A cartoon from 1905 shows U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt using his “New Diplomacy”—characterized by the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick”—to police the world.
It is important to recognize that the United States has a dismal history in Latin America. And, as is apparently unknown to president Trump, current circumstances are the result of historical events and happenings. Nobody could possibly believe in a concept involving the United States having 'positive intentions' toward Latin American countries. That has never been the case - from the Monroe Doctrine all the way up to the present day.
The Monroe Doctrine says that efforts by European nations to take control of any independent state in North or South America would be viewed as "the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." To state in other terms, if Sweden attempted to take control of Uruguay, for example, the United States would feel justified to bomb Sweden back to the stone age, in self defense. We have been governed by that 'doctrine' and have used it as a justification for virtually everything we do in this hemisphere.
And here we are now, in the process of overthrowing the government of Venezuela, again...
United States involvement in regime change has entailed both overt and covert actions aimed at altering, replacing, or preserving foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. government undertook regime change actions mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, and included the Mexican-American, Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. At the onset of the 20th century the United States shaped or installed friendly governments in many countries including Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government expanded the geographic scope of its regime change actions, as the country struggled with the Soviet Union for global leadership and influence within the context of the Cold War. Significant involvements included the 1950 Korean War, the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion targeting Cuba, the Vietnam War, and support for the Argentinian Dirty War.
Panama was a part of Columbia. The United States led a revolution in Colombia to separate Panama from Columbia. On November 3, 1903, Panama (with the support of the United States Navy) revolted against Colombia and Panama became a new country. The U.S. secured the rights to the canal strip of land forever. Roosevelt later said that he "took the Canal, and let Congress debate"
As governor of New York, roosevelt wrote: I have always been fond of the West African proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."
'Big Stick' diplomacy has become our standard in Latin America. That and 'yellow journalism' dominated United States foreign policy in the early 20th century.
Honduras, where the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, saw insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925.[12] Writer O. Henry coined the term "Banana republic" in 1904 to describe Honduras.
Nicaragua, which, after intermittent landings and naval bombardments in the previous decades, was occupied by the U.S. almost continuously from 1912 through 1933.
1954 Guatemala In a CIA operation code named Operation PBSUCCESS, the U.S. government executed a coup d'état that was successful in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz and installed the first of a line of brutal right-wing dictators in its place.[28][29] The perceived success of the operation made it a model for future CIA operations because the CIA lied to the president of the United States when briefing him regarding the number of casualties
1961 Cuba Bay of Pigs Invasion The CIA orchestrated a force composed of CIA-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
Operation MONGOOSE was a US government on-going effort throughout the 1960's to overthrow the government of Cuba. The operation included economic warfare, including an embargo against Cuba, “to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cuba's economic needs,” a diplomatic initiative to isolate Cuba, and psychological operations “to turn the peoples' resentment increasingly against the regime.” The economic warfare prong of the operation also included the infiltration by the CIA of operatives to carry out many acts of sabotage against civilian targets, such as a railway bridge, a molasses storage facilities, an electric power plant, and the sugar harvest, notwithstanding Cuba’s repeated requests to the United States government to cease its terrorist operations. In addition, the CIA orchestrated a number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, head of government of Cuba, including attempts that entailed CIA collaboration with the American mafia.
1965 Dominican Republic. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, convinced of the defeat of the Loyalist forces and fearing the creation of "a second Cuba"[37] on America's doorstep,
1973 Chilean coup d'état was the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende by the Chilean armed forces and national police. This followed an extended period of social and political unrest between the right dominated Congress of Chile and Allende, as well as economic warfare ordered by US President Richard Nixon. The regime of Augusto Pinochet that followed is notable for having, by conservative estimates, disappeared some 3200 political dissidents, imprisoned 30,000 (many of whom were tortured), and forced some 200,000 Chileans into exile. The CIA, through Project FUBELT (also known as Track II), worked to secretly engineer the conditions for the coup. The US initially denied any involvement, and though many relevant documents have been declassified in the decades since, a US president has yet to issue any apology for the incident.
As a prelude, see the 1970 assassination of the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, Rene Schneider.
