Matt Kennard

In the middle of the night on April 16, 2009, an elite Bolivian police unit entered the four-star Hotel Las Americas situated in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, a hotbed of opposition to the President Evo Morales’s government. Flown in from the capital, La Paz, the commandos planned to raid a group of men staying in the upscale lodgings. What happened in the early hours of that morning is still disputed, but at the end of the operation, three men who were asleep in bed had been killed in cold blood. Some say they were executed, while the Bolivian government claims its officers won out in a 20-minute firefight. In the aftermath, the story gained international attention when it was revealed that two of the dead were not even Bolivian. One was Michael Dwyer, a 26-year-old Irishman from County Cork, where he had been a bouncer and security guard before moving to Santa Cruz just six months earlier. Another, Árpád Magyarosi, was Hungarian-Romanian, and had been a teacher and musician before relocating to Bolivia at the same time. The third person killed in the operation was the ringleader of the group, Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, an eccentric Bolivian-Hungarian who had been born in Santa Cruz before fleeing the country during the US-backed dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the 1970s. His family moved to Chile before the ascent of another US-backed dictator in that country, General Augusto Pinochet, and resettled finally in Hungary. Rózsa was a supporter of Opus Dei, the right-wing Catholic sect, and fought in the Croatian independence war in the early 1990s, founding the paramilitary International Platoon that many believed was aligned with fascistic elements. Two journalists, including a British photographer, died in suspicious circumstances while investigating the platoon. In Santa Cruz on that night, two others, Mario Tadic, a Croatian, and Elöd Tóásó, also from Hungary, were arrested and remain in a high- security La Paz prison to this day. Two more suspects, both with Eastern European connections, were not at the scene and are still missing.

It transpired that the government had acted on intelligence indicating that these men comprised a cell of terrorists who were planning a program of war and violence in the country, which included a somewhat bizarre plan to blow up Evo Morales, the president, and his cabinet on Lake Titicaca, the biggest lake in the Andes and a major tourist attraction. The intelligence services, after a tip-off from an informer close to the group, had been following them for a number of months. They decided to act soon after a bomb exploded at the house of the Archbishop of Santa Cruz, Cardinal Julio Terrazas. The government appointed a seven-person committee to investigate the plot, headed by César Navarro, deputy minister for coordination with social movements and civil society, which spent the next five months until November 2009 looking into it. Among the items seized during the raid was Rózsa’s laptop in which investigators claim to have discovered emails between ex-CIA asset and Cold War double-agent István Belovai. “There are emails between Rózsa and Belovai, he was the brains behind it,” Mr Navarro told me in his office in the presidential palace in La Paz. “He would ask them logistical questions about escape routes, about whether the government or police would be able to get to them.” Belovai, who died in 2010, was a spook who called himself “Hungary’s first NATO soldier”. Rózsa is thought to have become friends with Belovai in the 1990s during the Balkan war.

At the time of the attacks, the attitude of the US embassy, revealed through the cables sent from La Paz to Washington, was one of incredulity at the government’s claims and worry about persecution of the opposition. One comment was headlined ‘“Terrorism” excuse for mass arrests?” The US embassy was concerned about “raising fears of possible arrests of members of the Santa Cruz-based political opposition”. Another cable did admit that in “an interview released posthumously, the group’s leader [Rózsa] advocated the secession of Santa Cruz department, Bolivia’s largest and most prosperous state”. The reaction from the opposition was no less sympathetic. The right-wing governor of Santa Cruz, Rubén Costas, accused the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government of “mounting a show” in the aftermath. The photos released by the government afterward told a different story. Rózsa and Dwyer can be seen posing with large caches of heavy weaponry including pistols and sub-machine guns, and a large rifle with telescopic sights. President Morales said the cell was planning to “riddle us with bullets”. A US embassy official met with a public defender assigned to alleged terrorist Tadic. She told the official that “the Santa Cruz leaders named by the government are most likely linked with the group” – these leaders were in fact intimately involved with the US embassy. Tadic, she said, had been stockpiling weapons and carrying out military training on rural properties outside Santa Cruz. She confirmed they were responsible for placing the explosive device in front of the cardinal’s house, while Tadic had testified that the next target was going to be Prefect Rubén Costas’ residence, and that Rózsa had advised Costas to strengthen his security gate to minimize the damage. The intent in targeting the cardinal and the prefect was to make it look like MAS supporters were carrying out the attacks.

The fact that the alleged terrorists were staying in a four-star hotel with no discernible day job suggested they must have had money coming from somewhere. The pictures of these foreigners partying in Santa Cruz – subsequently released – also show they were accepted and welcomed openly by some powerbrokers in the city – it seemed to go all the way to the top, even the prefect of the department. But none came more powerful than Branko Marinkovic, a local oligarch of Croatian origin, who had been a long-time friend of the US embassy and is now in exile in the US after being identified as one of those “most likely” to have been involved with the terrorist group. Juan Kudelka, Marinkovic’s right-hand man, said in March 2010 that he had been asked by Marinkovic to pass envelopes of money to Rózsa as part of the plan to support this terrorist group, called, he said, “La Torre”. Another suspect, Hugo Achá Melgar, a keen friend of a strange human rights group in New York, also soon fled to the US, where he was also welcomed with open arms. “[T]here are several factors that could induce the [government of Bolivia] to connect us to suspected extremist groups in Santa Cruz,” noted one US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks. “The petition of political asylum from alleged terrorist Hugo Acha and his wife, allocation of USAID assistance to a Bolivian organization suspected of funding a terrorist cell in Santa Cruz, and an implied [US Government] role based on the [Government of Bolivia’s] assertion that the Santa Cruz cell leader organized meetings and had contacts in Washington.” All of these assertions turned out to be true; in fact, the situation was worse than that. The US planned to bring the opposition from all over the country together in a supra-departmental business lobby in an effort to rid Bolivia of its socialist government.

At the time, the US embassy “reassured” Vice President Álvaro García Linera “that there was no US government involvement”, and President Obama vouched for that too when asked by President Morales soon after. But Mr Navarro, the investigator, still didn’t believe it. “The US didn’t not know,” he told me. When I brought Vice President Linera into the Financial Times office in London to speak to the union at the paper, he told me: “Nothing like this happens in Bolivia without the US knowing something about it.” Even if we assume the US embassy didn’t know of the cell, why would the US then provide a sanctuary to alleged funders of “terrorists” whose own public defender was telling the embassy that they were “most likely” guilty? The answer is long and complex and reveals the lengths to which the US has gone to undermine the democratically elected government of Evo Morales since it came to power in 2005.

Turning the tide

The raid and the deaths came at a pivotal moment in Bolivian history. At that time the poorest country in South America, it also had the highest proportion of indigenous people in the continent – 60 percent. In December 2005, there was a tectonic shift in the power structure of the nation, unheard of since independence from Spain, when the country elected its first ever indigenous president, the socialist trade union leader Evo Morales. It wasn’t a sudden development but followed decades of confrontation and public protests that had escalated in the previous five years. In 2000, the so-called “Water Wars”, centered in the city of Cochabamba in the middle of the country, had pitched the local communities en masse against the government and the World Bank which had overseen the privatization of the water industry and resultant soaring prices. Police had been instructed to arrest people collecting rainwater to avoid the new prices they could not afford. Over the next years, the indigenous movement, which is based around small micro-democratic communities, grew stronger. In 2003, mass protests spread and thousands of demonstrators went on to blockade La Paz before troops, allegedly under orders of the government, shot dead a score of protesters.

The presidential incumbent, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, more commonly known as Goni, was forced out and fled to Miami, where he lives to this day. It was in this ferment that Morales, a former cocalero (coca picker) turned trade union leader, and his party, MAS, came to power with a huge take of the popular vote. This turn of events, however, was not greeted kindly by the traditional elites in Bolivia and their international backers. The US had been sending its own political “experts” for years to try to avoid exactly this scenario: a 2005 documentary, Our Brand is Crisis, shows a team of slick campaign managers from Greenberg Carville Shrum, the political consultancy, successfully running Goni’s campaign as he defeated Evo Morales in the 2002 presidential elections. This time it was different: the US was powerless to stop Morales, causing serious worry among planners. Bolivia remains one of the most unequal societies in the western hemisphere, but the established state of affairs had made some people very rich. As the New York Times put it when describing Santa Cruz: “Scenes of extreme poverty stand in contrast here with the construction of garish new headquarters of corporations from Brazil, Europe and the United States.” On top of this, the land distribution has led some analysts to describe the set-up as akin to “semi-feudal provinces dominated by semi-feudal estates”. Five percent of the landowners control over 90 percent of the arable land. When MAS came to power it sought to deal with this egregious inequality, which is marked pretty consistently along race lines, with the poor landless peasants largely comprising the indigenous population. As always, the US supported the oligarchy, which in turn supported the continued slavery of the country to US corporations.

A land reform program was started by Morales to break up the huge rural estates that had long been controlled by a small elite and to redistribute land that was fallow to landless indigenous peasants. The government stipulated that private ownership of huge estates would only be acceptable if put to “social use”. But a plan like that was going to engender vociferous opposition from an entrenched elite that felt it was being usurped. One particularly illustrative case is that of Ronald Larsen, a 67-year-old American from Montana, who came to Bolivia in 1968 and who, by the time President Morales came to power, owned 17 properties throughout Bolivia (along with his sons), comprising 141,000 acres, or three times the size of the country’s biggest city. The new Bolivian government accused Mr Larsen of keeping indigenous Guarani farmers as “virtual slaves”, and tried to deliver seeds to them to help them escape from servitude. Mr Larsen responded: “These people, their main thing in life is where they’re going to get their next bowl of rice. A few bags of rice buys a lot of support.”1 The government reported that it was fired on as it tried to deliver the said rice.

The reaction to land reform from the east of the country, where the majority of natural resources and wealth is located, was near hysterical. A class of magnates – most of European descent – own many of the businesses there and, over the next three years, with their allies in the media luna (the crescent-shaped “opposition” area of the country) worked to bring down the new President Morales. The US government and its agencies, which had for decades exercised overwhelming economic and political power over Bolivia in tandem with these newly displaced elites, was not a benign player in this period. It actively worked to help the opposition and undermine the democratically elected government. The spider web of US control was, and is, extensive, with many US agencies created at the height of the Cold War still in place, civilized language hiding their use, first, as a tool against Soviet influence in the region, and now to undermine the democratic socialism of MAS. Despite vast natural gas reserves, these agencies, alongside transnational corporations and their local compradors in government, have conspired to keep Bolivia the second-poorest country, and among the most unequal, in South America.

When the MAS government threatened to upend that social order, it was logical that the US would be nervous. One of President Morales’ first acts in power was to shutter the CIA office that had until then, he said, been operating in the presidential palace. Morales’ claims that the various agencies that make up the US foreign policy apparatus have been giving covert support to the opposition are dismissed by the US government as “conspiracy theories”. Alongside the US government, a score of non-governmental institutions, some headquartered in New York, or US-ally Colombia, have been working to undermine the democratic government in Bolivia and continue to this day.

Paying clandestine visits

When I interviewed César Navarro, who headed the investigation of the April 2009 incident, in his office lined with pictures of Che Guevara and prominent members of Bolivian civil society, he spoke at 100 miles an hour, desperate to get all the information out as quickly as possible. “Rózsa didn’t come here by himself, they brought him,” he told me. “Hugo Achá Melgar brought him.” The prosecutor in the case had charged that one of Achá’s business cards was found in the backpack of one of the alleged terrorists. Further, it was claimed that Achá met with Rózsa on at least three occasions, while testimony from other terrorist suspects in custody implicated Achá as a financial supporter of the group. The Bolivian government has tried to request the extradition of Achá, who is currently in the United States, to no avail.

Achá’s story reveals a long trail that leads all the way to a set of plush offices in the midtown area of Manhattan. The husband of a prominent opposition congresswoman, Achá was the founder and head of a Bolivian version of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an American non- governmental organization (NGO) based in New York. Not very well known – but boasting Elie Wiesel and Václav Havel on its “international council” – the HRF was founded in 2005 by a character atypical of the NGO and human rights world. A rich playboy-cum-political talking head, Thor Halvorssen could be spotted on the Manhattan party scene, as well as giving his two-pennies-worth on Fox News.

His foundation is not typical either – Mr Halvorssen told The Economist in 2010 that he wanted his organization to break from the traditional NGO mold. First his group had an overt agenda, the magazine said, focusing “mainly on the sins of leftist regimes in Latin America”. But his tactics were different, too. “With the confidence of a new kid on the block,” the article continued, “he argues that the big players in human rights have become too bureaucratic, and disinclined to do bold things like pay clandestine visits to repressive countries.” From his midtown Manhattan office, Halvorssen said: “They work in these big marbled offices, where’s the heart in that?” It was in the dusty streets of La Paz that he wanted to be. In many ways, Halvorssen was merely a chip off the old block. HRF’s obsession with the “repressive” governments of, particularly, Venezuela and Bolivia was not something new to the family. Neither were clandestine activities. Halvorssen’s father, Thor Halvorssen Hellum, is a Venezuelan businessman, the head of one of the richest families in the country. In 1993, he was arrested and charged with homicide and other counts after a group of terrorists set off a series of six bombs around the capital, Caracas. It was named the “yuppie” terrorists plot because its planners were allegedly bankers and other gilded elite who hoped that the panic caused by the bombs would help them speculate on the stock market. The Houston Chronicle noted at the time: “Police have identified one alleged mastermind as Thor Halvorssen, a former president of telephone company CANTV, former presidentially-appointed anti-drug commissioner, and, according to officials, a former operative of the US Central Intelligence Agency in Central America.” Halvorssen Hellum eventually spent 74 days in prison before a superior court judge found him innocent of attempted homicide and all other charges related to the bombings. Many found the decision murky. And two hours after his release, another “human rights” NGO, the International Society for Human Rights, appointed him director of its Pan-American committee. During a CIA “anti- drug” campaign in Venezuela, which saw a ton of nearly pure cocaine shipped to the US in 1990, Mr Halvorssen Hellum, in his position as narcotics chief, was again in trouble. The New York Times reported that “[t]he DEA discovered that Halvorssen, who had his own links to the CIA, was using information from DEA cases to smear political and business rivals”.

Like father like son. Halvorssen Jnr’s own human rights project, the HRF, was set up, he said, to help in “defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy in the Americas”. HRF “will research and report on human rights abuses” and “produce memoranda, independent analyses, and policy reports”. But it is clear that the organization is set up, primarily, to malign the governments of Venezuela and Bolivia. It did have sizeable funds to carry out its tasks. The group’s financial accounts make interesting reading. In the year ending December 31, 2006, the first full year of operations, the group spent $300,518 on its programs. By the next year, ending 2007, this had more than doubled to $644,163. In 2008, this had gone down to $595,977, but it surged again in 2009 to $832,532, as political violence was reaching a head in Bolivia. Interestingly, in the year ended 2008, “general programs”, which was the highest spending category, was $85,525, or 14.4 percent of total spending on “program services”. By 2009, “general programs” spending was up 813 percent to $458,840, and comprised 55 percent of total spending. In the four years from 2006 to 2009, HRF has spent nearly $2.6 million on running costs. But where was the money going? We do know thanks to the WikiLeaks cables that when Branko Marinkovic, the oligarch, fled to the US from Bolivia, one of his first ports of calls was the HRF office in Manhattan. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they talked about. In its six years of operations, the group has released two 30-odd page annual reports, and 16 other reports on varying topics related to “repressive governments”. To be fair, the group did organize an Oslo human rights conference which, one Wall Street Journal journalist noted, was “unlike any human-rights conference I’ve ever attended”, because “there was no desire to blame … the US or other Western nations”.

In the same article, Mr Halvorssen laughed off claims that he, like his father, was in cahoots with the CIA, calling such claims “conspiracy theories”. But links between his group and Achá, the man accused of buying the tickets for the terrorists in Santa Cruz, were closer than he let on. Mr Halvorssen maintained that the Bolivian group was “inspired by HRF’s work” but is “a group of Bolivian individuals … a wholly independent group with a board of directors made up entirely of Bolivian nationals”. Really? Achá was briefing the US embassy on his problems all through the period and officers from the embassy met with him in “his capacity as head of Human Rights Foundation – Bolivia”, which the embassy was told was tightly linked to the New York-based organization. One cable notes that Achá’s outfit is “an affiliate of the larger Human Rights Foundation group” – the one headed by Mr Halvorssen.

The HRF group in New York naturally still denies any wrongdoing by Achá, and is, according to some, likely helping him in his efforts to remain in the US. Its spokesperson told the press that “Human Rights Foundation in Bolivia has carried out extraordinary work denouncing human rights abuses in that country, and unfortunately the response of Morales comes in the form of insults and unfounded accusations … We have carried out an internal review and have found no evidence that Mr. Acha is linked to the group that the government claims is carrying out separatist activities.” As WikiLeaks cables reveal, the group further accused President Morales of “vilifying the reputation” of HRF due to HRF–Bolivia’s reporting on the “destruction of democratic institutions, the grand human rights violations in Bolivia” and the “anti-democratic character of the Morales Administration”. It was a typical response. The Bolivian human rights ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) Waldo Albarracin, referring specifically to the Human Rights Foundation, told the US embassy: “they do not have the facts and so any opinion they have is just that, an opinion.”

Achá was at one point arrested on suspicion of being involved in the plot. The cables reveal the concern of the embassy over the arrest of this “Embassy contact and leader of a human rights NGO”. Achá had even given the embassy a copy of the warrant for his arrest, which he linked to his “investigations” into a massacre in the Pando department of Bolivia (carried out, in fact, by far-right elements of the opposition). But, like many of the opposition figures, he was successful in persuading the US to grant him political asylum. The cable ends by saying that “Acha is currently in the US”. Providing a sanctuary for Bolivian suspects would become a theme of US policy. In fact, the US had been active in his alleged terrorist education. According to the WikiLeaks cables, Achá had actually participated in a Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies “Terrorism and Counterinsurgency” course in Washington in late 2008 – one assumes to gain knowledge for his own violent “counter-insurgency” terrorism back in Bolivia. Included in the course’s mandatory reading were “Left Wing Terrorism in Italy” by Donatella della Porta and “Lenin on Armed Insurrection” by Tony Cliff.

Roger Pinto, a senator for the opposition party, Podemos, told the US embassy that the government “has evidence that Acha was involved with the alleged Santa Cruz cell”. He added that Achá was involved in trying to solicit funds for the group from opposition leaders in the media luna, the opposition stronghold, but only in order to “set up a self-defense force for the Media … not to assassinate the President”. Pinto contended that, among others, Achá had approached the mayor of the central city of Trinidad, Moises Shriqui, with Rózsa to enlist his support. Pinto said that Shriqui flatly refused to get involved and discounted the group as “a really bad idea”. Another opposition Podemos deputy, Claudio Banegas, told the US embassy that the congressional investigation into the Santa Cruz group had revealed that Achá did in fact have a relationship with the cell. His colleague said his involvement was “not at the top of the lighthouse, just at the bottom”. In another cable from La Paz, Achá is called a “human rights lawyer” and it is noted that political officers from the embassy met twice with him in Santa Cruz while he was investigating the September 2008 massacre of indigenous peasants in the Pando department of Bolivia. “He was preparing a report detailing a high degree of Morales administration involvement to provoke violence in Pando,” the cable added. Halvorssen never mentioned whether this “wholly independent group” had received funding from the HRF for the task, but his own group came to similar politically motivated and erroneous conclusions about the Pando massacre. Incidentally, Thor Halvorssen contacted the Financial Times soon after I asked for an interview with a résumé of my apparent “radicalism” and precipitated my departure from the paper. These “believers in freedom”, as mentioned, only believe in freedom when it benefits them.

