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Secret Invasion: US Troops Steal into Paraguay
By W.T. Whitney Jr
12/29/05 "ICH" -- -- The Bush administration has sent troops into
Paraguay. They are there ostensibly for humanitarian and
counterterrorism purposes. The action coincides with growing left
unity in South America, military buildup in the region and
burgeoning independent trade relationships.
In a speech on July 26 in Havana, Fidel Castro took note of the
incursion and called upon North American activists to oppose it. In
that vein, an inquiry is in order as to why the US government has
inserted Paraguay into its strategic plan for South America. In
addition, we should look at factors that favor Bush administration
schemes for the region and others that work against US plans.
In December 2004, the Bush administration canceled $330 million in
economic and military aid to 10 South American countries. They were
being penalized for turning down a US request for granting its
soldiers immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit within the
countries’ borders.
On May 5, however, the government of Paraguay took the bait. It
signed an agreement authorizing an 18-month stay, automatically
extended, for US soldiers and civilian employees. The previous limit
had been set at six months. On May 26, in a secret session,
Paraguay’s Congress passed legislation protecting US soldiers from
prosecution for criminal activity, both within Paraguay and by the
International Criminal Court.
Reportedly, 400 or 500 US troops – estimates vary – arrived in
Paraguay on July 1, with planes, weapons, equipment and ammunition.
They are billeted at a base near Mariscal Estigarribia, a small city
located 200 kilometers from the Bolivian border in the arid,
sparsely populated Chaco area of Paraguay. That facility, built by
US contractors in the waning years of the Stroessner dictatorship
(1954-1989), offers a runway long enough to accommodate large
military transport planes and bombers. It provides barrack space for
16,000 troops.
Journalist and human rights activist Alfredo Boccia Paz, stated in
Asuncion that immunity from prosecution for US soldiers, extension
of their stay, and joint military exercises all provide the
groundwork for the eventual installation of a US base in Paraguay.
He quoted Argentine Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel:
“Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave.
And that really frightens me.”
The US embassy in Paraguay declared that the United States has
“absolutely no intention of establishing a military base anywhere in
Paraguay” and “has no intention to station soldiers for a lengthy
period in Paraguay.” The government of Paraguay seconded that
notion. Brazil, however, responded. In late July, its army undertook
military maneuvers along that country’s border with Paraguay.
Paratroopers staged a mock occupation of the Furnas electrical
substation, located on the Brazilian border with Paraguay.
Paraguay’s vice president, Luis Castiglioni, met with Vice President
Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and former Assistant
Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Roger Noriega last
July in Washington. Observers suggested that this welcoming
committee was unusually high-powered for a visiting vice president
of a small South American nation. According to Rumsfeld, experts
would soon be going to Paraguay to develop a “planning seminar on
systems for national security.” The secretary visited Paraguay in
August. The FBI announced that it would be opening an office in
Paraguay in 2006.
The official US version of the Paraguay initiative is that for the
next 18 months, in addition to joint military exercises, 13 US
military teams would be working on humanitarian aide projects,
provide counterterrorism and police training and ameliorate the
effects of poverty. It turns out that US military personnel have
been providing medical care for poor peasants in a northern province
since 2002. Boccia Paz commented: “These missions are always
disguised as humanitarian aid.… What Paraguay does not and cannot
control is the total number of agents that enter the country.”
There is of course no shortage of US bases in Latin America. They
are located in Guantánamo, Cuba; Fort Buchanan and Roosevelt Roads,
Puerto Rico; Soto Cano, Honduras; and Comalapa, El Salvador. New US
air bases are situated in Reina Beatriz, Aruba; Hato Rey, Curacao;
and Manta in Ecuador. The latter was officially described as a
weather station on a dusty road, until it came out that a
full-fledged air base had materialized on the site at a cost of $80
million. Washington also operates a network of 17 land-based radar
stations (three in Peru, four in Colombia, plus 10 mobile radar
stations in secret locations.) All of these installations come are
under the control of the US Southern Command, based in Miami.
