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Interview: A Journalist Not Scared to Speak the Truth

5 Jun

June 5, 2010

Celebrity Dialogue

CelebityDialogue: Which news publications do you write for?
Eric: I’ve written for The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation, Huffington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among others.

CelebityDialogue: What is your beat?
Eric: I don’t have one beat in any traditional sense. My interests are quite varied. I generally critique US foreign policy, our outrageous military budget, the privatization of war, including the use of mercenaries, and the growing use of robotics, both on the ground and in the air, in modern warfare. I also regularly write about nonviolent movements around the world for Waging Nonviolence, a blog that I helped start last year.

CelebityDialogue: What would you say to the critics who may view your writing as mostly anti-government?
Eric: I would say that would be an inaccurate way of characterizing my work. I’m not against all government. I’m against government that is destructive, dysfunctional and unresponsive to the will of the people, and that’s unfortunately where we’re at in the United States. On issue after issue the policies of the US government are in direct opposition to the demands of social and economic justice. To take just one example, we spend upwards of a trillion dollars every year on the Pentagon and war while tens of millions of Americans live in poverty and have no access to health care. That is immoral and unacceptable.

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Schock fighting against freedom in Honduras

18 Oct

October 18, 2009

Peoria Journal Star

casa-presidencial_-senadores-republicanos-llegan-a-honduras-para-reunirse-con-presidente-micheletti_noticia_encabezado

After traveling to Honduras earlier this month to show his support for the June 28 military coup, Congressman Aaron Schock ironically spoke of his concern for democracy and “the will of the Honduras people.”

The ousted President Manuel Zelaya, however, is the democratically elected leader who – with the support of the tiny Honduran elite – was forcefully removed from power by the military. And despite the massive propaganda campaign against Zelaya, his popularity hasn’t changed. According to a poll that was just released, only 17.4 percent of Hondurans support the coup and a majority still favor Zelaya’s return to power.

While the State Department and the White House view the matter differently, Schock continues to argue that Zelaya was illegally attempting to change the constitution so that he could run for another term, thereby making the coup perfectly legal and constitutional. The truth is another matter.

While President Zelaya did call for a non-binding referendum on whether the public would support rewriting the 1982 constitution – which has already been rewritten 16 times – such action was apparently perfectly legal under the 2006 Honduran Civil Participation Act. Moreover, Zelaya repeatedly said that any changes made by the constitutional assembly, including allowing a second presidential term, wouldn’t apply to him, since his term ends in January.

The real reason that Honduran soldiers stormed the presidential palace in the middle of the night and flew Zelaya at gunpoint to Costa Rica was because of opposition by the wealthy beneficiaries of the status quo to his redistributive policies – such as raising the minimum wage, subsidizing public transit and providing free school lunches and pensions for the elderly – that began to address the massive inequalities and desperate poverty in the third poorest country in the hemisphere.

Since taking power, the coup government of Roberto Micheletti has closed down critical media outlets, blocked access to international news sources like CNN, and regularly beaten, arrested and killed courageous, peaceful protesters calling for a return to democracy and the rule of law.

Schock’s embarrassing stance on Honduras only adds to the rich, sordid history of politicians from both sides of the aisle backing military dictatorships and repressive regimes that are seen as beneficial to our “economic interests,” while paying lip service to democracy, human rights and freedom.

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Outsourcing the Iraq War: Mercenary Recruiters Turn to Latin America

28 Feb

July/August 2008 issue

NACLA Report on the Americas, Innsikt (Norway), Common Dreams, ZNet

iraq_peruanos1In October, Erik Prince, the 39-year-old CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, a leading private security company operating in Iraq, went into damage-control mode. Blackwater employees in Baghdad’s Nisour Square had killed 17 Iraqi civilians the previous month, causing an uproar and the suspension of official diplomatic convoys throughout the country for four days. Making the rounds with the media and testifying before Congress, Prince repeatedly said that his employees are not mercenaries, as critics contend. Citing the definition of a mercenary as “a professional soldier working for a foreign government,” Prince told the House Oversight Committee that in contrast, Blackwater’s employees are “Americans working for America, protecting Americans.”

This statement would come as a surprise—and a slap in the face—to the thousands of Latin Americans and others from outside the United States whom the company has hired to fill its contracts in Iraq since the war began. Greystone Limited, a Blackwater affiliate set up in 2004 in the tax haven of Barbados, has recruited Iraq security guards from countries throughout Latin America, including Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama, as journalist Jeremy Scahill has reported.

But Blackwater is far from the only such company hiring “third-country nationals,” or employees who are not from the United States or Iraq. In the interest of improving profit margins, private military firms in Iraq are increasingly turning to the developing world for armed guards. Peter Singer, a leading expert on the private security industry at the Brookings Institution, has estimated that there are citizens from 30 countries employed as security contractors in Iraq. While ex-soldiers from the Balkans, Fiji, Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uganda are all common in Iraq, Latin America has proven to be a particularly fertile recruiting ground for these companies.

Latin America, says Adam Isacson, director of programs at the Center for International Policy, is a predictable site for U.S. mercenary companies to recruit personnel. In “what other region of the world are you going to find reasonably westernized people with military experience, in some cases with combat experience, who will work for low wages, who speak a language that a lot of our own military personnel speak,” he asks, noting that the U.S. Army is about a quarter Latino and that Latin America accounts for about 40% of U.S. military training programs worldwide. “It’s their natural ground to find people with military experience for whom $1,000 a month is a lot of money.”

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Bolivia: An Early Goodbye for President Mesa?

27 Feb

February 13, 2004

Center for International Policy

In November 2002, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a pro-business, pro-U.S. figure known by his nickname “Goni,” paid a visit to the White House. The two presidents discussed Bolivia’s U.S.-supported program of military and police-led eradication of coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

gonibushGoni was worried about the eradication program’s economic impact. Without a $150 million boost in emergency aid to cushion the blow to thousands of coca-growing families, Goni told Bush, “I may be back here in a year, this time seeking political asylum.”

President Bush was reportedly amused. According to The New York Times, Bush “told his visitor that all heads of state had tough problems and wished him good luck.” [1]

Goni’s prophecy turned out to be right on target. In October 2003, eleven months after being sent back to La Paz empty-handed, a month of escalating protests forced him to take a one-way journey to Miami. The demonstrations, blockades and other unrest, which met with a violent reaction from Goni’s security forces, were sparked by plans to build a natural-gas pipeline from landlocked Bolivia to the Chilean port of Mejillones (which belonged to Bolivia until a 19th-century war).

The protests soon became an outlet for expressing a variety of pent-up grievances against the government. These, the Andean Information Network’s Katherine Ledebur notes, included “demands for better wages, reform of anti-drug legislation, rejection of a law imposing prison terms for people participating in road blockades, and repudiation of the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).” [2] Anti-pipeline and anti-globalization sentiment were only part of a larger set of demands; Bolivia is the poorest country in South America and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Indifference to the unpopular president’s predicament cost the U.S. government one of its strongest allies in the Andean region. However, Goni’s vice president and immediate successor, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, has assured Bush administration officials that Bolivia will continue the U.S.-mandated coca eradication program.

mesaMesa’s days could be numbered, though; renewed protests may be imminent. As the former journalist and political unknown came into office, leaders of the September-October protests announced that they would grant him 90 days to heed their demands. That period has now expired. “More than 100 days have passed and there are no signs of change,” radical labor leader Roberto de la Cruz recently argued. “After 100 days we can say he is the face of neo-colonization, he has shown continuity”with the Sánchez government. [3]

The same forces that brought down his predecessor will soon engulf Mesa unless La Paz and Washington change course.

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