Dark Armies, Secret Bases & Rummy, oh my!

Dark Armies, Secret Bases & Rummy, oh my!

By Conn Hallinan

It would be easy to make fun of President Bush's recent
fiasco at the 4th Summit of the Americas in Mar del
Plata, Argentina. His grand plan for a free trade zone
reaching from the Artic Circle to Terra del Fuego was
soundly rejected by nations fed up with the economic
and social chaos wrought by neo-liberalism. At a press
conference, South American journalists asked him rude
questions about Karl Rove. And the President ended the
whole debacle by uttering what may be the most
trenchant observation the man has ever made on Latin
America: 'Wow! Brazil is big!'

But there is nothing amusing about an enormous U.S.
base less than 120 miles from the Bolivian border, or
the explosive growth of U.S. financed mercenary armies
that are doing everything from training the military in
Paraguay and Ecuador to calling in air attacks against
guerillas in Colombia. Indeed, it is feeling a little
like the run up to the '60s and '70s, when Washington-
sponsored military dictatorships dominated most of the
continent, and dark armies ruled the night.

U.S. Special Forces began arriving this past summer at
Paraguay's Mariscasl Estigarriba air base, a sprawling
complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator
Alfredo Strosserr. Argentinean journalists who got a
peek at the place say the airfield can handle B-52
bombers and Galaxy C-5 cargo planes. It also has a huge
radar system, vast hangers, and can house up to 16,000
troops. The air base is larger than the international
airport at the capital city, Asuncion.

Some 500 special forces arrived July 1 for a three-
month counterterrorism training exercise code named
Operation Commando Force 6.

Paraguayan denials that Mariscasl Estigarriba is now a
U.S. base have met with considerable skepticism by
Brazil and Argentina. There is a disturbing similarity
between U.S. denials about Mariscasl Estigarriba, and
similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy
Alfaro airbase in Manta, Ecuador. The U.S. claimed the
Manta base was a 'dirt strip' used for weather
surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size,
however, the U.S. admitted the base harbored thousands
of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and
Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with
Ecuador.

The Eloy Alfaro base is used to rotate U.S. troops in
and out of Columbia, and to house an immense network of
private corporations who do most of the military's
dirty work in Columbia. According to the Miami Herald,
U.S. mercenaries armed with M-16s have gotten into fire
fights with guerrillas in southern Columbia, and
American civilians working for Air Scan International
of Florida called in air strikes that killed 19
civilians and wounded 25 others in the town of Santo
Domingo.

The base is crawling with U.S. civilians-many of them
retired military-working for Military Professional
Resources Inc., Virginia Electronics, DynCorp, Lockheed
Martin (the world's largest arms maker), Northrop
Grumman, TRW, and dozens of others.

It was U.S. intelligence agents working out of Manta
who fingered Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
leader Ricardo Palmera last year, and several leaders
of the U.S. supported coup against Haitian President
Bertram Aristide spent several months there before
launching the 2004 coup that exiled Aristide to South
Africa.

'Privatizing' war is not only the logical extension of
the Bush Administration's mania for contracting
everything out to the private sector; it also shields
the White House's activities from the U.S. Congress.
'My complaint about the use of private contractors,'
says U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsy (D-Il), 'is their ability
to fly under the radar to avoid accountability.'

The role that Manta is playing in the northern part of
the continent is what so worries countries in the
southern cone about Mariscasl Estigarriba. 'Once the
United States arrives,' Argentinean Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Adolfo Perez commented about the Paraguay
base, 'it takes a long time to leave.'

The Bush Administration has made the 'Triple Frontier
Region' where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet into
the South American equivalent of Iraq's Sunni Triangle.

According to William Pope, U.S. State Department
Counterterrorist Coordinator, the U.S. has evidence
that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed spent
several months in the area in 1995. The U.S. military
also says it seized documents in Afghanistan with
pictures of Paraguay and letters from Arabs living in
Cuidad del Este, a city of some 150,000 people in the
tri-border region.

