Venezuelan President and High Ranking Officials to Declare Wealth, Ex-Minister Investigated for Corruption
By Z.C. DUTKA | Venezuelanalysis | June 18, 2014
San Francisco – Venezuelan comptroller Adelina Gonzalez announced yesterday that all senior officials in public office must update their sworn declaration of wealth (DJP) between the 1st and 31st of July.
The DJP has been required for select offices since the ratification of the Law Against Corruption in 2003. A government website for the task was set in place in 2009. The last DJP summons was for all police bodies, though the current injunction – detailed in the Official Gazette published just days after president Nicolas Maduro’s election to office – is much broader in scale.
The mandate extends to all state, federal, and municipal employs of superior rank, as well as any functionary working within the realm of public accounting. This includes President Nicolas Maduro, as well as magistrates of the Supreme Court, military generals and high ranking army personnel, the National Electoral Council, the Attorney General’s Office, governors, ministers and vice ministers, ambassadors, consuls, notaries, the Central Bank directors’ office and university rectors.
Those who do not comply with this requirement will be fined or, as articles 38 and 39 of the corruption law indicate, may be removed from their post and banished from all public office for up to 12 months.
Maduro’s firm stance against corruption has defined his presidency from the beginning, though critics believe his policies have been largely unsuccessful. Since he took office in April of 2013, there have been arrests and investigations within the tax and customs office, Seniat, the goods and services monitor, Indepabis, and state owned iron ore company, Ferrominera.
While addressing the National Assembly last October, the head of state implored deputies to reject the notion of corruption as “normal in political life.”
“I call on the people to not tolerate corruption,” he said, “neither of those with a yellow collar [opposition supporters] nor the corruption of those with a red collar [supporters of the Bolivarian revolution]. It’s the same thuggery, no matter how you dress; it’s the same anti-people and anti-country behavior.”
In an interview last September, Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres went into detail, “This problem of corruption neither started with the revolution, nor did it increase during the revolution. Rather, it began when the republic began. I believe that we should see corruption as part of an effort to dominate sectors of the public administration… In all public institutions there used to be parallel institutions. There always was someone who you would pay [on the side], to take care of the procedures. This created a culture.”
He explained how increasing government efficiency and eliminating bureaucracy are two key methods of destroying the normalized institution of corruption. He reminded reporters that in the pre-Chavez era, there was only one moment when politicians were publicly accused of corruption. That moment involved a scheme which left the country with “literally zero dollars in foreign currency reserves.
“Some experts who have studied this say that this was the greatest fraud in the history of the world,” Rodriguez stated.
Though the conspiracy was of vast proportions and markedly reliant on government insiders, only one man was accused and convicted for the renowned “RICADI fraud,” Rodriguez said.
Ex-minister accused
The Attorney General’s Office, presided over by Luisa Ortega Diaz, is currently conducting an investigation on Eugenia Sader, Health Minister from 2010 to 2013. Sader, a known supporter of Hugo Chavez, was replaced in her position shortly after Maduro took office.
An alleged Justice Department informant leaked information to local newspapers that Sader’s trial will begin on Thursday, at which time she will be questioned regarding numerous “irregularities in management” during her time as Health Minister. The informant took this to mean corruption and embezzlement, but others interpreted the term differently.
On Tuesday a house deputy for the opposition Justice First party and physician, Dinorah Figuera, asked attorney general Diaz to clarify what the charges against Sader are to be. Figuera told reporters she believes the case corresponds with a number of grave complaints her office made in regards to public hospital management under Sader’s administration, including emergency rooms closed for improvements that were never reopened.
An auditing commission of the national assembly last year questioned Merida city mayor and member of the opposition Lestor Rodriguez, in response to a dozen accusations of embezzlement gathered by a city councilor. At the time, the mayoralty had not collected trash in Merida since the previous year, though Rodriguez had claimed it was for lack of funds.
Rodriguez was later indicted for corruption.
Mexico: Jailed Activist’s Family Threatened
Weekly News Update on the Americas | June 15, 2014
A group of Mexican legislative deputies announced on June 2 that they would call on the federal Governance Secretariat to guarantee the security of family members of Nestora Salgado, an imprisoned community activist from the largely indigenous town of Olinalá in the southwestern state of Guerrero. The announcement came one day after an attack on a bus that Salgado’s daughter Saira Salgado was riding from Olinalá to Mexico City for a scheduled meeting with legislators. Armed men stopped the bus shortly after it left Olinalá and without explanation executed a woman passenger. Saira Salgado said the victim was dressed the way she herself is usually dressed. After the murder, the men left without harming or robbing the other passengers. Deputy Roberto López, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), charged that the attack was not an isolated incident.
