With the June 28 military coup in Honduras, the agreement for five United States military bases in Colombia and the intensification of a propaganda campaign against Venezuela, “the big question is whether the US will look at launching an ideological war that will undoubtedly spread throughout the region, or whether it will decide to postpone such a scenario and attempt to continue dealing regular blows.
According to Luis Bilbao, director of the Venezuelan-based Latin America magazine, America XXI, “there is no other possible scenario.” Bilbao has accompanied Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to various regional ALBA meetings and he has worked with the Chavez government to help build the Union of South American Nations (Unasur). He said recent US moves, which included assisting the ouster of Hugo Chavez protégé, Manuel Zelaya, in Honduras was the result of the “increased political role of Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas Alliance (ALBA) in the region” this year.
ALBA, which was formed by the revolutionary socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, has grown and now involves nine countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, had taken that democratic country into the ALBA block, thus upsetting his Liberal Party, the US, and the democratic elements in Honduras. ALBA initially presented the façade of a fair trade bloc, and an alternative to the neo-liberal US-proposed Free Trade of Americas Agreement. Since then, ALBA has become an increasingly aggressive interventionist political vehicle for destabilizing and coordinating interventions in the internal affairs of the region’s pro-American democratic governments.
Two events clearly demonstrate the increased ALBA meddling and the resulting leftist shift in hegemony in the region. The participation of the ALBA group in the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago [held on April 17-19] is something without precedent. The ALBA group had met the day before to create a counter-document to the one that the US had already built consensus around. This resulted in an eruption of unexpected force, preventing the approval of the U.S. proposed document.
Due to the intervention of the anti-democratic ALBA bloc, a large number of other countries — that had already approved the final document — felt coward and did not want to appear to be signing onto a proposal in opposition to the position of ALBA. The second event occurred two months later, at the meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS), where the ALBA plan was to accept the reincorporation of the fifty year old Castro Cuban dynasty into the OAS, on the condition that Cuba accepted Western democratic principles. Here, once again, the ALBA bloc erupted onto the scene ... and the proposed democratic plans for Latin America were defeated by the ALBA socialist block.
These unprecedented chain of events and the reversals to the projected democratic solutions provoked a situation where the balance of power in the OAS changed hands, from the US to the ALBA bloc. Clearly, this was something the US could hardly accept especially being the U.S. is the principle financier of a now socialist and anti-American left leaning OAS.
The Obama administration being completely outmaneuvered and lacking the political-democratic means to counter this socialist shift in the OAS, then put into motion a new phase of its policy toward Latin America; an alternative policy that had been prepared for in advance but contained and applied only in tentative and partial ways.
As the people of these Latin American countries, that had fallen into Hugo Chavez ALBA socialist camp, realized they had been duped and had now become part of the socialist camp, counter movements started gaining momentum throughout the region.. In Bolivia last September, a popular attempt proposed to divide the country and initiate a civil war if necessary, in order to bring down the ALBA socialist government of President Evo Morales. Unfortunately the plan failed and the country continues down the road of authoritarian socialist dictatorship. Less than a month after the OAS meeting, the ALBA president of Honduras was forcefully ousted from office. Within hours, ALBA moved into action and created that same change in the balance of power in order to condemn and isolate the Honduran interim government.
The OAS and the Obama administration could not support the removal of Zelaya, as ALBA had already launched a plan to counteract any legitimacy afforded to the interim government. Therefore, the OAS and the Obama administration immediately came out against the removal of the "legitimate" ALBA president, Manuel Zelaya. U.S. president Barack Obama was also duped and coerced to say he was not in favor of this so-called 'coup', in an ambiguous fashion in order to subtly support the interim Honduran government while verbally opposing it. The U.S. had naively been placed with its back to the wall and could not play the role of backing the democratic so-called coup, either openly or covertly.
Obama, with his back to the wall, had to come out and publicly stating that his administration was against the Honduran interim government, despite the different maneuvering such as using Costa Rican president Oscar Arias to head negotiations between Zelaya and the Honduran interim government The situation did not change and to the contrary it has become worse and more complex for the indecisive and vacillating Obama administration.
