The two paths to 21st century empire-building-via-proxies are illustrated through the violent seizure of power in the Ukraine by a US-backed junta and the electoral gains of the US-backed Colombian war lord, Alvaro Uribe.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/i>We will describe the \u2018mechanics\u2019 of US intervention in the domestic politics of these two countries and their profound external effects \u2013 that is how they enhance imperial power on a continent-wide basis.<\/p>\n
Political Intervention and Proxy Regimes: Ukraine<\/b><\/p>\n
The conversion of the Ukraine into a US-EU vassal state has been a prolonged process which involved large scale, long term financing, indoctrination and recruitment of cadres, organization and training of politicos and street fighters and, above all, a capacity to combine direct action with electoral politics.<\/p>\n
Seizing power is a high stakes game for empire: (1) Ukraine, in the hands of clients, provides a NATO with a military springboard into the heart of the Russian Federation; (2) Ukraine\u2019s industrial and agricultural resources provide a source of enormous wealth for Western investors and (3) Ukraine is a strategic region for penetrating the Caucuses and beyond.<\/p>\n
Washington invested over $5 billion dollars in client-building, mostly in \u2018Western Ukraine\u2019, especially in and around Kiev, focusing on \u2018civil society groups\u2019 and malleable political parties and leaders. By 2004, the initial US political \u2018investment\u2019 in regime change culminated in the so-called \u2018Orange Revolution\u2019 which installed a short-lived pro-US-EU regime. This, however, quickly degenerated amidst major corruption scandals, mismanagement and oligarchical pillage of the national treasury and public resources leading to the conviction of the former-Vice President and the demise of the regime. New elections produced a new regime, which attempted to secure ties with both the EU and Russia via economic agreements, while retaining many of the odious features (gross endemic corruption) of the previous regime. The US and EU, having lost thru democratic elections, relaunched their \u2018direct action organizations\u2019 with a new radical agenda. Neo-fascists seized power and established a dictatorial junta through violent demonstrations, vandalism, armed assaults and mob action. The composition of the new post-coup junta reflected two sides of the US-backed political organizations: (1) neo-liberal politicos for managing economic policy and forging closer ties with NATO, (2) and neo-fascists\/violent nationalists to impose order by force and fist, and crush pro-Russian Crimean \u2018autonomists\u2019 and ethnic Russians and other minorities, especially in the industrialized south and east.<\/p>\n
Whatever else may ensue, the coup and the resultant junta is fully subordinated to and dependent on the will of Washington: claims of Ukrainian \u2018independence\u2019 notwithstanding. The junta proceeded to purge the elected and appointed government officials affiliated with the political parties of the previous democratic regime and to persecute its supporters. Their purpose is to ensure that subsequent managed elections will provide a pretense of legitimacy, and elections will be limited to two sets of imperial clients: the neo-liberals, (self-styled \u201cmoderates\u201d) and the neo-fascists dubbed as \u201cnationalists\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s road to imperialist power via a collaborator regime illustrates the various instruments of empire building: (1) the use of imperial state funds, channeled through NGOs, to political front groups and the build-up of a \u2018mass base\u2019 in civil society; (2) the financing of mass direct action leading to a coup (\u2018regime change\u2019); (3) the imposition of neo-liberal policies by the client regime; (4) imperial financing of the re-organization and regroupment of mass direct action groups after the demise of the first client regime; (5) the transition from protest to violent direct action as the major backdrop to the extremist sectors (neo-fascists) organizing the seizure of power and purge of the opposition; (6) organizing an \u2018international media campaign\u2019 to prop up the new junta while demonizing domestic and international opposition (Russia) and (7) political power centralized in the hands of the junta, convoking \u201cmanaged elections\u201d limited to the victory of one or the other pro-imperial pro-junta candidates.<\/p>\n
In summary, empire-builders operate on several\/levels: violent and electoral; social and political; and with selected incumbents and rivals committed to one strategic aim: the seizure of state power and the conversion of the ruling elite into willing vassals of empire.<\/p>\n
Columbia\u2019s Deathsquad Democracy: Centerpiece of the Imperial Advance in Latin America<\/b><\/p>\n
In the face of a continent-wide decline of US influence in Latin America, Colombia stands out as a constant bulwark of US imperial interests: (1) Colombia signed a free trade agreement with the US; (2) provided seven military bases and invited thousands of US counter-insurgency operatives; and (3) collaborated in building large-scale paramilitary death squads prepared for cross border raids against Washington\u2019s arch enemy Venezuela.<\/p>\n
Colombia\u2019s ruling oligarchy and military have been able to resist the wave of massive democratic, national and popular social upheavals and electoral victories that gave rise to the post-neo-liberal states in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay.<\/p>\n
While Latin America has moved toward \u2018regional organizations\u2019 excluding the US, Colombia strengthened its ties to the US through bilateral agreements. While Latin America reduced its dependence on US markets, Colombia expanded its commercial ties. While Latin America reduced their military ties to the Pentagon, Colombia tightened them. While Latin America moved toward greater social inclusion by increasing taxes on foreign multinational corporations, Colombia lowered corporate taxes. While Latin America expanded land settlements for its landless rural populations, Colombia displaced over 4 million peasants as part of the US-designed \u2018scorched earth\u2019 counter-insurgency policy.<\/p>\n
