Dominican Republic: You Are Wrong, Mr. Ambassador. Five Reflections To Share with Mr. James Brewster
Published in Kaos en la Red
(Dominican Republic) on 23 April 2014
by Matias Bosch (link to original)
(Dominican Republic) on 23 April 2014
by Matias Bosch (link to original)
Translated from
by Miken Trogdon.
Edited by Bora Mici.
A convincing and harsh answer to the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, James Brewster:
I am writing to you because, using the pages of a prestigious national publication [Listin Diario], you have written to all of us Dominicans and, with that, to all Latin Americans, inviting us to defend sovereignty, liberty, democracy, the rule of law and international order. You've done this by alluding to the situation in the Ukraine.
But be careful: I don’t want to argue with you about Russia, Ukraine or Crimea. No, that’s not the point. Upon seeing your eight-paragraph article, I think — condescendingly — that you do not know the history of this country or that of Latin America, or how it was established. It’s hurtful, even offensive, to see you begin your text talking about "people trying to determine their own destiny," without even reflecting for a moment on how 49 years ago, invading American troops snatched this right from the Dominican people. Really, Mr. Brewster, you reflect while being mistaken about time and place: You are wrong.
I’ll move on to explain, point by point, taking the four paragraphs that in my opinion are the most worrying ones you've written. And I want to end by telling you what I think about you as a citizen and ambassador qualitatively.
1. Since last November, the Ukrainian people have been trying to determine their own future. In the process, they have become a symbol of courage and peaceful change for the entire world. The international community has stayed united over Ukraine with respect to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is not only about Ukraine, but also about basic principles that govern international relations between countries in the 21st century. As President Obama said in Belgium on March 26, this is "a moment of testing for Europe and the United States, and for the international order that we have worked for generations to build." This order is based on a group of basic principles. Meanwhile, in Crimea, Russia has defeated and undone the international legal order and thrown away the notion of rule of law. The principles that have meant so much to Europe and the world have to be defended.
When talking about the situation in Ukraine and Crimea, what rule of law and what international order that "we have worked for" are you talking about, Mr. Brewster?
Look, Ukraine has much to teach you about what you like to call the "free world." I’ll say it more clearly: While Ukraine and Russia have built the international order that overcame Nazism and today provides better balance against American omnipotence, the real powers of the United States have been opportunistic destroyers of this order.
It’s estimated that around 7 million Ukrainians fought on the Soviet army lines during World War II. Even though certain segments of the population were never pro-Soviet, the brutality and racial contempt of the Nazis could not capitalize on the anti-Russian sentiments in that part of the Ukrainian population, causing the country around 8 million deaths — more than half a million among those Jews assassinated with the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists; these same Ukrainian nationalists that today you exalt as standard bearers of "free Internet" and the right to "choose their destiny."
Mr. Brewster, listen closely: Almost 1.5 million Ukrainian soldiers fell facing the fascist Nazi invaders. During the war, 700 cities and more than 28,000 villages and towns of this republic were destroyed. This deserves respect and humility when making assessments like yours.
Ukraine, along with the old USSR and what is today Russia, did not enter World War II at the end of a fun action movie. No. They were part of those 20 million deaths that kept the Nazi army from dominating Europe: not the nationalists, not the extreme right-wing Ukrainians that today you extol as a symbol of liberty. No. It was the Ukrainian and Russian people. They did not split the world in that great piñata like the U.S. did, later creating NATO that today declares itself defender of Ukrainian peace and sovereignty. They truly paid with their lives. They, and not the leaders, Congress, Senate or Pentagon of the United States are the authors of what little civility remains in the international order because without their great deeds, maybe we would have all already succumbed to the voracious empires of yesterday and today.
You should know what I mean when I say "voracious." Just remember the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Remember the monstrous and brutal invasion of Vietnam and the punishment with napalm on the countless tiny bodies of children whose lives were destroyed forever.
Again I ask you: What rule of law and international order are you talking about?
I ask you because as you know, in June 1997, the surprised world attended the presentation of Project for a New American Century, a type of American neoconservative movement manifesto program that presented the strategic lines and tactical movements put into practice to bring the imperial pacification process initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the USSR to a close.
The goals of that manifesto were expressed as follows:
"We, the United States, cannot evade the responsibilities of global leadership or the associated military costs, without putting ourselves in danger … if we fail, we will be inviting others to challenge our fundamental interests … we need to increase defense spending if we want to get ahead in our global responsibilities: We need to strengthen the bonds with our democratic allies and challenge the regimes that are hostile to our interests and values; we need to internationally promote the cause of political liberty and economy."*
The bad part about all this, Mr. Brewster, is that that was not an outdated program from loud-mouthed independents, but a dangerous declaration of political principles of the neoconservative elite, from then on very influential, occupied with organizing an assault on government institutions that would take place with George Bush’s ascent to power. Among the signers were Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
None of this, Mr. Ambassador, was historical improvisation. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 embodied an expansionist and imperialistic zeal that after the Lincoln assassination, and more specifically from 1898 onward was installed in your foreign policy, later becoming controlled by multinationals and the military-industrial complex. That monster that was not betrayed by Fidel Castro, nor Hugo Chavez, but by President Eisenhower himself.
Today, Mr. Ambassador, global geopolitics is headed toward the same goals determined in the 1997 manifesto, and the subversion of basic principles of the rule of law and democracy is within view in Ukraine. The strategy appears to be a more or less manual repetition of the already familiar "color revolution:" a series of protests and revolutions that have taken place against leaders accused of "authoritarianism," rigging elections, and other forms of corruption — propaganda against which acts of violence will not occur, spreading a supposedly liberal and pro-Western democratic discourse, the gravitational role of the supposed nongovernmental organizations. Numerous well-founded complaints have displayed the active participation from external elements linked to American and other Western government interests through the CIA, the Soros Foundation, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
The manual put into practice is now exposed.
In Ukraine in 1994, during the first Rada elections, the Communist Party was the most voted for, and consequently obtained a majority of parliamentary seats; 83 out of 355. In the 1998 elections, it earned 24.7 percent of votes cast, which allowed it to place 121 representatives in parliament. Although in 2007 the amount of votes decreased, everything indicates that it still maintains its own electoral base. In those elections, its representatives won more than 1.5 million votes. The Communist Party was Yanukovych’s principal ally, today displaced by the Regional Party.
Those you qualify today as "citizen" groups and "symbols of bravery and peaceful change" are a coalition of Ukrainian political parties with traditional liberal tendencies. Established in 2001 and formally dissolved in 2012, its main leader was Viktor Yushchenko, one of the main proponents of the so-called Orange Revolution. From the 2004 elections, refuted as fraudulent by this and other political groups in the country, and a new panel ordered by the Supreme Court, Yushchenko was declared president, a position he occupied until 2010. In the elections that year the "democratic" opponent was defeated by Yanukovych, who won on an almost invisible percentage of votes (only 5.45 percent!).
This coalition featured the Our Ukraine party, of the central right, founded in 1995 under the name Union of Peaceful Forces of the Homeland, and whose main leader was Yulia Tymoshenko, who occupied the position of prime minister in 2007, and at the time Yanukovych’s government was overthrown, found herself in prison, convicted of flagrant acts of corruption. She was immediately freed, proclaiming her intention to participate in the upcoming presidential elections.
Please explain these striking inconsistencies, ambassador.
Through the fallen Orange Revolution and political debacle of its supporters came Yanukovych’s electoral triumph, but the destabilizing tools and successfully implemented methods in the election of 2004 had remained intact. Soon, a new opportunity to put them into practice would present itself.
On the night of Nov. 21, 2013, protests exploded in Kiev that according to you were only citizens who wanted "their voices to be heard," and that only three months later managed to defeat the government; they were known as Euromaidan or "European Plaza."
