EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: US in Central and South America

US in Central and South America

By Larry Romanoff, July 01, 2023

 

Panama

Nicaragua

Cuba

 

The US, so eager today to push China to a multi-party electoral system, has for almost two centuries destroyed every multi-party government that refused to permit US corporate plundering, and invariably installed a one-party dictatorship that would permit full US control. In most cases, a populist president is elected who wants to implement socialist reforms and remove control of the nation and its economy from the US and its corporations. Inevitably, he is replaced, usually by assassination, with someone more amenable to US plundering of the nation. Newspapers and other media critical of US interference and of the US-installed dictator, are closed down and their owners killed.

 

Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression by the US government and its CIA that involved state-sponsored assassinations and much else. The US planned, financed, coordinated and supported with arms, these brutal civilian repressions that were implemented during many years from about 1970 to the present day, by their right-wing dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. The US has destroyed the governments and the economies of the two dozen countries in Central and South America, leaving a trail of insurrections, revolutions, torture, massacre, misery and poverty. It is widely accepted in the West that the CIA alone, doing the bidding of successive US administrations, is directly responsible for at least 6 million civilian deaths in these regions. The deliberate savagery of US policy and actions is sometimes almost impossible to believe at first reading, as is the American arrogance and sense of entitlement to nations of the world as their property. In describing the US destruction of Nicaragua, a US official said, “Children shouldn’t disobey their parents”.

 

The US doesn’t only expend political, military and terrorist pressure on a domestic government and the local population. There is almost nothing the Americans won’t do to malign these unwilling nations in the eyes of the world, often mounting intense and prolonged media campaigns intended to both create domestic pressure for change on a local government but also to build a case to justify open military aggression against small countries unwilling to be colonised. Listen to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton preaching to her staff on Bolivia and Venezuela: “The Bush administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to turn them into international pariahs. It didn’t work. We are going to see what other approaches might work.” Democracy and non-interference, American-style.

 

The US will often terrorise a small government to adopt the American moral and Christian “value” of a free press, at which point the CIA will immediately purchase some of the most prominent media outlets in a nation and begin a campaign of slander and destabilisation from inside the nation. Truth is not a consideration here. In Venezuela, when trying to prevent the election of an anti-American president, the US produced TV and radio ads that featured the sound of a machine gun followed by a woman crying, “They (the anti-US candidates) killed my children. They offer only blood and pain. I can’t vote for them because they will take my child and he will belong to the state.” The US paid for full two-page spreads in prominent local newspapers that claimed, “If you are a mother, you will lose your house, your family and your children. Your child will belong to the state.” Many of the people involved in these despicable propaganda campaigns were staff of the local US embassies and consulates, local staff of US corporations, and a great many people employed by various American Christian missionary groups.

 

In all of these cases I have researched, the US history books and US government websites list US military and other belligerent incursions as simply a move “to protect American interests” somewhere, with almost never any details of the actual interests being protected or the need for the protection. In many cases from the early 1900s, as with the Honduras as an example, the US invasion was done protect American interests by controlling the outcome of an election, activity that was always against both US and domestic law in every case. But truly to the Americans, the “rule of law” is a restriction only for lesser beings. The American government and its agencies have never paid attention to either domestic or international law.

 

Panama and the Canal

 

Panama is a tiny country in the transition area from Central to South America, where the continental link becomes only about 50 kms. wide, and contains the Panama Canal which permits passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without having to make the long and dangerous voyage around the Southern tip of South America.

 

Few Americans appear to know that Panama became a separate country only relatively recently, that it had always been the Panama province of Columbia. About 100 years ago the US government wanted to build a transportation canal across the narrow isthmus, but Columbia declined the proposal when the US demanded that the canal and surrounding land would be owned by the US as sovereign American soil in perpetuity. So President Roosevelt sent in the US military, “liberated” the isthmus, declared a new country named Panama, appointed a compliant local President, and took ownership of its new “country”.

