Invasion! Who Are the Real Invaders on Planet Earth?

Tom Engelhardt


He crossed the border without permission or, as far as I could tell, documentation of any sort. I’m speaking about Donald Trump’s uninvited, unasked-for invasion of my personal space. He’s there daily, often hourly, whether I like it or not, and I don’t have a Department of Homeland Security to separate him from his children, throw them all in degrading versions of prison — without even basic toiletries or edible food or clean water — and then send him back to whatever shithole tower he came from in the first place. (For that, I have to depend on the American people in 2020 and what still passes, however dubiously, for a democracy.)

And yes, the president has been an invader par excellence in these years — not a word I’d use idly, unlike so many among us these days. Think of the spreading use of “invasion,” particularly on the political right, in this season of the most invasive president ever to occupy the Oval Office, as a version of America’s wars coming home. Think of it, linguistically, as the equivalent of those menacing cops on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014, togged out to look like an occupying army with Pentagon surplus equipment, some of it directly off America’s distant battlefields.

Not that many are likely to think of what’s happening, invasion-wise, in such terms these days.

Admittedly, like so much else, the worst of what’s happening didn’t start with Donald Trump. “Invasion” and “invaders” first entered right-wing vocabularies as a description of immigration across our southern border in the late 1980s and 1990s. In his 1992 attempt to win the Republican presidential nomination, for instance, Patrick Buchanan used the phrase “illegal invasion” in relation to Hispanic immigrants. In the process, he highlighted them as a national threat in a fashion that would become familiar indeed in recent years.

Today, however, from White House tweets to the screed published by Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white nationalist who killed 22 people, including eight Mexican citizens, in an El Paso Walmart, the use of “invasion,” or in his case “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” has become part of the American way of life (and death). Meanwhile, the language itself has, in some more general sense, has continued to be weaponized.

Of course, when you speak of invasions these days, as President Trump has done repeatedly — he used the word seven times in less than a minute at a recent rally and, by early August, his reelection campaign had posted more than 2,000 Facebook ads with invasion in them — you’re speaking of only one type of invasion. It’s a metaphorical-cum-political one in which they invade us (even though they may not know that they’re doing it). Hundreds of thousands of them have been crossing our southern border, mostly on their own individual initiative. In some cases, however, they have made it to the border in “caravans.”  Just about every one of them, however, is arriving not with mayhem in mind, but in search of some version of safety and, if not well-being, at least better-being in this country.

That’s not the way the White House, most Republicans, or right-wing media figures are describing things, however. As the president put it at a White House Workforce advisory meeting in March:

“You see what’s going on at the border… We are doing an amazing job considering it’s really an onslaught very much. I call it ‘invasion.’ They always get upset when I say ‘an invasion.’ But it really is somewhat of an invasion.”

Or as Tucker Carlson said on Fox News, “We are so overwhelmed by this — it literally is an invasion of people crossing into Texas”; or as Jeanine Pirro plaintively asked on Fox & Friends, “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time, or will our leaders sit passively back while the invasion continues?” The examples of such statements are legion.

The True Invaders of Planet Earth

Here’s the strange thing, though: in this century, there has been only one true invader on planet Earth and it’s not those desperate Central Americans fleeing poverty, drugs, violence, and hunger (for significant aspects of which the U.S. is actually to blame).

The real invader in this world of ours happens to be the United States of America. I’m speaking, of course, about the only nation in this century whose armed forces have, in the (once) normal sense of the term, invaded two other countries. In October 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush responded invasively to a nightmarish double act of terrorism here. An extremist Islamist outfit that called itself al-Qaeda and was led by a rich Saudi (whom Washington had, in the previous century, been allied with in a war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) proved responsible. Instead of organizing an international policing operation to deal with bin Laden and crew, however, President Bush and his top officials launched what they quickly dubbed the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. While theoretically aimed at up to 60 countries across the planet, it began with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and some of his crew were indeed there at the time, but the invasion’s aim was, above all, to overthrow another group of extreme Islamists, the Taliban, who controlled most of that land.

So, Washington began a war that has yet to end. Then, in the spring of 2003, the same set of officials did just what a number of them had been eager to do on September 12, 2001: they unleashed American forces in an invasion of Iraq meant to take down autocrat Saddam Hussein (a former U.S. ally who had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda). In fact, we now know that, within hours of a hijacked jet crashing into the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already thinking about just such an invasion. (“Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not,” he reportedly said that day, while urging his aides to come up with a plan to invade Iraq.)

So American troops took Kabul and Baghdad, the capitals of both countries, where the Bush administration set up governments of its choice. In neither would the ensuing occupations and wars or the tumultuous events that evolved from them ever truly end. In both regions, terrorism is significantly more widespread now than it was then. In the intervening years, millions of the inhabitants of those two lands and others swept up in that American war on terror were displaced from their homes and hundreds of thousands killed or wounded as chaos, terror, and war spread across the Greater Middle East (later compounded by the “Arab Spring”) and finally deep into Africa.

In addition, the U.S. military — equally unsuccessfully, equally long-lastingly, equally usefully when it came to the spread of terrorism and of failed or failing states — took action in Libya, Somalia, Yemen (largely but not only via the Saudis), and even Syria. While those might have been considered interventions, not invasions, they were each unbelievably more invasive than anything the domestic right-wing is now calling an invasion on our southern border. In 2016, in Syria, for instance, the U.S. Air Force and its allies dropped an estimated 20,000 bombs on the “capital” of the Islamic State, Raqqa, a modest-sized provincial city. In doing so, with the help of artillery and of ISIS suicide bombers, they turned it into rubble. In a similar fashion from Mosul to Fallujah, major Iraqi cities were rubblized. All in all, it’s been quite a record of invasion, intervention, and destruction.

Nor should we forget that, in those and other countries (including Pakistan), the U.S. dispatched Hellfire missile-armed drones to carry out “targeted” strikes that, once upon a time, would have been called “assassinations.” In addition, in 2017 alone, contingents of the still-growing elite Special Operations forces, now about 70,000 personnel, had been dispatched, in war and peace, to 149 countries, according to investigative journalist Nick Turse. Meanwhile, American military garrisons by the hundreds continued to dot the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion and have regularly been used in these years to facilitate those very invasions, interventions, and assassinations.

