Providence: The Possibility of US Intervention in Venezuela

"The Possibility of US Intervention in Venezuela"
Wilder Alejandro Sanchez
Providence
23 October, 2018
Originally published:  https://providencemag.com/2018/10/us-intervention-venezuela/

“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (Luke 14:28)

As the crisis in Venezuela continues and with Nicolás Maduro showing no intention of ever stepping down from power, diplomatic pressure from various Latin American governments and the Organization of American States has done nothing to shake the confidence of the chavistas in Caracas. In this situation, the US media has reported that US officials have met with anti-Maduro military officers, apparently to discuss a regime change in the South American state. But what does history and the Bible tell us about planning before acting?

Meetings and Statements
According to a September 8 article in the New York Times, the White House held “secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela over the last year to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.” The article described various meetings, during which Venezuelan military officers requested communication equipment to coordinate their coup, which Washington did not provide; nor did it, according to the article, endorse the conspirators’ plans.

As for President Donald Trump’s opinion about Venezuela, back in 2017 he talked about a “military option” to deal with the situation there. Then, while attending the United Nations General Assembly in September 2018, he once again mused that “all options are on the table,” adding that “the strong ones and the less than strong ones—and you know what I mean by strong.” At the same time, he has said that he is willing to meet with President Maduro.

Other senior officials have made direct or vague statements about the use of military force in Venezuela. For example, Vice Admiral Craig Faller, who has been nominated to lead Southern Command (which oversees US military operations in most of Latin America and the Caribbean) has stated that “we are not doing anything other than normal, prudent planning that a combatant command would do to prepare for a range of contingencies.” On the other hand, Republican Senator Marco Rubio tweeted in February that “the world would support the Armed Forces in #Venezuela if they decide to protect the people & restore democracy by removing a dictator.”

It is unclear exactly what role the US would play should something actually occur in Venezuela. Would the US back a coup carried out by Venezuelans? Or, as President Trump seems to think, could US troops land in Caracas? There are regional precedents for these speculations: in 1964, Washington sent a carrier group, led by the USS Forrestal, to Brazil to support, if necessary, a military coup against President João Goulart. As for more “traditional” regime change operations, in 1989 the US invaded Panama to overthrow the late dictator Manuel Noriega.

Discussion
Regime change operations are problematic, whether covert or overt. They should not occur without, as the Bible verse at the beginning of this essay states, lengthy discussions and analyses in order to attempt to predict and prepare for different outcomes, both positive and negative. After all, a government may intervene in another nation with the best of intentions, such as to remove a repressive regime that has brought the country to financial ruin while perpetuating its own power, but the consequences may not be as expected. The US experienced this not long ago when then-Vice President Dick Cheney said that “my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” as US troops prepared to go to Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and when then-President George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished.” History proved them wrong.

In Venezuela, the problem is not just President Maduro, but also other officials like Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, the cabinet of ministers, the unconstitutional National Constituent Assembly (including its president, Diosdado Cabello), and the military leadership, like Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, a key supporter of the regime. Any attempt at regime change would have to oust all of those individuals, as well.

Even more, should violence break out (whether between rival factions or against a foreign military), it is unclear how the Venezuelan military and other security agencies would react. We know there is some level of discontent within Venezuela’s National Bolivarian Armed Forces; in recent years Caracas has arrested many military officers, accusing them of plotting coups. But how the military would react if a coup or foreign intervention occurred is unknown. Again, it is unwise to be blindly optimistic.

As a final point, another regime change operation backed by US involvement would have regional (if not global) repercussions. In addition to the aforementioned examples, other US interventions include Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and numerous (failed) attempts against the Castro regime throughout the Cold War. Hence, although Washington would be helping to remove a very unpopular regime—Maduro’s allies in the hemisphere have been reduced to Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a handful of Caribbean islands—this would trigger memories of indiscriminate US interventions in the region within living memory. How Latin American and Caribbean citizens and governments would react, and what this would mean for Western Hemisphere geopolitics, is anyone’s guess.

Final Thoughts
The general consensus in the Western Hemisphere, with few exceptions, is that the Maduro government is a dictatorship that wants to perpetuate itself in power. Washington has hinted that “all options are on the table” when it comes to dealing with Caracas and has already imposed sanctions against high profile individuals. Recent media stories about meetings between the US government and opposition military leaders to discuss some sort of regime change in Caracas are likely true. After all, Washington has a lengthy history of intervention in the Western Hemisphere.

Alas, interventions, whether via military or other tactics, are tricky, and the decision making and planning process cannot be rushed. Washington and most of the hemisphere strongly desire Maduro’s removal, but prudence is found in thinking about the future rationally.

