CounterVortex

DRUG SURVEILLANCE DRONES FREQUENT FLYERS IN LATIN AMERICA

by Marcelo Ballvé, New America Media

Drone aircraft are increasingly engaged in counterdrug missions over South American jungles and Mexican cities.

The drones represent the latest high-tech escalation of Latin America’s anti-drug efforts.

Unlike the US military’s Predator drones used to shoot missiles at suspected terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the models known to be in use in Latin America limit their roles to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Latin America’s unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs—as drones are known in aviation circles—are not known to have flown armed missions.

Israel Aerospace Industries, a company that is Israel’s largest industrial exporter, struck recent multimillion-dollar deals in Ecuador and Brazil for its large, 54-foot wingspan Heron drone model.

Israel Aerospace has offices in Colombia, Chile and Ecuador and launched a new joint venture company in Brazil in 2008. The manufacturer sees promise in the Latin American UAV market.

“As we have experienced in other markets, as the [UAV] system becomes more familiar, new applications are found and, as a result, the market will grow,” Doron Suslik, spokesman for Israel Aerospace, wrote in an e-mail.

The UAVs make sense for Latin America since they are more cost-effective and remain in the air longer than manned flights, said Ray Walser, senior policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.

“I think the more the merrier,” he said. “Right now, there are some nations in which you simply don’t know what’s going on in your own territory.”

Two other Israeli manufacturers, Elbit Systems and Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd., have also sold UAVs to clients in the Americas in the last two years.

The US defense industry also manufactures UAVs, including the Predator series deployed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the transfer of US-made military technology to foreign governments is highly regulated.

“If it is something you can buy off the rack in Israel,” you can avoid some of the scrutiny accompanying US sales, said Rick Van Schoik, director of Arizona State University’s North American Center for Transborder Studies.

Latin American buyers of UAVs may be acquiring them from Israel, but they are following the example of the United States, which pioneered the use of UAVs in non-combat law enforcement roles.

As early as 2004, the US Border Patrol tested Elbit Systems’ 34-feet wingspan Hermes drone to patrol the border with Mexico.

Today, US Customs and Border Protection’s 300-aircraft fleet includes six unarmed Predator B UAVs manufactured by California-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, said John Stanton, executive director for National Air Security Operations.

Three of the Customs and Border Protection Predator Bs are stationed south of Tucson, Ariz., from where they patrol the US-Mexico border. Another Predator B modified for maritime surveillance off southeastern U.S. shores will soon be involved in drug enforcement missions.

The Pentagon has also deployed UAVs for counter-narcotics work.

Drones play an important role supporting “allies around the world in efforts to curb the illegal narcotics trade,” said US Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Bob Mehal. He declined to discuss specifics.

However, it is known that the Miami-based US Southern Command, which oversees Pentagon operations in Latin America, has been a testing ground for UAVs.

One SouthCom test in May 2009 at a base in El Salvador involved a Heron UAV manufactured by one of Israel Aerospace’s North American subsidiaries, Stark Aerospace, headquartered in Mississippi. The air base, Comalapa, is one of the overseas “Forward Operating Locations” the Pentagon established for counter-narcotics missions in cooperation with Latin American and Caribbean governments.

“We think it was a resounding success,” Southcom spokesman José Ruiz said of last year’s test, in which the Heron flew over 100 hours, through strong winds, heavy cloud cover and rain, tracking a suspected drug ship in the Pacific.

After the test, Mississippi’s US senators requested and received $9 million for Stark to supply the Heron to SouthCom as part of the Defense Department’s 2010 budget.

Salvadoran Air Force Col. Nelson Hernández, who commands Comalapa, also closely followed the Heron’s performance.

“We are here to learn,” he was quoted as saying in a SouthCom report on the Heron flights. “It is possible that perhaps in our future, we may consider our own project or the acquisition of an existing UAV. We are, so to speak, like sponges, eager to see what we can absorb from this experience.”

In the end, El Salvador didn’t acquire a Heron, because of the multimillion-dollar price tag.

“Due to budgetary reasons, El Salvador is not contemplating the acquisition of this type of aircraft in the short term,” the country’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

But other Latin American governments with more resources have made the leap.

In June, Ecuador acquired six Israel Aerospace UAVs with $22 million from a special government program established with oil revenue, according to an Ecuadorean armed forces statement.

In 2008, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa canceled an agreement allowing the Pentagon to operate surveillance and interdiction missions from a Forward Operating Location in Manta, Ecuador. The four Searcher and two Heron models were acquired to make up for the lost US-led counter-drug flights.

The new UAVs are stationed at the Manta base, from where they will watch offshore waters for drug-runners and “coyotaje”—or human trafficking—and also reinforce Ecuador’s northern border with Colombia.

Mexico’s government reportedly flies a drone comparable to the Heron, an Elbit Systems’ Hermes 450, out of Ensenada, just south of Tijuana.

Ensenada residents have routinely spotted drone-like aircraft in flight over the city and one was even photographed this month by the Agencia Fronteriza de Noticias de Tijuana, a news agency.

After publishing a photo of the mystery aircraft online, Agencia Fronteriza identified it as a Hermes, thanks to reader feedback.

The UAV “caught our attention because of its nocturnal over-flights in Ensenada and the loud noise it produces while in the air,” said a Jan. 18 article accompanying the photos.

It seems likely any Mexican purchase of Hermes UAVs occurred in September 2008, when Elbit Systems announced in a press release it had closed a $25 million deal for Hermes and smaller Skylark drones with an unnamed country in the Americas. Jane’s Defence Weekly reported the purchasing country as Mexico, citing an anonymous industry source.

A 24-year-old American, an aviation photographer who wished to remain anonymous, told New America Media he was in a private aircraft last month and saw three large drones with a V-shaped tail—a defining characteristic of the Hermes—at the Ensenada air base that doubles as a civilian airport.

At press time, Mexico’s Defense Ministry had not yet answered requests for information on its UAV programs.

Mexico’s Public Security Department, which coordinates its country’s battle against drug trafficking, has touted its own programs in which smaller mini-drones keep tabs on drug cartels.

In March 2009, Eduardo Laris McGregor, who heads air operations for Mexico’s Federal Police, told Mexican reporters the drone fleet consists of four mini-UAVs and four balloon-type vehicles.

The eight UAVs are being used over epicenters of drug-linked violence, including Ciudad Juarez, Culiacán, and Tijuana.

The planes are a low-cost model marketed for use in urban warfare and low intensity conflicts. The Orbiter has a snub nose, upturned wingtips, a seven-feet wingspan, and is launched with a catapult-like device.

The Orbiter’s manufacturer, Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd. of Israel, also makes the Skystar 300 balloon acquired in the deal. The Skystar takes video day or night (with infrared) as it drifts, for up to 72 hours at a time, at an altitude of 1,000 feet.

Mexican company Hydra Technologies leads a nascent national UAV industry, creating a small surveillance UAV: the Ehécatl, named after the Aztec wind god.

Further south in the Andean region, reports of drone over-flights triggered last month’s spat between Colombia and Venezuela.

Just before Christmas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez accused Colombia of sending a spy drone into his country’s airspace. Colombia’s close military cooperation with the United States has strained relations between the Andean neighbors.

Colombian officials denied Chávez’s allegation, quipping the Venezuelans may instead have spotted “Santa’s sleigh.”

Colombian armed forces commander Gen. Freddy Padilla acknowledged having drones, but said his were small aircraft with a range so limited they could not have flown into Venezuela.

Padilla said his drones guard oil pipelines and electrical towers often sabotaged by guerrillas.

The Brazilian Federal Police—responsible for controlling Brazil’s 10,500 miles of remote land borders with 10 countries—has one of the world’s largest non-military UAV programs.

Last year, Brazil purchased 14 Heron systems for the federal police’s border protection, crime prevention, and counter-drug duties, at a cost of approximately $4.5 million per aircraft, according to a government press release.

Demonstrations of the Heron were held in late July 2009 at São Miguel de Iguaçu, near Brazil’s triple border with Paraguay and Argentina.

According to Israel Aerospace, “high ranking military and civilian representatives from a number of Latin American countries” were present to observe.

The Herons will fly from four different air bases distributed around Brazil’s huge landmass, the Ministry of Justice said, touting the Herons’ ability to film and photograph objects on the ground from an altitude of 30,000 feet,

Some of the UAV patrols will cover the sparsely populated Amazon River Basin, reported state-owned news agency Agencia Brasil.

Meanwhile, the development of an advanced “made in Brazil” drone has become one goal of the country’s ambitious new defense strategy, approved by President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva in December 2008.

Defense Minister Nelson Jobim, in an article earlier the same year for magazine Interesse Nacional, even floated the possibility that any Brazilian UAV be “not just for surveillance but also combat.”

This week, Jobim traveled to Israel where he toured Israel Aerospace’s facilities, and met with Israeli defense and intelligence officials. Jobim told reporters in Jerusalem he was negotiating a new purchase of UAVs that would include a technology transfer so that Brazil could manufacture similar drones.

Because so much is new and unknown about the region’s UAV programs, the implications for civil society have not been widely studied or debated.

