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Russia calls for reform of UN Security Council

Samizdat | August 3, 2022

The United Nations is in dire need of reform and the Security council must be “democratized” by expanding its representation, Russian foreign ministry official Alexey Drobinin has written in a keynote article published on Wednesday.

Drobinin, the Director of the Department of Foreign Policy Planning, commented on the current state of international relations and came to the conclusion that “more conscious effort and imagination is needed” to reform the UN.

He pointed out that the organization’s current agenda, which is primarily fueled by the West, is not necessarily in line with the interests of the majority of its international members.

Drobinin suggested that for most UN members the most important issues are things like access to cheap energy sources rather than the transition to “green” technologies, socio-economic development rather than human rights “in an ultra-liberal interpretation,” and security and sovereign equality rather than the artificial imposition of electoral democracy according to Western patterns.

He added that another topic that has once-again become relevant is the process of decolonization and ending the neo-colonial practices by transnational corporations in regards to the development of natural resources in developing countries.

However, international organizations such as the UN have essentially been “privatized” by the West, Drobinin points out. He suggests that the UN Secretariat and the offices of special envoys and special representatives of the Secretary General have all been saturated with the West’s own “tested” personnel, and that this also extended to non-UN organizations as well, such as the OPCW.

“The saddest thing is that this rust is eating away at the ‘holy of holies’ of the UN system – the Security Council,” Drobinin writes. “It devalues the meaning of the right of veto, which the founding fathers endowed to the permanent members of the Security Council with one single purpose: to prevent the interests of any of the great powers from being infringed, and thus save the world from a direct clash between them, which in the nuclear age is fraught with catastrophic consequences.”

While there are no “clear and simple recipes for correcting the situation here,” the diplomat continues, “clearly more conscious effort and imagination is needed when it comes to UN reform.” He goes on to suggest that the Security Council needs to be “democratized,” first of all by expanding the representation of African, Asian and Latin American countries.

Drobinin suggests that whatever the fate of international organizations such as the UN, WTO, IMF, World Bank or G20 is, the divisive policies of the West makes it “an absolute imperative for the coming years to form a new infrastructure of international relations.”

“After their frankly perfidious decisions and actions against Russia, its citizens and tangible assets, we simply cannot afford the luxury of not thinking about alternatives. Especially since many of our friends who have lost faith in Western benevolence and decency are thinking about the same thing,” the diplomat surmised.

August 3, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

US asks Argentina to confiscate aircraft linked to Iran

MEMO | August 3, 2022

The US Department of Justice said on Tuesday that it has asked the government in Buenos Aires for permission to seize an Iranian plane that was sold to new owners in Venezuela but is being held in Argentina on suspicion of being linked to international terrorist groups.

The unannounced arrival of the plane in Argentina on 8 June raised concerns within the Argentinian government about its relations with Iran, Venezuela and companies that the US has imposed sanctions on. The Justice Department said that the seizure request followed the disclosure of a warrant in the District Court for the District of Columbia dated 19 July to take the aircraft for violating export control laws.

According to the department, the US-made Boeing 747-300 is under sanctions because Iran’s Mahan Air sale to Emtrasur last year violated US export laws. Both companies are subject to US sanctions over their alleged cooperation with terrorist organisations.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said that, “The department will not tolerate transactions that violate our sanctions and export laws.” Mahan Air faces sanctions for its ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which the US has listed as a terrorist organisation.

There were 14 Venezuelans and five Iranians travelling on the aircraft when it landed in Buenos Aires. Seven of the passengers are still being held by the Argentinian authorities.

August 3, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | 1 Comment

US Wants to Increase RT, Sputnik Moderation Due to Their Objectivity – Russian Embassy

Samizdat – 28.07.2022

US senators are calling for increased moderation of Spanish-language RT and Sputnik, as they are dissatisfied with the interest of Latin Americans in objective coverage of events, the Russian Embassy in the United States said in a statement.