—
Wilder Alejandro Sanchez is an analyst who focuses on geopolitical, military and cyber security issues in the Western Hemisphere. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author is associated.

IPD: Assessing U.S. Military Assistance Towards Latin America

" Assessing U.S. Military Assistance Towards Latin America"
W. Alejandro Sanchez
International Policy Digest
30 March 2018
Originally published: https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/03/30/assessing-u-s-military-assistance-towards-latin-america/

here is an ongoing debate in Washington about the U.S. defense budget and the future of U.S. military operations around the world, whether it is President Donald Trump questioning NATO or operations in Afghanistan, Iraq or other places. Another pillar of U.S. military presence around the world are Foreign Military Training (FMT) programs with partner nations. In this commentary we will briefly discuss this initiative with a focus on partnerships between the U.S. and its Latin American allies.

FMTs and LatAm
The U.S. State Department, in co-operation with the Defense Department publishes every operation that falls under FMT programs between the U.S. and Latin America, titled “Foreign Military Training and DoD Engagement Activities of Interest” (click here for the 2016-2017 version). Two key FMT programs are International Military Education and Training (IMET) and the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP). The U.S. enjoys cordial relations with most Latin American and Caribbean nations which primarily fall under the jurisdiction of Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

The latest FMT report outlines the plethora of initiatives the U.S. carries out with its partners, including bringing Latin American military and police personnel to the U.S. for training at the Army War College, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the Inter-American Air Forces Academy, the Coast Guard Training Center, the Aviation School at Columbus Air Force Base, the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, among several other institutions.

The training programs carried out are similarly varied, like for example: aircraft electrician and avionic mechanic programs with Colombia; basic army intelligence and naval intelligence courses with the Dominican Republic; NCO professional development training with El Salvador; and courses on countering transnational threats and basic psychological operations with Honduras, just to name a few programs.

Exercises and Partnerships
It is worth noting that U.S. military agencies regularly conduct major training exercises with their Latin American partners which do not fall under the category of FMT programs, but they do serve to promote better interoperability between different military forces. Case in point, multinational naval exercises like UNITAS or PANAMAX help U.S. naval platforms train with platforms and personnel from allied navies. For example, for UNITAS 2017, which took place in Peru, the U.S. Navy deployed USS Somerset (LPD 25), USS Chafee (DDG 90) and USCGC Escanaba (WMEC 907), as well as U.S. Marines – for UNITAS Amphibious 2017, which also took place in Peru – to train alongside regional partners including Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru; and extra regional allies like Spain and the United Kingdom.

Finally, SOUTHCOM is part of the U.S. National Guard’s State Partnership Program (SPP), via which “17 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have active partnerships with defense and security forces from 23 nations in the Caribbean, Central America and South America.” For example, Louisiana NG carries out initiatives with Belize; Massachusetts NG partners with Paraguay; South Carolina NG teams up with Colombia; and West Virginia NG partners with Peru. Initiatives carried out under the SPP umbrella include Colombian army officers attending a live-fire artillery exercise at McCrady Training Center in November 2017; or personnel from South Dakota NG working alongside Surinamese troops to renovate parts of the O.S. Majosteeg 3 School in Paramaribo last August 2017.

There is a veritable plethora of scholarly work about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of U.S. FMT programs – a cursory online search shows insightful analyses in War on the Rocks, The Nation, Truth-Out, among many others. However, most of these commentaries focus on Africa, the Middle East and specific countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. This is understandable, as the U.S. is particularly active in these regions and states nowadays. The problem is that the conclusions and lessons learned from these case studies should not be generalized.

Furthermore, assessing the effectiveness and need for FMT programs and training exercises is complicated: on the one hand, it is important for the U.S. to keep close defense relations with allies and partners by training military and police officers, particularly if it doesn’t, other global powers, like China, may step in to fill in the void. On the other hand, the U.S. military cannot, and should not, be so involved in another country to the point that it is effectively constructing or reforming its armed forces. Even more, it is impossible to see the effects of these training initiatives until after they occur: will U.S.-trained military offices use what they have learned for the good of the country or will they carry out their own coups?

Generally speaking, U.S. training of Latin American armed forces has a negative connotation, as it brings up memories of regional military officers carrying out coups and human rights abuses during the Cold War – such as General Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia, who attended the School of the Americas (now known as WHINSEC) in 1956 and carried out a coup in 1971.

Then again, a former U.S. special forces interviewed by the author who has trained various armed forces, including from Latin America, pointed out that “it is impossible to know if in three, five or 10 years, someone that we trained will attempt to carry out a coup.”

