Syndicated Content

COLOMBIA: PARAMILITARY ATTACKS IN META

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Jan. 5, paramilitaries who identified themselves as members of the “Autodefensas del Llano” (Plains Self-Defense) group murdered four people in the community of Matabambu, in Puerto Lleras municipality, in the southern Colombian department of Meta. The victims were campesinos Arelis Diaz, Alcibiades Pachon, Luis Guillermo Gonzales and Rafael Quinto Orjuela Diaz. The paramilitaries also forcibly disappeared four siblings–Rafael, Amir, Yurley and Esteban Rodriguez–from the La Laguna farm owned by Rafael Rodriguez in Matabambu. The two youngest siblings are minors: Yurley is 17 and Esteban is 13. Among the paramilitaries were two men recognized as active duty soldiers from the army’s Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 42.

The massacre culminated a week of attacks on area residents by military and paramilitary forces. On Dec. 31, troops from the “Motilones” Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 17 of the Mobile Brigade No. 2, headed by Lt. Avila, arbitrarily detained Norberto Lujan in the community of El Vergel, village of Santo Domingo in Vistahermosa municipality, Meta department. On Jan. 3, soldiers arbitrarily detained eight campesinos in the village of Santo Domingo, accusing them of being guerrilla sympathizers. On Jan. 4, paramilitaries who identified themselves as members of “Autodefensas del Llano” forcibly disappeared Ecelino Pineda Pena, a campesino from the community of Santa Lucia. Pineda was on a bus headed from Granada to Puerto Toledo when the paramilitaries abducted him at a roadblock. On Jan. 6, in Villa La Paz, Puerto Lleras municipality, paramilitaries detained and disappeared campesino Gildardo de Jesus Salinas Piedrahita. Pineda, Lujan and Salinas all remained missing as of Jan. 18.

Another area resident, Rosabel Rincon, was forcibly disappeared by the paramilitaries at a roadblock in an area known as Cano Blanco. She also remained missing as of Jan. 18. Rincon was abducted while returning from Vista Hermosa, where she had gone on Jan. 4 to try to get information about her daughter, Marilyn Martinez Rincon, one of the eight people detained on Jan. 3 in Santo Domingo. The eight were all supposedly released on Jan. 5 in Vista Hermosa, although only one of them managed to return home. As of Jan. 18, the whereabouts of the others were still unknown.

A number of residents were apparently wounded during the paramilitary attack in Matabambu. While paramilitaries were still in the area, members of the Human Rights Comission of the Guejear River Region in Puerto Toledo went to see Lt. Garcia, in charge of the Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 42 of the army’s Mobile Brigade No. 4, to ask him to provide security for the community; Garcia responded that he had not committed himself to providing security. Soldiers under his command told Commission members that the same thing that happened in Matabambu would soon happen in Puerto Toledo. Lt. Garcia then blocked residents of Puerto Toledo from fleeing the town. (Communiques from Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, Jan. 4, 5 via Red de Defensores No Institucionalizados)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 22

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

See also WW4 REPORT #117
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1434

See our last update on state terror in Colombia:
/node/1489

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

PERU: SENDERO RESURGENT?

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Dec. 20, a group of about 20 guerrillas from the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebel group ambushed a police contingent and killed eight agents in Aucayacu, Leoncio Prado province, in the central Peruvian region of Huanuco. On Dec. 5, alleged Sendero rebels ambushed two police vehicles farther south in the Apurimac river valley, killing five police agents and wounding a police agent and a prosecutor.

President Alejandro Toledo responded to the attacks on Dec. 21 by decreeing a 60-day state of emergency in the jungle provinces of Maranon, Huacaybamba, Leoncio Prado and Huamalies in Huanuco region, Tocache in San Martin region and Padre Abad in Ucayali region. The decree, which took effect on Dec. 23, allows the armed forces to take control of the provinces and suspends certain constitutional rights, including freedom from unwarranted searches and the rights to free assembly and travel. (Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 27; Miami Herald, Dec. 23; El Nuevo Herald, Dec. 24, 25; AP, Dec. 23)

Toledo accuses Sendero of links to drug traffickers; in November the government inaugurated a police anti-drug base, funded with aid from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in Palmapampa, in the Apurimac valley. (ENH, Dec. 31)

In a communique published in the Huancayo daily Correo on Dec. 23, Sendero Luminoso took credit for the two recent attacks and announced its rejection of the upcoming April 9 presidential elections, which it called “the electoral circus.” The communique, signed by “Comrade Netzel” of the “Center-Mantaro Base of Sendero Luminoso,” calls for a “people’s war” against the country’s “alleged democracy,” and urged Peruvians to boycott the elections by abstaining. The communique included criticism of various politicians, including brothers Antauro and Ollanta Humala Tasso, whom Sendero called “pseudo-revolutionaries and fascists.” (Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 27; ENH, Dec. 24; La Cronica de Hoy, Mexico, Dec. 24; Terra Peru, Dec. 23)

The Humala brothers led an insurrection in 2000 against the government of then-president Alberto Fujimori, who has been detained in Chile since last Nov. 6 and is facing extradition to Peru. On Dec. 30 Ollanta Humala, a former lieutenant colonel, registered his presidential candidacy for the Nationalist Party Uniting Peru. (ENH, Dec. 31) Humala’s nationalist and pro-indigenous rhetoric appears to have propelled him into first place in the electoral race. On Dec. 26, a survey by the polling firm Idice showed Humala leading with 21.7% of voter intentions against 21.2% for traditional right-wing candidate Lourdes Flores Nano of the National Unity party. The poll showed ex-presidents Alan Garcia and Valentin Paniagua in third and fourth place with 19.8% and 16.7% respectively. Idice warned that Flores would likely lose a runoff against Humala. A poll released Dec. 28 by the international firm Datum showed Flores Nano ahead with 25% to Humala’s 23%, but even Datum acknowledged that support for Flores has stagnated while support for Humala “is growing daily.” (ENH, Dec. 29)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 1

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

See also WW4 REPORT #117
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1437

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

BITTER FRUITS OF JORDAN VALLEY APARTHEID

Palestine Activists Expose Truth in UK Direct Action Trial

by Sarkis Pogossian

On Jan. 26, seven Palestine solidarity protestors from London and Brighton were acquitted of “aggravated trespass” charges for their Nov. 11. 2004 arrests in a blockade outside the UK headquarters of the Israeli firm Carmel-Agrexco Ltd, in Uxbridge, Middlesex. The protesters used wire fences and bicycle locks in their human blockade of the Agrexco distribution center, halting all vehicle traffic in and out of the building for several hours before being arrested. The defendants argued that they were acting to prevent crimes against international law. The judge in the case found that the evidence against the defendants was “too tenuous” to justify continuing with a trial.

Agrexco, which markets under the brand name of Carmel, is Israel’s largest importer of agricultural produce into the European Union, and is 50% owned by the Israeli state. It imports produce from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The defendants argue that the Israeli state-sponsored settlements appropriate land and water resources by military force from Palestinian farming communities in violation of international law and convention. In a hearing in September, a judge ruled that Agrexco must prove that its business is lawful. Ironically, during the trial it was revealed that UK Land Registry documents showed that Agrexco UK had built both its entrance and exit gates on land the company did not own, and thus had no legal right to ask the protesters to leave.

Many of the defendants had served as volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), documenting human rights abuses by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the West Bank, and taking part in non-violent civil resistance to the occupation organized by local Palestinian committees.

The campaign to boycott Israeli goods is growing across Europe. In December 2005, the Sor-Trondelag district of Norway voted to cut economic relations with Israel, and national Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen of the Socialist Left party, a member of Norway’s ruling coalition, is publicly backing the boycott. The US administration has threatened “serious political consequences” against Norway if the boycott becomes national policy.

Agrexco fruits and vegetables are marked “produce of Israel,” with the company benefiting from European trade preferences for Israeli imports. However, much of the produce that reaches European supermarkets via Agrexco—which has its own specially-designed fleet of refrigerated ships, and markets under the trademarked slogan of “Ecofresh”—is grown in the plantations and greenhouses of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Jordan Valley.

Miles east of the “Apartheid Wall” which has won international headlines—that is, on the “Palestinian” side—the Jordan Valley has nonetheless been subject to an escalating program of Israeli settler colonization of Palestinian lands and waters. The world has paid little note to this illegal resource grab, as Agrexco rakes in the profits, purchasing nearly all the produce grown in the valley.

In June 2005, the Israeli government announced a plan to increase the number of settlers in the Jordan Valley by 50% over the next year. Economic incentives and benefits will be offered to encourage settlement, with grants of up to $22 million available for agricultural development. In recent months, large areas of land in the valley have been enclosed by fences and declared “military zones.” In a Jan. 6 broadcast on Israel’s Channel two, chief diplomatic correspondent Udi Segal disclosed that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had told him privately that he did not want to evacuate the Jordan Valley.

The approximately 7,000 settlers already in the valley live in 36 settlements which have already claimed large expanses of land, with the Israeli state utizling 95% of the valley’s total territory.

Most of the 50,000 Palestinians in the valley live in poverty, increasingly denied access to land, water and housing. Thirteen Palestinian villages were declared “legal” by Israel in 1967. Lena Green, an ISM activist who recently volunteered in the Jordan Valley, writes that these villages “are visibly obvious, being the only Palestinian areas where most of the houses are made of anything more substantial than plastic, wood and a few sheets of scavenged metal. Outside of these areas concrete constructions are invariably destroyed.”

Green describes how the landscape has been colonized by Israeli agribusiness interests: “Road 90, which extends the length of the valley parallel to the Jordan River, cuts between huge plantations of palm trees, grapes and banana trees, as well as greenhouses full of plants and vegetables for export. Such intensive agro-industry requires massive amounts of water, which is provided by wells four or five hundred meters deep. These [waters] are housed in cylindrical towers that sit on the foothills of the mountains separating the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank. Underneath the towers it is often possible to see Palestinian communities living in their flimsy housing. They are denied access to the water above them, and have to take tractor carts to the nearest wells they are permitted to use, often a distance of more than 20 kilometers.”

