IIRSA: THE FTAA’S HANDMAIDEN

South American “Infrastructure Integration” for Free Trade

by Raul Zibechi

The project for Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA, by its initials in Spanish), is swiftly but silently moving forward.

IIRSA is the most ambitious and encompassing plan to integrate the region for international trade. If completed in full, the project would connect zones containing natural resources (natural gas, water, oil, biodiversity) with metropolitan areas, and both of these with the world’s largest markets.

From August 31-September 1, during the 2000 South American Presidential Summit in Brasilia initiated by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB) presented its “Plan of Action for the Integration of South American Infrastructure.” In essence, it formed the foundation for what would become IIRSA, an ambitious plan to facilitate regional and global trade by carrying out physical projects and effecting changes in legislation, statute, and national regulations.

IIRSA is a multi-sectoral project that aims to develop and integrate transportation, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure over the next 10 years. The goal is to reorganize the continent’s landscape based on the development of a physical infrastructure of land, aerial, and river transport; oil and gas pipelines; waterways; maritime and river ports; and power lines and fiber optic cables, to name a few. These projects are organized in 12 integration and development axes—corridors where investments can be concentrated to increase trade and create chains of production connected to global markets.

To carry out this megaproject a number of physical, statutory, and social “barriers” must first be overcome. This requires harmonizing national legislation in the 12 affected countries, and occupying the key territories that tend to have low populations but are major reserves of raw materials and biodiversity.

An Ambitious Project

The December 2000 IADB study “A New Push for Regional Infrastructure Development in South America” suggests that the main obstacles to accomplishing physical integration, and therefore, to improving the flow of merchandise, are the “formidable natural barriers like the Andes Mountains, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Orinoco river basin.” Carlos Lessa, former president of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES, by its initials in Portuguese) agrees, pointing out, “The Andes mountain range is certainly beautiful, but it’s a terrible engineering problem.” This kind of logic that regards nature as a “barrier” in some places and a “resource” in others pervades all aspects of the plan.

During the September 2003 Sub-regional Seminar, IIRSA’s Technical Coordination Committee defined three goals:

1. Support the integration of markets to improve intra-regional trade.

2. Promote new chains of production to become competitive in major global markets.

3. Reduce the “South American cost” by creating a solid logistical platform that is well-inserted into the global economy.

According to studies, another objective of this integration project is to conquer South America’s natural resources and put them at the disposal of North American and European markets.

These objectives can be easily observed on maps of the development and integration axes, each of which encompasses several countries. The nine axes already defined (two are still under development) are:

1. Andean Axis (Venezuela-Colombia-Ecuador-Peru-Bolivia)

2. Amazon Axis (Colombia-Ecuador-Peru-Brazil)

3. Central Inter-oceanic Axis (Peru-Chile-Bolivia-Paraguay-Brazil)

4. Capricorn Inter-oceanic Axis (Antofagasta/Chile-Jujuy/Argentina-Asuncion/Paraguay-Porto Alegre/Brazil)

5. Guyana Shield Axis (Venezuela-Brazil-Suriname-Guyana)

6. Mercosur-Chile Axis(Brazil-Uruguay-Argentina-Chile)

7. Southern Axis (Talcahuano-Concepcion/Chile-Neuquén-Bahía Blanca/Argentina)

8. Southern Amazon Axis ( Peru-Brazil-Bolivia)

9. Atlantic and Pacific Maritime Axis (all countries)

The two axes still under development are the Parana-Paraguay waterway and a megaproject to unite the Orinoco, Amazon, and Rio de la Plata river basins through a connection of 17 rivers to permit river transportation from the Caribbean to Rio de la Plata.

Each axis involves a variety of infrastructure projects. For example, the Amazon Axis, which unites the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic and crosses three large ecosystems (coastal, Andean mountain, and rainforest), must tie the Amazon River and its tributaries to the ports of Tumaco (Colombia), Esmeraldas (Ecuador), and Paita (Peru). This will require major improvements to existing roads and construction of others. Since the axis aims to create a dense network of river transportation systems, several rivers will be dredged and straightened, while in other places river ports will have to be completely overhauled. These infrastructure projects and the spike in transportation flows they generate will result in massive environmental impacts on the Amazon ecosystem.

In areas covered by the axis, there is major hydroelectric power potential as well as large oil reserves already under development, in addition to soybean crops, wood extraction, fishing, and fish farms. The axis will connect with three others (Andean, Central Inter-oceanic, and Guyana Shield) and reduce transportation costs for Pacific countries to Europe, and Brazil to Japan, thus encouraging more trade. The construction of two gas pipelines is being considered for areas deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one extending from Coari to Manaos and the other from Urucu to Port Velho, at a total cost of $750 million. This would allow natural gas to be exported from key points in the Amazon and Southern Amazon Axes. The first contains the important port of Manaos, and the second Port Velho, Brazil, which would be united with the Peruvian ports on the Pacific. This would also allow transportation of the area’s grain production—where soy, corn, and wheat production are the fastest growing—in addition to Camisea’s natural gas from Peru.

The majority of the axes are interconnected. Of the nine, four cover the Amazon and five unite the Pacific with the Atlantic. Under this plan, the continent’s natural resources will be made available to international markets.

The IIRSA project has defined five processes of sectoral integration to address institutional and statutory obstacles. They are:

1. regional energy markets

2. functional systems of aerial, maritime, and multimodal transport

3. promotion of information and telecommunication technologies

4. the facilitation of border crossings

5. finance modalities.

Total investment is expected to be on the order of $37 billion. The project will be financed by the IADB, the Andean Promotional Corporation (CAF, by the Spanish), and the Financial Fund for the Development of the Rio de la Plata Basin (FONPLATA), in addition to the important contributions of the Brazilian Development Bank.

InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB)

Regional financial institution created in 1959 to encourage the economic and social development of Latin America and the Caribbean. It has 46 members: 26 from Latin America and the Caribbean; the United States; Canada; and 18 additional member countries from out of the region. Its highest authority is the Assembly of Governors, made up of the secretaries of treasury from each country.

The right to vote is determined by the number of shares: Latin America and the Caribbean have 50%, the United States 30%, Japan 5%, Canada 4%, and the rest 11%. Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico taken together have the same number of shares as the United States.

