Truth, Justice and Declassification: Secret Archives Show US Helped Argentine Military Wage ‘Dirty War’ that Killed 30,000

By Prof. Rut Diamint

Global Research, May 16, 2019

The Conversation 10 May 2019

History books may never tell the full story of the dictatorship that terrorized Argentina from 1976 to 1984.

But newly declassified United States military and intelligence documents recently delivered to Argentina offer new details about the country’s brutal military junta.

The archival documents were the fourth and final batch of 43,000 declassified U.S. telegrams, military records, intelligence and confidential memos given to Argentina following an extraordinary 2016 agreement between Argentine President Mauricio Macri and former U.S. President Barack Obama.

“Argentines now have more information about a dark period of our history that will allow us to continue strengthening justice, seeking and finding the truth,” Macri said on Twitterafter receiving the 7,500-document report on April 12.

The archives narrate the human rights abuses committed by Argentina’s military government, often with the assistance of the United States. They include the forced disappearances of 30,000 people, international assassination squads that stalked their victims abroad and the kidnapping of hundreds of babies born in detention.

Source: National Security Archive

Bloody history of US intervention

The U.S. declassification effort began under persistent pressure from Argentine human rights groups founded to uncover the atrocities of the dictatorship – a period I have spent my academic career studying.

Argentine democracy was interrupted by military coups six times in the 20th century.

The declassified documents outline what happened after the last coup, staged in 1976 by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla. It gave way to the cruelest, most repressive and violent eight years of Argentina’s history.

In August 2000 representatives from Argentina’s Center for Legal and Social Studies and the original Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – a human rights group that locates the lost children of the dictatorship, which has since splintered into several factions – met with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

That encounter led to the declassification of 4,700 State Department documents in 2002. Those documents included U.S. diplomatic cables, memoranda, reports and meeting notes related to the Argentine dictatorship, and revealed clear U.S. involvement in the junta’s “dirty war.”

Now, Argentina has the military and intelligence archives behind these operations, too.

The declassified documents show that U.S. intervention in Latin America went well beyond giving “a little encouragement” to Latin American military regimes, as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1976.

Declassified Docs Detail US Role in Argentina Dirty War Horrors

Argentina was the operations center for Plan Condor, a U.S-organized alliance between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, created in 1975 and operational until around 1980.

Fearing the spread of communism across the Americas, the Ford administration offered these rightist military regimes everything from counterinsurgency training and financial assistance to intelligence briefings.

With U.S. support, Argentina’s junta kidnapped leftists, dissidents, union leaders and anyone who looked remotely like a threat. They tortured detainees, and then threw them alive and conscious out of airplanes into the River Plate, near Buenos Aires, or dumped their bodies in mass graves.

Pregnant women were killed after giving birth, their babies adopted by the families of childless generals. Neighbors under police surveillance informed on other neighbors to appease the junta, then were abducted and tortured anyway.

The U.S. eventually grew uncomfortable with the activities of its Argentine allies.

In 1976 Robert C. Hill, U.S. ambassador to Argentina, reported to Washington that the number of people detained by the junta must “run into the thousands” and, with Kissinger’s knowledge, confrontedthe Argentine government about its human rights abuses.

“[Argentina’s] security forces are totally out of control,” Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman told Kissinger in 1976.

The U.S. withdrew its support from Plan Condor after Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977. Carter, a Democrat, hoped to see democracy restored in Argentina.

That would take another six years.

A bloody history learned little by little

Argentines have learned the details of this sadistic regime little by little.

Even in the waning days of the dictatorship, human rights groups began filing freedom of information requests and writs of habeas corpus with the dictatorship, to little effect.

The law began to work in democracy’s favor again after Argentina’s first post-dictatorship leader, the late President Raúl Alfonsín, was elected in 1983. He created a truth commission that uncovered 340 secret detention centers across Argentina and identified 8,690 “disappeared” people.

