Paraguay

• Drug Trafficking
• Human Trafficking
• Clean Water
• Estigarribia Secret Military Base re-opened under Rumsfeld in Mariscal Estigarribia, a town in the Boquerón Department, Paraguay. It is located at around 22°1′60″S, 60°37′60″W, close to the borders of Bolivia and Brazil. Built in 1982.
• The Bush-era Neocons– Iran Contra Guns & Cocaine scandal-Oliver North, President of the NRA
• Largest Aquifer at Chaco, where Bush 43 bought property close to
• Reverend Moon‘s, Drug & human trafficking, bailed out Jerry Falwell, G. H. W. Bush 43 legitimized him, Taliban-level anti-communist & Republican
• Religious Right
• Money Laundering, smuggling, arms, drug and human trafficking, and fundraising for extremist organizations: 20,000 regional Lebanese
• Hezbollah
• Russian Mob
• Bolivia

8 reasons we should all pay more attention to this crazy place Public Radio International August 07, 2014 By Will Carless ” Eastern Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este, meaning “City of the East,” is the de-facto capital of the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet. But South Americans know it more as a sort of Wild West — a place where the rule of law matters little and where drugs, arms and counterfeit goods arrive by the ton. Home to about 300,000 people, it’s also served as a refuge for anyone from drug traffickers to bootleggers and, as GlobalPost recently discovered, an alleged predator priest.

This place needs to be on everyone’s radar. Here are eight reasons why.

1. It’s home to a massive piracy industry … Pirated goods are everywhere in Ciudad del Este. From the ubiquitous DVD stands to cheap knock-offs of European soccer shirts, phonies with names like “Bolex” stare out from all corners.

2. … which the Paraguayan government does little to nothing about … Paraguayan police displayed this weapons haul in Ciudad del Este in 2008 after a shootout with gang members believed to be involved in kidnapping a Japanese Unification Church [Rev. Moon] pastor.

3. … and which helps to fund organized crime The links between piracy and organized crime in Ciudad del Este have been known for decades. A 2003 report by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress said the Tri-Border Area, or TBA, was an ideal location for organized crime.

4. It’s also a haven for drug runners …Paraguay is a major source of illegal narcotics for much of southern South America. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2010 World Drug Report, Paraguay is the world’s second-largest marijuana producer after Mexico, and Ciudad del Este is a transportation hub for drugs entering and leaving South America.

5. … and human traffickers … The US State Department’s 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report names Paraguay as “a source country for women and children subjected to sex trafficking, and for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor.” Ciudad del Este is a likely trafficking point, according to the US Embassy.

6. … and even priests accused of molestation As we’ve been reporting, Ciudad del Este even has problems within its churches. In spite of numerous warnings, the city’s diocese offered a top post to Carlos Urrutigoity, a priest accused of molesting young seminarians in the United States. Last month, the Vatican ordered him removed. But that’s not all. This sin city was also the last hideout for Aldo Omar Vara, an infamous former priest from Argentina who is accused of torturing prisoners during that country’s dictatorship.

7. It might be home to fundraisers for radical Islamic militants …Numerous reports over the years have said Ciudad del Este is a bastion for extremist Islamic groups such as Hezbollah. A 2009 book published by the RAND Corporation, “Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism,” states that in 2004 a Ciudad del Este-based criminal, Assad Ahmad Barakat, was named by intelligence agencies as the key financier for Hezbollah in Latin America.

8. … though it also might not Several media sources have built on the RAND book and other reports to paint Ciudad del Este as a terrorist hotbed. But a May 2013 report by Al Jazeera heaped scorn on these accounts. The Al Jazeera story accused other journalists of hysteria and of manufacturing links between Ciudad del Este and terrorism for the sake of headlines.”

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“It is not just the Americans and Paraguayans keeping an eye on Ciudad del Este. In 2016, an official of the Israeli Foreign Ministry told the Jerusalem Post that they had been involved in “intelligence cooperation” in the Tri-Border Area for years.

Even Saudi Arabia, which has just completed building Ciudad del Este’s biggest mosque, is in on the game.

“When I returned from the Hajj I was looking for a job,” said a Sunni Lebanese friend in Sao Paolo, who preferred to stay anonymous. “I still lived in Foz back then. An employee of the Islamic centre put me in touch with the Saudi embassy. They flew me to Brasilia and offered me $200 a month to keep an eye on the Shia community.”

We need to make sure every form and piece of paper is filled in 100 percent correct, because the tiniest mistake can get us in a lot of trouble

– Yahya Awali, business owner

The continuous allegations, the presence of informers, policemen and possibly foreign agents in Ciudad del Este has created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, in which everyone seem to be looking at everyone and in which mistakes can prove costly.

 

But the Paraguayan government may now have another reason to inflate the threat posed by Hezbollah.

In 2007, a US embassy cable reported that 80 percent of money laundering in Paraguay was thought to be moved through Banco Amambay, owned by a multimillionaire who also owns stretches of land along the Parana river.

The man’s name is Horacio Cartes, the current president of Paraguay and one of the US’s and Israel’s closest allies in South America today.

On Monday, Cartes stood alongside Benjamin Netanyahu at a ceremony in the new Paraguayan embassy in Jerusalem. “We remember our friends. We have no better friends than you,” Netanyahu said at the ceremony. “Thank you, Horacio. Thank you, Paraguay.””

 

 

Moonies accused of involvement in drugs Irish Times  October 14, 2004 “There are two principal branches to Moon’s interest in Paraguay,” he said, “control of the largest fresh drinking water source in the world and control of the narcotics business”.  Indeed the famous Iran contra affair was operated from Ciudad del Este. “The Moon sect is a mafia. They seek to subvert government control and are effectively building a state within a state. An aid to the Chilean Interior Minister described Rev Moon’s ideology, somewhere to the right of the Taliban‘s Mullah Omar, as “profoundly anti-communist, xenophobic and with a marked Nazi inspiration”. Venezuela and Honduras have expelled the cult. In 1999, the Brazilian federal police launched an investigation into the involvement of Rev Moon’s associates in money-laundering and tax evasion, amidst accusations of drug-running. Rev Moon bought the Banco de Credito in 1996, in nearby Uruguay, the banking hub of Latin America. On the day of opening under its new ownership, the Uruguayan bank employees’ union blew the whistle on a suspected money-laundering scheme. Rev Moon’s first involvement in the continent came during the late 1970s when his organisation donated the first $100,000 to Oliver North’s (President of the NRA) Nicaraguan Freedom Fund. The religious leader was implicated in many of the so-called Contra scandals during the Reagan-Bush administration.”  Council for National Policy      Religious Right

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Following is a host of information about the region from articles written during the mid-2000s, on the WayBack Machine.

While Baghdad Burns, Bush Buys October 23, 2006 WMR’s Paraguayan sources have confirmed that George W. Bush recently bought 42,000 hectares (over 100,000 acres) of land in Paraguay’s northern “Chaco” region.

The land, near the town of Chaco,  sits atop huge natural gas reserves, according to sources in Asuncion. Moreover, the land deal was consummated in a dinner meeting between Bush’s daughter Jenna and Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte. Although Jenna, who was in Paraguay under the cover of a 10-day UNICEF trip to visit child welfare projects, put the Bush family seal of approval on the land deal, the actual legal papers were worked out by Bush family lawyers and business representatives. Jenna Bush is supposedly working for UNICEF in Panama City. The Bush land is close to a new U.S. military installation, the Mariscal Estigarribia Air Base. It is also nearby a huge tract of land purchased by Sun Myung Moon that sits astride Latin America’s largest water aquifer, the Guarani aquifer.

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According to earlier Madsen reports, Bush and the Carlyle Group are also the owners of major tracts of land along the proposed U.S. super-highway linking Mexico and Canada (below image) land that will be worth hundreds of millions more when the highway is completed.

Neo-Con Escape Plan to Paraguay? Fascists seem to have a penchant for escaping to this place. Apparently Bush and cronies are allegedly buying land down there ..

“An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region…Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.” Related Article: Bush Buys Land in Northern Paraguay.

CIA Fact book Data – Paraguay

The unruly region at convergence of Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay borders is,

• locus of money laundering, smuggling, arms and illegal narcotics trafficking, and fundraising for extremist organizations major illicit producer of cannabis, most or all of which is consumed in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile

• transshipment country for Andean cocaine headed for Brazil, other Southern Cone markets, and Europe

• corruption and some money-laundering activity, especially in the Tri-Border Area; weak anti-money-laundering laws and enforcement

 Here’s a little background on the base itself, which Rumsfeld secretly visited in late 2005:

Secret Invasion – U.S. Troops Steal into Paraguay by W.T. Whitney Jr 12/29/05 from ICH.

The Bush administration has sent troops into Paraguay. They are there ostensibly for humanitarian and counterterrorism purposes. The action coincides with growing left unity in South America, military buildup in the region and burgeoning independent trade relationships.

In a speech on July 26 in Havana, Fidel Castro took note of the incursion and called upon North American activists to oppose it. In that vein, an inquiry is in order as to why the U.S. government has inserted Paraguay into its strategic plan for South America. In addition, we should look at factors that favor Bush administration schemes for the region and others that work against U.S. plans.

In December 2004, the Bush administration canceled $330 million in economic and military aid to 10 South American countries. They were being penalized for turning down a U.S. request for granting its soldiers immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit within the countries’ borders.

On May 5, however, the government of Paraguay took the bait. It signed an agreement authorizing an 18-month stay, automatically extended, for U.S. soldiers and civilian employees. The previous limit had been set at six months.

On May 26, in a secret session, Paraguay’s Congress passed legislation protecting U.S. soldiers from prosecution for criminal activity, both within Paraguay and by the International Criminal Court.  Reportedly, 400 or 500 U.S. troops – estimates vary – arrived in Paraguay on July 1, with planes, weapons, equipment and ammunition.

They are billeted at a base near Mariscal Estigarribia, a small city located 200 kilometers from the Bolivian border in the arid, sparsely populated Chaco area of Paraguay. That facility, built by U.S. contractors in the waning years of the Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), offers a runway long enough to accommodate large military transport planes and bombers. It provides barrack space for 16,000 troops.