On Wednesday, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, Senators Bill Cassidy and Tim Kaine called on the CEOs of Meta (banned as an extremist organization in Russia), Twitter and Telegram to better moderate content distributed by Spanish-language versions of RT and Sputnik. The senators said they were concerned by reports that the reach of such media outlets has increased amid the situation in Ukraine.

“Parliamentarians, in the typical manner, once again turn everything upside down, seeing in the work of our news agencies attempts to “spread disinformation”, “undermine democracy” and “sow chaos” in the Western Hemisphere. The reason for such accusations is dissatisfaction with the interest of the Latin American public in objective coverage of events in Russia and the world,” the Russian Embassy said on Telegram.

“Washington’s ruling circles are clearly annoyed that, thanks to high-quality and timely news content, citizens of the countries of the region make a choice in favor of Russia Today and Sputnik, and not US-controlled media,” it said.

July 28, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 1 Comment

South American trade bloc snubs Zelensky

Samizdat | July 21, 2022

South America’s Mercosur trade bloc has declined a request by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to speak at its summit, host nation Paraguay said on Wednesday, according to the AFP news agency.

Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay failed to reach an agreement on whether to invite the Ukrainian leader, Deputy Foreign Minister, Raul Cano said, albeit refusing to name the countries that opposed the move.

“There was no consensus on such communication, that’s why the Ukrainian counterpart has already been informed that under current circumstances there are no conditions allowing to speak with the president of Ukraine in the Mercosur format,” the minister explained.

Earlier this month, Julio Cesar Arriola, Paraguay’s foreign minister, said that Zelensky had talked with Mario Abdo Benitez, the nation’s president, on the phone and asked for the opportunity to address the upcoming Mercosur summit. According to Arriola, Benitez promised to discuss the matter with his colleagues in the bloc.

Mercosur is an economic and political organization that was established in 1991 to create a common market and incentivize development in South America.

After Russia attacked Ukraine in late February, Zelensky has addressed a slew of national parliaments and major international forums, including NATO, the G7 and the UN in an effort to rally countries to Kiev’s cause and help it fight off Moscow’s offensive.

However, in late June, when the Ukrainian president took part in a virtual meeting with the African Union, only a handful of leaders reportedly tuned in to listen to his speech. Following the conference call, the President of Senegal and African Union Chairperson, Macky Sall, indicated that Africa’s position of neutrality over the conflict in Ukraine remained unchanged.

July 21, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

WHO Wants To Run the World?

By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2022

In Geneva in late May at the 75th meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), amendments to its International Health Regulations (IHRs) were debated and voted upon. If passed, they would grant the WHO the right to exert unconscionable pressure on countries to accept the WHO’s authority and health policy actions if the WHO decides that there is a public health threat that might spread beyond a country’s borders.

As Ramesh Thakur, the second man at the UN for years, noted, the amendments would mean “the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers and budgets will depend on outbreaks of pandemics, the more the better.”

This is the first clear instance of a globalist coup attempt. It would subvert national sovereignty worldwide by putting real power into the hands of an international group of bureaucrats. It has long been suspected that the authoritarian elites arisen during covid times would try to strengthen their positions by undermining nation states, and the this 75th jamboree is the first solid evidence of this being true.

What an opportunity then to see who is in the conspiring club. Who drafted the amendments? What was in them? Which individuals supported them or spoke out against them?

WHO were the conspirators?

The amendments on the table at the May WHA meeting had been transmitted to the WHO by the US Department of Health and Human Services on January 18, circulated by WHO to its member states (‘States Parties’) on January 20 and formally introduced to the WHA on April 12.

The proposals, according to an announcement on January 26, were co-sponsored by 19 countries plus the European Union. Even if some co-sponsors had little direct involvement in drafting them, they all would have approved in principle the overarching goal of tightening up the WHO’s authority over member states in the face of a public health event.

Loyce Pace, the HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs – the leading US official nominally responsible for the proposed amendments – arrived at the Biden administration fresh from a stint as executive director of an advocacy organization called the Global Health Council.

