A Time to Unite and March Together

Fidel Castro
September 6, 2009
(Translation by Socialist Voice)

“The establishment of seven U.S. military bases in Colombia poses a direct threat to the sovereignty and integrity of the other peoples of South and Central America with which our national heroes dreamed of creating the great Latin American homeland.”

U.S. Air Base at Manta, Ecuador to be eliminated when its 30 year lease expires in 2009
(Photo: Defendamerica.mil)

This Reflection is addressed not to the governments but to the fraternal peoples of Latin America.

Tomorrow, August 28, the summit of UNASUR [Union of South American Nations] will convene in Argentina, and its significance cannot be overlooked. The conference must analyze the granting of seven military bases in Colombian territory to the U.S. superpower. The two governments kept their preparatory discussions a rigorous secret, so that the accord could be presented to the world as a fait accompli.

In the early morning hours of March 1, 2008, the Colombian Armed Forces – trained and equipped by the United States – attacked with precision bombs a guerrilla group which had entered a remote area of the Ecuadorian territory. At dawn, airborne elite Colombian troops occupied the small camp, killed the wounded and carried off with them the dead body of guerrilla leader Raul Reyes.

Apparently, he had been meeting with young visitors from other countries who were interested in the experience of the guerrillas engaged in armed struggle since the death of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán more than 50 years ago. Among the victims were college students from Mexico and Ecuador; they were not carrying weapons. It was a brutal action in Yankee style. The government of Ecuador had not received any advance notice of the attack.

This event was a humiliating action against the small and heroic South American nation engaged in a democratic political process. Suspicion is strong that the U.S. air base of Manta [in Ecuador] had supplied information and cooperated with the aggressors. President Rafael Correa made the brave decision to demand the return of the territory occupied by the Manta military base, in strict compliance with the terms of the military agreement with the United States, and recalled his ambassador from Bogotá.

photo on the left: Demostration Against the air field in Colombia

Seven U.S. bases in Colombia
The concession of territory for the establishment of seven U.S. military bases in Colombia poses a direct threat to the sovereignty and integrity of the other peoples of South and Central America with which our national heroes dreamed of creating the great Latin American homeland.

The Yankee imperialism is a hundred times more powerful than the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal, and a complete stranger to the origin, customs, and culture of our peoples.

It is not a matter of narrow chauvinism. “Homeland is humanity,” as Martí stated, but never under the domination of an empire which has imposed a bloody tyranny on the world. This is demonstrated beyond question in our own hemisphere by the hundreds of thousands of Latin American compatriots who were killed, tortured, and secretly murdered in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and other countries of Our America through the past five decades by coups d’état and other actions promoted or supported by the United States.

Cynical pretexts
As I analyze the arguments of the United States to try to justify the granting of military bases in Colombian territory, I can only characterize its pretexts as cynical. The U.S. claims that these bases are needed to aid the struggle against drug trafficking, terrorism, arms trafficking, illegal migration, the possession of weapons of mass destruction, nationalist outbursts, and natural disasters.

This powerful country is the largest drug purchaser and consumer on the planet. An analysis of the paper money circulating in the U.S. capital, Washington, has shown that 95 per cent of the bills have been in the hands of drug consumers. The U.S. is the largest market for and the main supplier of weapons to organized crime in Latin America, the same weapons that have killed tens of thousands of people every year south of its own borders.

It is the largest terrorist state that has ever existed. It dropped bombs on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and caused the death of millions of people with such imperialist wars as those carried out against Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries located thousands of miles away. What is more, it is also the largest producer and holder of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction.

The Colombian paramilitary, many of them former members of the Armed Forces, are part of their reserves and are the drug-traffickers’ best allies and protectors.

The so-called civilian personnel that would accompany the troops in the Colombian bases are, as a rule, expertly trained former American soldiers hired by such private companies as Blackwater, widely known for its crimes in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.

A country with self-respect needs no U.S. mercenaries, troops, or military bases to fight drug trafficking, protect the people in case of natural disasters or to provide humanitarian cooperation to other peoples.

Cuba is a country that does not have a drug problem or high rates of violent deaths – in fact the rate of such deaths decreases every year.

Threat to all Latin America
The only purpose of these bases for the United States is to place Latin America within reach of its troops in a matter of hours. The top military commanders of Brazil were very upset by the unexpected news of the agreement to establish U.S. military bases in Colombia. The Palanquero base is very close to the Brazilian border.

These bases and those in the Islas Malvinas [Falkland Islands], Paraguay, Peru, Honduras, Aruba, Curacao and others leave not a single location in Brazil and the rest of South America beyond reach of the U.S. Southern Command. Using its most advanced carrier aircraft, it can be on the spot within hours with troops and sophisticated combat equipment.

The best experts on the subject have provided all necessary data to prove the military scope of the Yankee-Colombian accord. This program, including the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet, was designed by Bush and inherited by the current U.S. administration. Some South American leaders are asking due clarification of U.S. military policy in Latin America. Nuclear aircraft-carriers are not required to combat drugs.

The most immediate objective of that plan is to eliminate the Bolivarian revolutionary process and to assure U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources. Moreover, the empire does not accept the competition of new emerging economies in its backyard or the existence of truly independent countries in Latin America. And it counts on the reactionary oligarchy, the fascist Right, and its control over the most important media, both internally and externally. It will never grant support to anything resembling true equity and social justice.

The Latin American migration to the United States is the consequence of underdevelopment, the result of U.S. plundering of our countries and of unequal exchange with the industrialized countries.

Mexico was forcibly removed from Latin America through the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. Most of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the USA are Mexicans, as are most of the hundreds who perish every year along the fence separating these nations.

Amid the current international economic crisis, the rate of extreme poverty in Mexico – a country with a population of 107 million – has reached 18 per cent, while more than half of the population lives in poverty.

Martí’s insight
During the life of Marti, the apostle of our independence, his major source of concern was annexation to the United States. After 1889 he became aware that this was the greatest danger for Latin America. He always dreamed of the Grand Homeland, from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia; and he died for it and for Cuba.

On January 10, 1891 he published an essay in the New York Illustrated Review under the title “Our America,” in which he wrote the unforgettable words, “The trees must form ranks to hold back the giant with seven-league boots! It is the time to gather and to march together, as closely united as the veins of silver at the roots of the Andes.”

Four years later, after his landing at Playitas in the eastern province of Cuba, territory held by the insurrectionists, he met on May 2, 1895, with the Herald journalist George E. Bryson, who told him that, in an interview with the celebrated General Arsenio Martinez Campos, the Spanish officer had said that he would rather surrender Cuba to the United States than accept its independence.

Marti was so impressed by the news that on May 18 he sent his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado the renowned posthumous letter where he wrote of “the road that is to be blocked off, and is being blocked off by our blood – the road of annexing our American nations to the brutal and turbulent North, which despises them.”

The following day, heedless of the advice of General Máximo Gomez, who advised that he should stay with the rearguard, he asked his assistant for a revolver and charged on a well-positioned Spanish force. He died in combat.

“I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails,” he wrote in his last letter.

(published in CubaDebate,1 August 27, 2009. Socialist Voice translation based on a translation published in the Cuban newspaper Granma2.)