From 1961-2002, the IADB approved loans totaling $18.82 billion: 51% for energy projects, 46% for ground transportation, and 3% for telecommunications, maritime, river, and aerial transport. Brazil received 33% of the resources.

Andean Promotional Corporation (CAF)

Multilateral financial institution created in 1970. By 1981, it had approved $618 million in operations, but from 1995-1999, it underwent a huge expansion, approving $12.33 billion in operations

It is the largest financial agent for infrastructure projects in Latin America. Made up of 16 member countries, it is the number one financier for countries belonging to the Andean Community of Nations. It is a major financier of the Atrato-Truando or Atrato-Cacarica-San Miguel canal, which will allow the connection between IIRSA and Puebla-Panama Plan.

Financial Fund for the Development of the Rio de la Plata Basin (FONPLATA)

Created in 1971 to finance integration projects for the river basin. Brazil and Argentina each hold 33.3%; Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay 11.1%. It finances multi-million dollar projects for transportation, agriculture and livestock, industry, exports, and health.

Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES)

Brazilian public bank created in 1952. Under the Lula da Silva government, it has been directed to finance large infrastructure projects in South America. It has extensive resources—greater than any other financial institution in the region—and it is implementing important energy and hydroelectric projects in Venezuela and Ecuador, among others. It has projects that exceed a billion dollars with Venezuela and Argentina.

In reality, these projects are already underway, though not in direct connection with IIRSA. According to CAF’s 2002 Annual Report, some 300 physical integration projects have been identified in South America, 140 of which were ready to begin at any moment. Sixty IIRSA-related projects were already underway: 40 for transportation, 10 for energy, and 10 for telecommunications.

Territories and Markets

Overcoming the physical, legal, and social barriers to implementing IIRSA will require profound changes in geography, legislation, and social relations. The South American continent is sometimes considered a collection of five separate “islands” that should be united:

1. the Caribbean Plate

2. the Andean Mountains

3. the Atlantic Plate

4. Central Amazon Enclave

5. Southern Amazon Enclave

The integration and development axes unify these “islands” by breaking down what is called in technocratic language natural “barriers.”

From a geographical perspective, this unification would demand major undertakings in infrastructure to “correct” the obstacles imposed by nature, speed up the flow of transportation and trade, and greatly reduce costs. The Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Axis, for example, seeks to create an access path from Brazil’s agricultural industry, in the Southern Amazon Enclave, to Pacific ports without having to first travel north through the Amazon river basin. To accomplish this, efficient highways crossing the Andes must be built, in addition to the infrastructure projects necessary for river transport. The path paved by nature will be modified, through huge investments, so that South American merchandise can more rapidly reach the global market.

As Andres Barreda points out, “Starting in the 1980s, the flow of commercial traffic from the Pacific began to displace flow on the Atlantic side. In the 1990s, port traffic on the Pacific was outpacing the Atlantic’s; and in the year 2000, the United States’ Pacific port traffic saw double the volume of its Atlantic ports. There is a problem when the global economy shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” This shift caused the Panama Canal to lose its significance and in its place corridors connecting the two oceans are beginning to appear. According to Barreda, South America has a “strategic bottleneck” in Bolivia, where five of the 12 corridors cross.

South America is one of the few regions on earth that contains all four strategic natural resources: hydrocarbons, minerals, biodiversity, and water. The profound changes to the landscape do not follow a model for integrating the continent as a whole, but rather, for inserting it into the global market . IIRSA, it could be said, centers on an “outward-facing” or exogenous type of integration, rather than an “inward-facing” one. In addition, the axes or corridors must have certain characteristics. Barreda: “To make real-time connections, the Internet is fundamental. To make just-in-time connections, intermodality is fundamental.” As such, the corridors must combine a modern-day telecommunications system with the necessary infrastructure for intermodal transportation.

Intermodality is based on the “container revolution.” The system must be exactly the same for ground, aerial, and river transportation, and merchandise must be able to transfer from one system to another seamlessly. This requires a system of highways and semi trucks, airports and plane fleets, and river barges capable of transporting freight containers, which are now replacing the old system of storage or deposit that the merchandise sector had traditionally utilized. This transformation is linked to the emergence of “global factories” that operate under the just-in-time premise. A sort of “global automaton” has been created by large businesses that employ remote-control operation techniques and cover the planet in the form of a network. But this global automaton, “industrially and productively integrated, now operates with new center-periphery hierarchical relations of an industrial character,” as evidenced by the maquiladora boom. IIRSA is the South American link to integrate the continent into this process, in a subordinate manner.

To overcome the various legal and statutory barriers, IIRSA has adopted the neoliberal strategy of deregulation and weakening the state. Adapting national legislation to the needs of global trade requires homogenization of the rules. This would inevitably lead to each country or region losing its distinguishing characteristics, and states would lose their autonomy to multinationals and the governments of developed countries.

Finally, the “social barriers” must also be overcome. Just one example of this among dozens is the 260-mile Coari-Manaos gas pipeline that passes through the Amazon River as well as one of the best-preserved areas of the rainforest. The two companies primarily interested in the project are Brazil’s Petrobras and the US-based El Paso (world leader in natural gas and one of the world’s largest in the energy sector). In 1998, Petrobras built the first part of the gas pipeline (174 miles), which united the Urucu reserves with the city of Coari. The project caused enormous social and environmental impacts. Writes Brazilian journalist Elisangela Soldatelli: “It reduced fishing levels, affecting river populations that depend on fish to survive; it affected areas where Brazil nut is extracted, crucial to the surrounding areas; the Coari population grew considerably, as the city houses the workers that arrive from different areas; and there has been a dramatic increase in prostitution, violent crime, and cases of malaria.” The Urucu-Port Velho gas pipeline will affect 13 indigenous communities and five municipalities where 90% or more of the population is indigenous.

The benefits gained by a small handful of multinationals will create irreversible social and environmental damages, and further weaken the autonomy of marginalized states, giving them even less recourse to deal with their problems.

