U.S. was, is and always will be a white-supremacist country

Article courtesy of the Dallas News

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Facing what seems like an endless stream of news about racialized conflicts and violence, it can feel imperative to get beyond our history and find solutions for today, concrete actions we can take immediately, ways of expressing love right now to help us cope with the pain.

Those goals are understandable, but it's just as important that we grapple with history, realize the inadequacy of any actions we might take today, and accept the limits of love in the face of political and economic realities. Better that we start with a harsh, but honest, assessment: The United States has always been, and always will be, a white-supremacist country.

Start by remembering that the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world and realizing that this wealth and power has depended on the idea of white supremacy. Recognize that the material comfort of the United States is the product of three racialized holocausts, rationalized by white supremacy.

Acquiring the land base of the United States required the most extensive genocide in recorded human history, the campaign to remove indigenous people and allow Europeans and their descendants to claim ownership of, and exploit, the land and its resources. This process killed millions and destroyed entire societies.

The United States in the 19th century was propelled into the industrial era in large part on the back of cheap cotton, which provided the raw material for the mills of the northeast and crucial hard currency from exports to Europe. This was not the product of free-market economics but the Atlantic slave trade, a process that killed millions and destroyed entire societies.

The United States in the 20th century eventually became the global power, through the use of overt military aggression, covert operations, and violence by proxies to maintain a world order hospitable to U.S. economic interests. From "our backyard" in Central America to southern Africa through the Middle East and Asia, U.S. policy drove toward dominance, a process that was easier to sell to the public because the millions killed and the societies destroyed were almost all non-white.

In all these endeavors, Europeans and their descendants did not dominate and exterminate because they hated non-white peoples but out of desire for wealth and power. The ideology of white supremacy emerged to justify the domination and extermination of other human beings. Europeans have a long history of violence directed toward each other as well, but the conquest of non-white peoples throughout the world produced the distinctive pathology of white supremacy.

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Because the wealth and power of the United States are so deeply rooted in white supremacy, the abandonment of that pathology would inevitably lead to difficult questions about the country's moral and material obligations to non-white people, at home and abroad. If poor and working-class white people were to say, "But wait, I haven't been able to cash in on much of this wealth," that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of capitalism. If women were to say, "But wait, no matter what the race and class hierarchies, we still face endemic violence and denigration," that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of patriarchy.

All systems of illegitimate authority that give some people unearned wealth and power are based on a similar pathology that tries to naturalize hierarchy and exploitation. Pull on one string, and the fabric of rationalizations for all domination or subordination start to unravel.

The United States will always be a white-supremacist nation because we have neither the intellectual nor moral traditions to deal with these harsh realities. We are intellectually lazy and morally weak. Mainstream politics, conservative and liberal, are terrified of acknowledging these realities.

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced." The United States still has not faced this history and contemporary reality.

That doesn't mean we have made no progress. No one I know wants to go back to 1962. The accomplishments of the freedom struggle, the anti-lynching campaigns, the civil-rights movement are not insignificant. The fact that a black person sits in the White House is not trivial.

But that doesn't change the white-supremacist roots and reality of the United States, and the entrenched resistance to change in the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.

In that essay, Baldwin suggested that a great writer attempts "to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more."

To date, the United States has turned away from that challenge. I see no evidence in contemporary culture that we are any closer to telling the truth. That means whatever actions we take today, however we make our love real in the world, we must push each other to face our history and ourselves.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His most recent book is Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2015), and he also is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005). Jensen can be reached atrjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online, or join anemail list to receive new articles. Twitter: @jensenrobertw

2014 High-Spanics (Super Chicanos y Mas) by the Numbers

The End of the Solid South

The American Prospect
By Bob Moser

The region's emerging majority is progressive. Its capitols are more conservative than ever. Something's got to give.

The final rally of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign took place on symbolically charged ground: the rolling fields of Manassas, site of the first major battle of the Civil War. It was the last stop on an election eve spent entirely in the South: Jacksonville, Charlotte, and finally Northern Virginia. In the autumn chill, an estimated 90,000 people spread out across the county fairgrounds and waited for hours to cheer a new president—and a new South.

