Recently declassified British files reveal how the Foreign Office prepared for a possible military coup in Colombia by secretly training the country’s armed forces in psychological warfare.

In 1970, Britain’s Cold War propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), secretly provided two weeks of counter-insurgency instruction to high-ranking Colombian military officials.

Part of the course was held at the Joint Warfare Establishment at Old Sarum in Wiltshire, where the Colombian officers were given special instruction in psychological operations.

At this time, the British ambassador encouraged the provision of military assistance to Colombia so as to “not find ourselves without lines to the government” in the case of a coup.

Eliminating Subversive Groups

In 1969, General Ricardo Charry Solano, the head of Colombian military intelligence, requested a British military training program for two high-ranking Colombian military officials.

General Charry was already known to British planners. In 1964, he became the first head of Colombia’s intelligence and counter-intelligence unit (BINCI), later known as the Charry Solano Military Intelligence Battalion.

Thereafter, he was a regular recipient of British propaganda material until his death in 1970.

According to Colombian newspaper El Espectador, BINCI was “created as a strategy to persecute and eliminate those who belonged to subversive groups, were from the left, or did not agree with the state model of the time.”

BINCI left a brutal legacy in Colombia. According to a report submitted to Colombia’s Truth Commission, human rights groups were already condemning the unit during the mid-1960s.

Between 1977 and 1998, BINCI was responsible for a series of homicides, forced disappearances, and cases of torture.

A U.S. cable released in 2007, for instance, revealed that during the 1970s BINCI “secretly created and staffed a clandestine terror unit […] under the guise of the American Anti-communist Alliance (AAA or Triple-A). The group was responsible for a number of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations against leftist targets during that period.”

One of the commanders assigned to BINCI during this operation was Mario Montoya, who was pictured in 2008 alongside Foreign Office official Kim Howells.

Coup Preparations

Carlos Lleras Restrepo, president of Colombia from 1966-1970, speaking, at right, in undated photo. (Iván Marulanda, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

General Charry selected two high-ranking Colombian military officials, Colonel Calixto Cascante and Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Botero Restrepo, for secret British training.

While Botero was relatively unknown to British planners, IRD field officer Keith Morris described Cascante as “the most experienced and best qualified intelligence expert the Colombian Armed Forces possess.”

One of Britain’s key objectives in providing the training was to curry favour with the Colombian military in the case of a coup. As British Ambassador to Colombia William H. Young noted, “with the military so much in the news elsewhere in the continent it is worth having a look at some recent moves at the top of the Colombian Armed Forces.”

Colombian soldiers. (Alejoturola, Pixabay)

Young continued, “one of our tasks here must clearly be to keep contact with the Army so that if they do intervene, we will not find ourselves without lines to the government.”Since the beginning of the 1960s, the military had seized power in neighbouring Brazil, Ecuador and Panama, as well as in Argentina and Bolivia. Britain had supported the coup in Brazil and played no small role in propaganda operations designed to insulate the dictatorship from criticism.

He added: “In this context it is very important that we should be able to fulfil an offer we have made to the Army, through General Charry, to send two intelligence officers to the U.K. next year”.

In 1967, Keith Morris, the IRD field officer in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, outlined Britain’s other commercial and strategic interests in Colombia. The country “has considerable untapped resources” and “Communist guerrillas based in Colombia could threaten the Panama Canal (a Colombian Communist Government might renew Colombian claims to Panama) and could easily create chaos in the Venezuelan oil fields which are in the frontier region.”

Secret Training in ‘Psychological Warfare’

London’s Carlton House, original home of the Information Research Department’s propaganda activities. (Suedwester93, Wikimedia Commons)

The Foreign Office agreed to provide Cascante and Botero with three months of training at the School of Military Intelligence in Ashford, Kent, followed by a fortnight of secret training with the IRD.

The training with the IRD was so secretive that not even the Colombian embassy in London was informed about it. Instead, the embassy was told that the officers would be taking a two week “holiday in London.”

Cascante and Botero’s training with the IRD lasted between June 22 and July 3,  1970. “The basic purpose of the course,” wrote senior IRD official Elizabeth Rosemary Allott, “is to equip them with sufficient specialist knowledge to set up a small IRD-type unit within the [Colombian] Ministry of Defence.”

Part of the training included a session at the psychological operations section of the Joint Warfare Establishment at Old Sarum — a military base which offered extensive training in psychological warfare and covert operations.

According to one document produced by the Joint Warfare Establishment, the aim of psychological operations was to:

“Support the efforts of all other measures, military and political, against an enemy, to weaken his will to continue hostilities and to reduce his capacity to wage war.”

It added:

“Psychological warfare relates to an emergency or a state of hostilities, and it is with the further subdivisions of strategic psywar, tactical psywar and psychological consolidation that its employment can best be examined.”

Similar training had already been given to two members of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 1969, and plausibly included instruction in “special interrogation” techniques – an allusion to torture.

Britain & Colombia

Guards outside Buckingham Palace during a rehearsal for the Colombian state visit in 2018. (Defence Imagery, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

British involvement in Colombia’s counter-insurgency conflict thus began long before it became publicly known. This training supplemented wide-ranging U.S. counter-insurgency measures, which during the 1960s involved recommending the use of “counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions [and] as necessary [to] execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities”.

During Tony Blair’s government, British military collaboration with Colombia reached new heights, and seemed to replicate Britain’s secret Cold War military assistance.

In 1999, U.K.  Defence Minister John Spellar told parliament that “advisory visits and information exchanges” had taken place between Colombia and Britain, focussing “on operations in urban theatres, counter-guerrilla strategy, and psychiatry.”

At this time, oil corporation BP was one of Colombia’s largest foreign direct investors. As Declassified U.K.  recently revealed, British military collaboration with Colombia is ongoing, with the army assisting in Colombia’s internal security operations, despite massive human rights abuses.

Declassified UK via consortiumnews.com

By Ben NORTON

Awitness at the heart of the botched invasion of Venezuela in May 2020 has stated that the US and Colombian governments were involved in the regime-change operation. Coup-plotter Yacsy Álvarez said she met with officials from the FBI and DEA in Florida and informed them of their plans.

Álvarez also revealed that Colombia’s President Iván Duque and his powerful mentor Álvaro Uribe, who is closely linked to drug cartels and death squads, were aiding the Venezuelan coup-plotters. Colombia’s top intelligence agency supported the conspirators before and after the attempted invasion, and Álvarez explained that “they knew everything.”

But the Colombian government later turned on Álvarez and her fellow coup-plotters and arrested them. Her lawyer has accused Colombia’s intelligence services of setting a “trap,” so Bogotá could pin the blame on her and her associates and wash its hands of the operation.

The failed invasion, which aimed to violently overthrow Venezuela’s elected President Nicolás Maduro, was spearheaded by a Florida-based private military company called SilverCorp, led by former US Army Special Forces officer Jordan Goudreau.

Goudreau said in a breach-of-contract lawsuit that he had met with two Donald Trump administration officials at the former US president’s National Doral Miami golf resort to discuss the coup plans, and was told that the White House supported it.

The US and Colombian governments both repeatedly denied involvement in the botched invasion, which was called Operation Gideon (Operación Gedeón in Spanish). President Maduro, on the other hand, said Venezuelan intelligence agencies had gathered evidence proving that both Washington and Bogotá backed the operation.

New bombshell testimony from one of the most important figures in the coup plot shows that Maduro’s accusations were indeed correct.

A hardline anti-Chavista Venezuelan, Yacsy Álvarez translated for Goudreau and helped him organize the operation, as the former US Green Beret trained a small army of Venezuelan defectors in camps along Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast.

In video testimony from July, published by the Colombian media, Álvarez said she had a meeting with her lawyers in Tampa, Florida, along with representatives from the FBI and DEA. “I explained to them a lot of the activities and all the stuff that we did for the coup,” Álvarez recalled.

In another testimony from June, Álvarez detailed the Colombian government’s involvement in Operation Gideon.

