Is there a square inch on the planet that Washington doesn’t think it rightfully controls? From Nick Corbishley at nakedcapitalism.com:
In 2009, Ecuadorians voted in a referendum to remove all US military presence from the country. Now, thanks to an agreement signed in the dying days of Guillermo Lasso’s corruption-tainted government, US troops are coming back.
Just ten days ago, I reported in my post, “Back to Business As Usual: The US Is Once Again Vigorously Stirring the Pot in Its Own ‘Backyard‘”, that the US is seeking to escalate its war on drugs in Latin America, as a pretext for trying to regain strategic dominance of the region. It is doing so one country at a time, with the apparent ultimate endgame being direct, overt military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels — on Mexican soil.
In mid-September, 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. A few days later, the Peruvian government, which has virtually zero democratic legitimacy and is under investigation for human rights violations, signed an agreement with US Homeland Security Investigations to collaborate in transnational criminal investigations through the establishment of a Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit (TCIU).
Now, less than a month later, Peru’s Andean neighbour, Ecuador, is on exactly the same path. Last Friday (Sept 29), the country’s outgoing President (and former senior banker) Guillermo Lasso held a closed-door meeting with senior officials of the US Coast Guard and Department of Defense in Washington. The outcome of that meeting was two status agreements, one that will allow the deployment of US naval forces along Ecuador’s coastline while the other will permit the disembarking of US land forces on Ecuador’ soil, albeit only at the request of Ecuador’s government.