“In the past it was just the United States flying them,” said Van Schoik of the North American Center for Transborder Studies. The extent of Latin American countries’ experiments with UAVs “raises the whole visibility of the issue.”

One remaining question is whether a Latin American country will deploy an armed drone.

Even with unarmed aircraft, there are risks. For example, bad intelligence gathered by a drone could result in a military or police raid killing innocents, said Adam Isacson, of the Washington, DC-based Center for International Policy.

“It’s not an outrageous thing to worry about,” he said, recalling an April 2001 incident in which US anti-drug agents working with Peruvian authorities shot down a plane carrying American missionaries. “It depends on how the countries who are using these things treat the intelligence.”

Perhaps a more immediate risk is from cross-border incursions with UAVs that trigger diplomatic crises, undermining regional stability, Isacson added.

Within Brazil, UAV programs have already generated controversy.

After the federal police announced its new Heron fleet, Rio de Janeiro officials sought federal approval to acquire Skylark mini-UAVs from Elbit Systems.

Rio is in the midst of a police push to wrest control of slums known as favelas away from drug gangs before hosting soccer’s 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic games.

In October, a police helicopter was shot down during an operation in a Rio-area favela and two officers died, spotlighting the risks of piloted flights.

But not everyone agrees the introduction of UAVs into an ever-escalating drug war is the right approach.

“It’s a mistake to think our problems with public security will be solved with high-tech military equipment,” wrote Valter Pomar, international relations secretary for Brazil’s governing Worker’s Party, in a letter to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.

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This article was originally published on Jan. 27, 2010 by New America Media.

Resources:

Avión UAV, no tripulado el captado en Ensenada
Agencia Fronteriza de Noticias de Tijuana, Jan. 18, 2010

Center for International Policy
http://www.ciponline.org

From our Daily Report:

Venezuela: Chávez sees Curaçao threat
World War 4 Report, Dec. 18, 2009

Rio de Janeiro: 12 dead, chopper down as favela wars escalate
World War 4 Report, Oct. 19, 2009

Colombia nears deal with Washington for military base
World War 4 Report, June 17, 2009

Oaxaca: APPO defends university, feds send in spy plane
World War 4 Report, Nov. 4, 2006

Drones to patrol Mexican border
World War 4 Report, Nov. 3, 2006

See also:

PLAN COLOMBIA’S SECRET AIR FORCE PROGRAM IN PERU
by Peter Gorman, World War4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2006

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingDRUG SURVEILLANCE DRONES FREQUENT FLYERS IN LATIN AMERICA 

BLOODY CALABRIA

Criminal Networks Exploit Italy’s Anti-Immigrant Backlash

by Giulio D’Eramo, World War 4 Report

It was a bloody beginning of the year in Italy’s poor southern region of Calabria. Twenty-one African seasonal workers, 14 local villagers and 18 policemen were injured between Jan. 6 and the 8, according to police reports. It was not a shooting between two rival families in the land of the ‘Ndrangheta, which recently overtook the Sicilian Mafia as the richest and strongest criminal organization in the country. It wasn’t another intimidatory bomb set to explode in front of a state building as has happened twice already in 2010, in response to the ongoing trials against members of the criminal organization. What took place was a confrontation between some of the poorest immigrants in the western world, and the local residents of one of its poorest regions.

However, the ‘Ndrangheta, making immigrants work and live like slaves through its control of local businesses and town governments, simultaneously exploits the politically controversial issue of immigration. The criminal organization is accused by many of being the dark hand behind the apocalyptic events that took place in the village of Rosarno—in order to create the institutional chaos that serves so well those who want to set themselves up as the substitute state. Supporters of this theory of preemptive strikes can also hold as proof something that went unnoticed by the mainstream media: a few days after the events, on Jan. 12, a two-year police operation brought to the arrest of 15 members and affiliates of the Bellocco clan—the very same that controls Rosarno.

A brief review of the violence in Rosarno and the events leading up to it points to two related factors—’Ndrangheta control of the region, and the Italian state’s incapability of addressing the immigration crisis.

On Jan. 6, two unknown youngsters shot rubber bullets at two African workers who were on their way to one of the abandoned hangars where most of the 1,500 seasonal employees lived in disgraceful conditions. News of the shooting rapidly spread through these veritable slums, and a thousand immigrants took their anger to the streets in a violent expression of discontent. Dustbins were set to fire, boutiques smashed, and a few occupied cars were rattled with sticks. The police intervened to prevent a confrontation between the immigrants and the local populace, who were starting to gather in the main square in response to the violence—many already prone to viewing immigration in the region as a “plague.” The police intervention was largely effective, although many people were injured in minor incidents in other parts of town. Five immigrants were hospitalized after local villagers intentionally ran their cars over them. One of the motorists were arrested, and one had a long record of mafia-related crimes.

The riots went on through the afternoon of Jan. 9—when the immigrant were largely confined in their main slum, called Rognetta, with a cordon of police protecting them from local residents who had gathered around it, shouting menacing anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The police reports maintain that the next day all the immigrants voluntarily decided to leave. But, as the UK’s Observer newspaper put it, “local people clapped and cheered yesterday as hundreds of Africans were moved by police out of Rosarno.” The ones without documents (some 700) were sent to the “welcome” camps the national government has established in Bari, while the others took the train in search for better luck. While the immigrants were moving out, the police started to knock down the shameful slums, throwing out their few abandoned possessions. So the only result of the riots is that immigrants fled the village (and their jobs), and that their slum was destroyed. (Where will next years’ seasonal workers sleep?) Some of them have since come back to Rosarno, looking for the same job and the same living conditions.

Observers such as the progressive website Articolo21 ask what happened to the Rosarno of the ’90s, when it was a model of ethnic integration—so much such so that the village council declared Jan. 6 as day of brotherhood among the local populations. Rosarno had been a frontrunner in the struggle against the ‘Ndrangheta. But the city hall that was once routinely shot at by mobsters was ordered temporarily closed by the national government together with the town council because of mob infiltration in October 2008. Until new elections are held this year, Rosarno’s municipal powers have been assumed by the local Prefect, official representative of the national state for the province of Reggio di Calabria.

But this has not stopped mafia intimidations. Immediately after the January riots, Loretta Ventre, 83, saw her volunteer social projects destroyed by the mobsters, who ransacked the canteen for seasonal workers she ran at her home, providing free meals three times a week.

The ‘Ndrangheta has finally shown that in their territory, not even the police could stop them.

A few miles from Rosarno lies the small village of Riace. A decade ago in this small village, the center-left mayor Mimmo Lucano decided to welcome refugees. After being almost deserted over the previous 50 years (as the young sought work in the cities), Riace now has 1,800 inhabitants, repopulated and revived by some of the Kurds, Nigerians, Eritreans and Somalis who have landed on the shores of southern Italy. This model was also adopted by many neighboring villages. In 2009 the regional government of Calabria adopted the first (and only) law in Italy to integrate refugees through small local projects of sustainable development, from housing and tourism to agriculture and artisanship.

Riace was last summer the set of Wim Wenders’ new movie on immigration, Il Volo, where it was described as a modern utopia. To this comment, the mayor responded in a telephone interview: “If ours is a Utopia, then the whole world including Rosarno is madness. Wenders’ Utopia is just normality.”

Then he gave his opinion about the riots: “The shooting that prompted the riots is a good thing for criminal organizations. It provokes widespread confusion, it destabilizes the institutions and it diverts the public’s attention from the underlying problems. I had hoped that immigrants wouldn’t respond to the violence, because it was obvious that their reaction would bring very serious retaliation.”

After the incident, much was made by the media about the silent racism of Italian society. People from Rosarno, a few days after the immigrants quit the village, demonstrated peacefully to reject any allegation of racism. The funny thing is that the only anti-mafia banner present, set up by high school students, was removed by the organizers. So the locals, while denying any wrongdoing on their part, were silent about the responsibility of the ‘Ndrangheta, whose control of the territory explains the subhuman working and living conditions of the immigrants. A war between desperate people, and a wall of silence to protect the criminals responsible for it.

Two years ago in Rosarno, two masked boys entered one of the hangers where the African workers lived and fired a gun, severely injuring two young immigrants. There were some protests, and a Facebook group called “Africans will save Rosarno” was created in response to the attack. But then everything went back to normal, the immigrants kept coming two months per year to get a 20-euros wage for a 14-hour shift in agricultural labor and sleep in crowded, dirty abandoned buildings—for companies which court documents show to be in the hands of criminal syndicates. Anybody wondering if they are crazy not to look for a better job should keep in mind that even an Italian with a 40-hour-per-week job in the private sector (for example, bartendering) only receives around 500 euros a month, in Naples as well as in Calabria.

Last year, the Italian government had agreed to set up a 200,000-euro grant in order to provide the migrant workers in Rosarno with at least chemical toilets and a drinkable water supply—but only the 50,000 from the center-left government of the region actually arrived. For a few months there were some toilets at disposal; then they were removed for lack of funds. The national government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi never delivered the 150 thousand euros promised. And everything went back to “normal.”