The US rationale for converting Paraguay into a military satellite
is worth exploring. For one thing, Washington is responding in
catch-up fashion to mounting popular resistance in the region to US
bullying. In neighboring Bolivia, for example, two US-friendly
presidents have been chased from office in the past two years. And
mass opposition to the US-backed candidate in last December’s
national election was no exception to the trend.
There’s more. Paraguay’s neighbor, Uruguay, put a social democrat
into the presidency in 2004, and last February President Kirchner of
Argentina violated world financial orthodoxy when his government
negotiated a 60 percent cut in Argentina’s $82 billion debt
obligations. Both Argentina and Brazil have quietly rejected the
FTAA. Paraguay has joined them in the South American Common Market (Mercosur),
which shelters its members from US and International Monetary Fund
dictates. For Paraguay to defect would serve US ends.
Washington took major exception to declarations emanating from a
gathering March 29, 2005 of Brazilian, Colombian, Venezuelan and
Spanish heads of state at Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela. They had
discussed the use of raw materials and regional trade patterns to
combat poverty and secure peace in South America. A few weeks later
Washington was miffed when its candidate for the secretary
generalship of the Organization of American States was rejected. And
right under the US nose, Latin American nations are coming together
to form Telesur and Petrosur, continent-wide television and energy
corporations, and developing banking services that serve people’s
needs.
Natural resources may also figure into the US motivations for
expanding its military presence in South America. One branch of the
main opening for a huge Bolivian natural gas field apparently
crosses the international border and is accessible in Paraguay at
the Independencia I site, not far from Mariscal Estigarribia. If US
troops occupied the base there, they would be in striking distance
of the Bolivian provinces of Santa Cruz and Tarija, where US natural
gas corporations are active. Bolivia will soon be voting on autonomy
for the provinces. A “yes” vote is expected to result in
privatization. In the event of civil unrest following that outcome,
the corporations could call for military protection.
The military base overlies the Guarani aquifer, one of the world’s
largest underground fresh water reserves. Already water wars have
riled Bolivian politics. Oligarchic interests in both the United
States and South America have great longings to advance the process
of turning water into a commodity.
The Bush administration has an additional interest in Paraguay
through its war on terrorism. The so-called triple border, where
Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet along both sides of the Parana
River, is the storied locus for smuggling, money laundering,
commerce in child prostitutes, counterfeit operations, and fixing of
illegal border crossings. Some 20,000 Middle Eastern, Muslim
expatriates, most of them Lebanese in origin, live in Ciudad del
Este on the Paraguayan side of the river and Foz do Iguacu in
Brazil. The cities supposedly are centers for Islamic extremism and
sources of funding for terrorist groups. Al Qaeda, Hamas and
Hezbollah operatives reportedly have passed through the area, and
training camps, sleeper cells, and passport factories are said to be
located there. After September 11, 40 FBI agents joined Paraguayan
colleagues to investigate some of these networks. Dozens of suspects
were arrested. US military authorities advertise their operatives
moving into Paraguay as experts in counterterrorism.
US meddling in South America has great potential to add to existing
tensions in the region as it adds its might to ongoing South
American military expansion. According to Uruguayan Raúl Zibechi, an
expert on the continent’s military landscape, South America is
experiencing unprecedented military growth. Nations there have
reacted to the excesses of US Plan Colombia and to new military
modalities, particularly the privatization of military forces on
display in Columbia. They are also attempting to emulate Brazil’s
new posture of strategic military autonomy. And, as is their habit,
ruling circles in many countries, following Washington’s lead,
respond to social unrest through military expansion.
In December 2004, Venezuela agreed to buy 110,000 Kalashnikov
rifles, 33 helicopters and 50 fighter-bombers from Russia. Spain
supplied Venezuela with naval aeronautical material, 10 transport
planes, and four coast-guard cutters. Venezuela will be buying 50
training and combat jets from Brazil. Venezuela earlier this year
activated a two million-member reserve component of its national
military force.
