Political Report #1448 Long Overdue For Latin America: A New “Good Neighbor Policy” by Medea Benjamin and Steve Ellner posted by Counterpounch

U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a fiasco. Try as it might, the Trump regime-change team has been unable to depose President Maduro and finds itself stuck with a self-proclaimed president, Juan Guaidó, who President Trump was reported to have called "a kid" who "doesn't have what it takes." The Venezuelan people have paid a heavy price for Trump's debacle, which has included crippling economic sanctions and coup attempts. So has U.S. prestige internationally, as both the UN and the EU have urged lifting sanctions during the pandemic but the U.S. has refused.

Political Report # 1379 Brazil's history is repeating itself: democracy at stake

By  Norberto Montani Martins Jaime Ernesto Winter Hughes León Institute of Economics (IE), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) written for LAP

On October 7^th, 2018, Brazilian citizens witnessed the consolidation of the far-right as the leading political force in the country. The former military Jair Bolsonaro almost won in the first round for the presidency. His party – the Social Liberal Party – achieved one of the largest congressional benches in the Chamber of Deputies (51 out of 513 seats) and candidates associated to Bolsonaro excelled in Senate, Gubernatorial and Legislative Assemblies elections all around Brazil.

The country seems to mirror the path that was already trailed by European countries, such as Austria, Germany, Poland and Italy – not to mention Trump’s election in the U.S. The recent Brazilian experience is connected with this broader global movement towards the far-right, an outcome of a structural crisis of capital in its neoliberal phase.

Differently from Europe, xenophobia does not seem to play a relevant role in the Brazilian case – even though Bolsonaro has already referred to recent immigrants in Brazil as the ‘scum of the world’. Indeed, the very possibility of Bolsonaro taking over is an outcome that combines this global element with the authoritarian political culture in Latin America. The current rise of the far-right, which follows the fall of the 2000s’ Pink Tide, reproduces and synthetises the swing of democratic and anti-democratic regimes that historically characterises politics in the region.

The former Brazilian dictatorship started in 1964 and formally ended in 1985. A democratic period was set up when the so-called citizen Constitution was released. It became the mark of a transition from the dictatorship to a democratic period: the ‘new Republic’ (1988-2015). However, the self-amnesty of the militaries (1979) and the continuity of former political forces in power show that this label ‘democracy’ should be relativized.

Political Report # 1378 U.S. Meddling in Venezuela, Venezuela Next

By Vijay Prashad Frontline

On September 8, The New York Times carried a story with a provocative headline: “Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan Officers”. The journalists Ernesto Londoño and Nicholas Casey spoke to 11 current and former United States officials and Venezuelan commanders. These people told the journalists that they had been involved in conversations with the Donald Trump administration about regime change in Venezuela. In August 2017, Trump had bragged that the U.S. had a “military option” for Venezuela. This statement, these men told the reporters, “encouraged rebellious Venezuelan military officers to reach out to Washington”. In February this year, then U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, “In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is often times that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad and the leadership can no longer serve the people.” This was an invitation for a military coup in Venezuela.

Political Report # 1377 Bolsonaro’s Most Dangerous Supporters

By Aldo Cordeiro Sauda  and Benjamin Fogel Jacobin

The first round of Brazil’s elections saw the neo-fascist candidate Jair Bolsonaro come within four points of victory. Between Bolsonaro and victory however stands The Workers Party’s (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad. He has less than two weeks to stop Bolsonaro, after coming second with only 29 percent of the vote. Moreover Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL) went from political irrelevance to become the second-largest party in Brazil overnight. It is no exaggeration to say that Brazilian democracy itself is at stake. Even if Haddad manages to pull off a last-minute victory, in the polarized climate of Brazilian politics there could still be a hard military coup to follow the soft congressional coup that removed Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Bolsonaro has the backing of significant sectors within the military hostile to the PT. These sectors, along with many on the Brazilian right, claim the PT is trying to enact “a “silent revolution” with the goal of turning Brazil into a communist dictatorship. In order to understand both Bolsonaro’s rise and the danger to democracy he poses, it is vital to examine the anti-PT faction in the military.