In addition, in this period the CIA set up “black sites” in a number of countries where prisoners, sometimes literally kidnapped off the streets of major cities (sometimes captured in the backlands of the planet), were for years subjected to unbearable cruelty and torture. U.S. Navy ships were similarly used as black sites. And all of this was just part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by Washington, whose beating heart was a now notorious (and still open) prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Since 2001, the U.S. has succeeded in squandering staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars unsettling a vast swath of the planet, killing startling numbers of people who didn’t deserve to die, driving yet more of them from their homes, and so helping to set in motion the very crisis of migrants and refugees that has roiled both Europe and the United States ever since. The three top countries sending unwanted asylum seekers to Europe have been Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, all deeply embroiled in the cauldron of the American war on terror. (Meanwhile, of course, we live in a country whose president, having called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” during his election campaign in 2015, has done his best to follow through on just such a Muslim ban.)

And by the way, those original invasions and interventions were all surrounded by glorious explanations about the bringing of “democracy” to and the “liberation” of various societies, explanations no less bogus than those offered by the El Paso killer to explain his slaughter.

Still in the Land of the Metaphorically Invaded

Invaders, intruders, disrupters? You’ve got to be kidding, at least if you’re talking about undocumented immigrants from south of our border (even with the bogus claims that there were “terrorists” among them). When it comes to invasions, we should be chanting “USA! USA!” Perhaps, in fact, you could think of this country, its leadership, its military, and its war on terror as a version of the El Paso killer raised to a global scale. In this century at least, we have been the true invaders and disrupters on planet Earth (with the Russians in Crimea and the Ukraine coming in a distant second).

And how have Americans dealt with the real invaders of this world? It’s a reasonable question, even if seldom asked in a country where “invasion” is now a matter of almost obsessional discussion and debate. True, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, a striking number of Americans had the urge not to go to war. The streets of major cities and small towns filled with protesters demanding that the Bush administration not do what it was obviously going to do anyway. When the invasion and occupation happened, it should have quickly been clear that it would be a destructive disaster. The initial shock-and-awe air campaign to “decapitate” Saddam Hussein’s regime, for example, managed not to touch a single key Iraqi official but, according to Human Rights Watch, killed “dozens of civilians.” In this way, the stage was set for so much of what would follow.

When the bad news (Mission Unaccomplished!) started coming in, however, those antiwar protestors disappeared from the streets of our country, never to return. In the years that followed, Americans generally ignored the harm the U.S. was doing across significant parts of the globe and went on with their lives. It did, however, become a tic of the times to “thank” the troops who had done the invading for their “service.”

In the meantime, much of what had transpired globally in that war on terror was simply forgotten (or never noted in the first place). That’s why when, in mid-August, an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up at a wedding party in Kabul killing at least 63 people, the New York Times could report that “weddings, the celebration of union, had largely remained the exception” to an Afghan sense of risk-taking in public. And that would be a statement few Americans would blink at — as if no weddings had ever been destroyed in that country. Few here would remember the six weddings U.S. air power had obliterated in Afghanistan (as well as at least one each in Iraq and Yemen). The first of them, in December 2001, would kill about 100 revelers in a village in Eastern Afghanistan and that would just be the beginning of the nightmare to come. This was something I documented at TomDispatch years ago, but it’s generally not even in the memory bank here.

In 2016, of course, Americans elected a man who had riled up what soon be called his “base” by launching a presidential campaign on the fear of Mexican “rapists” coming to this country and the necessity of building a “big, fat, beautiful wall” to turn them away. From scratch, in other words, his focus was on stopping an “invasion” of this land. By August 2015, he was already using that term in his tweets.

So, under Donald Trump, as that word and the fears that went with it spread, we became the invaded and they the invaders. In other words, the world as it was (and largely remains) was somehow turned on its head. As a result, we all now live in the land of the metaphorically invaded and of El Paso killers who, in these years, have headed, armed with military-style weaponry, for places ranging from synagogues to garlic festivals to stop various “invaders” in their tracks. Meanwhile, the president and a bipartisan crew of politicians in Washington continued to pour ever more money into the U.S. military (and into little else, except the pockets of the 1%).

As for me, in all those years before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, I had never watched his reality TV shows. Though I lived in New York City, I had never walked into Trump Tower. I had never, in other words, invaded his space, no matter how metaphorically. So, with invasions in the air, I continue to wonder why, every day in every way, he invades mine. And speaking of invasions, he and his crew in Washington are now getting ready to invade the space not just of people like me, but of endangered species of every sort.

Of course, the president who feeds off those “invaders” from the south doesn’t recognize me as a species of anything. For him, the only endangered species on this planet may be oil, coal, and natural gas companies.

Believe me, you’re in his world, not mine, and welcome to it!

Another police-state raid in Australia to protect spy agencies

Mike Head

In a further move to block leaks exposing the criminal activities of the US-linked Australian surveillance and military agencies, Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers spent almost eight hours searching the Canberra home of a senior intelligence official on Wednesday. They left carrying large black plastic bags, reportedly containing evidence.

Police pointedly refused to state the reason for the early morning raid on the house of Cameron Gill. He works for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the electronic spy agency that forms a key part of the global “Five Eyes” network led by the US National Security Agency.

Gill is a significant target. He has been a top-level adviser to a succession of key government ministers and is also the husband of Australia’s ambassador to Iraq, Joanne Loundes. The crackdown on whistleblowers is taking place at the highest echelons of the political and security establishment.

Far from backing away from such raids in response to widespread outrage over the attack on free speech and the public’s right to know the truth, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government is stepping up the offensive. Morrison personally endorsed the raid, saying the police were “just doing their job.”

The raid came just three months after intimidating raids against journalists accused of exposing damaging government secrets.

News Corp senior political editor Anikka Smethurst, had published documents revealing plans to legalise internal spying by the ASD. A day after ransacking Smethurst’s Canberra home in June, the AFP spent a day searching the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Sydney headquarters. That was over the publication of stories by Dan Oakes and Sam Clark about the protracted official cover-up of war crimes by Australian Special Forces units involved in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The latest raid is almost certainly connected to a hunt for the source of Smethurst’s April 2018 story. She revealed secret correspondence between Defence Department secretary Greg Moriarty and Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo about how the ASD’s electronic surveillance capabilities could be used to target people within Australia.

