JUNE 2008

CASTRO DEDATES OBAMA IN OP ED

MAY 2008

BUSH REGIME SENDING NAVY TO THREATEN SOUTH AMERICA

LATINO IMMIGRANTS SENDING LESS MONEY BACK HOME

LATINOS STILL THE FASTEST GROWING GROUP IN U.S.

APRIL 2008

BUSH REGIME TO SEND SHIPS TO THREATEN SOUTH AMERICA

LAMIA OUALALOU LE FIGARO Choosing to confront the rise in power of left-leaning governments in its backyard, the United States is recreating the Fourth Fleet. It's now official: The Pentagon is going to resuscitate its Fourth Fleet, with the mission of patrolling Latin American and Caribbean waters. Created during the Second World War to protect traffic in the South Atlantic, the structure was dissolved in 1950. "By reestablishing the Fourth Fleet, we acknowledge the immense importance of maritime security in this region," declared Adm. Gary Roughead, head of the Pentagon's naval operations. . .

According to Alejandro Sanchez, an analyst at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a research center on Latin America based in Washington, "the reestablishment of the Fourth Fleet is more of a political than a military gesture, designed to confront the rise in power of left-leaning governments in the region." The Pentagon does not trouble to camouflage its intentions: "the message is clear: whether local governments like it or not, the United States is back after the war in Iraq," Sanchez explains.

Washington's military influence in the region has diminished considerably since September 11, 2001, and the launch of the "war against terrorism." Concentrated on the Middle Eastern arc of crisis, the Pentagon did not pay much attention to the political upsets in its own backyard. Leftist governments, now broadly in the majority in Latin America, reproach the United States with the support it gave the dictatorships that reigned over several decades and to the ultra-neo- liberal policies those dictatorships applied.

While Washington assures that its sole interest in the region is combating "new threats" (terrorism, drug trafficking and the Maras gangs of Central America), Latin American people often see it as the pursuit of "imperialist" interests dictated by energy needs. The tensions between Washington and the radical presidents of the sub-continent's main oil and gas producers (Venezuela, Equator and Bolivia) accentuate that perception.

As a sign of defiance, almost all Latin American countries have refused to sign the American Serviceman Protection Act, a treaty that prevents legal pursuit of American soldiers for crimes committed abroad.

The plan to install a military base in Paraguay, close to Bolivian gas fields, was denounced by Brazil and Argentina. Ecuador has made it known that the American military base installed in Manta until 2009 will not be allowed to renew its mandate. Worse still, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has relaunched the idea of a South American Defense Council, explicitly excluding all United States intervention.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050208G.shtml

MARCH 2008

HAVANA OFFICALS DECLARE HEADPHONES ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY'

FEBRUARY 2008

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: FIDEL AND ME

Sam Smith

IF there has been one constant in my journalistic life it has been Fidel Castro. Even Teddy Kennedy had just been admitted to the Massachusetts Bar when I covered Castro for the first and only time. And though I would never actually see him again, Fidel would ceaselessly reappear like some ghost of revolutions past, casting a mysterious and malicious spell on American politicians and journalists that caused them to act in strange and masochistic ways. I came to think that Fidel Castro's worst act was his ability to make American leaders speak and behave so stupidly. Given all the rotten dictators and international criminals we supported contentedly, I could never figure out why this man of such modest mischief should be held in such fear and contempt. I finally concluded that those claiming the title of "foreign policy expert" in Washington weren't all that smart after all and certainly not to be trusted.

It began in 1959, during Castro's victory visit to the United States which included coming to Harvard, where I was news director of the college radio station, WHRB.

Castro spoke to 8,000 enthusiastic faculty and students (including one from Brandeis named Abbie Hoffman) at Dillon Field House. Castro was still considered a hero by many Americans for having overthrown the egregious Batista. While those of us who had taken Soc Sci 2 knew that not all revolutions were for the better, there was about this one a romance that took my thoughts far from Harvard Square as a top Castro lieutenant, sitting in front of my little portable tape recorder in a local eatery, told me of his days with Fidel in the mountains.

Castro was booed only once in his speech according to my broadcast report later that evening, when he "attempted to defend the execution of Cuban war criminals after the revolution. Castro asked his listeners, 'you want something else?' and proceed to give them a fifteen minute further explanation."

My story continued:

"Some of Castro's aides expressed a feeling of relaxation during the Harvard tour in comparison with the formal diplomatic visit to Washington. Leaving the faculty club, Castro's air attache was cheered for his nappy uniform by the students who surrounded the area. . . WHRB will rebroadcast Dr. Castro's speech on Monday at midnight. WHRB's recording of the event will also be broadcast by the Voice of America and Station CMQ in Havana."

In less than a year, all feeling of relaxation was gone. As the Militant reported in 1995, Castro "did not receive a warm welcome from the U.S. government during his visit to New York City in 1960. The Cuban delegation moved to Harlem after being kicked out of the Shelburne Hotel amid a racist slander campaign in the press that included baseless charges - repeated to this day by the Associated Press - of plucking live chickens at the hotel."

The man who arranged his welcome: Malcolm X. Castro would later recall, "I always remember when I met with Malcolm X at the Hotel Teresa, because he was the one who gave us support and made it possible for us to be accommodated there. We had two choices: one was the patio in the United Nations; when I told this to the Secretary General he was horrified at the thought of a delegation camping in tents there; and then we received Malcolm X's offer, he had talked to one of our comrades, and I said: 'That is the place, Hotel Teresa.' And there we went."

Ralph D Matthews covered the story for the New York Citizen-Call:

|||| To see Premier Fidel Castro after his arrival at Harlem's Hotel Theresa meant getting past a small army of New York City policemen guarding the building, past security officers, U.S. and Cuban. But one hour after the Cuban leader's arrival, Jimmy Booker of the Amsterdam News, photographer Carl Nesfield, and myself were huddled in the stormy petrel of the Caribbean's room listening to him trade ideas with Muslim leader Malcolm X. Dr. Castro did not want to be bothered with reporters from the daily newspapers, but he did consent to see two representatives from the Negro press. . .

We followed Malcolm and his aides, Joseph and John X, down the ninth-floor corridor. It was lined with photographers disgruntled because they had no glimpse of the bearded Castro, with writers vexed because security men kept pushing them back.

We brushed by them and, one by one, were admitted to Dr. Castro's suite. He rose and shook hands with each one of us in turn. He seemed in a fine mood. The rousing Harlem welcome still seemed to ring in his ears. . .

After introductions, he sat on the edge of the bed, bade Malcolm X sit beside him, and spoke in his curious brand of broken English. His first words were lost to us assembled around him. But Malcolm heard him and answered: "Downtown for you it was ice. Uptown it is warm." The premier smiled appreciatively. "Aahh yes. We feel here very warm."

Then the Muslim leader, ever a militant, said, "I think you will find the people in Harlem are not so addicted to the propaganda they put out downtown." In halting English, Dr. Castro said, "I admire this. I have seen how it is possible for propaganda to make changes in people. Your people live here and they are faced with this propaganda all the time and yet they understand. This is very interesting."

"There are twenty million of us," said Malcolm X, "and we always understand." . . .