Journalist and human rights activist Alfredo Boccia Paz, stated in Asuncion that immunity from prosecution for U.S. soldiers, extension of their stay, and joint military exercises all provide the groundwork for the eventual installation of a U.S. base in Paraguay. He quoted Argentine Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel: “Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave. And that really frightens me.” The U.S. embassy in Paraguay declared that the United States has, “absolutely no intention of establishing a military base anywhere in Paraguay” and “has no intention to station soldiers for a lengthy period in Paraguay.” The government of Paraguay seconded that notion.

Brazil, however, responded. In late July, its army undertook military maneuvers along that country’s border with Paraguay. Paratroopers staged a mock occupation of the Furnas electrical substation, located on the Brazilian border with Paraguay.

Paraguay’s vice president, Luis Castiglioni, met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Roger Noriega last July in Washington. Observers suggested that this welcoming committee was unusually high-powered for a visiting vice president of a small South American nation. According to Rumsfeld, experts would soon be going to Paraguay to develop a,  “planning seminar on systems for national security.” The secretary visited Paraguay in August. The FBI announced that it would be opening an office in Paraguay in 2006.

The official U.S. version of the Paraguay initiative is that for the next 18 months, in addition to joint military exercises, 13 U.S. military teams would be working on humanitarian aide projects, provide counterterrorism and police training and ameliorate the effects of poverty. It turns out that U.S. military personnel have been providing medical care for poor peasants in a northern province since 2002.  Boccia Paz commented: “These missions are always disguised as humanitarian aid… What Paraguay does not and cannot control is the total number of agents that enter the country.”

There is of course no shortage of U.S. bases in Latin America. They are located in,

• Guantánamo, Cuba

• Fort Buchanan and Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico

• Soto Cano, Honduras

• Comalapa, El Salvador

New U.S. air bases are situated in,

• Reina Beatriz, Aruba

• Hato Rey, Curacao

• Manta in Ecuador

The latter was officially described as a weather station on a dusty road, until it came out that a full-fledged air base had materialized on the site at a cost of $80 million. Washington also operates a network of 17 land-based radar stations (three in Peru, four in Colombia, plus 10 mobile radar stations in secret locations.) All of these installations come are under the control of the U.S. Southern Command, based in Miami. The U.S. rationale for converting Paraguay into a military satellite is worth exploring.

For one thing, Washington is responding in catch-up fashion to mounting popular resistance in the region to U.S. bullying. In neighboring Bolivia, for example, two U.S.-friendly presidents have been chased from office in the past two years. And mass opposition to the U.S.-backed candidate in last December’s national election was no exception to the trend. There’s more. Paraguay’s neighbor, Uruguay, put a social democrat into the presidency in 2004, and last February President Kirchner of Argentina violated world financial orthodoxy when his government negotiated a 60 percent cut in Argentina’s $82 billion debt obligations. Both Argentina and Brazil have quietly rejected the FTAA.

Paraguay has joined them in the South American Common Market (Mercosur), which shelters its members from U.S. and International Monetary Fund dictates. For Paraguay to defect would serve U.S. ends. Washington took major exception to declarations emanating from a gathering March 29, 2005 of Brazilian, Colombian, Venezuelan and Spanish heads of state at Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela. They had discussed the use of raw materials and regional trade patterns to combat poverty and secure peace in South America.

A few weeks later Washington was miffed when its candidate for the secretary generalship of the Organization of American States was rejected. And right under the U.S. nose, Latin American nations are coming together to form Telesur and Petrosur, continent-wide television and energy corporations, and developing banking services that serve people’s needs.

Natural resources may also figure into the U.S. motivations for expanding its military presence in South America.

One branch of the main opening for a huge Bolivian natural gas field apparently crosses the international border and is accessible in Paraguay at the Independencia I site, not far from Mariscal Estigarribia. If U.S. troops occupied the base there, they would be in striking distance of the Bolivian provinces of Santa Cruz and Tarija, where U.S. natural gas corporations are active. Bolivia will soon be voting on autonomy for the provinces. A “yes” vote is expected to result in privatization.

In the event of civil unrest following that outcome, the corporations could call for military protection. The military base overlies the Guarani aquifer, one of the world’s largest underground fresh water reserves. Already water wars have riled Bolivian politics. Oligarchic interests in both the United States and South America have great longings to advance the process of turning water into a commodity.

The Bush administration has an additional interest in Paraguay through its war on terrorism. The so-called triple border, where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet along both sides of the Parana River, is the storied locus for smuggling, money laundering, commerce in child prostitutes, counterfeit operations, and fixing of illegal border crossings.

Some 20,000 Middle Eastern, Muslim expatriates, most of them Lebanese in origin, live in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguayan side of the river and Foz do Iguacu in Brazil.

The cities supposedly are centers for Islamic extremism and sources of funding for terrorist groups. Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah operatives reportedly have passed through the area, and training camps, sleeper cells, and passport factories are said to be located there. After September 11, 40 FBI agents joined Paraguayan colleagues to investigate some of these networks. Dozens of suspects were arrested. U.S. military authorities advertise their operatives moving into Paraguay as experts in counterterrorism.

U.S. meddling in South America has great potential to add to existing tensions in the region as it adds its might to ongoing South American military expansion. According to Uruguayan Raúl Zibechi, an expert on the continent’s military landscape, South America is experiencing unprecedented military growth. Nations there have reacted to the excesses of U.S. Plan Colombia and to new military modalities, particularly the privatization of military forces on display in Columbia.

They are also attempting to emulate Brazil’s new posture of strategic military autonomy. And, as is their habit, ruling circles in many countries, following Washington’s lead, respond to social unrest through military expansion.

In December 2004, Venezuela agreed to buy 110,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 33 helicopters and 50 fighter-bombers from Russia. Spain supplied Venezuela with naval aeronautical material, 10 transport planes, and four coast-guard cutters. Venezuela will be buying 50 training and combat jets from Brazil. Venezuela earlier this year activated a two million-member reserve component of its national military force. Yet according to the journal Military Power Review Venezuela comes in at sixth place among South American nations in terms of military strength. Brazil is far in the lead; Peru places second; Argentina, third; followed by Chile and Colombia.

Increased military power, operating in tandem with nationalist stirrings, may inhibit U.S. military meddling. Brazil, for example, with its own strategic defense plan and brisk economic growth, is an unlikely U.S. acolyte. The nation is the 10th largest industrial power in the world and has become the world’s fifth largest arms exporter. Brazilian industry builds warships, several types of fighter jets, and is constructing a nuclear submarine. And to facilitate its expanded trade with China, Brazil is paying 70 percent of the $1 billion cost of a 1,500 mile long highway that extends from Peruvian ports to Santos on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Brazil recently sent military planners to Vietnam to learn about guerrilla war.

The head of Brazil’s Amazon military command, General Claudio Barbosa, has predicted that Brazil may in the future face wars similar to the war that convulsed Vietnam and the one transpiring in Iraq now. The priority would be guerrilla warfare, “an option the army will not hesitate to adopt facing a confrontation with another country or group of countries with greater economic and military power.” What nation could the general be thinking of?

Brazil opposes Plan Colombia. The nationalist orientation of its industrial leaders persuaded them to put off joining FTAA. Brazil has no U.S. bases on its soil, nor does Brazil engage in joint military exercises with the United States. Military cooperation between Brazil and Argentina apparently is flourishing, and in February, Brazil signed strategic accords with Venezuela. The Brazilian example of independent pursuit of national interests has emboldened other South American nations.

The single-minded pursuit of national interests, however, may work against popular struggle and Latin American unity. Analysts agree that Brazil and Argentina’s preoccupation with internal interests has created a power vacuum that encouraged Washington to court Paraguay successfully. Relations between the two nations have long been plagued by trade clashes.
Ideally, Brazil might have utilized its economic power to further Latin American unity and ward off predatory U.S. behavior. Instead it operates according to free market rules and, unlike Venezuela, looks for salvation through from the U.S.-led world market economy, distancing itself from Latin America’s agenda.

Worse, jostling for market advantage creates divisions that lay the region open to tactics of divide and rule. The Herculean labors of unified democratic struggle elsewhere in Latin America point to strategies through which Bush scheming and U.S. military probing in the region might be resisted. The example of the FARC-EP, in its survival and apparent growth, has meaning for revolutionaries far beyond Colombia’s borders. The organization now maintains a presence in nearly 100 percent of the municipalities in Colombia, and, according to Monthly Review,

“with the exception of Cuba, [the FARC-EP] has become the largest and most powerful revolutionary force – politically and militarily – within the Western Hemisphere.”

Chávez forces in Venezuela, under the aegis of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), have fused the twin causes of Latin American unity and social justice.

Mass protests in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, even Chile keep empire minders in Washington on edge. The point here is that growing solidarity on the part of U.S. activists with struggles throughout Latin America may act as a brake on U.S. meddling in Paraguay.

Opposition likely will materialize within Paraguay itself. In recent years peasants there have mounted protests against privatization, economic restrictions imposed by the International Monetary Fund, unfair land holding patterns, and antiterrorism legislation.

There is no lack of awareness. Orlando Castillo of the human rights group Servicio Páz y Justicia recalls that, “U.S. soldiers taught torture and other forms of human rights violations in courses at the School of the Americas.” He warns that “the United States has strong aspirations to convert Paraguay into a second Panama for its troops and is not far removed from reaching its objective of controlling the Southern Cone.” While attending the 2nd Jubilee South World Assembly in Havana, Sixto Pereira of the Paraguayan Initiative for People’s Integration told Cuban-based Prensa Latina: We demand the abolition of regulations that harbor and give impunity to Pentagon troops. It is a demand in favor of Paraguay and Latin American integration.

Pereira indicated that mobilization against the presence of U.S. troops is gaining momentum in Paraguay.

Mariscal Estigarribia is a town in the Boquerón Department, Paraguay. It is located at around 22°1′60″S, 60°37′60″W, close to the borders of Bolivia and Brazil.

