Under the control of the Empire

Image_Elyeser Szturm
Whatsapp
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Telegram

By ROBERTO BUENO*

Brazil became a legitimate territory governed according to the logic of protectorates now mixed with neo-fascist practices.

“The truth that hate is epidemic soon spread; that grows and spreads the same as a disease; that no society is sane enough to be automatically immune”. (Martin Luther King).

For many decades now, the United States has exercised an absolutely harmful foreign policy, not only for the peoples of South America, Central America and the Caribbean, but also for other latitudes. This region is particularly observed by the empire as devoid of sovereignty, exposing it to the expropriation of wealth, and its people according to the tortuous anthropological-political lens of neo-fascist supremacists who legitimize violent interventions, predominant in the stable and cryptic administration of the USA and its State deep. Here we come across a cosmovision and a sociobiological interpretation closely connected with the basic precepts of German National Socialism, whose historical horizons today illuminate the future of North America.

The US has no other orientation in its foreign policy towards Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean than the continued effort to undermine the sovereignty of peoples and the fight against all forms, present and future, of national-developmentalist policies, and to bring further on, this process relied historically, as recognized by Florestan Fernandes (2015, p. 116), with the intervention of the local elite, who shared the idea that the country's independence was not a historical solution. In order to achieve this project of control and domination, there is no hesitation in carrying out direct or indirect interventions in the most diverse latitudes of the planet (cf. GUIMARÃES, 2011, p. 14) and, of course, Latin America was no exception, imposing governments -puppet, ordering them to expropriate the riches of territories under their authority and that feed the splendor of modern Western civilizations (cf. FERNANDES, 2015, p. 112).

Latin American history is full of illustrative examples of the empire's lack of scruples in intervening through the mobilization of the local elite, which does not behave only as the owner of power but as the “owner” of its own territory and its riches. The empire does not hesitate to enlist traitorous outcasts from their respective homelands, recruiting all kinds of corrupt people without neglecting the hiring and employment of assassins for actions they deem indispensable, making use of absolutely any and all means for the US to protect (and project) their economic and geopolitical interests. The implementation of these actions includes torture and death as a possible destination for non-conformists and resistance fighters against open forms of exploitation and complete subjugation of indigenous populations. The neocolonial Armed Forces stationed within national territories with which they no longer preserve cultural identity, exercise their functions as mere delegations of the empire, transformed into mere well-armed and trained police for efficient political repression, avoiding the outbreak of typical forms of economic exploitation. of neocolonial capitalism in a dependent capitalist order (cf. FERNANDES, 2015, p. 102).

This ongoing project of the empire relies on the irreplaceable readiness of the local Armed Forces, heirs of the spiritual formation of the neo-colonizers, its officer corps, like the elite, is formed in parallel with the social culture, but still immersed in it, perceiving the mass of its individuals as a result of a great factory that was not dissolved, and its dialogue with the indigenous and national culture was developed from a perspective of superiority, as they understand it, as suggested by Darcy Ribeiro (1972, p. 101), as a “ […] spurious creation because it is born conditioned by colonial domination".

The local elite, armed or not, maintains contempt for the native culture, and its foreign acculturation is accompanied by firm tension for the deculturation applied in the foreground to blacks and indigenous peoples, whose culture served as a matrix to configure the national identity, which, by distancing itself from them, imposes the logic of debilitating the people, which, by going in the opposite direction, builds the bastion to sustain the sovereignty that offends the interests of the empire. The attack on black culture and indigenous peoples is not accidental, but part of the project of exercising dominion in its neo-fascist version, in which the categories of identification of the people with their roots are extirpated, and once the territory is “sanitized ”, therefore, all the space remains free for the occupation of the cultural and structural references of the occupying empire.