“President Duque and Álvaro Uribe, they promised us three things, in exchange for one: First of all, they promised a runway, so we can land planes; and a place to train, a camp; and the freedom to cross the border between Venezuela and Colombia,” Álvarez explained. She added, “In exchange, we would fight against the ELN” – a reference to a Colombian socialist guerrilla group.

“I know this because I am the translator between Jordan Goudreau and Cliver Alcalá,” Álvarez said in the video testimony, referring to a former Venezuelan general who fled to Colombia in 2018 and has been involved in numerous coup attempts against Venezuela’s leftist government.

ESCÁNDALO EN COLOMBIA | Este es el testimonio de Yacsy Álvarez, intérprete de Jordan Goudreau, donde reconoce que Iván Duque y Álvaro Uribe participaron en la planificación de la Operación Gedeón que intentó derrocar al pdte. @NicolasMaduro#DiálogoEsPaz pic.twitter.com/bCOsc5F2cL

— VTV CANAL 8 (@VTVcanal8) January 28, 2021

Colombia’s intelligence agency turns on failed Venezuelan coup-plotter

Yacsy Álvarez was much more than just Jordan Goudreau’s translator; she was a crucial figure in plotting the botched May 2020 invasion.

Álvarez helped to traffic large sums of weapons into Colombia for use in Operation Gideon, working closely with former General Cliver Alcalá.

She also connected Jordan Goudreau and two of his former US Green Beret colleagues with the defectors from the Venezuelan military and police who carried out the coup attempt.

According to Álvarez, Colombian intelligence agencies were intimately involved in the operation. And after the invasion failed, Colombian spies spent months protecting Álvarez inside the country. She met with them, and they repeatedly told her they would defend her. But they betrayed her.

In September 2020, in an attempt to save face, the Colombian government decided to arrest a group of Venezuelans who had been involved in the botched invasion and were still living in Colombia. Among those detained was Yacsy Álvarez.

Journalists from the major Colombian TV network Noticias Caracol visited Colombia’s Picaleña prison to interview Álvarez. On January 27, the media outlet published a report that shined more light on Operation Gideon.

The Noticias Caracol report shows that Yacsy Álvarez was in “constant” correspondence with Colombia’s intelligence agencies, who were supporting the Venezuelan coup-plotters.

Álvarez said Colombia’s National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) put her in touch with a contact named “Rosa” and told her, “if you need anything, if you have an emergency, contact them.”

“They told me that everything was okay and everything was fine, that they were protecting my life from the people from FAES [the Venezuelan police’s Special Action Forces], but that here we would be okay, in Colombia,” Álvarez recalled.

She said she personally met with her Colombian intelligence contact in August – just a month before she was arrested. Álvarez was then put in touch with another Colombian intelligence officer named Francklin Sánchez.

“They told me to stay calm, that they’re going to protect you and they’re going to look after you,” Álvarez recalled. “They themselves told me that FAES is looking for me. When I met with them they showed me two photos of the people who were looking for me. He himself told me, ‘Change your SIM card; don’t call so much; be careful.’”

“That is what I don’t understand. If they were protecting me, how are they going to send me to prison on illogical charges?” a bewildered Álvarez asked in the interview.

When she was detained in September, Álvarez said it was totally unexpected. “It’s that everything was supposedly cool, calm, and supposedly everything was supposed to be resolved, and it was an incredible shock. It never once passed through my head that they were going to charge me and arrest me,” she told Noticias Caracol.

“The day that they arrested me, I was going to meet with the man from the DNI,” she added.

Álvarez’s lawyer says she was caught in a “trap” laid by the Colombian intelligence agency. He accused the Colombian government of putting the blame on Álvarez and her co-conspirators in order to draw attention away from its own complicity in the botched invasion.

As evidence of their previous collaboration, Álvarez’s attorney provided Noticias Caracol with a letter from August 2020 that was sent to Colombia’s prosecutor general from the head of terrorism and counter-terrorism for the DNI, Jorge Miguel Padilla Ruiz. The letter shows Padilla acknowledging that the top Colombian intelligence agency had been seeking protection for Álvarez.

The Noticias Caracol report noted that Colombia had faced diplomatic and political pressure due to its involvement in the coup plot. Russia formally raised the issue in a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, questioning Bogotá’s role.

It appears that the Colombian government decided to turn on Álvarez, arresting her and her associates as cover, to give the impression that Bogotá was holding the participants responsible for the coup attempt. Álvarez also appears to be a casualty of a political conflict between the Colombian prosecutor’s office and other state institutions.

More details of Operation Gideon emerge

When the Colombian government arrested the Venezuelans who had been involved in Operation Gideon in September 2020, President Iván Duque tried to distance himself from them, claiming they were “delinquents” who were plotting “destabilization.” But Yacsy Álvarez’s testimony shows this was just PR.

Before and after the invasion went sideways, Álvarez was living in the northern Colombian city of Barranquilla. This was the same place where her associate, the former Venezuelan army general Cliver Alcalá, had defected in 2018.

Alongside Álvarez, Alcalá not only helped in the planning of Operation Gideon, but also initiated a similarly violent plot that the Venezuelan government had exposed just a few months before, in March 2020.

The Washington Post reported in July that Yacsy Álvarez had been working for the Venezuelan multimillionaire Franklin Durán, an erstwhile ally of former President Hugo Chávez who later turned on Venezuela’s leftist government.

Durán helped fund Operation Gideon, and provided logistical support for the coup-plotters. Álvarez also reportedly used Durán’s money to finance Alcalá’s activities.

The Associated Press reported in August that Álvarez had traveled to Miami to meet with the US mercenary Jordan Goudreau and two of his former Special Forces colleagues. In January, the four flew to Colombia on a plane owned by Durán.

Goudreau’s two former Green Beret colleagues, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, participated in the botched invasion of Venezuela on May 3. The men were subsequently arrested by the Venezuelan government and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

thegrayzone.com

By Alan MACLEOD

It is the festive season in Colombia, but not everyone is celebrating. Sunday brought news of the ninetieth massacre of the year. Five people were found dead in Bolívar Department in the north of the country, among them former leftist guerilla Rosa Amalia Mendoza and her infant child. Meanwhile, just hours earlier in the southwestern department of Cauca, the brutally tortured body of 55-year-old Manuel Alonso Villegas was found on a roadside close to his hometown of Miranda.

Both Mendoza and Villegas had been members of the leftist guerilla group the FARC until 2016 when they and many others agreed to permanently lay down their weapons in a historic peace deal that promised to end the country’s decades-long civil war. Mendoza, 25, had reportedly become involved in local activism, founding the South Bolívar Agricultural and Environmental Housing Association. Meanwhile, Villegas had turned his hand to handicrafts, making custom shirts and other items. He was also active in a number of local community agricultural development projects.

Colombia’s 90th massacre of 2020 under the watch of narco-president @IvanDuque: Ex-FARC guerrilla Rosa Mendoza, 25, her newborn baby and 3 others were murdered on Saturday. Mendoza was the 249th signer of the 2016 peace accords to be assassinated. pic.twitter.com/XbDwlIYMtS

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) December 28, 2020

His body was found only 200 meters from the gate of his community’s collective farm, something which locals perceive as a calculated “message.” “The community is really scared,” one local said, in a recording shared with MintPress. This was not the first time the town had experienced such terror. Last year, two brothers had also been murdered. Their mother died of a heart attack at their funeral.

James Jordan, National Co-Coordinator of the Alliance for Global Justice and a friend of Villegas’, spoke to MintPress about the incident. “Manuel was a master woodworker and had a room full of items he was selling, all the way from little stands to put your cell phone on to really nice beds and rocking chairs and cabinets,” he said.

One encounters news of all these killings and atrocities and massacres by the armed forces, paramilitaries and other armed groups. But when you get to know a community and see how eagerly they are working for peace, how enthusiastically they have handed over their guns for plows and sewing machines and woodworking tools, when you visit with these people where they live, share meals together, dance, play soccer, together, the depravity and cruelty of the enemies of the peace becomes visceral. I can still see Manuel’s face and to think of how his life and dreams have been extinguished so brutally is just not acceptable. Not only must we demand his murderers be apprehended and punished, but if we would see justice, we have to make Manuel’s dreams and hopes and spirit of peace our own.”

