Hey y'all, Scott here.
First of all, thanks to the show's sponsors and donors who make it possible for me to do this.
Secondly, I need more sponsors and more donors if the show is to continue.
ScottHorton.org/donate has all the links to use PayPal, Give.org, Google Wallet, WePay.com, and even Bitcoins to make a donation in any amount.
You can also sign up for monthly donations of small and medium-sized amounts through PayPal and Give.org.
Again, that's ScottHorton.org/donate for all the links.
To advertise on the site or the show, email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org.
And thanks.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Our first guest is Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's FPIF.org.
Jon Pfeffer and the whole crew over there do so much good work.
I really hope that you guys keep them bookmarked there.
Welcome back to the show, Con.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us today and, well, helping make me a little bit smarter here.
Militarizing Latin America, four more years.
So, yeah, let's go all the way back to 1823 and the Monroe Doctrine.
And I guess the good neighbor policy came 100 years later, but that's basically been the ruse all along, right, is America, like the Brits with their white man's burden and all that, we own not just, you know, everything between Bangor and San Diego, but everything south of the Rio Grande belongs to us, too, you know, to protect the poor little brown people in their savage ways and that kind of thing.
They were much more bold about it back in those days, Scott.
They just said they didn't want the Europeans in there exploiting the Latin Americans.
So let's just take it.
Yeah.
Outright grand theft with no pretense, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, what's interesting is that I think that when you look at the actual record, which is that the Monroe Doctrine was passed in policy, really, was passed in 1823, but it isn't until 1843 that the United States gets directly involved in Latin America, you know, in terms of military force, et cetera, and that's from the Mexican-American War.
And from that point on, virtually every country in Latin America we have either used military force in or in places like Brazil we helped out the military coup.
We did the same thing in Argentina.
Of course, everybody knows what we did in Chile.
And so that either through sort of direct method, that is, landing the Marines in Nicaragua and Guatemala and, you know, fighting the Mexicans in the Mexican-American War.
Besides that, we've also dominated the economies.
We've been the sort of big economic dog on the block.
Generally forced what they called the Washington Consensus during the 1980s and 1990s, which was this process of massive austerity to repay debts.
And it just tanked economies and destroyed living standards across the board in Latin America.
And then, of course, we encouraged coups or else supported those coups.
So in one way or other, we have really been the colossus of the North.
We've been the dominant power in Latin America.
That's starting to change, but there are some disturbing straws in the wind from the Obama administration.
All right.
Now, I'm going to tell you a story real quick.
And I hate this story, and I've told it before.
So for the regular listeners, you know, sorry.
Go ahead and roll your eyes now or whatever.
But this is so important to me.
Right after September 11th, I knew a guy who came back.
He was here in Austin, Texas.
And he said that he had been in, I forget if it was Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on September 11th, and that all the people were standing out on the sidewalk watching the TV in the store window, like back in the 50s or whatever here in America, you know, watching the news in the store window.
And they're all standing around, and they're not cheering, but they are kind of doing that thing where they silently pump their fist and sort of grin, and they're saying to themselves, yeah, see, now you know what it feels like.
And they were happy.
They were gratified that finally the American people had to suffer for a change.
And you know what?
Like, hey, those weren't the Palestinians.
They weren't the Iraqis under blockade.
They were the Brazilians who Americans think of probably mostly like little pets or something down there.
How could they possibly identify with the men who were crashing those planes that day?
Con, can you explain that?
Sure, because they had a popularly elected government, which was in the process of instituting not particularly radical but sort of low-level land reform, which is a big problem in Brazil.
A very small elite owns tremendous amounts of land, and a huge number of people are landless, and particularly in the early 60s, a large part of the population in Brazil was still rural.
Sao Paulo had not grown to the size that it is now.
Even Rio de Janeiro was not as big as it was then.
And what happened was that there was a military coup, and the U.S. helped organize that military coup.
In fact, William Casey, who was the director of the CIA, brags about it in his book, talks about how the U.S. helped the military organize the coup.
That was a terrible coup.
It not only derailed democracy in Brazil, but the military junta that took over arrested large numbers of people, put people through terrible, terrible tortures.
The current president of Brazil was arrested and savagely tortured during this period.
From the point of view of most Brazilians, the United States played a very important role in derailing their history.
It's sort of like the Iranians are angry at the U.S.
People can't figure out why the Iranians are mad at the U.S., those mad mullahs.
Well, because we overthrew the democratically elected government of Mosaddegh in 1953, and installed the Shah and a regime of terror for decades.