A military training agreement with Asunción, giving immunity to U.S. soldiers, caused some concern after media reports initially reported that a base housing 20,000 U.S. soldiers was being built at Mariscal Estigarribia within 200 km of Argentina and Bolivia, and 300 km of Brazil, near an airport which could receive large planes (B-52, C-130 Hercules, etc.) which the Paraguay Air Forces do not have. The governments of Paraguay and the United States subsequently declared that the use of an airport (Dr Luís María Argaña International) [1] was one point of transfer for few soldiers in Paraguay at the same time.

According to the Clarín Argentinean newspaper, the U.S. military base is strategic because of its location near the Triple Frontera between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina; its proximity towards the Guarani aquifer; and, finally, its closeness toward Bolivia (less than 200 km) at the same,

“moment that Washington’s magnifying glass goes on the Altiplano and points toward Venezuelan Hugo Chávez – the regional demon according to Bush’s administration – as the instigator of the instability in the region”.

El Clarín In October 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush was reported to be negotiating for purchase of a 400 km² ranch in this region.

Why has Bush bought 150 square miles in northern Paraguay? (Hellie)

Paraguay is a landlocked country in South America, with a population of 6 million. It’s one of the least densely populated countries, and has a super-high Gini index. Back in the day, its economy was dominated by a small number of landlords, with big loads of the population squatting on the fringes of their huge estates. The Gini index (the standard measure of income inequality) is predictably high  –  56, by comparison the U.S. is at 45, France at 32, Brazil at 59. Sounds like a great place for disgraced dictators to hide out.

Analysts in Latin America believe that the U.S. government is using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to secure natural resources in the region.

“The objectives of the U.S.A. in South America have always been to secure strategic material like oil in Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, tin mines in Bolivia, copper mines in Chile, and always to maintain lines of access open,” Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, a Brazilian political scientist at the Universidade de Brasilia, wrote in the Folha de São Paulo. (8)

Orlando Castillo, a Paraguayan human rights leader, said the goal of U.S. military operations in his country is to, “debilitate the southern bloc… and destabilize the region’s governments, especially Evo Morales…” (9) While grappling with these challenges, the Morales administration will have to answer to the millions of Bolivians who, in the December election, gave him the biggest mandate in the country’s history. For centuries Bolivians have, in the words of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, “suffered… the curse of their own wealth.” The country’s tin, copper and silver were exploited by foreign companies that made enormous profits while Bolivia struggled on. For many Bolivians, the election of Morales offers the hope that history will stop repeating itself. As Galeano writes, “Recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is the recovery of our destiny.”

Sources

1. Raul Zibechi, “Two Opposing Views of Social Change in Bolivia”, IRC Americas, 12-14-05 http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2987
2. Zibechi
3. Jorge Martin, “Bolivia after the election victory of the MAS – Morales cannot serve two masters”, In Defense of Marxism, 10-1-05 http://www.marxist.com/bolivia-election-victory-mas100106.htm
4. Reed Lindsay, “Exporting Gas and Importing Demoracy in Bolivia”, North American Congress on Latin America, 11-05 http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=2603#
5. Benjamin Dangl, “U.S. Military in Paraguay Prepares To “Spread Democracy””, Upside Down World, 9-15-05 http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/47/44/
6. Sam Logan and Matthew Flynn, “U.S. Military Moves in Paraguay Rattle Regional Relations”, IRC Americas, 12-14-05, http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2991
7. Dangl
8. Logan
9. Benjamin Dangl, “An Interview with Paraguayan Human Rights Activist Orlando Castillo”, Upside Down World, 10-16-05 http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/48/44/

THE ROVING EYE The Asia Times by Pepe Escobar August 3, 2006 from AsiaTimesArticle Website

Part 1

Hezbollah south of the border

CIUDAD DEL ESTE

at the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay This is the way savage globalization ends – at least 20,000 shops, stalls, tin shacks and mini-malls crammed into 15 blocks selling everything under the (tropical) sun.

There’s Little Asia – thousands of Taiwanese, mainland Chinese and Koreans. But above all there are some 20,000 Arabs of Syrian and mostly Lebanese descent (another 12,000 live in the Brazilian resort of Foz do Iguacu, across the Friendship Bridge).

Welcome to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, population 200,000, free-trade cesspit and World Trade Organization wet dream, realm of sacoleiros (bag carriers) crossing the bridge every day and dreaming of the ultimate knockoff, but mostly realm of money changers, prehistoric armored cars, gun-and-coke dealers, dodgy pharmacists and stolen Mercedes with tinted windows.

The border is virtually non-existent, as Paraguay is a Mercosur member (along with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela). Airspace is free – virtually no radar. Cocaine comes by plane or truck from the Bolivian Andes. Brazilian weapons are everywhere – not to mention real and fake Kalashnikovs. Tons of laundered money whirl in free flow.

The whole thing is a dizzying black void of billions of dollars in contraband, narco-trafficking, weapons smuggling, money laundering, car theft, piracy and corruption of public officials.

And it gets worse: it’s crammed with terrorists.
Stand and deliver

The head of the U.S. Southcom (Southern Command), the vociferous General Brantz Craddock, is absolutely convinced the Triple Border is the abode of, “the transnational terrorist, the narco-terrorist, the Islamic radical fundraiser and recruiter, the illicit trafficker, the money launderer, the kidnapper and the gang member”. The emphasis is on “terrorist” and “Islamic”.

Southcom – U.S.$800 million annual budget, more than the State, Treasury, Commerce and Agriculture departments combined – is the eyes and ears of the Pentagon over Latin America.

In essence, this is how it works. Armchair gurus in Washington and New York theorize on the so-called five wars of globalization – terrorism, trafficking, money laundering, piracy and migration – and the Pentagon sends the Special Forces posing as cleaners to make it all proper for the “free” world. The underlying assumption is that Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda – “in sum, terror” – are profiting like mad from the so-called five wars.

The “new threats of the 21st century recognize no borders”, according to the Pentagon. Ergo, everyone may be a terrorist, at least a potential one. Not accidentally, General Craddock hates “anti-globalization and anti-free-trade demagogues”.

Sunni or Shi’ite, Marxist or anarchist, ruralist or existentialist, the Russian mafia, the Hong Kong triads, the Nigerian mafia, the Ukrainian mafia – they are all in cahoots. And for the Pentagon, Hezbollah is selling pirate video discs of Christina Aguilera to finance more Katyusha rockets.

At the real Triple Border, though, everyone may be a spy, or a would-be spy, because everyone is there:

• the Russian mafia

• the Mossad

• the Nigerian mafia

• the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

• the Hong Kong triads

A rule of gold in the underworld is that Brazil is neutral territory and not subject to turf wars: everyone is entitled to join the fun (technically Ciudad del Este is in Paraguay, but it does business as a Brazilian annex via the Friendship Bridge).

There’s no chance of catching one of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s lieutenants slipping $100 bills into the G-string of dancer Harlem Roux at the Casino Parana. He – and his al-Qaeda affiliation – would be spotted in minutes.

General Craddock grudgingly had to admit that the Pentagon has “not detected Islamic terrorist cells” at the Triple Border, nor anywhere else in South America, for that matter. But he’ll keep trying. If he dropped by Ciudad del Este’s mean streets, Craddock would hear a lot of Mandarin – but not Arabic.

He would see every cheap plasma set in every audio-video shop tuned to Lebanese TV – or Al-Jazeera, hardly a terror ID. In his search for preemptive strikes, he could try the Condominio Mesquita – which, as the name attests, is a condo in the shape of a gold-painted mosque (they would love it in Peshawar).

But he would see no Hezbollahs in fake Nikes chewing an empanada and sipping mate with Jet Li lookalikes.

Hezbollah’s electronic casino

Anyway, the latest annual State Department terrorism report explicitly regards the Triple Border as a main source of financing for both Hamas and Hezbollah, even though it admits “there’s no confirmed information” either Hamas or Hezbollah has “an operational presence” on the ground. The U.S. government keeps accusing the Brazilian government of regarding Hezbollah as a legitimate political party. The Treasury Department also said it has detected money transfers from Foz do Iguacu – home of the famous Iguacu (Iguazu in Spanish) Falls, on the Brazilian side – to “terrorist groups” including Hezbollah. 

In a report on drugs released in March, the U.S. once again was explicit:

Brazil must fight “terrorism financing” in the Triple Border area. It doesn’t matter that the State Department has found no evidence of “terrorist financing” from Paraguay and was forced to admit that between 1961 and 2003, only 1.2% of worldwide terror took place in,

• Argentina

• Brazil

• Paraguay

• Uruguay

• Chile combined

An International Monetary Fund report on money laundering also revealed the obvious: the Triple Border is awash in cash smuggling, but no sight of “terrorist financing”. In 2001 CNN dubbed the Triple Border “a terrorist paradise” – based on dodgy documents obtained by U.S. embassies in both Paraguay and Argentina. An article in The New Yorker in late 2002 defined the Triple Border as “the center of Middle Eastern terrorism in South America” and “a community under the influence of extreme Islamic beliefs” – with Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda all training on the spot.  Between late 2001 and early 2002, this whole thing was fine-combed by U.S. and Brazilian investigators.

There was no chance Sheikh Nasrallah would be uncovered operating an electronic casino in Ciudad del Este under an alias. Commercial and banking ties between the Arabs in the Triple Border and their relatives in the Middle East were perfectly legal – just like the ones between resident Arabs in the U.S. and their relatives.

But the heat was on – relentless, humiliating, brutal.

Thus U.S. Immigration and Customs agents, financed to the tune of $2.25 million, will soon be parachuting into the Triple Border to help the locals fight money laundering, contraband and terrorism financing. The Americans will establish “units of commercial transparency”.

Up to now the only country in the world boasting a “unit of commercial transparency” was Colombia. The Brazilian Federal Police and the Ministry of Foreign Relations prefer not to comment. American diplomats insist a permanent group representing the U.S., Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay has agreed on the matter.

Common wisdom rules that at least $20 million annually is sent from the Triple Border to finance Hezbollah, linking South American banks to banks in Texas and New York in the U.S., plus banks in Panama, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Egypt and Lebanon.

That would be 20% of total worldwide financing for Hezbollah’s military wing.

There’s no independent confirmation.