The question now remains whether the US will allow the interim Honduran government to fall, which would be another huge defeat and humiliation for the White House, or whether the U.S. will regain it's leadership role in this hemisphere and stop condemning and further isolating Honduras by joining the ALBA lynch mob, but rather put a decisive stop to Hugo Chavez and his ALBA acolytes from their blatant meddling and intervening in the internal affairs of their neighbors and pro-U.S. allies in the region.
Manuel Zelaya encouraged by Hugo Chavez will undoubtedly try to create a blood bath and place the blame on the military or business groups in Honduras. This tactic of creating martyrs and parading them up and down the sweltering streets before a crowd of salivating foreign journalists has been used time and again by the radical extremist left in Latin America to gain sympathy for their cause and condemnation toward the legitimate authorities.
It is clear that if the Hugo Chavez and his ALBA alliance unleash a massacre of the Honduran people, this confrontation could easily spill over into the rest of the countries in the region subjected to ALBA socialist repression. ALBA can not allow the ouster of their cohort, Manuel Zelaya, to stand, and will do all in their power to see that the Honduran interim government falls. The blustering interventionist, Hugo Chavez, has gone to the extreme of publicly warning Honduras of a military invasion if Manuel Zelaya is not reinstated as president.
Sensing the danger of the precedent set by the ouster of his ALBA acolyte in Honduras, Hugo Chavez has called for an ALBA military force to be created to counter any foreseeing aggression by the "Imperialst Yanqis." Besides upgrading his air force with fleets the latest Russian Sukoi SU-35 fighter bombers, Chavez has been conducting naval maneuvers with the Russian navy who have gladly accepted by sending among other navel forces, their most modern missile frigate, Peter the Great, to American waters. As the U.S. Bush administration was focused on Middle Eastern oil, and chasing Osama bin Laden around the block, China grasped the opportunity and took advantgage of the past ten years of U.S. neglect toward the Latin American region, and has offered to build Costa Rica a huge new soccer stadium, and they have given a ten billion dollar loan to the Brazilian oil company to become now one of Brazils principle trading partners. This, only a few years ago would have been unthinkable.
Chavez meanwhile has bolstered his oil rich economic power by dealing with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, and exchanging information and modern weapons for drugs thus creating in Venezuela a narco state in further detriment and debilitating U.S. policy in the region. Ten years ago, we only had Cuba to worry about, and now only Columbia remains our steadfast ally in the region. If these countries joined by Mexico join ALBA against us, the U.S. will be in a very precarious position. Most likely the most dangerous time in it's short history.
One other important role being played out in this hemispheric tug-of-war, is the role being played by Brazil's president, Ignacio Lula da Silva, who has maintained a quiet and neutral role in this ongoing hemispheric struggle, and is definitely not playing into the hands of Hugo Chavez or his ALBA Alliance. Brazil, up to know, has been busy developing their country and have recently discovered huge oil deposits that takes away the oil card that Hugo Chavez has accustomed to use to extort his neighbors. China is making inroads and in many instances replacing U.S. traditional interests in that huge South American country.
We here in the U.S. can not ignore this conjecture of fact and reality in the American continent, but neither can we ignore the results of this complex correlation of forces building up against us. The U.S. is in the process of building new military bases on the Columbian border with Venezuela, who is now arming the FARC narco guerrillas in Colombia; and we must also acknowledge and support the democratic movement in Paraguay attempting to bring down the ALBA President, Lugo. We need to create a snowball effect of falling ALBA dominos and reestablish true democracy in this hemisphere.
If insurgent wars were ever to break out in Latin America, ALBA’s response, according to Hugo Chavez, will be firm and definite. But beyond the official ALBA response, is the response of the extreme leftist radicals in Latin America. In a context of regional war, revolutionary armed forces would certainly reappear across Latin America, and these guerilla forces would try to intimidate the U.S. public with a barrage of propaganda, and use every imaginable clandestine and violent form of combat. But we must also understand that this would not be solely a U.S. fight, but we cannot ignore the democratic forces in each of these countries who only need to feel our support.
It is clear that a blood bath on the American continent is a very real possibility, and it will depend on what the U.S. and the Obama administration determines will be our foreign policy toward Latin America during the 21st Century. Also, it is undetermined whether Obama has the stomach needed for this type of action.
Albeit, it will be interesting to see if Obama has what it takes to come up from behind in this tug-of-war, or will it take a new and more decisive U.S. president to bring peace, unity, and prosperity back to the Americas.
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