There would never be a coup d'état in the United States of America - USA

'Why will there never be a coup d'état in the United States?'  Because there is no U.S. embassy in Washington”, says an old popular joke.

By Raúl Antonio Capote and Delfin Xiqués

U.S. embassies, with a long tradition in coups d'état and political subversion - Paraguay 1954, Guatemala 1954, Dominican Republic 1963, Brazil 1964, Argentina 1976, Bolivia 1971, Uruguay 1973, Chile 1973-, became the base of operations for destabilization in the continent.

The military occupation, the imposition of the Platt Amendment in Cuba and the multiple armed interventions of the United States in the internal affairs of the Island, during the first decades of the 20th century, symbolized the advent of the neocolonial Republic.

Then we had Yankee embassy in which more than ambassadors, proconsuls invested with more authority than a Spanish Captain General, bossed presidents, parliamentarians and military.

That lasted until January 1959, when the Revolution triumphed.  There were no direct bilateral diplomatic ties between the two countries between 1961 and 2015, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke off relations with the largest of the Antilles.

U.S. Ambassadors to Cuba

Herbert G. Squiers: May 20, 1902 - December 2, 1905

- He was a fervent annexationist.  He participated on behalf of his country in the signing of the first treaty on the Isle of Pines; he was such an interferenceist that he forced the U.S. State Department in 1905 to remove him from his post.

William E. Gonzales: June 21, 1913-December 18, 1919

- On August 9 he ratified the approval of the government of General Mario García Menocal, who by then succeeded that of General José Miguel Gómez, making use of the Platt Amendment.

Boaz W. Long: June 30, 1919 - June 17, 1921

- During his mission in Cuba, Enoch H. Crowder is appointed with the rank of “personal envoy” of U.S. President Warren G. Harding.  The “envoy” supervised Cuban state activities and acted as the highest authority, even above the President of the Republic.

Enoch H. Crowder: February 10, 1923 - May 28, 1927

- On March 5, 1923, he presented his credentials as the first ambassador of his country in the Caribbean nation, when the Northern Legation on the Island became an Embassy.

Harry F. Guggenheim: October 10, 1929 - April 2, 1933

- He was ambassador during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, which he supported on behalf of his government.

Sumner Welles: April 24, 1933 - December 13, 1933

- Sent to Cuba as “mediator” between the dictator Gerardo Machado and the popular forces.  His presence was declared unwelcome by the Hundred Days Government, due to his interfering attitude.

Jefferson Caffery: February 23, 1934- March 9, 1937

- He continued the same line of his predecessor and began to conspire with elements opposed to the revolutionary government to overthrow it.

Robert Butler: May 22, 1948- February 10, 1951

- On March 11, 1949, U.S. Marines, who had arrived in Havana's port, outraged the statue of José Martí.  The ambassador's apology showed the Government's contempt for him; he did not even know the name of Cuba's National Hero.

Arthur Gardner: May 28, 1953 - June 16, 1957

- He was a staunch supporter of Fulgencio Batista.  The CIA station in Havana had at that time more than two dozen operational officers in its embassy.  During his work, the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities (BRAC) was created on the island.

Earl E. Smith: June 3, 1957 - January 19, 1959

- Openly supported the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.  After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Smith resigned on January 10, 1959 and was replaced by Phillip W. Bonsal.

Heads of the U.S. Interests Section (USINT)

The U.S. Interests Section (USINT) operated from September 1, 1977 to July 20, 2015, and became the headquarters of the counterrevolution in Cuba.

Lyle Franklin Lane: 1977-1979

- He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the first Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

Curtis W. Kamman: 1985-1987

- On January 29, 1987, Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz warned Curtis W. Kamman about the espionage activities carried out from USINT.  In the summer of that year more than one hundred CIA officers, among those stationed at SINA, were unmasked.

Joseph Sullivan: 1993-1996

- Maintained close ties with “opposition” groups, among them the “dissidents” of Concilio Cubano.

Vicki Huddleston: 1999-2002

- In 2000, USINT sought to manipulate an event of great international prestige such as the 7th edition of the Havana Biennial.  Parallel to the event's activities, officials of the Interests Section developed their own plan: an aggressive operation of influence and recruitment.