“This figure was arrived at by the Mossad. They always have plenty of people snooping around here,” said a Lebanese-Brazilian businessman who owns a bustling audio-video shop. Hezbollah receives donations from sympathizers worldwide. There’s no evidence it is being financed by pirate video discs or cocaine dollars from the Triple Border. But the pressure is non-stop. Thus the U.S. Congress has approved a motion enabling President George W Bush to ask for a task force to act against “terrorism in the Western Hemisphere”, especially on the Triple Border. Bush is also supposed to demand from Brazil and other Latin American countries the branding of both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.

The Brazilian Embassy in Washington was furious – reminding the Americans that even the White House admits there’s no terror operating on the Triple Border. Carlos Alvarez, head of the Commission of Permanent Representatives of Mercosur, worries that the Americans,”want to convert the Triple Border into part of the war on terror“. Diplomats from Mercosur countries say they have enough of an institutional base to fight crime – as that is the real issue.

Brazil has set up a new police unit and has reinforced air and fluvial patrols at the Triple Border – fighting above all the trafficking of drugs and weapons. Starting in two weeks – to the dismay of the business community in Ciudad del Este – they will even start inspecting all the sacoleiros crossing the Friendship Bridge.

Arab businessmen in both Foz do Iguacu and Ciudad del Este dismiss U.S. paranoia as, well, paranoia. They have more tangible things to worry about – like two Lebanese businessmen robbed of $250,000 cash in downtown Ciudad del Este just as they had left a bank. The robbers – carrying machine-guns – were disguised as Paraguayan investigative police.

The Sunday headline in the Paraguayan daily Ultima Hora also told another popular story: “It’s easier to leave Lebanon than to arrive in Paraguay”. It referred to a Lebanese-Paraguayan family who managed to leave Lebanon in a Brazilian rescue plane, arrived in Sao Paulo but then could find no flights home. No one wants to fly to Paraguay: airspace is totally unprotected, with no security systems and no radar. The locals claim they don’t need Americans to arrest one of the top Brazilian narco-traffickers, Marcelinho Niteroi, as they did last week. Niteroi carried fake Paraguayan identification, which he obtained posing as a “farmer”.On the other hand, businessmen on both sides of the border focus on made-in-USA missiles used by Israel that killed Lebanese-Brazilian kids, who were born in Brazil. “Maybe these kids were dangerous terrorists,” said a real-estate developer. Where is Osama’s hotel?

Irrespective of the facts on the ground, as far as the Pentagon is concerned the Triple Border remains a nest of subversive activity to be preempted as fast as Syria and Iran. Take what happened last year when the Foz do Iguacu municipality ran a full-page ad in leading newspapers with a photo of Osama bin Laden.

The caption read:”When he’s not busy blowing up the world, bin Laden spends his time relaxing at Iguacu.” Craddock might have taken it literally – and blown the place apart. Craddock would have had a heart attack with the recent subversion calendar. Last month the Mercosur chiefs of state got together in Cordoba, Argentina – officially welcoming Venezuela as a new member.

Fidel Castro stole the show. Venezuela’s news network Telesur – very popular via satellite in Ciudad del Este – provided extensive coverage of “anti-imperialist” speeches by both Castro and Hugo Chavez.  Meanwhile civil society – in the form of social, political, cultural, environmental, student, religious and human-rights organizations – was engaged in the second Triple Border Social Forum in Ciudad del Este, discussing the region’s security, a controversial military agreement between the U.S. and Paraguay, and the preservation of the Guarani Aquifer.

The slogan went straight to the point: “Out Yankee troops and the World Bank”. The “Yankee troops” are holding “training exercises” in Paraguay (more on that in below Part 2 of this report).And the World Bank is developing a program toward mapping the Guarani Aquifer – which is the first step toward commercial exploration of its precious waters. The Guarani Aquifer is arguably the biggest reservoir of fresh, potable water in the world – right under Triple Border soil. The majority (71%) of its 1.2 million square kilometers lies in Brazil.

According to the United Nations, by 2025 worldwide demand for potable water will be 56% higher than what will be on offer. When you combine a huge Arab community and lots of non-commercialized water in a Pentagon-defined “lawless area”, no wonder bells start ringing.

Watching the non-stop coverage on the Arabic channels of Lebanese civilians dying under Israeli bombs, a Lebanese-Brazilian businessman offered the preferred local version of the “war on terror”: “In Iraq they said there were WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. They wanted the oil. Here they say that we are terrorists. But what they want is our water.”

Part 2

Lost paraguayos The Yankees are coming Asia Times by Pepe Escobar

ASUNCION

“The Yankees are coming,” says a Paraguayan university student in Villa Morra, the slice of North American suburbia in eastern Asuncion. Wait; in fact they’re already here. And not only because of the American University, or the rows and rows of private clinics, medical services, pharmacies and life-insurance companies catering to expat customers in Mariscal Lopez Avenue. President Nicanor Duarte has been allowing U.S. troops on Paraguayan soil since mid-2005. U.S. Special Forces are performing 13 military exercises, to expire late this year, including “educational courses”, “domestic peacekeeping operations” and counter-terrorism training, this one part of Operation Commando Force 6, scheduled to go on until next month.

The whole package is part of a controversial military agreement between Paraguay and the United States endorsed by the Paraguayan Congress more than a year ago. The U.S. Special Forces are guaranteed total immunity and diplomatic status. They are free to import and export, they don’t pay any taxes, and what they trade is not subjected to any inspections. Contraband kingpins at the Triple Border would kill for a deal like that. The Foreign Ministry for its part insists that,”the national government did not sign any accords with the U.S. government for establishing an American military base”.The Paraguayan government defines these rumors as “delirious”. Brazilians are not so sure. According to Brazilia  Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, “They told us this is just training and humanitarian health missions… There is no reason to believe that there is something related to terrorism.” Brazilian diplomats worry that Paraguay didn’t even bother to tell its Mercosur counterparts it would be hosting U.S. troops. Paraguayan businessmen even want to scrap Mercosur altogether, complaining that the big members, Brazil and Argentina, monopolize all the decisions.

When in doubt, invade 

It’s useful to remember that soon after September 11, 2001, notorious neo-con Douglas Feith suggested to George W Bush an air invasion of the Triple Border – where the boundaries of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet – to capture al-Qaeda fighters and permanently occupy the region.

No wonder that as early as 2002 a study by the Brazilian army was asking whether,

“these armed forces that ring the border of Brazil, especially in the Amazon region”, could be used “for reasons that are [at present] undeclared”.

Although the Paraguayans insist these troops are in the country on a “temporary” basis, they may represent a giant step toward Washington’s setting up a U.S. military base very close to the Triple Border. Way back in 1982, the U.S. built and started operating a semi-clandestine airstrip in Mariscal Estigarribia, in the Chaco region in northern Paraguay near the Bolivian border, where B-52 bombers and C-5 Galaxy cargo planes are able to land with no hassle. The airstrip is literally in the middle of dense forest. It also happens to be only 270 kilometers from the Brazilian border.

Some Brazilian diplomats bet off the record that a U.S. permanent base is all but inevitable. But maybe not, as Brazil is known to play hardball with Paraguay. Significantly, the U.S.-Paraguay military agreement happened right when President Duarte was struggling against social movements contrary to his privatization wave, and peasant movements fighting for more land.

The “training” provided by the U.S. forces is the usual mix of combat and counter-insurgency and counter-terror theory. After that, it could be adapted for use against any “terrorist” threat. For Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the Bush administration’s real target is to smash popular movements and governments in South America.

Muy amigo

The Washington-Asuncion axis has been a stellar accomplishment of President Nicanor Duarte, who came to power in August 2003. Duarte is described by economic analyst Pablo Herken as, “populist, demagogue, charlatan, liar, incoherent, authoritarian, rancorous and irresponsible”.  The supreme Pentagon obsession remains the Triple Border and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay – the Wild West of the “war on terror”.

Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela have been very critical toward Washington’s regional geostrategic designs. So for the Bush administration a weak and corrupt Paraguayan government is the perfect Trojan horse. Duarte is a certified FOB (Friend of Bush). He was personally received at the White House. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Asuncion one year ago. Paraguayan Vice President Luis Castiglioni met his U.S. counterpart Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and crucially Roger Noriega, the sinister former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

John Keane, U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, publicized a huge contribution to fight “drug trafficking, terrorism, money laundering and corruption”. The Triple Border has always been the top issue on all meetings between these players, not to mention the ministerial meetings sponsored by Southcom (the U.S. Southern Command).

The lethal cocktail of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Noriega, the Triple Border and all those thousands of “Ay-rabs” in Ciudad del Este could not but spell endless trouble. Argentine non-governmental organizations also identify the Triple Border as the Americans’ No 1 geostrategic target. The master plan would be typical Rumsfeld: light, “rapid reaction” forces based in Paraguay intervening in neighboring countries and conducting low-intensity warfare against the – non-existent – Triple Border “terrorists”. The Pentagon’s agenda is the militarization of the so-called Western Hemisphere. In his South American trips the Rumsfeld mantra has been “dominion over ungoverned spaces”.

So Pentagon logic equally applies to the Triple Border and the Rio favelas run by drug mafias.
El Condor pasa (again)

Brazil is one of the very few South American countries with no U.S. bases, garrisons or airstrips. But now that Brazil is actually facing U.S. troops on two flanks – north, in Colombia, and south, in Paraguay – no wonder Brazilian congress members have started to regard it as “a threat to our national security”. Public intellectuals in both Brazil and Argentina fear that the usual U.S.-paid mules will keep planting stories in the media about Arab “terrorists” at the Triple Border, thus justifying a permanent-resident visa for the U.S. forces in Paraguay. What happened in Colombia is also evoked.

The Colombian agreement with the United States stipulated visa-free entry for U.S. civilians. But these “civilians” happen to be mercenaries, working for private security firms. The same process could happen in Paraguay.  Essential in the Pentagon machinery is the new Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program, which is operated (with no supervision by anyone) out of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. What this represents in fact is nothing but a rerun of the infamous Operation Condor coordinated by infamous Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during the 1970s.

As much as Condor, the Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program may work as the de facto Central Command in a South America-wide campaign of intimidation and political terror.
In the 1970s – with sinister dictator Alfredo Stroessner in full power – the Central Intelligence Agency set up in the U.S. Embassy in Asuncion the most powerful electronic spying station in South America.According to researcher Anibal Miranda, it’s still operational.