This example shows that the government knew that the immigrants were treated as virtual slaves, while their employers flourish also thanks to European Union funds for agricultural development that they use to hire undocumented and under-payed workers. Just after the immigrants were moved out of the region, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni dismissed any allegation of responsibility by putting the blame on clandestine measures to assist undocumented immigrants supposedly undertaken by leftist local governments—and, obviously, on the immigrants themselves, not perceived as victims but as criminals.

Along with this rhetoric has come a series of new laws which reduce the possibility for immigrants to get working permits, while at the same time toughening the legal consequences of illegal immigration. Under the new legislation, which passed last July, undocumented immigrants are liable to pay a fine of 10,000 euros ($14,200) and can now be detained by the authorities for up to six months. Obviously no undocumented immigrant could pay such a fine. But the criminal organizations who use them like slaves, saving millions of euros in regular wages, only risk incurring a modest fine in case they get caught. Additionally, people who knowingly house undocumented migrants can now face up to three years in prison.

If that were not enough, the new law also permits the formation of unarmed citizen patrol groups to help police with immigration enforcement. The law criminalizes immigrants while encouraging vigilantism—thus contributing to the dangerous spiral of violence.

It is important to understand that mass migration to Italy started in the ’90s, and in the past ten years the country has passed from 1 to 4 million estimated immigrants. Such a fast rise brings inevitable social tensions, especially in times of economic crisis. Figures such as Harvard economist George Borjas purport that native workers’ wages decline by 3% or 4% for every 10% increase in immigrants with similar skills. So behind the usual distinction between left and right on such issues stands an inherent contradiction between ideology and actual politics.

Berlusconi clearly summarized the different ideological positions in the aftermath of the riots: “The left wants a multi-ethnic society—we don’t.” If workers (potential left-wing voters) are scared of immigrants because they believe their presence drives down wages, entrepreneurs and businessmen (potential right wing voters) make good use of workers without legal rights. So potential supporters of right- and left-wing political parties are at odds with their own parties’ ideology.

The present and past governments, instead of trying to manage the situation, preferred to either instigate fear in order to build a consensus (Berlusconi), or simply failed to recognize the importance and dangers of the issue (Romano Prodi). Berlusconi and his allies are daily reaching out to new voters with their politics of fear, and pleasing their natural base by reducing the civil rights of immigrants. Increasing the desperation of the migrants further drives down the cost of their labor—which pleases many entrepreneurs, especially if they are part of a criminal organization, as in Rosarno.

So, as the left unsuccessfully tries to hide the fact that they are unable or unwilling to address the problem, Berlusconi gets two pigeons with one stone.

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Giulio D’Eramo is a freelance writer whose work appears frequently in Index on Censorship, Articolo 21, Red Pepper and other online publications. He recently launched his own blog. An Italian native, he currently resides in England.

Resources:

Italians cheer as police move African immigrants out after clashes with locals
The Observer, Jan. 10, 2010

Wim Wenders helms 3D pic in Italy
Variety, Feb. 5, 2010

From our Daily Report:

Italy: authorities detain African immigrants following violence
World War 4 Report, Jan. 12, 2010

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, March 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBLOODY CALABRIA 

THE PARADOXICAL POLITICS OF AVATAR

A Hollywood Simulacrum of Indigenous Struggle

by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today

The science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, when asked where he gets his ideas, famously always answers: “Schenectady.”

Well, Harlan Ellison may get his ideas from Schenectady, but James Cameron, the director of Avatar, appears to get his ideas from Ursula K. Le Guin.

For all the ink that’s been spilled on Avatar, no critics have noted that the plot appears to be drawn directly from that of Le Guin’s 1972 book The Word for World is Forest, set on the distant forest planet of Athshe. A couple of centuries in the future, the capitalist system is still going strong down here on Earth; all of our forests have long since been destroyed, so timber is being imported from this pristine woodland world. But there is a native race on Athshe of indigenous humanoids. Instead of giant blue men as in Avatar, it’s little green men. But it is still a hunting-and-gathering society of tribal peoples who use bows and arrows and spears—and have psychic abilities, communicating by going into dreamlike states. After seeing their forests gutted, their tree-dwellings destroyed by helicopters mounted with flame-throwers, they use these extrasensory powers to organize a planet-wide uprising and drive off the technologically superior human invaders. Sound familiar?

Le Guin’s gung-ho Captain Davidson is a clear model for the evil Marine commander in Avatar who wants to exterminate all the Na’vi, the indigenous blue giants. In the novel, there is a division between the hardliners around Davidson and the dissident anthropologist Lyubov—the model for Grace, the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver in Avatar. He is also something of a model for the lead character in Avatar, the paraplegic renegade Marine Jake Sully. Lyubov isn’t a fighter, but after studying the little green Athsheans, he gets to know them and comes to appreciate their culture—and doesn’t want to see them exterminated. He turns traitor, and starts feeding the furry fellows intelligence that allows them to overrun the humans’ central command post on the planet.

In Avatar, the Earthlings are seeking a mineral rather than timber, but that’s a minor point. The most significant difference is that in the novel there is no human who actually fights for the little green men—the hero who leads the rebellion is himself a little green man. His name is Selver, which the astute will recognize as drawing upon the Latin word root for “forest” (as in selva, Spanish for jungle; or Pennsylvania—Penn’s Woods)

Of course the “avatar” concept doesn’t appear in the book—but this idea is hardly original, being a straight rip-off of The Matrix. In the Matrix movies it is a technological avatar, while in Avatar it is biological—but it is the same notion of animated surrogate beings remotely controlled in a parallel world. And both The Matrix and Avatar tap into popular alienation from the industrial system and technosphere. (There have also been speculations on the sci-fi blogs that Cameron lifted the avatar concept from a 1957 Poul Anderson novella about a paraplegic who telepathically controls a surrogate body on another planet, Call Me Joe.)

In the 1950s—and even into the ’60s, with Star Trek’s imperial Federation and capitalistically dubbed Enterprise—it was still possible to produce science fiction in which the imperialists were the good guys. But there was a real turning point in the post-Vietnam era, after which that just wasn’t going to fly in popular culture.

So it was necessary that in the Star Wars movies the rebels be the good guys, and the Empire the bad guys. And the Ewoks—the low-tech guerilla teddy-bears who bring down the ultra-mechanized Imperial forces on their forested moon in Return of the Jedi—both echoed the Athsheans and predicted the Na’vi. Their tree-top dwellings were probably an inspiration for those of the Na’vi in Cameron’s creation, along with those of the elves of Lothlorien in The Lord of the Rings, who resist the genetically-engineered and proto-industrial goblin armies of the Dark Lord.

There was a bit of a backlash in the Reagan era—and it is very telling that the Star Trek series hit the silver screen in the ’80s. But backlash never plays like the real thing.

Avatar, to Cameron’s undoubted joy, has become a football in the current culture wars. Right-wing pundits bash it as anti-white propaganda, while the politically correct lament that it is another picture in which the hero is a white guy who goes native, in the tradition of Lawrence of Arabia or Dances With Wolves.

On the other hand, South America’s first indigenous head of state—the Aymara president of Bolivia, Evo Morales—has praised Avatar as a “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defense of nature.”

In a wink to the politically hip, Cameron’s Colonel Quaritch, the gung-ho Marine who wants to exterminate the Na’vi, is a veteran of counter-insurgency wars in Venezuela (where the left-wing populist Hugo Chávez is sticking it to US oil companies here in the real world) and Nigeria (where indigenous militants are sabotaging the operations of Shell and Chevron).

More vulgar leftists see Avatar as an analogy for Iraq or Afghanistan, and those are legitimate parallels—as the Hobbit-heads used to say back in the ’60s, “Roll your own.” And certainly Le Guin was riffing off of Vietnam in The Word for World is Forest. But the far more obvious parallel is to the world’s indigenous peoples. The jungle environment, hunter-gather culture, talk of “flows of energy” and “animal spirits”—all speak to the shamanic peoples of the world’s threatened rainforests. Even the Na’vi’s mystical communion with all life forms via their sacred tree (seemingly lifted from the dreamtime of Le Guin’s Athsheans) recalls the ritual use of hallucinogenic brews by traditional rainforest healers to communicate with spirits—the ayahuasca of the Amazon peoples, the iboga of Gabon’s Bwiti.

What Cameron is playing on here—or, to be more cynical, exploiting—is that we all intuitively understand, even without knowing the details, that our way of life is destroying indigenous cultures that live close to the land all over the Earth, and is ultimately destroying the planet itself. So, intuitively, movie-goers are going to want to root for the big blue giants defending the rainforest—especially if they ride around on pterodactyls, ’cause it doesn’t get much cooler than that.

So Evo Morales may have a point that after seeing the movie, people will be more inclined to side with indigenous peoples in their struggle against the global industrial leviathan.

But you can’t root for indigenous peoples if you don’t know about them. And while the current FX fest, set on another world in the distant future, is on the tip of the tongue of every teenage popcorn-head and media pundit—whether they are praising or bashing it—the real-world survival struggles of indigenous peoples are safely invisible.

