Mexico City - Roughead maintains that the fleet's focus will be on drug
interdiction and "conducting training exercises" and its activation is
"non-hostile." Frank Mora, a professor at the U.S. War College in
Leavenworth Kansas told the Miami Herald, he thought the Fleet could be
used in "environmental emergencies" and to control "youth gangs."
The
reactivated flotilla will sail in the strategic area overseen by the
U.S. Southern Command or SOUTHCOM based in Quarry Heights, Panama and
is to be homeported at Mayport in Jacksonville Florida. The fleet is
expected to group together 11 war ships homeported at Mayport,
including an aircraft carrier (reportedly the soon-to-be commissioned
"U.S.S. George H.W. Bush") and a nuclear submarine. To allay Latin
leaders' fears, Undersecretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs Tom
Shannon was deployed to South America during July.
The
Undersecretary's visit to Brazil proved abrasive. He was met by raucous
demonstrators in Brazilia and closely questioned on the floor of the
Brazilian Senate about the Fourth Fleet's revival - one lawmaker
recalled how in 1964, U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon had threatened to
land marines stationed right off the Brazilian coast if leftist
president Joao Goulart did not resign. Ex-Brazilian president Jose
Sarnay warned of U.S. Fourth Fleet designs on the enormous Tupi
deep-water oil field that may hold as many as five to eight billion
barrels and could turn Brazil into one of the top five petroleum
producers on the planet.
The U.S. Navy currently operates out
of six Latin bases - Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Quarry Heights, Panama;
Aruba, Curacao; Comalapa, El Salvador; Comayuga, Honduras; and Manta,
Ecuador - the last-named about to be shut down by Ecuador. Incensed by
Washington's participation in the March 1st bombing of a FARC guerrilla
camp in the Ecuadoran jungle - Manta is believed to have provided
logistical support for Colombian helicopters - President Raphael Correa
has resolved not to renew the U.S. lease on that facility when it
expires in 2009. An educated guess has the base being relocated to La
Guajira, Colombia close to the Venezuelan border which will not make
Hugo Chavez happy.
Those attentive to Latin American history do
not view the U.S. Fourth Fleet's intentions as "non-hostile." U.S.
Naval blockades of Cuba in 1963 during the Soviet-American missile
crisis and of revolutionary Mexico in 1914, stir bitter memories. The
U.S. Navy turned the Caribbean into an "American lake" from 1914
through the late 1920s, parking its fleet in Santo Domingo and
repeatedly invading Nicaragua.
U.S. Navy flotillas land troops
on sovereign soil, their long guns take out distant targets, and
bombing raids and reconnaissance flights are launched from aircraft
carriers. Just the presence of the Fourth Fleet in Latin American
waters smacks of strategic intimidation.
From Brazilia,
Undersecretary Shannon flew south to Buenos Aires to deliver the good
news that the Fourth Fleet would not enter Argentina's territorial
waters or inland rivers "without being invited." Shannon's timing was
impeccable. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's six month-old
regime, which has been roiled by months of mobilizations led by big
soybean farmers, was on maximum alert - the "soyeros" have blocked the
nation's highways since last January after Fernandez tacked a 15 per
cent tax on exports in order to finance programs for the poor.
Bi-lateral
relations between Washington and Buenos Aires have been in the tank
since the U.S. charged supposed bagmen for Venezuelan president Hugo
Chavez with financing Fernandez's campaign. The so-called scandal of
the "Maletas" ($800,000 USD was alleged to have been smuggled into
Argentina in a suitcase or "maleta") is a scenario that Queen Cristina
(as she is taunted by political opponents) labels "garbage."
Writing
in the Mexican daily La Jornada, left Latin American analyst Raul
Zebichi concludes that Shannon's voyage to Buenos Aires to sell the
Fourth Fleet to Fernandez during the soyero crisis amounted to
"deliberate destabilization." The sailing of the Fourth Fleet is "naked
aggression by Washington to regain its hegemony" on a continent where
U.S. influence has been impressively diminished by the serial victories
of the Latin American electoral left.
Undersecretary Shannon
then moved on to Bolivia where that majority indigenous Andean nation's
president Evo Morales is viewed by Washington as one of the ringleaders
of the anti-American wave sweeping the southern continent.
Bolivia
is not a target for the U.S. Fourth Fleet, having lost its access to
the ocean in the Guano War of the late 19th century. Nonetheless,
Morales denounced U.S. ambassador Phillip Goldberg's support of the
right-wing "autonomy" movement that is promoting the secession of five
Bolivian provinces, reading Shannon e-mails sent by U.S. AID officials
to Bolivian citizens threatening aid cut-offs if they continued to
support his government.