A secret campaign of targeted assassinations

The 2016 peace deal saw the FARC disband, ending armed struggle and taking up electoral politics under the name of the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force. Then-president Juan Manuel Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the agreement.

However, the violence has only stopped in one direction as precious few of the government-aligned far-right paramilitaries have demobilized. Villegas and Mendoza are the 248th and 249th signatories of the 2016 deal to be murdered to date, suggesting a secret campaign of targeted assassinations. The Common Alternative Revolutionary Force condemned the violence, complaining that Colombia “does not give guarantees to those who [have] bet on peace.”

Relatives of Astrid Conde, a former FARC rebel, at her funeral in Bogota after she was gunned down near her home, March 8, 2020. Ivan Valenciaa | AP

The government has half-heartedly suggested drug trafficking as an explanation for many of the massacres, but few appear convinced. “If drug trafficking were a determining factor in homicides, it would be expected that this phenomenon would occur mostly in the coca-growing municipalities. However, the evidence indicates the opposite,” stated Giovanni Álvarez, Director of the Colombian Investigation and Accusation Unit.

While the homicide rate in Colombia has fallen this year, massacres have, by contrast, greatly increased, as has their bloodiness throughout 2020. Altogether, 375 people have now been murdered in mass killings this year, according to local human rights group Indepaz. “Every massacre is a message,” Manuel Rozental, a physician and longtime activist living in Cauca, not far from Villegas’ home, told MintPress earlier this year. “The massacres are methodic, systematic. It is a job being done as planned.”

Earlier this month, United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called on the government to take “stronger and much more effective action to protect the population” from “appalling and pervasive violence.” “It is the state’s duty to be present throughout the country, implementing a whole range of comprehensive public policies, not only to clamp down on those responsible for the violence, but also to provide basic services and safeguard the fundamental rights of the population,” she added.

Few, however, seem to be expecting a radically different 2021. Colombia has long been the most dangerous place in the world to be an activist. Since 1989, according to human rights group Justice For Colombia, over 3,000 trade unionists have been assassinated, more than in the rest of the world combined. “In almost 100% of these killings, the perpetrators act with impunity,” Jordan said. This afternoon, Norbey Antonio Rivera from Cauca, became the latest social leader to be assassinated.

“Violence fueled by US policies”

Current president Ivan Duque is a strong conservative and a protege of the country’s former leader Álvaro Uribe, a figure who has dominated Colombian politics for most of the twenty-first century. Both Duque and Uribe bitterly opposed the 2016 peace deal, beseeching the public not to back it. Since assuming office in 2018, Duque has attempted to roll back parts of the agreement.

Uribe has an extremely close relationship with both the far-right paramilitary groups and organized drug cartels. While president from 2002 to 2010, he oversaw a years-long wave of murders of peasant, union, and indigenous leaders that resulted in over 10,000 deaths. Dubbed the “False Positives Scandal,” government-controlled forces would kill anyone they wished, later framing their victims as members of the FARC, both clearing their own name and justifying even more security spending. This allowed Uribe to impose his rule on the country, intimidating opponents into silence. His own political campaigns came financed, in turn, with money directly from the notorious Medellin drug cartel.

George W. Bush presents the Medal of Freedom to Alvaro Uribe, Jan. 13, 2009, during a White House ceremony

Paramilitary groups continue to hold considerable influence inside the country to this day. The COVID-induced lockdown has made it even easier for the death squads who still terrorize the country to operate freely, knowing precisely where their targets will be and meeting little organized resistance. Over 1.6 million Colombians have tested positive for coronavirus, with 42,620 deaths reported as of Wednesday — a similar per capita rate to the United States.

Painfully, I have to repeat what so many have said before, that political violence in Colombia is fueled by U.S. government policies. The United States continues to provide weapons and direction for the Colombian armed forces, police, and jails, and it has all too often directly encouraged and even funded the leaders of private death squads. The Trump administration also waged a full scale campaign to undermine Colombia’s peace accords. We must not waste our time hoping the Biden administration might reverse course, we must demand it,” he told MintPress.

mintpressnews.com

Five years later under U.S. President Donald Trump, Cuba is back on the U.S. terror sponsor list, joining Iran, North Korea, Syria and Sudan. The U.S. State Department notes, “Cuban’s refusal to productively engage with the Colombian government demonstrates that is not cooperating with U.S. work to support Colombia’s efforts to secure a just and lasting peace, security and opportunity for its people.”

In other words, Cuba’s diplomatic efforts in the region are clashing with the U.S. plan to maintain its terror ties with the Colombian government – described in 2002 by the former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell as meeting “Washington’s human rights standards.” Powell’s statement preceded a surge of right-wing paramilitary violence against civilians, including killings and forced disappearances. The Colombian army was also involved in false positive killings of civilians – a directive which sought to terrorise the population by increasing the statistics of people killed by government forces. The extrajudicial killings were mostly reported as “enemy combatants killed in action”. Between 2002 and 2010, Colombia’s armed forces executed 10,000 civilians out of a total of 16,724 people which the government claimed were mostly guerrillas.

Given that Colombia meets U.S. standards for state terror, it is no surprise that Cuba, which promotes internationalism and solidarity, is once again a prime target for U.S. imperialism.

Last month, the Cuban embassy in the U.S. was subjected to an armed attack. Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel denounced the terror attack and demanded a thorough investigation from the U.S. government. Bruno Rodriguez, Cuba’s Foreign Minister, has equated the U.S. response with the hostile diplomacy suffered in the past. “From the U.S. government we have only received silence, a silence that we know well, one that has accompanied violence against Cuba by groups based in U.S. territory for years.”

It was due to the U.S. collusion with anti-revolutionary Cuban dissidents in Miami that the Cuban Five were tasked with protecting the nation from terror attacks and sabotage. CIA operatives worked with known terrorists such as Luis Posada Carilles and Orlando Bosch, both of whom were involved in terror attacks against Cuba, notably the bombing of Cubana Airlines in October 1976.

Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, the U.S. has been involved in 581 counts of state terror against Cuba. Not to mention the 638 U.S. attempts to murder Fidel Castro.

Cuba, meanwhile, has pursued its revolutionary goals which run contrary to the U.S. aims for the country and the region. It has maintained its principles – outlined by Fidel – to never instigate any attack against any country in the world. Cuba has repeatedly asserted the principles of internationalist solidarity and remains steadfastly opposed to any form of intervention against any nation.

The same cannot be said for the U.S. – the country which has explicitly portrayed the correlation between humanitarian and financial aid, and human rights violations. While funding right-wing groups to destabilise socialist countries, the U.S. destabilises Cuba not only by maintaining the illegal blockade. To drive a wedge in diplomatic relations, Cuba is back on a list which the U.S. itself should be leading in prime position.

The false designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror is also a direct means of incitement against the island, at a time when Cuba is a leading nation in efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19. Revolutionary principles and terror motives cannot be part of the same agenda. Cuba does not promote violence – hence the U.S. has no grounds upon which to discredit the revolutionary nation.

However, the virus spread is not the only danger for indigenous communities. In Colombia, unknown assailants killed two indigenous people and wounded two others. All victims were in their home observing quarantine. Far-right paramilitaries are suspected to have carried out the attack, with full impunity from the Colombian government due to its reluctance to investigate criminal activity and the targeting of the indigenous populations on their lands.

Indigenous representatives have asked the government to implement a ceasefire to regulate the precarious political situation. Failure to regulate hostilities would exacerbate the already violent conditions under which indigenous communities live, especially with the virus threat looming.

In Ecuador, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorean Amazon (CONFENAIE) closed access to the rainforest for non-indigenous people and companies, demanding a complete halt to industrial activity as a means to prevent the coronavirus from reaching their communities. Two cases of coronavirus – both tourists who visited the forest – have been confirmed, thus raising the alarm and a possible threat of extinction for indigenous people in the area.