Last year saw an indigenous uprising in the Peruvian Amazon, over government plans to privatize tribal lands to oil companies—climaxing in the June massacre at Bagua, where the security forces opened fire on a protest roadblock. It made practically no headlines in the US.

In Indonesia’s restive West Papua, armed attacks are growing against the mineral operations of the US multinational Freeport-McMoran—and rights groups are protesting the appointment of a new regional military commander who is a veteran of several bloody campaigns against peoples struggling for land and autonomy throughout the archipelago.

But while everybody knows about the fictional Na’vi, practically nobody knows what is going on in West Papua. It recalls Jean Baudrillard’s warning that “everything is replaced by its own simulacrum.”

The movie’s McDonalds souvenir tie-ins are particularly telling—even if Mickey-Dee’s, unlike other burger chains, claims not to use rainforest beef. It is the perfect tip-off that Avatar represents the capitalist spectacle commodifying and recuperating our alienation from the capitalist spectacle.

In her 1973 essay “The Stalin in the Soul,” Ursula Le Guin raised some caveats about her own genres of science fiction and dystopian fantasy. While censorship occurs in totalitarian regimes by bureaucratic fiat, she argued, there is a more subtle phenomenon of market censorship in the “free” capitalist world, in which economic forces impose trivialization:

Recent science fiction…is full of edifying and hideous pictures of terrible futures—overpopulated words where people eat each other in the form of green cookies; postholocaust mutants behaving in approved Social Darwinist fashion; nine billion people dying various awful deaths by pollution at the rate of a billion per chapter, and so on. I have done this myself; I plead guilty. And I feel guilty. Because none of this involves real thought or real commitment. The death of civilizations, the death of a species, is used the way the death of an individual is used in murder mysteries—to provide the readers a cheap thrill. The writer holds up a picture of overpopulation, or universal pollution, or atomic war, and everybody says Ugh! Agh! Yecchh! That is a “gut reaction,” a perfectly sincere one. But it is not an act of intelligence, and it is not a moral act.

Man does not live by gut alone. Reaction is not action.

Novels of despair are intended, most often, to be admonitory, but I think they are, like pornography, most often escapist, in that they provide a substitute for action, a draining off of tension. That is why they sell well. They provide an excuse to scream, for writer and reader. A gut reaction, and nothing further. An automatic response to violence—a mindless response. When you start screaming, you have stopped asking questions.

Yeah, there’s a possibility that movie-goers who have seen Avatar will be more likely to root for indigenous peoples on the six o’clock news. Except that indigenous peoples don’t make the six o’clock news.

The struggle of the Papuans against Freeport-McMoran’s gold and copper interests in Indonesia doesn’t make the six o’clock news. The struggle of the Ijaw people fighting against the Nigerian military and Shell Oil in the Niger Delta doesn’t make the six o’clock news. The struggle of the Penan, blockading the logging roads in the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, doesn’t make the six o’clock news—despite the fact that these peoples are fighting and dying for their land every day.

The fact that remote Ashuar bands in the Peruvian Amazon are threatened with actual extermination as their lands are sold to oil companies without their informed consent—that doesn’t make the six o’clock news. And even when the rainforest peoples of Peru—the Ashuar, the Ashaninka, the Matsigenka, the Harakmut—block the access roads and seize the oil pipelines, armed only with their spears and blowguns and machetes, it still doesn’t make the six o’clock news. And when they are fired upon by the security forces of a government that has just entered into a Free Trade Agreement with the United States—as precisely happened last June at Bagua—even then, it doesn’t make the six o’clock news.

And when, in the wake of the massacre, a general uprising is threatened across Peru’s jungle, and the government blinks and agrees to negotiations, and indigenous leaders with their face-paint and feathers meet with cabinet ministers in Lima, an utterly unprecedented victory—still nothing on the six o’clock news up here in Gringolandia, the intended destination for most of that rainforest oil.

So how are we in North America—where we consume some 60% of the world’s resources, the destination for a disproportionate share of all that oil and copper and timber—supposed to root for indigenous peoples if we don’t know about them? We don’t know the names of the Ijaw and Papuans and Ashaninka. But we all know about the Na’vi.

The languages of indigenous peoples are threatened all over the world, a wealth of cultural information dying along with them—and the world pays no note. But meanwhile geeks and popcorn-heads throughout the industrial nations are teaching themselves Na’vi—an artificially created language for a movie—or Klingon or Elvish.

Something, as the saying goes, is wrong with this picture.

Pun intended.

—-

A shorter version of this article first appeared Feb. 10 in the national weekly Indian Country Today.

See also:

PERU’S AMAZON UPRISING
Indigenous Resistance to the Corporate Agenda
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2010

From our Daily Report:

Peru: indigenous leaders reject Bagua massacre report; García intransigent
World War 4 Report, Jan. 4, 2010

Indonesia: new ambush targets Freeport personnel in militarized West Papua
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2010

Nigeria: militants blow up Chevron pipeline —again
World War 4 Report, Jan. 12, 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, February 10, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE PARADOXICAL POLITICS OF AVATAR 

VENEZUELA: VOICES OF PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY

Book Review:

VENEZUELA SPEAKS!
Voices from the Grassroots,
by Carlos Martínez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell
PM Press, Oakland, 2010

by Hans Bennett, Upside Down World

There are many different ways that the corporate media continues to misrepresent the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Many critics of this biased media coverage have directly challenged the demonization of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, but very few critics, if any, have exposed the media’s virtual erasure of the vibrant and growing participatory democracy in Venezuela. The new book entitled Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots offers a powerful correction to this misrepresentation by spotlighting a wide range of people and movements that are actively governing themselves, within official governmental structures created since the 1998 election of President Chávez, and the growing non-governmental social movements that have existed for several decades.

Venezuela Speaks! embodies this non-hierarchical philosophy by presenting the voices of the people themselves in interviews from practically every sector of society, including community organizers, educators, journalists, cultural workers, farmers, women, students, and Indigenous & Afro-Venezuelans. Co-authors Carlos Martínez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell argue persuasively that this untold story of democracy from the bottom up is key to understanding the complexity of the present-day political situation in Venezuela. They write that “by failing to see beyond Chávez and the government’s anti-neoliberal policies, one of the most significant political dynamics in Venezuela has gone ignored and underappreciated—the dynamic between a government that has committed itself to a discourse of grassroots political participation, and the response of ordinary Venezuelans to this call, often in ways that go beyond the expectations of the government, occasionally even challenging it.”

Authors Martínez, Fox, and Farrell explain that “the idea of participatory democracy, as opposed to representative democracy has been a pillar of Chávez’s political movement since his successful run for office in 1998.” The most well-known example of participatory democracy in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution is the system of communal councils, which have “provided Venezuelans with a legal mechanism to locally organize themselves into democratic structures of between 200-400 families, with the greater goal of determining the way that government funds get used for development and infrastructure projects in their communities.”

However, the authors argue that the community councils are just the “tip of the iceberg of the construction of popular power in Venezuela. Over the course of the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuelans have created cooperatives; taken over factories; occupied urban and rural lands; launched community radio and television stations; built centers for culture and popular education; participated in creating national legislation and found numerous other ways of bringing the government’s discourse of popular power into reality. Many of these actions have been motivated by the words of President Chávez or have been facilitated by government initiatives. Meanwhile, many people behind these actions continue to pressure the government in order to survive or succeed.”

While the revolution has opened up new possibilities for popular participation, many of the participants interviewed explain how they are actively pressuring the governmental bureaucracy to follow through on the revolution’s goals. Looking at this tension between social movements and the state, the authors write that “while much of the blame has been attributed to corrupt or right-wing elements still functioning within the government’s bureaucracy, many social movements also argue that an overly ‘institutionalized’ approach to revolutionary change has not taken their independent initiatives sufficiently into account.” Indeed, “many social movements recognize the reality that although government leadership may have changed, radical transformation will often still demand confrontation with those in political power.”

The authors recognize the interviewees “conflict and frustration” with the government, but they argue that “rather than let their criticisms of Venezuela’s political process fill us with disillusionment, these testimonies should provide us with inspiration in knowing that so many people are actively engaged in constructing their new society, regardless of setbacks.” This point is clearly the dominant theme throughout the book, with the authors boldly asserting that “beyond the social programs, economic projects, and anti-neoliberal policies promoted by the national government, truly profound change will only come from the active debate and dialogue between organized peoples and the government. It is this debate and dialogue that has set Venezuela apart from many national liberation struggles of the past, and if Venezuela is to succeed where others have failed, then it must continue to strengthen this relationship.”

Yanahir Reyes Joins Book Tour
Marking the release of Venezuela Speaks!, co-authors Michael Fox and Carlos Martinez are joining photographer Sylvia Leindecker on a book tour around the US. The tour began in San Francisco’s Mission District on January 14 and on the East Coast on January 20, in Arlington, Virginia.

