Cheney's Paraguay Caper Is Intended
To Produce `A Splendid Little War'
by Dennis Small
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Paraguay on Aug. 16, with the principal mission of putting the final touches on Vice President Dick Cheney's scheme of establishing a U.S. military base in that country, in the heart of South America. The proper response to that development, advised U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche, is to issue the following urgent security advisory across South America:
Redouble the guards at the cemeteries and the morgues, and put a special watch on all university anatomy classes. Those psychopathic policy twins, Cheney and Rumsfeld, the "Burke and Hare" of Washington, D.C., are on the loose in South America.
William Burke and William Hare—made famous in such locations as Robert Louis Stevenson's tale, The Body-Snatcher—were 1820s Scottish entrepreneurs of sorts, who set themselves up as procurers of fresh corpses to satisfy the lively demand of Edinburgh's medical schools' anatomy classes. When demand outstripped the supply available from digging up the graves of the recently departed in the dead of night, the two free marketeers turned to supply-side economics, and started murdering people directly. They weren't caught until they had produced 16 victims.
In the 21st-Century Cheney-Rumsfeld re-run of Burke and Hare's antics, most of the corpses are intended to be Brazilian.
What is the actual intent behind Cheney's Paraguay caper? Locate the regional South American developments in the context of the documented short-term drive for pre-emptive war against Iran, including nuclear strikes, which has been launched by Dick Cheney and his allied gang of "spoon-bender" Utopian lunatics within U.S. military and intelligence circles. And locate them, as well, in the framework of a rapidly disintegrating global financial system, which Cheney et al. have been deployed to salvage, at all costs.
Here are the principal South American elements leading into the dangerous Paraguay caper:
On Feb. 24, 2005, the Argentine government of Nestor Kirchner successfully negotiated a 60% writedown of $82 billion of public debt, over the violent opposition of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the world's financial oligarchy.
On March 29, 2005, the heads of government of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Spain gathered in the Venezuelan city of Ciudad Guayana, to discuss the details of regional great infrastructure projects to pull their economies out of poverty, and to lay the foundations of lasting, regional peace. This surprise development was a significant setback for the international financial interests that Cheney and Rumsfeld speak for, whose regional objective is both to ensure their control over strategic raw materials, and to sink the entire region into chaos such that no unified opposition to the dying IMF system can be mustered.
In April 2005, a further political blow was dealt to Cheney and the neo-cons, with Washington's inability to impose their preferred candidate as the next Secretary General of the Organization of American States. Cheney and his Wall Street friends were not amused.
So, on May 5, 2005, the United States induced the Paraguayan government to sign an agreement authorizing joint military training activities over the 18-month period running from July 1, 2005 to Dec. 31, 2006, which accord can be extended indefinitely. The base for the maneuvers is to be the Mariscal Estigarribia military base and airfield—which was built by the U.S. to be able to handle large military transport planes, and house up to 16,000 troops—located in the middle of the largely uninhabited Chaco region of northwestern Paraguay. This is the very region which was the scene of the bloody Gran Chaco War of 1932-35 between Paraguay and Bolivia (see map).
On May 26, 2005, the Paraguayan Congress granted the participating U.S. troops legal immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in Paraguay, an exception that the Bush-Cheney government had previously also demanded of Brazil, Argentina, and other South American countries, and had been firmly rebuffed.
And then came the most revealing development:
On June 10, 2005, Paraguayan Vice President Luis Castiglioni travelled to Washington, D.C., where he held private meetings with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and neo-con hatchetman Roger Noriega, then Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. The totally disproportionate attention paid to Castiglioni—in particular the private meeting with Cheney—indicated that the scheme had gone live, and that Cheney was hands-on.
On July 1, 2005, the first 500 American troops began to arrive in Paraguay. On July 7, the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay issued a public disclaimer stating that they had no intention of establishing a permanent military base in the country. But in late July, an unconvinced Brazilian Army launched military maneuvers along that country's border with Paraguay, parallel to the arrival of the U.S. troops.
Short-sighted regional and other commentators have focussed on diverse explanations for the Paraguayan U.S. military base—or Cooperative Security Location (CSL), as it is known in Pentagon lingo—in the heart of South America (the only other such CSL in South America is located in Manta, Ecuador):
- To control the giant natural gas deposits in Bolivia, which is only 250 kilometers from the Mariscal Estigarribia base.
- To deploy against purported Iranian terrorist capabilities, including money-laundering facilities, located in the Triple Border area of Paraguay-Argentina-Brazil.
- To deliver a body-blow to the South American Common Market (Mercosur) project, which Brazil has led against the free trade diktats coming from Washington and the IMF. Paraguay is a member of Mercosur, along with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
- To seize the giant Guarani Aquifer, one of the world's largest reserves of fresh water, covering an area of 1.2 million square kilometers—of which an estimated 70% is located in Brazil, 19% in Argentina, 6% in Paraguay, and 5% in Uruguay.
- To gain access to the immense riches of the strategically important Amazon region of Brazil.
There is an element of truth in each of these explanations, but all overlook the two determining strategic considerations cited at the outset: the global financial meltdown, and the lunacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration. In fact, the policy objective of Cheney's Paraguay caper, is to launch a British-style "Splendid Little War" in the region—both among nations and as civil wars within today's existing nation-states, such as the drive to split Bolivia in two—to thereby sink the region into a New Dark Age of chaos and genocide.
Cheney and Rumsfeld want corpses. So South Americans beware, of the new Burke and Hare.
