Even the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has admitted that Plan Colombia was a resounding failure from a counter-narcotics perspective while providing short-term benefits from a counter-insurgency perspective.
As regular readers are by now well aware, the Commander of US Southern Command (SouthCom), General Laura Richardson, has a rare talent for saying the quiet parts out loud. She also has a penchant for dividing the world into a Manichean struggle between good guys — essentially countries and governments in the US’ neighbourhood that are aligned with “Team USA” and “Team Democracy” — and bad guys — primarily China, Russia and Iran, and their allies on the American continent, which has helped her to win hearts and minds on Capitol Hill and among the Neocon think tanks that help to shape foreign policy in Washington.
These two talents were on full display in a recent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center, titled “Preserving and Strengthening Democracy in Latin America”. In one exchange with the moderator she laid out in disarmingly candid, unabashedly neo-colonial terms how SouthCom — the command unit of the US Department of Defense she heads up, which is responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation for Central and South America, and the Caribbean — views the role of Latin America and the Caribbean in the US’s great power rivalry with China and Russia: (READ MORE)
Even the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has admitted that Plan Colombia was a resounding failure from a counter-narcotics perspective while providing short-term benefits from a counter-insurgency perspective.
As regular readers are by now well aware, the Commander of US Southern Command (SouthCom), General Laura Richardson, has a rare talent for saying the quiet parts out loud. She also has a penchant for dividing the world into a Manichean struggle between good guys — essentially countries and governments in the US’ neighbourhood that are aligned with “Team USA” and “Team Democracy” — and bad guys — primarily China, Russia and Iran, and their allies on the American continent, which has helped her to win hearts and minds on Capitol Hill and among the Neocon think tanks that help to shape foreign policy in Washington.
These two talents were on full display in a recent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center, titled “Preserving and Strengthening Democracy in Latin America”. In one exchange with the moderator she laid out in disarmingly candid, unabashedly neo-colonial terms how SouthCom — the command unit of the US Department of Defense she heads up, which is responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation for Central and South America, and the Caribbean — views the role of Latin America and the Caribbean in the US’s great power rivalry with China and Russia: (READ MORE)