James Cason: 2002-2005

- Following instructions from the White House, he used diplomatic immunity to organize meetings in his official residence with leaders of counterrevolutionary organizations.  He supported “opposition” organizations with all kinds of resources, which was denounced in 2003 by Cuban television.

Michael E. Parmly: 2005-2008

- He gave continuity to the work of his predecessor.  Notes exchanged between Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello and Cuban-Americans living in Florida implicated Parmly with Cuban-born terrorist Santiago Álvarez Fernández-Magriñá.

Jonathan D. Farrar:  2008-2010

- In 2010 the Wikileaks site declassified a cable from Farrar in which he acknowledged that he was in contact “with most of the official dissident movement in Havana,” whose members, he claimed, frequently visit USINT.

John Caulfield: 2011 - 2014

- On June 19, 2012, USINT culminated an Introduction to Journalism course through which about 26 counterrevolutionaries obtained their diplomas, issued by Florida International University.

All of the following served as Chargé d'Affaires a.i. at the U.S. Embassy.

Mara Tekach: July 20, 2018-July 21, 2020

- On November 20, 2019, Tekach was charged with working closely with Cuban counterrevolutionary José Daniel Ferrer.  He focused his work on the purpose of recruiting mercenaries, identified areas of the economy against which to target coercive measures, and actively engaged in defamation and open incitement to violence.

Timothy Zúñiga-Brown: July 31, 2020 to July 14, 2022

- He worked to create an artificial crisis, trying to portray as political an economic emigration caused, in the first place, by the very blockade measures designed for that purpose.  He was determined, like his predecessors, to provoke an explosion on the island by any means necessary.

Mike Hammer November 14, 2024

- The “Ambassador of the Cuban counterrevolution” carries out an active provocative work with the aim of creating a diplomatic crisis that will lead to his expulsion from Cuba and justify the closing of the embassy.  To that end he consciously violates everything established.

Source

Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti

By Belen Fernandez

Haiti's brutal paramilitary campaigns received scant media coverage, while "political violence" was decried at length.

The Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti was instrumental in the 2004 coup d'état that deposed Aristide [EPA]

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, certain media outlets painted a picture of a country overrun by looters and at the mercy of gang members and other criminals, including thousands of prisoners jolted free by the quake.

Relevant details were ignored, such as the contention by prominent Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph that 80 per cent of said prisoners had never been charged.  The media effort perhaps aided in rendering less incongruous in the eyes of the international public the deployment of a sizeable US military force to deal with quake-affected people who did not seemingly require military attention.

A Reuters dispatch from one week after the disaster - which reported "marauding looters", "scavengers and looters swarm[ing] over damaged stores", "increasingly lawless streets" and "[h]eavily armed gang members" - offered the following plea from policeman Dorsainvil Robenson: 

"Haiti needs help ... the Americans are welcome here.  But where are they?  We need them here on the street with us."

The whereabouts of the ever-elusive Americans are of course hinted at two paragraphs later, when we learn that "the White House said more than 11,000 US military personnel are on the ground, on ships offshore or en route".  Elsewhere, French Co-operation Minister Alain Joyandet was quoted as commenting in reference to seemingly skewed US priorities: "This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti".  As foreign military monopolised the Port-au-Prince airport, teams of paramedics and first responders were delayed in the critical hours immediately following the earthquake.  

Subscribers to the fantasy that the US is somehow qualified to counteract violence and install order in the Caribbean nation would do well to peruse a new book entitled Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, in which author Jeb Sprague masterfully documents - among other topics - the detrimental role of US and fellow international actors in Haitian history.

Offering new evidence obtained through interviews and a massive amount of formerly classified US government documents, the book clarifies how Haiti's post-quake reconstruction rests on a foundation of total impunity achieved by the country's most brutal paramilitaries and their financiers. 

Legacy of violence 

As Sprague notes, the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 under "the pretext of possible German encroachment during the First World War… caused the deaths of an estimated 15,000 Haitians and saw the imposition of slave labour".  It also imposed "a modern army, one that would continue the US occupation long after US troops were gone", functioning on behalf of the Haitian elite and their American counterparts. Observes Sprague: "The US occupation wedded the country’s future to North American business interests."
 

Later, during the reign of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier in the 1960s, US Marines trained the dictator’s Tonton Macoutes paramilitary force, known for "leaving bodies of their victims hanging in public, a clear warning to anyone stepping out of line, most especially leftists, socialists and pro-democracy activists".  Linked to the business elite and the military itself, the Macoutes were "vital for upholding a system based on severe inequality and class privilege". 

