EMPIRE OF CHAOS
COUNTRIES
PAGE 1
AFGHANISTAN
"In the 1980s, Afghanistan
had a genuinely popular government that was implementing widespread
reforms. Labour unions were legalized, a minimum wage was established,
hundreds of thousands of Afghans were enrolled in educational
facilities, and women were freed from age-old tribal bondage and
able to earn an independent income.
U.S. and Western imperialism, fearful of that kind of equitable
distribution of wealth, supported the feudal landlords and fundamentalist
mullahs to sow chaos across the country, giving rise to elements
that later formed al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Afghan people
were once more dealt a severe punishment by the forces of Western
imperialism following 9/11, despite a lack of conclusive evidence
linking either the Taliban or al-Qaeda to the attacks. 30 years
of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan have left the people of Afghanistan
impoverished, traumatized, and desperate."
T.J. Petrowski, 2015
"It is due to the wrong
and devastating policies of the U.S. government and NATO countries
that unfortunately today Afghanistan is a mafia state and ranked
at the top of the most unstable and corrupt countries in the world."
Elizabeth DiNovella, 2009
"In 1973, the CIA stepped
up its subversion in Afghanistan, working together with Pakistan
and with the Shah of Iran, to try to control the new Afghan government.
... The CIA worked hand in hand with Afghan fundamentalists, who
were linked with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim World League.
... Events moved rapidly, as the Islamists, supported by the Pakistani
ISI and the US, launched an all-out campaign of terror in Afghanistan,
assassinating hundreds of teachers and civil servants.
... US arms began flowing to the Islamists.
... An unprecedented campaign began to recruit, train, transport
and pay tens of thousands of Islamic fighters-terrorists by any
definition - to fight what were, from the Muslims' perspective,
the occupying Soviets in Afghanistan, eventually bringing together
communist China, Islamic Iran, Iranophobes Saudi Arabia and Egypt,
and many more incongruous 'allies'. This policy went into high
gear after 1979 - in secret and illegally.
... Fundamentalists were recruited to Afghanistan from Tunisia,
Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. 22-year-old
Osama bin Laden joined what he may at least initially have been
unaware was a US-sponsored jihad, following his own agenda to
liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation.
... The number of CIA-Saudi sponsored religious schools (madrassahs)
increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
... Once the Afghan operation got going, Pakistan became the conduit
for virtually all the money, arms and fighters.
... In March 1985, Ronald Reagan issued the secret National Security
Decision Directive (NSDD) 166, which authorized stepped-up covert
military aid to the Mujahideen. The supply of arms increased from
10,000 tons in 1983 to 65,000 tons annually by 1987. NSDD 166
was the largest covert operation in US history.
... The US was to bring in men and material from around the Arab
world and beyond into Afghanistan. The most hardened and ideologically
dedicated men were sought on the logic that they would be the
best fighters. Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed
in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements
and motivations to join the Jihad. The US plan for jihad was a
Saudi dream-come-true. The Saudis were eager to see Afghanistan
as a Saudi-groomed Sunni Islamic state beside Pakistan as a counterweight
to Shia Iran. The US showed no concern for the long term implications
of destroying the fragile Afghan state, satisfied with creating
a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Soviet Union in order to destroy
it.
... When the United State took over drug law enforcement in Afghanistan,
opium production increased dramatically. All of a sudden Afghan
heroin is flooding the US and Europe. It still is. You can say
it's a coincidence, except that all the opium warlords are on
the CIA payroll."
Eric Walberg, 2011
"Afghanistan is the world's
largest producer of opium. Poppy cultivation increased 10 percent,
to 201,000 hectares in 2016, while eradication declined significantly;
the 2016 crop yielded an estimated 4,800 metric tonnes of raw
opium, a 43% increase over 2015. The Taliban and other antigovernment
groups participate in and profit from the opiate trade, which
is a key source of revenue for the Taliban inside Afghanistan;
widespread corruption and instability impede counter-drug efforts.
