A war of annihilation is a war in which the goal is the complete obliteration of the state and the extermination of its people. It is defined as a radicalized form of warfare in which “all psycho-physical limits” are abolished and the strategic goals are pursued by any means necessary. It is war without rules, restrictions or moral constraints. The United States is in the early phases of a war of annihilation against Russia the aim of which is the total destruction of the economy, the culture, the population and the nation.

“We have seen 5 waves of NATO expansion. Now NATO is in Romania and Poland and they are deploying their missile-attack systems there. That’s what we are talking about. You need to understand, we are not threatening anyone. Russia did not come to the US borders or the UK borders. No. You came to our borders and now you are saying, ‘Ukraine will join NATO and will deploy their systems there. They will deploy their military bases and their attack-systems.’ We are concerned about our security. Do you understand what that means?” Vladimir Putin, press conference, You Tube

Question– Is there a justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

Answer– Yes, there is. Russia was being threatened by developments in Ukraine, so it told Ukraine to either stop what it was doing or suffer the consequences. Ukraine chose to ignore those warnings, so Russia invaded. That is basically what happened.

Question– But how does that justify the invasion, after all, Ukraine is a sovereign country and sovereign countries should be able to do whatever they want to on their own territory, right?

Answer– No, that’s wrong. Ukraine does not have the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory. Ukraine and more than 50 other countries signed treaties (“at the OSCE summits in Istanbul in 1999 and in Astana in 2010”) agreeing that they would not strengthen their own security at the expense of other’s security. This is called the “indivisibility of security”, but in practical terms it just means that you can’t put artillery pieces and tanks on your driveway and point them at my house. Because that would undermine my security. Do you understand? The same rule applies to nations.

If we accept your reasoning on the matter, then we’d have to conclude that John Kennedy had no right to challenge Fidel Castro for putting nuclear weapons in Cuba. But he did have the right because Castro’s action put the US at risk of a nuclear attack. In other words, Castro had no right to improve his own security at the expense of the United States. This is no different. Putin has every right to defend the safety and security of the Russian people, in fact, that is what people expect of their leaders.

Question– You’re not making any sense. Putin invaded Ukraine, therefore, Putin is an aggressor.

Answer– I disagree, but instead of arguing about it, let’s use an analogy:

Let’s say, I hold a gun to your head and threaten to blow your brains out. But you quickly grab the gun and shoot me in the leg. Who is to blame for that incident?

If you think that I am responsible, you’re right. The victim, in this case, simply reacted in a way that would best ensure his own safety. That’s called self-defense which is perfectly legal.

This same standard can be applied to Russia, whose “Special Military Operation” is a preemptive step to defend its own national security. Russia has no designs on Ukrainian territory nor does it seek to mettle in Ukraine’s internal affairs. Russia’s sole objective is to end the existential crisis that was created by Washington. It was Washington that encouraged NATO to pump Ukraine full of lethal weapons. It was Washington that provided arms for the far-right extremists that were threatening ethnic Russians in east Ukraine. It was Washington that coaxed Ukrainian President Zelensky to jettison Minsk and to publicly support the development of nuclear weapons. It was Washington that launched the coup in 2014 that deposed the democratically-elected president and replaced him with a US-puppet. And, it was Washington that has done everything in its power to isolate and demonize Russia following provocations that were entirely of its own making. In short, it was Washington that held a gun to Russia’s head and threatened to blow its brains out.

Can’t you see that or are you so brainwashed you think this fiasco started when Putin’s tanks rolled across the border? Even the most avid CNN propagandist doesn’t believe that nonsense. The crisis began with the relentless buildup of weaponry followed by one calculated incitement after the other. Russia was deliberately and repeatedly provoked. No one who’s followed events closely would dispute that.

By the way, Putin has never talked about toppling the government in Kiev and replacing it with a Moscow-backed stooge. No. His plan is aimed at “demilitarization” and “denazification.” Why?

Because those are his only objectives. He wants to destroy the weapons that NATO and the US have been shipping to Ukraine (to fuel the conflict) and he wants to eradicate the Nazi militants that are the sworn enemy of the Russian Federation.

Is that unreasonable? Do you think the US would act any differently if Mexico allowed Al Qaida and ISIS cells to operate openly in Guadalajara or Acapulco? Don’t be ridiculous. They’d bomb the entire region to smithereens without batting an eye.

Would you call that “an invasion,” too?

No, Washington would probably call it a “Special Military Operation” just like Russia is calling its intervention a “Special Military Operation.”

The problem here is not what Russia is doing, the problem is that a different standard is always applied to the United States. All I’m asking is that people engage their own critical thinking skills—ignore the hysterical braying of the media—and make their own judgement on the matter.

Russia did what anyone would do; it reacted in a way that would best ensure its own safety. By definition, that is self-defense. It removed itself from the threat of great harm or death, and is now in the process of reestablishing its own security. Ukraine chose to ignore Russia’s legitimate security concerns, and now Ukraine is paying the price. Here’s is an excellent summary of the events preceeding the Russian operation from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

“The narrative in the media, which presents the invasion as an unprovoked action, is a fabrication that conceals the aggressive actions by the NATO powers, in particular the United States, and its puppets in the Ukrainian government.…

In Europe and Asia, the US pursued a strategy aimed at encircling and subjugating Russia. Directly violating its earlier promises that the Soviet bureaucracy and Russian oligarchy were delusional enough to believe, NATO has expanded to include almost all major countries in Eastern Europe, apart from Ukraine and Belarus.

In 2014, the US orchestrated a far-right coup in Kiev that overthrew a pro-Russian government that had opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO. In 2018, the US officially adopted a strategy of preparing for “great power conflict” with Russia and China. In 2019, it unilaterally withdrew from the INF Treaty, which banned the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Preparations for war with Russia and the arming of Ukraine were at the center of the Democrats’ first attempt to impeach Donald Trump in 2019.

Over the past year…the Biden administration recklessly escalated provocations against Russia….The key to understanding this is the US-Ukrainian Charter on Strategic Partnership, signed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on November 10, 2021….”

The Charter endorsed Kiev’s military strategy from March 2021, which explicitly proclaimed the military goal of “retaking” Crimea and the separatist-controlled Donbass, and thereby dismissed the Minsk Agreements of 2015, which were the official framework for settling the conflict in East Ukraine….

Washington also explicitly endorsed “Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability,” that is, its integration into NATO’s military command structures.

Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO is and was, for all intents and purposes, a fiction. At the same time, the NATO powers exploited the fact that Ukraine is not officially a member as an opportunity to stoke a conflict with Russia that would not immediately develop into a world war.

The US was fully aware that fascist forces in Ukraine would play the principal role of shock troops against both the Russian military and opposition within the population….Their descendants, from the fascist Svoboda Party to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, are now deeply integrated into the Ukrainian state and military and are being heavily armed with NATO weapons.

It will fall to historians to uncover what promises the Ukrainian oligarchy received from Washington in exchange for its pledge to turn the country into a killing field and launching pad for war with Russia. But one thing is clear: The Kremlin and Russian general staff could not but read this document as the announcement of an impending war.

Throughout 2021 and in the weeks immediately preceding the invasion, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Ukraine’s integration into NATO and its arming by the Western powers constituted a “red line” for Russia, and demanded “security guarantees” from the US and NATO.

However, the US contemptuously dismissed all these statements, and NATO staged one major military exercise on Russia’s borders after another..., in the weeks leading up to the war, while constantly warning of an impending Russian invasion, the Biden administration made no diplomatic effort to avoid it and instead did everything it could to provoke it.” (“The US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine”, World Socialist Web Site)

So, what can we glean from this summary of events?

We can see that Washington did everything in its power to undermine Russia’s security with the explicit aim of drawing Moscow into a war in Ukraine. That was the objective from the get-go. Washington knew that NATO membership for Ukraine was one of Putin’s “red lines”, so the US foreign policy establishment decided to use Putin’s red lines against him. They decided to make Ukraine a NATO member in everything but name which (they assumed) would be sufficient provocation for an invasion. That was the plan, and the plan worked.

In the last year, there has been a constant flow of lethal weapons to Ukraine; heavy weapons that can destroy tanks and shoot down planes. At the same time, Ukraine’s combat troops and officer corps have received regular training from NATO advisors. They have also engaged in frequent joint-military excercises with NATO units inside Ukraine and in other locations around Europe. (At least 10 more of these joint-military drills are scheduled for this year alone.) For the last 12 months, NATO specialists have been almost constantly on Ukrainian territory while their troop control system has already been fully-integrated into NATO. “This means that NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads.”

Also, Ukraine’s “network of airfields have been upgraded while its airspace is open to flights by US strategic and reconnaissance aircraft and drones that conduct surveillance over Russian territory.”

In short, “Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO is (largely) a fiction”, as the WSWS’s author points out. The country has been stealthily integrated into the Alliance in every way excluding a formal declaration of membership. As a result, Russia faces a hostile army and its military infrastructure on its western border posing an existential danger to the nation’s survival. In Putin’s own words, “NATO’s military infrastructure is a knife to our throat.”

So, Putin’s analysis is essentially the same as our own, that is, that Russia is acting in self defense. Putin was merely grabbing the gun that Washington had pointed at his head. Was that wrong? Should entire populations have to live in constant fear for their lives so the US can pursue its geopolitical agenda without interruption?

No, every country deserves basic security and protection from the threat of violence. Russia is no different than anyone else in that regard. And when those basic security concerns are shrugged off by puppets in T-shirts (like Zelensky), then countries have to take matters into their own hands. What other choice do they have? National security remains the highest priority of the state. Every state! It is unfortunate that the “guarantor of global security” is also (in the words of Martin Luther King) “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” But that is sad irony of our current predicament.

But why—you may ask—has the US gone through so much trouble to prod Putin into invading Ukraine, after all, it is the Ukrainian people who are going to suffer the most just as it is the country that is likely to be a staging ground for disruptive and bloody NATO military operations for years to come? What is the strategic objective here?