At the doors of what had already been classified as civil war (strange resemblance to processes like the coup d’état in Chile in 1973, or in the Dominican Republic in 1965), at the end of February, president Yanukovych’s party lost the parliamentary majority, causing the opposition to approve a series of laws in favor of opposing protesters, restoring the 2004 constitution, freeing those considered political prisoners and bringing President Yanukovych to justice (whom you have called a "coward.)
It’s curious that you don’t take something into account, Mr. Ambassador: Opinion surveys conducted in August 2013, for example, showed that only 30 percent of those interviewed viewed the signing of the free trade agreement with the European Union as positive for the economy, while 39 percent considered it a negative. In November of that same year, another survey showed that 39 percent of those interviewed favored entering the EU, while 37 percent disagreed.
These data show the fallacy of presenting as unanimous, or as popular opinion of the country, an option that is argued about and controversial, and about which there are many opposing positions. They also show that one of the possible options has been imposed in the Ukrainian political spectrum, not precisely through dialogue, nor by consensus, but through confrontation and force.
Another interesting element that showed the futility of protests and their motives are the declarations of the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, in the sense that the EU has never invited Ukraine to join, simply to sign the free trade agreement. And still more interesting: Neither the leaders of the EU, nor the media, nor the American authorities made any gesture to open the eyes of misinformed demonstrators.
In any case, ambassador, it’s slowly becoming known that the U.S. government put more than $5 billion into the defeat of Yanukovych’s government, financing the "patriotic" opposing forces. This isn’t anything new, of course. That method has been used to take down governments since 1953: in Iran, when 6,000 "protesters" were paid within the framework of the CIA operation dubbed PBAJAK to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Mossadegh, who had dared to nationalize Iranian oil. In 2004, during the first attempt in Ukraine against Yanukovych, an enormous quantity of money given by the U.S. government to leaders of "civil society" groups known as "Para" and "Otpor" was revealed.
It’s also been known that one Timothy Pool, considered an "expert reporter in war and conflict zones," trained by the CIA for that end, just arrived in Caracas from Kiev with the objective of accelerating the high-profile war through social networks against the government of Venezuela.
Knowing these things causes grief, ambassador, as you surely read in Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s article from this past April 2 in The New York Times, indicating that "the American government supported the 2002 coup and recognized the coup government despite its anti-democratic behavior." Maduro also condemned the Obama administration for setting aside $5 million annually to help Venezuelan opposition movements, in addition to a petition for $15 million more that is sitting right now with the U.S. Congress, along with proposals to impose sanctions on his nation.
By the way, Mr. Brewster, what do you think of ZunZuneo? Yes, you should know what it’s about — the social network used on mobile phones and computers, created by USAID in order to facilitate "political dissidence" among youth in Cuba, and it’s capable of dodging the digital control of the telephone companies of that country. ZunZuneo, set up to be in charge of phantom businesses, as if it had independent owners, and operate from bases in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Washington, violating the laws of these countries, was unveiled in a journalistic investigation by the Associated Press (not the "feared" Cuban security forces). Again, scandal. Do you know how the director of USAID responded to interrogation in front of his country’s senators? I don’t know whose idea it was.
There it is, Mr. Brewster: The information revealed about the terrible situation that the meddling politicians of the U. S. economic, military and political elite imposed on the world in general and Latin American in particular: the 1990s that began with the invasion of Panama; the 77 assaults that we've been subjected to; the 74 American military bases on the continent; the Colombia Plan that has contributed to South America having the largest amount of refugees in the world, almost 7 million; the already present certainty that we were on the verge of a war between Ecuador and Colombia, motivated by border attacks that were perpetrated with technical and military help from the United States; five coup d’états in the last 13 years.
You, ambassador, who talks about "international order," can you explain to us why the country you represent controls sufficient atomic power to destroy planet Earth 3,500 times over? Why in 2011 alone did the U.S. spend $711 billion on defense, something like 30 trillion Dominican pesos, or 14 times the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic?
Mr. Ambassador, where are the "weapons of mass destruction" that you wanted neutralized in Iraq? What can you say to the families of more than 5,000 dead soldiers, your own countrymen, the majority of them no more than 25 years old, sent on that suicide mission? What can you say to all the other veterans with disabilities, mutilations, amputations, extreme psychological damage, those who have committed suicide, been charged with domestic crimes, or been affected by severe drug addiction?
You talk about "the national order that we've built:" Do you remember the fake photos that were shown to the United Nations? Do you remember that you attacked Iraq without permission from the majority of that international organization, created precisely so that international rights are preserved and respected? Do you remember that you did the same thing in 2011 in Libya, taking advantage of a U.N. decision to establish an aerial safe zone and ended up invading and imposing a government?
Where is Osama bin Laden’s body, whom you presented to the world as the worst enemy of the human race and then simply told us you threw him into the ocean? Where are the investigations about the connections between the CIA and al-Qaida? Who can explain how Afghanistan, after the American invasion, has become the largest grower of opium on the planet, being that your government is a champion of peace and the fight against drug trafficking?
Mr. Ambassador, has any high-ranking political official provided the necessary explanations about the Iran-Contra scandal? Because if you don’t remember, that was while the U.S. government and the most recalcitrant right spread fear of an Islamic revolution in Iran, and those same groups sold weapons to Iranian forces and used that money to buy and sell drug shipments, with which they financed the troops for the counterrevolution in Nicaragua.
Mr. Brewster, how do you explain that the successive U.S. governments have NEVER ratified the Kyoto Protocol, being the most contaminatory power on the planet, and also has not passed the Children’s Rights Law, doesn't recognize the International Criminal Court, and in spite of being centered in Washington and financing the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, has NOT signed the inter-American convention established to protect fundamental human rights. But you do tend to conduct yearly Department of State evaluations about "human rights" in other countries?
Ambassador, how is it possible that you and your government feel so outraged about the possibility of Crimea joining Russia, knowing very well that Puerto Rico is a colony taken by force in 1898, whose colonial status has been contested by the U.N. and Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, and that you have kept it as a colony with such cruel actions as the massacres at Ponce and Cerro Maravilla? What causes you to know that the U.S. elite do NOT consider Puerto Rico a state or even a territory, but — literally — a property that they can regulate and even sell? How is it possible, ambassador, that you talk about "democracy" and "sovereignty," if the U.S. government assassinated the independent leader Pedro Albizu Campos by inoculating him with cancer while in prison, and today keeps Puerto Rican political prisoners (the most famous among them Oscar Lopez), whose only sin is to have fought for their liberty?
How can you talk about sovereignty, rule of law and international order if your government has the Guantanamo base in the Republic of Cuba, an improperly conquered territory, that serves as a center for detention and illegal torture? What can we know about President Obama’s unfulfilled promise to close the concentration camp, implanted on the margins of morality and all acceptable laws?
You talk about "sovereignty," and I at once think: What about the anti-drug policy that your U.S. government imposes on all of Latin America as part of the regional relationship agenda? Have you thought about all our modest governments have had to spend in weapons, human resources and all the youth who die each year as victims of "the war on drugs," when the United States, the richest country in the world, has more than 20 million people over age 12 who use illegal drugs? That is an impossible war. Mr. Brewster, while you do not do anything serious within your borders, you remain the principal traffickers of drugs, weapons and money, not letting us escape the misery.
2. It’s fitting to point out another important point: Today’s political activism in Ukraine, same as the activism in Maidan in the winter, includes all nationalities and religions that make up the multiethnic Ukraine. The Ukrainian people who speak Ukrainian, Russian and Tatar equally have a right to decide their future as a sovereign and democratic country.
Look, Mr. Ambassador, the friendly and democratic face you've placed on neo-Fascist Ukraine, aided by the "color revolution," is belied by its racist character and sectarian extremism.
Action of extreme right-wing groups, headed by openly neo-Nazi forces, drawn to the heat of Yanukovych’s regime and ideological heirs of the Hitlerist occupants, are accompanied by a new and extremely dangerous re-emergence of anti-communist hysteria, which manifests itself in the generalized destruction of monuments to Lenin and heroes of the Great Patriotic War, by criminal assaults on party headquarters, by moral and fiscal terror against communists, and in the demands to prohibit party activity that brings them together.