Across Latin America, indigenous populations are emulating Ecuador’s approach, with communities taking the initiative to protect themselves by blocking access to their lands and staying on their territory. The action taken by indigenous communities is a form of resistance which governments have criminalised in the past within the context of multinational companies’ exploitation of land and natural resources. For indigenous communities, the current protection for their own well-being to prevent a coronavirus outbreak is also the means through which a statement can be made about land ownership which, in Brazil and Chile for example, will be in direct confrontation with the governments’ plans for industrialisation of the Amazon and the Araucania, respectively.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has taken the coronavirus spread lightly, prioritising profit over health and refusing to set strict quarantine rules. The poor are suffering the most, rationalised the president who has squandered Brazil to neoliberal profits. Bolsonaro has also threatened to fire Health Minister Luis Henrique Mendetta after the latter emphasised the importance of quarantine and refused the president’s rhetoric that coronavirus could be treated with medication used for malaria.

Refuting pandemic evidence constitutes additional dangers to indigenous communities in Brazil’s Amazon. An indigenous woman from the Kokama tribe in Brazil’s Amazon has contracted the coronavirus, raising fears of the spread among the communities. If industries – notably mining and agribusiness companies – disregard quarantine which the president himself is not taking seriously, both the risk of contamination and the risk of violence against indigenous people will be heightened. Undoubtedly, the communities will be on alert for any disruption that could jeopardise their communities’ health. However, with the government offering no protection, it is possible that there will be an escalation of violence committed with complete impunity from the government.

The danger for indigenous communities and environmental activists is unlikely to drop in the coming months. Colombia is one example of exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to target indigenous people. For right-wing governments in the region, the pandemic presents an opportunity to combine two deadly weapons – a virus and state impunity – to criminalise and target indigenous communities and their activism. Always elusive, governments’ accountability in this period is likely to become even more inaccessible through state and multinational violence cooperation, if there is no complete cessation of incursions into indigenous terrain.

Whitney WEBB, Alan MACLEOD

Many of the massive anti-neoliberal protest movements that exploded across the globe last year have pressed on into 2020, especially those that rose up throughout Latin America. Many of those demonstrations — clearly newsworthy due to their enormous size, composition, and motives — were and continue to be ignored by prominent English language news outlets, essentially creating a media blackout of these movements.

This trend has been particularly magnified in Latin American countries whose current governments are closely allied with the United States, with Colombia, in particular, standing out. Despite being faced with protests from hundreds of thousands of people fueled by anger over state corruption, proposed neoliberal reforms and a spike in murders of social leaders, the unrest in Colombia has garnered remarkably little international media attention.

In contrast, U.S.-supported right-wing movements attempting to topple socialist governments like those in Venezuela and Bolivia have received a great deal of coverage and open support from both the media and the political class.

It is certainly telling that international media outlets largely ignored the protests of Colombia’s teachers, who were motivated to act largely due to a dangerous wave of violence targeting them incited by the government itself, leading to several murders and hundreds of death threats in the span of just a few months. Colombia’s President Iván Duque’s political mentor Álvaro Uribe, himself president between 2002 and 2010, accused the country’s teachers of brainwashing the youth: “Teachers only teach them to yell and to insult, not how to debate, warping their minds,” he said.

That story was overlooked in the media, likely due to the close ties between the country’s conservative government and the United States. Colombia remains the continent’s top recipient of American military aid, despite the fact that the U.S. government itself has disclosed ties between Colombia’s military, former President Uribe and the illegal drug trade.

Colombian teachers protest to defend their lives

Of the recent protests that have taken place in Colombia, the strikes led by Colombian teachers and one of the main teachers’ unions in the country — the Colombian Federation of Education Workers (Fecode) — have received almost no coverage in English-language media. The Fecode-led strikes revolve not around demands for better wages or increased funding for public education but around the slew of death threats and recent murders that have targeted Colombia’s education workers.

“Our teachers continue to be threatened and attacked,” said Fecode head Nelson Alcaron, “This government is indolent. It isn’t taking measures to protect their lives,” he added, noting that 240 have been threatened this year alone. “We live in a country that kills children, that kills social leaders, with a government that is against peace…That is why we have to change something. We cannot continue to live like this,” another protester said.

Though the fact that Colombian teachers are protesting in defense of their very lives is clearly newsworthy, adding to the importance of the demonstrations is the fact that these murders and death threats are closely tied to Colombia’s current government led by President Iván Duque. Duque and his political allies have incited violence against the country’s teachers, and those affiliated with Fecode in particular. The president’s political party, the Democratic Center, have stepped up their rhetoric towards education workers, asserting that teachers’ unions, namely Fecode, “must disappear” while some Democratic Center politicians have moved to criminalize teacher protests and strikes and fire any teachers who make political statements deemed non-essential to the subject they teach.

As these verbal attacks have grown, teachers in Colombia have been increasingly targeted, especially after Fecode-led strikes and demonstrations took place during the latter half of last year denouncing a new wave of threats towards teachers which they assert are linked to Duque’s political base. One demonstration in August was partially spurred by the brutal murder of school principal Orlando Gómez, who was abducted from the school where he worked and then murdered after having received numerous death threats for his educational work in the violence-plagued Cauca region.

As noted by Fecode during a 24-hour teacher strike “in defense of the lives of teachers” that took place last September, 10 teachers were murdered and another 700 received death threats during Duque’s first year in office. Fecode claimed the murders and death threats were directly related to “a systematic social media campaign of harassment and outright lies against educators and their students” led by Democratic Center activists and leaders.

Yet, since 2020 began, the wave in violence against teachers has continued to grow. In the first two weeks of February alone, one teacher was murdered, a regional coordinator of Fecode survived an assassination attempt, an entire school was forced to close down due to death threats made against teachers, and 15 Fecode-linked teachers were forced to flee the town where they lived and worked. Last week, death threats were sent to an additional 25 teachers ahead of their school’s plan to commemorate a massacre committed by a paramilitary group 25 years ago. In response to the wave of violence and threats, Fecode announced another strike to take place in coming weeks to both highlight and denounce the dangerous situation faced by Colombian teachers.

Western media ignore largest strike in over 40 years

One reason for the jump in violence targeting Fecode and Colombian teachers may be due to the fact that their demonstrations helped to spur much larger protests that have united diverse factions and groups in Colombian society in their opposition to various right-wing policies of the Colombian government. Following the Fecode-led demonstrations in August and September of last year, a massive national strike and anti-government protests saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets last November amid a backdrop of anti-government demonstrations in several other Latin American countries, including Chile and Ecuador. Today, seven million Colombian students have been left without teachers amid a massive strike.

The national strike was joined, not just by Fecode, but by the country’s labor unions, student groups, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities and farmers, among others. It was the largest national strike to take place in Colombia since the late 1970s and was met by the Duque government with curfews, border closures, rubber bullets and teargas, with at least one person killed by a police projectile.

Since November, however, the national strikes and general anti-government sentiment have continued, with national strikes and related demonstrations taking place in December and January. Another strike is planned for Friday and a separate strike is scheduled to take place in March. Protest organizers asserted last month that these actions will continue “until something changes,” with the high rate of murders targeting social leaders remaining one of the main complaints of those demonstrating.

While the protests have gripped Colombia, they have barely been reported in the Western press, with coverage of the monthslong rebellion garnering barely a few, disinterested mentions. CNN, for example, appears not to have discussed the events for over two months. When mentioned at all, the idea that the protests are largely the result of “foreign meddling” (CNN) from Venezuela or “Russian trolls” (New York Times) is often floated.

In comparison, there was widespread coverage of and immediate support for the right-wing protests and coup attempt that brought down Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales in November, with media falsely claiming he had resigned (CBS News) due to election fraud (New York Times). Collectively, corporate media welcomed the fall of a supposed “full-blown dictatorship” (Miami Herald) and the “restoration of democracy” (The Economist).

State-backed terror and “low-intensity democracy” in Colombia

One reason for the lack of media coverage likely owes to the decades-long U.S.-Colombia alliance. In order to cover the popular movements against Duque’s government, the media would have to acknowledge the gravity of Colombia’s current situation, which would then increase international pressure on Duque and his administration to address the issues that motivate the protests, something the U.S. government does not support.