Political Report # 1347 The disappeared of Guatemala: a family’s search for their murdered son

By Nina Lakhani, The Guardian

As the court delivered the damning verdict convicting powerful ex-military officers of crimes against humanity, sexual violence and the forced disappearance of 14-year-old Marco Antonio Molina Theissen, his three older sisters and mother clung to each other and wept. It’s almost 37 years since the schoolboy was bundled into a sack by officers after they had ransacked the family home looking for his sister, Emma Guadalupe, who had managed to escape a military torture chamber. Marco Antonio’s family has never stopped looking for him, but the boy who dreamed of becoming an engineer was disappeared by a military regime that considered children fair game in its quest to crush political dissent. The guilty verdicts handed down in Guatemala City last month satisfied the Molina Theissen family’s pursuit for justice against the former “untouchables” - the high command that ordered the systematic persecution, torture, murder and disappearance of civilians considered enemies of the state. Peacetime efforts to tackle impunity have been impeded by the domination of post-war governments by military strongmen. Now is no exception. In the aftermath of the verdict, as rescue workers searched for victims of the Fuego volcano, politicians with military links attempted to sneak through a reform guaranteeing impunity for officers accused of crimes against humanity. The convictions in Marco Antonio’s case were a victory not just for his family but for thousands of Guatemalans whose lives were destroyed by a US-backed counterinsurgency war masquerading as a legitimate national security policy. “The verdict is in our name but belongs to all the people like us, who were terrorised and bereaved just for thinking differently,” Maria Eugenia Molina Theissen, one of Marco Antonio’s sisters, tells the Guardian.

Political Report # 1342 US-Trained Special Forces Joined Police Crackdown on Dam Protesters in Honduras

By Sandra Cuffe, Truthout

It started at dawn. A vehicle full of Honduran police officers showed up at around 5 am on May 3 in front of the community protest camp in Pajuiles, where residents have been present day and night for more than a year to prevent the passage of hydroelectric dam construction machinery. Less than two hours later, the whole area was crawling with hundreds of members of various police units, including regular national police, the Police Investigations Directorate, the elite COBRAS unit and the TIGRES special forces, which are heavily supported by the US and trained by Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne). "It was like a war zone," Pajuiles community leader Albertina López told Truthout. Police forces lined the immediate area along the nearby highway that runs from El Progreso up to Tela, along the Caribbean coast in the Atlántida Department. Soon they were also lining the road past the camp and up to the contested construction site of the Mezapa River dam. They showed up in convoys, escorting machinery, construction materials and company personnel up to the site, where the Honduran company HIDROCEP has been trying to build a 1.3 megawatt dam. "People were scared," said López. Nevertheless, she and a few other women made an attempt to stop the machinery, lying down in the road in front of the protest camp to try to stop the machinery's passage. "That's when they started firing tear gas at us," she said. People scattered, ushering a 75-year-old protester and children to safety, but López and others maintained their permanent presence at the roadside resistance camp throughout the police operations that lasted two full days. State violence against community resistance to natural resource exploitation projects continues unabated in Honduras. The recent crackdown in Pajuiles to impose a fiercely contested hydroelectric dam project is just one of the latest incidents, but it provides a clear example of the involvement of US-trained and -supported special forces in repression against community activists.

LAP Protest Statement of Marielle Franco's Assassination in Brazil

Message of Solidarity with the Brazilian People

With sorrow and indignation, we, the editors and collaborators of the journal Latin American Perspectives (University of California, Riverside) learned of the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco, of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) of Brazil, on the night of March 14, in downtown Rio de Janeiro. In 2016, Marielle Franco was the fifth largest vote recipient in the city, obtaining 46,000 votes.

A few days before her murder, Marielle Franco was appointed rapporteur of the Parliamentary Commission to monitor the military intervention that since February 16 has prevailed over public security in the state of Rio. On February 28, the councilwoman published on her Facebook profile: "We take a stand and are against this intervention. It is a farce, with electoral objectives. We will occupy this space fulfilling our oversight role, as a municipal legislator. " One day before she was murdered, she protested on her Twitter account, "How many more must die for this war to end?" The military intervention in Rio de Janeiro was the toughest measure of Michel Temer's government in the election year of 2018.

Born poor and black in the Maré Favela, Marielle broke several barriers to study Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In 2014, she received her Master's degree in Administration at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), where she criticized the Units of Police Pacification (UPP) and a public security policy that was unable to reduce murders and violence. Marielle worked for ten years with state deputy Marcelo Freixo (PSOL-RJ), a Brazilian leftist politician who became world-famous when he was depicted as a character in the film Tropa de Elite (by José Padilha), as a human rights activist against "militias" (gangs of corrupt police officers who act violently in their territories with electoral purposes).

Marielle Franco was active in feminist and LGBT causes, in the struggle against police violence, in combating the genocide of black youth and in defending social equality. She used her office as a tribune on behalf of the oppressed sectors of the Brazilian society. Recognized for genuine leadership, the councilwoman daily denounced the abuses of military power. The crime of which she was the victim has all the characteristics of an execution.

