http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4077735Source: AP
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) - Brazil's vice president says his country should develop nuclear weapons.
Jose Alencar says "a nuclear weapon has great importance" to prevent attacks on Brazil because of its extensive borders and maritime holdings. Alencar tells Brazilian newspapers that Brazil doesn't have a program to develop nuclear weapons, but should.
Alencar's influence is relatively limited and he is not a member of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's party. Brazilian officials insist they are developing nuclear energy only for peaceful means.
Alencar aide Adriano Silva confirms the comments published Friday by newspapers including O Globo and O Estado de Sao Paulo. He says they are personal opinions and not a position of the government. -----------------
First of all, this article establishes that at least two countries in South America are developing nuclear energy--Venezuela and Brazil. But it raises another important point...
Apparently, there are a lot of people in South America worried about the US military behemoth taking their resources by force--as the US did to Iraq at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. The President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, for instance, has said that the Bushwhack reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean is a threat to
Brazil's oil. (Everybody south of the border knows that it is a threat to Venezuela's.) And, though this Brazilian VP is not speaking for da Silva or the government, on this issue (nuclear arms), the fear of attack that he expresses is widespread, and has been recently exacerbated by the US plan for
seven new US military bases in Colombia--a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth, and which just happens to border Venezuela's main oil region.
Further, there is evidence that the US colluded with Colombia last year to conduct a bombing/raid on Ecuador's territory (in which they slaughtered 25 sleeping people--suspected FARC guerrillas--without benefit of trial). Ecuador has one of the other huge oil reserves in South America, and Colombia also borders its main oil region. A third reason for worry, among South Americans, is the US's slow response to restoring democracy in the US client state of Honduras, where a rightwing military junta is killing protestors and union and other activists, beating up and torturing people, and has the country clamped down with martial law. Only recently has the US seemed serious about stopping this outrage--more than two months into the junta--and even now the junta seems confident enough in US rightwing and Pentagon support that it is defying all efforts to mediate the crisis.
US policy is driving all of this fear. South America has suffered a century of rightwing dictatorships, human rights horrors and extreme poverty, at the hands of the US,. South America has no other enemy. Obama may want a different policy--and has a stated policy of peace, respect and cooperation in Latin America--but he does not seem to have sufficient power to implement it. Bushwhack war plans, plots and intense psyops/disinformation continue without let. This is WHY Venezuela seeks friends and allies in Russia, Iran and China, and other countries. It is US oil target
Number One. This is WHY Brazil's VP speaks of developing nuclear weapons. This is WHY Brazil's president has expressed fear of the US. This is WHY all of South America is alarmed by the greatly increased US military presence in Colombia. While China and India have the protection and prestige of nuclear armaments, the rest of the third world has no protection from US aggression--except for the strength of their political/economic regional alliances (as in South America, with their new "common market," UNASUR, which helped fend off a Bushwhack funded and organized coup in Bolivia in September of last year) and their alliances outside their region, in particular with the countries that likely blocked the US nuking of Iran (Russia and China, i.e., countries the US fears and cannot bully).
Chavez, da Silva and other South American leaders have expressed a very important point about the current world context and the future--and that is, that the US has to get used to a multipolar world, and give up its intentions to dominate and bully everybody else. These intentions have by no means been "taken off the table" just because Obama is president. Obama can easily--easily!--be Diebolded (or, I should say, ES&S-ed) out of office in 2012, and a new warmonger installed who could be even worse than Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, while the people of the US stand helplessly by, because our very vote-counting system has been hijacked by far rightwing corporations (of which ES&S is the worst--worse than Diebold!). (Note: ES&S just bought out Diebold and now has a monopoly on our vote counting system, which permits 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code with virtually no audit/recount controls. ES&S has truly hair-raising far rightwing connections).
Are our war profiteers, global corporate predators and fascist politicians going to give up their ambition to control the world? Not willingly, that's for sure. We might curtail them by restoring democracy here (starting with ridding ourselves of private, rightwing, corporate voting systems). Or they may be curtailed on some "Projects for the New American Century" the way they were curtailed from nuking Iran (fear of Armageddon--i.e., Russia and/or China coming into it--by some in our political/military establishment). Or they may not be curtailed until the last of their "cannon fodder" is dead or wounded, more areas of the world are devastated by the US war machine, and our country utterly collapses from the weight of military expenditures combined with massive looting by the rich.
I fervently hope for the first remedy--that we restore democracy here before it is too late.
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