Two Cases: Brazil and Bolivia

IIRSA affects each country in the region differently, but in general, we can define “winners” and “losers” in terms of the benefits and damages the implementation of IIRSA will generate. One of the problems with the project is that it will deepen the gaps between countries, regions, and the rich and poor social sectors of society, since different regions will be integrated into the global market on an unequal footing based on current “comparative advantages.” Brazil, one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, illustrate this point well.

In Bolivia, the only thing poor is the indigenous majority. The country boasts important hydrocarbon reserves, the second largest on the continent behind Venezuela. It also occupies a key geographical position: five of the integration and development axes connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic must pass through its territory. It is also rich in biodiversity. Consequently, in its plan “Cambio Para Todos” (Change for All), the international banks call for Bolivia “to become a thoroughfare for the subcontinent and central distributor of gas and other sources of energy,” according to a report from the Bolivian Forum for Environment and Development (Fobomade). As a country providing passage, corridors for exporting goods and services will form part of important binational projects for hydro- and thermoelectric energy generation and distribution.

According to plans defined by IIRSA, Bolivia must construct a new “Fundamental Network of Highways” that will leave entire zones isolated but connect hydrocarbon reserves to global markets. The Central Inter-oceanic Axis that seeks to unite the Brazilian port Santos with the Chilean ports Arica and Iquique, crosses through the middle of Bolivia and is critical to countries like Brazil and Chile, which are especially interested in establishing bi-oceanic trade. The Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Axis would unite the Brazilian state Rondonia with the Pacific and gain access to its large-scale soy production, thereby “taking advantage of one of the regions where crossing the Andes presents the least difficulty,” writes Fobomade. Bolivia is about to become the object of huge investments for the construction of the five corridors that will fracture its national territory.

Brazil finds itself in the opposite situation. Exogenous integration will permit it to “advance its goal of dominating Latin America, a result of its 1980s strategy to reach a position of regional leadership by gaining influence over its closest neighbors: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, first, then Bolivia and Chile, and finally, the rest of the Andean community and all of South America, the ultimate goal being to strengthen its economy in the face of the FTAA.”

Brazil will be in a position similar to that of the world’s industrialized nations the moment it begins to benefit from IIRSA. In reality, Brazil’s relationship with the rest of South America—Argentina being the exception—is similar to that which most center countries have with peripheral countries. In the first place, Brazil has a major interest in channeling its industrial and agribusiness production through the Pacific. Second, several of the businesses set to develop infrastructure are Brazilian, like Petrobras or Norberto Odebrecht Construction, which has investments all over the region. Third, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) is one of the principal financiers of IIRSA.

The Madeira River Complex, which is a nucleus of the Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Axis, is perhaps the best example. Carlos Lessa, ex-president of the BNDES, maintains that under this project “Brazil can promote its vision of conquering the West, a jungle zone with neighboring Peru and Bolivia. Its megaproject illustrates the dream of Latin American integration, an area that is ripe for development.” The Madeira River Complex project includes two hydroelectric dams in Brazil; floodgates for making the river navigable, which will require the elimination of a zone of waterfalls that “interrupt” navigation; a hydroelectric dam on the Beni River in Bolivia; and ports for the Madeira-Gupore-Beni-Madre de Dios waterway in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru. The project will allow “significant supply of low-cost energy and consolidate the agribusiness Development Pole in the western region of Brazil and the Bolivian Amazon.” This would permit a reduction in the cost of transportation for grains, and other commodities.

The project will have an enormous impact on the environment and will benefit only Brazil. “Brazilian businesses will be the only buyers of the energy produced, allowing them to impose conditions on buying, contracts, and prices.” The project will involve a $6 billion investment, benefiting Brazilian-owned businesses Odebrecht, Furnas Centrais Electricas, and the Tedesco Maggi group (largest soy producer in Brazil). The latter has invested $100 million into making the Madeira River navigable, “where it has the largest fleet of barges and tugboats, with a river transportation capacity of 210,000 tons per month,” writes Patricia Molina of Fobomade.

Taken in perspective, projects like the Rio Madeira Complex make up part of Brazil’s geopolitical expansion west to occupy “empty” territories and control strategic resources like Bolivia’s hydrocarbons. Journalist Guilherme Carvalho writes: “Brazil’s leaders believe that increasing their competitiveness in the international market depends, in large part, on South American integration,” It is, however, a kind of subordinate integration on two levels: Brazil over the rest of South America, and global markets and business over the region as a whole.

IIRSA in the World

IIRSA is closely linked to the FTAA, to the point where they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. “The FTAA deals very concretely with judicial and administrative issues, while IIRSA deals with infrastructure,” according to a report from Uruguay Friends of the Earth. Both form part of a much larger project that includes the Puebla-Panama Plan. IIRSA is, however, unique in at least one way: it is a type of integration that has been conceived of by the South, engineered in large part by the continent’s elite, and will primarily benefit those sectors best inserted into the global market. The demand for infrastructure projects has grown out of the need for global markets to access a stable and increasing flow of raw materials and natural resource exports. Accessing these resources has to be done as “competitively” (which is to say, as cheaply) as possible. It’s clear that this type of development will only generate more poverty and greater inequalities, further concentrate wealth on a local and global scale, and create profound environmental impacts. Among other negative consequences, the external debt of South American countries will continue to rise. The current practice of overexploiting resources could create a situation where a few decades down the road, countries that today depend on oil and natural gas to generate income will exhaust their reserves without ever having truly benefited from them.

One of the most worrisome aspects of IIRSA is the way in which it is being implemented: silently. While the continent furiously debates the FTAA and other free trade agreements, IIRSA projects are taking place without the participation of civil society or social movements and without the release of information by governments. This method of implementation clearly seeks to avoid debate altogether. At the same time, projects are starting up in separate areas to be linked at a later date—a technique that prevents vigilance, weakens the control of affected communities, and facilitates the sidestepping of environmental regulations. Formally, IIRSA began in the year 2000, but a good part of its projects have their roots in the previous decade.

The most disturbing prospect of IIRSA’s large network of infrastructure projects is that they may well accomplish the same goals as the FTAA, only without that name, with no debate, and imposed from the top down by global markets and national elites. If this is the case, a few decades from now South America will have quietly completed a gigantic, continent-wide remodeling project that affects every one of its inhabitants. The elite know–as recent experience has shown them–that openly debating their plans will only condemn them to failure.