Once some perpetrators and victims were known, the victims’ families could file suits to hold the people who oversaw torture centers criminally responsible for their loved ones’ disappearance.

Painstaking archival research, interviews, investigations, lawsuits and prosecutions have followed under every administration since, albeit with differing levels of priority.

Much of what is known about the fates of those abducted by the military regime was discovered in the basement of the Argentine Air Force in 2013, where “black lists” of identified leftists were archived.

The newly declassified U.S. archives offer little new information that might bring closure to thousands of Argentine families whose loved ones remain, officially, “disappeared.”

As of 2017, 2,979 people had been tried for their role in the dictatorship. The charges include crimes against humanity, arbitrary detention and kidnapping. Another 593 cases remained in process.

‘Never again’

The newly declassified U.S. telegrams and confidential communications may spur new prosecutions.

They include the names of government officials and informants complicit in Plan Condor, as well as details on the torture techniques used to extract information from detainees.

“The release of these documents stands as a uniquely valuable contribution to the cause of human rights, the cause of justice and the cause of our fundamental right-to-know,” said Carlos Osorio, a Latin America analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

In 2014, under President Cristina Fernández, Argentina began its own declassification program, alongside that of the United States. Among other disclosures, it published thousands of dictatorship-era archives, including 648 pages documenting the staffing and day-to-day operations of the military junta’s foreign ministry, including its relations with the United States.

Argentina’s commitment to uncovering every dark detail of the dictatorship derives from a national sentiment that its democracy depends on understanding the past.

“Nunca mas” – “never again” – has become the rallying cry of a population that insists that history should not repeat itself.

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Prof. Rut Diamint is Political Science Professor, Torcuato di Tella University.

Featured image is from IC on the Record

The original source of this article is The Conversation

Copyright © Prof. Rut Diamint, The Conversation, 2019

https://www.globalresearch.ca/secret-archives-show-us-helped-argentine-military-wage-dirty-war-killed-30000/5677632


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Argentina and France – Opponents of IMF versus Yellow Vests – Where Is the Correlation?

By Peter Koenig
November 30, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -   What do Argentinean protesters have in common with French protesters? – They both strongly dislike their governments, and their leaders (sic).

The protests in Argentina against the upcoming G20 meeting and around the IMF are just a pretext for an overall malaise – which is an understatement – vis-à-vis President Mauricio Macri and his debt-driven austerity program, that has left hundreds of thousands jobless. People who had decent jobs under the Kirchner governments have now joined the ranks of the unemployed and are begging for survival. Macri has driven the poverty rate from about 14%, where it was in November 2015, a months before the Presidential elections, to more than 35% in September 2018 – and all the while increasing tariffs for transportation and basic services such as electricity, gas, water – health care, education – in fact, privatizing such vital public services to the point where only higher middle class and elite can afford them.

That of course, will leave a vast majority of the people uneducated and without basic health care – precisely what neoliberalism wants. Decimating the number of poor people to a minimum needed for useful slavehood and leaving those who vegetate along, struggling for one meal at the time without education, without a job, so they don’t have the time, energy and political savvy to protest against the ruling class.

