by W. T. Whitney Jr.

Until recently, the United States has operated 22 U.S. military bases in Latin America, 800 worldwide. Now there are two more, one in Chile and another in Argentina – the first in either country. The purported justification is humanitarian.

U.S. diplomats and Chilean military chiefs gathered April 5 at the Fort Aguayo naval base in Concón, 90 miles northwest of Santiago, to inaugurate a recently completed eight-building complex intended as a training prop for mock urban battles.. The U.S. military’s Southern Command provided $460,000 for construction. Training will be consistent with U.S. military doctrine known as Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT).

Opening ceremonies took place even as U. S. and Chilean military personnel were teaching 300 junior level military and police personnel from 17 countries. The course there covers police training, convoy movements, crowd control, and helicopter tactics. Students are being prepared ostensibly to deal with natural disasters or national emergencies, specifically for United Nations “Peacekeeping Operations.” Joint Chilean and U.S. military experience in post-earthquake Haiti in 2010 is cited as a model.

Chilean defense officials and U.S. Southern Command head Douglas Frazier prepared the way with an agreement signed on September 10, 2011. The accord allows U.S. troops to deploy in Chile whenever “the Chilean Army finds itself overwhelmed by some emergency situation [like] a natural disasters,” or when international aid with “military components” is required, or when “national emergency scenarios [prompt] a state of exception and suspension of constitutional guarantees.” .

Critics recall participation by U.S. military and intelligence services in the violent overthrow of President Salvador Allende’s government in 1973, and U.S. collaboration afterwards with the Pinochet dictatorship. Some worry that carabineros, Chile’s militarized police notorious for political repression, will train at the new base.

Communist Party Congressman Hugo Gutiérrez objected to “training for the Armed Forces to combat a civilian population.” Human rights activist Alicia Lira indicated that, “when the United States is involved in this militarist, interventionist practice, we have to be worried.” For Patricio Labra, head of the SERPAJ – CHILE human rights group, “this supposed training for peace is a cover for preparing military forces to contain and repress citizen’s legitimate reactions to unjust situations.”

Indeed, Chile’s right wing government headed by billionaire Sebastián Piñera faces increasingly militant domestic opposition. Students demanding free high-quality education demonstrated repeatedly last year. Cities in remote Chilean Patagonia are alive with protests. Indigenous peoples, despite incarceration, terror, and deaths at the hands of security forces, are intensifying their long fight for land and sustenance.

By 2013, the U.S. government will over six years have funneled $45,105, 001 in “military and police aid to Chile.” U.S. – Chile military cooperation entails joint military exercises, troop exchanges, Chilean participation with U.S. National Guard training, and military purchases worth almost $1 billion over 20 years. Chile has sent almost 4000 soldiers to the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (now the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”), averaging 190 students annually over the past decade. Chilean as well as Colombian military trainers traveled to post-coup Honduras to support security forces there.

In Chaco State, Argentina, construction is underway at the Resistancia airport of a so-called “humanitarian aid center” for dealing with natural disasters. At a planning meeting in December, 2011 attended by Chaco Governor Milton Capitanich, U.S. Embassy official Jefferson Brown identified the project costing $3 million as a high U.S. priority. Military attaché Col. Edwin Passmore, in charge, indicated the Southern Command would be paying.

For some, giant antennae springing up at the site as betray espionage and surveillance purposes. Venezuela expelled Passmore in 2008, when as military attaché at the U.S. Embassy, he was accused of spying. In 2011 he arranged for a U.S. military plane to land unannounced and unexplained in Buenos Aires loaded with electronic monitoring equipment, medications, and intelligence transmission devices.

Observers say location of the facility in Chaco relates to the Guarani Aquifer underneath, one of the world’s largest reserves of fresh water; to the nearby Triple Frontier region, entry point for illicit drugs and home base for terrorist planning, say U.S. officials; and to abundant, exploitable natural resources throughout the region.. The United States unsuccessfully tried to persuade previous Argentinean governments to permit a military base in Misiones Province, also close to the Triple Frontier.

