Cuba Commemorates US Bombing Of Its Airports, Says Still Under Attacks 53 Years On

Cuba Commemorates US Bombing Of Its Airports, Says Still Under Attacks 53 Years On

HAVANA, April 16 (BERNAMA-NNN-Prensa Latina) -- Cuba commemorates on Tuesday the 53rd anniversary of the bombings of its airports, ordered by the government of the United States and resulting in the prelude of the mercenary invasion that was defeated in record time in Playa Giron (Bay of Pigs).

The commemoration is taking place at a time when evidence shows new modalities of aggression against Cuba, described as non-conventional warfare in a training handbook of the Special Operation Forces of the U.S. Army.

At the dawn of Saturday, April 15, 1961, enemy planes camouflaged as aircraft of the recently-founded Revolutionary Armed Forces, attacked the airport in Ciudad Libertad (in the capital), the air base in San Antonio de los Banos (southeast of Havana) and the airport in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba.

Eight B-26 planes departed from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, with the mission of destroying, on the ground, Cuba's modest aviation and guaranteeing the impunity of other incursions.
A fleet, armed and financed by the U.S. government had departed from that Nicaraguan city, carrying a mercenary brigade whose mission was to occupy a beachhead from where they would announce the establishment of a puppet government.

More:
http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v7/wn/newsworld.php?id=1030998

What Communist Conspiracy? Brazil’s 1964 Coup

April 15, 2014
What Communist Conspiracy?

Brazil’s 1964 Coup

by MICHAEL UHL
#1

It all began with Cuba in 1959. That was a line in the sand for Tio Sam. Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress in ‘61, and caudillos throughout South and Central America lined up for lessons on how to prevent their own homegrown communists from reproducing what Fidel and El Che had brought down from the Sierra Maestras. The School of the Americas’ manual of torture, originally drafted in Scotland and likely passed along during WWII to eager Yanks in the OSS, was in due course thumped like the bible into the hands of willing thugs in the pay of ruling elites from Guatemala to Chile. In Brazil, when the military grabbed the reins of government on April 1, 1964, the torture manual came off the shelf for immediate application to those who were obnoxious to the dictatorship ideologically, and with lethal consequences for some who fought from the more militant wings of the resistance.

I was in Brazil at the time of the 1964 coup, spending a year at Rio’s exclusive Catholic University (PUC). I spent considerable time at first with a guy named Bud who worked for USIA, the “public” face of American overseas diplomacy. The agency operated cultural programs and libraries, also, back in D.C., Voice of America, where I worked part time as a Georgetown undergrad. My friend was a good guy, a kind of mentor twenty years my senior who welcomed me into his family as I slowly acclimated to the seductive lifestyle of the Brazilian gentry on the coattails of their sons and daughters, my classmates, who would invite me home for the hot sit down midday meal, cooked and served by the black live-inempregadas. An American student was a novelty in those days, and, being short of funds, I was happy to eat out on it.

After a month I met Chris, an American my own age who’d been ski bumming in the Alps and drifted to Brazil to look up an uncle who held the second highest rank in the U.S. Embassy. Chris had just received his draft notice from home, and we got it in our heads to hitchhike to the Amazon where he’d hideout and avoid military service now that Vietnam was coming on with a vengeance. I don’t recall if we clued Bud in about the exact reason for our abrupt departure from Rio, but he very kindly provided contact info for other U.S. diplomats we could crash with as we made our way north along the coast. Our first stop was in Vitoria, a small coastal port for shipping ore from the neighboring but landlocked mineral rich state of Minas Gerais. The diplomat we stayed with in Vitoria, Bud had explained, was setting up a coop to rival a similar effort influenced by the local communists who, by that time in Brazil, were organized into a mélange of currents on all sides of the Sino Soviet split.

This guy in Vitoria, absent the charisma, was cut to the Dr. Tom Dooley mold, one of the hordes of Cold War zealots the U.S. had posted for mischief in the guise of good works throughout the backwaters of the non-communist world. On paper, of course, the Alliance was a blue print for bloody utopia. Here’s the Wiki version of what it claimed to have stood for: “an annual increase of 2.5% in per capita income, the establishment of democratic governments, the elimination of adult illiteracy by 1970, price stability, to avoid inflation or deflation, more equitable income distribution, land reform, and economic and social planning.” It read well in Nebraska, but it was not the masses, but the Brazilian burguesia and latifundists who were the real U.S. clients, and they were hardly down for a program that altered the social balance. If people could read, they could vote. What might that lead to?