On U.S.-Cuban relations: In answer to Malcolm's statement that "As long as Uncle Sam is against you, you know you're a good man," Dr. Castro replied, "Not Uncle Sam, but those here who control magazines, newspapers..."

Dr. Castro tapered the conversation off with an attempted quote of Lincoln. "You can fool some of the people some of the time,..." but his English faltered and he threw up his hands as if to say, "You know what I mean." ||||

One can reasonably speculate that our relationship with Cuba might have been much better and happier if it had not started on such a sour note. The reason one can reasonably speculate that is because we have been far more willing to welcome some antagonistic leaders than others and in most cases it has worked to our benefit. Khrushchev, for example, visited the U.S. with much favorable publicity (although he was not allowed into Disneyland) the same year that Castro could find no room in New York City.

Why were we nicer to Khrushchev than to Castro? In the end, it was a matter of power and not virtue. Khrushchev we had to respect but, by the standard of the American foreign policy myth, Castro was too small potatoes for such an honor.
Over and over, we have treated difficult heads of smaller countries this way and it has inevitably been to our loss. And we still haven't learned the lesson.

When I wasn't being a student journalist at Harvard, I was a drummer - and in those days you couldn't qualify for cool without some affection for, and skill in, Afro-Cuban rhythms. Castro was thus also, among other things, a living representation of the sound of meaning. When the door slammed on Cuba, even the term Afro-Cuban disappeared and it wasn't until decades later, listening to the Buena Vista Social Club for the first time with an unexpected sense of deja vu, that the rhythm and spirit came back to me.

And music wasn't the only thing lost, as ESPN noted:

"By most descriptions, the 1950s [Washington] Senators are a loose and entertaining bunch, which probably helps take the sting out of their .416 winning percentage for the decade. About the only positive on-field accomplishment anyone seems to recall is an all-Cuban triple play (Ramos to Becquer to Jose Valdivieslo) turned against Whitey Herzog of the Kansas City A's. Though he still had to suffer through the mindless indignity of segregation at spring training in Florida, Julio Becquer says life in Washington, D.C. was perfectly comfortable for dark-skinned ballplayers with Spanish accents. 'We had no problems whatsoever,' he remembered. 'None. Zero. I'd go anywhere. I'd do anything. I was well-liked.'" With the despised Castro, the Cuban ballplayers weren't welcomed either.

After college, I found myself in uniform as a Coast Guard officer, waiting with others in uniform to find out if Castro, Kennedy or Khrushchev would cause a world war that we would have to fight. The romance of Fidel had disappeared and would never return.

Which is not to say that I regretted the fall of Batista or had the slightest regard for the multitudinous misadventures of his squalid, sordid Florida heirs or favored anything other than normal relations with Cuba. I became a Castro moderate, which is to say that I admired what he did for literacy and disliked what he did for liberty. According to Human Rights Watch, Castro executed 15,000 political opponents since coming to power. That's a lot of people who won't be reading in the future, either poorly or well.

My personal involvement with Cuba soon faded until the Elian affair. When word circulated in my neighborhood that they were looking for temporary housing for Elian, I was among those who suggested Rosedale, a nearby estate owned by Youth for Understanding, a non-profit already well wired to the Central Intelligence Agency.

I knew Rosedale well because, as the elected neighborhood commissioner, I had helped to save it from the National Cathedral, which planned to sell it to the Bulgarian Embassy. It was a brutal fight. On one occasion, another commissioner and I had actually accused the bishop in a memo of a "breach of faith" At a heated neighborhood meeting, Bishop Creighton was surrounded on either side by Cathedral officials Robert Amory and Richard Drain, who were coincidentally top figures in the CIA. "It looks like Caesar 2, God 1," I remarked. Bishop Creighton struck back by suggesting an anti-Eastern European tenor to the community's opposition. I looked Creighton right in the eye and told him what I thought of the charge, concluding that "on the whole, I have been treated better by Bulgarians than by Episcopalians." I was far from the most vociferous and we eventually saved the site along with a provision that allowed neighbors to walk their dogs on it.

So when Elian came, the open space was neatly divided by a long yellow tape, on one side the embattled youngster, his family and the Secret Service and, on the other, the neighborhood dogs and their owners. It was clear, fair and fun. Would that our larger Cuban policy been the same.

THE CASTROPEDIA

[From the Independent]

LONGEST-SERVING LEADER: Fidel Castro was the world's third longest-serving head of state, after the Queen of Britain and the King of Thailand. He was its longest-serving government leader when illness forced him to hand over power to his brother in July 2006.

LONGEST SPEECH: Castro's holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations: 4 hours and 29 minutes, on Sept. 29, 1960. His longest speech on record in Cuba was 7 hours and 10 minutes in 1986 at the III Communist Party Congress in Havana.

ASSASSINATION PLOTS: Castro claims he survived 634 attempts on his life, mainly masterminded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. They involved poison pills, a toxic cigar, exploding mollusks, a chemically tainted diving suit and powder to make his beard fall out so as to undermine his popularity.

OUTLASTED NINE US PRESIDENTS: Despite CIA plots, a US-backed exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs and four and a half decades of economic sanctions, Castro outlasted nine US presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton, and faced increased hostility under George W. Bush, who tightened enforcement of financial sanctions and a travel ban.

LAST CIGAR PUFF: Castro, once a cigar-chomping guerrilla fighter, gave up cigars in 1985. Years later he summed up the harm of smoking tobacco by saying: "The best thing you can do with this box of cigars is to give them to your enemy.". . .

RECORD-BREAKING COW: One of his pet projects was a cow called Ubre Blanca (or White Udder) that produced prodigious quantities of milk and became a propaganda tool for Cuba's collectivized agriculture in the 1980s. Ubre Blanca is in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest milk yield by a cow in one day - 110 litres (29 U.S. gallons). . .

SIZE OF THE ORIGINAL rebel army led by Castro and including Che Guevara that sailed to Cuba in 1956, eventually toppling President Batista on 1 January 1959: 82. . .

BAY OF PIGS INVASION: Months that passed before the Cuban Missile Crisis, of which the failed invasion is seen as a catalyst: 18

CIGARS: Age at which Castro began smoking cigars: 15. Age at which Castro gave up smoking cigars: 59. . . Number of Petit Upmanns Kennedy ordered his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to buy the day before he signed the 1962 Cuban trade embargo (which stopped legal trade in Cuban cigars): 1,000. . . Number obtained by Salinger, according to an article he wrote in 1992: 1,200

COMMUNICATIONS: In 2004 Cuba passed a law forbidding private citizens to access the internet. It is illegal to buy a computer without government approval, which is rarely granted to ordinary Cubans. Similar restrictions apply to the ownership of mobile phones. . . Number of mobiles in Cuba (2005): 134,500. . . Number of internet users: 190,000. . . By comparison, Greece, which has roughly the same population (11 million), boasts 10 million mobile phones and 4 million internet users.

FIRING SQUADS: Castro's preferred form of capital punishment. It is not known exactly how many Cubans have been executed during his rule. The Cuban authorities placed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2000, but a year later they introduced anti-terror legislation permitting its use in "extreme cases".

HEALTHCARE: Life expectancy at birth: male 75.11; female: 79.85 (US: 75.02; 80.82). . . Infant mortality rate: 6.22 deaths per 1,000 live births (US: 6.43).. . . Physicians per 1,000 population: 5.91 (US: 2.56). . . Hospital beds per 10,000 population: 49 (US: 33). . .

