A Clinton Presidency Will Be a Disaster for the Caribbean

WAYNE MADSEN | 11.08.2016 | OPINION

A Clinton Presidency Will Be a Disaster for the Caribbean

Based on the destructive policies of Bill and Hillary Clinton towards Haiti and Honduras, both in and out of political office, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a disaster for the Caribbean Basin. The Clintons’ use of poverty- and earthquake disaster-ridden Haiti as a personal cash cow stands as one of the most egregious examples in recent history of American politicians using the misery of others to line their own pockets. After helping Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide regain power after a 1991 military coup, sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency, ousted him, the Clintons have done everything possible to ensure that Aristide and his progressive populist political party have not been returned to power.

The reason why the Clintons have suppressed the will of the Haitian people is chiefly based on Arkansas crony capitalism. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), the infamous cipher for CIA covert activities, and members of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association (ARGA), who are political cronies of the Clintons, have wreaked havoc on Haiti’s once thriving rice growing business. Once a net exporter of highly-nutritional rice, a combination of USAID policies and one-sided Clinton-era trade deals destroyed the Haitian rice industry and made the country dependent on expensive and non-nutritional genetically-engineered bleached white rice from Arkansas agri-businesses. These agri-businesses have contributed generously to the political campaign coffers of both Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2008, the soaring price of rice worldwide and price-fixing by US agri-businesses linked to the Clintons resulted in food riots breaking out in Haiti.

It is now well-known from public disclosures of Mrs Clinton’s and other emails that the William J Clinton Foundation is a criminal «pay-to-play» extortion racket. In 2010, no sooner had Hillary Clinton turned her plane around on a trip to Australia and New Zealand to head back to Washington to deal with the Haiti situation, her husband launched the following high-tech appeal on the web site of his William J Clinton Foundation: «Text ‘HAITI’ to ‘20222’ and $10 will be given to the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti Relief Fund, charged to your cell phone bill». Clinton also solicited for donations of up to $1000 for the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti Relief Fund. Bill Clinton already had too much influence over Haiti’s affairs. Little of the donations to the Clinton coffers ever made it to Haiti’s most needy people, most of whom had lost their homes and possessions in the devastating Haitian quake.

In 2009, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed Mr Clinton as the UN’s Special Envoy for Haiti. For Haiti, the decision was akin to the fox being put in charge of the hen house.

Hillary Clinton’s contemptible support for the 2009 military coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya is also another reason why the Caribbean Basin should be apoplectic about a Hillary Clinton presidency. Not only did Mrs Clinton, as Secretary of State, support Zelaya’s military ouster, but she gave tacit support for the subsequent coup-installed right-wing governments consisting of CIA death squad veterans from the 1980s.

After his ouster, Zelaya, with the support of other Latin American leaders, attempted to return to Honduras to reclaim his presidency from the right-wing coup leaders. Mrs Clinton, ensconced at the State Department, was fully aware from National Security Agency intercepts that Honduran army troops were under orders to assassinate the exiled legitimate President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya and Nicaragua’s Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the UN General Assembly, if their plane managed to land at Tegucigalpa airport. The plane carrying Zelaya and d’Escoto was diverted to Nicaragua but Clinton’s State Department «ordered» Zelaya to return to Washington to enter into «negotiations» with the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS).

Mrs Clinton was also well aware that the Honduran military, with the knowledge of US military and Israeli security advisers, planned to assassinate three Latin American presidents traveling in a second airplane accompanying Zelaya and d’Escoto to Tegucigalpa in a show of support for Zelaya. The three Latin American presidents targeted for assassination at Tegucigalpa airport were Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo. The plane carrying the three presidents was diverted to El Salvador after the threat was received from the Honduran junta. Mrs Clinton presided over the removal of Lugo from office in a CIA-orchestrated «constitutional coup», similar to that which later removed Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff from office.

The Clintons have always carried the CIA’s water when it came to the Caribbean. Since its inception in 1947, the CIA has treated the Caribbean as America’s «private lake». The CIA always saw the «Caribbean Left» as a bête noire for American foreign policy that had to be stamped out, preferably before ever achieving power. When the Caribbean Left did enjoy success, the CIA engaged in subterfuge and political assassinations, particularly in the English-speaking Caribbean countries of Grenada, Jamaica, Dominica, and Guyana.

Mrs Clinton’s blueprint for dealing with progressive governments in Haiti and Honduras was spelled out in a CIA report, issued during the directorship of William Casey, in November 1985, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal of the Ronald Reagan administration. Titled, «The Caribbean Left: New Tactics for Old Problems», the now-declassified Secret report warned that Caribbean leftists were shifting their approach from armed action, foolishly and falsely suggesting that this was the preferred method of pro-independence movements in the French Caribbean, to one of «winning power through the electoral system». The secret report also justified CIA intervention in the region due to Libya’s «cultivation a broad range of contacts among Caribbean leftists».The charge of Libya posing a threat to Caribbean security was as laughable as the Clintons’ later charge that Aristide posed a threat to Haitian democracy. Such fallacious arguments clearly bear the watermark of the CIA and the Clintons have never wavered in their support for such baseless propaganda from the disinformation «boiler rooms» in Langley, Virginia.

The CIA has always maintained a «hit list» of Caribbean leaders it preferred to see removed one way or the other. In 1985, the hit list included Forbes Burnham of Guyana, Desi Bouterse of Suriname, Michael Manley of Jamaica, and Roosevelt «Rosie» Douglas, later elected prime minister of Dominica. Another leftist on the CIA’s hit list, Maurice Bishop of Grenada, was executed during the 1983 coup that was followed by the US military invasion of Grenada. Douglas and Burnham later died under highly suspicious medical circumstances.

Today’s Caribbean hit list includes, once again, Suriname’s Desi Bouterse, who has weathered repeated US attempts to oust him and have even included the arrest and incarceration of his son by the United States on trumped up charges, invented by Israeli interests in America, that he was involved in the arms and drug smuggling business with Lebanese Hezbollah. Others on today’s hit list include Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, who is experiencing an unprecedented US economic war against his country, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’ Ralph Gonsalves.

In 1985, the CIA recognized that progressive parties and leaders had opted for the ballot box to achieve political power. And since 1985 and encouraged by the Clintons, the power of the ballot box has been overturned by the CIA and its ciphers USAID and George Soros’s Open Society Institute, using undemocratic election tactics in Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, and Guyana. The Clintons can surround themselves with all the black and brown supporters they can muster up in the United States, but for the black and brown people of the Caribbean, the Clintons represent pure corruption, coercion, and neglect.

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