The 162 artesian wells in the Jordan Valley established by the Jordanians before 1967 have either been destroyed or have dried up and become salinated as the deeper settlers’ wells have tapped the aquifer. In 2004, five people in the valley were prosecuted for “stealing” water from Israeli farms and settlements. All of the settler plantations are surrounded by electric fences.

The Jordan River itself, the most obvious source of water in the valley, is also cordoned off by an electric fence that extends from the Green Line in the north to south of Jericho. This fence encloses 500 square kilometers of land once used by local Palestinians for agriculture. Unlike the more famous “Apartheid Wall” to the west, it is not marked on the maps produced by the UN.

Green writes that Palestinian farmers are effectively if unofficially prevented from selling to Agrexco. They are also effectively barred from selling to markets within the Occupied West Bank by the IDF checkpoints that restrict access and egress in the valley. “Entire vegetable crops have been left to rot in the ground or used to feed sheep and goats.”

In addition, because produce from the Jordan Valley settlements can be driven straight to Palestinians cities like Ramallah on Israeli-only “aparthied” roads, generally closed to most Palestinian traffic, the settler produce undercuts Palestinian produce—which suffers from a higher markup as a result of the cost of transporting it through Israeli military checkpoints, unpaved roads not much better than donkey paths, and the “back-to-back” system, in which goods from one region must be transferred from the back of one truck to the back of another from an adjoining region at the IDF’s arbitrary roadblocks. Palestinian consumers, a majority of whom live on less than two dollars a day, are faced with the dilemma of buying patriotic, or buying the produce they can best afford.

The traditional farming lands of several Palestinian villages to the west also extend into the Jordan Valley, and these villages are increasingly losing access to these lands by the “Apartheid Wall.” In early January, the IDF announced the seizure of over 16 dunams of land (16,044 square meters) from Aqraba, a village east of Nablus. The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign reported on its website that the seizure was made to build a sniper watchtower in the east part of the village, effectively barring Aqraba farmers from access to their lands in the Jordan Valley. In total, 2,000 dunams of Jordan Valley land will be cut off from the Aqraba villagers.

In a Jan. 14 story on Freshinfo, the international produce industry news service, Ori Zafir of Agrexco’s UK sales team boasted that the “Israeli potato season” was off to a flying start, with high sales especially anticipated in the company’s line of organic spuds. “Customers are appreciating the freshness and quality that we offer,” he said. On Dec. 18, 2005, Agrexco general manager Amos Orr said he expected the company’s European strawberry sales to increase by 10% in 2006. Apparently sanguine about the boycott threat, he said, “The only downside is possible problems about price,” citing increased transport costs due to high fuel prices.

RESOURCES:

“Apartheid and Agrexco in the Jordan Valley,” by Lena Green, Electronic Intifada, Sept. 4, 2005
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4161.shtml

“Continuing the Eastern Wall: Aqraba Left Isolated after Fresh Land Seizure,” WAFA, Jan. 10, 2006
http://english.wafa.ps/cphotonews.asp?num=1061

“Uxbridge 7 acquitted,” Press Release, Jan. 27
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/01/332331.html

For updates on the Uxbridge Seven, see Palestine Solidarity Campaign:
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/news.asp?d=y&id=1563

“Sharon’s Strategic Legacy for Israel: Competing Perspectives,” JCPA Jan. 12
http://www.jcpa.org/brief/brief005-15.htm

See also our last feature on the West Bank:

“Holy Land or Living Hell? Pollution, Apartheid and Protest in Occupied Palestine,” by Ethan Ganor
/node/1144

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

BOLIVIA: A COMING TRIAL BY FIRE?

by Benjamin Dangl

After winning a landslide victory on Dec. 18th, Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales announced plans to nationalize the country’s gas reserves, rewrite the constitution in a popular assembly, redistribute land to poor farmers and change the rules of the US-led War on Drugs in Bolivia. If he follows through on such promises, he’ll face enormous pressure from the Bush administration, corporations and international lenders. If he chooses a more moderate path, Bolivia’s social movements are likely to organize the type of protests and strikes that have ousted two presidents in two years. In the gas-rich Santa Cruz region, business elites are working toward seceding from the country to privatize the gas reserves. Meanwhile, US troops stationed in neighboring Paraguay may be poised to intervene if the Andean country sways too far from Washington’s interests. For Bolivian social movements and the government, 2006 will likely be a trial by fire.

The Social Movements and the State

Among the presidential candidates that ran in the December election, Morales has the broadest ties to the country’s social movements. However, he has played limited roles in the popular uprisings of recent years. During the height of the gas war in 2003, when massive mobilizations were organized to demand the nationalization of the country’s gas reserves, Morales was attending meetings in Geneva on parliamentary politics. After the 2003 uprising ousted right-wing president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Morales urged social movement leaders to accept then-vice president Carlos Mesa as Sanchez de Lozada’s replacement. In June 2005, when another protest campaign demanding gas nationalization forced Mesa to resign, Morales helped direct the social movements into governmental channels, pushing for an interim president while new elections were organized.

Morales’ actions during these revolts were aimed at generating broad support among diverse sectors of society, including the middle class and those who didn’t fully support the tactics of protest groups. This strategy, combined with directing the momentum of social movements into the electoral realm, resulted in his landslide victory on Dec. 18.

In spite of Morales’ relative distance from social movements, his victory in a country where the political landscape has been shaped by such movements presents the possibility for massive social change. Once he assumes office, Morales has pledged to organize a Constituent Assembly of diverse social sectors to rewrite the country’s constitution. It is possible that this could allow for a powerful collaboration between social movements and the state.

Vice President-elect Alvaro Garcia Linera says such collaboration is possible. He contends that MAS, the Movement Toward Socialism party which he and Morales belong to, is not a traditional political party but rather “a coalition of flexible social movements that has expanded its actions to the electoral arena. There is no structure; it is a leader and movements, and there is nothing in between. This means that MAS must depend on mobilizations or on the temperament of the social movements.”

Oscar Olivera, a key leader in the revolt against Bechtel’s privatization of Cochabamba’s water system in 2000, believes the relationship between social movements and the Morales administration will play a vital role in creating radical change in the country. Olivera participated in the December election because he felt that it was part of “a process of building strength so that in the next government… we can regain control of natural resources and end the monopoly that the political parties have over electoral politics… We are creating a movement, a nonpartisan social-political front that addresses the most vital needs of the people through a profound change in power relations, social relations, and the management of water, electricity, and garbage.”

To sustain their momentum and unity, an alliance between some of the most dynamic social groups was formed in early December 2005 in the first Congress of the National Front for the Defense of Water and Basic Human Services. This alliance includes the Water Coordinating Committee of Cochabamba, the Federation of Neighborhood Councils of El Alto, the Water and Drainage Cooperatives of Santa Cruz, as well as neighborhood organizations, cooperatives, irrigation farmers, and committees on electricity, water rights and other services from all over the country. In many cases, these autonomous groups have organized methods of providing citizens with basic services which the state fails to offer. Such a coalition of grassroots forces may pave the way for a nationwide alternative form of governance.

Tangling Over Coca

Morales plans to fully legalize the production of coca leaf and change the rules of the US-led War on Drugs in his country. White House officials are wary of any deviation from its anti-narcotics plan in Latin America; a strategy they claim has been successful. However, US government statistics and reports from analysts in Bolivia tell a different story.

A recent report from the US Government Accountability Office states: “While the US has poured 6 billion dollars into the drug war in the Andes over the past five years…the number of drug users in the US has remained roughly constant.”

In an interview on National Public Radio (NPR), Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s undersecretary for political affairs, said the Bush administration hopes “that the new government of Evo Morales in Bolivia does not change course, does not somehow assert that it’s fine to grow coca and fine to sell it.”

Though it is a key ingredient in cocaine, coca has been used for centuries in the Andean region for medicinal purposes; it relieves hunger, sickness and fatigue. It’s also an ingredient in, cough syrups, wines, chewing gum, diet pills and, many claim, Coca-Cola. The US Embassy’s website for Bolivia suggests chewing coca leaves to alleviate altitude sickness.

“Trying to compare coca to cocaine is like trying to compare coffee beans to methamphetamines; there‚s a universe of difference between the two,” Sanho Tree from the Institute for Policy Studies explained on NPR. “We have to respect that indigenous cultures have used and continue to use coca in its traditional form, which is almost impossible to abuse in its natural state.”

Georg Ann Potter worked from 1999 to 2002 as an advisor to Morales, and since then has been the main advisor to the Coordination of the Six Women Federations of the Chapare, the country’s biggest coca growing region. Potter stated that although Morales plans to continue a hardline approach against the drug trade, the current policies of the US War on Drugs need to change.

“One billion dollars has been spent [on alternative crop development] over the last 20 years and there is little to show for it,” she said. “Forced eradication resulted in many dead, more wounded, armed forces thieving and raping.”

It’s widely held among critics of Washington’s anti-narcotics agenda for Latin America that the US government uses the War on Drugs as an excuse for maintaining a military and political presence in the region.

A report from the Congressional Research Service stated that the US War on Drugs has had no effect on the price, purity and availability of cocaine in the US. Potter explained that even the US government admits that “Bolivian cocaine, what there is of it, does not go to the US, but rather to Europe.”

The Andean Information Network, a Bolivia-based NGO which monitors human rights issues in the US-led War on Drugs, recommends that “the US should recognize studies that have determined that domestic education, prevention, and rehabilitation programs are more effective in altering drug consumption, and accordingly address the demand side of the war on drugs.”

Between a Rock and Hard Place

In regard to the country’s gas reserves, the Morales administration could go in two directions. It could fully nationalize the gas reserves and face the wrath of multinational corporations and lending institutions that want exactly the opposite to happen. Or it could renegotiate contracts with gas corporations, and partially nationalize the industry. Choosing the latter option would likely generate massive protests and road blockades. Social movement leaders have stated that if Morales doesn’t fully nationalize the gas, the population will mobilize to hold the administration’s feet to the flames.