For the past five years the U.S. has also set up a real sanitary cordon in South America, from the Caribbean to the Paraguayan Chaco – 20 garrisons split between air and radar bases, at the cost of roughly U.S.$340 million. Spy planes roam the Amazon, the Andes and the Antilles.

Operating under the “war on drugs” banner, three airstrips are crucial in this plan:

• Hato in the Netherlands Antilles

• Queen Beatrix in Aruba

• Manta in Ecuador

The first two happen to be right in front of Venezuela’s coast. After September 11 the U.S. State Department mantra was that al-Qaeda and/or Hezbollah had an intimate connection with FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).

The “coincidence” could not be more extraordinary:”terror” at the geographic heart of Mercosur – which happens to be dreaded in Washington as the made-in-South America answer to the Washington-promoted Free Trade Area of the Americas – was suddenly connected with “terror”, which happens to be the biggest obstacle to the U.S. occupation of the Amazon rainforest.

Before September 11 the main rationale behind Washington’s Plan Colombia was the “war on drugs”. Then it became the “war on terror” – and Plan Colombia spread way beyond the Andes. The Pentagon’s new Long War (war on terror remixed) is now the catalyst that multiplies “evidence” forever justifying sending special agents, U.S. Special Forces, “training” of local forces, “joint military operations” and, sooner rather than later, a permanent military base.

Pentagon Quietly Builds Up South American Bases by Teresa Gutierrez February 23, 2006 from WorkersWorld Website

Manta, Ecuador U.S. Military Base. In 2001, the Pentagon came under criticism for opening a military base in Manta, Ecuador. The base is located 20 minutes from war-torn Colombia‘s borders. Those in Colombia who resist neocolonial domination there consider the base opening an act of war. Many U.S. Congress members also opposed Manta and tried to block the Manta project.

The first thing the base in Manta housed was E-3 AWACS surveillance planes. According to the Washington Post (Jan. 25, 2001), with the troops and the planes, “Manta will become the main hub for U.S. surveillance flights over the vast cocaine-producing areas of Latin America.” The U.S. pays no rent at Manta. It signed the deal with a former Ecuadorian president, Jamil Mahuad, who fled to exile in the U.S. and was under indictment for abuse of power. One year before Ecuador opened the Manta base it adopted the U.S. dollar as the national currency.

A rose is a rose

In the usual Pentagon and Washington double talk, government officials have taken to doctoring up the language of the militarization of Latin America to make it palatable for the U.S. public.
In the case of both Manta, Ecuador, in 2001 and Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay now, government officials called the bases “Forward Operating Locations” or “Cooperative Security Locations” to avoid calling them bases.

Washington has mislabeled the militarization of Latin America as part of the fight against drugs, just as some of the media have mislabeled the Minutemen militarizing the U.S.-Mexican border as freedom fighters. In reality, the strengthening of military bases and the sending of U.S. troops is aimed to subvert the rising revolutionary movements in Latin America. It is aimed against Presidents Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia and at Fidel Castro in Cuba. But the tide for an end to colonial and imperialist domination has turned in favor of the oppressed and no military base can turn it back.

Additional Information

• Dick Cheney’s ‘Spoon-Benders’  Rampage Through South America  – EIR Article  PDF

• It’s useful to remember that soon after September 11, 2001, notorious neo-con Douglas Feith suggested to George W Bush an air invasion of the Triple Border… http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_25530.shtml

Mariscal Estigarribia

U.S. Military Base, Paraguay

The Estigarribia airbase was constructed in the 1980s for U.S. technicians hired by the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and is capable of housing large troops units.

The base has an enormous radar system, huge hangars and an air traffic control tower. The airstrip itself is larger than the one at the international airport in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital.

It’s oversized for the Paraguayan air force, which only has a handful of small aircrafts. Pope John Paul II (Vatican Control) was there in May 1988 when he visited the town of Santa Teresita, 3 kilometers away.

Estigarribia has a population of about 2000, which 300 belongs to the 6th Infantry Division, 3rd Corps, Paraguayan army garrison. On a May 2005 agreement, Paraguay allowed United States to use the base.

Paraguay

On July 1, 2005, the United States reportedly deployed troops and aircraft to the large military airfield of Mariscal Estigarribia as part of a bid to extend control of strategic interests in the Latin American sphere, particularly in Bolivia. A military training agreement with Asunción, giving immunity to U.S. soldiers, caused some concern after media reports initially reported that a base housing 20,000 U.S. soldiers was being built at Mariscal Estigarribia within 200 km of Argentina and Bolivia, and 300 km of Brazil, near an airport which could receive large planes (B-52, C-130 Hercules, etc.) which the Paraguay Air Forces do not have.

The governments of Paraguay and the United States subsequently declared that the use of an airport (Dr Luís María Argaña International) was one point of transfer for few soldiers in Paraguay at the same time.According to the Clarín Argentinean newspaper, the U.S. military base is strategic because of its location near the Triple Frontera between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina; its proximity towards the Guarani aquifer; and, finally, its closeness toward Bolivia (less than 200 km) at the same, “moment that Washington’s magnifying glass goes on the Altiplano and points toward Venezuelan Hugo Chávez – the regional demon according to Bush’s administration – as the instigator of the instability in the region” El Clarín, making a clear reference to the Bolivian Gas War.

Paraguay Revokes U.S. Military Immunity  by Jessica Weisberg and Benjamin T. Brown 05 October 2006  (Editor’s note: Article updated, corrected on 10-13-06)

On October 2, the Paraguayan government announced its decision to revoke U.S. immunity as soon as their current contract expires in December 2006. The U.S. military has carried out military exercises in Paraguay since July 2005. Since then the troops have enjoyed technical and administrative immunity, exempting them from trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said that the U.S. will not continue to provide military support without immunity for its soldiers. However, on October 3, 2006 President Bush signed a waiver allowing for military aid in countries that have refused to sign immunity agreements with the U.S. military. The waiver affects 21 countries, including Paraguay. Historically, Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte Frutos and President George W. Bush have enjoyed what Brazilian President Lula calls a “political matrimony.” (quote from Ultimahora)

Paraguay’s decision represents a political alliance with the countries in the MercoSur trade block, which includes Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. Orlando Castillo, director of SERPAJ, a human rights organization based in Paraguay, stated that Frutos’ decision does not necessarily represent an ideological shift of Paraguay’s center-right government. Castillo explained that regional solidarity would require major reforms in all sectors of the Paraguayan government. Furthermore, military representatives from the CIA, DEA, and FBI will continue to hold immunity in Paraguay.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH OTHER LINKS Paraguay Revokes U.S. Military Immunity by Jessica Weisberg and Benjamin T. Brown 05 October 2006 (Editor’s note: Article updated, corrected on 10-13-06) On October 2, the Paraguayan government announced its decision to revoke U.S. immunity as soon as their current contract expires in December 2006. The U.S. military has carried out military exercises in Paraguay since  July 2005. Since then the troops have enjoyed technical and administrative immunity, exempting them from trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said that the U.S. will not continue to provide military support without immunity for its soldiers.

However, on October 3, 2006 President Bush signed a waiver  allowing for military aid in countries that have refused to sign immunity agreements with the U.S. military. The waiver affects 21 countries, including Paraguay.

Historically, Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte Frutos and President  George W. Bush have enjoyed what Brazilian President Lula calls a  “political matrimony.” (quote from Ultimahora)  Paraguay’s decision represents a political alliance with the countries in the MercoSur trade block, which includes Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile,  and Venezuela.
Orlando Castillo, director of SERPAJ, a human rights organization based in Paraguay, stated that Frutos’ decision does not necessarily represent an ideological shift of Paraguay’s center-right government. Castillo explained that regional solidarity would require major reforms in all sectors of the Paraguayan government.

Furthermore, military representatives from the CIA, DEA, and FBI will continue to hold immunity in Paraguay.

The U.S. Military Descends on Paraguay The Nation July 17, 2006 by Benjamin Dangl He is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, forthcoming from AK Press in March 2007, and a recipient of a 2007 Project Censored Award for his coverage of U.S. military operations in Paraguay.

“While hitchhiking across Paraguay a few years ago, I met welcoming farmers who let me camp in their backyards.I eventually arrived in Ciudad del Este, known for its black markets and loose borders. Now the city and farmers I met are caught in the crossfire of the U.S. military’s “war on terror.”  On May 26, 2005, the Paraguayan Senate allowed U.S. troops to train their Paraguayan counterparts until December 2006, when the Paraguayan Senate can vote to extend the troops’ stay.

The United States had threatened to cut off millions in aid to the country if Paraguay did not grant the troops entry. In July 2005 hundreds of U.S. soldiers arrived with planes, weapons and ammunition. Washington’s funding for counterterrorism efforts in Paraguay soon doubled, and protests against the military presence hit the streets.  Some activists, military analysts and politicians in the region believe the operations could be part of a plan to overthrow the left-leaning government of Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia and take control of the area’s vast gas and water reserves.Human rights reports from Paraguay suggest the U.S. military presence is, at the very least, heightening tensions in the country.
Soy and Landless Farmers 

Paraguay is the fourth-largest producer of soy in the world.As this industry has expanded, an estimated 90,000 poor families have been forced off their land. Campesinos have organized protests, road blockades and land occupations against displacement and have faced subsequent repression from military and paramilitary forces. According to Grupo de Reflexion Rural (GRR), an Argentina-based organization that documents violence against farmers, on June 24, 2005, in Tekojoja, Paraguay, hired policemen and soy producers kicked 270 people off their land, burned down fifty-four homes, arrested 130 people and killed two.

The most recent case of this violence is the death of Serapio Villasboa Cabrera, a member of the Paraguayan Campesino Movement, whose body was found full of knife wounds May 8.Cabrera was the brother of Petrona Villasboa, who was spearheading an investigation into the death of her son, who died from exposure to toxic chemicals used by transgenic soy producers. According to Servicio, Paz y Justicia (Serpaj), an international human rights group that has a chapter in Paraguay, one method used to force farmers off their land is to spray toxic pesticides around communities until sickness forces residents to leave. GRR said Cabrera was killed by paramilitaries connected to large landowners and soy producers, who are expanding their holdings. The paramilitaries pursue farm leaders who are organizing against the occupation of their land. Investigations by Serpaj demonstrate that the worst cases of repression against farmers have taken place in areas with the highest concentration of U.S. troops.

