A fire in the Esperanza 1 gold mine in the Arequipa region of southwestern Peru on May 6 killed 27 miners 80 meters below ground. The miners were employed by Servigol, a contingent labor contractor. The mine is owned by the Yanaquihua mining company. All 27 miners died from asphyxiation at midnight on May 6.
Mine inspectors at site of Esperanza disaster [Photo: Sunafil - OCOM]
It is thought that the mine, filled with explosive gases, exploded due to an electrical spark provoked by a short circuit. Following the explosion the mine’s very flammable wooden support beams caught fire, filling the gallery with smoke. The short circuit appears to have taken place near the mine’s entrance. So far there is no explanation about what caused the short-circuit.
Witnessing the explosion were miners who were leaving the mine, or who had yet to enter it. The Esperanza mine is not small; it consists of nine interconnected galleries that reach down to a depth of 100 meters.
While many gold mines in Peru are illegal, often under the control of organized crime, Esperanza 1 had been approved by the local authorities and passed inspection last November. However, there is no indication that there were any emergency exits, proper ventilation systems, or that the workers possessed the necessary safety equipment. The workers had no means of communicating with the outside world. It took an hour and a half for news of the explosion to reach emergency and police personnel in the city of Arequipa.
Interviewed by the Peruvian daily La Republica, family members waiting to receive the dead described the working conditions of their loved ones. Elvis Sanchez, who had worked only five months in the company, would routinely complain to his family about the way he and his comrades were badly treated. Elvis had suffered an injury shortly before the explosion, but was denied adequate time to heal, according to his aunt.
Willian Cuentas Puma had also warned his family about the unsafe conditions in the electric service to the mine. “He would tell us this, just in case something bad happened,” declared his cousin.
Last year, Adriel Cadena Huachaca told his family that a worker was hit by a falling rock inside the mine.
Not since the year 2000 have there been as many casualties in a single mine incident in Peru. However, the totals add up. In 2021, 63 miners died, and another 38 died in 2022. So far this year, including the 27 gold miners, there have been 32 casualties. Over the last ten years there have been 456 deaths on the job, nearly 20 percent of all job related deaths in Peru and the number of deaths continues to rise.
According to Sara Rosa Campos, an expert in Labor Relations at Peru’s Catholic University, the increase in deaths and injuries is a consequence of firms, private and public, increasingly ignoring safety regulations. “Companies prioritize payments of social [insurance] benefits, instead of security and health,” she said. “The latter have been pushed aside and there is not investment in the acquisition of personal protective equipment, or in safety education [of employees].”
Peru is one of the world’s biggest sources of gold, silver and copper. Prices for all three commodities are rising (gold recently surpassed 2,000 US dollars/oz.), and mining corporations are generating extraordinary profits, while wages and working conditions continue to deteriorate. At the same time that stockholders, corporate managers—and government officials—enrich themselves, government oversight agencies (such as the Arequipa Energy and Mines Commission [FEMA]) face shortages of inspectors and funds. In many cases, government agencies subcontract inspectors from the private sector. Regional agencies are starved for funds.
This is not new. In 2014, a report by a government agency, La Defensoria del Pueblo, exposed the absence of personnel and sufficient budgets to inspect mines across Peru.
In the weeks following the explosion at the Esperanza 1 mine, there has been media silence on this terrible incident. Other than an initial demand for an investigation, the Peruvian trade union federations, and the mining unions, have made no statements, let alone called for solidarity strikes by miners and other workers.
Yesterday, voters went to the polls to elect the members of 8,131 municipal councils and 17 regional legislatures in Spain. The elections were widely seen as a preview of national elections to be held in December. The right-wing Popular Party (PP) carried the elections amid rising support for the far-right Vox party, while the parties in national government, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the pseudo-left Podemos party, suffered a major defeat.
People wait in line to cast their ballots during local elections in Barcelona, Spain, Sunday, May 28, 2023. [AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti]
The PSOE lost 500,000 votes compared to the previous elections, falling from 6.7 million to 6.2 million votes, while the PP rose from 5.1 million to 6.9 million votes. The PP alone or in alliance with Vox won every major city in Spain with the exception of Barcelona. It carried Madrid, Valencia, Seville, Valladolid, Palma, Zaragoza, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva and Jaén.
It was a humiliating rebuke to the PSOE-Podemos government, which has championed ultra-right policies during its three years in office. Championing the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, it slashed pensions and wages, pursued a profits-over-lives policy in the COVID-19 pandemic, and massively hiked the military budget and bailouts for major banks and corporations. It also savagely attacked striking truck drivers and metal workers. The result was a collapse in its support.
The most striking feature of the elections was the complete disintegration of the vote for Podemos and its various regional allies and split-offs. Podemos lost all its councilors in Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza, Tenerife, Burgos, Valladolid, Vigo and Coruña. In Barcelona, Podemos-backed mayor Ada Colau lost her mayorship after eight years.
A similar picture emerges from the elections to Spain’s highly powerful regions, which control spending in key public services including education, housing and health care. Of the 10 regions ruled by the PSOE which went to the polls on Sunday, it only retained Asturias and Castilla-La Mancha. The PP and Vox won in Valencia region, Aragón, Balearic Islands, Cantabria and La Rioja.