Yet according to the journal Military Power Review Venezuela comes
in at sixth place among South American nations in terms of military
strength. Brazil is far in the lead; Peru places second; Argentina,
third; followed by Chile and Colombia.
Increased military power, operating in tandem with nationalist
stirrings, may inhibit US military meddling. Brazil, for example,
with its own strategic defense plan and brisk economic growth, is an
unlikely US acolyte. The nation is the 10th largest industrial power
in the world and has become the world’s fifth largest arms exporter.
Brazilian industry builds warships, several types of fighter jets,
and is constructing a nuclear submarine. And to facilitate its
expanded trade with China, Brazil is paying 70 percent of the $1
billion cost of a 1,500 mile long highway that extends from Peruvian
ports to Santos on Brazil’s Atlantic coast.
Brazil recently sent military planners to Vietnam to learn about
guerrilla war. The head of Brazil’s Amazon military command, General
Claudio Barbosa, has predicted that Brazil may in the future face
wars similar to the war that convulsed Vietnam and the one
transpiring in Iraq now. The priority would be guerrilla warfare,
“an option the army will not hesitate to adopt facing a
confrontation with another country or group of countries with
greater economic and military power.” What nation could the general
be thinking of?
Brazil opposes Plan Colombia. The nationalist orientation of its
industrial leaders persuaded them to put off joining FTAA. Brazil
has no US bases on its soil, nor does Brazil engage in joint
military exercises with the United States. Military cooperation
between Brazil and Argentina apparently is flourishing, and in
February, Brazil signed strategic accords with Venezuela. The
Brazilian example of independent pursuit of national interests has
emboldened other South American nations.
The single-minded pursuit of national interests, however, may work
against popular struggle and Latin American unity. Analysts agree
that Brazil and Argentina’s preoccupation with internal interests
has created a power vacuum that encouraged Washington to court
Paraguay successfully. Relations between the two nations have long
been plagued by trade clashes.
Ideally, Brazil might have utilized its economic power to further
Latin American unity and ward off predatory US behavior. Instead it
operates according to free market rules and, unlike Venezuela, looks
for salvation through from the US-led world market economy,
distancing itself from Latin America’s agenda. Worse, jostling for
market advantage creates divisions that lay the region open to
tactics of divide and rule.
The Herculean labors of unified democratic struggle elsewhere in
Latin America point to strategies through which Bush scheming and US
military probing in the region might be resisted.
The example of the FARC-EP, in its survival and apparent growth, has
meaning for revolutionaries far beyond Colombia’s borders. The
organization now maintains a presence in nearly 100 percent of the
municipalities in Colombia, and, according to Monthly Review, “with
the exception of Cuba, [the FARC-EP] has become the largest and most
powerful revolutionary force – politically and militarily – within
the Western Hemisphere.”
Chávez forces in Venezuela, under the aegis of the Bolivarian
Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), have fused the twin causes of
Latin American unity and social justice. Mass protests in Bolivia,
Ecuador, Peru, even Chile keep empire minders in Washington on edge.
The point here is that growing solidarity on the part of US
activists with struggles throughout Latin America may act as a brake
on US meddling in Paraguay.
Opposition likely will materialize within Paraguay itself. In recent
years peasants there have mounted protests against privatization,
economic restrictions imposed by the International Monetary Fund,
unfair land holding patterns, and antiterrorism legislation.
There is no lack of awareness. Orlando Castillo of the human rights
group Servicio Páz y Justicia recalls that, “US soldiers taught
torture and other forms of human rights violations in courses at the
School of the Americas.” He warns that “the United States has strong
aspirations to convert Paraguay into a second Panama for its troops
and is not far removed from reaching its objective of controlling
the Southern Cone.”
While attending the 2nd Jubilee South World Assembly in Havana,
Sixto Pereira of the Paraguayan Initiative for People’s Integration
told Cuban-based Prensa Latina:
We demand the abolition of regulations that harbor and give impunity
to Pentagon troops. It is a demand in favor of Paraguay and Latin
American integration.
Pereira indicated that mobilization against the presence of US
troops is gaining momentum in Paraguay.
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