Imperial domination is facilitated by the cultural rupture with its founding references and its consequences in what Darcy Ribeiro (1972, p. 101) conceptualized as deculturation, which would suggest having as a basic element a “[…] compulsory character, expressed in the effort to make the manifestation of one's own culture unfeasible and to make its transmission impossible […], because it is at this crossroads that the visceral interdiction of the people’s encounter with themselves and with the possibility of their unity that strengthens the exercise of sovereignty occurs. This process of deculturation presupposes dehumanization, uprooting individuals, distancing them from their possibility of giving vent to their identity, this being the first and indispensable step for the subsequent acculturation in a new alien key managed by what the indigenous people could regard as abaite (1)

The essence of US foreign policy can be classified as a vast Anaje (2), remaining attached to the paradigms that maintained slave acculturation, which in the Brazilian case formally lasted until May 13, 1888 under the Lei Áurea, but materially has a sequence through the concept of modern slavery. The Brazilian challenges were already overcome by the grammar and political geography of Martin Luther King (2013, p. 125) when he warned in the mid-twentieth century that “Ace siglos, civilization acquired the certainty that the man so only had freed himself from barbarism to the extent that he recognized the ties that united the next”, and this lack of knowledge of others was what the US hesitated to implement at the time, but which, after achieving it at home, continues to maintain in its foreign policy.

There are countless objective manifestations of the empirical application of the invasive profile of US foreign policy that unmasks the discourse of rights and the myth of democracy – in favor of a political realism whose outstanding pragmatism strangles it by supporting regimes that violate human rights (cf. . NIXON, 1991, p. 381) –, contradictory with his activist practices of territory incorporation (Louisiana and Florida), belligerently imposing on Mexico the loss of 2/3 of its territory (1846-1848), but also occupying Haiti for 10 years, in addition to occupying Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, defending Spain from the region in 1898 and taking control of the region for itself, with 1945 being the year zero of the North American transition from regional to world power, thus taking precautions , as recognized by Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães (2011, p. 13), of maintaining hegemony against the emergence of competing powers.

Examples of this interventionist policy are numerous and of varying degrees of invasiveness. Thus, the Dominican Republic came to know the weight of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1891-1961) thanks to the military work of the Marines Americans, as well as Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), whose Chilean coup against Allende in 1973 was openly sponsored by the US. Anastasio Somoza García (1896-1956) also reigned through barbarism and exploitation of Nicaragua in favor of the USA for twenty long years, from 1936 until his assassination in 1956, just four years before the Dominican Trujillo was imposed the same violent end. , eliminations typical of the “discards” that the CIA executes in consonance with the oscillation of North American economic and geopolitical interests. This demonstrably happened with Trujillo, like Manuel Noriega (1934-2017), from Panama, another of the several thousand military personnel who graduated from the famous School of the Americas maintained by the USA. Noriega advanced in the military career closely with Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian dictator between 1968 and 1981, who had also risen to power through a coup d'état. In close connection with the CIA, Noriega brokered weapons originating in the US, acting as dictator and puppet of the empire in Panamanian territory between 1983 and 1989, due to his fall due to the progressive distancing of the US, which finally resulted in the invasion US military to imprison the former ally.

Somoza served as dictator in Nicaragua between 1936 and 1956, interrupted only by the assassination, but soon succeeded by his son, a regime that would last another 23 years, despite the widespread corruption that in no case caused discomfort to the North's Protestant ethics. Americana that derived superlative benefit from it. Governing with the support of the USA, Somoza adopted repression as a way of guaranteeing the effectiveness of the regime and maintaining power, not ignoring the opportunity to amass a vast personal fortune, which he soon extended to his family members beyond the legendary-fantasy. Somoza rose through the ranks of the Nicaraguan National Guard, a force organized by the Marines Americans, having reached the position of command by express designation of the empire. Assuming the Presidency, Somoza soon tried to reform the Constitution in order to concentrate all the powers, attributing key posts, including the military, to people close to him, and also to relatives. Full domain.