Her murder further weakens the credibility of the current Brazilian government.  Latin American Perspectives shares the concerns of the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch in favor of independent investigation of the case and joins the outcry of the population that has massively demonstrated in the streets of the major cities of the country in search of justice. So that the history of impunity reported by the National Commission of the Truth of Brazil is not repeated, we offer our solidarity.

Riverside, March 16, 2018.

Political Report # 1315 Defending Hope and Freedom against Fear and Repression in Honduras

By  David A. Sylvester Tikkum

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS - You may have seen the photographs of the violent protests here in the capital of Honduras when the right-wing candidate Juan Orlando Hernández installed himself as president two weeks ago after manipulating the November election in his favor.  For hours, the opposition demonstrators appeared like dark forms in the grey haze of tear gas as they faced off against three types of police and soldier. But you probably never saw a more important event the next night: an interfaith vigil and demonstration calling for national dialogue and a peaceful return to a constitutional government. In spite of the confrontations of previous day, more than 500 Hondurans streamed onto the Avenida La Paz directly in front of the bunker of a U.S. Embassy and freely shouted in defiance to those in the building, with an appeal to the lines of police and soldiers guarding it and, perhaps equally important, to strengthen hope in each other. Speaker after speaker railed against the stolen presidential election, the crisis of militarization in Honduras, and the disaster of this slow social strangulation supported by the United States. In the street, Hondurans sang and danced and cried with grief for the wounded and dead at the hands of the military.  For a moment, even surrounded by the machinery of repression, the gathering became a cathartic fiesta of freedom.

Political Report # 1314 Green for Blue in the Mexican Security State

By Nicola Chavez Courtright NACLA

On December 19, exactly three months after the earthquake that left over 360 dead in central Mexico, the iconic Arena México in Mexico City was gearing up for its regular Tuesday evening show. According to the event's flyer, however, the night of lucha libre would be punctuated by a special event: an homage to "the Mexican heroes who participated in rescue missions" after the September 19th quake. In a pause between lucha rounds, dozens of uniformed men and women marched into the arena in step with the Zacatecas March, played by the wind section of the National Defense Secretary band. While soldiers posed before the green, white, and red of the Mexican flag waving across huge LED screens, the celebration uplifted the military's role as the genuine heroes of the disaster, sidelining the roles taken on by civilian rescue groups in the quake's aftermath. The act exuded all the grandeur of an army that had just been given sweeping powers to conduct military operations against its own population. More than just a commemoration, the display at Arena México tacitly acknowledged a concerning sign of army encroachment into civilian life. Four days earlier, Mexico had adopted its Ley de Seguridad Interior, or Internal Security Law, which amends the constitution to enable the executive branch to grant certain police responsibilities to Mexican armed forces-a response that has become increasingly normalized since the beginning of Mexico's Drug War in 2006. In 2017, Mexico registered the highest number of homicides since the drug war began. Rather than a panacea, however, the law stands to create new sources of terror for an already-terrorized population caught in the ongoing U.S.-backed drug war ravaging the region.

Exclusive, The Right to Protest: Women Retake the Streets in El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras

By Suyapa Portillo, Pitzer College

@SuyapaPV

Women and Jesuit Clergy, among them Father Melo of Radio Progreso, take over the road near Quebrada Seca bridge after a meaningful mass that called for an end to militarization and violence. Photo taken by: Suyapa Portillo

Women took over the road for a peaceful march in Quebrada Seca, El Progreso, Yoro, on November 25, 2018, National Day of the Honduran Woman. On this same road, just a day before, protesters experienced heavy repression.  People have been here almost daily protesting the fraudulent elections of November 26, 2017. They have been met with disproportionate force and violence from riot squads of the National Police, Military Police of Public Order and the Armed Forces, who have harmed, threatened, and shot real bullets at innocent people. One young man was taken out of his house without proper warrant and falsely accused of burning a police station and taking police gear. Unable to find the actual perpetrators of the alleged crime, police have framed him. Contrary to the fabricated story of the police, this young man’s only activity was his participation in peaceful street protests in opposition to electoral fraud. Another young woman was picked up at a protest by an unmarked civilian car. She was beaten, insulted and then thrown out of the car in the street down the road. Other protesters have been followed by National Police and Military Police agents after the demonstrations to their homes, beaten, and told they would be killed, as happened to the son and brother in law of former LIBRE congressperson Bartolo Fuentes on November 26, 2018. These intimidation tactics are infringing on local Progreseños right to peacefully protest the imposition on them of a repressive authoritarian government, which is starting to look more and more like a nascent dictatorship.