HUMAN RIGHTS: Number of Cubans in prison for political reasons, according to a 2005 report by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and Reconciliation: 306. . . Number of political dissidents, journalists and human rights advocates imprisoned in a government crackdown in 2003: 75. . . Number who remain in prison, according to Human Rights Watch: 61.

MORE

AND YOU THOUGHT NAFTA WAS BAD: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SECURITY AND PROSPERITY PARTNERSHIP OF NORTH AMERICA

DOLLARS & SENSE - While left activists and researchers in Canada and Mexico have been spreading the word about the [Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America] for several years, so far in the United States the SPP, which was officially launched in March 2005, has mainly caught the attention of the right wing, which sees it as a stealth plan to impose a European Union-style government on the continent.

The SPP is not a North American version of the European Union. But it is a stealth plan-one aimed at bypassing the kind of international solidarity that halted the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. The European Union emerged after years of public debate and a treaty ratified by member states. By contrast, the SPP is not a treaty and will never be submitted to the U.S., Mexican, or Canadian legislatures. Instead it attempts to reshape the North American political economy by direct use of executive authority. And while the European Union maintains an explicit role for government in addressing inequality within and between countries, the SPP's foundation is an unequal alliance where the United States retains the political and economic trump cards.

Designed to shore up the United States' weakening position as a global hegemon, the SPP's primary goals are to link economic integration of the three countries to U.S. security needs; deepen U.S. access to oil, gas, electricity, and water resources throughout the continent; and to provide a privileged-and institutionalized-role for transnational corporations in continental deregulation. The stakes for labor, the environment, and civil liberties in all three countries couldn't be higher. Yet because of the SPP's reliance on executive authority to push the agenda, many of the SPP's initiatives remain virtually invisible, even to many activists.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994, was designed to enhance the access of transnational capital from the United States to cheap Mexican labor and Canadian natural resources. The SPP deepens these relations and harnesses the so- called war on terror to an expanded U.S.-Mexican- Canadian trade agenda and a lopsided energy grab to secure U.S. access to dwindling continental oil and gas reserves.

As its name implies, the SPP has two basic parts: the Security Agenda and the Prosperity Agenda. Both are rooted in the United States' deteriorating global position, particularly its increased competition for access to global oil and gas reserves and worsening trade balance with China.

With the explicit aim of securing North America from "internal" as well as external threats, the Security Agenda coordinates intelligence activities among the three countries and streamlines the movement of "low risk" goods and people (especially so-called "NAFTA professionals") across borders. It also involves extensive military coordination, much of it focused on protecting energy and transportation infrastructure. (Consolidating a North American military structure no doubt also serves as an offensive hedge against Venezuela's attempt to shape an independent South American energy policy.). . .

In Canada and Mexico the opposition to SPP is better organized and hence less vulnerable to being thrown off balance by the right (or by government officials)-all the more reason for U.S. activists to make common cause with left activists to the north and south.

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0108sciacchitano.html

JANUARY 2007

A LOOK AT THE NEW BOLIVIA

DECEMBER 2007

GREG PALAST ON ECUADOR'S NEW PRESIDENT

GREG PALAST, QUITO - I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed."

He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail."

He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."

Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

"My mother told us he was working in the States."

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide. . .

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell. . .

http://www.gregpalast.com/a-quechua-christmas-carol/

CHAVEZ: FLY NOW, DIE NOT MUCH LATER?

NOVEMBER 2007

VINCENTE FOX REVEALS PLAN FOR NORTH AMERICAN CURRENCY

WORLDNET DAILY - Ex-Mexican President Vicente Fox last night on CNN Former Mexican President Vicente Fox confirmed the existence of a plan conceived with President Bush to create a new regional currency in the Americas, in an interview last night on CNN's "Larry King Live." It possibly was the first time a leader of Mexico, Canada or the U.S. openly confirmed a plan for a regional currency. Fox explained the current regional trade agreement that encompasses the Western Hemisphere is intended to evolve into other previously hidden aspects of integration.

According to a transcript published by CNN, King, near the end of the broadcast, asked Fox a question e-mailed from a listener, a Ms. Gonzalez from Elizabeth, N.J.: "Mr. Fox, I would like to know how you feel about the possibility of having a Latin America united with one currency?" Fox answered in the affirmative, indicating it was a long-term plan. He admitted he and President Bush had agreed to pursue the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas - a free-trade zone extending throughout the Western Hemisphere, suggesting part of the plan was to institute eventually a regional currency. "Long term, very long term," he said. "What we proposed together, President Bush and myself, it's ALCA, which is a trade union for all the Americas."

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58052

MEMO REVEALS U.S. INTERFERENCE IN VENEZUELAN REFERENDUM

JAMES PETRAS, COUNTERPUNCH - On November 26, the Venezuelan government broadcast and circulated a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations and which will influence the referendum this Sunday.

The memo sent by an embassy official, Michael Middleton Steere, was addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence, Michael Hayden. The memo was entitled 'Advancing to the Last Phase of Operation Pincer' and updates the activity by a CIA unit with the acronym 'HUMINT' (Human Intelligence) which is engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming referendum and coordinate the civil military overthrow of the elected Chavez government. . .

The memo recommends that Operation Pincer (be operationalized. OP involves a two-pronged strategy of impeding the referendum, rejecting the outcome at the same time as calling for a 'no' vote. The run up to the referendum includes running phony polls, attacking electoral officials and running propaganda through the private media accusing the government of fraud and calling for a 'no' vote. Contradictions, the report emphasizes, are of no matter. . .

www.counterpunch.org

OCTOBER 2007

IF YOU THINK CHAVEZ IS BAD, LOOK AT FRANCE, GERMANY, THE UK, AND AMERICA FOR ITS FIRST 175 YEARS

BILL BLUM - The latest evidence that Hugo Chavez is a dictator, we are told, is that he's pushing for a constitutional amendment to remove term limits from the presidency. . . The American media and the opposition in Venezuela make it sound as if Chavez is going to be guaranteed office for as long as he wants. What they fail to emphasize, if they mention it at all, is that there's nothing at all automatic about the process -- Chavez will have to be elected each time. Neither are we enlightened that it's not unusual for a nation to not have a term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation's first 175 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer51.htm

BILL BLUM - The latest evidence that Hugo Chavez is a dictator, we are told, is that he's pushing for a constitutional amendment to remove term limits from the presidency. . . The American media and the opposition in Venezuela make it sound as if Chavez is going to be guaranteed office for as long as he wants. What they fail to emphasize, if they mention it at all, is that there's nothing at all automatic about the process -- Chavez will have to be elected each time. Neither are we enlightened that it's not unusual for a nation to not have a term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation's first 175 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer51.htm

MAY 2007

MEXICAN CULTURE LOOSENS UP

LOUIS E.V. NEVAER, NEW AMERICA MEDIA - This summer, Mexican legislatures will take up the issues of euthanasia, the decriminalization of possession of marijuana and cocaine for personal use, and the establishment of "sanctuary" cities for illegal immigrants from Central America. Mexico, of course, is undergoing the cultural and social renaissance that Spain itself has undergone after the end of the stifling dictatorship of Francisco Franco. This time around, with Spain as example, gay couples can adopt and marry and women can have abortions (and the world doesn't come to an end). All this is fueling an almost giddy atmosphere and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Recently, almost 20,000 Mexicans stripped naked to pose in front of the Presidential Palace and National Cathedral, participating in the world's largest naked art event and affirming Mexico's new live-and-let-live social mores.