Most of the heroin consumed in Europe and Eurasia is derived from
Afghan opium."
Francesco Cossiga, former Italian
President, 2017
"With the U.S. occupation
in Afghanistan, opium production, which the Taliban had nearly
eliminated for the single year of 2001, reached a new high of
five thousand six hundred tons in 2006."
Peter Dale Scott
"It's hard to overstate
the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan.
While the U.S. has occupied the country for seven years and counting,
and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has
yet to restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly
more populous than Houston, a single one of the public services
its citizens used to enjoy. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan
in the 1980s, they modernized the education system and built power
plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the most coveted
in the country."
Ann Jones, 2009
"Although there has been
no attempt to conduct a serious mortality study in Afghanistan
as there was in Iraq but using similar techniques to arrive at
the body count, approximately 130,000-150,000 Afghan soldiers
and police were killed. As for innocent civilians, the estimate
is about 875,000 to have been killed since 2001, with a minimum
of 640,000 and a maximum of 1.4 million."
Consortium News, 2018
"Today, U.S. soldiers who
are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country;
they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying
for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American
empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are
dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for
the machines of death."
Howard Zinn
"Since the US and Britain
"freed" Afghan women from the oppressive Taliban regime
in 2002, life is just as bad for most, and worse in some cases.
Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery
and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned
from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited
from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality
of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims
are driven to self-immolation - burning themselves to death -
or severe self-harm.
Violent attacks against females, usually domestic, are at epidemic
proportions. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced. 57
per cent of brides are under the age of 16.
The illiteracy rate among women is 88 per cent with just 5 per
cent of girls attending secondary school.
Maternal mortality rates - one in nine women dies in childbirth
- are the highest in the world alongside Sierra Leone. And 30
years of conflict have left more than one million widows with
no enforceable rights, left to beg on the streets alongside an
increasing number of orphans. Afghanistan is the only country
in the world with a higher suicide rate among women than men."
Terri Judd, 2008
"The anti-American feelings
in Afghanistan are not just coming from conservative or religious
elements. These feelings stem from the actions and military operations
of the foreign troops. The anti-western sentiment is directly
because of the military actions, the civilian casualties, and
the lack of respect by foreign troops for Afghan culture."
Shukria Barakzai, a female member
of the Afghan parliament, 2008
"The proceeds of the Afghan
heroin trade are the source of wealth formation outside Afghanistan,
largely reaped by powerful financial and business/criminal interests
within Western countries. This process of wealth accumulation
resulting from the drug trade is sustained and supported by the
US "War on Terrorism". Decision-making in the US State
Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting
this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity
value after oil and the arms trade."
Michel Chossudovsky
"When the US invaded Afghanistan
in 2001, there was an immediate hike in the amount of heroin that
was flowing out of the country. According to the United Nations
Office of Drugs and Crime, after the US invasion in 2001 opium
production in Afghanistan rose from 7,606 hectares in 2001 to
193,000 hectares in 2007. Now that the CIA has control of Afghanistan,
93% of the world's heroin comes from inside its borders."
John Vibes, 2015
"If you look at the deployment
of US forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that the US forces are
positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about.
It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."
Craig Murray, former British ambassador
to Uzbekistan, 2009
"The United States has
no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is building one
of its fortress embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan, just as it is
building a $1 billion embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Just as
it has built an enormous fortress in Baghdad, Iraq. Whatever happens
to American ground troops who eventually will be withdrawn, will
make no difference to the significance of the violent American
presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in Iraq. These are seen
as places where the United States will have a permanent presence
- a strategic position - where it will be able to monitor, and
perhaps influence, and perhaps control the influences of its imperial
rivals."
John Pilger
"It is estimated that 130,000
- 150,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed in the U.S. invasion
and occupation of Afghanistan. As for innocent civilians, the
estimate is about 875,000 to have been killed since 2001, with
a minimum of 640,000 and a maximum of 1.4 million."
