New Latin American Defeat for Bush

The Rio Group cry for Latin American independence and brotherhood resounded, and prevailed, this past March 17 through the walls of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C., capital of the decadent empire. The United States’ pressure melted like butter in front of the Latin American and Caribbean Foreign Secretaries, who reiterated in the bowels of the monster and in the face of their representatives, the pronouncement against the aggression to Ecuador, agreed on in Santo Domingo.

As if to remind their neighbors to the south of the peculiar diplomacy they reserve for them, the United States sent John Negroponte to the front of their delegation, one of their most conspicuous experts on destabilization and death squad organization, whose questionable past extends from Central America to Iraq, where he acted much like a “gauleiter” in Nazi-occupied Europe. He didn’t have, as his closest collaborators in the “arms for drugs” traffic against the Sandinista Revolution, in vain the terrorists of Cuban origin Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía and Luis Posada Carriles, both, by the way, distinguished guests of the Miami government who proclaimed them world champions in the war against terrorism.

In the debate and behind the scenes, Negroponte intended the meeting, like Israel against the Palestinians, to justify Bogotá’s aggression in invoking its right to “self-defense”: to codify judicially in our continent the so-called “Bush doctrine of the preventable war.” Useless attempt. It appeared as if some weak government out of those situated south of the River Bravo gave in initially to American demands, but the fundamental part is that in the end they categorically overcame Latin American determination, once more united around the firm position of President Rafael Correa’s administration in defense of Ecuadorian sovereignty and international rights.

The precedent that the United States tried to set with the coldly calculated massacre against the FARC camp in Ecuadorian territory is seriously dangerous, not only in reference to the depreciation for national sovereignty, but also with respect to the life of human beings. The extermination operation, where, in a flagrant war crime, the survivors, guerillas, and unarmed civilians were finished off, prefigures a deliberate project to install in Latin America the recipe applied indiscriminately by Washington, DC to Muslims. With simply alleging that they are terrorists, it is sufficient enough to achieve a complicit silence or media approval, so that they can be tortured or murdered. It is the same logic that takes the mainstream press to remain oblivious to the million deaths brought about in Iraq by American arms or the repugnant lynching of the wounded Mexican student and her murdered classmates.

Imperialism and its modes of (dis)information are quickly developing psychological preparation for a counterrevolution in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, that isolates Cuba, and later finishes it off– as if it were that easy– same as the wounded in the FARC camps. Bush, who reflected on the serious economic crisis and on being defeated in the OAS, hours after the Foreign Secretary meeting, took out his bitterness towards Hugo Chávez, connecting him to terrorism with the alleged evidence found in Raúl Reyes’s shell-proof computers.

It doesn’t come free. Venezuela, with lots of oil, sustains the anti-imperialist flag and is a key piece in the continental chess game in favor of independence, sovereignty, integration, and peace between peoples, and Washington dreams of imposing again there a servile government like those before Chávez. The aggression against Ecuador demonstrates the threat that Bush, beaten and discredited, represents, but with an abundant arsenal of war and media to continue killing and poisoning the minds of millions.