Nestora Salgado is a naturalized US citizen from Olinalá who migrated to the US and settled in Washington state. In recent years she began visiting her hometown and became involved in community affairs there; eventually she was elected head of the community police force. Community police forces are legally recognized in Guerrero, and Salgado originally had good relations with the state government. But in August 2013 she ordered the arrest of a local official, Armando Patrón Jiménez, in connection with cattle rustling and the deaths of two ranchers. Five days later Salgado herself was arrested on charges of kidnapping and was removed to a federal women’s prison at Tepic in the western state of Nayarit. She has been held there ever since without access to a lawyer; her daughter’s meeting with legislators was intended to discuss their plan to have her transferred to a more accessible prison in Mexico City.
Mexican and US activists have organized a campaign for Salgado’s release, along with a petition drive. The US government had done nothing to help with Salgado’s case despite her status as a US citizen, Deputy Loretta Ortiz Ahlf, of the small leftist Labor Party (PT), said on June 2. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/3/14; Desinformémonos (Mexico) 6/8/14)
Maduro Unveils Policy to Eradicate Extreme Poverty in Venezuela
By Ewan Robertson | Venezuelanalysis | June 9, 2014
Mérida – Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro unveiled a new policy to focus on the needs of the least well off as part of his pledge to eradicate extreme poverty in the country by 2018.
The policy involves creating almost 1,500 special attention points that group together various social programs in areas where extreme poverty still prevails, in order to meet the basic needs of these communities.
The attention points, called Social Mission Bases, will house government social programs such as free community food kitchens, subsidised food stores, and free medical clinics. They will be spread out over the 255 of the country’s 1163 local districts where households experiencing extreme poverty still exist.
Venezuela’s National Institute of Statistics estimates that 5.5% of Venezuelan households still experience extreme poverty. This is calculated using the regionally based Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) structural poverty indicator, which considers as extremely poor those homes where two or more basic needs, such as access to basic services, adequate living conditions, or schooling, are not met.
The percentage of households in extreme poverty has decreased steadily over the previous decade from 12.7% in 2003 to 5.5% currently. In the same period, overall structural poverty has decreased from 30.5% to 19.6%.
President Nicolas Maduro has vowed to eliminate extreme poverty altogether by 2018, the end of his current term of office, as well as to continue to reduce overall structural poverty.
“In the year 2018 I’ll be…able to say that we’ve achieved the goal of zero misery in Venezuela… the Bolivarian revolution must end poverty to establish a system of equality [and] justice,” he said as the first Social Mission Base was founded in the coastal state of Miranda.
Maduro also informed the country that the Social Mission Bases will be complemented with multidisciplinary teams of social program workers, such as community doctors, sports therapy trainers and cultural promoters, who will visit deprived communities house by house to assess living conditions and attend to differing needs.
“The great battalion [multi-disciplinary team] … won’t have another objective but to fight a strong battle along with our people to eradicate extreme poverty,” the president said, while also encouraging supporters to participate in the work of the Social Mission Bases.
The policy announcements come amid a debate over poverty in Venezuela, with government critics pointing to an increase in income-based poverty between the second half of 2012 and the first half of 2013, in the context of a sharp increase in annual inflation.
“The days when poverty was a winning issue for chavismo are over. Official statistics now show that poverty is rising rapidly,” wrote anti-government blogger Juan Nagel for Foreign Policy magazine recently.
Nevertheless income-based poverty actually decreased in the second half of 2013 to lower than it was in early 2012, and in keeping with the level of income-based poverty recorded in recent years, at 32.1%, down from 62.1% a decade earlier.
The Social Mission Bases policy also comes not long after Maduro announced reforms to the country’s national system of welfare programs, in order to improve their performance and reduce bureaucracy and overlapping functions.
The programs, known as “missions”, include free health clinics, free educational programs, subsidised food outlets, and the construction of heavily subsidised housing. They are held as one factor behind the large reduction in poverty since the Bolivarian government was elected to power in 1999.
Brazil: Worker’s Struggle Trumps Sports Spectacle
By James Petras :: 06.03.2014
Introduction
For decades social critics have bemoaned the influence of sports and entertainment spectacles in ‘distracting’ workers from struggling for their class interests. According to these analysts, ‘class consciousness’ was replaced by ‘mass’ consciousness.
They argued that atomized individuals, manipulated by the mass media, were converted into passive consumers who identified with millionaire sports heroes, soap opera protagonists and film celebrities.
The culmination of this ‘mystification’ – mass distraction –were the ‘world championships’ watched by billions around the world and sponsored and financed by billionaire corporations: the World Series (baseball), the World Cup (soccer/futbol), and the Super Bowl (American football).