By this point, Virginians knew Obama well. In February, he had beaten Hillary Clinton 2 to 1 in the state’s Democratic primary, a blow to her floundering bid. After clinching the nomination, he’d kicked off his general-election campaign in rural Virginia and been a frequent visitor since. Bucking conventional wisdom, Obama’s team had invested heavily in three Southern states: not just perennial battleground Florida but also Virginia and North Carolina, which had not voted Democratic for president since 1964 and 1976, respectively. No Democrat—not even Bill Clinton—had made a serious attempt to win North Carolina or Virginia since Ronald Reagan claimed it in 1980. But Obama was gambling on an emerging South—one that is younger than the rest of the country, far more ethnically diverse than the old black-and-white paradigm, and more liberal-leaning than any Southern generation to precede it.

That emerging South was arrayed in the dark hills around Obama as he flashed into the spotlight. On soil where whites once fought to the death for the right to enslave blacks, this throng had gathered to hail the soon-to-be first black man to be elected president. The next day, Obama carried all three of his Southern targets—55 electoral votes for the party. For Southerners, the message was unmistakable: The future has arrived. The Solid South is dead.

When Americans talk about the South, they tend to be talking about the past. When they talk about Southern politics, they tend to be talking about the old, stereotyped “Solid South”—that uniformly conservative, racist, anti-union, snake-handling cluster of former Confederate states that voted en masse for Democrats from the pre–Civil War through civil rights, then switched their allegiance to the former “party of Lincoln” beginning in the 1970s. Once LBJ and the Democrats betrayed the cause of white supremacy and Richard Nixon cooked up the “Southern Strategy,” the region became as solidly Republican as it once was Democratic. End of story.

Southern politics has never been quite so uncomplicated as that. It took decades for Republicans to outnumber Democrats, and Republican control of the region has never matched the Democrats’ former hegemony. The South has been contested ground for 40 years, with the GOP dominating federal elections and gradually cutting into the Democrats’ hold on state and local offices—culminating in 2012, when Arkansas’s legislature became the last to go Republican. (Virginia’s Senate has a partisan split.)

Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone. The politics of the region’s five most populous states—Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas—will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fast-growing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats. If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren’t competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.

Republicans will not give up easily. Their counter-insurgency began soon after Obama’s three Southern victories. It was propitious timing. The Tea Party, a mostly Southern phenomenon, was turning Obamaphobia into a political movement. Big conservative donors, their money freed up by Citizens United and other court decisions, were ready to spend unprecedented amounts on obscure state assembly races and judgeships (to elect those fired-up Tea Partiers, in many cases). Republicans recognized that 2010 might be their last great chance to expand their gains in the South. They made the most of it.

In a bad year for Democrats nationwide, it was a disaster in the South. Two years after North Carolina voted for Obama, both chambers of the general assembly went Republican for the first time in 120 years. In Florida, the Tea Party launched Marco Rubio into the U.S. Senate. The year before, in Virginia’s off-year elections, right-wing Republicans had been elected governor and attorney general. Republicans now controlled all but four legislative chambers in the region.

With those statehouse majorities, the GOP had won the larger prize it sought: control of legislative and congressional redistricting. The party redrew the maps with gusto, giving it favorable districts for the next decade. The trick is watering down the impact of minority voters by moving them from competitive districts into those that are already minority-held. That way, the blacker and browner districts get blacker and browner, and 60 percent Democratic districts become 70 percent Democratic. The white districts, in turn, get whiter—and more Republican. In North Carolina, which ended up with the South’s most egregiously misshapen map, half of the state’s black population of 2.2 million was drawn into one-fifth of its legislative and congressional districts.

Civil-rights and civil-liberties groups argued that Republicans were using race illegally as the primary basis of redistricting. But the courts mostly upheld the maps, and the results were startling. In 2012, Republicans won legislative majorities in every former Confederate state for the first time. (In Virginia, the Senate is evenly split by party, 20-20.) Overall, the South had now elected 222 more Republican legislators than it had in 2008. Georgia’s Democrats made up 47 percent of the statewide vote in 2008 and 2010, but after redistricting they could only elect a maximum of 31 percent of statehouse members. The gerrymandering was just as effective in congressional elections. In Virginia, Obama won by 4 percent statewide, but Republicans captured 10 of 13 seats in the U.S. House.

Southern politics is more fractured than it’s ever been. Obama threw down the gauntlet in 2008, and Republicans answered in 2010 and 2012. The voters are moving left, while the state governments are lurching right. The only safe prediction is that after 150 years of being largely ignored in national elections, the South is about to become the most fiercely contested, and unpredictable, political battleground in America.

