jueves, 20 de diciembre de 2007

Acoso estratégico




John Saxe-Fernández
La Jornada, México,
20 de diciembre de 2007.



“Si este sistema de misiles se pone en funcionamiento lo hará automáticamente como parte de toda la infraestructura nuclear de Estados Unidos. Será parte integral de la capacidad nuclear de EU.” Vladimir Putin describió así la médula de la iniciativa del gobierno de Bush para instalar sistemas antibalísticos, interceptores y radares en Polonia y la República Checa. Hecha ante Europa –y el mundo–, en la Conferencia sobre Política de Seguridad que se celebró en Munich a principios de año, los eventos demostraron que no fue una declaración menor: al colocar las fuerzas balísticas y nucleares estadunidenses en las puertas mismas de Rusia, la Casa Blanca intenta crear una capacidad de “primer ataque nuclear”. El propósito de corto plazo es paralizar a Rusia, por ejemplo, ante un eventual ataque de Bush-Cheney contra Irán, nación poseedora de la segunda reserva petrolera del planeta.



Pero después de que 16 agencias de inteligencia de EU dieron a conocer hace poco que Irán había cancelado su programa nuclear militar desde 2003, en contradicción con los dichos de la Casa Blanca, se derrumbó la justificación para la guerra y para el “escudo antimisiles”, erigido, según Bush, “para proteger a Europa” de un ataque iraní con cohetes. Así lo enfatizó la prensa checa y polaca en encabezados de primera página. Pero el Pentágono persiste con el “escudo antimisiles”, haciendo ostensibles dos designios de la ultraderecha militar (neocon): uno interno, centrado en grandes negocios derivados de jugosas subvenciones bélico-industriales del “escudo” y en los presuntos beneficios electorales de otra guerra durante los comicios presidenciales; y otro externo: para frenar el desplome hegemónico de EU, propiciando el control militar sobre la principal cuenca petrolera (y un insostenible “patrón petróleo-dólar”); acorralando a Moscú y China desde la OTAN y azuzando conflictos euroasiáticos, cruciales al ascenso hegemónico de EU durante el siglo XX.


Es claro que el escudo “antibalístico” de Bush es, en verdad, “una declaración de guerra de facto” contra la Federación Rusa, pues es como si Rusia hiciera lo mismo en Chihuahua y Alberta. Se induce así otra guerra fría con su carrera armamentista, la competencia por el dominio de áreas de alta tecnología –microelectrónica, espionaje satelital, “nano y bio tecnología”, etcétera– y su secuela de guerra propagandística y fortalecimiento de redes de espionaje. Pero la actual guerra fría difiere de la anterior en al menos tres aspectos: 1) el crudo antagonismo geopolítico en torno a asuntos demográficos y de recursos naturales estratégicos (petróleo, minerales, agua, biodiversidad) sustituye la confrontación ideológica; 2) con el colapso medioambiental en curso se crean otros conflictos –y oportunidades de intervención–, y 3) existe una probabilidad mayor de que, en los tiempos del peak oil, la nueva guerra fría mute en “guerra general termonuclear” (GGT) de manera vertiginosa. La inestabilidad e incertidumbre creadas por el “acoso antibalístico” son riesgosas. Yuri Baluyevski, jefe del Estado Mayor de las fuerzas armadas de Rusia, se refirió la semana pasada a la moratoria impuesta por Moscú al Tratado de Fuerzas Armadas Convencionales en Europa (FACE). Adujo la desventaja militar que ocasiona porque EU y la OTAN lo usan para presionar a Rusia y consideró necesario “recordar”, no en estricto sigilo –nótese–, sino urbe et orbi, que el “escudo” que EU intenta desplegar en Europa “podría provocar una respuesta con un proyectil balístico intercontinental”. Luego agregó: “el lanzamiento de un proyectil antimisiles desde Polonia podría ser considerado por el sistema autómata de Rusia como el lanzamiento de un misil balístico, lo que podría provocar un asalto en respuesta” (La Jornada, 16/12/07, p. 25).


El “sistema autómata” mencionado se refiere a una postura estratégica y capacidad operativa (balística-satelital-computacional) conocida como Launch-on-Warning (LoW), desarrollada por EU, la URSS y Rusia. Aunque la documentación desclasificada es escasa, documentos del Archivo de Seguridad Nacional indican que en el otoño de 1969 Georgy Arbatov, del Instituto de Estudios sobre EU y Canadá de Moscú, comentó a Helmut Sonnenfeldt del Consejo Nacional de Seguridad de EU sobre las dificultades estratégicas de LoW. Irónico dijo que “no había problema”, porque “ninguno de los dos esperaría en caso de recibir advertencia de un ataque. En lugar de ello, vaciarían sus silos lanzando un contrataque de manera inmediata”. Años después H. Kissinger, irresponsable y con calculada ambivalencia, “aceptó y desestimó” los altos riesgos de GGT “accidental” o por una “falsa alarma” del LoW. Son contingencias advertidas por Robert McNamara y Fred Ikle con aprensión y alarma comprensibles: EU y Rusia cuentan con 13 mil armas nucleares y unos 4 mil 400 cohetes en estado de máxima alerta desde que EU anunció que ampliaría su infraestructura nuclear a Polonia y la República Checa.


El de Bush es un corrupto “acoso estratégico” con alto riesgo de catástrofe humana y ecológica terminal.

jueves, 6 de diciembre de 2007

BM: Pilatos previsor




John Saxe-Fernández
La Jornada, México,
jueves 6 de diciembre de 2007.



La crisis institucional de la pax americana se suma, junto con la energía, la pobreza y el calentamiento global, a la agenda contemporánea. Nuevas opciones financieras regionales (arreglo Chi Mai o el Banco del Sur), así como la pérdida de 88 por ciento de la cartera de préstamos del FMI desde 2002, y de 42 por ciento que afectó al Banco Mundial (BM) desde 1996, así lo indican. Agréguese la debacle moral y de derecho penal internacional, por más de un millón de bajas civiles en Irak y crímenes de guerra a granel, y se comprende lo difícil que es ocultar una criminalidad de Estado en la cual el BM, la CIA, el Pentágono y el FMI han sido pieza central.


En México, cual Pilatos previsor, el BM se lava las manos de cara a 2008. Dice que “le preocupa” la polarización social (La Jornada, 4/12/07, primera plana) y días antes se alarma por el “índice de desestabilización”. Los “índices”, parte de sus herméticos manejos estadísticos, no apantallan a una opinión pública que padece los resultados de los programas privatizadores, de ajuste estructural y de apertura comercial impulsados por el BM y sus country managers que operan desde Los Pinos y Hacienda. El lobo se dice inquieto por el bienestar y la seguridad de Caperucita, días antes de la cadena de zarpazos de 2008 pactados en el TLCAN contra millones de productores de maíz, leche, carne y frijol.


A lo largo de 25 años, el BM y FMI han jugado un papel central en la inducción de condiciones micro y macroeconómicas que afectan al aparato productivo, el empleo y el bienestar social, lo que, según Joseph Stiglitz, ex economista jefe del BM, se realiza en cuatro etapas (Memoria, junio de 2002): el paso uno “… puede llamarse con más precisión la sobornización”, es decir, el uso de empréstitos y otros dispositivos “para lograr la adhesión de presidentes y ministros para que, en lugar de oponerse a la venta de las grandes empresas estratégicas de gas, electricidad, petróleo, puertos o ferrocarriles, se inclinen a liquidarlas alegremente”.


Con las exigencias del FMI como excusa, “podías ver cómo se les abrían los ojos ante la posibilidad de una comisión de 10 por ciento, pagada en cuentas suizas, por el simple hecho de haber bajado unos cuantos miles de millones el precio de venta de los bienes nacionales” (p. 15). La venta de garage salinista (que algunos taimados “de izquierda” aconsejan seguir en Pemex por medio de contratos riesgo), valorada entre 23 y 26 mil millones de dólares, superó las privatizaciones de Yeltsin, hechas bajo impulso de EU en medio de “oleadas oligárquico-etílicas”, rematando grandes empresas energéticas, ahora recobradas.


Al segundo paso Stiglitz lo denomina “el ciclo del dinero caliente”, o sea, la “desregulación” del sector financiero, pactada por Salinas y Zedillo con el FMI para que especuladores y empresas extranjeras puedan repatriar dólares a su gusto. Así se prepara el terreno para grandes despojos, usando además instrumentos “novedosos” como el “mercado mexicano de derivados”. El Plan Brady, por su parte, facilitó a Wall Street inflar el “mercado emergente mexicano” mutando decenas de miles de millones de dólares de dudosos bonos de la deuda en valores comerciales “respetables”, al amparo de papeles del Tesoro estadunidense a 30 años: para Salomón Brothers, Meryll Lynch, Citibank, J.P. Morgan et al, las ganancias fueron fabulosas en medio de risas y champaña. La hilaridad fue mayor cuando el secretario Gurría afirmó, días antes de la macrocrisis de 1994, que la Ronda Uruguay “y la firma de acuerdos comerciales de México, en particular el TLC… ofrecerán a nuestro país un entorno favorable que debe aprovechar para sustentar el crecimiento futuro en el comercio y la inversión, alejando con ello la amenaza de otra crisis de sobrendeudamiento”. Lo cierto es que en cada ciclo “neoliberal” aumentan desempleo, despojo del patrimonio y millones migran a EU en busca de empleo.


El paso tres consiste en una desestabilización sociopolítica tal cual, pues con políticas recesivas se ataca la economía popular al alentar desempleo e “informalidad económica”, con su sector punta: el crimen organizado y el narcotráfico. A sabiendas de las consecuencias se reduce la inversión pública social y productiva, se retiran subsidios a la agricultura, se arrasa con los contratos colectivos, acelerando los despidos y acentuando la distribución regresiva del ingreso, se impulsa el alza en el precio de los combustibles (gasolinazo) y se ataca la canasta básica. Esto da lugar al paso “tres y medio” de Stiglitz: “los disturbios sociales inducidos por el FMI”.

Paso cuatro: con la nación “caída y en desgracia”, el FMI y el BM “se aprovechan y le exprimen hasta la última gota de sangre. Incrementan el calor, hasta que la olla entera explota”. (p. 15-17). En este contexto, con aval de Calderón, EU despliega sobre territorio nacional su sombrilla de seguridad (ASPAN-Iniciativa Mérida-contratistas/mercenarios), mientras sus empresas, con nuevos apoyos, se lanzan sobre “los bienes restantes” (petróleo, electricidad) “… a precios de remate”.

jueves, 22 de noviembre de 2007

EU: la crisis








John Saxe-Fernández
La Jornada, México,
22 de noviembre de 2007.






Según Jan Hatzius, de Goldman Sachs, las consecuencias macroeconómicas de la crisis hipotecaria “podrían ser bastante dramáticas”. Pocas horas después, John Stumpf, CEO de Wells Fargo, advirtió que la situación del mercado de bienes raíces “es la peor desde la Gran Depresión”. Hay riesgos de orden mayor: además de “hipotecaria”, la crisis es bancaria, bursátil, de liquidez y, en el fondo, de hegemonía. En el aparato productivo su impacto es extenso: al contraerse la inversión en bienes raíces se afecta a la industria de la construcción, gran generadora de empleo, vinculada con otras actividades: cemento, acero, vidrio, plásticos, etcétera. Por el impacto tan amplio del sector vivienda, el “contagio” de la crisis es asunto potencialmente grave, dentro y fuera de EU: incrementos mayores del desempleo conllevan más oleadas antinmigrantes, racismo y represión contra nuestra población. Y las disminuciones en los volúmenes de importaciones afectan la relación de EU con Asia y de manera especial con México: la asimetría estructural con EU es notoria: 90 por ciento de nuestras exportaciones van al otro lado del río Bravo mientras sólo 15 por ciento de las suyas se destinan a México.
La crisis hipotecaria no es pasajera y sin impacto sociopolítico. Jeff Faux advierte que esta situación difiere del desplome que se dio en el mercado accionario, que no afectó a las familias “porque tenían pocas o ninguna acción”. Pero ahora “el precio de la vivienda en picada sería un desastre prolongado”, como ocurrió en Japón desde 1991 (Global Class War, New York, John Wiley, 2006, p. 198. De próxima publicación por la UACM).
Ya se registran quiebras bancarias y en fondos especializados en la industria de la construcción. De interrumpirse la cadena de pagos la situación sería explosiva en un escenario macroeconómico deteriorado por el costo de la petro-ocupación de Irak y Afganistán, entre otros desatinos de Bush: sus déficit fiscal y de cuenta corriente crecen sin control y como en 1975 hay riesgos de inflación con estancamiento (estagflación). Según Hatzius, un cálculo “conservador” de las pérdidas de los inversionistas –unos 200 mil millones de dólares– se traducirían en recortes en la inversión por 2 billones (trillions) de dólares. Es decir, más desempleo, rebajas en las tasas de interés y mayor déficit comercial. Y con ello un deterioro todavía mayor del dólar, con fuertes pérdidas para inversionistas y tenedores de la divisa.
Estudios del Instituto Levy, citados por Faux, indican que en 2008, “para evitar que el desempleo siga, el gobierno tendría que aumentar de manera sustancial su gasto deficitario por encima de su déficit federal proyectado en 2.3 billones de dólares para la década”, lo que “mandaría volando la deuda externa e interna a 100 por ciento del PIB, y después vendría más”. Y a mayor inyección de liquidez, mayor “estagflación”.
El contexto difiere del de 1975, ya que desde entonces ocurrió un cambio profundo en la estructura de poder del aparato monetario internacional. El dólar no tiene más el monopolio como divisa de reserva: existen otras opciones sostenidas por políticas macroeconómicas que inversionistas y bancos centrales consideran más “responsables”, de cara al desorbitado gasto de “seguridad” de EU, estimado en un billón de dólares en 2007. Para gobiernos e inversionistas los títulos en dólares no son confiables y mantener sus monedas atadas al dólar resulta una operación riesgosa. En noviembre el desplome que registró el dólar se debió tanto a la crisis hipotecaria como a las declaraciones de un funcionario chino de que su país “tiene un plan bien definido” para diversificar sus reservas monetarias. (China tiene reservas cercanas al billón de dólares.)
La diversificación monetaria y de portafolios se generaliza: en India la caída del dólar ante la rupia llegó a los tabloides: publicaron que la súper modelo Gisele Bündchen no acepta dólares como pago a sus servicios. Mientras para ingresar a museos y monumentos como el Taj Majal, el ministerio de cultura dejó de obligar a los turistas a pagar en dólares. Ahora se usa la rupia, más estable. Los ingresos de Bündche o los del ministerio de cultura son ínfimos comparados con los de los jeques de la OPEP, quienes en la última cumbre rehusaron dejar constancia de “preocupación” por el desplome del dólar, como sugirieron Irán y Venezuela. Eso sí, diversifican “poco a poco” sus portafolios y reservas monetarias: desde mayo Kuwait “desató” su moneda del dólar. Igual plantean los Emiratos Árabes Unidos (EAU): una desvinculación gradual por medio de una canasta de monedas. El Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo, que incluye a Kuwait, los EAU, Arabia Saudita, Qatar, Bahrein y Omán, tratará el asunto en diciembre.
La crisis hipotecaria es síntoma de agravamiento de una crisis histórica: si Vietnam fue un fracaso táctico, Irak es un desastre tanto estratégico-militar como “monetario” y “fiscal”: el Pentágono debilita, no apuntala al dólar. Es la crisis de la pax americana: momento de incertidumbre, de oportunidad y de gran riesgo a la paz mundial.