Today, Brazil is the living refutation of this line of cultural-political analysis. Brazilians have been described as ‘football crazy’. Its teams have won the most number of World Cups. Its players are coveted by the owners of the most important teams in Europe. Its fans are said to “live and die with football” . . . Or so we are told.
Yet it is in Brazil where the biggest protests in the history of the World Cup have taken place. As early as a year before the Games, scheduled for June 2014, there have been mass demonstrations of up to a million Brazilians. In just the last few weeks, strikes by teachers, police, construction workers and municipal employees have proliferated. The myth of the mass media spectacles mesmerizing the masses has been refuted – at least in present-day Brazil.
To understand why the mass spectacle has been a propaganda bust it is essential to understand the political and economic context in which it was launched, as well as the costs and benefits and the tactical planning of popular movements.
The Political and Economic Context: The World Cup and the Olympics
In 2002, the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) candidate Lula DaSilva won the presidential elections. His two terms in office (2003 – 2010) were characterized by a warm embrace of free market capitalism together with populist poverty programs. Aided by large scale in-flows of speculative capital, attracted by high interest rates, and high commodity prices for its agro-mineral exports, Lula launched a massive poverty program providing about $60 a month to 40 million poor Brazilians, who formed part of Lula’s mass electoral base. The Workers Party reduced unemployment, increased wages and supported low-interest consumer loans, stimulating a ‘consumer boom’ that drove the economy forward.
To Lula and his advisers, Brazil was becoming a global power, attracting world-class investors and incorporating the poor into the domestic market.
Lula was hailed as a ‘pragmatic leftist’ by Wall Street and a ‘brilliant statesman’ by the Left!
In line with this grandiose vision (and in response to hoards of presidential flatterers North and South), Lula believed that Brazil’s rise to world prominence required it to ‘host’ the World Cup and the Olympics and he embarked on an aggressive campaign. . . Brazil was chosen.
Lula preened and pontificated: Brazil, as host, would achieve the symbolic recognition and material rewards a global power deserved.
The Rise and Fall of Grand Illusions
The ascent of Brazil was based on foreign flows of capital conditioned by differential (favorable) interest rates. And when rates shifted, the capital flowed out. Brazil’s dependence on high demand for its agro-mineral exports was based on sustained double-digit economic growth in Asia. When China’s economy slowed down, demand and prices fell, and so did Brazil’s export earnings.
The PT’s ‘pragmatism’ meant accepting the existing political, administrative and regulatory structures inherited from the previous neo-liberal regimes. These institutions were permeated by corrupt officials linked to building contractors notorious for cost over-runs and long delays on state contracts.
Moreover, the PT’s ‘pragmatic’ electoral machine was built on kick-backs and bribes. Vast sums were siphoned from public services into private pockets.
Puffed up on his own rhetoric, Lula believed Brazil’s economic emergence on the world stage was a ‘done deal’. He proclaimed that his pharaonic sports complexes – the billions of public money spent on dozens of stadiums and costly infrastructure – would “pay for themselves”.
The Deadly ‘Demonstration Effect’: Social Reality Defeats Global Grandeur
Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, Lula’ protégé, has allocated billions of reales to finance her predecessor’s massive building projects: stadiums, hotels, highways and airports to accommodate an anticipated flood of overseas soccer fans.
The contrast between the immediate availability of massive amounts of public funds for the World Cup and the perennial lack of money for deteriorating essential public services (transport, schools, hospitals and clinics) has been a huge shock to Brazilians and a provocation to mass action in the streets.
For decades, the majority of Brazilians, who depended on public services for transport, education and medical care, (the upper middle classes can afford private services), were told that “there were no funds”, that “budgets had to be balanced”, that a “budget surplus was needed to meet IMF agreements and to service the debt”.
For years public funds had been siphoned away by corrupt political appointees to pay for electoral campaigns, leading to filthy, overcrowded transport, frequently breaking down, and commuter delays in sweltering buses and long lines at the stations. For decades, schools were in shambles, teacher rushed from school to school to make-up for their miserable minimum-wage salaries leading to low quality education and neglect. Public hospitals were dirty, dangerous and crowded; under-paid doctors frequently took on private patients on the side, and essential medications were scarce in the public hospitals and overpriced in the pharmacies.
The public was outraged by the obscene contrast between the reality of dilapidated clinics with broken windows, overcrowded schools with leaking roofs and unreliable mass transport for the average Brazilian and the huge new stadiums, luxury hotels and airports for wealthy foreign sports fans and visitors.
The public was outraged by the obvious official lies: the claim that there were ‘no funds’ for teachers when billions of Reales were instantly available to construct luxury hotels and fancy stadium box seats for wealthy soccer fans.