Translated for the IRC Americas Program by Nick Henry.

RESOURCES

Marcel Achkar and Ana Dominguez, “IIRSA: Otro paso hacia la des-soberania de los pueblos sudamericanos,” Programa Uruguay Sustentable-Redes Amigos de la Tierra, Montevideo, 2005.

Andrés Barreda, “Geopolitica, recursos estrategicos y multinacionales”, Dec. 20, 2005, Latin American Information Agency (ALAI)

Guilherme Carvalho, “La integracion sudamericana y Brasil,” Action Aid, Rio de Janeiro, 2006.

“El rol de Bolivia en la integración sudamericana,” Fobomade, 2005

Patricia Molina, “Bolivia-Brasil: Relaciones energeticas, integracion y medio ambiente,” Fobomade, 2005

Elisangela Soldatelli, “IIRSA. E esta a integraçao que nos queremos?”, Amigos da Terra, Porto Alegre, December 2003.

Raul Zibechi, “Brazil and the Difficult Path to Multilateralism,” March 8, 2006, IRC Americas Program
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3144

The BICECA Project: Building Informed Civic Engagement for Conservation in the Andes-Amazon http://www.biceca.org/en/Index.aspx.

Banco Nacional de Desarrollo Económicoy Social (BNDES)
http://www.bndes.gov.br

Comunidad Andina de Naciones
http://www.comunidadandina.org

Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF)
http://www.caf.com

Foro Boliviano sobre Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo (Fobomade)
http://www.fobomade.org.bo

FONPLATA
http://www.fonplata.org

IIRSA
http://www.iirsa.org

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Raul Zibechi, a member of the editorial board of the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, is a professor and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de America Latina and adviser to several grassroots organizations. He is a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program

This story first appeared June 26 in Upside Down World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/337/1/

It was originally published by the IRC Americas Program
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3313

See also:

“South American Pipeline Wars”
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT #118 February 2006
/node/1531

“Peru’s Camisea Gas Project: One Year Later”
by Yeidy Rosa, WW4 REPORT #114, October 2005
/node/1140

“Indigenous Opposition to Puebla-Panama Plan Faces Reppression”
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT #91 August, 2003
/puebla-panama

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingIIRSA: THE FTAA’S HANDMAIDEN 

BOLIVIA: LAND REFORM DECREED

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On June 3, Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma signed decrees instituting a large-scale national agrarian reform program. In a ceremony in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, Morales handed out the first titles under the new program, distributing 30,000 square kilometers of state-owned land to indigenous campesino communities in what he called the start of a “true agrarian revolution.” Thousands of representatives of indigenous, campesino and social organizations attended the ceremony in the city’s Chiriguano Plaza.

Morales called Bolivia’s 1953 agrarian reform “insufficient” and said his new program is broader and deeper. On June 6, Alfredo Rada, deputy minister of coordination with the country’s social movements, announced that the program would redistribute 2.2 million hectares of land over the next four months. About 20 million hectares–a fifth of Bolivia’s total land area–is expected to be redistributed over the next five years.

In addition to handing out land parcels, the government will provide subsidies, credits and equipment to small-scale agricultural producers under the reform plan. In his June 3 speech, Morales also pledged his government’s support for “ecological products” and called for turning Bolivia into an “organic country” which produces crops without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

While the reform program’s initial distributions involve state-owned land, Morales said his government will also confiscate private lands that are deemed non-productive. He denied accusations by large-scale landowners that their lands are being stolen. In talks with those business sectors, Morales said, he asked them to prove such claims and they declined. “They, their grandparents, have stolen our land for 500 years,” said Morales. “They have to give the lands back to their original owners.” (BBC News, June 4; Resumen Latinoamericano, June 7; La Jornada, Mexico, June 7; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 10 from AP)

The federation representing large-scale landowners in the eastern Bolivian departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando violently opposes the land reform. When its leaders walked out of talks with the government during the week of May 29, they warned that their members would form paramilitary “self-defense” groups to protect their estates from confiscation. (BBC News, June 4; LJ, June 7)

Santa Cruz governor Ruben Costas also tried to fight the agrarian reform by announcing his own reform plan on May 23, allegedly with the goal of distributing land to campesinos and indigenous people in Santa Cruz, the country’s largest and most economically powerful department. The national government called Costas’ plan illegal and unconstitutional. (LJ, June 7) On June 9, the Santa Cruz business sectors named Costas as their representative for possible land reform talks with the Morales government. (LJ, June 10)

According to a public statement from the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB), the Morales government’s new land reform decrees were developed in consensus among Bolivia’s indigenous and campesino organizations and were approved in the National Agrarian Commission. Federations representing large-scale farmers and ranchers were invited to participate in the Commission but declined, said CIDOB.

The Commission was established under Law 1715, the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) Law, pushed through in October 1996 by the government of then-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada despite fierce protests by campesino and indigenous sectors. The latest decrees, which must still be approved by Congress, modify Law 1715 and, according to CIDOB, seek to correct “injustices and illegalities” in decrees promulgated in May 2005. One of these, Decree 28140, created a new form of property–“forest property”–favoring powerful economic sectors in eastern Bolivia. (CIDOB Statement, June 9) Decree 28140 was one of 46 decrees issued by President Carlos Mesa Gisbert on May 17, 2005, a day after mass protests began against his administration. He was forced from office three weeks later, on June 6. (National Department of Social Communication)

SANTA CRUZ: LANDOWNER INSTIGATES CLASH

Over the weekend of June 3, Bolivian businessperson Luis del Rio hired a group of Ayoreo indigenous people, armed with bows, arrows and sticks, to attack other indigenous people allegedly squatting on property he claims to own in Ascencion de Guarayos, in the eastern department of Santa Cruz. The Ayoreo–who were apparently drunk during the attack–burned the squatters’ makeshift homes, the alternative news agency Bolpress reported. Two indigenous people were wounded. (La Jornada, June 7; El Nuevo Herald, June 10 from AP; Confederacion de Pueblos Indigenas de Bolivia-CIDOB statement, June 9)

Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said on June 9 that neither Del Rio nor the squatters have any property titles for the land in Guayaros, and that both groups will be evicted. Speaking in Santa Cruz, Rural Development Minister Hugo Salvatierra accused the Guarayos deputy mayor and the mayor of El Puente of “inciting violence among indigenous people.” Salvatierra said the two municipal officials also sought to kidnap a national government commission investigating land invasions in the area, in order to “aggravate the problem.” (LJ, June 10)

The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB) accused large landholders of creating a “false conflict” in Guarayos, “making it seem as if the Ayoreo people are in confrontation with the campesinos, which is not true.” According to CIDOB, “Once the Ayoreo brothers have been tricked by land speculators taking advantage of their economic need, they are hired and paid to defend the lands of those who claim to be the owners–without proving it–of land occupied by Ayoreos and campesinos.” (CIDOB Statement, June 9)

A similar land conflict involving Ayoreo indigenous people who were hired as thugs took place May 8-12, 2005, on the Los Yuquises estate in Santiesteban province, in Santa Cruz. See WW4 REPORT #110.

ORURO: ONE DEAD IN URBAN EVICTION

On June 9, a land conflict erupted in Oruro department in southwestern Bolivia when police agents and soldiers moved to evict hundreds of members of the Homeless Movement (MST) from urban properties on the outskirts of the city of Oruro, the departmental capital. The MST had been occupying the properties, which belonged to private owners and the departmental government, for a month and a half. Police agents and soldiers used tear gas and rubber bullets to dislodge the squatters, who responded with rocks, sticks and dynamite, according to a report from the Erbol radio network. At least 10 squatters were treated in a local hospital for injuries; one police agent was killed by a bullet. More than 30 people were arrested by the Technical Judicial Police (PTJ). (La Jornada, Mexico, June 10; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 10)

Oruro governor Alfredo Aguilar said he ordered the eviction based on a court order. Alfredo Rada, deputy minister of coordination with social movements, expressed the national government’s support for the action taken by Oruro authorities. (ENH, June 10) Rada said the government talked with the MST to try to find a solution, “but we found an intransigence among the representatives and we decided on the eviction. We knew the risks, but we had no alternative but to restore legality.” (LJ, June 10)

Presidency Minister Juan Ramon Quintana said the police agent who died was a “member of the Battalion of Private Physical Security.” Rada said the agent was dressed in civilian clothing during the operation. “The circumstances of the death are under investigation,” said Rada. (ENH, June 10 from AP)

Quintana denied that the police had used firearms, “not even rubber bullets.” The use of lethal weapons “does not fit within the logic or the policy of our government; the maximum use of chemical agents was ordered for this task,” said Quintana.

The MST responded to the eviction with a protest march on the evening of June 8, and 70 of its members began a hunger strike at the offices of the Departmental Workers’ Federation (COD). (LJ, June 10)

Quintana blamed the Oruro violence on the right-wing Democratic and Social Power (Podemos) party led by ex-president Jorge Quiroga, which he accused of working with elements of the “radical left” in an effort to erode support for the ruling Movement to Socialism (MAS) as the July 2 elections for a Constituent Assembly draw near. (AP, June 11)

The Constituent Assembly, which will have the task of rewriting Bolivia’s Constitution, is scheduled to begin sessions on Aug. 6. (Resumen Latinoamericano, June 7) Congress approved the law convening the Constituent Assembly on March 4, Morales promulgated it on March 6 and candidates for the Assembly’s 255 seats had to be registered by April 3. The MAS is set to benefit from the short timeline, since only political parties, duly recognized citizen groups or undefined “indigenous peoples” can offer candidates. Any social organization lacking such status would have had to obtain–in less than a month–signatures representing 2% of registered voters on a departmental or national level. (“Bolivia: Proceso Abierto,” article by Raquel Gutierrez & Luis A. Gomez, April 30 via Resumen Latinoamericano, June 9, AP, June 11)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 11

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #122
/node/2031

“Bolivia: Evo launches ‘land revolution,'” June 6
/node/2057

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBOLIVIA: LAND REFORM DECREED 

“BIONOIA” Part 4

Dengue in Cuba, West Nile in New York:
When Mosquitoes Come Home to Roost

by Mark Sanborne

In previous installments in this series, we discussed the wartime use of infected fleas and lice to spread plague (definitely by Japan in China and maybe by the US in Korea), and the possibility that the pandemic of tick-borne Lyme disease was a result of secret biowar research at Plum Island, NY. But there’s another bug that has vectored its way into the history of biological warfare, and it’s one that almost everyone on the planet is intimately familiar with: the hated mosquito.

The US biowar establishment, it turns out, has long been interested in using the blood-sucking insects as vectors to transmit diseases to designated human populations. A particular favorite is the dime-sized Aedes aegypti mosquito, which has the talent of infecting people with potentially deadly yellow and dengue fevers. In fact, there is unnerving evidence that the US sought to conduct mosquito vector tests on unwitting foreign subjects, and that it may have used the knowledge it gained in such “experiments” to launch a stealthy mass attack on a civilian population, with far-reaching though little-recognized consequences.

A disturbing but fascinating article, “US Attempted to Test Biowarfare in Haryana,” appeared in an Indian newspaper, the Deccan Herald, on Nov. 5, 2002. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

Admission by the United States that it released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in a Pacific island in 1965 as part of its biological warfare test programme has vindicated the Indian government’s decision to close down a similar US-sponsored mosquito project in India in the early 1970s, scientists say.

Indian scientists who had worked on the project say the latest revelation has convinced them that they were unwittingly helping the US biowarfare research under the cover of a public health programme to control malaria. NP Gupta, former director of the National Institute of Virology, told PTI that the then prime minister Indira Gandhi “acted correctly” and at the right time by ordering closure of the project before the planned massive release of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in 1975 at Sonepat, Haryana. The Sonepat project aimed at finding out the range and survival of these mosquitoes and how they dispersed and penetrated homes and other places once release from the centre of town.

Three weeks ago, the US Defense Department de-classified documents listing as many as 46 secret biological and chemical weapons tests conducted at the height of the Cold War. In one such trial, codenamed Magic Sword, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit yellow and dengue fevers were released off the coast of Baker Island [in the Pacific] to obtain information on mosquito biting habits, mosquito trap technology and operational and logistical problems associated with the delivery of mosquitoes to remote sites.