“We will nationalize the natural resources, gas and hydrocarbons,” Morales stated after his election. “We are not going to nationalize the assets of the multinationals. Any state has the right to use its natural resources. We must establish new contracts with the oil companies based on equilibrium. We are going to guarantee the returns on their investment and their profits, but not looting and stealing.”

Any move that Morales makes is likely to upset either corporate investors, social movements or both. Previous Bolivian presidents Carlos Mesa and Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada walked similar gauntlets and ended up being ousted from office by protests.

A secession movement in Santa Cruz, the wealthiest district in the country, also threatens Bolivia’s peace. An elite group of businessmen lead the movement to separate Santa Cruz from the rest of the country, which would allow for the full privatization of the gas industry regardless of what protest groups and the national government demand. This group has been accused of maintaining militias organized to defend their autonomy.

Other methods of destabilization are already underway. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the US government has spent millions to support discredited right-wing political parties and stifle grassroots movements in Bolivia. Between 2002 and 2004, a grant from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) allowed for the training of thirteen “emerging political leaders” from right-wing parties in Bolivia. These 25-to 35-year-old politicians were brought to Washington for seminars. Their party-strengthening projects in Bolivia were subsequently funded by the NED.

US Troops in Paraguay

Outright US military intervention in Bolivia is a possibility. An airbase in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay is reportedly being utilized by hundreds of US troops. The base, which was constructed by US technicians in the 1980s under Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, is 200 kilometers from the border with Bolivia and is larger than the international airport in Paraguay’s capital. Analysts in the region believe these troops could be poised to intervene in Bolivia to suppress leftist movements and secure the country‚s gas reserves.

Under US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s direction, the Pentagon has pushed for a number of small Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs) based around Latin America. These military installations permit leapfrogging from one location to another across the continent. Such a strategy reflects an increased dependence on missiles and unmanned aircraft instead of soldiers. CSLs offer the opportunity for a small but potent presence in a country. Such outposts exist at Eloy Alfaro International Airport in Manta, Ecuador; Reina Beatrix International Airport in Aruba; Hato International Airport in nearby Curacao; and at the international airport in Comalapa, El Salvador. Paraguay may already be home to the region’s next CSL.

The US Embassy in Paraguay contends that no plans for a military outpost are underway and that the military operations are based on humanitarian efforts. However, State Department reports do not mention any funding for humanitarian works in Paraguay. They do mention that funding for the Counterterrorism Fellowship Program in the country doubled in 2005.

U.S. officials say the triple border area, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet, is a base for Islamic terrorist networks. Analysts in Latin America believe that the U.S. government is using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to secure natural resources in the region.

“The objectives of the USA in South America have always been to secure strategic material like oil in Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, tin mines in Bolivia, copper mines in Chile, and always to maintain lines of access open,” Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, a Brazilian political scientist at the Universidade de Brasilia, wrote in the Folha de São Paulo.

Orlando Castillo, a Paraguayan human rights leader, said the goal of US military operations in his country is to “debilitate the southern bloc…and destabilize the region’s governments, especially Evo Morales…”

While grappling with these challenges, the Morales administration will have to answer to the millions of Bolivians who, in the December election, gave him the biggest mandate in the country’s history.

For centuries Bolivians have, in the words of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, “suffered the curse of their own wealth.” The country’s tin, copper and silver were exploited by foreign companies that made enormous profits while Bolivia struggled on. For many Bolivians, the election of Morales offers the hope that history will stop repeating itself. As Galeano writes, “Recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is the recovery of our destiny.”

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Benjamin Dangl has traveled and worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Paraguay. He edits Upside Down World, uncovering activism and politics in Latin America, and Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events.

This story originally appeared in Toward Freedom, Jan. 12
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/724/

SOURCES:

“Two Opposing Views of Social Change in Bolivia,” by Raul Zibechi, International Relations Center—Americas Program, Dec. 14, 2005
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2987

“Bolivia after the election victory of the MAS: Morales cannot serve two masters,” by Jorge Martin, In Defense of Marxism, Oct. 1, 2005
http://www.marxist.com/bolivia-election-victory-mas100106.htm

“Exporting Gas and Importing Demoracy in Bolivia,” by Reed Lindsay, North American Congress on Latin America, November 2005
http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=2603#

“US Military in Paraguay Prepares To ‘Spread Democracy,'” by Benjamin Dangl, Upside Down World, Sept. 15, 2005
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/47/44/

“US Military Moves in Paraguay Rattle Regional Relations,” by Sam Logan and Matthew Flynn, IRC—Americas, Dec. 14, 2005
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2991

“An Interview with Paraguayan Human Rights Activist Orlando Castillo,” by Benjamin Dangl, Upside Down World, Oct. 16, 2005
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/48/44/

SOUTH AMERICAN PIPELINE WARS

Chavez Bloc Races with Oil Cartel to Grid the Continent

by Bill Weinberg

As the left-populist Evo Morales takes office in Bolivia, a clear anti-imperialist bloc is consolidating in South America, led by Venezulea’s Hugo Chavez and also including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and potentially Chile. Days before Morales was inaugurated Jan. 22, Chavez and other regional leaders met in Brasilia to announce ambitious plans for new gas and oil pipelines spanning the continent, linking national markets across vast areas of rainforest and towering mountains.

Now a race is on between a series of pipeline projects already being developed under the auspices of multinational corporations and the proposal unveiled at Brasilia: the first predicated on extracting resources from South America with the minimum return to the continent’s inhabitants; the other on harnessing those resources to lift the continent’s masses out of poverty.

The corporate projects invariably link oilfields in the continental interior—the Amazon and Orinoco basins—with the Pacific and Caribbean coasts for export to the United States. The Caño-Limon pipeline, run by a consortium led by California’s Occidental Petroleum, links Colombia’s Arauca oilfields in the Orinoco with the Caribbean. To the south, the Putumayo-Tumaco line links the new oilfields of the Colombian Amazon to the Pacific, with Petrobank Energy of Canada a major investor. In Ecuador, the new Heavy Crude Oilduct (OCP) similarly spans the Andes, linking Amazon oilfields to the coast, with Occidental again a leading member of the consortium. In Peru, the Camisea pipeline, built by Halliburton for a consortium led by Hunt Oil of Texas, has just gone on line, again linking Amazon gasfields to the coast. All of these projects have met with long protest campaigns by impacted indigenous and campesino communities. And another such project, a proposed gas line linking the Bolivian Amazon to the Chilean coast, to be built by Sempra Energy of California, was effectively cancelled by the Bolivian indigenous uprising of October 2003.

The main pillar of the Chavez plan, in contrast, does not link the Amazon to the sea but crosses the Amazon to link the South American nations to one another. The proposed arteries that would reach the sea envision exports not to the US but to China.

The plan is also seen as a move towards establishment of a regional joint venture of state-sector oil companies, to be dubbed PetroAmerica, which would integrate Latin America and the Caribbean on principles of self-sufficiency, and re-invest profits into development and social programs.

At the Second Bolivarian Congress of Peoples‚ a pan-Latin American summit of social and political leaders that Chavez hosted in December 2004, Evo Morales said: “We dream that PetroAmerica can be consolidated… [W]hy can’t PetroAmerica have partners like China and Bolivia to stop the North American empire? It’s important to advance these economic proposals to liberate our peoples… Enough of foreign people who come to dominate us, and to subjugate us and make themselves the owners of our lands.”

The London Times reported Jan. 22 that on Morales’ pre-inauguration trip to Venezuela he and Chavez announced plans to merge their respective countries’ state energy sectors as a first step towards the creation of PetroAmerica.

But apart from the daunting costs and technical challenges of the Chavez pipeline vision, there are clear political obstacles. Some observers believe that the proposed network’s competition with the pipelines already pumping or under construction will have a destabilizing effect on the new South American bloc. A perhaps more fundamental contradiction is that indigenous and campesino communities whose lands stand in the path of Chavez’ proposed pipelines could find themselves facing the same kinds of pressures they now face before the corporate mega-projects—thereby undermining a crucial constituency of the region’s left-populist governments.

An Anti-Imperialist “Spinal Chord”?

At the Jan. 19 Brasilia meeting, Chavez, Brazilian President Luiz (“Lula”) Inacio da Silva and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner agreed to move ahead with a planned gas pipeline running the length of the continent. The proposed pipeline would stretch 10,000 kilometers (6,215 miles)—more than three times the length of the US-Mexico border. It would take seven years to build and cost up to $20 billion, according to Venezuela’s Energy and Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez.

“We are moving forward with tremendous political will to make this project a reality,” Ramirez told Bloomberg news, adding that the pipeline would be the “spinal cord” of South America. The line would start at Venezuela’s Caribbean coast and run through Brazil before reaching Argentina, dissecting the Amazon Basin.

Sophie Aldebert, Rio de Janeiro-based associate director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, expressed skepticism that the project will ever be built. “It is very difficult to believe this will take place, because of the distance, the financing and the supply,” Aldebert told Bloomberg news in a telephone interview.

The plan envisions using Venezuela’s 150 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, the world’s eighth-largest, to help resolve chronic gas shortages in Argentina. “In the opinion of all the presidents, this is one of the most important steps for the consolidation of a united South America,” Lula’s top international aide, Marco Aurelio Garcia, told Bloomberg. “Energy is becoming the driver of that integration.”

An imperative for Venezuela in the regional integration is to open South American markets for its hydrocarbon resources and lessen its dependence on the US, which now takes about two-thirds of the country’s oil exports.

But Venezuela is having trouble meeting its own internal demand. Venezuela in December actually cut home deliveries of heating and cooking fuel in some eastern states because of natural gas shortages. However, Chavez boasted to reporters in Brasilia that Venezuela’s capacity may double as the country develops offshore fields near the border with Colombia and off Trinidad and Tobago.

The ever-present threat of US intervention was also an implicit issue at the meeting. Chavez used the summit to discuss purchase of 36 training aircraft from Brazil’s Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica SA, the world’s fourth-largest aircraft maker. The US, of course, opposes the sale, and Brazil needs Washington’s approval to sell the aircraft as they utilize US technology.

“It’s totally absurd,” Chavez said. “They are training planes for our cadets so that they can learn to fly. This is an example of the absurdity of US international policy; they are punishing Brazil and international trade.”

