Bolivia: de staatsgreep in 2019 werd uitgevoerd door de CIA, Groot-Brittannië en de OAS met hulp van grote bedrijven

De staatsgreep in 2019 tegen de democratisch gekozen regering Morales in Bolivia was vooral ingegeven door de 'wereldhonger' naar lithium, de belangrijkste grondstof voor accu's, niet voor niets wordt lithium witgoud genoemd.

Declassified UK heeft een uitvoerig schrijven van Matt Kennard gepubliceerd (door mij overgenomen van Information Clearing House) waarin hij beschrijft welke rol Groot-Brittannië heeft gespeeld in deze smerige coup, die zoals zo vaak werd georganiseerd en geregisseerd door de CIA......

Overigens stond het hele westen inclusief de reguliere media achter deze coup, met grote graagte werden in november 2019 de leugens overgenomen van de Organisatie van Amerikaanse Staten (OAS) als zouden de zojuist gehouden verkiezingen in Bolivia zijn gestoken door de partij van Evo Morales.....(zo heeft Trouw en VPRO correspondent, zijne kwaadaardigheid Edwin Koopman, fiks lopen liegen over wat er wel en niet zou zijn gebeurd in Bolivia*) Die media en politici in het westen durfden zelfs te stellen dat er geen sprake was van een staatsgreep, maar dat Morales zelf was opgestapt na 'massale protesten' (waar het overgrote deel van het Boliviaanse volk niet aan meedeed.....), terwijl het leger hem heeft ontvoerd en met een militair vliegtuig deporteerde naar Mexico.....

Deze gang van zaken geeft ten overvloede nog eens aan dat de zogenaamde onafhankelijke (massa-) media, in handen van oligarchen en steenrijke investeringsmaatschappijen, de neoliberale status quo propageren en daar maar al te graag voor liegen (dat het gedrukt staat...)..... Schande overigens dat westerse regeringen (inclusief het disfunctionerende kabinet Rutte 3) zich achter deze coup schaarden, immers zij moeten via hun eigen geheime diensten hebben geweten dat e.e.a. op grove leugens was gebaseerd..... (zo niet zijn die geheime diensten geen knip voor de neus waard... oh wacht even, dat zijn ze 'ook niet...')

Evo Morales was de eerste president van de oorspronkelijke bewoners nadat witte psychopaten een paar eeuwen geleden het land innamen..... Hij was uiterst succesvol en heeft de arme oorspronkelijke bevolking (de meerderheid in Bolivia, dit in tegenstelling tot andere Latijns-Amerikaanse landen) uit de armoede getrokken, heeft deze bevolking verder onderwijs, medische zorg en zoveel mogelijk goede behuizing gegeven. De economie draaide prima, ondanks het nationaliseren van een aantal bedrijven door Morales, bedrijven die tegen een appel en ei de grondstoffen van Bolivia hebben gestolen...... (die nationalisaties waren mede een reden voor de staatsgreep)

Oké het was voor de mensen die verder nadenken dan de neus van de westerse media lang is al duidelijk dat hier een heel smerige staatsgreep werd uitgevoerd en waarbij schandelijk genoeg ook nog eens een aantal mensen van de oorspronkelijke bevolking werden vermoord door politie en leger, echter dat in feite de regering Johnson en de geheime dienst van Groot-Brittannië zo'n grote rol hebben gespeeld was althans voor mij een openbaring, wat een geteisem!!

Gelukkig heeft de partij van Morales de verkiezingen van 2020 ruimschoots gewonnen, echter het leed wat er werd aangericht met de coup is daarmee niet weggewist.....

Lees het artikel van Kennard en zegt het voort, daar men in het westen nog steeds volhoudt dat de coup van 2019 wettig was...... (hoe zot in je kop moet je zijn om dat te beweren.....)

Revealed: The UK supported the coup in Bolivia to gain access to its ‘white gold’

By Matt Kennard

After a coup in the South American country of Bolivia in November 2019, democratically elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee. Foreign Office documents obtained by Declassified show Britain saw the new military-backed regime, which killed 18 protesters, as an opportunity to open up Bolivia’s lithium deposits to UK firms.

• Lithium – known as ‘white gold’ – is a key metal used in batteries and increasingly important to the world car industry

• Britain’s Foreign Office appears to have paid Oxford-based company to optimise ‘exploitation’ of Bolivia’s lithium deposits the month after Morales fled country

• UK embassy acted as ‘strategic partner’ to coup regime and organised international mining event in Bolivia four months after democracy overthrown

• UK firm founded by British Army veteran was ‘now in line to offer its services’ to mining companies, Foreign Office noted after event

• UK embassy provided data for the now discredited international report which was used to justify 2019 coup

• UK embassy brought cybersecurity company with close links to the CIA to Bolivia in March 2019, eight months before the military takeover

March 09, 2021 "Information Clearing House" - On 10 November 2019, after the head of the army called for his resignation, Bolivia’s socialist president, Evo Morales, stepped down. It followed weeks of protests after the release of a report by the Organisation of American States (OAS) alleging irregularities in the election Morales had won the previous month.

Persecution from the new regime forced Morales to flee the country and an “interim president”, Jeanine Áñez, was installed. Widely condemned as a coup, resulting protests were met with lethal force.

Days after taking power, on 14 November, the Áñez regime forced through Decree 4078 which gave immunity to the military for any actions taken in “the defence of society and maintenance of public order”.

The following day, on 15 November, Bolivian military forces shot and killed eight protesters in the city of Sacaba. On 21 November, regime forces killed another 10 protesters in the neighbourhood of Senkata just outside the capital La Paz.

Despite the deadly violence, which was condemned by human rights groups, the British embassy in La Paz moved quickly to support Bolivia’s new regime, Declassified can reveal from documents we have obtained.

We have seen a project list for a Foreign Office programme in Bolivia called “Frontline Diplomatic Enabling Activity”, which the UK government describes as a “small pot of money that [embassies] receive and have authority over to spend on projects supporting [embassy] activity”.

‘Interim President’ of Bolivia Jeanine Añez speaks during a press conference at the presidential palace on 15 November 2019 in La Paz, Bolivia. (Photo: Gaston Brito Miserocchi / Getty Images)

The deposits

Bolivia has the world’s second-largest reserves of lithium, a metal that is used to make batteries and which has become increasingly important due to the burgeoning electric car industry.

The UK government has stated that lithium battery technology is a priority for its “industrial strategy”. In June 2019, it announced it was investing £23-million in “electric car battery development”.

The government has further noted: “It’s estimated that South America holds 54% of the world’s lithium resources, which are increasingly in demand to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles and energy diversification programmes.”

It added: “The UK aims to have a thriving, sustainable battery industry, which would translate to a £2.7 billion opportunity … and our bilateral partnerships are essential to ensure this.”

In February 2019, Evo Morales’ government had chosen a Chinese consortium to be its strategic partner on a new $2.3-billion lithium project which would focus on production from the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars (salt flats under which the lithium is deposited).

But after the coup, the regime’s new minister for mining cast doubt on whether the deal would be honoured by the new government.

These particular salt flats were of interest to the UK embassy.

One project it co-funded from 2019-20 sought to “optimise Bolivia’s lithium exploration and production (in the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars) using British technology”.

After the coup, this project was quickly moved forward.

The abstract for the project was authorised by its main funder – the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) – on 25 November 2019, two weeks after the coup and days after the Senkata massacre.

The project gained full approval for funding of $100,000 weeks later, in mid-December 2019.

The IADB told Declassified: “The implementation of [grant] activities are conducted in close coordination with designated government authorities and their technical teams.” At that point its “close coordination” would have been with the Áñez regime.

A woman shouts anti-regime slogans in front of a police line during a funeral procession of the victims killed during clashes with police at the Senkata fuel plant on 21 November 2019 in La Paz, Bolivia. (Photo: Gaston Brito Miserocchi / Getty Images)

Satellite Applications Catapult

The British embassy in La Paz provided £5,000 towards this lithium project in 2019-20, but the Foreign Office refused to tell Declassified if these funds were disbursed after the coup in November 2019.

