Nicaragua, ALBA, and Intellectual Betrayal

By Toni Solo writing for Venezuela Analysis

People in Latin America have frequently found themselves fighting regular forces and mercenary contractors coordinated ultimately by the United States Southern Command, the State Department and related US government bodies. That was true in Central America in the 1980s. It has been the case in Colombia for many years. On a smaller scale it is happening now in Honduras. Shortly, they may well find themselves fighting regular forces and mercenary contractors coordinated by NATO.

2009 marked the transition via a practically seamless continuity in US government foreign policy in Latin America from one gangster US government administration to another. The international intellectual and information-media manager classes have failed to report assertively and adequately the US government’s escalating war on the peoples of Latin America. For overstretched US military forces, anxious to apply pressure to perceived enemies in Latin America, resorting to NATO’s mutual defence Article 5 – as they have in Afghanistan – is an attractive option. With its new military bases in Colombia, the US government can readily provoke an incident as they did fifty years ago in the Tonkin Gulf.

The Venezuelan government recently expressed concern about the intentions of the US government in relation to its bases in the Dutch Antilles- Aruba and Curacao. Holland is a member country of NATO. The well known NATO war games known as Plan Balboa posited unequivocally a joint NATO operation against Venezuela. Despite this, leading US intellectuals like Noam Chomsky dismiss the chances of a US government-led aggression against Venezuela. (1) Their failure of imagination only makes sense in the broad economic, political and propaganda context of the Americas.

The Kidnapping of Haiti

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the “swift and crude” appropriation of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With George W. Bush attending to the “relief effort” and Bill Clinton the UN’s man, The Comedians, Graham Greene’s dark novel about exploted Haiti comes to mind.

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.

The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.” Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East… is now increasingly tied up with military power.”

Ecuador’s President Correa Faces Off With Indigenous and Social Movements

By Roger Burbach. Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA). This article first appeared on the NACLA Web page.

Quito, Ecuador. Beginning his fourth year as president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa confronts a major challenge from some of the very social actors that propelled him into office. In an address to the country in early January, Correa expressed his ire with a “coming series of conflicts this month, including indigenous mobilizations, workers, media communications, and even a level of the armed forces.”

While the country, amidst the global crisis, is facing a downturn in the economy and chronic electrical outages, the roots of the current confrontation run much deeper, to the growing disenchantment with the “Citizens Revolution” that propelled Correa into office in 2007 and formed the basis for his political organization, the Alianza Pais, or Country Alliance. Correa promised to re-found the country with a new magna carta and to rid the country of the corrupt partidocracia comprised of the financial and political elites that had imposed disastrous neoliberal economic policies on Ecuador for almost two decades.

Early on he enacted a series of social spending programs that have in part tapped the country’s oil revenues to assist the poorest and convened a constituent assembly that drafted a pluri-national constitution providing for ample public participation in the country’s social and economic institutions. Reelected president under the new constitution, he declared in his inaugural address last August 10 that the Citizens Revolution “adheres to the socialist revolution of the twenty-first century.”

Everything You Need to Know About the Anti Olympic Convergence

From the No One Is Illegal chapter of the Coast Salish Territories – Vancover.

The 2010 Winter Olympics will take place in Vancouver & Whistler, on unceded Indigenous land, from February 12-28 2010. We call on all anti-capitalist, Indigenous, housing rights, labour, migrant justice, environmental, anti-war, community-loving, anti-poverty, civil libertarian, and anti colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents. We are organizing towards a global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial convergence against the 2010 Olympic Games.

BELOW IS LEGAL INFO, LOGISTICAL INFO, WAYS TO SUPPORT AND MORE.

SUPPORT THE CONVERGENCE:

You can help by providing:

1. HOUSING:
If you have a couch or extra floor space, please help us out by providing sleep space for out of town activists. Fill out the housing form at: http://olympicresistance.net/content/2010-convergence-billeting-form

Crow Creek Land is Not for Sale

Why Resist the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver?