Last month, Pezzullo bluntly told a parliamentary committee inquiry into the police raids that the person who leaked the documents to Smethurst should “go to jail for that.” He declared that the police were homing in on the source of the story, effectively foreshadowing Wednesday’s raid and prejudicing any resulting trial.

Currently, the ASD is legally barred from domestic spying, but previous documents released by WikiLeaks and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden proved that this is a sham. The material showed that the ASD and its Five Eyes partners spy on millions of people around the globe, as well as rival governments, and freely exchange data with each other.

In its submission to the parliamentary ­inquiry, the ASD insisted that police action was essential to stop “unauthorised disclosures” that would “undermine Australia’s relationships with international partners.”

This confirmed the little-reported statement by AFP acting chief Neil Gaughan, the day after the ABC raid, that its purpose was to protect access to the Five Eyes network. Gaughan’s remark pointed to the pressure coming from the Trump administration to ensure that information about the activities of the US spy and military forces is kept from public view.

As well as the police raids, two closed-door trials are being prepared over revealing leaks. In one, former military lawyer David McBride is accused of giving the ABC the “Afghan Files” on the Special Forces cover-up. In the other, a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer, known only as Witness K, and his lawyer Bernard Collaery could be jailed for up to two years for exposing ASIS’s illegal bugging of East Timor’s cabinet office during oil and gas negotiations.

Official report exposes dire conditions in New Zealand prisons

John Braddock

The New Zealand government’s Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier recently released a damning report on conditions at Ngawha Prison, in the impoverished and socially-divided Northland region, which has a significant inmate population of indigenous Maori.

The Labour Party-led coalition government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had promised to improve conditions in prisons and reduce the prison population.

Boshier tabled his report in parliament in August, following an unannounced inspection of the prison last February. He found that prisoners were not being treated “according to minimum standards.”

The facility opened to much fanfare in 2005, with a stated aim of operating based on “Maori values”—47 percent of Ngawha prisoners are Maori—and turning around the lives of prisoners. High-security prisoners were transferred out of the prison in 2013, and it now houses prisoners with lower security classifications. The report noted that almost a quarter of the prison’s population was on remand awaiting trial, yet many of the prison’s practices were more suited to a high-security setting.

In fact, management inhumanely treated all prisoners, regardless of their classification. One example was an instruction that cell doors be locked while prisoners were exercising in the compound, supposedly to reduce assaults. Inspectors found that prisoners were resorting to urinating and defecating in the compound because of a lack of toilet facilities. “This is pretty uncivilised in modern New Zealand,” Boshier told Radio NZ.

The facility is severely overcrowded. It was built for 350 prisoners but currently has 650, following the introduction of double-bunking in recent years.

Inspectors were told of restricted access to drinking water in the yard. Prisoners were not allowed to take water bottles or drinks containers and instead had to use a drinking fountain, which was integrated into the yard’s lavatory. “I consider this to be degrading treatment and a breach of Article 16 of the Convention against Torture,” Boshier said. The prison director had since revoked the restriction.

Prisoners complained the most about cell conditions, specifically high temperatures and a lack of ventilation. Inspectors found temperatures exceeding 28 degrees Celcius and, in the kitchen, 38 degrees. Prisoners and staff reported long-standing clothing and bedding shortages.

In May, Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis announced that Ngawha and a prison in Hawke’s Bay would shift to a “Maori-focused” model, costing $100 million over four years. Davis said prisoners would have a “Maori pathway that grounds them in their culture, their language but also brings their whanau (families) along.” This has clearly done nothing to improve basic conditions for prisoners.

The Corrections department has launched a new strategy, called Hōkai Rangi, across the prison system, purportedly focused on treating prisoners with “respect” and giving them more access to families. The stated aim is to cut the disproportionate number of Maori in prison from 52 percent down to 16 percent to match the general population.

There is evidence that Maori are subject to racial profiling by police and receive more draconian criminal sentences than non-Maori. The expansion of the prison population and the brutal treatment of prisoners, however, are bound up with the intensifying corporate assault on the working class as a whole. As the revelations about Ngawha Prison demonstrate, the provision of Maori cultural programs will not fundamentally alter the conditions facing prisoners.

The Labour Party campaigned in the 2017 election on reducing the prison population by 30 percent by 2030. But it simultaneously promised a fresh “law and order” push to recruit 1,000 additional frontline police, which was sure to significantly expand the prison population. The government last year announced the construction of additional prison facilities to provide a further 900 beds.

The number of prisoners has soared after years of “tough on crime” policies by successive governments. This includes the passage of a “three strikes” law by the previous National Party government in 2010, mandating severe responses for people convicted of some offences.

Adern’s government has not repealed the three strikes law, despite Labour promising to do so before and after the 2017 election. Labour’s excuse is that its right-wing populist coalition partner NZ First had rejected any change. NZ First is also remaining “tightlipped” over calls to restore voting rights to prisoners, removed by National in 2010, so they can participate in the 2020 election.

Official figures show the prison population has risen for 30 years, ever since the “pro-market” economic liberalisation program launched by David Lange’s 1984–1990 Labour government, attacking jobs, living standards and social welfare. While the rate of crime has not increased, spending on the “justice” apparatus—police, courts and prisons—has increased at three times the rate of economic growth.

Rising class tensions across Indonesia trigger West Papua protests

Mike Head

Demonstrations involving thousands of people have broken out across the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua in the past three weeks, resulting in violent repression by the police, military and Islamist thugs. According to scanty reports, the protests have resulted in the burning of government buildings, confrontations with police, mass arrests and dozens of deaths or injuries.

The protests and clashes began on August 17 after police and Islamic militias brutally attacked Papuan students in the East Javan city of Surabaya. The social unrest comes amid intensifying economic and social tensions across the entire sprawling Indonesian archipelago, home to 263 million people.