Greece is an outstanding example. Within less than ten years the once cheerful, happy and economically relatively well-off country was destroyed into misery by foreign imposed debt and austerity programs. – By now, almost all public assets were sold or privatized to pay for the horrendous debt service. Public health services are on a drip, there is a lack of special medication, like for cancer – schools are closed or privatized – pensions cut to unlivable levels, unemployment rampant – all leading to extreme poverty and skyrocketing suicide rates, about which nobody dares speaking.
That’s the making of the west. In the case of Greece even worse. Their European brother and sister countries went along with the loot. In fact, they pushed Greece into her demise, especially Germany, France, the European Central Bank (ECB), and, of course, the entire European Brussels apparatus, led by the unelected European Commission (EC) and, and eventually with the ‘official’ outside hammer, the IMF. Greece had to go.
Is Argentina going to become under Macri the Latin American Greece? Could well be. By now the country is encircled by neoliberal and fascist neighbors, Brazil, Chile Paraguay, Uruguay. Bolivia is a laudable exception. All the others will do what Washington mandates; whatever it takes to support Macri and his IMF-imposed economic killer policies, that – in the end – will sell out the resource-rich country to foreign oligarchs and corporations, to the US and NATO. Yes NATO, unbelievable, but true. NATO is officially in south America, as Colombia by her own choice has become a NATO country.
From Colombia to Argentina and actually to all of Latin America is like a walk in the park, with all the borders of the partly newly installed neoliberal / neofascist governments wide open – for NATO forces, that is. Macri has already invited the US to establish several US military bases. In July 2018 Sputnik reported that President Macri has given green light to establish “at least three US bases in the provinces of Neuquén, Misiones and Tierra del Fuego. Their creation would be financed by the US Southern Command.”
And now, in the midst of this man-made – Macri-made – socioeconomic calamity, he invites the G20 (30 November to 1 December 2018) to feast on Argentina’s goodies, to see for themselves what can be made of an otherwise prosperous country – so that prosperity is ‘shared’ and outsourced to foreign oligarchs, banks and corporations. Wonderful. For that G20 event, Macri mobilized some 22,000 military forces to guarantee the security of the chiefs of state.

Surely, after the G20 summit, new austerities will be imposed, because everybody sees there is more to be milked from Argentina. They see what they were able to do to Greece.  When common sense would dictate – stop, that’s it, that’s all we can take – there is an opening for even more to be squeezed out of the country. In Argentina there is still a lot of milking to be done. It has just started. If nothing else, the newly Washingtonshoed-in president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, will teach Macri how to do even better for the western money sharks.