By Chris Shaw

Chris Shaw is a professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of British Columbia where he conducts research into the origins and treatments for neurological diseases. He has been an vocal anti-Olympics critic and is the author of Five Ring Circus, Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. His blog is hosted on www.VancouverObserver.com. This article is reproduced from rabble.ca

“The Olympic Games are coming and you can’t stop them, so what’s the point of protesting now?” is a question I get asked virtually every day. Sometimes the question is posed by journalists sincerely puzzled by the fact that opposition to the Games still exists and seems to be growing just a month before the opening ceremonies. Other times, the query comes from members of the public or even from friends and family. Inevitably, the tone is akin to, “It rains a lot in Vancouver so what’s the point of bitching about it?” The usual tag line to both is “If you don’t like it, stay home” or “Move somewhere else.”

Unlike the rain, which is beyond the power of normal mortals to control, the Olympics are not a force of nature, rather one of human construction whose impacts have been acutely harmful to a lot of people. Most of us grew up or moved to Vancouver knowing it was going to rain a lot, a fact we chose to accept as part of life. The Games, however, were not the outcome of a fair choice; rather they were foisted on the city by a small band of developers and politicians who stage-managed a plebiscite (functionally an opinion poll) involving only 12 per cent of British Columbia’s population in order to get a desired result.

Peru’s Amazon Uprising: Indigenous Resistance to the Corporate Agenda

By Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report. Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Earlier versions appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas and Oct. 9 in the weekly Indian Country Today.

In the wake of this past year’s indigenous uprising in the Amazon, Peru is in many ways fundamentally changed. For the first time, indigenous leaders from the rainforest are in direct dialogue with the highest levels of government. For the first time, a powerful alliance has emerged between rainforest peoples and highland campesinos and urban workers, who joined in the protest campaign. The days when Lima’s political elite could treat the rainforest as an internal colony seem definitively over.

Yet there has been a high price in human lives—and it is only the most controversial of President Alan García’s “legislative decrees” that have been overturned. These decrees—promulgated under special powers granted to García by Peru’s congress in 2008 to ready the country for the new free trade agreement with the United States—would undo a generation of progress in protecting indigenous territorial rights in the rainforest, and open indigenous lands to oil and other resource interests as never before. And an indigenous pledge to physically resist the operations of Hunt Oil of Texas on communal rainforest lands could re-ignite the uprising.

Outstanding Demands

After consulting with some 300 apus (traditional chiefs) from Amazon communities in early September, the Amazonian indigenous alliance AIDESEP—for Inter-ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest—announced that it is putting off a decision to return to its paro (protest campaign) to give dialogue with the government more time. A key factor in the move was hailed the government’s formation of an investigative commission on the June 5 massacre at Bagua, where the National Police opened fire on an indigenous roadblock.

Philippine Community Blocks Entry of Large Mining Firm

From Intercontinental Cry.

The community of Anislagan on the island of Mindanao has successfully blocked the Philex mining company from entering their lands.

According to a press release from the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center-Kasama sa Kalikasan (LRC-CdO), nearly the entire community gathered to greet Philex, the largest mining firm in the Philippines, with a makeshift checkpoint they put together, on January 11, 2010.

The company was planning to commence work on a “livelihood training center.” However, “The Philex 6-vehicle convoy backed out after they failed to pass through the thousand residents of Anislagan,” states the LRC-CdO.

To reinforce the checkpoint, the community formed into a human a human barricade, leaving the company with nowhere else to go

“Women and children here are ready anytime to defend our land. This land is where we survived. We should fight for it!” said Rizalina Lisbos, a mother of four, who was on the front line of the barricade.

Dept. Rules Against Native Rights, Says Eagle Rock Isn’t Sacred

From Intercontinental Cry.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, has shamelessly and underhandedly given its final approval for Kennecott’s proposed Eagle Mine project, a nickel and copper sulfide mine on the Yellow Dog Plains.

In issuing the approval, the MDEQ overstepped the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s treaty rights, and dismissed a 2009 ruling by Administrative Law Judge Richard Patterson, who found that Eagle Rock is a place of spiritual importance to Keweenaw Bay Community and should be protected.