The final detonator for mass street protest was the increase in bus and train fares to ‘cover losses’ – after public airports and highways had been sold cheaply to private investors who raised tolls and fees.
The protestors marching against the increased bus and train fares were joined by tens of thousands Brazilians broadly denouncing the Government’s priorities: Billions for the World Cup and crumbs for public health, education, housing and transport!
Oblivious to the popular demands, the government pushed ahead intent on finishing its ‘prestige projects’. Nevertheless, construction of stadiums fell behind schedule because of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement. Building contractors, who were pressured, lowered safety standards and pushed workers harder, leading to an increase in workplace deaths and injury. Construction workers walked out protesting the speed-ups and deterioration of work safety.
The Rousseff regime’s grandiose schemes have provoked a new chain of protests. The Homeless Peoples Movement occupied urban lots near a new World Cup stadium demanding ‘social housing’ for the people instead of new five-star hotels for affluent foreign sports aficionados.
Escalating costs for the sports complexes and increased government expenditures have ignited a wave of trade union strikes to demand higher wages beyond the regime’s targets. Teachers and health workers were joined by factory workers and salaried employees striking in strategic sectors, such as the transport and security services, capable of seriously disrupting the World Cup.
The PT’s embrace of the grandiose sports spectacle, instead of highlighting Brazil’s ‘debut as a global power’, has spotlighted the vast contrast between the affluent and secure ten percent in their luxury condos in Brazil, Miami and Manhattan, with access to high quality private clinics and exclusive private and overseas schools for their offspring, with the mass of average Brazilians, stuck for hours sweating in overcrowded buses, in dingy emergency rooms waiting for mere aspirins from non-existent doctors and in wasting their children’s futures in dilapidated classrooms without adequate, full-time teachers.
Conclusion
The political elite, especially the entourage around the Lula-Rousseff Presidency have fallen victim to their own delusions of popular support. They believed that subsistence pay-offs (food baskets) to the very poor would allow them to spend billions of public money on sports spectacles to entertain and impress the global elite. They believed that the mass of workers would be so enthralled by the prestige of holding the World Cup in Brazil, that they would overlook the great disparity between government expenditures for elite grand spectacles and the absence of support to meet the everyday needs of Brazilian workers.
Even trade unions, seemingly tied to Lula, who bragged of his past leadership of the metal workers, broke ranks when they realized that the ‘money was out there’ – and that the regime, pressured by construction deadlines, could be pressured to raise wages to get the job done.
Make no mistake, Brazilians are sports minded. They avidly follow and cheer their national team. But they are also conscious of their needs. They are not content to passively accept the great social disparities exposed by the current mad scramble to stage the World Cup and Olympics in Brazil. The government’s vast expenditure on the Games has made it clear that Brazil is a rich country with a multitude of social inequalities. They have learned that vast sums are available to improve the basic services of everyday life. They realized that, despite its rhetoric, the ‘Workers Party’ was playing a wasteful prestige game to impress an international capitalist audience. They realized that they have strategic leverage to pressure the government and address some of the inequalities in housing and salaries through mass action. And they have struck. They realize they deserve to enjoy the World Cup in affordable, adequate public housing and travel to work (or to an occasional game) in decent buses and trains. Class consciousness, in the case of Brazil, has trumped the mass spectacle. ‘Bread and circuses’ have given way to mass protests.
Zapatistas Retire Subcommander Marcos
HAVANA TIMES — May 26, 2014
Subcommader Marcos has spoken “his last words in public,” reads a statement from the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). According to the statement, the figure of Marcos is “no longer necessary,” reported Pulsar news agency.
Marcos announced he will no longer be the spokesperson for the EZLN and will change names to subcommander Galeano, in tribute to the indigenous leader killed on May 2 during an attack on the small farmer and farm worker organization Central Independiente de Obreros Agrícolas y Campesinos Histórica (Cioac).
The new Zapatista spokesperson is subcommander Moses, explained Marcos. He noted that “the baton of command is not passed on due to illness or death or by internal displacement, purging or cleansing, it is due to internal changes that took place and take place in the EZLN.”
Recalling the birth of the character “subcommander Marcos”, he said it was “a complex maneuver of distraction, a trick of terrible and wonderful magic, a malicious move of the native heart.”
“The character was created and now its creators, the Zapatistas, destroy it,” said Marcos.
“It is our belief that to rebel and fight that neither leaders, political bosses, messiahs or saviors are necessary. To fight it just takes a little sense of shame, a bit of dignity and a lot of organization,” concludes the Zapatista statement.
South American union raps US sanction bid on Venezuela
Press TV – May 24, 2014
Twelve South American states have rejected an effort by US legislators to impose sanctions on Venezuela over alleged rights abuses.
