|
THE ABOLITION OF MILITARY BASES
Ending imperialist intervention
BY NIDIA DIAZ —
Granma International staff writer —
THE
fact that the United States has military bases all
over the world is not news; neither is its news that
it uses them to back its imperialist geopolitical
strategies. What is new is that what until now was
accepted as the unavoidable “right” of a large power
is beginning to be questioned by a growing movement
committed to peace and the survival of those of us
who inhabit the Earth.
Precisely from March 5 to 9 of this year, activists,
academics, Nobel laureates, and representatives of
social and political movements planned to meet in
Quito, Ecuador for the International Conference on
the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases — 95% of
which belong to the United States. There, they will
discuss and adopt common actions for turning back
the grand objective of the U.S. government:
constituting a global empire and destroying — as was
the case with Carthage, the Roman Empire — all
peoples and nations that oppose it.
It
was not accidental that President George W. Bush
said he would invade 60 or more “dark corners” of
the Earth when he officially inaugurated his crusade
of death under the pretext of a war on terrorism.
To
do so, of course, he was counting on his impressive
genocidal logistics: 737 military bases installed
on all five continents, with approximately two
million troops, according to revelations by Elsie
Monge, president of the Human Rights Commission in
Ecuador and by U.S. historian Chalmers Johnson, a
scholar on the issue.
The
figures, confirmed by the Pentagon, do not include —
according to the professor — the 106 military
garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor those in
Israel, Qatar, Kirghizstan or Uzbekistan, nor the 20
it shares with Turkey.
Diverse sources affirm that, given its control over
those installations, the United States has become
the largest landowner in the world, situated on
2,202,735 hectares of land.
That
entire apparatus is accompanied by the most
sophisticated means of war, and by agreements and
treaties with countries willing to obey its dictates
with docility and servility, allowing it to spread
its tentacles over more than 1,000 locations on the
planet.
These agreements, to cite just a few, include the
so-called “Forward Operating Locations” or
“Cooperative Security Locations,” and the security
and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP),
all with the common denominator of guaranteeing
impunity and intervention by U.S. troops, mostly in
the Third World, given that that is where the
world’s greatest reserves of hydrocarbons, fresh
water and other natural resources are located,
needed for its unbridled consumerist society.
In
Latin America, our region, considered to date by our
powerful northern neighbor to be its back yard, the
United States maintains more than a few military
bases whose strategic importance has grown in recent
years to the same extent that there are more
governments willing to put a stop to Yankee impunity
and intervention, and thus rescue their
already-besmirched sovereignty.
The
naval base that Washington maintains on the
illegally-usurped Cuban territory of Guantánamo, is
an example of the diabolical use that the empire is
capable of giving to these facilities. Since its
invasion of Afghanistan and its genocidal war on
Iraq, the Guantánamo base has become a detention and
torture center, with the apathetic complicity of
European governments who did not dare to support
Cuba’s proposal to condemn those actions in the UN
Human Rights Commission.
From
that moment and given the revelations of former
prisoners, the movement to close the Guantánamo
base, because of its justness, has confronted the
double standards that the White House tends to use
to address the human rights issue.
Popular mobilizations in Puerto Rico forced the U.S.
Republican administration to close down its military
base on Vieques, responsible for destroying the
environment and the health of that island’s
inhabitants.
With
that fighting spirit, the movement is going to
Ecuador, where a 10-year agreement signed in 1999 by
the Ecuadorian government gave the United States the
right to occupy and operate the Manta military base,
which it uses to back its Plan Colombia, and which
has become a launching pad for actions against our
nations.
In
Honduras, moreover, the Pentagon maintains the Soto
Cano/Palmerolas base; in El Salvador, the Compalapa;
in Peru, the Iquique; in Aruba, the Queen Beatrice;
and in Curacao, the Hato Rey. That does not include
the presence of Yankee military forces in Paraguay
under the pretext of combating drug trafficking and
terrorism in the so-called Triple Border area that
unites that nation with Brazil and Argentina, which
“coincidentally” possess the strongest economies to
date in Latin America.
In
the 1980s, moreover, the Pentagon built – in
Paraguay’s El Chaco – a base 200 km from Bolivia and
Argentina, and 320 km from Brazil which, in the new
Latin American scenario, constitutes a perfect flank
for aggression against those countries.
Ecuador, the country chosen for the International
Conference for the International Abolition of
Foreign Military Bases, is at the center of heavy
pressure brought to bear by the United States, given
that there, 260 km southeast of the capital of
Quito, the Manta air base has one of the largest
landing strips in the region, where U.S. planes fly
over the waters and coasts of the eastern Pacific
and the Caribbean to Florida, supposedly fighting
drug trafficking.
A
statement by Colonel Javier Delucca, the U.S.
administrator of the euphemistically dubbed Forward
Operating Location in Manta, reflected his concern
and that of his government’s regarding anti-U.S.
sentiment among Ecuadorians and opposition by
newly-elected President Rafael Correa to extending
the 1999 contract, which is due to expire in 2009.
And
Delucca is worried because, according to the United
States itself, Manta is an important location in the
Latin American and Caribbean context, “because we
are in a magnificent location for carrying out our
mission.”
No
comment is needed.
Those meeting in Quito to protest the military bases
imposed by the United States and other world powers
no doubt constitute the advance force of the
increasingly growing human conglomerate that, beyond
political and ideological differences and positions,
is convinced that as History has shown by the fall
of ancient empires, the new Caesars are willing to
do anything to protect their interests and their
delusions of grandeur.
|