Only in Colombia, the first stop of
Shannon's checkered journey, did he find some satisfaction. Touching
down soon after the immaculately scripted "rescue" of Ingrid Betancourt
and 14 hostages held by the weakened FARC guerrilla army, Tom Shannon
laid on the blarney. The Fourth Fleet's intentions were honorable and
"non-hostile." The war ships will safeguard commercial shipping lanes
and provide additional drug interdiction.
It didn't take much
effort to sell President Alvaro Uribe, George Bush's top flunky in
Latin America, on the idea. Uribe even offered Barranquilla as a
homeport away from home for U.S. war ships. Fourth Fleet deployment to
Colombia will provide much needed backup for Washington's anti-drug,
War on Terror Plan Colombia, a $6,000,000,000 boondoggle that has
succeeded in expanding the nation's cocaine acreage by 27 per cent in
2007.
If Uribe was supportive of the Fourth Fleet's
reactivation, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was decidedly not, declaring the
move to be "an act of war" and fretting about Yanqui sabotage of
offshore oilfields. In the Caribbean, Fidel Castro, an 82 year-old
columnist for a Cuban communist youth paper, sneered that the Fourth
Fleet is "the flotilla of intervention". Castro has had first hand
experience with U.S. Naval blockades.
One immediate response of
Latin America's leftist leaders to Washington's unilateral revival of
the fleet has been the formation of UNASUR, a 12-nation mutual security
pact that pointedly excludes the U.S. Spearheaded by Brazil, the
continent's economic powerhouse, UNASUR seems designed to boost
Brazilian armament industry sales as much as to stave off U.S. stabs to
reestablish its hegemony over Latin America.
Mexico, which is
banking on deep-water oilfields in the Gulf (an area under Fourth Fleet
purview) to revive its sinking reserves, does not seem alarmed about
the war ships on the eastern horizon - despite the rather touchy
dispute over whether Mexico or the U.S. has title to those deep-water
tracts. The U.S. Navy trains Mexico's Navy and supplies it with
state-of-the-art weaponry. Under the Merida Initiative, sometimes
tagged Plan Mexico, the Mexican Navy is slated to receive Orion
tracking planes and souped-up interdiction craft, part of the
$1,400.000,000 USD war chest to rearm Mexico's security apparatus -
despite its reputation as one of the worst human rights abusers in the
Americas.
Equipment received via the Merida Initiative,
actually a hefty subsidy to U.S. defense contractors, will forge what
Uruguayan political writer Carlos Fazio dubs "the third link" by which
the Mexican security apparatus is annexed to Washington. Indeed, just
the need for spare parts will tie the Mexican military to the Pentagon
for the life of the planes, helicopters, swift boats, and transport
carriers Plan Mexico will buy.
Actually, the Merida Initiative,
born in the Yucatan city of that name in a surge of enthusiasm during
Bush's first encounter with Mexico's Felipe Calderon in 2007, almost
didn't make it to the wire. When the U.S. Senate, urged on by Vermont's
Patrick Leahy, voted to impose human rights oversight on the package,
Mexico almost backed out, accusing Washington of interfering in its
domestic affairs.
The Senate bill would have mandated civilian
trials for Mexican military personnel accused of human rights violation
and would have strengthened the hand of non-government human rights
organizations to watchdog how Merida Initiative equipment was used. The
measure would also have pressed for an investigation into the 2006
murder of independent U.S. journalist Brad Will by Oaxaca security
forces - indeed, the human rights components of Plan Mexico were
largely due to the persistence of Brad's friends who were sometimes
escorted from congressional hearings for vehemently pushing their case.
The bill's human rights provisions were rejected by all three
sides of Mexico's political spectrum. Legislators compared the call for
compliance with the odious "certification" process by which the U.S.
Congress "certified" Mexico's cooperation in Washington's Drug War each
year through the mid-1990s, a source of much distrust. But Mexican
politicos were not alone in their contempt for the new Plan Mexico -
Bush White House drug czar John Waters accused Leahy and his Democratic
cohorts of "sabotaging" the agreement, and Homeland Security chieftain
Michael Chertoff warned that the human rights provisions were
"unacceptable."
The Senate bill was sent back to Congress for
rectification but reemerged with an almost identical text - even the
call for resolving Brad's murder was left intact. Yet in the magic
realist mindset that passes for politics here, President Calderon, his
Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino, and Foreign Minister Patricia
Espinosa chose not to acknowledge the unreconstructed language and
signed off on the grant. Espinosa made much of the affirmation that no
U.S. soldier will set foot on Mexican soil as the result of the Merida
Initiative - a phenomenon never contemplated by the agreement in the
first place.
George Bush signed the Merida Initiative into law
June 30 and in mid-July Chertoff flew into Mexico City for discussions
on implementation and to "evaluate eventual risks to mutual security."