Duque was elected president in May 2018 to much fanfare from the Western press. The election took place under a generalized state of terror, his leftist challenger Gustavo Petro narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, while many of his supporters were less lucky. This was the first election in which the left felt they had a chance of gaining power since the assassination of President Jorge Gaitan in 1947, an event that sparked decades of civil war. Right-wing paramilitary death squads linked to the government issued public death threats, promising to kill those who voted for Petro. In addition to the intimidation tactics, there was also widespread vote buying; American human rights lawyer Daniel Kovalik, an election observer, was mistaken for a voter and offered money to vote for Duque. There were over 1,000 official electoral fraud complaints.

Despite this, corporate media heralded the flawed election as a victory for democracy, downplaying or flatly ignoring its failings. For example, CNN stressed that “though there have been isolated incidents of violence related to the election, they have been minimal,” suggesting that the only fear voters had was that Petro would swing the country “dangerously to the left.” Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera creatively told its readers that there was a “taboo” against voting for leftists in Colombia. After his victory, Donald Trump invited Duque to the White House where he said that it was “a great honor” to be “working very closely” with him, especially on regime change in Venezuela. In comparison, the Venezuelan election taking place at the same time, overseen and praised by 150 international observers was written off as a “heavily rigged” (New York Times) “farce cementing autocracy” (Huffington Post) and the “coronation of a dictator” (The Independent), despite the lack of evidence of fraud.

Duque, as previously mentioned, is the protege of Álvaro Uribe, a man once ranked by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency “on a list of 104 important narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels” and who was alleged to have served as the “head of Colombia’s paramilitary groups” by former paramilitary members prior to and during his time as president.

Under Uribe, the government carried out a years-long series of extrajudicial murders and massacres that resulted in over 10,000 deaths. Dubbed the “False Positives Scandal,” Colombian forces would murder anyone they wished, later claiming their victims were members of the leftist revolutionary army the FARC. Through this practice, the military could impose its rule across the country through terror and by disappearing those who opposed it. One member of Duque’s Democratic Center party, Senator Carlos Meisel, recently called for this Uribe-era program to be reinstated.

This policy was part of a longstanding partnership with the United States to control the country through force. Thousands of soldiers and other security forces have been trained at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA (now rebranded as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security). There, recruits are taught that communist subversion is a cancer that must be immediately eradicated through force to ensure freedom across the Americas. They are instructed on torture techniques based off Gestapo manuals. Signs of communism, leaked instruction books show, include criticizing the judiciary or police, unrest among labor or student groups, striking, questioning the government, circulating petitions and refusing to pay rents and taxes. Indeed, as historian Doug Stokes found, one manual entitled Revolutionary War, Guerrillas and Communist Ideology noted that participation in the democratic process was a dangerous sign of subversion, as communists can “resort to subverting the government by means of elections in which the insurgents cause the replacement of an unfriendly government official to one favourable to their cause.”

The forces trained by the School of the Americas took the message to heart and made Colombia by far and away the most dangerous country in the world to be an activist. According to the United Nations, a minimum of 107 human rights defenders were killed in 2019, with the number of those killed in 2020 already hitting double digits, something the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights describes as a “staggering,” “vicious and endemic cycle of violence and impunity.” More trade unionists are killed in Colombia than all other countries combined, with over 2,000 killed between 1991 and 2006, alone according to Amnesty International. Meanwhile, 52 journalists have been killed since 1992, compared to just five in Venezuela (none of whom were killed by the government).

Uribe and other presidents partnered closely with the U.S. in its “Plan Colombia” program, a campaign ostensibly aimed at reducing drug production but whose real target was the local population and leftist militias such as FARC. Colombia has some of the most fertile, unspoiled land on the planet, and underneath lies a mountain of oil and valuable minerals. Under the guise of eradicating coca production, the U.S. and its local partners have forced millions of people off their ancestral land, impoverishing them in the process. And if they refuse to leave, they are often killed and labeled as FARC terrorists afterward.

As a consequence of near-constant violence, Colombia has the largest internally displaced population in the world. 16 percent of the country — some 7.7 million people — have been forced from their homes in a massively underreported genocide, a disproportionate amount of them from black or indigenous backgrounds. For context, Syria’s displaced population numbers 6.2 million.

Yet because Colombia has for decades been a close ally of the United States and Europe, the country continues to be referred to as a “democracy.” This has led to academics coming up with new phrases to explain the apparent paradox, including “low-intensity democracies,” “undemocratic democracies” and even “genocidal democracies.”

The fact that so many groups — students, unionists, victims of violence, farmers and teachers — are on the streets in such numbers protesting today is a testament to their fortitude, given the long history of violence meted out by the government and its death squads. But like in Chile, young and the disadvantaged are beginning to break the spell and lose their fear. While the outcome is far from certain, the conviction of those protesting is not in doubt.

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After the socialist tide swept Latin America, progressive governments backed the Palestinian plight and eschewed close relations with Israel. Some progressive leaders, including Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua severed relations with Israel over its maltreatment of the Palestinian population of Gaza. With Morales being recently overthrown by a right-wing military coup and Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, on the political ropes due to crippling US-led sanctions, Israeli counter-insurgency mongers are frequently seen in Latin American capitals where right-wing, even neo-Nazi influenced regimes govern. Using almost Talmudic logic, the Israeli government believes that in order to battle pro-Palestinian governments having friendly relations with Iran it is acceptable to deal with the likes of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who, in the past, has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Israel’s security legacy in Latin America stands as an infamous record of supporting genocidal dictators. With the advent of the “Socialist Spring” in Latin America, the Israeli death merchants largely adopted a lower profile or sought out new prospects in Africa, the Balkans, and South Asia. With Bolivia’s Morales being the last of the “Socialist Spring” leaders falling in the “southern cone” of South America, Israeli counterinsurgency merchants saw a new market open when the Bolivian junta’s Interior Minister, Arturo Murillo, welcoming Israeli assistance to beef up the capabilities of his newly-formed death squad, the “Anti-Terrorist Group” (GAT), which he said was aimed at battling “terrorists.” In typical fascist parlance, “terrorists” in this case, are Bolivians loyal to ousted President Morales, who, after a brief exile in Mexico, now enjoys political asylum in Argentina, as well as Morales’s fellow native indigenous peoples: the Aymara (Morales’s ethnicity) and the Quechua, Chiquitano, Guaraní, and Moxeño.

Interior Minister Murillo’s reason for choosing the Israelis as his security advisors was stated in an interview with Reuters. He said, “They’re used to dealing with terrorists. They know how to handle them.” Murillo was, of course, referring to Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinian people, a record of inhuman treatment that Israeli military and intelligence companies have managed to package, with equipment and advisers, as an export commodity. Murillo’s commitment to establishing an Israeli-style surveillance state in Bolivia was made clear in his warning to a group of Argentine human rights officials who arrived in Bolivia to see, first hand, the human rights abuses directed against members of Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and indigenous peoples. Murillo warned the Argentines and other foreign officials in declaring: “We recommend these foreigners who are arriving to be careful. We are looking at you. We are following you. There is no tolerance for terrorism, sedition or armed movements. Zero tolerance.” The warning is practically a carbon copy of that delivered by Israel to international aid workers who have tried to bring relief supplies to the people of Gaza.

The Israelis had the advantage of quickly arriving in Bolivia to offer their services from neighboring Brazil. Brazil’s President Bolsonaro and his foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, are Christian fundamentalist fanatic supporters of Israel. Both are disdainful of Muslims, including the Palestinians, who, they claim, are not a people with a right to nationhood. Araujo’s background should be anathema to Israelis. However, because Binyamin Netanyahu government decided to create a Faustian alliance with all enemies of Palestinians and Muslims, even if they are neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Israel has made common cause with individuals like Bolsonaro and Araújo and it is assisting them in their genocide of Amazonian Indians.

Israel has no problem with maintaining close relations with Araújo, even though his father, Henrique Fonseca de Araújo, served as the Attorney General of Brazil between 1975 and 1979 under the Brazilian dictatorship of General Ernesto Geisel, the son of German immigrants. Together, Attorney General Araújo and Geisel prevented the extradition to Germany of Gustav Franz Wagner, the deputy commander of the infamous Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Sobibor’s only reason for existence was to exterminate Jews. Known as “The Beast,” Wagner was responsible for the extermination of 200,000 Jewish inmates. After the war, Wagner escaped from Italy to Syria, and, ultimately, with a Brazilian passport issued under the name Gunther Mandel, escaped to Brazil. Attorney General Araújo’s refusal to extradite Wagner to Germany, where he faced a death sentence, did not protect “The Beast” for very long. In 1980, Wagner was found dead under suspicious circumstances in Sao Paulo. A knife was driven into his chest.