At the regional level, Podemos lost 10 regional lawmakers in the Madrid region, and eight in the Valencian parliament, the two most important at stake. Más Madrid, a split from Podemos with a strong presence in Madrid, also collapsed. It lost seven councilors in Madrid city, falling to 12. In the region of Madrid, while it won four regional lawmakers, gaining from Podemos’ losses, its vote actually nonetheless dropped by around 100,000 votes.
Adelante Andalucía, a group led by the Pabloite Anticapitalistas faction of Podemos lost the mayorship of Cádiz to the PP, collapsing from 13 to six councilors and is left without representation in all the other important cities of Andalusia. The Pabloites played a treacherous role during the repression of the Cádiz metalworkers’ strike in November 2021.
The election campaign was a degraded spectacle, an expression of the relentless move to the right of European bourgeois politics. The PP and the far-right Vox party have mostly absorbed the vote of liberal right-wing Citizens. In 2019, Citizens obtained 1.9 million votes, while yesterday it barely received 300,000. Podemos and its various split-offs avoided any discussion on the war and social inequality, centering their campaign on identity politics and issues promoted by the far-right.
The first week of the two-week campaign was dominated by denunciations of the largely extinct Basque armed group ETA, which ceased to exist 12 years ago. However, EH Bildu, a Basque separatist party, fielded candidates who previously belonged to the petty-bourgeois group. ETA’s terror attacks, and even existence, were used for decades as an opportunity to clamp down on democratic rights.
While the PP and Vox called to outlaw Bildu, the PSOE and Podemos participated in this right-wing charade. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described Bildu’s move as “legal, but not decent” and the deputy of Podemos for Vizcaya, Roberto Uriarte, demanded that those convicted of “blood crimes” be withdrawn.
The second week was dominated by the “squatting problem,” denouncing squatters to cover the real issue of housing affordability and the lack of rental housing. High rents, coupled with poor salaries and job precariousness, prevent many youth from leaving their parents’ homes.
The political periphery of Podemos participated in this debate, calling for police action against squatters. In an interview with right-wing daily El Mundo, Rita Maestre, candidate for mayor to Madrid for a Podemos split-off, More Madrid, said that “squatting is illegal and creates problems for social harmony.” Maestre infamously called it “a pleasure and a pride” for Madrid to host the NATO summit last year, where the main imperialist powers plotted war on Russia and China.
In Barcelona, Podemos-backed mayor Colau endorsed police repression, after a video emerged showing municipal riot police beating two after-school activities educators. Colau, once dubbed a “mayor of change,” is notorious for slashing spending, attacking striking public transport workers and persecuting migrants.
Last year, she met far-right Mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klichkó, in Ukraine, committing aid money and fire trucks, while denouncing Putin’s “crimes against humanity” and exclaiming, “Ukraine is Europe.”
Throughout the campaign, Podemos and its new split-off, Sumar, doubled down on identity politics. Yolanda Díaz, deputy prime minister and future candidate for the general elections in December, participated in an election debate on prime-time television. Congratulating herself that only women were attending the debate, she said, “men are bred to fight in wars. They are very warrior-like,” adding that heterosexual men are boring.
Díaz is part of a government that is training and arming Ukrainian soldiers to fight Russia on NATO’s behalf, while doubling the presence of Spanish troops in Eastern Europe.
On COVID-19, Podemos centered its criticism of right-wing regional premier of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, on corruption, rather than the profits-for-lives policy in the region that killed over 11,000 elderly people. They were left to die in the cruelest conceivable way in nursing homes. Podemos was silent on this, however, as it implemented the same policy at the national level, costing 160,000 lives and millions of infections.
The regional elections were widely interpreted as setting the stage for the general election to be held in December. The survival of the PSOE-Podemos government is now highly questionable. There is also the possibility of a far-right coalition of the conservative Popular Party (PP) and the neo-fascist Vox taking power—the first time the far-right would return to power since the collapse of General Franco’s fascist dictatorship in the 1970s.
There is explosive, left-wing opposition in the working class to the policies of the PSOE-Podemos government. However, in the vacuum created to the left of Podemos by pseudo-left parties that support Podemos and work to block the formation of any organization challenging Podemos on its left, the possibility of a right-wing victory is real and growing.
I met Murder on the way He had a mask like Castlereagh Very smooth he looked, yet grim Seven bloodhounds followed him. All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
A commentary in the liberal Jewish publication Forward suggests that these lines from Shelley, directed against Lord Castlereagh, the reactionary British foreign minister of his time, would apply equally well to Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who turned 100 years old on Friday, May 27.
It is a more than justified comparison of two enemies of human freedom and social revolution. Castlereagh defended the British Empire and sought to suppress revolution in its colonies, especially Ireland, and destroy the legacy and influence of the French Revolution.
Kissinger has devoted his long life to the defense of American imperialism and the destruction of the legacy and influence of the Russian Revolution. He may have been born a German Jew and escaped the Holocaust when his family fled to America, but he allied himself with the very forces that had sponsored and cheered on Hitler, and which encouraged Hitler’s imitators in fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world.
As Kissinger once remarked—with the cynicism that became a trademark and passed for “wit” among his admirers in bourgeois political and media circles—“If it had not been for the accident of my birth, I would have been an anti-Semite.”