 

"Pare 1 minuto y proteste es su derecho Fuera JOH" Quebrada Seca, El Progreso, Yoro

Photo taken by: Suyapa Portillo

Since the elections of November 26, 2017, there has been no peace in Honduras.  The unrest is not that of hopeful, peaceful protesters who bring banners, flags and creative chants calling for the resignation of the fraudulent president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, but rather the violence of the Military Police and Armed forces who shoot to kill, invade homes and shoot tear gas canisters often affecting children and the elderly. Far from a true democracy, the government regime has sought to repress civilians’ right to peaceful protest, a protected value alongside freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Quebrada Seca was heavily militarized on January 20, the first day of the Paro Nacional (National Stoppage) to oppose the illegitimate president’s swearing in ceremony, a national strike called by those who oppose the dictatorship—the Alliance Against the Dictatorship.  The exaggerated levels militarization that day dwarfed contingents of protesters and local citizens in El Progreso and the nearby Valley of Sula.  In this context, the taking of Quebrada Seca by young and elderly women on Honduran Women’s Day has special significance.

Women have had to fight for any political and labor rights they have in Honduras, including the right to vote. This is why many are unhappy their vote was stolen by Juan Orlando Hernandez. They are confident in their claims, even if ample proof of vote rigging and Nationalist Party intimidation tactics, doctoring of voting documents, and plain force and repression have not convinced the US State Department, nor the Organization of American States, to invoke the Inter-American Democratic Charter, demand due process in Honduras, call for annulment of the elections and a new electoral process, with full civil society participation as well as international observers.

 

Resident of Quebrada Seca shows International Observers real bullet casings shot at them the night before during protest. Photo by: Suyapa Portillo

November 25, 2018 marked 63 years since women in Honduras gained suffrage. Though they won the right to vote in 1955, they did not vote until the election of 1957, when President Ramon Villeda Morales was elected, the first Liberal President since the dictatorship of Carías Andino, and his hand-picked successors.  Since 1955, women in Honduras has been important social actors in every ambit of society, yet Honduras remains one of the most violent countries to be a woman.  The feminicide rate soars as does impunity, where apparently most of these cases remain in file cabinets. Now, with the current electoral coup (as many local women call the illegal re-election of Juan Orlando Hernandez), many Feminist groups consider their situation dire. Women are employed mostly in the informal economy, including maquiladoras, which are non-union and enforce no-pregnancy and negative HIV test to hire workers.

 

Military Police for Public Order, National Police and DPI Investigators stationed on both sides of street during peaceful protest. Photo by: Suyapa Portillo

Locals ascertain that they were not physically harmed on that day only because of the solidarity of international observers, a delegation of 50 North American clergy members, Jesuit priests, pastors, ministers and affinity groups accompanying local Jesuit Radio Progreso. On January 27, 2018, the inauguration of Juan Orlando Hernandez, took place with no international dignitaries present. Even more noteworthy, 5 rings of security, including National Police, Military Police and the Armed Forces, created a fortress around Juan Orlando Hernandez in the National Stadium, where he was installed as president of the people he was keeping at bay.  The event was underwhelming and overshadowed by protesters courageously taking the streets to express their discontent in the face of vicious military response against unarmed citizens.  While National TV and Radio stations were forced to play the ceremony live, over 80% of the population throughout the country protested, took over streets, and made their voice heard using creative protests tactics chants and posters that in invalidated the inauguration. Honduras’ future remains in the balance as the various social movements align in one concrete demand: #FueraJoh.

Political Report #1285, Open Talk of a Military Coup Unsettles Brazil

By Alex Cuadros,  The New Yorker

Last month, during a lecture at the Grande Oriente Masonic Lodge, in Brasília, a Brazilian Army general named Antonio Hamilton Martins Mourão said that the country’s military leaders had discussed overthrowing the government. Corruption investigations have ensnared successive Presidential administrations in Brazil, and Mourão said there was a limit to the political chaos the armed forces could tolerate. “Either the institutions solve the political problem through the courts, removing those elements involved in illegal acts from public life, or we will have to impose the solution,” he said. Wearing his official uniform, his chest laden with decorations, Mourão explained that his colleagues in the Army’s high command shared his view. “We have very well-made plans,” he went on, before ominously adding, “This solution won’t be easy. It will bring trouble, you can be sure of that.” When he finished, the audience broke into applause. Brazil is all too familiar with military coups-the last one, in 1964, brought on a twenty-one-year dictatorship. Mourão’s speech, then, was troubling enough on its own. But his superiors’ reactions were even more disturbing. No one in the civilian Administration publicly condemned his remarks, and the commander of the Army, General Eduardo Villas Bôas, refused to censure his subordinate for violating the prohibition on political speech by active officers. Instead, he called Mourão “a great soldier.” Confronted by a journalist on TV, he was compelled to weakly acknowledge that “dictatorship is never the best” solution, but he only doubled down on Mourão’s dark suggestion, saying that the armed forces had the constitutional authority to “intervene” when the country finds itself “in the imminence of chaos.” As the columnist Josias de Souza noted, Brazil’s constitution grants the military no such power. That did not stop another general, Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, from making the same claim in a newspaper op-ed two weeks later.