La España Gloriosa

Bolivian people, and particularly the business community in the country, have always had a strong disdain for a central government they see as interfering and stifling. To this purpose, in most areas of the country, there are institutions called civic committees, which organize and represent business interests. They have become especially important in the opposition stronghold of the media luna. In Santa Cruz, where the Rózsa group was foiled, the civic committee has become the major non-governmental voice of opposition to Evo Morales. Its presidency has been held by some of the most powerful businessmen and politicians in the country, including Rubén Costas, the current governor of Santa Cruz. Its funding comes from 220 businesses in the department. In its internal report on civil society in Bolivia (which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reported that the two main columns on either side of the state are “the civic committees […] on the right, and the large labor organizations on the left”. There have been accusations that the Santa Cruz civic committee (SCCC) has members with fascist leanings involved in violence against indigenous citizens, particularly in the affiliated youth branch. Ignacio Mendoza, a senator in Sucre, who is part of the left-wing opposition to MAS, told me: “Against us there is the Santa Cruz Civic Committee and the Youth Union, which is a neo-fascist group. These groups always threaten.” In the New York Times, correspondent Simon Romero noted: “It is no surprise that many Bolivian supporters of Mr. Morales view Santa Cruz as a redoubt of racism and elitism.” He added: “This city remains a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the late Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco.”

This would appear to include the SCCC. At the conclusion of a series of interviews at SCCC’s offices, the group’s spokesperson inexplicably allowed me to download a tranche of files from the computer in the main office. These included racist cartoons of Evo Morales, as well as a poem lauding the old colonial country, Spain.

One reads (my translation):

The grand Spain with benign fate. 

Here he planted the sign Of surrender.

And it did in its shadow An eminent people

Of clear front A loyal heart

There is also a letter titled Filial Espana (Spanish affiliate) sent by the president of the committee to the president of the far-right civic committee in Spain, Carlos Duran Banegas, thanking him for his support and help. Another folder includes a coat of arms for Germán Busch who was a president of Bolivia in the 1930s and was believed by many Bolivians to have Nazi tendencies. Reports by the fascist- linked grouping UnoAmerica also feature prominently on the SCCC computer. In fact, among the documents there are photos taken, one must assume, by an SCCC photographer of UnoAmerica delivering its report on Pando to the Organization of American States (OAS) in New York.

The computer files I retrieved were also full of unhinged documents calling Chávez and Morales terrorists. One reporter accurately noted that the SCCC is “a sparkplug of separatist agitation in the East”. Despite these leanings, the US taxpayer, through USAID, is funding members of this group. In the WikiLeaks cables, under the subtitle “Blowing Smoke”, an August 2007 dispatch makes fun of Bolivian government claims about USAID activities being used to help the opposition. But inadvertently this proved it. It noted: “[a]nother USAID contractor, Juan Carlos Urenda (a Santa Cruz civic leader) described the MAS accusations as an attempt to cast a smokescreen over the ‘serious problems in this country’.” A search in the trove of documents from the SCCC’s computer turns up the same Mr Urenda, USAID contractor, as the author for the SCCC of a long article lauding the history of the department’s autonomy struggle. A prominent lawyer in the east, in 1987 he published a book called Departmental Autonomies, which, he noted, “outlines what will be the fundamental doctrine of the process of autonomy”. He went on: “Conscious of the error of having structured the country in a centralized way, [Santa Cruz] has not ceased in its attempt to decentralize the state throughout its republican history.”

It turns out that Mr Urenda was actually one of the founders of the SCCC’s pre-autonomy council and one of the area’s most prominent ideologues. This finding makes a mockery of USAID’s claim to be apolitical. As its own report noted: “it is clear that Bolivian civil society in the first columns on both sides [civic committees and labor organizations] are playing roles that are less social and more political and governmental.” Although they shy away from talking about direct aid, the top brass of the SCCC were full of praise for USAID when I talked to them. Documents from the computer also show extensive preparations for the Ferexpo 2007, a business show in the city, which US ambassador Philip Goldberg would attend. “USAID in Bolivia was supporting democratic organizations and tourism and fairs,” said Ruben Dario Mendez, the spokesperson. “They were interested in fomenting political participation. Evo doesn’t like that, he doesn’t like there to be freedom.”

It’s not just USAID that helps out. Mr Mendez noted that the Journalists’ Association of Santa Cruz has an agreement with the US embassy that helps them print books and put on events, an agreement which is not in place in other parts of the country. “In some cases the US helps us,” he said. “Anyone can submit a proposal to get help. I have attended events about political governance, about freedom of expression, human rights,” he added. “There was a new penal prosecution code, and a workshop on that has been carried out by USAID for years.” He was still optimistic about the ability of USAID to go about its work: “There are still organizations and people in Santa Cruz who believe in democracy. This was proved the other day when I went to the opening of a center for the support of democracy, USAID helped fund this, they work with the university president, and the vice-president of the civic committee helped set this up.” He obviously thought that USAID believed in his type of democracy. “We have a totalitarian system here, if there was a democratic government there wouldn’t be a problem here. The biggest problem in Bolivia is centralism.” (A view echoed in USAID’s reports.) The extensive cache of reports from both organizations on the office computer also reveals the links between the SCCC and the NGOs HRF and UnoAmerica. These were evidently being sent out as primers on the situation in Bolivia.

I found more evidence of US support for these right-wing opposition forces in Sucre, the judicial capital of the country, where in August 2006 President Morales announced the opening of the constituent assembly. It would spend six months redrafting the constitution with enhanced rights for indigenous communities, more economic control of the country’s resources, as well as land reform. It was eventually passed by a referendum in 2009. “Sucre is like the dividing line between the east and the altiplano [poorer indigenous west] so the idea was it was a place that could bring peace between the two peoples,” Mr Mendoza, the left-wing senator, told me as we sat in the local government headquarters. “But radical groups here connected themselves with Santa Cruz and all of a sudden it became about something bigger.” The whole process was marred by violence, as the opposition set out to scupper the process. “It all comes down to racism,” he added. “The constituent assembly was largely made up of indigenous farmers and that prompted racism. People were saying, ‘Whoever doesn’t jump is a llama’, acting superior to indigenous people and calling them llamas because they are from the altiplano.”

As the killings and lootings got under way, the US made no statement of condemnation. “They are setting fire to gas pipelines, and the US government does not condemn that?” asked Morales at the time. “Of course, they know they [the opposition groups] are their allies. So why would they denounce them?” He was right.

The tactics used by the SCCC mirrored those used in Chile when the US was trying to destabilize the government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s; he was eventually taken out in a US-backed anti-democratic coup. In Bolivia, there was the violence from the local youth groups but also strikes – this time organized by the business elites – designed to bring the country to its knees and keep goods from being delivered to the west of the country. The Confederation of Private Businesses called for a national shutdown if the government refused “to change its economic policies”. Altogether this was called a “civic coup”. It failed, but around the same time the US was trying to rejuvenate the opposition, according to evidence uncovered during my time there. While in Sucre, I talked to the civic committee for the department of Chuquisaca, in which the city sits, still an opposition stronghold. Félix Patzi, the president, described the civic committee’s role as keeping “an eye on government projects to make sure they follow through on their promises”. But the US embassy had been in contact with a staggering request, he recalled. “They made an offer years ago. They wanted to finance a meeting of all the civic committees in the country to bring them together in 2007,” he said. The idea was “to bring together the works of the different civic committees to encourage communication between them”. He added: “I don’t know why the US did it, but we heard from Santa Cruz that the idea was to create a national civic committee.” The US obviously knew (from its own internal documents) that such a national civic committee would be right wing and take on a political and governmental role. That must have been its intention. Mr Patzi said the Chuquisaca committee refused because it doesn’t receive outside funding, but, he added, “I don’t how many other civic committees have accepted money from the US.”

Back at the SCCC I talked to other officials who gave the impression of a tight relationship with the US. “We’ve always tried to work so that civil society in Bolivia has its own place to develop,” said Nicolas Ribera Cardozo, vice president of the SCCC. “We’ve always had a conversation with the US about it.” He said that in the past year-and-a-half as vice president he had had two conversations with the head of communications and publications at the embassy. “What they put across was how they could strengthen channels of communication,” he said. “The embassy said that they would help us in our communication work and they have a series of publications where they were putting forward their ideas.” But things were even better under Bush. “There were better programs under Bush; there were programs from USAID and DEA [the US Drug Enforcement Administration] to deal with narco-trafficking.” He added that the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy had “held informative workshops for young people about leadership”. For him it was not controversial that these programs were designed to help the opposition. “Of course they were opposition, it’s a liberal train of thought, you train people to be more aware, productive.”

The most controversial aspect of the SCCC is its youth branch, the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC), who have been called by one Bolivia analyst “paramilitary shock-troops”. They roam the streets of Santa Cruz in times of unrest and have been involved in violent attacks and atrocities against indigenous peasants, as well as damage to government buildings. The US embassy noted that the UJC “have frequently attacked pro-MAS/government people and installations”, adding, “Their actions frequently appear more racist than politically motivated. Several months ago, a group of mainly white Youth Union members attacked an altiplano migrant … The Youth Union has boasted to the press that it has signed up 7000 members to participate in the [civil defense militias] – the number is likely inflated but many of those who have signed-on are militant.” Another cable noted: “the Santa Cruz youth union seems to be radicalizing: one group waving Santa Cruz flags drove through town in a jeep emblazoned with swastikas.” In the aftermath of the Rózsa plot, the police apprehended Juan Carlos Gueber Bruno, reportedly an advisor to the UJC, and former SCCC activist, who was known as “Comandante Bruno”.

“Youth Union violence was basically in retaliation to a threat,” Mr Cardozo told me. “The youth groups did participate in these things but because they thought it was a threat and MAS started it.”

I also talked to Samuel Ruiz, president of the UJC, at the SCCC headquarters, surrounded by photos of previous presidents, including Marinkovic and Costas. “The committee was formed in 1952 as a means to protect this region, it was under attack from other regions and felt it needed to protect itself,” said Mr Ruiz. “The civic committee existed but it was felt it could do with a youth branch too.” Now the UJC has 3,000 passive members, and 500 active, according to its president. Asked three times if it has any indigenous people as members, he avoided the question twice. On the third time of asking, he replied: “What percentage? I don’t know. There are 20 representatives in different provinces that represent areas with indigenous people.” He complained that when Morales came to power he got rid of USAID and other US groups – a false claim. “It has had a huge impact,” he said. “When there were international agencies, Bolivia was much more peaceful, now we see loose arms and legs about the streets, there are kidnappings, it’s violent and dangerous whereas it wasn’t before.” The UJC had taken matters into its own hands. He said that the government was bringing people from Chile and Peru to train farmers in military combat, and that Venezuelan and Cuban doctors were actually providing military training. His paranoia about Cuban and Venezuelan influence was similar to that shown in the cables from US officials. He claimed that Morales sent campesinos to Santa Cruz to start violence at the height of the tension, even though the cables noted that Morales went out of his way to avoid casualties. “[M]ilitary planners have told us that President Morales has given them instructions not to incur civilian casualties,” one noted. “Field commanders continue to tell us they will require a written order from President Morales if asked to commit violence against opposition demonstrators.” Another said: “A senior military planner told [an embassy official] December 13 that President Morales wants the military to be careful to avoid violent confrontations with demonstrators if called upon to support Bolivian police.”

“We are monitoring government to see what they are doing,” Ruiz claimed. “But for example they are getting people from Peru to come and train campesinos who kill my friends, and they are training campesinos in war, what are we meant to do?” On the resulting violence against indigenous people, Ruiz said it was self-defense. “After last elections, Evo sent campesinos to Santa Cruz to start aggression; our organization sent out its people but only to defend itself … It’s not a direct threat,” he admitted, but it worried him because they were “training campesinos who can’t even read or go out and feed themselves”. Ruiz claimed the UJC has never had any weapons – which is also demonstrably false.

The cables also revealed US suspicions in the same period that “some Crucenos are reportedly forming fighting groups”. They would know, as they were funding them. “Sources reported that Crucenos are developing fighting/defense groups and are equipped with weapons such as long rifles and hand guns.” Ruiz claimed that fighting campesinos caused the Pando massacre. “The Venezuelans killed the indigenous people. There are photos … The Venezuelans infiltrated by entering through the Cuban doctors,” he said. “They went to Pando to form military strategy for organization, so it wasn’t chaos, but all the campesinos, armed people, were drunk, and the Venezuelans killed them by mistake because they didn’t know what side they were on, and they also shot in the leg a Bolivian journalist because they wanted them to stop filming.” The SCCC were also implicated in the Rózsa plot by Ignacio Villa Vargas, a local fixer and driver for the group, who said that a number of their members had been involved. But the SCCC believed that the Morales government organized the Rózsa plot. They did, though, admit to me that Rózsa had been to their offices, but they claimed that he was trying to infiltrate the committee on behalf of the government, disguised as a journalist. I was shown screenshots of supposed emails between Rózsa and Vice President Álvaro García Linera, which were clearly faked, dating from August 2008 and March 2009, just before the raid in the Hotel Las Americas.

The cables revealed by WikiLeaks noted that the opposition “are nervous to the point of paranoia”. They were also trying to cover their tracks with delusional conspiracy theories. As noted above, one of those suspected of involvement in the terror cell was retired president of the SCCC, Branko Marinkovic, one of the wealthiest men in Bolivia, who owns a vast soybean business and large tracts of land in the east of country. His parents were emigrants from the former Yugoslavia in the 1950s and Marinkovic became a successful businessman before moving into politics, a well-trodden route in the east of Bolivia. When the Morales government came to power and embarked on a land reform program that took fallow lands from their owners to give to landless peasants, men like Marinkovic had much to lose. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, Marinkovic predicted that Bolivia would soon be like Zimbabwe “in which economic chaos will become the norm”. (The head of the International Monetary Fund’s western hemisphere countries unit in the same year praised the Morales government for what he referred to as its “very responsible” macroeconomic policies.) But Marinkovic continued – “speaking English with a light Texas twang he picked up at Southern Methodist University” – with a veiled threat: “If there is no legitimate international mediation in our crisis, there is going to be confrontation. And unfortunately, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Bolivians.” This was just before the Rózsa-Flores plot was scuppered.

The New York Times also noted that Croatian news services had investigated claims that Marinkovic “sought to raise a paramilitary force with mercenaries from Montenegro, where his mother was born”. Marinkovic denied the claims, but there is no doubt he was pushing for a break-up of the country in the same way Yugoslavia had been split in the 1990s. On September 1, 2008, Marinkovic flew to the US, and when he came back just a week later the east of the country was in open revolt. At around the same time, US ambassador Philip Goldberg met in secret with the governor of Santa Cruz, Rubén Costas (the meeting was captured by a news organization). Initially Marinkovic filed a lawsuit against two government officials for “slander” for linking him with the Rózsa-Flores plot. His attorney declared that he “is in Santa Cruz, will stay in Santa Cruz, and will remain in the country”, to prove he had no links to the terrorist cell. Except now he is in hiding. The UJC president divulged that he was in the US. “The government has already cast him as guilty and he can’t defend himself from here so he asked the US for political exile and they granted it to him.” Like Achá. He added that he didn’t know if Marinkovic had ever met Rózsa. Maybe it’s not so surprising. “The US has had a very good relationship with Branko Marinkovic,” said Mr Navarro, MAS minister. “When he was head of civic committee they shared their opposition to the president.” Marinkovic once jettisoned plans to visit Argentina due to distrust of the Morales-allied Kirchner government, fearing that he might be arrested there and extradited to Bolivia. During one of Marinkovic’s trips to the US, he, contrariwise, participated in strategy meetings with political consultants Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and other polling and consulting firms, according to WikiLeaks cables.

When I had finished talking to the SCCC, I asked if there was anyone else I should speak to. The spokesperson recommended former general Gary Prado, who is infamous for being the man who captured Che Guevara and handed him over to his executioners. At the time Prado was a young captain in the Bolivian army. “Where do I find him?” I asked. “He usually has coffee over there in a little café about 4pm every day,” I was told. I subsequently found out that Gary Prado is under house arrest, but as it is not enforced he moves around freely. I head along to his house in an upmarket neighborhood of Santa Cruz. “I am under house arrest but I go to work every day so there’s not much point in that,” he said. Mr Navarro had told me there was “a group of retired generals who have advised the civic committee in the event of a government attack on them”. Prado is alleged to be among them. The government has drawn attention to a meeting Prado had with Rózsa at his house. “I gave an interview to Rózsa- Flores just like I’m giving to you, he came here to this same room, we had an interview about the guerrilla Che Guevara in Bolivia, he took a picture with me here, and that’s all the contact I had with him.” Rózsa apparently thought he was the new Che Guevara, as well as the new Hemingway. But from what Prado does know, he doesn’t believe that Rózsa planned to assassinate Morales. “There was no intent of assassination, never, absolutely not,” he said. Asked why they bought in foreigners, he replied: “They were brought to Santa Cruz by some people probably to try to create a group of mercenaries to defend Santa Cruz.” Then he added that the cell was “probably created to justify political repression”. He would not offer a guess on who bought the mercenaries in. The US, he added, merely “promote seminars about democracy and freedom”.

The massacre that wasn’t

In May 2008 political turmoil rocked Bolivia and threatened civil war. Santa Cruz held an autonomy referendum, which the government claimed was a move to secession by the eastern province. Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz, had said in the run-up that the vote – which was not legally sanctioned by the National Electoral Court or recognized by the OAS – would “give birth to a new republic”. (This is the same governor whom terror suspect Mario Tadic told authorities had met with the terror cell’s leader three times and vaguely discussed “organizing something”.) As things hurtled out of control with mass protests and violence, President Morales refrained from annulling the plebiscites which took place in other departments and called a recall referendum on his own mandate. He won resoundingly, with two- thirds of the national vote. At this point, desperate and bewildered, the opposition went on strike, and sent out the UJC (the far-right youth group) to attack government buildings and local indigenous people. The defeat at the polls led the opposition to unilaterally declare “autonomy” in four of the country’s eastern provinces. One of the platforms of the autonomy movement was the rejection of central government control over profits from the country’s natural gas reserves concentrated in the region. In the Bolivian context, therefore, the term was used as a euphemism for increased control over taxation, police and public works. If autonomy was granted in the form Santa Cruz wanted, Morales’ extensive reforms would be impossible – which was obviously the aim of the request.

The strategy of the autonomy movement was to take complete control of the media luna, provoke a national crisis to destabilize the government, and convince the army to remain neutral or move against Morales. The mayor of Santa Cruz, Percy Fernández, had already called on the military to overthrow Morales’ “useless government” just before the August referendum. In this heady tumult, in September 2008, 13 indigenous peasants in the Pando department of Bolivia were massacred in violence erupting across the region between pro- government and opposition forces. The atrocity remains relatively uncontroversial – unless you are the HRF, Achá, or the Bolivian opposition. A report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) placed the blame for the killing of the peasants at the hands of people working for the local prefecture, which was led at the time by the opposition politician Leopoldo Fernández. Fernández is still in jail in La Paz, after being arrested, in the aftermath, on charges that he was involved in ordering the attack. The US embassy, in the WikiLeaks cables, noted that he was being held “under dubious legal pretext”.

