https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/us/politics/biden-cuba-haiti-latin-america.html
-->The NYT assumption that the United States is a force for democracy in Latin America is simply laughable. The CIA has spent decades overthrowing democratically elected presidents in the region, only to put in some of the worst dictators imaginable. The only real challenge to democracies south of the boarder is to choose their form of government without the intervention of CIA assassins, illegal trade embargoes and outright military invasions.
In fact, after 30 years of involving itself in the Middle East, the US is closely allied with some of the most brutal of dictators in the world. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two countries that get billions in US military aid, are among the most repressive. And then there is our top recipient of foreign aid, apartheid Israel, where fully half of the population lives in perpetual occupation and siege, all because they are the wrong religion. Our newspaper of record calls all of this involvement "pressing for democracy." Only in the dream world of the Pentagon.
After a couple of paragraphs, the NYT gets down to the real reason why Biden is worried about Latin America: "But U.S. influence began waning in the region over the past decade, as it turned toward fighting terrorism in the Middle East and as Russia and especially China moved in to finance projects and offer political support and other incentives."
-->Russia and China are now important trade partners with many Latin American countries. The US is attempting to overthrow democratically elected leaders in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to reverse these gains. First our national media will slander these countries with propaganda. Next, there will be special operations to train and arm insurgents. We have seen it all before. Calling for democracy is nothing but the fig leaf that hides US imperialism. Shame on the NYT to pollute the national discourse with these crude distortions.
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FAIR:
"A wave of protests in Cuba became the somewhat unlikely focus of global attention earlier this week, the events becoming the worldwide No. 1 trend on Twitter for over 24 hours, as celebrities, politicians and even the president of the United States weighed in on the action. ... Media, too, were quick to focus on the story, giving the protests front and center coverage, something extremely unusual for demonstrations in Latin America. Far larger and more deadly movements in Chile and Ecuador were mostly ignored by the corporate press. ...
However, while giving the protests a great deal of coverage, the corporate press across the political spectrum consistently downplayed one of the primary causes of unrest: the increasingly punitive US blockade. ...
[It] is ironic indeed that a host of outlets resorted to using images of pro-government demonstrations to illustrate how large and impressive the anti-government movement was. The Guardian (7/12/21), Fox News (7/11/21), Boston Globe (7/11/21), Financial Times (7/12/21), Yahoo! News (7/11/21) and NBC’s Today program (7/13/21) were among that used an image of masses of government supporters gathering in central Havana to show the extent of the anti-Communist demonstrations."
https://fair.org/home/media-play-up-protests-play-down-effect-of-us-sanctions-in-cuba/
-->Cuba brings out the very worst in the US media, with distortions and outright lies being the norm. Sad that we still think of our media as "free" when it so slavishly parrots misconceptions about Cuba. All the news that Wall Street thinks is fit to print.
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Orinoco Tribune:
"Jorge Rodríguez, head of the National Assembly of Venezuela, has presented evidence that links the Colombian mercenaries implicated in the recent murder of Jovenel Moïse in Haiti, with the 2018 assassination attempt on President Maduro.
Rodríguez reported that the security firm that had recruited the Colombian hitmen was also involved in a failed assassination attempt on the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, that occurred on August 4, 2018. On that occasion, Maduro had accused his Colombian counterpart, then President Juan Manuel Santos, of being behind the failed assassination attempt.
Jorge Rodríguez referred to a report published on July 11 by the American newspaper Miami Herald to assert that the Colombians implicated in the murder of Haitian President Moïse, hired by the security firm CTU Security LLC, based in Miami, Florida, were also involved in the attack against the Venezuelan president."
-->These are links that most of our well trained, mainstream media will never make for the public. US assassinations of Third World leaders is the dirty secret of the empire.