For the East Coast segment, they will also be joined by Yanahir Reyes, who works with Women’s First Steps Civil Association and is the founder of Millennium Women’s Word, a feminist radio program broadcasted on a community radio station in her neighborhood of Caricuao. The 28-year old Reyes is featured in Venezuela Speaks, as part of the chapter focusing on women and sexual diversity movements. Her powerful account is just one of the many interviews featured, but it shows the complexity of how the Bolivarian Revolution has impacted women’s liberation.

Reyes explains that her earliest feminist consciousness came from home, as she saw that her father, a former member of a leftist guerrilla movement, “could go out and do whatever he wanted. He was freer, while my mother stayed at home, taking care of us-the girls-ironing, washing, scrubbing, and cleaning the house.” After discovering that he was having an extra-marital affair, she saw her father as “a coward, a chauvinist,” who “had the power to dominate the situation.” According to Reyes, this type of sexual inequality is compounded by the poverty because “housing is very hard to come by in Caracas and sadly some women are forced to remain in demeaning situations because of it·I want to have my own apartment, alone. I want to travel, to do a lot of things without depending on a man.”

Reyes talks about her involvement in the local ludoteca, which serves as an educational, family, and community center that is flexible and “responds to the needs of the people. The ludotecas are different from traditional schools, because they can take place anywhere in a community—under a mango tree, a room in a barrio, on a closed-off street. The ludoteca isn’t managed by the teacher or an institution, it’s managed by the people. Mothers and fathers participate in the space,” and it “has the objective of strengthening the emotional bonds within the family and using play as a means of education—but an education for transformation.”

Along with working towards a healthy family, the ludoteca has been an important tool for women’s education. As mothers brought their children in, they would gradually become more involved with their children’s education by volunteering at the ludoteca. Reyes explains that “the women were not trained in workshops or anything like that. They began by observing what [co-worker] Milda and I did. But when the women began to participate as volunteers, they started learning children’s songs, how to play the children’s games, how to work with pregnant women. It wasn’t about us teaching the mothers. They learned through practice.” Even further, “the school pushes the community to organize, to solve serious human rights issues, like the right to water, education, security, recreation, nutrition, and other necessities. The ludoteca functions as a safe space, preventing the violence generated by the nature of survival and the vicious cycle of patriarchy and capitalism.”

Illustrating the Bolivarian Revolution’s contradictions and tensions, their ludoteca had trouble getting financial support from the government’s Ministry of Education, which Reyes attributes to the Ministry’s “conservative and bourgeois education policies.” However, “we were able to receive support from Fundayacucho, which is a foundation under the Ministry of Education. These are the contradictions we have in the government. The people inside Fundayacucho understand this project, but the people working directly in the Ministry don’t.”

Reyes concludes her interview by arguing that the Bolivarian Revolution has opened doors for women, but “our concern goes beyond the language of gender inclusion and the political participation of women. The larger struggle is to change the culture.” Reyes cites several important government initiatives for women, including the National Women’s Institute and the 2007 Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free of Violence, which “actually examined the different forms of violence established by patriarchy and machismo as a cultural and ideological system. The creation of the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality in March of 2009 was another very significant step. But I have to say that the bureaucracy swallows good intentions. I think it is a mistake to keep strengthening the institutions. The communities are ready to make the changes. The struggle continues to be the divide between institutions and popular power.”

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Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist whose website is Insubordination. This review first appeared Jan. 20 on Upside Down World. Details on the book tour are available at PM Press.

See also:

VENEZUELAN LABOR BETWEEN CHAVEZ AND THE GOLPISTAS
The Bolivarian Government Against Union Autonomy
by Rafael Uzcategui, Tierra y Libertad
World War 4 Report, November 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, February 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingVENEZUELA: VOICES OF PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 

OBAMA’S FIRST YEAR:

What Comes Next For the Anti-War Forces?

by Bill Weinberg, Phase 2

In assessing how our position has changed one year into the Barack Obama administration, the anti-war forces must avoid twin errors: that of relaxing our vigilance and opposition to the continuing permanent war, and that of denying the de-escalations in the global and domestic situation that have in fact taken place. The prior error will defeat the very purpose of our movements, while the latter will relegate us to further marginalization. Only a distanced consideration of exactly what has changed since the Bush years can provide an accurate assessment of the empire’s new posture—and the correct way to respond to it.

Orwellian Nobel Peace Prize
Obama’s election was a repudiation of the “neocons”—and their hubristic program of endless “regime change” throughout the Middle East (and eventually the rest of the world)—by both the US electorate and political elite.

Citing a more “hopeful state of world affairs” brought about in part by the new administration in Washington, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January announced that it was moving the minute hand of its famous Doomsday Clock one minute back—to six minutes of midnight. The decision echoes the findings of the Nobel Peace Prize committee that Obama has significantly ratcheted down global tensions.

Yet Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech was an open defense of the two wars that he is waging—the one in Iraq winding down but still involving some 130,000 US troops (and many more private contractors); the one in Afghanistan rapidly escalating, with the 100,000 US troops there slated to rise this year to higher than Iraq levels (in addition to private contractors and a 30,000-strong international force).

According to a Jan. 13 Associated Press report, Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—on top of what promises to be a record-breaking $708 billion for the Pentagon next year. It is a grim comment on our times that a president elected on an anti-war platform, and still perceived as a peace-maker, will be the first to boost the Defense Department budget over $700 billion.

Obama’s Pentagon is now viewing Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single “Af-Pak” theater. Obama has actually escalated US drone strikes against presumed al-Qaeda targets in Pakistani territory—over the open objections of the Islamabad government, Washington’s supposed ally. The drone strikes—now coming every few days—reportedly killed some 700 in 2009, overwhelmingly noncombatants. This counter-productive strategy only fuels the Taliban insurgency that now threatens to destabilize Pakistan entirely.

Dismantling the Torture Regime—Maybe
Obama has not met his deadline, announced in an executive order last January, to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year, and officials admit the camp may remain open until 2011 to allow an Illinois prison time to prepare for the arrival of the detainees. Even at the Thomson Correctional Center, the detainees will still remain under Pentagon administrative control, not that of the civilian authorities.

Of the 775 detainees that have passed through Guantánamo since it was opened in the aftermath of 9-11, less than 200 remain—but their fate is uncertain. The Obama administration has decided to try some in the civilian courts—the five charged in the 9-11 conspiracy—but has gone ahead with military tribunals for others. The tribunals are ostensibly proceeding with greater standards for due process, following a reform of the Military Commissions Act. Of course, the right adamantly opposes any transfer of the Guantánamo detainees to US soil.

The administration has also taken measures to dismantle the secret network of clandestine prisons launched by the Pentagon and CIA under the Bush administration, which held many thousands around the world. The most significant hub in this global gulag, the prison at Afghanistan’s Bagram air base, has been moved off the base in preparation for its transfer to Afghan authorities. This will not necessarily mean an improvement in the human rights situation faced by the detainees there, but hopefully it will at least become a traditional prison rather than an extra-legal one. Obama has continued the Bush policy of denying any recognition of the habeas corpus rights of detainees held by the US overseas.

The passing of Obama’s deadline for the closure of Guantánamo means that now there is no longer any firm timeline for shutting the prison camp. And disturbingly, the Obama administration is calling for dismissal of the pending suit against Bush administration attorney John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memos” that authorized human rights abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

Slowing the Trajectory Towards a Police State—Tentatively
On the domestic front, Obama has called a halt to the Bush administration’s aggressive and brutal coast-to-coast raids on factories, workplaces and neighborhoods by the Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead, ICE is sending employers written notice that they may face civil fines if they are found to be using unauthorized workers. Obama’s Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona’s Maricopa County—who has run a local anti-immigrant police state complete with detainment camps—and ICE has revoked his authority to enforce federal immigration law. (Arpaio has vowed to defy the federal order, but so far hasn’t.)

But a New York Times report of Jan. 9 (based on data procured through the Freedom of Information Act) revealed that the Obama administration has continued to conceal the facts concerning more than 100 deaths in ICE detention facilities since 2003. And while Obama has thus far resisted calls to mobilize army troops to the Mexican border, he has not halted construction of the border wall launched by the Bush administration.

Following the attempted Christmas Day jetliner terror attack, Homeland Security has instated new airline passenger screening measures based on country of origin that rights groups are assailing as unconstitutional.

New Quagmires Beckon
Since the attempted Christmas attack, Yemen has emerged as the next country to be targeted for a US-directed counter-insurgency—although even before the attempt, there were reports of US warplanes carrying out bombing raids in Yemeni territory. The multiple insurgencies in Yemen (waged by both Sunni and Shi’ite militants) could draw the US into yet a third military quagmire.

With the change of administration in Washington, the likelihood of US aggression against Iran has greatly diminished. So too have the odds of the CIA and State Department attempting to groom the opposition there as proxies, following the neocon playbook—which is the last thing Iran’s pro-democracy movement needs. However, if Israel launches air-strikes against Iran, Obama will be faced with the choice of whether to back Tel Aviv up, either politically or militarily.

Obama has not removed the Special Forces troops sent by Bush as military advisors to West Africa, with little public notice. The growing presence of the self-declared “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” means greater risk of US troops being drawn into combat in Mali, Niger or Mauritania.

