groups to the FARC is nothing new, particularly since the death of Cubas's daughter. However, in an interview with the Paraguayan newspaper La Nación, the bishop of Concepción, Zacarias Ortiz Rolon, said, "As far as the official interest in making believe that there is a guerrilla group and that it is fed by the Colombian FARC, that seems a bit suspicious to me."
The Association of Farmers of Alto Paraná (ASAGRAPA), a campesino group near the Triple Border, reported that a local politician offered one of the organization' s leaders a sum of money equivalent to a monthly salary, in return for which the ASAGRAPA member was told to announce that other leaders in the organization were building a terrorist group and receiving training from the FARC.
BASE-IS reports suggest that this type of bribery and disinformation is part of an effort to guarantee the "national security of the US" and "justify, continue and expand the North American military presence."
"All of these activities coincide with the presence of the US troops," Palau explained about the violence against farmers. "The CIA and FBI are also working here. It's likely they are generating these plans for fabricating lies about guerrilla and terrorist activities. They need to find terrorists to use as an excuse for militarization."
Last October the Cuban media outlet Prensa Latina reported that FBI director Robert Mueller arrived in Paraguay to "check on preparations for the installation of a permanent FBI office in Asunción...to cooperate with security organizations to fight international crime, drug traffic and kidnapping."
Journalist Hugo Olázar of the Argentine paper Clarín reported last September that US troops were operating from an air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay. He visited the base last year and said it had an air-traffic control tower, a military encampment and was capable of handling large aircraft.
Though the United States denies it is operating at the base, it used the same rhetoric when first discussing its actions in Manta, Ecuador, which is currently home to an $80 million US military base.
The base there was first described in 1999 as an archaic "dirt strip" used only for weather monitoring. Days later, the Pentagon said it would be utilized for security-related missions.
Other indications that the US military might be settling into Paraguay come from the right-wing Paraguayan government. Current President Nicanor Duarte Frutos is a member of the Colorado party, which has ruled the country for more than 50 years.
It was this party that established the thirty-five- year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. Soon after his election in 2003, Duarte became
the first Paraguayan president to be received at the White House.
Last August Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to Paraguay. Shortly afterward, Dick Cheney met with Paraguay's vice president. Last year, Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel commented on the situation in Paraguay, "Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave. And that really frightens me."
Counterfeit Rolling Papers and V iagra
Washington has justified its military presence in Paraguay by stating that the Triple Border area at Ciudad del Este is a base for Islamist terrorist funding. In a June 3, 2006, Associated Press report, Western intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, claimed that if Iran is cornered by the United States, it could direct the international network of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah to assist in terrorist attacks.
The Justice Department has indicted nineteen people this year for sending the profits from the sale of counterfeit rolling papers and * to Hezbollah. "Extensive operations have been uncovered in South America," the AP article states, "where Hezbollah is well connected to the drug trade, particularly in the region where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet."
Other claims about terrorist networks said to be operating in the Triple Border region include a poster of Iguaçu Falls, a tourist destination near Ciudad del Este, discovered by US troops on the wall of an Al Qaeda operative's home in Kabul, Afghanistan, shortly after 9/11. Aside from this, however, the US Southern Command and the State Department report that no "credible information" exists confirming that "Islamic terrorist cells are planning attacks in Latin America."
Luiz Moniz Bandeira, who holds a chair in history at the University of Brasília and writes about US-Brazilian relations, was quoted in the Washington Times as saying, "I wouldn't dismiss the hypothesis that US agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence."
Throughout the cold war, the US government used the threat of communism as an excuse for its military adventures in Latin America. Now, as leaders such as Bolivia's Evo Morales and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez move further outside the sphere of Washington's interests, the United States is using another "ism" as an alibi for its military presence.
As Greg Grandin pointed out in his article "The Wide War," first posted on TomDispatch. com, the Pentagon now has more resources and money directed to Latin America than the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce and Treasury combined.
Before 9/11 the annual US military aid to the region was around $400 million. It's now nearly $1 Billion. Much of this goes to training troops.
Making wild allegations about Paraguayan farmers being terrorists is one way to justify the increased spending and military presence in the region. "The US government is lying about the terrorist funding in the Triple Border, just like they did about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," said an exasperated Castillo of Serpaj.
Indeed, the street markets I walked through in Ciudad del Este,
and the farmers I met along the way, seemed to pose as much of a threat to US security as a pirated Tom Petty CD or a bottle of counterfeit whiskey.
============ =======
Benjamin Dangl is the editor of Upside Down World, an online magazine uncovering activism and politics in Latin America, and Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events. He is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, forthcoming from AK Press in March 2007, and a recipient of a 2007 Project Censored Award for his coverage of US military operations in Paraguay.
