U.S. pushes repression in Latin America

While mass demonstrations and uprisings are challenging puppet regimes that carry out imperialism’s neoliberal, privatizing and anti-people policies, the leading imperialist power, the United States, is on a witch-hunting rampage. It is aided by ultra-right forces at home and abroad and by its surrogates in friendly states. They use the “terrorist” label to arrest, prosecute and even execute those they feel are a threat to imperialism — that is, to monopoly capitalism in its final stage.

Two recent examples in the Caribbean and Latin America illustrate this, one in Puerto Rico and another regarding Venezuela and Colombia.

Criminalization of P.R. independence movement

During a 20-minute hearing on May 10 in a Hartford, Conn., federal court, Norberto González Claudio pleaded not guilty to charges related to the theft of $7.2 million in 1983 from a Wells Fargo truck by the Boricua Popular Army-Macheteros, a socialist, pro-independence clandestine group.

Ten days earlier, agents of the FBI and the Puerto Rico Bureau of Special Investigations had arrested him in a town in the center of the island. After more than two decades in which he lived clandestinely for the “crime” of fighting for the liberation of his homeland, the question is why he was arrested now. Is there a concerted effort to retaliate against anti-capitalist and pro-socialist liberation movements?

His brother, Avelino González Claudio, has been in a U.S. prison for the same charges since 2008. On May 9 he was suddenly classified as a “domestic terrorist” and separated from the general prison population. While in isolation, he is more vulnerable to becoming a victim of torture. For more than a year he has been denied medicine for Parkinson’s disease, causing permanent neurological damage.

On May 10 another Puerto Rican political prisoner in U.S. dungeons, Oscar López Rivera, was denied parole on the grounds that his release would “promote disrespect for the law.” He has been behind bars for almost 30 years. (prolibertadweb.tripod.com)

Many pro-independence figures on the island are under constant police and FBI surveillance. They remember too well the vicious and cruel assassination of Macheteros leader Filiberto Ojeda Ríos in 2005, who, after being shot, bled to death while hundreds of FBI agents stood by, denying him emergency medical care.

This was meant as a warning to the progressive forces in the island-colony, where the political situation is at the boiling point. The pro-statehood, Tea Party-affiliated Gov. Luis Fortuño has sped up neoliberalism by imposing privatizing laws that benefit the criollo bourgeoisie and U.S. transnational corporations. An example is his effort to privatize the prestigious public University of Puerto Rico, which has awakened a glorious student movement.

Fortuño has increased the repressive force of the state as an appendage of the U.S. by nominating the second in command of the FBI office there to head the Puerto Rican police.

Venezuela & Colombia

In South America, U.S.-imposed efforts to criminalize struggle and silence the opposition have taken on another form.

On the same day that U.S. authorities were busy criminalizing Puerto Rican pro-independence fighters, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an imperialist think tank, launched its latest document for aggression, this time against Venezuela and Ecuador. The IISS, it should be remembered, masterminded the lie about “weapons of mass destruction” that served as the basis for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Nigel Inkster, IISS director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk, released a book called “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archive of ‘Raúl Reyes.’” Inkster had also been involved in the WMD deception.

The book accuses both the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean governments of close collaboration with the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which the U.S. government lists as a terrorist organization.

However, the book has already been discredited — by no less than the Colombian Supreme Court.

The IISS report is based primarily on Interpol’s supposed findings regarding the computer files of FARC leader Raúl Reyes. It claims that his computer and pen drives were miraculously saved intact after the Colombian military bombed a FARC encampment in Ecuador near the border with Colombia on March 1, 2008. The bombing killed Reyes and 22 other people, including Mexican students visiting the camp. The report is clearly meant to up the aggression against Venezuela and its efforts to develop sovereignty and regional unity with independence from imperialism.

It is ironic that the Venezuelan government a few weeks before the IISS report handed over revolutionary journalist Joaquin Becerra to the criminal Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos, supposedly because Becerra was on Interpol’s list of people linked to FARC.

Becerra, a survivor of the progressive electoral bloc Patriotic Union, which was massacred by death squads in the 1980s after winning many local offices throughout Colombia, had to take refuge in Sweden more than 10 years ago. He became a Swedish citizen and started an alternative online journal, ANNCOL, which reported about the reality in Colombia.

For that, ANNCOL has been a target of former President Alvaro Uribe and now of the Santos administration, which wants to whitewash Colombia’s image in order to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.

Che Guevara’s statement of “al imperialismo, ni un tantito así” (no concession to imperialism, even the smallest one) has proven correct once again. Imperialism forced the hand of the Venezuelan government, through U.S.-ally Santos, only to turn around and accuse it of aiding terrorists anyway.

Now Becerra is in danger, along with thousands of other political prisoners in Colombia, the country he was forced to leave after his first wife was killed there.

On May 19 the whole basis for accusing Becerra was demolished. The Colombian Supreme Court ruled that the so-called evidence from the Reyes computer was not valid and was in fact illegal, since, among other considerations, the alleged computer equipment was taken without the authorization or participation of the Ecuadorean government.

The court also pointed out that the files used to accuse the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean governments, Becerra, many other activists and even progressive Colombian Sen. Piedad Córdoba were in Word format, not emails, so it could not be proven that they were sent or received. (AFP, May 19)

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