Latin America and the Caribbean in 2016: A New Phase of Conflict and Uncertainty Tortilla Con Sal
go to original March 24, 2016

Washington continues to try to exploit Latin America (Reuters)

The volatility and dizzying pace of world events is quickly turning 2016 into an especially decisive year for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ever since the crisis of 2008, the global corporate elites have patiently defended their huge accumulated economic and financial advantage. At opportune moments, through their influence over government foreign policy via political proxies or through unleashing outright violence, they have pressed that advantage ruthlessly. President Obama's renewal of the sinister presidential decree casting Venezuela as a threat to the national security of the United States is the most recent example. President Mauricio Macri's abdication of national sovereignty to a New York judge and Wall Street vulture funds over Argentina's debt is another. The judicial and media attack on Brazil's Ignacio Lula da Silva is another.

These examples at a very high level get extensive media coverage because they are so high profile. By contrast, the endless, low intensity corporate elite war on the impoverished majority at grass roots throughout Latin America and the Caribbean rarely receives such coverage. Only a huge effort by international solidarity organizations has kept the recent assassination of Berta Cáceres in the news over the last couple of weeks. By contrast, international coverage since the 2009 military coup of the continuous sequence of murders and abuses aimed at destroying militant community and popular movements in Honduras has been minimal. The same tends to be true to varying degrees of media coverage throughout the region from Mexico to Colombia to Paraguay to Chile.

Now, acute economic problems, cynically exploited by local elites and their foreign owners and allies, most clearly in Venezuela and Brazil, are exacerbating the volatility of political conflict in the region. This is also happening in a different way in the United States which remains hopelessly tied to extremely counterproductive financial and trade policies while exploiting its decades old blockade of Cuba and attacking much more vulnerable countries like Venezuela, or, too, Bolivia and Ecuador. In the US itself, the share of gross domestic income for the great majority of people is at record lows while corporate profits are at record highs. The U.S. Federal Reserve, accompanied by its allied Central Banks in Europe and the Pacific region, is trapped in an intractable policy dilemma resulting from over two decades of deep financial and fiscal policy mismanagement.

Read the rest at teleSUR

Related: Operation Condor Never Ended: Assassinations and Coup Plots Continue Across Latin America (GlobalResearch)

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