Cheney's Paraguay Caper Is Intended To Produce 'A Splendid Little
War'by Dennis Small
U.S.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Paraguay on Aug. 16, with
the principal mission of putting the final touches on Vice President Dick
Cheney's scheme of establishing a U.S. military base in that country, in
the heart of South America. The proper response to that development,
advised U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche, is to issue the following urgent
security advisory across South America:
Redouble the guards at the cemeteries and the morgues, and put a
special watch on all university anatomy classes. Those psychopathic policy
twins, Cheney and Rumsfeld, the "Burke and Hare" of Washington, D.C., are
on the loose in South America.
William
Burke and William Haremade famous in such locations as Robert Louis
Stevenson's tale, The Body-Snatcherwere 1820s Scottish
entrepreneurs of sorts, who set themselves up as procurers of fresh
corpses to satisfy the lively demand of Edinburgh's medical schools'
anatomy classes. When demand outstripped the supply available from digging
up the graves of the recently departed in the dead of night, the two free
marketeers turned to supply-side economics, and started murdering people
directly. They weren't caught until they had produced 16
victims.
In the
21st-Century Cheney-Rumsfeld re-run of Burke and Hare's antics, most of
the corpses are intended to be Brazilian.
What is
the actual intent behind Cheney's Paraguay caper? Locate the regional
South American developments in the context of the documented short-term
drive for pre-emptive war against Iran, including nuclear strikes, which
has been launched by Dick Cheney and his allied gang of "spoon-bender"
Utopian lunatics within U.S. military and intelligence circles. And locate
them, as well, in the framework of a rapidly disintegrating global
financial system, which Cheney et al. have been deployed to salvage, at
all costs.
Here
are the principal South American elements leading into the dangerous
Paraguay caper:
On Feb.
24, 2005, the Argentine government of Nestor Kirchner successfully
negotiated a 60% writedown of $82 billion of public debt, over the violent
opposition of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the world's
financial oligarchy.
On
March 29, 2005, the heads of government of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela,
and Spain gathered in the Venezuelan city of Ciudad Guayana, to discuss
the details of regional great infrastructure projects to pull their
economies out of poverty, and to lay the foundations of lasting, regional
peace. This surprise development was a significant setback for the
international financial interests that Cheney and Rumsfeld speak for,
whose regional objective is both to ensure their control over strategic
raw materials, and to sink the entire region into chaos such that no
unified opposition to the dying IMF system can be mustered.
In
April 2005, a further political blow was dealt to Cheney and the neo-cons,
with Washington's inability to impose their preferred candidate as the
next Secretary General of the Organization of American States. Cheney and
his Wall Street friends were not amused.
So, on
May 5, 2005, the United States induced the Paraguayan government to sign
an agreement authorizing joint military training activities over the
18-month period running from July 1, 2005 to Dec. 31, 2006, which accord
can be extended indefinitely. The base for the maneuvers is to be the
Mariscal Estigarribia military base and airfieldwhich was built by the
U.S. to be able to handle large military transport planes, and house up to
16,000 troopslocated in the middle of the largely uninhabited Chaco
region of northwestern Paraguay. This is the very region which was the
scene of the bloody Gran Chaco War of 1932-35 between Paraguay and Bolivia
(see map).
On May
26, 2005, the Paraguayan Congress granted the participating U.S. troops
legal immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in Paraguay, an
exception that the Bush-Cheney government had previously also demanded of
Brazil, Argentina, and other South American countries, and had been firmly
rebuffed.
And
then came the most revealing development:
On June
10, 2005, Paraguayan Vice President Luis Castiglioni travelled to
Washington, D.C., where he held private meetings with Cheney, Rumsfeld,
and neo-con hatchetman Roger Noriega, then Assistant Secretary of State
for Western Hemisphere Affairs. The totally disproportionate attention
paid to Castiglioniin particular the private meeting with
Cheneyindicated that the scheme had gone live, and that Cheney was
hands-on.
On July
1, 2005, the first 500 American troops began to arrive in Paraguay. On
July 7, the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay issued a public disclaimer stating
that they had no intention of establishing a permanent military base in
the country. But in late July, an unconvinced Brazilian Army launched
military maneuvers along that country's border with Paraguay, parallel to
the arrival of the U.S. troops.
Short-sighted regional and other commentators have focussed on
diverse explanations for the Paraguayan U.S. military baseor Cooperative
Security Location (CSL), as it is known in Pentagon lingoin the heart of
South America (the only other such CSL in South America is located in
Manta, Ecuador):
* To control the giant natural gas deposits in Bolivia, which
is only 250 kilometers from the Mariscal Estigarribia base.
* To deploy against purported Iranian terrorist capabilities,
including money-laundering facilities, located in the Triple Border area
of Paraguay-Argentina-Brazil.
* To deliver a body-blow to the South American Common Market
(Mercosur) project, which Brazil has led against the free trade diktats
coming from Washington and the IMF. Paraguay is a member of Mercosur,
along with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
* To seize the giant Guarani Aquifer, one of the world's
largest reserves of fresh water, covering an area of 1.2 million square
kilometersof which an estimated 70% is located in Brazil, 19% in
Argentina, 6% in Paraguay, and 5% in Uruguay.
* To gain access to the immense riches of the strategically
important Amazon region of Brazil.
There
is an element of truth in each of these explanations, but all overlook the
two determining strategic considerations cited at the outset: the global
financial meltdown, and the lunacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration. In
fact, the policy objective of Cheney's Paraguay caper, is to launch a
British-style "Splendid Little War" in the regionboth among nations and
as civil wars within today's existing nation-states, such as the drive to
split Bolivia in twoto thereby sink the region into a New Dark Age of
chaos and genocide.
Cheney
and Rumsfeld want corpses. So South Americans beware, of the new
Burke and Hare. |