And it is the acclaim that Mexican art and culture is enjoying around the world that is emboldening the Mexican public. From Japan to Iran, Mexican artists are at the forefront of this loosening of mores. Tokyo residents are enjoying public sculptures by Mexican artists along their boulevards, just as thoroughfares in the Mexican city of Merida are graced by Japanese sculptures. . .

This month Mexico held a "National Day Against Homophobia," but government officials acknowledge that the majority of Mexicans don't care enough about anyone else's sexual orientation enough to get worked up about it, not surprising in a country where gay and lesbian members of Congress have rainbow flags on their desks, one popular television host interviews guests in full drag, and cable television shows HBO-style nudity without much outcry.

Mexicans are astounded at the threats against U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, since Mexico elected a black president (Vicente Guerrero) back in the mid-19th century, and a full-blooded Native American (Benito Juarez) governed as Abraham Lincoln's contemporary. The matter of a mixed-race couple occupying the presidential palace was settled when Lazaro Cardenas was president in the late 1930s.

When Chihuahua State attempted to decriminalize possession of marijuana for personal use in 2005, it was the Bush administration that pressured Mexican president Vicente Fox to intervene, arguing that such a step would be "a dangerous precedent."

This time around, it is the Mexican legislature, in consultation with Canada, that is addressing the matter. Canada hopes that if Mexico begins the process of decriminalizing possession of marijuana and cocaine for personal use they might, as they did with Prohibition, make it impossible for the United States to stick to the status quo . . .

VENEZUELA, URUGUAY GET HIGH SCORES ON DEMOCRACY FROM THEIR CITIZENS

VENEZUELA ANALYSIS - Venezuelans view their democracy more favorably than the citizens of all other Latin American countries view their own democracies, except Uruguay, according to a new survey released by the Chilean NGO Latinbarometro. Also, Venezuela is in first place in several measures of political participation, compared to all other Latin American countries.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means a country that is not democratic and 10 is a country that is completely democratic, Venezuelans, on average, gave their own democracy a score of 7.0. The Latin American average was 5.8, with Uruguay having the highest score, of 7.2, and Paraguay the lowest, at 3.9.

Similarly, Venezuelans say more often than the citizens all other countries except Uruguayans that they are satisfied with their democracy. 57% of Venezuelans are happy with Venezuelan democracy, which is the second highest percentage, with 66% of Uruguayans expressing satisfaction. The average for all countries surveyed was 38%, with citizens of Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay, expressing the least satisfaction, of 23%, 22%, and 12% respectively.

For Venezuela, the percentage of citizens surveyed who indicated satisfaction increased more since 1998, the year Chavez was elected, than any other country. The percentage expressing satisfaction increased from 32% to 57% in those eight years.

In terms of political participation, Venezuelans indicate that they are more politically active than the citizens of any other surveyed country. Venezuelans have the highest percentage of citizens that say they discuss politics regularly (47%, average is 26%), who say that they try to convince others on political matters (32%, average is 16%), who participate in demonstrations (26%, average is 12%), and who say they are active in a political party (25%, average is 9%).

With regard to whether they believe that elections in their country are 'clean,' Venezuelans answer in the affirmative 56% of the time, which puts them in third place, after Uruguay (83%) and Chile (69%). These were the only three where over half said they believed elections were clean. On average, only 41% of Latin Americans expressed confidence in elections in their country. Paraguayans (20%) and Ecuadorians (21%) expressed the least confidence in their elections.

The polls are financed by a variety of multilateral agencies, such as the European Union, the Inter- American Development Bank, and the World Bank.

www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2179

LATIN AMERICAN ELITE DOESN'T THINK MUCH OF U.S.

JIM LOBE - Elites in the major countries of Latin America are increasingly bullish about their nations' economies and increasingly alienated from the United States, according to a new survey by Zogby International and released this week by Newsweek magazine. The poll of 603 prominent Latin Americans -- divided roughly equally among politicians, businesspeople, academics and media figures, virtually all of them with university degrees -- suggests that Washington looms less important for these leaders than in the past and has become increasingly unpopular under President George W. Bush.

Indeed, 86 percent of respondents, including 81 percent who identified their political views as being right of centre, characterized Washington's handling of relations with Latin America as being either "fair" (48 percent) or "poor" (38 percent), compared to the mere 13 percent who called them "good" and one percent who said they were "excellent".

Anti-U.S. opinion was particularly pronounced in Mexico where nearly two out of three respondents described relations with Washington as "poor". Even in Colombia, by far the largest recipient of U.S. aid in Latin America, only less than one in four respondents characterized ties with the U.S. as "good", while more than three in four said they were either "fair" (46 percent) or "poor" (31 percent).

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0109-02.htm

NOVEMBER 2006

THE PINK TIDE SWEEPS ECUADOR

COUNCIL ON HEMISPHERIC AFFAIRS - As important as any other aspect of the presidential race was that its outcome represented a stinging defeat for Washington's Latin American policy, which already had hit rock bottom throughout the Bush presidency. Key U.S. policies like free trade, privatization and market integration, anti-drug trafficking, increased regional military presence, and the pursuit of isolating Cuba and Venezuela, were being challenged and dismissed as being irrelevant.

The White House has touted recent elections in Mexico and Peru as a sharp defeat for the "Pink Tide" movement of left-leaning governments in the Americas (Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina and, to an extent, Chile). But the more recent victories of leftist candidates Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and now Rafael Correa in Ecuador, represent a humiliating rebuke for Washington's chief goals.

Another major winner was Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Although Chavez was somewhat restrained in getting involved in the Ecuadorian race, the same was certainly not true about Correa, who made repeated complimentary references to the Venezuelan president throughout his campaign.

In Mexico and Peru, Chavez had played the role of poison pill, fatal in his ability to inadvertently strike dead his electoral allies in other countries through guilt by association. In Ecuador, to the contrary, he proved to be an imposing plus factor in Correa's victory.

The Correa victory is much more meaningful because his campaign was pegged in favor of an autonomous path of development, including a more muscular Latin American definition of its sovereignty than was the case with Daniel Ortega's win in Nicaragua. Ortega's victory was much more muddied by his two-tier policy of presenting himself as both a friend of business, the Church, and Washington's free trade policies, while at other times projecting himself as a prospective candidate of Pink Tide dissent, and that his victory should be seen as a challenge to U.S. hegemony.

But there was nothing ambiguous about Correa's victory, which must be seen as yet another piece of evidence that the U.S. continues to pay a heavy price for the near fatal damage done to its good name throughout the hemisphere by Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, during their archly controversial reigns as State Department's assistant Secretaries for Western Hemispheric affairs.