It’s been almost four decades since journalist and historian John Egerton famously declared the South “just about over as a separate and distinct place.” He was writing about a newly integrated 1970s South that was suddenly teeming with suburban tracts and office parks, urbanizing so rapidly that it could hardly be recognized. To this day, Americans still think “rural” when they think “Southern.” But there’s nothing very rural about the South anymore. Florida is 91 percent urban, Georgia and Virginia 75 percent, and in probably the biggest surprise, Texas is 85 percent urban.

With the suburbs and office parks came new Southerners. At first it was mostly Northern professionals, who began moving down in the 1950s and 1960s for low taxes, affordable homes, and jobs in banking (Charlotte), energy (Houston and Dallas), technology (the Research Triangle Park and Austin), and government-contract work (Northern Virginia). Many of the “relocated Yankees,” as they were sometimes fondly called, were registered Republicans—but they were more moderate than their Southern partymates, especially on culture-war issues. Those transplants became swing votes, and they haven’t stopped coming.

The demographic big bang didn’t begin in earnest, however, until the 1990s. Large numbers of African Americans had begun moving South in what would become known as the “great remigration.” From the early 20th century until the 1960s, more than seven million blacks fled the Jim Crow South in the Great Migration to pursue a better life, mostly in the industrial North. It was the largest domestic migration in American history. Now hundreds of thousands are returning. Last decade, 75 percent of the growth in America’s black population was in the South. Atlanta and its endless suburbs gained 491,000 African Americans in the past decade, more than any other city. Some are middle-class blacks whose families once relied on government jobs up North that are now disappearing. Some are caring for older relatives left behind in the Great Migration. Some are simply coming home to reunite with their families, finding a region that has undergone seismic changes since the South’s segregated “way of life” finally came to a merciful end.

While blacks were remigrating, Latino populations were expanding rapidly. Birth statistics tell the story: By 2010, 49 percent of newborns in Texas were Latino. Among the big five Southern states, Virginia has the lowest rate at 12 percent. Hundreds of thousands of young Latinos become eligible to vote in the South every year, and that number will be climbing for decades. At least for now, this strongly favors Democrats, who win Latino votes by large margins. Florida used to be the exception, because first-generation (and often second-generation) Cuban Americans were staunch, anti-communist Republicans. But younger Cuban Americans have joined a new immigrant population in Central Florida to help flip the state in the Democrats’ favor.

The key is getting Latinos to the polls—and it’s been a challenge in most Southern states. In 2010, for instance, Latinos were 38 percent of Texas’s population. But just 16 percent of eligible Latinos voted as Republicans won historically big margins in both legislative chambers. The poor turnout is partly a factor of youth. Latinos are, on average, a decade younger than Anglos. Most are not in the habit of voting. If they live in a state like Texas or Georgia, it’s likely that nobody has ever courted their vote.

Once Latinos begin to vote in proportion to their population, the change that they will bring to Southern (and American) politics won’t be limited to a shift in party loyalties. It will be manifested in a new progressivism as well.

Republicans like to talk about how Latinos are “hardworking, religious, family-oriented,” as if those qualities automatically made people conservative. In fact, an exit poll from 2012 showed the opposite: Latino voters are not only more liberal than Republicans; they’re sometimes more liberal than Democrats. On same-sex marriage, 59 percent said yes, against 48 percent of all voters. Should abortion be legal? Sixty-six percent said yes, against 59 percent overall. On economic issues, Latinos’ liberalism tends to be even more pronounced (the same is true for African Americans). Fifty-five percent said last year that they have a negative view of capitalism. They want more spending on public schools. They want universal, public-run health care. They want government to take a strong hand in the economy. Taxes? Raise them, if it means better social services. The same goes for every part of the South’s emerging majority—African Americans, Asian Americans, and under-30 whites who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Given the progressive tilt of the South’s coming majority, it’s no wonder that Scott Keeter, head pollster at the Pew Research Center, calls the region “a ticking time bomb for Republicans.” The Southern GOP is 88 percent white, and the white population is aging. Republicans will buy some time with their friendly legislative districts buffering any losses. They’ll continue to try to make it harder for minorities and young people to vote—and if the Supreme Court strikes down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act this year, it will be easier to suppress votes in the South.