In a statement issued on Friday following a meeting in the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, foreign ministers from the 12-member Union of South American Nations (Unasur) said that a bill proposed by American lawmakers against Caracas would violate Venezuela’s internal affairs and undermine attempts to defuse the crisis in the country.
Sanctions are obstacles for Venezuela, whose “people can overcome their difficulties with independence, and in democratic peace,” the statement said.
The US House of Representatives will vote on the legislation on Wednesday. The bill will order the administration of US President Barack Obama to ban visas and freeze the assets of Venezuelan officials involved in the alleged rights abuses in the past three months.
Venezuela has been the scene of protests against and in support of the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro since February.
The protests broke out in the western city of San Cristobal, where students took to the streets to criticize the crime rate and inflation in the country. The demonstrations later spread to other cities including the capital Caracas.
Maduro says the unrest is a US-backed plan to topple his government.
Last week, Maduro urged opposition leaders to return to political talks aimed at ending street clashes in the country.
The move came after the Venezuelan opposition suspended the negotiations with the government on May 14 to protest against what it called the mass arrests of anti-government activists.
The opposition says it will not return to the negotiating table until the government accepts its demands, including amnesty for opposition prisoners.
The government, on the other hand, says the opposition is making impossible requests that are akin to blackmail.
Remember When Venezuela and Bolivia Kicked the U.S. DEA Out of Their Countries, Accusing It of Espionage? Looks Like They Were Right…
By Stephan Lefebvre | CEPR Americas Blog | May 22, 2014
In their latest article on U.S. government spying for The Intercept, Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras review and publish leaked documents that show that the U.S. government may have used the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to aid the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on U.S. citizens and non-citizens in foreign countries. The NSA is shown to have assisted the DEA with efforts to capture narcotraffickers, but the leaked documents also refer to “a vibrant two-way information sharing relationship” between the two intelligence agencies, implying that the DEA shares its information with the NSA to aid with non-drug-related spying. This may explain how the NSA has gathered not just metadata but also the full-take audio from “virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.”
The authors write,
The DEA has long been in a unique position to help the NSA gain backdoor access to foreign phone networks. “DEA has close relationships with foreign government counterparts and vetted foreign partners,” the manager of the NSA’s drug-war efforts reported in a 2004 memo. Indeed, with more than 80 international offices, the DEA is one of the most widely deployed U.S. agencies around the globe.
But what many foreign governments fail to realize is that U.S. drug agents don’t confine themselves to simply fighting narcotics traffickers. “DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is,” says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who works with the drug-reform advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence.”
What’s more, Selander adds, the NSA has aided the DEA for years on surveillance operations. “On our reports, there’s drug information and then there’s non-drug information,” he says. “So countries let us in because they don’t view us, really, as a spy organization.”
While the documents accompanying the article reveal detailed information that has never before been available to the public, this is not the first time that the DEA has faced allegations of spying.
In 2005, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela stopped cooperating with the DEA after accusing it of espionage in his country. At the time, a State Department spokesperson responded by saying, “the accusations that somehow the Drug Enforcement Agency is involved in espionage are baseless. There’s no substance or justification for them.” Using arguments that would change very little over the next nine years, a State Department official said at the time, “I think it’s pretty clear to us that the motivation for this is not the accusation itself or not what they state is the problem. The motivation is an effort to detract from the government’s increasingly deficient record of cooperation.”
Three years later, President Evo Morales expelled the DEA from Bolivia saying, “there were DEA agents who worked to conduct political espionage.” He also said, “we can control ourselves internally. We don’t need any spying from anybody.” The State Department spokesperson said in response, “the charges that have been made are just patently absurd. We reject them categorically”, and the news agency EFE reported that “Washington has repeatedly denied that the DEA has been involved in any activities in Bolivia apart from the war on drugs.”
Few of the press reports from 2005 or 2008 took these accusations seriously, and the State Department dismissed the allegations categorically, but in 2008, CEPR’s co-director Mark Weisbrot wrote that “To the Bolivians, the U.S. is using the “war on drugs” throughout Latin America mainly as an excuse to get boots on the ground, and establish ties with local military and police forces.” To this list, we can now add access to national phone and communication networks, and storage of the content of phone calls.
U.S. Senate Committee Approves Sanctions, Venezuela to Appeal to United Nations
By Z.C. Dutka | Venezuelanalysis | May 20th 2014
Earlier this afternoon in Washington, the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate approved 13 to 2 the “Venezuelan Human Rights and Democracy Protection Act.” The bill includes sanctions on key individuals of the Venezuelan government and at least $15 million to “defend human rights… and strengthen the rule of law.”