Parliamentary Deputy Victoria Donda, victim of Argentina’s “dirty war, was hardly alone in noting “overwhelming evidence that in Latin America the strategy of the Southern Command is to disguise its intelligence activities as humanitarian aid and international cooperation.”
Reacting to the Fort Aguayo installation, the Ethics Commission against Torture, a Chilean NGO, spoke for many: “Sovereignty rests with the people. Security can not be reduced to protection of the interests of the trans-nationals… The armed forces are supposed to protect national sovereignty. Its bending to the dictates of the North American army constitutes treason to the homeland.” And besides, “People have the legitimate right to organize and to demonstrate publically.”

Check out this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/22/un-investigate-us-native-americans

Memorandum
To: Fellow CPUSA members
From: Transit Club, New York City
Subject: Time to Change the Line
Date: April 12, 2012

Below are some facts for Party members to ponder before again accepting the false and harmful “unity against the ultra right” line stubbornly promoted by our top CPUSA leaders.

Our Party’s line, to be stressed at the April 21-23 national meeting in New York means, objectively, CPUSA support for corrupt, reactionary corporate Democrats in the White House, Congress, and in many state houses. Our governor, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, (D-NY) is an example. He is an instrument of Wall Street power.

Anyone who thinks working for corporate Democrats is a stage on the road to socialism, which is what our Party leaders claim, should study the appalling record below.

Before anyone counters, “But the GOP is much worse!” a notion which is, at best a half truth, there is another political line open to our Party besides Lesser Evilism, the present policy.

It is this: Support progressives and independents in the two major parties and elsewhere, whenever it still makes sense, i.e., when they fight corporate power. But the CPUSA should devote its main strength to leading the union movement — all the people’s movements — toward building an independent political voice, divorced from both Democrats and Republicans.

This is our Party’s historic position. It is a longer, harder road than Lesser Evilism. With some 16 million members across the US, organized labor still represents a powerful political force that can criticize or support a US Administration, as it sees fit.

Only the CPUSA has the history and theory to lead this effort. The social reformists, the ultra left, the liberals, and the anarchists are clueless or unwilling. About three months ago, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka agreed to build an independent voice for labor. He conceded that is what union members are asking for.

If the Party doesn’t act soon — if it leaves matters as they are — our Party will continue to spiral downward.

In unity,
Austin Hogan Transit Club, New York City
(Signed, unanimously)
__________________________________________
Corporate Democrats in Power: a Select List of Misdeeds

Politics
• After the 2008 elections, Democrats squandered the people’s good will and desire for change. They squandered the large Congressional majorities enjoyed in the first two years, from January 2009 through January 2011.
• After election, the Democratic White House appointed right-wing economists, advisers, Cabinet members (Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emmanuel, and William Daley) to oversee policy. Many were the same people responsible for the deregulation that made the crash more severe. Result: The people who created the crisis were bailed out; and the working class has been forced to pay the bill;
• It refused to change direction after disastrous November 2010 elections, and the early 2010 Massachusetts Senate special election. Results of the 2010 Congressional elections showed widespread anger in the Democratic mass base at the direction of their Party;
• Massachusetts’s special Senate election to replace Ted Kennedy should have been a shoo-in. It resulted in a major Republican win, with blame placed on the woman candidate, not where it belonged: the Administration’s insistence all through 2009 on taxing union health benefits. Its betrayal was cited by union activists and others for the refusal of Massachusetts union workers to vote for or to campaign for the Democratic candidate.
• In November 2010 Republicans took over the House of Representatives and in effect the Senate. Further result: the Democratic drifted further to the right, with more appointments and policies to appease corporate America, Wall Street, and the Pentagon.