Because of an anti-democratic internet shutdown by the Indonesian government across the remote Papuan provinces, and bans on international journalists, information on the clashes is hard to verify. But social media reports indicate that a number of protesters have been killed. Witnesses of a single clash in Papua’s remote Deiyai regency said at least eight bodies were located after security forces opened fire on protesters.

Despite the official censorship, videos have emerged online showing protests by Papuan students and workers in what is estimated to be 30 towns in the two provinces, as well as in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, and several other cities, including Medan and Bandung. Last week, demonstrators torched parliament and police buildings in the Papuan capital, Jayapura. Police fired tear gas and 600 extra paramilitary troops were deployed to the city.

The unrest erupted on August 17, Indonesian Independence Day, when armed Indonesian police, soldiers and Islamic militia members stormed a student dormitory in Surabaya that housed Papuan students, arresting 43. The students had allegedly refused to raise the Indonesian flag. According to eye-witness accounts, students were tortured and called “monkeys,” “pigs” and “dogs” during the attack.

This assault has triggered another wave of secessionist agitation, which date back to the Indonesian annexation of the former Dutch colony in 1961. The violent official response has involved thugs from the Banser militia, the paramilitary wing of the Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, working in close collaboration with the Indonesian military. “If the TNI [Indonesian military] commander or the defence minister asks us, the only thing we can say is that we’re ready,” Banser leader Alfa Isnaeni told the media.

By some estimates, President Joko Widodo’s government has deployed more than 6,000 military personnel to the Papuan region in an effort to quell dissent. Video obtained by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) showed paratroopers descending in the highlands of Wamena and in Sentani, near Jayapura.

Papuan business and political elites once sowed illusions in Widodo, who pledged to address inequalities and human rights abuses in Papua during his first election campaign in 2014. But conditions have only worsened.

Both the “pro-independence” protests and the Islamist-linked repression are driven by efforts to divert underlying and growing social tensions into divisive communal conflicts. The resource-rich, but deeply impoverished, provinces on the western half of the island of Papua have become a particularly acute demonstration of the immense social inequality wracking Indonesia.

While transnational mining conglomerates, backed by local capitalists, extract super-profits from the archipelago’s natural wealth and the labour power of local workers, millions of people live in abject poverty.

Driven by global financial forces, this social divide throughout Indonesia has escalated since the collapse of the 33-year Suharto military dictatorship in 1998. Today, an estimated 1 percent of the Indonesian population owns 50 percent of national wealth, and the richest 10 percent possesses 77 percent, while most people lack decent jobs, housing and essential social services.

In Papua, much of the brunt of this exploitation and inequality is now borne by workers from across the wider archipelago. The government’s “trans-migration” program has encouraged the human influx in order to satisfy the demands of the mining companies and other employers for larger sources of cheap labour.

UK pensioners suffer massive increase in poverty

Thomas Scripps

The proportion of pensioners living in severe poverty, receiving less than 40 percent of median household income, has climbed to five times the level of 1986. This is an increase from 0.9 percent to 5 percent. It is the largest increase among western European countries, taking the UK from one of the lowest rates to the fourth highest.

The figures are from a new study titled “Pension Reforms and Old Age Inequalities in Europe.” The report’s author, Professor Bernhard Ebbinghaus, explained in highly muted language, “The United Kingdom is a good example of the Beveridge-lite systems that have historically failed to combat old-age poverty. ... These have rather ungenerous basic pensions with means-tested supplements, and this reproduces relatively high severe poverty rates among the elderly.”

The state pension in the UK is a pitiful £8,767 per year. Average spending for a one-person retired household is an already incredibly low £13,265, with many forced to cut costs in all directions, but this still leaves a roughly £4,500 shortfall.

The report also found that those European countries that had made private pensions an important source of income for the elderly had seen a rise in financial inequality. “The comparison shows that the shift toward increasing privatisation amplifies the already existing level of social inequality,” Ebbinghaus said.

The figures underscore the persistent social evil of old-age poverty in the UK, which in the last seven years has begun to grow once again. Almost 18 percent of pensioners—nearly 2 million people—are in relative poverty, receiving less than 60 percent of median household income, up from 13 percent in 2011/2012. This means that the reduction in the catastrophic pensioner poverty rates of the late 1980s and the 1990s (of up to 40 percent) has been halted and, since 2012, been going into reverse.

The first sharp rise in pensioner poverty in the post-war period took place from the mid-1980s after a two-decade fall, as the British ruling elite launched an all-out assault on the social gains of the working class and inequality began to skyrocket. General poverty rates among old people then declined by two thirds from a late 1980s peak to the early 2010s.

However, this highly uneven process, which still left hundreds of thousands in dire financial straits, was shattered by the 2008 financial crash and government austerity. The crisis of world capitalism, in which the British banks were bailed out to the tune of £1 trillion from the public purse, set the stage for a new collapse in the living standards of many pensioners.

Recent rises in pensioner poverty have been caused by the housing crisis and welfare benefits cuts in particular. Around 20 percent of pensioners are now forced to privately rent their homes, and this proportion is increasing thanks to the lack of affordable housing. Sky-high rents mean that the poverty rate for these households is more than 35 percent, nearly double the level for pensioners in general. The freeze on housing benefit has exacerbated the problem.

In February, the government announced another benefit cut, specifically hitting retirees’ incomes. Under Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) plans, pension credit is being withdrawn from all pensioners with working-age partners. This will affect 15,000 couples this year and 60,000 by 2023-2024. These households will be left up to £7,000 a year worse-off, and those in social homes will be liable to pay the bedroom tax—an average £15 a week loss in income.

US Defense Department prepares for mass internet censorship

Kevin Reed

The US military has issued a call for research proposals from technology partners for the development of an automated system capable of scanning the entire internet and locating and censoring content deemed as “false media assets” and “disinformation.” According to government documents, the requested solution would provide “innovative semantic technologies for analyzing media” that will help “identify, deter, and understand adversary disinformation campaigns.”

On August 23, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a solicitation for a so-called Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program on the federal government business opportunities website. According to the bid specifications, SemaFor “will develop technologies to automatically detect, attribute, and characterize falsified multi-modal media assets (text, audio, image, video) to defend against large-scale, automated disinformation attacks.”