In France, the Yellow Vests protests against higher fuel prices and labor reform laws is just a pretext for something much bigger – a growing awakening of the French people, a steadily increasing recognition of how the slippery soft-speaker Emmanuel Macron is stripping France’s populace of most of their civil and social rights, of their labor rights – and ultimately, still to come, of their jobs. A number of ‘false flags’ from Charlie Hebdo to Bataclan to the Nice’s 14^thJuly terror attacks, have helped Macron to put a permanent State of Emergency – basically Martial Law – into the French Constitution. By doing so, he has created a kind of French “Patriot Act”, slice by slice reducing long acquired social rights, transforming them into increased profits for foreign and French corporations and banking giants. Big wonder, Macron is a Rothschild child. He has been put into his position to uphold and expand the Rothschild clan’s banking empire, expanding it way beyond the French borders.
Who are the Yellow Vests – or ‘gilets jaunes’in French? The name refers to the yellow phosphorescent vests that each and every French driver needs to carry in his vehicle for visibility and protection in case of an incident on the highway. The movement started on 10 October, propagated through facebook against the Macron imposed increase of fuel taxes. It then expanded rapidly into a movement of discontent with the continuous loss of purchasing power of the common people through budget cuts and soft but steadily increasing austerity imposed on the French citizenry. That, plus the decay of public services, especially in urban peripheries, has transformed the Yellow Vests movement into a vivid protest against Macron, an outright call for Macron’s resignation.
Hundreds of thousands – cumulatively several millions – of Yellow Vests have demonstrated and blocked at times most of Paris during the past two weeks, to reverse the fuel tax increase and to basically regain their social rights and financial purchasing power, increase salaries to at least keep pace with inflation. Diesel prices have already increased in 2018 alone by 23% and gasoline prices by 15%. These prices should increase further by 2019 according to a Macron imposed law.
Can protests in the street remove a President? – A President, who came to power with less than 27% of the French eligible voters, a President, who built his power on a movement, called “En Marche” (something like ‘moving on’) which hardly even existed a year before Macron’s ‘election’ in May 2017, an election based on false propaganda, selling heaven to desperate people, who after socialist President François Hollande deceived his country bitterly, leaving his presidency with a popularity rate of less than 10% – these people were ready to accept any ‘populist’ lie in the hope that life would become better.
Well, as usual, the ruling class – almost always the financial elite – took advantage of the desperate situation – and bingo. Macron is legally in office for 5 years, until 2022. Removing him the ‘democratic way’, through a Parliamentary vote of confidence, is a slim chance, as he has an absolute majority in Parliament, also called the French National Assembly.
So far Macron has been able to impose his ‘austerity’ without the open help of the IMF. But, be sure, with Christine Lagarde at the helm of the IMF, a former French Finance Minister, with close ties to Macron, he most certainly get IMF ‘advice’ on how to continue softly squeezing the juices out of the French people, of their, since the end of WWII, accumulated and hard fought-for social benefits. Maybe also Greek style?
Curiously, the European Commission and the ECB are much more generous with France than with Italy, when it comes to adhering to the arbitrary 3% deficit limit. Italy was scolded, called to order and to submit a revised budget, when deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, presented Italy’s 2019 budget with a 2.9% deficit. France, on the other hand, has been running a deficit above 3% for years, but is gently reminded to please look into their finances a bit more carefully. In other words, the EU is treating brothers and sisters with different yard sticks, thus, helping Macron to do whatever he sees fit to push austerity down the French citizens’ throats. And if they protest, well, we see what’s happening now. There is the State of Emergency that allows the most brutal police crack-down, if needed. And Macron may well need it, if he wants his presidency to survive.
The French people, are, however, special. They prompted the French Revolution in 1789, the legacy of which still reverberates in legal systems around the world. French students started 40 years ago, the 1968 student and workers revolt. It began on the premises of “equal rights and liberty” between men and women. It led to strengthening workers unions and eventually to many workers rights and benefits, precisely those that already former President Sarkozy attempted to dismantle and for which Macron was installed to finish the job.
There is a direct relation between what happened in 1968 and what is occurring now. Will the people prevail? – Will France set an example for the rest of Europe? –  Mind you – Europe is in the plans to be derailed and robbed similarly and through different means, one of which is a massively increasing influx of so-called refugees or migrants from poor countries bordering Europe. Absorbing millions of homeless souls from western destroyed countries, is a challenge, Europe may not survive. Macron may just be a convenient intermediary.
So, what do the people of Argentina and the people of France have in common? – They both want to get rid of a despotic president, implanted by the western financial elite to steal the socioeconomic coffers of their heritage, and which, if not stopped, may continue a movement throughout the Americas and Europe.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50686.htm

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G20 Summit, Top Agenda Item: Bye-Bye American Empire

By Finian Cunningham

November 30, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  The G20 summits are nominally about how the world’s biggest national economies can cooperate to boost global growth. This year’s gathering – more than ever – shows, however, that rivalry between the US and China is center stage.

Zeroing in further still, the rivalry is an expression of a washed-up American empire desperately trying to reclaim its former power. There is much sound, fury and pretense from the outgoing hegemon – the US – but the ineluctable reality is an empire whose halcyon days are a bygone era.

Ahead of the summit taking place this weekend in Argentina, the Trump administration has been issuing furious ultimatums to China to “change its behavior”. Washington is threatening an escalating trade war if Beijing does not conform to American demands over economic policies.

President Trump has taken long-simmering US complaints about China to boiling point, castigating Beijing for unfair trade, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property rights. China rejects this pejorative American characterization of its economic practices.

Nevertheless, if Beijing does not comply with US diktats then the Trump administration says it will slap increasing tariffs on Chinese exports.

The gravity of the situation was highlighted by the comments this week of China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, who warned that the “lessons of history” show trade wars can lead to catastrophic shooting wars. He urged the Trump administration to be reasonable and to seek a negotiated settlement of disputes.