Nicaragua 1982-1989. The U.S. government attempted to topple the government of Nicaragua by secretly arming, training and funding the Contras, a terrorist group based in Honduras that was created to sabotage Nicaragua and to destabilize the Nicaraguan government. As part of the training, the CIA distributed a detailed "terror manual" entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War," which instructed the Contras, among other things, on how to blow up public buildings, to assassinate judges, to create martyrs, and to blackmail ordinary citizens. In addition to orchestrating the Contras, the U.S. government also blew up bridges and mined Corinto harbor, causing the sinking of several civilian Nicaraguan and foreign ships and many civilian deaths. After the Boland Amendment made it illegal for the U.S. government to provide funding for Contra activities, the administration of President Reagan secretly sold arms to the Iranian government to fund a secret U.S. government apparatus that continued illegally to fund the Contras, in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. The U.S. continued to arm and train the Contras even after the Sandanista government of Nicaragua won the elections of 1984.
1983 Grenada. In what the U.S. government called Operation Urgent Fury, the U.S. military invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada to remove the Marxist government of Grenada that the Reagan Administration found objectionable.
Panama In December 1989, in a military operation code-named Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invaded Panama.
1991 Haiti. Eight months after what was widely reckoned as the first honest election held in Haiti, the newly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed by the Haitian army. It is alleged by some that the CIA "paid key members of the coup regime forces, identified as drug traffickers, for information from the mid-1980s at least until the coup. Coup leaders Cédras and François had received military training in the United States.
Brazil - Quadros's foreign policy—named "Independent Foreign Policy"—quickly eroded his conservative support. In an attempt to forge new trade partnerships, the Brazilian president tried to create closer ties with some Communist countries. That included Cuba. Quadros openly supported Fidel Castro during the U.S.-led Bay of Pigs invasion. He visited the Caribbean nation after the event, and when Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara retributed the visit, he was decorated with Brazil's highest honor.
The U.S. secretly provided arms and other support for the military coup plotters. U.S. government documents released on 31 March 2004, the 40th anniversary of the Brazilian coup, expose the U.S. role. Brazil's former president, Lula da Silva, "prompted U.S. suspicion in 2010 when he tried to intervene alongside Turkey in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Along with Brazil's previous president, Dilma Rousseff, their "ruling Workers Party has been a traditional friend of regimes considered unpalatable by the U.S., such as Cuba and Venezuela under the recently deceased Hugo Chavez. Brazil was one of the largest targets of the U.S. National Security Agency's mass surveillance program. Rousseff canceled a rare state visit to Washington following revelations that Brazil was a target of American spy programs. The United States is looking for bilateral trade and investment since China has overtaken the U.S. as Brazil's largest trading partner. A 2015 document, reported in various Russian news agencies, addressed the possibility of U.S. intelligence agency involvement in the parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff. "It is quite possible that the CIA is involved in the plan to stage riots in Brazil nationwide,”
Yellow Journalism (fake news, today) describes the reporting that used yellow ink to sensationalize the news in order to drive up circulation. It characterized the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was used to get the United States into the Spanish-American war, not so much to be against Spain, but more to take over Spain's empire including Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The United States acquired Guantánamo as a direct result.
In Venezuela, in 1914, during the presidency of Juan Vicente Gómez, oil was discovered under Lake Maracaibo.
After Hugo Chávez was first elected President of Venezuela by a landslide in 1998, the South American country began to reassert sovereignty over its oil reserves, which challenged the comfortable position held by U.S. economic interests for the better part of a century. The Chávez administration overturned the privatization of the state-owned oil company PDVSA, raising royalties for foreign firms and eventually doubling the country's GDP.
Those oil revenues were used to fund social programs aimed at fostering human development in areas such as health, education, employment, housing, technology, culture, pensions, and access to safe drinking water.
Chávez's very public friendship and noteworthy trade relationship with Cuba and with Fidel Castro undermined the basic United States policy of attempting to isolating Cuba.
