Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Max Blumenthal.
He wrote the book Goliath and the 51 Day War.
And his latest is The Management of Savagery about the terror wars.
And he's got this one at ConsortiumNews.com.
Joe Biden fueled the Latin American migration crisis.
It originally ran at his site, the Grayzone Project.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
Great to be back.
I know you've been to Venezuela since you wrote this thing, but I haven't had time to review any of that material yet.
So maybe we'll catch up on that next week.
Yeah, no, I've been in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
But this piece is really about Honduras and Colombia.
I haven't been to Colombia, but my colleague Ben Norton was there earlier this year.
And we managed to talk to some of the besieged local human rights community.
I think they've had like over 80 murdered so far this year.
Just about how the U.S. runs the whole show down there.
So my piece is really a look.
It's kind of an investigative look at Biden's legacy.
The legacy that he's boasting about on the campaign trail in the words of Hondurans and Colombians.
Well, so I'll just start us off with my one little anecdote that I have about this.
I'm really bad on Latin America stuff.
I mean, I'm good on everything, but I'm way behind on everything.
No, you know more than everyone combined about the Middle East.
So it balances out.
I'm trying.
Except I don't speak a lick of Arabic.
So that can't really be true either.
Yeah, no, it's not.
But here's one thing I know about this.
I'm actually putting out a book of my transcripts of my interviews of Ron Paul.
And at a couple of times back years ago, we talked about when he was in the House of Representatives.
Whenever it was time for Plan Colombia, which he said was really all about the oil.
But he said the only people who would ever show up to lobby for it or against it for that matter.
The only people who were from outside of Congress that chimed in at all were from the helicopter companies.
And they just were there to pick up their welfare check.
And he said at one point there was a conflict between two different helicopter companies.
Who was going to supply them for the Colombian army down there.
And they decided to compromise and they would both get a contract to sell as many helicopters as they wanted.
I think I originally heard him say that in a speech.
And it was sort of an anecdote of just a day in the life of Washington, D.C.
That this is how it's run.
You might have heard this Plan Colombia thing.
Well, I saw how the sausage got made.
And it was just some helicopter lobbyists.
Yeah, not exactly.
It sounds like no-bid contracts, too.
Easy does it.
Plan Colombia was just a gigantic giveaway to the MIC.
And for Colombians, it militarized and totally transformed their society into this kind of right-wing, U.S.-backed bastion that people in South America refer to their Israel.
And that was the point.
I mean, that was how Biden conceived it.
It was originally put forward by President Andres Pastrana in the late 90s.
And he envisioned it as kind of a peace plan.
And he said, you know, the FARC is the left-wing party.
I mean, you could liken them to the IRA.
They have a political wing like Sinn Fein.
And then they had a guerrilla wing.
And Pastrana said, you know, the FARC is part of our society.
We can't just eliminate them.
But, you know, he had to go to his masters in Washington to conceive this plan, to get the money for it.
And then there was Biden in the Senate, who was, you know, always either the chair or co-chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.
He basically turned it into a militarization and counterinsurgency plan when Pastrana saw it as.
He wanted to call it plan, the peace, like Plan Colombia peace.
Biden took peace out of it.
He personally lobbied for billions of dollars to basically wipe out FARC, as well as to spray coca fields, basically terrorizing civilians, the poor campesinos, by bombing their crops with chemicals, toxic cancer-causing chemicals, which I'm sure was a boon for America's petrochemical industry and whatever airplanes were provided and helicopters.
I think the helicopter lobbyists were in on this.
And it was, you know, the plan, first of all, was a colossal failure.
2018 represented a year of record coca production for Colombia.
The plan failed to stop the migration crisis from Colombia.
We've seen record outflows of migrants from Colombia.
And the plan resulted in some of the most heinous atrocities ever seen in recent history in the Western Hemisphere.
The most notorious was the false positive scandal, which I think took place in 2006 under the watch of Alvaro Uribe, who is this right-wing leader who was really brought in to implement Plan Colombia.