At a meeting of top Turkish and US officials in Ankara in 1975, after Kissinger suggested that the Nixon administration could arrange to have allies provide critical military supplies to Turkey after a congressional vote banned US aid, the US ambassador blurted out, “That is illegal.”
Kissinger replied, “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”
The secret transcript of this meeting was only made available by WikiLeaks in 2011, 36 years later.
Kissinger’s crimes
Kissinger was directly in charge of US foreign policy, as national security adviser and then secretary of state, from 1969 to 1976, a critical period of worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class and oppressed peoples. In every country where American imperialism intervened, either with military force or political subversion or propping up bloodstained dictatorships, he played a sinister role.
At least one million people died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the period of Kissinger’s direction of American policy, most of them killed by US bombs, incinerated by US napalm, or poisoned by US chemicals like Agent Orange. Many were simply massacred by American troops even as Nixon and Kissinger voiced the usual lies about America defending “freedom” and “democracy” against Communism.
The Nixon administration proclaimed a policy of “Vietnamization” and began the long-drawn-out process of negotiations with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Throughout these seven years, American soldiers, nearly all draftees from the working class, continued to die, adding another 30,000 to the death toll.
The war crimes in southeast Asia are innumerable, but the most important include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia that set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, the major urban centers of North Vietnam.
In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the chief North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris talks, Le Duc Tho. Kissinger did not go to Norway to collect his award, fearful of the likely mass protests. Le Duc Tho refused his award altogether.
In Latin America, Kissinger oversaw a wave of military coups and imposition of dictatorships, most notably in Chile in September 1973, when Augusto Pinochet launched his CIA-backed military overthrow of the reformist regime of Salvador Allende. It ended in the death of Allende and the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Chilean workers and political activists.
It was about Chile that Kissinger made one his most notorious and oft-quoted remarks, telling a meeting of the top secret 40 Committee before the 1970 Chilean elections, won by Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He wrote later of the bloody 1973 coup, “The Chilean military had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime and the United States from an enemy.”
A tank in support of Augusto Pinochet approaches the government palace during the 1973 coup. [Photo by @goodvibes11111 / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Similar coups followed in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, and these dictators joined forces with military regimes of longer standing in Brazil and Paraguay to mount Operation Condor, a joint venture of the region’s secret police and the American CIA to hunt down and kill revolutionary exiles and leftists of all kinds.
There were equally reactionary events in other parts of the world in which Kissinger is implicated: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; the military slaughter in Bangladesh in 1971; US support and aid for dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran; US support for the ultra-right insurgencies against nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; US backing for the Canberra Coup, which ousted the elected Labor Party government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
In the Middle East, Kissinger helped stave off the military defeat of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, rushing huge volumes of military equipment to the Zionist state, and then bribed the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat to change sides in the Cold War and become an American rather than a Soviet client.
Kissinger’s legacy
In world geopolitics, Kissinger is most identified with the policy of taking advantage of the split between the Soviet Union and China, both under Stalinist rule, as these bureaucratic police states vied with each other for global influence, a reactionary nationalist conflict that even erupted into military clashes along the border between Chinese Manchuria and the Soviet Far East.
The central thrust of Kissinger’s simultaneous embrace of détente with Moscow and ending the decades-long US policy of non-recognition of Beijing was to enlist the aid of the Stalinists against revolutionary struggles in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. It is this policy which is the most celebrated in US imperialist circles and accounts for Kissinger’s ability to exert continued influence decades after he left office.
When the Nixon-Ford administration ended its eight years in office, and Democrat Jimmy Carter entered the White House, he publicly pledged to make the defense of “human rights” the basis of US foreign policy. This was aimed at counteracting the stench of Kissinger’s crimes. However, nothing changed but the packaging. The crimes of American imperialism were now embellished with cynical references to the “humanitarian” concerns supposedly determining the actions of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department.
In later years, Kissinger’s accomplices in the Nixon-Ford administration constitute a who’s who of American war criminals. While Kissinger was secretary of state, George H. W. Bush, the future president, was CIA director. Donald Rumsfeld, White House chief of staff and then secretary of defense, returned to the Pentagon in 2001, where he oversaw US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and in 2001 was vice president to George W. Bush and the principal warmonger in that administration.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head a bipartisan commission to investigate, with a Democratic vice chair, former Senator George Mitchell. The congressional Democrats approved this arrangement, but public protests threatened to discredit the commission even before it could begin, and Kissinger had to step down.
As the WSWS noted at the time, “Selecting Kissinger to head this body amounts to an admission that the US government has much to hide in relation to September 11, and that the Bush administration, working in tandem with the congressional Democrats and the media, is determined to bury the truth.”
We also pointed out the growing notoriety of Kissinger internationally:
Kissinger can no longer travel freely in Europe and Latin America. He had to cancel a trip to Brazil last year because of human rights protests. He was sought for questioning by French police during a visit to Paris, in a case involving a French citizen murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. He is the subject of lawsuits in Chile and the US for his role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean military commander whose elimination paved the way for the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Today this opprobrium is expressed on the internet, as the Washington Post noted in an article Sunday in its Style section, which cited the widespread social media preparation to celebrate Kissinger’s inevitable death and the overwhelming disgust and hatred for his crimes among millions of young people who were not even born when he headed the State Department.