The problem is that Washington is demanding the impossible. It’s like as if the US wants China to turn the clock back to some imagined former era of robust American capitalism. But it is not in China’s power to do that. The global economy has shifted structurally away from US dominance. The wheels of production and growth are in China’s domain of Eurasia.

For decades, China functioned as a giant market for cheap production of basic consumer goods. Now under President Xi Jinping, the nation is moving to a new phase of development involving sophisticated technologies, high-quality manufacture, and investment.

It’s an economic evolution that the world has seen before, in Europe, the US and now Eurasia. In the decades after the Second World War, up to the 197os, it was US capitalism that was the undisputed world leader. Combined with its military power, the postwar global order was defined and shaped by Washington. Sometimes misleading called Pax Americana, there was nothing peaceful about the US-led global order. It was more often an order of relative stability purchased by massive acts of violence and repressive regimes under Washington’s tutelage.

In American mythology, it does not have an empire. The US was supposed to be different from the old European colonial powers, leading the rest of the world through its “exceptional” virtues of freedom, democracy and rule of law. In truth, US global dominance relied on the application of ruthless imperial power.

The curious thing about capitalism is it always outgrows its national base. Markets eventually become too small and the search for profits is insatiable. American capital soon found more lucrative opportunities in the emerging market of China. From the 1980s on, US corporations bailed out of America and set up shop in China, exploiting cheap labor and exporting their goods back to increasingly underemployed America consumers. The arrangement was propped up partly because of seemingly endless consumer debt.

That’s not the whole picture of course. China has innovated and developed independently from American capital. It is debatable whether China is an example of state-led capitalism or socialism. The Chinese authorities would claim to subscribe to the latter. In any case, China’s economic development has transformed the entire Eurasian hemisphere. Whether you like it or not, Beijing is the dynamo for the global economy. One indicator is how nations across Asia-Pacific are deferring to China for their future growth.

Washington likes to huff and puff about alleged Chinese expansionism “threatening” US allies in Asia-Pacific. But the reality is that Washington is living in the past of former glory. Trading blocs like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) realize their bread is buttered by China, no longer America. Washington’s rhetoric about “standing up to China” is just that – empty rhetoric. It doesn’t mean much to countries led by their interests of economic development and the benefits of Chinese investment.

One example is Taiwan. In contrast to Washington’s shibboleths about “free Taiwan”, more and more Asian countries are dialing down their bilateral links with Taiwan in deference to China’s position, which views the island as a renegade province. The US position is one of rhetoric, whereas the relations of other countries are based on material economic exigencies. And respecting Beijing’s sensibilities is for them a prudent option.

A recent report by the New York Times starkly illustrated the changing contours of the global economic order. It confirmed what many others have observed, that China is on the way to surpass the US as the world’s top economy. During the 1980s, some 75 per cent of China’s population were living in “extreme poverty”, according to the NY Times. Today, less than 1 per cent of the population is in that dire category. For the US, the trajectory has been in reverse with greater numbers of its people subject to deprivation.

China’s strategic economic plans – the One Belt One Road initiative – of integrating regional development under its leadership and finance have already created a world order analogous to what American capital achieved in the postwar decades.

American pundits and politicians like Vice President Mike Pence may disparage China’s economic policies as creating “debt traps” for other countries. But the reality is that other countries are gravitating to China’s dynamic leadership.

Arguably, Beijing’s vision for economic development is more enlightened and sustainable than what was provided by the Americans and Europeans before. The leitmotif for China, along with Russia, is very much one of multipolar development and mutual partnership. The global economy is not simply moving from one hegemon – the US – to another imperial taskmaster – China.

One thing seems inescapable. The days of American empire are over. Its capitalist vigor has dissipated decades ago. What the upheaval and rancor in relations between Washington and Beijing is all about is the American ruling class trying to recreate some fantasy of former vitality. Washington wants China to sacrifice its own development in order to somehow rejuvenate American society. It’s not going to happen.