martes, 20 de noviembre de 2007

NAFTA: The Intersection of the Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Capital

John Saxe-Fernández
Social Justice, Vol. 23, 1996
Journal Article Excerpt
www.questia.com
Preliminary Outline
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) "is REMINISCENT OF an earlier era, when mother countries such as England offered preferential trade terms, or Commonwealth preferences, to their former colonies in order to ensure their continued economic, financial, and political dependence....The motives of the [U.S.] government with regard to Mexico certainly remind us of those of the British Empire." This was written by Robert Kuttner in Business Week in mid-1991. At that time the intersection of U.S. "geoeconomics and geopolitics," as it would affect North America - and the rest of the Western Hemisphere - was already apparent.
The idea was to "integrate" a Third World country of Latin America - a country that at the time of this writing is still officially known as the United States of Mexico - into the larger economy of North America.(1) Few Mexican citizens were aware that not only some of the constitutional principles established more than 150 years ago, but also crucial elements of the exercise of "jurisdiction" normally associated with the concept of the nation-state were at stake in the "negotiations" preceding the eventual implementation of NAFTA. More specifically, I refer to the "total" transformation of the "economic geography" (which covers not only trade, but also finance, industry, infrastructure, and agriculture) of North America, to the detriment of the "public interest" of Mexico and that of the other countries involved.
The consequences will be especially costly and damaging for the formal wage-earning sector, whether blue- or white-collar. This sweeping transformation has been orchestrated mainly to cater to "U.S. private interests"(2) and it entails a "geopolitics" that also serves large corporate interests. Both the geopolitics and the geoeconomics have been codified through the commercial, financial, geopolitical, and jurisdictional instruments developed by the most powerful of the three nations concerned during the process that culminated in the signing of NAFTA. From a historical perspective, this "integration process" should be seen as a fresh manifestation of the Monroe Doctrine; there is a direct link between NAFTA and the expansionist tradition of the United States. U.S. Vice President Al Gore vividly expressed this connection, urbi et orbi, when he compared NAFTA to the territorial acquisitions of Louisiana and Alaska made by the United States in the last century.(3) In this century, NAFTA is not the first example of expansion...
End of free preview...

jueves, 8 de noviembre de 2007

Montebello: saqueo de México



John Saxe-Fernández

La Jornada, México,
8 de noviembre de 2007



Poco después del cónclave secreto en Montebello, Canadá, de la Alianza para la Prosperidad y Seguridad de América del Norte (ASPAN), de la cual el Consejo de la Competitividad de América del Norte (CCAN) es “brújula”, Eduardo Pérez Motta, presidente de la Comisión Federal de Competencia, insta a “proteger a los consumidores” ante monopolios “que frenan la competitividad y por ende el crecimiento económico”: entre ellos mencionó los de telecomunicaciones, transporte, servicios financieros y “el de energía”.



Toda una prestidigitación seguida poco después por el PAN, transformado en vergonzoso cabildo de las petroleras extranjeras, para llevar hasta sus últimas consecuencias lo que Jorge F. Moncada y Mario di Costanzo han calificado, en relación al “rescate bancario”, como El saqueo a los mexicanos (Grijalbo, 2007): un magno atraco que dejó al país sin banca y lo colocó a merced de la usura “legalizada”. Con parte mínima de los intereses de ese “rescate”, ardientemente promovido por tecnócratas y oligarcas locales, podría duplicarse el presupuesto de salud y “duplicar la capacidad de refinamiento de petróleo y reducir así al mínimo la importación de gasolina” (p.11).



Ni lerdos ni perezosos, los integrantes mexicanos del CCAN lanzan otra cruzada para “la apertura de ciento por ciento” a favor de la inversión extranjera directa (IED), “en sectores estratégicos”, metiendo en el mismo saco a los monopolios privados y a los sectores constitucionalmente reservados a la nación. Es una maña vieja: con Salinas (1988-1994) el Banco Mundial (BM) desató sobre Pemex un diseño de desmembramiento y desarticulación, conocido en Estados Unidos como divestiture, que el Senado de ese país a principios de los 70 amenazó, pero decidió no aplicar, a sus monopolios petroleros porque los llevaría a la ruina ante una competencia externa con sólida integración vertical. Con aval de Salinas, el BM lo hizo, “marcando su territorio” sobre Pemex, como perro por su jardín.


Ahora se lanzan sobre los principales “trozos” de Pemex bajo el ropaje de la “competitividad”.¿Objetivo?: medio tapar el hedor de las transas de las privatizaciones-rescates (bancos, carreteras, azúcar, etcétera) para que el CCAN, integrado por promotores de la IED, como Claudio X. González, procedan con un “fobaproa petroeléctrico”: la receta para terminar de hacer pedazos la economía y la paz social del país.


Esta estafa en curso dentro del vital sector energético se realiza por la vía de la subcontratación –Halliburton/Bechtel–, el “manejo” opaco del portafolio de negocios de Pemex-CFE y de una vil agresión fiscal perpetrada por el FMI-Hacienda. Se ataca el corazón del país en momentos en que la capacidad mundial de producción de crudo convencional ya no cubre la demanda y por tanto el control nacional del sector es crucial para que la nación no se nos deshaga en las manos.


Pero las grandes petroleras, en pos del negocio del crudo, cuentan con los cómplices de siempre. En 1996 en un sobrio análisis sobre procesos e intereses implicados en la enajenación del sector petroeléctrico, eje principal de acumulación de México, Gastón García Cantú señalaba que la dirigencia empresarial es “fundamental” en la transformación de las empresas públicas que quedan, “en botín a repartirse entre mexicanos, primero, y extranjeros después, con el argumento de que en poder del Estado no hay negocio próspero”.


Es el “guión” que usan Acción Nacional y algunos bribones de la “oposición” legislativa para entregar Pemex a la IED: para el BM es un ente poco competitivo que llegó al límite de su endeudamiento siendo los privados los únicos que pueden aportar los capitales requeridos para su expansión. Pero como demuestra José Luis Manzo (http://www.untcip.net/) con datos recientes del Estado de resultados y balance general de Pemex, en los 18 años comprendidos entre 1989 y 2006 ésta acumuló (en dólares constantes de 2006) utilidades por 471 mil millones de dólares (mmdd). Entre 1989-1997 los ingresos totales fueron de 264 mmdd y los costos de 107 mmdd, con utilidades de 157 mmdd e impuestos pagadores por 145 mmdd, arrojando una utilidad de 12 mmdd. Sólo en el sexenio de Fox, por el alza de precios, se lograron ingresos por 441 mmdd, generó utilidades por 240 mmdd, pero Hacienda, bajo lacayos de Washington, la asaltó con una carga fiscal de 258 mmdd.


En el periodo 1998-2005 la codicia y el entreguismo se salieron de control. Zedillo y Fox perpetraron un crimen de lesa patria: después de restar a los ingresos (471 mmdd) los costos (215 mmdd), Pemex registró una utilidad de 256 mmdd, “superior en casi 100 mil millones de dólares a la del periodo anterior (...) Sin embargo, como el importe de impuestos pagados fue todavía mayor (284 mmdd) ello provocó a Pemex una pérdida contable acumulada de 28 mmdd en este periodo” (¡!). Y claro, comparada con las empresas privadas en México y otras petroleras extranjeras, resulta que Pemex no es “competitiva”: su carga fiscal cuadruplica la de las empresas privadas en el país y casi triplica la de otras petroleras.

jueves, 25 de octubre de 2007

El predicamento mexicano



John Saxe-Fernández



La Jornada, México,
jueves 25 de octubre de 2007





Hoy como ayer, en la entrega del país a EU la oligarquía se posiciona como intermediaria en los grandes negocios de la “compraventa” de México. Regímenes que, ante su ilegitimidad de origen, optan por la represión como ocurrió en la usurpación electoral y posterior coerción sufridas por las fuerzas encabezadas por Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas durante el gobierno de Salinas (1988-1994) y ahora contra vastos sectores de la población aglutinados en torno a López Obrador y de otras causas populares, que sufren el embate policial-militar a sus derechos humanos y políticos: el estado de excepción se instala de facto como blindaje para los opacos negocios de la privatización y entrega de ferrocarriles, petróleo, agua, biodiversidad, electricidad, bancos, carreteras, puertos, aerolíneas, seguridad social, universidades, etcétera.





Rasgo central de la “colonialidad” de esta dirigencia ha sido el hecho de que, como ocurrió en 1848 y en el Tratado de la Mesilla (1853), “la enajenación del país es el fin de una política represiva. En la medida que se restringen las libertades individuales y sociales, se persigue a los intelectuales que los denuncian y se reparte como un botín los bienes públicos, se procede a la venta de la nación al extranjero”, como escribió Gastón García Cantú, en su imprescindible Las invasiones norteamericanas en México (Era, 1971). Es un trauma relacionado a las fases diferentes del desarrollo capitalista y la posición internacional de EU: tanto el “reordenamiento territorial” de México, un despojo de 2 millones de kilómetros cuadrados, como el sometimiento del librecambismo porfirista, contribuyeron en el ascenso de EU a las grandes ligas imperialistas a finales del siglo XIX. Y de ahí, como retador hegemónico del imperio británico, luego de su largo, y en el siglo XX, fulminante, ascenso hegemónico que culmina con la primacía global después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la consolidación de la “pax americana” y el dólar.





Las ecuaciones de poder no son estáticas: ahora bajo el capital monopolista fuertemente impactado por un agresivo sector financiero y en una constelación de poder signada por agudas contradicciones, a poco más de 15 años del colapso de la URSS y con una relación estratégica ruso-china revigorizada, EU está anegado por la resistencia Iraquí y dependiente de combustibles fósiles, agua y minerales, con movimientos de construcción social alternativa bolivarianos y retadores monetarios y tecnomilitares en Europa y Asia. Por lo que se vuelca sobre México y Canadá como “modelo” y plataforma de “imperializacion” para una recomposición de su hegemonía hemisférica, con el TLCAN y una “integración profunda” de corte policial-militar pactada por los “líderes” –Bush, Harper y Calderón– a espaldas de los poderes legislativos y de la opinión pública de sus respectivos países. Esto se hace bajo tres ejes post 11-09: a) el desborde hacia México y Canadá de un estado de excepción que conlleva la ampliación de facto de la jurisdicción de EU; b) la agudización de un apartheid laboral con una homologación a la baja de los derechos y salarios del trabajador de México y EU; y c) un vasto esquema de infraestructura –corredores del TLCAN– para el saqueo de recursos y mayor explotación de la fuerza de trabajo.





EU es un hegemón de gran poder y acumulación de contradicciones: su agresividad militar no equilibra, sino que desestabiliza dimensiones cruciales de la economía y política mundial que van desde los fundamentos político-electorales de la paz social mexicana hasta los de la OTAN. La ocupación de Irak y la “imperialización” de México se dan en medio de la debacle de Bretton Woods (FMI-BM-BID), de una veloz multilateralización y regionalización económica, monetaria, industrial y tecnológico-militar. El fenómeno, que desembocó en guerra mundial, difiere del bloquismo del periodo entre-guerras: el retorno a las “grandes áreas” por la cúpula de EU desde el Foreign Relations Council y sus contrapartes en México y Canadá, se hace en un contexto de “crisis hegemónica” con mecanismos de seguridad establecidos por las mismas fuerzas de clase y bajo la colonialidad formalizada en el TLCAN: el Consejo para la Competitividad de la Alianza para la Prosperidad y la Seguridad de la América del Norte.



La capitulación de Calderón al diseño policial-militar (Plan México) energético, laboral y ambiental de EU cercena la soberanía e impone, por la fuerza y la usurpación, a la facción oligárquico-imperial que sigue lucrando con la “compra-venta” del país. Pocas veces, desde la década de 1840, estuvo México en tal riesgo y se necesitó de tanta cohesión cívico-militar para su defensa. Por lo que resalta el desentendimiento de este predicamento en el penoso endoso de Cárdenas a la usurpación electoral de Fox y Calderón. Sus “argumentos” debilitan las fuerzas sociales y los instrumentos político-electorales para el tránsito pacífico a la legalidad y a la constitucionalidad. La legitimidad y lealtad de Calderón a la Carta Magna sí están a debate.

viernes, 12 de octubre de 2007



La entrega de
“todo México”



John Saxe Fernández


La Jornada, México

jueves 11 de octubre de 2007




Tony Garza, embajador de Estados Unidos en México, dijo al diputado texano Henry Cuellar que “el presidente Calderón (es) el mandatario más dispuesto a colaborar con Washington, mucho más que todos los anteriores”. Poco después, el Departamento de Estado informó que “Garza está inmerso con Calderón” en “negociaciones serias” y en total sigilo sobre asuntos policial-militares. No es sólo “asistencia”, sino esquemas de “integración” y absorción militar. Según Jeannette Becerra Acosta (Milenio, 24/9/07 p. 6-8), fuentes del Pentágono indican que “desde 2002 México ‘analiza’ su futura integración al Comando del Norte (NorthCom, establecido por Rumsfeld bajo el impacto del 11/9 como instancia vital para la “seguridad y defensa patria”) en un área que incluye a Estados Unidos, Canadá, México, partes del Caribe, el Golfo de México, los estrechos de Florida y las zonas marítimas del Atlántico y el Pacífico hasta 500 millas náuticas de distancia de las costas de EU” (p. 8).