The UN report unequivocally called it a “massacre of peasants” and a “grave violation of human rights”, concluding that the massacre was committed by personnel from the local road service office, members of the Pando civic committee and others linked to the prefecture. The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) also sent a delegation to investigate, headed by Argentina’s undersecretary for human rights who concluded that the Bolivian government had acted fairly and it was the opposition that was responsible for the murders. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet called an emergency meeting in Santiago of UNASUR to discuss the Bolivian crisis. The resulting Declaration of La Moneda, signed by the 12 UNASUR governments, expressed their “full and decided support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales”, and warned that their respective governments “will not recognize any situation that entails an attempt for a civil coup that ruptures the institutional order, or that compromises the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia”. Morales, who participated in the meeting, thanked UNASUR for its support, declaring: “For the first time in South American’s history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems without the presence of the United States.”

But men like Achá and his “affiliate” HRF saw it differently. In October, a month after the massacre, HRF dispatched their own team to Bolivia to investigate – not the massacre but the “arbitrary detention” of “opposition members and at least one journalist”. HRF’s sources in Bolivia, presumably Achá, were telling it how serious the situation was. “Preliminary research done by our staff and reports sent to us from Bolivian civil society advocates suggest that the recent arrests of journalists and members of the opposition in Bolivia are politically motivated,” said Sarah Wasserman, chief operating officer of HRF. The report from Achá, as mentioned by the US ambassador, posited that the MAS government had actually initiated the murders. And the HRF went on to link the massacre to a speech by government minister Ramón Quintana exhorting government sympathizers to take Pando governor Leopoldo Fernández “to the end of the world” and “give him an epitaph: Prefect, rest in peace and live with the worms. “The speech preceded violence that erupted on September 11, 12 and 13 in Pando, where more than 20 people were murdered for political reasons,” they noted. The report by the Bolivian “affiliate” of the HRF blames the massacre on Morales and his national executive officers. “The deterioration of the rule of law, individual rights … do not allow the existence of a democratic system,” the report concluded. “In Bolivia, with this background, it outlines the installation of a regime despotic and dictatorial presided by Evo Morales.”

To be fair, there were other NGOs which came to a similar conclusion. One was the aforementioned UnoAmerica, another “human rights” group based in Colombia, whose logo shows crosshairs in the ‘o’ in their name. It was founded in 2008 by Alejandro Peña Esclusa, who is now detained in his home country, Venezuela, for allegedly being found with detonators and 2lb of explosives in his home. The Venezuelan government claims he has close ties to the CIA, and was involved in the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed Hugo Chávez. In one video, Esclusa is seen insisting on a plan for massive protests across Venezuela, making the government unable to control it. “It is a more efficient mechanism that generates a political crisis and a crisis of instability that forces the regime to withdraw the reform,” he says. UnoAmerica became heavily involved in Bolivia after the Pando massacre, sending a team on a five-day mission to investigate what had happened. To conduct the investigation they partnered with NGOs from Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay and Venezuela (whose names read like a Who’s Who of fascists in Latin America). Taking part from Argentina was El Movimiento por la Verdadera Historia, or Movement for the True History, a group which seeks to bring to justice “subversives” working against the US-backed fascist junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and murdered an estimated 30,000 people. One of its Argentina delegates was Jorge Mones Ruiz, an intelligence officer of the Argentine army in Bolivia during last dictatorship. (The government also claimed that the Rózsa cell had links with fascist groups in Argentina, which go by the name of carapintadas or “painted faces”.)

The joint report concluded that “the government of President Evo Morales had planned and executed the violent acts”. It claimed it had “sufficient information to demonstrate the responsibility of the Evo Morales administration in the so called Pando Massacre”. The WikiLeaks cables revealed that the US embassy was receiving highly questionable intelligence like this from Achá and other contacts in the opposition, without applying the constant cynicism it reserved for MAS statements. In conversation with a political officer from the embassy, one contact “alleged the MAS deliberately fomented unrest in Pando in September to justify a military siege, depose Prefect Leopoldo Fernandez, and arrest opposition-aligned leaders to swing the balance of power to the MAS in the Senate”. It is not countered. Another cable noted after the September 2008 violence in Pando: “the government illegally jailed Prefect Leopoldo Fernandez and violently detained over forty more, many of them prominent political opposition members.” The UN had said that Fernández’s jailing was not illegal.

We’ll take care of him

The most active of the many US agencies working in Bolivia is USAID, the main foreign aid arm of the US government. USAID poured money into the country: between 1964 and 1979, it contributed more than $1.5 billion, trying to build a citizenry and investor climate conducive to US corporate needs. For nearly half a century it has carried out its ostensible goal of providing “economic and humanitarian assistance” – a gift “from the American people”. The agency operates around the world in a similar capacity, and invests billions of dollars annually on projects that span from “democracy promotion” to “judicial reform”.

Its operations are controversial. The Morales administration has continually said that it uses its money to push the strategic goals of the US government under the cloak of “development”, claims denied by the US government. The Bolivian government also derides the lack of transparency, in comparison with EU aid money, for its programs. Mark Feierstein, USAID assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, put its raison d’être bluntly in December 2010 when he said: “USAID’s programs are not charity … they are not only from the

American people, as the agency’s motto says, they are for the American people.” As an aside, Mr Feierstein was a key campaign consultant to the former president Lozada (Goni) who fled to the US to avoid facing trial for the massacre of protesters in La Paz. There is now an attempt to prosecute him under the Aliens Tort Statute for his role in the murders. (Feierstein has never expressed regret about the campaign; in fact, the same firm did polling for Morales’ opponent, Manfred Reyes Villa, in 2009.)

Like other methods and agencies used to control democracies in Latin America and around the world, it is hard to pin down USAID. But on-the-ground interviews, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and the WikiLeaks cables have made it possible to unearth the strategies this agency uses to keep its stranglehold on Bolivia, at the same time providing a template for how it is used across the region to undermine left-wing democratic governments. There is no doubt how USAID personnel felt about Morales before he came into power, and one young American student heard first-hand their plans for him. In the summer of 2005, he found himself in La Paz learning Spanish on a break from university when the powder keg of political resistance in the city blew up. President Carlos Mesa – who had taken over from Goni in 2003 after the massacre of protesters in La Paz – had just stepped down. The student decided to go on a bike trip. “Basically I went down the ‘Death Road’, the world’s most dangerous road, with some other gringos,” he said, not wanting to be named. “There were some folks from the US embassy and USAID on the trip. I remember them having a discussion on the road down to [the city of ] Coroico, talking about not wanting Evo to get into power. They said something along the lines of, ‘We can’t let Evo get into power’.”

In fact, the officials went further. “There were two things that were said, one was ‘We can’t let Evo get into power’, and then something along the lines of, it struck me, it was harsher than that, it was something along the lines of, ‘We’ll have to take care of him’. It was ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted that we have to take him out, which I don’t think is what they meant. But when they said it I thought, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe they are saying this, they don’t even know me’.” The conversation continued as the group descended the mountain. “I’m assuming they thought I was sympathetic,” he said. “This was right in the middle of the protests and the president resigning, so a lot of the tourists had fled Bolivia, so perhaps they thought I was there because I was working for some sympathetic capacity, maybe working for an international corporation, or related to the embassy or something. It shocked me at the time. One, it seemed weird to have this conversation in public, because not everybody is sympathetic. And two it seemed like they were meddling in democracy, people that shouldn’t be involved in those things, the US embassy and USAID shouldn’t have anything to do with voting a president into power or not.”

But involved they were and would remain as Morales eventually did take power.

Much important work has been carried out on this topic by the investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood in the period before MAS came to power, but his Freedom of Information Act requests stopped being answered when he asked for information about projects after the election of 2005. What Bigwood unearthed from before 2005 supports the testimony of the American student. Early on, the MAS party was fingered as a problem for the US that had to be dealt with. In a declassified July 2002 letter from the US embassy, a planned USAID political party reform project was outlined which aimed to “help build moderate, pro- democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical [MAS]”. The next section, presumably more open on details, was redacted. A series of emails from USAID functionaries in Bolivia also detailed attempts to form relationships between the US government and indigenous groups in the coca growing region of the Chapare (the sector from which Morales emerged) and the eastern departments, aiming, as Bigwood explained, to “create a common USAID-guided front against … the MAS”. A few years into the MAS government, USAID made itself so unpopular in the Chapare region that its local leaders in 2008 suspended all projects funded by the agency. They said they would replace the funding with money from Chávez’s Venezuela. In Pando, the mayors signed a declaration in 2008 also expelling USAID. “No foreign program, least of all those from USAID, will solve our problems of poverty, physical integration, family prosperity and human development while we ourselves don’t decide the future,” it said.

I managed to procure documents that relate to the operations of projects since 2005, and they show a similar effort to weaken the power and popularity of the MAS government. The USAID tactic is not the overthrow of the government, but the slow transformation of Bolivian society from its participatory democracy to the type of democracy it had before: controlled by the US and good for investors. The Bolivian example is important because it provides a template of how USAID tries to control Latin American democracies that have “got out of control” and make them work “for the American people”, or American business interests.

Of course, USAID pitches itself as something completely different. In one cable from La Paz, the ambassador wrote: “We will continue to counter misunderstandings about USAID’s transparency and apolitical nature with reality.” But the reality is that the agency is not transparent or apolitical. And its own internal documents reveal as much. USAID maintains it is transparent with the money it invests in the country, but the Bolivian government claims large sums are being handed out without its knowledge, in contravention of usual aid etiquette. In the WikiLeaks cables, Morales tells the US he wants to start an “open registry to monitor aid”, but it was not supported by the US. The Bolivian government’s estimate that 70 percent of aid money is unaccounted for appears overstated, but there is clear evidence that money was being spent without the knowledge of the government.

After one spate of criticism of USAID programs by Morales, the US ambassador noted that the country “cannot afford to risk USD120 million in assistance” from the agency (it works out as about $12 for every Bolivian). In another, it is noted: “we’re spending about $90 million annually to further social and economic inclusion of Bolivia’s historically marginalized indigenous groups and to support democratic institutions and processes, including decentralized governance.” But an American journalist living in La Paz was present at an emergency meeting called by the US embassy to explain USAID’s activities to foreign journalists, after another round of criticism. She was given a breakdown of spending by USAID. “This information was given to the small group of reporters gathered to use as background in stories,” she told me. It outlined $16.8 million to USAID health programs, $19.2 million to integrated alternative development (alternative to coca production), $15.3 million to environmental and economic development programs, and $22 million to counter-narcotics. It added up to $73.3 million. But the ambassador had said in the cable that $120 million was invested in Bolivia per year. Where was the other $50 million going?

Internal evaluation documents give an indication of why some projects are best kept secret. I procured a host of documents on USAID “democracy promotion” programs in Bolivia in the period after the Morales government was elected. In one, outlining the goals and success of its “administration of justice” programs which have run in the country for 17 years – “among the largest in Latin America” – the group was explicit about where its money was going. “USAID/ Bolivia programs include support to promote decentralization and municipal strengthening, support to Congress and political parties,” it noted. There is no mention of which political parties it is “supporting” but this is candid language that the group and the US embassy have never used in public. (Morales has said that one mayor told him that USAID offered him $15,000 to $25,000 to oppose the president.) Decentralization in this context is also a euphemism for strengthening the opposition. One of USAID’s central functions in Bolivia, ramped up since 2005, has been moving power away from central government, an effort which clearly chimes with the interests of the opposition in the east.

The justice project was conceived by USAID and Bolivian officials before the 2005 election that brought Evo Morales to power, and coordinators admit that “the personnel changes at the higher echelons” of the government “completely changed the atmosphere” in which it worked. The project hoped to open a training school for public defenders, but in mid-2007 it was suspended, “a prime example of the project being ‘overtaken by events’ that were completely outside the control of … USAID,” the evaluation noted. Internally, USAID was very critical of the Morales government on the subject, commenting that the Bar Associations of Bolivia have been “significantly weakened in the past few years” by the government’s policies. As is customary in projects of this kind, USAID paid subcontractors to carry out their functions, enhancing the already intricate web of institutions and clouding accountability. This project was run by Checchi and Company Consulting, set up in 1973 by economist and Democratic donor Vincent Checchi, which then brought on board the State University of New York and Partners of the Americas. One of the main ways USAID exerts influence – in this justice program but also through its other activities – is through training programs. These programs school young Bolivians in the “American way”.

In Sucre, I spoke to Ramiro Velasquez, an administrator in the local government offices who has worked for a USAID-funded program in the city. He said it was set up by a consultancy firm, funded by USAID, which has a subsidiary called Fortalecimiento Identidad de Democracia, or FIDEM. “They were looking for Bolivian operators in every department to do their work,” he said. “FIDEM was looking for an NGO to do the work and they would look for operators. They were in La Paz, Oruro, Potosi, and Sucre.” Mr Velasquez was asked to be an operator and told they wanted him to run courses on “democracy and participation”, a program eventually shut down by the Morales government. “This project was aimed at young people,” he said. “So to get young people, you had to get into universities and social movements and state institutions, even the church.” In the end 600 young people signed up. The courses took on two phases with the first workshops an opportunity to select around 20 young people to move on to La Paz for the second phase, carried out by FIDEM and another NGO. It was called “leadership training”, ostensibly to create a new generation of Bolivian leaders. But they had to have the right opinions. “They were teaching about democracy but not the type of democracy Evo and Bolivians have,” he said. “They were teaching them about representative democracy not participatory democracy … It was clearly to create leaders for the opposition.”

The cables from La Paz support such a conclusion. One visiting official went to a “civic education project funded by USAID through the NGO FIDEM and implemented by the Santa Cruz binational center”. Its aim was to grow a “civic responsibility” arm in addition to its educational and cultural activities. “The project was reaching 21,000 (out of 150,000) residents in the marginalized neighbourhood ‘Plan 3000’ which is widely thought to be a MAS stronghold,” it added, as if to explain why it was a good thing. The local residents were “enthusiastic” about the initiative, it noted. The same cable registered that Santa Cruz residents were “determined as much as possible to halt democratic back-sliding. Their main request to us is to report accurately to Washington and the international community what is really happening in Bolivia.” Vice President García Linera repeatedly told the US embassy he opposed democracy programs like FIDEM’s, because they strive to “win the hearts and minds”, presenting a vision of democracy that differs from the government’s. It was true. FIDEM works in eight of the nine departments in Bolivia (three of which are governed by democratically elected MAS prefects) providing the kind of state-building training and technical assistance that USAID and other donors provide worldwide. The work – regional development planning, service delivery, financial planning and more – is technical and non-political. Its focus on departmental authorities was planned to weaken MAS, as was admitted in the cables: “MAS’s goals [is] strengthening municipal governments to the detriment of departmental governments, thus weakening one of the MAS’s main sources of opposition.”

Also in Sucre, I talked to the MAS mayor, Verónica Berrios Vergara, who has been under concerted attack since taking her position in 2008. The city had been the venue of intense violent unrest in 2007 when the constituent assembly, given the responsibility of writing a new constitution, was placed there. In 2008, an opposition candidate was voted into the position of mayor in Sucre, but was disqualified because he was under a criminal charge. Ms Vergara took his place on a decision of the municipal council, causing an outbreak of violence and unrest. “Vested interests were behind the anger of the opposition and that led to us living the most difficult moment in Sucre in many years,” she told me. She said various explosives were thrown at the mayor’s headquarters and the dissidents tried to kill her on a number of occasions. “One of the questions we asked ourselves at the time is where these students got the money from, because they had the money to buy lots of explosives. They don’t even usually have enough for rent and food, where did they get the money for them from?” She began to cry as she recounted her experiences at the sharp end of the turmoil in Bolivia. “I do fear that these groups are still waiting in the wings and at any point they could come out and do something to me,” she said. “This is really about racism and also that this local government and national government are threatening business interests.” She believed that USAID was behind the funding to some of these groups: “The fact that the Rózsa affair was taking place at the same time and there were question marks over USAID’s work and suggestions they were trying to overthrow the government leads me to question where the money was coming from.” At the time it sparked violence in the streets of the city, which Ms Vergara thinks USAID was behind. “They are in union with the opposition and media to stand in the way of the government’s development plans in the country.”

Building democracy an investor-friendly business climate

USAID had another reason to dislike President Morales and his government: they weren’t good for business. The investment climate in Bolivia, which had been open for business to US transnationals for decades, was turning into a more hostile place. Their fears were shared by their natural allies among the oligarchy of European descent in the east of Bolivia. Both were increasingly scared of the economic

program of the Morales government, which has provided a model for developing countries around the world: achieving high growth, as well as reductions in poverty, while part-nationalizing key industries. The Bolivian government, even when composed of ruthless dictators, maintained an investor-friendly business climate, which saw US mining companies, such as Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp, take advantage of the vast natural resources in the country as the Spanish had done before them. Bolivia’s major exports to the United States are tin, gold, jewellery and wood products. For a long time, foreign investors were accorded national treatment, and foreign owners of companies enjoyed virtually no restriction. Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Bolivia grew to $7 billion in stock during 1996–2002, nearly all of which went to the business interests in the east.

Concern about nationalization crops up frequently in the cables from La Paz. “There is … rampant speculation about President Morales’ traditional May 1st speech, in which he is expected by many to announce nationalization of companies based in Santa Cruz, potentially including Cotas or food industries,” one reads. “If the latter, many expect Branko Marinkovic’s cooking oil and other companies to be taken in the name of ‘food security’.” The cables from La Paz do not pull punches when outlining their opposition to the economic thinking of the MAS government. One advisor to Morales, an economics professor is, one cable notes, “steeped in out- dated socialist economic theories and has yet to accept the practical realities of a globalized economy”. It adds that he “may be beginning to understand the real impact of free trade on job creation”, but, unforgivably, “he appears to believe that markets in Venezuela and China serve as alternatives to US markets. He has told Bolivian exporters to seek markets outside the United States, unconvinced that the US is crucial to their trade.” It notes that he recently returned from Venezuela after negotiating an agreement to buy Bolivian soy. “Additionally, he has regularly antagonized other businesses, telling them that the President’s Dignity Tariff, a new lower price meant to provide cheap electricity to Bolivians is a done deal, remarking that the private sector should either get on board or suffer.”

USAID had a plan to deal with this. One of the most important components of the justice project is “promotion of legal security”, through which “it was hoped that the business and investment climate in Bolivia would be improved”. The principal donor for this purpose was USAID and the project was budgeted $4.8 million over five years. It chimed with the sentiment in cables from La Paz, one of which noted, the “key areas of concern in Bolivia currently are democracy, narcotics, and protection for US investments”(my emphasis). The justice project sought “reforms in the commercial and administrative law areas” as well as “business organization assistance and training”. For this purpose, USAID funding would help develop a civil, commercial and administrative law curriculum for law schools in Bolivia. In a sign of the penetration of USAID into the highest echelons of the justice system, USAID and the Bolivian Supreme Court jointly published a document called Civil and Commercial Justice in Bolivia: Diagnosis and Recommendations for Change, which urged the creation of a specialized commercial law jurisdiction. It would “enhance the investment climate of Bolivia”, while the “establishment of a good business climate is essential to attracting investment” and will “maintain and improve its competitiveness”. It noted: “This component was important to the overall success of the … project due to the fact that it enlisted enthusiastic support from many private sector actors, while also furthering the goal of improving the investment and business climate in Bolivia.” The agency worked with its “partner organization”, the National Chamber of Commerce, in order to replicate and strengthen arbitration centers through local chambers of commerce (big donors to civic committees). “If Bolivia wants to attract foreign investment … then it will need legal security for investors,” it noted. “Should there be an opportunity to continue the work in this area, it would be of high importance for the development of Bolivia.” Their natural allies in this task were organizations like CAINCO, a business confederation in Santa Cruz. In the aftermath of the Rózsa shoot-out, another suspect, Alejandro Melgar, who was a key figure in CAINCO, fled the country. Eduardo Paz, the president of CAINCO, was also an investor in the Santa Cruz civic committee. One cable noted that “The main impact [of nationalization] has been to halt new investment in the [energy] sector, which Bolivia needs to meet domestic demand and fulfil contractual obligations to Brazil and Argentina.” It added that “[as] a political measure, however, the ‘nationalization’ remains wildly popular.” It was also successful. In June 2011, Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, raised Bolivia’s credit ratings by one notch, praising President Evo Morales’ “prudent” macroeconomic policies which allowed for a steady decline in the country’s debt ratios.