And people don't forget those things.
I mean, it's their history that was hijacked.
So I'm not surprised at all that that was that feeling in Brazil, because of the three big, important military coups in Latin America, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
The U.S. played a very important role in all three of them.
Yeah, and this has come up on the show recently.
I forget now if it was with you or not, but that Chalmers Johnson, the great author of the blowback trilogy, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, on September 11th, he thought, and the tactic doesn't seem to fit, but he thought it was possible that maybe the attack was done by Chileans, because it was the anniversary of the coup against Allende.
Yeah, 1973 coup.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's sort of interesting.
We think of the world as, you know, sort of changing after September 11th attack on New York.
Well, you know, for Chileans, it was 1973, September 11th that changed their world, and still to a certain extent changes their world.
In other words, you've gotten rid of the military government, but you still have a very powerful and important right wing that plays a very strong role in the country, and the process of land reform and the process of social welfare reforms and everything that the Andean government was in the process of putting in, those things have never gotten back up to the level that they were in, you know, July or August 1973.
So, you know, these coups were not something that just happened a long time in the past, but they're things which still reverberate in today's life.
Okay, now let's go through and count the ways here that the U.S. is losing influence.
It sort of seems like during the Bush years, they kind of, well, like they got distracted from Al-Qaeda by going to Iraq.
They got distracted from dominating South America by going to the Middle East and Central Asia in general, and they kind of seem like, well, there was plenty of blowback coming from previous years' policies anyway, and the Republicans seem to just sort of let it all go, no?
Because they tried to do that coup against Chavez there that one time in 2002.
Right.
There were a couple of things they did.
First of all, there was the coup against Chavez, and that was U.S.
-supported, and that was very scary for Latin America.
You know, Latin Americans had seen this before, and whether or not they happened to support Hugo Chavez or not, Latin Americans everywhere were horrified by the coup.
They did two other things, too, and these started in the Clinton administration but were strongly reinforced during the Bush administration, which is that the military presence of the U.S. in Colombia grew, and it also grew to a certain extent in Central America.
I think one of the important things they did was that the Bush administration reactivated the Fifth Fleet.
The Fifth Fleet was a grouping of naval ships and support ships, etc., that was originally sort of a Cold War fleet, and then in the 1960s it was deactivated and essentially mothballed.
Well, they put the Fifth Fleet back into action, and that's caused a great deal of concern in Latin America, and the Brazilians are particularly concerned with it, as are the Argentinians.
Well, pardon me, I'm confused.
I thought the Fifth Fleet was stationed at Bahrain and was for threatening the Iranians with all that.
I'm sorry, Fourth Fleet.
Did I say Fifth?
I'm sorry.
Excuse me, I'm 70 years old.
I get the note.
Fourth Fleet.
The Fifth Fleet is, in fact, stationed in Bahrain.
The Fourth Fleet.
This is something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
During the Cold War, you could say, well, in theory you had Russian submarines or surface craft, etc., in the South Atlantic or the Caribbean because of Cuba, etc.
So you might have a local fleet that would be responsible to Southern Command and be responsible for the South Atlantic and for the Caribbean.
There's no reason now to have that.
There's no foreign force that in any way threatens those particular waters.
So from the position of people like the Brazilians, they look at this fleet and they say, well, is that aimed at some kind of enemy of the Americans, or is it aimed at controlling our offshore oil deposits in the El Salto deposits about 100 miles out to sea south of Rio de Janeiro?
From the Brazilians' point of view, they're now buying submarines because they're worried about this American fleet.
So this kind of stuff is happening.
And then what we've got with the Obama administration is a lot more special forces in Latin America.
We don't know where all those special forces are.
We know where some of them are.
We know that there are Marines in Guatemala and that there are other special forces in Central America and in Colombia, etc.
But a lot of this stuff we really don't know.
And it's being cloaked under the guise of national security.
There's a lot of drones now being moved into Latin America.
What are those drones looking for?
Why are they there?
There's this crazy law that the Obama administration just signed off on, on keeping Iran out of Latin America.
One does not think of Iran as a major threat in Latin America.
But what it does do is that it allows the United States to kind of extend its surveillance footprint all over Latin America, not looking for Iranians.
There are no Iranians in Latin America to speak of.
A couple of them in Argentina, some in Uruguay and Paraguay.
But what it does allow them to do is it allows them to kind of set up this surveillance system.
And, you know, what are they looking for?
I mean, that's the question people need to be asking.