Como la Constitución está vigente, no sorprende que las negociaciones de “integración militar” impulsadas por la Casa Blanca, con Fox y ahora con Calderón, se realicen en “total secreto”. Es un proceso “pasito a pasito”, para “no alborotar el gallinero”. Por ejemplo, desde 2004 Fox autorizó la instalación de cinco radares Wide Area Augmentation Systems (WAAS). Se hizo por medio del Departamento de Transporte de Estados Unidos y la Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transporte ante la resistencia de la alta oficialidad militar del país. El WAAS estará en total “operación trinacional a más tardar en 2013”. Críticos de la Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de la América del Norte (ASPAN) indican que se trata de “acelerar la integración total a más tardar en 2020”.




Es un anexionismo sui generis que conlleva un brutal apartheid laboral, pero factible por el adormecimiento público ante el “polkismo” de Calderón. (Me refiero al colaboracionismo con el presidente James Polk –1845-1849–, cuando Estados Unidos despojó a México de más de la mitad de su territorio, aunque ambicionaba “todo México”.) Garza dijo a Cuellar que “éste es el momento en que está abierta la ‘ventana de oportunidades’, mientras Calderón cuenta todavía con un capital político durante su primer año de gobierno en el que podemos ayudarlo en esta difícil guerra contra las drogas” (p. 7).




Bajo la pantalla del antiterrorismo, las drogas o la delincuencia, Estados Unidos despliega plataformas de “asistencia militar” para la expansión e intervención castrense y del aparato de seguridad y espionaje, incluyendo el despliegue de tropas, asesores y “contratistas”, así como el establecimiento de bases militares, siempre en función de los intereses del alto empresariado internacional y local por la explotación de mano de obra barata y de recursos naturales, petróleo, gas, minerales, agua, biodiversidad. Estas operaciones ahora se articulan desde la ASPAN, cuya agenda y reuniones se realizan marginando a los poderes Legislativo y Judicial y a espaldas de la opinión pública de Estados Unidos, México y Canadá: son encuentros secretos entre altos empresarios, embajadores, ministros y comandantes militares, como el que se realizó en Banff, Alberta en septiembre de 2006 –en el que se institucionalizó un esquema que privilegia la participación del sector privado, por medio del Consejo para la Competitividad de América del Norte (CCAN)–, o el más reciente en Montebello, Québec, en agosto pasado, ya bajo la batuta del CCAN. En materia de gas y petróleo el CCAN impulsa, junto a la fusión policial-militar, la “integración energética” en función de “un imperativo estratégico para EU”, porque “Canadá y México han sido bendecidos con abundantes recursos energéticos”.




Instigan la “reforma” –privatización– “del sector energético de México” por medio de “iniciativas intermedias” y “la lógica de un mercado integrado” para desde ahí inducir el ritmo para “una reforma fundamental”. El CCAN indicó que los altos mandos empresariales esperan ser “socios” en la protección de “infraestructura vital”, así como en la “administración” de esquemas “tripartitos” prioritarios en caso de “emergencia”, sea por pandemias u otros “eventos” (¿terrorismo, huelgas, desobediencia civil?). Con la excusa de los ataques contra la infraestructura de Pemex, ocurridos antes de la reunión de Montebello, Calderón encargó a SY Coleman Corporation de EU el monitoreo de instalaciones estratégicas petroeléctricas. Es una vigilancia y resguardo que por ley corresponde únicamente al Ejército, la Marina y la Fuerza Aérea Mexicana. Según el general Roberto Badillo Martínez, secretario de la Comisión de Defensa del Senado, cabe exigir a Calderón “… una explicación pormenorizada del posible ingreso de ex militares estadunidenses para operaciones de vigilancia. Esto es muy grave para la soberanía. Ningún gobierno mexicano durante el siglo XX permitió la entrada de tropas (de Estados Unidos), ni de mercenarios disfrazados, y mucho menos de asesores”. Pero es lo que ocurre en medio de una vasta represión popular y de la entrega de “todo México”.


jueves, 27 de septiembre de 2007

Costa Rica: golpes bajos


John Saxe-Fernández


La Jornada, México
jueves 27 de septiembre de 2007



La campaña por el sí, en el referendo que se celebrará el 7 de octubre en Costa Rica sobre el TLC con EU, fue dañada desde el gobierno al publicarse un documento interno de la presidencia de Oscar Arias proponiendo el chantaje, la amenaza y el temor para doblegar a la oposición. Dirigido al presidente y su hermano Rodrigo –ministro de la presidencia– por Kevin Casas, ex segundo vicepresidente y el diputado Fernando Sánchez del gobernante Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN), plantea un programa de guerra sucia contra la coalición por el no compuesta por “universidades, la iglesia, sindicatos, grupos ambientales, etcétera”. El “etcétera” incluye a organizaciones comunales, cooperativas, sindicatos, de mujeres y de barrios, grupos artísticos, campesinos o juveniles, pequeños y medianos productores, agricultores, empresas y al Partido de Acción Ciudadana (PAC), cuyo líder, Otón Solís Fallas disputó la presidencia a Arias en las reñidas elecciones de 2006. Lo hizo junto a Epsy Camphell Barr, ahora dirigente del PAC, defensora de la soberanía, la autosuficiencia alimentaria, el aparato productivo, el agua potable, la educación y las telecomunicaciones, de cara al TLC.
Aunque la censura de los medios no es nueva –desde hace meses se cierran espacios a los críticos del TLC, como el programa de televisión de Álvaro Montero Mejía– se propone saturar “… los medios de comunicación con publicidad” escogiendo “muy bien los rostros de la comunicación masiva del sí y utilizar casi exclusivamente trabajadores y pequeños empresarios”. Ello porque la contradicción entre un Estado dominado por la oligarquía y la población (tema desarrollado por Eduardo Saxe-Fernández en La nueva oligarquía, UNA, Heredia, 1999) deriva en confrontación ante el esquema antinacional y antipopular del TLC: “La campaña del TLC”, se reconoce en el documento, “se está convirtiendo en lo que nunca debimos haber dejado que se convirtiera: una lucha entre ricos y pobres, entre pueblo y gobierno”.
Desde la revolución de 1948 no se había registrado una división tan profunda en la sociedad y la política: fue notable la presencia de miles protestando fuera del Estadio nacional, durante la ceremonia de toma de posesión de Arias. Desde una legitimidad quebradiza, éste ahondó políticas favorables a los intereses extranjeros y de la elite, centrados en las exportaciones, la maquila electrónica, agregándose, entre otros, la especulación en bienes raíces –ante el ingreso de gran cantidad de jubilados de EU, los precios de la tierra e inmuebles se disparan– junto a una tolerancia a actividades como el lavado de dinero, proveniente del narcotráfico y otros servicios: florece la prostitución y el juego: el sportbook se disemina y es un negocio multimillonario. Hoy son más los casinos que las aulas: en esto San José se parece a La Habana de Batista y el poder se ejerce desde el lucro oligárquico-imperial. Los Arias son dueños del mayor ingenio del país, productor de etanol que se exporta a California, un negocio de decenas de millones de dólares anuales con altos costos a la biodiversidad. No sorprende que junto a la creciente polarización sociopolítica, la credibilidad del régimen esté por los suelos: “En este momento”, dice el memorando, “nadie cree una palabra al gobierno ni a los políticos”. Por ello la campaña del sí debe usar “… intensivamente testimoniales de gente muy sencilla y en situación precaria”. La preocupación oficial es mayor porque la población se organiza y resiste (la presión popular impulsó el referendo) y lleva al primer círculo de los Arias a intensificar la guerra sucia, una temeridad por la aguda polarización y deterioro socioeconómico. En un pasaje memorable por el desprecio a la civilidad se propone “estimular el miedo”: un miedo que “es de cuatro tipos: a) “miedo a la pérdida del empleo”; b) “miedo al ataque a las instituciones democráticas”; c) miedo a la injerencia extranjera en el no”; d) “miedo al efecto de un triunfo del no sobre el gobierno”.
Para Arias es difícil deslindarse de un diseño que sólo intensifica, antes del referendo, lo que de tiempo atrás hace su autoritario gobierno: Casas y Sánchez se manifiestan por estimular la “… cizaña sobre los líderes, motivos, métodos, financiamiento y vínculos internacionales del no”. En corto: asustar a los ticos con dos cocos: Fidel Castro y Hugo Chávez, sugiriendo, con engaño, que motivan y financian el no al TLC.
Para reforzar el sí se chantajea a los municipios, cimiento de la estabilidad. Dice el memo: “Pero hay que hacer algo… con los 59 alcaldes del PLN y… transmitirles con toda crudeza una idea muy simple: el alcalde que no gana su cantón el 7 de octubre no va a recibir un cinco del gobierno en los próximos tres años... (igual)... a los regidores, a quienes se puede hacer responsables de distritos específicos”.
Son golpes bajos contra el “contrato social” de una población alertada ya por el TLC: a decir de Alfonso Chase, el “reloj despertador más efectivo que hemos tenido en los últimos 100 años”.

jueves, 13 de septiembre de 2007

¿Temores prelectorales?



John Saxe-Fernández

La Jornada, México
jueves 13 de septiembre


Además de la industria petrolera, armamentista, del carbón y forestal, el vasto aparato corporativo que se beneficia desde el 11/09 con las políticas privatizadoras de funciones públicas y de seguridad en todo el gobierno federal de EU –y no sólo en el Departamento de Defensa (DdD) y su controvertido programa de “reconstrucción” en Irak– respalda la continuidad bipartidista, con especial predilección por la ultraderecha republicana. Para ello se alienta la derechización (existente) del Partido Demócrata (PD), con disfraces liberales. Y también se induce el temor y la histeria a través del manejo mediático de eventos terroristas. Ya la CNN se aproxima a Fox News en alarmismo y ramplonería: se trata de imprimir la inseguridad, incertidumbre y aprensión en la “conciencia colectiva” (incluyendo al “inconsciente” de la población), algo que resulta crucial en todo esfuerzo por remontar el colapso político republicano reflejado en las encuestas, por el rechazo del público a la ocupación y agresión armada en Afganistán e Irak. El esquema también podría servir como distracción de los efectos sobre el electorado de la grave contracción económica en curso.

En entrevistas varias los precandidatos republicanos y demócratas, incluyendo a Hillary Clinton y Barack Obama, contestaron que dejarían la “opción abierta”, cuando se les preguntó si, de asumir la presidencia, respaldarían un ataque contra Irán. Agréguese a esto la fuerte llamada de atención del Consejo del PD al diputado Jim Moran por haber osado desaprobar al Comité Israelí de Asuntos Públicos (AIPAC, por sus siglas en inglés), juzgándolo como “el cabildo más poderoso en la promoción, desde sus inicios, de la guerra en Irak”. En lo que es otro indicio de los “fuertes lazos” de los dadivosos integrantes del AIPAC con republicanos y demócratas, el PD exigió a Moran que se retractara, calificando su comentario de “visiblemente irresponsable”. Como los reproches de Moran se hicieron públicos cuando circulaba un libro de John Mearsheime y Stephen Walt (decano expulsado por ello de la Kennedy School de Harvard bajo presión de esos donantes y cuya postura documentó con anterioridad James Petras en The Power of Israel in the United States, Clarity Press, 2006), el consejo del PD agregó que los dichos de Moran “… además de incorrectos e irresponsables, son abiertamente peligrosos”.

Para promover el “temor” y un clima de “urgencia” los locutores y comentaristas de radio y televisión de EU imprimen tonos convulsivos a cualquier noticia vinculada con actos terroristas dentro o fuera del país, por ejemplo, que la policía alemana desactivó ataques por militantes islámicos contra instalaciones de EU con explosivos similares a los usados en Madrid o los recientes y repetidos ataques contra gasoductos de Pemex. También ocurren otras acciones extrañas que recuerdan y refuerzan la percepción de vulnerabilidad ante descuidos o potenciales sucesos catastróficos. Tal es el caso del avión B-52 de la fuerza aérea estadunidense, cargado “por error” con misiles crucero con cabeza nuclear y que sobrevoló ese país el 30 de agosto (La Jornada, 6/09/07, p. 30). El DdD no dio detalles por considerar el asunto “secreto mayor”, pero Han Kristensen, experto en la materia, dijo que “conocía antecedentes públicos de arsenal atómico activo transportado en bombarderos desde fines de los años 60”. Luego agregó: “parece increíble que tantos chequeos hayan fallado” (ibidem). Aunque el DdD aseguró que “en ningún momento estuvo amenazada la seguridad pública” porque “las municiones estaban protegidas y bajo control militar”, agregando que todo “apunta a un error aislado”, se acrecienta la controversia porque el 110/9 de 2001 el espacio aéreo de EU, en el momento de los ataques, estaba “protegido y bajo control militar”. Además muchas operaciones de “seguridad”, incluyendo el resguardo de armas y sustancias radiactivas de laboratorios asentados en Los Alamos, Sandia y Livermore, son contratadas con empresas de vigilancia que privilegian la obtención de ganancias sobre la seguridad pública. Se sabe que 94 por ciento (¡!) del presupuesto del Departamento de Energía –encargado de elaborar las ojivas nucleares para los sistemas balísticos del DdD– se asigna a empresas, algunas encargadas de resolver los problemas causados a la biodiversidad por la radiación que escapa desde sus plantas nucleares a los ríos. Por cierto, una de ellas, la CH2M Hill, está a cargo de la administración del programa de ampliación del Canal de Panamá.

Además del uso de la información para promover el temor se volvió a espantar al público la semana pasada con otro mensaje de Bin Laden (ex contratista de la CIA para desestabilizar a la URSS en Afganistán), ¿parte del sexto aniversario de los ataques del 11/09? De confirmarse su autenticidad (el último comunicado de Osama Bin Laden se difundió días antes de las elecciones presidenciales de 2004), ¿es casual que después de tres años de ausencia mediática de Bin Laden empiece a reaparecer en las pantallas en directo y a todo color de cara a 2008?

domingo, 2 de septiembre de 2007

Bush: amenaza nuclear


John Saxe-Fernández

La Jornada, México,
30 de agosto de 2007.

“He autorizado a nuestros comandantes militares en Irak a hacer frente a las actividades homicidas de Teherán.” A estas palabras de Bush, pronunciadas el martes en Nevada, siguieron otras más ominosas: afirmó que el programa nucleoeléctrico iraní amenaza dejar al Oriente Medio “bajo la sombra de un holocausto nuclear”. Como el despliegue naval de Estados Unidos en aguas cercanas a Irán incluye armamento nuclear “táctico” y además Israel colocó en estado de alerta una escuadra de bombarderos, presuntamente armados con armas “no convencionales”, la “advertencia” de Bush no puede ser más grave: otro indicio de su extremo desprecio de las normas de convivencia internacional. El uso de la amenaza de “holocausto nuclear” como parte de los instrumentos de política exterior, además de reflejar desesperación e impaciencia totalitaria ante el crudo desmoronamiento político-militar de la ocupación de Irak, es otra manifestación de “criminalidad de Estado” del grupo en el poder que acarrea enormes riesgos de intensificación bélica a escala mundial.