The truth was that the US embassy was fearful for US mining investments, despite high-level Bolivian officials giving “repeated assurances that the Morales administration will respect existing US mining interests”.

Threats that the Bolivian government would nationalize the mining industry – including taking over a smelter owned by Swiss company Glencore (which had been sold by ex-president Goni) – scared them. “We continue to urge the [Government of Bolivia] to respect existing mining concessions and to limit tax and royalty hikes,” one cable noted. In other words, create a good “business climate” at the expense of the population. The US embassy viewed the Morales administration as contrary to its interests. “Strengthening and supporting democracy in Bolivia is our mission’s primary concern,” notes another cable. But in the next line it says: “Although the ruling MAS party and President Evo Morales were elected with a clear majority in fair and open elections, their actions since assuming power have often displayed anti-democratic tendencies.” Elsewhere the cables note the “overwhelming victory” of MAS in elections. Despite this, the US called Morales a “leader with strong anti-democratic tendencies” who “manipulates the media”. His closest advisors were compared to “back alley thugs”.

In fact, the democratic credentials and popular mandate of the MAS government are among the most stellar in the world. First elected to the presidency in December 2005 by 54 percent of the popular vote, nearly double the 29 percent of his nearest rival, Morales was re-elected in December 2009 by 67 percent of the public vote, more than double the percentage won by his nearest opponent, Manfred Reyes Villa. In between these landslides, Morales won the recall referendum called in the face of the “autonomy movement” in August 2008 with 67 percent of the public voting for him to be returned. Just five months later, in January 2009, Morales won the constitutional referendum with 61 percent voting in favor, to 39 percent against. In 2014, he won yet another landslide. But the embassy was disparaging of these achievements, saying Morales was “like a struggling student in the areas of economics and international relations decision-making”. It also noted his apparent desire to become a dictator: “[As] an admirer of Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Morales probably is drawn by the longevity of their time in power and seeks to emulate their ‘success’.” It was rubbish. The referendum in 2009 stipulated a two- term limit for the presidency. On the occasion of a foreign dignitary visiting, the ambassador pushed him “to encourage Morales to follow a democratic path”, alongside, of course, pushing him “to respect US mining interests to take advantage of free trade”.

The cables are full of fear about US investments. “One US investment which is vulnerable is San Cristobal mine, which is 65 percent owned by Apex Silver,” said one cable. “San Cristobal would be particularly hard-hit by a bill currently in Congress, which would increase mining taxes. Although the Bolivian government claims to want a fifty-fifty split of profits, the proposed tax increases actually result in, on average, a 60 percent government take of profits.” Although fantastically rich in silver and other mineral wealth, in the past the Bolivian people had never benefitted and stayed poor.

Trading bribes

The US was also using trade deals as leverage in trying to get MAS to change its economic outlook. In September 2008, President Bush suspended the crucial trade preferences that Bolivia enjoyed – alongside Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA). The country has lost millions of dollars in exports because of this punitive action. The ostensible reason was Bolivia’s uncooperative attitude to coca eradication in the country, but political and economic motives were thought to be highly relevant. A Reuters article written a few weeks afterward noted that “the decision came one day after five leading US business groups urged the Bush administration and Congress to consider ending trade benefits for both Bolivia and Ecuador because of what they described as inadequate protections for foreign investors in both countries”. The next month, in November, President Morales announced that the DEA would be expelled from the country. For decades, hundreds of DEA agents swarmed the northern Pando and Beni regions, destroying coca crops and, in the process, becoming implicated in massacres of the indigenous cocaleros. Largely given a free rein to carry out military operations or eradication by successive governments eager to please their masters, the former cocalero Morales wasn’t so easy to convince. He charged that the DEA was carrying out “political espionage”, and “financing criminal groups so that they could act against authorities, even the president”.

The goal of the DEA, one cable noted, “is to provide assistance to achieve US goals while keeping the [government of Bolivia] out in front”. In 2008, Morales suspended DEA operations in Bolivia and expelled its 37 agents in the country. He named Steven Faucette, the regional agent of the DEA in Santa Cruz, as a spy, saying that he had made trips to cities in the media luna provinces of Beni and Pando with the objective of financing the civic committees which were committed to carrying out a “civic coup”. The US was also using its aid as leverage to keep the DEA in Bolivia. “The Ambassador suggested that if eradication is to be stopped and USG involvement in the Chapare ended … we could begin shutting off our multi-million dollar assistance programs now,” one cable noted. Many had long said that the DEA was acting as a front for the CIA in Bolivia. (The agency refused my request for information through the Freedom of Information Act, as did the National Security Agency.) The cables are full of criticism of Morales for failing to heed the US’s call for areas it specified to be cleared of coca. It also called the EU effort “relatively modest and narrowly-focused”.

But the US preoccupation with eradication in Bolivia, evidenced in the cables, is strange. According to one cable, the DEA estimated that “less than one percent of cocaine seized in the US can be chemically traced back to Bolivia”. One percent. The US was also alone in blocking a UN resolution on making the coca leaf sacred in 2011. The tension surfaced even though the Morales government was being largely compliant. The cables present successes like 133 factories being raided in El Alto during the first 10 months of 2008. During the first full year of Morales’s tenure, the amount of coca grown in Bolivia increased around 5 percent. In Colombia, the US ally, it jumped 27 percent in the same period, according to UN statistics.

The opposition I talked to, interestingly, were all in support of the DEA. The spokesperson for the SCCC said that during his time as a journalist working on the topic of narco-trafficking, he saw the DEA and the US embassy dealing with the issue properly: “They were teaching us about how the drugs workers work, how they buy drugs, it helped us.” Another vital US agency which works in Bolivia is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 to “promote democracy”, but with a history of doing the opposite. In Bolivia it has focused on potentially recalcitrant indigenous areas, promoting the “American way” to the young. I obtained the proposals for various Bolivian projects granted money by the NED. The tactic of “training civil society” to gain a stranglehold on communities around Bolivia was exactly the same as that used by USAID projects. One project, Observancia, which ran from 2008 to 2009 and cost $54,664, was typical. It worked in eight municipalities in the country and helped in the “training of municipal functionaries and civil society”. The aim was to create future “municipal candidates” who would be “inserted into government programmes”. Another project, from 2006 to 2007 and costing $48,000, focused on Uriondo, Tarija, which sits in the media luna opposition stronghold. The grant was given at a politically tumultuous time. The report mentioned that the area of Tarija has the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the country, and the project wants “to increase the capacity” and “strengthen local government” of Uriondo, particularly by improving how the media communicates with the locals. Other projects look to “encourage political citizenship among young people”.

In one project in Totora, Cochabamba, the proposal notes that the population are mostly Quechua speaking and a lot more “politicized” than in Uriondo, adding that “there exists … an obstinate opposition to what they term as ‘neoliberal’, and they reject any advances from such parties”. Finally, it noted that the people of Totora organize themselves through a model of “corporativism” – the imposition of “a logic of the majoritarianism”, which rejects a form of democracy respectful of any differences. “This prompts us to consider that in the future we should include democratic values, in all sectors of society, not just as a citizen’s exercise when voting for their electoral representatives, but also with the logical respect that democracy has in other contemporary global societies,” the proposal noted. But the fact that the people of Totora organize themselves into collectives and make decisions collectively is common among indigenous groups throughout the country. The organization writing the proposal, however, concluded that this is in fact undemocratic and that they should introduce programs that demonstrate how undemocratic this form of democracy is compared with “other global societies”.

Another project called for better election monitoring. It suggested “revising the referendum votes for 2008 and 2009, where, in some regions, participation is registered at 100 percent and where the vote in favor of President Morales is of a similar percentage, something which does not have antecedents”. This accusation is questionable because in many departments people vote collectively – a tradition within many indigenous  groups.

One project awarded $36,450 to the Bolivian National Press Association. Its ostensible aim was to defend freedom of expression “through the supervision and documentation of violations and threats against journalists” and “improve the professionalism and impartiality of Bolivian journalists”. However, its focus is trained on the government, in keeping with US embassy fears about Venezuelan influence. “The [National Press Association of Bolivia] denounces that the action the government of Morales has taken, something which has never happened under a democratic government, total control of the National Company of Bolivian Television (ENTB), when he integrated the directors with state ministers.” In another project, in Totora, it was noted that they were “expecting – in the coming months – the installation of a community radio transmitter, financed by the Venezuelan government, which forms part of a communications network which that regime has been promoting”. A later section called 2008 “the worst year for freedom of expression since the return to democracy” with “one dead and over a hundred attacks”. The Santa Cruz UJC and its allies committed a number of these attacks. In one case: “A police officer sprayed pepper spray at a journalist who approached the Vice President of the Santa Cruz Youth Union.” The NED criticized Evo Morales for denouncing La Razon newspaper, even though coverage of the president Morales in that newspaper has been overtly racist for years, with racist caricatures and racist commentary.

Very measured

As in smaller countries in the region, such as Haiti, the US embassy in Bolivia wielded huge power through the second half of the 20th century, often more than the sovereign government itself. The US embassy in La Paz is the second largest in Latin America (slightly

smaller than in Brazil), despite the country having a population of just 9 million people. Through the last 50 years, the US had supported coups to get “their” dictators in place (Hugo Banzer), lent public relations specialists to get “their” presidents in place when democracy returned (Goni), and sent their brightest economists to “restructure” the economy in their image (Jeffrey Sachs). Now, the US provides sanctuary for “their” presidents wanted for crimes against humanity (Goni, again). But such a situation could give rise to complacency. And the election of the democratic socialist government of MAS in Bolivia marked the first time the country threatened to break free of US control. As such, relationships with ambassadors from the US became increasingly strained as the power dynamic switched around, and the sovereign government issued orders to the embassy, not the other way around. Maria Beatriz Souviron, Bolivian ambassador to the UK, told me: “The US ambassador before Morales had a lot of influence over the politics in our country, even pushing to take domestic decisions at some points.” She added: “We want some sovereignty in our country and to make our own decisions. And of course the former ambassador [Goldberg] was involved with the opposition.”

The MAS government accused ambassador Philip Goldberg of “subversive actions” which included a “disinformation campaign” in the lead-up to the recall referendum, as he tried to unite the opposition. In late 2007, the US embassy began moving openly to meet with the right-wing opposition in the media luna. Ambassador Goldberg was photographed in Santa Cruz with a leading business magnate who backed the autonomy movement, and a well-known Colombian narco-trafficker who had been detained by the local police. Morales, in revealing the photo, said the trafficker was linked to right-wing paramilitary organizations in Colombia. In response, the US embassy asserted that it couldn’t vet everyone who appeared in a photo with the ambassador. Goldberg was expelled because of his meetings with opposition figures at the most on-edge period of the battle with the MAS government. In 2008, he was photographed having a secret meeting with opposition governor Rubén Costas. The US embassy liked Costas. In one cable it was noted: “Costas’ willingness to work with the United States would make him a solid democratic partner.” It also praised his “politically savvy use of the media to advance the interests of the media luna”.

This government anger at US embassy interference culminated in September 2009 when ambassador Goldberg was expelled from the country. He has still not been replaced, the US embassy having to make do with the diplomatic downgrade of a chargé d’affaires. The US retaliated by expelling the Bolivian ambassador to Washington. “The US embassy is historically used to calling the shots in Bolivia, violating our sovereignty, treating us like a banana republic,” said Gustavo Guzman, the ambassador who was expelled from Washington. Goldberg had an interesting history, which made him a curious appointment by President George W. Bush in October 2006. Between 1994 and 1996 he had served as State Department desk officer for Bosnia and as special assistant to the late Richard Holbrooke, who had been instrumental in brokering the Dayton Accords and then the NATO military campaign against Serbia in 1999. From 2004 to 2006, Goldberg served as chief of mission in Pristina, Kosovo. In other words, he was used to dealing with countries that were breaking up into their constituent parts.

The leaders of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee certainly liked him. “My overall impression of Goldberg is that he was very measured politically,” said its vice president. “Compared to the two ambassadors that preceded. They were very openly political, they got involved a great deal, and compared to them Goldberg was measured.”

The US embassy had been overtly hostile to Morales from the start, and the previous two ambassadors had openly tried to halt his rise to power. In 2002, when Morales narrowly lost his first presidential bid, US ambassador Manuel Rocha, the first Bush appointment, openly campaigned against him, threatening: “If you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of US assistance to Bolivia.” In 2003, the second Bush appointment, David N. Greenlee, was put in place, and he had a long history with Bolivia. He served in the Peace Corps in Bolivia, 1965–67, and met his wife in the country. Later he served as a political officer at the US embassy in La Paz, 1977–79, dealing with issues, one think-tank noted, such as communism, military coups and Operation Condor, the continent-wide terror network set up by General Pinochet with the help of the US government. He returned as deputy chief of mission, 1987–89. When back as ambassador, Greenlee openly tried to scupper MAS’s ascent. In March 2003, for example, he sent a letter to Carlos Mesa, then president, alleging, falsely, that MAS was planning a coup in the summer. The MAS government hoped that things would change with President Obama’s election, but MAS officials say it has been no different. In fact, President Obama is now thought to have deployed special operations forces to Bolivia, while he supported the illegitimate post-coup election in Honduras. “President Obama lied to Latin America when he told us in Trinidad and Tobago that there are not senior and junior partners,” said President Morales in 2009.

While in La Paz I arranged an interview with the US chargé d’affaires, John S. Creamer, who has served in embassies in Nicaragua, Argentina and Colombia. I was not allowed to record the interview, but took notes. “The Bush administration took a heavy toll on perceptions of the US, that’s an empirical fact,” he said. He denied knowing of the various foundations – HRF and UnoAmerica – but is “sceptical” they were involved in the Rózsa plot. It became clear later that the US embassy is aware of these groups, and is being briefed by them. Mr Creamer told me there was “growing opposition” from within MAS against the leadership, an interesting observation, as it is a strategy that the government itself is increasingly wary of. “Evo is now scared that the new tactic is the opposition infiltrating the government and MAS, in order to take power from within,” Mr Mendoza, the Sucre senator, had told me. The embassy is obviously still in close contact with the radical elements in the east, as Mr Creamer defends the violence of the UJC and other radical opposition elements, arguing self-defense. “It’s natural to defend yourself,” he said, as we finish.

The international community have also been accused of supporting the break-up of the country. I talked to the British ambassador, Nigel Baker, in La Paz, who seemed to agree with the autonomists. “I think the long-term destiny for Bolivia … is some form of federalist structure,” he said. “The topography of the country, the different character of different peoples in different parts of the country, different economic structures, all work in favor in Bolivia of greater autonomy.” He thought the US had entirely benign intentions: “I think historical record will show that the US was operating correctly in Bolivia and trying to work with all political groups, people of all political colors, to work with and strengthen Bolivian democracy.” The WikiLeaks cables reveal that opposition politicians were openly approaching the US embassy for support in elections. One opposition politician “stands out as a potential national opposition leader,” one cable noted, before adding that in a meeting with embassy officers he had “privately expressed his interest in obtaining US support to run for the presidency”.

One the major concerns for the US after Morales came to power was Bolivia moving out of its traditional sphere of influence and making alliances and economic deals with other countries: thumbing its nose at its traditional patron. Among the people consulted by USAID for one its projects was Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, a former president of Bolivia who controversially decommissioned the country’s only air-defense system, purchased from China, putting Bolivia under the basic military control of the US. It was people like this the US was used to dealing with. But Morales no longer countenanced such servility. At the same time, China embraced the MAS government openly (largely because of the lithium reserves, no doubt), and did not seem as intent to undermine the democratically elected government as the US was. They also provided an alternative source of investment, worrying US planners. And it wasn’t just China. In 2008, it was announced that Bolivia had signed a deal with state-owned Russian gas company Gazprom to explore and produce natural gas in the country. State-owned oil and gas company, YPFB, which was nationalized by the MAS government, signed the deal to exploit South America’s second-largest reserves, concentrated in the southeast.

Bolivia also announced more military purchases from China and Russia, after the US blocked Bolivian purchases of Czech aircraft. Most worryingly for the US, Venezuela and Cuba were also increasing their presence, a fear constantly discussed in the cables. One cable from La Paz noted: “Cuban and Venezuelan advice, interference, and assistance continue to be a serious concern.” The concern is listed as “Cuban doctors and newly inaugurated hospitals bring medical care to isolated communities”, while Venezuela provided micro-credit financing to small businesses. Unlike USAID, of course, “Venezuelan funding is pouring into the country with no transparency or accountability, further damaging the democratic process.” Venezuelan funding for the media was a particular “issue of concern”, which, we have seen, was being fought as a proxy war through the NED’s programs. One cable worried “that media will be sold without public knowledge, changing the opinion-leader landscape in the country”, i.e. the anti-Morales bias. The cable even noted that the main newspaper, La Razon, has a “generally anti- [government of Bolivia] stance”.

In February 2008, a story broke about a Fulbright scholar in Bolivia who had been asked to spy on Cubans and Venezuelans in the country. John Alexander van Schaick said that he was told by regional security officer Vincent Cooper at the US embassy “to provide the names, addresses and activities of any Venezuelan or Cuban doctors or field workers” he came across while he was in Bolivia.7 His account was supported by similar testimony from Peace Corps members and staff who were all told by Mr Cooper to gather information on Cuban and Venezuelan nationals. Three days after the story broke, it was announced that Mr Cooper would not be returning to Bolivia. Morales called it the “expulsion” of a “man who conducted North American espionage”, an accusation with some justice. Many believed it was the tip of the iceberg. “We had a mutual friend, and [van Schaick] approached me in December 2007,” Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, the American journalist living in La Paz who broke the story, told me. “It took a couple months to get a hold on the Peace Corps angle, I had heard lots of rumors, but hadn’t been able to substantiate them. The Peace Corps duty director went on record at the time saying Vincent Cooper came and gave these inappropriate instructions to the group.”

The volunteers were in a moral quandary about what to do. “Some kids were worried about the message coming from the embassy, one girl was planning on living with a Cuban family; she wondered if she would have to collect information on them,” said Friedman-Rudovsky. The director and the Peace Corps staff complained to the US embassy, remonstrating that they couldn’t act like an intelligence service for the US government. Four months later, however, van Schaick received the same instructions. “In general, not much has changed in terms of US-Bolivia since Obama came into power,” said Friedman-Rudovsky. The ambassador never admitted it had happened; he merely commented that if these instructions had been given, it went against US policy. But it was the first ironclad proof of the US using its agencies to gather information in the country. “Every time Morales speaks on US-Bolivian relations in terms of US meddling in Bolivian affairs, he refers to this story, it’s the only story with definitive proof of spying,” said Friedman-Rudovsky. In the aftermath, the Bolivian foreign minister asked the US to establish exchange programs because the current US programs “are not transparent and we are suspicious when scholarship students are asked to spy on us”. The US did not comply.

Another controversy erupted in 2008 when a police unit called the Special Operations Command (COPES) was implicated in a domestic surveillance scandal after it was revealed that the unit had been used to collect intelligence on areas outside its remit of narco-trafficking. The unit was funded by the US, and was ultimately answerable to the US embassy. The idea that no one there knew what was going on is hard to countenance. It was disbanded soon after.