Perhaps it’s similar to McCarthyism, driven by the U.S. and responsible for, among other criminal atrocities, the assassination of the Rosenbergs, accused of being "communist agents?"
You should not forget to mention the symbols used, and the Nazi and racist ideology of a good part of the radical youths participating in the Ukrainian protests: the persecution against Communists and Jews and the anti-Semitic declarations that have caused the High Rabbi of Ukraine to ask for protection from Israel, that same state to which the government had promised many times to guarantee protection under any circumstance. In Ukraine, after the "protests" that you refer to, monuments erected to remember the Holocaust during World War II have also been destroyed, and there are calls to rid Ukrainian writing associations and the national culture of Jews.
3. Social media has given us access to understand these opinions firsthand. One only has to see the videos, photos, or read the blogs that circulate around the world through dynamic and open social networks. A free and unrestricted Internet has given these Ukrainian voices a global range.
Are you sure about this, Mr. Ambassador?
If you and your government believe in the Internet and free communication, why is Julian Assange in asylum in a London embassy? Why is Edward Snowden in asylum in Russia? Why do you advocate free information in Ukraine and Crimea while in the United States, Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving documents to WikiLeaks? It must be terrible, without a doubt, that Manning showed thousands of U.S. diplomats’ communications to the whole world on a video in which Apache helicopter pilots killed nine people, among them a Reuters photographer and his Iraqi driver.
Let’s see, Mr. Ambassador, who can control, with accessible, complete and accurate information, the $800 billion from U.S. contributors that are injected each year into the military industry? How did the police react in the face of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which simply protested that 1 percent of the country’s population holds more wealth than the remaining 99 percent? In whose hands is the U.S. democracy for which Lincoln gave his life, when the electoral market funded the last presidential campaign with $2.7 million? Who responds to the PRISM program, with which 500 million Internet and telephone communications were spied on in Germany alone?
Do you know what we just found out, Mr. Brewster? The New York police saw themselves as obligated to (supposedly) disassemble a program in the hand of their intelligence management that they have been using to spy on the private, family and work lives of thousands and thousands of citizens and residents of Arab descent all these years. Does it seem to you that this is an honorable fact about those who self-proclaim themselves as guardians of democracy and opportunity, of the "American dream"?
Where did free Internet and informative democracy for all Americans and hundreds of millions of men and women worldwide go after the sadly celebrated Patriot Act?
4. So that, even here in the Dominican Republic we can see, hear, and read for ourselves that the citizens of Ukraine have been striving to achieve. In the coming weeks and months, from Kiev to Washington and through Santo Domingo, the world has to keep defending the rights of brave humans who confront corrupt and authoritarian leaders.
Look, Mr. Brewster, I agree that in the last instance, you have the right to think and talk about Russia, Ukraine, Crimea and of course the United States, which you find convenient.
But no, you cannot talk like that, saying "in the Dominican Republic we can," nor "we ourselves." You are not "in" the Dominican Republic: You are the ambassador of a government that is against the Dominican state. This is not a soccer field or a vacant lot; this is an independent, sovereign and democratic state. You cannot talk about the Dominican Republic in the first person plural with such ease and flippancy because you and we don’t form another "we." You are you. Speak in the first person singular: "I" or "my government." You should know this as a basic element of diplomacy.
Uglier still is this "passing through Santo Domingo" between Kiev and Washington, and talking about what our country should do against authorities from third-party countries. No. You cannot do that, and you should not, and I understand that I should be clear and explain the point to you in case you haven’t had time to study our sacred history.
You can’t because frankly and with all due respect, you and the power you work for do not have the authority to judge "corruptness" and "authoritarianism" in other governments, much less on Dominican soil. It was your President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, referring to Somoza and other tyrants of his kind, said, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
Picture this, Mr. Brewster: They were American troops who invaded Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916. The military leader of that invasion was our country’s first dictator in the 20th century. That same intervention trained and formed Trujillo, who you later gave aid to as a loyal anti-communist ally and defender of the "free world."
Let me share with you a very expressive portion of U.S. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler’s address to the Senate in 1935:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903."
I’ll tell you more: Not long ago, in March 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, on his own, declared:
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else."
Don’t these facts seem positively archaic, primitive and dramatic, and don’t they show how our lands have been used to spread all sorts of impositions, false interests and corruption?
It was one of your colleagues, John Bartlow Martin, ambassador to this country in 1963, who while he impressed President Juan Bosch with a positive image, tricked President Kennedy and predisposed him against the Dominican president, so that when the hawks in his government decided to aid and facilitate the coup d’état on Sept. 25, Kennedy was literally left paralyzed without knowing what to think or do because there was nothing he could have done to uphold the government of a man whom he respected and whose democratic values no one could question; at the same time, he was surrounded by a diplomatic, military and intelligence machine that did not respect him and that systematically lied to him.
It’s sad to think of John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert. Many specialists say that the death of the U.S. president itself, or the ridiculing of it in front of the world by the Bay of Pigs and the coup in the Dominican Republic, is considered a more than reasonable price by which the oligarchy that owns your country obtains their precious treasures.
Mr. Brewster, it’s heart-rending learning details of strategies like Operation Northwoods, thought up by the U.S. Army in 1962 to "generate support among the American people" for military action against Cuba and Fidel Castro (within the much broader Operation Mongoose).
This plan was proposed by high ranking officials in the U.S. Department of Defense, among them Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it considered actions such as initiating simulated attacks, sabotages and disturbances at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay and blaming Cuban forces; bombing and sinking a U.S. ship at Guantanamo base; destroying an unmanned aircraft, and passing it off as a commercial plane supposedly full of "university students on vacation;" and even laying waste to crops with incendiary devices in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and other places. That means that since many years ago, threatening third world countries and your own American people has been an acceptable possibility for the hawks in the U.S. administration. Who is really served by assassinating the Kennedy brothers? Who was helped by overthrowing Juan Bosch?
But let’s continue. They were your troops, Mr. Brewster, that today, along with NATO, are threatening the borders of Ukraine, and that are in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Puerto Rico; your troops that entered Santo Domingo in 1965, one April, 49 years ago. To do it you used false arguments in pursuit of "liberty," the "Soviet threat," and "fundamental rights," forcing the Organization of American States to aid your plan. Yes, it was in April, the same month you chose to talk about Dominicans in the first person plural to judge other countries and incite violence and conflict among nations.
It was all of you, Mr. Brewster, who put Joaquin Balaguer into power in 1966 and supported each and every one of his electoral frauds and his counterinsurgency policy, mother of all types of murders, tortures and disappearances. And when you didn't need him anymore, you helped him cede the presidency forever, as long as he retained parliament and the supreme court. You, Mr. Ambassador, have NEVER said anything against that "father of democracy," during whose last term, just 20 years ago, the journalist Narciso Gonzalez disappeared because — I think, Mr. Ambassador, this idea is mine — you had selected terrorists, predetermined enemies and favorite democrats.
Did you know why, ambassador, when President Johnson came to this country when Bosch claimed the presidency, he applauded Kennedy’s speech in support of the Alliance for Progress and representative democracy in Latin America, while in 1965, when he saw the Dominican people rise up to defend this representative democracy, he justified the occupation by more than 40,000 Marines because in the Dominican Republic, "communists march with heads impaled on spears?"**
What will you do in the Dominican Republic to recover confidence after so many stumbles, and overcome the feeling of your frankly authoritarian and corrupt way of relating to people? I propose that you read all the WikiLeaks that correspond to the relationship between your embassy and this country, and you will see that you have a lot of work to do to win true credibility among the civilized and aware citizens whom as you suggest, aspire to a true sovereignty in this country, a genuine liberty and an authentic democracy, where embassies are not headquarters of wrongful instructions and shameful decisions.