The goal was to “design and implement a satellite data-based application that can optimise exploration and exploitation of large/best lithium sources in the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars in Bolivia”, the documents outlined.

The Foreign Office noted that the project was to be implemented by Satellite Applications Catapult, an Oxford-based organisation “helping organisations harness the power of satellite-based services”.

The company receives about a third of its funding from the UK government but it did not respond to Declassified’s questions about the Bolivia project.

However, we found that on 19 December 2019 – two days after the IABD gave final approval to the project – the UK Foreign Office transferred £33,220 to Satellite Applications Catapult, in a payment listed as “programme spend”.

The department refused to tell Declassified if this funding was for the lithium exploitation project in Bolivia. The IADB told us: “Coordination with the British Embassy has been particularly cooperative in search for synergies”.

A picture of the Coipasa salt flats in Bolivia, photographed by an Expedition 33 crew member on the International Space Station. (Photo: Nasa)

International seminar

Then, in March 2020, four months after the coup, the British embassy in La Paz partnered with the regime’s Ministry of Mining to organise an “international seminar” for more than 300 officials from the global extractives sector.

A British company, Watchman, was brought in by the UK embassy to give the keynote presentation and outline the “creative solutions” it had enacted in Africa to bring local communities onside with mining projects.

The Foreign Office documents note: “Watchman UK and other consultancies are now in line to offer services in this important field to a number of Bolivia mining companies who wish to achieve win-win solutions to their controversies with indigenous inhabitants and towns located in the area of influence of their activities”.

Watchman is a risk management company set up in 2016 by Christopher Goodwin-Hudson, a nine-year veteran of the British Army who was later executive director of global security for the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The company supports corporate clients “across the extractive, agribusiness and capital project sectors” who are having trouble operating because of local resistance. Watchman’s website carries the logo of the UK Foreign Office.

The firm’s associate director, Gabriel Carter, has held a number of senior roles in the private security industry and in 2012 founded an Afghanistan-focused security company that “supported numerous British and US development projects”.

Carter, also a veteran of risk management at Goldman Sachs, is a member of the Special Forces Club, an exclusive and secretive private members’ club for senior intelligence and special forces veterans in Knightsbridge, London.

Watchman did not respond to Declassified’s questions about the event and the UK Foreign Office refused to answer questions related to it.

Voor deze documenten waar ik vreemd genoeg geen werkende link kan maken naar het PDF zie het origineel op Declassified UK. (en veiligheidsgordels vast voor je gaat lezen!!)

UK Foreign Office documents from 2015-20 documenting a range of programmes run by the British embassy in Bolivia.

A long courtship 

The quick moves of the British embassy on the lithium project followed years of trying to court Bolivia’s socialist government over the country’s reserves of the metal, the new documents show.

Morales had moved Bolivia away from the country’s traditional reliance on Western corporations since taking power in 2006. His government was widely praised for reducing poverty and increasing investment in schools, hospitals and infrastructure.

The Foreign Office notes that its “first engagement with the Bolivian Lithium Company”, known by its Spanish acronym YLB, was in 2017-18 when it paid £31,500 to organise a scientific UK mission. It focused on training the YLB on new technologies to explore and produce lithium in a “sustainable” way.

The documents note this project “allowed British organisations … to carry over projects on lithium in Bolivia with [Inter-American Development Bank] and [UK government] funding in the following years”.

The UK government noted: “Relationship with the Bolivian Lithium Company might also prove relevant as Bolivia becomes a supplier of lithium (a critical material) to the UK”, and referenced its “effort to connect Bolivia, Chile and Argentina (ie the Lithium Triangle) with the London Metal Exchange”.

The following year’s programme notes that “stronger links” developed between the YLB and the British embassy in Bolivia.

The documents also outline how in April 2019, the British embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, hosted a “high-level technical meeting” with the mining and lithium authorities of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, as well as senior representatives of the London Metal Exchange.

Those three countries together share ownership of the “lithium triangle”, the region of the Andes rich in lithium reserves. At the time Argentina and Chile had right-wing governments friendly with the UK.

Also in attendance was Bolivia’s vice-minister of lithium and the chief executive of YLB. “The project from the British Embassy in Bolivia … consisted in securing and facilitating the presence of the Bolivian authorities in the meeting”, the Foreign Office documents note.

It added that, after the meeting, the Bolivian government was now “aware of the relevance of the London Metal Exchange” and particularly “its interest to establish a lithium standard” which was to be based upon the lithium triangle production. Such standards serve “to promote understanding and communication between metal producers and users”.

The following sections in this passage are redacted under two exemptions related to “international relations” and “commercial interests”. These are the only redactions made on the programme documentation for the five years of operations seen by Declassified.

The London Metal Exchange, the world centre for industrial metals trading. (Photo: UK government)

Darktrace

There is further evidence Britain was always priming the country for a change in government. In the year before the coup, the British embassy was promoting the UK cyber sector, bringing a company to Bolivia founded by the UK intelligence community, and with close links to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In 2009, Morales had expelled a US diplomat who he claimed was a CIA asset heading an operation to infiltrate Bolivia’s state-owned oil company.

Eight months before the coup, the UK embassy spent more than £4,500 organising a “major event” in Laz Paz on cybersecurity for financial institutions, attended by 150 executives and senior officials from the Bolivian financial sector, according to the Foreign Office documents.

Delivered in coordination with the Bolivian Stock Exchange, Bolivian banks were said to “now be acquiring specialised services to protect their systems from cybercrime”. Further, the bankers were now aware that fighting cybercrime had to be “based upon adequate and state-of-the-art technology”.

Presentations were delivered by British company Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm set up by Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, and its signals intelligence agency, GCHQ. The company was incorporated the day after the first of whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s exposures was published in The Guardian.

Since its founding, Darktrace has hired personnel from the US intelligence community, including directly from the CIA and the National Security Agency, where Snowden used to work.

Recruits from the CIA

Alan Wade, who sits on Darktrace’s advisory council, is a 35-year veteran of the CIA and its former chief information officer.

Darktrace also recruited Marcus Fowler, a former US Marine and 15-year veteran of the CIA, as its “director of strategic threat”. At the CIA, Fowler worked on “developing global cyber operations and technical strategies” and “conducted nearly weekly briefings for senior US officials”, he says.

In July 2013, Evo Morales’ presidential plane was grounded in Austria after US intelligence agencies suspected it had Snowden on board.

Bolivian President Evo Morales (C) speaks to the media at the airport in Vienna, Austria, 3 July 2013. Morales’ plane landed in Vienna after the aircraft was denied access to French and Portuguese airspace over suspicions that US whistleblower Edward Snowden was on board. (Photo: Helmut Fohringer/EPA)

Morales blamed the US and other international actors for the November 2019 coup. “It was a national and international coup d’état,” he said soon after. “Industrialised countries don’t want competition.” He added: “I’m absolutely convinced it’s a coup against lithium.”  

The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables show that the US embassy in La Paz worked closely with the political opposition in Bolivia to remove the Morales government after it took power in 2006.

Morales expelled the US Drug Enforcement Agency in 2008 and the US Agency for International Development in 2013, accusing them of “conspiring” against his government.

For the March 2019 event, the UK embassy also brought an expert from the London-based think tank Chatham House, whose co-president is Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former director-general of MI5.

Its funders include the US State Department, UK Foreign Office, the British Army, and the oil companies BP and Chevron.

After the event, Britain’s Foreign Office noted that “several companies in the field [are] now being hired and consulted”. It is not known if Darktrace was one of them.

The embassy kept up the engagement soon after. “New dialogue with the Bolivian government on cyber”, notes the Foreign Office in its 2019-2020 programme. It is unclear if this referred to the coup regime.