 

For a very long time it was almost impossible to learn the real truth about the creation of Panama and the story of the canal. US history texts boasted effusively about American ingenuity and prowess in building the canal, but nowhere did they mention the military aggression and hijacking of a country. A typical US history text tells us without further detail, “In 1903 the United States secured the right, by treaty, to build a canal across Panama”. On the repeated occasions when Columbia sent troops in unsuccessful attempts to un-liberate its province, American history books and even US government websites list these events as “putting down a local insurrection” or, sometimes, “protecting American interests”. One US university history textbook claimed the US sent troops into Panama “to mediate a border dispute”, the dispute of course being that there was no border, that Panama was a province of Columbia. The ‘new’ Panamanian constitution granted the United States the right to “intervene in any part of Panama, to reestablish public peace and constitutional order”, and the US did so on numerous occasions, generally to ensure a favorable outcome in Panama’s “democratic” elections. Several Panamanian presidents or candidates “died unexpectedly” during an election campaign, and on more than one occasion the US military had to intervene to protect their installed puppet president from lynching by angry mobs.

 

Of course, the canal was every bit as advantageous in economic and military terms as the Americans had hoped. It saved American vessels countless billions in extra fuel costs and brought in hundreds of billions of dollars in transit fees for the US treasury. The canal also provided enormous political advantages since it permitted the US military easier access to both Oceans and the Americans could control access by the military and commercial vessels of other nations, becoming a prized tool of US imperialism for the extortion of compliance and submission. Most Westerners have an image of the Panama Canal as a kind of non-partisan transportation route available to all the world’s shipping, but that has never been true. The US has repeatedly used the Canal as a negotiating tool for Imperial compliance, and to its own military and commercial advantage. US military vessels regularly transit through the canal, but does the world imagine Russian vessels do the same, or that an Iranian ship, if permitted passage at all, will pay the same transit fee as an American vessel? In fact, one of major tools the US used to provoke Japan to attack the fleet at Pearl Harbor was the closing of the canal to all Japanese shipping, and to all vessels, especially those carrying oil, that were headed to Japan. When we add the financial gains and the enormous political and military gains, the value of the Panama Canal to America’s rise, was beyond estimation.

 

Just so it doesn’t go unsaid, almost no benefit accrued to the Panamanian population or economy. Panama’s share of canal revenues was a pittance, and Panamanian businesses were explicitly prohibited from providing services to the Canal Zone or ships transiting through the Zone. The American presence and control have always been bitterly resented by the local population, and still are today. The country has experienced repeated riots and massive civil disruption due to American arrogance and overt control of elections, with the locals repeatedly revolting to overthrow the US-imposed “president”. Wikipedia tells us, “United States officials supervised elections at the request of incumbent governments”. Uh huh. But that’s not their version.

 

The new US imperial territory of Panama had other uses that were not widely publicised and that remained unknown for many decades. One of these was that Panama became the location of the world’s largest and most notorious terrorist and torture training facility, the famous US-operated “School of the Americas” where the CIA and US military instructed and trained almost all of the world’s brutal dictators and terrorist governments in all the fine arts of torture, acts of terrorism, sabotage, revolutions, suppression of civilian populations. Panama was also used as a staging base for the illegal invasions of other nations in Central and South America, as well as by the CIA for its activities in the political destabilisation of other nations in the region. Due to Panama’s location and US control, it was also of inestimable value to the CIA for its international narcotics trafficking operations.

 

The Panama Canal was built by the US, but was financed by Jewish bankers from The City of London, and they (or their friends) also supplied most of the labor. It isn’t widely-known, but the Jews abducted tens of thousands of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong to build the canal, and the Panama railroad. This is why even today about 10% of the population of Panama is Chinese. The Jews did the same for the construction of the trans-continental railroads in both Canada and the US, as well as for their mining of Guano in Peru and to work Rothschild’s diamond and gold mines in Africa. This is why we have Chinese all over the world today. “… the project, which employed more than 40,000 laborers, also took immense liberties with human life. Thousands of workers were killed. The official number is 5,609, but many historians think the real toll was several times higher.[1]

 

In both Panama and North America, many of the Chinese laborers were simply killed when the work was completed. In Canada and the US, there are persistent tales of the Chinese being put into small boats and pushed out into the Pacific Ocean. In Panama, the “official story” is that the Chinese laborers, no longer having a supply of opium after completion of the project, decided to kill themselves, primarily by hanging themselves with their long hair, or alternatively using swords to cut off their own heads. As James Bond would say, “Well, that’s a neat trick”.