Días antes de la mencionada arenga y con el título de “Criminales controlan el Poder Ejecutivo”, Paul Craig Roberts, ex subsecretario del Tesoro de Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), conocido articulista y ex integrante de la página editorial de The Wall Street Journal, escribió que “el pueblo estadunidense y sus representantes en el Congreso deben enfrentar el hecho de que personas criminales y dictatoriales controlan el Poder Ejecutivo de Estados Unidos y deben de manera inmediata rectificar esta situación, altamente peligrosa”. Después de comentar las delicadas advertencias de Zbignew Brzezinsky ante el Senado, analizadas aquí con anterioridad (La Jornada, 1/03/07; 5/07/07 y 16/08/07), Craig asevera que las razones para desaforar a Bush y Cheney exceden en varios órdenes de magnitud el conjunto de todas las que se han argumentado en el pasado para someter a juicio a cualquier presidente estadunidense. La amenaza de un ataque convencional/nuclear contra Irán elucida el gran riesgo mundial de la campaña bélico-electoral de Bush y Cheney, respaldada por un sector “politizado” del Pentágono: tejen un asalto armado contra Irán y lo que va quedando de la Constitución. Ante ello, dice Craig, “lo mínimo que el Congreso puede hacer en este estado avanzado del proceso es dejar en claro que cualquier ataque contra Irán bajo cualquier pretexto sin la autorización del Congreso o cualquier intensificación de la guerra en Irak sin una autorización legislativa expresa… conllevaría la remoción inmediata de Bush y Cheney”. La renuncia del fiscal Alberto González fortalece la propuesta de Craig de que el Congreso, además, investigue el ataque de Bush a las libertades civiles, la separación de los poderes, las Convenciones de Ginebra y la desinformación usada para “justificar” la agresión a Irak.

Robert Baer, un ex miembro de la CIA, publicó en la revista Time del 18 de agosto, que la Casa Blanca “atacaría Irán en los próximos seis meses”, es decir, ya con el proceso electoral en su fase decisiva. Baer constató los juicios de Craig cuando dijo a Fox News que el asalto sería diferente al de Irak, porque no se prevé el envío de tropas. El casus belli se centra en la presunta intervención en Irak de la Guardia Revolucionaria Islamista de Irán (GRI) –la mayor fuerza del ejército iraní–, que Bush está en vías de colocar en la lista de “organizaciones terroristas”, lo que se interpreta en Teherán como una declaratoria de guerra, y en la acusación, hecha por varios oficiales militares adictos a Bush, sin verificación independiente, de que Irán suministra “explosivos sofisticados” a la “insurgencia” iraquí. Baer agregó que después de un sondeo informal que realizó dentro del gobierno, “la sensación es que atacaremos a la GRI” considerada “… un obstáculo para que exista un Irán amistoso y democrático”. Además que “los iraníes están interfiriendo en Irak y en el resto del Golfo”. Esas fuentes no anticipan una guerra que incluya el uso terrestre de tropas. Lo que se plantea desde Nevada es reactivar la “guerra relámpago” (blitzkrieg) hitleriana, en el contexto de la “doctrina de la guerra de autodefensa anticipatoria” que Bush impulsó desde 2002, en desacato abierto a los fundamentos del derecho internacional. “De ocurrir ese ataque”, dijo Baer, “… será algo muy rápido y va a sorprender a mucha gente”. Además es un blitzkrieg político-electoral para conservar el poder y restablecer, manu militari, el control de la principal cuenca petrolera del planeta. Decisión funesta que lejos de enfrentar la crisis hegemónica que abate a Estados Unidos, la profundiza: la noción de que puede gobernar el orbe amenazando a Irán, la región y a la humanidad con un “holocausto nuclear”, lanzando tropas y/o explosivos de destrucción masiva sin sufrir represalias igualmente devastadoras, llegó a su límite no sólo militar, sino también comercial, financiero y monetario: un ataque nuclear/convencional en la principal cuenca petrolera del planeta haría estallar en pedazos –literalmente– a la economía internacional y al dólar.

domingo, 19 de agosto de 2007

El entramado bélico-electoral

John Saxe-Fernández



La Jornada, México,
16 de agosto de 2007.

Además de los consabidos trucos electorales, ¿forman parte de las piezas de la coreografía comicial de la Casa Blanca para 2008 las provocaciones seguidas de ataques contra Irán, que también podrían incluir el uso de armas nucleares “tácticas”? Es un escenario que, frente al colapso político de Bush y Cheney en las encuestas, parece superfluo. Pero ante los éxitos obtenidos por el grupo en el poder al usar la sangrienta bandera del 11-9 para impulsar su agenda política, legislativa, empresarial y de seguridad, es imprudente desestimar los entramados bélico-electorales y terroristas.

Desde el 11-9 a la fecha el impulso de la agenda de Washington en momentos claves, frecuentemente coincide con la bitácora de hechos con efectos atemorizantes, sean los nunca aclarados ataques con ántrax en el Senado, antes de la aprobación de la Ley Patriota; las declaratorias de “estados de alerta en momentos político-electorales cruciales o la actuación de Bin Laden y AlQeda, dando a conocer videos o realizando acciones específicas en Londres, Madrid, etcétera, que han sido decisivos cuando se planteó dar carácter “permanente” de las “leyes de excepción”, incluyendo la abrogación del habeas corpus. Bush et al evocan, además, la oleada de apoyo que lograron en 2001 bajo el efecto 11-9.

En febrero, Zbignew Brzezinsky, ex consejero de seguridad nacional, advirtió al Senado sobre la posible “manufactura” de un suceso de esa naturaleza, “en Estados Unidos o en Irak”, que sería atribuido a Irán. Según un documento secreto del Pentágono publicado por el Washington Post en abril de 2006, “… otro 11-9 podría crear tanto la justificación como una oportunidad, que hoy carecemos, para responder contra algunos blancos conocidos”. Sea un “evento” doméstico o en ultramar, se trata de una carambola de varias bandas que vincula lo interno con el manejo temerario de la ecuación estratégica global –v.gr. el despliegue antibalístico en las puertas de Rusia–, parte del teatro de operaciones del Oriente Medio.

La embestida contra Irán se intensificó en los últimos días: Cheney y Bush van por el petróleo iraní, un repunte electoral o una “emergencia nacional catastrófica”. Ante los despliegues aéreos y navales, el coronel retirado Sam Gardiner notó que “… las piezas ya se están moviendo… EU será capaz de escalar las operaciones militares contra Irán”. A lo que se agrega una cuantiosa venta de armamentos anunciada en julio, parte de lucrativos negocios bélico-industriales como de “movidas” en el tablero de guerra. Israel hará compras (tecnológicamente jerarquizadas a su favor) por 30 mil millones de dólares (mmdd), y Arabia Saudita, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman y los Emiratos Árabes Unidos por otros 20 mmdd. Las ventas a Egipto son por 13 mmdd. Natalie J. Goldring, del Centro de Estudios de Paz y Seguridad de Georgetown, dijo a Inter Press Service que “los únicos ganadores de este trato son los contratistas de armas de Estados Unidos… Para la industria militar estadunidense esto es navidad en julio”.

Como en el caso de la agresividad “antibalística” contra Rusia, la intención es disuadir acciones contra Estados Unidos de ocurrir un ataque convencional y/o nuclear contra Irán y también atar a las dirigencias árabes. Otras medidas contra Irán en curso van desde la penetración de grupos étnicos con fuerzas especiales adiestrándolos y armándolos, a la entrega de fondos a la oposición para inducir un regime change. Estas acciones tienen el efecto contrario: la opinión pública iraní no olvida la brutalidad de la dictadura del Sha instaurada por Estados Unidos. Bush dijo a los iraníes que cambien de gobierno: “… ustedes pueden tener un gobierno mejor que éste” e inmediatamente acusó a Teherán de “persistir en armar y adiestrar a la insurgencia iraquí”. Ese es el paraguas mediático para el asalto armado. Como la intimidación fue contundente, congresistas demócratas y republicanos advirtieron a Bush que requiere autorización para cualquier acción bélica. Mientras, se informó que Ryan Crocker, embajador estadunidense en Irak, en reuniones con su contraparte iraní le remachó la amenaza de Bush. Tal agresividad inquieta a los aliados de la OTAN e incluso a subordinados, como Hamid Karzai de Afganistán o Nuri Malaki, primer ministro de Irak, cuyo intento de negociar con Irán enfureció a Bush.

Cheney favorece inducir el efecto 11-9 atacando antes de las elecciones. Un funcionario describió el escenario de provocación en Irak advertido por Brzezinsky: se atacaría si surge “… nueva evidencia de la complicidad iraní en apoyo a las fuerzas anti-EU en Irak, por ejemplo, sorprendiendo camiones de soldados o armamentos cruzando desde Irán hacia Irak”.
El escenario de Cheney para su país es fatal a la Constitución: implica la suspensión de los comicios, la aplicación de la ley marcial y un régimen dictatorial. El 15 de abril de 2007, en Face the Nation, de CBS, dijo: “la mayor amenaza ahora es un 11-9 realizado por un grupo de terroristas armados no con boletos de avión o cuchillos, sino con un arma nuclear en medio de una de nuestras propias ciudades”.

viernes, 10 de agosto de 2007

X Globalization and Security: The US ‘Imperial Presidency’: Global Impacts in Iraq and Mexico[1]


John Saxe-Fernández[2]



X.1 Introduction


This chapter approaches globalization and security from a theoretical and a historical perspective, making reference to the centrifugal processes observed in the development and impact of US capitalism in the international strategic scene as well as in Mexico. It also focuses on the centripetal forces involved in this process; forces derived from a historically observed centralization of police-military and intelligence power in the US executive branch over the last two centuries. This is a power used to deal with the propensity of capital, in its search for opportunities and profits, to tear and de­stabilize the social milieu within which it acts. As described below, this presidential power is pro­jected domestically and internationally. The impact of expansionism and Manifest Destiny in the US political and constitutional system has been enormous. In fact, in the view of some analysts, it has led the ‘Imperial Presidency’ to usurp legislative and judicial functions, eroding democracy in the process.[3]



From the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the present, many US presidents have simply ignored Con­gress when it opposed the interests which they directly represent. Through their control over foreign policy, and usually through covert actions, they have tended to draw power out of both the judicial and legislative branches and into the executive. War (and the Civil War) – as well as secret diplomacy and what today is known as black operations – to manipulate the US Congress and the public have been used frequently. As for example, by President Polk (1845-1849) in the process that led to the war against Mexico; by Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) who, as commander in chief of the military during the Civil War “raised and committed an army to oppose secession without even consulting Congress”[4] (and more significantly, authorized the head of the military to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when necessary (LaFeber 1989; Agamben 2004); by Franklin Roosevelt, in his use of various executive-legislative agreements to circumvent constitutional restrictions in the formalization of treaties; by Lyn­don Johnson, in his secret operations to obtain the war powers via the Bay of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964 (LaFeber 1989).



Since World War II, it has been the US that has generated a worldwide corporate and military-indu­strial structure: its repercussions and interrelationships with the economic sphere require greater eluci­dation but because of its very nature, the phenomenon represents one of the most daunting challenges to conceptualization and, especially, to explanation (Saxe-Fernández 1994: 283). This is especially the case since following – and as a result of – World War II, military ‘globalization’ came to mean that a ‘superpower’ in the Western Hemisphere located in an area historically ‘conquered’ by European colonial and imperial powers, has been ‘occupying’ militarily the most highly developed economic poles of Eurasia, and is now projecting its “national military might” as an occupying power at the sites of the main oil reserves of the world located in the Middle East (Klare 2004; Saxe-Fernández 2006), generating an unprecedented local and regional resistance and destabilizing the whole strategic equation.
The chapter addresses how these two forces – the centrifugal and the centripetal (that is, the economic and police-military) – relate to each other in what Arthur Schlesinger conceptualized as the ‘imperial presidency’ and its modus operandi in the international scene as well as in Mexico. Passing reference is made to the Porfiriato – for the Mexican case –, but the focus is mainly on a description of some of the trau­matic and disruptive consequences of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) on the Mexican peasantry and their socio-political impacts as reflected since the Chiapas rebellion (1994).



The impacts of such an ‘imperial presidency’ in the US domestic mileu, particularly in the constitu­tional arena, are addressed in the context of the war on terrorism at home, through a régime d´exception formalized in the Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act which carries with it the abrogation of “habeas corpus” and a new Martial Law, The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, signed on 17 October 2006, which allows the president to involve the military in domestic law enforcement (Morales 2006).[5] The ‘American Gulag’, as experienced in Abu Ghraib, in Guantánamo, and in a global prison camp infrastructure holding – at this point in time – , 14 thousand persons, is interpreted as a testing ground for a “new legal system” (Saxe-Fernández 2006a, 2006b; Delgado 2007). George W. Bush’s has used ‘anti-terrorist’ war powers granted after 11 September 2001 to undermine civil liberties, establish secret military tribunals, and destabilize civil-military relations as exemplified by his request to US Congress to modify the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act, which does not permit the military to act within the United States. Since earlier 2007, the power granted to the Exe­cu­tive by the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, encourages the President to declare federal martial law as it allows the ‘commander-in-chief’ to declare a ‘public emergency’ and station troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public dis­order”.[6]



Some crucial impacts of the US national security regime in Mexico such as the export of weapons and military training to Mexico are illustrated. The paper concludes with a general assessment of the relationship between the ‘contradictions’ of capital, in its monopolistic stage, and the etiology and prospects for a general war.
The chapter focuses on the impacts of the imperial power of the United States on international security (the occupation of oil-rich Iraq), and its power projections in Mexico. A historical analysis will show that there is a clear imperialist pattern that emerges in a review of developments from the early l9th century to the most recent turn of US imperialism in the wake of 11 September 2001. At issue in these developments is the need for, and efforts of, the US Executive branch (the ‘imperial presidency’) to reconcile conflicting imperatives of economic power, projected by US-based multinational corpora­tions, and the political imperative to foster stability and order. Some of the implications of the efforts of the US imperial presidency to ‘resolve’ this problem manu militari are analysed.