‘Important input’

The day after the Bolivian election on 20 October 2019, the Washington-based Organisation of American States – the grouping of countries in North and South America – released a report on the vote which Morales had marginally won. It cited “an inexplicable change” that “drastically modifies the fate of the election”.

It also raised doubts about the fairness of the vote and fuelled a chain of events that led to the November coup.

However, a subsequent study by independent researchers using data obtained by The New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities found that the OAS statistical analysis was flawed.

Its conclusion that Morales’ share of the vote jumped inexplicably in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques, the researchers found.

Declassified can now reveal that the British embassy provided data for the OAS’s discredited report.

The British embassy spent £8,000 putting together an alliance of civil society organisations which “coordinated an operation for citizens’ observation of the elections in 2019”.

This alliance carried out a survey on voting intentions before the elections, which “was an important input for the OAS mission report, which identified irregularities in the process”, the Foreign Office notes.

The OAS failed to respond to Declassified’s questions about the UK embassy’s role in its discredited report and the Foreign Office refused to answer any questions about it.

The British embassy’s projects to prepare for the election went even further. In February 2019, it spent £9,981 to bring the Thomson Reuters Foundation to the country to train 30 Bolivian journalists on “verification techniques and pre-planning an election on coverage that is balanced, accurate and free of polarisation”. 

The Foundation said that “ahead of the elections in Bolivia” it was teaching “practical skills and tools to recognise fake news and attempts to influence the electorate with false information”.  

Declassified previously revealed how the British government is using journalism as an influencing tool in Latin America. Also recently revealed was that the British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970s at the behest of an anti-Soviet propaganda unit linked to British intelligence.

‘Marxist solidarity’

Days after the November coup in Bolivia, the UK Foreign Office released a statement saying: “The United Kingdom congratulates Jeanine Áñez on taking on her new responsibilities as interim President of Bolivia.” It added: “We welcome Ms Áñez’ appointment and her declared intention to hold elections soon.”

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab arrives at 10 Downing Street on 3 February 2021 in London. (Photo: Hollie Adams / Getty Images)

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated: “We hope that the current crisis in Bolivia can now be resolved swiftly, peacefully and in a democratic way. The Bolivian people deserve to have the opportunity to vote in free and fair elections.”

Then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn offered a completely different view, saying: “I condemn this coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for democracy, social justice and independence.”

Raab proceeded to attack Corbyn, quote-tweeting him and stating: “Unbelievable. The Organisation of American States refused to certify the Bolivian election because of systemic flaws. The people are protesting and striking on an unprecedented scale. But @jeremycorbyn puts Marxist solidarity ahead of democracy.”

But Raab and the Foreign Office made no further comments as the new regime’s forces carried out the Sacaba and Senkata massacres the following week.

Jeff Glekin, Britain’s ambassador to Bolivia since January 2019. (Photo: UK government)

In March 2020, four months after Morales was overthrown, the new regime was organising a series of new initiatives “with the UK as a strategic partner”, the documents note.

That same month, Britain’s ambassador during the coup, Jeff Glekin, offered a glimpse of the UK interests involved in backing the new regime.

Glekin spoke to the Bolivian media about British Week, which was bringing 12 British companies to the country for the first time.

“Many are looking for new markets in the world and Bolivia can be an opportunity to grow,” he said. “Due to the political changes in Bolivia, a more open environment for foreign investment is perceived and I believe that this will open new doors to companies that want to share their technology, their products and make alliances with different companies.”

Glekin, who remains in post, added: “We are working with the Santa Cruz Mayor’s Office … and we invite Santa Cruz corporations to participate in the event.”

In the documents seen by Declassified, a disproportionately high number of UK embassy projects have focused on the eastern city of Santa Cruz, which was the centre of opposition to Evo Morales’ government.

Glekin continued: “The previous government was not very in favour of foreign investment. So, with the changes that we are going to see, it will be easier to enter the market and do business. The companies to come are from different parts of Great Britain and from various sectors. They are modern firms that are doing innovative things and want to enter the market and share their services and products in Bolivia.”

Glekin added: “The demand for lithium is growing and Bolivia must take advantage of that opportunity.”

When new elections took place in October 2020, Evo Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo won 55% of the votes against six rivals on the ballot, easily avoiding the need for a runoff. The runner-up was former President Carlos Mesa with just under 29%.

A Foreign Office spokesperson told Declassified: “Presidential elections held in Bolivia in October 2020 were free and fair. There was no coup. The UK has a strong and constructive relationship with current and former Bolivian administrations.” DM

Matt Kennard is head of investigations at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world. 

Follow Declassified on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Sign up to receive Declassified’s monthly newsletter here. You can become a member and supporter of Declassified by visiting here.

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* Zie ook wat Edwin Koopman heeft durven zeggen over deze coup: 'Bolivia: een jaar na de coup wint de socialistische partij alsnog de verkiezingen' Met daarin hetvolgende plus link naar een bericht van Trouw met daarin een voorbeeld van foute berichtgeving over Bolivia, geschreven door de neoliberale fantast Edwin Koopman (werkt ook voor de VPRO) die een uiterst gekleurd verslag gaf over de situatie voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen in Bolivia, waarbij hij verzweeg dat de OAS de coup van 2019 organiseerde op basis van de uitslagen (waarbij Koopman de overwinning van Morales als dubieus durfde neer te zetten) Zie ook andere fratsen van Koopman door op het label met zijn naam te klikken, direct onder dit bericht....): 'Bij de verkiezingen in Bolivia worden de kandidaten met stenen bekogeld en gaan aanhangers met elkaar op de vuist'

 Zie verder 'Bolivia: de coup is voorbij, tijd om secretaris-generaal Almagro van de OAS af te zetten en te berechten'

'Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, en massamedia doodstil over moord op journalisten in Bolivia' 

'Bolivia: CIA en OAS hebben op valse gronden een coup tegen de Boliviaanse president Morales opgezet'

'Bolivia: OAS heeft gelogen over verkiezingen: Evo Morales onterecht afgezet middels staatsgreep!'

'Bolivia: de coup heeft alles te maken met grondstoffen' 

'NOS liegt weer over Evo Morales (Boliviaanse president) die met coup werd afgezet'

'Bolivia coup een 'CIA job', aldus anonieme Duitse veiligheidsanalist, met lessen voor de toekomst'

'Bolivia: misdadigers die vechten voor het kapitalisme'

The US EMBASSY in Bolivia continues carrying out covert actions to support the coup d’état against President Evo Morales. 

'NOS met fake news over Bolivia'

'Bolivianen eisen hun president terug'

'Bolivia: staatsgreep maakt eind aan succesvol presidentschap Evo Morales'

'Bolivia: bewijs op tafel dat VS aanstuurt op een coup''

Bolivia's Evo Morales 'unhurt' after helicopter emergency landing

Bolivia Closes 2018 Among The Highest Economic Growth Rates

Bolivia’s Remarkable Socialist Success Story: President Evo Morales has transformed his country’s economy with an unapologetically left-wing agenda.

 

'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO........'

'VS couppleger in Venezuela belooft VS Venezolaanse olie als hij de macht heeft overgenomen' 

'Halliburton en Chevron hebben groot belang bij 'regime change' in Venezuela' (zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over Venezuela)

'9 'ex-FARC rebellen' vermoord door leger Colombia: FARC-EP opgericht'

'Mensenrechten- en milieuactivisten worden massaal vermoord in Brazilië en Colombia, waar het laatste land NAVO bases heeft.......'

'Koenders heeft vrijlating gegijzelde Spoorloos makers in Colombia bewerkstelligt....... AUW!!!'

'Paus Franciscus in Colombia om vrede te prediken......'

'People of Brazil: my sincere condolences with 'your' fascistic, psychopathic president Bolsonaro......'

'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'

'NAVO naar Zuid-Amerika? Weg met dit agressieve, terroristische bondgenootschap, NU!!!'