What the Correa victory will mean for the future of Latin America's ties to Washington and what role the Pink Tide movement will have for the hemisphere is of the utmost importance. Initially, the Correa victory will provide renewed momentum to the moderate leftist, New Deal-style leadership, which characterizes most of South America. After setbacks in Colombia, Mexico and Peru, the Pink Tide grouping seemed to have lost its spirit, not counting the more radical initiatives being put forth by Venezuela and Bolivia. Because of Washington's preoccupation with Iraq and the mid-term elections, Latin American countries were able to pluralize their relationship with other parts of the world and think globally, not just hemispherically. As a result, we may be witnessing a decline in the centrality of a hemispheric orientation as represented by the OAS and an increase in importance of outward looking associations like the Ibero-America Summit and the budding Brazil-South Africa-India and China ties.

AUGUST 2006

CUBAN NOTES

DUNCAN CAMPBELL, GUARDIAN - Even some of those who hope to see an end to all the Castros think that change will be gradual rather than the sudden shift desired by the hardline Cuban exiles in Miami. Brian Latell, former CIA analyst on Cuba and author of the book After Fidel, believes that Raul "is likely to be more flexible and compassionate in power".

But Raul is 75 and many anticipate that his leadership will be nominal or short-lived. The three other younger names most frequently mentioned as likely to take over the running of government are those of Ricardo Alarcon, 69, president of the national assembly, former UN ambassador and the most public face of the government; Carlos Lage, 54, the vice-president; and Felipe Perez Roque, the 41-year-old foreign relations minister and Castro's loyal former chief of staff.

There have been, according to Fabian Escalante, former head of the Cuban secret service, 638 plots to kill Castro, not to mention the many plans - of which the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 is the best-known - to remove his government by force. Last month the US government published a report by its Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which appeared to seek change in a non-violent way, with $80m assigned for the purpose, but which included a secret classified annex "for reasons of national security".

"You may assume that what is there [in the annex] - or they want you to assume that what is there - has to do with military intervention," Mr Alarcon says in an interview with the Guardian. . .

"I am sure many people would laugh at the idea that they would propose now to get involved in another foreign military adventure. At the same time, they haven't changed an iota," he says. "The American government has said that they do not accept the Cuban laws about succession. Now the only way you can substitute yourself as the sovereign of another country is by war. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cuba/story/0,,1835341,00.html

[From a Salon interview with Miami lawyer Alfredo Duran]

ALFREDO DURAN, SALON - There's two types of people in Miami. The old Cubans, the ones who came prior to the 1980s, they would probably wish the U.S. Marines would invade Cuba and really have a complete overthrow. Those who came after the 1980s, who have a more benevolent view, what they would like to see is really a transition where the people of Cuba would not suffer as much, where things would go towards normalization, where ultimately democracy would be established. But they don't want a violent overthrow. They want basically an evolution of the system.

The new generation, basically just because of the survival factor. The people who came in the '60s are becoming less and less. You're getting a more moderate view in the community. That's reflected in voter registration. They're starting to act more and more like immigrants and less and less like exiles. They want Cuba to be normal. They don't want Fidel Castro, but they don't want a civil war that would kill their relatives. . .

United States policy a long time ago stopped being about the best interests of the United States. It's got a lot to do with local politics, and it's got a lot to do with the fact that it's Castro in there, and they're not going to let Castro have his way. It shouldn't be that way, but that's the mind-set in Washington, at least until a new administration comes in. The time to start talking is now. . .

You know, the biggest surprise [going back to Cuba] is that it didn't feel like a different country. It felt the same. The first time I went back was 40 years after I left. I felt sort of strange. I said, "What the hell is going on?" Basically, I realized the shock was that everything was exactly as I had left it. Havana hasn't changed that much. I could get around exactly the way I had before. The second biggest shock was that after so many years of a Soviet presence, I couldn't see any signs of Soviet cultural influence. There was more American influence.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/08/02/duran/index1.html_

IN YOUR EDITOR'S LIFE, Fidel Castro has been the one political constant and a reminder that even empires as large as America don't always get their way. A few months after Castro took office in 1959 he visited Harvard University where your editor was news director of the campus radio station, WHRB:

SAM SMITH, MULTITUDES - The most noteworthy figure to appear at Harvard during my tenure was the newly victorious Fidel Castro, who spoke to 8,000 enthusiastic faculty and students (including one from Brandeis named Abbie Hoffman) at Memorial Stadium. Castro was still considered a hero by many Americans for having overthrown the egregious Batista. While those of us who had taken Soc Sci 2 knew that not all revolutions were for the better, there was about this one a romance that took my thoughts far from Harvard Square as a top Castro lieutenant, sitting in front of my little recorder in Hays Bickford cafeteria, told me of his days with Fidel in the mountains. Castro was booed only once according to my broadcast report later that evening, when he "attempted to defend the execution of Cuban war criminals after the revolution. Castro asked his listeners, 'you want something else?' and proceed to give them a fifteen minute further explanation."

My story continued:

"Some of Castro's aides expressed a feeling of relaxation during the Harvard tour in comparison with the formal diplomatic visit to Washington. Leaving the faculty club, Castro's air attaché was cheered for his snappy uniform by the students who surrounded the area. . . WHRB will rebroadcast Dr. Castro's speech on Monday at midnight. WHRB's recording of the event will also be broadcast by the Voice of America and Station CMQ in Havana."

WE RAN THIS BACK IN MAY but it is worth repeating, especially at a time when the Bush regime is dissing the new Palestinian and Venezuelan governments. History suggests it might have made more sense to have given Castro a decent hotel room and otherwise acted with decency towards his government:

FIDEL CASTRO - I always remember when I met with Malcolm X at the hotel Teresa, because he was the one who gave us support and made it possible for us to be accommodated there. We had two choices: one was the patio in the United Nations; when I told this to the Secretary General he was horrified at the thought of a delegation camping in tents there; and then we received Malcolm X's offer, he had talked to one of our comrades, and I said: "That is the place, Hotel Teresa." And there we went.

THE MILITANT, 1995 - In September 1960 Fidel Castro traveled to the United States to address the United Nations General Assembly. . . Castro did not receive a warm welcome from the U.S. government during his visit to New York City in 1960. The Cuban delegation moved to Harlem after being kicked out of the Shelburne Hotel amid a racist slander campaign in the press that included baseless charges - repeated to this day by the Associated Press - of plucking live chickens at the hotel.

RALPH D. MATTHEWS, NEW YORK CITIZEN-CALL, 1960 - To see Premier Fidel Castro after his arrival at Harlem's Hotel Theresa meant getting past a small army of New York City policemen guarding the building, past security officers, U.S. and Cuban. But one hour after the Cuban leader's arrival, Jimmy Booker of the Amsterdam News, photographer Carl Nesfield, and myself were huddled in the stormy petrel of the Caribbean's room listening to him trade ideas with Muslim leader Malcolm X.

Dr. Castro did not want to be bothered with reporters from the daily newspapers, but he did consent to see two representatives from the Negro press. . .

We followed Malcolm and his aides, Joseph and John X, down the ninth-floor corridor. It was lined with photographers disgruntled because they had no glimpse of the bearded Castro, with writers vexed because security men kept pushing them back.

We brushed by them and, one by one, were admitted to Dr. Castro's suite. He rose and shook hands with each one of us in turn. He seemed in a fine mood. The rousing Harlem welcome still seemed to ring in his ears. . .