Nicolas JS Davies, 2018
"The war on Afghanistan
of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the
arms industry, accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants,
and lacking purpose other than maintaining an unneeded empire
and funneling money to the Complex."
Fred Reed, 2018
"There is ample evidence
that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels,
governmental services, relations among ethnic groups, and quality
of life-all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists
than under the Taliban or the present government of President
Hamid Karzai."
Chalmers Johnson, 2008
"One of the hidden objectives
of the war In Afghanistan was effectively to restore the CIA sponsored
drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over
the drug routes."
Michel Chossudovsky in his book
" America's War on Terrorism"
"Almost eight years after
the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic
and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued
domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that
ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.
... The government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords
and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban.
... Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of
abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated
by fundamentalists."
Afghan peace activist Malalai Joya,
2009
AFRICA
"It can never be underestimated
the extent of underdevelopment that Africa has been historically
hobbled with from American and European colonial and neocolonial
economic exploitation."
Finian Cunningham, 201
"The West has a real stake
in keeping Africa poor. People in Western countries have sincere
feelings of charity and they have faith that aid works - but Western
governments and multi-national corporations reap enormous benefits
from the continued instability and destitution of African countries.
The successful manipulation of cheap labor and agricultural products,
smuggled resources, and arms trading relies on corrupt politicians,
prolonged warfare, and an underdeveloped civil society that lacks
the capacity to stand up for its rights. If there were peace and
transparency in the Congo, it would be much more difficult - if
not impossible - for foreign corporations to exploit the mineral
resources; if there were no rebel groups or tribal conflicts,
there would be no market for small arms."
Jenny Williams, worked with NGOs
in Africa, 2006
"'Western powers' real
concern is that African states will opt for Chinese deals to free
themselves from the punitive conditions of IMF-World Bank loans
and other forms of financial dependence on Europe and the United
States."
Lena Weinstein, 2008
"The continent of Africa
went from a net exporter of food in the late 1960s to a net importer
today - thanks to the World Bank and the WTO riding roughshod
through the continent in the same cavalry unit as the four horsemen
of the apocalypse. The Bank's "structural adjustment programs"
and the WTO's "tariff reductions" don't quite have the
ring of war, pestilence, famine, and death, but they have been
just as devastating."
John Feffer, 2008
"At the heart of Africa's
suffering, is the West's, and most notably the United States',
desire to access Africa's diamonds, oil, natural gas, and other
precious resources. The West has set in motion a policy of oppression,
destabilization and a ruthless desire to enrich itself on Africa's
fabulous wealth. Western countries have incited rebellion against
stable African governments, and have even actively participated
in the assassination of duly elected and legitimate African Heads
of State and replaced them with corrupted and malleable officials."
John Perkins
"US policy was instrumental
in the break-up of Sudan into Northern and Southern states in
2011-2012. That, in turn, has wrecked the economies of both states
and fomented conflicts, leading to massive displacement of communities.
Somalia on the Horn of Africa was invaded by US forces in the
early 1990s and for the past three decades has been destabilized
by relentless American military aggression from naval, air and
drone strikes in a so-called "war on terror".
Africa's mass emigrations can also be traced directly to US and
NATO European members waging illegal wars in several countries,
including Libya, Mali, Niger, Ivory Coast and the Central African
Republic. US-backed proxy wars in Angola, Uganda, Democratic Republic
of Congo and Mozambique have too left a baleful legacy."
Finian Cunningham, 2017
"In the wars in Iraq, Libya,
Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria, America has destroyed any
significant progress those nations had made in education, healthcare,
infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity, postal
services, courts. By degrading the standards of living for people
in perceived "hostile" nations, America's ruling elite
empowers itself, while claiming that it has ensured the safety
and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able
to convince the public that its criminal actions are "humanitarian"
and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys."
Douglas Valentine, 2017
ARGENTINA
"The Argentine dictatorship
was a land of sheer, open terror. Nothing in Latin America, not
even Pinochet's Chile, could equal the levels of violence that
followed the military coup of March 1976. Indeed, the only regime
to create a state of fear approximating that in Argentina was
Hitler's Germany."