Judge Patterson, in his ruling, stated that both Kennecott and the MDEQ “did not properly address the impact on the sacred rock outcrop known as Eagle Rock” and suggested that they move the mine’s entry point somewhere “away from the rock”.

The MDEQ unilaterally decided that the judge’s ruling was unnecessary “…because it pertained to Eagle Rock as a place of worship. They believe that a place of worship must be a building and therefore negates comments that were not in favor of the mining company,” explains the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve, who works along side the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and others opposed to the mine.

However, the MDEQ did much more than dismiss the ruling and deny the sacredness of Eagle Rock. First, it handed the matter down to a Senior Policy Advisor, who made the decision on his own and just two days before the MDEQ was formally dissolved.

Why We Can’t Wait: Reading Dr. King in the Age of Obama

By Billy Wharton. Billy is the co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and the editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.

Albert Boutwell’s election as Birmingham, Alabama, mayor in 1963 might have signaled the end of the modern civil rights movement. As a moderate Democrat, Boutwell promised to temper the harsh repression unleashed by the city’s notorious chief of police and his mayoral opponent Eugene “Bull” Connor. Mainstream leaders of the black community were told to wait it out –- let the storm pass and incremental changes could begin. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. refused to wait. Instead, he launched Plan “C” (confrontation), a large-scale protest campaign that broke the back of Southern segregation.

Today, US President Barack Obama is held up as the logical outcome of the movement King led. Such a claim avoids a basic fact of US history. Elections do not deliver much in the way of social change. More often they provide sleeping pills -– skillfully crafted illusions meant to demobilise, to dull the senses and to prevent serious demands for social justice from emerging. King understood this process well. One can assume that if Martin Luther King were faced with two active wars, 48 million people without health care and more than 20 million unemployed, he would be able to see through the illusions being offered from the top. The good news is that a new movement for justice need not start from scratch -– it can learn the lessons of history. The civil rights movement offers nearly all the instincts necessary for movement building — a scepticism about elections, an unquenchable desire for grassroots mobilisation and a firm conviction that the movement is operating on the side of justice.

`New Day in Birmingham’

King’s small essay entitled, “New Day in Birmingham”, should be seen as a blueprint to the pivotal Birmingham campaign. In it, he rails against the request by the white population to accept “polite segregation”. He views the election of Boutwell as less a sympathetic act by white voters, than an expression of how little they understood about the aspirations of the black community. When the hardcore segregationists dug in and filed a lawsuit to maintain themselves in office, even greater pressure was applied to the black community to wait. The judicial process was then held up as the ultimate arbiter of justice. A simple formula was offered — the polite segregationists would prevail in court, Connor and his allies would be removed and peace would be restored to Birmingham. According to mainstream commentators, all the established black leaders needed to do was keep agitators like King out.

Cuban Doctors in Haiti: `The Worst Tragedy is Not Bbeing Able to do More’

By Leticia Martínez Hernández, photos by Juvenal Balán. From Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti — January 18, 2010 — Granma — The little boy, with a drip attached to his hand — although at that stage it wasn’t helping him very much — couldn’t stop trembling. The fluid that perhaps in other circumstances would give him some strength was not passing through his collapsed veins. Lying on a piece of cardboard, his life was ebbing away, while, at his feet, a Cuban doctor lamented not being able to do more.

“They brought this little angel in this morning. He was buried under the rubble for three days. A rescue team member brought him; he has no family and he’s unlikely to survive. We’ve given him everything, we’ve cleaned him up, we’ve treated his injuries, and I don’t know what else to do to help him. This tragedy has been merciless on the children, the pain is unbearable.”

Aged 28, Sergio is already familiar with the face of death. These last few days have been terrible for this doctor from Santiago de Cuba, who has left his country for the first time to save lives. When asked what was the worst, he fired off two aspects from his heart: the suffering of little ones and not being able to help them all. That was what Sergio Otero González said, while a woman with bruised face clung to his hand.

How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal: Haïti Through A Distorted Lens

This piece first appeared on Counterpunch. It is two years old — but no less revealing, since for many people Haiti only jumped in existence last week when the media turned its eyes on an earthquake.