That council receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its members include Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Abbott Labs, and Johnson & Johnson. You get the idea. Via one of the foxes-turned-chicken-guard, it appears the HHS ‘worked closely’ on these amendments with large pharmaceutical companies, who will be chomping at the bit for a more proactive (read: profitable) response to any public health emergency, real or imagined.

So the conspiring club consists primarily of the US government and its Western allies in lockstep with Big Pharma, and they are looking to undermine both the sovereignty of their own governments and that of other countries, presumably with the idea that the Western elites would do the running.

What was in them? A blizzard of acronyms and euphemisms

To understand what the US proposed at the WHA, we need first to understand how things have worked in the WHO to this point.

The IHRs in their current form have been in force as international law since June 2007. Among other things, they impose requirements on countries to detect, report and respond to ‘public health events of international concern,’ or PHEICs. The WHO Director-General consults with the state where a possible public health event has occurred, and within 48 hours they are meant to come to a mutual agreement on whether or not it actually is a PHEIC, whether or not it needs to be announced to the world as such, and what counter-measures, if any, should be taken. It’s essentially an early-warning system on major health crises. This is a good thing if it’s run by people you can trust and if it has checks and balances to rein in expansionary tendencies.

The proposed amendments would greatly strengthen the power of the WHO relative to this baseline, in a number of ways.

First, they lower the threshold for the WHO to declare a public health emergency by empowering its Regional Directors to declare a ‘public health event of regional concern’ (PHERC, italics ours) and for the WHO to put out a new thing called an ‘intermediate public health alert.’

Second, they permit the WHO to consider allegations about a public health event from non-official sources, meaning sources other than the government of the state concerned, and allow that government only 24 hours to confirm the allegations and a further 24 hours to accept the WHO’s offer of ‘collaboration.’

Collaboration is essentially a euphemism for on-site assessment by teams of WHO investigators, and concomitant pressure at the whim of WHO personnel to enact potentially far-reaching measures such as lockdowns, movement restrictions, school closures, consumption of medicines, administration of vaccines and any or all of the other social, economic, and health paraphernalia that we have come to associate with the covid circus.

Should the state’s government acceptance of the WHO’s ‘offer’ not be forthcoming, the WHO is empowered to disclose the information it has to the other 194 WHO countries, while continuing to pressure the state to yield to the WHO’s invitation to ‘collaborate.’ A non-collaborating country would risk becoming a pariah.

Third, the proposal includes a new Chapter IV, which would establish a ‘Compliance Committee’ consisting of six government-appointed experts from each WHO region tasked with permanently nosing around to ensure the member states are complying with IHR regulations.

There are more crossings-out of the existing IHR language and new language added in, but the flavour of what the US-led alliance is shooting for is a WHO that can unilaterally decide whether there is a problem and what to do about it, and can isolate countries that disagree.

Compliant WHO member states could act as a supporting cast in the isolation effort, through the distribution of their own health budgets and their ‘health-related’ policies, which would include travel and trade restrictions. The WHO would become a kind of command-and-control center for globalist agendas, pushing the produce of (Western) Big Pharma.

Why and how would this work?

We learned during covid times why it would make sense that the US and its allies are insisting on these amendments.

Lowering the bar for declaring a global (or regional) public health threat triggers a huge opportunity for Western pharmaceutical companies. As legal experts have observed: “WHO emergency declarations can trigger the fast-track development and subsequent global distribution and administration of unlicensed investigational diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

This is done via the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EULP). The introduction of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ in particular will also further incentivise the pharmaceutical industry’s move to activate domestic fast-track emergency trial protocols as well as for advance purchase, production and stockpile agreements with governments before the existence of a concrete health threat to the world’s population has been detected, as is already the case under WHO’s EULP via the procedures developed for a ‘pre-public health emergency phase’.”

You can bet that the WHO ‘expert teams’ sent in to make on-the-ground assessments, under the banner of ‘collaboration’ with the host country experiencing the health event, will be chock-a-block with operatives from the CDC and who knows what other Western agencies, all poking around potentially sensitive facilities that a host government might justifiably claim a sovereign right to keep to itself. Likewise with the ‘Compliance Committee’ proposed by the US under the new Chapter IV of the IHRs: its government-appointed members have an open-ended brief, enshrined in international law, to be busybodies.