In other words, the US Defense Department is seeking a technology partner that will build a platform to enable the Pentagon to locate any content it identifies as an adversarial “disinformation attack” and shut it down. This technology will cover anything on the internet including web pages, videos, photo and social media platforms.

The documents released as part of the DARPA request say that the technology and software algorithms it is seeking would “constitute advances to the state of the art” that will be top secret and do not include “information that is lawfully publicly available without restrictions.”

Diagram of the Semantic Forensics online censorship system sought by the Defense Department

These advances would involve moving away from “statistical detection techniques” which are becoming “insufficient for detecting false media assets.” The use of intelligent semantic techniques—the ability for a program to analyze online content within context and determine its meaning and intent—requires the latest developments in artificial intelligence and so-called “neural networks” that have the ability to “learn” and improve performance over time. According to the US Defense Department, semantic analysis will be able to accurately identify inconsistencies within artificially generated content and thereby establish them as “false.”

There are three components to DARPA’s requested solution. The first is to “determine if media is generated or manipulated,” the second is that “attribution algorithms will infer if media originates from a particular organization or individual” and the third is to determine whether the media was “manipulated for malicious purposes.” Although the request makes reference to deterrence, there are no details about how the Pentagon intends to act upon the content it has identified as “false.”

East Timor’s mass poverty, unemployment belie promises of “national liberation”

Patrick O’Connor

On August 30, the small state of East Timor commemorated the 20th anniversary of the referendum vote in favour of formal independence from Indonesia, which invaded and annexed the former Portuguese colony in 1975.

Official festivities for the anniversary were held amid mass unemployment and some of the most extreme poverty anywhere on the planet. The notoriously corrupt local elite used the opportunity to flaunt their designer jewellery and luxury vehicles, while representatives of the imperialist powers that continue to dominate East Timor, particularly Australia and the US, were warmly embraced.

Timor’s capital Dili was again converted into a Potemkin Village. Ahead of the 2012 independence commemorations, iron sheets were used to conceal slums and polluted canals from the eyes of visiting dignitaries travelling on the road from Dili airport. This time, government buildings around the fireworks display were reportedly given fresh coats of paint.

The anniversary served to underscore the failure of the nationalist political perspective behind the drive for Timorese independence that culminated in the 1999 referendum and 2002 formal assumption of sovereignty. Two decades on, contrary to the promises of Fretilin and other proponents of “national liberation,” it is clear that the creation of the new capitalist state did nothing to advance the social interests and democratic rights of the Timorese working class and rural poor.

Anniversary poster in front of the Timorese prime minister's office

The majority of Timor’s 1.4 million people live in severe poverty. Many people remain dependent on subsistence farming, with a “hungry season” endured annually. According to a Global Hunger Index survey released last month, East Timor is the tenth worst country for hunger suffering in the world, narrowly behind war-ravaged Afghanistan and Sudan. Almost 50 percent of all Timorese children are stunted due to malnutrition.

Even in Dili and the major towns, basic services are lacking, including access to clean water, sanitation, health, and education. Literacy levels are just over 50 percent. Power blackouts are regular occurrences in the capital, while much of the country remains without electricity.

Mass unemployment has badly affected young people, with 75 percent of the population under 35 years-old. Tens of thousands of youth have emigrated and do factory and meatpacking work in Britain and Europe, cleaning and other menial work in South Korea, and fruit picking and onerous farm work in Australia. Remittances from overseas workers constitute Timor’s second largest “export.”

Oil and gas remain the state’s critical resource and the source of the wealth amassed by a tiny ruling elite over the last 20 years.

Energy resources extracted from the Bayu Undan gas field in the Timor Sea have generated about $20 billion in revenues for the Timor-Leste Petroleum Fund since 2004. Portions of this sovereign wealth fund, mainly interest payments, have financed about 90 percent of all government spending. While only a pittance has been allocated to basic social services, hundreds of millions have been spent on the state’s military, police, and government apparatus. Untold wealth has been lost through corrupt public infrastructure and service tenders.

The very basis of “independent” East Timor is now in question, however, with the Bayu Undan field due to run dry within the next two to three years. The Timor-Leste Petroleum Fund is already stagnating, with its value steady at $US16 billion over the last four years.

The entire Timorese elite has staked its future on the future development of the enormous Greater Sunrise gas field. Backed by the opposition Fretilin party, Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak’s government hopes to raise billions in funding to begin extraction from the Timor Sea, piping gas to Timor for the first time, thereby developing a long-term gas refining industry in the country.

Billions of dollars have already been invested in this gamble. The Timorese state recently bought out the Greater Sunrise stakes owned by ConocoPhillips and Shell for $485 million and $413 million respectively. The American and Dutch energy giants had opposed the proposed pipeline to Timor, demanding instead that existing pipelines to northern Australia, and refineries in Darwin, be utilised. The same demand is still being issued by Australian company Woodside, which has a 33 percent stake in the Greater Sunrise project.

Costa Rican government imposes ban on political strikes

Andrea Lobo

Thousands of public sector workers, including teachers, doctors, nurses, electricians, trash collectors and others carried out a national strike in Costa Rica on Tuesday to oppose an anti-strike law promoted by the right-wing administration of President Carlos Alvarado and his Citizen’s Action Party (PAC).

As thousands of workers marched outside, the Legislative Assembly voted in favor of the bill, banning all forms of political strikes and imposing draconian limits on all strikes. It constitutes a historic attack against a basic democratic right enshrined in the 1948 Constitution and can only be enforced through police state repression.

The law’s prohibitions cover “all strikes with political ends or of any nature without a direct connection with the employment relationship or labor violations chargeable to employers.” At the same time, it places a 48-hour limit on strikes against policies “that directly affect the economic and social interests of workers,” while prohibiting more than one strike against the same policy.

The law annuls the existing provision that strikers should receive payment for missed days until the strike is declared illegal. It also expands the bans on strikes in the Labor Code regarding “essential services,” including 10 categories including health care, air traffic, migration, police, firefighters, and transportation of medicines, medical supplies and perishable foods. These latter products, which constitute fully two-thirds of exports, threaten the outlawing of strikes among the private sector workers involved in their production and harvesting.