Here’s how political analyst and former Member of the European Parliament, Nick Griffin, summed it up in a recent article at the Unz Review. He said:

“The fundamental targets of the NATO warmongers in this crisis are not… Russia, but Germany, and China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. They are trying to keep Germany down, and China out; failure to do both means that the US will become an isolated rust-belt island thousands of miles away from the core economic block of the world….

The same development also spells the forthcoming end of the dollar as the world’s financial reserve currency.……. NATO’s aggression towards Russia is not born of confidence but of fear. In just three decades, we’ve gone from the ‘End of History’ to the looming end of the Dollar Empire….

The attempt to force Russia into war in Ukraine… is not really about promoting the geopolitical interest of the Dollar Empire – it is about its very survival.

(This is why) They are indeed desperate for war!” (“Ukraine Implementing Minsk Accords & Ending Conflict ‘Very Last’ Thing US, UK Want, Ex-MEP Says,” Unz Review)

Griffin is right. The war in Ukraine is not about Ukraine, it’s about geopolitics and, in particular, the steady erosion of Washington’s power on the global stage. That’s why we are seeing this wretched attempt to crush Russia on the way to encircling China. It’s pure desperation, and it’s gotten considerably worse since the February 4 summit between Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, when the two leaders announced a new “global governance system,” that would bind Europe and Asia together through “infrastructure connectivity”, high-speed rail, and colaborative distribution of energy resources. Russia and China are allies on the biggest free trade project in history, which is why Uncle Sam is doing everything he can to rock-the-boat. Here’s more from Alfred McCoy’s article at Counterpunch:

“In a landmark 5,300-word statement, Xi and Putin proclaimed the “world is going through momentous changes,” creating a “redistribution of power” and “a growing demand for… leadership” (which Beijing and Moscow clearly intended to provide). After denouncing Washington’s ill-concealed “attempts at hegemony,” the two sides agreed to “oppose the…
interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

To build an alternative system for global economic growth in Eurasia, the leaders planned to merge Putin’s projected “Eurasian Economic Union” with Xi’s already ongoing trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to promote “greater interconnectedness between the Asia Pacific and Eurasian regions.” Proclaiming their relations “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era,” an oblique reference to the tense Mao-Stalin relationship, the two leaders asserted that their entente has “no limits… no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” On strategic issues, the two parties were adamantly opposed to the expansion of NATO, any move toward independence for Taiwan, and “color revolutions” such as the one that had ousted Moscow’s Ukrainian client in 2014.” (“The Geopolitics of the Ukraine War,” Alfred W. McCoy, Counterpunch)

How does this relate to the war in Ukraine?

It shows that Uncle Sam is trying to destroy Russia so he can project power into Central Asia and maintain Washington’s grip on global power. Who is going control the most populous and prosperous region of the next century, Asia? That’s the question that guides Washington’s actions in Ukraine.

Simply put, Washington’s plan is to crush Russia first and then move on to China. This explains why the US has imposed the most comprehensive and vicious sanctions of all time. The gloves have come off and we are beginning to see that Washington is embroiled in a scorched earth campaign to strangle the Russian economy, crash the Russian markets, slash vital oil and gas revenues, freeze foreign reserves, seize privately-owned assets, terminate the flow of foreign capital, torpedo multi-billion dollar pipeline projects, prevent access to the capital markets, send the ruble off a cliff, demonize the Russian leadership and remove Russia from the community of nations. At the same time, the US has increased the flow of lethal weaponry to Ukraine while the CIA continues to advise and train far-right militants who will be used to launch an anti-Russian insurgency.

It should be clear by now, that Washington’s approach to Russia has fundamentally changed. The ferocity of current strategy suggests that we have transitioned from infrequent skirmishes to a full-blown war of annihilation on the Russian state.

unz.com

In September, the full madness of Joe Biden’s open border season became painfully visible as some 12,000 illegal Haitians were filmed huddled under the Del Rio International Bridge seeking shelter. So shocking were the images, which could have passed for one of Dante’s nine circles of hell, that the FAA banned news media from flying drones over the humanitarian wasteland.

Ironically, at the very same time these illegal migrants were getting ushered into the U.S. mainland with nowhere to go, international cargo ships were being restricted from delivering their shipments at U.S. harbors. Many of the vessels are still adrift at sea today, idling off the coast of California and beyond. So bad is the backlog, in fact, that Vice President Kamala Harris broke the news to Christians that Santa would have some trouble fulfilling orders on time this Christmas.

“The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children, it might now be might be the time to start buying them, because the delay may be many, many months,” she said at a conference in predominantly Buddhist Singapore, of all places.

In any case, instead of calling out the real Grinch behind the global gridlock, which was the Democrat’s draconian kill-switch response to the Covid pandemic, Harris blamed climate change for spawning “stronger typhoons” and a “sea level rise” that has purportedly wreaked havoc on “port infrastructure.” Does anyone recall the Weather Channel reporting on cargo ships going missing at sea lately, or was Harris just offering a tantalizing hint that climate change lockdowns are the next big event on the horizon?

Manufactured crisis. This is a map of the cargo ships currently incoming and in holding pattern offshore. Your country is under attack from the inside. pic.twitter.com/AoJgZWDDgJ

— Ian Smith (@iansmithfitness) October 1, 2021

Whatever the case may be, despite clear skies, listless sea conditions, and not a single polar iceberg in sight, over 70 cargo ships are double-parked in the Pacific, anxiously waiting to drop anchor at Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego, and a number of other ports of call.

Harris conveniently failed to mention it, but the real reason for these logjams is simply a lack of longshore workers who have been sidelined one way or another by the pandemic, or more precisely, the Democrat’s irrational response to the pandemic, which effectively destroyed a large swath of the economy, not to mention jobs. Not all is lost, however, here seems to be a perfect opportunity for the Democrats to make amends and wed two of their disastrous domestic policies – draconian lockdowns amid a surge in Covid cases, and an open door policy at the U.S.-Mexico border – into one beautiful accidental marriage.

Instead of dispatching tens of thousands of illegal migrants from Haiti to sanctuary cities around the country, where their chances of catching a glimpse of the elusive American dream in its natural habitat are predictably slim, why not send them straight to California? Here they can earn an honest wage for their free food, board and health insurance instead of living off American taxpayer.

It’s important to note that the overwhelming majority of these illegal aliens do not speak a lick of English, or even Spanish for that matter (Haitians speak predominantly French and Haitian Creole, which will prove to be a severe impediment during any future job interviews), so working the docks seems to be a job they would perfectly qualify for under the grim circumstances.

And what is truly fascinating about these newly arrived migrants is that they appear to be impervious to Covid, despite having arrived in the United States after traveling the length of Mexico, which ranks as one of the countries that the U.S. government has warned its citizens to avoid due to high rates of Covid.

Alejandro Mayorkas, Department of Homeland Security Secretary, admitted during a congressional hearing that apprehended immigrants have been released into the American wild without being tested for COVID-19. Yet, both foreigners and Americans arriving to the United States – including fully vaccinated people – are required to show a test result taken three days prior to flying, or that they have recovered from Covid in the past three months. The illegal aliens arriving from only God knows where are not required to show any such documentation. Needless to say, that flies in the face of common sense, if not good science, which the Democrats seem to think they understand better than anyone else. Clearly they do not.

Under the Trump administration, illegal migration to the United States slowed to a trickle following the passage of a public health order by the CDC known as Title 42, which gave border patrols the authority to expel the illegals. Although the Democrats screamed that this ruling was a travesty and “racist,” it was certainly more humane than having thousands of Haitians seeking shelter under a bridge following a harrowing journey that exposes them to every imaginable horror, including robbery, rape, murder and, yes, Covid.

Democrats should place any further illegal arrivals to American shores on one-way flights to the West coast (after they’ve been tested) where longshore workers are desperately needed to keep the supply chains in the U.S. open. Allowing illegal aliens the ability to earn an honest wage seems to be the best redress for an egregious act on the part of the Democrats, who increasingly wish to subject tax-paying, law-abiding Americans to their deranged will, while letting criminals and illegal migrants roam free. This travesty of justice really must end if the United States has any hope of remaining a free and democratic sovereign state.

What can we make of Kamala Harris’ trip to Mexico? The public reads reports about success, but without anything to back that up. Naturally, from corporate media and from Harris, we are left with meaningless platitudes and cackling vagueities. We are roughly informed that Harris (and not Biden) goes to meet with heads of state of Guatemala and Mexico. Guatemala is one of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador) states caught up in the ‘Root Causes’ of the refugee crisis.

Harris has been under pressure to visit the U.S. border with Mexico, since the Biden administration had appointed her Czar of the border issue.

In the most clear and simple terms, Kamala Harris’ trip to Mexico was a clean-up job in the aftermath of an aborted plan to flood the U.S. with refugees in the event that Trump attempted to remain in office after January 20^th.  Without that understanding, we are left with vague generalities about ‘Root Causes’ of migration which are almost always going to be described in banal economic terms, or (conveniently within the rubric of Great Reset mythology), climate change.

This may appear to the uninitiated as a big claim, but we have provided even larger proofs in our past work on the subject in exposing the Transition Integrity Project. If we are going to talk about the ‘Root ‘Causes’ of the crisis, then the TIP stands front and center. This was the project financed by a group including George Soros and Nicolas Berggruen of the World Economic forum (under Klaus Schwab), and led by John Podesta of the Clinton clique. Its war-games were published in all the major Operation Mockingbird-type operations of the intelligence services – The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.

Alex Soros and Kamala Harris after the Final Interview round in Biden’s VP vetting process in 2020

Borrowing from the language and methods of standard destabilization/color revolution schemes, the ‘Transition’ was based on the all-out gambit to remove Trump from office. This even included an openly promoted secession movement wherein “Cascadia’’ (California, Oregon, Washington) would all secede if Trump won the election or refused to accept a Biden victory, and these actions would be endorsed publicly by Biden and Harris. This much isn’t speculation, but the openly published outcomes of the TIP war-game.

Because color revolution and coup techniques involve destabilization campaigns, we know that all assets that can be wielded in that direction, will be. One very visible sign of intentional destabilization is when ‘conditions’ create large population displacement.