X.2 The US Imperial Presidency and Monopoly Capital: Then and Now


Advanced initially by LaFeber (1995), the main thesis centres on the notion that:
Americans, often viewed as ardently anti-revolutionary, acted as catalysts for revolution as they searched for economic and missionary opportunities around the world; then as they willingly sacrificed order for the sake of opportunity, they supported a new presidency that emerged with this imperialism. Indeed, the Pre­sident’s chief function in foreign affairs became his use of constitutional commander-in-chief powers to use force, when necessary, to restore enough order so opportunities could again be pursued. (LaFeber 1995: xiii)

The ways through which US imperialism has tried to solve what appears an irreconcilable contra­dic­tion between the destabilizing thrust of its economic agents (the big monopolies and oligopolistic sec­tors)[7] and the advocacy of its foreign policy to foster stability and order, centre on the recourse to po­li­ce military interventions to face repeated socio-political explosions. This pattern increased in frequency with the spectacular growth of US capital after the Civil War when, in many industries, monopoly — and managerial — capitalism had already replaced family enterprises. Large monopolies grew and do­minated major sectors of the US economy. As Alfred Chandler points out, these growing monopolies altered the basic structure of these sectors and of the economy as a whole taking over:
From the market the coordination and integration of the flow of goods and services, from the production of the raw materials through the several processes of production to the sale to the ultimate consumer. Where they did so, production and distribution came to be concentrated in the hands of a few large enterprises (Chandler 1995: 11).

Thus, the visible hand of monopoly power, through its ownership and management structures, denied any credibility to the notion of the invisible hand of the market forces, the very notion upon which US corporate expansionism, following the British imperial rhetoric of free trade, was launched. As Prince Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, pointed out in reference to England: “Free trade is the favourite doctrine of the dominant power, afraid others might follow its example.”

Its most basic imperialistic expression is to be found in an increased symbiosis of state power and cor­po­rate interests. By the end of the l9th century, the coordination of American foreign policy and nation­al private interests became more intense and extensive. The US overseas expansion was entirely fo­cu­sed on markets and moved along many routes to all corners of the world and under the impulses stem­ming from the relationship of its foreign policy and the dynamics and needs of monopoly capita­lism.


From a general theoretical and global perspective, Paul Sweezy (1997), Baran and Sweezy (1968), Harry Magdoff (1992), and István Mészáros (1995), have identified capitalism’s contradictory tenden­cies to greatly overreach itself with regard to one of its most important dimensions that directly affects the relationship between its economic and political command structures. According to Mészáros:
The contradiction between the rival national states of the capital system and the problematical drive of its most powerful economic units – the giant corporations – towards transnational monopolism is the clear ma­nifestation of this overreaching (Mészáros 1995: 170).
This theoretical proposition is crucial, taking into account that at the beginning of the 1960’s and of the war in Vietnam, Herbert Marcuse, Baran and Sweezy insisted on the centrality of the ‘warfare state’ in the dynamics of US monopoly capital and its ‘Pax Americana’[8]. By the ‘warfare state’ Marcuse (1964) meant, a social construct distilled from US capitalist experience, based on a massive mobilization of human and material resources, for the eventuality of war, internal or external, against an enemy, internal or external, real or imaginary. Baran and Sweezy (1968) described and analysed the political economy and the basic power mechanisms utilized in favour of powerful corporate interests by dealing with the deep-seated and indeed ‘systematic’ modus operandi of what US political science calls ‘the iron triangle’.[9] In its dynamics the role of the ‘imperial presidency’ is crucial: the ‘iron triangle’ concept is used to portray a politically interdependent relationship between the Executive branch – the imperial presidency[10] – and its Federal bureaucracy (Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, NASA, etc.), the private interests of giant corporations, particularly in the defence, aerospace and the oil and gas sectors, including labs, research institutes, trade associations and trade unions in the industry itself, and the key committees and members of US Congress, the House and Senate Committees on Energy and Natural Resources, the Armed Services Committees and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, as well as Congressional members from defence-related districts and states. As special interests, the Federal bureaucracy and Congress develop business relations and inter­penetrate each other, so does their effort to defend their interests not only from outsiders but also from ‘insiders’ (‘whistle blowers’) and alternative perspectives (and after 9-11 through drastic restriction of public access to governmental documents and other ‘State of exception’ police and ‘intelligence’ regu­lations, as indicated, now formalized as part of the ‘anti-terrorist’ clauses of the Patriot Act and other laws).



To shed light on the dynamics of the Iron Triangle’s machinery[11], which is centred in the generation of profits – through the use and manipulation of information and influence – there are two related concepts. The first, ‘pork-barrel politics’ describes the use of this interdependency to boost and protect the priva­te interests.[12] At its very core US economy is centred on military Keynesianism involving a sort of ‘military-industrial’ populism (pork and barrel) used by politicians, presidential candidates, senators and congressmen in their efforts to obtain public support through obtaining ‘contracts’ that favour em­ploy­ment and business in their districts and states, irrespective of any economic or military efficiency (Engler 1966; Adams 1982; Briody 2003) All these three components (hence the expression iron ‘triangle’), usually carried out their transactions under the umbrella of the ‘national security’ rhetoric.
The second notion is the ‘revolving door’ practice that is the on-going traffic of personnel (and with it, of information, contacts and influence), from the private to the public sector, and vice versa. This is crucial in the area of governmental contracts:
A contractor seeks information from Congress and the Executive in answer to many questions: What pro­grams are forthcoming and where and how are they being defined; What are Federal procurement plans and regulations going to look like; Where do bureaucrats and members of Congress stand on particular sy­stems; When will legislation be considered and what form will it take? The company reworks this informa­tion, which flows in vast quantities, to focus on company needs and possibilities … it becomes intelligence (Adams 1982: 23).



This conceptual framework briefly sketched, shades light on current trends towards the formation of economic, monetary and geopolitical blocs, as well as the increased reliance by Washington, not on mul­tilateralism or ‘market-friendly policies’ to obtain access to key raw materials, but on political-military unilateralism and economic nationalism. Within the US ‘power elite’ there is a deep-em­bed­ded mistrust of the ‘invisible hand’ to deal with key geo-strategic issues such as access to oil and other key resources. Instead they rely on the Pentagon’s iron fist as it can be observed in Iraq or the constant intelligence community’s black operations practices.



As in Middle East, Mexico and other Caribbean and Latin American nations, what it is involved is the material base and thus the survival of our civilization since it carries with it the big decisions on war or peace. Needless to say, an understanding of the modus operandi of the imperial presidency under mo­nopoly capital is crucial in any attempt to elicit a ‘non-terminal’ resolution of the current deep crisis of ‘Pax Americana’, a central feature in the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weapons. As Richard Barnet foresaw these issues in the late 1970’s:
A global struggle over resource distribution is already underway. A key political question is whether the holders of power over the present resource system will control the next. War has been a favourite way for great nations to meet their resource needs. If there is another world war, the conflict will most likely be over what the industrial states have come to regard as the elements of survival. Oil, of course, but also iron, copper, uranium, cobalt, wheat, and water (Barnet 1980: 19).


X.3 The Imperial Presidency in Iraq and Mexico
X.3.1 The Case of Iraq



While the ‘iron triangle’ is a social construct at the core of the relationship between ‘state violence’ in Iraq and corporate behaviour and profits, both the ‘pork and barrel’ and the ‘revolving door’ practices are at the centre of any attempt to analyse current US involvement not only in that oil-rich country but also in Mexico’s political and economic life and most directly in Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex); the country’s most important corporation, public or private. A good example is provided by the activities and political-economic forces – and actors – surrounding Halliburton’s participation in Iraq and in Mexico’s Pemex.
In the case of Iraq, the main Federal contracts of Halliburton, the giant oil services company based in Houston Texas, and its subsidiary, Brown and Root, now Kellog, Brown and Root (KBR) are imple­mented through the Department of Defense´s (DoD) Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), through a modality known as the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (LOGCAP).

Initiated by the Pentagon in 1985, during the Reagan administration, the LOGCAP intended to use hundreds of private contractors to supply the DoD and the troops stationed abroad, with support services ranging from food services to latrine cleaning, trucks to cots and tents, gymnasiums and showers, to generators and air conditioners, transportation, housing, construction of jails, distribution of gasoline, cleaning and maintenance of installations and barracks, et cetera. By this ‘outsourcing’ of ma­ny of its non-war-fighting functions, it was argued that thousands of troops would be freed to serve in battle.

The LOGCAP did not get momentum until 1992, when Dick Cheney, as Defense Secretary of President George Bush, gave it a push through a multi-million dollar classified investigation his office granted to KBR, to assess the costs and benefits of an extended LOGCAP, that is, to all logistics including not only basic services but also ‘security’ functions such as ‘interrogation of prisoners’, use of death squads and other paramilitary and illegal operations. The main conclusion of the study stresses the advantages to the Federal Government from an ‘expanded LOGCAP’, since private contractors could carry on questionable clandestine and security operations that would not fall under the military code or the US international commitments on human rights violations such as genocide and torture.[13]



In August 1992 Cheney awarded KBR, Halliburton´s subsidiary, the first extended LOGCAP. Soon afterwards, in 1995, he was appointed CEO of Halliburton. The Cheney-Halliburton ‘pork and barrel’ and ‘revolving door’ practices are part and parcel of the ‘modus operandi’ of monopoly capital. In 1997 the US Governmental Accountings Office (GAO) detected significant irregularities and Halliburton was substituted by DynCorp, another service contractor founded and staffed by former CIA directors and corporate personnel. Nonetheless Halliburton was awarded a non-bid 5 year contract for the recon­struc­tion of Iraq’s oil fields destroyed during the first Gulf War. Halliburton’s role as the main contractor in Iraq illustrates the way substantial profits can be made through the destruction of entire countries. Lancet, the British medical journal, had estimated Iraq’s civilian toll by 2006 in the hundreds of thousands (Roberts 2007). By 2007, more than 3,000 US soldiers have been killed and the seriously wounded and mutilated young men run in the 22,000 figure. But thanks to the ‘modus operandi’ of monopoly capital in the US, as the human tragedy and costs of the war in Iraq escalate, so do the profits to the corporations (Saxe-Fernández 2003, 2005, 2005a).



Since KBR received more money from the US involvement in Iraq than any other contractor, natu­rally many analysts think Halliburton’s high level connections may have given it undue influence in winning sole-source business. Halliburton’s shares in the stock market have soared as the price tag of Iraq’s military occupation increases (Witte 2005). At the beginning of the aggression in March 2003, the White House estimated the war would cost 60 billion dollars. Information provided by the New York Times (year) indicates that since then 137.5 billion dollars have been used just on military operations, out of a total of 250 billion.[14] The cost of the war in Iraq for the period from 2006 to 2010 has been esti­mated at over 1.3 trillion dollars.
The wide use of hundreds of contractors that operate under ‘cost-plus’ contracts is at the root of this pri­ce escalation and mounting abuses. During the late 1950’s and mid-1960’s, government contracts for the military and space agencies were assigned to companies on a ‘cost-plus basis’, a ‘device’ engi­neered under the American oligarchy’s exorbitant ambition for higher profits that gave the contracting firms a strong incentive to run up costs. Thus, as Melman pointed out, cost overruns were actually enc­ouraged by the Pentagon’s managers and the Federal government’s economics, on the grounds of “bolstering the economy” and “getting America moving again”.[15] Thus, “cost maximizing” became an in­sti­tutionalized practice among the Pentagon’s 37,000 industrial firms and over 100,000 subcon­tractors – including the “military divisions” of US 500 most important corporations (Melman 1987). According to the trade journal Defense Week, by the 1980’s, the prices of the military-serving goods produced by this network of firms were rising 20 per cent annually (Melman 1987: 4).



In 1991, prior to the terrorist attacks of 9 September 2001, and with Cheney as vice-president, KBR got a 10-year LOGCAP. As a result Halliburton is the largest contractor of the Pentagon in Iraq, in charge of 90 per cent of the LOGCAP. In June 2003 KBR got 320 million dollars in contracts. By September of that year the company was awarded 2 billion. According to Associated Press’ Lolita Baldor from 2003 to 2004 KBR contracts in Iraq were estimated at 10.7 billion, but Halliburton’s Iraq-related contracts in the Middle East could reach the 18 billion mark, not including operations in many coun­tries – such as the construction of jails in Guantánamo and Afghanistan.[16] The Army has ordered nearly 5 billion in work from Halliburton to provide logistic support to the US troops in Iraq over the next year, 1 billion above what the Army paid for similar services the previous year. This was happening while Halliburton is being audited for irregular practices (Witte 2005).



It occurs within the context of what Murray Weidenbaum (cited in: Adams 1982: page) perceives as a conver­gence between the Executive – such as the DoD’s ACE, or its Air Force, and its major suppliers, which blurs and reduces much of the distinction between public and private activities in key branches of the US economy, such as aircraft and aerospace, defence, and oil and gas (Adams 1982: 26). Weidenbaum´s assessment is corroborated almost daily.
The involvement of Halliburton and KBR, and the Vice-president, in the decision-making process that led to this ‘petro-war’ is clarified by the events surrounding these ‘irregularities’. For example, in late 2002, KBR was deployed to Kuwait to support the 150,000 or so Army troops pouring into the country in preparation for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. According to information gathered by , KBR took up residence in villas paying 200 dollars per person with a total hotel tab soon reaching 1.5 million per month. The work was part of the above-mentioned weeping ten-year LOGCAP, and the decision to attack Iraq, strenuously fostered by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Wolfowitz at Bush’s National Security Council, meant billions of dollars in contracts and profits.



The demotion of key military officers and civilian employees of the Federal Government reporting accounting irregularities is part of a vast – and indeed extreme – ‘damage control’ effort by the Bush/Cheney administration (and its related private sector and Congressional allies and partners), which is reaching dictatorial proportions for its ‘state of exception’ mechanisms in the crucial area of accountability and official auditing practices. This case illustrates the fact that, as Adams points out, once moulded, the triangle sets with the rigidity of iron. Its key participants exert strenuous efforts to keep it isolated and protected from outside scrutiny (Adams 1982: 25).


Halliburton´s ‘pork and barrel’ scandals and ‘revolving door’ features are far from being the exception, as virtually all major corporations (like Boeing, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, United Technologies, General Electric, Science Applications Interna­tional Corporations and CSC/Dyn Corp, to name but a few), and tens of thousands of subcontractors spread all over the US are involved in the ‘iron triangle’ dynamics[17]. For the past three years, for instance, and due to the Pentagon’s need for fuel for its global involvement, which includes pro­minently the war in Iraq, the Air Force sponsored a 30 billion dollar proposal to convert passenger planes into military refuelling tankers and lease them from Boeing, “as an efficient way to obtain air­craft the military urgently needs” (Smith 2005: A01).