Why don’t I start with something simple? Stop talking about "we" and stop suggesting what "Santo Domingo" (as you called us) should do against other nations. This is in poor taste. Stop celebrating July 4 with fireworks in the embassy, as if our capital city were a wild countryside and your diplomatic seat an amusement park (this is in still poorer taste). And, if you’ll allow, have a website, where your day-to-day agenda is posted: whom you are going to meet with and talk to, and the topics at hand. This, ambassador, is transparency and free information, more so in a country that your government has invaded twice. Also — taking advantage of this opportunity — I advise that you propose a revision to the Central America Free Trade Agreement-DR before it becomes applicable. If it is implemented as it is designed, something very similar to what happened in Haiti is going to happen to us, and not even Bill Clinton will come to ask forgiveness.
Another suggestion, ambassador, is that USAID should really apply itself to be an organization that works "in the name of the American people." The American people are noble, hard-working, brave, diligent, generous, earnest and admirable. Do not involve them in things like ZunZuneo in Cuba, or in Venezuela, or in any other part of Latin America (hopefully, the world). Each time that you do this, the informed citizens of this small but dignified country feel offended, bullied and abused. Be careful too that USAID does not conduct campaigns in the Dominican Republic and show it snowing on Malecon, or that you or some other government official don't make speeches about how to protect citizens’ security, of how to make political, economic and social improvements: We are not that rich, but it’s because you've robbed us by force, Mr. Brewster, and we are not imbeciles, nor do we lack a sense of shame. We can feel that you want to humiliate us and Juan Pablo Duarte, Luperón, Fernández Domínguez, Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, Máximo Gómez, Francisco Alberto Caamaño, Piky Lora, Juan Bosch and the Mirabal sisters can show you our sense of honor.
If you haven’t gone to the National Pantheon, Mr. Brewster, I recommend you do. There you will see the founder of Dominican education, Eugenio María de Hostos, a Puerto Rican whose remains are here as a perennial witness to his choice, which was not to return to Puerto Rico until that nation was completely and truly free. In this small and humble, yet great land, it’s from this precious material that we are made, ambassador.
By the way, Mr. Ambassador, speaking of Hostos — a civics and morality professor — I should warn you about judging corruption and authoritarianism in countries that are not yours. Paul Krugman, a prestigious economist from a university like Princeton, recently said that social inequality in the U.S. is getting worse and worse. Some time ago, he knew that one of every six Americans suffered from hunger. Forty-six Puerto Rican youths leave his country each day, but at the same time, as we all know, the banks were saved from bankruptcy by the Bush and Obama administrations, and that this money came from the printing house located in the Federal Reserve that in contrast to our countries is the property of the banks themselves; that money was not used to save the jobs or businesses of the average American, mothers and fathers of families. "Obamacare," Mr. Ambassador, could not be more than a patch on the health care crisis because the clinical and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists can do more than the willpower of the citizens can. The whole world knows that in 2000, George W. Bush did not win the election, and that he became president by fraud, and that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other important officials were linked to very powerful industries, an obvious conflict of interest.
The worst part, Mr. Ambassador, is that there is still no known action from your government to stop all that, that everything appears to indicate that Obama did not become an attractive or idealistic candidate, a decent man, but one who doesn't stop our countries (the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Honduras, among others) from functioning as a back porch, or stop the U.S. embassies from functioning as a type of command center for such excesses.
5. I’ll end with this: what I think about you.
Upon telling you all this, ambassador, I do not want you to think that we don’t appreciate your great country. You, by being ambassador, should know how to distinguish between homeland and state.
We admire the U.S. battles for independence starting in 1776. That libertarian war was not made to subjugate anyone, but to achieve "in name and with the power of the good people" of the colonies the liberty that Great Britain did not want to grant you. That war was successful under the command of the extraordinary political and military leader George Washington, and he deserved the admiration of the Venezuelan hero Francisco de Miranda, enchanted by the sign of the first free American people. The Bill of Rights and that Declaration of Independence opened a new political concept in the world, rooted in republicanism, equality and free will.
The Constitution of 1787, under which Washington governed, defined the seal of political and social order pursued in the beautiful preamble:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
What did Washington want? Five things expressed in his farewell address in 1796: leaders subordinate to the Constitution, unity and justice among all states, absolute austerity and justification for taxes and public spending, that political parties not dominate the nation, and peace and harmony with all nations of the world.
Later on, it was Abraham Lincoln’s turn to lead the Republicans in the Civil War and achieve the abolition of slavery that still was exercised in the South against millions of oppressed blacks. The residents of that land who chased after liberty, justice and well-being did not enjoy them equally. As many remember, Lincoln died by assassination.
What did Lincoln want? His most memorable piece, the Gettysburg Address in 1863 (when the restorative revolution was exploding in the Dominican Republic), expresses it clearly: "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and "this nation ... shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
And in the 20th century, it would be a black man, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the standard bearer and defender of civil rights for all Americans. King, like Lincoln, also died by assassination.
That is our biggest sorrow, ambassador. To feel that the most powerful nation on earth and the author of one of the most admirable and fascinating freedom processes is being hijacked by elites and mangling ethics in the relationship with its own people and the people of the world: a ruling class whose moral compass is its limitless ambition, even though for that, they have to attack their own homeland.
At this stage, one asks if you, as long as you’re ambassador, are going to have the same respect and honor for the Dominican Republic’s history, as many Dominicans have had for your personal history and your honor.
Being frank, I don’t think so. I would like it to be so, but historical evidence contradicts me. At the end of it all, you are an ambassador for those who rule in the United States, who like you, are not the president, but what you call the "government in the shadows" or "permanent power." You, from what we know, do not have great diplomatic achievements beyond being an activist and fundraiser for President Obama’s electoral campaign.
There are Dominicans who have come to your defense when you have been offended or insulted by their emotional, affectionate and sexual life choices. I haven’t done this, nor will I. I will never dishonor them, nor will I allow them to be disgraced by those motives in my presence; it would be immoral, and I will never defend it.
And I won’t do it for the simple but profound reason that many human beings, peoples, and sections of the population, like blacks, women or homosexuals have suffered — more than simple discrimination — oppression and domination, justified by their supposedly inferior human condition or individual choices. That oppression, which is an inequality to the right to be recognized socially with full dignity, that domination that impedes being in equal positions and states of power, maintaining subordination, and therefore living in a fictitious democracy — that’s not what you endure, and it's what has been endured by prominent activists of the human and civil rights movement across the world.
Neither you, nor Obama, nor Margaret Thatcher, have been oppressed or dominated. You have fought for strictly individual rights, but not for social or global justice. You have never risked anything truly grave; you do not know the true sacrifice of a poor black person, a poor homosexual, a working-class woman. On the contrary, you almost freely get a respect that has been won by the sacrifices of others who have confronted oppression and domination; in reality, you serve the most totalitarian, brutal, cruel, bloodthirsty, ambitious and inhumane powers.
You, Mr. Brewster, do not need me or anyone else in this small country that you disrespect to defend you. While the American and Dominican people have to travel by bus, subway or on foot each day to work, you live very differently. When I've been on César Nicolás Penson Street or Leopoldo Navarro Street (the same one you took more than half of in order to protect yourself), and your car is about to leave, a poor policeman, paid by my town, stops traffic, and you leave in a caravan of tinted cars, armed to the teeth. No one stops you, and you brake for no one; you go where you want, talk with whomever you want, go to all the cocktail parties, and go in all the bars without waiting in line or asking permission or pardon. Uniformed personnel surround you, and many citizens nod their heads to you; some even extend their hand hoping for a handout.
Finally, I don’t even want to defend you, and you don’t need a Dominican or other Latin American to do so, and you show that by treating us with the same disrespect and disdain of all your predecessors.
Nevertheless, you should know that you are mistaken in words, time and place. This is not a casino or a hotel lobby for campaign fundraising, nor the Department of State’s porch. This is the homeland of 514 years of resistance, of the Caonabo and the Anacaona.
I think I've said everything. Maybe there are a few of us who are ready or have the opportunity to tell you this: You are wrong, Mr. Brewster. You are wrong, Mr. Ambassador.