Serpaj reported that in the department of San Pedro, where five U.S. military exercises took place, there have been eighteen farmer deaths from repression, in an area with many farmer organizations. In the department of Concepción there have been eleven deaths and three U.S. military exercises.Near the Triple Border, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, there were twelve deaths and three exercises. “The U.S. military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups…. They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally,” Orlando Castillo of Serpaj told me over the phone.”The U.S. troops talk with the farmers and get to know their leaders and which groups, organizations, are working there, then establish the plans and actions to control the farmer movement and advise the Paraguayan military and police on how to proceed…The numbers from our study show what this U.S. presence is doing. U.S. troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against ‘terrorism.’ “

Tomas Palau, a Paraguayan sociologist at BASE-IS, a Paraguayan social research institute, and the editor of a recent book on the militarization of Latin America, said,”The U.S. conducts training and classes for the Paraguayan troops. These classes are led by North Americans, who answer to Southern Command, the branch of the U.S. military for South America.” Like Castillo, Palau said there is an association between the U.S. military presence and the increased violence against campesinos.”They are teaching counterinsurgency classes, preparing the Paraguayan troops to fight internal enemies,” he told me.He said it’s common knowledge that the U.S. troops and the Paraguayan troops are conducting operations together.”All the Paraguayan press is talking about this.” The U.S. Embassy in Asunción rejects all claims that the U.S. military is linked to the increased repression against campesino and protest groups, either through exercises or instruction.

In an e-mail response to the charges, Bruce Kleiner of the Embassy’s Office of Public Affairs writes that,”the U.S. military is not monitoring protest groups in Paraguay” and that “the U.S. military personnel and Paraguayan armed forces have trained together during medical readiness training exercises (MEDRETEs) to provide humanitarian service to some of Paraguay’s most disadvantaged citizens.”

However, the deputy speaker of the Paraguayan parliament, Alejandro Velazquez Ugarte, said that of the thirteen exercises going on in the country, only two are of a civilian nature. According to BASE-IS, Paraguayan officials have recently used the threat of terrorism to justify their aggression against campesino leaders. One group, the Campesino Organization of the North, has been accused of receiving instructions from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), that country’s largest leftist guerrilla movement.The FARC has also been accused of colluding in the kidnapping and murder of the daughter of former Paraguayan President Raúl Cubas Grau last year.

A June 23 report from the Chinese news service Xinhua said that Colombia’s defense minister, Camilo Ospina, spoke with Paraguay’s attorney general, Ruben Candia, about the presence of the FARC in Paraguay. Ospina said the FARC was consulting organized crime groups and “giving criminals advice on explosives” in Paraguay. Regarding the FARC connection in Paraguay, Paul Wolf, an international attorney in Washington who has studied the group closely and written about it, said,”Since the Colombian government hasn’t shown any evidence or given any names, this can’t be considered as anything but war propaganda.” Linking Paraguayan campesino groups to the FARC is nothing new, particularly since the death of Cubas’s daughter. However, in an interview with the Paraguayan newspaper La Nación, the bishop of Concepción, Zacarias Ortiz Rolon, said, “As far as the official interest in making believe that there is a guerrilla group and that it is fed by the Colombian FARC, that seems a bit suspicious to me.”

The Association of Farmers of Alto Paraná (ASAGRAPA), a campesino group near the Triple Border, reported that a local politician offered one of the organization’s leaders a sum of money equivalent to a monthly salary, in return for which the ASAGRAPA member was told to announce that other leaders in the organization were building a terrorist group and receiving training from the FARC.

BASE-IS reports suggest that this type of bribery and disinformation is part of an effort to guarantee the “national security of the U.S.” and “justify, continue and expand the North American military presence.” “All of these activities coincide with the presence of the U.S. troops,” Palau explained about the violence against farmers. “The CIA and FBI are also working here. It’s likely they are generating these plans for fabricating lies about guerrilla and terrorist activities. They need to find terrorists to use as an excuse for militarization.”

Last October the Cuban media outlet Prensa Latina reported that FBI director Robert Mueller arrived in Paraguay to, “check on preparations for the installation of a permanent FBI office in Asunción… to cooperate with security organizations to fight international crime, drug traffic and kidnapping.” Journalist Hugo Olázar of the Argentine paper Clarín reported last September that U.S. troops were operating from an air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay.

He visited the base last year and said it had an air-traffic control tower, a military encampment and was capable of handling large aircraft. Though the United States denies it is operating at the base, it used the same rhetoric when first discussing its actions in Manta, Ecuador, which is currently home to an $80 million U.S. military base. The base there was first described in 1999 as an archaic “dirt strip” used only for weather monitoring. Days later, the Pentagon said it would be utilized for security-related missions.

Other indications that the U.S. military might be settling into Paraguay come from the right-wing Paraguayan government. Current President Nicanor Duarte Frutos is a member of the Colorado party, which has ruled the country for more than fifty years. It was this party that established the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. Soon after his election in 2003, Duarte became the first Paraguayan president to be received at the White House. Last August Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to Paraguay. Shortly afterward, Dick Cheney met with Paraguay’s vice president.

Last year, Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel commented on the situation in Paraguay, “Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave. And that really frightens me.”

Counterfeit Rolling Papers and Viagra

Washington has justified its military presence in Paraguay by stating that the Triple Border area at Ciudad del Este is a base for Islamist terrorist funding. In a June 3, 2006, Associated Press report, Western intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, claimed that if Iran is cornered by the United States, it could direct the international network of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah to assist in terrorist attacks.

The Justice Department has indicted nineteen people this year for sending the profits from the sale of counterfeit rolling papers and Viagra to Hezbollah.

“Extensive operations have been uncovered in South America,” the AP article states, “where Hezbollah is well connected to the drug trade, particularly in the region where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet.” Other claims about terrorist networks said to be operating in the Triple Border region include a poster of Iguaçu Falls, a tourist destination near Ciudad del Este, discovered by U.S. troops on the wall of an Al Qaeda operative’s home in Kabul, Afghanistan, shortly after 9/11.

Aside from this, however, the U.S. Southern Command and the State Department report that no “credible information” exists confirming that “Islamic terrorist cells are planning attacks in Latin America.” Luiz Moniz Bandeira, who holds a chair in history at the University of Brasília and writes about U.S.-Brazilian relations, was quoted in the Washington Times [Rev. Moon] as saying, “I wouldn’t dismiss the hypothesis that U.S. agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence.”

Throughout the cold war, the U.S. government used the threat of communism as an excuse for its military adventures in Latin America. Now, as leaders such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez move further outside the sphere of Washington’s interests, the United States is using another “ism” as an alibi for its military presence. As Greg Grandin pointed out in his article “The Wide War,” first posted on TomDispatch.com, the Pentagon now has more resources and money directed to Latin America than the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce and Treasury combined.

Before 9/11 the annual U.S. military aid to the region was around $400 million. It’s now nearly $1 billion. Much of this goes to training troops.  Making wild allegations about Paraguayan farmers being terrorists is one way to justify the increased spending and military presence in the region. “The U.S. government is lying about the terrorist funding in the Triple Border, just like they did about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said an exasperated Castillo of Serpaj. Indeed, the street markets I walked through in Ciudad del Este, and the farmers I met along the way, seemed to pose as much of a threat to U.S. security as a pirated Tom Petty CD or a bottle of counterfeit whiskey.”

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Dark Armies, Secret Bases, and Rummy, Oh My! Foreign Policy In Focus by Conn Hallinan November 21, 2005  Editor: John Gershman, IRC

“It would be easy to make fun of President Bush’s recent fiasco at the 4th Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

His grand plan for a free trade zone reaching from the Artic Circle to Tierra del Fuego was soundly rejected by nations fed up with the economic and social chaos wrought by neoliberalism. At a press conference, South American journalists asked him rude questions about Karl Rove.

And the President ended the whole debacle by uttering what may be the most trenchant observation the man has ever made on Latin America:“Wow! Brazil is big!”

But there is nothing amusing about an Enormous U.S. base less than 120 miles from the Bolivian border, or the explosive growth of U.S.-financed Mercenary Armies that are doing everything from training the military in Paraguay and Ecuador to calling in Air Attacks against Guerillas in Colombia.

Indeed, it is feeling a little like the run up to the ‘60s and ‘70s, when Washington-sponsored military dictatorships dominated most of the continent, and dark armies ruled the night. U.S. Special Forces began arriving this past summer at Paraguay’s Mariscal Estigarribia air base, a sprawling complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator Alfredo Stroessner.

Argentinean journalists who got a peek at the place say the airfield can handle B-52 bombers and Galaxy C-5 cargo planes. It also has a huge radar system, vast hangers, and can house up to 16,000 troops. The air base is larger than the international airport at the capital city, Asuncion .

Some 500 special forces arrived July 1 for a three-month counter- -terrorism training exercise, code named Operation Commando Force 6. Paraguayan denials that Mariscal Estigarribia is now a U.S. base have met with considerable skepticism by Brazil and Argentina.

There is a disturbing resemblance between U.S. denials about Mariscal Estigarribia, and similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta , Ecuador . The United States claimed the Manta base was a “dirt strip” used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the United States admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with Ecuador .

The Eloy Alfaro base is used to rotate U.S. troops in and out of Columbia, and to house an immense network of private corporations who do most of the military’s dirty work in Columbia. According to the Miami Herald, U.S. mercenaries armed with M-16s have gotten into fire fights with guerrillas in southern Columbia, and American civilians working for Air Scan International of Florida called in air strikes that killed 19 civilians and wounded 25 others in the town of Santo Domingo.

The base is crawling with U.S. Civilians – many of them retired military  –  working for Military Professional Resources Inc., Virginia Electronics, DynCorp, Lockheed Martin (the world’s largest arms maker), Northrop Grumman, TRW, and dozens of others.