Oddly,
the day the Homeland Security boss went home, the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration leaked an intriguing story to the daily El Universal:
Mexican drug war troops had discovered a car bomb factory in Culiacan,
Sinaloa, where a bloody battle between cartels has taken over 500 lives
since the first of the year. The DEA suspected that the Sinaloa
cartels' hit men were being sent through Chavez's Venezuela (where
else?) to Iran (where else?) for advanced terrorist training.
Preposterous?
Under current security arrangements, the Iran gambit could become a
pretext for the U.S. military occupation of Mexico, which on the face
of it is of course highly unlikely. But Plan Mexico folds into the
ASPAN - the North American Agreement on Security and Prosperity, a sort
of security and energy NAFTA. Much as NAFTA was aimed at integrating
the economies of its three member nations, ASPAN proposes to integrate
security and energy structures - a goal greatly advanced by Plan Mexico.
In
addition to ASPAN, Mexico has been designated the U.S.'s southern
security perimeter by NORCOM, the United States Northern Command, which
is responsible for keeping terrorists out of North America. The
suggestion that Iran-trained terrorists are car-bombing a few hundred
miles south of the border could have the stealth bombers on the runways
at NORCOM headquarters in a hollowed-out mountain in Colorado in a
jiffy.
Foreign minister Espinosa's affirmation that Plan Mexico
will not land U.S. troops on Mexican shores flies in the face of the
facts. Since 2006, the Yanks have offered at least 60 training courses
to Mexican army and navy troops inside Mexico - 700 Mexicans are
trained in the United States at the Center for Strategic Forces in Fort
Bragg North Carolina under the provisions of the IMET program. U.S.
Naval trainers offer courses at Veracruz on the Gulf Coast and
Manzanillo on the Pacific.
But the physical presence of U.S.
military personnel on the ground here is mooted by the Pentagon's
reliance on civilian mercenaries. SY Coleman, which advertises itself
as "a warrior in the global war on terror" on its web page, has been
recruiting pilots "with experience in international military conflicts"
to fly reconnaissance over Mexico's Caribbean off-shore platforms, an
inviting terrorist target. Blackwater WorldWide just opened its western
training facilities in a huge warehouse several hundred yards from the
U.S. - Mexican border on the Otay Mesa in San Diego, and in July
provided security for John McCain on a Mexico City campaign stopover
according to knowledgeable sources, that notorious mercenary army's
first known sighting inside Mexico.
Blackwater has recently
been awarded big boodle Department of Defense drug war contracts and
appears to be bulking up to challenge DynCorps which holds the
franchise on privatizing Washington's War on Drugs in Latin America.
With
the Yanquis' Fourth Fleet working Latin America's Atlantic coast, the
United States Coast Guard patrols its Pacific flank. During the last
week in July, the Coast Guard and the Mexican Navy found themselves
under submarine attack - a 36-foot submergible with five tons of
Colombian cocaine aboard was spotted by the Americanos' radar 100 miles
off Oaxaca and towed to port where the crew was jailed.
In
addition to cocaine, Pacific shipping lanes are also important to
liquid natural gas tankers, another inviting terrorist target,
operating under contracts with Spanish energy titan REPSOL between Peru
and LNG terminals in Manzanillo in southern Mexico and the Sempra
Corporation's Ensenada facility hard by the U.S. border. In fact, the
Ensenada terminal, which provides San Diego with energy, was to have
been located in that U.S. port city but fears the plant could be taken
out by terrorists moved it to Mexico.
Deploying the U.S. Pacific
Fleet, which is homeported in San Diego, to Latin America's west coast,
is surely being weighed by Navy brass.
What does presumptive
President Barack Obama think about all this updated gunboat diplomacy?
The only clue voters have as to Obama's Latin policies was a speech he
delivered months ago to win the hearts and minds of the gusano-laced
Cuban American National Foundation in Miami in which platitudes were a
dime a dozen - no end to the Cuban embargo, Hugo Chavez was
"dangerous", Colombia's Uribe a "democratic hero." Given this
repertoire it doesn't sound like much is going to change when Obama
takes the helm of state. All the pieces are in place - Plan Mexico,
Plan Colombia, ASPAN, SOUTHCOM, NORCOM, and NAFTA - to keep the
Consensus of Washington thriving during an Obama presidency.
"What's
good for Latin America is good for the United States of America" the
presumptive president told the gusanos in Miami, failing to annunciate
the other half of the equation: what's good for the United States is
usually very bad for Latin America.
The resurrection and imminent dispatch of the United States Fourth Fleet to patrol the coasts of Latin America invokes the bad old days of Monroe Doctrine impositions and gunboat diplomacy for many citizens of those southern latitudes.