Labor & Economy
• On taxation, the Bush tax cuts for billionaires, the main cause of federal deficits, are still in place.
• In November 2010, to placate Republicans on the deficit issue, the US Administration ordered a two-year wage freeze for federal civilian workers. Many state governments followed its lead.
• The White House continued Bush policy of bailing out the banks unconditionally.
• It abandoned promises on Employee Free Choice Act, the supreme priority of organized labor and a matter of survival for private sector unions. This was the centerpiece of the argument for unions to support Democrats and bring them back into power. It was scuttled from Day 1.
• In February 2012 the president signed a bill into law that will make it more difficult for airline and other workers to join unions. The FAA Reauthorization Act contains a provision that requires a union in order to succeed in a representation election, to win not a majority of workers in a bargaining unit but a majority of all potential worker voters. Worse, in order for an election to be held, the union must submit signatures from a majority, not 35 percent as formerly.
• It offered little or no support for unionized public workers under all-out assault in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere.
• In almost four years, no significant worker safety and health regulations were promulgated.
• Its auto industry bailout approach was to slash auto workers wages in half; to force workers to pay more for a diminishing health care benefits; and in most cases to turn defined benefits pension plans into 401K plans (“defined contributions”) a boon for Wall Street investment management companies; auto industry “reorganization” amounted to forced plant shutdowns, large-scale layoffs and major union givebacks.
• On trade policy, the White House supported job-destroying free trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, over organized labor’s strong objections.
• On Feb 22, 2012 Trumka denounced the White House “corporate tax reform” proposal. While it contained a few progressive ideas (for example, making leveraged buyouts more difficult) it failed to raise any revenue beyond what is needed to pay for business tax breaks.
• On international economic policy, through Treasury Department and the IMF (controlled by the US Treasury Department) the US Administration, in league with the German-dominated European Union and European Central Bank, has toughened austerity against debt-ridden European peripheral states such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy, hurting the working class of these lands including their Communist Parties with whom we say we are in solidarity.

Racism
• There are sins of omission and commission. The US Administration boycotted the UN’s International Conference on Racism in South Africa in 2009 and actively worked to undermine any action coming out of it.
• Domestic policies of action and inaction have dramatically increased unemployment, poverty and inequality across the board; but by far joblessness is worst in African-American working class and poor communities. Yet no special measures to address mass unemployment among Black youth, near 50 percent in big cities.
• Even before the 2008 crash, Black religious leaders were protesting on Wall Street that their congregations were special victims of predatory subprime mortgage lending, but there have been few special measures from the Administration to help them avoid foreclosure and eviction.
• Increase in federal deportation of undocumented workers, mostly Latino, above the level seen in the Bush era.
• No concerted federal drive against racial profiling of Blacks and Muslims. Local police departments are often out of control in this matter.