*Editor's note: Accurately translated, this quotation could not be verified. For the original wording of the PNAC Statement of Principles, visit https://web.archive.org/web/20130609155055/http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
**Editor's note: This quote could not be verified.
I am writing to you because, using the pages of a prestigious national publication [Listin Diario], you have written to all of us Dominicans and, with that, to all Latin Americans, inviting us to defend sovereignty, liberty, democracy, the rule of law and international order. You've done this by alluding to the situation in the Ukraine.
But be careful: I don’t want to argue with you about Russia, Ukraine or Crimea. No, that’s not the point. Upon seeing your eight-paragraph article, I think — condescendingly — that you do not know the history of this country or that of Latin America, or how it was established. It’s hurtful, even offensive, to see you begin your text talking about "people trying to determine their own destiny," without even reflecting for a moment on how 49 years ago, invading American troops snatched this right from the Dominican people. Really, Mr. Brewster, you reflect while being mistaken about time and place: You are wrong.
I’ll move on to explain, point by point, taking the four paragraphs that in my opinion are the most worrying ones you've written. And I want to end by telling you what I think about you as a citizen and ambassador qualitatively.
1. Since last November, the Ukrainian people have been trying to determine their own future. In the process, they have become a symbol of courage and peaceful change for the entire world. The international community has stayed united over Ukraine with respect to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is not only about Ukraine, but also about basic principles that govern international relations between countries in the 21st century. As President Obama said in Belgium on March 26, this is "a moment of testing for Europe and the United States, and for the international order that we have worked for generations to build." This order is based on a group of basic principles. Meanwhile, in Crimea, Russia has defeated and undone the international legal order and thrown away the notion of rule of law. The principles that have meant so much to Europe and the world have to be defended.
When talking about the situation in Ukraine and Crimea, what rule of law and what international order that "we have worked for" are you talking about, Mr. Brewster?
Look, Ukraine has much to teach you about what you like to call the "free world." I’ll say it more clearly: While Ukraine and Russia have built the international order that overcame Nazism and today provides better balance against American omnipotence, the real powers of the United States have been opportunistic destroyers of this order.
It’s estimated that around 7 million Ukrainians fought on the Soviet army lines during World War II. Even though certain segments of the population were never pro-Soviet, the brutality and racial contempt of the Nazis could not capitalize on the anti-Russian sentiments in that part of the Ukrainian population, causing the country around 8 million deaths — more than half a million among those Jews assassinated with the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists; these same Ukrainian nationalists that today you exalt as standard bearers of "free Internet" and the right to "choose their destiny."
Mr. Brewster, listen closely: Almost 1.5 million Ukrainian soldiers fell facing the fascist Nazi invaders. During the war, 700 cities and more than 28,000 villages and towns of this republic were destroyed. This deserves respect and humility when making assessments like yours.
Ukraine, along with the old USSR and what is today Russia, did not enter World War II at the end of a fun action movie. No. They were part of those 20 million deaths that kept the Nazi army from dominating Europe: not the nationalists, not the extreme right-wing Ukrainians that today you extol as a symbol of liberty. No. It was the Ukrainian and Russian people. They did not split the world in that great piñata like the U.S. did, later creating NATO that today declares itself defender of Ukrainian peace and sovereignty. They truly paid with their lives. They, and not the leaders, Congress, Senate or Pentagon of the United States are the authors of what little civility remains in the international order because without their great deeds, maybe we would have all already succumbed to the voracious empires of yesterday and today.
You should know what I mean when I say "voracious." Just remember the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Remember the monstrous and brutal invasion of Vietnam and the punishment with napalm on the countless tiny bodies of children whose lives were destroyed forever.
Again I ask you: What rule of law and international order are you talking about?
I ask you because as you know, in June 1997, the surprised world attended the presentation of Project for a New American Century, a type of American neoconservative movement manifesto program that presented the strategic lines and tactical movements put into practice to bring the imperial pacification process initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the USSR to a close.
The goals of that manifesto were expressed as follows:
"We, the United States, cannot evade the responsibilities of global leadership or the associated military costs, without putting ourselves in danger … if we fail, we will be inviting others to challenge our fundamental interests … we need to increase defense spending if we want to get ahead in our global responsibilities: We need to strengthen the bonds with our democratic allies and challenge the regimes that are hostile to our interests and values; we need to internationally promote the cause of political liberty and economy."*
The bad part about all this, Mr. Brewster, is that that was not an outdated program from loud-mouthed independents, but a dangerous declaration of political principles of the neoconservative elite, from then on very influential, occupied with organizing an assault on government institutions that would take place with George Bush’s ascent to power. Among the signers were Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
None of this, Mr. Ambassador, was historical improvisation. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 embodied an expansionist and imperialistic zeal that after the Lincoln assassination, and more specifically from 1898 onward was installed in your foreign policy, later becoming controlled by multinationals and the military-industrial complex. That monster that was not betrayed by Fidel Castro, nor Hugo Chavez, but by President Eisenhower himself.
Today, Mr. Ambassador, global geopolitics is headed toward the same goals determined in the 1997 manifesto, and the subversion of basic principles of the rule of law and democracy is within view in Ukraine. The strategy appears to be a more or less manual repetition of the already familiar "color revolution:" a series of protests and revolutions that have taken place against leaders accused of "authoritarianism," rigging elections, and other forms of corruption — propaganda against which acts of violence will not occur, spreading a supposedly liberal and pro-Western democratic discourse, the gravitational role of the supposed nongovernmental organizations. Numerous well-founded complaints have displayed the active participation from external elements linked to American and other Western government interests through the CIA, the Soros Foundation, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
The manual put into practice is now exposed.
In Ukraine in 1994, during the first Rada elections, the Communist Party was the most voted for, and consequently obtained a majority of parliamentary seats; 83 out of 355. In the 1998 elections, it earned 24.7 percent of votes cast, which allowed it to place 121 representatives in parliament. Although in 2007 the amount of votes decreased, everything indicates that it still maintains its own electoral base. In those elections, its representatives won more than 1.5 million votes. The Communist Party was Yanukovych’s principal ally, today displaced by the Regional Party.
Those you qualify today as "citizen" groups and "symbols of bravery and peaceful change" are a coalition of Ukrainian political parties with traditional liberal tendencies. Established in 2001 and formally dissolved in 2012, its main leader was Viktor Yushchenko, one of the main proponents of the so-called Orange Revolution. From the 2004 elections, refuted as fraudulent by this and other political groups in the country, and a new panel ordered by the Supreme Court, Yushchenko was declared president, a position he occupied until 2010. In the elections that year the "democratic" opponent was defeated by Yanukovych, who won on an almost invisible percentage of votes (only 5.45 percent!).
This coalition featured the Our Ukraine party, of the central right, founded in 1995 under the name Union of Peaceful Forces of the Homeland, and whose main leader was Yulia Tymoshenko, who occupied the position of prime minister in 2007, and at the time Yanukovych’s government was overthrown, found herself in prison, convicted of flagrant acts of corruption. She was immediately freed, proclaiming her intention to participate in the upcoming presidential elections.
Please explain these striking inconsistencies, ambassador.
Through the fallen Orange Revolution and political debacle of its supporters came Yanukovych’s electoral triumph, but the destabilizing tools and successfully implemented methods in the election of 2004 had remained intact. Soon, a new opportunity to put them into practice would present itself.
On the night of Nov. 21, 2013, protests exploded in Kiev that according to you were only citizens who wanted "their voices to be heard," and that only three months later managed to defeat the government; they were known as Euromaidan or "European Plaza."
At the doors of what had already been classified as civil war (strange resemblance to processes like the coup d’état in Chile in 1973, or in the Dominican Republic in 1965), at the end of February, president Yanukovych’s party lost the parliamentary majority, causing the opposition to approve a series of laws in favor of opposing protesters, restoring the 2004 constitution, freeing those considered political prisoners and bringing President Yanukovych to justice (whom you have called a "coward.)