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/15/brazils-1964-coup/

Thoughts go out to DU'ers true friend, ocpagu, whose intelligent, kind presence here led us to feel far closer to Brazil, as she helped us see the country through new, awakened eyes.

Honduras Is Combating Its Homicide Epidemic With Militarization

Honduras Is Combating Its Homicide Epidemic With Militarization
By Giorgio Trucchi
April 16, 2014 | 7:09 am

In March of 2013, images captured on a public security camera in a busy area of the capital city of Tegucigalpa shocked Honduras.

The footage shows a group of highly trained and militarized hooded kidnappers, over the course of just a few minutes, surround two young people, force them to lie flat on the ground, and viciously execute them with a spray of bullets — calmly retreating afterward in several different vehicles.

This brutal felony has yet to be solved — and is just one of the tens of thousands of murders that have gone completely unpunished in the last years. According to official data from the Public Ministry of Honduras, only 20 of every 100 murder cases are ever investigated, and of those only a few go to trial or reach a verdict.

“In this country there is total impunity, and the judicial system works well only for the perpetrators… while it works completely against the victims,” said Felix Molina, a journalist and director of the Tegucigalpa Resistance Radio Program.

Molina, who is an authority on regional violence and an expert on Honduran human rights violations, told VICE News that the system was especially kind to “those behind the 2009 attack against president Manuel Zelaya,” who was forced into exile in Costa Rica in what the Honduras Truth Commission subsequently determined was an illegal coup d’état.

More:
https://news.vice.com/articles/honduras-is-combating-its-homicide-epidemic-with-militarization?trk_source=homepage-in-the-news

Criminalization of Social Movements and the Political Opposition in Colombia

April 15, 2014
From Massive to Selective Detentions

Criminalization of Social Movements and the Political Opposition in Colombia

by LILANY OBANDO

Although we Colombians, especially those of us who belong to social, human rights, and political organizations and labor unions, are used to carrying out our work in risky situations, sometimes things get worse. This is one of those unlucky times. It coincides with the pre-election contest.

In a cycle that repeatedly sends us back to a repressive past – one they don’t want to close down – we are witness to a perverse return to obscurantism and forced unanimity, to dissident thinking being considered subversive, to social protest having to be silenced at whatever cost, and where opposition guarantees are only a chimera. These are practices far removed from the duty of a state, especially one proclaiming itself as the continent’s oldest, most solid “democracy.”

Many years ago, and in tune with the U. S. obsession for transforming the idea of security into state policy, one outcome being anti-terrorism, the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez during his first term (2002-2006) instituted in Colombia the politics of “Democratic Security.” That gave rise to a series of actions damaging to the right to liberty, to guarantees like equality, legality, and judicial norms, and, generally, to an international framework for human rights.

The strategy of arbitrary detentions imposed under the pretext of maintaining security of the state, and for “good citizens,” has its origins there. The modalities used were illegal interceptions, the network of informants, the Law of Justice and Peace and its accusers, and intelligence reports – or battlefield reports. They fueled judicial set-ups.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/15/criminalization-of-social-movements-and-the-political-opposition-in-colombia/

Vermont Lawmakers Pass Country’s First No-Strings-Attached GMO Labeling Law

April 16, 2014 2:59 PM
Katherine Paul, 207.653.3090

Vermont Lawmakers Pass Country’s First No-Strings-Attached GMO Labeling Law


FINLAND, Minn. - April 16 - Today, by a vote of 28 to 2, the Vermont state senate passed H.112, a bill to require mandatory labeling of foods sold in Vermont that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The bill also makes it illegal to call any food product containing GMOs “natural” or “all natural.” Unlike bills passed last year in Maine and Connecticut, which require four or five other states to pass GMO labeling laws before they can be enacted, Vermont’s law contains no “trigger” clauses, making it the first “clean” GMO labeling law in the country.

The bill now goes back to the House which is expected to agree to the Senate’s amendments, then to Gov. Peter Shumlin who is expected to sign it.

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), issued the following statement:

Today’s victory in Vermont has been 20 years in the making. Ever since genetically modified crops and foods entered the U.S. food supply in the early 1990s, without adequate independent pre-market safety testing and without labels, U.S. consumers have fought to require the labeling of foods containing GMOs.

Consumer demand for mandatory labeling of GMOs spawned a national grassroots movement that has persevered despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the biotech and food industries to lobby state lawmakers in Vermont, and to fund anti-labeling campaigns in California (2012) and Washington State (2013).

