By Atilio Borón on March 29, 2023
Between March 28-30, the Second Democracy Summit will be held in Washington DC. The plenary meeting will be held on Wednesday, March 29. The event has been convened by the U.S. Government through the Department of State, but, as usual, other “partner governments” have also called for the meeting and whose mission is to disguise the fact that the Summit is entirely a Washington project. The objective is crystal clear: to regain ground in the waning international prestige of US democracy, badly damaged by the growing levels of popular dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy (over 50% of the population surveyed), as revealed by numerous public opinion polls; and by the unprecedented incidents surrounding the storming of the Capitol, the seat of the US Congress, in Washington, on January 6, 2021.
As announced, the Democracy Summit has “five co-hosts: The United States, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, and Zambia; and their government representatives will officially open the Summit, with each co-host leader presenting a live, fully virtual, themed event.” The day before, the State Department will host a panel session, chaired by Secretary Antony Blinken, on the need for a “just and lasting peace in Ukraine,” with President Volodymyr Zelensky as the keynote speaker. Supposedly, Zelensky and Secretary Blinken will discuss, along with foreign ministers from a group of regionally diverse countries, steps to achieve a ceasefire and a “lasting peace” in Ukraine, although all the policies pushed by the Biden Administration run in exactly the opposite direction. Apparently, gone are the days when the European, and partly American, press characterized Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe and Zelensky himself as a despotic and equally corrupt leader. In 2015, the British newspaper The Guardian called him so. Almost a year after the start of the war in Ukraine, other press reports said that “the war with Russia had not changed that.”
The fact that the day after the plenary session, dedicated to digital technologies for advancing democracies and the dangers of digital authoritarianism, the keynote speaker will be none other than Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs, Audrey Tang, may give us an idea. This is a frontal attack on China, because the guests at the Summit are supposed to be representatives of independent countries, and Taiwan certainly is not. It is not even recognized as such by the U.S. Government itself, but the intention is clear: to promote Taiwanese separatism, to harass China and provoke it into a military response that would then justify U.S. aggression.
We Latin Americans know very well that if there is one government in the world that cannot give lessons in democracy, it is precisely the US government. Since the beginning of U.S. imperial expansion, the United States has stood out for its permanent attacks against the establishment of any democratic government in the region. When Cuba and Puerto Rico were waging a liberation struggle against Spanish oppression during the so-called “Spanish-American” war, the United States captured Cuba in 1898 following the Treaty of Paris and spoiled the Cuban victory. If we were to make a list of coups sponsored or directly executed by the United States in our countries, we would run the risk of turning this note into a voluminous essay. We will only mention a few cases.
In Argentina, the bloody military coups of 1966 and 1976 were sponsored and protected by Washington. In Chile, the brutal coup d’état and subsequent assassination of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, was orchestrated directly from Washington by President Richard Nixon himself and his National Security Advisor, and later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The coup d’état that took place in Brazil in 1964, which lasted until 1985, had Washington’s enthusiastic support, as did the 1973 military coup in Uruguay, which also lasted until 1985, when Washington realized that its undisguised support for Latin American dictatorships was damaging its international image and that the time had come to bet on democracy, but taking due precautions. We should not forget that Washington prepared an armed confrontation that lasted ten years (1979-1989) against the Sandinista government and used all the means at its disposal to destabilize the government of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador in recent years.
The worn-out democratic rhetoric of the United States is not enough to conceal the perverse intentions of its new strategy based on the possibilities opened up by the use of soft power and new techniques to pressure progressive or leftist governments: from the “conditionalities” of the World Bank and the IMF, to the oligopolistic control of the media and the indoctrination of judges and prosecutors to implement lawfare maneuvers (judicial proceedings for the purpose of political persecution), discrediting or destruction of the public image and disqualification of a political adversary) to eliminate from the field of electoral politics leaders undesirable for the empire, such as Lula in Brazil, Correa in Ecuador, Cristina in Argentina, Lugo in Paraguay, Zelaya in Honduras, Evo in Bolivia and just a few months ago Pedro Castillo in Peru.
History and the present show that an imperial republic like the United States needs vassals, not partners, especially in these times when the empire is going through its irreversible decline. At times like these, democracies, as an expression of popular sovereignty and the self-determination of nations, could not be more dysfunctional for the empire. That is why the Summit for Democracy will be yet another farce, a propaganda montage whose true objective is to consolidate a “new cold war” that divides the friends and allies of the United States, who will be considered democrats, and the adversaries of Washington, demonized as perverse autocracies that will have to be fought by all available means.
Source: Al Mayadeen