Since the start of the George W. Bush administration in 2001, Chávez was highly critical of U.S. economic and foreign policy; he has critiqued U.S. policy with regards to Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and other areas. Chávez also denounced the U.S.-backed ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Chávez said that Bush promoted "a false democracy of the elite" and a "democracy of bombs"
 Henrique Capriles & Right-Wing Riots in Venezuela
False Beliefs and the War on Venezuela
from telesur by: Tortilla Con Sal Western media coverage of this latest coup attempt by Venezuela’s right-wing opposition has tried to establish false beliefs.A basic reality underlies the self-evident role of Western media as their ruling elites’ cultural and psychological warfare arm against both their own peoples and the peoples of the majority world. The Western power elites can no longer freely externalize the costs of their countries’ prosperity and democracy onto the majority world. They have always defended their global power and control of global resources through military and economic aggression overseas. Now they are intensifying repression of civil and economic rights at home. In that global context, psychological warfare takes on disproportionate importance as a means to promote acceptance among whole populations of overseas military aggression and domestic curtailment of civil and economic rights. Over the last 50 years, military developments of psychology and social science have gone from “brainwashing” and “perception management,” through what used to be called low-intensity warfare to what many people call fourth generation warfare. Since World War Two, the United States and allied country film and television industries have been fundamental components of Western cultural and psychological warfare. Internet monopolies like Google and Facebook have multiplied the power and reach of Western cultural mass reproduction many times over. The elites managing these corporations control the supply and demand of messages on an international industrial scale. Together with their governments’ global surveillance and intelligence apparatus, they also shape how those messages are consumed. This concentration and control of intellectual production and cultural reproduction ensure a permanent flow of information endlessly asserting and reaffirming the views and values of the imperialist Western ruling elites and their governments. Their constant global cultural and psychological warfare has developed to the point where it operates via infinite feedback loops needing virtually no intervention. Effectively, by means of relentless suggestion, fake corroboration, and systematic omission, the West’s system of disinformation and intellectual production constructs collective false memories. Over time, relentless cultural propaganda and psychological warfare manipulate people’s imaginations building false memories and beliefs immune to rational analysis. Over decades, this process establishes a received wisdom that ratifies and entrenches a set of false beliefs whose effect no amount of factual debunking and exposure can erase. The clearest example of this is how exposure to U.S. and British government lies about Iraq has made no difference. The Western elites and their psychological warfare machinery simply move on to create the next big lie, always using the same techniques: relentless suggestion, fake corroboration, and systematic omission. In relation to North Korea, for example, the big omission is that North Korea is and has been the victim of permanent military threat by the United States, involving the regular mobilization on its borders of hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied military personnel and the threat of nuclear attack, ever since the Korean War. In the case of Iran, the big omission is that revolutionary Iran has been a force for relatively progressive change in the region since 1979, challenging Western-allied feudal tyrannies and Israel’s genocidal occupation of Palestine. For nearly 60 years the big omission in the coverage of Cuba’s Revolution has been the success against all odds of its political system and its huge social, scientific and cultural achievements recognized and admired around the world despite the permanent illegal U.S. blockade. The false validity of the black and white silhouette monsters created by these systematic omissions gets corroboration via well-worn infinite feedback loops. For example, in Latin America, the regional right wing will circulate a given falsehood which is then repeated as true by the Western news and entertainment media. The regional right wing then takes Western repetition of their falsehood as vindication of its truth which is then recycled. In Latin America, since the turn of the century, Venezuela has been the most high-profile victim. But all the region’s progressive governments and political movements have been similarly targeted to a greater or lesser degree. Fundamentally, everything is aimed at manipulating and shaping people’s imaginations and memories, both within the region and beyond. Right now, the regional battle referred to on May 5 by Lula da Silva and Pepe Mujica at a rally in Sao Paulo is playing out intensely and literally in Venezuela. Western media coverage of this latest coup attempt by Venezuela’s right-wing opposition has tried to establish false beliefs such as:
Despite being clearly untrue, all these falsehoods have been reported as true while the contradictory reality has been suppressed. One infamous example of this process figured in Western reports of the opposition attack on the maternity hospital in the El Valle district of Caracas on Apr. 20. Reports in leading Western news media outlets played down the terrorist nature of this attack and in one case even tried falsely to attribute the evacuation of the hospital to the use of tear gas by the police. Western coverage of that outrage resembled all too closely similar coverage of the Odessa massacre of May 2, 2014 in Ukraine, when police stood by while Nazi gangs set fire to a trades union building killing 42 people. In both cases, the most prestigious liberal Western media failed to report truthfully the aggression of fascist terror gangs. Right now the priority for everyone who supports progressive change in Latin America and the Caribbean is to support all efforts at a peaceful settlement of the crisis in Venezuela. President Maduro’s call for a national constituent assembly represents the best hope for a peaceful outcome. That is precisely why the U.S. government, Luis Almagro and his team at the OAS and right-wing leaders from Mexico’s President Peña Nieto to Argentina’s Mauricio Macri want it to fail. The regional right wing know that, without duress, a majority of people in Venezuela will vote to defend peace and stability and the legacy of Comandante Hugo Chavez. For the moment the outcome is very much in the balance. The only thing for sure is that Western media will continue to suppress the facts and justify the terrorist violence of Venezuela’s minority opposition. Tortilla con Sal is an anti-imperialist collective based in Nicaragua producing information in various media on national, regional and international affairs.  |
Friday, May 12, 2017
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