'Bolton geeft toe dat de VS een fascistisch beleid voert......'

'Bolsonaro, de fascistische nieuwe president van Brazilië, werd volgens Avaaz en fake news brengers als de NYT gekozen door manipulatie via WhatsApp'

'Bolsonaro wint Braziliaanse verkiezingen >> weer zijn we een fascistisch geleid land 'rijker...''

'Braziliaanse verkiezingen: democratie versus (neo-) fascisme, ook een groot gevaar in Europa'

'Katy Sherriff (Radio1 correspondent Z-Amerika) brandt socialistische partij Brazilië af......' (Sherriff was destijds correspondent voor de zogenaamd onafhankelijke NOS (!!), ze beschuldigde o.a. Lula da Silva, de voormalige socialistische president van Brazilie af als corrupt, toevallig werd afgelopen week, het is nu 13 maart 2021, bekend gemaakt dat Lula is vrijgesproken door het Hooggerechtshof in Brazilie!! Sherriff is nu werkzaam voor...: Amnesty International >> hoe is het gvd mogelijk..??!!!)

Een anti-fascistisch manifest over de vermoorde Chileense politiek activist en protestzanger Victor Jara

Desiree Hellegers heeft een uitgebreid artikel geschreven over de door de VS georganiseerde en geregisseerde coup tegen het socialistische bewind van Salvador Allende op 11 september 1973 (de eerste 9/11).

Hellegers begint haar artikel met de vraag op Facebook van haar vriendengroep waar zij zich bevonden gedurende belangrijke gebeurtenissen als de 9/11 aanvallen op de Twin Towers en de moord op John F. Kennedy in 1963. Ze vraagt zich af of ze later op de huidige tijd zal terugkijken als een korte pauze in het afzakken van de VS naar een 'full blown' fascistische staat (het aantreden van Biden als VS president ziet ze dan als pauze*). Als dat gebeurt zal ook de klimaatverandering verder worden aangejaagd door de VS, wat overigens ook gebeurde onder Obama, die zelfs toestemming gaf voor de bouw van een enorme kolencentrale aan de rand van een uiterst belangrijk natuurgebied de Sundarbans dit over de grens met India in dit natuurgebied, op de kant behorend tot Bangladesh......... 

Onder Obama werd de VS de op één na grootste steenkoolexporteur, de absolute nummer 1 is het als de VS zo door de klimaatverandering geteisterde Australië dat nu nog 1 miljoen ton steenkool per dag exporteert en daar binnenkort nog een fikse schep bovenop doet, als de nieuwste en grootste steenkoolterminal ter wereld wordt geopend, waarvoor een zeekanaal dwars door het Groot Barrièrerif werd gegraven...... Het is maar de vraag of Biden inderdaad een andere koers zal inslaan, immers ook hij is een marionet van de oliemaatschappijen, het militair-industrieel complex en de financiële maffia.......*

Ook besteedt Hellegers aandacht aan de illegale oorlog van de VS tegen het Noord-Vietnamese volk en bijvoorbeeld de rol van Henry Kissinger, een uitermate smerige oorlogsmisdadiger die al lang in Scheveningen gevangen had moeten zitten (na te zijn berecht door het Internationaal Strafhof >> ICC)... Echter deze schoft, die schunnig genoeg ook de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede kreeg, zal gewoon in een bed buiten de gevangenis sterven, zoals zoveel witte oorlogsmisdadigers......   

Hellegers wijst o.a. op de triomf van het huidige Chileense volk dat in een referendum eiste dat de grondwet die door Pinochet in 1980 werd opgesteld wordt vervangen door een nieuwe grondwet en waarmee men nu bezig is deze op te stellen.

'Terug naar Chili van 1973' en de bloedige coup van fascist, massamoordenaar, verkrachter en martelbeul Pinochet, die zoals gezegd werd gesteund door de VS (ofwel de CIA, zonder deze hulp was de coup mislukt!!). Hellegers spreekt veel over de politiek activist, protestzanger en schrijver Victor Jara, die eveneens werd vermoord na de bloedige staatsgreep in 1973, samen met minstens 3.000 anderen, o.a. bestaande uit intellectuelen, studenten, professoren, advocaten en politiek activisten.

Lees het uitgebreide artikel van Hellegers en zegt het voort, de reguliere media hebben amper aandacht voor de enorme invloed van de VS die zoals gezegd ook de grondslag was voor de coup in het Chili van 1973..... (overigens heeft de VS voor en na die coup nog meer staatsgrepen met wapens, organisatie en regie gesteund in Latijns Amerika, zoals die in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazilië en die tegen de socialistische president Morales van Bolivia....) In het artikel verder een vergelijking van Victor Jara met Martiun Luther King en een korte beschuwing over het ijskoude inhumane neoliberalisme, geïntroduceerd door de duivels Margareth Thatcher, de Britse ex-premier en C-acteur en VS president Ronald Reagan, een politieke ideologie die de meeste westerse landen schunnig genoeg nog steeds volgen..... ('onze' huidige valse premier Rutte stelt wel dat hij het neoliberalisme niet meer als leidraad neemt, echter dat is de zoveelste leugen van deze aartsleugenaar!!)

CounterPunch

January 1, 2021

Victor Jara’s Hands: An Anti-Fascist Memoir-festo and Brief Personal History of Neoliberalism

by Desiree Hellegers

You can easily carbon date your friends on Facebook based on where they were during any major milestone in U.S. history. As a university professor teaching now for decades at what we euphemistically call a “land grant” university, many of my students these days were born after 9-11–into the U.S.’s seemingly endless “War on Terror.” It’s a war that some of their family members died in, but one that few of them seem to know much about.

Last month, older friends on Facebook who came of age in the 1960s were busy reflecting on what they were doing when they heard the news that JFK had been assassinated. Personally, I had only recently graduated from diapers to plastic pants and was likely occupied with important matters like trying to do the twist in front of the TV while my grandmother clapped and sloshed Scotch all over her TV table. But like most Americans who have not washed down decades of Rush Limbaugh with great swigs of QAnon Kool-Aid, I can’t help but wonder how we will look back at this moment in history. Is this the moment we turn the tide, or is it a brief respite from the country’s descent into full-blown fascism? The latter scenario would mean, of course, full speed ahead into climate collapse, given that the U.S. military is hands down the single largest carbon emissions machine on the planet, and our collective dust speck is already close to the boiling point.

May you live in interesting times. You got that right. These times are so interesting that we’ve had a lame duck president holed up in the White House consulting with his legal team from the Island of Malevolent Misfit Toys about the possibilities for declaring martial law to overturn the results of the election and it’s not the top story.

That stands to reason, I guess, when you’ve got a pandemic death count equivalent of a hundred 9-11s, and across the country bodies stacking up like cordwood in overstuffed mobile morgue units.

It’s hard to sustain the level of national alert so many of us felt during the run up to the election and the vote count, when Trump’s automatic-weapon-waving goon squads were busy battering on windows at voting precincts or sky-writing “Surrender Gretchen” over the Michigan State House. A meme was making the rounds at the time on Facebook: American politics as Night of the Living Dead. Personally, I was starting to feel like an insomnia-addled Lady Macbeth who’d been mainlining Halloween candy or days, and as in all things, I blamed my lovely spouse, who had shopped for Halloween candy like he was stocking up for Y2K.

Like me, my spouse knows how to brace for the worst, a skill we bonded over when we met organizing against the second Gulf War. One of the biggest misconceptions about the anti-war “movement,” if such a thing exists right now, is that peace activists somehow hate veterans. Since well before the war in Vietnam, the U.S. military has given veterans critical insight into the American war machine, along with heavy helpings of trauma and self-loathing. Some of my favorite peace activists are veterans, my spouse chief and foremost among them. We bonded organizing protests and staging a die-in in front of the Portland federal building. It was one of those “what are you doing after the die-in?” kinds of courtships.