Clan chief and businessman, Trujillo also accumulated an enormous fortune and exercised power as the most legitimate gangster (ROUQUIÉ, 1984, p. 198), something that was no exception, if not a rule in the various regimes established and sponsored by the US through coups of State in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean. Just like Fulgêncio Batista, many others rose to power waving the island's deliverance from the "gangsterism" of their predecessors but, soon, installed in power with the blessing of the empire, many became, like Batista, one of the many bloodthirsty and cruel tyrants who populated Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean. Batista's bloodthirsty path would not find Katekhon if not in the one that the cowardly devourers of popular flesh recognize as the last stop: the revolutionary weapons that, in this case, were those of the brothers Castro, Fidel and Raul, added to Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, among others, who dared in the Moncada and, under extreme courage and superior daring, the triumph in Malecón Pier on January 1, 1959.

Dictators who exercise power to expropriate their country's wealth, as was the case with Trujillo, who organize efforts to hand them over to the empire, receive full support and praise from the large transnational corporations that control the media universe and a large part of the world. mainstream academic-intellectual that resides in the best and most privileged spaces. From an internal point of view, regimes of this type need to mobilize and cohere together with ultima ratio of power de facto, namely, the Armed Forces, and thus Trujillo, like all other dictators, while crushing the population with impoverishment policies to the limit of compromising even collective existence, grant extreme economic privileges to the military as a sure formula to obtain their enduring loyalty, even though the US prefers to co-opt the ascending leaderships rather than infiltrating the Armed Forces, as widely demonstrated by the approximations carried out through courses, internships, various private contracts and training (not just intelligence) and also to contain any political movements (violent or not) that have as their object the replacement of the capitalist system that interests North American companies. In summary, the US trained the Armed Forces of Latin American and Central American countries to operate as mere ideological police with vast repressive power and extremely high lethality with competence for national action with a view to protecting the interests of the empire.

Trujillo had no qualms about joining the invading US Armed Forces, and his political rise was meteoric. Without distancing itself from other political models implemented by the US very close to protectorates,

Trujillo's dictatorial administration managed the Dominican Republic as a rural space, orienting its political choices according to its personal interests. Ordering opponents to be killed was not a rarity, and if the only option for that was the testimony of the indigo sky, this would not matter either, as is usual in the bloodiest dictatorships. The USA did not prevent this, and with its blind eye and political support, Trujillo gave course to the deaths in a manner directly proportional to his mobilization in meeting the interests of the empire in any quadrant, and in what still remained of the need for theoretical-discursive anchoring the supposed threat, anti-communism, was brought up.

Oceans of blood were shed under the banner of this threat, without limits or restrictions on methods. Trujillo remained in power for a long 31 years, interrupted by his assassination, when his son took power and, as the underworld does not have regulations either, once caught, the killers were delivered alive to quench the appetite of sharks, an end very elucidating the internal relations at the heart of criminal associations in which mourning is obviously not allowed as a verb, not even as a noun.

Trujillo's case is far from being isolated in the long and sad record of disservices that the US has been rendering to Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean. This was also the case in Paraguay under General Alfredo Stroessner (1912-2006) who came to power in 1954 through a coup d'état fueled by political instability resulting from the Chaco War (1932-1935) between Paraguay and Bolivia, in that Stroessner had fulfilled his functions and obtained relative prominence. This garnered the US sympathy, growing when his proposal for a violent seizure of power overthrew Federico Chaves, the legitimately elected president. Stroessner's coup with US support was carried out in May 1954, and from then on he concentrated command of the Armed Forces and the honorary presidency of the Colorado Party, in addition to exercising all powers outside democratic legality, disregarding parliament. , always under the approval of the greatest world power and “reference of a democratic model”.

The list of US interventions in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean is very long, a potent and tireless economic dynamo of political and economic destabilization that generated successive crises, which would not be successful without its economic resources co-opting genuine traitors of their respective homelands, rotten souls available in all latitudes and hemispheres at low prices. Allende's Chile has known the intense and successive US efforts to destabilize and overthrow it, Kissinger's machinations with the CIA under the approval of the irascible Richard Nixon, who had already committed himself to clouding the election and preventing Allende from taking office in 1970, scene of the attempted coup carried out by generals Roberto Viaux and Camilo Valenzuela, also financed by the US, an operation consisting of kidnapping General Schneider, a well-known defender of constitutional legality (who ended up dead) to avoid Allende's inauguration.