For the most part, the media has been nervous about commenting on Kissinger’s 100 years, fearing the implications of any, even sanitized, review of his record. In a noteworthy and particularly guilty silence, the New York Times has not yet published an article on the subject.
It is a demonstration of how far to the right American foreign policy has moved that in recent years, Kissinger has been cited occasionally as a “moderate” critic of undue American aggressiveness, particularly in relation to China. (He is a fervent supporter of the war in Ukraine). In his 2012 volume, On China, he warned that the US was adopting the same policy towards China as imperial Britain toward rising Germany in the period leading up to World War I, which made open military conflict inevitable.
There is no doubt, however, of the deeply reactionary character of his politics. In 1985, he publicly supported Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Waffen-SS military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where the US president laid a wreath.
In 1973, he made a revealing remark to Richard Nixon, after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who pressed him on the question of permitting Soviet Jews to leave the USSR (with the hope they would settle in Israel). The tape, made public only in 2010, has Kissinger declaring, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
A much earlier work, Necessity for Choice, published in 1961 when he was an academic “expert” on foreign policy at Harvard, sums up his world view: “No more urgent task confronts the free world than to separate itself from nostalgia from the period of its invulnerability and to face the stark reality of a revolutionary period.”
It is this hatred and fear of revolution and determination to crush it that underlies every crime with which the centenarian Kissinger—and the myriad imperialist politicians who consulted him, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—is identified.
While Kissinger’s criminality was of a particularly overt character, it set a standard for ruthlessness which has continued and indeed deepened in the subsequent development of American imperialism. It is in some way fitting that his 100th year on earth coincides with an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that is bringing mankind to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.
As for the present day representatives of American imperialism, they confront the “stark reality of a revolutionary period” ill equipped to do anything to contain it.
The US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the Pentagon’s overseer for Latin America and the Caribbean, will be sending hundreds of Marines and special forces troops to Peru beginning as early as this week, to train military and Peruvian National Police special forces units. These same forces have carried out massacres and extra-judicial executions to suppress the mass protests against the coup regime of Dina Boluarte.
Peru's National Police special forces unit, which has played a major role in the martial law repression. [Photo: @PoliciaPeru]
Peru’s Congress, dominated by the ultra-right Fuerza Popular party and its allies, approved the US deployment by a two-to-one margin earlier this month. Congress has joined with the Boluarte regime and the judiciary in consolidating an authoritarian state to suppress Peru’s restive working class and oppressed masses.
The repression of the mass upheavals that began last December in response to the ouster and arrest of President Pedro Castillo has resulted in an official death toll of nearly 70, many of the victims killed by live fire from the police and the military. Many hundreds more have been grievously wounded.
The dispatch of US troops to Peru, while largely blacked out by both the Peruvian and US media, constitutes an unmistakable demonstration of support on the part of the Biden administration and the Pentagon for this bloody repression. It is also a bid to exploit the crisis gripping the country to further American imperialist dominance in the region, using military means.
Peru’s top prosecutor has summoned Boluarte to testify next week in an inquiry opened at the start of this year into her alleged role in the deaths of protesters killed in clashes with security forces after Castillo’s ouster. She, along with top government ministers, are supposedly being investigated over alleged crimes of “genocide, aggravated homicide and serious injury.”
A report issued last week by Amnesty International, however, strongly suggests that this probe is a sham. It states that Peru’s Attorney General’s office has yet to question a single member of the Peruvian security forces involved in the mass killings, while a “lack of resources, experts and prosecutors allocated to these cases, plus a series of institutional measures taken by the Attorney General ... have undermined investigation and the collection of key evidence.”
The Amnesty report states that the use of live ammunition against unarmed protesters across four separate regions of Peru suggested the “responsibility of the most senior commanders, at least, of the Peruvian Nationalist Party and the Peruvian Army” in a “deliberate and coordinated state response” to drown the social protests in blood. It further charged that Boluarte and her ministers worked to “stigmatize” those being killed. They made “baseless statements that branded protesters as terrorists and praised the actions of the Peruvian security forces.”
In reviewing the casualties in the conflict zones of Andahuaylas, Chincheros, Ayacucho and Juliaca, Amnesty identified a number of those killed as 15- and 16-year-old youth. Hilaria Aime Gutiérrez, mother of Christopher Ramos, killed by the military in Ayacucho, told the human rights group, “How can a 15-year-old child be a terrorist? How can a child who saved money every day to get ahead be a terrorist? (...) You cannot treat an adolescent like this, he was my little one, my beloved child.”
Amnesty International warned that, as a result of recent laws and amendments passed by the right-wing Congress, Peru’s security forces enjoy a level of impunity that allows those “responsible for serious violations of human rights to escape justice.”
This impunity has only been widened with a recent ruling by Peru’s supreme court that there effectively exists no right to protest under Peru’s constitution, which was imposed by the dictatorial regime of Alberto Fujimori in 1993. The ruling was handed down in rejecting an appeal of four people convicted for participation in blocking trucks at the Las Bambas mining project, a common form of protest by peasant communities against the ravaging of their lands by the transnational mining corporations.
The high court found that any protest that “could” infringe upon anyone’s rights or upon the workings of Peru’s capitalist economic system—even if peaceful—constitutes criminal activity.
