Good for Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa for kicking USAID out of his country. If only every nation in the world would do that. While part of USAID’s activities ostensibly relate to helping “the poor,” that’s just a cover to disguise the real mission of the agency: to act in tandem with the CIA to engage in political activity designed to effect regime change in foreign countries.
To Correa’s credit, USAID is not the only U.S. agency he’s evicted from Ecuador. He’s also kicked the DEA out of the country. Moreover, he forced the Pentagon to close down one of its imperialist bases in Ecuador and depart the country.
Why would the CIA and USAID want to oust Correa from office? Because he’s a socialist, one who has established close ties to Cuba and Venezuela.
Do you recall when the CIA and the Pentagon were claiming that if Latin American countries went communist or socialist, the United States would be in danger of falling to the communists? That’s what the Cold War was all about — engendering deep fear of communists and communism within the American people in order to justify ever-growing budgets for the military, military-industrial complex, and CIA — i.e., the old Cold War national-security state apparatus.
That’s what the obsession with Cuba was (and is) all about. The CIA invaded Cuba, imposed a brutal embargo, initiated terrorist strikes within Cuba, and repeatedly tried to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro, notwithstanding the fact that Cuba never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
It was also what the CIA’s regime-change operation in Guatemala was all about. In 1954, the CIA destroyed Guatemala’s democratic system by ousting the democratically elected president of the country, Jacobo Arbenz, and replacing him with a brutal pro-U.S. military dictator.
Why Arbenz? Because like Castro and Correa, Arbenz was a socialist-communist. That meant, according to U.S. officials, that the United States was in danger of falling to the communists.
It was the same in 1970-1973, when the CIA helped engineer events in Chile that led to the ouster of the man that the Chilean people had democratically elected to be their president, Salvador Allende. His replacement? Pro-U.S. military strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who proceeded to have his military and intelligence goons round up tens of thousands of Allende’s socialist-communist supporters and jail, torture, rape, maim, disappear, or murder them.
What was wrong with Allende? Like Correa, he was a socialist-communist. According to the Pentagon and the CIA, that increased the likelihood that the United States would fall to the communists.
Of course, it was all a crock, just like the old domino theory regarding the Vietnam War. You remember that one, right? That’s the one by which U.S. national-security state officials claimed that if North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam, the dominoes would start falling, causing the United States to fall to the communists. Notwithstanding the deaths of some 58,000 American soldiers, North Vietnam did defeat South Vietnam. But as everyone knows, the dominoes didn’t fall and the United States is still standing.
Today, Cuba is still a communist nation, and other Latin American countries have gone in the socialist-communist direction that the Pentagon and CIA were trying to prevent during the Cold War. Venezuela is ruled by a socialist with close ties to Cuba. Chile is led by a president whose economic views are similar to those held by Allende. Nicaragua is headed by Daniel Ortega, the socialist-communist that Ronald Reagan said needed to be ousted from power on grounds of “national security.” Bolivia is headed by a socialist. And then there is Ecuador, which just kicked USAID out of the country.
Yet, is the United States falling to the communists? Oh sure, it’s true that the United States has embraced many of the same socialist programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income taxation, and equalization of wealth) that Latin American socialist regimes have embraced, but that’s just because Americans, like Latin Americans and Europeans, love socialism.
It’s obvious that for the U.S. national-security state, nothing has changed. The Pentagon and the CIA are still stuck in their Cold War mindsets. That’s why they’re still obsessed with meddling in the affairs of Latin American nations (and Eastern Europe and Ukraine and “pivoting” toward China).
That’s why USAID was in Ecuador. And that’s why USAID was recently caught meddling in Cuba with a ridiculous cell-phone escapade designed to induce Cuban young people to oust the Castro regime … and why U.S. government subcontractor Alan Gross is sitting in a Cuban jail … and why the U.S. government continues to maintain its brutal 56-year-old embargo against the Cuban people.
If only the American people would finally bring an end to this foreign-policy inanity. But the second-best solution is for foreign regimes to kick U.S. agencies out of their countries. President Correa’s ouster of USAID, DEA, and the U.S military is a good thing not only for Ecuadorians but also for the American people.