Email ben(at)upsidedownwo rld.org
====================
http://upsidedownwo rld.org/main/content/view/452/44/
====================
Paraguay Revokes U.S. Military Immunity
Written by Jessica Weisberg and Benjamin T. Brown
Thursday, 05 October 2006
(Editor's note: Article updated, corrected on 10-13-06)
On October 2, the Paraguayan government announced its decision to revoke U.S. immunity as soon as their current contract expires in December 2006. The US military has carried out military exercises in Paraguay since July 2005.
Since then the troops have enjoyed technical and administrative immunity, exempting them from trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said that the US will not continue to provide military support without immunity for its soldiers. However, on October 3, 2006 President Bush signed a waiver allowing for military aid in countries that have refused to sign immunity agreements with the US military. The waiver affects 21 countries, including Paraguay.
Historically, Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte Frutos and President George W. Bush have enjoyed what Brazilian President Lula calls a "political matrimony." (quote from Ultimahora)
Paraguay´s decision represents a political alliance with the countries in the MercoSur trade block, which includes Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela.
Orlando Castillo, director of SERPAJ, a human rights organization based in Paraguay, stated that Frutos´decision does not necessarily represent an ideological shift of Paraguay´s center-right government. Castillo xplained that regional solidarity would require major reforms in all sectors of the Paraguayan government.
Furthermore, military representatives from the CIA, DEA, and FBI will continue to hold immunity in Paraguay.
======================
http://www.fpif. org/fpiftxt/2939
============ ==========
Dark Armies, Secret Bases, and Rummy, Oh My!
Conn Hallinan |
November 21, 2005
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
It would be easy to make fun of President Bush's recent fiasco at the 4th Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina. His grand plan for a free trade zone reaching from the Artic Circle to Tierra del Fuego was soundly rejected by nations fed up with the economic and social chaos wrought by neoliberalism.
At a press conference, South American journalists asked him rude questions about Karl Rove. And the President ended the whole debacle by uttering what may be the most trenchant observation the man has ever made on Latin America: “Wow! Brazil is big!”
But there is nothing amusing about an Enormous U.S. base less than 120 miles from the Bolivian border, or the explosive growth of U.S.-financed Mercenary Armies that are doing everything from training the military in Paraguay and Ecuador to calling in Air Attacks against Guerillas in Colombia.
Indeed, it is feeling a little like the run up to the ‘60s and ‘70s, when Washington-sponsore d military dictatorships dominated most of the continent, and dark armies ruled the night.
U.S. Special Forces began arriving this past summer at Paraguay's Mariscal Estigarribia air base, a sprawling complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator Alfredo Stroessner.
Argentinean journalists who got a peek at the place say the airfield can handle B-52 bombers and Galaxy C-5 cargo planes. It also has a huge radar system, vast hangers, and can house up to 16,000 troops. The air base is larger than the international airport at the capital city, Asuncion .
Some 500 special forces arrived July 1 for a three-month counter-terrorism training exercise, code named Operation Commando Force 6.
Paraguayan denials that Mariscal Estigarribia is now a U.S. base have met with considerable skepticism by Brazil and Argentina .
There is a disturbing resemblance between U.S. denials about Mariscal Estigarribia, and similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta , Ecuador.
The United States claimed the Manta base was a “dirt strip” used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the United States admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with Ecuador .
The Eloy Alfaro base is used to rotate U.S. troops in and out of Columbia, and to house an immense network of private corporations who do most of the military's dirty work in Columbia.
According to the Miami Herald , U.S. mercenaries armed with M-16s have gotten into fire fights with guerrillas in southern Columbia, and American civilians working for Air Scan International of Florida called in air strikes that killed 19 civilians and wounded 25 others in the town of Santo Domingo.
The base is crawling with U.S. Civilians - many of them retired military -- working for Military Professional Resources Inc., Virginia Electronics, DynCorp, Lockheed Martin (the world's largest arms maker), Northrop Grumman, TRW, and dozens of others.
It was U.S. intelligence agents working out of Manta who fingered Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia leader Ricardo Palmera last year, and several leaders of the U.S.-supported coup against Haitian President Bertram Aristide spent several months there before launching the 2004 coup that exiled Aristide to South Africa.
“Privatizing” war is not only the logical extension of the Bush admin's. mania for contracting everything out to the private sector; it also shields the White House's activities from the U.S. Congress.
“My complaint about the use of private contractors,” says U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsy (D-IL), “is their ability to fly under the radar to avoid accountability.”
The role that Manta is playing in the northern part of the continent is what so worries countries in the southern cone about Mariscal Estigarribia.
