STILL MORE MIGHT-MAKES-RIGHT MILITARISM IN THE AMERICAS

An ominous event took place in the Americas in the past week. On May 28 the foreign and security ministers of five Ibero-American nations—Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Ecuador—met in Santiago, Chile, convened by that country’s President Jose Antonio Kast, to announce the formation of a new regional agreement to collaborate in combating organized transnational crime.

They signed the Santiago Regional Commitment, whose content will be presented to the Organization of American States (OAS) in June, to its 56th General Assembly, so that the action plan the five agreed to, “can be extended to the whole continent,” media report.

Yes, crime should be combatted, but that is not the purpose nor issue here. What is unfolding is a pretext of institutional approval for interventions against sovereign nations, in the name of fighting crime and terrorism, in the unlawful way that the United States invaded and kidnapped the leader of Venezuela, has sanctioned and threatened Cuba with invasion, and so on.

President Trump repeatedly mentions his disposition to send U.S. forces into Mexico to fight transnational crime, by combatting drug cartels.

All five of the new “Santiago” nations are members of President Trump’s warmongering Shield of the Americas operation established in March this year, whose 13 members signed a joint statement May 15 threatening to intervene militarily in Bolivia’s political crisis. The pretext is their false claim that former President Evo Morales is in league with drug traffickers.

There are many more heinous details to this deadly trend in the Americas. The interconnections with the deployments of the U.S. Southern Command stand out in the array of options to undercut nations, in the name of fighting “transnational crime.”

However, the nature of this Western Hemisphere militarization can be seen as an extension of what is happening in the might-makes-right warfare underway by the United States and Israel against Iran, and in the Europe-based Coalition of the Willing insistence on perpetuating killing in Ukraine, and making war-by-NATO-proxy against Russia.

In the latest reports this weekend from the Persian Gulf, U.S. forces struck a commercial vessel on Saturday, reportedly as it was seeking to reach an Iranian port. According to military.com, a U.S. missile struck the engine room of Gambia-flagged Lian Star, which is now adrift in the Gulf of Oman. Striking this way, at the very same time as Washington claims to be awaiting word hour-by-hour on whether an interim deal can be reached with Tehran shows the insanity, as well as the lethality, of the might-makes-right crowd.

Understanding and conferring on how to defeat this depravity was part of the essential discussion among international activists on last week’s meeting of the International Peace Coalition Friday May 30. For the two weeks before, the special open letter was circulated internationally, “To the Governments of the United Nations: A Policy to Bring Peace and Development to Southwest Asia,” under the name of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, leader of the Schiller Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of EIR.

The IPC efforts are part of the extraordinarily wide international debate that took place last week on what the principles and rules must be for a new world governance framework. The leading discussion venue was the UN Security Council open debate, “Upholding the Purposes and Principles of the UN Charter and Strengthening the UN-Centered International System,” in which well over 100 nations and organizations participated, chaired by China, the rotating UNSC chair for May. The Group of Friends of Global Governance, whose 60 nations conferred May 29 in New York at the UN, intend to meet again in the Autumn in Xiong’an New Area, the “city of the future” in China.

Join and expand this mobilization, through the International Peace Coalition, whose next meeting is June 5.