It was U.S. intelligence agents working out of Manta who fingered Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia leader Ricardo Palmera last year, and several leaders of the U.S.-supported coup against Haitian President Bertram Aristide spent several months there before launching the 2004 coup that exiled Aristide to South Africa.

“Privatizing” war is not only the logical extension of the Bush admin’s. mania for contracting everything out to the private sector; it also shields the White House’s activities from the U.S. Congress. “My complaint about the use of private contractors,” says U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsy (D-IL), “is their ability to fly under the radar to avoid accountability.”

The role that Manta is playing in the northern part of the continent is what so worries countries in the southern cone about Mariscal Estigarribia. “Once the United States arrives,” Argentinean Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez commented about the Paraguay base, “it takes a long time to leave.”

Life at the Triple Frontier

The Bush administration has made the “Triple Frontier Region” where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet into the South American equivalent of Iraq’s Sunni Triangle.

According to William Pope, U.S. State Department Counterterrorist Coordinator, the United States has evidence that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed spent several months in the area in 1995. The U.S. military also says it seized documents in Afghanistan with pictures of Paraguay and letters from Arabs living in Cuidad del Este, a city of some 150,000 people in the tri-border region. The Defense Department has not revealed what the letters contained, and claims that the area is a hotbed of Middle East terrorism have been widely debunked.

The U.S. State Department’s analysis of the region – ”Patterns of Terrorism” – found no evidence for the charge, and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study found the area awash with money smuggling, but not terrorism. It is the base’s proximity to Bolivia that causes the most concern, particularly given the Bush administration’s charges that Cuba and Venezuela are stirring up trouble in that Andean nation.

Bolivia has seen a series of political upheavals, starting with a revolt against the privatization of water supplies by the U.S. Bechtel Corp. and the French utility giant, Suez de Lyonnaise des Eaux. The water uprising was sparked off when Suez announced it would charge between $335 and $445 to connect a private home to the water supply. Bolivia’s yearly per capita gross domestic product is $915. The water revolt, which spread to IMF enforced taxes and the privatization of gas and oil reserves, forced three presidents to resign. The country is increasingly polarized between its majority Indian population and an elite minority that has dominated the nation for hundreds of years. Six out of 10 people live below the poverty line, a statistic that rises to nine in 10 in rural areas.

Bolivia in Focus

For the Bush administration, however, Bolivia is all about subversion, not poverty and powerlessness. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Paraguay this past August, he told reporters that,“There certainly is evidence that both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways.” A Rumsfeld aide told the press that Cuba was involved in the unrest, a charge that even one of Bolivia’s ousted Pres, Carlos Mesa, denies.

A major focus of the unrest in Bolivia is who controls its vast natural gas deposits, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere.

Under pressure from the United States and the IMF, Bolivia sold off its oil and gas to Enron and Shell in 1995 for $263.5 million, less than 1% of what the deposits are worth. The Movement Toward Socialism’s presidential candidate Evo Morales, a Quechuan Indian and trade union leader who is running first in the polls, wants to renationalize the deposits.

Will it be as easy as it was in the old days when the CIA could bribe truckers to paralyze Chile and set the stage for a coup? Nothing is easy in Latin America anymore.  The United States can bluster about a trade war, but the playing field is a little more level these days. The Mercosur Group of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay embraces 250 million people, generates $1 trillion in goods, and is the third largest trade organization on the planet.

If the American market tightens, the Chinese are more than willing to pick up the slack. A meeting last month of the Ibero-American heads of state turned downright feisty. The assembled nations demanded an end to the “blockade” of Cuba. The word “blockade” is very different than the word “embargo,” the term that was always used in the past. A “blockade” is a violation of international law.  The meeting also demanded that the United States extradite Luis Posada to Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 76 people.

If the United States tries something in Bolivia (or Venezuela), it will find that the old days when proxy armies and economic destabilization could bring down governments are gone, replaced by countries and people who no longer curtsy to the colossus from the north.

Media Reports That 16,000 U.S. Troop Invade Paraguay by James Dunnigan August 7, 2005

Earlier this month, there was a fast moving news story in Latin America about the American troops in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, a town in the desolate Chaco desert.

As the story grew, during the first week of July, it evolved into the description of an air strip out in the desert capable of handling B-52s and heavy American transports. Word had it that some 16,000 American troops were moving in. The reason for all this American military activity was reported as U.S. interest in natural gas deposits across the border in Bolivia.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Eventually, some reporters checked with government officials, and flew out into the Chaco desert to see for themselves. Naturally, there was no there there. What was there was an air freight base being built by a Russian firm. There were American troops in Paraguay. Seven (as in 7) had arrived in the capital on July 3rd, to conduct a training course on counterinsurgency and anti-drug operations.

A second small group of will arrive on July 24th, to do medical work in eastern Paraguay. A total of 204 American troops will be visiting Paraguay, in groups no larger than 32, between July and December, 2005. These are all training missions of one kind or another.

Wild rumors about nefarious American military operations have always been popular in Latin America, but the strident efforts to paint the liberation of Iraq as another conquest by evil imperialists has got reporters fired up and ready to take any rumor the extra mile.

Sun Myung Moon Heavenly Deception. FEBRUARY 14, 2005

“The top-down expressions of apocalyptic, fundamentalist faith represent a screen theology, to deceive the sincerely devout – for instance, that Bush is a “godly man” who holds power by the “will of God” in these “Last Days” – and to mask the true hearts and intentions of the gangster elite. At best, they are hypocrites. And if they are worse than that, then they are much worse.

Many of America’s conservative Christians may be surprised to learn their Christian Right isn’t so Christian anymore. Over the past 15 years, it’s been largely bought, borrowed, compromised and blackmailed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And what Moon represents is yet another hub in the fascist/intelligence/criminal nexus of money laundering, drug trafficking and arms dealing we frequently see behind the thinning veil of America.

Limited investigations of Moon’s organization have revealed large sums of money flowing into the United States mostly from untraceable accounts in Japan, where Moon had close ties to yakuza gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa. Former Moon associates also have revealed major money flows from shadowy sources in South America, where Moon built relationships with right-wing elements associated with the cocaine trade, including the so-called Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia in the early 1980s.

Allegations of Moon’s relationship to the South American drug trade don’t stop with the fall of Klaus Barbie’s neo-fascist narco-state. Since 1999, Moon has acquired 600,000 hectares of arid land in Paraguay’s northern state of Chaco, bordering Brazil, directly above the world’s largest aquifer. Senator Domingo Laino claims that Moon intends to control his nation’s narcotics trafficking, as well as the “largest fresh drinking water source in the world.” http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/11/5/13314/9719

If that’s not bad enough, Iran-Contra vet Elliot Abrams [PNAC Neocon]- Bush’s new “Deputy National Security Adviser for global democracy strategy” – is also deep in Moon’s pocket. Abrams spoke at three Moon rallies in 1998, including one in Sao Paolo, Brazil, attacking anti-cult “deprogrammers” and those who hire them to rescue their family members from the Unification Church. According to Abrams – about whom we’re expected to believe this matters – it’s simply an issue of “religious freedom.”

While Moon is a large, and largely hidden, part of the story of the corruption of religion for criminal and covert ends, the story neither begins nor ends with him. There are many examples on the spooky side of life, that demonstrate that evangelical Christianity has been penetrated and exploited by intelligence assets, and that what may sound like a profession of faith may be nothing more a cover story, and a joke at the expense of the faithfully deceived.

Michael Meiring, the Davao City bomber sheltered by U.S. authorities from Philippine justice, confided to acquaintances in Mindanao that he was CIA, but winked that it stood for “Christ in action.”

Wally Hilliard, the money man behind the two Florida flight schools which trained the 9/11 pilots, is an avowed evangelical who’s former insurance firm in Wisconsin boasted the motto “Hate Sin, Fight Communism, and Back the Pack!” Forty-three pounds of heroin was found on Wally’s Lear Jet, just three weeks after Mohammed Atta enrolled; the largest seizure ever in Central Florida. His plane had made dozens of round trips to Venezuela with passengers who always paid cash, and that the plane had been supplied to Hilliard by the same drug smugglers who had outfitted CIA drug smuggler Barry Seal’s. Hilliard and his pilot were not charged. The heroin seizure plays like one of those instances in which the DEA gets its wires crossed with the black ops boys. (Daniel Hopsicker tells more, in his Welcome to Terrorland.)

Interestingly, Hilliard is yet another “devout” figure who has bailed out Jerry Falwell, having loaned, and forgiven, the Reverend one million dollars. Shortly after, another curious thing happened: Britannia Aviation was awarded a five-year contract to manage a large maintenance facility at the Lynchburg airport. It was chosen over a seasoned local company worth millions, when it had a book value of only $750, virtually no qualifications, employees or history. Britannia didn’t even have the necessary FAA license to fulfill the contract. What it had, however, was Wally Hilliard’s hanger at the Venice, Florida flight school, and according to a Drug Enforcement Agency source, a “greenlight” to operate by the DEA. Hopsicker’s research suggests Brittania may have been used as part of the protected black ops drug trade, which was much in evidence in Venice. Indeed, it seems as though there are many interested parties who have bailed out the Reverend Falwell.

Hopsicker writes: “Jerry Falwell got bailed out in the early ’90’s by a Lynchburg businessman whose son is married to Billy Graham’s daughter,” a Lynchburg observer told us. “Since then he runs a missionary service called World Help, which flies all over the world.” Many of the flight trainers who had trained the Arab terrorist pilots had also flown missions out of the Venice and Sarasota Florida Airports for such Christian missionary services as televangelist Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing.

It was “Islamic fundamentalist” Osama bin laden who cloaked his covert activities under the cover of religious charities. Were we now discovering that our own government intelligence agencies used the same ruse? Christian-linked or not, why did a transparent dummy front company like Paul Marten’s Britannia Aviation have a ‘green light’ from the DEA? A green light for what?