There had been a long lineage for this kind of subterfuge. In 1997 testimony to Congress, James Milford, deputy administrator of the DEA, said: “The Intelligence and Special Operations Group (GIOE) is one of Bolivia’s most successful drug enforcement programs. It was developed four years ago as a result of cooperation between DEA and the Bolivian National Police [and was] responsible for handling sensitive intelligence and conducting the most important complex criminal investigations in Bolivia.”

The US had long-established law enforcement agencies in Bolivia operating under the guise of drug enforcement; these agencies could be used for different purposes, and no one could actually verify whether they were gathering intelligence. Later, President Morales alleged that the CIA had tried to infiltrate state-run oil firm YPFB through marketing director Rodrigo Carrasco, who had attended a number of “training courses” in the US, which involved intelligence, security and politics. Carrasco had been a member of COPES. In the aftermath, the US embassy still complained that the “threat to expel the CIA from Bolivia means that any one of us can be (mis)identified as a spy and kicked out should we do – or be falsely accused of doing – anything that displeases Evo”. Spying was definitely taking place on a large scale. All through the cables there are allusions to “sensitive reporting” which is a euphemism for spying. One cable noted that a MAS official whom “many political analysts” consider “a radical” is “railroading controversial legislative measures”, before adding: “Sensitive reporting indicates that Ramirez may be very vulnerable on corruption and human smuggling charges.”

Being a softy

When in Sucre, I talked to Enrique Cortes, a professor at one of the universities in the city and a specialist in US-Bolivian relations. “Bolivia is still dependent,” he said. “This position of dependency was from the beginnings of when the nation was created, we were always dependent on an international monetary system lately led by the US.” He added: “There was a triangular relationship between the state, oligarchs and transnational organizations and these oligarchs responded to international money. When they lose power they use force to stop history from developing. Within that fits Rózsa-Flores and the Pando massacre, and Leopoldo.” The move to democracy, he said, may not be permanent, and could be scuppered. “There was the fascist process, dictatorship, but it’s not over. With Carter began the phase of controllable democracies, but now we think a new phase has opened. And this new phase is characterized by vital resources, and wanting control over these vital resources. So that’s the central conflict with the US.” He thought that the US could still put a brake on the process initiated by MAS to greater independence. “A coup is not the only way to put brakes on this. History shows there are other strategies, such as penetrating the popular organizations, and social movements using agencies like USAID.” But coups have been the traditional US tactic in the country.

Declassified documents released in 2008 exposed US financial and political support for the military coup led by right-wing general Hugo Banzer in 1971, who ruled until 1978 (before making a comeback, democratically elected this time, from 1997 to 2001). The State Department at the time denied supporting the three-day coup that left 110 dead and hundreds more wounded. Banzer’s dictatorship was a nightmare for organized labor and anyone who disagreed with his restructuring of the economy in the interests of foreign capital. He arrested 14,000 Bolivians without due process, and 8,000 more were tortured. Some 200 people were thought to have disappeared. Banzer had been trained at the notorious School of the Americas in Panama (Fort Gulick) and at Fort Hood in Texas, before becoming a military attaché in Washington. The declassified documents show that the Nixon administration had signed off $410,000 to be made available for politicians and military officers willing to take out the left-leaning dictator Juan José Torres. At a meeting in July 1971, the 40 Committee – chaired by the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and overseeing covert operations around the world – discussion focused on giving this money to opposition figures who, the understanding was, would undertake a coup. Under-Secretary of State Alexis Johnson said: “What we are actually organizing is a coup in itself, isn’t it?” The plan was approved and the same day that the coup began in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, a National Security Council staffer reported to Kissinger that the CIA had transferred money to two high-ranking members of the opposition.

A month earlier, Nixon and Kissinger had discussed the possibilities for dealing with the Bolivian leader who was leaning too far left.

Kissinger: We are having a major problem in Bolivia, too. And –

Nixon: I got that. Connally mentioned that. What do you want to do about that?

Kissinger: I’ve told [CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Thomas] Karamessines to crank up an operation, post-haste. Even the Ambassador there, who’s been a softy, is now saying that we must start playing with the military there or the thing is going to go down the drain.

Nixon: Yeah.

Kissinger: That’s due in on Monday.

Nixon: What does Karamessines think we need? A coup?

Kissinger: We’ll see what we can, whether – in what context. They’re going to squeeze us out in another two months. They’ve already gotten rid of the Peace Corps, which is an asset, but now they want to get rid of [US Information Agency] and military people. And I don’t know whether we can even think of a coup, but we have to find out what the lay of the land is there.

Fast-forward 40 years and not much had changed. The WikiLeaks cables reveal that as the political turmoil was peaking, the US embassy was contemplating the eventuality of a military coup. One noted that “there are strong indications the military is split and could be reticent to follow orders”. Another complained that: “A strong commitment to institutionalism would require a rock-solid constitutional argument before commanders would participate in any action that could be considered ‘political’.” There is no doubt that these feelings were being communicated from within the military to the US embassy. “[Armed Forces Commander General Wilfredo] Vargas had been, publicly and privately, a supporter of US-Bolivian military relations,” one cable noted. “Although he continues to cooperate enthusiastically with us at a working level, even giving awards to three [Military Group] officers December 13 his public comments in the last few months have irritated Bolivian military officers and raised eyebrows within the Embassy.” (The Military Group is part of the US Department of Defense.) But there were reasons for optimism. “Evo does not have a network of personal friends within the military (although his Presidency Minister Juan Quintana does),” one cable noted. “[T]he military is leery of taking on any role considered remotely political. The military fears above all a repeat of the bloody military- civilian conflicts in El Alto in 2003, which brought down the Goni government.” The Goni government – supported by the US, where he is now in exile.

Finally, we are told that Commander Vargas is too unreliable to count on. “Vargas remains an enigma,” the cable noted. “Some commanders suspected, at least before his December 8 comments, that he might be sympathetic to a coup. He is widely characterized as an ‘opportunist’”. The cable added wryly: “We cannot expect him to stand behind his assurances.”

In a piece of bare-faced historical revisionism, USAID said that between 1985 and 2003 “fundamental economic and political rules of the game were liberalized”, adding, “organizations with a pluralistic view of democracy grew and flourished – especially in response to the availability of donor assistance”. It noted that, “Corporatist civil society organizations dominated citizen participation in the public sphere between 1952 and 1985”, which was the moment when the Bolivian government “began to change the direction of Bolivia’s economic policies and democratic practices”. Soon, as the fairytale went, “Pluralistic civil society then emerged, and was active – especially at the level of communities.” What that period, in fact, describes is the “Shock Doctrining” of the Bolivian economy and wider society. President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, who had been a supporter of US- backed dictator Hugo Banzer, ruled from 1985 to 1989 and instituted a neoliberal recipe to help put the staggering economy back on its feet. He repressed labor unions, sacked 30,000 miners, and privatized most of the state-owned companies. The broken society he and his successor Goni created would provide fertile ground for the Morales administration to grow in.

As its framework for the definition of civil society, USAID uses the work of Larry Diamond, a professor at Stanford University and fellow at the Hoover Institution where he coordinates the project on Democracy in Iran. He was a senior advisor on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the founding co-editor of the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy. He has worked for the State Department, World Bank and USAID. In other words, the perfect intellectual to design democracy in Bolivia.

US weapons and military had been found in Bolivia. In June 2007, Donna Thi Dinh, a 20-year-old American woman, was detained at La Paz airport after arriving on a flight from Miami. The authorities found 500 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition in her luggage. Ms Thi had initially claimed to customs that she was carrying cheese. She was met at the airport by the wife of a military liaison at the US embassy in La Paz. US ambassador Philip Goldberg said that the bullets were for training and sport shooting and she did not realize that she had to declare them. This might be true, but at the very least it shows the impunity with which Americans felt they could act in Bolivia. Bolivia’s director of migration, Magaly Zegarra, noted: “the fact that a North American citizen, related to the embassy, is carrying ammunition on a North American aircraft coming from Miami, a city where terrorists from all over Latin America are protected by the government, especially their teacher, as [Luis] Posada is called by the terrorists, and make a mockery of all [justice] mechanisms, is questionable.” In another incident, in March 2006, Triston Jay Amero, a 25-year-old from California, set off 300 kilos of dynamite at two hotels in La Paz. He was carrying 15 different identity documents. Two years later, security services uncovered the presence of two fake American journalists photographing presidential vehicles.

The US military itself was also using Bolivia as a base. In June 2010, it was revealed that the Obama administration was expanding the role of US special operations forces around the world in a “secret war” to combat al-Qaeda, with the Washington Post noting that they were placed in 60 to 75 countries, with about 4,000 personnel available in countries aside from Iraq and Afghanistan. Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation, based on “well-placed special operations sources”, that Bolivia was one of those countries. The role of the joint special operations command forces was to launch “pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes”, but this was ambiguous. “While some of the special forces missions are centered around training of allied forces, often that line is blurred. In some cases, ‘training’ is used as a cover for unilateral, direct action,” Scahill wrote. A special forces source told him: “It’s often done under the auspices of training so that they can go anywhere. It’s brilliant. It is essentially what we did in the 60s,” adding, “Remember the ‘training mission’ in Vietnam? That’s how it morphs.” US armed forces did occasionally pop up in Bolivia. In 2008, just weeks before the raid on Hotel Las Americas, Iraq war veteran Lieutenant Commander Gregory Michel was arrested after he pulled a gun on a prostitute in Santa Cruz. The US embassy managed to secure his release on grounds of “diplomatic immunity”. The WikiLeaks cables also show that C-130s and helicopters owned by the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) at the US Embassy were being used to transport “eradicators and troops”. Elsewhere, the embassy noted allegations that the DEA, US military and Bolivian national police headed Bolivian anti-narcotics efforts “from a US military base” in the Cochabamba department. In reference to this, the cable noted: “The US supports Bolivian anti-narcotics efforts at the Chimore Airport and has offices there, but there are no US military bases per se in Bolivia.” Per se. The WikiLeaks cables reveal an embassy concerned about renewing “mil- mil” (military to military) cooperation and establishing a “Status of Forces” agreement. But the Bolivian government was reticent about signing up – also refusing to ratify an “Article 98” which excuses US nationals from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, a common demand made by the US, a rogue nation intent on not abiding by international law.

But, as the US knows, Bolivia is still captive to the American military. A cable noted: “Bolivia has not spent any money on ammunition in two years, and the capacity to quickly move troops remains in doubt.”

Saying thank you

In early 2006, a cable from La Paz noted “the billions of US dollars of assistance in the past few decades”, and said that the ambassador observed that the US government “would sometimes appreciate a good word or thanks” from President Morales. To this day, the Morales government and his party, MAS, have not “thanked” the US for its support, because since 2005, and before, that support has been designed to finish them, and by extension democracy, in Bolivia. In many ways, Bolivia is the most democratic country in the world now. When you walk around the country you sense the involvement of the citizenry in the politics of their local community as well as on a national level, in a way that is markedly absent in the US or UK. There is a simple formula for US foreign policy in Latin America and beyond: support democracy if the people vote the right way. If they don’t, and the political party threatens to upset the “natural” order of things and with it the business interests of America and other foreign companies, then a program of subversion and destabilization gets under way. This investigation is focused on Bolivia in the specifics, but the general patterns have been replicated from Venezuela to Ecuador, from Brazil to Peru.

Another cable noted: “Evo Morales’ election in December 2005 was a political earthquake in Bolivia, sweeping aside political expectations that have defined Bolivian politics for generations and at the same time breaking open fissures and offering up new possibilities.” It is these new possibilities that scare the US government, the threat of the “virus of a good example”, a government that can provide for its citizens while growing the economy. Even Bolivia’s admirable lead on climate change is dismissed by the US embassy as a “vehicle for raising [Morales’s] and Bolivia’s international political stature”. The US is slowly losing the ownership it has had over Bolivian society for decades. For the first time

Published: Daily Maverick (17 September 2019) w/ Mark Curtis

The United Kingdom is fighting at least seven covert wars largely outside parliamentary or democratic oversight.

The British government states that its policy on the covert wars it fights is “not to comment, and to dissuade others from commenting or speculating, about the operational activities of special forces because of the security implications”.

The British public’s ability to scrutinise policy is further restricted by the UK’s Freedom of Information Act which applies an “absolute exemption” to its special forces.

UK special forces consist of a number of regiments, but the Special Air Service (SAS), a unit of the British army, is the most renowned. Based at RAF Credenhill, just outside Hereford in western England, it is rumoured to have about 500 personnel.

This explainer outlines what is known of these covert wars, which is likely to represent only a small part of actual UK military operations in these countries. Nearly all the leaks which appear in the mainstream media are officially sanctioned and have been further approved by the Ministry of Defence’s DSMA Committee, which seeks to prevent material deemed damaging to the national security interest from being published in the media.

Afghanistan

The SAS has fought in Afghanistan since 2001, longer than any war in the regiment’s history, according to some sources.

The public was told at the end of 2014 that British forces had withdrawn from Afghanistan. However, some British troops stayed behind to help create and train an Afghan special forces unit. Despite officially only having “advisers” in the country, British covert forces have consistently fought Islamic State and the Taliban.

By 2018, the SAS was reportedly fighting almost every day in Afghanistan, usually in support of Afghan commandos leading the battle against the Taliban.

In February 2018, Britain doubled the size of its SAS force in Afghanistan from about 50 to more than 100. One newspaper reported at the time:

“The commandos will conduct kill-or-capture missions alongside US special forces and come under the command of the American-led Joint Special Operations Command. Part of the force will be made up of 15 snipers who will be part of a specialist unit tasked with killing Taliban commanders.”

In July 2018, “dozens” more special forces troops were sent to Afghanistan as part of a contingent of 490 extra soldiers deployed to join the almost 650 already there.

By March 2019, the Pentagon was asking British special forces to play a key role in counter-terrorist operations in Afghanistan. This followed US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull US troops out of the country. It was also reported that a contingent of the Special Boat Service (SBS) is operating in central and eastern Afghanistan.

In 2014, the government stated that it had ended its drone strikes programme in Afghanistan, which had begun in 2008 and covered much of the country. It is believed that all British Reaper drones were withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Yet in 2015, British special forces were still calling in airstrikes using US drones instead.

Overall, British troops in Afghanistan numbered about 1,000 by mid-2019.

Iraq

Hundreds of British troops have been deployed in Iraq to train local security forces. But they are also engaged in covert combat operations against Islamic State.

In early 2016, Britain reportedly had more than 200 special forces soldiers in the country, operating out of a fortified base within a Kurdish Peshmerga camp near Mosul in northern Iraq. In May 2016, special forces were given the green light to conduct covert parachute assaults involving SAS and SBS commandos being sent in to support Kurdish and Iraqi troops fighting Islamic State, with small vehicles, heavy machine guns and mortars.

The SAS in Iraq was also reported in 2016 to have been given a “kill or capture”  list of up to 200 UK citizens who had joined the Islamic State group.

By May 2019 about 30 SAS and SBS troops were reported to be working on a “kill or capture” mission to hunt down Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq. They were said to be operating from a special forces HQ north of Baghdad and teaming up with US special forces. The search for al-Baghdadi reportedly involved MI6, UK listening station GCHQ and the American National Security Agency.

British Reaper drones were first deployed over Iraq in 2014 and continue to fly. From then until March 2019, UK drones conducted 1,384 missions in Iraq, releasing 666 weapons.

Libya

SAS forces were secretly deployed to Libya at the beginning of 2016, working with Jordanian special forces embedded in the British contingent. This followed a mission by MI6 and the Royal Air Force in January 2016 to gather intelligence on Islamic State and draw up potential targets for airstrikes.

Some 100 British special forces were said to be operating in Libya in early 2016, helping to protect government officials and advising Libyan forces on fighting Islamic State. The Libyan Express reportedthat “British and American intelligence officers ‘with suitcases full of cash’ are bribing tribal leaders not to oppose an international ground force” in the country.

British commandos were soon also engaged in fighting and directing assaults against Islamic State in Libya. They also ran intelligence, surveillance and logistical support operations from a base in the western city of Misrata.

A team of 15 British special forces were also reported in June 2016 to be based in a French-led multinational military operations centre in Benghazi, eastern Libya, supporting Libyan general Khalifa Haftar. In July 2016, Middle East Eye reported that this British involvement was intended to help coordinate airstrikes in support of Haftar, whose forces are opposed to the Tripoli-based government that Britain is otherwise supporting. It was unclear why.

In 2017, eight members of the SBS — supported by 40 British specialists — were deployed with US, French and Italian forces “to deny Islamic State any opportunity to establish a base in Libya”.

A Libyan anti-terrorism official was quoted as saying in May 2019 that the UK was co-operating with the Libyan government in “surveilling and fighting terrorists”. In the same month, an SAS unit was evacuatedby the RAF following the rapid advance of Haftar’s forces in the cities of Tobruk and Tripoli.

Pakistan

The UK has been a co-party to the US’s extensive drone campaign in Pakistan. The UK spy base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire has facilitated US drone strikes against jihadists in Pakistan, with Britain’s GCHQ providing “locational intelligence” to US forces for use in these attacks.

RAF pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada have been involved in these US drone operations in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) which have killed hundreds of civilians. The role of these pilots is unclear but, Amnesty International notes, “this does raise concerns that UK pilots under US command may have been ordered to carry out drone strikes and could therefore implicate them in these violations”.

US drone strikes continue in Pakistan, although at much lower levels than in previous years, and the UK role in them remains obscure.

Somalia

A small contingent of SAS troops has been training and advising Kenyan security forces and providing intelligence to help Kenya in its efforts against al-Shabaab in Somalia, including to capture its leaders.

In 2012, it was reported that the SAS was working on the ground in Somalia with Kenyan forces to target al-Shabaab terrorists. This involved up to 60 SAS soldiers, close to a full squadron, including forward air controllers who called in airstrikes by the Kenyan air force, which also employs a number of ex-RAF pilots.

In early 2016, Jordan’s King Abdullah, whose troops have operated with UK special forces for the war against Bashar Assad in Syria and whose special forces were planned to be embedded with the UK’s in Libya, said that his troops were also ready with Britain and Kenya to go “over the border” to attack al-Shabaab in Somalia.

By April 2016 it was reported that the SAS had a 10-strong team in Somalia, based at a camp north of Mogadishu, which was engaged in “regular skirmishes” with al-Shabaab and was also training Somali soldiers. The SAS team was also working with US Delta Force directing airstrikes against the insurgents by US jets based in Djibouti.

The British government said in May 2016 that it had 27 military personnel in Somalia. These troops were said to be supporting the UN, EU and African Union training missions in Somalia which were set up to counter al-Shabaab and were “developing” the Somali national army.

The Menwith Hill base in Yorkshire has also facilitated US drone strikes against jihadists in Somalia (as they have in Pakistan), with Britain’s GCHQ similarly providing “locational intelligence” to US forces for use in these attacks.

Syria

Evidence suggests that a British covert operation in Syria began in late 2011. By November of that year, MI6 and French special forces were reportedly assisting Syrian fighters and assessing their training, weapons and communications needs. The CIA, meanwhile, was providing communications equipment and intelligence.

Britain also became involved in the “rat line” of weapons delivered from Libya to Syria via southern Turkey. This was authorised in early 2012 following a secret agreement between the US and Turkey. Revealed by journalist Seymour Hersh, the project was funded by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar while “the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria”.

British and US covert operations were focused on toppling the Assad regime in the first few years of the war. Britain began training Syrian rebel forces fighting Assad from bases in Jordan in 2012. At the same time, the SAS and SBS also began “slipping into Syria on missions”.