Penny Lernoux in her book "Cry
of the People"
"No Latin American country,
not even Pinochet's Chile, could equal the levels of violence
that followed the military coup of March 24, 1976, in Argentina.
Indeed, the only regime to create a state of fear approximating
that of Argentina was Hitler's Germany. As many as thirty thousand
political prisoners (including students, union organizers, journalists,
and even pregnant women were killed or disappeared during the
1976-1983 "Dirty War," which was fully endorsed by the
Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.
... The CIA and the US State Department remained primary sponsors
of the Argentine military junta, which was led by General Jorge
Videla. On February 16, 1976, six weeks before the coup, Robert
Hill, the US ambassador to Argentina, reported to Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger that the plans for the coup were underway
and that a public relations campaign had been mounted that would
cast the new military regime in a positive light."
Paul L. Williams
"In Argentina, more than
thirty thousand persons disappeared during the "dirty war"
between 1976 and 1979, four hundred of them children kidnapped
with their parents or born in captivity. The vast majority of
the disappeared remain unaccounted for."
Kate Millett
"In October 1976, Argentine
Foreign Minister, Admiral Cesar Guzzetti met with Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in
Washington. The meeting was to discuss the military junta's proposal
for massive repression of opposition in the country. According
to declassified US State Department documents released only years
later, Kissinger and Rockefeller not only indicated their approval,
but Rockefeller even suggested specific key individuals in Argentina
to be targeted for elimination. At least 15,000 intellectuals,
labor leaders and opposition figures disappeared in the so-called
"dirty war"."
F. William Engdahl
"In 1993 Argentine President
Carlos Menem, a close friend of Citigroup and the Bush family,
resigned amidst a major drug scandal. Menem was just the latest
in a series of crooks to run Argentina, long a favorite drop point
for Southeast Asian HSBC-financed heroin entering Latin America.
In 1968 the CIA began training police and right-wing death squads
in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina to attack leftist revolutionary
groups. The region became an Orwellian nexus of bloody fascist
dictators and drug running."
Dean Henderson
"If there was a country
where Monsanto could do whatever it wanted without the slightest
obstacle, that country was Argentina. Half the cultivated land
the country was planted with transgenic soybeans - 35 million
acres - and a million tons harvested, 90 percent of which was
exported.
... Monsanto's RR soybeans spread from the Argentine pampas like
wildfire. Covering only 90,000 acres in 1971, soybeans spread
over 20 million acres in 2000, 24 million in 2001, 29 million
in 2002, and reached more than 39 million acres in 2007, accounting
for 60 percent of the cultivated land.
... RR soybeans continued their irresistible advance, transforming
what was once the breadbasket of the world into a producer of
cattle feed for the European market.
... From 1996-97 to 2001-2, the number of tambos (dairy farms)
decreased by 27 percent and, for the first time in its history,
Argentina had to import milk from Uruguay. Similarly, the production
of rice fell by 44 percent, corn by 26 percent, sunflowers by
34 percent, and pork by 36 percent. In tandem with this movement
came a staggering rise in the prices of basic consumer products:
in 2003, for example, the price of flour went up 162 percent,
lentils - a major element in the national diet - by 272 percent,
and rice by 130 percent."
Marie-Monique Robin
"In January 1981 Ronald
Reagan took office, and he greatly expanded the CIA's guerilla
warfare and sabotage campaigns. In November 1981 Reagan authorized
a covert plan for $19 million to help the Argentina dictatorship
train a guerilla force operating from camps in Honduras to attack
Nicaragua."
David Model
"It was under Lyndon Johnson's
watch that the United States began to shift the balance of its
Latin American diplomacy away from development toward the interests
of private capital. Increasingly, economic reform in Latin America
meant not industrialization and socially responsible investment
but lower tariffs on U.S. exports and lower tax rates on U.S.
profits, a policy that would come to full bloom under Ronald Reagan.