And the last part of it is that suddenly this is an administration which has been very tolerant of coups.
There was the 2009 coup in Honduras, which the U.S.
The only thing the U.S. did about that coup was to actively encourage other Latin American countries to recognize the coup government.
I mean, that literally was what the State Department did full time.
They didn't make any comment on the failed coup in Ecuador against the leftist president Carrera in Ecuador.
And they've been very quiet about the parliamentary coup, because that's what it was, in Paraguay last year.
And so I think what's happened is you've got a lot of Latin Americans, and they're looking at this growing military presence in the region coupled with this tolerance for coups.
And that's going to make a lot of people very nervous.
Yeah.
Well, you know, back in, what, 2002 or 2003, I was in an argument with a Republican who said, oh, yeah, well, what do you think Al Gore would have done after September 11th?
And I said, well, he would have blamed it on the FARC and invaded Colombia, of course, you know, because that's where his oil interests are.
Occidental Petroleum right there, not so much focused on the Middle East, but Latin America.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, look, Latin America is extremely important for the United States.
I swear that joke was funny at the time.
We're no longer the big dog on the block.
China is the major trading partner now for Latin America.
And that's what I think, in part, this is a response to, is that there's a growing independence, economic and political, in Latin America.
I mean, politically, there's been the election of a lot of progressive or left governments in a lot of countries in Latin America.
But economically, you've also had the formation of, like, Mercosur, which is a common market, basically, for South America.
And it's Uruguay and Paraguay, although Paraguay is temporarily suspended at this point.
Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
It's going to include Bolivia as status from Colombia, sort of associate membership from Colombia and Chile.
And their trade relations are less now to the north than with the BRICS countries, which are South Africa, China, Russia, Brazil, you know, Argentina, etc.
This kind of swath of mostly southern hemisphere countries, India, etc.
And that's sort of really changed a lot of the politics.
And it's also changed the economics of what Latin America looks like.
In the old days, when the U.S. got a cold, Latin America got pneumonia.
This last economic crisis, the 2008 economic crisis, Latin America came through better than any place but China.
They've done so much building up of their own economy that it's not even dependent on us anymore at all.
And a big part of that is that countries like Brazil and Argentina really invested in getting rid of poverty, particularly to Brazil.
And huge numbers of people were bought out of poverty.
I mean, partly for a very simple device of giving very poor people a certain amount of guaranteed income every month.
Well, of course, the effect of that is that people have money.
People have money and they spend it.
People spend money, the economy does well.
I mean, duh, if we would only understand that in this country and in Europe, we go a long way towards resolving the current economic crisis, which is gripping those areas.
Instead, of course, people are applying this austerity.
Now, that's not going to happen in Latin America because they went through that in the 80s and the 90s.
And they saw what the result of that policy of austerity was.
And they're not going there again.
So, in a lot of ways, it's really – it's the world turned upside down.
I mean, we always think of the world, the top of the world is the United States and the Northern Hemisphere.
Well, you know, in space, it's just a ball.
What's up and what's down doesn't really bear any resemblance to really what's up and what's down.
So, in a sense, Latin America has kind of turned the world upside down, of course, with their links with India and South Africa and China, etc.
The world is a very different place than it was 20 years ago, Scott.
Well, and, you know, the American – the D.C. crowd, they can stamp their feet and be mad at China all they want and that kind of thing.
But they've really done this to themselves, right?
Like you mentioned the IMF loans and the foreign aid and then all the strings that come attached and all that.
Did the American government ever give a loan to a Latin American country that was in good faith, that wasn't just a ruse to bribe their politicians into auctioning off their most precious resources for pennies on the dollar?
I mean, you know, that's what – I remember Greg Palast talking about Hugo Chavez.
This was – you know, he always got along with the oil companies in Houston.
He still does this whole time.
What really made everybody mad was he took his $20 billion out of the Federal Reserve and he started making low-interest loans to the other Latin American countries without ulterior motives, or just giving them a loan.
That's right.
And then they would pay it back and it was actually just business.
And, you know, that was what really made him the enemy.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no question that – you know, one of the things that Venezuela did was it started up a South American bank.
And the loans which places like Argentina and Chile and everything got from the IMF were all aimed at one thing, which was essentially strangling those economies, making those economies dependent on the United States.
And that's not the way things are going now.
And that's an interesting – you know, that's a real change in the world.
I think it's a very important change.
It is also why I am particularly concerned by this kind of growth of special forces and military forces in Latin America, coupled with this toleration of coups, because there are still very powerful and wealthy elites in all of these Latin American countries.