More:
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2014/04/16-3

30 Venezuelan officers arrested over plot to oust President Maduro

30 Venezuelan officers arrested over plot to oust President Maduro
Apr Wednesday 16th 2014
posted by Morning Star

Alleged 'destabilisation attempt' was planned for March 20


Thirty military officers have been arrested for allegedly plotting to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, national newspaper Ultimas Noticias reported on Monday.

“High-level sources” at the presidential palace told reporters that most of those arrested were from the air force, but some were from the national guard, navy and army.

Seven generals were included in the haul.

The officers were put under observation after loyal members of the military told the intelligence services that “something strange” was being planned.

Ultimas Noticias said the “destabilisation attempt” was planned for March 20, with “air operations and eventual shooting of soldiers and other events planned to cause confusion and clashes.”

More:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-4088-30-Venezuelan-officers-arrested-over-plot-to-oust-President-Maduro#.U03i52ePLmI

Cuban doctors in eye of Venezuelan hurricane; program popular with poor, maddening to critics

Cuban doctors in eye of Venezuelan hurricane; program popular with poor, maddening to critics
By Andrea Rodriguez, The Associated Press April 16, 2014 12:40 AM

CARACAS, Venezuela - When Judith Faraiz's son was near death after a severe motorcycle accident, she put his life in the hands of God and Cuban doctors.

Like many in Petare, a sprawling hillside slum of crumbling brick buildings on the eastern outskirts of Caracas, Faraiz has come to rely on Cuban physicians for free health services in a country where private care is too expensive for the poor and public hospitals have a dismal reputation.

The link is vital for both governments: In exchange for the services of its doctors and other professionals, Havana gets an estimated $3.2 billion in cut-rate Venezuelan oil that is a lifeline for Cuba's ailing economy. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, for his part, relies on social programs such as these to shore up support among his poor power base even as his approval ratings fall hand-in-hand with a faltering economy.

The Cuban doctors are the most visible symbol of the controversial collaboration between the two countries during 15 years of socialist rule in Venezuela, and increasingly they are a flashpoint for the violent unrest that has rocked the country since February and is blamed for at more than 40 deaths.

More:
http://www.canada.com/news/world/Cuban+doctors+Venezuelan+hurricane+program+popular+with+poor/9742447/story.html

What Venezuelan ‘Regime Change’ Could Mean

What Venezuelan ‘Regime Change’ Could Mean

April 15, 2014

Exclusive: Venezuela’s socialist government may be next on Official Washington’s list for destabilizing sanctions as violent protests sweep across the oil-rich country. But “regime change” in Caracas also could undermine the entire region’s independence, as Andrés Cala explains.

By Andrés Cala

For 15 years, the economic keystone of Latin America’s growing independence from U.S. domination has been energy-rich Venezuela’s willingness to provide discounted oil to many of its neighbors, a project now at risk amid violent opposition protests at home and threats of destabilizing sanctions from Washington.

The preferential financial terms for oil was the brainchild of Venezuela’s late leader Hugo Chavez who understood that the only way that he could counter America’s economic might was to use his nation’s petroleum to stabilize the fragile economies of Caribbean and Latin American countries, including longtime U.S. target, Cuba.

Stronger South American nations benefited, too, from the geopolitical umbrella offered by Venezuela, allowing them to stand united against U.S. diplomatic dictates, especially in Bolivia and Ecuador. In that sense, Venezuela’s oil literally fueled the region’s growing independence from Washington.

So, the thinking goes that if “regime change” in Caracas could pull away the keystone of Venezuela’s discounted oil, much of the region’s independence would collapse along with it to the advantage of Washington.

More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/15/what-venezuelan-regime-change-could-mean/

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

Published on Monday, April 14, 2014 by Common Dreams

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

by Eric Zuesse

study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, "Who governs? Who really rules?" in this country, is:

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, ..." and then they go on to say, it's not true, and that, "America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened" by the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy.

The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled "Testing Theories of American Politics." The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the U.S. by the super-rich:

Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans – though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases – is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.

More:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/14

Obama plans to host Uruguay's president next month

Obama plans to host Uruguay's president next month
Apr 14, 4:40 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House says Uruguay's president is planning to visit next month.

The White House says the May 12 visit will highlight the Obama administration's support for President Jose Mujica's (moo-HEE'-kuh) record on human rights and global security. The White House says President Barack Obama also wants to discuss growing economic ties and other issues.

Mujica has said recently that the two countries are negotiating a release of some Guantanamo Bay detainees into Uruguay.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_URUGUAY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-04-14-16-40-15

(Short article, no more at link.)

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