Israel also maintains a close security relationship with Paraguayan President Mario Abdo Benitez. Benitez delighted the Israelis earlier this year when he announced that Paraguay recognized Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah as terrorist groups. In May 2018, Paraguay further pleased Israel when Benitez’s predecessor, Horacio Cartes announced that Paraguay would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Relations soured after Benitez changed announced in September 2018 that the embassy would be moved back to Tel Aviv. The announcement coincided with the opening of a Palestinian embassy in Asuncion. Israel was furious and it closed its embassy in Asuncion in protest. Since Benitez declared Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations, relations between Israel and Paraguay have been patched up. Israel does not mind Benitez’s family background, just as it overlooks that of Brazil Foreign Minister Araújo.

Benitez is the son of Mario Abdo Benítez Sr., the private secretary of Paraguay’s military dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner. The son of a Bavarian immigrant to Paraguay, Stroessner welcomed two Nazi refugees to Paraguay: Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death,” who performed grotesque experiments on the inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and Edward Roschmann, the equally-infamous “Butcher of Riga.” Roschmann, who oversaw the mass murder of Latvian Jews in Riga, entered Paraguay from Argentina with papers bearing the alias name of Federico Wegener. Mengele was granted citizenship by Stroessner under the name of José Mengele.

One of the most shameful examples of Israeli assistance to commit genocide was in the 1980s in Guatemala. There, Israeli advisers, using advanced surveillance equipment, helped dictator Efrain Rios Montt, a member of the California-based Christian fundamentalist cult called the “Church of the Word,” to carry out the elimination of entire Mayan Indian villages. One million Mayan Indians were affected by the Israeli inspired and supported genocide. Not only did Israelis help Montt murder tens of thousands of Mayans, but it helped him gain power in his 1982 military coup. Similar Israeli assistance was seen in military coups in Venezuela in 2002, Honduras in 2009, and Paraguay in 2012. In 1983, the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” reported that Israel “taught the Guatemalans how to build an airbase. They set up their intelligence network, tried and tested on the West Bank and Gaza, designed simply to beat the ‘Guerilla’.” A Guatemalan court later tried and convicted Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. Yet, none of Montt’s Israeli collaborators faced punishment. One of Israel’s security advisers in Guatemala at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Amatzia Shuali, reportedly said, “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit.”

In the style of the Nazis, Montt’s military shot every resident of the Mayan village of Dos Erres and burned it to the ground. Israeli-made Galil rifles were found at the scene of the war crime. Today, some of the grandchildren of the victims of Montt’s war find themselves on the receiving end of Israeli surveillance technology sold to the United States as they attempt to seek asylum at the US southern border.

It may become harder for members of US academia to research, write about, or discuss Israeli support for genocidal regimes in Latin America. On December 11 of this year, Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting federal funds to US colleges and universities that permit any criticism of Israel and its policies. Such campus activities are now labeled by the White House as “antisemitic.”

Although there are attempts by the right-wing in Latin America and the United States to turn Bolivian progressive president Evo Morales into a Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro, and thus, worthy of sanctions on him and his government, there are clear indications that Morales won the election for his fourth term in receiving 47.07% to 36.51% for former President Carlos Mesa in the first round of the presidential election held on October 19^th and 20^th. Morales’s 10.56 edge over Mesa gave him a 10 percent lead with over 40 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be declared winner of the first round.

Although the usual suspects in the Organization of American States (OAS) and European Union, reinforced by right-wing US senator Marco Rubio of Florida – Washington’s main lobbyist for all of Latin America’s oligarchs and narcotics lords – demanded a second-round election, Morales and his Movement for Socialism party was confident of their victory to agree an OAS audit of the vote tally. However, Mexico’s government warned the OAS not to interfere in the Bolivian election. Since the advent of the Trump administration, the OAS has become more vocal against progressive governments in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, all of which have been hit with crippling US economic and travel sanctions.

The Trump administration and its right-wing allies in the OAS and the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia cried foul and demanded a second-round vote. Those questioning Morales’s victory are the same corporatist quarters that propelled Bolsonaro, Pinera, and Argentine president Mauricio Macri into power. Morales’s traditional political enemies in provinces like Beni and Santa Cruz, hit the streets with protests. It is well-known that the Bolsonaro government in Brazil has provided political and financial support to Morales’s right-wing opposition, the Civic Community alliance.

Rather than rely on military coups to overthrow popularly-elected progressive governments – a tactic long used by the Central Intelligence Agency in the Western hemisphere – the new architects of “regime change” in Langley, Virginia have discovered “lawfare,” the use of corrupt judges and prosecutors, to bring falsified criminal charges of corruption against leaders opposed by Washington.

In Brazil, lawfare was used to justify the impeachment and removal from office of progressive President Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment on a cooked-up bribery conviction of her progressive predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula’s imprisonment and ineligibility to run for president in 2018 opened the door for the victory of Bolsonaro in the presidential election. The selection by Bolsonaro of Sergio Moro as his justice minister exposed the entire corruption that is inherent with Moro and Brazil’s far-right. Moro was the federal prosecutor who waged lawfare actions against Lula and Rousseff in charging them with involvement in the “Operation Car Wash” bribery scandal involving the Brazilian construction company, Odebrecht SA. It is more than apparent that Car Wash was a lawfare tactic developed by the CIA to overturn progressive leaders in Latin America.

A ruling by Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court in November of this year could overturn Lula’s conviction. If that occurs, Lula will be free to challenge Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election. Bolsonaro, who plans to run for re-election, has been trying, along with Moro, to unconstitutionally and illegally influence the Supreme Court decision. Workers Party leaders Lula and Rousseff were not the only progressive leaders painted with the wide brush of the Car Wash probe. Others targeted include Chile’s former president, Michelle Bachelet and Argentina’s former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

The right-wing plot to tarnish Mrs. Kirchner with Car Wash was a complete failure. Although Macri, with the support of the administration of his old business partner, Trump, and the Bolsonaro regime, launched a propaganda campaign against Kirchner, her leftist Frente de Todos party scored a major win over Macri in the October 27 presidential election in Argentina. The victory of leftist presidential candidate Alberto Fernandez and his vice-presidential running mate, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (no relation to the presidential candidate), sent a message to Latin America and Washington that the rightward tilt of the hemisphere was in check. In one of his first statements after his victory, Alberto Fernandez called on Brazil to release Lula from prison. A revitalized progressive left bloc emerged with Argentina’s President Fernandez and Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrado as its cornerstones.

In Uruguay, the leftist Frente Amplio, which has ruled Uruguay for over 14 years, saw its presidential candidate, Daniel Martinez, with a plurality of the vote over his right-wing challenger, Luis Lacalle Pou. Since neither candidate achieved a 50 percent threshold, the election will go to a second round on November 24. Uruguayans have been alarmed by Pou’s willingness to reconstitute the country’s national security force. During past military rule, such a force was responsible for countless human rights violations.

The accusations in Chile against former President Bachelet came as her right-wing billionaire successor, Pinera, was coping with massive street protests that resulted in a state of emergency declaration. Pinera’s security forces killed 11 protesters. The heavy-handed response was reminiscent of the darkest days of military junta rule of dictator General Augusto Pinochet, someone who Pinera generally admires. The timing of the charges against Bachelet was extremely suspicious and appeared to undermine Bachelet’s position as the head of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and her condemnation of the human rights abuses by Pinera’s government.

