Paraguay: coup backers push for US military bases
Paraguay: coup backers push for US military bases
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Mon, 07/02/2012 - 23:30.
A group of US generals reportedly visited Paraguay for a meeting with legislators on June 22 to discuss the possibility of building a military base in the Chaco region, which borders on Bolivia in western Paraguay. The meeting coincided with the Congress's sudden impeachment the same day of left-leaning president Fernando Lugo, who at times has opposed a US military presence in the country. In 2009 Lugo cancelled maneuvers that the US Southern Command was planning to hold in Paraguay in 2010 as part of its "New Horizons" program.
More bases in the Chaco are "necessary," rightwing deputy José López Chávez, who presides over the Chamber of Deputies' Committee on Defense, said in a radio interview. Bolivia, governed by socialist president Evo Morales, "constitutes a threat for Paraguay, due to the arms race it's developing," according to López Chávez. Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over the sparsely populated Chaco from 1932 to 1935, the last major war over territory in South America.
The US has been pushing recently to set up military bases in the Southern Cone, including one in Chile and one in Argentina's northeastern Chaco province, which is close to the Paraguayan Chaco, although it doesn't share a border with Paraguay. Unidentified military sources say that the US has already built infrastructure for its own troops in Paraguayan army installations near the country's borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil; for example, an installation in Mariscal Estigarribia, some 250 km from Bolivia, has a runway almost 3.8 km long, in a country with a very limited air force. (La Jornada, Mexico, July 1, from correspondent in Argentina)
The Chaco is thought to have some oil reserves. Richard González, a representative of Texas-based Crescent Global Oil, announced on June 28 that the company was investing $10 million in the region, starting with exploratory drilling in September or October of this year. The announcement came after Crescent's representatives met with Federico Franco, who was Lugo's vice president before being appointed president by Congress. Supporters of Lugo's ouster claim the investment by the US company could ease Paraguay's total dependence on foreign oil. Venezuela, which supplies 30% of Paraguay's oil, cut off shipments after the removal of the elected president. (Prensa Latina, June 29; La Nación, Paraguay, June 29)
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...constantly looking for "soft spots" in the victim--points of most weakness and pain--by which to invade the victim's body and mind, to take it over, control it, get what it wants.
It is sadistic.
It is sick.
And it is no surprise whatever that this coup in Paraguay has Pentagon and U.S. transglobal corporate connections. These forces found the rot in Paraguay's legislature--fascists ready to sell out their country's sovereignty to get on the Washington "gravy train." They stuck the electrodes in and "turned" Paraguay from a country that been, at long last, asserting its independence, democratic values and commitment to social justice, into just another U.S. whore, like Colombia, like Honduras, like Mexico (though the DEA and the ATF are still working on the torture and rape of Mexico).
It is disgusting. First come the U.S. troops. Then come the Secret Service "parties" and all the other contemptible behavior of the "conquistadors" from the death squads and mass graves to the ripoff of resources, enslavement of workers and impoverishment and grinding into the dust of the poor majority.
It is the intention of our U.S. rulers to "divide and conquer" the vast Leftist democracy movement that has swept across South America, and into Central America, over the last decade. Solidarity has been one of the key strengths of this movement and Paraguay, with its 60 history of fascist rule including a heinous, U.S.-supported fascist dictatorship, has been and is a weak point--only just recently turned toward democracy with the election of the beloved "bishop of the poor," Fernando Lugo, as president. It is the poorest country in South America, exceeding even Colombia ("free trade for the rich"
in miserable poverty, and is now poised to imitate Colombia with a U.S. "war on drugs" bloodbath that, a) targets trade unionists and other advocates of the poor and b) provides the U.S. with a launching pad for coup plots, violence and other kinds of trouble against all the bordering leftist governments. (Honduras is also the template, especially for "b" but also for "a."
This is what the U.S. does in Latin America, on behalf of war profiteers, transnationals and--if the truth were known--the big, protected drug cartels and their banksters, no matter who is president. And this is why Lula da Silva, said, in his last speech in office (2010, after Obama was elected, and post-Honduran coup): "The U.S. has not changed."
"WE" are the Mafia, writ large. (Perhaps that is why our corporate filmsters are so enamored of the lesser Mafia--the Italian one.) An "Uber-Mafia." There is no other word for the combination of violence, vicious bullying, callousness, corruption, cynicism, elitism, pious self-rightenousness, hypocrisy and profound greed that characterizes the U.S. government in its service to war profiteers and transglobal corporations.