 

“The Sea Witch, owned by Howland and Aspinwall, was 192 feet long with towering masts and a black dragon as figurehead. Launched in 1846 for the China trade, by 1854 she was a famous ship. The Sea Witch was the first vessel to sail from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn in less than 100 days. … Many of the sea wall strollers, eager to relieve their boredom, rowed out for a closer look at the beautiful vessel and thereby suffered disillusionment. The Witch was filthy and stank like a slaver. She had made the run from Canton to Panama with her holds packed with Chinese coolies. Soon she was joined in the harbor by two other sailing ships, equally filthy and odorous, also loaded with the Orientals. The railroad company had purchased the services of the coolies from “a Canton labor contractor” under a system similar to that of the British “indentured servants” sent to Virginia and Georgia during the seventeenth century. … The onlookers on the sea wall noticed with amazement the great number of Chinese discharged from each vessel “They must have been stowed in every available nook and cranny,” reported Dr. H. D. Van Lewen.

 

… After being deprived of opium, acute melancholia had struck the Chinese, Their work gradually slowed to a halt and this morning the mass suicides had begun. “Should I live to be as old as Methuselah, I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes that morning,” Totten wrote. “More than a hundred of the coolies hung from the trees, their loose pantaloons flapping in the hot wind. Some had hung themselves with bits of rope and tough vines. Most, however, used their own hair, looping the long queue around the neck and tying the end to a tree limb. Crumpled Chinese bodies were scattered about everywhere on the ground like broken dolls. Some had thrown themselves violently on their machetes. Others, in the words of Totten, had “cut ugly crutch-shaped sticks, sharpened the ends to a point, and thrust their necks upon them.” Still others, obviously, had been aided in their self-destruction, their heads being almost blown off or severed from their bodies.”[2] This excerpt applies only to the Panama railroad.

 

Nicaragua

 

Nicaragua is one of the loveliest countries in the Americas, small, fertile and friendly. It unfortunately also had resources of interest to US corporations, primarily minerals including gold, silver and copper, which resulted in yet another CIA-induced regime change and the installation of a dynasty of savage dictators – the Somozas, father and son – who brutalised their nation for 40 years with the approval, financing and support of the US government. Then the people finally organised their revolution, carried out largely without arms, using shovels and pitchforks in many cases, making Somoza flee for his life and executing many of his Generals.

 

Daniel Ortega was elected president and turned his attention to the development of his nation. The US of course was not pleased at this tiny nation that dared to defy the great colonial master, and for a decade or more waged one of the most inhumane and repugnant wars of aggression ever seen. The CIA was sent in with unlimited funding to destabilise the nation, to destroy everything Ortega tried to build, and to bring the nation to its knees. American agents derailed trains and other means of transporting goods, bombed energy installations and electricity plants, destroyed communications, and much more. When Nicaragua turned to Russia for aid in rebuilding, the CIA mined the nation’s harbors so all ships would encounter the mines, explode and sink.

 

The US secretly and illegally financed the remnants of Somoza’s escaped Generals – the so-called “Contras”, and the CIA trained them as a guerilla army to wreak increased havoc on an already struggling nation. For 10 years the Americans carried out a reprehensible and brutal campaign against this little nation. They murdered, massacred, raped, slaughtered, countless civilians, keeping the nation in terror to the great pleasure of President Reagan. The assault was primarily economic, a deliberate attempt to destroy the entire economy of the country as punishment for disobedience. It was successful; Nicaragua’s standard of living fell by 90% during that decade, and countless thousands starved to death due to the effective US embargo. I have lost the source for the following quotation:

 