After introductions, he sat on the edge of the bed, bade Malcolm X sit beside him, and spoke in his curious brand of broken English. His first words were lost to us assembled around him. But Malcolm heard him and answered: "Downtown for you it was ice. Uptown it is warm." The premier smiled appreciatively. "Aahh yes. We feel here very warm."

Then the Muslim leader, ever a militant, said, "I think you will find the people in Harlem are not so addicted to the propaganda they put out downtown."

In halting English, Dr. Castro said, "I admire this. I have seen how it is possible for propaganda to make changes in people. Your people live here and they are faced with this propaganda all the time and yet they understand. This is very interesting."

"There are twenty million of us," said Malcolm X, "and we always understand." . . .

On his troubles with the Hotel Shelburne, Dr. Castro said: "They have our money. Fourteen thousand dollars. They didn't want us to come here. When they knew we were coming here, they wanted to come along." (He did not clarify who "they" was in this instance.) . . .

On U.S.-Cuban relations: In answer to Malcolm's statement that "As long as Uncle Sam is against you, you know you're a good man," Dr. Castro replied, "Not Uncle Sam, but those here who control magazines, newspapers..."

Dr. Castro tapered the conversation off with an attempted quote of Lincoln. "You can fool some of the people some of the time,..." but his English faltered and he threw up his hands as if to say, "You know what I mean."

http://www.themilitant.com/1995/5941/5941_20.html

JULY 2006

CHOICEPOINT DATA MINING LATIN AMERICA

HUGH DELLIOS, CHICAGO TRIBUNE - For a people who have grappled with American meddling for more than a century, Nicaraguans were surprised to find that Uncle Sam's long reach may now extend right into their private lives.
The latest intrusion was by information companies rooting out identity documents, driver's license numbers, phone records and other personal data, all of which were made available to the U.S. government for screening.

Prosecutors in Nicaragua, Mexico and elsewhere across Latin America have opened investigations into the business of private information mining after discovering that the U.S. Justice Department hired a Georgia company to collect personal information on up to 300 million people throughout the region without their knowledge.

The company, Choicepoint Inc., in turn hired local subcontractors to dig out the information. . .

The project is part of the U.S. government's attempt to expand its intelligence sources in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. . . South of the border, the Justice Department project has stirred concerns about the U.S. acting as "Big Brother" and interfering in the affairs of countries that pose little threat. Officials in Nicaragua worry it could fuel a black market in private information in nations already plagued by corruption and lacking official oversight to prevent abuses. . .

The contract called for personal information on citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela, Choicepoint officials said. The company has since ceased collecting data in Argentina and Costa Rica

Earlier this year, Choicepoint destroyed part of its Mexico database after Mexican officials alleged that it included information from the government's national voting registry, which would be illegal. . .

Meanwhile, Mexican prosecutors want proof - beyond a company news release - that Choicepoint destroyed its original copy of the suspected voter files. The Mexicans sent a delegation to company offices in Alpharetta, Ga., to witness the erasing of the files, but the company first requested a statement from Mexico exonerating its employees of any wrongdoing.

The Mexicans refused, saying they couldn't make such a statement in the middle of their investigation. "Because of the simple fact that (the list) has left the electoral arena and has been used in a commercial form, for other ends, there is a presumption that a crime has been committed," said Maria de los Angeles Fromow, Mexico's special prosecutor for electoral crimes.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4973.htm

MATT PASCARELLA & GREG PALEST - This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico's voter files under a secret "counterterrorism" contract with database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. The FBI's contractor states that, following the arrest of Choice Point agents by the Mexican government, the company returned or destroyed its files. The firm claims not to have known collecting this information violated Mexican law. Such files can be useful in challenging a voter's right to cast a ballot or in preventing that vote from counting.

It is, of course, impossible to know if the FBI destroyed its own copy of the files of Mexico's voter rolls obtained by Choicepoint or if these were then used to illegally assist the Calderon candidacy.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/dcwire/

DECEMBER 2005

COCAINE COUP AND COCA REVOLUTION

JEFF WELLS, RIGOROUS INTUITION - As Evo Morales begins to exercise his unambiguous mandate, it will be interesting, and quite likely disheartening, to watch how Bolivia suddenly becomes a topic of great concern in certain quarters; even possibly a crisis of national security demanding intervention.

Here's an early example: Jim Kouri, a Vice President of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, written an opinion piece entitled "Bolivian Thug Becomes President." He predictably blovates that the win "will increase the destabilization of the South American continent," and that Morales is an "ally of the drug cartels and traffickers."

The continent enjoys far greater stability today - and in the mental health sense of the word, too - than in the days of death's head satraps employing the methods of the School of the Americas and answerable to none but Washington. And in an interview with Luis Gómez of Narco News, former Bolivian guerrilla leader and presidential candidate Felipe Quispe makes distinctions between coca and cocaine that undoubtedly would be lost on Kouri:

"Coca has been, ancestrally, a sacred leaf. We, the indigenous, have had a profound respect toward it. . . a respect that includes that we don't "pisar" it (treat the leaves with a chemical substance). In general, we only use it to acullicar: We chew it during times of war, during ritual ceremonies to salute Mother Earth (the Pachamama) or Father Sun or other Aymara divinities, like the hills. Thus, as an indigenous nation, we have never prostituted Mama Coca or done anything artificial to it because it is a mother. It is the occidentals who have prostituted it. It is they who made it into a drug. This doesn't mean that we don't understand the issue. We know that this plague threatens all of humanity and, from that perspective, we believe that those who have prostituted the coca have to be punished."

Kouri walks his readers right up to "regime change": "Should [Morales's] coca policy show an increase of cocaine on US city streets, his regime will be seen as a national security threat and rightly so."

Funny, that. Or rather, like so many things these days, it would be funny if it didn't mean people's lives. Because on July 17, 1980, "los Novios de la Murete" - narcotics traffickers and mercenaries recruited by fugitive Nazi and CIA asset Klaus Barbie - overthrew the democratic government of Bolivia in the "Cocaine Coup." Cocaine production increased dramatically and America was flooded with the cheap drug. In his essay on the drug war's shills in Kristina Borjesson's Into the Buzzsaw, 25-year DEA veteran Michael Levine writes that "there are few events in history that have caused more and longer-lasting damage to our nation." Bolivians could say the same.

Levine made headlines two months prior to the coup when his DEA sting netted Bolivian cartel leaders Roberto Gasser and Alfredo Gutierrez outside a Miami bank. He had paid them $8 million for the then-largest ever seizure of cocaine. Just a few weeks later Gasser and Gutierrez were released, thanks to pressure from the CIA and the State Department, and weeks after that both men and their cartels became principal financiers of the coup, and were rewarded by the new regime with squads of neo-Nazis to bully their competition.

And then there's Sun Myung Moon. Robert Parry remembers that one of the first international well-wishers who travelled to La Paz to congratulate the putschists was Moon's right hand Bo Hi Pak, former publisher of The Washington Times and "Koreagate" principal, who declared "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city." Later disclosures from the Bolivian government strongly suggested that Moon's organization had heavily invested in the coup, and Parry writes that in 1981 "war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were often seen together in apparent prayer." Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, an Argentine intelligence officer recruited by Barbie, described Ward as his "CIA paymaster." His monthly salary was drawn from the offices of Moon's anti-communist umbrella organization, CAUSA. (Moon still has a huge stake in South America, having purchased the land above the world's largest fresh water aquifer, in Paraguay. These people play a long game.)

