Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  In the far north, next door to Mosul Airport, is Camp Marez, where on December 21, 2004, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a tent dining room, killing at least thirteen U.S. soldiers and four KBR employees. Al-Asad Air Base in the western province of Anbar is another major military airport and garrison that the United States is urgently rebuilding as one of its enduring sites. It is the second-largest air base in Iraq, with two main runways measuring fourteen thousand and thirteen thousand feet. Al-Asad is the most important base near the Syrian frontier. The Americans have one other major air base in Anbar province, al Taqaddum, near Ramadi, where Seabees have been upgrading runways and facilities. Then there is the huge complex in the south clustered around Tallil Air Base adjacent to the ancient ziggurat of Ur. Still another is Camp Renegade, a former Iraqi fighter base with facilities for at least two squadrons, located just outside the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, near the Kirkuk refinery and petrochemical plant.

  Camp Qayyarah (“Q-West” to American soldiers), a former military air base about thirty miles south of Mosul, was occupied in 2003 by units of the 101st Airborne Division. It is considered a hardship post but is located in a strategically important area. Al Sahra airfield is a sprawling former Iraqi air force base just south of Tikrit. Its army base is named Camp Speicher after navy lieutenant commander Michael Speicher, who was shot down over Iraq on January 17, 1991, the opening night of the first Persian Gulf war. It contains the largest structure the U.S. military has built in Iraq so far, a $6.7 million divisional headquarters that will replace the current headquarters, located in a monumental pink marble palace built by Saddam Hussein in his hometown. The United States gave the palace back to the Iraqis in November 2005.70

  Undoubtedly there are also some bases in Basra, currently occupied by British forces, that the United States will try to retain. But if push comes to shove, according to information gathered by Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, the United States has chosen four Iraqi bases that it will try to hang on to come what may: Tallil Air Base in the south, al-Asad Air Base in the west, Balad Air Base in the center, and either Camp Qayyarah or an unnamed airfield near Irbil in the north.71 Whether the United States retains any of these facilities and for how long is an open question. For now, however, the Americans have built a much more powerful imperial presence in Iraq than they ever enjoyed in Saudi Arabia and many billions of dollars have been spent in the process.

  Turning to other parts of the world where the United States is widely detested and there is suspicion of everything it does, Paraguay illustrates a somewhat different approach to how the U.S. military goes about penetrating an area. The U.S. Southern Command’s efforts there are aimed at keeping control over Latin America, where the United States is probably more unwelcome than at any time since the open imperialism of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

  Most citizens of Latin American countries know about our armed interventions to overthrow popularly supported governments in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), and Nicaragua (1984-90). Many know about Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy that specializes in training Latin American officers in state terrorism and repression. (It was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2000 to try to disguise its past.) Some are aware of the 1997 creation of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies within the National Defense University in Washington to indoctrinate Latin American civilian defense officials, as well as the Pentagon’s endless efforts to create close “military-to-military” relations by sending U.S. Special Forces to train and arm Latin American armies. Finally, there is the steadfast advocacy of radical free-market capitalism that, when implemented by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, have invariably left Latin American countries more indebted and poverty stricken than they were before.

  As a result of these and other accumulated grievances, by late 2005 regimes openly cool to the United States had come to power in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Venezuela. On December 18, 2005, Bolivia followed suit by electing Evo Morales, leader of the country’s indigenous population and its first Indian president, who quickly nationalized Bolivia’s extensive gas resources and was planning to legalize the growing of coca. In Ecuador, which has in the last decade alone toppled three presidents before their terms expired, a deep hostility to American-sponsored neoliberal economic policies prevails. In Mexico, the government of Vicente Fox became the hundredth nation to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty, making it unlikely that the United States will ever try to station troops there.

  Other than Colombia and Honduras, about the only place left where the American military is welcome is El Salvador, scene of numerous American-sponsored war crimes during the 1980s and the only Latin American country still to have a truly symbolic contingent of troops in Iraq. In order to push back against these anti-American trends, the Southern Command has fallen back on old tricks: it tries to merge its antidrug efforts with the war on terrorism (drug trafficking is now called “narco-terrorism”), discredits genuinely democratic outcomes by labeling them “radical populism,” and revives the old specter of “Castro Communism” in the form of a newly discovered villain, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.72

  The Southern Command is also trying in a highly stealthy manner to build Forward Operating Sites and Cooperative Security Locations in places that are so small and weak they do not have the resources even to think of resisting. As of mid-2005, the Southern Command’s older facilities in the Americas included the huge base and prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and an FOS at Soto Cano Air Base, near Palmerola, Honduras. Soto Cano houses 448 military personnel and 102 civilians and dependents. During the Reagan-era counterrevolutionary war of the Contras against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Honduras was the main support facility and, at the time, the largest CIA base on Earth. Soto Cano was acquired during that period.