I don’t remember exactly when I began thinking of Victor Jara’s hands and how they’d been crushed by Chilean soldiers in the early days of the U.S.-sponsored Chilean coup in 1973. I do know, though, that as my spouse and I took a left turn to drop our ballots off at our local library, Victor Jara had been on both our minds. It wasn’t a total coincidence, given that only a day or two before, on October 25, Chileans had voted overwhelmingly in favor of drafting a new constitution.

The referendum was a concession wrenched from President Sebastian Piñera following a year of street protests and civil unrest. The vote was a definitive kiss-off to the Chilean constitution of 1980, enacted under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet.

Living in the U.S., you’d never know that Chile had had its own national disaster on September 11, nearly three decades before the U.S.

Not many Americans can define neoliberalism, let alone know that on September 11, 1973, it was ushered into Chile by U.S.-made tanks and at the butt of U.S.-made guns—automatic weapons of the sort Trump’s “very fine” friends never seem to tire of waving. And not at all unlike the militarized Portland Police, and the BORTAC and Homeland Security armies that spent all summer pounding and traumatizing friends of mine in the streets of Portland, and spraying them with chemical weapons long ago judged too dangerous to use in war, the health effects being so severe and long term.

It was on September 11, 1973, that Richard Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger swept Pinochet to power as the front man for the U.S.-sponsored “experiment” in neoliberalism. A folksinger-songwriter, often referred to as “Chile’s Bob Dylan,” Victor Jara would be the most visible of more than 3,000 Chileans executed by Pinochet’s death squads in September, as the coup began. You can get a quick overview of the horrors that the U.S. helped unleash on Chileans in the 1970s by watching the 2019 Netflix documentary Massacre at the Stadium.

Shortly after Pinochet’s reign of terror began, an estimated five thousand were detained at a Santiago stadium—then named Estadio Chile, and since renamed Estadio Victor Jara—and another twenty thousand at the Estadio Nacional across town. Professors, students, musicians, farm and factory workers were crowded shoulder to shoulder and sorted into lines to live or die, to be interrogated, beaten, tortured, and/or murdered. At Estadio Chile, more than seventy were executed on site, while others were “disappeared.” Today a quote painted on the back of the Estadio Nacional reads: “Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro” – “A people without memory are a people without a future.”

Jara grew up poor, in a family of farmworkers, but went on to become a theater director and teacher, and to achieve international visibility with songs like “Manifesto,” which speaks to Jara’s understanding of art as a critical tool in struggles for justice, as an instrument of decolonizing resistance, of spiritual, material, and ecological liberation.

“I don’t sing for the love of singing, /or because I have a good voice,” sang Jara, “I sing because my guitar/has both feeling and reason. It has a heart of earth/and the wings of a dove….”

Jara’s music was inspired by his mother Amanda Martínez’s love of folk music rooted in her Indigenous Mapuche heritage; his music was also shaped by a Catholic education that included a brief period in the seminary. Jara’s music was embraced in the 1960s and ‘70s by American folk heavies like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Arlo Guthrie and Holly Near are among the American songwriters who have since written tribute songs. In the run-up to the election of Allende, Jara’s version of the song “Venceremos” or “We Will Overcome,” became the anthem of Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, and also figured centrally in eyewitness accounts of Jara’s death. Pinochet’s U.S.-supported forces beat and tortured him, smashing his wrists.

At some point in the stadium, Jara reportedly sang to the other prisoners “Venceremos,” a song he’d adapted with new lyrics that had egged Allende on to victory. Before he was executed, shot more than 40 times by Pinochet’s U.S.-funded forces, Jara wrote his final song: “What horror the face of fascism creates!/They carry out their plans with knife-like precision./Nothing matters to them./To them, blood equals medals,/slaughter is an act of heroism./Oh God, is this the world that you created?” 

 

No human cost was too high to pay to usher in neoliberalism, to eviscerate the gains that labor had made under Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, and to maintain a steady flow of cheap copper, fruit and fish to the U.S. under the auspices of “trade liberalization.” The new constitution passed under Pinochet’s dictatorship rolled back the reforms instituted under Allende. It expanded the power of the presidency and enshrined private property and corporate profits over social needs; Pinochet rolled back taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and eliminated a host of government services. State-owned companies, public housing, education, health care, and pensions were all privatized, turned into profit centers for corporations and the wealthy. The constitution written under Pinochet limited reforms, and the gap today between rich and poor in Chile is one of the highest in Latin America.

Jara may be technically dead, but if you do a bit of digging around on the internet, you’ll see evidence of his long afterlife; hence the title of a documentary about his impact on musicians in particular: The Resurrection of Victor Jara. Tens of thousands of hands have gone on playing Jara’s songs in the nearly fifty years since his torture and murder in the stadium. Jara, says Chilean musician Horacio Salinas, in the documentary, “could create a ceremonial effect with his music.” On youtube, you can find countless videos of musicians playing Jara’s songs, and songs written in tribute to him, including my personal favorite, “Victor Jara’s Hands,” by Joey Burns of the Tucson-based indie-rock band Calexico, sung alternately in Spanish and English: “Songs of the birds like hands/ call the earth to witness/ Sever from fear before taking flight.”

And for the past year, as across the streets of the U.S. Black Lives Matter activists have demanded justice for George Floyd and the defunding of police departments that consume the lion’s share of city budgets across the country, Jara has been resurrected again and again–in an all-star Chilean studio recording–and on the streets of Chile. At an October 25, 2019 march in Santiago with a crowd estimated at more than a million, people sang together Jara’s anti-war anthem “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz,” or “The Right to Live in Peace,” while countless people played along on the guitar.

This past year, workers in Chile have risen up again to demand a world in which workers do more than just struggle to survive, one in which everyone has a right to not just bread, but roses, music, and art.

Over the past year, Chilean women have created their own distinctive, woman-centered actions on the streets of Chile, with thousands collectively performing the song “Un Violador en Tu Camino,” or “A Rapist in Your Path,” in a public rite of resistance to rape culture and femicide.

The song was inspired by the work of the renowned Argentinian-Brazilian feminist anthropologist/bioethicist Rita Laura Segato. The song calls out the role of police and the courts in perpetrating and perpetuating sexual violence that repeats, on a smaller scale, the systemic rape and torture of women that happened under Pinochet, and that is a central feature of fascism.

If the goal in Chile—as it would be later in Iraq—was, as Naomi Klein has argued–to disorient or “shock” the country into submitting to a radically different and patently exploitative economic system, the system that was imposed was also more rigidly patriarchal.  Sexual violence and degradation were integral parts of Pinochet’s fascist playbook. But as Chileans battle the legacy of Pinochet, this rite of feminist resistance, together with other longstanding organizing, is propelling Chile to break new ground internationally: Chile will be the first country in the world with a constitutional assembly comprised equally of women and men.

I turned twelve the month that Pinochet came to power, and I have no memory whatsoever of hearing about the murder of Jara, the mutilation of his hands, or the thousands of Chileans who were tortured or disappeared. Looking back, I find this fact stranger for the fact that I grew up within miles of the White House. And when I look back on growing up in two very white suburbs on the edge of Washington D.C., it might as well have been Apartheid South Africa, the lines of demarcation between the Black inner city; Georgetown, where my father was a professor; and the white suburbs, were so clear and stark.

My first inklings of the Chilean coup came in 1976, when the political violence of the Pinochet regime erupted in Washington, D.C. I was fifteen, and a friend of my older sister was dating Pablo Letelier, the son of Orlando Letelier, when the latter was blown to pieces in a car bombing, along with his co-worker Ronni Karpen Moffett. Orlando Letelier had been a close associate of Allende and remained until his death an outspoken critic of Pinochet, who was eventually pegged for the bombing, though a fat lot of good that did.

By the age of fifteen in 1976, I was not a complete newbie when it came to assassinations. Just months before the Chilean Coup, in July of 1973, Colonel Yosef Alon, a 42-year-old an Israeli Air Force pilot and military attaché, whose daughter Yael rode the bus with us to school in the morning, was assassinated in their driveway.