Therefore, we cannot ignore the vast network of Soros-backed NGOs operating in Central America and, much to the chagrin of the Mexican government, also in Mexico. These NGOs were activated to organize ‘Root Causes’ into actual human waves of migrants who magically arrived into U.S. facilities with their documentation completed, well-dressed and well-fed, and already coached on the precise words to use to qualify them not as a regular migrant, but as a victim (refugee) of inhumane conditions.

Honduran migrants aiming to reach the U.S. border walk alongside a highway in Chiquimula, Guatemala, Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021

And these ‘economic problems’ at the ‘Root Causes’ themselves are not acts of nature nor of God, but calculated cycles intended to produce certain outcomes. Corporate media continues to misinform the public that specific economic realities are too complex to be projected and controlled for specific outcomes by conscious actors on the global stage. In that make-believe world, it is as if interest rates determined by central banks, or the future of any publicly traded company at the hands of the hedge fund practice of short-selling, are random market-driven events and not operationalized as part of globalist policy.

But since Biden was inaugurated, why did we have a migrant crisis anyhow?

Simply put, the inertia of the assets already deployed and the process already in play to ‘hit the ground running’ pre-determined that a certain initial flow would hit the U.S.. The number of people involved, organizations, promises, moneys spent, bureaucracies involved – all together created the scenario of steering the Titanic away from the iceberg. The captain of the ship in a “worse-case scenario” (for the IMF and WEF) would have been Trump. And so what we saw, and are seeing in Harris’ trip, is purely damage control and clean-up.

The “New Era” of this scheme took place when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the green-light for a coup to overthrow the popular left-nationalist Honduran President Zelaya in 2009. This led to a dehumanizing policy of austerity, that countless hundreds of thousands fall into austere and destitute conditions.

Subsequently, Soros-backed NGOs began to organize ‘Human Waves’ out of Honduras and into the U.S. over the following years. In other words, Soros organized the coup against Zelaya: a private-sector moratorium on Honduran firms, using hedge funds to harm the Honduran economy. This may well have included his own Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund company. Soros after all is number 27 on Forbes’ list with a net worth of $23 billion. At the end of the havoc, this compelled the military to seize power to ‘save the country’.

The solution to the Soros created economic crisis that lead to austerity and rising poverty, was for Soros NGOs to go in and organize the malcontent into a human migration wave. Problem – reaction – solution.

Likewise, we have been disinformed in corporate media that Hurricane Amanda is responsible also for the refugee crisis. And of course, that these (actually seasonal) events are now attributable to global warming, and if because of cooling conditions, then of climate change in general. Is this really credible?

Hurricane Amanda claimed the lives of just 17 people in El Salvador and Guatemala, and temporarily displaced some 7,000 citizens across 154 shelters in El Salvador. Is this what we, in part, owe the massive migration crisis at the border? Prudence tells us, probably not. But corporate media insists otherwise.

We cannot underscore the significance of the Soros human-wave phenomenon, which was also carried out after the Arab Spring in Syria into Turkey, Lebanon and finally Europe – or conversely, into Michigan.

While human beings have naturally migrated in trickles for time immemorial, or in waves in relation to massive changing climactic conditions or vastly changed political realities (the end of the last ice-age, or the Mongol incursions westward), a mass human wave had not been consciously organized until late modernity. This fact alone should impress upon anyone the sheer power of that intersection of capital, NGOs, and sociology, in such a planned undertaking as the transplantation of massive numbers of people.

It is important to note that the crisis facing many would-be migrants is a real one. While it is questionable if these are caused by local governments, natural disasters, or climate change, there is no doubt that they are caused chiefly by the capital-driven motives of transnational corporations and banking structures like the IMF. The general trend, towards the aim of restoring the post-cold war unipolar moment, of the trans-Atlantic power establishment, has been to upwards distribute wealth and geographically relocate this. As a rule, this has been from the periphery of global development (the so-called global south) to the core of global development (the so-called global north).

The Crisis Planned for Trump

While Harris scrambles to do damage control, and now inform migrants ‘not to come’, we know that these NGOs were informing migrants that U.S. policy would create an open door for them if Biden won the election. Long before November, these organizations began to prepare the next wave, and after the election, received the green light. Bear in mind that any number of possibilities regarding an unclear succession process were still in game until late January 20^th.

Color Revolutions and related destabilization campaigns involve a number of assets including traditional soft-power mechanisms and media campaigns. It appears that the thinking was that if Trump were to somehow invoke a state of emergency to remain in power post January 20^th, then the secession plan and a refugee crisis would be engaged.

Trump with top military brass in the State Dining Room of the White House on October 7^th, 2017 quoted as stating ‘This is the calm before the Storm’. Credit: Getty Images

But this refugee crisis would have been orders of magnitude greater than what we have seen, and what Harris is trying to wind-down. In conjunction with this, we consider the media hysteria surrounding Covid-19, and the prospect that migrants would be carriers.

The IMF would have placed additional pressures on Northern Triangle States and Mexico for Covid-19 compliance, regarding lockdowns. Only Mexico would have been strong enough to buck these pressures, but as for the Central American states, it is clear that their conditions of lockdowns would have further destroyed those economies. That would contribute to the ‘Root Causes’, economic destitution misframed as ‘Covid’, along with ‘Global Warming’. Hence, economic destitution created intentionally by the IMF and WEF (which openly opposed Trump) for a destabilization campaign, would be misframed by media as ‘acts of Nature or God’.

Media would play upon fears in all directions, and Trump would be forced to use the only tools at hand, the same that Obama had: people in cages.

But such numbers would have overwhelmed the present facilities, and the solutions would be limited. Any solution would have been characterized a catastrophe, and politically destructive for a Trump-in-power, already by now being called a military dictatorship.

Trans-Atlantic media would have gone full-court press, and the U.S. would have been a pariah state, with the refugee crisis full of Covid-19 stricken inmates placed on par with the concentration camps of Hitler’s Germany. The ‘civil-war’ scenario with the secessionist states, and likely military operations underway to resolve this, would have only contributed to the planned scenario. With programs like HARP, we might also see weather disasters within the U.S., and more (and this time, serious) in the Northern Triangle to spurn further human waves.

Taken together with Klaus Schwab’s ‘warnings’ of cyber-terrorism striking energy and food supplies, we can understand the scope and magnitude of what was planned.

Conclusion

Forensically, we can say with a high degree of certitude that this indeed was the plan.

An interesting fact about destabilization strategies like Arab Springs or Color Revolutions, and related coup-techniques that  involve complex systems and multivariate/multipronged vectors of attack, is that even when this or that part of the plan is aborted, or even if the whole plan becomes superfluous, we nevertheless see fragments of it in vestigial or primordial form. Furthermore, those elements may be re-integrated into any number of concurrent contingencies of value.

This is what we are seeing with the border crisis currently. This does not exclude that going forward, to a lesser extent, with this or that destabilizing disaster doesn’t also come with realizable benefits for those well-connected interests anyhow. Political divisions, cheap labor, and the general mantra of ‘never let a good disaster go to waste’ would still be fruitful.

It is also what we have seen currently with the cyber-attacks in the U.S. that have effected energy and food supply: they serve a purpose for the IMF and the transition from plutocracy to technocracy within the context of the Great Reset, but also (and chiefly) are fragments of a larger, but aborted, plan to create a failed-state scenario in a Trump-led nationalist military dictatorship against the neoliberal IMF globalist plan.

The reason why the public has heard nothing concrete about the real nature of these meetings with Latin American leaders, is that in all likelihood these were conducted to flatten-out the remains of the planned refugee crisis. It’s simply too politically inconvenient, and ill-suited for the administration now responsible for it. We are likely to hear of various economic commitments, but not of the agreements to curtail the activities of the NGOs involved in this plot. This, in conclusion, explains the administration’s about face with Kamala’s new slogan “Do Not Come”.

Since Joe Biden took over the White House nearly three months ago, a recurring controversy dogging his administration is the plight of migrants crossing the southern border from Mexico. In the following interview, Randy Martin gives his take on the subject as a seasoned observer and campaigner based near the border. He says much of the political heat on the subject recently is being generated by the bitterly divisive, bipartisan politics of Republicans and Democrats. Martin points out that migration numbers are at historical lows. What needs to change, he says, is a policy that addresses the ongoing legacy of exploitation, conflict, and crime that the United States has inflicted on its southern neighbors.

Randy Martin is a blogger, political analyst, and activist who lives in New Mexico near the U.S.-Mexican border. He has devoted most of his life to political activism on a wide range of issues, from defending human rights to anti-nuclear weapons and waste campaigning, as well as promoting anti-war causes, and combating hunger and homelessness in the United States. He was part of the Sanctuary Movement in the early 1980s which provided safety and material support to refugees from Central America fleeing from conflicts fueled by malign U.S. military interventions in the region; those interventions were either aimed at toppling governments Washington disproved of, or at supporting repressive regimes. Randy has maintained support for immigrant rights throughout his life in the southwest border area and has helped organize New Mexico communities around social and environmental justice issues. Environmentalism and public health are major local issues due to the proximity of U.S. military weapons testing sites in the area and the toxic impact from decades of contamination. He lives not far from where the world’s first-ever atomic weapon was tested on July 16, 1945, three weeks before the bombing of Japan. As an internet activist – hacktivist – he has also been involved in international solidarity campaigns through social media projects that included the popular website crookedbough.com in support of the Pearl Uprising in Bahrain in 2011.

Interview

Question: The numbers of unauthorized migrants being detained at the U.S. border with Mexico, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, has greatly increased compared with the same period last year – by a factor of five. Is the surge in numbers due to a specific change in policy under the Biden administration compared with the previous Trump administration?

Randy Martin: Historically, there is always a surge in numbers of those headed to the U.S. Southern border when administrations in Washington change – by way of testing the waters to see what will be acceptable to the incoming administration. Part of the recent surge has to do with “clearing the queues” of those waiting to cross the border after Trump pressured Mexico and Guatemala into keeping migrants on their sides while the migrants waited on processing that was never to come. It was inevitable that the queue of migrants on the Mexican and Guatemalan sides of the border would have to be resolved and those seeking immigration to the U.S. would have to move north.