When Haiti’s wealthy elites removed President Jean Bertrand Aristide from office in a February 2004 coup, they had the help of the Bush administration, as well as that of the French and Canadian governments. But they also had help from the U.S. press, which helped publicize a carefully planned narrative to justify the overthrow.

I have always been interested in how a supposedly independent press so often manages to report on foreign affairs from the point of view of the State Department. What are the mechanisms by which the government’s narrative ends up being the frame for stories about U.S. military interventions and CIA-backed coups in the Americas? Who are the foreign correspondents and how do they learn the “correct” way to report on a given crisis? Journalist Michael Deibert reported as a special correspondent in Haiti during the crisis, contributing to or authoring 16 stories, which were first published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and then in Newsday. I chose to look at the stories of just one foreign correspondent because together they provide a perfect example of framing techniques used by the press to create acquiescence towards the coup, or at least to confuse the public.

Ortega Warns of US Deployment in Haiti

This article was published by Press TV on 17 January 2010

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega says that the United States has taken advantage of the massive quake in Haiti and deployed troops in the country.

“What is happening in Haiti seriously concerns me as US troops have already taken control of the airport,” Ortega said on Saturday.

The Pentagon says it has deployed more than 10,000 soldiers in Haiti to help victims of Tuesday’s earthquake.

The Spirit of Cooperation Is Being Put to Test in Haiti

By Fidel Castro Ruz

The news reported from Haiti describes a great chaos that was to be expected, given the exceptional situation created in the aftermath of the catastrophe.

At first, a feeling of surprise, astonishment, and commotion set in.  A desire to offer immediate assistance came up in the farthest corners of the Earth.  What assistance should be sent — and how — to a Caribbean nation from China, India, Vietnam, and other countries that are tens of thousands of kilometers away?  The magnitude of the earthquake and the poverty that exists in that country generated at first some ideas about probable needs, which gave rise to all types of pledges about possible resources, which people then tried to bring to Haiti through every possible way.

We Cubans understood that the most important thing at that moment was to save lives, and we are trained not only to cope with catastrophes like that, but also to cope with other natural catastrophes related to human health.

Hundreds of Cuban doctors were working there, along with quite a number of young Haitians of humble origin, who had become well-trained health professionals, an area in which, for many years now, we have been cooperating with that neighboring sister nation.  Some of our compatriots were on vacations, while other Haitians were being trained or studying in Cuba.

Disaster Imperialism in Haiti

By Shirley Pate.

Shirley Pate is a Haiti solidarity activist, who was in Haiti six weeks after the 2004 coup, participating in a delegation to determine the role of the US in the coup.  This article was first published by the HONDURAS OYE! blog on 16 January 2010.

Yesterday, I watched news of rescue efforts in Port-au-Prince.  Elite rescue teams, such as the one from Fairfax County, VA, were focusing primarily on the Montana Hotel and the headquarters of the UN “peacekeeping” force, MINUSTAH.  Anyone who knows Haiti knows that the Montana Hotel is the most lavish lodging your can find in Port-au-Prince and is frequented by wealthy business people, foreign dignitaries, and served as the initial headquarters of the MINUSTAH force.  Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods most heavily hit by the earthquake, Haitians, equipped with nothing more than their bare hands, dug frantically to save their families and neighbors.

The Canada Haitian Action Network is circulating an aid worker’s account that tells of this class/race disparity in responding to the injured.  The aid worker says rescue teams are refusing to go into popular neighborhoods because they  fear “violence.”  Breathlessly, the media rotate stories of poor, injured Haitians with warnings of violent Haitian masses on the verge of a nationwide riot.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s foil to counter Michael Moore about his indictment of the US health care system in his film Sicko (Moore kicked his ass), reported two nights ago that a tent clinic in downtown Port-au-Prince was abandoned by all medical staff because of a “rumor” of impending violence.  Gupta showed the CNN audience cot after cot of injured Haitians with no medical staff in sight.  CNN would probably get an Emmy award if Gupta would quit playing journalist and used his time there being the doctor he was trained to be.  This is not a place or time where ANY medical professional on the ground in Haiti should do anything other than treating the injured.