Integration or Rivalry?

Chavez also called for integrating Bolivia into the new pipeline network. Together Venezuela and Bolivia “have gas for 200 years,” he said. “This pipeline is vital for us.”

But a Jan. 20 analysis for the Associated Press by Alan Clendenning finds the Latin leaders’ “show of brotherhood could backfire if this expensive dream becomes reality since the network they hope to build would also likely turn the continent’s neighbors against each other as they compete for clients.”

Bolivia is already the biggest exporter of gas to Brazil and wants to increase exports to Argentina through another proposed pipeline. By joining the much larger proposed pipeline, Bolivia “would be tying [its] production prospects to whatever Chavez wants to dictate,” said Andres Stepkowski, a Bolivia-based oil consultant.

Chavez dismissed that idea in Brasilia. “There is no desire to compete. I don’t think there is any fear in Bolivia, rather there’s joy that this project is going to integrate us all. You wait and see.”

Critics say Bolivia lost a big export opportunity with the collapse of a multi-billion-dollar plan to build a pipeline over the Andes to a Pacific port in Chile, where the gas would be liquefied for shipment to Mexico and Southern California. Evo Morales helped lead the rebellion against that plan in 2003, charging that Chile and the United States stood to profit to Bolivia’s disadvantage. California’s Sempra Energy turned instead to Indonesia as its supplier, company spokesperson Art Larson told AP.

Bolivia’s vice president-elect, Alvaro Garcia Linera, said the Chile project will never happen with Morales as president, but that his administration would consider a pipeline that could reach the Pacific via Peru. Since both countries lost territory to Chile in the 1879-1884 War of the Pacific, Bolivia and Peru have often been united against their more prosperous southern neighbor.

Yet if a Bolivia-Peru pipeline is built, the two countries “would be fighting for the same markets, Mexico and the United States,” said Pietro Pitts, editor-in-chief of Venezuela-based LatinPetroleum.com. “It’s a race to see who’s going to get that gas first,” Pitts said. “Why would Peru want to let Bolivian gas get through unless it charges a lot for the pipeline?”

These analyses quoted by AP ignore the potential for opening new markets for the region’s hydrocarbon resources—especially fast-industrializing China, which has a growing economic presence in South America. When president-elect Morales met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing, he hailed China as an “ideological ally” and invited it to develop Bolivia’s gas reserves, the New York Times reported Jan. 10. Hu promised to encourage “strong and prestigious” Chinese companies to invest in Bolivia.

Venezuela: South America’s New Saudi Arabia?

Chavez is also preparing an unprecedented thrust of domestic expansion in the oil sector. Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, has announced plans to reach crude production levels of 5.8 million barrels per day by 2012 and 7.5 million barrels per day by 2020, Business Wire reported Jan. 11. PDVSA also intends to invest $3 billion into expanding its refining capacity, and form strategic alliances to use refineries in the other Caribbean and South American countries.

With reserves estimated at more than 77 billion barrels, Venezuela is hoping to surpass even Saudi Arabia as a global supplier. During the first six months of 2005, Venezuela’s oil production reached 3 million barrels per day—a figure PDVSA hopes to increase by 6.6 million barrels per day, building 650 additional kilometers of pipelines in the oil-rich eastern region.

Alejandro Granado, PDVSA’s vice president of refining, said the company is considering spending $10.5 billion to build three new refineries in Cabruta, Caripito, and Barinas, increasing Venezuela’s processing capacity by 700,000 barrels per day. Granado said that the governments of Venezuela and Cuba are also working together to reactivate the island nation’s Cienfuegos refinery, which has a processing capacity of 70,000 barrels per day. Venezuela is also considering the possibility of processing 50,000 barrels per day from the eastern Franja de Orinoco region at Uruguay’s La Teja refinery, and building new refineries in Brazil through its alliance with Petrobras, the Brazilian state company.

Asdrubal Chavez, PDVSA’s internal director, announced that by 2012 PDVSA will have 58 tankers in its fleet, with construction and maintenance of the ships to be coordinated via strategic alliances with Argentina, Brazil, China, and Spain.

PDVSA has also announced the PetroAndina Initiative, which features building an oil pipeline from Venezuela to the Pacific via Colombia, Business Wire reported. Asdrubal Chavez told Business Wire the pipeline will facilitate greater access to Asian markets.

The Chinese news service Xinhua reported Dec. 23, 2005 that Venezuela is already exporting 140,000 barrels of crude oil per day to China, compared with 1.5 million to the US.

Venezuela-Colombia Rapprochement

The Los Angeles Times reported Dec. 18 that after a near breach in relations earlier last year, petro-politics has now brought Chavez and Colombian leader Alvaro Uribe back together. On Dec. 17, the two leaders hugged, called each other “brother” and schmoozed in the shade of a giant ceiba tree near the spot where Latin American independence leader Simon Bolivar died on Dec. 17, 1830 in the Colombian port of Santa Marta. Uribe invited Chavez to Santa Marta to mark the 175th anniversary of the death of the Liberator. After two hours of talks, they announced a series of economic initiatives.

The low point in Venezuela-Colombia relations came in January 2005, when agents acting on behalf of Uribe’s government abducted Colombian guerrilla leader Rodrigo Granda out of the Venezuelan capital to a Colombian prison. Venezuela recalled its ambassador and suspended commercial relations for a month. Later, Chavez accused Colombia of hosting enemies plotting against him.

But Uribe needs continued access to Venezuela’s markets (the second-biggest destination for Colombian goods after the US) and the continued goodwill of its government toward the estimated million Colombians living and working there. And Chavez needs access to Colombia as an artery to export oil to China. Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez confirmed to the LA Times that the two countries were moving forward on the pipeline plan. As a first step in the project, Venezuela has agreed to foot the cost of a $300 million pipeline to import Colombian natural gas

In a sign of warming relations, Colombia in November rejected asylum claims for six Venezuelan officials who Chavez said were involved in the April 2002 coup attempt against him. Speaking to reporters Dec. 17, Chavez denied charges that Venezuela offers refuge to Colombian guerrillas. “It’s a lie, and no one has ever shown any proof to the contrary,” Chavez said. “We are for peace.”

Sierra de Perija: Battle for the Border Zone

The proposed new pipeline links between Colombia and Venezuela would have to cross the Sierra de Perija, the mountain range which forms the Colombian border. This strategic Sierra is already slated by the Chavez government for new coal-mining concessions—which has led to the first signs of tension between the populist regime and indigenous peoples and ecologists.

Robin Nieto reported for Venezuelanalysis.com Dec. 13, 2004 that Chavez is supporting the controversial plan to increase coal mining operations in the state of Zulia, a key oil-producing region bordering Colombia. But ecologists and Zulia’s water authorities warn that the plan may threaten the state’s most important water supply. Coribell Nava, a biologist at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela in Maracaibo, Zulia’s capital, says that increased coal mining would severely degrade the biologically rich Sierra de Perija, which protects the state’s critical watersheds.

“Coal is found in the heart of the hydrological valley. The [mining] concessions that are being granted in the Sierra Perija would terminate our water source,” Nava said.

Maracaibo holds over half the state’s population of approximately 2.5 million, and depends on only two sources of water, both in the Sierra de Perija: the Tulé and Manuelote reservoirs. These reservoirs are fed by the Cachiri and Socuy rivers, respectively.

CorpoZulia, the national government’s regional development corporation, is planning to open new coal mines along both rivers above the reservoirs. The state water authority, HidroLago, has expressed concerns about the plan.

“If the coal mining project continues, the ecological impact will be disastrous,” Herencia Gonzalez said, manager of the regional branch of HidroVen, the national government’s water authority.

Gonzalez told Venezuelanalysis that last year she and national Environment Minister Ana Elisa Osorio visited the coal mines currently in operation in the Sierra, and said she was shocked by what she saw. “I could not believe my eyes,” Gonzalez said, “Is it worth destroying our natural heritage and our water source for coal?”

The Paso Diablo and Mina Norte concessions that Gonzalez and Osorio visited are located just north of the Manuelote reservoir. Contamination of local lands and waters from mining at these two locations has already displaced local Bari, Jukpa and Wayuu indigenous people residing in the area.

William Fernandez, a 27 year-old student at the Bolivarian University in Maracaibo, and a member of the Wayuu nation, told Venezuelanalysis how his family was forced from their lands by the mining operations: “We lived in the Caño Corolado sector by the Guasare River from 1986 to 1995. We dedicated ourselves to agriculture, corn, and the raising of cattle. Because of the effects on the environment we had to leave the area.”

Fernandez’ family is now living in another area that is also being affected by mining—this time from barite (barium sulfate) mines. “We are now thinking of leaving this area too because of how it affects our animals,” Fernandez said.

Indigenous territories in the Sierra de Perija have yet to be demarcated by the national government. Rusbel Palmar, a leader of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Zulia (ORPIZ), wants to issue be settled before new mining concessions are granted. “The coal infrastructure plans have not been presented to indigenous people,” he told Venezuelanalysis. “These plans cannot be done without consultation with indigenous people and different sectors of civil society.”

The national plan for the Sierra and Zulia includes construction of a new mega-port for coal export at the sea mouth of Lake Maracaibo, to be dubbed Puerto America, and a 500-megawatt coal-fueled electric plant to power a new rail line linking the port to the mines. These projects are set to begin next year according to CorpoZulia. The plans were outlined in the Zulia-wide newspaper, Panorama, in an Oct. 27, 2004 article, in which CorpoZulia boasted they will employ “clean and efficient” technology.

Zulia already faces a chronic water shortage—impacting not only the state’s north-western coal-mining regions of Mara and Paez, but also Maracaibo. Many districts of the city receive running water only once a week.

The national government recently provided Zulia a loan of $15 million for water infrastructure for the state’s northwest region. However, this infrastructure would still depend on the two reservoirs now threatened by increased coal production.

Nava stressed that the rivers are threatened not only by sulfur contamination from mine waste, but also the deforestation that would result from new mining operations. “The cutting down of pristine forest is just part of the ecological disaster,” he said. “The deforestation will also affect the water reservoirs since without trees and their roots to sustain the soil of surrounding mountains, the rain will literally wash the soil directly into the water reservoirs.”