Mr. PK Rajagopalan, a senior medical entomologist who was on the staff, said the Sonepat project had identical aims (as the one conducted in Baker Island) except that that it was planned on a very large scale using hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes reared at a special facility in New Delhi built with funds from the US Public Health Service routed through the World Health Organization (WHO).

Prior to its closure, the US project in India drew media criticism and a parliamentary committee probe was conducted due its preoccupation with the Aedes aegypti species that causes yellow fever, a disease which does not exist in India.

Apparently the U.S interest in development of yellow fever as a biological warfare weapon was sustained even after President Nixon supposedly ended the biological warfare program in 1970, says Gupta. Only this time the trial was conducted outside the United States in a developing country under the umbrella of the WHO, he says. Rajagopalan is also surprised at the different standards employed by the US. Baker Island was unpopulated and remote from the mainland, the trial used informed volunteers and the mosquitoes were eradicated after the trial was over. No such plans existed for the proposed release in Sonepat, whose entire population of half a million was to become unwilling volunteers while the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) was in the dark about the real intention behind the release experiment, said Rajagopalan, who retired from an ICMR institute.

Colathur Golpalan, who was ICMR director general at that time, said the US project was permitted by his predecessor and he was not responsible. “It was I who saw to the closure of the project,” he said in a telephone interview.

Ms. Indira Gandhi stopped the trial and ordered the project closed on the advice of an expert committee despite mild protests from WHO and denial by the US State Department that the project had anything to do with biological warfare. But according to Gupta, the latest revelation that the Baker Island release was indeed a biological warfare experiment vindicates the closure of the US project in India.

Aside from the breathtaking audacity of the US subterfuge, the Sonepat project also provides further evidence for critics who claim that the WHO and other UN and international (as well as domestic) agencies have long been (and still are) stocked with “experts” who cooperate closely with the US military-intelligence complex. Such cozy covert relationships raise the possibility that Washington may have succeeded in hoodwinking other developing countries into actually allowing mosquito vector tests on their territory under the guise of malaria control. Declassified Cold War documents also indicate that US Army biowarriors at Fort Detrick, MD, conducted A. aegypti release experiments at military bases in Florida and Georgia in the late 1950s, and that war planners had determined that mosquito-transmitted yellow fever, a mostly tropical disease, could be a suitable bioweapon to employ in southern parts of the Soviet Union.

But if, as suggested, such vector tests actually did lead to a stealthy mass attack on a civilian population, where might that have occurred? Round up the usual suspect: Yes, Cuba.

CUBA AND DENGUE: MADE IN THE USA?

As noted in Part 2 of this series, from the 1960s onward Cuba appears to have been on the receiving end of an unremitting barrage of biological attacks hatched in the U.S. and carried out by anti-Castro terrorists—and even directly by State Department spray planes flying over Cuban territory. The list of targets is impressive in its Nazi-like thoroughness: sugar, tobacco, pigs, cattle, coffee, citrus, dairy cows, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, beans and other vegetables, bananas, and honey bees, to name more than a few.

Of course, some of the outbreaks may have occurred naturally, and it’s often difficult to conclusively prove one way or the other—that’s one of the great advantages of biowarfare. But many of the incidents involved infections, parasites, and blights never before seen in Cuba, and sometimes were firsts for the Western Hemisphere. And they weren’t all aimed at plants and animals—we also noted the outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981 that infected over 340,000 Cubans and killed 158, most of them children. The vector for the disease: that uncomplaining workhorse, A. aegypti.

“We share the people’s conviction and strongly suspect that the plagues that have been punishing our country, especially the hemorrhagic dengue, could have been introduced into Cuba, into our country, by the CIA,” Fidel Castro declared in a July 26, 1981, speech celebrating the Cuban revolution, during which he dealt at length with the public record of US biowar efforts and attacks. “We urge the United States government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the CIA will or will not be authorized again—or has this already been authorized?—to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals, and our people.”

The State Department responded that charges of Washington’s involvement in the dengue outbreak were “totally without foundation… The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces than to admit those failures.” But whatever one may think of the Cuban revolution, the fact remains that the health care system it created prevented the hemorrhagic dengue pandemic from turning into a complete catastrophe, as it likely would have in almost any other Latin American country.

“In 1981, we faced the gravest health situation ever to have confronted our country, with tens of thousands of persons hospitalized, and over 10,000 in shock and bleeding,” a Cuban health official told a Havana trial hearing evidence about the US role in the outbreak, held in July 2003 as part of Cuba’s compensation claim against the United States.

Due to the disease’s high mortality rate, medical authorities expected a minimum of 3,000 fatalities in the first few weeks, yet Cuba’s model response—combined with what one pediatrician called “collective thinking”—kept the death toll remarkably low. (In fact, Cuba’s effective approach to the dengue outbreak was subsequently adopted by the Pan American Health Organization.)

So, aside from means, motive, and opportunity, what else indicates the US may have been behind the outbreak? Let’s start with the fact that it was the first major epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue in the Americas in nearly a century. Then there are the odd particulars: the epidemic began with the discovery of simultaneous clusters of infections in three widely separated parts of Cuba (Cienfuegos, Camaguey, and Havana) that then spread like wildfire, and none of the initial victims had recently been away from home or been in contact with international travelers who might have carried the disease and transmitted it to the local mosquito population.

Oh, and how about a confession? In 1984, Eduardo Arocena, head of the Omega-7 terrorist group, on trial in the US for the murder of a Cuban UN diplomat, affirmed that his group—and he personally—had introduced “germs” into Cuba, including dengue, as part of the US biowar against Castro. (He was convicted of the murder, and revealed as an FBI informant, leading to the collapse of his group.) Previous reports had indicated Cuban terrorists also smuggled the African swine flu virus into the country in the late 1970s, forcing the slaughter of all of the island’s pigs.

Cuban counter-revolutionaries are known for their braggadocio, even in court, and in the case of the 1981 dengue pandemic it’s unclear how they could have smuggled the thousands of pre-infected A. aegypti mosquitoes into Cuba that would have been necessary to spark the outbreak. (How many mosquitoes can be crammed into a large suitcase or packing crate—or even a diplomatic pouch?)