The Menendez Bill
Committee chair, Democrat Robert Menendez, who played a lead role in the writing of the proposed legislation, plans to present the bill before the whole Senate within the coming weeks.
The legal measures proposed are in regards to recent anti-government protests that have reached levels of extreme violence in certain Venezuelan cities, resulting in 42 dead, 800 injured, and millions of dollars of public property damaged, including the burning of multiple universities.
Menendez said the US can’t “play the role of bystander” while Venezuelan president is going to “dangerous extremes to silence political dissent.”
“The U.S. should always be on the side of human rights around the world,” said another lead supporter, Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio.
Rubio has prepared list of Venezuelan military and government officials who would be targeted for sanctions if the bill were to pass. Among those listed are attorney general Luisa Ortega Diaz and the head of operations for the National Guard, Manuel Quevedo.
Earlier this month another piece of similar legislation, the Venezuelan Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, promoted by Florida congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, passed the corresponding foreign committee of the U.S. Congress. It has yet to be addressed by Congress as a whole.
Roberta Jacobson, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, has attended the senate hearings and expressed concern on behalf of the White House.
“This is not a U.S.-Venezuela issue,” she said. “We have strongly resisted attempts to be used as a distraction from Venezuela’s real problems.”
She has displayed equal unease that the bill might distract from the important dialogue that is taking place between the Venezuelan government and the opposition.
Appeal to the UN
Even before the bill passed today’s Senate committee, Venezuelan foreign minister Elias Jaua expressed outrage at what he considers repeated US “interference” in Venezuelan affairs.
On Thursday Jaua announced his plan to present a formal claim to the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
“We’ve had enough of the United States assuming a role that belongs to multilateral bodies, Jaua said Thursday. “We must remember that as a free and independent nation we do not recognize the United States parliament… as a legislative [force] over Venezuela. There are basic principles of the United Nations Charter that must be respected.”
The minister has called a meeting with the UNASUR, to be held next week in Ecuador. He plans to bring with him a “dossier of all the declarations of interference posed by representatives of the United States, starting with president Obama, Secretary [of State John] Kerry, and others…”
The West’s Non-Linear Warfare and the Right for the Rest to Resist
By Andrew Korybko | Oriental Review | May 19, 2014
Nearly two weeks ago, Peter Pomerantsev, writing for Foreign Affairs, published an article about “How Putin Is Reinventing Warfare”. He alleges that Russia is engaging in “non-linear warfare”, strongly alluding that this poses a threat to the West. If one can read between the lines of his biased and subjective approach, he is in actuality describing a very real and objective development – the restoration of Russian power and global standing. His ire is likely due to Russia now being able to deflect international information and media assaults against it and its policies and finally promote the truth. Pomerantsev then goes on a peculiar ranting spiel where he alleges a convoluted metaphor of Russia conspiring to be a “corporate raider”, an exercise in exasperation which will likely only reach those with pre-existing anti-Russian beliefs. It is the end of his article, however, that forms the basis of this response to it. Pomerantsev uses the analogy of the West’s “global village” versus Russia’s “non-linear warfare” to make his final point in throwing mud at Russia. In reality, there is not one “global village”, but rather, many regional civilizational villages that are experiencing Western raids and “non-linear warfare”, and they have finally started to band together to stop the marauders.
The liberal end of history (aka “the global village”) does not exist outside of ideological fantasy, and the world is instead divided into civilizational zones (regional villages) united around certain actors (Russia, China, Islamic pillars, the West). This forms the basis of the running metaphor that will be utilized below to advance the claim of the West waging non-linear warfare against the Rest.
Repeated raids from Western marauders and bandits, whose village is the only one seeking to expand, loot, and plunder, has resulted in parts of the other villages being burnt down. In the past decade, the Islamic village experienced this the worst, with conflagrations decimating its Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, and now Syrian neighborhoods. Currently, the Eurasian village is having to deal with a fire in Ukraine, one that was purposely set to spread to the Russian core. However, as a result of these repeated raids, the regional villages have formed self-defense forces and are now working together to put out the fires and stop the raiding. Experience has taught them how to successfully resist and defy the Western village. In the real world, the success of international media firms (RT, Press TV, CCTV, Telesur) shows that media and information assaults can in fact be deflected and that perception management and national PR initiatives are not under the sole monopoly of the West.