There’s a cost to the time Republicans are buying. The Tea Party legislators who brought Republicans to power in 2010 are moving the party further right on practically every issue—at the same time that voters are tilting back toward the center. That’s creating the kind of situation that unfolded last year in Virginia. Republican lawmakers pushed a bill requiring every woman who requests an abortion to have an invasive sonogram procedure. In an election year, in a battleground state that is trending Democratic, what sense does such sure-to-be-divisive legislation make? None at all, unless you’re in a state—or a region—that is smack in the middle of a demographic revolution that is fueling a political one. It is a confusing business.

In the South’s new battlegrounds, 2020 shapes up as a pivotal year. If Democrats have gathered enough strength by then to send majorities to Richmond, Raleigh, Atlanta, Tallahassee, and/or Austin, they can tear up the Republican maps from 2011 and make it dauntingly difficult for the GOP to regain its majorities. That’s likeliest to happen in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina; Democratic majorities could take longer in Texas and Georgia, where Republicans are more deeply entrenched.

But the politics of the big Southern states are all betwixt and between, as natives like to say. If Republicans can find a way to hold on to their majorities through 2020, they will stay competitive, on the state level at least, for another decade. Ultimately, they won’t be able to keep winning unless they can convince Latinos and African Americans to vote Republican. If they do, Southern Republicans could become a model for the national GOP—the states that figured out how to persuade Latinos to vote Republican.

But it will be no quick or easy matter for the Southern Republican Party—built on a Chamber of Commerce foundation and lifted to victory by evangelical Christians—to find a message that can appeal to the South’s new electorate. How do you build bridges to voters whose views would sound, to your average Southern Republican, socialistic and downright un-American?

More likely, destiny will follow demography. The South’s big states could soon be undergirding a durable national Democratic majority that’s capable of lasting as long as the New Deal consensus. Liberalism would have a chance to flourish anew—not just in state capitols but in Washington, D.C., as well. This would be an emphatic break from history. From Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Barack Obama’s stimulus and heath-care overhaul, the biggest obstacle has always been Congress’s solid white wall of Southern conservatism. That wall is crumbling. In the future, if you can be progressive and win Texas or Georgia, the American political order will transform in ways we can barely comprehend.

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Zetas Cartel Occupies Mexico State of Coahuila

By Tracy Wilkinson for LA Times

Few outside Coahuila state noticed. Headlines were rare. But steadily, inexorably, Mexico's third-largest state slipped under the control of its deadliest drug cartel, the Zetas.

The aggressively expanding Zetas took advantage of three things in this state right across the border from Texas: rampant political corruption, an intimidated and silent public, and, if new statements by the former governor are to be believed, a complicit and profiting segment of the business elite. It took scarcely three years.

What happened to Coahuila has been replicated in several Mexican states — not just the violent ones that get the most attention, but others that have more quietly succumbed to cartel domination. Their tragedies cast Mexico's security situation and democratic strength in a much darker light than is usually acknowledged by government officials who have been waging a war against the drug gangs for six years.

"We are a people under siege, and it is a region-wide problem," said Raul Vera, the Roman Catholic bishop of Coahuila. A violence once limited to a small corner of the state has now spread in ways few imagined, he said.

What sets the Zetas apart from other cartels, in addition to a gruesome brutality designed to terrorize, is their determination to dominate territory by controlling all aspects of local criminal businesses.

Not content to simply smuggle drugs through a region, the Zetas move in, confront every local crime boss in charge of contraband, pirated CDs, prostitution, street drug sales and after-hour clubs, and announce that they are taking over. The locals have to comply or risk death.

And so it was in Coahuila. One common threat from Zeta extortionists, according to Saltillo businessmen: a thousand pesos, or three fingers.

With the Zetas meeting little resistance, wheels greased by a corrupt local government, there was little violence. But the people of Coahuila found themselves under the yoke of a vicious cartel nonetheless.

"It was as if it all fell from the sky to the Earth," said Eduardo Calderon, a psychologist who works with migrants, many of whom have been killed in the conflict. "We all knew it was happening, but it was as if it happened in silence."

The "silence" ended in rapid-fire succession in a few weeks' time starting mid-September. Coahuila saw one of the biggest mass prison breaks in history, staged by Zetas to free Zetas; the killing of the son of one of the country's most prominent political families (a police chief is the top suspect); and, on Oct. 7, the apparent slaying of the Zetas' top leader by federal troops who say they stumbled upon him as he watched a baseball game.

"Apparent" because armed commandos brazenly stole the body from local authorities within hours of the shooting. The military insists that the dead man was Heriberto Lazcano, Mexico's most feared fugitive, acknowledging that he had been living comfortably and freely in Coahuila for some time.