And those are elites that are not in any way committed to democracy.
And if they had their druthers, they would rule through, you know, codillos, through authoritarian governments or military dictatorships.
So that's a little scary.
Yeah.
Well, and how much of this too is centered around the same – well, I don't know.
It really all is the same policy, isn't it?
The Cold War against China.
Not even necessarily doing it, but just having the ability to cut off their access to oil in the event of an emergency.
Right?
That's why we have to dominate all the sea lanes.
That's why we have to dominate Africa and the Middle East, where we barely even buy any oil from the Middle East.
It's all about the strategery of still waging the old Cold War against Mao Zedong.
Yeah.
It just shifted.
It shifted from, you know, the Soviets to the Chinese.
And that's what the age of pivot is about.
That's why I think the Americans are sort of surging back into Latin America, because they pay attention to the fact that the Chinese are the number one trade partner now with Latin America.
They don't like that.
And they see a lot of strategic materials that China gets from Latin America – copper and iron ore and, of course, oil and gas, soy, agricultural goods, etc.
A lot of stuff that the Chinese get from Latin America, which has played an important role in kind of keeping Latin American economies rolling along, even though things are down a little bit right now in the case of Brazil particularly.
But, you know, nothing like what the northern hemisphere went through.
And now you mentioned this earlier.
I wanted to ask you, do you know much about the whole – I guess it started with the Heritage Foundation or one of these right-wing foundations put out this thing about how Iran is taking over the southern hemisphere.
I guess it's been going on since the Buenos Aires bombing of 1994.
There's been this propaganda campaign about Iran.
What there is is there's this area in South America that borders southern Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay.
It's this triangle, which is the largest freshwater aquifer in the world.
That's not a small thing in Latin America because it is extremely important in terms of agricultural production and also industry as well.
So what happened was that Heritage started this thing that – there was this Islamic – at that point it wasn't specifically Iran, but there was this Islamic subversion going on in this region because there are Arabs in the region.
Well, there are Arabs in the region.
For instance, there's a fair number of Lebanese traders in South America.
There has been kind of a steady flow of people, Palestinians, Syrians, some Iranians, etc., into Latin America.
Now, actually, the CIA did an evaluation of it and said there was no evidence whatsoever that there was any kind of Islamic plotting going on in this region.
But, of course, people don't pay attention to that because it's a perfect excuse to say, well, the Iranians are attempting to subvert U.S. interests and build extremism in Latin America.
And the Buenos Aires bombings, of course, which was directed at the Jewish community in Argentina and does have a link to a combination of Hezbollah and Iran, that has been the kind of cloud behind which the U.S. has been able to kind of insert themselves in this area.
I think Gary Porter has really cast a lot of doubt on that entire story.
He points at right-wing factions inside the police forces.
And it could have been.
It could have been.
We don't really know exactly what it is.
But now, of course, there's a couple of big bases in southern Bolivia and Paraguay, which the U.S. has access to.
And there's a lot of instability in that region.
I mean, there's this move on the part of the eastern Bolivians, which is the wealthiest part of Bolivia, to break off from the rest of Bolivia, to break off from the Indian majority in Bolivia.
And most of these eastern Bolivians, they're the old Spanish conquistadors.
And they're very wealthy.
They have oil and gas.
They have big agriculture.
And a very, very powerful, strong right-wing movement that many aspects of it look very, very fascist.
And there's this move to form a country in eastern Bolivia and break Bolivia off.
So, you know, there's a lot of concern in the region about how the U.S. is moving in here.
The recent coup in Paraguay got Paraguay thrown out or suspended, anyhow, its membership suspended, from Mercosur.
Because there's a section in the Mercosur document, the charter, which says that you can't do anything which is undemocratic.
And this was a completely undemocratic, you know, parliamentary coup that threw out the progressive president of Paraguay.
And so they were suspended.
And, you know, again, there, the Brazilians and the Argentinians are particularly critical of the Obama administration, because the Obama administration didn't say anything about this parliamentary coup.
And they said, well, there are elections coming up, and why don't we see what the outcome of the elections are?
You know, that's pointing out that a coup like this dampens the possibility of popular elections in a place like Paraguay, which has been dominated by the military for generations.
Now, when it comes to the coups in Honduras and then Paraguay, did I even know there was a coup in Paraguay?
I don't know if I even knew there was a coup in Paraguay.
Were these both just CIA jobs or no?