Foreign and Military Policy; War and War Budget
• The Administration reappointed Robert Gates, Bush’s defense secretary as its own defense secretary.
• It continues the 50-year blockade of socialist Cuba.
• It has given the green light to Israeli aggression. Indifferent to Palestinian suffering, it has no objection to Israeli bombing of Gaza and seizure and detention of humanitarian relief ships to Gaza. It has cravenly capitulated to the Israel Lobby. It renewed loan guarantees for Israel. It has failed to come down firmly against continuing Israeli settlements.
• It is threatening and encircling People’s China. It forced Australia to accept a US base on its territory at its closest point to China; it began a ten-year projected buildup of US forces in East Asia, aimed at China.
• It committed aggression against Libya and Honduras. It overthrew both legitimate governments. In the former, there was all-out US military and political support for aggression by other NATO powers. It assassinated the Libyan head of state. It gave at least tacit approval to the Honduras coup, refusing to label it as such. It has recognized the elections run by the coup government in Honduras.
• It is now working on destabilizing Syria, in preparation for “regime change.”
• It continues demonization, threats and military pressure against socialist North Korea.
• It continues the Bush-era policy aimed at internal subversion of and military pressure on Venezuela and other progressive Latin American governments. It continues Bush buildup of Fourth Fleet encircling Latin America.
• It is building AFRICOM, a network of US military bases in Africa. US Navy is increasing patrols off Somali coast.
• Like Clinton and later, Bush, this White House has refused to sign the land mine treaty
• Its “departure” from Iraq is bogus. The US will keep at least 15,000 troops and mercenaries indefinitely, not to mention a Baghdad embassy the size of a small state.
• It deployed tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. (the “Surge”) Despite latest atrocities (premeditated mass murder of children, Koran-burnings, desecration of the dead) US still committed to full-scale war in Afghanistan.
• It uses drones in Pakistan. Now such drones are allowed, with the agreement of Congress, to be used within the U.S.
• It talks the talk about a “nuclear-free world,” as did Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, after intensifying economic warfare against Iran, it is joining Israel in threatening Iran with bombing, for non-existent nuclear weapons program. It carries out unofficial, un-declared wars by means of Special Forces in Iran border areas.
• It appointed Bill Clinton to be UN Special Representative to Haiti. As president, Clinton consistently undermined Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the most progressive elected Haitian leader in modern times.
• It wages a “secret” border war, as well as a drone war in Pakistan and Yemen. It expanded CIA and US Special Forces interventions in both countries.
• It gave military support to Saudis to crush opposition in Bahrain, the seat of the main US naval base in Persian Gulf.
• It introduced the largest military budget in history, nearly $700 billion.

Civil Liberties; Constitutional Rights; Repression

• A provision of Defense Reauthorization Act, recently signed by the President allows any US president to assassinate a US citizen suspected of terrorism anywhere in the world, without due process of law.
• The Administration expanded extrajudicial killings and assassinations by drones and US Special Forces
• Supported impunity for Bush era war criminals and torturers; refused to release Bush-era military prison and torture photos; refused to release Bush era documents on torture, mistreatment of prisoners and other illegal acts
• Despite campaign promises and a signed Executive Order, White House has not shut down Guantanamo
• Continuing the build up of Baghram air base in Afghanistan as a second Guantanamo. Civil liberties groups, US and international, believe “extraordinary rendition” is going on there, despite Administration denials.
• Seeking to extend the Patriot Act with all its repressive sections.
• Dismantled the Occupy encampments in big cities, in cooperation with mayors, most of them Democrats, with tactics suggested and coordinated by Homeland Security Department

Environment
• In 2009 the international “global warming” conference at Copenhagen, supposed to reverse Bush’s reactionary stance at Kyoto, was a fiasco. It merely cemented the Bush direction on global warming and, in some ways, made it worse. White House actively worked to undermine any effective outcome from the UN Climate Change Summit.
• Pushing thoroughly ineffective climate change legislation, which will be a bonanza to Wall St.
• White House has failed to stop mountain-top removal coal mining
• OSHA regulations and EPA regulations have been stripped of original meaning; and no new regulations of any note have been adopted;

Social Safety Net
• Handpicked the Bowles-Simpson Commission whose report, accepting Wall St. assumptions, favored cuts in social safety net, shrinkage of social insurance systems and expansion of private insurance systems to give bigger role to Wall Street.
• In accordance with Bowles-Simpson recommendations, White House promised to cut Medicare and Social Security in the 2011 “debate” on debt ceiling.
• White House ordered all federal agencies to undertake a study and make recommendations for ways to cut spending.