Dengue is an arbovirus (i.e. transmissable only by insects) and cannot be transmitted between humans—each victim requires their own mosquito bite. Though one insect can infect multiple victims, it’s likely that, based on the number of Cuban afflicted, several hundred thousand mosquitoes would have had to be released to achieve the desired effect, putting the scale of the operation suspiciously in line with that of the aborted Sonepat test project. For that reason, it seems more likely that the mosquitoes were somehow dispersed from the air, dropped like covert paratroopers behind enemy lines—and indeed, the locations of the three initial outbreaks were all close by international air corridors.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED (?) CONSEQUENCES

According to the Centers for Disease Control, dengue (pronounced “DEN-ghee”) “is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans; its global distribution is comparable to that of malaria, and an estimated 2.5 billion people live in areas at risk for epidemic transmission.” Tens of millions of people are infected with dengue fever (DF) annually. However, while debilitating and terribly painful (it’s not known as “break-bone fever” for nothing), DF infection is relatively short-lived and fatalities are rare. But each year sees several hundred thousand cases of the more virulent dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), leading to tens of thousands of deaths among those who develop the related dengue shock syndrome (DSS)—a mortality rate of about five percent in most of the world, though it can be much higher in more undeveloped areas.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting, and frightening. There are four types of DF (DEN-1, 2, 3, and 4), and getting one type does not give the victim immunity from contracting the other types. In fact, it is known that contracting one version after having earlier been infected with another can make the victim particularly prone to developing the much more dangerous DHF/DSS.

Following World War II, mass spraying of insecticides targeted against A. aegypti succeeded in eliminating most major DF epidemics in the Western Hemisphere, though the spray campaign waned in the 1970s due to environmental concerns. By 1970, only DEN-2 was present in the Americas. Suddenly, in 1977—two years after the Sonepat project was cancelled—DEN-1 appeared in Jamaica (where another U.S. bete noire, the socialist Michael Manley, was in power) and then Cuba, the first major dengue outbreak in the country since 1944. Though it was a milder version that didn’t lead to DHF and caused no deaths, it was widespread and helped lay the epidemiological groundwork for a subsequent hemorrhagic outbreak. (A 1978 serologic survey indicated that 45% of the Cuban population had been infected with DEN-1, whereas before 1977 only 2.6% had antibodies for the virus. That’s quick work.)

Then in 1981, a “new” strain of DEN-2 exploded onto the scene in Cuba, and this one, insidiously piggy-backing on the 1977 pandemic, did lead to a mass hemorrhagic outbreak of DHF and DSS, the first in the hemisphere since the turn of the century. The CDC says the deadly new strain was from Southeast Asia, where the disease is endemic and is the leading cause of hospitalization and death among children. But Cuban and other researchers are more specific: they say it is identical to one known only from a 1944 outbreak in New Guinea. In which case, the odds of such an obscure strain suddenly appearing in multiple places in Cuba by “natural” causes seem slim indeed.

(There were reports that the all of the personnel at the US Navy base at Guantanamo were vaccinated against dengue prior to the 1981 outbreak and thus were not infected. While the medical literature notes that currently there is still no publicly available vaccine against dengue, a Google search also indicates that a modern vaccine was first produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals—and the Pentagon has never been shy about giving its troops experimental drugs, as it did with anthrax vaccine in the first Gulf War.)

In the years following 1981, Cuba launched a rigorous program of A. aegypti eradication, vector control, and medical surveillance to keep dengue in check, though there were further smaller outbreaks in Santiago de Cuba in 1997 and Havana in 2001-2 that were contained with limited casualties. (While there is no evidence that the origins of these particular epidemics were suspicious, some have speculated that they may been designed to hurt Cuba’s growing foreign tourism industry.)

Meanwhile, in the years following the 1981 outbreak, the virulent strain of “imported” DEN-2 that caused it proceeded to metastasize rapidly throughout the Caribbean to Mexico and Central and South America. By 2003, 24 countries in the Americas had reported confirmed cases of hemorrhagic dengue where it was previously unknown, and potentially deadly DHF is now endemic in many of these countries. (The U.S. itself gets an estimated 100 imported cases of dengue a year.) If, as the evidence strongly suggests, both the 1977 and 1981 Cuban pandemics were spawned in Washington—or more specifically, Fort Detrick, MD—then the resultant devastating effects on the hemisphere as a whole are staggering to contemplate. It would represent state bioterrorism on an almost unimaginable scale.

Is this an example of the law of unintended consequences? One can only hope they were unintended, though it’s hard to see how they could not have been foreseen. Evidently, for those in a position to know, the “gain” was deemed to be worth the risk.

THE ARRIVAL OF WEST NILE

Which leads us to our last stop on Bionia’s skeeter hit parade. Remember the West Nile virus, way back in those halcyon pre-9-11 days of 1999? It made a particularly big impression on those of us who live in the New York City metropolitan region, where the disease made its first appearance in the Western Hemisphere in August of that year. Lucky us.

The first case of human infection occurred in Queens on Aug. 2. By the end of the year, there were a total of 62 cases and seven deaths in the region from the mosquito-borne illness, most of them older people with compromised immune systems. More alarming for many was the initial “cure” imposed by the administration of Mayor Rudolf Giuliani: mass spraying of the insecticide malathion, a likely carcinogen. This writer was among the many who had to dodge inside to escape swooping, spraying helicopters in Brooklyn and Queens, while some residents walking the late-night streets of Manhattan were actually hosed in the face with the poison from passing trucks.

West Nile is a member of the genus flavivirus, along with our new friends dengue and yellow fever, though WN is much less of a global health threat. About 80% of those who contract West Nile show no symptoms and are unaware they are infected, while others display mild, flu-like symptoms. In the few worse cases it can lead to deadly encephalitis and meningitis, and in fact its initial appearance was misdiagnosed as St. Louis encephalitis.