No evidence appears to have emerged of British training of Syrian rebels to fight Islamic State in Syria before May 2015, when Britain sent 85 troops to Turkey and Jordan to train rebels to fight both Islamic State and Assad. By July 2015, Britain was training Syrians in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar to fight Islamic State, but the war against Assad also continued. As part of a US-led training programme, British special forces provided training, weapons and other equipment to the New Syrian Army, comprised of defectors from the Syrian army.

In 2015, British special forces were “mounting hit-and-run raids against Islamic State deep inside eastern Syria dressed as insurgent fighters”. They were reported to “frequently cross into Syria to assist the New Syrian Army”, from their base in Jordan.

Turkey also offered a base for British military training. In 2015, for example, Britain deployed several military trainers to Turkey as part of the US-led training programme in Syria. This programme was providing small arms, infantry tactics and medical training to rebel forces.

British aircraft began covert strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria in 2015, months before Parliament voted in favour of overt action in December 2015. These strikes were conducted by British pilots embedded with US and Canadian forces.

In September 2016, UK forces were involved in US-led airstrikes against targets in Syria which killed more than 60 Syrian troops. These strikes were part of a battle against Islamic State in Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria which the US and UK claimed they were targeting and had hit Syrian army targets accidentally. In June 2018, the RAF targeted Syrian army forces near the border with Iraq and Jordan in close proximity to a UK/US special forces base.

Some 200 UK troops were in Syria in early 2018, consisting of the SAS, Parachute Regiment and Royal Marines which together make up the Special Forces Support Group. They were working alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

In March 2018, Matt Tonroe, an SAS soldier embedded with US forces, was killed in the northern city of Manbij, fighting with local Kurdish troops against Islamic State. SAS sources claimed that those who planted the bomb which killed Tonroe could have belonged to the Free Syrian Army. However, a media investigation in 2019 revealed that Tonroe was killed by “friendly forces” after an accidental detonation.

British special forces continue to operate on the ground in Syria in 2019 and are reported to number at least 120 soldiers.

Britain has also been operating a secret drone warfare programme in Syria which began in 2014. From then until March 2019, UK drones conducted 1,801 missions in Syria, releasing 304 weapons. In 2017, Reaper drones killed two British Islamic State militants in Syria, again before parliament approved military action.

Yemen

The government previously claimed it had no military personnel based in Yemen. Yet a Vice News report in 2016 based on interviews with UK officials revealed that British special forces were in Yemen. They were, in fact, seconded to MI6, which was training Yemeni troops fighting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and had infiltrated AQAP.

Vice News also revealed in 2016 that British military personnel were helping with US drone strikes against AQAP. Britain was playing “a crucial and sustained role with the CIA in finding and fixing targets, assessing the effect of strikes and training Yemeni intelligence agencies to locate and identify targets for the US drone programme”. UK officials, the report said, were taking part in “hits”, preparing “target packages” and participating in a “joint operations room” with US and Yemeni forces in support of strikes.

The Menwith Hill base in Yorkshire facilitates US drone strikes in Yemen, as shown in files from Edward Snowden revealed by The Intercept in 2016. Documents show that the US National Security Agency has pioneered groundbreaking new spying programmes at Menwith Hill to pinpoint the locations of suspected terrorists accessing the internet in remote parts of the world. This role for Menwith Hill was denied for years by the UK government.

In November 2017, it was revealed that the British Army was secretly training Saudi troops to fight in Yemen. It was reported that up to 50 UK military personnel were in Saudi Arabia teaching battlefield skills. The training mission — codenamed Operation Crossways — came to light only after the army released photos and information by mistake. The training was undertaken by UK troops from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland who were imparting “irregular warfare” techniques to officers from the Royal Saudi Land Forces Infantry Institute.

In January 2019, a 12-man US/UK special forces task force, comprising the SAS and the US Green Berets, was flown into Yemen from Djibouti. The soldiers were dressed in Arab clothing and were reported to be operating near the government-held town of Marib, 500 miles north of Aden.

By March 2019, 30 SBS personnel were deployed inside Yemen, based in the Sa’dah area of the northern part of the country. The SBS force includes medics, interpreters and intelligence officers and their mission is to “advise” official Saudi and Yemeni government troops. However, the media has reported that these SBS forces have also been involved in fierce clashes with militia groups. An SBS spokesperson has said that British soldiers have been injured in “firefights”.

More on the UK’s drone wars

The UK has been recently involved in drone strikes in at least six countries: Afghanistan,Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Its squadron of 10 Reaper drones is controlledremotely by satellite from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire and by RAF aircrew at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, US.

The RAF’s secret drone war beganin Afghanistan in October 2007 and elsewherein 2014. The NGO Reprieve notesthat Britain provides communications networks to the CIA “without which the US would not be able to operate this programme”. Reprieve says that this is a particular matter of concern as the US covert drone programme is illegal.

UK personnel have been embeddedwithin US units and form part of US drone operations. UK personnel flew US drones (Predators) during Operation Ellamy, the codename for the UK’s participation in the military intervention in Libya in 2011. UK personnel embedded with the US Air Force have also operated US armed and unarmed drones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In July 2018, a two-year probe by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones revealedthat the number of drone operations facilitated by the UK in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia has been growing without any public scrutiny. The drone strategy also involved working with repressive regimes including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Amnesty International’s 2018 report, Deadly Assistance, documented four RAF bases in the UK involved in the US drone attacks programme: Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, Digby in Lincolnshire and Croughton in Northamptonshire. Around one-third of all US military communications in Europe pass through RAF Croughton, which has a direct link through a fibre-optic communications system to a US military base in Djibouti (Camp Lemonnier), from where most US drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia are carried out.

Embedded in the US and other militaries

The government stated in 2015 that it had 177 military personnel embedded in other countries’ forces. Some 30 of those were working with the US military. UK military personnel are assignedto various commands in the US and to US Navy Carrier Strike Groups.

It is possible that these forces are also engaged in combat. For example, the then First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Philip Jones, saidBritish pilots fly US F18s from the decks of US aircraft carriers in the Gulf. This means that some “US” airstrikes may well be carried out by British pilots.

Published: Daily Maverick (10 October 2019) w/ Mark Curtis

The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.

“This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the first tranche of information,” state minutes of a 7 November 2013 meeting at the MOD.

The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its stated purpose is to “prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations”. It can issue “notices” to the media to encourage them not to publish certain information.

The committee is currently chaired by the MOD’s director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was previously director of security and intelligence in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who describes himself as an “accomplished, senior ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership”.

The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary, placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.

Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: “The Guardian was obliged to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice code.” The minutes add: “This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.”

‘Considerable efforts’

These “considerable efforts” included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would “jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel”. It was marked “private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media”.

Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing blog Guido Fawkes made it public.

At the time, according to the committee minutes, the “intelligence agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out”. Such D-Notices were clearly seen by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden revelations.

One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee’s then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance “made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to consult him in advance before telling the world”, according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.

Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.

“I don’t want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures,” he said in a statement to MPs. “I think it’s much better to appeal to newspapers’ sense of social responsibility. But if they don’t demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act.”

The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported at the time that “The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] … and the Telegraph published only a short”. It continued by noting that only The Independent “followed up the substantive allegations”. It added, “The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story.”

The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.

According to the committee minutes, the fact The Guardian would not stop publishing “undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system’s future usefulness”. If the D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ’s most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?

It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.

GCHQ and laptops

The security services ratcheted up their “considerable efforts” to deal with the exposures.

On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian’s offices at King’s Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published.

At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.

The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper’s reporters, brought “angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks”. The reporter added, “The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment, a ‘degausser’, which destroys magnetic fields and erases data.”

Johnson claims that the destruction of the computers was “purely a symbolic act”, adding that “the government and GCHQ knew, because we had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode hadn’t changed anything.”

Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee minutes for November 2013 outlined: “Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving.”

The British security services had carried out more than a “symbolic act”. It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.

The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper’s laptops “engagement … with The Guardian had continued to strengthen”.

Moreover, he added, there were now “regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists”. Rusbridger later testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself “collaborated” in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even “been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters”.

But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that “the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member”.

At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper’s computers under the watchful gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in May 2014 and was to remain on it until October 2018.

The Guardian’s deputy editor went directly from the corporation’s basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.

A new editor

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued to publish some stories critical of the security services.

But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another candidate to be Rusbridger’s successor).

Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was launched just two weeks before the first Snowden revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.

This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.

In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented “exclusive” with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. The article noted that this was the “first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service’s 107-year history”. It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.

The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an “increasingly aggressive” Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, “Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files.”

Parker told the two reporters, “We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk about our work and explain it.”

Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian published another unprecedented “exclusive”, this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian’s investigations editor, Nick Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.

The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball. Titled “MI6 returns to ‘tapping up’ in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers”, it focused almost entirely on the intelligence service’s stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.

“Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain,” Younger told Hopkins. “Every community from every part of Britain should feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status.”

Just two weeks before the interview with MI6’s chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would “hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to charge MI6’s former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004”.

None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig would qualify for the intelligence service. “He would not get into MI6,” Younger told Hopkins.

More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu’s “first major interview since taking up his post” the previous year and resulted in a three-part series of articles, one of which was entitled “Met police examine Vladimir Putin’s role in Salisbury attack”.

The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these “exclusives” as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden’s. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again.

What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD’s Dominic Wilson, praised Johnson who, he said, had been “instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian”.

Decline in critical reporting

Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian’s celebrated investigative team, whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.

One well-placed source told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team “have not felt backed by senior editors over the last year”, and that “some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period”.

In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues, notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, started at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.

“It seems they’ve got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way,” one current Guardian journalist told us.

Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger’s editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6 on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.

“Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies — epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories — appears to have been abandoned,” a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it “sometimes seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks.”

A second former Guardian journalist added: “The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not always to be trusted.”

While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its “scoops” increasingly focus on issues more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.

The Guardian has, by contrast, published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin, his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.

In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian’s front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security service tips focused on the “Russia threat”, and was titled “Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin”.

Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records” although he insists that “the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage”.

There was a much bigger story in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who “ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork”.

We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin’s friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.

Getting Julian Assange

The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.

One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian’s sister paper The Observer, titled “When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange”. This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy in March 2017, organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage’s producer at LBC accompanied Farage at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.

Rather, she posited that this meeting was “potentially … a channel of communication” between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump, who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a “political alignment” and that “WikiLeaks is, in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything”.

Yet Cadwalladr’s one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a “highly placed contact with links to US intelligence”, who told her, “When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information in ways and places that cannot be monitored.”

It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to undermine Assange.

In 2018, however, The Guardian’s attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began on 18 May 2018 with one alleging Assange’s “long-standing relationship with RT”, the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been closely documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.

One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding, claimed that “Russian diplomats held secret talks in London … with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned”. The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such “escape plot” involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.

This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page splash, based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

This “scoop” failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was manufactured and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian, however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.

The “exclusive” appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for “re-establishing links” between The Guardian and the security services.

The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped create the conditions for a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.

Acting for the establishment

Another major focus of The Guardian’s energies under Viner’s editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected Labour leader, the Sunday Times reported a serving general warning that “there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister”. The source told the newspaper: “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”

On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was fed the story that “MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA”. It formed part of a Telegraph investigation claiming to reveal “Mr Corbyn’s full links to the IRA” and was sourced to an individual “close to” the MI5 investigation, who said “a file had been opened on him by the early nineties”.

The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.

Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: “Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation. At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn’t clear the security vetting.”

Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources told The Times that Corbyn had been “summoned” for a “‘facts of life’ talk on terror” by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.

Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail reported another leak, this time revealing that “Jeremy Corbyn’s most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin’s ‘global propaganda network’.”

The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn’s office for a year but had still not received a security pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called “a senior parliamentary source”, that Murray’s application had encountered “vetting problems”.

Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. “Call me sceptical if you must, but I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail’s sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security service],” he wrote in the New Statesman. He added, “Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?”

Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. “However,” he added, “I wouldn’t dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there who I could trust.”

The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and the paper’s clearly hostile stance has been widely noted.

Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular, its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears carried in the media.

The Guardian and The Observer have published hundreds of articles on “Labour anti-Semitism” and, since the beginning of this year, carried over 50 such articles with headlines clearly negative to Corbyn. Typical headlines have included “The Observer view: Labour leadership is complicit in anti-Semitism”, “Jeremy Corbyn is either blind to anti-Semitism – or he just doesn’t care”, and “Labour‘s anti-Semitism problem is institutional. It needs investigation”.

The Guardian’s coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically.

While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts.

In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party “is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law.”

Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017, shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn’s tenure and that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.

Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.

At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn’s critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.

In July 2016, one of this article’s authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.

A reliable publication?

On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been “developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees”.

This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.

A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: “It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian.”

The Times published its scoop under a strong headline, “Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy”. However, before the article was published, the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations by telling its side of the story.

The Guardian posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: “MoD says revised torture guidance does not lower standards”.

Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD’s position: “The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly disinformation.

Published: Foreign Policy (19 March 2019) w/ Ismail Einashe

BERBERA, Somalia—On any given day in Berbera, the deep-water port on Somaliland’s Red Sea coast, ramshackle ships dock next to small boats known as dhows. Most of them are waiting to set off for the Persian Gulf, laden with spices, scrap metal, and often more lively cargo—goats raised for the global market on the country’s scorched landscape.

It may be hard to tell by looking at it, but some 30 percent of the world’s crude oil transported on ships passes just a few miles offshore, a detail that has made Berbera’s port a prized location for outside powers looking for a new connection to the world’s most vital sea transport route. As a result, Somaliland, like its neighbor Djibouti, which is emerging as a hub for foreign military installations, has found itself at the center of big power rivalries that could reshape the Horn of Africa.

By 2020, Berbera’s dhows are set to have some much larger neighbors. Somaliland’s authorities have inked a deal with the United Arab Emirates for a $442 million port upgrade and the establishment of a new UAE naval base, offering the UAE a new launch point for its involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen and a way to strengthen its footing in the Horn of Africa.

When it becomes operational, Berbera’s new port is set to be run by DP World. After getting its start building Dubai’s Port Rashid, the largely state owned company from the UAE has become one of the world’s biggest port operators. The project will also include the establishment of a free trade zone, which aims to deliver huge economic gains for Somaliland and the Horn of Africa more broadly.

Given that Somaliland is not a country that formally exists, this new development is particularly ambitious. Although the territory has declared itself to be independent from Somalia, no other government recognizes its sovereignty, despite years of effort.

For the UAE, deepening ties with Somaliland aligns with a broader determination to punish Somalia. The Emiratis are aggrieved by Mogadishu’s coziness with Qatar and its refusal to join in the Saudi-led blockade of that country. In January, Qatar donated 68 armored vehicles to Somalia’s military. In April, the UAE retaliated by shutting down a key hospital it had funded in Somalia’s capital.

For Somaliland, the infusion of Emirati money means a lot more than being able to accommodate bigger ships and process more containers. For many, this set of investments is being viewed as an accelerant for the territory’s attempts to achieve formal independence from Somalia.

According to the head of Somaliland’s port authority, Saed Abdullahi Hassan, it is the largest infusion of foreign cash the region has ever received.

Hassan added that the investment “means everything to us.” He told Foreign Policy that the port “is something big for us … as you know that we are moving away from Greater Somalia.” For him, “DP World coming to Berbera shows the stability of the country.”

However, Somaliland’s relative stability is only part of the equation. Western powers have said it’s up to the African Union to decide whether or not it will recognize Somaliland first. Given the complexities of revising colonial borders in Africa and the reluctance of larger African states to set a precedent that could be leveraged by their own rebellious regions, the African Union’s member states have few incentives to change the status quo. Somaliland is facing some very high barriers to realizing its ambitions of statehood, first and foremost in the form of opposition from Somalia.

The willingness of outside backers to support Somaliland has aggrieved Mogadishu. Since the Somali state collapsed into a three-decade-long cycle of conflict and violence, Somalia’s government has been trying to regain control of the country’s entire territory. Somaliland’s plans for Berbera’s port directly challenge that vision.

It’s not just the UAE that is taking an interest in Berbera, but also Somalia’s neighbor and rival Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government has signed a tripartite agreement with the UAE and Somaliland, giving Addis Ababa a 30-year concession for the development and management of the port. “The port can be one of the gateways for Ethiopia,” Somaliland’s foreign minister, Saad Ali Shire, told FP, “which is one of the biggest countries in Africa.”

But since Somaliland is not a recognized state and cannot legally make contracts with foreign governments, it is unclear how this will all pan out. Somalia’s fragile government in Mogadishu, led by President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (widely known by his nickname, Farmajo) has declared this deal “null and void,” adding that it risks pushing war-torn Somalia into further instability.

In a statement in March, Somalia’s Ministry of Ports and Marine Transport said Berbera’s port deal was going against the grain of hopes for unity of Somalia and that it was a violation of the Somali Constitution.

But for Saed Abdullahi Hassan, the head of Berbera’s port authority, the Somali government has no right to get in the way: “They should not disturb the investment going into Somaliland.” Given that Farmajo’s government still only functionally controls small swathes of Somalia and is locked in a bitter war with al-Shabab, his government’s irritation over the Berbera port deal may remain just that.

The tensions surrounding outside investment in Berbera offer a window into how power struggles from Middle East are increasingly being projected onto the Horn of Africa.

Somaliland is just 162 miles across the water from Yemen’s port city of Aden. As war in Yemen has resulted in the increasing militarization of the Red Sea region, its ports have become important stepping stones for various Middle Eastern players. The United Arab Emirates has a port in Eritrea. Qatar has plans to upgrade a port in Sudan. The Turks are in Mogadishu. Ahmed Soliman, a Horn of Africa expert at Chatham House in London, told FP the region has become a “maritime laboratory” with every major power now either in possession of a military base or searching for one.

The Horn of Africa has long entered into the geopolitical calculations of Middle Eastern powers. In the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire had its farthest outpost in Zeila, a historic seaside town north of Berbera, on the border with Djibouti.

In 1869, the Red Sea was changed forever with opening of the Suez Canal. In 1956, the French, Israelis, and British went to war with Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to keep their privileged access to the waterway, before pressure from the United States eventually forced their defeat.

Today the Red Sea has once more become an important space for the region’s powers to pursue their own ambitions, and strengthening connections to Berbera and neighboring Djibouti have become top priorities for many regional players.

Somaliland itself was created during the 19th century, when the Horn of Africa was carved up by European powers. Contemporary Somalia is a composite state—formed in 1960 when two former colonial territories, British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, were fused together. Meanwhile, Djibouti, which was once labeled French Somaliland, became independent in 1977.

The Somaliland of today exists within the same borders as its colonial predecessor, British Somaliland. However, this has led to ongoing territorial disputes with Puntland, a semi-autonomous part of Somalia, which claims that the contested regions of Sool and Sanaag should belong to it, rather than Somaliland, on the basis of kinship ties rather than colonial-era divides. Because British Somaliland gained independence five days before Italian Somaliland, advocates of Somaliland’s sovereignty say that this detail gives them the ability to revert back to their previous status as an independent nation. If Somaliland volunteered to join with its much larger neighbor to the south in 1960, the idea goes, its leaders can also decide to opt out.

In the post-colonial era, Somalia came under the rule of Gen. Siad Barre, who took over in a bloodless coup in 1969 after he forced out the country’s first democratically elected president. Barre quickly aligned himself with the Soviet Union. It was during this era of socialist rule in Somalia from 1969 to 1991 that Berbera gained its contemporary significance as a place where outsiders seek to project power in the Horn of Africa.