Health Care Policy
• Accommodated corporate insistence that single-payer and any other progressive proposals be rejected. Corrupt US Senators (e.g., Max Baucus, D-MT) ensured such proposals were “off the table.”
• The resulting Administration “reform” (ACA) entrenches private insurance carriers and Big Pharma – which together are the main cause of the health care cost crisis – in the system. ACA makes future real reform a heavier lift.
• After promises that, in national health care reform law (ACA), no one would lose what they have, in secret meetings with health industry lobbyists, White House agreed to tax the health benefits of union workers which would a) force employers to ante up 40% more in payment for existing benefits; or b) force workers to accept 40% less in benefits, or c) force workers to pay the 40% out of their pockets. After promises in campaign speeches that “single payer” would get a fair hearing, but, in office, tossed out single payer approach as not being insurance-carrier friendly and therefore not realistic. ACA forces uninsured to buy their insurance from state-based, for-profit insurance carriers, with benefits to patients still being highly questionable in terms of their breadth and depth.
• White House sold a national health reform as universal; when in fact, it is not universal and it is a major bailout in the form of a guaranteed permanent market) of already giant health insurance carriers.

Women’s Equality
• It has repeatedly caved in to the right on women’s equality

Education
• Education Secretary Arnie Duncan is the main proponent of charter schools, as well as more standardized testing and “merit pay” for teachers. He is promoting the privatization and corporatization of public schools and profit-making schools. It threatens states with reduced federal support unless they privatize more public schools.
• It is threatening higher education in the USA, as in 2012 State of the Union Address, with reduced federal support unless states reduce spending on higher education; thus, objectively threatening the wages and benefits of faculty.
• It has furthered the attack on public school teachers by continuing to agree with the right wing ideologues that the problem in the schools is bad teachers. There is little or no White House or US Senate effort to stop demonization of teachers.
Regulation
• Administration’s mortgage rescue plan only helps banks and real estate industry, despite campaign promises.
• Despite campaign promises, it gave industry lobbyists positions in governments. The private heath insurers essentially wrote the health care “reform” law. Another example, White House appointed Cass Sunstein, a self -described “libertarian paternalist,” to oversee regulatory policy.

Comrades

On behalf of the Exeter and South Devon Branch of the Communist Party of Britain, I am writing to give our support and solidarity in your fight against the anti-democratic laws of the state of Texas.

The article recently published in the Morning Star highlights a situation that many of us thought was banished to the pages US history.

The state is indeed a machine for the oppression of one class by another and the authorities of Texas are using this machine to great affect. Good luck in your struggle, you have our support and admiration.

In Comradeship, on behalf of the Branch

Tim Gulliver
Secretary
Exeter and South Devon Branch
Communist Party of Britain

I am a communist. I am not a terrorist and yet there is a law in Texas which denies communists the right to work as a public servant or to stand for office.

I have stood in both local government elections and in the last general election as a communist. I have done this quite legally. There is absolutely no reason why communists in Texas should not have the same rights as communists in Devon, England.

I ask you to circulate the Senate and find time to remove the anti-communist legislation from the Statute Book. Sooner or later this will be seriously challenged. The most decent and cheapest way to effect this would be for this strange legislation to be voted down.

I look forward to your reply.

Gerrard Sables

To all comrades and friends in Texas,

Sincere solidarity to all our comrades in Texas, fight and fight and fight again to defeat this vicious and reactionary neo-MacCarthyite legislation in the lone star state.

Your fight is always our fight and we will back you all the way.

Comrades you are in the belly of the beast and we salute you.

Solidarity forever.

Phil Brand.

Vice-Chair.

South London Branch.

Communist Party of Britain.

W. T. Whitney Jr.

On April 9, 1948 in Bogota, Colombia, an assassin’s bullets killed the eloquent, populist Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Onlookers murdered shooter Juan Roa Sierra, variously described as deranged or fascist. Radio broadcasters quickly blamed the assassination on the government and its Conservative Party leaders. For months, police and paramilitaries had been eliminating adherents of a newly unified Liberal Party widely expected in the 1950 elections to propel Gaitán into the presidency.

The assassination was tragedy, and so too was violent upheaval that within 48 hours took 330 lives in Bogota and killed 3000 people throughout Colombia over two weeks. Then ten years of conflict between guerrillas identifying with Gaitán’s Liberal Party wing and military forces of governments led by the Conservative Party or by dictator Rojas Pinilla caused over 200,000 deaths. Beginning with the early 1960’s, war between leftist insurgents and the government’s U.S. supported military machine killed tens of thousands more.