Two other categories are created for “transcendental” and “strategic” services. The former includes garbage collection, ports, elections, banks and courts, limiting strikes to 10 days during which “minimum services” must be maintained. “Strategic” services include teachers, limiting their strikes to 21 days and prohibiting school occupations. The legislation also establishes an expedited, oral process for labor tribunals to declare strikes illegal. Picket lines are fully barred.

Amid slanders against strikers in the corporate media and a nationalist orientation of the unions and pseudo left toward the rotten political establishment, the vast majority of workers have not been politically prepared for this lurch toward authoritarian forms of rule.

The measure follows escalating preparations for dictatorship across the world, with the British Prime Minister suspending Parliament, the US president ruling increasingly by emergency decree, the French president deploying troops against “yellow vest” protests and the German ruling coalition promoting the fascistic right.

Now, any attempt by the working class majority in Costa Rica to use its social power under capitalism—withholding labor—whether it is to defend and advance their democratic rights or to oppose wars, invasions, coups and all forms of aggression and diktats by imperialism and tyranny nationally and internationally, will be deemed illegal by a government dubbed “progressive” and a “firm democracy” in Western media.

The WSWS spoke with striking workers marching in San Jose, Tuesday, most of whom preferred to remain anonymous. A pharmacy worker in the state health care institution, called the “Caja,” declared: “Unconstitutionally, they are robbing our right to express ourselves. We have to be conscious that they are taking away the right to demonstrate, at a time when salaries do not suffice, the added-value tax is coming and tons of companies are closing down. They cut our income and raise water and light bills. If the people don’t ‘pinch’ themselves, we’ll be ‘horses and wagons’—it will be whatever they command.

“This is not only in Costa Rica, but across Latin America and Central America, everyone is protesting because economic pressures are pushing us down, working people are losing their jobs and wealth is only for those at the top.”

A lab technician added: “It’s noticeable that people have been uniting, facing the situation that the country is in, not only those of us at the Caja or teachers. Simply put, they are shutting us all up.”

A teacher from Heredia with 30 years of experience said: “This is a struggle between the haves and have-nots. In France, there were social struggles and what did French politicians say? They condemned those struggles, which exerted enormous pressures. Politicians don’t want to see that in our country. They want to standardize us to give us all a hunger wage.

India labels 1.9 million Assam residents “foreigners” as prelude to their mass expulsion

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Almost two million residents of Assam, a state in India’s northeast, have been excluded from the Indian state’s reactionary National Register of Citizens (NRC). These de facto “foreigners” are now under threat of being herded into detention centres prior to their mass expulsion.

Moreover, if India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has its way, the process under which all of Assam’s more than 33 million residents have had to provide documentation demonstrating their right to citizenship to the authorities’ satisfaction, or be targeted for deportation, will be extended throughout the country—that is, to all of India’s 1.3 billion people.

Almost all of the 1.9 million people who have been excluded from the NRC—some 6 percent of Assam’s population—are Bengali-speaking, and more than 90 percent of them are impoverished Muslims.

Fearing mass protests against its attempt to declare a substantial fraction of Assam’s Bengali-speaking minority stateless, the BJP central government deployed more than 145 companies of the Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) across the state prior to the publication of the “final” NRC list last Saturday.

A preliminary NRC list published in July 2018 excluded 4.1 million people. The state unit of the BJP and its principal partner in Assam’s government, the ethno-chauvinist Asom Gana Parishad (AGP-Assam People’s Association), have criticized Saturday’s “final” NRC for not targeting far more Bengali-speakers for deportation. “The AGP is not satisfied at all about the number of exclusions … [it] is far too low and we cannot accept that,” declared party chief and Assam cabinet minister Atul Bora.

The stated aim of the NRC is to root out and expel all those who cannot prove that they or their ancestors lived in India prior to March 24, 1971. Thus by design, the vast majority of those who have been deemed “foreigners” were born and have spent their entire lives in India, or at the very least have lived there for decades. However, human rights groups have documented numerous instances of people whose families have lived in Assam for generations, and thus fulfill the state’s reactionary citizenship criteria, but have nevertheless been excluded from the NRC due to the authorities’ communal malevolence and incompetence.

The NRC process has sparked opposition and outrage in India and internationally, with even the western press, which never tires of celebrating India as the “world’s most populous democracy,” publishing critical reports.

On Sunday, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tried to paint the publication of the NRC as essentially a non-event. He denied those excluded from the NRC have been rendered “stateless” or designated “foreigners.” “Exclusion from the NRC,” said Kumar, “has no implication on the rights of an individual resident in Assam. Those who are not in the final list will not be detained … till they have exhausted all the remedies available under the law.”

All this is lies—a transparent attempt to dress up a state-engineered ethnic-cleansing campaign as lawful, restrained, even humane.

The right-hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP President and Home Minister Amit Shah, has repeatedly described “illegal” immigrants as “termites” and vowed to drop them in the Bay of Bengal.

Six detention camps already exist in Assam, most of them within district jails, and almost a dozen more are reportedly under construction.

The NRC process has already caused enormous anxiety, distress and hardship, as poor, often illiterate people have scrambled to come up with documentation to convince hostile government appointees that they should not be excluded. Now, under conditions where the state government has publicly declared that it is dissatisfied that “only”1.9 million have been denied citizenship, those excluded from the NRC will have to go before one of the more than one thousand newly-established “Foreigners Tribunals” to try to convince the authorities that they meet the reactionary NRC criteria. Should they fail, theoretically they can appeal to the courts, but every step of this process involves spending money that most don’t have.

The Modi government’s whipping up of hostility against immigrants, like its promotion of “cow protection,” the building of a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of the razed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and other Hindu communalist causes, is aimed at deflecting mounting anger over mass joblessness, chronic poverty and agrarian distress into reactionary channels.

The BJP’s anti-Bengali campaign in Assam, it should be added, has a pronounced anti-Muslim communalist thrust. In line with its vile Hindutva-ite ideology which defines India as a Hindu nation, and in keeping with its plans to transform into a Hindu rashtra or state, the BJP has brought forward legislation to grant Hindus who have migrated to India from Bangladesh citizenship, while denying it to Bangladeshi Muslims, on the claim that the former have fled persecution. But when it comes to the Rohingya fleeing ethnic-cleansing in Burma, the BJP government is adamant that none will be granted asylum, let alone citizenship.