This is a cat who showed up in 1991 on a DEA list of the top 100 narco-traffickers in the world because he was working so closely with Pablo Escobar.
He's brought in to do the counterinsurgency, and the military under his watch lured 22 rural laborers who had no connection to any guerrilla warfare to a remote location, massacred them on sight, and then dressed them in FARC uniforms and said, you know, we've killed this giant band of FARC guerrillas.
Send us more money from Plan Colombia because we're doing the job.
And it was exposed, I think, three years later.
It became a massive scandal.
All of the officers who had been promoted as a result of this were put on trial.
And it started to come out that this was part of a wider pattern, that over 10,000 people had been killed in similar fashion.
This is the legacy of Biden in Colombia.
And all along, Biden and the supporters of Plan Colombia were getting these reports from people like John Walters, who's one of the biggest drug warriors this country has ever seen.
He was the drug czar under George W. Bush, and Walters had to concede that coca production continued to go up and that while large numbers of FARC guerrillas were being killed, the war wasn't being won.
There was going to have to be an actual peace agreement.
So this is just part of the failure of Biden.
And then we move to Honduras.
The reason, just going back, the reason I was inspired to write this is because Biden has been bragging on the campaign trail that he is an architect of Plan Colombia.
He did it.
And he's so proud of what he did.
But if you actually scratch the surface and look at what he did, he helped destroy an entire society, and his plan completely failed, and it wasted billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money.
And no one, not one journalist has dared challenge him on this.
Now, well, let me ask you before you switch to Honduras here.
Well, first of all, I just have to comment that I'm fairly certain.
I haven't double-checked this, but I'm fairly certain that every single school of economics in the world admits that prohibition doesn't work when it comes to alcohol or I don't know.
I mean, I guess they're pretty effective at keeping Iran or Saudi right now.
I guess not.
Right.
Like even Saudi and Iraq, you can get something to drink there.
Certainly around here, as long as there's a demand for a New York state worth of cocaine every year, then there's going to be a supply somehow.
And poisoning farmers in the name of poisoning their crops is just the most insane way, if you're objective about it at all, of attempting to tackle this so-called problem for what it is.
Yeah.
Just two points on that.
We can't smell what The Rock is cooking because The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, was forced to delete a tweet boasting about or kind of like chortling about having shots of tequila with Mohammed bin Salman when MBS was the darling of America's elite and he came over on his trip here.
So that guy's throwing it back.
And Biden actually at the beginning of his primary campaign this year was actually talking about – boasting about his efforts to ratchet up drug prohibition and to ban – to punish people for having small amounts of marijuana.
So Biden is just the quintessential consummate drug warrior.
And who thinks here that Joe Biden has never done cocaine?
I mean, come on.
Well, his son certainly has, and I think that his son would have benefited.
Everyone should read the New Yorker profile of his son, Hunter.
And Hunter was heavily – I mean he wasn't just doing cocaine.
He was doing crack and it was kind of a secret habit and he was ashamed of what he was doing.
And this is someone who really would have benefited from treatment and who wouldn't have been smoking crack if there wasn't this stigma.
But the legacy of his father has helped – I mean his father's policies actually helped destroy his life, I think.
And this is something that Biden just isn't confronted with.
All the criticism now is that he's senile and that he makes all these gaffes, but we should really talk about what Biden did when he was mentally competent.
Well, his other son is dead from his Iraq policy.
He got brain cancer from the burn pit there in Iraq War II.
I actually didn't know that.
I didn't know that, but that's just totally consistent with the conversation and it's really disturbing.
Absolutely.
Hang on just one second.
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Yeah, now, so here's the thing, though.
There was a peace deal with the FARC a couple of years back and at one point the referendum canceled it, but then they held another referendum.
And they passed it.
So they have had a pretty stable peace there as far as I can tell since then, but I don't really know.
Well, it's falling apart under Duque, but yeah.
Well, I'm sorry.
Go ahead and include that in your answer in a second.
But if you could, was the escalation of the war a part of that at all under the Plan Colombia, like pressuring them to give in?
