☫ Iran in Latin America III

Analysis  Iran in Latin America | Part 3

Imam Ali and The Fearless Tiger

Iran In Latin America: A Threat To Which United States?

It is quite arrant that the presence of Iran in the American continent poses no threat to the people of the United States. Yet it undoubtedly presents a major burden for those hold­ing that nation to ransom by massive debts, a colonialist foreign policy, and a dependence on worldwide drug trafficking rings. It is this protection of the kidnappers of the US, rather than the protection of its people, which has prompted the US Department of State to re­peatedly raise threats at Latin American leaders 'flirting with Iran.'

The cooperation that Iran has been providing during the last years to energy and indus­trial development initiatives from the Gulf of Mexico to the Strait of Magellan runs far be­yond the facades of automotive assembly lines, deep water ports, hydroelectric power plants, and health and education infrastructure. Because several Latin American nations have heavily relied on Western foreign aid, they inadvertently opened their doors to devel­opment agencies such as USAID, which are notable for invasive political agendas main­taining a colonialist view of what international cooperation is supposed to mean.

But the hand that Iran has been extending, as part of the Islamic duty to help the op­pressed and neglected human beings stressed by the founder of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Imam Khomeini, has for the first time offered a genuine alternative to the Western unilateralism.

Achieving an unchallenged pervasiveness in Latin America with the failure of the Soviet Union, Western so-called cooperation agencies finished consolidating the weaving of two heinous enterprises which had already been brought to life by the CIA-backed military dic­tatorships when they leveled the region earlier on: The generation of massive external debt (primarly owed to the IMF and World Bank), and the drug trafficking industry (particu­larly of cocaine).

a. DEBT, OR THE LOSS OF SOVEREIGNTY

Table 1 shows how massive external debt was generated in an artificial manner in Latin America in two different stages, in a collusion between CIA-backed dictatorships, the IMF, the World Bank, and subsequent pro-US Latin American governments.

Country indebted to IMF/World Bank	Debt % at start of US-backed dictatorship	Debt % at end of US-backed dictatorship	Debt % in 1996 (through US DoS)
Argentina	9.3	48.9	93.8
Bolivia	0	2.7	5.2
Brazil	5.1	105.1	179
Chile	5.2	18	27.4
El Salvador	0.9	2.2	2.2
Haiti	0	0.7	0.9
Paraguay	0.1	2.4	2.1

Table 1. Generation of debt in Latin America (or loss of sovereignty); first through CIA military dictatorships, and later through pro-US Department of State regimes and “cooperation.”

Unbelievably, the importance of the nations' external debt is often overlooked, even when a country enslaved to irrational debt sees its policies and sovereignty overridden by the interests of foreign loaners - often not foreign nations, but internationalist cartels of usury bankers.

In 2010 the former President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was asked how did Brazil manage to enter the arena of emerging powers of the world, with an independence to even vote against the unjustified UNSC sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program: “We paid off the IMF, we paid off the Paris Club. We don't owe anything to anybody,” was his brief explanation. Two years ago in Ecuador, Correa declared the external debt illegal, and almost simultaneously he ceased an agreement allowing the United States military presence in the Manta base.

b. COCAINE, THE OPIUM OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

For the people of the Middle East it is common knowledge that the US official speakers claim their administration to be doing one thing, while actually being engaged in the exact opposite, especially when it comes to the so-called war 'on' terror. In Latin America the story would seem to go along a similar narrative in the so-called war 'on' drugs, with Mexico and Colombia suffering the most thanks to 7 million American addicts and their suppliers.

In 1996 and at the peak of a successful journalistic career which included the Pullitzer prize, the San Jose Mercury News investigative journalist, Gary Webb, unveiled for the first time the deep ties running between the CIA and the cocaine trafficking networks of Latin America. In 'Dark Alliance,' a work triggered by his interest in the rise of cocaine-related criminality in Los Angeles, Webb focused primary in the DEA cooperation with the Nicaraguan contras to ship cocaine from Latin America into the United States.

The implications were astounding. But first Webb had to take the fall, enduring a seemingly organized campaign of ridicule from the rest of the mainstream media, leading many to believe that his premature death few years later was no suicide; after all, how can anyone kill himself from multiple shots to the head? After a very successful passage through the Western media industry, Webb summed up his awakening to the myth of freedom in it stating that “the reason I enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long [in the media industry] hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

In an editorial article of December of 2010, Le Monde Diplomatique Spanish editor, Ignacio Ramonet, has been the latest one to update the controversy in his article 'Mexico At War, The US Is To Blame.' Ramonet has indicated that the 90% of the weapons in both sides involved in the violence spree of Mexico -police and drug cartels- which left tens of thousands of people killed in 2010 alone, are being supplied by the United States. He further noted that a 90% of all the profits off of the sale of drugs -45 billion dollars yearly- ends up inside the United States, whereas a 10% stays in Latin American drug cartels.

The United States maintains military bases throughout Latin America, most promi­nently in Colombia, under the excuse of fighting drugs. But it would always seem that wherever an American military base pops up, the drug trafficking market thrives. This is a very straightforward fact in Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan's opium crops.

In contrast, in a June 2010 report, the United Nations congratulated the joint efforts of Iran and Turkey at cutting the Afghan poppy crop down by 48%. Iran's influence in Latin America is going along those same lines. While the US constantly tries to associate inde­pendent Latin American governments with drug traffickers, people in the streets of Iran-allied Bolivia are quite aware of the decrease in coca production in that country ever since Morales estranged ties with the United States.

The ease for countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua to stop relying on suspicious American military presence and politically toxic development agencies is rooted in Iran's offering of an alternative and genuine form of cooperation, based on Islamic tenets. Since applying the Iranian experience at cutting down Central Asian poppy crops in the Latin American cocaine silk road would get in the way of a juicy revenue of 45 billion dollars for the United States -plus the earnings from the selling of weaponry-, it somehow becomes clearer why the US Department of State has unsuccessfully tried to prevent Iran's influence from expanding.

At the same time, breaking the materialistic unilateralism offered to Latin American countries by the West and the East, provides an option away from usurping debt plans that take independence and sovereignty away from the people. 
 

//End of part 3 (Next; Iran's victory, Islamic style)