The Indian state’s foul and shameful actions in Assam echo its actions in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and underscore that India’s ruling elite, like its counterparts around the world, is increasingly using authoritarian methods of rule and cultivating communalist and fascist reaction.

Trade war accelerates trend towards global recession

Nick Beams

There are increasing signs the world economy has entered a period of much slower growth and could be heading for a recession, including in the US, as the trade war against China intensifies and the Trump administration prepares attacks on other targets.

Earlier this week, a key indicator of British manufacturing activity contracted in August for the fourth consecutive month to reach its lowest level in seven years. The IHS Markit purchasing managers’ index (PMI) dropped to 47.4 from 48 in July. A rise to 48.4 had been predicted, with a reading of less than 50 indicating more executives believe their economic activity is contracting rather than expanding.

IHS director Rob Dobson said high levels of political uncertainty—a reference to the Brexit turmoil—together with ongoing global trade tensions had “stifled the performance of UK manufacturers.”

“Companies scaled back production in response to the steepest drop in new order intakes since mid-2012,” he said.

The British economy contracted by 0.2 percent in the second quarter compared with the previous three months, and a further contraction in the current quarter would see it officially in a recession. Dobson said the latest PMI data was “consistent with a quarterly pace of contraction close to 2 percent.”

While the British economy is being adversely affected by the Brexit upheaval, the economic outlook is little better in the European Union. The export-dependent German economy, the world’s fourth largest and the euro zone’s main driving force, contracted 0.1 percent in the second quarter and the central bank has warned that a recession is likely.

German retail sales fell further than expected in July. The Ifo Business Climate survey of German executives fell from 95.8 top 94.3 in August, the fifth straight month of falling sentiment.

Clemens Fuest, the president of the Ifo Institute, which conducts the survey, said: “There are more indications of a recession in Germany. The last time that industrial companies demonstrated such pessimism was in the crisis year of 2009. Not a single ray of light was to be seen in any of Germany’s key industries.”

Surveying the results of PMI data from around the world, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that global industrial production had fallen in the three months to June, and August surveys “point to weak inflows of new orders that suggest a significant rebound in output is unlikely in coming months.”

The article noted that in a number of Asian countries, “surveys pointed to a decline in activity that mirrored that felt in Europe. The PMIs for Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia were below 50.”

Economies in the Asia-Pacific region are being heavily impacted by the US-China trade war. South Korea has reported that its exports to China fell by 21.3 percent in August compared to the same month last year. Total exports have dropped by 13.6 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

In Japan, capital spending by manufacturing companies dropped by 6.9 percent in the June quarter, the first decline in two years, largely as a result of a significant decline in exports to China.

NLI Research Institute analyst Taro Saito told the Wall Street Journal: “Given there is no sign of recovery in Japan’s exports due to the US-China friction, the downtrend in manufacturers’ profits and capital expenditures is expected to continue.”

The Hong Kong economy is also experiencing its worst downturn since the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, as a result of the US-China trade war and the mass protests of the past three months.

The PMI for the territory fell to 40.8 in August, down from 43.8 percent the previous month, going even further below the level of 50 marking the border between expansion and contraction.

The Hong Kong administration has downgraded its growth forecast for the next year to between zero and 1 percent from its previous prediction of 2–3 percent.

Figures released yesterday on the Australian economy show that in the last quarter it grew at its slowest pace since the global financial crisis. Gross domestic product grew by only 1.4 percent compared with the same period last year, despite a major boost in exports which saw the country reach its first current account surplus since 1975.

The growth rate in household consumption spending, which makes up 60 percent of the economy, fell to 1.4 percent in the June quarter, down from 1.8 percent for the previous three months.

Five Star-Democrat coalition government announced in Italy

Alex Lantier

A shaky coalition government between the Democratic Party (PD) and the Five-Star Movement (M5S) is set to be sworn in at 8 a.m. this morning in Rome.

Yesterday, outgoing Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte informed President Sergio Mattarella that he had found the necessary support in parliament for an M5S-PD coalition government. A month ago, on August 8, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the neofascist Lega had withdrawn his support from Conte’s M5S-Lega government, bringing it down. While Salvini was seeking new elections, hoping to form his own government in alliance with the fascistic Fratelli d’Italia party, the M5S and PD desperately sought to block elections and thus reliably keep the M5S in power.

As he announced his new government to the press, Conte pledged: “Based on our program oriented to the future, we will dedicate our energy, our skills and our passion to make Italy better in the interests of all of its citizens.”

But the new M5S-PD government, cobbled together in backroom deals whose stated purpose was to avoid elections and any input from the population, is no alternative to its far-right predecessor. It will maintain European Union (EU) austerity and the assault on refugees, setting it on a collision course with the working class. It also opens the door to Salvini and his allies falsely posturing as defenders of democracy and the electoral process and as opponents of austerity, while escalating their virulently nationalistic and anti-refugee propaganda.

Ministerial nominations include Roberto Gualtieri, a member of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) and now in the PD, who will lead the austerity offensive as economy minister. With Italy’s debt standing at €2.3 trillion or 132 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Brussels is expected to demand tens of billions of euros in austerity measures. This year’s Italian budget is to be negotiated by October.

Le Monde hailed Gualtieri’s nomination as a “peace offering” to the EU: an advisor to pro-austerity PD governments under Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, he is widely expected to ruthlessly implement social cuts dictated by Brussels. Already, unemployment stands at over 10 percent and at nearly one third of youth 15-24 in Italy. Further austerity would likely savage its economy, which contracted in the second half of 2018 and is set to grow only an anemic 0.1 percent this year.

Conte named Roberto Speranza, a leader of the small Free and Equal (LEU) party, as health minister, apparently to ensure that his government could count on LEU support in the upcoming confidence vote. He divided all the remaining ministerial positions save one between the M5S and the PD.

M5S leader Luigi di Maio will become foreign minister, while Lorenzo Guerini, an associate of Renzi at the PD, is slated to become defense minister. Conte also nominated former Milan police prefect Luciana Lamborghese, who is affiliated to no political party, to replace Salvini as interior minister. Together, they will have the task of continuing the assault on refugees that Salvini made his trademark policy, provoking mass protests in several Italian cities.