"He was like Pedro in his house," former Gov. Humberto Moreira said, using an expression that means he was totally at home and could go anywhere.

The Zetas had such confident dominion over the state that Lazcano, alias the Executioner, and the other top Zeta leader, Miguel Angel Trevino, regularly used a vast Coahuila game reserve to hunt zebras they imported from Africa.

Since their formation in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a paramilitary bodyguard for the then-dominant Gulf cartel, the Zetas operated primarily in Tamaulipas state on Mexico's northeastern shoulder and down the coast of Veracruz and into Guatemala.

For most of that time, Coahuila, rich in coal mines and with a booming auto industry, was used by cartels as little more than a transit route for drugs across the border. The Zetas maintained a presence limited to Torreon, the southwestern Coahuila city that served as a bulwark against the powerful Sinaloa cartel that reigned in neighboring Durango state.

In 2010, the Zetas broke away from the Gulf cartel, triggering a war that bloodied much of Tamaulipas and spilled over into neighboring states. Coahuila, with its rugged mountains and sparsely populated tracts, became a refuge for the Zetas, and they spread out across the state, including this heretofore calm capital, Saltillo.

Even if the violence hasn't been as ghastly as in other parts of Mexico, nearly 300 people, many of them professionals, have vanished in Coahuila, probably kidnapped by the Zetas for ransom or for their skills.

The man in charge of Coahuila during most of the Zeta takeover was Moreira, the former governor. After five years in office, he left the position a year ahead of schedule, in early 2011, to assume the national leadership of the Institutional Revolutionary Party on the eve of its triumphant return to presidential power after more than a decade.

But scandal followed Moreira, including a debt of more than $3 million he had saddled Coahuila with, allegedly from fraudulent loans. He was eventually forced to quit the PRI leadership, dashing what many thought to be his presidential aspirations.

Tragedy followed when Moreira's son Jose Eduardo was shot twice in the head execution-style in the Coahuila town of Acuna early last month. Investigators believe that most of the Acuna police department turned Jose Eduardo over to the Zetas as a reprisal for the killing of a nephew of Trevino. The police chief was arrested.

Killing the son of a former governor — and nephew of the current one, Humberto's brother Ruben — was a rare strike by drug traffickers into the heart of Mexico's political elite.

In mourning, Humberto Moreira gave a series of remarkably candid interviews in which he accused entrepreneurs from Coahuila's mining sector of sharing the wealth with top drug traffickers who in turn used the money to buy weapons and pay off their troops. They killed his son, he said.

Mining in Coahuila is huge and notoriously dangerous, with companies routinely flouting safety regulations and workers dying in explosions and accidents. The depth to which drug traffickers have penetrated the industry is being investigated by federal authorities.

The question on the minds of many Mexicans was: If Moreira was so aware of criminal penetration, why didn't he stop it?

Critics suggest that during his tenure, he was happy to turn a blind eye to the growth of the Zetas as long as he could pursue his business and political interests. He denies that now and says fighting organized crime was up to the federal government; the federal government blames state officials, in Coahuila and elsewhere, for coddling the drug lords.

"The northern governors have long cut deals with the cartels that operate in their domains. The pattern in the north is cooperation," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who has written extensively on the Zetas and Mexican issues.

"The Coahuila police are among the most corrupt in all Mexico."

The extent to which the Zetas' tentacles had penetrated state government became clear this year when federal authorities discovered a protection racket that dated well into

Humberto Moreira's administration and was led by none other than the brother of the state attorney general. According to the federal investigation, he and 10 other state officials were being paid roughly $60,000 a month by the Zetas to leak information to the gang.

The nearly 3 million residents of Coahuila, meanwhile, find ways to survive and accommodate.

In rural areas where the Zetas are most commonly seen on the streets, people have learned to be mute and blind. In cities such as Saltillo, they change their habits, don't go out at night, send their children to school in other cities.

A businessman whose family has lived here for generations said, "We are in a state of war, without realizing when or how we got there."

wilkinson@latimes.com

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Wikileaks and Latin America: Same Old Imperious U.S. Diplomats

By Former Senior Research Fellow Nikolas Kozloff

As more and more documents become available from Wikileaks, the public has gotten a novel and close up view of U.S. diplomats and their operations abroad. I was particularly interested to review heretofore secret documents dealing with Latin America, a region which has absorbed the attention of Washington officials in recent years. While it’s certainly no secret that the Bush administration, not to mention the later Obama White House, have both sought to isolate the so-called “Pink Tide” of leftist regimes in South America, the Wikileaks documents give us some interesting insight into the mindset of U.S. diplomats as they carry out their day to day work.