Or it was really the abandonment of that policy that finally led to the reconciliation?
And then you're saying it's falling apart now?
What about that?
Yeah, no, it was – the plan was designed to do that, to force FARC to the table as this weakened entity.
I mean going back to the Indian wars, it's been this kind of colonial U.S. strategy.
Every surge that was done in the Middle East was done with the same thing in mind.
And it was Dos Santos, the predecessor of Duque, kind of abandoning the counterinsurgency strategy and sitting down with FARC, which won him a Nobel Prize.
And that is really why Colombia is experiencing some stability right now, although FARC is having second thoughts about giving up their weapons because Duque is starting to move in and do really harsh repression against FARC's political wing.
So we're seeing another phase of Plan Colombia.
And then there's just the drug eradication efforts have wreaked havoc on the rural population.
I mean it's why you have Evo Morales as president in Brazil.
He was a coca farmer, and his constituents, who are the indigenous population, were being tortured by these aerial spraying campaigns.
And he first started out organizing as a union leader, the coca farmers, ended the scorched earth policy, organized them into a political bloc and became president.
And he's been a very successful president and lifted up the standard of living for the rural population.
Colombia's had the exact opposite for its rural campesinos.
And at the same time, I mean, there's so much money flowing into the military and into Colombia's leadership through drug profits that it's not like they're really trying to wipe out coca production.
Again, according to the UN, it's at record highs.
And it's the same in Honduras.
Well, Honduras in just a sec, but all during that war, the FARC and the government-backed right-wing paramilitaries they were fighting were all selling drugs, of course, because they were dependent on them.
They had no choice, essentially, all sides probably.
But certainly the government was in on that too, and that was according to their American allies even at the time, back, say, Bush years.
I mean, the right-wing paramilitaries were straight up funded by Escobar and a lot of the drug lords as protection.
And that's the way this whole thing was functioning when Plan Colombia came in and kind of formalized the relationships, brought the paramilitaries more formally into the military.
And all along, I mean, you just go back and look at the rhetoric of Biden.
He's talking about bringing peace, eliminating paramilitary abuses.
And all it did was ratchet it up.
I mean, it's just been such a colossal failure.
And Biden, he wasn't a kind of casual – he wasn't someone who just delivered a floor speech in support of the Iraq War.
He was whipping votes in support of Iraq.
I mean, he has been a very activist senator on interventionism.
And Plan Colombia is part and parcel of that.
And then you have Plan Biden in Central America, which has gotten no critical scrutiny in U.S. media.
Now, is that from when he was a senator or that's from Obama years when he was the vice president?
This was when he was vice president.
And he really – what he did was he kind of leveraged his experience on Plan Colombia.
Apparently, like everyone in the Obama administration thought, wow, Biden did such a great job on this.
We're going to – and he has – and he had the experience in the Senate of whipping votes and lobbying for money for these counterinsurgency plans.
So he goes back to the Senate in 2014 when the child migration crisis began as a result of Hillary Clinton's coup in Honduras.
And all these Honduran kids are showing up alone on the border.
Hillary and Obama say we've got to send them back.
So they get $3.7 billion from Congress to put the kids in cages and send them back.
They weren't Trump's cages, so no one talked about it at the time.
And then Biden goes to Congress and asks for $750 million, what's now known as Biden's billion, for what he called a development plan.
And it really was just a boon to the energy industry, to the private prison industry or the prison industry in general, and to also the – basically IFIs, international financial institutions.
He called it the Alliance for Prosperity, and he rolled it out in an op-ed in The New York Times.
And he said that we need to rebuild Honduras' economy so we don't have this migration crisis.
We're going to address the root cause.
And what he did was basically routed the money through the Inter-American Development Bank, which is basically a hub for all of the – a hub of neoliberalism for the international financial institutions to impose their agenda on Latin American countries that are in the U.S. sphere of influence.
The U.S. actually has a majority share of votes at the IADB's board of directors.