Following the transfer of power to Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, a brutal counter-insurgency force known as the Leopards was trained and equipped "by former US marine instructors who were working through a company (Aerotrade, Inc and Aerotrade International, Inc) under contract with the CIA and signed off by the US Department of State". 

Prior to becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president in early 1991, the young liberation theologian, Jean-Bertrand Aristide "denounced the historic role of the United States in founding, arming and training Haiti's military, which had been responsible for so much of the violence in Haitian history".

Sprague quotes Aristide: "They [the United States] set up the Haitian Army, they trained it to work against the people".  Indeed, it would be difficult to argue that the army was working for the people by massacring citizens attempting to vote in 1987, or by overthrowing the newly elected Aristide in September 1991 and slaughtering his supporters. 

Aristide's coup-inducing crimes included inviting street children and homeless persons to breakfast at the National Palace and endeavouring to raise the daily minimum wage from $1.76 to $2.94.  As Joanne Landy wrote in the New York Times in 1994, the latter effort was "vigorously opposed by the US Agency for International Development because of the threat such an increase would pose to the 'business climate', particularly to American companies paying rock-bottom wages to workers in Haiti". 

Aside from USAID, another relevant euphemism from the coup period was the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a paramilitary organisation intimately linked to the Haitian military that assumed the task of terrorising the non-elite masses under the military junta. "Internal US government documents reveal that FRAPH was founded in part at the behest of the US Defence Intelligence Agency," Sprague notes. 

Recycling brutality 

After years of brutality and corruption, the military dictatorship faced growing resistance at home and abroad.  Aristide was thus reinserted in his lawful post in 1994 in exchange for, inter alia, committing to be more attentive to the needs of the US agriculture industry and drastically slashing tariffs on imported rice. 

Upon reinstatement, he logically moved - with overwhelming public support - to disband the armed forces and the section chiefs (the hated rural constabulary).  His government, and the elected governments that followed him, also gathered testimonials from thousands of victims of paramilitary violence and undertook judicial proceedings to prosecute military and paramilitary criminals. 

However, as researcher Eirin Mobekk has critically pointed out and Sprague has underscored, "only the army as an institution was dissolved… In a country where the army had run political life for decades it was an illusion to think that its networks would disappear with the removal of uniforms and the use of its buildings for other purposes".

US contributions to the dissolution of the army included maneouvering to insert allied Haitian ex-military officials into what was supposed to be a civilian police force and eliminating officers seen as overly loyal to Aristide or less than enthusiastic about the coup.  Some Haitian police officers were trained in the United States, where they were susceptible to overtures by the CIA, which also funded various FRAPH leaders and other paramilitaries. 

Given the high level of impunity enjoyed by military and paramilitary members who had committed atrocities - not to mention US insistence on a full amnesty for the coup perpetrators - it is somewhat less than astonishing that Aristide's re-election in 2000 also culminated in a coup d'état.  Instrumental in the overthrow was the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti (FLRN), which as Sprague explains was "led by renegade police officials who were from among the same ex-FAd'H [Haitian Armed Forces] pushed into the country’s new security force by the United States in the late 1990s". 

Backed by some wealthy Haitians, neo-Duvalierists, sweatshop owners, and government and army officials from the neighbouring Dominican Republic (who didn't want Aristide's anti-military, pro-human rights rhetoric rubbing off on their own citizenry), the FLRN staged incursions into Haiti from Dominican territory with the ultimate goal of forcing the re-establishment of the Haitian army.

Of course, the sign of any good army is its ability to safeguard the domestic population, and these incursions provided the FLRN with an opportunity to showcase its skills - which it did by massacring and assaulting supporters of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party, often with sickening tactics. Citing formerly classified US embassy cables, Sprague uncovers how a small but powerful fifth column within the government was also working to undermine Aristide. 

According to Sprague, it is likely that French and US intelligence facilitated the paramilitary insurgency in some way, while "the International Republican Institute (an organisation funded by the US government that promotes 'democratisation programmes' around the world) provided a forum through which the [Haitian] political opposition strengthened its ties with the paramilitaries".