Needless to say, the picture that emerges isn’t too flattering.

Take, for example, a 2005 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia1 which details a high level conversation which took place between the American ambassador, John Danilovich, and Brazilian General Jorge Armando Felix. A longtime businessman, Danilovich spent 20 years in the shipping industry in London and it was there that the American organized voters for George Bush and his father. A big time GOP donor, Danilovich proved a loyal lieutenant at his post in Brasilia, specifically by opposing the left turn in South America.

In 2005, Hugo Chávez was at the height of his political powers, challenging the unpopular Bush regime throughout the region. Over in Bolivia meanwhile, Washington fretted that an erstwhile coca farmer, Evo Morales, might win his country’s presidential election. For Washington, Brazil had become a country of vital geopolitical importance: if President Lula could be persuaded to drop his support of neighboring Venezuela, then the U.S. would certainly be more successful at halting the region’s leftist advance. In the effort to turn back the Pink Tide, Danilovich was a key figure.

Speaking with the Brazilian daily O Estado de São Paulo, the diplomat accused Chávez of actually funding political forces within Bolivia. Seeking to foster a common U.S.-Brazilian front, Danilovich said the funding was a concern for Washington and ought to preoccupy officials in Brasilia as well. When reporters asked Danilovich whether he was accusing Chávez of directly funding Morales’ campaign, the diplomat would not specify [Morales himself denied the U.S. allegations].

Behind closed doors, Danilovich continued his diplomatic offensive. After lunching with General Felix, the ambassador broached the subject of Venezuela, noting that Chávez was “disrupting Brazil’s efforts to play a leading role politically and economically in South America.” It’s unclear from the cable what Felix might have thought about the ambassador’s comments, though reading between the lines it seems the military man may have been sympathetic toward the U.S. and disagreed with his own government’s official policy toward Venezuela.

Since we don’t have the full text of Danilovich’s cable, it’s unclear whether the diplomat approached other figures in the Lula government about Venezuela, let alone military officials. To be sure, at the time of this meeting Felix was working as Lula’s own Minister of Internal Security and as such no longer occupied an official post within the ranks. Yet, there are some disturbing parallels to the historic past here. Consider that it was not too long ago that Washington collaborated with the anti-Communist Brazilian military which overthrew democracy in a coup. Later, the armed forces hunted down leftists both within the country and abroad through so-called “Operation Condor.”

From Brazil to Argentina

Elsewhere in South America, the U.S. has faced political opposition from some unlikely quarters. Take for example Argentina, up until recently a fairly reliable U.S. ally which followed the Washington economic consensus. With the coming to power of Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner however, U.S.-Argentine relations have taken a nosedive. A fierce critic of the International Monetary Fund, Néstor also pursued an unprecedented diplomatic alliance with leftist Venezuela.2

Wikileaks cables document the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Buenos Aires and show U.S. diplomats as imperious and scheming. Take for example a diplomatic spat between Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs Arturo Valenzuela and Argentine officials, an incident that I wrote about at the time.3 An American of Chilean descent and a Chavez critic, Valenzuela made his way to Buenos Aires late last year. Causing a diplomatic firestorm, Valenzuela declared before the local media that Argentina lacked adequate legal protections. When the government protested that such was not the case, Valenzuela clarified that he had personally spoken with representatives of American companies through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who were upset about management of the economy. They were reluctant to invest due to lack of legal protections, Valenzuela added.

As if he had not annoyed the government enough already, Valenzuela then declared that he personally had detected a change in the investment climate between 1996 [the height of Argentina's flirtation with neo-liberal economics] when “there was a lot of enthusiasm to invest,” and the present day. In a communiqué, the Argentine foreign ministry angrily retorted that the government “had not received complaints from U.S. companies which had interests and investments” in the country.

The irate chorus continued with Interior Minister Florencio Randazzo regretting that some U.S. officials had gone back to “the old practices” even though “there was an expectation in Argentina of the inauguration of a new U.S. foreign policy” during the Obama era. The Minister of Justice added that Valenzuela’s remarks were “very unusual and unjustified.” By far however the most incendiary remarks came from former president Néstor Kirchner who accused Valenzuela of behaving like a “viceroy.”

