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Ecuador top | ||
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Haiti top | ||
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Mexico top | ||
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Manuel Lopez Obrador
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Wayuu indigenous people, Colombia top | ||
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ECUADOR GETS CHAVEZ'D
top By Greg Palast Excerpted from The Nation 16 May 2005 [Quito] George Bush has someone new to hate. Only twenty-four hours after Ecuador's new president took his oath of office, he was hit by a diplomatic cruise missile fired all the way from Lithuania by Condoleezza Rice, then wandering about Eastern Europe spreading "democracy." Condi called for ?a constitutional process to get to elections,? which came as a bit of a shock to the man who'd already been constitutionally elected, Alfredo Palacio. What had Palacio done to get our Secretary of State's political knickers in a twist? It's the oil--and the bonds. This nation of only 13 million souls at the world's belly button is rich, sitting on at least 4.4 billion barrels of oil in known reserves, and probably much more. Yet 60 percent of its citizens live in brutal poverty; a lucky minority earn the "minimum" wage of $153 a month. The obvious solution--give the oil money to the Ecuadoreans without money--runs smack up against paragraph III-1 the World Bank's 2003 Structural Adjustment Program Loan. The diktat is marked "FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY," which "may not be disclosed" without World Bank authorization. TheNation.com has obtained a copy. The secret loan terms require Ecuador to pay bondholders 70 percent of the revenue received from any spike in the price of oil. The result: Ecuador must give up the big bucks from the Iraq War oil price surge. Another twenty percent of the oil windfall is set aside for "contingencies" (i.e., later payments to bondholders). The document specifies that Ecuador may keep only 10 percent of new oil revenue for expenditures on social services. I showed President Palacio the World Bank documents. He knew their terms well. "If we pay that amount of debt," he told me, "we're dead. We have to survive." He argued, with logic, "If we die, who is going to pay them?" We met two weeks ago in the Carondelet Palace where, on April 20, his predecessor had disappeared out the back door to seek asylum in Brazil. A crowd of 100,000 protesters had surrounded the building, seeking the arrest of fugitive president Lucio Gutierrez. "Sucio Lucio" (Dirty Lucio, as the graffiti tags him) had won election |
(a photo infamous in Quito) and US Treasury officials instructed him in the financial facts of life. Lucio returned to Quito, reneged on his campaign promises and tightened the austerity measures including raising the price of cooking gas. The public, after a dispirited delay, revolted. Last month, once Lucio fled, the nation's congress recognized the vacancy in Ecuador's Oval Office and filled it with the elected vice president, in accordance with the Constitution. Given the oil windfall, Palacio sees no need to follow Gutierrez' path to economic asphyxiation. "It is impossible that they condemn us not to have health, not to have education," he told me. He made it clear that handing over 90 percent of his nation's new oil wealth would not stand. That's not what the Bush Administration wanted to hear. Outside the presidential palace, indigenous women in bowler hats and pigtails chanted, "FUERA TODOS! FUERA TODOS!" Everyone out. As far as they are concerned, every one of the seven presidents who have entered office in the past nine years has sold them out to the bondholders, to the oil companies, to the World Bank and its austerity punishments. To them, Palacio is bound to be just another in a long line of disappointments. I asked the president what he would do if the World Bank and the Bush Administration nix his request for Ecuador to keep an extra tiny percentage of its oil money. Mindful that no Ecuadorean president since 1996 has served out his term, Palacio told me simply: "There is no way. There is no other way. These people have to listen to us." ******** Read the entire story at www.TheNation.com Hear and view Palast's special report from Ecuador this week on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View more photos and video of his investigations in Ecuador and South America at www.gregpalast.com/ecuador.html ============================================ |
Bolivia top | ||
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Operation Condor, Kissinger, Pinochet top and see Corporate Fraud | ||
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Paramilitary top | ||
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Trade Agreements, CAFTA top | ||
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Deforestation top | ||
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South American Community of Nations top | ||
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Following his script from Langley, Obama re-launches the Contras against Nicaragua, October 18, 2010 -- |
WMR
In an almost carbon copy of Ronald Reagan's covert policies in Latin
America, President Obama has not only authorized CIA-planned coups in
Honduras and Ecuador, but has, according to our sources in Costa Rica,
re-launched a new generation of Contras to destabilize the Sandinista
government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
As in the 1980s, the Contras are operating from Honduras, which, after the CIA's and Mossad's ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, is now a safe operating base for the Nicaraguan rightists, and Costa Rica, which is now governed by a right-wing administration, including a pro-Israeli Vice President, Luis Lieberman Ginsburg, who has authorized the Costa Rican Intelligence and Security Directorate (DIS) to work with Mossad to wiretap phone lines, emails, and web sites to ensure the success of the Contra activities being directed against Ortega. The pro-U.S. docile governments of Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla, Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, and Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli are reportedly supporting the CIA and Mossad operations in Nicaragua. Martinelli is one of Israel's few allies in Latin America and he condemned the UN's Goldstone Report on Israel's invasion and genocide in Gaza. Under Martinelli, Israeli training programs for