Transmitted by mosquitoes and other vectors, particularly birds, WN has since spread quickly across the country, and by 2003, 45 states and the District of Columbia had reported human cases. By 2005, a total of 19,625 cases and 882 deaths were reported by the CDC, considerably less than the annual toll from the common flu. (However, the number of those infected but undiagnosed or without symptoms probably numbers in the hundreds of thousands.) More alarmingly, while direct human-to-human transmission was initially ruled out, in 2002 it was discovered that the virus could be transmitted through donated blood, organ transplants, breast milk, prenatal exposure, and occupational exposure.

Another spooky attribute of WN is its propensity to kill birds, its most common host. An unusual number of dead birds, particularly crows, were evident around the tri-state area for a while before they were connected to the West Nile outbreak. The virus was first discovered in 1937 in Uganda, and the African variety does not affect bird or animal hosts. Other mild outbreaks occurred in Israel in the 1950s the South Africa in the 1970s, but beginning in the mid-1990s a string of more serious epidemics occurred in North Africa, Israel, Italy, Russia, and Romania that included large die-offs of local bird populations. This seems odd, because it’s generally not in the evolutionary interest of a virus to kill off its main host that gets it from place to place.

Was this creepy entourage of dead crows some sort of designer harbinger for the end of the millenium? (Perhaps an engineered Avian flu will be the Antichrist.) Is it evidence, as some observers have suggested, that the virus—which has long been held in government labs here and around the world—was modified genetically as part of some shadowy biowar project?

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Our last installment dealt at length with the questionable history of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located off the North Fork of eastern Long Island, particularly in regard to its possible propagation of tick-borne Lyme disease. Considerable evidence was cited from a 2004 book, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, by Michael Carr, who also weighed in on the West Nile question. He wrote that Plum Island researchers were already studying the WN virus at the time of the outbreak (officials deny this), and cites the death of 18 horses in eastern Suffolk County near Plum Island in August 1999 as evidence that the North Fork was the epicenter of the epidemic.

The official story is to blame international air travel, as if that’s something new. It’s suggested that a WN-infected traveler (yet another Patient Zero) from the Middle East arrived in New York and was bitten by a local mosquito or two, who then went on a major feeding binge and spread the disease to both birds and humans far and wide. Or perhaps a few infected mosquitoes somehow hitched a ride to New York on a jet and wreaked havoc when they escaped into the environment. Or maybe an infected bird was imported or somehow made its way across the ocean. But questions of geography persist: How could such sole-source vectors initially manage to infect both horses at one end of Long Island and humans at the other end, in Queens, but very few people in between? (Though later Suffolk County did develop one of highest rates of West Nile, as it did with Lyme disease in the 1970s.) Just as in the case of the simultaneous appearance of dengue in three widely separated parts of Cuba, here is a hint of the hand of man, not nature.

Or maybe it was just an “accident.” If Plum Island (i.e. the US underground biowar complex) was somehow the source of the West Nile outbreak and/or Lyme disease, were the releases somehow inadvertent, or were they in fact something far more sinister—that is, stealthy mass attacks on domestic civilian populations? Again, considering the apparent US role in spreading a deadly version of dengue fever in the Western Hemisphere, it’s hard to give “them” the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, the idea that the arrival of West Nile was a potential bioterrorist event was knocked around quite a bit by media pundits early on in the outbreak, though the short list of official suspects should not surprise anyone. In a recent web search for “West Nile and biological warfare,” these were the first four stories that came up: “West Nile Virus—Is Castro’s Bioterrorism Threat Being Ignored?”; “Castro Weaponizes West Nile Virus”; “Iraq and Cuba – Fitting Pieces in the West Nile Puzzle?”; and “West Nile Virus: Part of Hussein’s Plan—via Cuba?” This US intelligence disinformation campaign, spread by NewsMax and several right-wing Cuban-American web sites, while predictable, is at least as fanciful as a story on the CDC’s web site positing that Alexander the Great may have died of West Nile virus encephalitis.

Some accounts at the time did take note of the embarrassing fact that the CDC had provided samples of West Nile and a host of other potential biowar agents to Saddam Hussein’s then-friendly regime in the mid-1980s. While the strain delivered to Iraq was different than the one that turned up in New York, NewsMax declared that “experts have confirmed that Saddam has the ability to mutate viruses and other biological agents.” (Sounds like he’s one of the X-Men.)

But it wasn’t only right-wingers who weighed in on the subject. In the October 11, 1999 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Preston wrote a lengthy story headlined “West Nile Mystery: How Did It Get Here? The CIA Would Like to Know.” It cited the concerns of unnamed intelligence analysts, and referred to an excerpt of a book entitled In the Shadow of Saddam published in the April 6, 1999, Daily Mail, a London tabloid. The author, who called himself Mikhael Ramadan, purported to be have been one of Saddam’s body doubles before he escaped from Iraq, and claimed his boss bragged to him in 1997 that Iraq had developed a strain of WN that was “capable of destroying 97% of all life in an urban environment.”

Preston acknowledged that the claims “sounded crazy,” but went on to suggest that there might be at least a germ of truth behind the story, displaying only slightly more skepticism than the American press later did in the trumpeting of Iraq’s nonexistent WMD threat during the run-up to the 2003 invasion. So here’s a final suggestion for all those official experts out there: Next time an incidence of possible bioterrorism pops up on the media’s radar, try to avoid the usual projection of guilt upon the empire’s victims, and instead take a look in the mirror.

RESOURCES:

Granma International on Cuban Dengue outbreak
http://www.granma.cu/cubademanda/ingles/demanda13-i.html

CDC official history of dengue (note: read between the lines)
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/dengue/

Medical Service Corp. International hisotry of dengue
http://www.mscionline.com/projects/diseases/dengue.htm

“West Nile Mystery,” by Richard Preston, The New Yorker, Oct. 18 & 25, 1999
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/artwestnilenewyorker.htm

CDC on Alexander the Great and West Nile Virus
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no12/03-0288.htm

From our weblog:

“Desert Storm vets demand Rumsfeld resignation,” Oct. 21, 2002
/static/56.html#iraq15

“Is Baghdad next?” Oct. 20, 2001
/static/4.html#shadows2

See also:

“Bionoia,” Pt. 3, WW4 REPORT #121
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue Reading“BIONOIA” Part 4