In 1964, the Soviet Union was the first major power to arrive in Somali-controlled Berbera. The Soviets constructed the largest airstrip in Africa at the time, just next to the port. In the 1970s, Soviet troops ran military operations out of Berbera. This was particularly unnerving to the United States, which saw Barre’s government as a proxy for expanding the Soviet Union’s power in Africa.

But Somali-Soviet ties were short lived. In 1977, when animosity between Ethiopia and Somalia culminated in the Ogaden War over another disputed border, the Soviets starting arming and supporting Somalia’s archrival Ethiopia, and the alliance between the two was over. In a remarkably abrupt pivot between enemies, Barre’s government realigned itself with the United States. U.S. President Ronald Reagan subsequently embraced the dictator.

Somaliland suffered terribly in the late 1980s under a U.S.-aligned Somali government. Its current capital, Hargeisa, became known as “Africa’s Dresden,” because it was so heavily bombed in 1988.

The Horn of Africa’s relevance waned as the Cold War ended, and in 1991 the country collapsed into a three-decade-long civil war, while Somaliland unilaterally declared its independence from the rest of Somalia.

The threat of international piracy off the Somali coast brought the Horn of Africa back into the international spotlight in the early 2000s. Since then, the United States has played a significant role, which seems set to expand. Shire, Somaliland’s foreign minister, said, “Since Trump came to office it seems there has been an escalation of the war against al-Shabab.”

Somalia’s current president, Farmajo, is a dual American-Somali national who lived a significant part of his life in Buffalo, New York. He rose up through the African diaspora of Buffalo, home to a significant number of Somali refugees who had escaped the war. He refined his leadership at the New York State Department of Transportation, where he worked as the commissioner for equal employment. Farmajo is also a registered Republican—a particularly complex position for a Somali dual national in the era of U.S. President Donald Trump.

When Stephen Schwartz, the first U.S. ambassador to Somalia in 25 years, met Farmajo in February 2017, he presented him with a gift: a blue-and-white baseball cap with the slogan “Make Somalia Great Again.”

Makau W. Mutua, a Kenyan-American professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who knew Farmajo, told FP that though people were proud when he became the ninth president of Somalia, his political affiliation in the United States did not go unnoticed. “It was surprising that he’s a Republican,” he said.

Only weeks after he took office in early 2017, Trump signed a directive that declared parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities.” Since then, rules of engagement by the U.S. military in Somalia have been relaxed, which has led to a rapid increase in drone strikes in the country. Hundreds of people have been killed, including militants and civilians, with displacement becoming an increasing problem.

But the violence in Somalia is just one example a trend in the wider Horn of Africa, which has become one of the most militarized areas of the world in the past decade. The UAE had originally planned to build a port in Djibouti. When the deal fell apart, it moved down the coast to Somaliland.

Berbera benefits from its proximity to Aden, Yemen’s main port and the de facto headquarters of the Gulf coalition in Yemen. UAE soldiers are stationed in Yemen, and many say the UAE’s long-term aim is to create a buffer zone in south Yemen, a breakaway region, from which the Houthi north can be contained by military and naval bases on either side of the Red Sea. With Berbera, the UAE will have effective control of both banks of the Red Sea.

Djibouti, despite the UAE pullback, remains another crucible. A former French colony the size of New Jersey with a population less than 950,000, it is home to the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa, at Camp Lemonnier, the home of U.S. Africa Command. Africom was established as a stand-alone command in 2008, at a time when the U.S. government was focused on fighting insurgent groups and terrorists in Africa and elsewhere. It is also home to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, which was set up after 9/11 and tasked with preventing violent extremist organizations in East Africa from posing a threat to the United States.

Under former U.S. President Barack Obama, Camp Lemonnier underwent a $1.4 billion upgrade. The installation now houses around 4,500 American military personnel and includes a well-appointed gym and a Pizza Hut. The base has become a vital cog in the machinery of U.S. military operations in the region. From this camp, the United States has launched countless drone flights into Somalia and Yemen.

But the United States is far from alone. China has also eyed Djibouti as a vital strategic outpost for projecting its power across Africa and the Middle East. The Chinese support base in Djibouti, which cost $590 million to build, and opened in 2017, is the first overseas military base ever constructed by the Chinese navy.

Beijing has also invested heavily in infrastructure projects in Djibouti as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. It has recently completed a railway connecting landlocked Ethiopia’s 100 million people with Djibouti, a project that cost $490 million. The Chinese are also behind plans for Djibouti to transform itself into the Dubai of the Horn of Africa.

In response to growing Chinese influence, even Japan, which is renowned for its reluctance to project military power, has also put a footprint in Djibouti. Since 2011, a Japanese Self-Defense Forces contingent of 180 troops has occupied a 30-acre site in Djibouti, next to Camp Lemonnier, the country’s first long-term overseas base since World War II. In November 2018, the Japanese Defense Ministry announced plans to expand its base for range of missions beyond anti-piracy operations.

In early 2017, the Djiboutian government signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia that would allow the Gulf state to build a base in the country. The French have a naval base there, and troops from Germany and Spain have also established a presence. The one power that has been barred from building a base in the country is Russia, because, according to Djiboutian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the country did not want to “become the terrain for a proxy war.”

Djibouti and Somaliland have predicated their development models on attracting powerful foreign militaries.

As the region continues to emerge as a site of competition for both regional players such as the UAE and Qatar and global powers such as China, Japan, and the United States, this is a strategy that risks embroiling the region in dangerous international rivalries.

For Shire, Somaliland’s foreign minister, Berbera’s port is “a purely commercial deal.” But with the region now a crucible for global power projection, there are more than just economic considerations.

In the summer, temperatures in Berbera can reach up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Many of the women and children who live there move uphill into the Sheikh Mountains to escape the summer heat. As major powers continue to flex their muscles in the region, there may be no way to avoid being caught up in their power struggles.

Published: La Jornada (6 November 2018)

Arriving at the Houses of Parliament in London, I worried that I would find Jeremy Corbyn downbeat and nervy. The leader of the Labour Party, the official opposition to the British government, has been the victim of fierce attacks over the past six months -- the crescendo to a campaign that has been rolling since he was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015.

In a near-universally hostile British media, he is regularly portrayed as an anti-semite, a misogynist, a terrorist sympathiser, a communist agent -- the list is literally endless. Every day, there is a new line of attack on a politician who for just about his whole political life was a largely unknown, marginalised left-wing voice in British politics.

But, like so much when it comes to Jeremy Corbyn, the opposite is the case. He is upbeat and relaxed. I meet him at his offices where he is surrounded by young and enthusiastic staff buzzing round the office. As he greets me, he hands me a double espresso. Someone has got his order wrong. “Want it?” he asks smiling.

He is quick to crack a joke, is intensely interested in other people, and seems at peace. His aura is one of enviable calm. Considering the storm around him, it’s disorientating. You take a lot of hits, I say. People worry this must have an effect on you: are you happy? “Absolutely,” he cries with his characteristic wry smile, raising his eyebrows. “Absolutely!” he adds again for emphasis. “I’m extremely happy. I do my work in Parliament, I spend a lot of time touring around the country doing campaigning events, meeting people. And I travel when I can, I was in Jordan this summer visiting refugee camps.” He then adds: “I lead a very balanced life. I read quite widely. I have an allotment, which I'm very proud of, and I keep myself fit and healthy. We want people to be able to lead full lives, and I lead a very full life, and I'm very happy doing it.” As we chat casually -- he is disarmingly open -- I have to keep reminding myself that I am sitting opposite the biggest threat to the British establishment maybe ever. There have been important anti-imperialist socialist figures throughout Britain’s history, but none has ever got as close to power as Jeremy Corbyn is right now. His rise has been improbable, but, after constant destabilisation campaigns (often by his own party) he is obviously going nowhere.

In the General Election of 2017, when he was roundly predicted to crash and burn, he increased Labour’s seat count and the Tories lost their majority in the Houses of Parliament. Some say it was the most important moment for progressive politics in modern British political history. The left finally proved that its ideas could be popular with the general population. Socialism is back, and many predict that if Britain’s unstable Prime Minister Theresa May falls and a general election is called, Corbyn and Labour would win a landslide.  

Corbyn, unlike many in parochial British politics, is and has always been an internationalist. He links struggles for democracy and human rights across the world and has travelled extensively throughout his life. But Latin America, and especially Mexico, has a special place in his heart. I glance over to his desk where a miniature Mexican flies above his papers. Further back is a framed picture of his Mexican wife Laura Alvarez at her graduation.

Corbyn has been rereading A History of Mexico in preparation for the interview and he is clearly enthused by the fact Mexico has turned red with the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador -- the first time, he points out, Mexico has elected a real left-winger since Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s. In fact, he is so excited by what AMLO represents that he announces he will be travelling to Mexico for the inauguration of AMLO in December.  “AMLO has shown amazing personal and political courage over many decades,” he tells me. “He was one of the most reforming of mayors of Mexico City in history. Indeed, it's quite humbling when you go to the supermarket at the time of the month when the older people get their food vouchers, and they call them AMLOs.”

Does Corbyn sees similarities between himself and AMLO? “I see similarities in the sense that we're both of about the same age, both been in politics all of our lives, and both have an absolute commitment to human rights and to righting injustice. I support him in the difficulties I know he's going to face in searching for all the disappeared, as well as dealing with the Ayozinapa 43, and the dreadful case that that is.”

Corbyn first went to Latin America in the late 1960s when he was 20-years-old. He was living in Jamaica working with Voluntary Service Overseas and when he finished he embarked on a solo trip around South America. He fell in love with the region and has since visited nearly every country in Latin America. “There is a huge ethnic diversity across Latin America that's often not understood by people outside. Understanding the history of Latin America is very limited in the rest of the world. The diversity of Bolivia, for example, with Quechua being actually the dominant language not Spanish. When that diversity is recognized you tend to get more inclusive governments. For example, in Chile the great Salvador Allende recognized the needs of the Mapuche people, which had often been ignored until then. I see the strength of Latin America as bringing people together.”

This is the side of Latin America that has inspired the left across the world in the past century. But there is another, darker, side to the region that, in places like Brazil, is coming back. Corbyn is aware of this too. “I also see elites in Latin American that have often been interlinked with the armed forces and global corporations ... hence the problems that the Allende suffered. I think an ongoing issue is the question of control of resources, and the economic development of the continent. I was looking recently at my diaries from 1969, and I've got an entry from May the 1st, 1969, in Santiago. That was the time when Popular Unity had been formed which eventually led to the election of President Allende a year later. Remember it was the first past the post system, so Allende got elected on, I think, 36% of the vote. He faced opposition from the very beginning, particularly from the mining companies, and the CIA, much of it led by Kissinger. It's all very well recorded.”

Corbyn pauses then adds: “There are powerful forces that move around in the world that want to oppose those who want to bring about economic and social justice. The only way to combat it is insertion of democratic values and humans rights, and that is exactly what I'm determined to do.”

Corbyn has been called by some Britain’s answer to Salvador Allende. Except the powerful reactionary forces he mentions will be much more concerned about Britain going red than Chile. No core capitalist country has ever had an anti-imperialist socialist in power. The political and economic system is sick and immoral. It remains to be seen whether such a system will ever allow a decent and principled human being to rise to its apex. Do you worry, I ask, about the forces that brought down Allende doing the same thing to you? “Well, I understand a lot of the media are very unkind towards me here,” he says. “Extremely unkind,” he adds with a wry grin. “I think what we showed in the general election and since then is our ability to communicate with people was critical. Things like social media, and local organizations, have created a confidence amongst a lot of people in Britain that we can bring about political change, we can be a government of social justice and we can have a foreign policy based on human rights and justice. I'm utterly determined to achieve it.”

The Labour Party in Britain is nominally left-wing yet at least since Tony Blair won leadership of the Party in 1994 -- and arguably long before -- it has allied with reactionary forces across the world, from George W Bush to Silvio Berlusconi to the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.  That meant it showed no solidarity at all with the “pink tide” movement of the late 1990s and 2000s which saw progressive governments come to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Brazil. In one of most exciting times for left politics in history, the Labour Party under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was completely absent - only offering ritual denunciations of “authoritarianism” and “populism” in the liberated countries.

I wonder if that will now change under Corbyn, that the Latin American left can expect solidarity from the Labour Party now. “I'm very clear that we have to build an international movement, which deals with economic injustice and inequality, and challenges the neoliberal agenda. We need governments that think alike to work together on economic justice and we'll absolutely do that.” He is particularly interested in the progress that Bolivia has seen under the government of Evo Morales and the social movements that catapulted him to power. “I had a very interesting visit to Bolivia some years back when I led a parliamentary delegation there. We were looking at the control of water, and the mining industry, but also the enfranchisement of the diversity of Bolivia. The idea that a non-Spanish speaking woman should be the author of the constitution of Bolivia was amazing and historic in so many ways. I've got a lot of respect for what they've achieved in Bolivia.”

Published: La Jornada (6 November 2018) 

Londres. Al llegar a la sede del Parlamento en Londres, me preocupó la idea de encontrar a Jeremy Corbyn abatido e irritable. El líder del Partido Laborista, la oposición oficial al gobierno británico, ha sido víctima de feroces ataques en los pasados seis meses, al arreciar una campaña que ha estado en marcha desde que fue elegido dirigente del partido, en 2015.

En los medios británicos, casi universalmente hostiles, se le muestra con regularidad como antisemita, misógino, simpatizante del terrorismo, agente comunista… la lista es interminable. Cada día surge una nueva línea de ataque a un político que durante casi toda su trayectoria ha sido una voz de izquierda en gran medida desconocida y marginada en la política británica.

Sin embargo, como ocurre a menudo tratándose de Jeremy Corbyn, ocurre la contrario. Se muestra optimista y relajado. Me reuní con él en su oficina; estaba rodeado de colaboradores jóvenes y entusiastas que pululan por el lugar. Me recibe con un café expreso doble. Alguien no entendió su pedido. ¿Lo quieres?, me pregunta sonriendo.

Es ágil para bromear, tiene un intenso interés por los demás y parece estar en paz. Tiene un aura de calma envidiable. Eso desorienta, considerando la tormenta que lo rodea. Usted recibe muchos golpes, le digo. La gente se preocupa de que eso le haga efecto. ¿Es feliz?

–Absolutamente –responde con su característica sonrisa irónica, alzando las cejas–. Soy feliz en extremo. Hago mi trabajo en el Parlamento, paso mucho tiempo viajando por el país en actos de campaña y reuniéndome con la gente. Y viajo siempre que puedo, como ahora que estuve en Jordania en verano, visitando campos de refugiados. Tengo una retribución asignada, de la que me siento muy orgulloso, y me mantengo físicamente en forma y saludable. Queremos que la gente viva con plenitud, y trabajar en eso me hace feliz.

Mientras charlamos sin formalidades –su estilo amigable derriba toda defensa– tengo que recordarme todo el tiempo que estoy sentado ante quizá la mayor amenaza de la historia al establishment británico. Ha habido importantes figuras socialistas antimperialistas a lo largo de la historia de la nación, pero ninguna ha estado tan cerca del poder como Jeremy Corbyn actualmente. Su ascenso ha sido improbable, pero, después de constantes campañas de desestabilización (con frecuencia de su propio partido), es obvio que no se va a hacer a un lado.

En las elecciones generales de 2017, cuando en todos lados se predijo su caída, incrementó el número de escaños del laborismo y los toriesperdieron su mayoría en las cámaras. Algunos dicen que fue el momento más importante para la política progresista en la historia moderna británica. La izquierda probó por fin que sus ideas pueden ser populares entre la población general. El socialismo está de vuelta, y muchos predicen que, si la inestable primera ministra Theresa May cae y se convoca a elecciones, Corbyn y su partido ganarían de calle.

A diferencia de muchos en la parroquial política británica, Corbyn es y siempre ha sido un internacionalista. Se vincula con luchas por la democracia y los derechos humanos en todo el mundo y ha viajado extensamente a lo largo de su vida. Pero América Latina, y México en particular, tienen un lugar especial en su corazón. Miro al otro lado del escritorio, donde una bandera mexicana en miniatura se alza sobre sus documentos. Más atrás hay un retrato enmarcado de su esposa, la mexicana Laura Álvarez, el día de su graduación.

Corbyn ha estado releyendo A History of Mexico en preparación para la entrevista y es claro su entusiasmo porque México ha virado hacia el rojo con la elección de Andrés Manuel López Obrador: por primera vez, destaca, México ha elegido a un verdadero izquierdista desde Lázaro Cárdenas en la década de 1930. De hecho, está tan emocionado por lo que AMLO representa, que anuncia su intención de viajar a México para su toma de posesión, en diciembre próximo. AMLO ha mostrado una asombrosa valentía personal y política durante muchas décadas, expresa. “Fue uno de los alcaldes más reformistas de la Ciudad de México. De hecho, ir allá al supermercado en la época en que los adultos mayores reciben su pensión mensual y oírlos decir ‘es lo de AMLO’ me pone en mi lugar con respecto a mis logros”.

¿Ve Corbyn similitudes entre López Obrador y él mismo? Las veo en el sentido de que tenemos más o menos la misma edad, somos políticos de toda la vida y tenemos un compromiso absoluto con los derechos humanos y con remediar la injusticia. Lo apoyo en las dificultades que sé que va a enfrentar al buscar a todos los desaparecidos, así como en atender el caso de los 43 de Ayotzinapa, un caso espantoso.

El primer viaje de Corbyn a América Latina fue a finales de la década de 1960, cuando tenía 20 años. Vivió en Jamaica, trabajando con el Servicio Voluntario de Ultramar, y al terminar recorrió Sudamérica por su cuenta. Se enamoró de la región y desde entonces ha visitado todos los países latinoamericanos. Existe una enorme diversidad étnica en América Latina que a menudo las personas de otras regiones no entienden. Por ejemplo, la diversidad de Bolivia, donde el quechua, no el español, es la lengua dominante. Cuando se reconoce esa diversidad, uno tiende a tener gobiernos más incluyentes. En Chile, el gran Salvador Allende reconoció las necesidades del pueblo mapuche, hasta entonces ignoradas. Ve que la fortaleza de América Latina radica en unir a todos los pueblos.

Este es el lado de América Latina que ha inspirado a la izquierda en todo el mundo en el siglo pasado. Sin embargo, hay en la región otro lado, más oscuro, que en lugares como Brasil está regresando. Corbyn está consciente de ello también. “Veo en América Latina élites que se han vinculado con las fuerzas armadas y las corporaciones globales… de ahí los problemas que sufrió Allende. Creo que un tema de actualidad es el control de recursos y el desarrollo económico del continente. Recientemente leía mis diarios de 1969 y vi una anotación del primero de mayo de ese año en Santiago. Fue el tiempo en que se formó la Unidad Popular, que un año después llevó al poder al presidente Allende, con 36 por ciento de los votos, me parece. Encontró oposición desde el principio, en particular de las empresas mineras y de la CIA, en gran medida dirigida por Kissinger. Todo está muy bien documentado”.

Luego de una pausa, añade: En el mundo se mueven fuerzas poderosas que se oponen a quienes quieren lograr la justicia social y económica. La única forma de combatirlas es la inserción de valores democráticos y derechos humanos, que es exactamente lo que me propongo hacer.

Algunos llaman a Corbyn la respuesta británica a Salvador Allende. Excepto que a las poderosas fuerzas reaccionarias que menciona les preocuparía más que Gran Bretaña virara a la izquierda que Chile. Ninguno de los principales países capitalistas ha tenido nunca a un socialista antimperialista en el poder. El sistema político y económico es perverso e inmoral. Está por verse si un sistema así permitirá algún día que un ser humano decente y con principios se eleve hasta la cúspide. ¿Le preocupa a Corbyn que las mismas fuerzas que derrocaron a Allende hagan lo mismo con él?