In layman’s terms, the WHO would be turned into an international thug, with its member states offered the role of backyard gang members.

As a bonus for Western elites, the proposals are a sneaky form of rewriting history. By cementing authority within an international organisation to determine the existence of public health crises and direct potentially draconian emergency responses, Western governments would get to enshrine and legitimise their own extreme responses to the covid outbreak, as we have pointed out previously. Their backsides would thereby be given some protection from legal challenges.

The refusniks: Developing countries

The proposals were pushed primarily by Western countries: the US was joined by Australia, the UK and the EU in arguing for passage. The resistance was led by developing countries who saw it as a colonialist ambush in which their ability to set policy and respond to health threats in a manner commensurate with their domestic situations would be overridden.

Brazil reportedly went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the WHO, and the African group of almost 50 countries, along with India, argued that the amendments were being rushed through without adequate consultation. Russia, China and Iran also objected.

Failure on the first try, but the US and its allies in the West will get more shots to push it through.

How do we expect them to do this? Well, when a proposal gets bogged down inside a giant bureaucratic machine like the WHO, the inevitable response is to set up committees to work in the background and circle back with a new set of proposals to be presented at a future meeting. True to form, a ‘working group’ and ‘expert committee’ are being assembled to accept member state proposals on IHR reform by the end of September this year. These will be ‘sifted through’ and reports will be prepared for review by the WHO’s executive board in January next year. The objective is to have a fresh set of proposals on the table when the WHA convenes for the 77th time in 2024.

Not all was lost

Salvaging something from the fact that the WHA failed to get a consensus around its biggest agenda item, the US and its allies got a small victory on the point of when they can try again – though in their desperation they needed to violate the IHRs’ own rules to accomplish it. Article 55 of the IHRs states unambiguously that a four-month notice period is required for any amendments.

In this instance, revised amendments were presented on May 24, the same day that the first lot were rejected. These were discussed, further amended on May 27 and then adopted on the same day. The approved amendments halve the two-year period for any (further) approved amendments to the IHRs to take effect. (The IHRs that came into force in 2007 were agreed to in 2005 – but under the new resolution, anything agreed to in 2024 would come into effect in 2025 rather than 2026.)

Yet, what was achieved in terms of fast-tracking the force of new amendments was lost in slow-tracking their implementation. Nations would have up to 12 months – double the previous suggestion of six months – to implement any IHR amendments that newly enter into force of law.

State of play

Where is all this going?

If the WHO takes the reins on decisions about what constitutes a health crisis, and can pressure every country into a one-size-fits-all set of responses that it, the WHO, also determines, that’s bad enough. But what about if its invitation to ‘collaborate’ with countries is backed up with teeth, such as sanctions against those who demur? And what about if it then broadens the definition of ‘public health’ by, for example, declaring that climate change falls under that definition? Or racism? Or discrimination against LBTQIA+ people? The possibilities thereby opened up for running the world are endless.

A global ‘health’ empire would bring huge harms to humanity, but a lot of power and money is pushing for it. Don’t think it can’t happen.

Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Developing world to face wave of defaults’

Samizdat – July 10, 2022

Emerging nations, including El Salvador, Ghana, Egypt, Tunisia and Pakistan, will be challenged with a historic cascade of defaults as a quarter-trillion-dollar pile of distressed debts keeps exerting downward pressure on economies, Bloomberg is reporting.

“With the low-income countries, debt risks and debt crises are not hypothetical,” the World Bank’s Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart told the agency on Saturday. “We’re pretty much already there.”

Over the past six months, there’s reportedly been a doubling in the number of emerging markets with sovereign debt that trades at highly distressed levels, meaning yields that indicate investors believe default is a real possibility.

Another cause for major concern reportedly arises from a potential “domino effect” that commonly occurs when scared investors begin yanking money out of countries with economic problems similar to those defaulting nations had previously gone through.