Colombia\u2019s \u201cexceptional\u201d unwavering submission to US imperial interests is rooted in several large-scale, long-term programs developed in Washington. In 2000, President \u2018Bill\u2019 Clinton committed the US to a $6 billion dollar counter-insurgency program (Plan Colombia) which greatly increased the brutal repressive capacity of the Colombian elite to confront the popular grass roots movements of peasants and workers. Along with arms and training, US Special Forces and ideologues entered Colombia to develop military and paramilitary terror operations \u2013 aimed primarily at penetrating and decimating political opposition and civil society social movements and assassinating activists and leaders. The US-backed Alvaro Uribe, notorious narco-trafficker and the very personification of a ruthless imperial vassal, became president over a \u2018Death-Squad Democracy\u2019.<\/p>\n
President Uribe further militarized Colombian society, savaged civil society movements and crushed any possibility of a popular democratic revival, such as were occurring throughout the rest of Latin America. Thousands of activists, trade unionists, human rights workers and peasants were murdered, tortured and jailed.<\/p>\n
The \u2018Colombian System\u2019 combined the systematic use of para-militarism (death squads) to smash local and regional trade union and peasant opposition and the technification and massification of the military (over 300,000 soldiers) in fighting the popular insurgency and \u2018emptying the countryside\u2019 of rebel sympathizers. Large-scale multi-billion dollar drug trafficking and money laundering formed the \u2018financial glue\u2019 to cement a tight relationship among oligarchs, politicos, bankers and US counter-insurgency advisers \u2013 creating a terrifying high-tech police state bordering Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil \u2013 countries with substantial popular mass movements.<\/p>\n
The same state terror machinery, which decimated the pro-democracy social movements, has protected, promoted and participated in \u2018stage-managed elections\u2019, the hallmark of Colombia as a \u201cdeath squad democracy\u201d.<\/p>\n
Elections are held under a vast overlapping network of military bases, where death squads and drug traffickers occupied towns and villages intimidating, terrorizing and \u2018corrupting\u2019 the electorate. The only \u2018safe\u2019 protest in this repressive atmosphere has been voter abstention. Electoral outcomes are pre-ordained: oligarchs never lose in deathsquad democracies, they are the empire\u2019s most trusted vassals.<\/p>\n
The cumulative effects of the decade and a half-long bloody purge of Colombian civil society by Presidents Uribe and his successor, Santos, have been to eliminate any consequential electoral opposition. Washington has achieved its ideal: a stable vassal state; a large-scale and obedient military; an oligarchy tied to US corporate elites; and a tightly-controlled \u2018electoral\u2019 system that never permits the election of a genuine opponent.<\/p>\n
The March 2014 Colombian elections brilliantly illustrate the success of US strategic intervention in collaboration with the oligarchy: The vast majority of the electorate, over two-thirds, abstained, demonstrating the absence of any real legitimacy among the eligible voters. Among those who \u2018voted\u2019, ten percent submitted \u2018spoiled\u2019 or blank ballots. Voter abstention and ballot-spoilage was especially high in the rural regions and working class areas which had been subject to state terror.<\/p>\n
Given the intense state repression, the mass of voters decided that no authentic pro-democracy party would have any chance and so refused to legitimize the process. The 30% who actually voted were largely urban middle and upper class Colombians and residents in some rural areas completely controlled by narco-terrorists and the military where \u2018voting\u2019 may have been \u2018compulsory\u2019. Of a total of 32 million eligible voters in Colombia, 18 million abstained and another 2.3 million submitted spoiled ballots. The two dominant oligarchical coalitions led by President Santos and ex-President Uribe received only 2.2 million and 2.05 million votes respectively, a fraction of the number who abstained (14 million). In this widely scorned electoral farce, the center-left and left parties made a miserable showing. Colombia\u2019s electoral system puts a propaganda veneer on dangerous, highly-militarized vassal state primed to play a strategic role in US plans to \u201creconquer\u201d Latin America.<\/p>\n
Two decades of systematic terror, financed by a six-billion dollar militarization program, has guaranteed that Washington will not encounter any substantial opposition in the legislature or presidential palace in Bogota. This is the \u2018acrid, gunpowder-tinged smell of success\u2019 for US policymakers: violence is the midwife of the vassal state. Colombia has been turned into the springboard for developing an US-centered trade bloc and a military alliance to undermine Venezuela\u2019s Bolivarian regional alliances, such as ALBA and Petro Caribe as well as Venezuela\u2019s national security. Bogota will try to influence neighboring right and center-left regimes pushing them to embrace of the US Empire against Venezuela.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n
Large-scale, long-term subversion and organization in Ukraine and Colombia, as well as the funding of paramilitary and civil society organizations (NGO) has enabled Washington to: (1) construct strategic allies, (2) build ties to oligarchs, malleable politicians and paramilitary thugs and (3) apply political terrorism for their seizure of state power. The imperial planners have thus created \u201cmodel states\u201d – devoid of consequential opponents and \u2018open\u2019 to sham elections among rival vassal politicians.<\/p>\n
Coups and juntas, orchestrated by longstanding political proxies, and highly militarized states run by \u2018Death Squad Executives\u2019 are all legitimized by electoral systems designed to expand and strengthen imperial power.<\/p>\n
By rendering democratic processes and peaceful popular reforms impossible and by overthrowing independent, democratically elected governments, Washington is making wars and violent upheavals inevitable.<\/p>\n
________________________<\/p>\n
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.<\/em><\/p>\n