The protests in Chile were mirrored by those in Ecuador, where President Moreno, who was named Lenin because of his father’s great admiration for Vladimir Lenin, had decided to break with the socialist policies of his predecessor, Correa, but had instituted crippling austerity measures, including slashing fuel subsidies, which were all designed to placate the International Monetary Fund and foreign creditors. The protests against Moreno were so intense, the government was forced to temporarily relocate government functions from Quito, the capital, to Guayaquil amid a declaration of a state of emergency. Meanwhile, the faltering Moreno regime continues its attempts to have former President Correa extradited from Belgium, where he has political asylum. As Moreno’s hold on power became shakier, his regime grew closer to the US military while Moreno began making wild accusations about Correa “spying” on him from Belgium.

Another US puppet, President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras, was faced with massive labor and student protests after his younger brother, Tony Hernandez , was convicted of drug trafficking charges by a US federal court in New York. During the trial, several witnesses linked the Honduran president to his brother’s drug trafficking cartel. The US has ensured that CIA-approved puppets like Hernandez have maintained political control of Honduras ever since a CIA-backed coup toppled progressive president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Evidence presented during the trial implicated not only President Hernandez, but also his predecessor, Porfirio Lobo, who was installed after the 2009 CIA coup against Zelaya. Former President Zelaya and supporters of his leftist LIBRE party were among several protesters on the streets of Tegucigalpa calling for Hernandez’s resignation.

Protests also swept Haiti, with demonstrators calling for the corrupt president, Jovenel Moise, to step down. As with Honduras, Haiti has been subjected to repeated CIA-backed coups, with two directed against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Recent local elections in Colombia, governed by the far-right President Ivan Duque, were marred by the assassination of one of several leaders of the de-mobilized FARC leftist guerilla movement. The latest victim was Alexander Parra. Although a peace agreement was negotiated between the FARC and Duque’s more centrist predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, the recipient of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, Duque and his narco-trafficker ally, former President Alvaro Uribe, have done their best to scuttle the FARC peace deal by assassinating its leaders.

Election results from throughout Colombia were devastating for Duque; his political godfather, Uribe; and Uribistas tied to right-wing paramilitary groups and drug cartels. In Medellin, an Uribista stronghold, Daniel Quintero, an opponent of Duque and Urbe, was elected mayor. Reformist mayors also won mayor’s races in Bogota, which saw its first female mayor, Claudia Lopez, elected on the Green Alliance ticket. A progressive party, Fuerza Ciudadana, won the governorship in the right-wing paramilitary stronghold of Magdalena province.

Trump and his fellow neo-fascists in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, and Colombia were hoping for a right-wing tide to continue to sweep through the Western Hemisphere. The news from Buenos Aires, La Paz, Bogota, and Montevideo suggests that the region’s right-wingers can put away their champagne bottles.

Over the past three years, over 17 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations have signed onto the new operating framework of the Belt and Road Initiative which extends far beyond the limited China-to-Europe corridor which many presumed it to be when it was announced in 2013. With its focus on long term planning and interconnectivity, China is already number one in vital infrastructure investments globally and while not number one in overall trade in the Americas, has now produced over six times more investment into Latin American energy infrastructure than the World Bank.

This new paradigm has been a breath of fresh air for many nations of the south that have been gripped by Western drug money laundering, poverty, debt slavery and organized crime which has been kept in place by over four decades of IMF-World Bank dictates enforced by London/Harvard trained economists positioned as local governors over the bodies of nationalist leaders.

In spite of the 17 nations on board the BRI, the big four powers (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia) have not yet joined, which has been a frustrating obstacle for the greater vision of integrated infrastructure to blossom. However, in the past few weeks, even this has begun to change.

Colombia and the BRI

At a July 29-31 state visit to Beijing, Colombia’s President Iván Duque embraced a long term perspective with China (though not fully joining the BRI) when he spoke to 200 Chinese businessmen saying that China could help “transform Colombia into a food basket for the world” and that Colombia should be China’s “golden gate” into South America. He invited China to help with projects to develop infrastructure, education and science calling for “a Colombia-China initiative for the next 40 years”.

The specific program to transform Colombia was outlined by Duque as a “productive corridor” connecting the Eastern High Plains with the Pacific Port of Buenaventura through transportation corridors across the Andes, and a Sea Motorway 2 connecting the Gulf of Uraba in the Caribbean and several oil fields. While only 8 million hectares of agricultural land are currently used, Colombia’s full potential of 24 hectares will become developed once this initiative is built.

On the BRI itself, Duque said that it should be “the conceptual umbrella for this project to materialize”.

As the infamous 1999 photograph of the President of the NYSC embracing Raul Reyes (FARC narco-terrorist leader) demonstrates, Wall Street and London financiers have literally kept Colombia under the clutches of narco-traffickers for decades, resulting in a culture of organized crime, terrorism, and impoverishment that only the BRI can solve. In the 21^st century over two million Colombians have no access to electricity. With Colombia’s involvement in the BRI, every Andean nation in South America would be on board.

A Sea Change for Argentina

Since Mauricio Macri’s December 2015 victory, Argentina took a slide into insanity. At one time representing a powerful force of opposition to the international financiers and vulture funds under the Peronist government of the late Nestor Kirchner and his wife Christina, Argentina under Macri has once again become a bankers’ fiefdom which brought the nation slavishly back under the whip of the financial oligarchy. Under Macri, austerity became the new norm and payment of debts the new priority for Argentina, while the vast majority of large scale infrastructure projects begun by President Kirchner were cancelled or postponed.

Somehow Macri was surprised that his monetarist strategies failed to win him the love of the people as unemployment continued to rise, and inflation topped 55% with no hope in sight.

The effects of the population’s suffering under the IMF’s monetarist diktats resulted in a surprise August 12 pre-election vote which gave Macri’s opponent Alberto Fernandez 47% of the votes (compared to a mere 33% for sitting President). Although this was only a pre-election vote, Fernandez demonstrated that he will likely become the President in the November elections. What is also notable is that Fernandez (a former Chief of Staff to Nestor Kirchner) is partnered on the Front for All ticket with his Vice-Presidential running mate Christina Fernandez de Kirchner herself. Fernandez and Kirchner promise to re-organize the unpayable IMF debts and end the age of austerity. Of course, speculators showed their disapproval of this return to a national power by collapsing the Argentina peso by 15% on August 13 and threatening more punishment if the “populist Peronists” are elected.

With Kirchner’s immanent return to power, many presume that the burgeoning golden age of China-Russian relations will blossom once more. Under Kirchner’s leadership a powerful “Argentina-China Integral Strategic Alliance” was formed along with 20 major treaties between the nations.

Some of the projects begun under Kirchner which Macri wasn’t able to kill involve the $4.1 billion Patagonia Hydroelectric project where two dams are being built on the Santa Cruz River, and also the $8 billion plan to build two nuclear power plants (one Canadian CANDU and one Chinese design). The dam represents the first hydro project built in over a quarter century and even thought Argentina was the first Latin American country to go nuclear with the Atucha I plant in 1974, very little was permitted since then.

Neo-Liberal Fractures in Brazil

While the current right wing regime under Jair Bolsonaro has turned away from a friendly relationship with China on orders from Washington, Chinese-sponsored projects begun under Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff were not so easy to kill with Brazil still receiving the second highest investment of Chinese capital amounting to $54 billion. Some BRI-related projects underway currently involve the Ultra High Voltage electricity transport system under construction since 2011 by China’s State Grid subsidiary in Brazil. This incredible project also known as the Electricity Superhighway carries high voltage electricity with very little loss of power over 2000 km from the northern Belo Monte Dam to the impoverished and populated southeast providing cheap electricity to 22 million people.

In agriculture, China imported 50 million tons of soybeans (80% of Brazil’s soy exports) and 560 tons of beef (40% of total) in 2018, and this is only expected to rise.

The New Development Ban is also setting up operations in Brazil and will begin emitting funds outside of the control of the IMF/World Bank shortly and Brazil’s hosting of the 11^th BRICS Summit on November 13 is sure to dovetail with Chinese and Russian investment strategies in the South. Under a re-organized financial system, such new institutions as the New Development Bank, the Silk Road Investment Fund, Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank would take on leading roles in providing long term productive credit for projects globally.

When responding to Bolsonaro’s attacks on Kirchner and Fernandez of Argentina, Fernandez responded saying “with Brazil, we are going to get on splendidly. Brazil will always be our main partner. Bolsonaro is a passing phase in the life of Brazil- just as Macri is a passing phase in the life of Argentina”.