Congressman Gaitán, condemning the 1928 massacre of United Fruit Company banana workers, castigated a “government[with] its tremulous knee on the ground before Yankee gold.” The young lawyer founded the short-lived National Revolutionary Left Union as a vehicle for land reform. Rejoining the Liberal Party, Gaitán served as Bogota mayor in 1936 and later as national education minister and labor minister. The branch of the Liberal Party headed by Gaitán called for agrarian reform, poverty alleviation, and poor people’s rights. Party disunity led to Conservative Party victory in the 1946 presidential elections.

On February 7, 1948 in Bogota, a “silent march” ended with Gaitán’s famous “Oration for Peace.” Mr. President,” he said, “We ask you for deeds of peace and civilization…We deeply love this nation, and we don’t like that our victorious ship has to navigate rivers of blood.”
(Colombians intent upon preserving Gaitán’s memory have long regarded April 9 as a day for public observances. Gaitán may no longer be the primary focus of that day. The 2011 Law of Victims and Restitution of Lands redefined April 9 as a catch-all “Day of Memory and Solidarity with Victims.”)

In 1948, the government quickly attributed violence and Gaitan’s killing to communists wanting to eliminate a rival and bring down the state. Colombia cut relations with the Soviet Union. John C. Wiley, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia in 1946-1947 had reported that Gaitán “blindly promoted state socialism” and “would deplume our eagle.”

Simultaneously, amidst shootings, fires, and tumult, the ninth Pan American Conference was meeting in Bogota. For safety, delegates retreated to a secure warehouse. U. S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall was on hand to promote establishment of the Organization of American States and thereby create an institutional framework for cold war in Latin America. Marshall explained to reporters that chaos enveloping the city and nation represented “the first important communist attempt in the Western hemisphere since the end of the war.” He reiterated that theme in radio broadcasts to Colombians.

U.S. Ambassador Beaulac had warned Gaitán earlier of communist plans for an uprising that would be blamed on his Liberal Party. An Embassy official supposedly offered Gaitán a prestigious European academic position in return for leaving Colombian politics.

History did repeat. The Organization of American States (OAS) returned to Colombia on April 14-15 as the 6th Summit of the Americas, which it sponsored. News coverage centered on Cuba’s exclusion from the meeting situated in Cartagena. Evidently Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa regarded Cuban absence, a non-event, as farce. His government stayed away. The OAS, having expelled Cuba in 1962, worked afterwards to isolate and enforce continent-wide hostility against revolutionary Cuba. Under Latin American pressure, the United States relented in 2009 allowing the OAS to readmit Cuba, which remains a non member.

The “Bogotazo,” as the leaderless rebellion following Gaitán’s killing is labeled, manifested another Cuba connection. Young Fidel Castro was in Bogota at the time representing the (Cuban) University Student Federation at an international student conference. He consulted with Gaitán.

CIA operative John Mepples Espirito was in Bogota in 1948 monitoring leftist students. Later in Cuba he fought against Batista and was jailed for complicity in the death of a comrade. Mepples’ revelations to Cuban intelligence officials about helping to assassinate Gaitán for the CIA became the basis for a documentary film shown to Gaitán’s daughter Gloria in 1961. Verification problems prevented its release. Later jailed as a counterrevolutionary insurgent, Mepples in 1980 told more in return for release from prison. He claimed he and others had set up Juan Roa Sierra as “fall guy” in the assassination.

U.S. lawyer Paul Wolf eventually gave up on Freedom of Information requests to secure U.S. intelligence material on the assassination. Unable to force the CIA to retrieve relevant microfilms, he claimed the FBI had disposed of hundreds of files.

Prior to the Summit of the Americas, host President Santos announced he’d urge the U.S. government to let up on Cuba. That too may end as farce.