The Amnesty report follows another issued last month by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), of which Peru is a member. It likewise found the Peruvian police and army guilty of “excessive, indiscriminate and lethal use of force” in suppressing protests across the south of the country in December and January, following the ouster of Castillo. It also condemned the Boluarte regime for “the stigmatization” of peasants and indigenous peoples with the false accusations that they were “terrorists”, thereby justifying the massacres.
A similar conclusion was reached by Nyaletsossi Voule, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the rights to peaceful assembly and association in a statement at the end of a recent 10-day official visit to Peru: “Excessive and disproportionate use of force led to the killing and injury of protestors and bystanders during the protests that began in December 2022.” He further insisted that “those responsible for human rights violations during the protests are effectively held to account.” Nothing of the kind, of course, has taken place.
This, then, is the pariah regime and its security forces to which the US military and the Biden administration is preparing to provide “support and assistance.” US troops are to be deployed to some of the same regions where streets were awash with blood and where new strikes and protests are being organized and prepared. They are being sent to help prop up a regime that is overwhelmingly hated by the Peruvian masses. The highest approval rating Boluarte has received in recent polls is 16 percent, while that of Congress is even lower.
Even as troops are being prepared for deployment to Peru, US SOUTHCOM on May 23 announced the appointment of a Peruvian general, Brig. Gen. Marco Marín, as the deputy commanding general-interoperability for US Army South, ensuring the closest collaboration between the Pentagon and Peru’s repressive security forces.
There is no question of mistaken identity involved here. The Boluarte regime was brought to power with the direct connivance of Washington. The US ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna, a CIA veteran and former top aide to Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on the very eve of the parliamentary coup that brought down Castillo, organized a meeting with Peruvian Defense Minister Gustavo Bobbias to ensure that the military would cast its deciding vote in favor of overthrowing the Peruvian president.
US SOUTHCOM’s Peruvian expedition exposes the rank hypocrisy of Washington’s incessant invocation of “human rights” as a cover for the pursuit of its imperialist interests, from Ukraine, to the Pacific and Latin America itself.
In Peru, these interests are obvious. The country is the world’s second-largest producer of copper, expected to mine 2.8 million tons this year. Exploration has begun in the southern region of Puno near the border with Bolivia for lithium deposits. Both metals are of strategic importance in the race for developing electric vehicles and “clean” energy. Peru is also an important producer of gold, zinc, silver and natural gas.
China has eclipsed the US as Peru’s main trading partner, while it has extensive investments in mining as well as in the development of infrastructure, including the only Chinese-run port in Latin America. Beijing and Lima have a free-trade agreement, and Peru has become part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. According to China’s embassy in Peru, trade between the two countries topped $37 billion in 2021, more than double the amount between Peru and the US. For Latin America as a whole, trade with China has soared from $12 billion in 2000 to $495 billion in 2022.
The support for the coup regime and the deployment of troops in Peru is part of Washington’s strategy in the hemisphere. It is based upon a reliance on militarism and support of the region’s counterrevolutionary oligarchies to offset the dramatic erosion of US economic hegemony—all the while mouthing phrases about “human rights” and “democracy”.
In Peru, where six presidents have been ousted in five years and virtually every major political figure is implicated in corruption scandals, Washington is seeking to build up the military as an instrument for dominating the state and carrying out counterrevolutionary repression, while serving as a US-aligned counterbalance to China’s economic influence.
US imperialism’s determination to turn Latin America into a battlefield in the drive toward a third world war poses immense dangers to the masses of working people in the region. The US is reviving its well-worn methods of militarism, coups and dictatorship in its attempt to reassert hegemony in a region it long viewed contemptuously as its “own backyard”.
Bitter experience has proven that these threats cannot be countered by reliance on supposedly “left” bourgeois politicians and parties. From Castillo in Peru, to the PT in Brazil, the Boric government in Chile and elsewhere in the region, the so-called “pink tide” governments have only paved the way to the rise of the most right-wing forces and intensified attacks upon the working class.
Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s growing strength have accelerated Taiwan’s military overhaul. Taipei is exploring multiple ways to enhance its security, but unorthodox methods risk escalation.
In early May 2023, a U.S. delegation consisting of 25 defense contractors arrived in Taiwan for a security summit, aimed to increase interoperability between the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries. It marks the latest step toward Taiwan’s years-long efforts to strengthen its defense capabilities and pose credible deterrence to the Chinese military.
But though Taiwan’s 1.7 million reservists appear to form a formidable challenge to China’s roughly 2 million active military personnel, Taiwan’s forces largely exist only on paper. Its military currently only has 169,000 active military members and an estimated 300,000 combat-ready reservists, according to Wang Ting-yu of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
The Taiwanese government was therefore quick to explore increasing training times for reservists after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and in December 2022 lengthened conscription from four months to one year, bringing praise from the U.S. By boosting pay and training, the Taiwanese government hopes to bolster its forces and bring it closer to South Korea’s 18-month compulsory military service.
But China’s population of 1.4 billion dwarfs Taiwan’s mere 23 million, meaning additional Taiwanese conscription initiatives are futile if China resorts to additional conscription as well. Taiwan’s $19 billion defense budget also pales in comparison to the $230 billion spent by Beijing.