It was also under Johnson that Washington began either to organize
or patronize a cycle of coups starting in Brazil in 1964, continuing
through Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile, and ending in Argentina in
1976."
Greg Grandin
The IMF has become a tool of
a predatory force of international financier circles. Now, we've
got to the point that if we try to collect the debts, as they
are now, civilization will vanish from the planet for some time
to come. That is, it's not possible to collect the debts, and
for civilization to survive.
That's what you see in Argentina. It's not possible for Argentina
to pay this debt and for Argentina to survive physically as a
nation and people. This is true also for the entirety of South
and Central America. Very soon, sooner or later, but in the near
future, every country in South and Central America will be destroyed.
... So therefore, the choice is, either you meet the obligations
imposed by the IMF and thus give up civilization, accept global
genocide; or you say, no."
Lyndon LaRouche, 2004
"In October 1976, Argentine
Foreign Minister, Admiral Cesar Guzzetti met with Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in
Washington. The meeting was to discuss the military junta's proposal
for massive repression of opposition in the country. According
to declassified US State Department documents released only years
later, Kissinger and Rockefeller not only indicated their approval,
but Rockefeller even suggested specific key individuals in Argentina
to be targeted for elimination. At least 15,000 intellectuals,
labor leaders and opposition figures disappeared in the so-called
'dirty war'."
F. William Engdahl, 2007
"In 1993 Argentine President
Carlos Menem, a close friend of Citigroup and the Bush family,
resigned amidst a major drug scandal. Menem was just the latest
in a series of crooks to run Argentina, long a favorite drop point
for Southeast Asian HSBC-financed heroin entering Latin America.
In 1968 the CIA began training police and right-wing death squads
in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina to attack leftist revolutionary
groups. The region became an Orwellian nexus of bloody fascist
dictators and CIA/P-2 drug running.
Decades of drug corruption have left the Argentine economy in
shambles. In late 2001 Argentina defaulted on its $132 billion
debt to the international bankers led by Citigroup. Argentine
protestors attacked banks, the Argentine peso was severely devalued
and the IMF issued the typical austerity demands. Five Presidents
later, Argentina has refused to comply with IMF demands and remains
cut off from international lending."
Dean Henderson, 2005
"GMO contamination benefits
only multinational corporations like Monsanto. Once everything
is contaminated, the company will be able to take control of the
most widely grown grain in the world and collect royalties as
in Argentina and Brazil."
Aldo Gonzalez one of the leaders
of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca,
2006
"The Bank of Santander
is a predatory instrument of Europe in South and Central America.
And now, in a sense, with the IMF backing, and with backing from
European governments and from the U.S. government, they have imposed
a cruel dictatorship upon Argentina."
Lyndon LaRouche, 2004
"The impact of mass soybean
monoculture in Argentina was horrendous. Traditional farming communities
close to the huge soybean plantations were seriously affected
by the aerial spraying of Monsanto Roundup herbicides.
... A study conducted in 2003 showed that the spraying had not
only destroyed the nearby peasants' crops: their chickens had
died and other animals, especially horses, were adversely affected.
... On average, the Roundup soybean crops gave between 5% to 15%
lower yields than traditional soybean crops. Also, far from needing
less herbicide, farmers found vicious new weeds which needed up
to three times as much spraying as before.
... By 2004, GMO soybean had spread across the entire country
of Argentina, and the seeds all depended on Monsanto Roundup pesticide.
A more perfect scheme of human bondage would be hard to imagine."
F. William Engdahl
"Two years ago, researchers
found that the rubella vaccine used in a campaign in Argentina
was laced with Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG), a pregnancy
hormone that is necessary for a newly conceived zygote to implant
in the uterine wall after conception.
When the body receives HCG in a vaccine, it perceives it as an
intruder and creates antibodies that fight the presence of the
hormone in the body. The body's immunological response is turned
against pregnancy, causing abortions when conception occurs."