But Alon’s assassination was not the first to have entered the sphere of my privileged white childhood. My guess is that would have been the Yablonski murders on New Year’s Eve, 1969.

We attended a parochial school at the time called The Little Flower School, which made the news not too long ago as the grade school alma mater of Brett Kavanaugh. I was eight and my sister was seven when we learned that the in-laws of one of the teachers at Little Flower—“Mrs. Yablonski”—had all been mowed down in their Pennsylvania home: Chip Yablonski, the President of the United Mine Workers Union, his wife Margaret, and their daughter Charlotte Yablonski.

I imagine this was around the time I came home one day from school to find myself locked out of the house, and when I banged on the window and peered inside, I found my two older siblings had staged their own murder, knives lying on the floor, a theatrical flourish of ketchup here and there. Perhaps I’ve coped with my third-grade trauma by picturing myself as a stony-faced critic who found the scene unconvincing, their characters lacking in development.

The field of Epigenetics assumes that stress is genetically transmitted. I don’t need to know that my genetic fibers are somehow entangled in my parents’ to understand that I’ve carried some of their trauma into my own life. I grew up listening to—and, at times taking notes on—my parents’ stories of trauma. My mother’s stories were about growing up the child of a working-class single mother too poor to raise her. She told stories about kids who accidentally jumped off trains onto chainsaws, and about her experience dressing dead bodies as a young student nurse on a deserted ward.

My father’s trauma centered around the May 10, 1940, Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Barely a month short of his fourteenth birthday, he ended up lying in a ditch next to his eighty-year-old grandmother, mortars flying, trees bursting into flames overhead. His family narrowly made it across the border before it closed. My father had four brothers, including twins, one of whom, my Uncle Pierre, had suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation during delivery. My father lived with the knowledge throughout his life that something as small as a hand visibly shaking as a man pockets his papers, and they might have landed in Westerbork or Auschwitz rather than in England, and his brothers might have been medically tortured and dissected.

I know exactly where I was when my father’s life ended on May 8, V.E. Day, 1979, just outside Amsterdam. I was accompanying him on his lecture tour, the chance to see Europe a high school graduation present. I was at my uncle’s house, my father’s body still warm on the couch before me, where he’d reclined after diagnosing his own heart attack. He died just two days before the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The last destination I visited with my father was Anne Frank’s “Secret Annex.” War, as I learned on that trip, throws out shockwaves and unexploded ordinance—both physical and emotional—that explode across generations, and can shave decades off a single life.

While the “Neoliberal Experiment” began in Chile in 1973 with tanks and guns—and on a smaller scale in New York City with the manufactured financial crisis of 1975—Reagan would become its American figurehead, its presidential mad social scientist. I was in my second year at Georgetown when Reagan was inaugurated, and I can remember exactly where I was when Reagan was elected 40 years ago, on November 4, 1980. I was at the Republican election watch party at some tony D.C. hotel, the details documented somewhere in a newspaper article buried deep in my office closet.

In the fall of 1980, I was in my second-year writing for the more liberal of Georgetown’s two student newspapers, The Voice. Whether the story was assigned to me or I chose it out of some perverse curiosity or out of an unshakeable conviction that Republicans had better hors d’oeuvres, I can’t quite remember. While I wasn’t the most savvy reporter at the time, I can say that voting for Reagan was as unthinkable to me then as now. And if memory serves, I covered the election party with all the rhetorical gravitas of a monkey throwing shit at their new zookeepers.

I would go on to attend the inauguration in D.C., again out of the kind of curiosity that one might feel toward newly–landed Martians walking the red carpet from their space capsule. I was a sophomore and busy running from one panicked deadline to the other, but Reagan’s inaugural speech got my attention. “[A]mong all the nations of the earth,” as Reagan would have it, “[The U.S. was] special…The freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured” in the U.S. “than in any other place on Earth,” Reagan claimed.

What I missed the first time around, though, was his distillation of neoliberal principles: The one barrier to the “individual liberty” of citizen/workers in a country “without ethnic or racial divisions” was government itself. “It is time,” Reagan proclaimed, “to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” While Reagan deftly tipped his hat to working people—to “men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children,” and on and on—for Reagan, as for Trump, the joke was on working people.

The years I spent at Georgetown in the wake of my father’s death provided a crash course in the importance of the social safety net that Ronald Reagan was hell bent on gutting. At the time, if I was somewhat oblivious to the nuances of Reagan’s political agenda, it was likely because I was occupied a good bit of the time with trying not to have a nervous breakdown. My personal social safety net at the time consisted of Social Security Survivor’s Benefits, four years of free tuition to Georgetown–where my father had taught for more than a decade–and something I never thought very much about having: white skin. My father’s death sent my mother off her fragile rails, and within six months of Reagan’s inauguration, during the summer of 1981, my sister and I were homeless.

My sister and I learned that summer that with white skin, student I.D.’s, and a keen eye out for security guards, there are ways of getting by on a college campus rent-free. At the time, I didn’t think much about the role that whiteness played in stopping us from falling any further. I was oblivious to the fact that the safety net we found in sleeping in vacant dorms would not have been available to us had we been Black or brown. As it was, there would be no cops, no Karens staring skeptically at our student I.D.’s, no guns pointed in our faces, no one asking if we were enrolled or if we’d paid summer rent for the dorm rooms. That experience, together with my father’s death, would radically remap my life for decades to come.

+++

When neoliberalism arrived in Chile, Victor Jara and working class supporters of Socialist President Salvador Allende were under no illusions about whose benefits the coup would serve.

If neoliberalism was brought into Chile with guns and tanks, in the U.S., it was done with smoke and mirrors. Reagan was inaugurated forty years ago this January on a platform based on the self-interested lies and deceptions crafted by the so-called “Chicago Boys”­­­­­––the architects of neoliberalism. Reagan greased his personal path to the White House on the neoliberal snake oil of “Trickle Down Economics” and Free Market Fundamentalism. And while Jimmy Carter had already gotten the ball rolling, Reagan would jump start the neoliberal bait and switch transfer of funds from public housing, education, and welfare, to policing, prisons, and endless war.

Ronald Reagan was as eager to shill for trickle-down economics and gutting the social safety net as he’d been for the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the warmongers at General Electric. Meanwhile, in the UK, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was happily breaking the glass ceiling for women intent on dropping bombs on babies and exploiting working families. On opposite sides of the pond, Thatcher and Reagan were simultaneously slashing corporate taxes, deregulating the financial industry—and setting the stage for waves of future financial crises. And both of them were intent on breaking labor.

Though my siblings and I were all given four years of free tuition, in the 1980s, you didn’t have to have a scholarship—or a parent who was a professor—to walk away from a four-year degree debt-free or close to it. In 1983, the year I graduated, tuition at a public university barely topped a thousand a year.But public universities had already been on Reagan’s hit list in the 1960s when he was governor of California, and students at Berkeley were busy mobilizing for free speech, civil rights, and an end to the Vietnam War.

To Reagan, Berkeley students were nothing more than unruly “welfare bums”; free tuition was their dole, and Reagan was hell bent on sending them “back to work.”

Defunding higher education and slapping students with debt was, Reagan understood, a path to reign in “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates….” Today California spends more money incarcerating people than it does educating them—from K-12 through university. In the U.S. today, tuition at public universities is ten times higher than it was when I graduated in 1983. Inflation counts for less than a third of the increase.

Over the past forty years, public universities have been steadily transformed into student debt delivery machines operated on the backs of debt-strapped adjuncts. University presidents, who routinely make five times more than governors, sell students—as “customers”—on the fiction that History–along with Literature, Women’s Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, and the Arts–are frivolous luxuries we can no longer afford to fully fund. The Gipper might be pleased today to see 18-22-year-olds signing off on documents they’d need MBAs in finance to understand and then emerging as desperate and pliable indentured servants for corporations. Even pre-COVID, 48% of university students in the U.S. were at risk of, or already, experiencing houselessness.