It’s curious that you don’t take something into account, Mr. Ambassador: Opinion surveys conducted in August 2013, for example, showed that only 30 percent of those interviewed viewed the signing of the free trade agreement with the European Union as positive for the economy, while 39 percent considered it a negative. In November of that same year, another survey showed that 39 percent of those interviewed favored entering the EU, while 37 percent disagreed.
These data show the fallacy of presenting as unanimous, or as popular opinion of the country, an option that is argued about and controversial, and about which there are many opposing positions. They also show that one of the possible options has been imposed in the Ukrainian political spectrum, not precisely through dialogue, nor by consensus, but through confrontation and force.
Another interesting element that showed the futility of protests and their motives are the declarations of the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, in the sense that the EU has never invited Ukraine to join, simply to sign the free trade agreement. And still more interesting: Neither the leaders of the EU, nor the media, nor the American authorities made any gesture to open the eyes of misinformed demonstrators.
In any case, ambassador, it’s slowly becoming known that the U.S. government put more than $5 billion into the defeat of Yanukovych’s government, financing the "patriotic" opposing forces. This isn’t anything new, of course. That method has been used to take down governments since 1953: in Iran, when 6,000 "protesters" were paid within the framework of the CIA operation dubbed PBAJAK to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Mossadegh, who had dared to nationalize Iranian oil. In 2004, during the first attempt in Ukraine against Yanukovych, an enormous quantity of money given by the U.S. government to leaders of "civil society" groups known as "Para" and "Otpor" was revealed.
It’s also been known that one Timothy Pool, considered an "expert reporter in war and conflict zones," trained by the CIA for that end, just arrived in Caracas from Kiev with the objective of accelerating the high-profile war through social networks against the government of Venezuela.
Knowing these things causes grief, ambassador, as you surely read in Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s article from this past April 2 in The New York Times, indicating that "the American government supported the 2002 coup and recognized the coup government despite its anti-democratic behavior." Maduro also condemned the Obama administration for setting aside $5 million annually to help Venezuelan opposition movements, in addition to a petition for $15 million more that is sitting right now with the U.S. Congress, along with proposals to impose sanctions on his nation.
By the way, Mr. Brewster, what do you think of ZunZuneo? Yes, you should know what it’s about — the social network used on mobile phones and computers, created by USAID in order to facilitate "political dissidence" among youth in Cuba, and it’s capable of dodging the digital control of the telephone companies of that country. ZunZuneo, set up to be in charge of phantom businesses, as if it had independent owners, and operate from bases in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Washington, violating the laws of these countries, was unveiled in a journalistic investigation by the Associated Press (not the "feared" Cuban security forces). Again, scandal. Do you know how the director of USAID responded to interrogation in front of his country’s senators? I don’t know whose idea it was.
There it is, Mr. Brewster: The information revealed about the terrible situation that the meddling politicians of the U. S. economic, military and political elite imposed on the world in general and Latin American in particular: the 1990s that began with the invasion of Panama; the 77 assaults that we've been subjected to; the 74 American military bases on the continent; the Colombia Plan that has contributed to South America having the largest amount of refugees in the world, almost 7 million; the already present certainty that we were on the verge of a war between Ecuador and Colombia, motivated by border attacks that were perpetrated with technical and military help from the United States; five coup d’états in the last 13 years.
You, ambassador, who talks about "international order," can you explain to us why the country you represent controls sufficient atomic power to destroy planet Earth 3,500 times over? Why in 2011 alone did the U.S. spend $711 billion on defense, something like 30 trillion Dominican pesos, or 14 times the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic?
Mr. Ambassador, where are the "weapons of mass destruction" that you wanted neutralized in Iraq? What can you say to the families of more than 5,000 dead soldiers, your own countrymen, the majority of them no more than 25 years old, sent on that suicide mission? What can you say to all the other veterans with disabilities, mutilations, amputations, extreme psychological damage, those who have committed suicide, been charged with domestic crimes, or been affected by severe drug addiction?
You talk about "the national order that we've built:" Do you remember the fake photos that were shown to the United Nations? Do you remember that you attacked Iraq without permission from the majority of that international organization, created precisely so that international rights are preserved and respected? Do you remember that you did the same thing in 2011 in Libya, taking advantage of a U.N. decision to establish an aerial safe zone and ended up invading and imposing a government?
Where is Osama bin Laden’s body, whom you presented to the world as the worst enemy of the human race and then simply told us you threw him into the ocean? Where are the investigations about the connections between the CIA and al-Qaida? Who can explain how Afghanistan, after the American invasion, has become the largest grower of opium on the planet, being that your government is a champion of peace and the fight against drug trafficking?
Mr. Ambassador, has any high-ranking political official provided the necessary explanations about the Iran-Contra scandal? Because if you don’t remember, that was while the U.S. government and the most recalcitrant right spread fear of an Islamic revolution in Iran, and those same groups sold weapons to Iranian forces and used that money to buy and sell drug shipments, with which they financed the troops for the counterrevolution in Nicaragua.
Mr. Brewster, how do you explain that the successive U.S. governments have NEVER ratified the Kyoto Protocol, being the most contaminatory power on the planet, and also has not passed the Children’s Rights Law, doesn't recognize the International Criminal Court, and in spite of being centered in Washington and financing the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, has NOT signed the inter-American convention established to protect fundamental human rights. But you do tend to conduct yearly Department of State evaluations about "human rights" in other countries?
Ambassador, how is it possible that you and your government feel so outraged about the possibility of Crimea joining Russia, knowing very well that Puerto Rico is a colony taken by force in 1898, whose colonial status has been contested by the U.N. and Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, and that you have kept it as a colony with such cruel actions as the massacres at Ponce and Cerro Maravilla? What causes you to know that the U.S. elite do NOT consider Puerto Rico a state or even a territory, but — literally — a property that they can regulate and even sell? How is it possible, ambassador, that you talk about "democracy" and "sovereignty," if the U.S. government assassinated the independent leader Pedro Albizu Campos by inoculating him with cancer while in prison, and today keeps Puerto Rican political prisoners (the most famous among them Oscar Lopez), whose only sin is to have fought for their liberty?
How can you talk about sovereignty, rule of law and international order if your government has the Guantanamo base in the Republic of Cuba, an improperly conquered territory, that serves as a center for detention and illegal torture? What can we know about President Obama’s unfulfilled promise to close the concentration camp, implanted on the margins of morality and all acceptable laws?
You talk about "sovereignty," and I at once think: What about the anti-drug policy that your U.S. government imposes on all of Latin America as part of the regional relationship agenda? Have you thought about all our modest governments have had to spend in weapons, human resources and all the youth who die each year as victims of "the war on drugs," when the United States, the richest country in the world, has more than 20 million people over age 12 who use illegal drugs? That is an impossible war. Mr. Brewster, while you do not do anything serious within your borders, you remain the principal traffickers of drugs, weapons and money, not letting us escape the misery.
2. It’s fitting to point out another important point: Today’s political activism in Ukraine, same as the activism in Maidan in the winter, includes all nationalities and religions that make up the multiethnic Ukraine. The Ukrainian people who speak Ukrainian, Russian and Tatar equally have a right to decide their future as a sovereign and democratic country.
Look, Mr. Ambassador, the friendly and democratic face you've placed on neo-Fascist Ukraine, aided by the "color revolution," is belied by its racist character and sectarian extremism.
Action of extreme right-wing groups, headed by openly neo-Nazi forces, drawn to the heat of Yanukovych’s regime and ideological heirs of the Hitlerist occupants, are accompanied by a new and extremely dangerous re-emergence of anti-communist hysteria, which manifests itself in the generalized destruction of monuments to Lenin and heroes of the Great Patriotic War, by criminal assaults on party headquarters, by moral and fiscal terror against communists, and in the demands to prohibit party activity that brings them together.
Perhaps it’s similar to McCarthyism, driven by the U.S. and responsible for, among other criminal atrocities, the assassination of the Rosenbergs, accused of being "communist agents?"
