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01/26/2005:

"A Not-So-Magical Reality: Latin America and the US"

by Toni Solo
When George Bush and Tony Blair start talking loudly about defending "freedom" and "democracy" and "ending poverty", people everywhere had better watch out even more keenly than usual for their ever more precarious liberties and economic resources. The US regime and its allies are committed to genocidal aggression, unlawful judicial procedures, debilitating "aid" blackmail and "free trade" extortion as their main foreign policy tools. They have demonstrated they will do whatever is necessary to get what they want.

People in Central America in the 80s and in Colombia for over forty years have already lived out the future in Iraq and other targets of international corporate greed. Iraq was already destroyed economically by UN sanctions and US-uk aerial bombardment through the '90s. But events in Fallujah confirm that the country faces mass population displacement over the next few years, just as millions of people in Colombia have been displaced. That population shift will create an even more desperate pool of semi-skilled and unskilled labour compelled to accept low wages incapable of providing a decent life.

Apart from losing the benefits of its oil, Iraq's cultivable soils will be ravaged by chemical pesticides and herbicides and planted with "green desert" GM crops to enrich foreign corporate agri-business, as is happening throughout Latin America. Its water resources will be debilitated and privatized just as is happening to water resources from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Together with these social and environmental catastrophes, the conditions imposed through "free trade" policies, by the World Bank, the IMF, and by "aid" programmes will create and sustain a continuous crisis of political institutions meant to prevent reforms that benefit the poor majority.

Constant interference by the US and its allies in the internal affairs of resource-rich poorer countries purposefully creates instability so as to cripple countries' abilities to deal effectively with mass poverty. In Latin America, the example of US illegality and contempt for basic legal norms is creating the conditions for renewed tyranny and dictatorship. Ruthless opportunists like Presidents Uribe in Colombia, Gutierrez in Ecuador, Toledo in Peru and Mesa in Bolivia and the US proxies running Central America right now, are all too ready to copy the Bush regime's freefall into criminality if they get the chance.
Full Article: counterpunch.org