But according to Ronald Garant, an official at the Pentagon comptroller’s office, the scheme “is a bailout for Boeing” and information gathered by Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post indicate that the prevailing opinion at the Pentagon is that the proposed lease of Boeing’s 767 would cost too much for a plane with serious shortcomings. To senators John McCain, John Warner and Carl Levin of the Armed Services Committee, this is “one of the most significant military contracting abuses in several decades” (quoted in Smith, 2005). The incident provides an extraordinary glimpse of how the ‘Iron triangle’ and the ‘imperial presidency’ operate.[18] It shows the US Air Force working hand-in-glove with one of its chief contractors, the financially ailing Boeing, to help it try to obtain the most costly government lease ever.



By February 2007, the three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a US House of Representatives Committee their review of 57 billion dollars in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State Department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, and bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done:
About 10 billion has been squandered by the US government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of con­tractor overcharges and unsupported expenses, and federal investigators warned … that significantly more taxpayer money is at risk (Yen 2007: AP 1)
The warning is important since after the November 2006 elections, ‘resistance’ to the war for oil in Iraq is also widespread in the US Congress and, so far, the Bush administration has spent more than 350 billion dollars on the Iraq ‘reconstruction and stabililization’ effort.
The ‘iron’ dimension of the ‘triangle’ is fully illustrated by a new inspector general’s report detailing the US Air Force’s vigorous efforts on Boeing’s behalf and also showing how Air Force leaders and Boeing officials jointly manipulated legislation to authorize the deal, and later sought to suppress dissenting opinion throughout the Pentagon (Blustein 2005: PED 1).[19]



There is an ongoing persecution and punishment of federal workers including military and intelligence officers who object to the doctoring of facts that clash with policy and business: an Army general sidelined for questioning the administration’s projections about needed troop strength in Iraq; a former intelligence officer and journalist whose credibility is being questioned because he has written about the Pentagon’s efforts to expand covert capabilities within the US, and provides documental evidence that former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was building up ‘an elite secret army’; a Medicare expert mu­ted when he tried to inform Congress about the true cost of the new prescription subsidies and a White House Specialist on climate change, who was punished after complaining that global warming statistics were being manipulated by White House political tacticians.


In addition to the hounding and bullying of ‘whistle blowers’ (NYT 2007), the White House, at the close of the second Bush presidency and in the face of a democratic victory in the 2008 presidential elections, behaves like an embassy in foreign territory getting ready for war, - or as a band of crooks facing an imminent inspection by the Internal Revenue Service: it is ‘burning evidence’ on a colossal scale. It is removing all embarrassing documents and data from public scrutiny. According to the New York Times this is being implemented at the unprecedented rate of ‘125 documents a mi­nute’:
The move toward greater secrecy has nearly doubled the number of documents annually hidden from public view – to well more than 15 million last year, nearly twice the number classified in 2001 – as bureaucrats have invented more amorphous categories like ´sensitive security information´. At the same time, the declassifi­cation of documents required under the Freedom of Information Act has been choked down to a fraction of what it was a decade ago, leaving the government working behind an ever darker, ever denser screen (NYT 2005).



X.3.2 The Case of Mexico

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into operation, the imperial presi­dency’s centrifugal-centripetal dynamics is increasing in Mexico. While the ‘free market’ economic scheme boosts social and political frustrations, police-military initiatives led by the White House become more pronounced. It is worth taking into account that this country’s massive concessions in de­regulating foreign trade – without reciprocity – and direct investment, formalized in the NAFTA were the basis for setting up an area of ‘hemispheric commercial, monetary, investment and military annexationism’ through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and related programmes such as Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) and Plan Colombia (PC) now euphemistically called Plan Patriota, The FTAA, PPP and PC are backed by an elaborate public relations structure that barely conceals their real intention, namely, to justify the absorption of cheap labour, markets and strategic raw materials such as oil, natural gas, minerals, water and the control of huge biodiverse areas from Latin America ( Delgado 2004; 2005), as part of an arsenal of instruments (including those of military and ‘security projection’) used by the US government to face an increasingly fragmented and competitive world economy.


Over the last 140 years, in the Americas the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) has been geared to providing state protection to US investment and trade. The needs of the fast-developing US industrial and agricultural system – based on protectionism and plagued by overproduction – were and are at the root of the US promotion of free trade agreements. This key structural feature was central in the l9th century and in the late 20th century: NAFTA and FTAA, as well as hemispheric and indeed US global economic and military diplomacy.
Former US Secretary of State, James G. Blaine (1889-1892)[20], spelled out the US economic policy to­­ward Latin America as follows:
I wish to declare the opinion that the United States has reached a point where one of its highest duties is to enlarge the area of its foreign trade. Under the beneficent policy of (tariff) protection we have developed a vo­lume of manufactures which, in many departments, overruns the demands of the home market. In the field of agriculture, with the immense propulsion given in it by agricultural implements, we can do far more than produce breadstuffs and provisions for our own people. ... Our great demand is expansion. I mean expansion of trade with countries where we can find profitable exchanges. We are not seeking annexation of territory. At the same time 1 think we should be unwisely content if we did not seek to engage in what the younger Pitt so well termed annexation of trade (cited in LaFeber 1995: 165),


Blaine’s interest in Latin America, and his idea to persuade US hemispheric neighbours to accept a kind of ‘older sister’ relationship, was influenced by economic motives. Blaine was a Republican representing big business interests. Naturally, he was aggrieved by the US’s adverse balance of trade with Latin America, a region which at that time was shipping huge quantities of raw materials to the US and which bought the bulk of its manufactured goods from Europe (Bailey 1980: 399). Like today, inter-capitalist rivalry was at the core of hemispheric free trade agreements. “Blaine’s aim,” writes Thomas Bailey:
was to elbow aside foreign competitors by forming closer commercial ties south of the border. And since economic relationships could not flourish amid whistling bullets, Washington would use its good offices to terminate wars in Latin America (Bailey 1980: 399).
This is of particular relevance when analysing the ways in which the centrifugal forces of US capitalism relate to the centripetal powers vested in the ‘imperial presidency’ and how they have related to each other in the past and at present – for example, through granting the President ‘fast track’ power to negotiate ‘trade agreements’.


In the 1870’s, for example, Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz opened the country to free trade and foreign investment, making Mexico a dependent of the US. In the years 1903-1910, investments skyrocketed to three times those of 1876-1900.[21] By 1910, 43 per cent of Mexico’s prosperity is owned by US investors, 33 per cent by 15 million Mexicans, and 24 per cent by other foreign capitalists (LaFeber 1995). The investment was put into oil concessions, silver and other mining operations and huge plantations for export agriculture. In 1905 James Speyer, a prominent US banker, told the German ambassador to Mexico that “In the US there [was] a pervasive feeling that Mexico [was] no longer anything but a dependency of the American economy” (cited in LaFeber 1995: 221).


As massive foreign investments transformed Mexico and haciendas shifted to export crops, landless peasants proliferated and the production of staple food dropped. In 1910 Mexico was more modernized than in 1876, but had less corn and beans for domestic consumption than in 1876. Under the govern­ment of Porfirio Díaz the centrifugal forces of US capitalism had torn the social fabric. Americans built railroads to carry the goods to the ports, but also penetrated and threatened communal life. There had been discontented peasants here and there in the country, but by 1910 they swelled over the country, as never before in Mexican history. In 1910, the country exploded into cycles of civil wars, lasting seven years and costing 1.2 million lives, out of a population of 15 million. By 1916 there had been frequent US military incursions into Mexico. President Wilson even ordered the naval bom­bard­ment of Veracruz. The centripetal forces of the imperial presidency played different instru­ments of military, intelligence and diplomatic nature.

The social and political consequences of the Porfirian laissez-faire policies were traumatic. Trade, in­vestment and banking deregulations, similar to today’s economic agenda, collapsed under both internal and external forces. At that time – as is increasingly the case today, as demonstrated by the financial collapse of December 1994 – Mexican dependence on the liquidity of the international system created serious vulnerabilities:
The US panic of 1907 demonstrated the price of dependence on the giant northern neighbour. As New York capital dried up, Mexican exports dropped, investment disappeared, thousands of Mexican immigrants to the United States suddenly began to return home and unrest spread (LaFeber 1995: 222).


The historical experience of the Porfiriato with US corporate greed and its destabilizing thrust is an important precedent when dealing with current trends, impacted by Mexico’s ‘neo-oligarchs’ (Saxe-Fernández, Eduardo 1999) and foreign interests articulated under the umbrella of the Bretton Woods arrangements. Under Washington’s initiative the Bretton Woods conference celebrated in mid-1944 aimed at providing the US with a “new world economic order” that “could keep the nation’s economy pumping away so that the war shocked world could be rebuilt and the US system saved from a possibly fatal shock of another 1930’s like depression” (LaFeber 1989: 410, Kolko/Kolko 1972: 16; Hudson 2003 [2004?]: 179-216) To solve these problems the meeting established two new organizations: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or the World Bank (WB).



Since the US at that time controlled two-thirds of the world’s gold, the Roosevelt administration insisted that the post-war economic system rest on gold and the US dollar. Thus, both institutions were designed, as Gabriel and Joyce Kolko agued, not merely to implement disinterested principles, “but to reflect the US’ control of the world’s monetary gold and its ability to provide a large part of its future capital. The WB was tailored to give a governmental framework for future private investment, much of which would be American” (Kolko/Kolko 1972: 16).


The US dominated the WB and the IMF, and these institutions, and the powerful dollar, were used by Roosevelt, first of all, “to force the British Empire to open up to the American goods and investment” (LaFeber 1989: 411), and soon after, as a powerful tools to do the same to the rest of the world, and most particularly to the Latin American and Caribbean region (Saxe-Fernández/Delgado 2004).
According to Dean Acheson (1969) who was ‘present at the creation’ of this new international economic architecture, the aim was to create not just an American dominated international mar­ketpla­ce, but one that did not need excessive state interference or high tariffs. The GATT arrangement later on the World Trade Organization, was central to these goals (Kolko/Kolko 1972). As both the IMF and the WB were designed to prevent or solve key international problems of the US – and later on of its associates (and competitors) in Europe and Japan – , in this chapter they are treated as state instruments of US national private interests and not as ‘international financial institutions’ or as ‘multilateral instruments’, as Roosevelt, not without sarcasm, liked, and seriously demanded, to label them.



Like the dollar, they have been vital tools of ‘Pax Americana’ and bringing about agricultural and industrial productivity in the capitalist periphery were not – and have never been – part of its agenda. Nor is it bringing about a social restructuring of any kind. The aim has never been to set into motion a cumulative process of development south of the Río Bravo, of the type which has characterized the per­formance of ‘advanced’ economies such as the US, British, Japanese or European economies. The East Asian ‘new industrial economies’ have developed by not following WB-IMF recipes. South Ko­rea, Taiwan and Japan, during the crucial period of 1950 to 1973 used a wide array of interventionist instruments including
import controls; control over foreign exchange allocations; provision of subsidized credit, -often at negative real interest rates- to favour firms and industries; control over multinational investment and foreign equity ownership; heavy subsidization and coercion of exports, particularly in South Korea; a highly active state technology policy; restrictions on domestic competition and government encouragement of a variety of cartel arrangements in the products markets; promotion of conglomerate enterprises through mergers and other government measures; and wide use of ´administrative guidance´ indicating non-transparency of government interventions (Singh 1998: 70).


As Singh points out, the economic history in South-East Asia “is unequivocally an argument for adopting an industrial strategy, for guiding the market, and not following the hands-off ‘market friendly’ approach recommended by the World Bank” (Singh 1998: 71).
The World Bank was specifically designed to promote primarily US national private interests and exports, not foreign development and resources. As a matter of fact, the WB operations are biased to aid the US, and in the case of WB’s agricultural modernization loans in Mexico, US agricultural exports. It is true that during the 1946 to 1952 period it helped US industrial exports and the position of its oil companies in the Middle East by financing the reconstruction of Europe and not primarily to aid the US. But from 1952 onward its lending activities concentrated in developing mechanism for the extraction of surplus from so-called ‘developing’ economies. It financed nearly 10 billion dollars of exports from the industrial nations to these ‘imperialized’ economies, about one-third were US ex­ports (Hudson 2004: 196-195).


The aggregate return to this country, on its total net investment position in the Bank, had exceeded 100 per cent from the Bank’s inception of through 1969. …On balance-of-payments accounts, US receipts from Bank operations approximated 2.1 times its investments in the institution. The Bank thus was not exactly an instrument of altruistic American generosity (Hudson 2004: 197).
When it comes to the ‘modernizing of Mexican agriculture the ‘laissez faire’ policies in Mexico ended up protecting US industrial and agricultural exports and investors against Mexican commercial, agri­cultural, and industrial nationalism.


In both, the Porfirian and in the ‘NAFTA periods’ what we have is a classic form of free trade im­perialism, and in both cases the economic strategy pushed social and political stability to the limits (and beyond!). While the US government lavished enormous subsidies on its domestic agriculture, aero­space, and other industries in order to assure a strong position in world markets, in Mexico the WB’s Agricultural Sector Loans and NAFTA’s free trade impositions in the agricultural sector have stimulated an unprecedented collapse of public expenditure and investment in the rural and industrial sector, generating an equally unprecedented exodus of untrained migrants into the cities and into the US. The social, political and military consequences of SAPs, and privatization and deregulation packages sponsored in Mexico by the IMF and the WB have been, and are being, implemented with the acquiescence of the Mexican government, dominated as it is by a powerful oligarchy.[22] Under this policy, the so-called ‘neoporfiriato’,[23] the government of Mexico, is being treated almost as if it were a part of the US.

Neoporfiriato’s basic features centre on the unilateral opening of Mexico’s domestic market, the pri­va­tization of some of the most important sectors of the Mexican economy – through a process designed to socialize costs and privatize benefits – all sorts of constitutional modifications designed to suit foreign in­terests, the transformation of Mexico into an exclusive paradise for US and Canadian investors by means of NAFTA, and the application of SAPs in the countryside. After listening to a major presen­tation on the privatization programme and the new Law of Foreign Privatization and Foreign Investment, sponsored by the World Bank during the government of President Salinas (year-year), a US entrepreneur expressed his satisfaction by calling the Salinas regime “the best thing that has happened to us since López de Santana delivered more than half of the Mexican territory to the United States” (source is needed).