“Once the United States arrives,”
Argentinean Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez commented about the Paraguay base, “it takes a long time to leave.”
Life at the Triple Frontier
The Bush administration has made the “Triple Frontier Region” where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet into the South American equivalent of Iraq's Sunni Triangle.
According to William Pope, U.S. State Department Counterterrorist Coordinator, the United States has evidence that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed spent several months in the area in 1995.
The U.S. military also says it seized documents in Afghanistan with pictures of Paraguay and letters from Arabs living in Cuidad del Este, a city of some 150,000 people in the tri-border region.
The Defense Department has not revealed what the letters contained, and claims that the area is a hotbed of Middle East terrorism have been widely debunked. The U.S. State Department's analysis of the region - ”Patterns of Terrorism” - found no evidence for the charge, and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study found the area awash with money smuggling, but not terrorism.
It is the base's proximity to Bolivia that causes the most concern, particularly given the Bush administration' s charges that Cuba and Venezuela are stirring up trouble in that Andean nation.
Bolivia has seen a series of political upheavals, starting with a revolt against the privatization of water supplies by the U.S. Bechtel Corp. and the French utility giant, Suez de Lyonnaise des Eaux.
The water uprising was sparked off when Suez announced it would charge between $335 and $445 to connect a private home to the water supply.
Bolivia's yearly per capita gross domestic product is $915. The water revolt, which spread to IMF enforced taxes and the privatization of gas and oil reserves, forced three presidents to resign.
The country is increasingly polarized between its majority Indian population and an elite minority that has dominated the nation for hundreds of years. Six out of 10 people live below the poverty line, a statistic that rises to nine in 10 in rural areas.
Bolivia in Focus
For the Bush administration, however, Bolivia is all about subversion, not poverty and powerlessness.
When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Paraguay this past August, he told reporters that, “There certainly is evidence that both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways.”
A Rumsfeld aide told the press that Cuba was involved in the unrest, a charge that even one of Bolivia's ousted Pres, Carlos Mesa, denies.
A major focus of the unrest in Bolivia is who controls its vast natural gas deposits, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere.
Under pressure from the United States and the IMF, Bolivia sold off its oil and gas to Enron and Shell in 1995 for $263.5 million, less than 1% of what the deposits are worth.
The Movement Toward Socialism's presidential candidate Evo Morales, a Quechuan Indian and trade union leader who is running first in the polls, wants to renationalize the deposits.
Polls indicate that 75% of Bolivians agree with him.
Failed States and Intervention
But the present political crisis over upcoming elections Dec. 18, and disagreements on how to redistribute seats in the legislature, has the United States muttering dark threats about “failed states.”
U.S. General Bantz J. Craddock, commander of Southern Command, told the House Armed Services Committee: “In Bolivia , Ecuador , and Peru , distrust and loss of faith in failed institutions fuel the emergence of anti-U.S., anti-globalization, and anti-free trade demagogues.”
Bolivia has been placed on the National Intelligence Council's list of 25 countries where the United States will consider intervening in case of “instability.”
This is scary talk for Latin American countries.
Would the United States invade Bolivia? Given the present state of its military, unlikely. Would the United States try to destabilize Bolivia's economy while training people how to use military force to insure Enron, Shell, British Gas, Total, Repsol, and the United States continues to get Bolivian gas for pennies on the dollar?
Quite likely.
And would the White House like to use such a coup as a way to send a message to other countries? You bet.
President Bush may be clueless on geography, but he is not bad at overthrowing governments and killing people.
Will it be as easy as it was in the old days when the CIA could bribe truckers to paralyze Chile and set the stage for a coup? Nothing is easy in Latin America anymore.
The United States can bluster about a trade war, but the playing field is a little more level these days. The Mercosur Group of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay embraces 250 million people, generates $1 trillion in goods, and is the third largest trade organization on the planet.
If the American market tightens, the Chinese are more than willing to pick up the slack. A meeting last month of the Ibero-American heads of state turned downright feisty. The assembled nations demanded an end to the “blockade” of Cuba . The word “blockade” is very different than the word “embargo,” the term that was always used in the past. A “blockade” is a violation of international law.
The meeting also demanded that the United States extradite Luis Posada to Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 76 people.
If the United States tries something in Bolivia (or Venezuela), it will find that the old days when proxy armies and economic destabilization could bring down governments are gone, replaced by countries and people who no longer curtsy to the colossus from the north.
=============================
Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus
(online at http://www.fpif. org ) and a lecturer in journalism
at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
=============
For More Information
PT, Left and Right
Emir Sader (October 24, 2005)
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2900
_________________
The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Chat
Usergroups
Calendar
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