The heightened political noise about the current surge is part of the unfortunate rhetoric of race-baiting in the bitterly divided politics of the U.S. Migration to the U.S. for Mexicans has been trending downward for decades and for Central Americans more generally the number of migrants has seen a modest increase in the recent decade and a half. Sadly, the current state of U.S. domestic politics misdirects attention from meeting the real needs of those that migrate to the U.S. who are trying to escape intolerable violence and poverty in their home countries.

Question: Do you think it is more accurate to refer to the people moving up from the south toward the United States as “migrants” or “refugees”? From which countries are they mostly coming? Which U.S. states are particularly seeing the most influx of people?

Randy Martin: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are the main Central American countries from which people are currently migrating to the U.S., according to data from the federal Customs and Border Protection agency. Once migrants enter the U.S. they make it to the major population centers where there is work, usually in the service sectors like hotels and restaurants and where there are established communities of other migrants – Cincinnati, Birmingham, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Seattle, among other destinations.

When someone has to make a tough decision to leave their home and family behind and make a treacherous journey with very little to nothing in their pockets, in order to escape violence, drug wars, civil wars or just find work, they are escaping from a grave situation that leads to horrific choices. When your daily goal is to eat, find shelter, and maybe send a few dollars back home to help those left behind, words like “migrant” or “refugee” don’t mean much.

Question: Images from detention centers indicate that conditions are harrowing for thousands of people. Is it accurate to refer to the situation on the U.S. border as a “humanitarian crisis”?

Randy Martin: Anytime we find it expedient or necessary to put people in cages there is most certainly a “humanitarian crisis”. Unfortunately, given the present divisive bipartisan politics of the U.S., words like “humanitarian crisis”, are manipulated to serve political agendas rather than meet real human needs. For decades, U.S. politicians from both Republican and Democrat parties have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on the problem of migration. The “humanitarian crisis” is driven by those who amass wealth off the backs of those who slave to the oppression of poverty and escape the violence in the home countries.

Question: President Joe Biden is coming under fire from Republicans for undermining U.S. national security by being too lax about border controls. Is that criticism fair?

Randy Martin: U.S. national security requires both parties to bring it about. Both parties have been busy for decades building fences, spending money on high-tech gadgets, adding border guards to hunt down people, and returning them to the other side of the border. The U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars solving an intractable problem that reflects U.S. policy failures as a consequence of the economic exploitation of the people who migrate. The problem is not a “lax border control”, it’s the legacy of corruption that stems from the long-term effects of colonial exploitation that has plagued Central America and Mexico since colonialism arrived in this hemisphere, colonialist relations which have been continued by Washington ever since the United States was founded nearly 250 years ago.

Question: Biden is also coming under fire from some Democrats in his own party who charge that his policies on immigration are too harsh and are exacerbating the problems of detention and of families being separated. Is that fair criticism?

Randy Martin: Fair or not, the criticisms are there and Biden has to deal with them. Different members of his party have different realities with their own constituents and their agendas which they are obliged to satisfy. If the Democrats are to survive in power beyond Biden’s current term, he has to listen and accommodate party criticism. The Democrats can ill afford to fracture and splinter over the issue of border policy and security.

Question: In the long historical view, how do present numbers of people trying to cross the U.S. border from Mexico compare with past periods? Why does the present situation seem to be a more hot political issue than in previous times?

Randy Martin: Every administration goes through a period of peak migrations. In recent years, Central American and Mexican emigration has been at an all-time low. Only recently has Central American immigration into the U.S. seems to be on the increase. The U.S. seems to be incapable of developing the flexibility to handle the “flux” in migration both from a legal system and for a system that cares for the material needs of the migrants.

The current intensity of the border political issues is because we are coming out of one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history. The nation is grotesquely divided, both major parties have severely agitated the already sore issue of migration, so the political rhetoric is high and the nerves are raw. The Republicans are being sore losers, agitating issues just like the Democrats did when Trump defeated Clinton in 2016. Both parties are conflating the migration with racial issues – race-baiting as a political tool has reached a toxic level in the U.S.

Question: What, in your view, is a long-term, sustainable policy that the U.S. government should adopt in order to deal with continental migration from south to north? Republicans and even the Biden administration lately seem to think that building a fortress wall at the border is a solution. Is it?

Randy Martin: The notion of keeping people out with walls is primitive thinking. The phenomenon of migration dates back centuries. You can slow migrants down but there will always be a way around walls. Walls will never be high enough to stop migrations on this planet. The first thing that should be done to mitigate migration is the U.S. needs to get a grip on how the legacy of its current behavior as a colonial power drives the migration from Central America and Mexico.

The U.S. southern border is 3,145 kilometers long (1,954 miles). The U.S. so-called Border Wall is about 654 miles of non-contiguous, anti-pedestrian, anti-vehicle barriers and fencing. The wall gets a lot of political hype but few realize that under Trump the actual amount of new wall built is somewhere between 15-45 miles. The true legacy of Trump’s Border Wall initiative is that he expedited maintenance projects. After it’s all sorted out, the reality is that the supposed Great Wall Trump built was actually just in the imagination and political rhetoric of the mainstream media and asinine leaders of both political parties. Trump will go down in U.S. political history as a fence-maintenance man and an ignorant bully who agitated racist thugs to riot at the White House.

The people indigenous to these lands have historically migrated routinely from Meso-America all the way north to Canada before and after the appearance of the European colonialists. And they will continue to do so as long as humans have legs. Migration is a reality and a basic behavior of all peoples on the planet. Everything from drought to wars and violence, compel them to do so.

Question: Some critics of historical U.S. policies and conduct toward its hemispheric neighbors would point to past imperial machinations as being pertinent, if not a causal factor. Such as Washington sponsoring despotic dictatorships, death squads, subversive wars, regime-change operations, all-out military invasions, predatory economics, and so on. Are the recurring migration problems facing the U.S. a case of “chickens coming home to roost”?

Randy Martin: The legacy of European colonialism of Meso-America and U.S. colonial expansion westwards across North America established borders (circa 1848) from notions of Manifest Destiny and land appropriation through genocide and enslavement of native people for cheap labor required by the evolving plantation and extractive economies. These economic models are alive and well today. Today, the genocide is muted and the post-industrial revolution age has brought on minimalist labor rights that make subsistence the new tyranny over workers.

The late 20th Century brought illicit drug narco-production and narco-trafficking that has flourished since the era of the U.S.-sponsored Banana Republics. As the rise of the drug cartels has marked the decline of the Banana Republics they have ushered in the new gangsterism of massive organized crime of the 21st Century which is now endemic from Central America to Canada. Gangsterism with its street-level violence and corruption now permeates the political and economic systems of North America making “legitimate business” largely indistinguishable from organized crime and corruption.

The market for illicit drugs and the permeation of gangsterism into U.S. society has spawned reverse logistics from the U.S. to Mexico and Central America for chemicals vital to the production of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine. The backflow of black-market cash from the U.S. along with weapons makes for the perfect reverse logistics channel.

The notion of “chickens coming home to roost” is much more ominous than the idea evokes. Those amassing wealth off the backs of the Mexicans and Central Americans are building chicken coops on the border to hold and return incoming migrant labor while much of the service industry in the U.S. and Canada are shut due to the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, the economies of the U.S. and Mexico, with their economies intertwined with organized crime, have dumped billions of dollars via “stimulus checks” into the U.S. economy with much of it trickling back up to the organized-crime activities of the cartels. The U.S. economic desperation and corrupt government are muscling in on cartels’ turf taking a share of the illicit drug market through the legalization of marijuana to prop up state coffers.

The prognosis? Migration is here to stay regardless of fences or chicken coops used for vetting migrants as labor, and the corruption of gangsterism will continue to normalize itself with the U.S. corporatist state.

Former Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz had a point when he quipped that “Mexico is too far from God, and too close to the United States.” In Diaz’s melancholy assessment, that left Mexico effectively disempowered, both vertically and horizontally. The current President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may or may not be an icon of godliness, but he has been endowed with a fair amount of geopolitical common sense. He knows that he and his party Morena, having been elected on a populist and basically leftist-sounding platform, must deliver something to his large electorate. But he appreciates as well that, because of the geographical proximity to which his predecessor Diaz referred, many of the practical measure that he had promised he must now dilute with rhetoric that would be comforting to his northern neighbour, but that he must go no further than that, if he wants to be safe and conclude his six-year term with relative success.

But alas, to his chagrin Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO, for short) has discovered that up North the only good nationalist, or populist, or leftist, or whatever you want to call him, is if not literally a dead one, then at least a politically neutralized or deposed one. (In the new “rule of law” era decreed by northern trendsetters, old fashioned assassinations are technically off the table, but targeting with cancerogenous substances is OK if it leads to the desired lethal outcome, and in extremis even an old-fashioned coup as in Honduras can be rebranded as a democracy-enhancing procedure.) There is now mounting evidence that a regime change light campaign is being mounted in Mexico, with all the usual external and internal suspects in the lead.

AMLO has tried earnestly not to cross most of the red lines set by the irritable demi-gods to his north and to give just the barest minimum of offense. But inevitably, in trying to balance the needs and expectations of his people against incessant hegemonic demands, AMLO has made a few slip-ups.

The foremost of these has been his apparent inability to comprehend that whatever painful changes may have taken place on the global chessboard, its local segment south of the Rio Grande is still being perceived by the northern neighbour as a unipolar zone. That means that the introduction of external players and adherence to unapproved ideological principles is viewed not just with suspicion, but with active hostility. Hence the hysterical reaction to “challengers” such as Venezuela which, under rational rules, would not be of more than minor concern. Hence also the unaccommodating position toward Mexico and obstinate refusal to accept the plain reality on the ground that Mexico is in every respect a serious state. That means that the imposition of an obedient banana republic administration, as in much of the rest of the continent, is not a viable option.