Moreover, it is important to note that present-day hemispheric armed forces do not require the start-from-the-bottom approach that the U.S. has taken elsewhere. That is a point in favor of continuing ongoing FMT programs and other partnerships.


Even more, Latin America’s security problems, particularly drug trafficking, are a direct problem for the U.S. as drugs make their way from the South to the U.S. market, which supports the argument of ongoing strong engagement in the region.

A final issue is, as other articles have discussed, whether the U.S. is trying to train too many armed forces around the globe. The aforementioned operator acknowledges that, “we are doing too much in too many countries…the U.S. doesn’t need it.” The problem is that most Latin American governments enjoy cordial relations with the U.S. and would actually want more defense and security assistance in order to face threats like drug trafficking, narco-cartels and insurgencies. “I trained various Latin American armies and I never felt any animosity towards myself for being a gringo,” the operator said. Indeed, a retired senior army officer from South America interviewed by the author, similarly mentioned that greater U.S. military involvement would be ideal – the Cold War legacy notwithstanding. Therefore, the question is reaching that delicate balance in which the U.S. military helps partner nations, but it does not do “so much” to the point that it becomes too involved in said country’s internal affairs.

Discussing what should be the future of FMTs and other partnership programs is complicated. Overall there seems to be a general consensus that the U.S. military is trying to do “too much” in certain countries, to the point that it is counter-productive. Even more, any time that a U.S.-trained military officer carries out human rights abuses or attempted coups, this adds fuel to the argument that the U.S. should withdraw from nation-building or army-building altogether.


Ongoing diplomatic issues notwithstanding, U.S.-Latin America defense relations nowadays are arguably at their highest, as Washington does not face any credible security threats from the region, and most armed forces would welcome greater U.S. military involvement to address mutual security threats. The geopolitics and security situation in Latin America cannot be compared to that of Africa, the Middle East or Asia. Thus, an eventual reform of FMT and partnership programs should not be done hastily.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author is associated.

Interview: Voice of America: Critics Say Venezuelan Protests Test Limits of Military's Support

Interview: "Critics say Venezuelan protests test limits of Military's Support"
Americas
Voice of America
By: Brian Padden
April 17, 2014
Originally published:http://www.voafanti.com/gate/big5/www.voanews.com/media/video/1895849.html

VOXXI: El Salvador: Will General Jose Guillermo Garcia be deported?

"El Salvador: Will General Jose Guillermo Garcia be deported?"
W. Alejandro Sanchez
VOXXI
April 15, 2014
Originally published: http://voxxi.com/2014/04/15/el-salvador-jose-garcia-be-deported/

The ruling of a Miami judge to deport Army General Jose Guillermo Garcia, a former defense minister of El Salvador, serves as a victory for human rights supporters, despite the difficulties to implement the rule anytime soon.

Judge Michael Horn ruled that Garcia had a direct role in the torture and extrajudicial killings of hundreds of individuals during that country’s civil war (1980-1992).

A brief background

A brief summary of El Salvador’s bloody conflict is required in order to properly understand the accusations against the retired army general.

Garcia served as defense minister of the Revolutionary Junta – a military government that ruled El Salvador from 1979 until 1982. It was during this period that a bloody civil war commenced between the government and the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), a coalition of various insurgent movements. Some 75,000 thousand people are believed to have died in the conflict.

Three significant incidents that occurred at the onset of the civil war were: the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the 1980 assassination of four U.S. church women, and the 1981 El Mozote Massacre.

Garcia was defense minister of the country when these crimes took place, as he served in that post from 1979 until 1983.

The School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) reports that Garcia “refused to investigate reports that hundreds of unarmed civilians were brutally murdered by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion in 1981.” This incident is known as El Mozote Massacre: Salvadoran soldiers, as part of “Operacion Rescate,” killed over 800 civilians at El Mozote village, where FMLN fighters were believed to be hiding.

Likewise, the SOAW claims that “Garcia also failed to launch a serious investigation of the murder of four U.S. churchwomen by members of the Salvadoran National Guard.” A 1998 New York Times reportexplains that the women (Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel) were abducted, raped and shot to death on the night of December 2, 1980; their bodies were later found alongside an isolated road.

A 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report concluded that Garcia and Coronel Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who at the time was the director of the National Guard, organized an official cover-up of the nuns’ assassinations.

In 1990, Garcia travelled to the U.S. in 1989 and was granted political asylum the following year. He has reportedly lived in Florida ever since.