That’s not to say that American society can never be rejuvenated. It could, as it could also in Europe. But that would entail a restructuring of the economic system involving democratic regeneration. The “good old days” of capitalism are gone. The American empire, as with the European empires, is obsolete.

That’s the unspoken Number One agenda item at the G20 summit. Bye-bye US empire.

What America needs to do is regenerate through a reinvented social economic order, one that is driven by democratic development and not the capitalist private profit of an elite few.

If not, the futile alternative is US failing political leaders trying to coerce China, and others, to pay for their future. That way leads to war. 

This article was originally published by "Strategic Culture Foundation " -  

Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here

==See Also==

Watch: Putin high-fives Saudi Crown Prince at G20:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50687.htm


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Will the Argentina-China Partnership Undermine Trump’s “Fortress America” in the Southern Cone

By Andrew Korybko

Global Research, November 28, 2018

Despite the post-Kirchner government’s many faults, one thing that it’s doing right is retaining the Argentinian-Chinese Strategic Partnership, which holds the best hope for Beijing to balance Trump’s “Fortress America” plans in the hemisphere.

This week’s G20 Summit has drawn global attention to the host country of Argentina, a South American nation that’s recently experienced a US-backed Hybrid War regime change through electoral means. Washington supported the opposition’s infowar against former President Cristina Kirchner there and ended up successfully reshaping popular perceptions to the point where right-wing neoliberal candidate Mauricio Macrinarrowly defeated her chosen successor in the 2015 polls. He then wasted no time in reversing her “Pink Tide” legacy, but the one element of it that he importantly retained was his country’s strategic partnership with China, which is presently Beijing’s best hope for balancing Trump’s “Fortress America” plans in the hemisphere following Bolsonaro’s US-backed rise in neighboring Brazil.

Strategic Context

In a nutshell, the US wants to reclaim its previously undisputed hegemonic position in the Western Hemisphere that was severely challenged during the “Pink Tide” of the mid-2000s, to which end it’s carried out a series of creative regime change operations in the region via military coups, electoral coups, and ‘constitutional coups’ to remove the multipolar gains from that time. This grand strategic campaign has yet to be successfully completed and is presently being pushed back against by the People’s Republic in an unexpected way following El Salvador’s surprising geopolitical pivot towards China a few months ago, which greatly advanced Beijing’s designs in the region and opened up a fresh opportunity to inject multipolarity into this increasingly unipolar space.

Nevertheless, for as strategically positioned as Central America is, it isn’t capable on its own of serving as the springboard that China needs for reversing the US’ recent gains in the hemisphere, but could instead function as a complementary part of a larger holistic strategy there that sees much more economically influential countries taking the lead in this respect. Mexico immediately comes to mind as the prime candidate if AMLO sees the wisdom in “balancing” between the US and China, such as if he seeks Chinese support for building his promised “Tehuantepec Corridor” and joining his Foreign Minister’s suggestion for a joint Mexican-American “Marshall Plan” in Central America aimed at stemming illegal migration from there.

Bolsonaro Is a Pivotal Part of Trump’s Plans to Build “Fortress America”

Reuters References

Even in the best-case scenario where both of these far-reaching strategic cooperation proposals succeed (which certainly can’t be assured given the US’ expected resistance to China’s participation in them), this still wouldn’t be enough for offsetting Trump’s plans for “Fortress America” seeing as how Beijing wouldn’t be making a noticeable dent in reversing the US’ latest gains in South America. Therein lays the relevancy of the Argentinian-Chinese Strategic Partnership, however, which is gaining more Mainstream Media attention ahead of the G20 Summit. Reuters published two very informative pieces about this earlier in the week that the reader should review if they’re interested in learning more details about it:

• “China, vying with U.S. in Latin America, eyes Argentina nuclear deal”
• “Factbox: Four ways China is a major economic driver in Argentina”

Basically, Kirchner locked her country into a strategic partnership with China by agreeing to prohibitively costly “cross-cancellation clauses” that made it impossible for Macri to pull out of Argentina’s Silk Road deals with it. In addition, Reuters notes that “China is the main importer of Argentine soybeans, the South American country’s biggest cash crop”, so the country’s influential agricultural lobby also stood to lose if Buenos Aires “recalibrated” its relations with Beijing to such an extent that its counterpart felt compelled to respond by boycotting its purchase of their soybeans. Naturally, Macri had no practical choice but to retain the Argentinian-Chinese Strategic Partnership, which is expanding to this day.