Washington’s hypothetical efforts to resupply the relatively isolated island of Taiwan during a conflict would meanwhile prove far more difficult than the ongoing Western effort to assist Ukraine. While stockpiling weapons could partially negate this issue, a prolonged conflict or blockade of Taiwan by China would steadily diminish Taiwan’s ability to continue fighting.
With the inherent disadvantages of the Taiwanese armed forces and the unwillingness of even the U.S. to officially commit to the island’s defense, Taiwan’s government has explored increasing engagement with the private sphere to ensure its security. The May 2023 U.S. contractors’ visit was just part of Taiwan’s recent efforts to increase engagement with both domestic and foreign private military firms.
Before the breakout of conflict in Ukraine in 2022, Taiwan had taken incremental steps toward greater privatization in its defense sector, such as privatizing the state aircraft manufacturer Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation in 2014.
However, the war in Ukraine completely altered the Taiwanese government’s view of private war. Russian private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been active in Ukraine since 2014, while the Russian PMSC known as Wagner has played an essential part in the war and in Russian propaganda. Various Western and Russian PMSCs are also fighting in Ukraine, while Chinese civilian drones have been used to great effect by both sides.
The Taiwanese government has since taken significant steps in engaging with Taiwan’s private sector to increase drone production. But more notable are the proposed changes to the Private Security Services Act, which regulates PMSCs operating in Taiwan, early into the war. Taipei has various types of private services to consider, such as those providing security, consulting, and training services, intelligence gathering, logistics support, and cyber and maritime security.
In September 2022, Taiwanese entrepreneur Robert Tsao pledged to spend $100 million training 3 million soldiers over three years in the Kuma Academy (also known as the Black Bear Academy). While his claims are ambitious, Russian billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin’s financing of Wagner has already played an integral role in the war in Ukraine, at the same time drastically increasing his stature in Russia and notoriety abroad.
Due to its own limited industry, any Taiwanese effort to promote greater military cooperation with the private sphere would require Western assistance. The U.S. scrapped its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in 1979 to normalize relations with China but the Taiwan Relations Act enables the U.S. to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, and privatization could make it easier for the West to support the Taiwanese military. Alongside weapons deals, Western PMSCs like G4S have been active in Taiwan for more than two decades and could quickly expand their operations on the island.
Greater cooperation with Western PMSCs may not be able to help Taiwan repel a Chinese assault. But they could complement Taiwanese military efforts to create a volunteer force modeled on Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force and advocated by former Taiwanese defense chief Admiral Lee Hsi-min. The U.S. has explored developing guerilla forces in the Baltic States to harass Russian forces if they were to invade, and growing the multiple private initiatives already underway in Taiwan could form a powerful guerilla network that could remain active even if Taiwan’s military is forced to stand down.
But committing to privatization has its own consequences for Taiwan. The role of Chinese PMSCs abroad has grown significantly over the last few years, with an estimated 20 to 40 Chinese active largely to guard Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure projects. However, China’s 7,000-plus PSMCs operating domestically “suggests ample opportunity for the future growth of internationally active” Chinese firms according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, while Chinese law prohibits them from using force abroad except for defense, Beijing’s assertion that Taiwan is part of China’s territory could erode legal and political barriers to using them.
In recent years, China has also deputized maritime militias of fishing boats to swarm parts of the South China Sea and establish control over certain areas. By collaborating with Chinese PMSCs, these militias could even avoid Taiwan and surround the Kinmen, Matsu, or uninhabited Pratas islands. Although these islands are claimed by Taiwan, they are geographically closer to China. This could be justified on the grounds of economic interests or security concerns. The use of these fishing militias to harass Taiwan could make up for significant underdevelopment in Chinese PMSC capabilities and help China to avoid using its official military forces.
The scale of cooperation between the Taiwanese government and private military actors is so far limited. But Taiwan’s manpower shortages and lack of official military and diplomatic ties have made the prospect of private military assistance far more attractive. The lack of international regulations sustaining Taiwan’s recent increased engagement with the private military sphere, however, will further encourage China to respond in kind.
Ukrainian oligarchs had turned to PMSCs to protect their assets in Ukraine after 2014, while Ukraine has come to heavily lean on foreign PMSCs to supplement the war effort. Wagner and other Russian PMSCs have meanwhile grown in importance to Russian military efforts in Ukraine as well. The growing power of PMSCs in Ukraine, as well as worldwide, suggests further military privatization of the dispute over Taiwan may be inevitable.
Electric vehicle (EV) sales are surging around the world. In just three years, between 2019 and 2022, global EV sales increased from 2 million to over 10 million units. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that by 2030, EVs will compose 60 percent of all car sales in the combined area of China, Europe and the United States.
This rapid growth in electric cars has important implications for the global economy. While total spending on the renewable energy transition remains substantially below the levels required to halt global warming, a transition of sorts is occurring.
About 7 percent of all greenhouse gases comes from cars. Unlike other sources of emissions, such as flying, shipping or the production of steel and cement, passenger cars can be relatively easily transitioned out of dependency on fossil fuels.
Amid highly volatile and increasingly expensive gas prices, as well as a general concern over the catastrophic effects of climate change, electric cars are being widely adopted.