In February 2013, during his deportation trial, Garcia admitted that he knew of abuses committed by Salvadoran forces, but he argued that he tried to stop them. “I have never ordered, nor have I ever agreed with torture because my principles prohibit it,” he stated.

The deportation verdict

Given the atrocious human rights violations that Garcia is accused of having either ordered or covered up while he was El Salvador’s defense minister, it is no surprise that human rights organizations have praised the recent ruling.

The Center for Accountability & Justice issued a press release in which it praises the judge’s decision and the New York Time’s work to make the ruling be public knowledge. It also states that the “CJA and our clients will continue to work to obtain justice for the brutality of the Salvadoran military and security forces under Garcia’s command.” (The CJA has uploaded a PDF of the 66-page judge’s decision).

The CJA has been trying to hold Garcia accountable for his actions since 1999.

In the conclusions of his lengthy decision, Judge Horn states that “the Court finds that the Department of Homeland Security has established by clear and convincing evidence that all the allegations in the charging documents are true and correct.” These are listed as Garcia’s extrajudicial killing of Archbishop Romero, the four American women, and the El Mozote Massacre, among several others. (P. 60-61)

It is well known that the U.S. government supported the Salvadoran military during the country’s civil war, and to this day the American military has a base in Comalapa, El Salvador. Garcia himself received some military training by the U.S. as he attended a course on counterinsurgency at the School of the Americas in 1962.

As for the general’s fate, his lawyer has declared that they will fight the decision to extradite his client back to Central America. In other words, we will have months, if not years, of legal proceedings before a final verdict is reached and carried out.

Thirty years ago, the atrocities committed in El Salvador’s civil war were horrific, and the perpetrators should be brought to justice. By perpetrators I do not mean solely the military personnel who killed the peasants of El Mozote or four American nuns, but also the higher-ranking officers who either ordered these crimes or covered them up. Hopefully Garcia will not face the U.S. justice system but will eventually return to El Salvador to be trialed there as well for his actions.

Blouin Beat: Politics - Brazil’s left rises as USS Forrestal nears the end

Brazil's left rises as USS Forrestal nears the end
W. Alejandro Sanchez
Blouin Beat: Politics
February 13, 2014
Originally published: http://blogs.blouinnews.com/blouinbeatpolitics/2014/02/13/brazils-left-rises-as-uss-forrestal-nears-the-end/

The aircraft supercarrier USS Forrestal departed Feb. 4 from Philadelphia for Texas, a trip that will take approximately 17 days. This is to be the vessel’s final voyage: it will be dismantled upon arriving in Brownsville, after 38 years of service in the U.S. Navy. A Texas scrap company, All Star Metals, reportedly bought the supercarrier from the Navy for one cent (not a typo).

The legacy of the Forrestal will be felt in Latin America, as the carrier was part of a fleet sent by the U.S. government to support a military coup in Brazil in 1964. At the time, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the Forrestal off the coast of Brazil as part of Operation Brother Sam. The goal was to support a military coup against then-President Joao Goulart. (The military officers who staged Goulart’s overthrow suspected the Brazilian leader of having communist sympathies.)  The coup occurred on March 31 of that year and was successful and largely bloodless — though it also initiated a military regime in the Portuguese-speaking giant that lasted from 1964 until 1985.

Upon coming to power, the military began a brutal crackdown on left-leaning entities. One group worth noting was the Comando de Liberacao Nacional (COLINA; National Liberation Command), a small militant movement that had branches in the Brazilian states of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. When the group was disbanded under the pressure of the clampdown, various members fled into the arms of a bigger guerrilla group, the VAR Palmares. One member of both movements was a young woman named Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s current president, and in 1970, while a member of VAR Palmares, she was arrested (and tortured) by the Brazilian military .

Predictably, U.S. media have focused on the more palatable aspects of the Forrestal’s history. It was in standby mode during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. The warship also aided in evacuatingU.S. citizens from Cyprus during a 1974 conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriot forces in the Mediterranean island. Tragedy struck the Forrestal in July 1967 when it was operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Vietnam’s coast. An accident started a fire that killed 132 sailors and injured over a hundred more. Coincidentally, Lt. Cmdr John McCain, Republican Senator from Arizona and the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, was aboard at the time. (That last fact has been a real sop to the American press corps.) In Brazil, as might be imagined, the coverage is sparser and darker. Consider this opening sentence of a January 7 article in the website of the Brazilian news agency Folha de Sao Paulo: “…the major symbol of Washington’s support for the 1964 coup, the [Forrestal] will be scrapped.”