the Panamanian National Police have increased. Nicaragua is seeing a surge in "civil society" activity, most notably operated by the CIA-connected US Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its components, and George Soros's various non-governmental organization (NGO) contrivances, including the Movement for Nicaragua. WMR's Costa Rica sources point to two USAID-linked contractors being involved in the covert activities in Costa Rica, Tetra Tech International, which has a substantial historical link to the CIA, particularly in the Middle East, and DPK Consulting, which is not only active in Costa Rica but also in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Ortega, who is barred from running for re-election next year, is now being faced with the same CIA, Mossad, and NGO construct that forced Zelaya from office in Honduras. Last month, Ortega reinstated a 1987 constitutional provision, known as Law 201, that permits judges and other government officials to stay in office beyond their terms until replacements can be appointed. The U.S.-backed opposition is now crying foul in a manner similar to the proposed constitutional referendum that was used to force Zelaya from office in Honduras. U.S. ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens is the key player in providing support to the neo-Contras and to ensure that the Honduran resistance movement to the Lobo regime does not receive asssistance from the Ortega government across the border in Nicaragua and vice versa. Lloren's role is similar to that of John Negroponte during the Reagan administration, complete with CIA-backed death squads in Honduras resuming assassinations of student and labor leaders, as well as journalists. U.S. covert activities in Honduras and Nicaragua are staged out of the Palmerola airbase in Honduras and are coordinated largely by Col. Robert W. Swisher, the US Defense Attache at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa. Williams Brands is the USAID coordinator who provides U.S. funds from the Office of Transition Initiatives to NGOs acting on behalf of U.S. intelligence. Silvia Eiriz, the political officer, is also reportedly the CIA station chief who coordinates the anti-Ortega activity with her counterpart in Managua. The anti-Ortega operation in Nicaragua is primarily the responsibility of U.S. ambassador Robert Callahan, an old CIA hand who goes back to assisting Negroponte with the running of the death squads in Tegucigalpa in the 1980s. The Nicaraguan opposition is now engaged in "false flag" street violence using bogus Sandinistas in classic "false flag" action carried out on behalf of the CIA and Mossad stations in Managua. The Sandinsta movement has also been split, thanks to CIA and NGO interference, into pro-Ortega and anti-Ortega factions. Similar activities on the Colombian-Venezuelan border have been carried out against civilian targets in Colombia and then blamed on Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) working with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. In fact, the attacks are carried out by Israeli and British commandos dressed in FARC uniforms, according to our Latin American sources. The operati0n is designed to force Chavez from office by tying him to terrorists. The Venezuelan Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP) has tied the phony FARC attacks in Colombia to media propaganda operations orchestrated by Venezuela's Jewish community leaders working closely with opposition-controlled media in Venezuela, as well as media in the United States and Europe. The CIA and Mossad are funding their neo-Contras with proceeds from the growing drug trade in Honduras and Costa Rica. As a result, drug-related murders are increasing on both sides of the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican and Nicaraguan-Honduran borders.When he was in power in Honduras, Zelaya reduced the drug trade. In Honduras and Costa Rica, customs officials now look the other way as Israeli private security personnel, mostly ex-Israeli commandos, guard half length trucks without license plates that are moving drugs and weapons from Honduras and Costa Rica into Nicaragua to support the new Contras gearing up to fight the Sandinistas prior to next year's election. Key border crossing points for the Israelis are in the Peñas Blancas National Park of Costa Rica and Cardenas, Nicaragua on Lake Nicaragua. The Penas Blancas area was a hotbed of Contra activity during the Reagan administration's secret war against Nicaragua. On the Nicaraguan-Honduran border, an ex-Contra named "Comandante Jahob" is planning to start an armed conflict against Nicaragua if Ortega does not leave office next year. Commandante Jahob, whose real name is José Gabriel Garmendia, is reportedly acting along with CIA and Mossad commandos in Honduras and with the knowledge of the Honduran regime imposed by the Obama administration last year. Old CIA bases in Honduras that once supported the Contras in the 1980s, are reportedly being reactivated. Costa Rican police and DIS personnel are allegedly involved in the cross-border trafficking. Currently, a Colombian bank is being used to buy up land along the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border ostensibly for "tourist" purposes but the $2 billion project is designed to establish staging areas for renewed Contra warfare in Nicaragua if the Sandinistas remain in power beyond the 2011 election. The US private military contractor Dyncorp is also involved in providing assistance to the Contras using the cover of "humanitarian assistance." On July 6, 2010, WMR reported: "After conducting its successful coup d'etat in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya, the imperialistic Barack Obama administration is now bent on ousting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega by massing a huge U.S. Coast Guard and Marine Corps presence in neighboring Costa Rica, a base of operations for Reagan administration-backed CIA operations in the 1980s in support of the Nicaraguan contras. Costa Rican government officials, including President Laura Chinchilla, Vice President Luis Lieberman Ginsburg, Security Minister Jose Maria Tijerino, counter-narcotics commissioner Mauricio Boraschi, and the Costa Rican Congress agreed to Operation Joint Patrol, which will see 7,000 US Marines, 46 mainly U.S. Coast Guard vessels, and 200 helicopters and 10 combat aircraft descend on Costa Rica, which does not have a military force, from July 1 to December 31."
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