And one of the things that they wanted to do was – I think it was called Plan de Pueblo Panama, which was a kind of regional energy infrastructure grid that would use Honduras, which has a lot of streams and lots of water that can be dammed to power hydroelectric plants, to supply electricity from Mexico all the way down to Panama.
It would all be one grid, and it would be privatized.
And so these companies could trade on the market.
And this resulted in the privatization of Honduras' national electric company.
People's electric bills and small business owners' electric bills started going up.
They were like doubled after the Alliance for Prosperity came into force.
This was a big factor in migration that people don't realize.
You have a country with a 66 percent poverty rate.
I think extreme poverty is somewhere around 40 percent.
And all of a sudden your electricity bills double and your kids can't do their homework at night and you can't cook.
You can't do anything.
You leave.
In addition, they privatized the medical sector.
This is all part of this agenda.
And they began privatizing people's Social Security plans.
The government that came into power, which Biden threw his weight behind going to Central America to meet with the president, to take photo ops, to talk him up as this great reformist, was Juan Orlando Hernandez.
Juan Orlando Hernandez is the most hated figure in Honduras right now.
People are in the streets.
There's a giant uprising.
It's a popular uprising that involves almost all sectors of society.
And you hear nothing about it, unlike Hong Kong.
And a lot of the people who are in the streets are the doctors who've lost their jobs and the teachers and the students because the universities are being privatized, the hospitals are being privatized.
And the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez actually took $300 million out of the Social Security system that paid people, that covered people's public health care, and used it to fund his 2017 campaign in which he stole an election.
The Organization of American States even affirmed that Hernandez stole the election, just straight up theft.
And thousands of people died as a result because they were unable to get critical medical care.
So a whole society is in the streets now.
They're being repressed by U.S.-trained police forces.
And two weeks ago, a federal court in New York accused Juan Orlando Hernandez of also funding his campaign with $1.5 million in profits from cocaine sales.
They basically accused him of being a narco-trafficker.
His brother, Tony Hernandez, is in prison right now in the United States.
He was arrested in Miami and accused of shipping large amounts of cocaine into the United States, marked TH with his own initials.
It just doesn't get more blatant than that.
And the craziest part of it is that this week, Juan Orlando Hernandez was in Washington to meet with the secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, for photo ops, handshakes, and to talk about cracking down on narco-trafficking in his country.
And he left the U.S. a free man after all of that.
And this is someone who was really welcomed and glad-handled and groomed and cultivated by the Obama administration, most personally by Joe Biden.
It's one of the most outrageous stories.
And if you haven't heard it before but you're constantly hearing about the uprising in Hong Kong, well, it's pretty obvious why.
The geopolitical situation is absolutely different.
The U.S. has no replacement right now for Juan Orlando Hernandez, and they can't come up with the right vassal who is more presentable and doesn't have this narco-trafficking record to keep the coup junta regime going in that country.
And so there's a silence around it.
Well, and as you said, a big part of that – well, you didn't say this part, but you identified the reason why – is because it was Obama and Hillary's government that was responsible for solidifying that coup in the first place.
I don't know if it's 100% clear.
It may be clear that they gave the green light, but they certainly gave the stamp of approval back in 2009 leading to this.
And it's worth mentioning, too, that – Well, Obama – sorry to cut in – but Obama himself did not approve of the coup.
It was Hillary who personally said, we need to do this.
He originally denounced it, and then she said, belay that order.
It's fine.
Right?
And overruled him.
Yeah.
And why did they do it?
Anyone listening, go to our YouTube channel.
Just go look up The Gray Zone on YouTube and watch Anya Parampil's interview with Manuel Zelaya, who was the president who was kidnapped by the Honduran military and taken out of the country.
He's back home now.
But he was removed under the watch of Hillary Clinton, and he explains why the coup took place.
He said essentially that George W. Bush personally came to him before the Obama administration and said, do not do this development deal with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
And he said, I'm going to do it because they're our regional neighbor and they're giving us tons of money to invest in our society and to give microloans to small business owners to build critical infrastructure.
And 2008, that year that he took that money from the ALBA development program, was just like a golden year for Honduras.
And you can ask any small business owner there.