Nevertheless, AMLO’s unwillingness to genuflect before the idol of neo-liberalism has earned him very bad marks from the start, never mind the fact that in Mexico, due to its peculiar political traditions and temperament, a movement publicly expressing such willingness would be unlikely to get anywhere. Of course, they might still be willing to play ball, as they have in the past, with a Mexican president who just used nationalist and social rhetoric to pacify the masses while being amenable in most practical matters. But there is a strong suspicion – probably justified – that in contrast to most of his recent predecessors, though not a saint by any means, AMLO is genuinely committed to the sovereignty of his country and the betterment of his people. Hence, not just his rhetoric but even his heart is definitely in the “wrong” place.

He has demonstrated as much in many small and sometimes symbolic ways which, cumulatively, has reinforced the suspicions and left a very bad impression. To name just a few, he has ostentatiously insisted on maintaining cordial relations with a certain Caribbean bête noire state which has been a source of great annoyance for decades. He has refused to disassociate himself with the popularly elected government of Venezuela and to officially recognize instead the pathetic even-less-than-Navalny figure who is being touted as that legitimate government’s rival. And when Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was illegally overthrown in a staged color revolution and scheduled for physical liquidation, AMLO recklessly gave him sanctuary in Mexico, thus saving his life for another day, which has actually come, by the way.

These and other factors have undoubtedly influenced negatively, from the standpoint of the northern partners, the perception of the Mexican President’s reliability.

His performance in the Covid-19 crisis has also been less than stellar, as viewed from the same quarters. (We need not revisit the pandemic controversy, having done that previously.) The important point to remember is that vassal officialdom throughout the world are expected not just to echo the approved narrative but also to rigorously implement the economically and socially self-immolating policies supposedly designed to suppress the pestilence. Failure to comply with these rules carries serious political costs, as the Belorussian President can attest. López Obrador, as it turns out, did not pay sufficient attention to that particular subtlety of the current global pandemic situation. His government was far too slow – it would be more accurate to say that it was dragging its feet – to fully and enthusiastically implement the economy-wrecking and society-reconfiguring measures that were demanded of it. As a result, the Mexican economy has been badly hit but still it is limping along, greatly upsetting the global anti-covid high command.

López Obrador’s circumspect covid response has, of course, a deeply rational basis. Mexico’s one hundred million plus population (nobody knows the real number) need to be fed and their basic human needs must be met. Totally wrecking the livelihood of an already volatile and undisciplined populace, as demanded, would have given the President the splendid choice of being lynched even before being deposed for declining to follow the prescribed global script.

The foxy AMLO tried hard throughout 2020 to temporize and to compromise, even by tolerating hard-line WHO operative, deputy health minister Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, as covid commissar to oversee the epidemiological side of the pandemic. López-Gatell was encouraged to regularly issue tough statements threatening an imminent crackdown on anything suggesting normal life. But plainly, the political will to self-destruct, as in UK, Germany, and some other countries, in Mexico under López Obrador just wasn’t there.

The invisible hand is now busy writing López Obrador’s grim political future on the wall. Wealthy business conglomerates (empresarios, as they are called in Mexico) which control the media and most of the political establishment are organizing a mighty offensive of discreditation and delegitimization. Applying a tested formula, the President is being held accountable for the economic damage caused by just the limited application of policies that had been urged on him, ignoring the fact that full-spectrum implementation would have brought greater, perhaps complete devastation. He is being blamed also for scaling down or deferring social measures he had promised in his campaign, ignoring completely the severe budgetary impact of the economic slowdown, which is the direct consequence of those pandemic policies he was required to follow and could not avoid adopting.

The obviously staged provocation a few days ago, when the President of Mexico, traditionally regarded as an almost king-like figure during his six-year reign, was rudely heckled by some passengers on the airliner that was taking him from Guadalajara back to Mexico City, is a small detail that may presage larger things to come. As is college dropout Bill Gates’ recent unsolicited advice to the Mexican President to focus more on education and less on petroleum extraction.

Something reminiscent of an adaptation of the never discarded Chilean scenario is being replayed in Mexico. But Los Pinos has not been bombed, yet; and for the moment Mexico’s potential Pinochets seem to be too busy cavorting with narco cartels to be actively interested in staging an insurrection.

Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia: Whenever the peoples of Latin America have had real freedom to vote, over the past 20 years they far more often than not vote Social Democratic by landslides.

Argentina, one of the two demographic and economic giants of South America, has elected left-of-center, Peronist governments four out of five times in the past 16 years. Current President Alfredo Fernandez has been a model of responsible social policies at home while incurring the outrage of the Trump administration in Washington for defending the Social Democratic leaders of Bolivia, Ecuador and most of all President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

In Mexico, popular President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, routinely “accused” of being leftist” and “populist” has courageously defied Wall Street and outspokenly described neo-liberalism as “a disaster” and “a calamity” for his country.

Giant Brazil with more than 200 million people the demographic heavyweight of Latin America, returned two successive twice-elected Social Democratic popular presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in four elections in a row from 2003 to 2014.

Rousseff was toppled by an impeachment process in 2016 and replaced by the allegedly corrupt and certainly utterly incompetent and widely despised Michel Termer until 2019, when repressive and even more inept current hard-right wing ruler Jair Bolsonaro took over. He has proved a monument to disastrous ineptitude ever since.

The same pattern continues in small nations as well as huge ones. Ecuador with 18 million people twice elected popular President Rafael Correa in 2007 and 2013. He emphasized a dramatic increase in spending on education and health. Now after years of right wing reaction under the ironically named Lenin Moreni, Correa’s chosen successor , former economics minister Andres Arauz looks set to decisively defeat hard-line right wing banker Guillermo Lasso who only won a derisory 19.74 percent in the first round of voting. However, that assumes Ecuador will not be subjected to the kind of dirty tricks and US-backed military coups that plagued Brazil and Bolivia.

Last year, Bolivia threw off the sinister shackles of military repression that reemerged under the interim presidency of attractive figurehead interim President Jeanine Anez in 2019 after popular twice-elected President Evo Morales, leader of the Movement for Sociaism (MAS) was toppled. Now Morales has been belatedly succeeded by his former economics minister Luis Arce who took office in November 2020.

Also, democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro continues to survive in Venezuela despite an enormous bipartisan-backed US effort to topple him. It started under Barack Obama, expanded under Donald Trump and continues unabated under current President Joe Biden.

Several points never, ever made in the laughable US Main stream media (MSM) need to be pointed out here.

First, none of these current and recent Social Democratic governments in any of these countries either tried to invade or otherwise destabilize or topple any of their neighbors.

Second, none of the Social Democratic, repeatedly reelected leaders who were destabilized and eventually toppled by US-backed military coups in Brazil or Bolivia ever supported any terrorist groups operating anywhere in the hemisphere. President Fernandez has been exemplary at prosecuting and exposing both former extreme right-wing human rights violators and death squad supporters in his own country in the dark 1970s and early 1980s and extreme leftist groups operating in later decades too.

The real crime of these far from extreme reformist leaders of course was that they continued to defy the United States government, Wall Street financial interests and the International Monetary Fund and put the needs of their own peoples first.

Third, it is quite simply impossible to find anywhere in the English language mainstream media in the United States any acknowledgement whatsoever of this enormous, continent -wide political tide that over the past 15 years at least has swept from the Rio Grande land border between the United States and Mexico all the way down to remote Patagonia in the extreme south of Argentina.

At best, financial outlets like “The Economist” and the “Financial Times” in London or “Forbes” and the “Wall Street Journal” in New York will brush off these continuing political dynamics as temporary inconveniences reflecting the alleged illiteracy and stupidity of the majority populations, especially indigenous Native Americans. The British Broadcasting Corporation in London and Public Broadcasting System in Washington of course know better than to question their masters.

Exactly the same arguments of course are used in the United States to sneer at, marginalize and humiliate the so-called “Deplorables” – the mainstream working class white, black and Hispanic populations of the American heartland who have been devastated by the policies of open borders, unregulated global free trade and withdrawal of government aid and support for them.

The pattern of politics and the tide of history across all the vast lands of Latin America in the 21st century are unmistakable: The peoples of the hemisphere seek and treasure democratic freedoms, open and fair elections and peaceful domestic economic and social policies.

And what nation and forces are interfering in the domestic affairs, electoral processes and democratic freedoms of all these nations? It is not Russia or China.

But how long can these tides of history demanding democracy and socially responsible policies be held back? And what happens when they finally break through?

A controversy has recently erupted in Mexico, of the type that may quite often be seen in other similarly defrauded countries. Its focus is the magnificent quetzal-plumed headdress of the last Aztec emperor Moctezuma which, contrary to the misleading impression encouraged by the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, is not displayed there at all. It is actually located, of all places, in the Ethnological Museum in Vienna, Austria.

The impression is misleading because as recalled by all visitors to the Mexican Museo de Antropologia the headdress occupies a deservedly prominent position among the museum’s numerous artefacts. Viewers are not informed, however, that what is on display there is not the genuine item but a skilfully manufactured replica. Nor are they told where the genuine article is located, or what unusual circumstances explain its transfer to a minor European country that has no visible connection to the safekeeping of Mexican people’s national heritage. Unless, of course, we take into account the brief reign of Maximillian von Habsburg as the foreign-imposed emperor of Mexico in the nineteenth century. But as it turns out, that seemingly plausible assumption is a false trail. The defeated Aztec emperor’s headdress was purloined and removed to Europe by the victorious Spanish conquistadors half a millennium ago, and it ended up in Hapsburg Vienna through labyrinthine dynastic channels. But that is a pedantic clarification of the artefact’s odyssey which in principle scarcely makes any difference.

Moctezuma’s headdress

The fate of this national treasure par excellence of the people of Mexico is vividly illustrative of the policy of cultural appropriation (or, perhaps, expropriation would be just as good a word) that has been and still is zealously practiced by shameless Western imperialists. Cultural vandalism would probably be the best terms of all.