  Southern Command also includes four CSLs, two located on the islands of Aruba and Curacao, both Dutch colonies in the Caribbean near Venezuela.73 Another, operated by the navy, is Comalapa, El Salvador; and the most important is Eloy Alfaro Air Base, on the Ecuadorian coast at Manta. Aruba and Curasao have about 450 military personnel between them and Comalapa about 100. The United States also possesses at least seventeen radar sites, mostly in Peru and Colombia, each typically staffed by about 35 people. There is also a Peruvian-owned base at Iquitos from which the CIA directs local military pilots to shoot down airplanes it believes are smuggling narcotics. In April 2001, planes from the base happened to shoot down a small airplane carrying an American missionary family. In Colombia, about 800 U.S. troops, Special Forces, and mercenaries are training and advising local troops trying to defeat a long-standing drug-financed guerrilla war against the Colombian establishment and incidentally protect an oil pipeline owned by the Occidental Petroleum Company.74

  The Manta base in Ecuador, which is the model for the CSL being built in Paraguay, is a perfect illustration of “mission creep.” In 1999, the Ecuadorian government agreed to let the United States refurbish an old airfield for counternarcotics surveillance flights. The American government promised that the base would be used only for daytime missions and would not permanently house U.S. military personnel.75 The United States began in a classically deceptive manner by distributing used clothing and school supplies to local day-care centers “to help the poor children... and to reach out to the community.” According to the investigative journalist Michael Flynn, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and quoting local activists, many Ecuadorians saw through this. A typical comment was: “Remember how Columbus gave glass beads to the Indians.”76 The United States has spent some $80 million upgrading the airfield and farmed out its maintenance to DynCorp, a well-known “private military company.”77

  Southcom soon expanded Manta s missions to include stopping, and in some cases sinking, ships that it
suspects of carrying illegal immigrants to the United States, coordinating a failed 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and providing military protection for American petroleum interests in the Andean region. Shortly after they arrived, American officials signed a ten-year lease agreement for the base with President Jamil Mahuad. The president, however, failed to submit the agreement to Ecuador’s Congress for approval as required by its constitution, and in 2000 Mahuad was overthrown in a military coup. Nonetheless, Manta soon acquired a contingent of 475 U.S. military personnel and a constant stream of navy warships calling at its harbor.78 The Pentagon has also not hesitated to build a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility on the base, the same kind of supersecret civil-military eavesdropping and intelligence post it has at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. It would appear that the United States has settled down in Manta unannounced on a more or less permanent basis.

  Planners in the Pentagon believed that they needed at least one more CSL in the cone of South America to monitor developments in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. They want to be ready to intervene against the new Evo Morales government, now that it has nationalized the second-largest natural gas field on the continent, should propitious circumstances develop. Paraguay seemed ideal for these purposes. A small, extremely poor, landlocked country bordering on Bolivia, Paraguay’s chief economic activities are subsistence agriculture, the illicit production and export of cannabis, and small-scale trading operations that serve primarily the interests of its two large and powerful neighbors, Argentina and Brazil. Its population as of July 2005 was a mere 6.3 million.

  One unusual feature of the country is that about 15,000 Lebanese immigrants live in the small, run-down town of Ciudad del Este where the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil converge. Many of these Lebanese arrived about twenty years ago and like their brethren in many other big Latin American cities such as Sao Paulo, Brazil, engage primarily in small retailing and textile manufacturing. Syrians and Lebanese began immigrating to Brazil more than 120 years ago, and an estimated 9 million or 5 percent of Brazil’s 186 million inhabitants have their ancestral roots in the Middle East. In fact, Brazil has more citizens of Lebanese origin than there are in Lebanon.79 Across the Parana River from Ciudad del Este is the richer and better-policed Brazilian town of Foz do Iguacu, near the most spectacular waterfalls in the Western Hemisphere. This is where most of the successful Lebanese traders actually live. The two cities together have a population of around two hundred thousand.

  This so-called triborder area has a reputation as an “unruly region,” in the words of the CIA’s unclassified World Factbook, a place where marijuana and cigarette smuggling into the Brazilian and Argentine markets has led to money laundering and arms and narcotics trafficking, much like any town on the U.S.-Mexican border.80 No one gave the place any thought until President Bush launched his global war on terror, at which time the presence of Muslims provided a pretext for future penetration. All of a sudden a spate of feverish articles appeared in American magazines typically describing the triborder area “as one of the most lawless places in the world.”81 A leader of this campaign in Washington was then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. The veteran New Yorker journalist Jeffrey Goldberg declared, “This Muslim community has in its midst a hard core of terrorists,” and Jessica Stern of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill warned in Foreign Affairs that the triborder region is “a place where terrorists with widely disparate ideologies ... meet to swap tradecraft.”82

  The problem is that there is no evidence for the presence of terrorists, or even of fund-raising activities for extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, in the triborder area. The former U.S. ambassador to Brazil said as much and the commander of Southcom, General James Hill, agreed with her. As the head of the Brazilian Federal Police in Foz remarked, “We have a marijuana problem and cigarette smuggling, but we don’t have any concrete evidence that this is a terrorist region.”83 The Brazilian ambassador to the United States wrote to Foreign Affairs complaining about “Jessica Stern’s groundless assertions.”84 According to the State Department’s annual report on “Patterns of Terrorism,” between 1961 and 2003 only 1.2 percent of worldwide terrorist activity took place in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile combined.85 Nonetheless, the Pentagon insisted that the Paraguayan government badly needed American help in fighting terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and corruption, and that, if Asuncion would accept an American military mission, we would also throw in some “medical assistance.” Thus the penetration of Paraguay began.