The growth of EVs has enormous implications: for the capitalist economy, for workers around the world, but above all in the context of the United States’ struggle to maintain its role as the dominant imperialist power.
The United States, China and batteries
As the US economic situation deteriorates, and its relative economic power declines, the planners in the Pentagon increasingly see China as a mortal threat to a US-dominated capitalist system.
The US has now been preparing to wage a war against China for over 10 years. Just this March, a leaked memo showed a top US general predicting the US would be at war with China by 2025.
A major problem, however, exists for the military strategists and policy experts in Washington. China controls a large portion of both the mining and processing of the minerals required to make EV batteries. In other words, they control the supply chains for a new technology that is rapidly becoming central to the global economy.
Share of Chinese control of select critical minerals in refining and mining. This chart uses data from the New York Times and the IEA. Refining refers to the physical refinement of these minerals in China. Mining, however, refers both to their mining in China as well as ownership through Chinese firms in other countries. Data from the New York Times and the International Energy Agency. [Photo: WSWS]
A previous report by the New York Times, basing itself on data from the CRU consulting group, shows that China is responsible for the global production of:
54 percent of electric cars
66 percent of battery cells
77 percent of cathodes (the positive electrode in a battery)
92 percent of anodes (the negative electrode)
While China does not directly produce most minerals (except for rare earths and graphite), the country dominates the processing of minerals. China refines:
95 percent of the world’s manganese (used primarily as a key alloy in steel)
73 percent of cobalt
70 percent of graphite
67 percent of lithium
63 percent of nickel
Meanwhile, by these same estimates, through its companies, China indirectly controls more than half of lithium mining operations and 41 percent of cobalt operations, largely in the Congo.
For decades, the US and its European allies have been content with this situation. While US and European companies owned much of the world’s intellectual property and leading corporate brands, China was made into the sweatshop of the world. Hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have ground their lives away, six days a week, 10 hours a day, in the sprawling factory complexes largely controlled by US and European capital.
Exploiting China’s lower environmental regulations and cheaper labor, Western suppliers have relied on China to perform the toxic task of refining and processing mineral ores into usable material. The fact that most of the minerals would ultimately then be used in production chains located in China further cemented this relationship.
But now, as the Biden administration more imminently prepares for war, the US, Japan and its main imperialist allies in the EU are all scrambling to find alternative sources for these minerals.
The energy transition and minerals
In order to produce the batteries for EVs, a significant quantity of lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite are required, alongside several rare earth minerals and a host of other so-called “critical minerals.”
The IEA predicts that under a modest renewable energy development scenario, global demand for lithium alone will multiply by 42 times between 2020 and 2040. For cobalt, the demand will grow 21 times, and for nickel 19 times. In short, an unprecedented surge of mining and processing of these minerals must now rapidly unfold.
This chart shows the International Energy Agency's projections for increasing demand of certain critical minerals in 2040 relative to 2020. This chart presumes the IEA's Sustainable Development Scenario, which is based on pledged but not enacted climate policies. [Photo: WSWS]
Because electricity, without batteries, must be consumed when it is produced, energy storage is central to the renewable transition, beyond just EVs.
When electricity is generated by a solar farm, its height of production will be in the middle of the day. Peak power use, however, happens in the morning and evening when workers are home. To better coordinate renewable energy production with its consumption, massive batteries will be required to hold charge.
These problems, known as “intermittency” problems, complicate all forms of renewable energy production. They necessitate, alongside EVs, a massive expansion in battery and thus critical mineral production.
It is in this context of the explosive growth of mineral demand for various types of batteries, and China’s dominance in their supply chain, that the Biden administration has launched a series of measures to develop a new US- and European-controlled supply chain.
Scrambling for contracts, excluding China
A recent New York Times article reports that “U.S. officials have begun negotiating a series of agreements with other countries to expand America’s access to important minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite.”
However, the Times notes, “it remains unclear which of these partnerships will succeed, or if they will be able to generate anything close to the supply of minerals the United States is projected to need.”
Here are just a few of the known national agreements that have been made or are being negotiated:
Japan and the US signed an initial deal in March 2023 over critical mineral supplies. It pledges shared “standards” for mining and processing as well as reviewing foreign investors.
During the G7, the US and Australia announced a similar new partnership on shared standards for “sustainable supply chains” of critical minerals.
The EU and the US are in the midst of negotiating a new comprehensive trade deal, of which EVs and critical minerals are an important part. Biden said the agreement “would further our shared goals of boosting our mineral production and processing and expanding access to sources of critical minerals that are sustainable, trusted, and free of labor abuses.”
Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of nickel and main alternative to Russian nickel, has also approached the US regarding some kind of critical mineral agreement.
The common thread in all of these initial series of trade agreements are words like “sustainable,” “trusted,” “standards, and “free of labor abuses.”
All of these terms are just euphemisms, however, for excluding China and Chinese-owned suppliers.
If Biden or his European or Japanese counterparts were seriously concerned about “labor abuses,” all they would have to do is look outside their own window. In the US, over a dozen people die every day due to workplace accidents overwhelmingly caused by poor safety standards. Meanwhile, child labor is returning to the US with children as young as 12 working in factories.