The Defense Department has not revealed what the
letters contained, and claims that the area is a hotbed
of Middle East terrorism have been widely debunked. The
U.S. State Department's analysis of the
region-'Patterns of Terrorism'-found no evidence for
the charge, and an International Monetary Fund (IMF)
study found the area awash with money smuggling, but
not terrorism.

It is the base's proximity to Bolivia that causes the
most concern, particularly given the Bush
Administration's charges that Cuba and Venezuela are
stirring up trouble in that Andean nation.

Bolivia has seen a series of political upheavals,
starting with a revolt against the privatization of
water supplies by the U.S. Bechtel Corporation and the
French utility giant, Suez de Lyonnaise des Eaux. The
water uprising was sparked off when Suez announced it
would charge between $335 and $445 to connect a private
home to the water supply. Bolivia's yearly per capita
gross domestic product is $915.

The water revolt, which spread to IMF enforced taxes
and the privatization of gas and oil reserves, forced
three presidents to resign. The country is increasingly
polarized between its majority Indian population and an
elite minority that has dominated the nation for
hundreds of years. Six out of 10 people live below the
poverty line, a statistic that rises to nine in 10 in
rural areas.

For the Bush Administration, however, Bolivia is all
about subversion, not poverty and powerlessness.

When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited
Paraguay this past August, he told reporters that,
'There certainly is evidence that both Cuba and
Venezuela have been involved in the situation in
Bolivia in unhelpful ways.'

A Rumsfeld aide told the press that Cuba was involved
in the unrest, a charge that even one of Bolivia's
ousted presidents, Carlos Mesa, denies

A major focus of the unrest in Bolivia is who controls
its vast natural gas deposits, the second largest in
the Western Hemisphere. Under pressure from the U.S.
and the IMF, Bolivia sold off its oil and gas to Enron
and Shell in 1995 for $263.5 million, less than 1
percent of what the deposits are worth.

The Movement Toward Socialism's presidential candidate
Evo Morales, a Quechuan Indian and trade union leader
who is running first in the polls, wants to re-
nationalize the deposits. Polls indicate that 75
percent of Bolivians agree with him.

But the present political crisis over upcoming
elections Dec. 18, and disagreements on how to
redistribute seats in the legislature, has the U.S
muttering dark threats about 'failed states.'

U.S. General Bantz J. Craddock, commander of Southern
Command, told the House Armed Services Committee: 'In
Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, distrust and loss of faith
in failed institutions fuel the emergence of anti-U.S.,
anti-globalization, and anti-free trade demagogues.'

Bolivia has been placed on the National Intelligence
Council's list of 25 countries where the U.S. will
consider intervening in case of 'instability.'

This is scary talk for Latin American countries.

Would the U.S, invade Bolivia? Given the present state
of its military, unlikely.

Would the U.S. try to destabilize Bolivia's economy
while training people how to use military force to
insure Enron, Shell, British Gas, Total, Repsol, and
the U.S. continues to get Bolivian gas for pennies on
the dollar? Quite likely.

And would the White House like to use such a coup as a
way to send a message to other countries? You bet.
President Bush may be clueless on geography, but he is
not bad at overthrowing governments and killing people.

You bet.

Will it be as easy as it was in the old days when the
CIA could bribe truckers to paralyze Chile and set the
stage for a coup?

Nothing is easy in Latin America anymore.

The U.S. can bluster about a trade war, but the playing
field is a little more level these days. The Marcosur
Group of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay
embraces 250 million people, generates $1 trillion in
goods, and is the third largest trade organization on
the planet. If the American market tightens, the
Chinese are more than willing to pick up the slack.

A meeting last month of the Ibero-American heads of
state turned downright feisty. The assembled nations
demanded an end to the 'blockade' of Cuba. The word
'blockade' is very different than the word 'embargo,'
the term that was always used in the past. A 'blockade'
is a violation of international law.

The meeting also demanded that the U.S. extradite Luis
Posada to Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban
airliner that killed 76 people.

If the U.S. tries something in Bolivia (or Venezuela),
it will find that the old days when proxy armies and
economic destabilization could bring down governments
are gone, replaced by countries and people who no
longer curtsy to the colossus from the north.

Submitted to Portside