A Word on Mexico

Mexico gained a huge victory with the election of nationalist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2017 who has fought for a Mexico/Central America Development Plan since his election as an alternative to the current IMF/World Bank paradigm. This plan which is very much in harmony with the Belt and Road model involves southern Mexico and the “northern triangle” of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras which would see the construction of a cross Isthmus and North-South railroad system and ports along with a new electricity grid and agro industrial developments for all four nations.

Although AMLO’s impulses favor joining the BRI, immense pressure has withheld this leap from occurring to this point.

Green Depopulation or a New Growth Paradigm

After Panama became the first Latin American nation to join the BRI in 2017, Uruguay followed suite, and was quickly joined by Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador, Chile, and Costa Rica. Caribbean nations on board involve Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic and Antigua-Barbuda.

Western assets embedded in the LAC political structures are not only easy to identify due to their rejection of the BRI and embrace of Wall Street, but also for their blatant support of “green” energy strategies which seek to shut down carbon emitting oil, coal and even nuclear power.  An example of this hive was made evident by coalition of former energy secretaries of Argentina that wrote a memo calling for a scrapping of nuclear in preference to a total wind/solar strategy in obedience to the oligarchs that wrote COP21 and the Green New Deal. For any thinking citizen, this is merely another name for depopulation.

Accurately capturing the principle of what is happening across South America and the world as a whole, Costa Rica’s ambassador to China recently said that China is “creating a new paradigm for development which may be as important perhaps as the Bretton Woods was after World War II” and that China is “calling upon the whole world to design together what the New Paradigm is going to be”.

With more than a “wink and a nod” from their collegial “caudillo del Norte,” Donald Trump, seven right-wing South American leaders have launched the Forum for the Progress of South America (PROSUR), which aims to eradicate all vestiges of Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chavez, and Brazil’s wrongfully-imprisoned past president, Inacio Lula da Silva. PROSUR seeks to replace the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which was created by Chavez and Lula in 208 to counteract traditional American hegemonism in Latin America enforced by the neo-colonial Organization of American States (OAS).

Leaders from seven right-wing South American governments – Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, and Guyana – recently gathered in Santiago, Chile, under the auspices of billionaire Chilean president Sebastian Pinera, to sign an accord creating PROSUR. One of the goals of the new bloc is to integrate the defense, security, and crime prevention infrastructures of the members. If that sounds like an embryonic recreation of the infamous Operation CONDOR of the 1960s and 70s, it very much has such potential. CONDOR was an alliance of the intelligence and security services of South American military dictatorships, nurtured by the CIA, that is believed to have been responsible for 60,000 murders, 30,000 “disappeared,” 400,000 wrongful imprisonments, and countless acts of torture.

Bolivia and Uruguay, members of UNASUR that support Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, against the Central Intelligence Agency-groomed and -installed presidential pretender, Juan Guaido, did not join PROSUR, and, instead, elected observer status in the group.

Pinera and Colombia’s right-wing and narco/paramilitary-backed president, Ivan Duque, were the architects behind PROSUR. Seeing a chance to bury the legacies of Chavez and Lula, the two presidents invited all but Maduro’s government to join the pact.

Ecuador, which joined PROSUR, served as the headquarters of UNASUR. In 2014, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa opened the $65 million headquarters in Quito. Today, with right-wing governments and, as with the cases of Brazil and Colombia, far-right wing governments, taking over most of South America, the UNASUR headquarters sits largely abandoned. Moreno ordered UNASUR to abandon the building and promised to turn it into a university. After UNASUR Secretary General Ernesto Samper left his post in 2017, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru suspended their membership in the bloc, dealing it a fatal blow.

Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno quickly abandoned his commitment to the ideals of Correa, Lula, and Chavez and embraced the caudillo politics of the right-wing South America presidents. Moreno, whose first name is in honor of Vladimir Lenin, plunged a knife into UNASUR when he said it was the creation of “perverse politicking of the self-styled 21st-century socialists.” After Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru withdrew from UNASUR, with the obvious prodding of the Trump administration, the stage was set for creating a new right-wing and pro-US alliance of neo-fascists, grifters, and oligarchs.

Moreno, who served as Correa’s vice president, has abandoned the socialist policies of his predecessor. Moreno not only welcomed US Vice President Mike Pence to Ecuador with open arms but sought the re-opening of the former US intelligence airbase at Manta, which had been closed by Correa in 2009. Moreno’s defense minister announced that what would replace the Manta airbase would be a “Security Cooperation Office.” In 2018, Moreno withdrew Ecuador from one of Chavez’s most-prized creations, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

Ironically, Moreno, who bears the first name of the founder of the world’s first Communist nation, reversed many of Correa’s policies aimed at reducing the influence of Ecuador’s oligarchs and banks. Correa, who now lives in exile in Belgium, faces imprisonment in Ecuador in a political jihad launched by Moreno that is not unlike that of the Brazilian right-wing that targeted Lula and his successor, Dilma Rousseff. Present at the inauguration of PROSUR in Santiago was Argentine president Mauricio Macri, the one-time business partner of Donald Trump, who has done everything possible to imprison his predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Now an Argentine senator, Kirchner and her husband, the late President Nestor Kirchner, were partners of Chavez, Lula, and Correa in creating UNASUR.

Uruguyan president Tabaré Vázquez, who sent an observer delegation to PROSUR’s inaugural summit in Chile without joining the group, criticized the new group at a United Nations conference in Buenos Aires. Vázquez said that South America already had regional organizations, including the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELADE), and the Latin American Integration Association (ALADI). However, like Moreno of Ecuador, Vázquez criticized the creation of UNASUR, saying, it “had a certain political ideology.”

Presidents Mario Abdo Benitez of Paraguay Martin Vizcarra of Peru have also steered their countries firmly into the right-wing camp. Both presidents joined their colleagues in Santiago for the PROSUR summit.

One surprise leader who signed on to PROSUR in Santiago was David Granger, the president of Guyana. Granger, as a former Brigadier General in the Guyana Defense Force, likely felt at home with individuals like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, a former Brazilian paratrooper whose spoken Brazilian Portuguese reflects that of an uncouth Army veteran combined with a street thug. Granger has made common cause with ExxonMobil to lay claim to oil reserves in Guyana’s Exclusive Economic Zone, which are also claimed by Venezuela. Granger has brandished his right-wing allegiances by ignoring Guyana’s Constitution and postponing a March 19, 2019 required election to 2020. It was the defection of Granger’s coalition government’s parliamentary backbencher, Charrandas Persaud, to the opposition in a no-confidence vote that originally triggered the election. Rather than comply with the Constitution, Granger’s government, accused Persaud of being a US citizen, not eligible to sit in parliament. Persaud also received death threats. Yet, according to the Western corporate media, Guyana is being threatened by an “undemocratic” Maduro government in Venezuela.

Just as PROSUR seeks to eliminate the vestiges of Chavez, Lula, Correa, and Kirchner in South America, there has been an attempt by Washington to also wipe out two other Chavez regional projects, ALBA and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Both organizations include Venezuela’s allies in the Caribbean region. Trump recently invited the leaders of five Caribbean nations – Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia – to his Mar-a-Lago billionaires’ club in Palm Beach to seek their commitment to isolate the Maduro government of Venezuela and support the Guaido puppet regime. In order to entice the leaders to sever all financial links with Venezuela, including their participation in the PetroCaribe program that provided them with subsidized Venezuelan gasoline and oil, Trump offered nebulous loan guarantees through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a Wall Street contrivance with major national debt pitfalls attached.

Trump has a major real estate project in the Dominican Republic. Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of Saint Lucia, is the incoming chairman of the Caribbean Community. He will be expected to wean away from Venezuela its last remaining allies in the organization.

Trump and his team of neocons, including national security adviser John Bolton and Venezuela regime change envoy Elliott Abrams, who was convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal and who benefited from a cover-up bolstered by Attorney General William Barr, will now concentrate their efforts on overthrowing Maduro and subjecting his last remaining allies, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, Uruguay, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada to regime change operations.