In June, traders reportedly pulled $4 billion out of emerging-market bonds and stocks, marking a fourth straight month of outflows.

Probable defaults may be followed by political instability. Earlier this year, Sri Lanka was the first nation to stop paying its foreign bondholders, burdened by unwieldy food and fuel costs that fueled protests and political chaos.

“Populations suffering from high food prices and shortages of supplies can be a tinderbox for political instability,” Barclays has said, as quoted by Bloomberg.

July 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Colombia elects 1st leftist president in its history: A great supporter of Palestine

By Eman Abusidu  | MEMO | June 24, 2022

In Colombia, where  some 13,000 Palestinians reside, the leftist candidate Gustavo Petro has won the presidential election after he defeated his far-right rival Rodolfo Hernandez. The 62-year-old’s victory represents a major revival for Colombia’s progressive left in Latin America as it joined left-wing parties in Chile, Peru, Mexico and Argentina for the first time. According to figures published by Colombia´s electoral authority, Petro won 50.44 per cent of the votes compared to the 47.31 per cent achieved by his opponent.

“Today is a day of celebration for the people. Let them celebrate the first popular victory. May so much suffering be cushioned in the joy that floods the heart of our country today,” Petro said on Twitter.

Petro was a legislator and a member of the M-19 guerrilla group, which was originally set up during Colombia’s 1970 elections. He later moved into politics and served as a senator and the mayor of Colombia’s capital, Bogota. He was finally victorious in his third attempt in the presidential race, promising to address inequality in a country where nearly half the population lives in poverty and unemployment.

The president-elect is known to be a supporter of the Palestinian cause and defender of human rights, which are being continuously violated in the Occupied Territories. More than once, Petro has described the struggle of the Palestinian people as an “historical struggle of a people for freedom and independence.” He has also posted the Palestinian flag on his Facebook account.

“I raise my voice against the murder of Palestinians. People are not to be massacred, they are to be respected as a culture, as a right to exist under the skies of the planet. Jesus was Palestinian and asked that human beings love one another,” Petro said  in a tweet, accusing Israel forces of carrying out a “massacre” against Gazans during the Great March of Return in May 2018.

Colombia had been the only South American nation that had not recognised Palestine as a sovereign state until it finally took the decision in 2018. The announcement was made public through a letter sent to Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki. The letter was written in August 2018 and signed by Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin Cuellar. “I would like to inform you that in the name of the government of Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos has decided to recognise Palestine as a free, independent and sovereign state,” the letter said.

Petro’s outspoken criticism of Israel’s policies and violations against Palestinians mean Colombia’s ties with Tel Aviv will take a different direction under his leadership. “The State of Israel is one thing and the Jewish religion is another, just as the Colombian State is one thing and the Catholic religion another,” Petro tweeted in 2019. “Confusing state and religion is typical of the archaic mentality. The State of Israel discriminates against Palestinians like the Nazis discriminated against Jews.”

Despite this, Israel’s Foreign Ministry rushed to congratulate Petro, tweeting: “We congratulate the People of Colombia and President Elect @petrogustavo on a successful democratic election and look forward to further strengthening the relations between Israel and Colombia and between our two peoples.”

Petro’s victory has also been described as a “big defeat for the USA”. Over the past two centuries, all Colombian presidents descended from right-wing aristocratic families, known for their loyalty to the US and its policies. This has contributed to making Colombia one of the most important nations in Latin America.

Expectations are rising that Petro’s electoral victory will lead to a deeper change in the political field in Latin America, and to the reconfiguration of Colombia’s relations with the US. With Petro’s victory, Colombia became the third largest country in Latin America to shift to the left. Chile, Peru and Honduras elected leftist presidents in 2021, while in Brazil former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is leading in the polls for this year’s presidential election.

These new Latin American governments will constitute a real threat to American hegemony over the region. Perhaps this explains Joe Biden’s rush to hold the Summit of the Americas in an attempt to test and identify his allies in Latin America.