Political Report # 1283 Militarization and "Shock Doctrine" Policies Abound After Earthquake in Mexico

By Renata Bessi and Santiago Navarro F.,   Truthout

The colored tarps hung over streets and patios of homes awaiting repair have become part of the everyday landscape of the Isthmus communities in Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, after the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the country on September 7 causing around 100 deaths. It was the most intense earthquake to strike Mexico in a century. People are still afraid and panicked due to the destruction that the earthquake and its aftershocks have caused. The earth still hasn't settled. Since the initial quake, the Mexican National Seismological Service has estimated more than 6,000 aftershocks, in addition to the subsequent earthquake on September 19 that measured a magnitude of 7.2 and devastated Mexico City and other areas of central Mexico. Three hundred and sixty-nine deaths related to the September 19 earthquake have been accounted for as of October 4. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, measuring 20,000 square kilometers, is the region that has been most affected by the September 7 earthquake. Official data presented by the government of Oaxaca show that the earthquake affected 120,000 people in 41 different municipalities, and around 60,600 homes. Of those residences, 20,664 were lost completely, while 39,956 sustained partial damage. Their infrastructure, drinking water and sewage systems are damaged. The local economy has taken a hit. The streets are piled with garbage. Many are concerned that a possible health crisis is at hand. It's been more than a month since the earthquake and the communal kitchens and tents set up by neighborhoods in public spaces, through their own resources or through donations from people, have become the only option for these communities. Shelters provided for by the state are almost nonexistent. In the municipality of San Mateo del Mar, for example, where 80 percent of homes were affected, the state response was to send the Navy to set up a shelter, but this meager gesture has been surpassed by the organizing of community members, who have found ways to address their most immediate needs.

Political Report # 1282 How Pentagon Officials May Have Encouraged a 2009 Coup in Honduras

By Jake Johnston,  The Intercept

FORT MCNAIR, ONE of the oldest U.S. military posts in the country, is nestled on an outcropping of land where the Anacostia and Potomac rivers meet in Washington, D.C. There, within the National Defense University, is the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, where hundreds of Hondurans took courses over the years. In mid-July 2009, Honduran military officials sought the center's help to solve a problem that had recently arisen. The Honduran military had just dispatched of its previous problem, President Manuel Zelaya, with a military coup. Now, the Central American military was facing international and regional condemnations for a brazen display of 1970s behavior in the 21st century. The military officials needed friends in the U.S. to rally behind it, but the Americans were wary of open shows of support. The U.S. had just revoked visas from top Honduran civilian and military officials, and suspended some security assistance. Two Honduran colonels were dispatched to Washington on a mission to convince the Americans that the Honduran military's involvement in the coup was in fact constitutional. The military had reached out to the CHDS's academic dean to get help for the delegation. Officially CHDS said no, Kenneth LaPlante, CHDS's then-deputy director, told me. However, according to Martin Andersen, a former CHDS communications director who became a whistleblower, Gen. John Thompson, the academic dean, had allegedly provided "behind-the-scenes assistance in Washington, D.C., to Honduran coup plotters." Andersen's allegation was made in a complaint being investigated by the Department of Defense Inspector General, which has taken no action.

Political Report # 1258 A World of Winless War: US Special Ops Forces Deployed to 137 Nations in 2017