Historian Howard Zinn observed, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday,” and that lack of knowledge is convenient for corporate interests intent on red-baiting and enlisting workers to rail against social programs and benefits that their own grandparents struggled mightily for. I may have learned nothing while I was at Georgetown about the U.S.’s role in the Chilean coup that killed Victor Jara, but I did learn a few things about what can happen to white American nuns who are labeled Communist sympathizers for getting too cozy with Indigenous farmworkers in Central America struggling for some very basic forms of justice.

In 1981, I stumbled across a talk Daniel Berrigan was giving on campus. Berrigan, I’ve long since learned was a rock star of the American peace movement. By the early 1970s, Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, poet, playwright, and professor, had made the FBI’s Most Wanted List for burning draft files in the parking lot of the Catonsville, MD draft board with homemade napalm in 1968, and then going underground to dodge the charges so he could keep organizing other actions.

“Apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” Berrigan famously said of the action. The American banality of evil in a nutshell.

On this particular day in 1981, though, I knew nothing about Berrigan, who quickly surrendered the floor anyway to a middle-aged Catholic couple, the parents of one Jeanne Donovan, a “Maryknoll lay missioner.” And the story the couple told went something like this: on December 2, 1980, this nice, idealistic young Catholic woman was raped and murdered, executed at close range—along with three nuns, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel. And suddenly Donovan’s parents had a chilling political awakening, as they began to understand the role that U.S. military advisors and U.S.-funded and -trained death squads played throughout Central–and much of Latin–America in repressing labor organizing and movements for social justice. Donovan’s parents were extremely convincing. I couldn’t come up with any plausible communist plot that would explain these two straight-laced Catholic squares having to talk about the rape and murder of their daughter.

If the 1980 crimes against the nuns and Donovan occurred in the final month of Carter’s administration, the perpetrators knew that it would be left to Reagan to answer for it. It would be Reagan’s job to rationalize the rape and murder of nuns as acceptable collateral damage in the U.S.’s holy war against Communists. The chief spinner of malevolent tall tales about Donovan and the nuns would be a professor of political science at Georgetown, Reagan’s newly appointed ambassador to the U.N.: Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick is remembered as a “principal architect” of the bloodbath the U.S. helped fund and unleash throughout Central America.

Questioned by reporters, Kirkpatrick was eager to put the matter to rest, to drive rhetorical nails into coffins that held the bodies of Donovan and nuns that had been dragged out of the ground by ropes around their ankles. The nuns, Kirkpatrick told The Tampa Tribune, “were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” They were aligned, she claimed, with guerillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front—the FMLN.

I have another somewhat fonder Kirkpatrick-related memory from that same Spring semester at Georgetown, one in which Kirkpatrick is standing at a podium delivering a commencement address and, slowly graduating seniors begin to rise and quietly turn their backs on her. Their message was clear, impressive, and unapologetic: Kirkpatrick didn’t deserve an honorary degree, and Georgetown had done them a disservice by pretending otherwise. What Kirkpatrick did, in fact, deserve–the student action clearly conveyed–was to be tried as a war criminal at the Hague.

There’s a famous quote from a Brazilian archbishop named Dom Helder Camara that encapsulates the distinction between charity and social justice: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” Union organizing, demands for the redistribution of stolen Indigenous lands, and anything else that threatened the profits of U.S. corporations would be labelled—and battled– under Reagan as part of an international Communist threat orchestrated by Cuba and the Soviet Union.

By the Fall of ‘81, having had my own brief and very privileged run-in with houselessness, I started volunteering at shelters in D.C. That experience gave me a small window into the

ways in which poverty served up daily reminders to D.C.’s Black residents of just how disposable they were to the city’s white elite and any god they might construct in their own image. Forty years of neoliberalism and gentrification have only intensified Black poverty in D.C. And poverty, coupled with the daily toll of racism in the U.S., can shave years–or decades­­–off a life. Today white privilege in Washington, D.C. translates into seventeen additional years of living. Seventeen years.

In 1981, the “Great Communicator” was busy cranking up his racist propaganda machine to rally low income white voters against their own best interests. Reagan managed to sell a sizable portion of the white working class on the patently obvious lie that the majority of welfare recipients were not only Black but living as “queens.” It turns out that all kinds of white folks would happily collaborate in slashing benefits they were desperately going to need in the future that Reagan’s administration was setting in motion–one in which jobs would become the U.S’s main global export.

“The Gipper” happily picked up the mantle of Nixon’s War on Drugs and ran with it. He stoked terror at the prospect of Black crack “fiends” running amok in inner city war zones, and SWAT teams began invading and terrorizing Black neighborhoods. As Michelle Alexander explains in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, Reagan put the U.S. squarely on the path to becoming the global leader in locking people up. Prisons and militarized policing at home and abroad would begin sucking up enormous amounts of money that could have gone to housing, health care, and public education.

As expensive as in-state college tuition is these days, the annual cost of a prison bed in most states is equivalent to four years of in-state college tuition. In 2017 in California, the cost of a single prison bed exceeded the cost of a year’s tuition and living expenses at Harvard.

Prisons and immigrant detention facilities generate huge profits for a tiny elite, while brutalizing everyone else, including the people who work there.  But Nixon, Kissinger, and Pinochet were all well aware that once people caught on to the swindle, the bait and switch trickle-down-free-market government-for-the-corporations game, there was a good chance they would need guns, tanks, and plenty of tear gas to hold back the rebellion.

Predictably one of the first casualties of the “neoliberal Experiment” would be people living in public housing. They would increasingly land on city streets and sidewalks, and the lucky ones in shelters like the ones I worked at in Seattle in the mid ‘80s. Between 1978–midway through the Carter administration–and 1983, midway through Reagan’s first term, the HUD budget was slashed by nearly three quarters. It went from “$83 billion to a little more than $18 billion (in 2004 constant dollars) and shelters opened throughout the United States.”

No administration to date­–Democrat or Republican–has made a serious move to restore the budget to its level in 1978, which is why today, prisons—along with military bases—are now by far the country’s largest supplier of public housing.

And so, decades into the U.S.’s “neoliberal experiment,” it’s not unusual in Portland, LA. or Seattle to see walkers and wheelchairs next to tents on the street. And the real human misery—the economic and housing fallout–from COVID-19 has yet to fully register. In 2019, 117 people shuffled off their mortal coils on the streets and sidewalks of D.C.  In L.A., 1039 died on the street, no bed to cushion their aching bones, no roof overhead, no privacy, no sanitation, no dignity.

If speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. were high school seniors, hands down, the one voted least likely to be read by American school children would be his 1967 sermon “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.”

As radical as the “military industrial complex” might sound the first time Americans hear it, the term wasn’t the demon spawn of Karl Marx, or the Weather Underground. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech writer coined the term in the farewell speech he wrote for him.

This was in 1961, back when the orderly succession of putatively democratically elected presidents was a given in the U.S., no matter how many coups Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers had busied themselves orchestrating in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, and God–and historians–only know where else.  Jack and Jackie and their Camelot myth-making press machine were about to sweep into the White House, followed by more military advisors and troops into Vietnam.

MLK would paint the consequences of the military industrial complex in far starker, more vivid, human and urgent terms than Eisenhower. The U.S., Dr. King seems to have suggested, was a war junkie–and it was a given that war and racism went hand in hand. The Vietnam War, King argued, was poisoning the country with racism and hatred:

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

The sniper fire that cut King down exactly a year later to the day—on April 4, 1968 in Memphis—likely said as much about his 1967 speech as it did his support for Memphis Sanitation workers. In his 1967 speech King famously compared the war in Vietnam to a “Demonic destructive suction tube” that vacuumed up funds that might have otherwise gone to LBJ’s “War on Poverty.”