The SAPs sponsored by the IMF and the WB are at the centre of neoporfiriato policies that were the major immediate cause of the insurrection in Chiapas. There is a virtual consensus among Mexican and many foreign analysts that the SAPs were a major precipitant of internal war, not in Chiapas but also in the case of other rural and urban sociopolitical explosions in the other states of Mexico, as well as elsewhere (for example, in Caracas, Santiago del Estero in Northern Argentina, and again [in 2002] in Buenos Aires and Montevideo). Social upheaval in Chiapas has deep roots in a colonial history of vio­lence, dispossession, and indignities suffered by the native Indians, and such grievances were not ad­dressed or even affected in any vital way by the Mexican Revolution. As is well known, the revo­lu­tionary government’s economic and political policies favoured landowners, cattle-ranchers, and those whose interests depend on the exploitation of the forests.



A crude coalition of these groups based on the political exploitation and inequities of caciquismo, the power structure of local bosses, was and still is the order of dominance in Chiapas. The agrarian and social structures derived from capitalist modernization benefited a small group and proletarianized a vast numbers of peasants in Chiapas and throughout Mexico (Calve 1993). According to research carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Ecológicas del Sureste in where, by 1989, 64.7 per cent of the Chiapas peasants were jornaleros (day workers), 28.4 per cent were abjectly poor, and a mere 6.9 per cent were relatively well off. It was during the 1960’s and 1970’s that jornalerización mainly occurred, but during that period peasants rejected the use of armed conflict to solve their grievances (Saxe-Fernández 1994).


The general conditions for social frustration have been present for a long time, but the events that actually triggered the Chiapas rebellion must be traced to the SAPs of the WB and IMF, particularly their ‘modernization’ schemes for the agricultural sector in Mexico. The adjustment package of reduc­tions in public spending, channelling government and private resources toward the payment of foreign debts, and the control of wages to reduce inflation and increase the international competitiveness of Mexican products had devastating effects on the Mexican people.


The IMF and WB policies initiated a steep decline in real incomes. WB sources corroborate that real wages fell substantially in Mexico throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s and that the decline was greatest in the agricultural sector. By 1989 it was estimated that 60 to 80 per cent of the population suffered a situation approaching the despair of sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh. Declining real incomes have afflicted both low-income and middle classes. The ‘proletarianization’ of the Mexican middle class has become even more acute, evoking ominous reminders of Crane Brinton’s findings in his famous Anatomy of Revolution that a serious deterioration of the position of the middle class seems to be a recurring theme in the English (Cromwellian), American, French and Russian revolutions. This development is clearly not restricted to Mexico as it has already pushed the middle classes of Argentina and Uruguay to join the peasants and workers in their struggle against this economic model.
In the case of Chiapas (Saxe-Fernández 1994, 2002), the decline in real wages was even more deva­stating due to the high proportion of jornaleros (salaried peasant). When the minimum salary was dramatically reduced, it represented an unacceptable decrease in the standard of living of 64.7 per cent for the Chiapas peasants. In relation to the living standards of 1979, the IMF-WB’s SAPs reduced real wages by 60 per cent. According to an analysis by Calva (1993), the highly recessive policies im­plemented from 1983 onward, the collapse of coffee prices in the international market, and the uni­lateral opening of the domestic market reduced employment and greatly increased underemployment (Calva 1993: 30). As a result of these trends, a large portion (38.8 per cent) of the agricultural population of Chiapas saw its income reduced to 50 per cent of the minimum wage, or less than US$1.74 a day; another 36.6 per cent of those employed in the agropecuario (agrarian sector) earned between US$1.74 and TJS$3.48 a day (Calva 1993: 30?).

In contrast to the highly subsidized agriculture in the US, the WB’s agricultural sector loans, through conditioned programmes implemented by the Mexican government, opened the way to US grain exports and agribusiness by eliminating subsidies to peasants and small farmers, as well as price con­trol mechanisms and price guarantees for the crops, creating the biggest crisis in Mexican agriculture since the 1910 revolution. Small-scale producers throughout Mexico now face competition from cheap US imports of massively subsidized staples like maize, while domestic public investment has been cut drastically. In 1982, public investment in agriculture (in the form of credit subsidies, fiscal transfers, and other public investments) was 2.5 per cent of the GDP. By 1991, under heavy World Bank pressure and loans, it had fallen to 0.7 per cent (Calva 1993).


Chiapas is a symptom of a generalized condition that now affects the very fabric of Mexican society, because the main factors that led to the Zapatista Rebellion are now present everywhere in the country. Carlos Montemayor (1998), a noted analyst of guerrilla movements in Mexico and the author of La Guerra del Paraíso, which analyses some of the most important anthropological features of the Chia­pas social structure, pointed out that the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) was only the tip of the iceberg of popular unrest and rebellion. He is right, for this type of social movement does not appear spontaneously. Montemayor argues that there is a long period of incubation that makes such movements resistant to violent repression. They are also strongly resistant to actions imposed from out­side the community of struggle, and, of course, are lot themselves products of ‘foreign’ or ‘external’ forces, as official explanations have tried to characterize the Zapatistas.


The preconditions for internal war are not restricted to Chiapas – because the frustration of social, economic, and political aspirations is a general feature of the current Mexican landscape, and the so-called ‘economic modernization’ being implemented under the impact of all sorts of loans from the WB and the Inter-American Development Bank, have serves as major precipitants of social conflict through­out the country. The concept of relative deprivation is an essential tool for any diagnosis of the national, and certainly the bilateral, origins of the Zapatista insurrection. That is, it is not absolute po­verty that is the main precipitant of internal war but social perceptions regarding the discrepancy between the community’s value expectations and its value capabilities. As expressed by Gurr:
Value expectations are the goods and conditions of life to which people believe they are rightfully entitled. Value capabilities are the goods and conditions they think they are capable of getting, and keeping (Gurr 1970: 24).



It is in this sense that the situation in Chiapas indicates a much deeper problem: relative deprivation might even be greater in states such as Chihuahua or Coahuila, which have higher standards of living and therefore face even greater relative inequities. There are growing indications that this is the case. There is a widespread perception that regressive distribution of income is an essential feature of current economic policies. The programme to combat ‘extreme poverty’, basically designed by the WB, has led to results that contradict what was expected to accomplish. This is mainly a consequence of the fact that it was unable to counteract the widespread effects of its wage control policy. The contraction of wages has been brutal. In the 1970-1982 period, wages were 37.1 per cent of the GDP, whereas in the 1990’s they were under 25 per cent. It is estimated that between 1983 and 1993, Mexican wage earners lost US$ 46.9 billion. From 1989 to 1993 the loss was estimated at US$ 160.9 billion.



Analysts often classify developmental policies as belonging to one of two types. Fragmenting develop­ment tends to concentrate wealth. Integral development tends to promote economic equity. Neopor­firiato economic policy has been decidedly of the former type. That it has served to concentrate wealth in the midst of increased absolute poverty is a major recipe for social violence, as it was during Don Porphyries’ tenure. The actual concentration of wealth has reached levels that are difficult to imagine: 0.2 per cent of the population – the very top of the Mexican plutocracy – holds 51.1 per cent of the country’s assets.[24]


Social expenditures have been cut drastically. In 1980 such expenditures amounted to US$ 3.2 billion, and in 1981, the last year of the López Portillo administration, they increased to US$ 3.5 billion. From 1989 to 1993, under IMF-World Bank economic ‘guidance’, social spending was reduced to US$ 1.96 billion while the regional anti-poverty programmes in Chiapas amounted to US$ 527.5 million, and the losses of wage earners in the state, according to Calva’s (1993: 4) calculations, were over US$ 3 billion.[25]


It is no accident that the Chiapas insurrection coincided with the official approval of NAFTA on 1 Ja­nuary 1994. The linkage between both events is associated with several other factors. In addition to the problems caused by the wage-control policy of IMF and World Bank, Calva underscores the impor­tance of the crisis of the coffee market, which affected about 60,000 small producers across the state. The crisis resulted from the Salinas government’s rejection – in compliance with US presidential trade policies – of the International Coffee Agreement (Calva 1993: app. 702.3), thus meeting the require­ments of NAFTA, that Mexico would not act in coalition with other producers to restrict exports and thereby affect international prices:
But the coffee clause, was not the only reason why the Indians rejected NAFTA, for peasants had al­ready been suffering the effects of trade liberalization on the prices of other items such as the collapse in the prices of meat, soybeans, sorghum, bananas, and cocoa, which further reduced the peasants’ income and threw the whole agricultural sector of the country into disarray (Calva 1993).


Global public investment in Mexico from 1981 to 1992 declined by 60.4 per cent. Public investment in agropecuario was especially hard hit by the WB’s economic policies, showing a decline of 79.04 per cent during the period.[26] The IMF-WB’s SAP has caused a major social trauma for Mexican rural and urban society. It has precipitated the biggest crisis in Mexican agriculture since the 1910 revolution. Only the historical record can fully explain the enormous social, political, and military implications of current neoporfirian regression fostered by the imperial presidency through the IMF-World Bank agricultural SAP.
In a synthesis of the historical record on this vital experience, the editors of the New Internationalist recall that Emiliano Zapata’s main concern during the Mexican Revolution was the restoration of lands seized from the peasantry under Porfirio Díaz, After the resignation of Díaz in 1911, Zapata refused to demobilize his army until this demand had been met. In November he promulgated the Plan de Ayala which spelled out the demand for agrarian reform.


The lands, woods and water that have been usurped ... will be immediately restored to the villages or citizens who have title to them. ... Because the great majority of Mexicans own nothing more than the land they walk on. ... A third of these properties will be expropriated, with prior indemnification, so that the villages and citizens of Mexico may obtain ejidos, sites for town and fields. During the next chaotic and violent years Zapata remained in opposition to every head of state that emerged. In March 1919 he directed an open letter to President Venustiano Carranza denouncing his policies which turned the revolutionary struggle to your own advantage and to serve the interests of those who helped you rise, then shared the spoils. ... The old land holdings have been taken over by new landlords. ... and the people mocked in their hopes (name year: page)



Carranza devised an elaborate scheme to get rid of Zapata. A Federal Colonel, Jesus Guajardo, feigned a mutiny and offered to join Zapata with 500 men, their arms and ammunition. As proof of good faith se­­veral Zapatista defectors were tried by court-martial and executed, and the town of Jonacatepec was ‘captured’ in Zapatas’s name. A conference was set for 10 April 1919 at the Hacienda de Chinameca in Zapata’s home territory. Zapata rode into the hacienda with just ten men: the ceremonial guard turned their guns on him and he died in a hail of bullets (New Internationalist, January 1994: 21).


X.4 The US ‘Imperial Presidency’ and the World Bank’s Rural Moder­nization


Since NAFTA, small-scale producers all over Mexico have faced competition from cheap US imports of staples like maize, while government support for corn prices has been cut drastically. In other words, with other parameters used for comparison, public investment in agriculture (in the form of credit sub­si­dies, fiscal transfers and other public investments), which was 2.5 per cent of the GDP in 1982, fell down to 0.7 per cent by 1991.
What happened in Mexico in the last two decades was properly labelled by a widely read US weekly magazine as ‘Don Porfirio’s Revenge’ not only because of the World Bank’s massive privatization programme but also because of what appears to be a full-fledged agrarian counter-reform. Salinas’ modification of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, considered by the World Bank as one of its most important successes, formally ended agrarian reform and the process of land redistribution by eliminating the concept of ‘social property’, and it left the ejidatarios and small farmers at the mercy of ‘market forces’. As a consequence of new legal loopholes, a substantial increase in latifundia and in the holding of transnational – mostly US based – agribusiness has taken place.



The elimination of the ejido system of Mexican agriculture and the large-scale substitution of capital-intensive, export-oriented commercial farming in Mexico for the near-subsistence agriculture still prac­tised in the countryside is clear evidence of the destabilizing forces unleashed by US capitalist centri­fugation. The rapid displacement of the rural population has swelled the urban labour market, further depressing wage levels. Millions of peasants are crowding the cities or moving north, increasing immi­gration pressures. These socially disruptive policies place enormous strain on public sector services, while undermining the traditional social patterns. The social explosiveness created conditions for rural insurgencies, like those in Chiapas. This led the WB, through the Salinas, Zedillo and Fox govern­ments, to implement Procampo (now combined with a similar scheme called Conmigo) an emergency programme designed in part to address the plight of beleaguered peasants, but operated more to neutralize the electoral costs of these regressive policies to the PRI and now to the PAN.[27]
According to a confidential document prepared by economic analysts working for the US embassy in Mexico and leaked to the local press, “Procampo was designed to alleviate the pain of the peasantry in its transition to an open market. ... the privatization of the rural sector has had abrupt and catastrophic consequences for the Mexican rural population,” which, according to the Ambassador’s analysts, “has little chance to modernize in a way that would enable them to compete within the framework of NAFTA” (Domville 1994: 20). The dynamics of the imperial presidency are evident in this case, for while the document recognizes that the WB’s rural policies carried out by Salinas “have contributed to social instability and thus fostered the Zapatista guerrilla movement,” it notes that,
in an electoral year the government has an obligation to at least temporarily alleviate rural problems in order to keep the electoral advantage it traditionally enjoys in the rural areas (Saxe-Fernández/Delgado 2005).



Speaking to an assistant to Representative Richard Gephart, who visited Chiapas in late 1994, an Indian woman summarized the prevailing sense of despair among the Mexican rural population: “They never gave us anything, but now, with the Constitutional changes, they left us without hope.” This claim echoes those recorded during the regime of Porfirio Diaz. But the foreign policy of the US imperial presidency, carried out through the neoporfiriato, centres on short-run corporate and regional interests. For example, US embassy analysts point out that US grain exporters will greatly benefit from the WB’s agricultural programmes since the inability of these schemes to promote local production tends to favour “more imports of US corn and beans in the short run.” And since the limitations of the WB’s agricul­tural programmes will not enable Mexico to meet future demands for wheat, sorghum, soybeans, rice and cotton, it is estimated that “In medium and long-run terms the increased demand for such items will be greater than the national capacity to produce them, and thus imports [from the United States] will increase correspondingly” (confidential text cited in Domville 1994: 20).

The national security implications of a policy that tends to push millions of Mexican peasants into cities north and south of the US border are now being addressed by an unprecedented – in Mexican history – increase in military and police budgets, and an equally unprecedented US projection of mili­tary assistance, training and technology, appropriate for the control of the rural and the urban popu­lation. In terms of this technology, I refer, for instance, to the Textron water cannon vehicle weighing 25 thousand pounds and shooting 400 gallons of water at sufficient pressure to knock down crowds of people, and to the Cobra crowd control vehicle manufactured by Customs Armouring of Pittsfield, as well as to thousands of machine guns, helicopters, and other weapons and training used in both the war against drugs and the war against people – indisputably a class war. With the SAPs of IMF and WB an unprecedented purchase of military goods and services from the US under all categories of assistance (Foreign Military Sales/FMS, Commercial Sales, Excess Defense Sales and International Military Education and Training programme (IMET) are under way (Willson 1997). A report from the Federation of American Scientists indicates that between 1984 and 1993 Mexico obtained 10 times more US arms than it accumulated between 1950 and 1983.