US Special Forces and Marines continue to hold joint manoeuvres with Philippine troops in the southern island of Mindanao, wracked by a Muslim insurgency. Under Bush, US Special Forces were briefly drawn into combat in Mindanao, and there are reports that there have been such incidents under the new administration as well.

There are other opportunities for Washington to be sucked into military adventures by circumstance. The Pentagon rescue mission to earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince appears as a moral necessity, but could be the beginning of a new US occupation of Haiti—especially if the situation in the destroyed city turns violent.

Hemispheric Militarization Advances
There is little evidence that Obama’s CIA was involved in last summer’s coup d’etat in Honduras, but Washington’s supposed isolation of the de facto regime has in fact been full of loopholes—even Pentagon training of Honduran military officers apparently continued. Washington’s intent to normalize relations with Honduras after the transfer of power to a new government on Jan. 27—following an election rejected as illegitimate by the popular resistance movement—will place Obama at odds with much of the rest of the hemisphere.

Although the US media have barely noted it, Obama is going ahead with plans launched under Bush to establish permanent military bases in Colombia—which remains both the top US aid recipient and worst human rights abuser in the western hemisphere. The leftist government of Hugo Chávez in neighboring Venezuela openly views establishment of the bases as a springboard for intervention, and the issue has greatly escalated tensions along the already militarized border.

Obama is also replicating the “Plan Colombia” model in Mexico, where drug-related violence is escalating to nearly the level of a civil war. The $1.4 billion “Merida Initiative” of military aid packages to Mexico and the Central American republics is directly modeled on the Colombian experience, although it stops short of actually committing US military advisors (which would be deemed an affront to Mexican nationalism).

The Obama administration has taken some measures to de-escalate the War on Drugs, which has been a disaster for civil and human rights both at home and abroad. Obama’s Justice Department has pledged to respect California’s medical marijuana law, and call off the raids that were standard practice under Bush (and continued through Obama’s first year). But federal prosecutors will, in fact, still have autonomy to enforce the US drug laws even where they clash with state law. And this retreat is but a small step towards the general decriminalization that will be needed to undercut the ultra-violent cartels, to break the trajectory towards a domestic police state north of the border and entropic war in Mexico.

The Thunder on the Right
Of course, the most organized and angry opposition to Obama is coming from the right, and it is imperative to recognize that many of the grievances fueling this opposition are absolutely legitimate. The “Tea-baggers” are foremost furious at the massive tax-payer rip-off represented by last year’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the notorious $700 billion Wall Street bail-out. Unfortunately, this rage has become mixed up with racism and xenophobia, paranoid opposition to a public health care system, and the anti-choice position on reproductive freedom.

This movement employs paradoxical anti-fascist rhetoric. Even the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has launched a blog baiting Obama with the oxymoron of “Liberal Fascism.” But fascism in its incipient phases always exploits populism—only to utterly betray it once power has been achieved. If more radical and openly racist elements consolidate leadership, the potential is real for the anti-Obama backlash to bring about a genuine fascist movement. Armed resistance on the right, or the taking of the White House by a right-wing populist such as Sarah Palin in 2012 are ominous possibilities.

On the other hand, a principled alliance with grassroots conservatives is possible around issues of civil liberties, economic justice and perhaps even the war(s). The prerequisites for such an alliance are, first of all, knowing our own politics and being explicit about where they differ from those of the grassroots right. We can openly disagree with Libertarians on economic issues and still make a tactical alliance with them around protecting constitutional rights, for instance. We can even coalesce with those we disagree with on abortion and immigration—if there is absolute clarity about those disagreements, and if they are not the ones actually leading the charge against reproductive freedom and immigrants’ rights.

Such alliances can not only raise the effectiveness of our demands, but hold the potential to spark a much-needed cross-grassroots dialogue and woo elements of the populist conservative opposition away from the hardcore racists—although if leftists attempt to impose their leadership, it will surely backfire.

There are, however, lines that cannot be crossed in alliance-building or even in dialogue. Embracing racists (even of the veiled variety today typical), or failing to make clear our differences with coalition partners, can play into the hands of the building fascist backlash—and help make a rope for our own necks. This grave error has already been displayed in Ralph Nader’s uncritical embrace of Pat Buchanan, and the growing popularity of right-wing conspiracy theory on the ostensible “left.”

The Post-GWOT Era?
Although the US military remains massively overstretched, there are indications that since Obama’s election, we have entered the post-GWOT era. The nomenclature, at least, has changed. The Obama administration has formally abandoned the Bush-era phrase “Global War on Terrorism.” The new term is the dryly clinical and antiseptic “Overseas Contingency Operation.” Is this an improvement—or a switch from a hubristic and bellicose rallying cry to an Orwellian euphemism? A normalization of permanent war?

In either case, the anti-war forces need to rethink the errors that have led to the decline of our movement even as the US escalates the unpopular Afghanistan war. Those who have relaxed their vigilance, failing to protest the Afghan “surge” because it is now a liberal Democrat’s war, represent one such erroneous tendency. And those who deny the de-escalations that have in fact taken place in other spheres paradoxically fuel this tendency.

Linked to this error is the hard left’s growing embrace of some of the ugliest exponents of global reaction. Supposed Marxists bizarrely look to the deeply reactionary forces of political Islam as the heroic “resistance” in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The so-called “9-11 Truth” movement similarly denies the realities of al-Qaeda and its allied forces, and increasingly embraces professional conspiracy hucksters of the right-wing and xenophobic variety (e.g. Alex Jones).

The Challenge of Solidarity
The secular civil resistance in the countries under imperial assault—groups such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, the Iraq Freedom Congress, and Iraq’s independent trade unions—have no such illusions about political Islam. They view political Islam and US imperialism as “twin poles of terrorism.”

The besieged civil opposition in Iraq—under threat of repression and assassination from the collaborationist and insurgent forces alike—is fighting to keep alive elementary freedoms for women, leading labor struggles against Halliburton and other US contractors, opposing privatization of the country’s oil and resources, and demanding a secular future for their nation. These—not the jihadists who seek to exterminate them—are our natural allies in Iraq.

It is from these voices that we must seek leadership. Building active human-to-human solidarity with these forces—and giving them a vocal role in our own organizing efforts—will both keen our own analysis, and undercut the false perception that secular and democratic forces in Afghanistan and Iraq support the occupations.

Back to the Grassroots
The greatest challenge is to understand that no anti-war opposition is now likely to be successful unless it recognizes the inexorable implications of an anti-war position for a far greater process of social change. Neither the fact that Obama is a liberal Democrat nor the fact that the insurgents the US faces in Afghanistan and Iraq are deeply reactionary alter the fundamental political economy of the global military crusade. This remains a struggle, both with rival powers and insurgent movements, to assure continued US global primacy through control of oil.

The architects of this global crusade in the Bush administration were an alliance of ideological neocons and figures such as Bush and Cheney who themselves emerged from the oil industry, and afforded its captains unprecedented access to policy-making. Obama has repudiated neocon strategies, and his administration lacks such organic ties to the oil industry. But he has inherited the crusade, and is propelled by its dynamics.

US global hegemony protects the uniquely privileged position of the US ruling class, which is predicated on the grossly disproportionate consumption of the planet’s hydrocarbon resources. Despite the conventional wisdom of the “national security” paradigm, which holds that US access to global oil is good for consumers on the lower levels of the social pyramid, in fact the tax-payers have borne the burdens of imperial overreach just as the sons and daughters of the working class bear its grim human costs on the battlefields. The effort to bring the Earth’s most critical oil resources under imperial control—especially via the Iraq adventure, although the Afghan campaign is also linked to encirclement of the Caspian Basin—has meant a hemorrhage of the national wealth of the world’s biggest economy, and contributed to the financial cataclysm. An effective anti-war opposition therefore necessarily involves issues of economic justice and the planetary ecological crisis.

A year ago, when it seemed global capitalism really teetered at the brink of collapse, there may have been a moment of possibility for Obama to rise to greatness in spite of his limitations in the manner of his role models Lincoln and FDR—to take the kinds of dramatic measures at home that would permit the military leviathan to withdraw its tentacles abroad. While Lincoln and FDR were war presidents, a marshalling of public power such as they effected could have been mustered in the interests of peace—a harnessing or even seizure of Detroit’s industrial apparatus and Wall Street’s financial machinery to instate a “Green New Deal” based on a crash conversion from the fossil fuel economy, concomitant with at least a degree of social leveling.

This opportunity is almost certainly lost. Obama has taken limited measures to impose discipline on the corporate petro-oligarchy—conditioning the Detroit bailout on retooling the industry, tightening auto emissions and smog standards, instating more restrictive rules for drilling leases on public lands and offshore waters. But his policy on the climate crisis centers on the technocratic pseudo-solution of carbon-trading. Ironically, it was TARP’s success in stabilizing the system (at tax-payer expense) that has removed any imperatives on Obama for systemic reform.