Pro-Chinese Multipolar “Balancing”

Interestingly enough, the Argentine model might be applied to Bolsonaro’s Brazil in the future too as China seeks to convince him to “moderate” the anti-Chinese rhetoric that he spouted on the campaign trail after realizing that his country might stand to lose too much if it worsens relations with Beijing at Washington’s behest. There are certainly differences between Argentina and Brazil’s relations with China, but the two South American countries have historically been rivals and Beijing could potentially seek to play Buenos Aires off against Brasilia in the future by refocusing on the first-mentioned if the second makes it too difficult for its companies to continue doing business there.

Furthermore, Argentina could play an important role in influencing the outcome of Mercosur’s free trade negotiations with other blocs, possibly with Beijing’s blessing. For example, Brazil just signed a free trade agreement with Chile, which outgoing President Temer celebrated as “uniting the Mercosur and Pacific Alliance”. This suggests that the continent’s two main economic camps could come together to form a South American-wide free trade area in the future, one which might jointly advance Mercosur’s free trade talks with the EU and possibly even the US. None of this can happen, however, without Chinese-friendly Argentina greenlighting the process, and Beijing might use Buenos Aires as its “backdoor” into this larger trade network.

Red Dawn Rising

China, after all, is investing considerable human resources into ensuring that its influence in the Western Hemisphere isn’t ephemeral. President Xi was quoted in a Spanish newspaper on Tuesday as proudly proclaiming that “This year, Spanish is officially included in China’s high school curriculum”, proving just how much the People’s Republic values this language that it’s giving hundreds of millions of schoolchildren the opportunity to learn it for boosting their future Silk Road career prospects. Argentina is undoubtedly expected to form the fulcrum of China’s South American strategy in this respect by virtue of the two nations’ strategic partnership, symbolized most significantly by their plans to clinch a nuclear energy deal this weekend.

If China succeeds in reaching such a high-level agreement with Argentina, then it would intimately tie both of their countries together in a deeply trusting long-term relationship that could enable Beijing to positively influence Buenos Aires’ decisions on some key issues, such as the previously discussed free trade negotiations. Furthermore, this deal would position Argentina as China’s main strategic partner in Latin America, thereby seriously complicating Trump’s “Fortress America” plans by extent and possibly even leading to Bolsonaro “moderating” his promised anti-Chinese positions once he takes office at the beginning of next year. In addition, the demonstration effect of this partnership could also influence other countries such as Mexico to follow Argentina’s lead in using China to “balance” the US.

Concluding Thoughts

The “Pink Tide” might have given way to a revival of the unipolar moment in Latin America, but just like its global predecessor, this moment might only be fleeting and already on the decline if China is able to nimbly leverage its strategic partnership with Argentina to offset Trump’s “Fortress America” plans. Should that happen, then the “Pink Tide” might transform into a “Red Dawn”, especially if China coordinates its moves with AMLO’s leftist Mexico and facilitates the North American country’s expansion of influence into comparatively Chinese-friendly Central America by signing on to its so-called “Marshall Plan” for the region. A lot can still happen to sabotage this grand strategy, but as it stands, Trump shouldn’t underestimate China’s challenge to his hemispheric plans.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Andrew Korybko, Global Research, 2018

https://www.globalresearch.ca/will-the-argentina-china-partnership-undermine-trumps-fortress-america-in-the-southern-cone/5661284



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