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch

The tabs on their shoulders read "Special Forces," "Ranger," "Airborne." And soon their guidon -- the "colors" of Company B, 3rd Battalion of the US Army's 7th Special Forces Group -- would be adorned with the "Bandera de Guerra," a Colombian combat decoration. "Today we commemorate sixteen years of a permanent fight against drugs in a ceremony where all Colombians can recognize the special counternarcotic brigade's hard work against drug trafficking," said Army Colonel Walther Jimenez, the commander of the Colombian military's Special Anti-Drug Brigade, last December. America's most elite troops, the Special Operations forces (SOF), have worked with that Colombian unit since its creation in December 2000. Since 2014, four teams of Special Forces soldiers have intensely monitored the brigade. Now, they were being honored for it. Part of a $10 billion counter-narcotics and counterterrorism program, conceived in the 1990s, special ops efforts in Colombia are a much ballyhooed American success story. A 2015 RAND Corporation study found that the program "represents an enduring SOF partnership effort that managed to help foster a relatively professional and capable special operations force." And for a time, coca production in that country plummeted. Indeed, this was the ultimate promise of America's "Plan Colombia" and efforts that followed from it. "Over the longer haul, we can expect to see more effective drug eradication and increased interdiction of illicit drug shipments," President Bill Clinton predicted in January 2000. Today, however, more than 460,000 acres of the Colombian countryside are blanketed with coca plants, more than during the 1980s heyday of the infamous         cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. US cocaine overdose deaths are also at a 10-year high and first-time cocaine use among young adults has spiked 61% since 2013. "Recent findings suggest that cocaine use may be reemerging as a public health concern in the United States," wrote researchers from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in a study published in December 2016 -- just after the Green Berets attended that ceremony in Colombia. Cocaine, the study's authors write, "may be making a comeback." Colombia is hardly an anomaly when it comes to US special ops deployments -- or the results that flow from them. For all their abilities, tactical skills, training prowess, and battlefield accomplishments, the capacity of US Special Operations forces to achieve decisive and enduring successes -- strategic victories that serve US national interests -- have proved to be exceptionally limited, a reality laid bare from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to the Philippines. The fault for this lies not with the troops themselves, but with a political and military establishment that often appears bereft of strategic vision and hasn't won a major war since the 1940s. Into this breach, elite US forces are deployed again and again. While special ops commanders may raise concerns about the tempo of operations and strains on the force, they have failed to grapple with larger questions about the raison d'être of SOF, while Washington's oversight establishment, notably the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, have consistently failed to so much as ask hard questions about the strategic utility of America's Special Operations forces. Special Ops at War "We operate and fight in every corner of the world," boasts General Raymond Thomas, the chief of US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM). "On a daily basis, we sustain a deployed or forward stationed force of approximately 8,000 across 80-plus countries. They are conducting the entire range of SOF missions in both combat and non-combat situations." Those numbers, however, only hint at the true size and scope of this global special ops effort. Last year, America's most elite forces conducted missions in 138 countries -- roughly 70% of the nations on the planet, according to figures supplied to TomDispatch by US Special Operations Command. Halfway through 2017, US commandos have already been deployed to an astonishing 137 countries, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw. Special Operations Command is tasked with carrying out 12 core missions, ranging from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to hostage rescue and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Counterterrorism -- fighting what the command calls violent extremist organizations (VEOs) -- may, however, be what America's elite forces have become best known for in the post-9/11 era. "The threat posed by VEOs remains the highest priority for USSOCOM in both focus and effort," says Thomas. "Special Operations Forces are the main effort, or major supporting effort for US VEO-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America -- essentially, everywhere Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are to be found..." More special operators are deployed to the Middle East than to any other region. Significant numbers of them are advising Iraqi government forces and Iraqi Kurdish soldiers as well as Kurdish YPG (Popular Protection Unit) fighters and various ethnic Arab forces in Syria, according to Linda Robinson, a senior international policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who spent seven weeks in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries earlier this year. During a visit to Qayyarah, Iraq -- a staging area for the campaign to free Mosul, formerly Iraq's second largest city, from the control of Islamic State fighters -- Robinson "saw a recently installed US military medical unit and its ICU set up in tents on the base." In a type of mission seldom reported on, special ops surgeons, nurses, and other specialists put their skills to work on far-flung battlefields not only to save American lives, but to prop up allied proxy forces that have limited medical capabilities. For example, an Air Force Special Operations Surgical Team recently spent eight weeks deployed at an undisclosed location in the Iraq-Syria theater, treating 750 war-injured patients. Operating out of an abandoned one-story home within earshot of a battlefield, the specially trained airmen worked through a total of 19 mass casualty incidents and more than 400 individual gunshot or blast injuries. When not saving lives in Iraq and Syria, elite US forces are frequently involved in efforts to take them. "US SOF are... being thrust into a new role of coordinating fire support," wrote Robinson. "This fire support is even more important to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a far more lightly armed irregular force which constitutes the major ground force