While CarboZuilia, the coal mining division of CorpoZulia, pledges to invest coal proceeds into regional development projects, like road-paving, ecologists contend that the cost of coal mining outweighs the economic benefits. “Coal today currently represents only 0.02 per cent of revenues for the national government,” said Lusbi Portillo, a professor at the University of Zulia and head of environmental group Homo et Natura. “Coal is not very significant in terms of economic production. However coal is important to other countries like the US, which consumes more than 900 million tons of coal each year.”

Portillo also points out that investments for Puerto America will eventually come from the IMF and the World Bank—despite the anti-globalization stance of the Chavez government. “Venezuela is serving the [US] empire at our expense, and Zulia is a zone of sacrifice.”

Even the national vice-minister of Environmental Conservation, Jose Luis Berroteran, said that coal mining in the Sierra de Perija is incompatible with the purported vision of the current Venezuelan government.

“Coal mining is not in accordance in a country that agrees with the Kyoto Protocol,” Berroteran said. “Perhaps coal mining may be acceptable in other countries but not here, not in a country with a government that has a new vision. It runs contrary to policies of sustainable development.”

The Mina Norte and Paso Diablo sites account for more than 80% of Venezuela’s annual coal production of 8.5 million metric tons. The mines are both owned by joint ventures of private companies with the national government as a minority partner. Mina Norte, 20 kilometers north of the reservoir, is run by Carbones de la Guarija, a joint venture of CarboZulia and Carbomar, an international consortium with a 64% stake in the mine. The two largest stakeholders in Carbomar are the local Massey Family (30.9%) and Chevron (29.94%).

Carbones del Guasare, which operates Paso Diablo, five kilometers north of Manuelote, is held jointly by CarboZulia and the foreign companies Anglo Coal (24.9%) and Peabody Energy (BTU), which recently purchased 25.5% of the mine from Germany’s RAG Coal International. Peabody Energy is world’s largest coal company, with annual sales of over 200 million tons and more than $2.8 billion in revenues. According to Peabody’s company profile, their coal and other products fuel more than 10% of all US electrical generation and over 2.5% of worldwide electrical generation.

Lusbi Portillo argues that Venezuela’s environmental movement has been paradoxically weakened under the progressive Chavez government. “It’s like ploughing the ocean,” said Portillo. “In an oil culture where we were taught that oil, coal and minerals make us rich, where can you go? PDVSA is supposedly ours now, it has been rescued from multinational corporations, this is what people believe, and this makes our work as ecologists even harder.”

Portillo is organizing a protest against the coal concessions at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas in March. “Five buses will take indigenous people and social organizations from Zulia to Miraflores,” he pledged.

Venezuelan Ecologists Under Attack

Portillo has been menaced by powerful figures in Venezuela’s industrial bureaucracy for his activism on behalf of the Sierra de Perija. In December 2004, the Venezuelan Program for Education and Action in Human Rights (Provea), an independent group, issued an urgent alert warning of threats made against Portillo by the CorpoZulia’s president, Brigade General Carlos Martinez, and by an engineer with the Venezuelan Ministry of Energy and Mines, Juan Rojas.

According to Provea, on Dec. 8, 2004, at a forum at the Second Bolivarian Congress of Peoples held that month in Venezuela, Martinez said: “Just as there existed a human rights mafia in Venezuela, environmentalists formed a green mafia. Behind this green mafia, opposed to the exploitation of coal in the Sierra de Perija, were the counter-revolutionaries and the transnational companies, and it was directed by the CIA.” He singled Portillo for particularly damning criticism, citing his recent statements against the mining concessions in the Zulia state newspaper The Truth.

Days later, on Dec. 11, representatives of CorpoZulia, the national Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) and Irish coal mining company Brendan Hynes made a tour of communities in Zulia’s mining zone. These representatives called together the inhabitants of the parish of Monsenor Godoy in the municipality of Mara, to seek the community’s approval for new coal concessions. The meeting was chaired by MEM engineer Rojas, who is attached to the national mining agency IngeoMinas. At the meeting, Rojas stated that Portillo was “a terrorist” and accused him of stealing MEM vehicles. Throughout the event, he continued to make indirect allusions to the presence of Portillo in the meeting.

Provea, of which Portillo himself is an associate member, protested that: “These remarks endanger the life and integrity of activists in the ecological and human rights movement in Zulia… These acts not only seek to inhibit the activity of communities affected by current and planned mining projects but could be interpreted as a green light to state or private actions which could endanger the life and integrity of Lusbi Portillo and other leaders of the ecological and human rights movements in the Zulia region.”

Despite these tensions, the rupture between indigenous peoples in Zulia and the Chavez government is not yet complete. But the struggle in the Sierra de Perija could prove a microcosm of the contradictions Chavez and his South American allies will face in the new race for strategic control of the continent’s resources.

SOURCES:

“The 2nd Bolivarian Congress of Peoples: On the Road Towards a Community of South American Nations,” by Robin Nieto, VoltaireNet, Dec. 10, 2004
http://www.voltairenet.org/article123175.html

“Venezuela’s Chavez Promotes Pipeline in Brazil Summit,” Bloomberg News, Jan. 19, 2006
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000086&sid=autgpEhwzkds&refer=latin_ame rica

“Pipeline network could divide South America,” by Alan Clendinning, AP, Jan. 20, 2006
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Business/2006/01/20/1402638-sun.html

“Venezuela: The New Saudi Arabia,” BusinessWire, Jan. 11
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/prn/texas/3579648.html

“For Leaders of Venezuela and Colombia, Common Ground,” by Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 18, 2005, online at Americas.org
http://www.americas.org/item_23929

“The Environmental Cost of Coal Mining in Venezuela,” by Robin Nieto, Venezuelanalysis.com, Dec 13, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1334

“Urgent Action to protect Venezuelan environmentalist and human rights defender,” Provea, Dec. 16, 2004, online at Mines and Communities Website
http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/action69.htm

LatinPetroleum.com
http://www.latinpetroleum.com

“Bolivia: Evo woos China on gas investment,” WW4 REPORT, Jan. 10, 2006
/node/1478

See our related stories:

“Colombia vs. Venezuela: Big Oil’s Secret War?” WW4 REPORT, April 2005
/colombiavenezuelabigoil

“Amazonia: Planning the Final Destruction,” reprinted from Native Americas,
Fall/Winter 2001
/amazonia.html

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

“BIONOIA” Part 2

The Nuts, Bolts and Crimes of Biological Warfare

by Mark Sanborne

In Part 1 of this series, which ran in our December issue, journalist and researcher Mark Sanborne noted how the media-fueled fear of microbes—with waves of “bionoia” over anthrax, SARS and now bird flu—has been used as a new justification for the national security state, even as the Bush administration has sought to erode the Biological Weapons Convention. This month, we take a look back at how the US has actually spearheaded the development of biological weapons—and their use against civilian populations. Part 3, to come next month, will explore the survival of the secretive Cold War biowar apparatus in both the US and Russia, and its links to the new wave of biological threats.

BIO-WARFARE: A BRIEF HISTORY

Bionoia may be a new concept, but biowarfare certainly is not. In its crudest form, it can be traced as far back as Neanderthal man, who rubbed feces on his spear points to add infection to his prey’s wounds, while in the sixth century BC, Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with rye ergot, an hallucinogenic. Most famously, Tartars in 1346 catapulted bubonic-plague infected corpses into an Italian trade settlement in Crimea, which possibly helped jump-start the Black Death pandemic that eventually killed a third of Europe. And in our own backyard, first British and later American agents pushed the process of genocide along by deliberately spreading smallpox among Native Americans

In the early 20th century, major European powers began seriously dabbling in biological warfare research. While it wasn’t used on the battlefields of World War I, there is evidence that German agents infected horses and cattle in the U.S. with glanders disease before they were shipped to France, though this fascinating escapade had no appreciable effect on the war effort.

By the start of World War II, the U.S. was the only major power not to have a biowar program, though Germany, Britain, and the USSR were wary of using such weapons due to the threat of retaliation in kind. By 1942, the British were testing anthrax weapons at the 520-acre Gruinard Island off northern Scotland, which became so contaminated with deadly spores that it was quarantined for nearly half a century. That same year, pushed to the wall by the Nazi blitzkrieg, the Soviets reportedly made effective use of Tularemia against the Germans near Stalingrad, though the disease spread to Russian soldiers and civilians as well. Washington finally decided to catch up when confronted with the German threat, and more importantly because of Japan’s massive biowar campaign in China, which began with its invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s.

The infamous Unit 731, led by radical nationalist Shiro Ishii, developed plague weapons that may have killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese throughout the war, and conducted Mengele-like experiments that killed thousands of prisoners of war, including some Americans. Despite that grisly record, after the war U.S. authorities granted freedom to Ishii and all his cohorts who shared their research data. (The USSR convicted and executed those Japanese biowar researchers it got its hands on, as their weapons had reportedly been used against Soviet troops when they invaded Manchuria in 1945.)

Meanwhile, some of Ishii’s now-respectable associates went on to found pharmaceutical companies in Japan. (Shades of the “reformed” Nazi industrialists in Germany.) His successor as Unit 731’s commander in the final months of the war, Masaji Kitano, founded the Green Cross blood products firm, and even published postwar research articles based on Unit 731’s experiments—but called the subjects monkeys rather than humans.

The U.S. promptly moved on from coddling war criminals to launching its own biowar program in earnest in the post-war period, endeavoring to catch up to the capabilities of the Russians. Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD, became the headquarters of Pentagon’s effort under a command that was later dubbed the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Other key facilities included the Dugway Proving Grounds test center in Utah and the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas.

In the “golden years” of the 1950s and ’60s, these secret facilities churned out tons —yes, tons—of “weaponized” anthrax, botulinum toxin, and our new friend Tularemia (rabbit fever), meaning they could be effectively delivered to our enemies by bombs, missiles, artillery, drone spray-planes, or other means. Plans were also developed to hurt the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine with germs and viruses cultivated at the secretive Plum Island installation off the north coast of Long Island, N.Y.