You should not forget to mention the symbols used, and the Nazi and racist ideology of a good part of the radical youths participating in the Ukrainian protests: the persecution against Communists and Jews and the anti-Semitic declarations that have caused the High Rabbi of Ukraine to ask for protection from Israel, that same state to which the government had promised many times to guarantee protection under any circumstance. In Ukraine, after the "protests" that you refer to, monuments erected to remember the Holocaust during World War II have also been destroyed, and there are calls to rid Ukrainian writing associations and the national culture of Jews.
3. Social media has given us access to understand these opinions firsthand. One only has to see the videos, photos, or read the blogs that circulate around the world through dynamic and open social networks. A free and unrestricted Internet has given these Ukrainian voices a global range.
Are you sure about this, Mr. Ambassador?
If you and your government believe in the Internet and free communication, why is Julian Assange in asylum in a London embassy? Why is Edward Snowden in asylum in Russia? Why do you advocate free information in Ukraine and Crimea while in the United States, Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving documents to WikiLeaks? It must be terrible, without a doubt, that Manning showed thousands of U.S. diplomats’ communications to the whole world on a video in which Apache helicopter pilots killed nine people, among them a Reuters photographer and his Iraqi driver.
Let’s see, Mr. Ambassador, who can control, with accessible, complete and accurate information, the $800 billion from U.S. contributors that are injected each year into the military industry? How did the police react in the face of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which simply protested that 1 percent of the country’s population holds more wealth than the remaining 99 percent? In whose hands is the U.S. democracy for which Lincoln gave his life, when the electoral market funded the last presidential campaign with $2.7 million? Who responds to the PRISM program, with which 500 million Internet and telephone communications were spied on in Germany alone?
Do you know what we just found out, Mr. Brewster? The New York police saw themselves as obligated to (supposedly) disassemble a program in the hand of their intelligence management that they have been using to spy on the private, family and work lives of thousands and thousands of citizens and residents of Arab descent all these years. Does it seem to you that this is an honorable fact about those who self-proclaim themselves as guardians of democracy and opportunity, of the "American dream"?
Where did free Internet and informative democracy for all Americans and hundreds of millions of men and women worldwide go after the sadly celebrated Patriot Act?
4. So that, even here in the Dominican Republic we can see, hear, and read for ourselves that the citizens of Ukraine have been striving to achieve. In the coming weeks and months, from Kiev to Washington and through Santo Domingo, the world has to keep defending the rights of brave humans who confront corrupt and authoritarian leaders.
Look, Mr. Brewster, I agree that in the last instance, you have the right to think and talk about Russia, Ukraine, Crimea and of course the United States, which you find convenient.
But no, you cannot talk like that, saying "in the Dominican Republic we can," nor "we ourselves." You are not "in" the Dominican Republic: You are the ambassador of a government that is against the Dominican state. This is not a soccer field or a vacant lot; this is an independent, sovereign and democratic state. You cannot talk about the Dominican Republic in the first person plural with such ease and flippancy because you and we don’t form another "we." You are you. Speak in the first person singular: "I" or "my government." You should know this as a basic element of diplomacy.
Uglier still is this "passing through Santo Domingo" between Kiev and Washington, and talking about what our country should do against authorities from third-party countries. No. You cannot do that, and you should not, and I understand that I should be clear and explain the point to you in case you haven’t had time to study our sacred history.
You can’t because frankly and with all due respect, you and the power you work for do not have the authority to judge "corruptness" and "authoritarianism" in other governments, much less on Dominican soil. It was your President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, referring to Somoza and other tyrants of his kind, said, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
Picture this, Mr. Brewster: They were American troops who invaded Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916. The military leader of that invasion was our country’s first dictator in the 20th century. That same intervention trained and formed Trujillo, who you later gave aid to as a loyal anti-communist ally and defender of the "free world."
Let me share with you a very expressive portion of U.S. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler’s address to the Senate in 1935:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903."
I’ll tell you more: Not long ago, in March 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, on his own, declared:
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else."
Don’t these facts seem positively archaic, primitive and dramatic, and don’t they show how our lands have been used to spread all sorts of impositions, false interests and corruption?
It was one of your colleagues, John Bartlow Martin, ambassador to this country in 1963, who while he impressed President Juan Bosch with a positive image, tricked President Kennedy and predisposed him against the Dominican president, so that when the hawks in his government decided to aid and facilitate the coup d’état on Sept. 25, Kennedy was literally left paralyzed without knowing what to think or do because there was nothing he could have done to uphold the government of a man whom he respected and whose democratic values no one could question; at the same time, he was surrounded by a diplomatic, military and intelligence machine that did not respect him and that systematically lied to him.
It’s sad to think of John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert. Many specialists say that the death of the U.S. president itself, or the ridiculing of it in front of the world by the Bay of Pigs and the coup in the Dominican Republic, is considered a more than reasonable price by which the oligarchy that owns your country obtains their precious treasures.
Mr. Brewster, it’s heart-rending learning details of strategies like Operation Northwoods, thought up by the U.S. Army in 1962 to "generate support among the American people" for military action against Cuba and Fidel Castro (within the much broader Operation Mongoose).
This plan was proposed by high ranking officials in the U.S. Department of Defense, among them Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it considered actions such as initiating simulated attacks, sabotages and disturbances at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay and blaming Cuban forces; bombing and sinking a U.S. ship at Guantanamo base; destroying an unmanned aircraft, and passing it off as a commercial plane supposedly full of "university students on vacation;" and even laying waste to crops with incendiary devices in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and other places. That means that since many years ago, threatening third world countries and your own American people has been an acceptable possibility for the hawks in the U.S. administration. Who is really served by assassinating the Kennedy brothers? Who was helped by overthrowing Juan Bosch?
But let’s continue. They were your troops, Mr. Brewster, that today, along with NATO, are threatening the borders of Ukraine, and that are in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Puerto Rico; your troops that entered Santo Domingo in 1965, one April, 49 years ago. To do it you used false arguments in pursuit of "liberty," the "Soviet threat," and "fundamental rights," forcing the Organization of American States to aid your plan. Yes, it was in April, the same month you chose to talk about Dominicans in the first person plural to judge other countries and incite violence and conflict among nations.
It was all of you, Mr. Brewster, who put Joaquin Balaguer into power in 1966 and supported each and every one of his electoral frauds and his counterinsurgency policy, mother of all types of murders, tortures and disappearances. And when you didn't need him anymore, you helped him cede the presidency forever, as long as he retained parliament and the supreme court. You, Mr. Ambassador, have NEVER said anything against that "father of democracy," during whose last term, just 20 years ago, the journalist Narciso Gonzalez disappeared because — I think, Mr. Ambassador, this idea is mine — you had selected terrorists, predetermined enemies and favorite democrats.
Did you know why, ambassador, when President Johnson came to this country when Bosch claimed the presidency, he applauded Kennedy’s speech in support of the Alliance for Progress and representative democracy in Latin America, while in 1965, when he saw the Dominican people rise up to defend this representative democracy, he justified the occupation by more than 40,000 Marines because in the Dominican Republic, "communists march with heads impaled on spears?"**
What will you do in the Dominican Republic to recover confidence after so many stumbles, and overcome the feeling of your frankly authoritarian and corrupt way of relating to people? I propose that you read all the WikiLeaks that correspond to the relationship between your embassy and this country, and you will see that you have a lot of work to do to win true credibility among the civilized and aware citizens whom as you suggest, aspire to a true sovereignty in this country, a genuine liberty and an authentic democracy, where embassies are not headquarters of wrongful instructions and shameful decisions.