This lost opportunity shifts the responsibilities for addressing the global crisis even more firmly to the grassroots. Obama still represents, at least, an imperial adjustment to a new world situation that includes some hopeful signs—the shift to the left nearly throughout Latin America, the past year’s strikes and uprisings in Europe, growing planet-wide struggles by indigenous peoples to protect their lands from corporate plunder. If we are to regain lost ground, our challenge is to remain intransigently oppositional in this period of adjustment—but in a more intelligent way, which recognizes what has changed, and to what degree.

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Bill Weinberg is editor of the online World War 4 Report and author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso Books, 2000). This article will appear in German in the upcoming issue of the Berlin-based magazine Phase 2. It also appeared in English Jan. 25 on AlterNet.

See also:

NOTES ON OBAMA’S ENERGY PLAN
“Everything Must Change So That Everything Can Remain the Same”
by George Caffentiz, Turbulence, UK
World War 4 Report, January 2010

From our Daily Report:

Obama’s first year: a World War 4 Report scorecard
World War 4 Report, Jan. 22, 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, February 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingOBAMA’S FIRST YEAR: 

MEXICO: BORDER MILITARIZATION CONTINUES IN 2010

from Frontera NorteSur

Whether active duty or retired, military men will continue playing a central role in Mexico’s drug war in 2010. In the northern border state of Coahuila, incoming mayors recently ratified the continuation of former military officers to head police departments in the municipalities of Ciudad Acuña, Piedras Negras, Saltillo, Monclova and Torreon. Colonel Salvador Méndez Cachu, who served as public safety chief in Ciudad Acuña, will now assume the same position in Piedras Negras.

“The work is coordinated with the Mexican Defense Department,” said Coahuila Governor Humberto Moreira Valles last month. “Decisions are made at that level. We are very content with the work that has been happening.”

In 2009, 200 retired military personel were placed in positions of law enforcement authority at both the state and municipal levels in Coahuila.

Up the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juárez, the deployment of soldiers in the anti-drug Joint Operation Chihuahua is likely to continue for much of this year. Countering earlier speculation that the Mexican army might pull back in March, a Chihuahua state offcial said the troops could be on the streets until next December. According to Fidel Bañuelos Madrid, spokesman for the Chihuahua Public Security Secretariat, the army’s presence will depend on public safety considerations as well as the readiness of civilian police forces to replace the army.

With nearly 2,700 killings in 2009, Ciudad Juárez has become the world’s most violent city, according to New Mexico State University researcher Molly Molloy. The carnage has continued into 2010. On January 3, human rights activist Josefina Reyes became one of the latest victims. Reported slain in the Juarez Valley, Reyes had once conducted a hunger strike to protest the disappearance of her son in 2008, allegedly by soldiers. On the afternoon of January 4, an unidentified man was shot to death in public in crowded, downtown Ciudad Juárez.

Commenting on troop movements that drew public attention at the end of the year, Bañuelos said they were part of the normal, 60-day rotation of soldiers that is carried out to prevent corruption by drug cartels. However, a contingent of elite GAFE troops, originally trained by the United States for counter-insurgency purposes, arrived in Ciudad Juárez as the year drew to a close. Bañuelos added that important modifications were forthcoming in the much-criticized Joint Operation Chihuahua, but the state official did not offer details to the press.

While many Mexican political actors support the military’s deployment in the drug war, criticisms continue to mount of alleged human rights violations by soldiers. For instance, both the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Amnesty International have leveled criticisms at General Mario Antonio Delgado Talavera, head of public security in the Coahuila state capital of Saltillo, for the mistreatment of migrants headed to the United States.

In the southern state of Guerrero, where the Mexican army has directed extensive anti-drug operations for decades now, the official state human rights commission documented 143 complaints against the military during 2009. The alleged violations included illegal searches of homes, arbitrary detentions, improper exercises of authority, robberies, damages, intimidations, and injuries. Six complaints were related to torture and one to homicide.

Defenders of the army’s anti-drug mission justify the use of the armed forces as a neccessary counter-weight to the tremendous firepower possessed by criminal groups.

In a letter published in 2010’s first edition of Mexico’s Proceso news weekly, Mexican Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez-Mont said one of the goals of the Felipe Calderón administration’s reliance on the armed forces was to break the cycle of corruption that plagues civilian institutions.

“We reiterate that [military] cooperation always has been proposed as temporary and supportive, in effect as long as institutions of public security are being reconstructed,” Gómez-Mont wrote.

Dissenting from the dominant political consensus, the Guerrero-based Tlachinollan Human Rights Center warned of the consequences of the growing activity of the military outside its bases.

“The power of the army has been transformed into a threat to society,” Tlachinollan charged in a report that analyzed the state of human rights in Guerrero in 2009. “That’s because the army emerges as a de facto power that has no legal or social control and only provokes confrontation, elevating the levels of violence and weakening democratic institutions at the same time.”

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This article first appeared Jan. 4 on Frontera NorteSur.

Resources:

Tlachinollan Human Rights Center
http://www.tlachinollan.org/

See also:

WOMEN IN BLACK MARCH ON CIUDAD JUAREZ
from Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, December 2009

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: 860 more army troops to Tijuana
World War 4 Report, Jan. 17, 2010

Mexico: more hideous narco-violence
World War 4 Report, Jan. 9, 2010

Mexico: Guerrero rebuked in disappearance of indigenous leaders
World War 4 Report, Jan. 4, 2010

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Special to World War 4 Report, February 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMEXICO: BORDER MILITARIZATION CONTINUES IN 2010 

HELPING HAITI: OUR DOLLARS AREN’T ENOUGH

by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report

On January 14, two days after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, I finally got a chance to look over my e-mail, courtesy of a small Haitian NGO in a quiet, relatively undamaged neighborhood in the south of the city. After reading and answering personal messages, I noticed that a lot of my mail consisted of appeals for earthquake relief. Some messages were from people asking me to recommend ways to donate to grassroots Haitian groups.

I was moved to see how many people were eager to help, and I certainly knew how desperately Haiti needed help. Although I was in no position then to make up a list of recommendations, by the next day my colleague Jane Guskin had posted some good information. I strongly encourage people to donate to these and many other Haiti-based organizations.

At same time, I got a funny feeling reading all these notes and appeals. I found myself wondering if people would think that their dollars were enough, that making a donation meant they didn’t need to do any more to help. Because if that was the case, I thought it would almost be better not to contribute to the relief effort.

But what more can we do?, people will ask.

For starters, we can help Haiti by refusing to believe the hype. Even sitting in that little NGO I could already imagine how the politicians and pundits would exploit the disaster, using it as an excuse to attack Haiti. And I don’t mean the bizarre fantasies of outright racists like Pat Robertson—I mean the more insidious and influential opinion pieces by liberals like Nicholas Kristof who profess sympathy for the impoverished Haitians and offer advice on how to rebuild their devastated economy.

But this advice is in fact the same advice that successive Haitian governments have followed since the time of “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Instead of protecting agriculture, reforesting the hillsides, strengthening the infrastructure and public services, especially education, and developing the internal market, for the past 35 years Haiti has obeyed Washington’s dictates: it has opened itself up to competition from heavily subsidized US agribusiness, it has slashed its meager public works programs and public services, and it has encouraged the growth of assembly plants producing for export, holding down wages to make sure these sweatshops “remain competitive.”

The results were predictable: a decimated rural economy, a virtually non-existent infrastructure, and an impoverished, overpopulated urban center so badly constructed that tens of thousands of people, at least, were certain to die when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck.

So we need to inform ourselves and not be taken in. There’s no lack of material. There are overviews of the economic policies our government foisted on Haiti; more detailed studies on the eradication of local livestock and the destruction of local rice production; short histories of how the United States plundered Haiti in the early twentieth century. Back in 2004, I wrote a brief article trying to show some of the ways the US government has worked to stifle the grassroots resistance. (See links below. —ed.)

But just being informed isn’t enough either. We have to share the information. We need to talk about these things to everybody we know–in conversations, on the internet, in leaflets, in letters to the editor. Haiti is in the spotlight for now, and we have to use this short time to help people understand what U.S.-promoted economic policies mean in the real world, not just in Haiti but also in the neighboring Dominican Republic and in Mexico. We need to get our friends and coworkers together to watch Life and Debt, a powerful documentary on what these policies did to Jamaica, just a few hundred miles west of Port-au-Prince. And we need to think about the effect of these policies on Honduras, the site of Latin America’s latest military coup.

But this still isn’t enough. As they say, you can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. What can we really do for Haiti if we remain powerless in our own country?

After all, the same corporations and economic advisers that trashed Haiti’s economy also brought us our own crisis, a worldwide economic earthquake that continues to threaten much of the global population—including Haitians and ourselves–with further suffering. If we want to have any effect on the world, we need to organize to fight back against cutbacks in our own public services and labor abuses in our own workplaces. Why aren’t we building groups to resist foreclosures? Where are our unemployed leagues?

And as we organize in defense of our own interests, we need to recognize that our hopes for a better world are intertwined with those of Haitians, Hondurans, and people around the world. When people resist anywhere, we need to take action in solidarity.

