She adds this:
"US corporations have a strong interest in the biofuel market as climate change mitigation measures are expected to result in a tremendous growth in demand for biofuels.
"In December 2010, scandal erupted around a US Embassy cable released by Wikileaks that described a February 2010 visit to Honduras by Republican Senator Dana Rohrabacher who took advantage of an official visit to bring a group of investors, including representatives of California based SG Biofuels, while lauding the military coup."
It's Deja vu all over again
Operation Hammer is one Mr Brownfield's pet projects. It involves military drug interdiction along both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Central America. US Southern Command is fully in cahoots on all this. As the US militarizes the issue, a NACLA report points out that Central and South American leaders are lobbying the US to re-focus its War On Drugs from military attacks on Supply in their homelands to belatedly addressing the Demand side in the US homeland.
Even the right-wing president of Colombia -- Juan Manuel Santos -- publicly suggested this to President Obama at the Summit Of The Americas in Cartagena in April. For some reason this important piece of news failed to get traction in the US media. You'll recall there was the lovely, big-breasted young lady who over-charged one of our horny secret servicemen.
The fact is, the US is going balls-to-the-wall to thwart talk of addressing demand at home in the USA. As it is going balls-to-the-wall to thwart state efforts to legalize marijuana inside the US. According to the NACLA report, these efforts may be succeeding in Central America:
"The prospects for changes to the drug war are now dimming, with waning support for (Guatemalan President) PÃ ©rez Molina's proposal. On Saturday, March 24 (2012), the day before Brownfield arrived in Honduras, PÃ ©rez Molina hosted a regional summit on legalization that was attended by only Costa Rican President (Laura) Chinchilla and Panama's Ricardo Martinelli. PÃ ©rez Molina said that U.S. pressure led to the other leaders' absence from the regional conference."
William Brownfield is the point man in this sales effort to keep the focus on the military and war in Latin America and, now, in Africa. And he proposes to use Plan Colombia and the baroque, bloody war with the Sinaloa Gang and The Zetas in Mexico as models.
If one can conceptually frame all this in a larger sphere of concern than the narrow "national interests" of the government of the United States of America, Brownfield has the mien of that ironically beloved, wild-eyed and blindered icon of US imperial history, General George Armstrong Custer. Like Custer, Brownfield seems determined for reasons of career or some self-reinforcing sense of glory to go to battle against a vast and immensely more populist, more naturally-rooted and logical force than he can mobilize on the battlefield he has chosen. When it's reduced to its basics, he's opposing the much vaunted Free Market. And in the glory realm, American Exceptionalism is driving this War Without End no less than Custer's over-confidence and arrogance drove him into the Little Big Horn.
The idea that the US can militarily "solve" its drug problem at home with military force projected around the world is an idea that has been proven wrong by the facts of the drug market. Of course, if Custer had had better intelligence he might have been less foolish and survived; but I dare say, he would not have been less arrogant. If he had also had better public relations, maybe he could have finessed the battle of Little Big Horn into a big success. And if he'd understood the point wasn't the glory of the battle; that it was the ruthless fate and logic of a long, genocidal war that counted in the end -- then, maybe he wouldn't even have marched into the Little Big Horn.
Mr Brownfield seems to understand these lessons about tempering imperial arrogance, but he fails to appreciate that the forces of indigent rebellion against arrogant empire in this global era have also learned from the same history, which includes the Vietnam War and the rest. He might benefit from mulling over the humble side of things, lest he and his over-confident cronies lead us into an even greater disaster than the state of the Drug War now.
During the Argentine Dirty War of the early 1980s, I knew a woman medical student from Argentina studying here in Philadelphia. I'll never forget one night she told me with sadness and fear in her eyes that the problem in her country was that there was no one ruthless enough to stop them -- them being the cutthroats and murderers decimating the left with the tacit support of the US government.
We're in a new phase of that kind of problem; it's now the Globalized US War Without End. The plot since the 1980s has certainly generated plenty of ruthless forces this time around. The problem from the US front seems to be that the United States, with all its history of Imperial bullying around the world, can't give up the habit of being a bully. To paraphrase my Argentine friend, There's no one powerful enough to stop us.
Yet.
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