The fabled Elgin Marbles immediately come to mind. The history of this section of the Parthenon that was brazenly looted by the Earl of Elgin, at the time the Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty to the Sublime Porte of Selim III, Sultan of Turkey, of whose realm Greece then formed a part, is emblematic of Western looting of other nations’ cultural patrimony. Lord Elgin cast an eye on the Parthenon and saw an opportunity to acquire what he could of it by bribing the corruptible Ottoman bureaucracy. After making a sweetheart deal with the local pasha (camouflaged with a forged imperial firman the original copy of which was never found in the meticulously kept Turkish archives) he arranged for the artefacts to be shipped by sea to Britain, where they are now on display in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum. The pattern of iniquitous deal making with third parties, while excluding the party with the direct and natural interest in the matter, henceforth became a feature of Western and in particular British policy. Greece’s attempts going back two centuries to reclaim its stolen treasure have been stonewalled and, obviously, have had no success.

One of the arguments advanced by Western opponents of restitution is that, were all similar claims to be honoured, Western museums would be emptied of the objects on display there. Their argument is breathtakingly cynical, but they also make a valid point. Yes, of course, the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum in this connection readily comes to mind, as well as thousands of other looted objects in museums throughout the continent. Goering’s robbery spree across occupied Europe was but a crude imitation of the way these artistic treasures were acquired in the first place. Though scathingly denounced for his depredations after the war, in Marxian terms in the milieu in which he operated the Reichsmarschall was not an aberration. He was merely expropriating the expropriators.

The point was brilliantly illustrated much later, at the time of the memorable liberation of Iraq by coalition armies. Specially trained units made a bee line to Iraq’s National Museum immediately upon the taking of Baghdad, and not because anyone thought that the elusive weapons of mass destruction were hidden among its treasures. The Museum was systematically pillaged, Goering-style, never mind the irksome 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property which sternly forbids it. Shortly thereafter, Iraqi artefacts began to emerge and were being offered in copious quantities to eager collectors all over Europe and North America.

Predictably, the rapacious conduct of the big hyenas is being replicated by their camp followers. Not to be outdone, Kosovo Albanians are laying claim to Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo and Metohija.

Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo and Metohija

As seen in the map, Serbian cultural markers thickly cover the entirety of the tiny province’s territory, with none reflecting a culturally significant historical presence by another ethnicity. Undaunted by that, a pseudo-scholarly rationale for the cultural expropriation of Serbian monuments in Kosovo and their reclassification as Albanian is currently being developed in leading Western institutions of learning, on behalf of their Kosovo Albanian clients. The work of Sir Noel Malcolm, a King’s Scholar at Eton College, “Kosovo: A Short History”, is a case in point in that regard. It is a companion volume to his earlier hit piece of similar inspiration, “Bosnia: A Short History”.

Returning to Moctezuma’s headdress, or penacho as they call it in Mexico, Vienna Ethnological Museum director Christian Schicklbruber offered some revealing views in the matter. “The Museum,” he stated, “cannot make any decisions with respect to political issues.” As to who the penacho should belong to, he indicated that he preferred to call it “shared cultural patrimony,” stressing that “legally it belongs to Austria, but ethically and morally it is a shared cultural item. I would call it ‘ours,’ not mine, it is not Austrian, all of us share it.” Anyway, according to Herr Schicklgruber, it is a matter for the Austrian parliament and Ministry of Culture to decide.

Bank robbers should take note and be inspired by the Schicklgruber Doctrine (and we will not trivialize it by speculating what famous individual the museum director might be related to). They should try arguing in court that their heist is not really the property of the bank at all, but a shared financial asset to which they are entirely entitled to lay an equal and valid claim.

The general view of AMLO and Mexico’s mainstream left including the nationalist left, is that the country took a catastrophic turn towards neoliberalism in 1982. This represented an ideological split in the PRI, leading towards the PAN. This is how Mexico arrived at two neoliberal parties, similar to Democrats (like the PRI) and Republican (like the PAN) in the U.S. AMLO’s mission originally with the PRD in 1989 and then the labor supported, trans-class MORENA (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional) was to return to an older type of PRM/PRI politics before neoliberalism (akin perhaps to FDR in the U.S.). This was envisioned to be in line with social-nationalist greats of the revolutionary period like Lazaro Cardenas.

The politics of MORENA, also meaning a mestizo or indigenous woman, have taken up the banner of ‘national regeneration’ – palingenesis – as the fundamental theme behind the Fourth Transformation. To make Mexico great again also means to drain the swamp.

Draining the Swamp

To arrive at indictments against these past five corrupt Mexican presidents represents an indictment against the control by foreign bankers, against globalization and the globalists behind it, against austerity and capital flight, against the war on the infirm, the elderly, and the weak, against the daily assault on women and children, against the privatization of sovereign resources, against poverty and the brain/brawn drain which is mass migration.

At face value, the ‘editorial problem’ of fake news Atlanticist press is that AMLO agrees with Trump about globalization, Covid, out-sourcing, and immigration, even if his reasoning is quite different. Trump has often times appealed in part to a crime-obsessed electoral base with a particular disdain for ‘sanctuary cities of Democrat strongholds’ which for some Trump supporters carries a tone of moral panic combined with the spectre of an invading swarthy horde. AMLO’s reasoning diverges significantly from these, but aligns with others.

Atlanticism and its media machine have been dedicated to the economic underdevelopment of both Mexico and the U.S., and Trump’s self-professed mission of draining the swamp therefore does parallel with AMLO’s across key vertices. AMLO’s campaign against Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto in that way mirrors Trump’s campaign against Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama.

Immigration

As AMLO sees it, because Mexico’s economy is growing, a shortage of labor will ultimately hinder this growth. The policy of corrupt Mexican presidents in the past has been to facilitate a general northward movement of labor. Skilled and unskilled Mexican labor went northward, but so did Central American labor. Mexicans seeking higher wages went to the U.S., and Central Americans seeking the same went to Mexico. Business owners, in the short-term, benefited from relatively cheapened labor supplies as American firms hired Mexicans and Mexican firms hired Central Americans.

But this arrangement was ultimately an immigration pyramid scheme, a social-pressure release-valve mechanism to manage boiling poverty and potential unrest in Mexico that came as a result between the collusion between corrupt Mexican political leaders and direct exploitation by American firms in Mexico. Moreover, as a great population replacement/swap campaign it divides both populations in ways that makes it more difficult to build meaningful consensus around larger issues. Immigration isn’t just a wedge issue, it’s a policy that creates many more wedge issues which in turn divide a population against itself, drowning out important conversations that need to happen on a whole range of other political topics – problems – which therefore go unaddressed.

These problems then fester and take on yet a tertiary group of problems in what we might describe as a domino/catalyst mechanism.

Fundamentally, at the level of social ideology AMLO’s policies explode the myth that mass migration outside of natural disasters and calamities, is an inherent and positive feature of the human experience. It exposes the great lie that left to their own devices, people will inherently desire to uproot themselves and become a deracinated collection of individuals deprived of peoplehood and left only as atoms subject to consumerism. In reality, these are all negative aspects of globalization itself. Globalization is not a ‘natural process’ in the pre-sociological sense of the term, but rather a particular social construction with intended goals that has built around itself a base social ideology compatible with that same globalization process. It appropriates for itself the language of the left, while having no relationship to, say, organized labor or the French Revolution. So this is a matter of demagogic expedience, and not its fundamental outcome which to the contrary is oligarchical or plutocratic in its result.

Building a Mexican Middle Class

A big part of the solution for Mexico as AMLO understands it is to build a Mexican middle-class. The gumption is already there among Mexicans – hence migration to the U.S. And so the aim is to retain precisely those Mexicans who are of the type who would otherwise be those who travel far from home and make great sacrifices in order to work, who build their skills in science, business, production and construction, and who have the go-getter mindset of the entrepreneurial economic migrant. To harness that energy and keep it in Mexico, working for Mexicans, would create upstream and downstream growth and prosperity for Mexicans from all walks of life.

And for this, Atlanticist media will always despise AMLO.

As AMLO explains, it was not a globalization process that was observed when we note economic development in the so-called global south, but rather a series of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist successes against globalization. Globalization in fact was a rebranding of the Washington Consensus, and so the neoliberal mask of universalism existed to ideologically conceal the continuation of Anglo imperialism. While it would be technically imprecise, it is not entirely without utility to use the terms Atlanticism, globalization, neoliberalism, and the Washington Consensus interchangeably.

For that reason, Bloomberg castigated AMLO, saying he would have won in 2006 if not for his campaign attacks on globalization, and they absurdly recommend he embrace it now. Their reasoning? That Mexico is a strong export economy, and this requires globalization to do. The glaring lapsus here is that globalization at Bloomberg is defined as simply ‘exporting stuff’. But those criteria more closely define a mercantilism with autarkic characteristics – unrelated to globalization if rigorously defined.

The Atlanticist Media Fix is in for AMLO and Mexico

Mexico will never get a fair shake in Atlanticist media, probably because the entire Atlanticist project involved keeping Mexico as a border-line failed state with such corruption and poverty as to create an endless supply of labor to the U.S. among other sinister plots. Strange, given that the economic theory of Atlanticism was to transform the U.S. into a service economy based on credit lines and imports with prices enforced by gunboat diplomacy, instead of equity building and exports. Strange indeed to require an endless labor supply when U.S. domestic unemployment levels have been in real terms quite high, when we consider real factors like wages and hours.

That means that openly corrupt Mexican leadership in the past might sometimes get a slap on the wrist from American journalism, while maintaining an undeservedly optimistic view that said corrupt leadership is nevertheless committed to ‘reform’ and ‘progress’. In that sense, Mexico gets the Saudi Arabia treatment.

And if it were about giving a fair PR shake to a struggling country, that would be one thing. But the real motives are exposed when someone, an actual progressive reformer, comes along and threatens to drain the swamp. Enter AMLO.

It is a well-known chauvinist trope from globalist Hollywood that Mexico is a giant sombrero wearing nap under a ‘no go zone’ sign nailed to a cactus, a failed state. A hell on earth no doubt ruled by Chalino blasting narco cartels, filmed with a yellow haze lens cover to convey that particular hue of arid hopelessness.