While Salvini publicly and aggressively refused to allow any refugees from the Mediterranean into Italy, the main lines of his immigration policy were put in place by his PD predecessor. PD Interior Minister Marco Minniti worked with the EU to seal off the Mediterranean Sea, establish the Libyan Coast Guard and Libyan concentration camps to hunt down refugee vessels and imprison refugees in horrific conditions in Africa, and block the arrival of refugees from Africa to Europe.

Colombian Peace Agreement in Peril: Rebels Return to Armed Struggle

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Civil war in Colombia may have a new lease on life. Appearing in a video released on August 29, Iván Márquez (formerly Luciano Marín Arango) spoke for former FARC guerrillas accompanying him.  He announced they had returned “to the mountain,” to armed struggle.

Guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had fought Colombia’s government since 1964. In late 2016, the FARC and that government signed a peace agreement. A war ended which, from 1980 on, had led to 220,000 deaths, mostly at the hands of paramilitaries and government forces. Now a precarious peace agreement is in intensive care.

Márquez, head FARC negotiator at the peace talks, explained why his group acted and what they hope for. The dissident FARC members joining him included Jesús Santrich (formerly Seuxis Pausias Hernández Solarte), also a former peace negotiator. The number of newly armed FARC guerrillas is unknown.

Approximately 2000 recalcitrant FARC members remained armed after the agreement. The others, numbering at least 6000, formed a socialist political party. The agreement, awarded the party ten seats in Colombia’s Congress. Márquez and Santrich occupied two of them. The new party, called the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force (FARC), issued a statement rejecting the return to arms.

Colombian President Iván Duque ordered that FARC members under arms be captured. The Defense Ministry indicated nine of them had been killed.

Background information is relevant as to why Márquez, Santrich, and the others acted:

1. During the four year-long peace negotiations, Márquez and Santrich had opposed relinquishing arms at once, which is what occurred. They preferred doing so in stages.

2. Colombian authorities arrested and jailed Santrich on April 9, 2018. Their plans were to extradite him to the United States on drug-selling charges. Prosecutors there were holding Marlon Marín, Iván Márquez’s nephew, to testify against Santrich. Santrich left prison on May 30, 2019 after convoluted judicial processes, abuse, a hunger strike, and a suicide attempt. He disappeared in July.

3. Perhaps in response to Santrich’s capture, Márquez disappeared in August, 2018. The fate of Simón Trinidad is an object lesson. Colombia extradited that FARC commander to the United States in 2004. Convicted on spurious charges, he is serving a 60-year sentence in a high security U.S. prison.

4. Demobilized FARC insurgents risk death. Since the peace agreement presumed paramilitaries have murdered 150 of them, plus 500 community and political leaders in rural areas. From 1986 on, they killed ex-FARC guerrillas and Communist Party members belonging to the Patriotic Union electoral coalition, around 5000 in all.

In his video presentation, Marquez surveys the government’s failures in implementing the peace agreement. Through “treason,” the government, he says, enables the killings, hasn’t addressed land reform, hasn’t allowed for conversion to legal crops (The agreement provides for both), did deprive demobilized guerrillas of full political participation, unilaterally introduced a plebiscite for endorsing the peace agreement, unilaterally modified the agreement’s language, and allowed “third parties” – a reference to paramilitaries – to escape punishment for crimes.

The “strategic objective” of the newly re-armed FARC insurgents is “peace in Colombia with social justice, democracy, sovereignty, and honor.” Márquez envisions a “great coalition of forces for life, social justice and democracy.” They will create “a new government [and] a new dialogue for peace.”

Márquez anticipates cooperation with guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN). A mainly defensive war will target corruption, impunity, and particularly “the oligarchy,” but will respect “the soldier, police, and lower officials [as] class brothers.” He calls for a constituent assembly. Under a “new order of sovereignty of the homeland,” there will be no extradition of citizens, no free rein for multinationals … and no foreign military bases.”

A video appeared on September 1 in which Jesús Santrich, attended by comrades, reiterated themes put forth by Márquez. He spoke of a universal right to revolution.

Prospects for implementation of the peace agreement, obviously grim in the eyes of these FARC rebels, rest fundamentally on whether their government wants war or peace. The odds are on war.

In that regard a recent report attributed to the Observatory of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law describes government prioritization of rural “developmental projects serving an extractive economy.” The report notes that, “Connections with narco-trafficking and illegal mining, connivance with paramilitaries, and a vast project of military control are not hidden.” The projects take root in what the government calls “Strategic Zones of Comprehensive Intervention.” Militarization of these rural zones has paralyzed land reform and stymied compliance with the peace accords.

The report attributes extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances to the military’s new rapid response teams. In fact, “the areas that are most militarized are those where illegal economies expand, and where illegal actors prevail, particularly the ELN, FARC dissident groups, and paramilitary groups above all.”

The existence of a powerful military force of 481,000 troops likewise suggests a disposition to war, just as does the government’s war-making partnership with the United States. Colombia hosts U.S. troops, intelligence operatives, and military bases, seven of them. Its government buys weapons from the United States. Currently pending is the delivery of anti- aircraft missiles and 15 F-16 combat planes.

Colombia plays a crucial role in aiding U.S. aggression against Venezuela.  According to one observer, the United States “has stationed special forces and equipment along the Venezuelan-Colombian border,” “the Duque government leads a diplomatic and propaganda war against Venezuela,” and officials are “docile captives of the interests of the United States.” Colombia’s government tolerates or encourages Colombian paramilitary incursions inside Venezuela.

In Colombia silence reigns as regards support for re-armed FARC insurgents, A voice identified as “We Defend the Peace,” asserts that “no justification, no excuse … can be considered as valid” for efforts favoring “armed violence.” Former ELN guerrilla commander and prisoner of war Carlos Arturo Velandia counsels patience: “Peace … is built day by day.”

On the basis of “democratic struggle in the country,” the Communist Party joined the Patriotic Union – the latter survived the massacre noted above – in condemning “a political action with grave consequences for the process of implementing the peace agreement.”