June 24, 2022 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Ex-Bolivian president Jeanine Anez sentenced to 10 years in prison

Press TV – June 11, 2022

Former Bolivian interim president Jeanine Anez has been sentenced to a 10-year prison term more than a year after being arrested on charges of leading a US-backed plot in 2019 to oust re-elected socialist president Evo Morales.

Anez will serve 10 years in a women’s prison in La Paz, the administrative capital’s First Sentencing Court announced on Friday in a ruling that came three months after her trial began.

Convicted of crimes “contrary to the constitution and a dereliction of duties,” the former right-wing television presenter was sentenced to “a punishment of 10 years” over charges stemming from when she was a senator, before becoming president.

Government prosecutors, however, had asked for a 15-year jail term for Anez, who has been held in pre-trial detention since March 2021 while dismissing her trial as “political persecution.”

Also sentenced to 10 years were the former chief of Bolivia’s armed forces, William Kaliman, and the country’s ex-police chief Yuri Calderon — both of whom have reportedly fled the country and remain on the run.

This is while Anez still faces a separate, pending court case for sedition and other charges related to her short presidential tenure.

At the start of her presidency, the US-sponsored rightist politician had called in the police and military to restore order. The post-election unrest left 22 people dead, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

For that, Anez also further faces genocide charges, which carry prison sentences of between 10 and 20 years.

The IACHR described the 22 deaths that occurred at the beginning of Anez’s presidential stint as “massacres,” and found they indicated “serious violations of human rights.”

Unlike the other accusations against Anez, the case will be dealt with by congress, which will decide whether or not to hold a trial.

The ex-president had already declared she would appeal if convicted, claiming, “We will not stop there. We will go before the international justice system.”

Anez became Bolivia’s interim president in November 2019 after Morales, who had won a fourth consecutive term as president, fled the country in the face of what was widely viewed as a US-sponsored unrest purportedly against alleged electoral fraud.

The US-led and Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS) claimed at the time that it had found “clear evidence” of voting irregularities in favor of Morales, a popular, anti-US president who was re-elected into office for 14 years.

Many potential successors to Morales — all members of his MAS party – were also forced to resign or flee, leaving right-wing opposition member Anez, then vice-president of the Senate, next in line.

Virtually unknown, the lawyer and former TV personality proclaimed herself interim president of the Andean nation on November 12, 2019, two days after Morales’ forced resignation.

The Constitutional Court recognized Anez’s mandate as interim, caretaker president, but MAS members disputed her legitimacy.

Elections were held a year later, and won by Luis Arce – a close ally of Morales.

With the presidency and congress both firmly in MAS control, Morales returned to Bolivia in November 2020.

After handing over the presidential reins to Arce, Anez was detained in March 2021, charged with illegitimate assumption of power.

“I denounce before Bolivia and the world that in an act of abuse and political persecution, the MAS government has ordered my arrest,” she proclaimed in a Twitter post at the time.

June 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Brazilian front-runner slams US billions for Ukraine

Samizdat | June 2, 2022

Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called out US President Joe Biden in two campaign speeches this week, citing the $40 billion in military aid Washington has pledged to Ukraine. Lula is polling far ahead of the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, in the upcoming presidential election.

“Biden, who has never made a speech to give $1 to those who are starving in Africa, announces $40 billion to help Ukraine buy weapons,” Lula said on Wednesday in Porto Alegre. “This can’t be!” he added.

The 76-year-old is the candidate of the leftist Party of Workers (PT), and currently the favorite to win the presidential election in October.

Speaking in Sao Paulo on Tuesday, Lula brought up the $40 billion in another context. How is it possible, he asked, that the world’s supposedly strongest economy is reduced to scouring the globe for baby formula – amid shortages in the US – even as Biden pledges billions in weapons sales to Kiev?

About half of the $40 billion package is directly earmarked for US weapons headed to Ukraine, while the rest would fund the government in Kiev, replenish the depleted Pentagon stockpiles, and fund US military deployments in Europe. Biden signed it on May 21 after both chambers of Congress passed it with token Republican opposition. The physical bill was flown to Asia, where Biden was visiting at the time, so he could formally attach his signature.