“The contras’ brutality earned them a wide notoriety. They regularly destroyed health centers, schools, agricultural cooperatives, and community centers-symbols of the Sandinistas’ social programs in rural areas. People caught in these assaults were often tortured and killed in the most gruesome ways. One example, reported by The Guardian of London, suffices. In the words of a survivor of a raid in Jinotega province, which borders on Honduras: “Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out they were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit. After many contra atrocity stories had been reported in the world press, it was disclosed in October 1984 that the CIA had prepared a manual of instruction for its clients, entitled ‘Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare’ which, amongst other things, encouraged the use of violence against civilians. Congressional intelligence committees were informed by the CIA, by present and former contra leaders, and by other witnesses that the contras indeed “raped, tortured and killed unarmed civilians, including children” and that “groups of civilians, including women and children, were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded”. These were the same rebels whom Ronald Reagan, with his strange mirror language, called “freedom fighters” and the “moral equal of our founding fathers”. (The rebels in El Salvador, in the president’s studied opinion, were “murderers and terrorists”.)’

 

After the election of Ortega, the US tried their best to sabotage the nation’s elections, spending huge sums of money in the country and threatening violence if Ortega were re-elected. Officials of the US Embassy, the NED, The International Republican Institute and many more US departments and NGOs were active in the country, looking to re-take control. US ambassadors and State Department officials publicly and explicitly campaigned for anti-Sandinista candidates, threatening all kinds of economic and diplomatic punishment if Ortega were to win another election. The US Ambassador even said that if Ortega were to win again, the concept of governments recognizing governments wouldn’t exist anymore and that it was just an old 19th century concept anyway. Finally, the US openly told the nation, “You are suffering and your nation is dying. Elect a different President, and it will all stop. We will even assist in the reconstruction”. The US government offered two candidates acceptable to them, either American or pro-American, and Ortega stepped down for the US candidate, at which point the US quickly moved in to rewrite the nation’s history books to omit the bad parts. But after one session under ‘American management’, the people elected Ortega again, and the US is still trying to destroy or re-colonise Nicaragua for the sake of its corporations.

 

Cuba

 

For a great many years, Cuba was a happy and prosperous little nation with a stable elected government. But then the US had a better idea, in the form of a pathological killer named Fulgencio Batista whom it wanted to install as puppet dictator. Batista failed in a bid to be elected as president, so in 1952 the US sponsored a coup, overthrew Cuba’s elected government and installed him as President. The US immediately recognized Batista’s new regime and, until he was deposed by the revolution in 1959, he received millions in financial, military, and logistical support from the US. He was supplied with planes, ships, tanks, and all the latest military technology which included chemical warfare items such as napalm, which Batista used freely against his own people.

 

The man was as brutal a dictator as the US had ever installed anywhere. Upon his US-backed appointment he immediately suspended Cuba’s constitution and all political liberties, closed the university, fired thousands of teachers and government officials and turned the country into an instant police state. The CIA instructed and aided Batista in establishing death squads that kidnapped, tortured and murdered more than 20,000 Cubans under America’s patient direction. Under Batista, Cuba and her citizens were subjected to wide-scale violence, torture and public executions. Young people especially were publicly executed, and hundreds of mangled bodies were left hanging from lamp posts or dumped in the streets as a warning to others.

 

The US had no illusions about the character of the man they had installed and were supporting. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. said “The corruption of the government, the brutality of the police, the regime’s indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice is an open invitation to revolution”. John F. Kennedy, in his campaign for the US Presidency, said that Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in only a few years and described Batista’s rule as “one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression”, ignoring the fact that it was entirely due to the US that Batista was put into power in the first place, and was US money and weapons that kept him there. Kennedy further claimed that the US government publicly praised Batista as a good friend, at a time when he was “murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people.”

 

But it was nevertheless very commercially successful for US multinationals in Cuba, which was the entire purpose of American support. The new Cuba was designed from the beginning for plundering by US multinationals. Batista freely turned over most Cuban businesses to US firms, beginning with the criminal organisations of DuPont and the United Fruit Company. Very quickly, almost every industry sector worthy of the name was taken over without cost by large American firms. US President Kennedy stated that only seven years after they installed Batista in power, “US companies owned about 40% of the Cuban sugar, almost all the cattle ranches, 90% of the mines and mineral concessions, 80% of the utilities, practically all the oil industry, and also supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports”.