The fashioning of Mexico in such form is precisely the ideological component, made for mass consumption, which complements the steady diet from Atlanticist media. Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? It doesn’t really matter when you control both.

This means that whenever we want to know if Mexico is on the right track, all we have to do is first look at Atlanticist media, we bring the Washington Post and the New York Times in focus.

Atlanticist media likes Mexican presidents like Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto. We’d have to dedicate another piece entirely to exploring what sort of hopeful things were written about these criminals over the years. Of course the ‘corrupt Mexico’, ‘backwards Mexico’, ‘impoverished Mexico’, and ‘narco state Mexico’ line always existed, and yet these five past presidents were treated with kid gloves and treated as if they were a solution to these problems instead of being representative of them.

So it’s no wonder now that AMLO is draining the swamp that they’ve drawn upon their standard tropes, and AMLO is not granted the benefit of the doubt.

You’ll note that the Washington Post criticizes AMLO for his positive approach to Trump and the new USMCA agreement.

WaPo writes, (bolded emphasis is our own):

 “For decades, Mexico’s presidents have handed over power peacefully at the end of their six-year terms… Now President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is threatening to shatter that tradition, accusing his five immediate predecessors of corruption or unfair economic policies — and seeking public approval to bring them to justice.”

WaPo presents this as a tradition born of stability and mutual respect, instead of explaining that there are actually laws that prevent the prosecution of past presidents. Well, they also say that much, they simply do it after the initial contaminated impression has been made upon the reader. This paints AMLO as doing something threatening against peace and stability, even though subtle. These kinds of subtle references are smuggled in precisely to paint a picture in one’s mind without being really aware that it’s been constructed such way. Manipulation.

“The 66-year-old populist is asking Mexico’s Senate to back a national referendum on the effort and petitioning the Supreme Court to rule on whether such a vote would be constitutional.”

And there it is – a law would be required to officially investigate and prosecute past presidents. Note the use of the term ‘populist’ – coming from WaPo in the age of Trump, it isn’t meant as a compliment.

“His court petition lays out a bill of complaints against all five men who governed between 1988 and 2018: Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.

López Obrador won office in 2018 on pledges to fight official corruption and repudiate the neoliberal economic policies of the previous two decades. The charges he has levied include a mix of both.

The petition repeats familiar allegations, never proved, that some of his predecessors took bribes or colluded with criminal groups. It denounces others for incurring onerous foreign debt while the country struggled in poverty. None of the five has been prosecuted.”

The popular allegations have never been proved, and none of the five have been prosecuted, only because there is no law that permits an investigation and prosecution – you know, the process that gets allegations prosecuted and proved. It’s as if the article was re-written by an editor without regard to the very logic of the article and the proposed Mexican legislation which begs the whole question of the petition itself. Absurd.

Imagine a conversation that goes something like –

‘Why would you want to stop the prosecution against this suspected criminal?’

• ‘Oh because the allegations have never been proved’

We’ll close our case about the lack of Atlanticist media love with the most recent headlines – not cherry picked – from The New York Times. They speak for themselves.

Mexico’s President is All in for Trump –

“Mexican democrats will not forget Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s reverence to the man who has maligned us.”

Between the Pandemic and the President: Mexico City Mayor’s Balancing Act

“As the first woman and Jewish person elected to lead the capital, Claudia Sheinbaum needs the president’s support. But how close can she remain to a man who has downplayed the pandemic?”

Mexican Leader Vows ‘Dignity’ at Trump’s Side; Critics Fear Humiliation

“President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, visiting the White House Wednesday, has avoided fighting the Trump administration. Critics say he is too willing to bend to the American president’s will.”

A New Revolution? Mexico Still Waiting as López Obrador Nears Half-Year Mark

“The new country President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says he is building looks an awful lot like the old one he swore to leave behind in the campaign.”

Ben NORTON

Some of the most powerful forces in Mexico are uniting in a campaign to try to topple the country’s first left-wing president in decades, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And they apparently have support in Washington and on Wall Street.

Known popularly as AMLO, the Mexican leader is a progressive nationalist who campaigned on the promise to “end the dark night of neoliberalism.” He has since implemented a revolutionary vision he calls the “Fourth Transformation,” vowing to fight poverty, corruption, and drug violence — and has increasingly butted heads with his nation’s wealthy elites.

López Obrador has also posed a challenge to the US foreign-policy consensus. His government provided refuge to Bolivia’s elected socialist President Evo Morales and to members of Evo’s political party who were exiled after a Trump administration-backed military coup.

AMLO also held a historic meeting with Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and even stated Mexico would be willing to break the unilateral US blockade of Venezuela and sell the besieged Chavista government gasoline.

These policies have earned AMLO the wrath of oligarchs both inside and outside of his country. On June 18, the US government ratcheted up its pressure on Mexico, targeting companies and individuals with sanctions for allegedly providing water to Venezuela, as part of an oil-for-food humanitarian agreement.

The value of the Mexican peso immediately dropped by 2 percent following the Trump administration’s imposition of sanctions.

These opening salvos of Washington’s economic war on its southern neighbor came just days after López Obrador delivered a bombshell press conference, in which he revealed that the political parties that had dominated Mexican politics for the decades before him have secretly unified in a plot to try to oust the president, years before his democratic mandate ends in 2024.

The forces trying to remove AMLO from power include major media networks, massive corporations, sitting governors and mayors, former presidents, and influential business leaders. According to a leaked document, they call themselves the Broad Opposition Block (Bloque Opositor Amplio, or BOA).

And they say they have lobbyists in Washington, financial investors on Wall Street, and major news publications and journalists from both domestic and foreign media outlets on their team.

El pdte. @lopezobrador_ difundió un documento llegado a Palacio (cuyo origen y autenticidad desconocemos) que propone la conformación de un bloque opositor para arrebatar la presidencia en el 2021, en el que participan partidos, empresarios, medios, intelectuales, periodistas. pic.twitter.com/zfXSlGdUYP

— Jesús Ramírez Cuevas (@JesusRCuevas) June 9, 2020

In a press conference on June 9, the Mexican government published a leaked strategy document purportedly drafted by the Broad Opposition Block, titled “Let’s Rescue Mexico” (Rescatemos a México). The AMLO administration said it did not know the origin of the leak.

These pages consist of an executive summary of “Project BOA,” outlining what it calls a “plan of action” – a blueprint of concrete steps the opposition alliance will take to unseat AMLO.

One of the key points in the plan is the following: “Lobbying by the BOA in Washington (White House and Capital Hill) to stress the damage that the government of the [Fourth Transformation] is doing to North American investors.”

The lobbying strategy depends heavily on turning the US against AMLO: “More than comparing it with Venezuela,” the document reads, “BOA should highlight the very high mass migration of Mexicans toward the United States if the crisis of unemployment and insecurity gets worse.”

Then the BOA adds: “Repeat this narrative in the US and European media.”

The leaked pages say that BOA has the “international press (USA and Europe)” on its side, along with “foreign correspondents in Mexico.”

The document even names specific media outlets, along with individual journalists and social media influencers, who could help spread their anti-AMLO propaganda. On the list are some of the top news publications in Mexico: Nexos, Proceso, Reforma, El Universal, Milenio, El Financiero, and El Economista.

The list of sympathetic anti-AMLO media outlets and journalists in the BOA document

The “plan of action” makes it clear that this powerful opposition alliance seeks to use its extensive control over the media to obsessively blame AMLO for “unemployment, poverty, insecurity, and corruption” in Mexico.

BOA even states unambiguously in its plan that it will use “groups of social media networks, influencers, and analysts to insist on the destruction of the economy, of the democratic institutions, and the political authoritarianism of the government of the 4T” (using an acronym for the Fourth Transformation process).

This makes it especially ironic that the BOA document reluctantly acknowledges that the López Obrador “government has managed to mitigate the economic impact of the health crisis of coronavirus by giving large amounts of public money to the affected, through social programs.”

The leaked pages likewise admit that AMLO has an approval rating of more than 50 percent — lower than his peak at 86 percent support in the beginning of 2019 or his 72 percent at the end of the year, but still impressive for a region where US-backed leaders like Chile’s Sebastián Piñera or Colombia’s Iván Duque have routinely enjoyed approval ratings of 6 percent and 24 percent, respectively.

#ConferenciaPresidente. Presentan un documento confidencial de un presunto Bloque Opositor Amplio (BOA) para desplazar a Morena y al gobierno actual en las elecciones del 2021. pic.twitter.com/ffoGXoWuVH

— Jenaro Villamil (@jenarovillamil) June 9, 2020

With backing from the US government and utter dominance of media narratives, the Broad Opposition Block plan is to unite all of Mexico’s establishment political parties.

Together, these parties could potentially run candidates under the BOA umbrella, according to the document. Their goal would be, in the 2021 legislative elections, to end the majority that AMLO’s left-wing party Morena won in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies.

After that, BOA states clearly that it plans to block reforms in the Mexican legislature, and ultimately impeach President López Obrador by 2022 — at least two years before his term ends.

Quite revealing is that the “Let’s Rescue Mexico” document does not mention anything about average working-class Mexicans and their participation in the political process. Nor does it acknowledge the existence of labor unions or grassroots activist organizations, which make up the base of AMLO’s movement and his Morena party.

This is not surprising, considering the BOA alliance lists some of the most powerful figures in the Mexican ruling class.

All the major political parties are included: the right-wing National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN), the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), the centrist Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano, or MC), and even AMLO’s former Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or PRD).

BOA also includes the new political party México Libre, a vehicle for former right-wing President Felipe Calderón, a major ally of George W. Bush who declared a catastrophic “war on drugs” in Mexico, leading to tens of thousands of deaths.

Along with Calderón, BOA lists former President Vicente Fox, another right-wing US ally, as a coalition ally. Fox worked closely with the Bush administration during his term as president to isolate the leftist governments in Latin America, and even tried to undemocratically remove AMLO as mayor of Mexico City and ban him from running for president.