If you want to get a really good idea of how much war just cost the U.S. in the time it took you to read this article, check out the National Priorities Project. The military budget for 2020 alone at $738 billion, , would be enough to provide “24.6 million [year-long] Hospital Stays for COVID-19 Patients,” “20.96 million [four year ] Scholarships for University Students,” or “23.65 million People receiving $600 weekly unemployment insurance payments for 1 Year.” There’s plenty of money. It’s just helping the super-rich, who are profiting at all our expenses.

King condemned in no uncertain terms the massive aerial spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange as akin to Nazi medical experimentation. “What do [the Vietnamese] think as we test out our latest weapons on them,” asked King, “just as Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” Today in the U.S., the test subjects are the kids in Detroit drinking water contaminated with lead, while Nestles is pumping, bottling, and profiting to the tune of 400 gallons a minute of fresh Michigan water; the Water Protectors at Standing Rock drenched for months with pepper spray, tear gas, and reportedly other chemical agents, along with water in freezing and subzero temperatures; the Black Lives Matter activists sprayed—sprayed along with hundreds of houseless people—all summer on the streets of Portland with chemical weapons banned for use in war; the BIPOC, elderly, and people with disabilities, dying at vastly higher rates of COVID-19.

And meanwhile, Vietnam is witnessing the third generation born with Agent Orange-related health effects, from missing eyes and limbs to spinal bifida and severe intellectual disabilities. The Middle East is littered with depleted uranium, cancer rates are soaring, and babies are born with a wide range of “congenital anomalies.”

By 1967, King had struck up a friendship with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And by ‘67, King, like every other major organizer in the Civil Rights Movement, had been pegged by the FBI as a Communist. Make of it what you will, it seems likely to me that given enough time on earth, King and Jara might have had long talks, written songs together, formed a fast and deep friendship. In his song “Derecho De Vivir En Paz”–or “The Right to Live in Peace”–released on his 1971 album, Jara wrote of “Indochina… the place/beyond the wide sea,/where they ruin the flower/ with genocide and napalm.”

He and King were definitely on the same page about the Vietnam War and so much more.

Feminists, in particular, have aptly spoken of our collective relationship to Trump as akin to domestic or intimate partner violence, with Trump a gaslighting batterer. But as metaphors go, battering and gaslighting are also fitting descriptions of the Chicago Boys’ neoliberal Magic Trick— brought into Chile, and later the Middle East, with guns and tanks. It’s the magic trick ordinary Americans have watched this year, as we’ve been fleeced of taxes that have gone to fatten the unimaginable wealth of a handful of billionaires, and to endless weapons and wars that have made the U.S. the hands down leader of the global arms trade. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us in 1967 that “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty years later, at the end of the Trump presidency, we seem to be rapidly approaching garlic and wooden stake territory.

Still too many Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief now that the Batterer-in-Chief has been handed his eviction papers, and they are looking to Biden as our collective white knight, our national pater familias. But anyone who knows anything about the dynamics of battering will tell you that the myth of the White Knight is a racist and patriarchal set up for repeating the cycle of abuse. We’re sitting now on the razor’s edge of fascism, and fascism isn’t interested in electoral cycles. We can’t count on having another four years to sort the situation out.

The RootsAction “No Honeymoon for Biden” campaign, embraced by Nina Turner, recognizes the urgency of the situation and would go a long way toward undoing the damage done by fifty years of neoliberalism.  It would shift funds from militarism and mass incarceration to universal healthcare and a more inclusive, multi-racial “Green New Deal” that would fund free higher education. The campaign also calls for a $15 federal minimum wage and for Biden to cancel student debt across the board. Research has shown that wiping out existing student debt would be shot in the arm for the economy. We need to pull back from our domestic and global cycle of battering and make government work for working people if we are going to stop a free fall into fascism and climate chaos.

Finally, there are a lot of lessons the U.S. could draw from the Chilean fight against fascism and the legacy of Pinochet. The global spark that Las Tesis set off this past year with street performances that drew thousands of women to witness collectively to their shared experience of sexual harassment and assault is a testimony to the power of art to mobilize resistance and speak truth to power. And the immortal life of Victor Jara–his presence this past year on the streets of Santiago­, where thousands of hands fluttered across guitars­­–testifies to the power of art to preserve history even in the face of guns, tanks and bullets bent on wiping it out.

Now, more than ever, we need to demand reinvestment in the arts—from K-12 to higher education. To paraphrase the quote Woody Guthrie famously scrawled across his guitar: we need art to kill fascism. What better reminder than the hollow man in the White House of the frustration life without art generates? We need art to foster empathy, to remind us of our collective humanity, to preserve in our national memory records of those who stood for justice, and those who collaborated to undermine it. We need art to preserve history, to sustain and energize us, to give us courage for the long struggle ahead.

Dedicated to the memory of Roxane Elizabeth Roberts (November 5, 1952-December 24, 2018).

Desiree Hellegers is a co-founder and affiliated faculty of the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver. and a member of the Socialist-Feminist Old Mole Variety Hour Collective on KBOO, Portland, Oregon’s community-supported radio station.

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* 'Beetje dom' om te geloven dat de situatie in de VS en haar buitenlandbeleid zal veranderen met oorlogsmisdadiger en mensenrechtenschender Biden...... Bovendien zit Biden in de zak van de financiële maffia en daarmee in die van de oliemaatschappijen, het militair-industrieel complex, de farmaceutische maffia en andere grote misdadige bedrijven >> hoe kan je ook maar enige verandering verwachten van zo'n figuur??!!! Toevallig werd vanmorgen op de BBC gemeld dat een aantal grote bedrijven en banken hun steun stoppen aan republikeinen die achter Trump blijven staan, ofwel deze bedrijven kopen de politiek niet alleen voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen, maar doen dat doorlopend, hoe kan je dan nog spreken van een democratie, als de politici volledig in de zak zitten van bedrijven....?? (om nog maar te zwijgen over het belemmeren van de stembusgang voor een groot aantal VS burgers)

Zie ook: 'Met de winst van Biden is het fascisme in de VS bepaald niet weggestemd' (en zie zeker de links in dat bericht over de 'geweldige' of beter gezegd gewelddadige oorlogsmisdadiger Joe Biden)

'Feest in Chili: fascistische grondwet verdwijnt voor een nieuwe!!'

'Chili groot aantal (zwaar) gewonden bij voortdurende protesten' 

'Protesten Chili en Ecuador: geweld tegen demonstranten gesteund door massamedia' (en zie de links in dat bericht)

'Chili, de protesten en de verslaggeving' (en zie de links in dat bericht, o.a. over het Amazonewoud en de strijd van burgers tegen oliemaatschappijen, maar ook over de situatie in Brazilië en Venezuela)

'Chili en de gestolen baby's, alweer met een 'mooie rol' van de rk kerk' 

'Venezuela is nog lang niet verslagen door de VS'

'Pinochet (ex-dictator Chili) werd 20 jaar geleden gearresteerd in Londen'

'9/11: de VS heeft niets geleerd......'

'VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen..........'

'List of wars involving the United States'

'VS: openlijke militaire oefening met terreurgroep in Syrië......'

'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO.........'

'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'

'Chileense fascisten vragen rk kerk om vergeving voor vreselijke misdaden begaan onder Pinochet bewind......'

'De VS, een duivels imperium, dat achter haar psychopathisch moordende troepen staat??'

'De war on drugs is veel dodelijker dan over het algemeen gedacht'

'Chili 11 september 1973'

'VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII........'

'CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi's beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz.........'

'CIA en 70 jaar desinformatie in Europese opiniebladen............'

Voor meer berichten over de steenkoolcentrale in de Sundarbans, vul deze naam in op het zoekvlak rechts bovenin deze pagina. Dat geldt ook voor andere namen en instanties die genoemd woorden in het artikel van Hellegers (de ruimte voor labels is wat mij betreft te klein, t.w. 140 tekens)