 

Even worse, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover brought in his organised-crime Mafia friends from New York and Chicago, and Cuba rapidly became one of the world’s havens for narcotics, gambling and prostitution. Havana, Cuba’s capital city, was suddenly filled with Mafia-owned hotels and casinos. The country was virtually owned and run by international gangsters and killers. Cubans brave enough to object to the destruction of their country were tracked down and killed without discussion.

 

In 1959 a young lawyer named Fidel Castro led a citizen’s revolution, defeated Batista’s army and took control of the country. Batista immediately fled Cuba with the contents of the nation’s treasury as well as a personal fortune gained from his dealings with the US Mafia that was estimated as high as $700 million in cash and fine art.

 

Castro’s first actions were to evict the Americans and their Mafia crime bosses – and the Jews, to close the casinos and brothels, and to nationalise all the Cuban industry that had been given to American corporations. Castro took back all of Cuba from the Americans and returned it to the Cubans. And in spite of President Kennedy’s fine and sympathetic words, the US government and its corporations were not at all pleased to have lost their looting privileges because of the young Castro. The US attitude toward Cuba became almost instantly hostile and the US government immediately began looking for ways to remove him from power and reclaim Cuba for themselves.

 

From one US government document that became available, a US State Department official named Lester Mallory wrote, “The majority of Cubans support Castro. The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba”. He proposed implementing economic sanctions – a US favorite in punishing disobedience – claiming this as “a line of action which makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.” And the US immediately commenced what would become for more than 50 years a criminal embargo intended to suffocate little Cuba – one of America’s “greatest enemies”.

 

If it weren’t bad enough that the US has imposed an illegal blockade against Cuba for over 50 years, it has also tried to prevent people from obtaining information about it. Contrary to the myths of free speech and press, the US government commonly censors articles and seizes books on Cuba but also confiscates money remitted to pay for them. The US embargo against Cuba not only cancelled Cuban exports to the US, but blockaded all oil shipments to Cuba as well as prohibiting the export to Cuba of all medicines and pharmaceutical supplies by US firms or where US firms control the patents – as they do for about 80% of the medical sector. When the UN allocated funds to help Cuba’s health care system, the US government seized the money. From 1960 onward the US has maintained a blacklist of all ships that landed in Cuba and, regardless of their country of origin, banned them from docking in a US port. There is almost nothing the US won’t do, to destroy a nation that refuses to surrender to US imperialism.

 

The US still mercilessly enforces these sanctions with military and economic threats against all countries and corporations. Any nation dealing with Cuba will lose any US aid, will be cut off from any financing from the IMF or World Bank, will have its US assets confiscated (illegally, of course), and may very well itself become a target of “regime change”, an American specialty when dealing with disobedience. The same is true for corporations. No US company may deal with Cuba under pain of fines and prison sentences. Foreign companies resident in the US risk having their entire assets confiscated, and other foreign firms will lose their access to the US market. A Cuban stamp in your passport can put you in prison. In addition to the sanctions, American civilians are prohibited from travel to Cuba and it is illegal for Americans to purchase any Cuban products anywhere. If an American travels to Canada or Europe and buys and smokes a Cuban cigar there, he will be arrested on his return to the US – for “aiding the enemy”. The US has no sense of humor when dealing with nations on its “list of countries we hate”.

 

The US didn’t stop with the implementation of sanctions. In 2013, Castro became the first person ever to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records for surviving murder attempts against him – 638 in total – all by the US, and all unsuccessful. Many of these were quite clever and even sophisticated, including poisoned cigars, poisoned toilet paper, exploding baseballs, a ballpoint hypodermic syringe, a gift of a poisoned wetsuit, a bacteria-infected hankie, an aerosol can filled with LSD. On several occasions, the US tried to infect Castro with cancerous cells among many other ingenious attempts. A documentary film has even been made, titled “638 Ways to Kill Castro”, that was aired on BBC public television. There must be, within the CIA, at least 100 people whose only job is to imagine yet more ways to try to kill this man. Since 1959, eleven US presidents have come and gone, all having done their part in the assassination plots, but Castro recently celebrated his 87th birthday. May he have many more.