BOA also says it has support from the governors of 14 states in Mexico, along with opposition lawmakers in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, judges from the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), and officials from the National Electoral Institute (INE).

Wall Street investors and Mexican oligarchs back anti-AMLO alliance

Joining the entire Mexican political establishment in the Broad Opposition Block is a powerful financial oligarchy, both domestic and foreign.

Along with its “anti-4T lobbyists in Washington,” the leaked document says BOA has “Wall Street investment funds” behind it.

BOA adds that it is supported by “corporations linked to T-MEC,” using the Spanish acronym for the new “United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement” free-trade deal, known popularly as NAFTA 2.0.

Some of the richest capitalists in Mexico are associated with BOA. Named in the leaked document is the Mexican corporate behemoth FEMSA and oligarchs from its associated Monterrey Group, which the New York Times once described as a “a tightly knit family of wealthy and conservative businessmen.”

The BOA pages also point to Mexico’s powerful Business Coordinating Council (Consejo Coordinador Empresarial) and Employers Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) as allies.

Opposition denies involvement in BOA, while turning up heat on AMLO

In the days after López Obrador’s press conference exposing the Broad Opposition Block, some of the prominent figures implicated in the alliance, such Felipe Calderón, denied involvement.

Some of these political and economic elites even claimed BOA doesn’t exist, seeking to cast doubt on the president’s scandalous revelation and accusing him of fabricating the scandal.

But their efforts are clearly part of a larger campaign by Mexican opposition groups to remove President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from power. As AMLO’s Fourth Transformation moves forward, their destabilization tactics have grown increasingly extreme.

López Obrador himself has warned of the radicalization of the right-wing opposition. As The Grayzone previously reported, the president made an ominous reference to the threat of a potential coup in November 2019.

Referencing Mexico’s former President Francisco Madero, a leader of the Mexican Revolution and fellow left-winger who was assassinated in 1913, AMLO tweeted, “How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are… Now is different… Another coup d’état won’t be allowed.”

¡Qué equivocados están los conservadores y sus halcones!
Pudieron cometer la felonía de derrocar y asesinar a Madero porque este hombre bueno, Apóstol de la Democracia, no supo, o las circunstancias no se lo permitieron, apoyarse en una base social que lo protegiera y respaldara

— Andrés Manuel (@lopezobrador_) November 2, 2019

The next part in this investigative series by The Grayzone will show how far-right forces in Mexico are pushing for a coup against AMLO.

Unlike the U.S. which has committed over $4.5 trillion to bailout criminal speculators amidst the crisis which is only enflaming the meltdown of the financial system, Obrador took a different approach last week saying: “No more rescues in the style of the neoliberal period, that provided for banks, big companies. They shouldn’t even be thinking that there will be tax forgiveness or other mechanisms that were used before.”

The End of the Neo-Liberal Order

This comes in the wake of Obrador’s recent anno the creation of a new network of national banks which I discussed in my last paper Mexico’s Fight for National Banking Revives a Forgotten History. Imposing the power of sovereign controls over private finance will give Mexico the capacity to direct productive credit towards things which the IMF/World Bank and international vulture funds have outlawed for decades: Advanced infrastructure and scientific progress needed to achieve economic independence.

This use of national power over banking, alongside the wise application of a protective tariff is the right of every nation, but since the post-1971 “globalized laws of free trade” outlawed the obstructing influence of nations into the world markets, very few nations have acted upon that right. Faced with the oncoming meltdown of the western financial bubble economy and the proven superior model of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that is all beginning to change.

Already 17 nations of Central and South America have signed agreements with China’s BRI joining a growing array of 160 nations operating in different degrees under this new multipolar system which focuses on real economic development of nations and people over the common practice of worshipping financial profit for the sake of speculators. Meanwhile the March 20 call for total Ibero-American debt forgiveness drafted by the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (LASCG) and endorsed by dozens of former Latin-American statesmen has put a renewed focus on the need for a re-organized financial system cleanse of debt slavery, speculation and rule by private finance.

Due to pressure imposed by imperial forces in the US State Department, Mexico’s desires to collaborate with China’s Belt and Road Initiative have been terribly set back even as these words are written.

In spite of this, AMLO has made one of his leading initiatives since his 2018 election the Mexico-Central American Development Plan which is a revolutionary $40 billion system of mega projects for the poverty prone South Mexico and Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. This development plan which Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard called “a Marshall Plan for Latin America” is built entirely around the Belt and Road Model and infuses BRI principles into North American long term planning as it is designed around a Cross Isthmus and North/South railway, ports, new electricity grid, and massive agro-industrial development.

Set side by side with his crackdown on Mexico’s deep state, and national banking renaissance AMLO is reviving a fight which last took place nearly 40 years ago when Mexico’s great president Lopez Portillo took a major stand in defense of both his nation and the world as a whole.

Portillo’s 1982 Fight for a Multipolar System

Standing defiantly against the empire of Wall Street and the City of London, Portillo recognized that his nation had been targeted for depopulation and destruction. Henry Kissinger’s 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) had outlined 13 developing nations who aspired to end their colonial scars by following the Japan model of advanced scientific and technological progress. Kissinger’s bone chilling report stated that should these nations succeed, then they would cause an overpopulation crisis. America’s duty, in Kissinger’s twisted mind, had to become wired towards a strict policy of de-population using every mechanism available with a focus on economic warfare. Mexico was at the top of this list.

Trapped under years of conditionality-laden loans from the IMF and World Bank, Mexico and other nations of the Global South were trapped under usurious debts, underdevelopment (loans were given on the condition that money would rarely be spent on any advanced infrastructure or industrialization), and poverty with no hope in sight.

Lopez Portillo was trapped. But unlike many others at this time, he didn’t give up.

In order to escape this trap, several major (yet little known) decisions were made by Portillo at this time which led into his declaration of war against the oligarchy.

How Portillo Played the LaRouche Card

The first major decision occurred when Portillo invited American economist Lyndon LaRouche to the Presidential Palace at Los Pinos in May 1982 where after a long meeting, Portillo requested the economist draft a policy program for Mexico’s resistance to the empire and broader economic recovery. This program was given to Portillo in August 1982 entitled Operation Juarez (named after Mexico’s first revolutionary President Benito Juarez).

Within weeks, Portillo followed the advice of LaRouche and attempted to gain the support of Argentina and Brazil to stand together against the oligarchy using their most powerful weapon: The debt bomb (a threat to default on their usurious debts). On September 1, 1982, Portillo nationalized the banks of Mexico to the ire of the financial oligarchy.

Portillo moved quickly to nationalize much of Mexico’s oil while preparing for capital controls to combat speculation, and manoeuvred to use Mexico’s oil revenues to maximize advanced technological growth in agriculture and nuclear energy as outlined in detail in Operation Juarez. Then came Portillo’s greatest moment when on October 1st 1982, he stood for all people of the earth at the United Nations in speech which must be heard to be believed.

In his speech Portillo said:

“The most constant concern and activity of Mexico in the international arena, is the transition to a New Economic Order…. We developing countries do not want to be subjugated. We cannot paralyze our economies or plunge our peoples into greater misery in order to pay a debt on which servicing tripled without our participation or responsibility, and with terms that are imposed upon us. We countries of the South are about to run out of playing chips, and were we not able to stay in the game, it would end in defeat for everyone. I want to be emphatic: We countries of the South have not sinned against the world economy. Our efforts to grow, in order to conquer hunger, disease, ignorance, and dependency, have not caused the international crisis….

We have been a living example of what occurs when an enormous, volatile, and speculative mass of capital goes all over the world in search of high interest rates, tax havens, and supposed political and exchange stability. It decapitalizes entire countries and leaves destruction in its wake. The world should be able to control this; it is inconceivable that we cannot find a formula that, without limiting necessary movements and flows, would permit regulation of a phenomenon that damages everyone. It is imperative that the New International Economic Order establish a link between refinancing the development of countries that suffer capital flight, and the capital that has fled.

The reduction of available credit for developing countries has serious implications, not only for the countries themselves, but also for production and employment in the industrial countries. Let us not continue in this vicious circle: it could be the beginning of a new medieval Dark Age, without the possibility of a Renaissance….”

Ultimately, without the support of a debtors alliance for progress, Portillo’s plans were sabotaged under a barrage of speculative attacks on the peso which drove his plans into the ground, and his nation into turmoil and economic hell for the next 40 years. Those nations which were too cowardly to stand alongside Portillo suffered as gravely as did Mexico in the coming decades*.

During the last 3 minutes of this video, Portillo is featured at a conference in 1998 sitting beside LaRouche’s wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche (chairwoman of the Schiller Institute). In this recording one can listen to the old statesman describe his 1982 battle and his debt to the LaRouches:

“I congratulate Doña Helga for these words, which impressed me, especially because first they trapped me in the Apocalypse, but then she showed me the staircase by which we can get to a promised land. Many thanks, Doña Helga.

Doña Helga—and here I wish to congratulate her husband, Lyndon LaRouche…. And it is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche. Now it is through the voice of his wife, as we have had the privilege to hear.

How important, that they enlighten us as to what is happening in the world, as to what will happen, and as to what can be corrected. How important, that someone dedicates their time, their generosity, and their enthusiasm to this endeavor.”

It is noteworthy, that less than one year before Portillo spoke these words, Helga LaRouche presented a program entitled the New Silk Road to a conference in Beijing calling for a new system of economic development corridors and sea routs to be developed by China’s government as a means of breaking other nations free from neo-colonialism. A selection from a 1997 Washington Conference features an incredible preview into the Chinese Grand design which has come to life over two decades later under the leadership of Xi Jinping.

It is important to recall that even though Mexico and the USA currently have many obstacles between them and the New Silk Road, they are both led by two leaders who have struggled with the deep state structures within their nations and who would be very open to collaborating with the new multipolar system led by China and Russia as an alternative to burning in the meltdown of the western financial system. The spirits of both Lopez Portillo and Lyndon LaRouche would certainly smile at this emerging potential.

* A complete overview of the 40 year fight for a new multipolar economic system can be found on the Schiller Institute site here:

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com