As journalist Max Blumenthal has documented, the IRI benefitted in its underhanded dealings from the diplomacy of Roger Noriega, an Iran-Contra-era figure recycled into the Bush II administration along with his Cold War Manichean fantasies according to which Aristide and anyone else with less than extreme right-wing political convictions is a communist demon.  

Sprague aptly comments that US' "knowledge that [sectors of] Haiti's 'business community' [were] strongly backing paramilitary terror underscores the cynicism of Washington’s constant demands that Aristide seek 'compromise' with his 'peaceful opponents'".  In the end, the compromise consisted of Aristide's removal on a US military plane to the Central African Republic in 2004 and the installation of Gerard Latortue as head of state.  The ensuing peace is recalled by historian Greg Grandin: 

"During Latortue's brief stint in office, 2004 - 2006, Haiti experienced some 4,000 political murders, according to The Lancet - while hundreds of Fanmi Lavalas members, Aristide supporters, and social movement leaders were locked up - usually on bogus charges. Latortue's friends in Washington looked the other way." 

Sprague, meanwhile, observes that "Bill Clinton's [former] policy of inserting a handful of ex-FAd’H criminals into Haiti's police force… was now put on steroids" and that "in 2004 -5 the United States and the UN oversaw the recycling of 400 ex-army paramilitaries into a revamped police force" - paving the way for yet more repetitions of history. 

Media coups 

Why is it that Haiti's brutal paramilitary campaigns received scant international press attention while quantitatively and qualitatively inferior political violence by a small number of Fanmi Lavalas supporters (which occurred in the context of clashes with the opposition) was decried at length? 

Obviously, media coverage is shaped by geopolitical and financial interests, with the terms of events defined by the powerful.  This is how, for example, terrorism conducted by the US and Israel becomes "counter-terrorism", "self-defence" and "democracy promotion" in the Western mainstream media. 

Sprague documents how, in the case of Haiti, the press in the US, France, Canada and other locales undertook to demonise Aristide and rebrand the violent and unpopular uprising against him as non-violent and popular. As US-trained FLRN commander Guy Philippe remarked to journalist Isabel McDonald following the coup: "[The] international media, the media leaders helped us a lot.  And thanks to them we were able to overthrow the dictator.  And without them I don't think that we could have".  

"Obviously, media coverage is shaped by geopolitical and financial interests, with the terms of events defined by the powerful."

In an essay for the London Review of Books, Paul Farmer describes how Aristide was made the scapegoat for crimes committed by the very people who overthrew him.  Summarising Philippe's pre-coup history, which involved reincarnation as a police chief following the demobilisation of the military, Farmer writes: 

"During his tenure, the UN International Civilian Mission learned, dozens of suspected gang members were summarily executed, most of them by police under the command of Philippe's deputy. The US embassy has also implicated Philippe in drug smuggling during his police career.  Crimes committed in large part by ex-military policemen are often pinned on Aristide, even though he sought to prevent coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up in these posts." 

Farmer also noted that "Philippe has been quoted as saying that the man he most admires is Pinochet".  The bloody legacy of the Chilean dictator offers a reminder of how helpful US-backed coups and violence can be when it comes to introducing neoliberal reforms. 

After the second overthrow of Aristide, Sprague writes, the temporary regime set about "securing [Haiti] as a platform through which global capital could flow freely", in accordance with instructions from the IMF and other interested parties: 

"The interim government laid off between eight and ten thousand civil sector workers, many from the poorest slums of Port-au-Prince. Other programmes under the Aristide government, such as subsidised rice for the poor, literacy centres and water supply projects, came to a halt following the coup d'état." 

The long-fantasised-about mass privatisation of Haitian state assets, however, appeared more difficult to pull off - until, that is, the country was shattered by the 2010 earthquake and control over Haiti's energy, water and other sectors was divvied up between international players like the World Bank and USAID. The 2011 debut of singer-turned-head of state Michel Martelly, elected with the support of a mere 16.7 per cent of the electorate and described by former Financial Times journalist Matt Kennard as a "shock president" prepared to enforce economic shock therapy, seems to have set the stage for the conversion of Haiti into a neoliberal fairytale kingdom. 

It is fitting that Martelly, whose presidential objectives include a resurrection of the Haitian armed forces rather than the pursuit of projects benefitting the majority of the nation's citizens, is himself a longtime close associate of Duvalier's paramilitary Tonton Macoutes.  

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobian Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the  London Review of Books blog, AlterNet and many other publications.

