By Earl Bousquet
Also in the past fortnight, payloads of pressure have been downloaded on Honduras, Mexico and Brazil, reminding the region -and the world- of Henry Kissinger’s mantra of US diplomacy: ‘America has no friends, only interests!’
Just 30 days after its latest failure to turn-back the clock on Venezuela, the latest ‘Breaking News’ included an attempted coup in Honduras and accelerated gunboat diplomacy against Mexico and Brazil.
Like with Venezuela, US and Canadian diplomats brazenly attacked Mexico and Brazil for wanting to combat cyber warfare and moving to popularize judicial order, even threatening punitive actions if ignored by governments they want to see replaced.
The US dollar is also quickly losing its traditional dominance in global trade as more countries decide to trade in their own currencies.
Displaced millions fleeing wars and extreme poverty and seeking refuge in the USA and Europe live to see their dreams end-up dead-on-arrival at the borders of the fabled Promised Lands of Milk and Honey.
The world’s developing nations -including the Caribbean’s Small Island Developing States (SIDS)- are banging louder and demanding meaningful delivery for Loss and Damage reparations from the rich nations most responsible for the accelerated Climate Changes that worsens annually.
In Haiti, Washington has outsourced its external intervention to Kenya and a few Caribbean, Latin American and African states.
It’s turning-out to more Caribbean people today, that the focus of the current imperial order isn’t (and never was) only on enforcing and/or enabling regime change in Caracas, but remains ever-firmly bent on ensuring Latin America and the Caribbean continues being treated like America’s Backyard, as dictated under the 201-year-old Monroe Doctrine.
Pliant and compliant administrations that joined Washington to question Venezuela’s election results are now finding they’re just-as-vulnerable to the pressures being applied on Brazil, Honduras and Mexico -and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) governments that didn’t back Washington’s Venezuela election plot have already also been loudly-threatened.
Now, the latest ‘Breaking News’ is the seizure by the US of a plane sometimes used by the Venezuelan President that’s been sitting on a tarmac in the Dominican Republic for months. But that’s nothing new -just the second hijacking of a Venezuelan airline after similar recent action by today’s right-wing Argentina administration.
It also follows the earlier kidnapping of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab in the Cape Verde Islands while on a mission seeking support for his heavily-sanctioned nation’s fight against the deadly effects of COVID-19.
None of that’s new either to the 14 member-states of the largely English-speaking Caricom region, where similar pressures were applied against Jamaica (using similar tactics as against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973) against Prime Minister Michael Manley from 1976.
Likewise, in Grenada, where the death of Maurice Bishop and the revolution’s suicide opened the way for the US to lead an invasion in the name of a ‘rescue mission’.
Caracas is quickly returning to normal, but all the evidence is that it will not be like normal back-to-basics, as opposition leaders are openly inviting arrest by breaking national electoral laws before, during and after the July 28 poll -and simply ignoring Supreme Court summonses to participate in a post-election judicial review.
History has taught that anytime any nation decides to pursue any political system called ‘socialism’, they eventually come under US scrutiny and pressure -from Jamaica’s ‘Democratic Socialism’ (under Manley) and Guyana’s ‘Cooperative Socialism’ (under Forbes Burnham) and Grenada’s ‘Revolutionary Socialism’ (under Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard), to Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian Socialism’ under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
The US has imposed economic sanctions on one-third of all nations on Planet Earth, including over-60% of the poorest.
Nothing’s new here either, as the US has bombed over 20 member-states of the United Nations (UN) since World War II; and in the Caribbean, Haiti was bombed in 1914 while the US tested the newly-minted weapons to be used for World War I.
The US also tried to massacre Haitians resisting the 1915 occupation -and the Pentagon has never fully-denied or disproved early claims it was American testing of modern underwater weapons of war too-near to Haiti’s tectonic plates that resulted in the major 7.1 magnitude ‘earthquake’ in 2010 that took over-300,000 lives.
Today, Washington is readily declaring that its military and political strategies are all connected to its never-ending interests in commanding the world’s natural resources.
Head of the US military’s Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, recently said despite Washington’s concerns about Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela’s ties with Russia, Washington’s real concern is about “the rich resources and rare earth elements” in Latin America and the Caribbean.
She told the Atlantic Council that America’s long list of strategic interests in South America include: “resources needed for technology” like with “60% of the world’s lithium in that triangle between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile”; “the world’s largest reserves of light sweet crude oil discovered off Guyana a year ago”; “Venezuela’s oil resources” (including “copper and gold”); “the Amazon as the lungs of the world”; and “31% of the world’s (fresh) water…”
Describing the listed resources as “off-the-charts”, General Richardson said: “This region matters…” because “it has a lot to do with (US) national security” and “we have to step-up our game!”
As per the old saying, ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same…’
But equally true is that which also says ‘Change is the only constant…’ Indeed, today’s regional political and socio-economic screenplay is like Caribbean and Latin American citizens forcibly living another replay of a worn-out version of a terribly-choreographed hybrid between a Gloom-and-Doom pantomime and a fateful human tragicomedy.
