US Secretary of Defense Lloyd. J. Austin III and Gen. Laura J. Richardson, commander of US Southern Command, arrive at SOUTHCOM headquarters, July 25, 2022. Photo: Chad J. McNeeley/DoD.
United States imperialism in Latin America via SOUTHCOM is threatening the development of a true Zone of Peace in the region.
Originally published in Orinoco Tribune.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez asked Venezuelans and all Latin American people to remain united and reject the United States' militarization of the region. On her social media accounts, she wrote that “Latin America and the Caribbean must continue to be a zone of peace. We, the people, must reject the US militarization of our region.”
Along with the message, this Sunday, May 5, she shared a video of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, in the company of Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino in which the dignitary warned about the threat that Guyana represents for the country “because they have turned Guyana into the epicenter of the greatest threat against the peace of South America and against Venezuela.”
In this sense, Padrino said that “there are 12 CIA bases and 14 secret bases of the Southern Command, already at this moment on the ground in Guyana, the evidence will be shown in due course. Just as they prepared Ukraine against Russia, they have prepared Guyana for that, underestimating us, they do not know what we are capable of doing in the face of threats and anything that arises,” the Defense Minister added on a report broadcasted for Venezolana de Television.
On Saturday, during the inspection of the Field Period exercises and Campaign maneuvers “El Essequibo Is Ours,” President Maduro expressed his pride to the soldiers that make up the National Bolivarian Armed Force (FANB). “To call yourself a Venezuelan soldier is to say an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, pro-independence, Bolivarian soldier, and today more than ever, deeply Chavista. Feel in your chests the pride of being Bolivarian and Chavista, you are the generation of the tercentenary.”
Since 2015, Guyana, in full breach of the 1966 Geneva Agreement, sent the dispute over the Essequibo territory to the International Court of Justice with the support of lawyers paid by the US oil transnational ExxonMobil, without the mutual agreements and the exhaustion of all the peaceful resolution tools specified by the UN Charter, agreed upon by the Geneva Agreement.
In the last months, the United States South Command (US SOUTHCOM) has announced plans for greater operations in cooperation with the right-wing governments in the region that are submissive to the U.S., like Ecuador and Argentina. This puts at risk the Peace Zone for Latin America and the Caribbean agreed by the head of states of the Latin American and Caribbean Community (CELAC) in Cuba on January 2014.
This year the region celebrates the 10 anniversary of that initiative which aims at eradicating the threat of the use of violence in solving regional disputes.
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