Lula has previously criticized Biden over the conflict in Ukraine, saying the US leader could have prevented it, but instead chose to give a blank check to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The United States has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided [the conflict], not incited it,” Lula said in an interview with Time magazine in early May.

“And now we are going to have to foot the bill because of the war on Ukraine. Argentina, Bolivia will also have to pay. You’re not punishing [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. You’re punishing many different countries, you’re punishing mankind,” he added.

Lula was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010 and remains one of the most popular Brazilian politicians ever. He was convicted on corruption charges and jailed in 2018 – during the interim presidency that had impeached his successor, Dilma Rousseff – but the conviction was annulled in 2021. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that Lula did not receive a fair trial, and cleared him to run for office again.

The most recent polls by Datafolha show Lula with a 21-point lead over Bolsonaro.

June 2, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , | 3 Comments

Duque forces MNNA status on Colombia despite unpopularity of NATO

By Paul Antonopoulos | May 31, 2022

Colombian president Iván Duque announced on his social media that his country is officially a non-NATO strategic ally. With less than two months to go until the end of his government, the Colombian president will seemingly be replaced with a centre-left candidate, the first in the country’s history.

“We welcome the memorandum sent by US President Joe Biden and the Secretary of State, which formalizes the designation of Colombia as a strategic non-member ally of NATO. A decision that reaffirms the good ties in our bilateral relations,” Duque wrote on Twitter on May 23.

The South American country will now have privileges when it comes to accessing the US military industry and extensive financing for procurements. However, this action by Duque has not been welcomed by the Colombian opposition, who showed their rejection of the announcement and reiterated that it is just one more move by the current administration to try and bolster the presidential elections that will have its second round on June 19.

Sandra Ramírez, a senator for the opposition Commons Party, said: “Colombia as an extra ally of NATO does not benefit us at all. On the contrary, we join their interventionist and war policies. In addition, it goes against sovereignty, which in the end is the voice of the majority of Colombians, and which is anchored to the self-determination of the peoples.”

Ramírez highlights that it is a simple lobby on the part of Duque, who has always put his personal interests above Colombia. “Surely that’s what his advisers told him and that’s why he spent so much time lobbying and not governing. NATO represents a policy of war and here we want a policy of peace and social inclusion to prevail. With this agreement we will continue to be at the mercy of US interests, which we reject.”

With Gustavo Petro, founder of the centre-left Humane Colombia, leading the polls and expected to be the next president of the Latin American country, Ramírez says he must reverse Duque’s decision and leave the NATO program immediately to focus his energies on solving local problems instead.

Another Commons Party Senator, Carlos Antonio Lozada, says that according to his sources, “Petro will get out of any military agreement that ties us to the geopolitical interests of the United States, which would be aimed against strengthening regional integration.”

A Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) does not mean that in the event that Colombia suffers external aggression, the US will intercede to protect the country, as is the case with actual members states. In this way, Colombia’s only advantage is that it can gain access to American weapons – at a time when much of South America is moving towards the just as effective but far cheaper Russian and Chinese weaponry.

The process for Colombia’s MNNA status began on March 10 during the meeting between Duque and Biden at the White House. Colombia thus joined the list of 17 MNNA countries, being the third in Latin America after Brazil and Argentina. The other allies are Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Jordan, New Zealand, Thailand, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, Bahrain, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Tunisia.

Colombia having MNNA status certainly makes the June 19 election all the more interesting, especially when considering this could be the country’s most historic election as for the first time a progressive candidate could be president of the country.

As Colombia has a central place for US policy in Latin America, the second round vote then holds an even greater importance for Washington, which closely observes events in the world’s leading cocaine-producing country.