Why don’t I start with something simple? Stop talking about "we" and stop suggesting what "Santo Domingo" (as you called us) should do against other nations. This is in poor taste. Stop celebrating July 4 with fireworks in the embassy, as if our capital city were a wild countryside and your diplomatic seat an amusement park (this is in still poorer taste). And, if you’ll allow, have a website, where your day-to-day agenda is posted: whom you are going to meet with and talk to, and the topics at hand. This, ambassador, is transparency and free information, more so in a country that your government has invaded twice. Also — taking advantage of this opportunity — I advise that you propose a revision to the Central America Free Trade Agreement-DR before it becomes applicable. If it is implemented as it is designed, something very similar to what happened in Haiti is going to happen to us, and not even Bill Clinton will come to ask forgiveness.
Another suggestion, ambassador, is that USAID should really apply itself to be an organization that works "in the name of the American people." The American people are noble, hard-working, brave, diligent, generous, earnest and admirable. Do not involve them in things like ZunZuneo in Cuba, or in Venezuela, or in any other part of Latin America (hopefully, the world). Each time that you do this, the informed citizens of this small but dignified country feel offended, bullied and abused. Be careful too that USAID does not conduct campaigns in the Dominican Republic and show it snowing on Malecon, or that you or some other government official don't make speeches about how to protect citizens’ security, of how to make political, economic and social improvements: We are not that rich, but it’s because you've robbed us by force, Mr. Brewster, and we are not imbeciles, nor do we lack a sense of shame. We can feel that you want to humiliate us and Juan Pablo Duarte, Luperón, Fernández Domínguez, Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, Máximo Gómez, Francisco Alberto Caamaño, Piky Lora, Juan Bosch and the Mirabal sisters can show you our sense of honor.
If you haven’t gone to the National Pantheon, Mr. Brewster, I recommend you do. There you will see the founder of Dominican education, Eugenio María de Hostos, a Puerto Rican whose remains are here as a perennial witness to his choice, which was not to return to Puerto Rico until that nation was completely and truly free. In this small and humble, yet great land, it’s from this precious material that we are made, ambassador.
By the way, Mr. Ambassador, speaking of Hostos — a civics and morality professor — I should warn you about judging corruption and authoritarianism in countries that are not yours. Paul Krugman, a prestigious economist from a university like Princeton, recently said that social inequality in the U.S. is getting worse and worse. Some time ago, he knew that one of every six Americans suffered from hunger. Forty-six Puerto Rican youths leave his country each day, but at the same time, as we all know, the banks were saved from bankruptcy by the Bush and Obama administrations, and that this money came from the printing house located in the Federal Reserve that in contrast to our countries is the property of the banks themselves; that money was not used to save the jobs or businesses of the average American, mothers and fathers of families. "Obamacare," Mr. Ambassador, could not be more than a patch on the health care crisis because the clinical and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists can do more than the willpower of the citizens can. The whole world knows that in 2000, George W. Bush did not win the election, and that he became president by fraud, and that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other important officials were linked to very powerful industries, an obvious conflict of interest.
The worst part, Mr. Ambassador, is that there is still no known action from your government to stop all that, that everything appears to indicate that Obama did not become an attractive or idealistic candidate, a decent man, but one who doesn't stop our countries (the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Honduras, among others) from functioning as a back porch, or stop the U.S. embassies from functioning as a type of command center for such excesses.
5. I’ll end with this: what I think about you.
Upon telling you all this, ambassador, I do not want you to think that we don’t appreciate your great country. You, by being ambassador, should know how to distinguish between homeland and state.
We admire the U.S. battles for independence starting in 1776. That libertarian war was not made to subjugate anyone, but to achieve "in name and with the power of the good people" of the colonies the liberty that Great Britain did not want to grant you. That war was successful under the command of the extraordinary political and military leader George Washington, and he deserved the admiration of the Venezuelan hero Francisco de Miranda, enchanted by the sign of the first free American people. The Bill of Rights and that Declaration of Independence opened a new political concept in the world, rooted in republicanism, equality and free will.
The Constitution of 1787, under which Washington governed, defined the seal of political and social order pursued in the beautiful preamble:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
What did Washington want? Five things expressed in his farewell address in 1796: leaders subordinate to the Constitution, unity and justice among all states, absolute austerity and justification for taxes and public spending, that political parties not dominate the nation, and peace and harmony with all nations of the world.
Later on, it was Abraham Lincoln’s turn to lead the Republicans in the Civil War and achieve the abolition of slavery that still was exercised in the South against millions of oppressed blacks. The residents of that land who chased after liberty, justice and well-being did not enjoy them equally. As many remember, Lincoln died by assassination.
What did Lincoln want? His most memorable piece, the Gettysburg Address in 1863 (when the restorative revolution was exploding in the Dominican Republic), expresses it clearly: "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and "this nation ... shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
And in the 20th century, it would be a black man, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the standard bearer and defender of civil rights for all Americans. King, like Lincoln, also died by assassination.
That is our biggest sorrow, ambassador. To feel that the most powerful nation on earth and the author of one of the most admirable and fascinating freedom processes is being hijacked by elites and mangling ethics in the relationship with its own people and the people of the world: a ruling class whose moral compass is its limitless ambition, even though for that, they have to attack their own homeland.
At this stage, one asks if you, as long as you’re ambassador, are going to have the same respect and honor for the Dominican Republic’s history, as many Dominicans have had for your personal history and your honor.
Being frank, I don’t think so. I would like it to be so, but historical evidence contradicts me. At the end of it all, you are an ambassador for those who rule in the United States, who like you, are not the president, but what you call the "government in the shadows" or "permanent power." You, from what we know, do not have great diplomatic achievements beyond being an activist and fundraiser for President Obama’s electoral campaign.
There are Dominicans who have come to your defense when you have been offended or insulted by their emotional, affectionate and sexual life choices. I haven’t done this, nor will I. I will never dishonor them, nor will I allow them to be disgraced by those motives in my presence; it would be immoral, and I will never defend it.
And I won’t do it for the simple but profound reason that many human beings, peoples, and sections of the population, like blacks, women or homosexuals have suffered — more than simple discrimination — oppression and domination, justified by their supposedly inferior human condition or individual choices. That oppression, which is an inequality to the right to be recognized socially with full dignity, that domination that impedes being in equal positions and states of power, maintaining subordination, and therefore living in a fictitious democracy — that’s not what you endure, and it's what has been endured by prominent activists of the human and civil rights movement across the world.
Neither you, nor Obama, nor Margaret Thatcher, have been oppressed or dominated. You have fought for strictly individual rights, but not for social or global justice. You have never risked anything truly grave; you do not know the true sacrifice of a poor black person, a poor homosexual, a working-class woman. On the contrary, you almost freely get a respect that has been won by the sacrifices of others who have confronted oppression and domination; in reality, you serve the most totalitarian, brutal, cruel, bloodthirsty, ambitious and inhumane powers.
You, Mr. Brewster, do not need me or anyone else in this small country that you disrespect to defend you. While the American and Dominican people have to travel by bus, subway or on foot each day to work, you live very differently. When I've been on César Nicolás Penson Street or Leopoldo Navarro Street (the same one you took more than half of in order to protect yourself), and your car is about to leave, a poor policeman, paid by my town, stops traffic, and you leave in a caravan of tinted cars, armed to the teeth. No one stops you, and you brake for no one; you go where you want, talk with whomever you want, go to all the cocktail parties, and go in all the bars without waiting in line or asking permission or pardon. Uniformed personnel surround you, and many citizens nod their heads to you; some even extend their hand hoping for a handout.
Finally, I don’t even want to defend you, and you don’t need a Dominican or other Latin American to do so, and you show that by treating us with the same disrespect and disdain of all your predecessors.
Nevertheless, you should know that you are mistaken in words, time and place. This is not a casino or a hotel lobby for campaign fundraising, nor the Department of State’s porch. This is the homeland of 514 years of resistance, of the Caonabo and the Anacaona.
I think I've said everything. Maybe there are a few of us who are ready or have the opportunity to tell you this: You are wrong, Mr. Brewster. You are wrong, Mr. Ambassador.
*Editor's note: Accurately translated, this quotation could not be verified. For the original wording of the PNAC Statement of Principles, visit https://web.archive.org/web/20130609155055/http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
**Editor's note: This quote could not be verified.