Since NAFTA was formalized in 1994 there have been new demands for an increased US participa­tion in Mexico’s military dynamics. During the Zedillo and Fox administrations and now with Cal­derón, the emphasis has been to echo the Department of Defense call for a ‘secure, stable, and friendly’ ‘vecino’ who would look increasingly to the US for directions and dependency relating to military and international policies. In 1996 the Mexican press cited from a US Department of Defense report describing the intention of US military programmes to Mexico as “expanding US influence in the Mexican military” (Willson 1997: page). Thus, while the IMF-WB and neoporfiriato economic schemes further destabilize Mexican society (the centrifugal forces), an increased US role in the militarization and repression in Mexico can be observed, the centripetal side of the coin. Here we have the imperial presidency and the neoporfiriato in full operation.


Concluding remarks


In an interview published in the Mexican press in May 1994, General James R. Harding anticipated many of the scenarios regarding the ‘home land’ strategies of the ‘imperial presidency’ after the terrorist attacks of 9 September 2001 when he stated that “illegal Mexican migration to the US now ranks with drug trafficking and international terrorism as a major threat to national security.”[28]


Using the war against terrorism as an excuse, the US Justice Department, then under John Aschcroft, asked the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to dust off and enforce a 50-year-old law that requires non-citizens to report any change of address within 10 days of moving. Failure to do so could result in penalties ranging from fines to deportation. This policy applies to all non-citizens, whether they are in the US legally or illegally, implying that foreigners are more predisposed to commit terro­rism than natives are (Navarette 2002: 13). According to Navarette, the deporting of people who fail to report a change of address is a blatant overkill, and by singling out non-citizens, the policy only reinforces prejudices and pushes immigrants to the margins of society. The Bush administration insists that the new policy will ‘enhance border security’, but nobody knows how this will be accomplished by harassing people who have already crossed the border.


In the post-September 11 environment, the destabilizing of IMF and World Bank programmes com­bined to the pursuit of US vested interests in corporate and national security have profound negative implications for civil liberties and civic-military relations in both Mexico and the US. As pointed out above, President Bush’s request to Congress to abrogate the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act is an invitation of the imperial presidency to military authoritarianism and to an erosion of democratic, human, and con­stitutional rights. According to the White House team headed by President George W. Bush, “the threat of catastrophic terrorism requires a thorough review of the laws permitting the military to act within the United States” (cited in Navarette 2002).


The laws now give the ‘imperial presidency’ unprecedented powers for the establishment of uncon­stitu­tional and police-state-like ‘anti-terrorist’ structures in the US now being fostered in Canada and Mexico through the Partnership for Prosperity and Security (but in Mexico also through the refunc­tiona­lization of troops by converting them into police bodies). This policy is having profound reper­cussions in Mexico and Canada, since the US new anti-terrorist strategy claims that homeland security can only be achieved by locating US security and intelligence units in Mexican and Canadian ports, seaports, railways, and highways.
The economic and political well-being of American society is intertwined with the economic and national security trap that is generated by Washington’s covert financial and military endorsement of Mexico’s neoporfiriato. US economic policies and miscalculations are causing turmoil not in faraway lands such as Vietnam, Chile or Argentina, but next door to the US itself.


Streets in the US are the other end of a transmission belt that is eroding the structure of work and in­come, as well as the very foundations of democracy and constitutional rights in the context of the authoritarian excesses being promoted by the ‘imperial presidency’, under the excuse that the US is a nation ‘currently’ at war against ‘world terrorism’. It is a war in which anybody can be a terrorist at any time, a difficult scenario to all legitimate social and political opposition. US imperial authoritarianism and militarism occurs in a context in which there is a deepening of the structural capitalist crisis while both the World Bank and IMF insist in irresponsibly advocating the recessive deindustrialization policies that were applied in Latin America in the 1980’s with devastating consequences for produc­tivity, and the well-being of the population. These grave miscalculations ‘globalize’ the problem, by aggravating the risks of worldwide recession and in the case of Mexico turning into a time bomb that, unless immediately defused, will have devastating consequences (Saxe-Fernández 1997), a situation that is ‘already’ generating unbearable social and economic costs. In this context, strength of social mo­ve­ments against the capitalist system should increase, as they place severe limits to the capacity of the US ‘imperial presidency’ to contain social change on a global scale.
The dangers to international security are further aggravated by the increased ‘politization’ and ‘milita­rization’ of international economic exchanges, particularly in the vital energy and other strategic natu­ral resources sector. It should be noted that, in contrast to most Cold War operations, now the ‘imperial presidency’ sponsors not only political-military espionage against its enemies, but also ‘economic’ espio­nage. This trend is especially disturbing for those nations which, in the view of the US national security establishment, are perceived as “commercially, industrially or financially” hostile to the aims, purposes, and needs of US civilian and military enterprises (Saxe-Fernández 1994: 241). The extension of the US ‘national security’ structure to Mexico and Canada and subsequently throughout the hemisphere, using clandestine plans and personnel, hardly foreshadows a world of stability and in­ternational security.


The use of a ‘preventive war’ strategy to obtain control of oil and gas deposits creates unprecedented risks of general war. In Iraq, Bush’s military advisors have failed to anticipate the consequences of the unprecedented resistance to military occupation. They estimated that by 2006 ‘only’ 5 to 6 thousand troops would remain and Iraq was supposed to be run by a popular, democratic government capable of keeping order, while US oil monopolies profited from Iraq’s vast hydrocarbon resources. Now the White House is contemplating an escalation of the war into Iran, in scenarios that involve the use of tactical nuclear weapons, sowing the seeds of more wars, and consequently, transforming the United States in a principal threat to international law and security. Military analysts such as Edward Luttwak considered the ‘first’ Gulf War, with its devastating human, financial, environmental and political consequences as a ‘battle’ in World War Three. By 2007 the ‘battle’, pursued by George W. Bush, involves a human holocaust costing around one million civilian casualties in Iraq (Roberts 2007). This ‘battle’ is already, as pointed out by Zbigniew Brzezinski on 1 February 2007 before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “a historical, strategic and moral calamity” (Grey 2007). But most significant was Brzezinski´s suggestion that the Bush administration might ‘manufacture’ a pretext to justify a military attack on Iran by “some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran…” (emphasis added as the allusion to the attacks of 11 September against the WTC and the Pentagon is more than ‘significant’, coming from a former national security advisor) (Grey 2007; Saxe-Fernández 2006a, 2007; Delgado 2007).


The temptation to resurrect the old US and German geo-political concepts of ‘large areas’ is already apparent in ‘North America’ and in the use of the ‘blitzkrieg’ worldwide. The war in Iraq and the destabilization of the Middle East, in the midst of massive corporate corruption, and the WB and IMF scenarios of domination for the Americas by economic and coercive means, once again illustrate the tendency of monopoly capital (basically the military-industrial and oil and gas sectors) in the US to manipulate external economic, diplomatic and military factors, as well as domestic politics in order to offset their economic and geo-strategic difficulties (access to cheap oil). The centrifugal-centripetal dynamics of the ‘imperial presidency’ is already exacerbating an already critical situation in the Middle East of unprecedented proportions (Saxe-Fernández 1980, 1979, 2007; Chossudovsky 2006a; 2006b; Delgado 2007). According to Richard Falk, this is, indeed, a core region for a World War Three sce­nario:
… general wars in the past have always occurred when a great power tries to compensate for economic and po­litical decline by recourse to decisive military means. At the present time, I believe that the American leader­ship is increasingly trying to offset a reality created and expressed by the weakness of the dollar in economic terms and by the loss of control over the Third World in resource terms. The United States is … trying to offset that weakness by relying on military superiority, and it is in that contest of offsetting political and economic disadvantage with the pursuit of military advantage that the most horrible wars … have occur­red (Falk 1979: 21).



[1] Source: Hans Günther Brauch, John Grin, Úrsula Oswald, et al, (eds) Globalization and Enrivonmental Challenges. Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century. Berlin-Heilddelberg-New York-Hong-Kong-London-Milan-Paris-Tokio. Springer-Verlag (2007) in press. Paper Presented at eh 2007 LASA Congress, Montreal, Septiember 2007. Bibliography available upon requesto to jsaxef@gmail.com
[2] The first draft of this paper was presented to the Canadian Social Science Congress, in Toronto, Canada, 29 May –1 June 2002, and published as: Saxe-Fernández (2002). The author wishes to express his gratitude to Dr. Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos for his technical help and his substantive observations on this work.
[3] For a description of the use by the Executive of secret operations to manipulate and undermine Congressional prerogative in foreign relations see Schlesinger (1973), Zinn (1990) and LaFeber (1987).
[4] Walter LaFeber (1995: 6): Lincoln did that on 15 April 1861, in contradiction to Article I of the Constitution, and during the next 10 weeks after 4 July “acted as a de facto absolute dictator”. Giorgio Agamben (2004: 54) citing Carl Schmitt (1965) refers to Lincoln’s dictates as a classical example of ‘dictadura comisarial’.
[5] The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act indicated that “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title of imprisoned not more than two years, or both”. This is the only US criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people under the cover of “law enforcement” (Morales 2006: 2).
[6] See for details at: ; ; Jeniffer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney (2006). A synthesis and analysis is offered by Frank Morales (2006).
[7] By multinational corporation, I refer to national (in this case, US-based) enterprises that operate internationally.
[8] Marcuse did so in a seminar devoted to ‘The Warfare State’ at Brandeis University (1964) as well as Baran/Sweezy (1968). See also: Sweezy (1978); on the ‘political sociology’ see C. Wright Mills (1957). For a critique of Mills’ work see Sweezy (1968) and Aptheker (1968). In his Power Elite Mills (1957) de-emphasizes the notion of a ‘ruling class’, remaining firmly influenced by the Machiavellian and Weberian mold – with great reliance on notions of bureaucratic elites – but the Marxian influence is undeniably there in his strong rejection of those works that do not take into account the fundamental importance of class and property and the control of and possession of property and stock. See Mills/Gerth (1942, 1965). For further theoretical integration, development and analysis see Milliband (1978).
[9] On the ‘iron triangle’ see: Adams (1977); Salomon/Siegried (1977). For a good study on the ‘iron triangle’ in the military-industrial sector, see Adams (1982), and for the same regarding oil and gas industry; see Engler’s classic (1966). The author’s description of the oil lobby’s operations and symbiotic relations with US Congress and the White House is one of the best and most systematic studies of the iron triangle’s ‘pork and barrel’ and ‘revolving door’ dynamics in the oil sector. For a well researched and politically vital study of the operations of the iron triangle in the aerospace industry see Nimroody (1988). An important recent study is offered by Briody (2003).
[10] On the imperial presidency in addition to Schlesinger (1973) and LaFeber, (1995), see: Saxe-Fernández (2005).
[11] Geared at the appropriation of surplus value.
[12] And this includes a sort of “military-industrial” populism used by politicians, presidential candidates, senators and congressmen in their efforts to obtain public support through obtaining “contracts” that favor employment and business in their districts and states.
[13] Such as in the Plan Colombia.
[14] According to the US based National Priorities Project, on 20 February 2007, US War costs in Iraq were about: 368 billion US$; for topical data see at: < option="com_wrapper&Itemid="182">.

[16] Since Cheney was appointed Vice-president of the US, Halliburton worldwide operations have multiplied. For example, just in Mexico, from January 2001 to may 2005 Pemex, the Mexican state oil enterprise, now under a World Bank “divestiture” scheme, awarded 1.22 billion to Halliburton in non-bid contracts.
[17] Professional up-dated profiles on these corporations are provided by www.corpwatch.org Design by Tumis.com 1611 Telegraphn Ave, N. 702, Oakland, Ca, 94612, USA. Current developments in the military industrial complex are provided on line, among others, by the NYT, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times.
[18] For details on how the iron triangle currently impacts transatlantic relations see Blustein, (2005)

[20] Blaine had also served as Secretary of State in 1881 during the brief presidency of James A. Garfield,
[21] The data on the Porfiriato is provided by LaFeber (1995).
[22] The World Bank and the IMF are treated in this paper as state and class instruments of US national private interests and not as international financial institutions or as financial multilateral instruments, and thus, as vital tools of Pax Americana. For a precise historical analysis, see Kolko and Kolko (1972).
[23] Neoporfiriato is a concept that defines more clearly current features of economic and political policies in contrast to the more popular label of neo-liberal. The Mexican XIX liberal tradition fostered important positive trends in vital areas such as state-church relations and in promoting the secularization of education. Thus the concept of neo-liberal is not as historically adequate as the neoporfiriato. This text is based on a previous research paper (Saxe-Fernández 1994, 2002, 2005, 2006).
[24] In 1984 the income of the lowest 10 per cent of Mexican families accounted for 1.72 per cent of the GDP. By 1989 this figure had declined to 1.58 per cent, and by 1992, to a mere 1.55 per cent. By contrast, the incomes of the richest 10 per cent of the population increased as a proportion of GDP from 32.77 per cent in 1984 to 37.93 per cent in 1989, and to 38.16 per cent in 1992 based on data from INEGI and the Banco Nacional de México. See: Elvia Gutiérrez, “Retrocesos en la distribución de la riqueza durante la actual administración”, in: El Financiero, 11 February 1994: 3. Data on the concentration of wealth by the Mexican plutocracy are from Banco de México and Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, See: La Jornada, 14 February 1994: 1.
[25] This type of inequity is also observed in the way the State of Chiapas, Mexico’s richest state in terms of water and forest resources as well as in the generation of electricity, is physically discriminated against by the Federal Government.
[26] These estimates were kindly provided by Calva as of 1 March 1994. The figures are based on official data from the Federal budgets of 1980-1992, and all estimates are made in 1980 pesos.
[27] PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) is the official party that dominated Mexican politics. PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) is the opposition right-wing party that won the 2000 and 2006 Presidential elections.
[28] In an interview with Mexican reporter Dolia Estévez, General Hardin pointed to the need “to prepare the Armed Forces in Latin America to deal with any threats to [national and regional, that is, US] security”, in: El Financiero, 20 May 1994: 44.