For the South American country, a progressive government could mean more favorable conditions for the strengthening of Latin American integration. Colombia, with its first potential progressive president, could leave behind a foreign policy that looks exclusively at the US and be an active part of continental integration. But until then, the question remains whether Petro would engage in the task of reversing Colombia’s MNNA status.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

May 31, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

The US-Hosted Summit of the Americas May Deal a Humiliating Blow to Biden

By Ekaterina Blinova | Samizdat | May 14, 2022

Less than three weeks before the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, it is unclear whether some major Latin American heads, including the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, will show up, creating yet another PR debacle for President Joe Biden.

The ninth Summit of the Americas (SOA) is due to take place on 6-10 June 2022 in Los Angeles, California. The City of Angels is home to the largest Hispanic/Latino community in the US. The event is held every three or four years. It will be convened in the US for the first time since its 1994 inaugural session in Miami.

According to the US State Department, a wide range of issues is expected to be discussed at the gathering, including the COVID-19 pandemic, “the cracks in health, economic, educational, and social systems”; threats to democracy; the climate crisis; and “a lack of equitable access to economic, social, and political opportunities” for “most vulnerable and underrepresented”.

As White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told journalists on 10 May, no formal invitations have been sent so far. Nevertheless, the upcoming event’s exclusiveness has already raised questions.

In March, it was revealed that Cuban officials and the presidents of Venezuela and Nicaragua would not be included, according to the New York Times. Cuba has long been subjected to Washington’s embargo, while the US has not formally recognised Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro or his Nicaraguan counterpart Daniel Ortega.

In response, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signalled that he would skip the summit if the heads of those countries were not invited.

“If there are exclusions, if not everyone is invited, then a delegation from the Mexican government will go, but I will not go,” López Obrador told a news conference on 10 May.

The same day, Reuters broke that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is not planning to attend the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry was less categorical telling the media outlet that “the president’s attendance is being studied and is not confirmed.”

Brazil is the largest country in South America and the fifth largest nation in the world, which will obviously make its absence notable.

At the same time, the absence of the Mexican president from the summit could axe the Biden administration’s opportunity to achieve any viable migration deal amid the US border crisis. Mexico remains one of the largest sources of migrants to the US, according to the NYT.

“[T]he boycott threats underscore the challenges facing the Biden administration in advancing its interests in the Americas, where the United States has long played an outsized role,” the newspaper notes.

What’s more, the unfolding situation is “threatening to deliver a humiliating blow to the White House,” acknowledges the NYT.

May 14, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | 1 Comment

Court orders arrest of ex-president over murder of priests

RT | March 12, 2022

An El Salvador court has ordered the arrest of ex-president Alfredo Cristiani in connection with the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests.

The six clergymen – five Spaniards and a Salvadorian, along with their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter – were killed on the campus of the Jesuit Central American University on November 16, 1989. It was carried out by an elite commando unit known as the Atlacatl Battalion during the country’s civil war, which was a counter-insurgency unit created in 1980 at the Panama-based US Army’s School of the Americas.

Prosecutors believe that Cristiani, who held the country’s top post between 1989 and 1994, knew of the murder plans but chose not to prevent the tragedy.

According to a statement by El Salvador’s attorney general’s office, the court ordered Cristiani and former lawmaker Rodolfo Parker, along with several former military officers, to be put “under provisional detention” pending further investigation.

Charges against Cristiani and others were filed on February 25, with Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado saying his office was “determined to go after those accused of ordering this regrettable and tragic event.”

The former president, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, denies any involvement or knowledge of the military’s murder plan.

“The truth is I never knew of the plans they had to commit those killings,” Cristiani said in a statement.

“They never informed me nor asked for my authorization because they knew that I would never have authorized that Father [Ignacio] Ellacuria or his brothers were harmed,” Cristiani said.

The murder was staged to make it look as though it was committed by leftist guerillas. Out of nine military officers who had been initially put on trial, seven were freed by the court, and two served short sentences before being released in 1993 under an amnesty. Later, the amnesty was found to have been unconstitutional and one of these two officers – Colonel Guillermo Benavides – was jailed again and currently remains in prison. Another colonel, Inocente Orlando Montano, was sentenced to 133 years in prison by a Spanish court in 2020.

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

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