Gerard Colby’s and Charlotte Dennett’s massive work, Thy Will Be Done: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, painfully details how the missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), also known as Wycliffe Bible Translators, served as proxy soldiers in the CIA’s Amazonian genocide. From a review by Carmelo Ruiz:

The authors found SIL a veritable empire whose missionary activities spanned every country in the Amazon basin, with a network of bases that look more like picket-fenced American suburbia than the frontier outposts for the global economy that they actually are. SIL even has its own air force and communications system, the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS), which permits it to act virtually independently from the governments of the countries where it operates. After years of research, Colby and Dennett found a number of irrefutable links between SIL and U.S. counterinsurgency operations.

Among these, SIL agressively denied that the native peoples of Brazil and Guatemala were being slaughtered by the military regimes of their countries; it allowed its base in the Ecuadoran Amazon to be used by Green Berets who were combing the Western Amazon for signs of armed insurgency; and it assisted the Peruvian air force, which had napalmed the Mayoruna and Campa Indians…In the course of their investigation, the authors learned that SIL had a big debt to institutions and individuals associated with the Rockefeller family...

Colby and Dennett found the Rockefeller connection particularly intriguing, and went on to investigate the Rockefeller family’s financial interests in the commercial and industrial development of the Brazilian Amazon. In 1941, Nelson Rockefeller was named by president Roosevelt to the post of coordinator of the Office of Interamerican Affairs (CIAA), which ran intelligence and propaganda operations against the Nazis in Latin America. In one of its many flagrant violations of the separation between church and state, SIL assisted the CIAA in its Intensive Language Program for American and Latin American military officers and gathered intelligence on native peoples.

As coordinator of the CIAA, Nelson acquired invaluable information about Latin America’s untapped natural resources, especially mineral reserves, information that ended up in his files and which he used after the war, when he formed the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). This company became a key component in the post-World War Two opening of the Amazon rainforest to commercial exploitation, a process that eventually led to military dictatorships, genocide of native peoples, loss of biological diversity and unprecedented misery for the majority of Brazilians.

The Rockefeller-led effort to conquer the Amazon and exploit its natural riches had been made possible in no small measure by SIL’s missionary activities. Colby and Dennett found a historic parallel in John D. Rockefeller, Sr’s support for Christian missionaries in the American west, who were compiling extremely useful information on Native American communities, which were potential sources of opposition to the entrance of Standard Oil into their lands. As a bonus, the evangelization process weakened the American Indians’ social structure and so undermined their resolve to fight for their rights.

The authors quote Baptist reverend Frederick Gates, who for many years was John D. Sr.’s right-hand man, as saying that “We are only in the very dawn of commerce, and we owe that dawn to the channels opened up by Christian missionaries… The effect of the missionary enterprise of the English speaking peoples will be to bring them the peaceful conquest of the world.”

John W. Hinkley Sr, the father of Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin. was president of the board for World Vision. World Vision served, in the words of John Judge’s words, as a “penetration force” for the CIA. (The Hinkleys and the Bushes had known each other for decades. In the sixties, when Hinkley’s oil company was failing, it was bailed out by Bush’s Zapata Oil.) World Vision was financed during the Vietnam War by the Agency and given the use of military equipment.

According to Judge, the mission ran the Cuban and Thai refugee camps in the United States. Reportedly there were beatings and abuses, and the camps were staffed by Alpha 66 and Omega 7 people, the virulently anti-Castro assets, who were looking for like-minded anti-communists to recruit for intelligence gathering and counter-insurgency. And as if we haven’t had enough already, here’s another kick in the head: Mark David Chapman, who eventually shot John Lennon, worked at World Vision’s Thai refugee camps in Arkansas. (That both Hinkley and Chapman were fixated upon Catcher in the Rye has suggested to some that the book was used as a trigger for “Manchurian”-like assassin mind control programming.) And speaking of mind control, survivor Kathleen Sullivan told the late Jim Keith in his book Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness, that she heard of plans to use Christian evangelists to push belief in the “tribulation” and the “Last Days” as one means of achieving social mastery.”

U.S. base in Paraguay established to protect Sun Myung Moon’s water and land resources. August 9, 2005

With U.S. troops currently protecting Halliburton’s oil operations in Iraq and the CentGas pipeline in Afghanistan, U.S. troops are now being sent to Paraguay, complete with immunity from criminal prosecution by Paraguay or the International Criminal Court, to protect the millions of acres of Paraguayan water and land resources bought over the years by religious cult leader Sun Myung Moon.

It is not coincidental that Moon’s Unification Church has many followers within the Bush administration. Last month, 500 U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay to expand the Mariscal Estigarriba air base to handle large U.S. military transport planes. Moon’s land acquisitions in Chaco Province are just north of the huge Guarani aquifer, one of the world’s largest sources of fresh water. In addition, Moon has acquired large tracts of land on the Brazilian side of the Paraguayan border.

Local villagers in Paraguay and Brazil claim that most of Moon’s land acquisitions were fraudulent and illegal. Moon’s World Unification Church operates in Paraguay under a corporate contrivance called the Victoria Company. Paraguay has also announced that everyone entering and leaving Paraguay will be photographed and fingerprinted. Not coincidentally, the new border control system is being financed by South Korea.

The Moon King of Paraguay: Protected by U.S. Troops

There is clearly a split within the Paraguayan government, with the Vice President and Pentagon neo-con ally Luis Castiglioni negotiating, along with a majority in the Paraguayan Congress, close bilateral military ties with the United States, apparently without the concurrence of President Nicanor Duarte.

It is no coincidence that considering the oil-centric Bush administration, the Mariscal Estigarriba air base is close to large Bolivian natural gas reserves in the neighboring Bolivian provinces of Santa Cruz and Tarija. The U.S. move in Paraguay comes at the same time the U.S. is stepping up its “counter-narcotics” operations from its Manta, Ecuador base and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez is accusing the United States of using Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) personnel in Latin America as espionage agents trying to destabilize his government.

In addition, the Paraguayan military operations are seen as a Bush administration attempt to intimidate neighboring Bolivia, where MAS Socialist party and coca farmer (cocalero) leader Evo Morales is poised to become the next President in scheduled December elections after years of popular demonstrations which saw Bolivian workers and peasants deposing a series of pro-U.S. presidents. A Morales government would add another anti-U.S. and free trade government in South America, joining Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

So soon, the mothers and fathers of U.S. military personnel will be able to take comfort in sacrificing the lives of their sons and daughters for a self-proclaimed Messiah, a non-English speaking Korean who claims to have saved the souls of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Stalin, and Hitler and communicates regularly with others in his departed flock of adherents, including all the deceased Presidents of the United States (who, Moon claims, appointed Richard Nixon as their spokesman from the “hereafter”).

About a year and a half ago (here and here), I referred to Sun Myung Moon’s purchase of 600,000 hectares of Paraguay’s Chaco for the stated intention of erecting an “ecological paradise.”  Moon’s land sits atop the Guarani Aquifer, the Earth’s largest resource of fresh drinking water, and also happens to be an “enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades,” according to Paraguay’s drug czar from 1976-89.

“The available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises.”

Now, apparently, the Reverend is again keeping familiar company: The Governor of Alto Paraguay, Erasmo Rodríguez Acosta has admitted to hearing that George Bush Sr. owns land in the Chaco region of Paraguay, in Paso de Patria. Acosta says that rumor has it that Bush owns near to 70 thousand hectares (173,000 acres) as part of an ecological reserve and/or ranch. However, the governor said he had no documents to prove the rumor. Acosta said that some stories credited the land to the Fundación Patria, which Bush would be a member of. The spokespeople of the organization were not available to comment. Supposedly, Timothy Towell , the U.S. Ambassador in Asunción (the capital of Paraguay) is the present administrator of the land. First accounts signaled that Bush had acquired 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) in the Chaco zone of Fuerte Olimpo, near the Bolivian Border. A spark of the interest in this property may have been Jenna Bush’s private visit to Paraguay with Unicef, which started Saturday, October 7, 2006. Supposedly Jenna will travel to the ranch to “observe” several indigenous villages are located on the property.

The original Oct 11 story from Paraguay, in Spanish, can be found here. There’s a second story from Prensa Latina that identifies the purchaser as George W rather than George HW Bush, but the Chaco purchase strikes me as more likely an initiative of the father than of the son. Bush Sr, let’s remember, tootled around Latin America in 1996 as Moon’s lapdog and praised him in Buenos Aires as “the man with the vision.” (Moon’s foresight might have included blackmail, specifically the office of the then Vice President with the Craig Spence call boy scandal [1989]. Influence, by any means necessary.) Still, keeping Moon’s company is a Bush family enterprise, as Neil accompanied the Reverend last year on his 100-day “global peace campaign.” Paraguay, of course, has been a recent source of alarm to the region for its allowance of its tri-border territory to become a U.S. military beachhead. Now, with the reports of the Bush purchase of an “ecological reserve” alongside Moon’s, we have good reason to suspect that U.S. national security has again been seconded to the Bush family business. Wayne Madsen Reports:

October 16, 2006

WMR was the first to report on UN Secretary General-designate Ban Ki-moon’s possible connections to the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, an enigmatic South Korean power broker and billionaire whose funding originally came from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).

Actually, this is a pattern. Bush and Porter Goss and other of Yale and the CIA owned a huge 25,000 acre ‘estate’ in Belize, useful simultaneously for running drugs to North America from hop points further south; useful for the secret wars of the CIA in Central America like Nicaragua (as a training base and supply transshipment point).

This can be read about in various places – one place recommended is the Hopsicker web information about it, as well as it being mentioned in print in his magnum opus Barry and the Boys. (For those who really want to know how the Fourth Reich started its beachhead in the United States…: MKULTRA, state drug trades, secret military experiments, wars, Nazis, organized crime – it’s all there.)

I would suggest that all we are seeing is just the attempt to create a territorial ‘hop point’ further south for the Bush desired invasion of the entire South American continent – to remove Chavez/Frias’s Venezuela, Morales’ Bolivia, and all nations entirely – helping to shut off the oil in Peru and Bolivia as well as per the mass global fakery of keeping the oil in the ground and then claiming a ‘crisis’ when they stop pumping it, instead of when they (fake story) ‘run out.’

Peak oil? Sheesh…Peak oil is only an empty concept. It’s peak fascism. It’s going to be a studied political shut down of oil, instead of it ‘running out.’ That’s the cover of the operation only.