Pomerantsev’s claims that “(economic) interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression” could not be more opposite to the truth. The Western village is actually two large ones, the US and the EU, and the American village grew out of the EU one and now controls its creator. In this case, the suburb controls the center, so to speak. It is the interconnection between the Eurasian (Russian) and EU villages that serves as the real check on further US aggression against the former. When not marauding and raiding, the Western village also tries to infiltrate the others via NGOs and Color Revolutions. Once it flips some members of the village and/or installs its pick as village leader, these turncoat individuals can “open the gates from within”, promote mutiny, and lead to the annexation of the village into the Western-dominated expanding sprawl.
Pulling back from the metaphor, the Brzezinski Doctrine (“The Eurasian Balkans”) is the definition of non-linear warfare and subversive destabilization. It uses NGOs as destabilizing elements within the targeted states, and for this reason, foreign-funded NGOs are required to register as “foreign agents” inside the Russian Federation. Gene Sharp’s writings have also provided pivotal tactical advice in advancing the West’s non-linear warfare strategy. Taking the use of non-state actors even further, the West has a history of promoting militarized proxy groups to carry out its policies. This is most clearly seen in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, although other countries have also been victims of this underhanded method of war. On the other hand, the West obviously engages in conventional warfare as well. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 2003 Iraq War. Mixing the two methods together is the new trend of American foreign policy. A non-linear campaign of militarized proxy destabilization culminated in a conventional NATO bombing in Libya. After this “success”, the West then turned its sights on Syria, but as a result of adroit Russian foreign policy maneuvers, non-linear warfare was stymied from mutating into its conventional form.
Pomerantsev’s article also uses fear mongering and heavy hype to scare the audience into thinking that Russia is proactively forming some kind of imaginary coalition against the West from within. If there happens to exist an overlap of perceived interests and objectives between Russia and domestic Western actors, it is because both parties arrived at the same conclusions after undergoing the same process – experiencing Western unipolar dominance and discriminatory targeting for two decades. For example, “Euro-scepticism” is also seen in Southeast Asia by the ASEAN members’ reluctance to form an EU-like union. The flower of New Leftism and resistance ideology in South America organically began to bloom in the 2000s, tended over by Hugo Chavez. In a similar fashion, the traditionally conservative societies of India, China, and Africa are just as disgusted as Russia’s by certain Western-centric values, such as the “bearded woman” of Eurovision. In laboratory conditions, the cause (Western dominance) has thus been proven to repeatedly result in similar effects all across the world, thereby confirming the hypothesis that Russia and others arrive at their conclusions on their own. There is no “contradictory kaleidoscope of messages”, as each actor’s resistance and defiance to the West, for various reasons and in differing forms, were a natural development.
To conclude, there are currently multiple civilizational liberation struggles playing out in the Pandora’s Box-setting of Western-led post-modernism. This is not a new page in the old historical story, but an absolutely new edition that is still being written. The Rest, absolutely diverse in their identity and overall mission, are coming together to stop the Western steamroller. They must work together to repel its aggression and safeguard the right to practice their identity and move forward with their historical mission as they individually deem fit. It is the democratic and sovereign choice of each civilization to be able to conduct itself how it pleases, but in order to get to that point, they must be liberated from the terror of the Western threat. These villages do not want to raze the Western one, so to speak, but they understand that the West will raze them if they can’t be annexed. In this manner, they are engaged in a do-or-die struggle, and at no time before in their histories has the situation been more dire. The Rest is slowly coalescing into providing a unified front against the Western menace, hoping to neutralize its raids and incursions so that they can once more go about their civilizational business in constructing and solidifying their societies. If, as Pomerantsev states, Russia and the Rest are anti-Western “raiders”, then yes, the future surely does belong to these resistant and defiant actors.
Andrew Korybko is the American Master’s Degree student at the Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO).
Argentina to appeal recent court ruling over AMIA case
Press TV – May 16, 2014
Argentina has vowed to appeal a decision by a federal court that rejected an agreement between the Latin American country and Iran over a joint probe into a bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center.
On Thursday, an Argentinean federal court struck down a 2013 agreement between the South American country and Iran to jointly investigate deadly attacks on a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994.
Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor in the investigation of the AMIA center explosion, in which 85 people were killed, had argued in his appeal to the court that the 2013 agreement constituted an “undue interference of the executive branch in the exclusive sphere of the judiciary.” The ruling by the federal court against the agreement said that it was illegal and ordered Argentina not to go ahead with it, according to the Reuters.
After the decision was announced, Argentina’s Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said that the ruling was “a mistake” and that the government will take the case to the country’s Supreme Court of Justice.
“I would like to say that the judges take stock in what their mistake means at a national level and at an international level,” Timerman said. “Regarding the decision, Argentina will appeal the mistake and, if necessary, take it to the nation’s Supreme Court of Justice,” he added.
Meanwhile, Justice Minister Julio Alak also said that a final decision was left to the Supreme Court. “The ultimate interpreter of the constitution will be the Supreme Court,” he said.