"Meanwhile," Parry adds, "Barbie started a secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight." Old habits, hardly dying, and a polyglot web of fascist patrons unashamed to profit by the labors of their Nazi lieutenants.

And here's another would-be funny thing: there were no American headlines about all of that. None at all. But maybe that's enough talk for now about a coup, while there's a revolution going on.

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/12/cocaine-coup-and-coca-revolution.html

SAM SMITH: The changes in Bolivia bring to mind something that happened some years back. Your editor and friends were engaged in the futile enterprise of attempting to make Americans for Democratic Action more progressive. There was a debate over drug policy that featured the president of the organization - Rep. Charles Rangel, a robotic drug prohibitionist - and Eric Sterling of the enlightened Drug Strategy Network. When it was Sterling's turn, he got up and said how pleased he was to see Rep. Rangel again and that he remembered well the trip they took to Bolivia when Sterling was a congressional staffer. He recalled them landing in La Paz, being greeted by their hosts and then being given some tea. . . coca tea. As Sterling told the story, Rangel seemed to turn paler than Michael Jackson.

[From Morales' speech at "In Defense of Humanity" forum in Mexico City, October 25, 2003. Translated by Ricardo Sala]

EVO MORALES - Thank you for the invitation to this great meeting of intellectuals "In Defense of Humanity." Thank you for your applause for the Bolivian people, who have mobilized in these recent days of struggle, drawing on our consciousness and our regarding how to reclaim our natural resources.

What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years. The will of the people was imposed this September and October, and has begun to overcome the empire's cannons. We have lived for so many years through the confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life represented by the indigenous people, and the culture of death represented by West. When we the indigenous people ­ together with the workers and even the businessmen of our country ­ fight for life and justice, the State responds with its "democratic rule of law."

What does the "rule of law" mean for indigenous people? For the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the "rule of law" means the targeted assassinations and collective massacres that we have endured. Not just this September and October, but for many years, in which they have tried to impose policies of hunger and poverty on the Bolivian people.

Above all, the "rule of law" means the accusations that we, the Quechuas, Aymaras and Guaranties of Bolivia keep hearing from our governments: that we are narcos, that we are anarchists. This uprising of the Bolivian people has been not only about gas and hydrocarbons, but an intersection of many issues: discrimination, marginalization , and most importantly, the failure of neo-liberalism. . .

I want to tell you, companeras and companeros, how we have built the consciousness of the Bolivian people from the bottom up. How quickly the Bolivian people have reacted, have said ­ as Subcomandate Marcos says ­ ¡ya basta!, enough policies of hunger and misery. . .

Most importantly, we face the task of ending selfishness and individualism, and creating ­ from the rural campesino and indigenous communities to the urban slums ­ other forms of living, based on solidarity and mutual aid. We must think about how to redistribute the wealth that is concentrated among few hands. This is the great task we Bolivian people face after this great uprising.

It has been very important to organize and mobilize ourselves in a way based on transparency, honesty, and control over our own organizations. And it has been important not only to organize but also to unite. Here we are now, united intellectuals in defense of humanity ­ I think we must have not only unity among the social movements, but also that we must coordinate with the intellectual movements. . .

It must be said, companeras and companeros, that we must serve the social and popular movements rather than the transnational corporations. I am new to politics; I had hated it and had been afraid of becoming a career politician. But I realized that politics had once been the science of serving the people, and that getting involved in politics is important if you want to help your people. By getting involved, I mean living for politics, rather than living off of politics.

We have coordinated our struggles between the social movements and political parties, with the support of our academic institutions, in a way that has created a greater national consciousness. That is what made it possible for the people to rise up in these recent days. . .

I believe only in the power of the people. That was my experience in my own region, a single province ­ the importance of local power. And now, with all that has happened in Bolivia, I have seen the importance of the power of a whole people, of a whole nation. For those of us who believe it important to defend humanity, the best contribution we can make is to help create that popular power. This happens when we check our personal interests with those of the group.

Sometimes, we commit to the social movements in order to win power. We need to be led by the people, not use or manipulate them.

We may have differences among our popular leaders ­ and it's true that we have them in Bolivia. But when the people are conscious, when the people know what needs to be done, any difference among the different local leaders ends. We've been making progress in this for a long time, so that our people are finally able to rise up, together.

http://salonchingon.com/readingroom/evomorales.php?city=ny

VIETNAM AND MEXICO SHOW HOW WRONG THE GLOBISTS ARE

LARRY ELLIOTT, GUARDIAN - Economists will have a field day explaining how the world is turning its back on millions of dollars' worth of extra growth, and that the poor countries will be the ones who will really suffer if the global economy lapses back into a new dark age of protectionism. That's certainly the accepted view. An alternative argument is that the trade talks are pretty much irrelevant to development and that in as much as they do matter, developing countries may be buying a pup.

The Harvard economist Dani Rodrik is one trade sceptic. Take Mexico and Vietnam, he says. One has a long border with the richest country in the world and has had a free-trade agreement with its neighbor across the Rio Grande. It receives oodles of inward investment and sends its workers across the border in droves. It is fully plugged in to the global economy. The other was the subject of a US trade embargo until 1994 and suffered from trade restrictions for years after that. Unlike Mexico, Vietnam is not even a member of the WTO.

So which of the two has the better recent economic record? The question should be a no-brainer if all the free-trade theories are right - Mexico should be streets ahead of Vietnam. In fact, the opposite is true. Since Mexico signed the Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) deal with the US and Canada in 1992, its annual per capita growth rate has barely been above 1%. Vietnam has grown by around 5% a year for the past two decades. Poverty in Vietnam has come down dramatically: real wages in Mexico have fallen.

Rodrik doesn't buy the argument that the key to rapid development for poor countries is their willingness to liberalize trade. Nor, for that matter, does he think boosting aid makes much difference either. Looking around the world, he looks in vain for the success stories of three decades of neo-liberal orthodoxy: nations that have really made it after taking the advice - willingly or not - of the IMF and the World Bank.

Rather, the countries that have achieved rapid economic take-off in the past 50 years have done so as a result of policies tailored to their own domestic needs. Vietnam shows that what you do at home is far more important than access to foreign markets. There is little evidence that trade barriers are an impediment to growth for those countries following the right domestic policies.

2001

CENTER ON PUBLIC INTEGRITY: The Central Intelligence Agency gave ex-Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos at least $10 million in cash over the last decade, as well as high-tech surveillance equipment that he used against his political opponents, the Center for Public Integrity has learned. Montesinos, who now faces trial on murder, arms and drug trafficking charges, among others, had founded and personally controlled a counter-drug unit within Peru's National Intelligence Service, known by its Spanish acronym SIN. It was to that Narcotics Intelligence Division, known as DIN, that the CIA directed at least $10 million in cash payments from 1990 until September 2000, U.S. officials told the Center's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Most of the money was to have financed intelligence activities in the drug war, though officials acknowledged a small part was for antiterrorist activities. The CIA knew the money was going directly to Montesinos and had receipts for the payments, the sources said. "It was an agency-to-agency relationship," said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity in Lima, the capital, "with Vladimiro Montesinos as the intermediary. . . . Montesinos had the money under his control." MORE

APOLITICAL INTELLECTUALS
Otto Rene Castillo

One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the humblest of our people.