Far from feeling contrite toward Argentina, U.S. diplomats treated the Valenzuela episode rather flippantly and superciliously. In a cable sent to Washington, recently released through Wikileaks4 , American officials in Buenos Aires wrote that the local press had “sensationalized” and over dramatized the incident. “Once again,” diplomats remarked, “the Kirchner government has shown itself to be extremely thin-skinned and intolerant of perceived criticism.” Downplaying the tenor of Valenzuela’s remarks, the authors added that many Argentines routinely complain about the weakness of governing institutions and the rule of law.

It’s difficult to parse what Washington’s policy might be toward Argentina in the Obama era. Judging from another cable released by Wikileaks5 , U.S. officials are still trying to sort it all out and seek to acquire as much information about the Kirchners as possible. Prior to Néstor’s recent death, Secretary of State Clinton personally wrote to the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, remarking that the U.S. was drawing up “a written product examining the interpersonal dynamics between the governing tandem.”

Clinton added that State had a pretty “solid understanding” of Néstor’s style and personality, but Cristina remained a mystery. Specifically, Clinton wanted to know how Cristina managed “her nerves and anxiety.” Somewhat bizarrely, Clinton then asked her subordinates whether Cristina was taking any medications. Again and again, the Secretary of State pressed for details about Cristina’s psychological and emotional profile.

Though certainly intriguing, the Wikileaks cable fails to answer a vital question: why would Clinton seek a psychological evaluation of Cristina in the first place? Perhaps, the United States government simply lacked information about the Argentine president and wanted to know who it was dealing with in South America. Another darker reading however is that the U.S. does not trust Argentina and is seeking to manipulate Cristina or uncover some dirt. A Machiavellian if there ever was one, Clinton is surely capable of playing political hardball and engaging in diplomatic intrigue.

For far too long, the U.S. public has remained ignorant of its government’s overseas efforts to turn back Latin America’s leftist Pink Tide. Though scant thus far, Wikileaks’ release of documents pertaining to Latin America is telling. From Brazil to Argentina, American officials have emerged as an imperious and cynical lot. Hopefully in the days ahead we may learn more about the Bush and Obama administration’s handling not only of Brazil and Argentina but also Venezuela, Bolivia, and Honduras.

Nikolas Kozloff, Ph.D. is a former COHA Senior Research Fellow and is the author ofRevolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left.

Some of his other posts are available at www.nikolaskozloff.com

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Covert Memories from Miami

23 September 2009

By Saul Landau

In Miami, several retired U.S. officials remembered the early 1960s, when the CIA sent hundreds of employees to join other government bureaucrats to process and recruit thousands of Cuban exiles to destroy the Cuban revolution. Assassination plans abounded, from poisoned cigars and wetsuits for Fidel Castro, to a sniper rifle smuggled in by his comrade to a sophisticated poison pill. The capsule’s designer imagined the pills dissolving in Fidel’s chocolate milkshake, which he drank regularly at the former Havana Hilton Hotel’s ice cream bar. These Hollywoodesque creations came from the CIA laboratory of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s ghoulish technology maven. Most of the plotters and erstwhile assassins of that era, like Gottlieb, have died.

One long-retired Air Force officer told me of his plan to undermine Fidel among Cuba’s guajiros (peasants). Given the shortages of consumer goods, it made sense to clandestinely drop tens of thousands of rolls of toilet paper on the island. On each leaf the guajiro would see a photo of Castro and Khrushchev together. “That would have given the guajiros a good laugh,” the perpetrator told me. “But the White House nixed it.” Perhaps Kennedy might have thought that if he approved such a prank, some joker in the U.S. could put the President’s and Bobby’s faces on toilet paper and sell the product throughout the United States; legal under the First Amendment.

Most Cubans who arrived in the days preceding what became the April 1961 Bay of Pigs “fiasco” assumed the U.S. government would deal with Fidel and his communists. Washington had never allowed such flagrant disobedience to go unpunished. By the summer of 1960, the Cuban revolution had the gall to seize property belonging to the mighty oil companies (the Cuban government nationalized Texaco and Esso after they refused to refine Soviet crude oil on orders from Washington). Such defiant behavior challenged the essence of the Monroe Doctrine: “Latin America is ours.”

Few inside the hub of operations questioned the premises. “It was the height of the Cold War, after all,” several retired officials explained as if this statement summarized the justification for everything. The West faced a relentless enemy of great power and U.S. agencies had to stop its expansion. Indeed, most of the world would have agreed, at least, that Cuba informally belonged to the United States, no matter what most Cubans thought of that assessment.