TESTING, TESTING…

Even more ominous is the evidence that has since emerged of widespread testing of biowar agents or supposedly safe facsimiles on unsuspecting U.S. citizens. (As in the case of the extensive radiological experiments performed on Americans during this same period, the facts were only admitted by the government many years after the events.) In one of the few cases of semi-informed consent, code-named “Project Whitecoat,” Fort Detrick scientists exposed some 2,700 Seventh-Day Adventist volunteers to a variety of infectious agents between 1954 and 1973, though allegedly no one died in the experiments.

There was also a huge airborne test of deadly bio-agents (probably anthrax) near Johnston Atoll in the Pacific in 1968 involving a fleet of Navy ships stocked with Rhesus monkeys, over half of which died. Though shifting winds may have exposed some sailors to toxins, the exercise convinced skeptical U.S. planners that bio-weapons could be delivered effectively against enemy troops.

Numerous other tests in the 1950s and ’60s targeted both unknowing service members and civilians for mock attack on a mass scale. The most famous was the dousing of New York City’s subway system in 1966 with Bacillus globigii, or BG, an allegedly noninfectious stand-in for anthrax, to study dispersal patterns. (The bacteria was contained in light bulbs that were dropped onto train tracks in midtown Manhattan.) However, it turns out that BG can infect people with weakened immune systems. Though no casualties were documented in the New York case, it’s not clear that anyone at the time would have noticed a slight increase in unknown infections among the elderly, infants, and immune-compromised adults.

BG, Bacillus subtilis, Serratia Marcescens, E. Coli, and other potentially dangerous live bacteria were also loosed upon a variety of other targets: Washington’s National Airport and Greyhound bus station, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and military bases in Key West, California, Virginia, and Hawaii. And way back in 1950, a Navy ship used giant hoses to spray a germ cocktail over the San Francisco Bay area, creating a big enough cloud to theoretically deliver 5,000 “safe” particles into the lungs of each of the city’s 800,000 residents. Eleven cases of pneumonia and one death were linked to the test, which one Wall Street Journal account in 2001 dubbed “the bacterial fogging of San Francisco.” That simulated attack and many others included the addition of fluorescent particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide—a substance now known to be carcinogenic—to better track the dispersal of the germ cloud.

CUBA: BIOWAR’S GROUND ZERO

All of which begs the question: If that’s how our government treated its own citizens, what did it do to its enemies? It’s largely forgotten today, but during the Korean War, China and North Korea accused the U.S. of engaging in large-scale field-testing of bio-weapons against military and civilian targets. These efforts allegedly included bombs filled with plague-infected fleas, a trick the Americans learned about from their friends in Unit 731. Though the case is “officially” unproven, there is considerable scholarly evidence for the claims. (See The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Indiana University Press.)

But the real ground zero for the U.S. use of bio-weapons is Cuba. As early as 1961-62, as part of the CIA’s notorious and wide-ranging “Operation Mongoose” terror campaign, anti-Castro agents used bio and chemical agents to poison cane fields, sickening field workers and contaminating Cuba’s sugar exports. A decade later, in 1971, the island was infected with African swine flu (the first such outbreak in the Western Hemisphere), forcing Cuban authorities to slaughter all of the country’s half-million pigs and depriving it of a staple source of protein. A Newsday report of Jan. 10, 1977 indicated the virus was transported to Cuba from the U.S. base at Fort Gulick, Panama. Swine flu reappeared in 1979-80, and another 300,000 pigs were slaughtered.

Emboldened by such “successes,” anti-Castro Cuban terrorists and their U.S. handlers in 1981 apparently introduced a virulent strain of hemorrhagic dengue fever into the island, infecting over a quarter of a million people and killing 158, including 101 children. (Just prior to the outbreak, according to some reports, all personnel at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay were fortuitously vaccinated against dengue.) A 1982 article in espionage-watchdog magazine Covert Action pointed to Fort Detrick’s experiments with dengue fever and the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads it, and noted that Cuba was the only country infected.

Over the next 15 years, there were unrelenting outbreaks of exotic and previously unknown diseases that targeted everything from sugar and tobacco to citrus, coffee, egg, and dairy production. In 1990-91, just as Cuba was launching programs to export bananas and honey, both sectors were hit with debilitating infections.

In April 1997, Cuba became the first state party of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) to request an investigation of an alleged biowar attack. It claimed that on October 26, 1996, a single-engine U.S. State Department plane en route from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida was seen releasing an unknown substance over Matanzas province. Shortly thereafter, on December 18, the Thrips palmi insect parasite made its first appearance in Cuba – in Matanzas. A group of 12 BWC state parties discussed the Cuban claim, but found the evidence insufficient.

OPERATION “MARSHALL PLAN”

The obvious should be noted: These acts of state bio-terrorism persisted over four decades through alternating Democratic and Republican administrations, continuing up to Clinton. But even all that pales next to what was contemplated if the U.S. had invaded Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.

The magnanimously named “Operation Marshall Plan” called for Havana to be blanketed with a cocktail of Venezuelan equine encephalitis and Q fever that would kill “only” 1 to 2 percent of those exposed. “Teams at Pine Bluff made thousands of gallons of the cocktail, enough to fill a swimming pool,” the now-infamous New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote in her 2001 book “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.” The director of Fort Detrick argued that the plan would cut down on combat casualties and thus had “a humane aspect.” Even if the low-ball fatality percentage was accurate, the attack would have killed between 70,000 and 140,000 Cuban civilians.

Since all of this not-so-secret history seems to remain a secret to official Washington, the corporate media exhibits no sense of painful irony when the Bush regime and its think-tank allies regularly accuse Cuba of being a biowar threat. In May 2002, John Bolton made a speech entitled “Beyond the Axis of Evil” charging that Cuba has “at least a limited offensive biological weapons research and development effort” and had “provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.” That same month, back on more familiar disinformational territory, Judith Miller, a friend of Bolton’s, wrote in the N.Y. Times that “administration officials” believed “Cuba has been experimenting with anthrax.”

The biotechnology that Cuba most evidently shares with the impoverished nations of the world are such things as hepatitis B and meningitis vaccines developed by its world-class pharmaceutical industry. Of course, the country has had plenty of practice defending itself against diseases—though we are meant to ignore the fact that many of them are apparently made in the U.S.A.

Next Month: Anthrax, SARS, bird flu, monkey pox and the new bionoia

RESOURCES:

“Years Ago, the Military Sprayed Germs on US Cities,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 2001
www.mindfully.org/Reform/Military-Germs-US-Cities.htm

“Decades of US Biowarfare Against Cuba,” The Internationalist, May 2003
www.internationalist.org/biowarfareagainstcuba0503.html

“Cuba Making Bio-Arms?” WW4 REPORT #34
/34.html#latinamerica1

“‘Axis of Evil’ Expands,” WW4 REPORT #39
/39.html#who’snext3

CENTRAL AMERICA: CAMPESINOS BLOCK HIGHWAYS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

EL SALVADOR: FMLN BACKS ANTI-CAFTA PROTESTS

Thousands of Salvadorans participated in a nationwide day of protest on Nov. 30 against the neoliberal economic policies of President Antonio Saca. The demonstrations, organized by the Popular Social Bloc (BPS) and backed by the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), consisted of 17 different actions, including the blocking of major highways, rallies in front of government offices and the distribution of literature on the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), a trade pact set to go into effect on Jan. 1 between five Central American countries, the Dominican Republic and the US.

The protesters used what they called “leaking blockades” on the highways. This consists of “closing and opening, letting a line pass slowly, talking, handing out literature, closing again, and so on,” explained BPS director Roberto Pineda. Blockades were set up on highways in at least eight of the country’s 14 departments: Morazan, Usulutan, La Libertad, San Miguel, San Vicente, Santa Ana, San Salvador and Ahuachapan. There were also protests in front of the Labor Ministry and a gas station belonging to ESSO, the local affiliate of the US-based multinational ExxonMobil. The Movement for the Self-Determination of Peoples (MAP) held a protest outside the building of the Legislative Assembly, which voted that day to allow the US to run a regional police training school, the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA), in El Salvador.

The protesters had five demands: aid for communities hurt by Hurricane Stan, rejection of a new law on land leases, reduction of gasoline prices, rejection of the privatization of water services, and a return to the national currency, the colon [replaced by the US dollar in 2001]. (Adital, Dec. 1; Upside Down World, Nov. 30)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 4

HONDURAS: WINNER FINALLY DECLARED

On the evening of Dec. 6, Honduras’ Supreme Electoral Council (TSE) announced that Manuel Zelaya of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL) had won the Nov. 27 presidential election with 49.9% of the votes to 46.16% for Porfirio Lobo of the ruling [even more] right-wing National Party (PN). On Dec. 7 Lobo conceded defeat, 10 days after the vote. Also at stake were the 128 deputies’ seats in the National Congress and the 398 municipal governments. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Dec. 8 from AFP)

The PL is projected to have won 63 of the deputies’ seats, two seats short of a majority. The PN followed with 54, the leftist Democratic Unification Party (UD) with five, the Christian Democrats (DC) with five and the social democratic Innovation and Unity Party (PINU) with two. Zelaya is now seeking an alliance with one of the smaller parties in order to get a majority in the Congress. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Dec. 11 from AFP)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 11

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #116:
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1346

See also our last update on Central America:
/node/1333

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

ARGENTINA: AUTONOMOUS WORKERS UNDER ATTACK

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

BUENOS AIRES: HOTEL WORKERS ATTACKED

Early on Dec. 8, a delegation of 12 cooperative members from the autonomous worker-controlled Bauen hotel were violently ousted from the Buenos Aires municipal legislature as they sought to attend a debate concerning their dispute with the hotel’s former owners. A larger group of Bauen workers had been waiting for eight hours outside the legislature, but when the debate finally began at around 2:30 AM, only 12 of the 60 workers remaining outside were allowed to enter the chambers, even though the sessions are supposed to be open to the public.