Another of the strategies used to exercise control over Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean is to make economic loans, not infrequently taking advantage of crises fueled by US agencies that instigate the emergence of emergency situations. The empire implements this domain directly or through the international organizations whose high posts it controls, easily establishing the conditions for the effectuation of loans, invariably designed in favor of large corporations. This has occurred throughout the turbulent history of Latin America at different times when the countries of the region – successive signings made by Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil – resorted to the IMF under conditions that only radically deepened their crises, being one of the most recent examples to Argentina.

In the processes of taking power through non-electoral means, one of the first movements of the North American strategy to consolidate the exercise of its dominion over the various Latin American States involves legal cover-up, resorting to the highest Courts of the countries to legitimize them before the eyes of public opinion. This happened, for example, in Brazil, when, at the root of the 1964 coup against João Goulart, the Federal Supreme Court recognized the declaration of vacancy of the office when the President was in national territory, precisely in the city of Porto Alegre (RS) and, when decades had passed, he returned to recognize the validity of the multiple legal violations enshrined in the non-existent “fiscal pedals” against Dilma Rousseff, whose first objective was to take the Brazilian pre-salt reserves discovered about 10 years before the facts.

Imperial movements in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean could not find the right conditions for establishing their domain if they did not have an extensive list of personalities from the local elite. The profile of this elite is friendly in relation to the frequent visits to the doors of the US barracks by the State Department to operationalize with the CIA the reversal of the possibly unfavorable political situation that may be imposed on it by the population resulting from the polling. This is a collective that knows no other logic than the threat of force, nor does its (lofty) pretensions have any other firm hold than the sufficient shine of weapons to heaven.

Even before Allende took office on November 4, 1970, the US had already been committing all the necessary resources to undermine the possibilities of success of any political path in the country that was not strictly capitalist or that minimally affected the interests of large US corporations. . With the election of Allende, this investment was substantially increased and aimed at submerging Chilean life in chaos, with the aim of absolutely strangling the conditions of governance. With this scenario drawn, for example, resorting to the collapse of city supplies and the unfeasibility of the economic system, the Chilean Armed Forces would be placed under the obligation to intervene to “remediate” the unsustainable circumstances – artificially created by US intelligence – under the argument legitimizing before the population to materialize the “pacification” of society. Under the scenario of chaos supposedly imposed on the country by Allende's socialist government, the new regime would be legitimized to operate under the logic of the State of exception from the juridical-political point of view, therefore resorting to the imposition of a ferocious dictatorship with a bloodthirsty appetite for consume its own people under the pretext of eliminating the enemies of the country.

The method applied in Chile was not innovative in its essence, but the development of a strategy that would be replicated in different latitudes with historical variations and adaptations that the sophistication of technology imposes. Among these spaces of control, Brazil became a legitimate territory governed according to the logic of protectorates now mixed with neo-fascist practices, sinking the country into the deepest chaos, interesting to the empire to extract the vast national riches free of charge while the new stage of strength is not consolidated so that the imposition of stability through force leads to a long cycle of no less than two decades of expropriations carried out in the shadows.

 

*Roberto Bueno is a university professor, postdoctoral in Philosophy of Law and Theory of the State (UNIVEM)

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

GUIMARÃES, Samuel Pinheiro. Prologue: Sweet illusions, harsh realities. In: MONIZ BANDEIRA, Luiz Alberto. Brazil-United States: The Emerging Rivalry (1950-1988). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011. P. 13. 277 p.

KING, Martin Luther. Anthology. A dream of equality. GOMIS, Joan. (Ed.). Madrid: 2013, Cataract. P. 125.

NIXON, Richard. in the arena. Victory, defeat and restart. São Paulo: Siciliano, 1991. 435 p.

ROUQUIÉ, Alain. The military state in Latin America. São Paulo: Alfa-Omega, 1984. 476 p.

 

NOTES:

(1) Bad, repulsive, strange people.

(2) Hawk of prey

See all articles by

10 MOST READ IN THE LAST 7 DAYS

See all articles by

SEARCH

Search

TOPICS

NEW PUBLICATIONS