Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance (City Lights Open Media) by Chomsky Noam

Author:Chomsky, Noam [Chomsky, Noam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Militarizing Latin America

September 20, 2009

The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in the words of George Washington. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture. From the earliest days, control over the hemisphere was a critical goal.

Latin America has retained its primacy in U.S. global planning. If the United States cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world,” observed President Richard M. Nixon’s National Security Council in 1971 when Washington was considering the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile.

Recently the hemisphere problem has intensified. South America has moved toward integration, a prerequisite for independence; has broadened international ties; and has begun to address persistent internal violations of elementary human rights.

The problem came to a head a year ago in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, where the new South American organization UNASUR supported the elected president Evo Morales against violent opposition by U.S.-backed traditional elites, as already discussed.

In another manifestation, Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa vowed to terminate Washington’s use of the Manta military base, the last such base open to the United States in South America, and later did.

In July [2009], the U.S. and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the United States to use seven military bases in Colombia.

The official purpose is to counter narcotics trafficking and terrorism, “but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations” told the Associated Press “that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations.”

The agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to U.S. military supplies, according to reports. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of U.S. military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category).

Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s. The correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.

The Associated Press also cited an April 2009 document of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, which proposes that the Palanquero base in Colombia could become a “cooperative security location.”

From Palanquero, “nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling,” the document states. This could form part of “a global en route strategy,” which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy and assists with the mobility routing to Africa.”

On August 28 [2009], UNASUR met in Bariloche, Argentina, to consider the U.S. military bases in Colombia.

After intense debate, the final declaration stressed that South America must be kept as “a land of peace,” and that foreign military forces must not threaten the sovereignty or integrity of any nation of the region. And it instructed the South American Defense Council to investigate the Air Mobility Command document.

The bases’ official purpose did not escape criticism. Morales said he witnessed U.S. soldiers accompanying Bolivian troops who fired at members of his coca growers union.

“So now we’re narco-terrorists,” he continued. “When they couldn’t call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists.

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