  After some hard-sell negotiations and a little bribery, on May 26, 2005, the Pentagon got what it wanted. The Paraguay Senate approved an agreement with the United States allowing four hundred Special Forces troops to enter the country on July 1 and conduct some thirteen joint military exercises lasting until December 31, 2005. Washington offered a funding package of approximately $45,000 per exercise.86 According to the Inter Press News Service journalist Alejandro Sciscioli, the Paraguay Senate approved the agreement “with no debate and without any information on it being published in the press.”87

  The U.S. embassy in Paraguay explained that the exercises in question would involve humanitarian and medical assistance to poor communities “as well as military training,” but the deputy speaker of the parliament, Alejandro Ugarte, let slip that only two of the thirteen exercises “are of a civilian nature.”88 In September 2005, Reuters carried photos of members of an army medical team performing checkups on small children in the Paraguayan city of Pilar on the Paraná River.89 Some Paraguayans commented that the sight of men in uniform frightened the children—this being a part of the world where uniforms have long been associated with dictatorial power and violence—and that such work would better be entrusted to a civilian organization such as Medecins Sans Frontieres.

  In order to soften up Paraguay, the Bush administration put on the sort of display of hospitality usually reserved for leaders of its closest satellites. On September 26, 2003, Paraguay’s newly elected president, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, was received in the Oval Office, the first Paraguayan head of state to be so honored. In June 2005, Duarte’s vice president, Luis Castiglioni, on a visit to Washington met with vice president Dick Cheney, former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The Paraguayan journalist Alfredo Bocca Paz noted dryly, “That’s a big fuss to make over a vice president of Paraguay.”90 In mid-August 2005, Rumsfeld flew to Asuncion for an on-the-spot inspection. While there he promised that he would send experts from the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies to work on a joint “planning seminar on systems for national security.”91 The FBI announced that it would open an office in Asunción in 2006.

  When the first American troops arrived in Paraguay in the summer of 2005, they did not, in fact, go anywhere near the unruly triborder area, as one might have expected, but instead established their base at an old airport some 434 miles away in the Chaco region of northern Paraguay, not far from the Bolivian border. This was enough to convince many Paraguayans and most of their neighbors that the United States was building a new base in the heart of South America.

  Back in 1982, the United States had helped General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 until 1989, to build a massive military airfield near the town of Mariscal Estigarribia, which now has a population of about two thousand, of whom three hundred are Paraguayan soldiers. The airfield has runways long and strong enough to take B-52 bombers and C-5 Galaxy transports, plus a fully equipped radar system, large hangars, and an air traffic control tower. It is actually bigger than the international airport in the capital, Asuncion. The only thing of note that ever happened at Estigarribia before the American troops arrived was Pope John Paul II’s landing there, in May 1988. In the summer of 2005, the Americans immediately set about refurbishing and
further enlarging the base.

  American troops are free to do almost anything they want in Paraguay. In the May 26, 2005, agreement, the Bush administration extracted a provision exempting its officials and military from the jurisdiction of both the local judicial system and the International Criminal Court. The Special Forces are not subject to customs duties and are free to transport weapons and medical supplies anywhere in Paraguayan territory.92 This is important for various reasons. Under the terms of Mercosur, the agreement among Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay creating a southern-cone trading bloc, all parties pledge to inform each other about international developments and to coordinate their foreign policies. Like virtually all other nations in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have rejected Bush administration demands for Article 98 Agreements protecting Americans from being turned over to the International Criminal Court. The United States has cut off all forms of aid to the three as a result. In 2004, despite the presence of the Manta base, Ecuador, too, forfeited $15.7 million in U.S. aid, much of it for military equipment, rather than go along with America’s pressure tactics.93 By giving the United States carte blanche in its country, Paraguay is breaking ranks with its neighbors, which has led to speculation that the United States wants to destroy Mercosur.

  The asymmetries in size and power between small nations like Paraguay and Ecuador and the United States inevitably make our relations with them imperialist in nature when we act in a high-handed way. Paraguay has no need for an American military base, nor for U.S training of its armed forces. Paraguay is not likely to go to war with its powerful neighbors, particularly given the nineteenth-century War of the Triple Alliance (1865-70) in which it was badly defeated and lost a large part of its territory. But the United States is always ready to use its overwhelming might to force small nations to bend to its will.