fighting ISIS in Syria." In fact, a video shot earlier this year, analyzed by The Washington Post, shows special operators "acting as an observation element for what appears to be US airstrikes carried out by A-10 ground attack aircraft" to support Syrian Democratic Forces fighting for the town of Shadadi. Africa now ranks second when it comes to the deployment of special operators thanks to the exponential growth in missions there in recent years. Just 3% of US commandos deployed overseas were sent to Africa in 2010. Now that number stands at more than 17%, according to SOCOM data. Last year, US Special Operations forces were deployed to 32 African nations, about 60% of the countries on the continent. As I recently reported at VICE News, at any given time, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special operators are now conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries. In May, for instance, Navy SEALs were engaged in an "advise and assist operation" alongside members of Somalia's army and came under attack. SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other US personnel were injured during a firefight that also, according to AFRICOM spokesperson Robyn Mack, left three al-Shabaab militants dead. US forces are also deployed in Libya to gather intelligence in order to carry out strikes of opportunity against Islamic State forces there. While operations in Central Africa against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal militia that has terrorized the region for decades, wound down recently, a US commando reportedly killed a member of the LRA as recently as April. Spring Training What General Thomas calls "building partner nations' capacity" forms the backbone of the global activities of his command. Day in, day out, America's most elite troops carry out such training missions to sharpen their skills and those of their allies and of proxy forces across the planet. This January, for example, Green Berets and Japanese paratroopers carried out airborne training near Chiba, Japan. February saw Green Berets at Sanaa Training Center in northwest Syria advising recruits for the Manbij Military Council, a female fighting force of Kurds, Arabs, Christians, Turkmen, and Yazidis. In March, snowmobiling Green Berets joined local forces for cold-weather military drills in Lapland, Finland. That same month, special operators and more than 3,000 troops from Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom took part in tactical training in Germany. In the waters off Kuwait, special operators joined elite forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council nations in conducting drills simulating a rapid response to the hijacking of an oil tanker. In April, special ops troops traveled to Serbia to train alongside a local special anti-terrorist unit. In May, members of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Iraq carried out training exercises with Iraqi special operations forces near Baghdad. That same month, 7,200 military personnel, including US Air Force Special Tactics airmen, Italian special operations forces, members of host nation Jordan's Special Task Force, and troops from more than a dozen other nations took part in Exercise Eager Lion, practicing everything from assaulting compounds to cyber-defense. For their part, a group of SEALs conducted dive training alongside Greek special operations forces in Souda Bay, Greece, while others joined NATO troops in Germany as part of Exercise Saber Junction 17 for training in land operations, including mock "behind enemy lines missions" in a "simulated European village." #Winning "We have been at the forefront of national security operations for the past three decades, to include continuous combat over the past 15-and-a-half years," SOCOM's Thomas told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities last month. "This historic period has been the backdrop for some of our greatest successes, as well as the source of our greatest challenge, which is the sustained readiness of this magnificent force." Yet, for all their magnificence and all those successes, for all the celebratory ceremonies they've attended, the wars, interventions, and other actions for which they've served as the tip of the American spear have largely foundered, floundered, or failed. After their initial tactical successes in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, America's elite operators became victims of Washington's failure to declare victory and go home. As a result, for the last 15 years, US commandos have been raiding homes, calling in air strikes, training local forces, and waging a relentless battle against a growing list of terror groups in that country. For all their efforts, as well as those of their conventional military brethren and local Afghan allies, the war is now, according to the top US commander in the Middle East, a "stalemate." That's a polite way of saying what a recent report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found: districts that are contested or under "insurgent control or influence" have risen from an already remarkable 28% in 2015 to 40%. The war in Afghanistan began with efforts to capture or kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Having failed in this post-9/11 mission, America's elite forces spun their wheels for the next decade when it came to his fate. Finally, in 2011, Navy SEALs cornered him in his long-time home in Pakistan and gunned him down. Ever since, special operators who carried out the mission and Washington power-players (not to mention Hollywood) have been touting this single tactical success. In an Esquire interview, Robert O'Neill, the SEAL who put two bullets in bin Laden's head, confessed that he joined the Navy due to frustration over an early crush, a puppy-love pique. "That's the reason al-Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my fucking heart." But al-Qaeda was not decimated -- far from it according to Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and the author of Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State. As he recently observed, "Whereas on 9/11 al-Qaeda had a few hundred members, almost all of them based in a single country, today it enjoys multiple safe havens across the world." In fact, he points out, the terror group has gained strength since bin Laden's death. Year after year, US special operators find themselves fighting new waves of militants across multiple continents, including entire terror groups that didn't exist on 9/11. All US forces killed in Afghanistan in 2017 have reportedly died battling an Islamic State franchise, which began operations there just two years ago. The US invasion of Iraq, to take another example, led to the meteoric rise of an al-Qaeda affiliate which, in turn, led the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) -- the elite of America's special ops elite -- to create a veritable manhunting machine designed to kill its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and take down the organization. As with bin Laden, special operators finally did find and eliminate Zarqawi, battering his organization in the process, but it was never wiped out. Left behind were battle-hardened elements that later formed the Islamic State and did what al-Qaeda never could: take and hold huge swaths of territory in two nations. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch grew into a separate force of more than 20,000. In Yemen, after more than a decade of low-profile special ops engagement, that country teeters on the brink of collapse in the face of a US-backed Saudi war there. Continued US special ops missions in that country, recently on the rise, have seemingly done nothing to alter the situation. Similarly, in Somalia in the Horn of Africa, America's elite forces remain embroiled in an endless war against militants. In 2011, President Obama launched Operation Observant Compass, sending Special Operations forces to aid Central African proxies in an effort to capture or kill Joseph Kony and decimate his murderous Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), then estimated to number 150 to 300 armed fighters. After the better part of a decade and nearly $800 million spent, 150 US commandos were withdrawn this spring and US officials attended a ceremony to commemorate the end of the mission. Kony was, however, never captured or killed and the LRA is now estimated to number about 150 to 250 fighters, essentially the same size as when the operation began. This string of futility extends to Asia as well. "US Special Forces have been providing support and assistance in the southern Philippines for many years, at the request of several different Filipino administrations," Emma Nagy, a spokesperson for the US embassy in Manilla, pointed out earlier this month. Indeed, a decade-plus-long special ops effort there has been hailed as a major success. Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, wrote RAND analyst Linda Robinson late last year in the Pentagon journal Prism, "was aimed at enabling the Philippine security forces to combat transnational terrorist groups in the restive southern region of Mindanao." A 2016 RAND report co-authored by Robinson concluded that "the activities of the US SOF enabled the Philippine government to substantially reduce the transnational terrorist threat in the southern Philippines." This May, however, Islamist militants overran Marawi City, a major urban center on Mindanao. They have been holding on to parts of it for weeks despite a determined assault by Filipino troops backed by US Special Operations forces. In the process, large swaths of the city have been reduced to rubble. Running on Empty America's elite forces, General Thomas told members of Congress last month, "are fully committed to winning the current and future fights." In reality, though, from war to war, intervention to intervention, from the Anti-Drug Brigade ceremony in Florencia, Colombia, to the end-of-the-Kony-hunt observance in Obo in the Central African Republic, there is remarkably little evidence that even enduring efforts by Special Operations forces result in strategic victories or improved national security outcomes. And yet, despite such boots-on-the-ground realities, America's special ops forces and their missions only grow. "We are... grateful for the support of Congress for the required resourcing that, in turn, has produced a SOCOM which is relevant to all the current and enduring threats facing the nation," Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. Resourcing has, indeed, been readily available. SOCOM's annual budget has jumped from $3 billion in 2001 to more than $10 billion today. Oversight, however, has been seriously lacking. Not a single member of the House or Senate Armed Services Committees has questioned why, after more than 15 years of constant warfare, winning the "current fight" has proven so elusive. None of them has suggested that "support" from Congress ought to be reconsidered in the face of setbacks from Afghanistan to Iraq, Colombia to Central Africa, Yemen to the southern Philippines. In the waning days of George W. Bush's administration, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed to about 60 nations around the world. By 2011, under President Barack Obama, that number had swelled to 120. During this first half-year of the Trump administration, US commandos have already been sent to 137 countries, with elite troops now enmeshed in conflicts from Africa to Asia. "Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit," Thomas told members of the House Armed Services Committee last month. In fact, current and former members of the command have, for some time, been sounding the alarm about the level of strain on the force. These deployment levels and a lack of meaningful strategic results from them have not, however, led Washington to raise fundamental questions about the ways the US employs its elite forces, much less about SOCOM's raison d'être. "We are a command at war and will remain so for the foreseeable future," SOCOM's Thomas explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Not one member asked why or to what end. Original article can be found here: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176300/

Global Security Watch—Venezuela

:::::: Book ::::::

Global Security Watch—Venezuela
by Daniel Hellinger

This in-depth study provides a timely assessment of how the foreign, military, and security policies of Venezuela shape relations with the United States in the Chavez era.

The growing importance of Venezuela in the global oil market along with the controversial nature of its leadership provoke concern among some world powers—especially the United States, whose international policies have been heavily criticized by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. This critical look at American/Venezuelan relations presents perceptions held by each government of the other and examines the sources of tensions—and points of confluence—between the two countries.

Global Security Watch—Venezuela traces the political relations between the United States and Venezuela from the early roots based in Pan Americanism to the domestic and foreign policies of the Chavez regime, including petro-diplomacy. This book provides a serious examination of the allegations about Venezuelan involvement in the drug trade, terrorism, and intervention; the view that the unilateralism of the United States threatens world peace; and the future of relations between the two countries.