Catherine J. Frompovich, 2013
"The CIA and the US State
Department remained primary sponsors of the Argentine military
junta, which was led by General Jorge Videla. On February 16,
1976, six weeks before the Argentine coup, Robert Hill, the US
ambassador to Argentina, reported to Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger that the plans for the coup were underway and that a
public relations campaign had been mounted that would cast the
new military regime in a positive light."
Paul L. Williams
"The introduction of GMOs
into Argentina came about with no public or even parliamentary
debate. There is still no law regulating their marketing. After
they were authorized in 1996, Monsanto's RR soybeans spread through
Argentina at an absolutely unprecedented speed in the history
of agriculture: an average of more than two million acres a year.
"
Walter Pengue, an agricultural
engineer at the University of Buenos Aires
BOLIVIA
"Bolivia is, in my opinion
at least, probably the most democratic country in the world. Nobody
says that, but if you look at what happened in the last couple
of years, there were huge, popular, mass organizations of the
most repressed population in the hemisphere, the indigenous population,
which for the first time ever has entered the political arena
significantly and were able to elect a president from their own
ranks and one who doesn't give instructions to his army, but who's
following policies that were largely produced by the population.
So he's their representative, in a sense in which democracy is
supposed to work."
Noam Chomsky, 2009
"The U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), a CIA cipher, and George Soros's Open Society
Institute, used Bolivian front groups to inundate Bolivia with
anti-Morales propaganda."
Wayne Madsen
"To fund the Bolivian army,
CIA- suported dictator Hugo Banzer ordered coca trees to be planted
throughout the country's ailing cotton fields. Between 1974 and
1980, land in coca production tripled. The coca was exported to
Columbian cartel laboratories. A multibillion dollar industry
was born. The tremendous upsurge in coca supply from Bolivia sharply
drove down the price of cocaine, fueling a huge new market and
the rise of the Colombian cartels.
... Once the Banzer Plan got underway, Bolivian officials began
compiling dossiers on church activists; censoring and shutting
down progressive Catholic media outlets; planting Communist literature
on church premises; and arresting or expelling undesirable foreign
priests and nuns. The CIA also funded anti-Marxist religious groups
that engaged in a wide range of covert operations, from bombing
churches to overthrowing constitutionally elected governments."
Paul L. Williams
"Along with former Federal
Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Citibank vice-chairman H. Anno
Ruding, who was formerly with the IMF, and Harvard Professor Jeffrey
Sachs, George Soros had a big hand in creating the Polish model
of "shock therapy." Jeffrey Sachs drew Soros's attention
through his work in implementing IMF-style "shock therapy"
in Bolivia."
Executive Intelligence Review Special
Report, 1997
"The ambassador of the
United States is conspiring against democracy and wants Bolivia
to break apart."
Bolivian President Evo Morales,
in the United States, September 2008
"The United States will
try to promote the fragmentation of territorial units such as
the Bolivian nation state through the promotion of secession movements
in the name of democracy."
Forrest Hylton
"Declassified documents
and interviews on the ground in Bolivia prove that the Bush Administration
is using U.S. taxpayers' money to undermine the Morales government
and co-opt the country's dynamic social movements - just as it
has tried to do recently in Venezuela and traditionally throughout
Latin America. Much of that money is going through the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID)."
Ben Dangl, 2008
"At U.S. urging, Bolivia
sold off majority control of its oil and gas company to Enron
and Shell in December 1996 for $263.5 million, well less than
1 percent of what the gas alone is worth today. A decade later,
indigenous Bolivians have the receipt and are demanding a refund."
Ryan Grim, 2005
BRAZIL
"USAID directed Brazil's
population reduction program, and organizations like the International
Planned Parenthood Federation and Family Health International
were involved. After 14 years of involuntary sterilizations, the
Brazilian Health Ministry estimated 44% of women from 14-55 were
sterile, including 90% of African descent."
