From Peru to Uruguay, to Ecuador and Guyana, the US is seeking to rebuild its strategic influence in Latin America, one gun at a time.
Last week, the head of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), Army Gen. Laura Richardson, visited Peru, a country that is in the grip of arguably its worst political crisis of this still-fledgling century. The country has witnessed wave after wave of anti-government protests followed by brutal, sometimes deadly, crackdowns by security forces since the US-greenlit removal of the democratically elected President Pedro Castillo in December. It also recently played host to a joint military exercise involving an unprecedented number of US troops.
With a record low approval rating of just 10% and a record high disapproval rating of 82%, Castillo’s replacement as president, his former deputy, Dina Boluarte, is weak. She is still under investigation for the deaths of dozens of pro-Castillo protesters in the early months of her government and refuses to hold elections until 2026 despite previous pledges to bring the vote forward. In the face of rising public discontent, her government recently proposed changes to the penal code that could, in their current form, allow for the prosecution of any citizen who calls for a protest march and any journalist who reports on it.
Washington, of course, is looking the other way.
During her stay in Lima, Gen Richardson met with Peru’s Secretary of Defence Jorge Chavez, senior armed forces leaders and the commanders of the Peruvian air force, navy and army, to discuss the “longstanding U.S.-Peru defence partnership.” Meanwhile, Boluarte was in New York spinning a web of lies and half truths, including a rapidly debunked claim that she had held an official meeting with Joe Biden on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly when in reality all they had shared was a photo op.
But relations between the US and Peru are stronger than ever. By the end of last week, the US Embassy in Peru had published a press release announcing a new agreement between US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the government of Peru to collaborate in transnational criminal investigations through the establishment of a Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit (TCIU). According to the press release, HSI’s TCIUs help further HSI’s global mission by bringing in foreign partners to help investigate and prosecute individuals involved in transnational criminal activities.
A New Escalation in Washington’s War on Drugs?
The move comes as Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits are busily psychologically prepping the US public for a fresh escalation in the war on drugs. Droves of high-profile figures, including arch neocon and regime change-specialist Lindsay Graham, presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ron de Santis, and media pundit Tucker Carlson, have been calling for direct, overt US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels in order to stem the flow of fentanyl.
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in March, former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump) William Barr likened Mexico’s “narco-terrorists” to Isis and called for “a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before.” Barr also called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors.
Barr is hardly one to talk given his central role in burying evidence of then-President George HW Bush’s involvement in the “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra” scandals, the latter of which involved the trafficking of huge volumes of cocaine to the US by the Contras, as the hand-written notebooks of Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war, amply show. Years later, courageous journalists like Gary Webb and Robert Parry would show that the CIA was also heavily involved in bringing crack cocaine into the US.
Back to today, it goes without saying that the real driving motivation behind the latest calls to expand the war on drugs is not to stem the flow of drugs into the US, or to tackle the escalating violence of drug cartels across Latin America — if Washington was serious about that, all it would have to do is pass legislation to stem the southward flow of US-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers. And if it was serious about tackling drug addiction, it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic in the first place. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with the daintiest of financial slaps on the wrists.
No, this is primarily about what the US war on drugs has always been about: pursuing geopolitical and geostrategic dominance in key regions of the world while controlling and imprisoning for serious sums of money the restive populace at home…
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Nick Corbishley 