The Forrestal’s role in Brazilian history may be a small anecdote in the warship’s distinguished decades of service. But 40 years ago this supercarrier and its support vessels were a larger-than-life demonstration of American military might and how far Washington was willing to go to protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere. The fact that the warship will now be scrapped as a left-wing “ex-guerrilla” (as Rousseff was first labeled when she came to power in 2010) sits in office as (and will likely be re-elected) Brazil’s president reveals how substantially power dynamics in the region have shifted since then.

Blouin Beat: Politics - Argentina marks 30 years since junta’s end

Argentina marks 30 years since junta's end
W. Alejandro Sanchez
Blouin Beat: Politics
December 10, 2013
Originally published: http://blogs.blouinnews.com/blouinbeatpolitics/2013/12/10/argentina-marks-30-years-since-juntas-end/

On December 10, 1983, Raul Alfonsin assumed the presidency of Argentina. This marked the end of the military junta which had ruled the country since March 1976. At the time of this writing, ceremonies are taking place in Argentina and abroad to commemorate this important occasion (the Argentine embassy in Washington will hold an event in the headquarters of the Organization of American States), not so much to celebrate Alfonsin’s rule per se, but rather to commemorate the end of a particularly dark period of Argentine history.

The Argentina junta was called the “National Reorganization Process” (Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional). While its intended goal was bring back stability to the country after the death of the popular leader Juan Peron in 1974, the military regime will be remembered in perpetuity for the human rights violations that it carried out.

Between the 1960s to 1980s, Latin America (including Argentina) was a boiling pot of armed movements that sought regime change. In Argentina, the military was especially concerned about the Montoneros, far left-wing radicals expelled from Peron’s Justicialist Party in 1974. To what extent the Montoneros were a credible insurrectionist threat is debatable. The insurgents did carry out some high-profile assassinations, including the killing of military officers like Navy captain Jose Guillermo Burgos in 1976 and army corporal Osvaldo Ramon Rios, which prompted the wrath of the Argentina junta.

But the Montoneros were effectively destroyed by the late 1970s, so they were certainly no longer a credible threat to the regime by the 1980s. Regardless, the junta used the threat of insurgency as justification to carry out a repressive crackdown on individuals they saw as potential enemies of the state, real or imagined. This period would be known as the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia), and is remembered for the approximately 30,000 individuals (though this estimation varies) that are believed to have disappeared (the desaparecidos).

The junta’s end was accelerated by an ill-fated invasion in 1982 of the Falklands Islands (or Islas Malvinas) which Argentina claims are part of its territory and not the United Kingdom, which London controls. After the attack, the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher deployed the British military, which quickly defeated the Argentines. One notable event of the war’s naval campaign was the sinking of the ARA Belgrano, the flagship of the Argentine navy, by the HMS Conqueror, a British submarine. The combination of a lost war, the aforementioned repression and a troubled economy fomented protests, which forced the military junta to step down and return the country to civilian rule.

A major breakthrough in bringing to justice the Argentina security forces that carried out major human rights violations during the junta occurred under the presidency of the late Nestor Kirchner. In 2003, The Argentine congress (both the Senate and House of Deputies) nullified the laws knownas “Obediencia Debida” and “Punto Final,” which were approved in the 1980s to give amnesty to Argentine security forces so that they could not be prosecuted for human rights violations committed during the military regime. In 2005, Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice also ruled that the aforementioned laws were unconstitutional, effectively opening the flood gates for a number of long-delayed prosecutions against human rights offenders. Jorge Rafael Videla, who sat at the junta’s head from 1976-1981, died this past May 2013 in a jail cell while serving a life sentence.

Three decades after the end of the military junta, Argentina is in better shape than it was in 1983. The 2001-2002 meltdown crippled the Argentine economy throughout the last decade, and it prompted a series of protectionist economic policies by recent heads of state, such as current President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The 2012 nationalization of the oil company YPF from the Spanish company Repsol is an example of the Argentina government’s current lack of support for privatization initiatives.

As for political stability, concerns about which prompted the takeover by the military in 1976, there’s no question the nation enjoys it. Modern Argentina has seen a series of democratically elected presidents – though it should be noted that when the 2001 economic meltdown occurred, a series of interim presidents took control of the country (Adolfo Rodriguez Saa was president for roughly seven days before quitting). And that Nestor Kirchner, who ruled from 2003 to 2007, was followed to the presidency by his wife, Cristina de Kirchner, who was elected in 2007 and re-elected in 2011. Nepotism – certainly. Preferable to an army backed-coup? Very likely. Though at the time of this writing, Argentina has been hit by a new series of protests. But instead of left-wing radicals protesting in favor of a political ideology, the current protests have been staged by the country’s police force – who are demanding higher wages.