Tag: Latin America

Things Do Not Always Go As Planned

The newest stupid act of attacking Venezuela is just an extension of the US ill-conceived plans for Latin America and the Caribbean….

You guys know I cannot let this go without offering a historical perspective, right?

America has a long history of intervening in Latin America and the Caribbean….all the way back to 1823 and the Monroe Doctrine…..

The Monroe Doctrine is the best known U.S. policy toward the Western Hemisphere. Buried in a routine annual message delivered to Congress by President James Monroe in December 1823, the doctrine warns European nations that the United States would not tolerate further colonization or puppet monarchs.

All well and good….but how has it all worked out over 200+ years?

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U.S. policy, underpinned by the Monroe Doctrine, has shaped the region in the decades since World War II, leading to overt and covert interventions that have often — but not always — resulted in bad outcomes and unintended consequences.

Here are five examples:

The overthrow of Guatemala’s government

By 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was concerned about a Guatemalan land-reform program that nationalized property owned by the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International). The initiative was carried out under Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, the nation’s second democratically elected leader, whose term began in 1951. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles accused Árbenz of establishing what he described as a “communist-type reign of terror.”

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Then there is the US biggest disaster….Bay of Pigs….

Shortly after taking office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy approved a covert plan to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had grown increasingly aligned with the Soviet Union since seizing power two years earlier. The secret operation, originally developed under the Eisenhower administration, relied on a force of about 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles who were expected to seize the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast and spark a popular uprising against Castro.

Instead, the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in disaster. Castro ordered some 20,000 troops to the beach, forcing most of the U.S.-backed invasion force to surrender. More than 100 were killed. The incident became a major embarrassment for the United States.

(There is so much more)

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/02/nx-s1-5652133/us-venezuela-interventionism-caribbean-latin-america-history-trump

Basically it is all must do as the US demands or face annihilation….the old ‘do as I say not as I do’ sort of thing.

This pathetic little man needs to whither away….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Gunboats Are Circling!

I am sure that we all remember Dear Leader’s threats to North Korea’s Kim…the “Fire and Fury” thingy…..well he, Dear Leader, did not stop there he has extended his bullying to Iran…..

Over the weekend he had a meltdown and started yelling (through CAPS) on Twitter….. “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE,” he wrote. “WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

That is what we foreign policy wonks call “Gunboat Diplomacy”…..now what does that mean?

“Gunboat diplomacy” refers to a foreign policy that relies on force or the threat of force. To some extent, such an approach to foreign policy has always existed between empires and nations. But in the American political lexicon the term is most commonly applied to U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean, Central America, and the northern tier of South America during the first three decades of the 20th century. Thereafter, this policy gave way to the “Good Neighbor Policy” formulated first by Herbert Hoover and then put into practice by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereby the United States would commit to refraining from armed intervention in Latin America.

One of the first examples of American gunboat diplomacy was the mission of Comm. Matthew C. Perry, who steamed with eight ships, one-third of the U.S. Navy, to “open” Japan to trade with the United States in 1853. When Perry returned, as promised, the next year, the Tokugawa Shogunate agreed to the Treaty of Kanagawa in part out of recognition of what unbridled European powers were doing in nearby China. Naval shows-of-force followed in Korea, Hawaii, and China.

Teddy’s “Carry a big stick” was an extension of Gunboat Diplomacy”……I refresh my readers memory because it appears that Dear Leader is reverting back to this type of foreign policy……

The situation in Latin America is becoming more volatile….Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc…….How will Dear Leader handle the coming crisis?

News media outlets are abuzz with reports that President Trump told aides in August 2017 to prepare a contingency plan for U.S. military intervention in Venezuela. The president apparently indicated considerable interest in that option. His security advisers reportedly pushed back firmly, arguing that resorting to military force would have significant adverse repercussions. For example, they warned it could cause a surge of anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Western Hemisphere. Although their opposition caused the president to put his flirtation with that drastic measure on hold, there is no evidence that he has renounced it. Indeed, given the worrisome political, economic, and security developments in Venezuela, Central America, and Mexico, there is a significant chance that President Trump or a future occupant of the White House will give that option serious consideration.

There may be a tendency to forget that U.S. military coercion of troublesome regimes in the Western hemisphere was once a major item in Washington’s foreign policy toolbox. That approach, so-called gunboat diplomacy, led to numerous military interventions during the first three decades of the twentieth century. That was especially true in Central America and the Caribbean. Washington launched multiple invasions and occupations of countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Even Mexico, a much larger and stronger country, was not immune to Washington’s imperialism. During Woodrow Wilson’s administration, U.S. forces seized the port city of Veracruz and sent an expeditionary force deep into northern Mexico in an attempt to apprehend Pancho Villa and his armed rebels.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/will-trump-revert-gunboat-diplomacy-latin-america

I know that the majority of Dear Leaders advisers would attack Iran tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it…..I hear he will convene his National Security Council soon and there is something they should consider (According to the Modern War Institute)

If President Donald Trump’s most recent tweets about Iran are any indication, a military confrontation with Iran is not off the table. And yet, there is almost certainly little consensus, even within the administration, about the wisdom of such a course of action. Mark Perry’s recent Foreign Policy article about Defense Secretary James Mattis’s efforts to avert war with Iran notes Mattis harbors no illusions regarding Iranian threats, but that he is also keenly aware any military strike would have broad and negative repercussions for the United States. One such repercussion is how an Iranian conflict might lead to regime change, possibly forcing the United States into another occupation in the region. Even the most hawkish US officials are not eager at the prospect of another foreign occupation. Occupations are something the United States has struggled with, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, since war rarely goes according to plan, the circumstances and situations war creates demand policymakers evaluate countless “what if” scenarios; including the possibility of a military strike escalating into regime change and a subsequent occupation.

https://mwi.usma.edu/pentagon-planning-occupation-iran-even-though-nightmare-scenario/

Just what the US needs yet another nightmare scenario….we have had enough of them with Afghanistan and Iraq….so where is the logic in making another one?