Shortly after the debate began, the 12 Bauen workers–most of them women–began to whistle their disapproval at deputy Mario Morando, author of a bill which seeks to return the Bauen hotel to the Iurcovich family, its original owners. Legislature president Santiago de Estrada responded by ordering the workers removed. Nearly 50 police agents arrived and attacked the 12 Bauen workers, beating them and spraying some kind of irritant gas in their eyes. After the workers were ejected from the chambers, the legislature continued its discussion, finally approving the creation of a commission of seven deputies to head a four-month negotiation process between the worker cooperative and the former owners. The workers’ cooperative is determined to maintain its control of the hotel. (ANRed, Dec. 8 via Resumen Latinoamericano) The owners shut down the hotel in 2001. Two years later, 40 of the original workers reoccupied it and opened it for business; the workers’ cooperative that runs it now has 150 members. (Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 10)

KIRCHNER INCHES TO THE LEFT?

On Nov. 28 the government of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner suddenly announced a reshuffling of his cabinet, with Banco de la Nacion president Felisa Miceli replacing Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna; ambassador to Venezuela Nilda Garre replacing Defense Minister Jose Pampuro; Deputy Foreign Relations Minister Jorge Taiana replacing Foreign Relations Minister Rafael Bielsa; and Juan Carlos Nadalich replacing Alicia Kirchner, the president’s sister, as head of the Social Action Ministry.

Cabinet changes were expected. Three of the former ministers–Pampura, Bielsa and Alicia Kirchner–were leaving to take seats they won in Oct. 23 legislative elections. But analysts were surprised by the firing of Economy Minister Lavagna. Appointed by interim president Eduardo Duhalde in April 2002, five months after the collapse of Argentina’s economy, Lavagna had maintained conservative fiscal policies while holding off the most drastic demands of foreign creditors and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Argentina’s economy grew at more than an 8% annual rate over the last three years. The Argentine stock market reacted to Lavagna’s departure on Nov. 28 by falling 4.49% that day in heavy trading.

Analysts say President Kirchner is moving to the left following the success of his candidates in the October legislative vote, including the election of his wife, Cristina Fernandez, as senator from Buenos Aires province. Economy Minister Miceli is considered close to Lavagna and worked in his consulting firm, but she appears to be to his left. “The orthodox measures for lowering inflation are the peace of the cemetery,” she said recently, indicating her negative view of neoliberal policies. Defense Minister Garre was a defender of left-populist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez when she was in Caracas. Miceli and Garre are the first women to head Argentina’s economy and defense ministries. (Inter Press Service, Nov. 28; New York Times, Nov. 29; Financial Times, Nov. 29; La Jornada, Mexico, Nov. 29)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 11

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #115
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1245

See also our last update on the struggle in Argentina:
/node/1392

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

BRAZIL: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES EVICTED FROM LANDS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

MATO GROSSO DO SUL: GUARANI-KAIOWA EVICTED

On Dec. 15 some 100-200 Brazilian federal police agents, backed by a helicopter and armed with tear gas and rifles that fire rubber bullets, forcibly evicted more than 500 Guarani-Kaiowa indigenous people from their homes on the officially recognized 9,300-hectare territory of Nande Ru Marangatu, in Antonio Joao municipality, Mato Grosso do Sul state. The community did not put up physical resistance to the eviction. After police and human rights observers left the scene, the ranchers who claim the land arrived and set fire to the community’s homes.

One of the evicted Guarani men described the scene to Survival International: “Helicopters flew very low over the area. Children were screaming and crying. Three people fainted and were taken to hospital. Everyone was crying and standing on the side of the road with nothing in the baking sun. We have nothing to eat. The ranchers when the police weren’t there burned all our food, our clothes and documents. They burned 15 houses. The only things we have left are the clothes on our bodies.” A Guarani-Kaiowa woman who was six months pregnant became startled by the low-flying helicopter, and fell down and suffered a miscarriage. Two journalists from Netherlands state television were arrested during the eviction.

The government sought to relocate the Guarani-Kaiowa to a 26-hectare section of the territory, but community leaders say that plot is a swamp, unfit for human habitation or crop cultivation. The evicted families have instead begun setting up makeshift homes along the highway, where they are unprotected from the rainy weather. They are surviving on donated food. Antonio Joao mayor Junei Marques said he will propose to the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) that the Guarani-Kaiowa be housed temporarily on land belonging to the army.

For years the Guarani-Kaiowa barely survived on a nine-hectare plot—much too small for their traditional subsistence agriculture–while campaigning for the return of their territory. On March 29 of this year, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva finally signed off on the demarcation of Nande Ru Marangatu, and the community spent the subsequent months planting crops on the land. But the Supreme Federal Tribunal subsequently issued a preliminary decision suspending the demarcation, and a court ruling ordered the land returned to the ranchers who claim ownership of it. (Survival International press release, Dec. 16; Adital, Brazil, Dec. 16; Agencia Brasil, Dec. 16, 17)

Meanwhile, 29 people have been detained in Operation Rio Pardo, Brazil’s first ever investigation into the genocide of indigenous peoples. The former governor of Mato Grosso state, Wilmar Peres de Farias, and former elite police commander Roberto de Almeida Gil are among the public figures accused in a plot by land grabbers and logging companies to eliminate the uncontacted Rio Pardo tribe. Speaking from the city of Cuiaba, public prosecutor Mario Lucio Avelar told Survival he believed there were sufficient grounds to prosecute for genocide. In November Brazilian TV showed the first known images of the Rio Pardo tribe; no outsiders know who they are or what language they speak. FUNAI found camps inside the territory with land measuring equipment, and bombs and ammunition to intimidate the indigenous residents. Invaders admit they found 30 hurriedly abandoned indigenous shelters. (Survival International press release, Dec. 14)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 18

PARA: CONVICTIONS IN NUN’S MURDER

On Dec. 10, a jury in the northern Brazilian city of Belem, capital of Para state, found Rayfran das Neves Sales and Clodoaldo Carlos Batista guilty of the murder on Feb. 12, 2005 of US-born activist nun and land rights defender Dorothy Stang in a rural area of Para. Sales, who shot Stang, was sentenced to 27 years in prison, while Batista was sentenced to 17 years for his complicity in the killing. Sales will be retried, since under Brazilian law anyone sentenced to more than 20 years in prison gets an automatic right to a retrial. Sales claimed he acted in self-defense, saying he believed the 73-year old nun was reaching for a gun when she put her hand in her bag to pull out her bible. Batista claimed there was no plan to murder Stang. Another three men, including landowner Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, are expected to go on trial sometime in 2006 for the murder; Moura is accused of having offered 50,000 reais (about $22,200) to Sales and Batista to murder Stang. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Dec. 11 from AP; Miami Herald, Dec. 11 from wire services)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 11

——

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

See also our last update on land struggles in Brazil:
/node/1308

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

PERU: INDIGENOUS PROTEST GAS SPILLS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Residents of the Machiguenga and other indigenous communities of the lower Urubamba river area in Peru’s Ucayali region began a 72-hour strike on Dec. 2 to protest the government’s failure to address the problems caused by gas spills on the Camisea pipeline. The strike was prompted by a spill of at least 5,000 barrels of condensed liquid gas on Nov. 24 in the Machiguenga Communal Reserve near the Vilcabamba mountain range in Echarati district, which has affected the communities living in the Urubamba and Ucayali river basins. It was the fourth spill from the 430-mile long Camisea pipeline in less than a year. (El Diario del Cusco, Dec. 6 via Amazon Alliance; Dallas Business Journal online version, Dec. 8; Regional Indigenous Organization of Atalaya-OIRA, Nov. 30)

Edward Bendezu Palomino, general secretary of the Federation of Residents of the Lower Urubamba, said the situation of the indigenous communities in the area is desperate, since they can no longer eat local fish or drink the water. Residents are demanding that the government declare a state of emergency for the gas pipeline and halt all activities of the Transportadora de Gas del Peru (TGP) consortium until it offers security guarantees to prevent future spills. As a first step, the communities are demanding that a high-level commission with decision-making powers arrive in the zone within a week. Bendezu said the indigenous communities don’t trust the promises of the government or the company, since after the third spill it was promised that measures would be taken to prevent similar incidents. (EDdC, Dec. 6) TGP is a joint venture between the Dallas, Texas-based Hunt Oil, the Argentine company Techint and five other shareholders. (DBJ, Dec. 8)

On Dec. 5, members of the indigenous federations of the Lower Urubamba COMARU, CECONAMA and FECONAYY met in the indigenous community of Nuevo Mundo and resolved to continue their strike and blockade along the Urubamba river until Dec. 12. The groups are demanding a meeting in the community of Kirigueti between the indigenous federations, the managers of the TGP and Pluspetrol companies, and authorities from the Ministry of Energy and Mines and the Supervisory Organization of Investment in Energy (OSINERG), along with district-level, provincial and departmental officials and members of the media from Lima and Cusco. The federations have 14 demands to be addressed at the meeting, including that the causes of the gas spill be determined; that the entire route of the Camisea gas pipeline be visually inspected; that the damages in indigenous communities be repaired, and all the affected communities compensated and provided with adequate medical services to monitor the impact of the spill on residents’ health; that self-sustaining fish farms be created in all the communities of the area in order to restore residents’ primary food supply; that the region be provided with electrical service and a gas distribution facility; and that indigenous workers on the Camisea project be paid wages on a par with the project’s foreign workers. (Joint communique from COMARU, CECONAMA, FECONAYY, Dec. 5 via Amazon Alliance)

Jeremias Sebastian Sandoval, president of the indigenous community of Miaria, said police committed acts of violence against his community on the first day of the strike, Dec. 2. Sandoval accused TGP of paying police agents to attack the indigenous protesters. (EDdC, Dec. 6)

According to Amazon Watch, a Washington, DC-based organization, the Nov. 24 spill has prompted a joint commission from Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mines and OSINERG to begin an emergency review of the Camisea pipeline situation. “We will have the results of an audit of the Camisea pipelines [soon], and these could lead to fines and even to the operator losing the concession if it failed to comply with the technical norms of the contract,” said Gustavo Navarro, director of the state oil and gas company Hidrocarburos de Peru, in an interview with Reuters. (DBJ, Dec. 8)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 11

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #115
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1240

See also our last update on Peru:
/node/1270

——————-

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

ECUADOR: MOVES TOWARDS NEW CONSTITUTION

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

The 31 new judges of Ecuador’s Supreme Court of Justice were sworn in, along with 21 alternate judges, on Nov. 30 by Carlos Estarellas, president of a four-member commission appointed to choose the magistrates. Ecuadoran president Alfredo Palacio and Organization of American States (OAS) secretary general Jose Miguel Insulza attended the ceremony. Ecuador has had no functional Supreme Court since last April 15, when president Lucio Gutierrez dismissed the entire court and was himself ousted from office five days later. (ENH, Dec. 1 from AFP; MH, Dec. 1 from wire services; AP, Dec. 4)

In a surprise executive decree signed on Nov. 30 and released on Dec. 1, Palacio asked the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to call a voter referendum for Jan. 22 on whether to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution. The move led TSE president Gilberto Vaca to resign on Dec. 3, saying he would not “lend myself to violate the Constitution.” Ecuador’s Congress, which had been negotiating with the president over constitutional reforms, threatened on Dec. 3 to impeach Palacio if he moves forward with the referendum. (La Jornada, Dec. 2 from Reuters; El Nuevo Herald, Dec. 4 from AFP; Miami Herald, Dec. 2, 4) The constituent assembly is a key demand of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which mobilized some 10,000 indigenous people to Quito Nov. 16-18.