Under intense political pressure imposed by the US and Israel, Argentina formerly accused Iran of having carried out the 1994 bombing attack on the AMIA building. AMIA stands for the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina or the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association.
Iran has categorically and consistently denied any involvement in the terrorist bombing.
Last January, Tehran and Buenos Aires signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly probe the 1994 bombing.
Colombian Army Escalates Attack on Communities near Tolemaida Military Base
By Luke Finn | Red Hot Burning Peace | May 14, 2014
The communities of Yucala, Mesa Bajo, and Naranjala are facing a slow and deliberate process of displacement by a key army base used by the U.S. military in Colombia.
Seven military bases in Colombia fall under the U.S.-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement, which allows for U.S. Military access to Colombian bases, and one of those is Tolemaida, Cundinamarca. It was originally founded in 1954 by Colombia’s only ever dictator, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (though, of course, Colombia’s list of authoritarian rulers is much longer), and modeled on Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the School of the Americas (now WHINSEC), the infamous training ground for human rights abusers throughout the hemisphere. Like the School of the Americas, Tolemaida was to become primarily a center for training, here in anti-guerrilla (and more recently counter-insurgency) warfare, specifically through its lauded “Curso de Lanceros” course run by U.S. officers and taken by amongst others the armies of the United States, France, and Panama, as well as Colombians. Tolemaida has a permanent presence of U.S. soldiers.
The Tolemaida base is located on a plateau, overlooking the river Sumapaz, an area that amongst other things contains the largest páramo ecosystem in the world, noted even within Colombia for its bio-diversity. Prior to 1954, a community on the plateau, named their settlement “El Mirador,” or “La Mesa.” One man I met, who still remembered those days, told me proudly that they had both a butcher and a soccer field. But then came La Violencia and the new military base, and the communites moved further down the hillside to the veredas of Yucala, Naranjala, and Mesa Bajo, clearing the land and planting their crops.
The community has been in a state of near constant harassment ever since the base’s construction, and even more so as the base looks to expand. For example, back in the 1980’s the military cut electricity to the community. The 150 campesino families affected today, experience three main forms of harassment as part of the Colombian Army’s petty and vindictive campaign.
The first is the economic blockade of the community. The small road (in a state of severe disrepair) up the hillside, turns off the Pan-American highway, and Policía Militar from the base, are posted daily on the road. Thus, the military prevents the community’s access to large amounts of food, materials to repair houses, and materials to prepare their stable fruit crops. Not even a single bag of cement comes through. People are going hungry, there is no money coming into the community, and their houses are falling down around their ears.
The second is the deliberate destruction of community property. On a number of occasions over the last year soldiers have come down from the base and torn up irrigation systems and fruit trees. On June 19, 2013, over 150 fruit trees were uprooted. This carnage is a further attempt to put a stranglehold on the economic life of the community, and starve them out.
The third way, and perhaps the most shocking, is the deliberate contamination of the community’s water, constituting a sort of biological warfare. At the Cueca de la Quebrada Naranjala, the primary water source for the families, the Army has dumped the rubbish from the base, an estimated 30 tons. Battery packs, broken glass, and ceramics, slowly rotting camouflage patterned clothing and bedding, munitions boxes (labeled in English and produced in the United States), and electrical equipment of all sorts litters the fount of the stream, and in rainy season get washed down hill and collect in sodden clumps. The water is visibly toxic green in parts, orange in others, with an oily sheen, and chemical foam. The putrefaction fills your lungs and turns your stomach as you clamber over a mountain of rubbish in one of the most beautiful places in the country.
The charitable could imagine this to be merely neglectful and careless, were it not for the numerous complaints raised by the community, including two (ignored) petitions at local and national level, a new case in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the economic harassment they have faced. But rubbish is still being dumped, and as it stands this seems to be a deliberate attack on the psychological, moral, and physical well being of these fifth generation workers of this land.
The expanding military base (and not to mention the vacationing bogotanos who buy up fincas and build condominiums in the area) has squeezed the communities of Yucala, Naranjala, and Mesa Bajo from both sides in a campaign of outrageous malice. There is no explicit violence in the area, no guerrilla, paramilitary, or bandas criminales, just the economic and environmental violence of the state against this blameless community. The fatuous, meaningless motto of the Colombian Army is “Faith in the Cause”—but if we were to take this at face value, what cause is this? Another slogan is “Yes, there are Heroes in Colombia”—is poisoning wells ever heroic?
Luke Finn is a writer and international accompanier with Fellowship of Reconciliation Peace Presence in Colombia. He graduated from the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester. Follow @Peace_Presence and on Facebook.
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The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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