 

The US tried an invasion of Cuba – the pathetic Bay of Pigs fiasco, and then concocted what they called “Operation Northwoods“, which was a series of false-flag operation proposals by the US government for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in US cities and elsewhere, that would be blamed on Cuba and create public support for a war of invasion. One of the more ingenious proposals, and typical of the CIA mentality, involved filling a passenger plane with US college students, sending it off-course over Cuba, then shooting it down, blaming the Cubans for this atrocity and using it to justify an invasion. The CIA had another plan that came within a hair of being approved to shoot down a US space launch, sacrificing the American astronauts in the space capsule, then blaming Cuba for “electronic interference” and using that as an excuse to invade Cuba. The CIA may claim it meant to substitute an empty aircraft for that filled with students, but there was no plan to substitute an empty space capsule, and it has been widely reported that NASA astronauts have been driven to tears in discussing the revelation of this plan during public speeches. The CIA also proposed multiple terrorist acts, setting off bombs in shopping malls and other locations – killing innocent Americans in the process – and blaming the acts on Cuba. It is not for nothing that the CIA is widely known as the largest terrorist organisation in the world – worse than even the FBI.

 

In addition to the blockade, the US government organised a paramilitary force and established a campaign of terrorism and sabotage designed to disrupt and eventually destroy Cuba and its government. The CIA, the NED and USAID funnel millions of dollars into Cuba every year, to be spent in programs designed to destabilise the government and propagandise the population. Besides the economic war and all the propaganda, there are media campaigns, plans of destabilization and terrorist attacks. As a result of 681 separate CIA-sponsored terrorist attacks, all proven and documented, more than 3,500 Cubans have been killed and more than 2,000 permanently disabled – the vast majority of these casualties being women and children.

 

In October 1976 the well-known terrorist Orlando Bosch organised – with the help of the CIA – the explosion of a bomb on a Cuban civil airliner, killing all 73 people on board. The US government refused to extradite Bosch to stand trial and a Miami TV station aired a live interview where Bosch not only admitted responsibility for the aircraft bombing, but revealed intentions of continuing terrorist activities against Cuba. Five Cubans travelled to the US to investigate this and other acts of sabotage and terrorism originating from the US, and obtained positive proof of not only the aircraft bombing but many other terrorist acts. Upon presenting this evidence to the US government, the FBI arrested the five Cubans on charges of terrorism (!) and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 15 years to life. The convictions were unique in the world of law, having been obtained by the US government without presenting any evidence whatever in court of the mens’ guilt of anything.

 

Every year there is a proposal made at the United Nations to end the US embargo on Cuba, and every year the US, with its veto power, votes against the resolution. Of all the nations in the world only the US and Israel – the world’s other democracy-loving nation – vote “No”, though they are sometimes aided by one or two almost-countries like Palau or the Marshall Islands.

 

The Americans don’t give up easily and, at least in the areas of sedition and subversion, are enviably innovative. The Argentina media published an article by Jean-Guy Allard titled, “US Invests in Video Games in Attempt to Destabilize Cuba”. In it, Mr. Allard stated that the US, the country that “democratized” Libya by bombing it to rubble and that still operates its infamous torture prison at Guantanamo Bay, has recently found a way to teach Cuban youth the virtues of their civilization. He documents that the US State Department will award $700,000 for the production of a video game that will encourage “critical thinking” among the Cuban youth with the purpose of causing “changes in society”. Another $700,000 will go to corporations and NGOs that will teach Cubans the beauty of the so called “free market”, where rich people do not have to lose their houses to the banks. Another $750,000 will be spent to provide “tools to detect and denounce human rights abuses and corruption” to US journalists who concoct and propagate stories that defame Cuba. As always, the US government will search out “dissidents”, then use vast amounts of money to bribe these citizens to betray their country. As you will learn in Volume 2, this is precisely the American approach in China today.

 

For all these years, the US government and the compliant US media propagate stories of Cuba as “an international pariah” responsible for a multitude of human rights violations and much other nonsense. But the simple truth is that Cuba has always been a fine little country at peace with everyone but, like every other bully, the Americans will never forgive the ant for defeating the elephant. The negative stories are all fabricated and meant for domestic consumption so that Americans, ignorant and simple-minded as they are, can sleep peacefully at night knowing their government is saving the world from evil and really good cigars.