On Dec. 2, in another unexpected and unexplained move, Palacio replaced three of Ecuador’s top military commanders in a brief ceremony at the government palace. Palacio appointed Gen. Nelson Enriquez to replace Vice Adm. Manuel Zapater as head of the joint command; Gen. Robert Tandazo to replace Gen. Jorge Zurita as head of the army, and Gen. Jorge Moreno to replace Gen. Edmundo Baquero as head of the air force. The changes came as Defense Minister Osvaldo Jarrin was on an official visit to Spain. (MH, Dec. 3 from wire services)

On Nov. 29, for the sixth time this year, 164 indigenous and campesino communities in the northern Ecuadoran provinces of Pichincha and Imbabura began blocking local highways to demand that the government release $50 million in funding for a drinking water project. The open-ended strike practically shut down Imbabura province and paralyzed traffic along the PanAmerican highway, which links Ecuador with Colombia. (Clajadep, Nov. 30 via Ecuador Indymedia)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 4

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #116
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1345

——————-

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

VENEZUELA: CHAVISTAS SWEEP ELECTIONS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

With 79% of the votes counted on the evening of Dec. 4, the six parties supporting left-populist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias had won all 167 seats in the National Assembly in national legislative elections that day. Chavez’s own party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), won 114 seats, according to MVR deputy William Lara, giving it 68% of the seats, more than the two-thirds required to make constitutional amendments and to approve key appointments. Together the pro-Chavez parties received 88.8% of the vote, according to National Electoral Council (CNE) president Jorge Rodriguez. The CNE reported that voter turnout was just 25%, considerably lower than Chavez supporters had expected.

With high ratings for Chavez in opinion polls and with the main opposition parties dropping out on Nov. 29 and calling for a boycott, a victory by pro-Chavez parties had seemed assured. But the high abstention rate was a concern for the government. Preliminary statements from observers for the European Union and the Organization of American States (OAS) on Dec. 6 held that the elections were clean but that the low turnout reflected “distrust” in the CNE. Chavez himself said on Dec. 6 that the turnout “must be looked at, analyzed and considered.” “Nobody can claim the abstention as a victory,” he told supporters. (Venezuelanalysis.com, Dec. 4, 6; AP, Dec. 6)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 11

On Nov. 29, four Venezuelan opposition parties from the “Unity” coalition announced they were pulling their candidates out of national legislative elections scheduled for Dec. 4, allegedly because the National Electoral Council (CNE) had failed to guarantee a secret ballot. On Nov. 28, the CNE had said it would not use fingerprint machines to identify voters; the previous week opposition forces demonstrated that the machines store the sequence in which votes are cast, allowing that sequence to potentially be matched against the fingerprints and destroying a guarantee of secrecy. (Miami Herald, Nov. 30)

Democratic Action (AD), a former social democratic ruling party which currently has 23 seats in the 165-seat National Assembly, was the first to announce it was boycotting the elections. The former ruling Christian Democratic party COPEI, with six seats, and the conservative Project Venezuela, with seven seats, quickly followed suit. Later on Nov. 29, the center-right party Justice First, with five seats, announced it was also pulling out.

The center-left Movement Toward Socialism, the second-largest opposition party with 11 seats in the Assembly, did not withdraw from the elections. But as of Dec. 1, the vote boycott had been joined by a dissident group of MAS candidates, as well as the Citizen Force, Cadecide, Red Flag and Democratic Left parties and 11 independent candidates. Still participating in the elections were 49 opposition candidates, of which 23 were independent and the rest were from the MAS and New Time, the party of Zulia state governor Manuel Rosales. In the current Assembly, opposition parties have a combined total of 79 seats. (MH, Nov. 30, Dec. 3; La Jornada, Mexico, Nov. 30) On Dec. 3, left-populist president Hugo Chavez Frias cited figures from the CNE that 556 candidates out of a total of more than 5,500 had pulled out of the race. (MH, Dec. 4 from AP) The ruling 5th Republic Movement (MVR) currently has 69 deputies, who together with 17 allies from minor parties hold a slim majority control of the Assembly with 52%. (MH, Dec. 4; LJ, Nov. 30)

Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel publicly welcomed the opposition parties’ withdrawal, saying they were “doing so because they have no votes,” and that it was “time for them to disappear off the map.” (MH, Nov. 30) Chavez said he was not surprised by the attitude of AD and COPEI, which alternated in ruling Venezuela between 1958 and 1988. “They were left without people after having looted and handed the country over to imperialism,” said Chavez. “What fraud?” he rhetorically asked the parties. “Accept the truth, you have no people.” (LJ, Nov. 30 from AFP, DPA, Reuters)

Chavez also accused the opposition parties of planning a conspiracy backed by the US government to disrupt the elections. (ENH, Dec. 4 from AP) On Dec. 2, Rangel confirmed that 11 people had been arrested that day in Zulia state; they are suspected of stockpiling dozens of Molotov bombs. Officials said the individuals were trying to block a road when they were caught with 31 containers of fuel, tacks, tires and false military identification cards. (ENH, Dec. 3; MH, Dec. 4 from AP) Rangel also confirmed the confiscation of 24 kilos of C-4 explosives in the central state of Guarico. (LJ, Dec. 4) A rustic homemade bomb exploded near a government legal office in Caracas on Dec. 2, causing minor injuries to a man and an adolescent, according to the attorney general’s office. Two other explosives, apparently grenades, were detonated at the Fort Tiuna military base in Caracas, seriously wounding a police officer. (ENH, AP, Dec. 4)

On Nov. 28, a delegation of six members of the US Congress and 22 congressional staff members arrived in Caracas for a visit during which they planned to meet with Venezuelan government officials and leaders from opposition groups including the “election monitoring” group Sumate, which is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Sumate issued a call for Venezuelans to abstain from voting in the Dec. 4 elections and instead go to church that day and pray for “transparency and the truth.” (MH, Nov. 30 from correspondent, Dec. 4 from AP)

But the US delegation, headed by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), chair of the House International Relations Committee, never got off the plane. Airport authorities initially refused to allow the aircraft to park near the official VIP terminal, then didn’t allow vehicles to approach the plane to pick up the passengers, according to US officials. The Venezuelan foreign ministry said in a statement that the delegation’s arrival was “delayed a few more minutes” because the VIP terminal was reserved for Spanish defense minister Jose Bono. The statement said Rangel’s office was negotiating a solution to the “inconveniences” when the US delegation decided to leave. Bono was in Caracas on Nov. 28 to sign a deal under which Venezuela is buying eight patrol ships and 12 planes from Spain. The US government opposes the deal. (MH, Nov. 30; LJ, Nov. 29)

On Dec. 2 the US State Department rejected the accusation that it was promoting the opposition’s electoral boycott. The AD and Justice First parties also denied any connection. “The democratic opposition does not have and will not have any political links with the US government or with any other government,” said AD leader and deputy Alfonso Marquina. (ENH, Dec. 3)

On Dec. 1, thousands of Chavez supporters marched through the streets of Caracas to call for participation in the elections and protest the maneuvers of the opposition parties. Marchers carried coffins with the names of the traditional parties, particularly COPEI and AD. Current National Assembly president Nicolas Maduro told the marchers that the boycotting parties “are in the service of the empire.” (LJ, Dec. 2)

Chavez’s base is meanwhile pushing him to deepen the country’s revolutionary reforms. About 10 independent left parties support Chavez but remain outside his MVR coalition. The National Network of Bolivarian Circles, which groups the pro-Chavez grassroots community groups, is urging its members to vote for some of the more radical forces, including the Communist Party. “We have to make a turn to the left, because regrettably the MVR has had the opportunity to change the direction of the process, but hasn’t done it,” said Marcos Sosa, a spokesperson for the Bolivarian Circles. (LJ, Dec. 3)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 4

——

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

See also WW4 REPORT #116
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1344

See also our last update on Venezuela:
/node/1426

——————-

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

CounterVortex

Tag: Syndicated Content

COLOMBIA: PARAMILITARY ATTACKS IN META

PERU: SENDERO RESURGENT?

BITTER FRUITS OF JORDAN VALLEY APARTHEID

BOLIVIA: A COMING TRIAL BY FIRE?

SOUTH AMERICAN PIPELINE WARS

“BIONOIA” Part 2

CENTRAL AMERICA: CAMPESINOS BLOCK HIGHWAYS

ARGENTINA: AUTONOMOUS WORKERS UNDER ATTACK

BRAZIL: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES EVICTED FROM LANDS

PERU: INDIGENOUS PROTEST GAS SPILLS

ECUADOR: MOVES TOWARDS NEW CONSTITUTION

VENEZUELA: CHAVISTAS SWEEP ELECTIONS