The secret plots to overthrow the revolutionary government had become the world’s most open secret. Miami became Planning and Operations Center for the CIA’s largest station (JMWAVE). One man, now in his late 50s, told me how a CIA official -- a Mr. Bishop -- had recruited his father in 1959. Their family moved to Miami along with hundreds of thousands of Cuba’s rich, professional and propertied middle classes. His father worked from a two story building in Miami Beach, one of hundreds of CIA properties in the area. Nearby, ships from the CIA’s navy would dock, load up with provisions (arms and bombs) and set off to the Cuban coast to wreak havoc or just drop or pick-up agents whose job was to subvert the new government. “It was routine, every day and sometimes twice a day.”

“I thought the invasion would come in October of 1960,” he told me, “or at least that would be the start of some intense guerrilla war. Everyone speculated if a full-scale invasion would occur or if men would be sent to the Cuban mountains to do what Fidel did to Batista.”

Eisenhower had obvious misgivings about the plan and passed the ball to Kennedy, who then suffered the ignominious defeat. Publicly, he accepted responsibility (“Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.”). Privately, however, he sought revenge: the overthrow of the Castro government. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, directed a war of terror against Cuba; assassination attempts and sabotage, propaganda and economic war against an island of 6 million people.

In December 1960, I was on a tour with a group of students going to Cuba. Arriving at the Miami airport, we learned the pilots of our Cubana plane (each hour Pan Am and Cubana flew to Havana) had defected. While waiting for a new crew to fly over from Havana, a “spontaneous demonstration” erupted. Angry Cuban exiles screamed at the college students; some protestors threw punches and began to spit at the students. One asked a demonstrator: If Cuba is so terrible, you should want us to go. Then we’ll return and tell lots of people how awful things are.” The protestor looked puzzled. He turned to the team leader and asked for instructions. “Don’t talk, just spit,” he sneered. It appropriately summed up U.S. policy for fifty years.

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and filmmaker (DVDs available through roundworldproductions.com)

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The Greyhoud Bus Experience

[Photo left: Arizona Landscape
Photo Below Left: Fort Stockton, Texas Bus Station]

For spring break 1998, I decided to embark on an adventure. I would take a Greyhound Bus from San Francisco, California to Jacksonville, Florida. I was 45 years old and I had never been west of San Antonio, Texas. I felt it was about time that I see the South. In retrospect, it was a foolhardy notion. Email me before you decide to take "The Dog." I will share with you some of my horror stories.

My biggest complaint was that it is impossible to get any sleep on a cramped bus. I tossed and turned in my narrow seat next to a three hundred pound man who exuded the pungent aroma of rotten milk. All the while an infant is screaming bloody murder behind me. Never again!

The bus stops every two or three hours in a nondescript town that time forgot. You have no choice but to be stirred from your vague slumber. The driver like some tormentor rousts you at three in the morning with the announcement of a rest stop over the loudspeaker. Everyone is herded like sheep ready for a fleecing.

I'm half awake and bleary eyed, so I decide to grab a hamburger and french fries at this anonymous eatery. Your first questions is, "where am I?" Two and half hours later you stop again. It's five thirty. I don't know why, maybe due to sleep deprivation, I eat again. This time I order two pieces of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. At the next bus station I go for a short walk. I survive the sleepless nights by attempting to take short naps throughout the day.

At every stop, I pray for a clean restroom. I rush to the sink and try to refresh myself. I'd brush my teeth and wash my face. I would try to clean my various parts to the best of my ability. I desperately needed a shower. As for entertainment, you eventually come to the realization that radio stations are few and far between in rural America. Before the trip I knew I didn't like country music. But in many parts of America — the twang of country music is all you hear.

At least once a day, like clockwork, the INS would interrogate me. At the station or on a lonely stretch of the interstate they would be looking for Mexicans. They would ask me if I was an American citizen and I would show them ID. Sometimes I would react obnoxiously and say, "I am as American as you are." I saw a dozen Greyhound passengers get arrested during my trip for not having the proper papers. To the INS having a dark brown face is an open invitation for questioning.

The ordeal was over when I made it to Florida on March 23, 1998. I had crossed the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic in three days and three nights. I promised myself that day I would never take the bus again. Then I remembered ... in five short days, I would have to get back on that same cramped bus to get back home. I winced at the thought. But first I desperately needed a shower.

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