In Haiti last summer thousands of assembly plant workers shut down the industrial park in the north of Port-au-Prince to demand a higher minimum wage. In some of the most dramatic protests in this hemisphere during 2009, the strikers marched into the capital and joined with protesting students to shut down the city’s center. The Haitian police and soldiers from a United Nations occupation force eventually managed to make the workers return to the assembly plants.

Would things have gone differently if people here—and around the world—had marched in the streets in solidarity with the Haitian workers and students? The next time Haitian workers mobilize for a wage increase, will we be ready?

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David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007) and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas. He was in Port-au-Prince with a delegation when the earthquake struck.

Resources:

Pat Robertson: Haiti “Cursed” After “Pact to the Devil”
CBS News, Jan. 13, 2010

Some Frank Talk About Haiti
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, Jan. 20

The Underlying Tragedy
David Brooks, New York Times, Jan. 14

Haiti-Earthquake: A wake-up call
Alex Dupuy, Alter-Presse, Jan. 23

What You’re Not Hearing about Haiti (But Should Be)
Carl Lindskoog, CommonDreams.org, Jan. 30

Porkbarreling Pigs in Haiti:
North American “Swine Aid” an Economic Disaster for Haitian Peasants
Allan Ebert, Multinational Monitor, December 1985

Trade and the Disappearance of Haitian Rice
Josiane Georges, Trade Environment Database (TED) Case Studies, American University, June 2004

How the U.S. Impoverished Haiti
Jean Damu, Berkeley Daily Planet, Jan. 16, 2010

Why the U.S. Keeps Invading Haiti
David Wilson, The Nonviolent Activist, May-June 2004

1930-1939: The unemployed workers’ movement
LibCom.org, Dec. 27, 2009

Life and Debt
Film website

From our Daily Report:

Violence in Haiti —from police and “peacekeepers”
World War 4 Report, Jan. 30, 2010

Day Three in Port-au-Prince: “A difficult situation”
World War 4 Report, Jan. 21, 2010

Haiti: support grassroots relief efforts
World War 4 Report, Jan. 16, 2010

Haiti: more strikes hit maquilas
World War 4 Report, Aug. 26, 2009

Haiti: maquila workers march for wage hike
World War 4 Report, Aug. 12, 2009

See also:

ELECTIONS IN PALESTINE & HAITI
This Is What Democracy Looks Like!
by Nirit Ben-Ari, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2006

THE RE-OCCUPATION OF HAITI
Lawlessness Brings Call for New U.S. Military Role
by Kody Emmanuel, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, July 2005

See related story, this issue:

HAITI AND THE JEWS: FORGOTTEN HISTORY
by Nirit Ben-Ari, Ha’aretz
World War 4 Report, February 2010

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Special to World War 4 Report, February 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHELPING HAITI: OUR DOLLARS AREN’T ENOUGH 

HAITI AND THE JEWS: FORGOTTEN HISTORY

by Nirit Ben-Ari, Ha’aretz

A field hospital established by the Israeli mission to Haiti treats dozens of earthquake victims every day, and is the only hospital prepared to perform complex surgeries and treatments in field conditions. But this delegation, which landed in Haiti following the recent earthquake, is not the first time the Jewish presence has been felt in the island.

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola—where Haiti lies today—he was accompanied by Torres, a Jew from Spain who was forced to convert to Christianity, and served as an interpreter. Following European settlement in the New World, Jews who fled the terror of the Spanish Inquisition also found refuge in Haiti. Jews who came to Haiti were merchants, plantation owners and slave-owners, and settled all over the island. In the 17th century the French came, bringing with them African slaves, who took the place of the natives whose culture was largely annihilated by the Spanish conquest.

In 1685, King Louis XIV published the document known as “Code Noir”, which set the rules of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies. Besides imposing draconian restrictions on the slaves and prohibiting the practice of all religions except the Catholic, the document ordered the expulsion of all Jews from French colonies in the islands. Most Jews left, but in Haiti, as well as other French colonies, local government facilitated softer interpretation to “Code Noir”, and Jews involved in commerce with companies that France was interested in received the status of French citizens in Haiti.

Mordechai Arbel, a former Israeli ambassador to Haiti, wrote in his book The Jewish Nation in the Caribbean (Gefen, 2002), one of the Jewish families that came to the island was Mendès-France—of the same family as Pierre Mendès-France, prime minister of France from 1954-1955.

In 1804, after the slave rebellion, the former slaves slaughtered nearly all whites on the island, including Jews, and established a Free Republic. The government of freed slaves wrote in the constitution that a white person would never be a landowner in the country. Most of the remaining Jews left, the plantations closed and trade ceased. Only a very few Jews remained and were absorbed into the nation’s elite; some of their descendants still live on the island.

From 1830, when the revolt against Russian occupation of Poland started, some Jewish families fled to Haiti, where they generally joined the upper classes. Toward the end of the 19th century, some 30 other Jewish families came from Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, and joined in the textile trade activity. During World War II, Haiti was one of the few countries in the world to open its doors to Jewish refugees, but most Jews emigrated after the war ended.

Anti-Semitism and Slavery: the Link
Haiti, like other Caribbean nations, is an island with a tradition of carnival celebrations. Dr. Elizabeth McAllister, a professor of religions at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, wrote in her article “The Jew in the Haitian Imagination: A Popular History of Anti-Judaism and Proto-Racism” (in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, Oxford, 2004) that “among the cast of characters during the Rara carnival in Haiti are the ‘Jews’.”

“Jews were Europe’s original, the first object of demonization”, reminds McAllister. “In Medieval Europe, Jews were associated with the devil, cannibalism, poisoning of the holy bread. When the Europeans came to the Caribbean, they brought these beliefs and applied them with little or no change on the native population and the Africans. So in fact, anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages was the basis for racism against blacks in the New World. ”

In her investigation of the Rara carnival, held during Easter in Haiti, McAlister found a a ceremony called “Bwil Jif”, in which carnival revelers make straw dolls called “Judas” or simply “the Jews “, dragging them in the march and finally setting them on fire. But at the same time, participants also see themselves as “Jews” celebrating the crucifixion of Jesus. According to McAllister, the participants adopted the negative representation of the Jews that the Spanish brought with them as an image of resistance and protest against their oppression under Catholic masters, and they burn the “Jewish” effigy as a mockery of to the racism and oppression against the slaves.

The Israeli Connection
Former ambassador Arbel says that when he lived in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, between 1972 and 1975, he insisted on uniting the 12 Jewish families who lived then in the city, organizing events on the occasion of Jewish holidays. As ambassador, he promoted agricultural development projects and invited Israeli farmers in Haiti to teach villagers how to develop agriculture. He says that two Israeli farmers lived in the Artibonite valley for four years, and helped local residents to grow vegetables for export. Arbel recalls a moving ceremony held in the village, in which all the residents exclaimed “Vive Israel!”

But it seems the Israeli involvement in the nation was not always so positive. On Dec. 27, 1982, the US newspaper Christian Science Monitor reported that since 1968 Israel had sold weapons to two Haitian dictators—Francois Duvalier, who became president in 1957; and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, who succeeded him in 1971. The two, known as “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc,” controlled and terrorized the country with a private army. On March 27, 1983, the New York Times reported that Israel was among the few countries that had agreed to sell weapons to Baby Doc, and provided him with the long-term payment arrangement that he requested.

Paul Farmer, who would serve as President Bill Clinton’s deputy UN representative to Haiti, previously reported that Gen. Prosper Avril, the head of the military junta that took power in Haiti in 1988, received temporary asylum in Israel in 1990. Avril was the head of Baby Doc’s notorious “Presidential Guard,” and a US court ruled that he was responsible for “scandalous human rights violations.” He would later serve prison time in Haiti for his crimes.

In 1990, four years after Baby Doc was ousted from power, the popular priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti—in the first democratic elections the nation had seen. But in 1991 he was deposed in a military coup. Britain’s The Independent newspaper reported Oct. 14, 1991 that about 2,000 Uzi and Galil machine-guns from Israel were sent to Haiti in the weeks prior to the coup—with diplomats claiming the weapons went to military units especially loyal to the coup-plotters.

According to an Aug. 1, 2005 report in Jane’s Intelligence Review, weapons of Israeli origin were being smuggled through Florida and ending up with armed gangs in Port-au-Prince in this period—some in collaboration with the junta, and some opposed.

The Israeli Defense Ministry did not issue any reaction by publication time.

Now, as Israeli doctors and nurses work around the clock at the hospital that was established in Haiti, one can only hope that Israel’s contribution to the suffering nation will now focus on saving lives, and not on weapons shipments.

Translation: Pacha Dovinsky

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Nirit Ben-Ari is a doctoral student in political science who teaches at Israel’s Sapir College. This article first appeared in Hebrew in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz on Jan. 22

See related story, this issue:

HELPING HAITI: OUR DOLLARS AREN’T ENOUGH
by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, February 2010

From our Daily Report:

Israel exploits Haiti for propaganda …and Sri Lanka?
World War 4 Report, Jan. 26, 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, February 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHAITI AND THE JEWS: FORGOTTEN HISTORY