They will be asked what they did when their country was slowly dying out, like a sweet campfire, small and abandoned.

No one will ask them about their dress or their long siestas after lunch, or about their futile struggles against "nothingness," or about their ontological way to make money. No, they won't be questioned on Greek mythology, or about the self-disgust they felt when someone deep inside them was getting ready to die the coward's death. They will be asked nothing about their absurd justifications nurtured in the shadow of a huge lie.

On that day, the humble people will come, those who never had a place in the books and poems of the apolitical intellectuals but who daily delivered their bread and milk, their eggs and tortillas; those who mended their clothes, those who drove their cars, those who took care of their dogs and gardens, and worked for them, and they will ask: "What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life were dangerously burning out in them?"

Apolitical intellectuals of my sweet country, you will have nothing to say,

A vulture of silence will eat your guts. Your own misery will gnaw at your souls. And you will be mute in your shame.

[From Tomorrow Triumphant, selected poems of Otto Rene Castillo, translated from the Spanish by Francisco X. Alarcon: "On March 19, 1967, in the remote highlands of Guatemala, a 31-year old poet name Otto Rene Castillo was burned at the stake after being savagely tortured and mutilated for four days by the Guatemalan Army."]

 STREET CHILDREN

CASA ALLIANZA: An estimated 100 million children live and work on the streets in the developing world; 40 million in Latin America. Most street children (75 percent) have some family links, but spend most of their lives on the streets begging, selling trinkets, shining shoes or washing cars to supplement their families' income. Most never go beyond a fourth-grade education. The remaining 25 percent live in the streets, often in a group of other children. Known as "street children", they sleep in abandoned buildings, under bridges, in doorways, or in public parks.

Most are addicted to inhalants, such as cobbler's glue, which offers them an escape from reality, and takes away hunger -- in exchange for a host of physical and psychological problems, including hallucinations, pulmonary edema, kidney failure, and irreversible brain damage. Many are victims of abuse, sometimes murder, by police, other authorities and individuals who are supposed to protect them.

Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by parents - often by step-parents - are the most common reasons why children leave their families. Psychologists and social workers refer to the problem as "family disintegration" -- the breakdown of the nuclear family.

Throughout Latin America, millions of children are born into shantytowns, colonias, that have mushroomed on the periphery of large cities during the last 30 years, a result of rapid urbanization and the absence of land reform policies. In Guatemala, two percent of the population owns 80 percent of the agricultural economy -- the arable land.

A 1991 study of 143 Guatemalan street children by the Center of Orientation, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Casa Alianza reports:

-- 100 percent of children interviewed had been sexually abused, of whom 53 percent were abused by family members.
-- 64 percent of the girls reported that the first person with whom they had sexual relations was their father or mother; 10 percent, uncle or aunt; 10 percent, brother or sister.
-- None of the children used contraceptives.
-- About 70 percent had one to two partners per day
-- 93 percent admitted to having contracted sexually transmitted diseases'
-- 100 percent of the children used inhalants, such as glue and solvents, as their drug of choice.

Many leaders of non-governmental international development and child welfare organizations view the problem of street children as a symptom of a gross imbalance in the distribution of resources globally . . .

CASA ALLIANZA

1999

PINOCHET PAPERS

Recently released US documents show that the CIA was aware of Chilean dictator Pinochet's murder and torture of opponents, but the papers have been edited in such a way as to leave significant questions. Censored material includes that relating to the car bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt. The material is censored, claims the government, because the 23-year-old assassinations are supposedly still being investigated by the Justice Department. Said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive: "The CIA has much to offer here, and much to hide. They clearly are continuing to hide this history." Some 3,000 people were killed during the Pinochet reign of terror following a US-backed coup against the democratic administration of Salvador Allende. The junta also arrested over 30,000 individuals.

NATIONAL POST, CANADA: U.S. farmers and ranchers are gearing up for border protests to be held [July 9] at Sweetgrass, Mont., and at Portal, N.D., citing trade policies they believe are driving producers in their own country out of business. Organizers said the blockades will turn back any truck carrying agricultural products south from Canada. The blockades are scheduled to begin at noon. Hank Zell, a Montana rancher who is organizing the rally at Sweetgrass, says the protests are aimed at U.S. Congressmen, whom the farmers believe have failed to protect their interests by allowing Canadian producers to ship lower-priced livestock and grain across the border.

SHOULD BUSH AND KISSINGER BE TRIED?
Saul Landau

The US government has released the first batch of documents relating to the violence unleashed between 1973-1990 by General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile .... The documents shockingly show what many people already knew. US officials helped Chile's secret police, DINA, or covered up their atrocities .... Washington covered up Pinochet's excesses so that Congress -- the public -- wouldn't know.

Listen to a September 27 1973 report from US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis. He offers a job description for "an advisor .... qualified in establishing a detention center for the detainees who will be held for a relatively long period of time." The "advisor must have knowledge in the establishment and operation of a detention center."

In June 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Pinochet in Chile. Indeed, Kissinger had helped Pinochet organize six South American secret police forces to form OPERATION CONDOR. The CIA had even donated to DINA a sophisticated computer that allowed agents to conduct surveillance on exiled dissidents and then murder them .... Three months later, in September 1976, three months after Kissinger approved Pinochet's methods, CONDOR agents assassinated former Chilean Chancellor Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC. Ronni Moffitt, Letelier's American colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, also died in the car bombing.

How now to use the documents that show US officials countenanced torture and murder? First, support the current Spanish case charging Pinochet with crimes against humanity. Second, extradite Pinochet for assassinating Orlando Letelier. Finally, consider charges against Henry Kissinger and George Bush, who, documents show, willingly abetted mass murder and torture.

SAUL LANDAU mailto: slandau@igc.org

PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN: It was Britain itself, after World War II, which escalated "ethnic cleansing" into state policy - only in those days it was called "forced repatriation." Immediately after World War II, tens of thousands of refugees, possibly hundreds of thousands - prisoners of war, escapers from communism - were forcibly sent back to Stalin's Soviet Union and Tito's Yugoslavia and certain death. Britain instigated the policy, which the U.S. echoed, giving it the cynical code name Operation Keelhaul. This shameful policy has been dubbed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the "last secret" of World War II, in violation of every tenet of decency and justice. British troops forced men, women, children into boxcars headed for the USSR and Yugoslavia, using rifle butts as prods. One British regiment, the London Irish, refused, saying their duty was to fight German soldiers, not club refugee women and children. American soldiers were more inclined to open the gates of refugee camps, and look the other way as they fled.

JAMES P. LUCIER, INSIGHT: Former chief counsel for the House Watergate committee, Jerome Zeifman, has filed charges before the International Criminal Tribunal seeking the indictment of Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. These formal legal documents have been submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat whose meticulous preparation of the case against Richard Nixon forced the Republican president out of the White House, is serious. And it raises concerns that, in an age of internationalism and depreciated national sovereignty, the president of the United States as well as the defense secretary could be placed in the same defendant's box as Slobodan Milosevic, the indicted Yugoslavian war criminal.

INSIGHT ARTICLE http://www.insightmag.com/articles/story2.html