In an increasingly frantic search for weapons to flow into the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US has turned to Latin America, the top US commander for the region has revealed.
US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) chief General Laura Richardson told an online forum held last week by Washington’s geopolitical strategy think tank the Atlantic Council that the Pentagon is trying to convince several unnamed Latin American governments to “donate” Russian-made military hardware to the US government. US-backed regime in Ukraine.
“We are working with the countries that have the Russian equipment to either donate it or exchange it for American equipment,” General Richardson told a virtual audience last Thursday.
Diplomatic relations are either zero or severely curtailed between the United States and the three countries in the region that have the closest military-to-military relations with Moscow – Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. All of them, like Russia, are subject to US sanctions.
While Richardson declined to name them at the forum, titled “On Security in America,” she said six other countries in the region have significant stockpiles of Soviet- or Russian-made weapons and that negotiations were “in the works” to obtain them. to donate it to Ukraine or the ongoing case.” Such agreements to send Russian-made equipment into the Ukraine war would include pressuring the Latin American countries to replace the Russian equipment with American-made weapons.
While the US Southern Command also declined to say which countries were in talks for such arms transfers, the Pentagon has kept a close eye on the influx of Soviet and Russian weapons into the region.
In testimony last July before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Western Hemisphere, Evan Ellis, the US Army War College’s chief expert on Latin America and a vocal proponent of Washington viewing the region as a battleground in preparations for world war, provided a detailed list of such weapons systems.
The Latin American country — outside of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua — with the largest number of such weapons, he testified, is notably Peru, which began importing Soviet weapons in the 1970s under the nationalist military regime of General Velasco Alvarado and which bought most recently in 2013 24 Mi-17 military helicopters and two Mi-35 attack helicopters from Moscow. In the intervening years, including under the right-wing dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori, Lima purchased Su-22 fighter-bombers, Mig-29 fighters and other equipment, while its armed forces received Russian military training.
The Dec. 7 parliamentary coup that ousted President Pedro Castillo and brought in a regime dominated by the Peruvian right and the security forces under Castillo’s former vice president Dina Boluarte may well have greased the wheels for the kind of deal promoted by General Richardson. A day before the coup, the US ambassador in Lima, Lisa Kenna, a veteran CIA agent, met and agreed with the country’s defense minister to support Castillo’s ouster. Since then, security forces have been unleashed on protesters, killing at least 60 of them.
Other countries with significant stockpiles of Soviet/Russian weapons include Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Argentina. The weapons include tanks, armored vehicles, multiple launch rocket systems, surface-to-air missile systems, MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems) and various fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
In his remarks, Richardson emphasized that the Pentagon was moving “aggressively” to take advantage of the obstacles imposed by anti-Russian sanctions on Moscow’s supply of parts for its weapons systems and financing to Latin American customers.
From the point of view of the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, the shipment of the weapons from Latin America serves a specific purpose. While international attention has been focused on the provocative and potentially world-catastrophic decisions to supply Kiev with advanced American M1 Abrams and German Leopard 2 main battle tanks, the reality is that it will be months before these weapons can be fielded with trained Ukrainian crews. The Soviet/Russian stockpiles in Latin America, on the other hand, are largely identical to the weapons already known to the Ukrainian military and can be deployed immediately.
As for Washington’s goals in Latin America itself, removing Russia as a competitor and re-establishing the Pentagon’s monopoly on arms regulations would give US imperialism increased political leverage in a region where the military has repeatedly intervened to topple governments seen as be insufficiently subordinate to the United States. and national profit interests.
Increased arms sales means a greater number of US military advisers on the ground in these countries, and more of their own officers being sent to the US for their military training. This works to create military-to-military ties far deeper than those that exist between diplomats or elected officials, establishing the organizational infrastructure for the kind of US-backed military coups that swept the continent over the past half-century .
While Richardson presented Russia’s operations in the region as an acute threat to US interests, in reality they pale in comparison and are largely a response to the massive US-NATO encirclement of Russia itself.
As the general made clear in her remarks, Washington and the Pentagon view China, which she described as a “malign state actor,” as the more consequential challenge to US imperial interests in the region.
Using the alarmist rhetoric of war propaganda, Richardson warned of “the invasion and tentacles of China [People’s Republic of China] in Western Hemisphere countries so close to the United States.” China’s presence, she said, had reached “right here on the 20-yard line of our homeland — right here in the red zone.”
The general’s language echoes the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which the United States first used to fend off European imperial interlopers in the hemisphere and later invoked in defense of military coups, police state dictatorships and bloody counterinsurgency wars waged in the name of defeat. “communism.”
She, like her predecessors, has the arrogant habit of seeing the countries south of the American border as American imperialism’s “own backyard.” But she is forced to admit that Washington has lost much of its grip on these territories.
“In many of our countries in this region, [China] is the number one trading partner, with the United States number two in most cases,” Richardson said. In reality, China is already South America’s largest trading partner. In just under two decades, total trade between China and the Latin American region as a whole has increased nearly 20-fold, from $17 billion in 2002 to $315 billion in 2019.
Twenty-one of the region’s 31 countries have joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has already produced significant infrastructure development, including 17 port facilities, highways and railways designed to direct the flow of Latin America’s vital raw materials across the Pacific to China. Meanwhile, despite US pressure, the Chinese multinational Huawei has taken the lead in telecommunications and the provision of 5G networks.
“I worry about these dual-use, state-owned companies emerging from [People’s Republic of China]and I worry about the dual-use capability — being able to turn them around and use them for military use,” Richardson said.
As she continued, however, the SOUTHCOM chief made it clear that the real concern is securing US dominance over the region’s strategic resources and being able to deny them to China.
To explain “why this region matters” to US national security, the general went on to catalog its “rich resources”, including the vast oil reserves of Venezuela and the discovery of huge deposits off the coast of Guyana, copper, silver, gold and other minerals, as well as 31 percent of the world’s fresh water supply. She noted that China today depends on Latin America for 36 percent of its food.
General Richardson placed particular emphasis on the so-called “lithium triangle” – Argentina, Bolivia and Chile – which accounts for most of Latin America’s estimated 60 percent of global lithium reserves. The strategic metal is a key component in the transition to electric vehicles and is used in virtually all modern weapons systems. The battle for control of lithium reserves in the region may soon resemble the violent and bloody battles for control of Middle Eastern oil. Today, China accounts for over half of the world’s lithium refining capacity and produces 79 percent of lithium-ion batteries, compared to just 6.2 percent for the United States.
Richardson said that just the day before she had called a Zoom meeting with “the US ambassadors in Argentina and Chile, and also the strategy officer from Livent [Tesla’s US lithium supplier] and also VP of global operations from Albermarle [the largest US lithium company] to talk about the lithium triangle in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, and the companies and how they are doing and what they see as challenges and the like in the lithium business. And then the aggressiveness and coercion from China.”
The goal, she said, was “to figure out the problems and exclude our adversaries.”
The SOUTHCOM commander gave no details on how Washington intends to “box” China out of a region and a strategic industry where it has already emerged as the dominant economic power.
The fact that it is the Pentagon’s regional chief who is calling a meeting of ambassadors and big business leaders to discuss how to wrest control of Latin America’s lithium reserves from China provides the answer. US imperialism is turning to expanding militarism in its attempt to offset the erosion of its global economic hegemony. It views Latin America as a target for imperialist plunder and a key battleground in the march to World War III, even as it tries to build and tighten its control over the region’s armed forces to confront the growing threat of social revolution throughout the region.