 

Third-World Finance, American-Style

 

In related news, few people are aware of the so-called “financial protection arrangements” that the US government forcibly imposed on many nations in the Americas, agreements whereby US banks would “manage” the cash and finances of these smaller nations, always to the great benefit of the bankers and to the detriment of the victims. In the case of Panama for example, the US refused to pay Panama directly the annual rent payments for land use related to the Panama Canal, instead giving the money to the Jewish bankers at J. P. Morgan who were to invest the money on Panama’s behalf but who invested the funds in New York real estate, making billions in profits over a century, while paying Panama only a small annual interest. Most countries in Central and South America have been subject to these peculiarly American financial contracts. These financial controls so commonly imposed on poorer nations in the Americas provided the US with overwhelming political power and massive financial profits as well as the desired income disparity, since a nation’s funds would not be released for social purposes incurring the displeasure of the Americans. Any of these nations attempting expenditures on social services or infrastructure development without the express permission of the US, would automatically activate an “obligation to intervene” by the US military. In total, the profits realised by a few American bankers and elite industrialists from these arrangements, were astronomical over a century. For well over 100 years, the entire Southern continent was treated as a lucrative, if reluctant and troublesome, divisional profit center for American bankers and industrialists.

 

But that wasn’t all. To use Haiti as an example, the US has constantly interfered in Haiti’s internal affairs for well over 100 years, overthrowing elected governments and replacing them with dictators, invading Haiti six or seven times to seize government revenue on behalf what is now Citibank. More than once, US Marines invaded the country, broke into the nation’s central bank, and stole all its money, including all Haiti’s gold deposits. When Haiti refused to turn over its banks to Citibank and its railroads to an American company, the US launched an overwhelming military invasion during which it re-wrote Haiti’s constitution, turned over almost all industry to American firms, disbanded the country’s army and replaced it with a US military police force, slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians and enslaved hundreds of thousands of others to build a railroad that would carry Haiti’s resources to American ships. The US ran the country as a military dictatorship for decades and viciously suppressed all local resistance. In American history books and US government propaganda, the military was there only “to maintain order during threatened insurrection” and, of course, “to protect American interests”. Little Haiti and many poor countries like it, have contributed enormously to American wealth.

 

The CIA organized the overthrow of Guatemala‘s elected government to install Ríos Montt, another US-financed pathological killer, and supported him during 40 years of CIA-trained and sponsored death squads. Montt specialised in torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, resulting in more than 200,000 victims. This was one of the most inhumane events of the entire 20th century, much of it sponsored by US President Reagan. And not only sponsored, but praised; Montt attended Reagan’s Presidential Inauguration and was one of his good friends. But the US-supported dictator had given virtually all of his nation to the US Bankers and corporations. At that time, the Rockefellers alone owned more than 40% of the arable land in Guatemala as well as the entire railroad network and telegraph system, and also the country’s only port. Earlier, when the US was preparing for its invasion of Guatemala, many of the planning documents were passed on to the Guatemalan government who published them in the media and demanded an explanation from the US. Of course, the State Department claimed the accusations were “ridiculous”, and added further, “It is the policy of the United States not to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This policy has repeatedly been reaffirmed.” And Time Magazine, always helpful, claimed that those documents were just a Russian plot to embarrass the US. And then the CIA continued with its plans, assassinating the President and overthrowing the government as if nothing had ever happened. Americans are not easily embarrassed.

 

However, not to lose the main point, all of these nations in South and Central America were subject to more or less the same political, military and financial pressures as were Panama, Haiti and Guatemala. That is why they are still poor today, after more than 100 years of American assistance. All of these nations collectively have made an enormous contribution to the US treasury and the accumulation of wealth of the American elite, a history both inhumane and despicable that has been entirely deleted from the Western historical record. Americans have never known, and the local populations will never forget.

 

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 —  Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/  + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

NOTES

[1] The Panama Canal’s forgotten casualties

https://theconversation.com/the-panama-canals-forgotten-casualties-93536

[2] The Tragedy of the Chinese:

http://www.panamarailroad.org/chinesetragedy.html

 

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