04 October, 2012

Source:

Al Jazeera

Coups 2.0 in the Americas

By Gonzalo Fernández - ALAI:

Everybody is familiar with the complexity of understanding the alternative processes that are taking place in the Americas, where multiple topics and agendas intersect, in the common will to break with the history of domination and exclusion of the subcontinent.  On the one hand, the 21^st century has been accompanied by the arrival of anti-neoliberal governments in various countries, with an unequal record of transformation, but which are the response to the popular majorities being fed up with their reality of poverty, inequality and external dependence. On the other hand, precisely taking advantage of this favorable context, many social movements - and many societies in movement - have raised the need for progress in the implementation of emancipative political agendas, that once and for all get beyond the colonizing and subordination logic to which the region and the population have historically been subjected.

 

So, after a few starts in which institutional and social actors walked hand in hand, tensions between governments and movements have emerged, as well as strained relations between old and new social movements: how slowly or quickly processes of change is taking place; the short life of governments or the long life of emancipation; developmentalism or a determined transition towards good living; the urgent need to overcome the patterns of dependency or the impossibility to do so in such a short period (in historical terms).  These are precisely the debates that baffle and enrich the reality of Latin America.  The answers to these situations are not simple, nor are they categorical, and deepening reflection on them is one of the great challenges of all the Left, including the European left.

 

However, something that cannot be denied, regardless of where we are positioned, is that all these processes initiated with the new century have torn open gaps, have allowed for spaces of accumulation of forces, spaces for the interconnection of struggles, spaces for the exercise of citizenship rights by large majorities.  And nobody can capitalize that, it is part of the action path taken by both governments and movements.  The Right knows it well: it attempts to put an end to this new exciting stage by any means.  Thus, attacks of the oligarchies and their media - hegemonically aligned with them - do not cease in their effort of discrediting governments and social struggles, with the aim of destabilizing the region and returning to the previous situation of absolute control of the subcontinent.  To do so, they are willing to do anything, including coups d'état.

 

This is the key to understanding the coup d'état in Venezuela in 2002 and the coup d'état in Mexico in 2006 - via electoral fraud -.  But it is also useful for understanding the coups d’état 2.0 in Honduras (2009) and Ecuador (2010), where new formulas of coup are being tested, seeking for the international community and the population not to assimilate them as such (but with identical results).  In this way, instead of the pure and simple military coup, new ways are emerging, ranging from social destabilization generated by the police to the fraudulent use of judicial and even constitutional resources.

 

This new coup scheme 2.0 is still very present in America today.  Last week, the President of Paraguay was dismissed on the basis of a political trial, a legal figure of the Constitution which makes it possible to remove a President from office based on a manifest disability to perform his duties.  In this sense, a legal staging was orchestrated for an illegitimate and anti-democratic event, where a President elected by popular vote was fulminated in a summary trial in which he only had two hours to exercise his defense, unable to prepare it properly, and against a very serious accusation. The ultimate goal of the coup: that one of the most retrograde oligarchies of the continent could put a stop to the timid processes of change engendered in recent years, and prevent the Left from accumulating enough forces to face the presidential elections in 2013.

 

On the other hand, since the past weekend, all the media of the world echoed the turmoil generated by the police strike in Bolivia - illegal in many countries - and which is perhaps a prelude of further attempts of destabilization in the Andean country.  Finally, we'll see what happens in the Mexican elections, where a broad student movement has gained significant momentum against the possibility that the PRI returns to power (with the full support of the Right and large media conglomerates.)

 

We must remain very much on the alert for these new realities, and denounce without palliatives, both here and there, the abuses perpetrated against democracy in the Americas.  Regardless of the views we hold about one government or the other, or their greater or lesser commitment to the emancipation of the continent, we must be clear about one thing: we cannot allow what has been achieved in the last decade to be reverted, and we must join forces to prevent anti-democratic regressions, not only because of international solidarity, but also given the importance of the region as a source of inspiration to raise proposals that allow us to envision other paths to overcome this crisis of civilization that affects us all.  Our paths are deeply intertwined, their democracy is also ours. 

(Translation FEDAEPS).

 

 

- Gonzalo Fernández is a member of the Internationalist Working Group of Alternatiba, Basque Country.

 

Source: ALAI

 

July 04, 2012

 

Venezuelanalysis