I realize that Dear Leader does not believe the old axiom…”Might Does Not Make Right”…….but he continues to thump his chest like a sex crazed primate…..and the nation will suffer.

SUFFER?  Now there is the one word that supporters of Our Dear Leader will fixate on a demand to know what I mean by “SUFFER”…..just so there is NO confusion…..by suffer I mean the loss of human life….the loss of taxpayer money that goes unaccounted for……and the loss of oversight by Congress….do you get the picture now?

Since too many of his supporters go to the Closing Thought only then they have missed anything that I may have written earlier…so I feel for their convenience I feel I need to explain everything so they do not look stupid.

Obama And Latin America

U.S. hegemony in Latin America has been maintained historically through military and paramilitary force, economic coercion, and since the mid-1980s through the additional strategy of manipulating civil society through a complex of programs implemented under the banner of “democracy promotion.” Democracy promotion is the topic of William Robinson’s 1996 book, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press).

Although the motor behind imperialism is first and foremost capitalist accumulation, public opinion requires that the government justify such violent and undemocratic actions as overthrowing and assassinating presidents and propping up dictatorships with liberal rationales; since WWII this cover has always been the defense of “freedom” from communism. However, since the USSR disappeared as an ideological enemy, the Clinton administration justified its considerable military support to Colombia as fighting the war on drugs; Clinton also escalated corporate globalization under the guise of democracy promotion. When the Bush administration decided to carry out military coups against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, it needed a more convincing justification, so it presented the narrative that both presidents had been overthrown by popular uprisings—a story that was planted in the media by the same “democracy promotion” networks that were orchestrating the coups on the ground.


Barack Obama seems to be oblivious to the sea change in Latin America, portraying the advance of the left as a threat which came about through the incompetence of the Bush administration, who allowed a “dangerous demagogue” like Hugo Chavez to rise to power.


If Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua are the bad guys, the good guys are represented by the Uribe government in Colombia, easily the biggest human rights violator in the hemisphere and the most corrupt (and for some reason embraced by the Clinton administration). Obama defended Colombia’s illegal March 1 attack on a guerrilla camp in neighboring Ecuador, where 25 people (including four Mexican students) were pulverized by aircraft artillery as they slept. His official statement: “The Colombian people have suffered for more than four decades at the hands of a brutal terrorist insurgency, and the Colombian government has every right to defend itself.” This is almost exactly what he said about Israel during its last invasion and bombing of Lebanon.

President Obama has a decision to make: either he will be on the side of the people and ecological sustainability, or on the side of transnational capital. He cannot steer a neutral course because he will be in charge of two enormous bureaucracies–the State Department and the National Security Agency–which have as their mission the removal of all obstacles to the accumulation of corporate profits. If he decides to switch sides, it will be in defiance not only of powerful economic and military interests, but of the team of advisors he has so far relied on. He will have to let them all go and bring in an entirely new group of people. The chance of that happening is next-to-none.

Does Anyone Remember The Monroe Doctrine?


Traditionally, international trade in Latin America has meant trade with the United States. The geographic proximity and close political ties between the two regions dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which was designed to monopolize US power in Latin America, have had a lot to do with that. As a result, Latin American governments and potential foreign trading partners other than the United States have historically been discouraged from trading with others by means of high tariffs on imports and exports and stringent regulations from Washington. Since the Roosevelt Corollary was announced in 1904 to stop German and British ships from sailing to Venezuela to collect debt payments, the United States has been the unofficial arbiter of all hemispheric affairs.

Although the United States will continue to play a vital role in the economic and political landscape of Latin America, there are a number of reasons to believe that the days of the United States’ ability to act with free reign are coming to an end. The inaction of the incumbent US president has a lot to do with that. The past eight years have been some of the most damaging for US-Latin American relations. The Bush administration’s neglect of the region, which has seen the president make only two perfunctory appearances (one at a Summit of the Americas meeting in Argentina in 2005 and another to Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay in 2007), has taken its toll politically. US popularity has sunk to all-time lows. The regional “leftist movement” that many have written about can owe part of its success to its leaders promising the end of U.S. influence and controversial Washington-advocated neoliberal economic policies in the region.


There is already evidence that US-dominated influence in the region is over, both politically and economically. In its stead, China has quietly positioned itself to fill the void in Latin American affairs. There are many developments that prove this. China and Peru are in the midst of free trade talks that could be signed as early as November, and Chile and China have had a free-trade agreement since 1 October 2006. In August, Argentina’s Banco de Inversión y Comercio Exterior (BICE) slashed interest rates in a move to directly encourage more investment from China Development Bank. On 1 September Paraguay reversed their decision to recognize Taiwanese sovereignty, and Alan Garcia of Peru has officially rejected Tibetan independence in an effort to show solidarity with the mainland Chinese government. Twelve days before he assumed the presidency in January 2006, Evo Morales met with Hu Jintao to discuss the two nations’ strategic importance and ideological similarities.

Maybe it is time to revisit the Monroe Doctrine.  Just a thought.