You can ask any citizen.
That's when the economy started to take off.
And then the following year, when he was removed, you just saw this just transition into chaos, into the law of the jungle.
And now Honduras, I think, is one of the top three most violent countries in the world.
The violent crime in Honduras is just out of control.
Well, what you describe here, it's like what they did to Russia in the 1990s.
I mean, their euphemism for it is privatization.
But what it really means is handing over all of the publicly owned resources to politically connected cronies, whether they have an incentive to even continue running those organizations or not.
They might just liquidate them and let them completely fail and run off and buy a yacht and have no interest whatsoever in keeping the hospital system going or whatever it is.
But they can sell all those drugs and cash out right now.
And so, we see this kind of time and time again.
Yeah.
It's a laboratory for this kind of crony capitalism.
And, you know, you talk about excess deaths in Russia.
There were something like three to five million excess deaths as the country's poverty rate went from something like 8% to 40%.
In Honduras, I mean, I mentioned, you know, when the corruption of Juan Orlando Hernandez cost thousands of deaths in this social security scandal.
It's impossible to measure how many excess deaths are taking place, but it's happening every day.
And just anecdotally, if you spend time in Tegucigalpa, you won't see any public works projects taking place at all.
Everything is some kind of public-private partnership, and basically five families control the entire economy or most of the economy.
It's a dream for companies like DESA, which was a energy company, I think an Italian energy company, which wanted to extract energy and therefore wealth from the indigenous region of Intibuca, which I visited.
And they ran up against an activist named Berta Casares, who is world famous as an environmentalist activist.
She was from the Lenca indigenous group.
Her family were very politically powerful in the area, and they hired a death squad to assassinate her.
This death squad was overseen by a West Point graduate who had become the executive of the company, along with other military intelligence veterans who were brought in to basically oversee this operation.
And DESA is still there.
And when I visited Berta's family, we were told, me and my colleagues from the gray zone, that when I said, can we go visit the plant?
Can we go see what they're doing?
And they said, no, because you're going to get your equipment taken and you're going to get roughed up by those very same death squads.
Inside Berta Casares' mother's home, there was a surveillance system where they have to watch their exterior, the perimeter of their house, 24-7.
Their cars are bulletproof and they have a 24-7 police guard.
And it's all paid for by human rights groups because the family is still living under the gun.
This is, again, the kind of gangster mafia economy that's been brought into that country.
That was what made Russia so dangerous in the 1990s.
And there's just very little discussion about this.
But Biden, again, he's out on the campaign trail bragging about what he did in Honduras and boasting about his plan for Central America.
We haven't even talked about Guatemala or El Salvador and the rest of the Northern Triangle where, I mean, they're living in chaos as well.
Yeah.
Well, and I know you've got to go, too, but we should point out, too, just as you're making this point in this article about Joe Biden being responsible for this.
This is the Democratic frontrunner.
And for any Democrat competing against him, the talking point here is so obvious.
It's just laying right on your plate that Biden is responsible for the election of Donald Trump.
That this migration crisis is what made the difference in him getting elected in the first place.
It wasn't the Russians.
It was Joe Biden's disasters in the Middle East and in Latin America that did it.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
I mean, and it's well beyond Biden.
But this is the program that Biden represents that he believes in and that he will continue to push, even if when he's in late stage Alzheimer's.
And that's really the issue.
And as you said, I mean, he's done everything he can to take the lead on this stuff.
He's like a John McCain figure.
He was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002 and held all the fake hearings.
And as you said, whipped for the invasion of Iraq back then.
Pushed hard.
Yeah.
I mean, he went out with Les Gelb in 2006 at CFR and called for dividing Iraq into three.
Right.
The hard way, which happened.
Yeah.
The guy might as well wear a pith helmet instead of hair plugs.
For real.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks again for coming back on the show.
It's a really great article here and I appreciate your time.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That's Max Blumenthal.
This one is at the Grayzone Project.
And it's also at ConsortiumNews.com.
Joe Biden fueled the Latin American migration crisis.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