Stephen Lendman, 2010
"Torture became systematically
employed by the Brazilian state after the 1964 coup, whether as
a method of collecting information or obtaining confessions (technique
of interrogation), or as a means of disseminating fear (strategy
of intimidation). Torture ceased being restricted to the violent
methods already employed by the Brazilian police against common
criminals, becoming more sophisticated and turning into the essence
of the military system of political repression, based on the arguments
of the supremacy of national security and the existence of a war
against terrorism."
Bill Van Auken, 2014
[report detailing the political murders, torture and other
crimes carried out during two decades of dictatorship that began
with a US-backed military coup in 1964
Brazilian Commission Details Murder and Torture by US-backed Dictatorship]
"The game plan of Operation
Condor was developed, in part, in the 1950s at the Brazilian Advanced
War College (Escola Superior de Guerra), a carbon copy of the
US National War College.
... In 1964, the graduates of the college united into a junta
that overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government
of João Goulart... Within two years of Goulart's overthrow,
foreign companies gained control of 50 percent of Brazilian industry...
By 1971, fourteen of the country's twenty-seven largest companies
were in foreign hands; of the remainder, eight were state-owned
and only five were private Brazilian firms."
Paul L. Williams, 2015
"Abraham Lincoln Gordon
was Washington's director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964,
which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João
Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years
of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship."
William Blum, 2010
"A 1986 study was Commissioned
by the new civilian government in Brazil. It presented a by-now
familiar picture of Brazil. Although boasting the eighth largest
economy in the Western world, Brazil fell into the same category
as the less developed African or Asian countries when it came
to social welfare indices"; this was the result of "two
decades of a free hand for the technocrats" and the approved
neoliberal doctrines, which "increased the cake" while
leaving "one of the most unequal income distributions in
the world" and "appalling deficiencies" in health
and welfare generally."
Noam Chomsky
"Generations of Brazilian
officers ... came to the United States for military courses. They
returned profoundly influenced by a new theory of national defense.
They had learned in America that fortifying their national system
against external attack was "far less important than shoring
up institutions against an 'internal enemy' that might be trying
to undermine them."
Kate Millett
"Every door was opened
to foreign investment incentive, easy credit, land purchase; huge
projects were undertaken, massive indebtedness was built up as
the living conditions of Brazilian citizens deteriorated. This
neocolonial situation where one nation holds sway over a formally
independent country, extracting economic and political benefits,
gradually requires greater and greater military enforcement."
Kate Millett
"The practice of using
live subjects, according to the Report of the Archdiocese [Brazil],
was introduced by the American police instructor Dan Mitrione
in the early years of the regime: "Mitrione took beggars
off the streets and tortured them in classrooms, so that the local
police would learn the various ways of creating, in the prisoner,
the supreme contradiction between the body and the mind by striking
blows to vulnerable points of the body." When Mitrione was
transferred to Uruguay to teach policemen there, the use of live
subjects could be refined upon."
Kate Millett
*****
the quotes below are
from Penny Lernoux's book Cry of the People
"The "institutionalization"
of violence in Brazil was rationalized by both Washington and
corporate industry as an unpleasant but necessary corollary of
development, the theory being that only a strong government could
drag Brazil into the twentieth century. As long as Brazil's gross
national product could show a reasonable growth, and as long as
the regime's representatives spoke piously about human rights
and democracy in international forums, the rest of the world would
look the other way."
"3 percent of the landowners
[in Brazil] control 80 percent of the arable land, and the multinational
corporations are establishing ranches of 500,000 acres and more
in the Amazon."
"Were it not for the guns,
for the torture, and the terror, Brazil's military regime could
not survive. And were it not for this regime, foreign corporations
could not continue to make enormous profits at the expense of
the people. The government has all the legal instruments necessary
to control these companies, and so has the United States."
"80 percent of the officers
who carried out the 1964 coup against President Goulart [Brazil]
had been trained by the United States."
"Because of Peron's lasting
influence, fascism never died in Argentina and could be revived
with little or no outside prompting; in Brazil it was reborn thanks
largely to Brazil's "greatest friend," the United States."
"80 percent of the officers
who carried out the 1964 coup against Brazilian President Goulart
had been trained by the United States."