You know, they don't talk a whole lot about it.
But what you had was it was a very important development in Paraguay.
But was the U.S. behind it, or was it a local thing?
Well, it's interesting.
You know, you remember what the – Paraguay has been dominated by the Colorado Party for, oh, since an original coup back in the early 60s.
And there was this guy, Strasser, who was the military dictator for 30 years, something like that, in Paraguay.
And it was dominated by a very, very small elite, and there was a lot of repression, etc.
And then what happened was that in the last election, Fernando Lugo, who used to be a Catholic bishop and whose nickname is the Red Bishop, was elected.
And a coalition of sort of left, progressive, and liberal parties defeated the Colorados and elected him president.
Now, they didn't control – they don't control either the Senate or the House.
And so what happened was that the Senate impeached Lugo and gave him a 24-hours notice to defend himself.
In fact, actually only a couple of hours to defend himself, and then removed him and put a right-wing vice president into power.
So what you had was a kind of a soft coup.
The Colorado Party was defeated for president.
All they did was just engineer this little impeachment.
They threw Lugo out, and they're now back in power with their guy in charge of things.
And it has to do with the fact that Lugo was in the process of developing a land reform in Paraguay, which is a tremendous crisis.
You have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of landless laborers in Paraguay and huge, massive control of the land by a very small elite.
A lot of soy farming, some of which is not owned by Paraguayans but is owned by Brazilians.
And you have this tremendous pressure for land, a lot of which is idle and which Lugo was moving in the direction of distributing some of this idle land to landless laborers.
That's what sparked the coup.
The coup is over who controls the resources in Paraguay.
And the administration, the Obama administration's reaction to this was just to say, oh, well, there's an election coming.
I mean, sort of like imagine that there's going to be an election next year in Syria, ha-ha.
And they should say, oh, well, there's going to be an election in Syria, so let's not worry about what's going on in Syria.
I mean, they wouldn't do that.
We're trying to overthrow the Assad government.
Paraguay, well, that's okay.
We don't have a problem with that.
All right, I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
But, oh, you know what?
I want to ask you one more thing real quick.
Is the CIA still running drugs down there, lots of cocaine, that kind of thing?
Who knows, Scott?
Who knows?
Well, somebody's got to, you know.
Are those Marines in Guatemala intercepting drug lords or?
I'd like to see, you know.
I don't know.
I'd like to see a mathematician describe how big is the pile of cocaine imported to the United States annually.
You know what I mean?
Like they say, if you took all the mined gold in the world and put it all together, it would be as big as the base of the Washington Monument, that kind of thing.
So you can have a visual representation of the quantity you're talking about.
How much land could you cover with the cocaine imported to the United States every year that we're supposed to believe our government doesn't know about?
Well, I will say one thing, and that is this war on drugs is nonsense.
And the idea that this has reduced the amount of cocaine or drugs coming in the United States is complete nonsense.
What it has managed to do is to create essentially criminal empires, some of which dominate big sections of Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
I mean, the war on drugs has been an unmitigated disaster.
And more and more Latin Americans are beginning to come to that conclusion.
All right.
Hey, another great interview.
Thank you so much for your time.
Okay, Scott.
Anytime.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
They've got a brand new website with new and improved access to more than 20 years worth of essays promoting the cause of liberty.
And FFF's writers, including Jacob Hornberger, Jim Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more, are just good.
They're the best at opposing and discrediting our corrupt overlords in Washington and their warfare-welfare regulatory police state.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at FFF.org.
The Emergency Committee for Israel, Brookings, Heritage, AIPAC, WINEP, JINSA, PNAC, CNAS, the AEI, FPI, CFR, and CSP.
It sure does seem sometimes like the war party's got the foreign policy debate in D.C. all locked up.
But not quite.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at Councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first, opposing our government's world empire, and especially their Middle Eastern madness.
That's the Council for the National Interest at Councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager Mike Swanson, who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
WallStreetWindow is unique in that Mike shows people what he's really investing in, and updates you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out, so also keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.
Hey ladies, Scott Horton here.
If you would like truly youthful, healthy, and healthy-looking skin, there is one very special company you need to visit.
DagenyanLane at DagenyanLane.com.
Dagenyan Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all-natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient-rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin.
That's DagenyanLane at DagenyanLane.com.
And for a limited time, add promo code SCOTT15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
Man, you need some Liberty stickers for the back of your truck.
At LibertyStickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
And government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at LibertyStickers.com.
And of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at TheBumperSticker.com.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