By pledging themselves to “trusted” and “sustainable” mineral supply chains, the major imperialist powers are signaling their commitment in creating an alternative supply network not dominated by Chinese companies. Among other things, such a supply chain would guarantee some degree of production of these essential minerals in the event of war between the US and China.
However, in the words of Scott Kennedy, an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies quoted by the Times, “There is no way anybody is going to become successful in electric vehicles without having some type of cooperation with China, either directly or indirectly.”
It is, in this sense, unimaginable how a war between the Untied States and China would not lead to a catastrophic breakdown of the global economy given how central this—and many other—Chinese supply chains are. Such a situation would also lead to a doubling-down of oil and gas dependency (something the United States, unlike China, dominates).
Inter-imperialist conflict and the EU
A central feature of the growing scramble for critical minerals is the resurgence of inter-imperialist rivalries and conflicts.
From left, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the G7 Hiroshima Summit in Hiroshima, Friday, May 19, 2023. [AP Photo/Franck Robichon]
At the G7, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed in a speech that the renewable energy transition should “not come at each other’s expense.”
Two months earlier, in March, the EU released a major act called the European Critical Raw Materials Act, which aims to build a so-called “Critical Minerals Club” to lead €20 billion worth of investment by 2030 into critical minerals. The act is seen as a response to and based off of the US CHIPS act.
Underlying von der Leyen’s comments is a growing concern among the US’s imperialist allies that they will be left behind as the US implements a series of protectionist, wartime, non-market measures to create a new critical mineral supply chain.
For example, a major issue at the G7 is the fact that the new US Inflation Reduction Act excludes European car makers from EV tax benefits. This essentially makes American-made electric vehicles more competitive in the massive American car market.
The EU has strongly petitioned the US to include European-made EVs and critical minerals in these tax credit schemes. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, consumers can get up to $7,500 in credit for buying EVs if both the battery components and final assembly have 50 percent or more of their value originating from North America (the NAFTA trio of Mexico, the US and Canada).
Von der Leyen speaks for an entire layer of European capitalists who, in joining the US-led drive to oppose China, fear that they will suffer from the growing nationalist protectionism of the US.
Russia and the war in Ukraine
Previously, the WSWS explained that the war in Ukraine plays a key role in the effort of the American ruling class to acquiring critical minerals.
The eastern expansion of the US-led NATO alliance has always had as its primary goal subduing or even breaking apart Russia, with a particular eye to controlling its natural resources.
Russia plays a particularly important role in high quality nickel production—the demand for which is expected to multiply 19 times in the coming two decades—as well as the platinum-group metals, especially palladium. Russia is also the world’s largest producer of diamonds, the second largest reserve holder of coal and gold, the third largest of iron, and the fifth in silver. This is not to mention Russia’s massive oil and gas reserves. Russia produced 12 percent of the world’s oil prior to the Ukraine war.
The reports coming out of the G7, showing a flurry of activity to develop a new critical mineral chain, confirm this analysis of the central role of critical minerals in the war in Ukraine.
Noting the growing importance of critical minerals to a host of new technologies, the WSWS wrote:
The deep need of American finance capital to dominate current and future sources of critical minerals, as well as the disproportionate control of China over them, forms an important part of the backdrop to the drive to war against Russia…
The breaking apart of Russia and its domination by American capital would be a strategic stepping stone in the efforts of the American ruling class to impose a “new American century” through the subordination of China and Eurasia more broadly to its aims. Resources play a role in this. Amid the enduring need for oil and natural gas, as well as the rapidly growing need for critical minerals, Russia is seen as a vital landmass with a vast array of riches.
The US-EU-Japanese push to secure new minerals forms part of this larger effort to impose a “new American century.” They see the development of alternative supply chains to China as an urgent necessity.
Further implications
The implications of the EV revolution and the new scramble for critical minerals are not just geopolitical.
Leaving aside the cataclysmic impact that a war between the US and China would have, there are other ways in which this transformation in car and energy production—two of the world’s largest industries—will affect workers, workplaces and capitalist society.
For one, EV production assemblies involve substantially less labor than combustion engine-based cars. The offshoring of most EV production (at major car manufacturers in the US, Japan and the EU) leaves significantly less work to be done. Additionally, with the need to retool and construct a more modern assembly line, car companies use EVs as an opportunity to introduce other far-reaching automation.
The auto companies are planning massive layoffs and an enormous increase in the exploitation of workers as part of the transition to EV production.
A truck drives past brine evaporation ponds at Albemarle Corp.'s Silver Peak lithium facility, Thursday, October 6, 2022, in Silver Peak, Nevada. [AP Photo/John Locher]
Another impact of this shift in global production will be in the labor-intensive mining industry. If the IEA’s estimates of a 4,100 percent increase in lithium production and similar giant leaps for other minerals is to be believed, a vastly expanded mining industry will emerge. Centers of global mineral production, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Chile, Russia, Indonesia, Australia, China and others are poised for explosive booms around their key mineral reserves.
While the US, EU, and Japan claim to be seeking “sustainable” modes of producing such goods, with better labor practices, the profitability of these operations will ultimately rely on slashing wages and cutting back on safety to better compete on the global market.
Whether an autoworker in Detroit assembling a new EV or a critical mineral miner in Chile, China, the DRC or Australia—all will be squeezed and pressed by this new, ferocious drive to dominate renewable energy production.