Bueno, entiendo que aquí gran parte de los medios son muy descorteses conmigo, dice. Extremadamente descorteses, añade con sonrisa sarcástica. Creo que lo que hemos mostrado a partir de las elecciones generales es que nuestra capacidad de comunicarnos con la gente ha sido esencial. Las redes sociales y las organizaciones sociales han creado en muchas personas en Gran Bretaña confianza en que podemos lograr el cambio político, podemos ser un gobierno de justicia social y tener una política exterior basada en los derechos humanos y la justicia. Estoy absolutamente decidido a lograrlo.

El Partido Laborista británico es nominalmente de izquierda; sin embargo, al menos desde que Tony Blair obtuvo el liderazgo, en 1994 –y se puede sostener que desde mucho antes– se ha aliado con las fuerzas reaccionarias del mundo, desde George W. Bush a Silvio Berlusconi y a la dictadura en Arabia Saudita. Por eso no expresó solidaridad con la ola rosada de finales de la década de los 90 y la de 2000, en la que gobiernos progresistas llegaron al poder en Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay y Brasil. En uno de los periodos más emocionantes de la historia para la política de izquierda, el Partido Laborista, bajo el dominio de Tony Blair y Gordon Brown, estuvo ausente por completo, sin ofrecer más que denuncias rituales de autoritarismo y populismo en los países liberados.

Me pregunto si eso cambiará ahora con Corbyn, si la izquierda latinoamericana puede esperar ahora la solidaridad de los laboristas. Tengo claro que necesitamos construir un movimiento internacional, que enfrente la injusticia social y la desigualdad, y que desafíe la agenda neoliberal. Necesitamos que los gobiernos que piensen del mismo modo trabajen juntos hacia la justicia económica, y absolutamente eso es lo que haremos.

Le interesa en particular el progreso que Bolivia ha tenido durante el gobierno de Evo Morales y los movimientos sociales que lo impulsaron al poder. Realicé una visita muy interesante a Bolivia hace unos años, cuando encabecé una delegación parlamentaria. Observamos el control del agua y de la industria minera, pero también el reconocimiento de la diversidad del país. Que una mujer sea la autora de la Constitución boliviana fue un hecho asombroso e histórico de muchas maneras. Tengo mucho respecto por lo que han logrado en Bolivia.

Antes de terminar, le pregunto si tiene un mensaje para los mexicanos ante la próxima toma de posesión de López Obrador, y me contesta en pertecto español: Saludos y buena suerte para el futuro, y paz y justicia para todo el pueblo de México.

Published: The Nation (22 October 2018) w/ Ismail Einashe

On a hot and humid June afternoon, a group of boys wearing FC Barcelona jerseys kicked around a soccer ball in the Malko-Durduro, a dry seasonal river on the outskirts of Hargeisa, the capital of the breakaway territory of Somaliland. At first glance, the flat, red earth of the riverbed made for a typical improvised pitch in this arid region. But recent heavy rains had exposed what had earned the area its moniker, the Valley of Death. Around them, human bones protruded from the ground. But these kids had grown up playing soccer surrounded by skeletal remains; they hardly noticed them.

Between 1987 and 1989, the regime of Somali dictator Siad Barre massacred an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq tribe, the largest clan group in the northwest part of Somalia. At the time, some Isaaqs were fighting for independence, and to eliminate the threat, Barre tried to exterminate all of them. Experts now say there are more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most of them in the Valley of Death.  

This year marks the 30th anniversary of what is often called the “Hargeisa Holocaust,” when about 90 percent of the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of Isaaqs were killed. Yet there are no major plans to mark the horrors in Somaliland, or anywhere else for that matter. In the past, a few international organizations have recognized the bloodletting. A 2001 UN report investigating the attacks against the Isaaqs concluded, “the crime of genocide was conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somalia Government against the Isaaq people of northern Somalia.” But the events have been mostly forgotten; the boys playing soccer did not know the story behind the bones.

Even in Hargeisa, many people don’t realize the extent of US support during the genocide. No American has ever apologized for what happened in Somaliland; there has been no internationally backed Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and no one has been criminally punished. There is little funding to investigate—let alone prosecute—the perpetrators. And some of the Somali genocidaires now have close ties to the US-backed government in Mogadishu of President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmajo.

COLD WAR PROXY

The country of Somalia was formed in 1960, when British Somaliland gained its independence from Britain and joined with its much larger neighbor to east and south, Italian Somaliland. Nine years later, General Siad Barre took over in a bloodless coup and steered the young country toward the Soviet Union. Somalia was strategically placed along Africa’s longest coastline, and the Soviets welcomed a new proxy in the Horn of Africa.  

This all changed in 1977 when Barre invaded the Somali-majority Ogaden region of southeastern Ethiopia. Previously Ethiopia had been aligned with the US, but after the Derg military junta seized power in 1974, the Soviets had begun supporting Somalia’s communist neighbor. Forced to choose between allies, the Soviets sided with the Derg junta, and sent arms and military advisers . Cuba’s Fidel Castro provided an additional 13,000 troops, and Ethiopia repelled the Somali army in 1978.

Livid at the Soviet support for Ethiopia, Barre switched sides, allying himself with the US. In January 1981, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger visited the presidential palace in Mogadishu, hoping to further strengthen US-Somalia ties. Barre had criticized President Jimmy Carter for not backing his country against the Soviets. But now Kissinger was convincing President Ronald Reagan to view Somalia as a crucial theater for US-Soviet confrontation. A year later, Barre made the trip to Washington, DC, to meet with Reagan in the Oval Office. Grainy footage of the encounter shows Barre asking Reagan for help. “Somalia is not afraid of any other country in the region, but it cannot cope with a superpower like the Soviet Union,” he told Reagan.  

Barre said the United States agreed to help Somalia, because it “is also in its own interest.” In the 1983 budget, Reagan requested $91 million in military and economic assistance for Somalia, plus another $18 million in food aid for refugees. That year Somalia’s entire GDP was less than $750 million.

Around this time, Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who would become the chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, took on the Barre government as a client. In 1980 Manafort founded the lobbying company, Black, Manafort and Stone, which had close ties to the Reagan White House and later the George HW Bush administration. Riva Levinson, who worked with Manafort in the 1980s, has said she asked at the time, “Are we sure we want this guy as a client?” Manafort sounded agitated: “We all know Barre is a bad guy, Riva. We just have to make sure he’s our bad guy.”

Manafort did PR for Barre even as he was massacring the Isaaqs. Levinson said Manafort sent her to Somalia to have Barre sign a contract for $1 million. “Our assignment would then be to clean up Siad Barre’s international reputation, which needed plenty of soap,” she wrote in The Washington Post in 2017.

With Manafort’s PR work and the country’s anti-Soviet Union alignment, the US was happy to turn a blind eye to Barre’s abuses. By 1988, the US had given his government hundreds of millions dollars of military and economic aid, and Barre had become entirely dependent on US support.

THE GENOCIDE AND THE US

Barre had long targeted and discriminated against the Isaaq tribe, and so in 1981 in London, Isaaq dissidents formed the Somali National Movement (SNM) to overthrow Barre’s rule in the north of the country. Barre responded to this insurgency with a ruthless military campaign. In 1988, Amnesty International reported the Barre regime used ”widespread arbitrary arrests, ill treatment and summary executions” and torture of those suspected of collaborating with the SNM. They found that those who opposed the Barre regime were gathered, bound, and taken to places like the Valley of Death where they were shot and buried in unmarked graves.

One of the most brutal parts of the genocidal campaign was the destruction of Hargeisa, the largest city in northern Somalia. In May of 1988, Barre’s regime sent in fighter jets to level the city. The destruction of Hargeisa was so total that it earned the nickname “the Dresden of Africa.” Bombing missions and ground troops attacks killed more than 40,000 people. Burao, the third largest city in Somalia at the time and the second principal city in northern Somalia, was razed. The relentless violence against Isaaq civilians in 1988 resulted in the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 300,000 refugees fled to Ethiopia, most of them arriving in the small border town of Harta Sheikh in Ethiopia, which became the largest refugee camp from 1988 until it closed in 2004.  

Saad Ali Shire, Somaliland’s current foreign minister, told us, “In 1988, when the government started bombarding Hargeisa and other towns in Somaliland, the Americans were of course friends of the Siad Barre regime … for strategic reasons. … And they gave Siad Barre arms—arms were unloaded in Berbera port—and it was reported by Amnesty International and other human-rights organizations at the time.”

He paused and then said, “The US was not directly involved in the inhuman treatment of the people of Somaliland, but, like many other allies of the regime then, of course their hand was there.” The US mission to Somalia did not return a request for comment.

The US knew what was going on and maintained its support. A cable released by Wikleaks from that period and sent by the US embassy in Mogadishu noted: “Many displaced persons (i.e. Isaaqs) would have returned home long ago had they not been deterred from doing so by … government forces.” The cable continued: “Isaaqs, suffering from thirst, hunger, disease, and abominable camp conditions, were demanding to go home.” There was no discussion of cutting support for Barre as the genocide unfolded.

But as the US ramped up its bombing campaigns in Iraq and the Cold War ended, the US eventually decided to redirect its resources from Barre’s government to the Middle East. Without US support, the government of Somalia collapsed.

Around that time, on May 18, 1991, the SNM declared the northwest bit of Somalia independent and established the Somaliland Republic. The international community still does not recognize Somaliland as a sovereign country, but it has all the trappings of a nation-state—a Constitution, a president, a currency, and even biometric passports.

THE HUMAN CONSEQUENCES

Three tumultuous decades later, the genocide still haunts survivors. Somaliland has one main tribute to the victims: In the middle of a traffic island in Hargeisa, the rusting shell of a MiG fighter jet shot down by the SMN sits perched on top of a wall with murals of mass slaughter. The central figure in one painting is a man with blood spurting out of his limbs after his arms and legs have been chopped off.

For survivors like Yusuf Mire the trauma depicted on the murals is still fresh. During a crackdown in 1988 by Barre’s forces in the city of Burao, Somali troops hacked off his left arm, and abducted and killed his family.

Mire has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth of what happened in the Valley of Death. He works with survivors and families of the disappeared, helping those who, like him, had loved ones that never returned from Barre’s killing fields. Mire told us that the US is simply not interested in digging up the past or funding forensic investigations in Somaliland. Given the US role, he said they’d prefer to prop up the government in Mogadishu and for the truth to remain buried.

Ismail Abdi is another survivor who works with vulnerable children in Somaliland for a British humanitarian NGO based in Hargeisa. As a young teen, Abdi ended up at the Hargeisa Orphanage. Then, in May 1988, from the orphanage window, he watched Barre’s military personnel execute a family; he still remembers the screams of dying children. Abdi sent us a photo taken by a Dutch woman who had worked at the Hargeisa Orphanage in 1988. The photo, which Abdi asked us not publish, showed the bodies of a woman and her children covered in blood.

We met him in the garden of a swanky hotel in the center of Hargeisa; men sat nearby on plastic chairs eating goat curry and drinking mango juice. Abdi lamented that young people now do not know what happened, and said he wants “justice for our people.” Abdi said he wants the evidence he has collected  about this one family to be used to bring those responsible to justice. But like most Somalilanders, he does not have the money to pursue those responsible in the courts either internationally or in Somaliland, a country that does not officially exist.

But there is an organization Abdi is hoping can help bring those responsible to justice. In the mid-1990s, Somaliland’s first president, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, established the Somaliland War Crimes Investigations Commission to find and unearth the mass graves, offer proper burials to victims, and bring judicial action against those responsible for the killings. The US government has offered no help.

Without international support, the Commission is woefully underfunded, according to the Khadar Ahmed, the Commission’s chairman. It lacks the necessary resources to properly investigate or collect the evidence needed to bring about prosecutions.

The Commission usually gets tip offs from locals about the mass-grave locations after rains expose new bones. Then staff members place piles of stones with red marks on them adjacent to the graves to alert the community. The Commission is tasked with investigating these graves, but with such tight budgets, graves are identified but few are ever dug up. Since it was founded, the Commission has exhumed 11 mass graves and reburied 318 skeletons, including a recent ones in Hargeisa and another in Berbera.

Ahmed said he’s upset that the US and other western powers have taken so little interest in the genocide: “As Somaliland Republic we are expecting to hear from the UN to establish a tribunal like Rwanda.” But their requests have been met with silence. Ahmed said that many of the killers are now hiding in plain sight in the US, Kenya, Canada, and elsewhere. Because it’s not a recognized state, Somaliland does not have the power to push for a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal, like in Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone.

As time passes, evidence gets lost. In the Valley of Death, rainfall reveals new skeletons, but it also erodes and washes away the bones. Thankfully, while the US government has not provided any support, the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) has stepped in, and introduced the Commission to the Peruvian forensic anthropology team Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (EPAF), led by Franco Mora. Since 2012, EPAF has been excavating the mass graves in the Valley of Death and other parts of Somaliland, identifying and recovering as many bodies as possible. They are also helping the Commission provide proper burials. “Our work is only humanitarian; we try to recover and identify the disappeared and to bury them with dignity,” Mora told us.

Ahmed said that the Commission has to pay the EPAF to dig up the graves, but complained that the Somaliland government can only afford to do this, at most, twice a year. With an estimated 200 sites, “we don’t have the capacity to carry out the work ourselves,” he said.

The Commission hopes the remains unearthed by the EPAF team can be used not only to get a better idea of what happened, but also as evidence to convict or hold genocidaires accountable. But this will be tough. Mora said his team is only, “recording the injuries and establishing the most probable cause of death.” He said to establish a legal case you would need not only information retrieved from the bodies and graves, but also historical information and documentation, which is nearly nonexistent because so many government records were destroyed during the war. The only reliable documents about the Barre regime’s genocidal campaign are held by countries like the US or international human-rights groups.

There have been a few successes holding perpetrators accountable, but to expand beyond the handful of cases requires funding and for the US to release more of its records. In 2012, the CJA helped a group of Somalis living in Virginia secure a $21 million judgment in a US federal court against Mohamed Ali Samantar, who served as prime minister under Barre. The court ruled that he was responsible for planning the torture and killings of Isaaq clansmen.

In 2016, a CNN investigation publicized another Somali who arrived in the US after allegedly participating in the genocide. Yusuf Abdi Ali stands accused of war crimes while a colonel in Barre’s regime during in the 1980s. He was head of the Somali army’s Fifth Brigade, which is said to have tortured clan members and burned down villages. For 20 years, he had lived near Washington, DC, and worked as a security guard at Dulles Airport (he was suspended after his identity was revealed).

The CJA brought a lawsuit against him in 2004. The CJA is representing Farhan Warfaa, who was nearly killed by Ali during an interrogation in 1987. In a 2016 ruling, the Fourth Circuit dismissed Warfaa’s claims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but upheld claims of torture and attempted extrajudicial killing. In June 2017, the Supreme Court allowed for the CJA to continue pursuing Warfaa’s claims under the US Torture Victim Protection Act.

But the US government has not been as keen as the CJA to help. Ali’s background had been revealed as far back as 1992 when Canadian broadcaster CBC News uncovered that he had worked as a security guard in Toronto after fleeing Somalia in 1991. Despite this, US authorities did not prevent him from settling in the US. The US authorities knew his record, but allowed him to settle in the US, get a job at Dulles airport, and live a suburban American life.

Of course not all the Somali perpetrators headed to the US. Last year, General Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan was filmed watching Farmajo’s presidential inauguration in Mogadishu, apparently as a guest. Morgan, known as the “butcher of Hargeisa,” has lived freely in Kenya since the collapse of the Barre government in 1991. Many Somalilanders hold him responsible for carrying out the Isaaq genocide; in 1988, he’s reported to have ordered his troops “to kill all but the crows.” Yet he still gets invited to political events in Mogadishu.

One thing Somalilanders are adamant about is that no one involved with the Somali government in 1988 can claim they didn’t know. “I think everybody was aware of what was happening,” Saad, the foreign minister, told us. “Perhaps they didn’t have the full picture of what was happening, but the fact that the Siad Barre regime was undemocratic and brutal and murdering many civilians was well-known. … But sometimes superpowers look the other way.”

Published: Foreign Policy (18 October 2018) w/ Claire Provost

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius—The security guard at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address at an office at the St Louis Business Centre in downtown Port Louis is not sure if we’re in the right place. The staff at the front desk are bewildered by our request to speak to someone from the company. The otherwise modest office block has flat-screen televisions on the walls and glossy magazines with titles like Savile Row and Family Business on a table in a small waiting area.

After about 20 minutes, a woman in a suit appears, bearing apologies—she had been out to lunch. At first, she seems to mistake us for investors in Malawi Mangoes. We jump in to clarify: We’re journalists looking to talk to someone from the company, which in 2014 received a $5 million loan from the private investment arm of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Our interlocutor appears confused, as if she knows little about the business, or why we might be attempting to learn more about it in Port Louis, Mauritius.

She confirms that Malawi Mangoes, a company whose plantations and juice-making operations are located over 1,500 miles away in Malawi, is indeed registered at this address, but she declines tell us anything else. There is no one from the company here to speak to, no one to interview, no pamphlets or brochures we can read.

Mauritius sits 1,200 miles off the eastern coast of southern Africa, in the Indian Ocean. It’s an isolated island, without an endowment of exploitable natural resources like oil or minerals. Simon Springett, the United Nations resident coordinator for the island, told us that when the country became independent from the United Kingdom in 1968, “economists basically said there’s no way Mauritius can survive as an independent nation-state.”

Sugar cane had been the country’s core crop for centuries. Sugar is still produced in Mauritius, but the island owes much of its modern prosperity to the development of another more controversial industry.

In 2018, Mauritius has an international reputation built around extremely low taxes—a flat corporate tax rate of 15 percent and an effective rate as low as zero to 3 percent for offshore companies—as well as high levels of financial secrecy. Global businesses registered in Mauritius have assets valued at more than $630 billion, almost 25 times the country’s own GDP of $26 billion. Its offshore financial industry includes more than 21,000 registered businesses —almost 70 times the number of primary schools in the country. However, these firms don’t take up a lot of space; many of them exist only on paper, set up to benefit from the island’s cut-rate taxes and its “ask no questions” attitude.

Since the early 1990s, Mauritius has remade itself into an African tax haven, where multinational corporations and ultra-rich individuals can stash their cash and profits and minimize their tax bills, away from the prying eyes of other governments and the public.

As the private investment arm of the World Bank, the IFC is tasked with investing in businesses in developing countries to help “end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity,” while also making money to support the bank’s other programs. Despite its mandate to help the world’s poorest people, it seems to have largely turned a blind eye to the controversial role Mauritius plays in the global tax system—and, in some cases, it has likely profited from the country’s remoteness and opaque financial services itself.

The IFC has approved loans and investments in more than 1,600 companies since 2012. According to our analysis of their project disclosures, at least 50 of these were for companies registered in Mauritius but operating elsewhere. Many of these companies, including Malawi Mangoes, are based in sub-Saharan Africa, and their registration in Mauritius may be depriving African governments of much needed-tax revenue.

Last year, the African Business Review reported that nearly 60 percent of investments made by international companies registered in Mauritius were destined for mainland Africa. Mauritius has been accused by civil society groups such as Oxfam of draining public resources from poorer countries by allowing multinational investors to shift their profits here, enabling them to pay much less than their fair share of taxes in the countries where they actually operate. And in 2013, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa criticized the island as “a relatively financially secretive conduit” that facilitates illicit financial flows across the continent.

Malawi Mangoes is one of the companies in which the IFC has invested. It was founded in 2009 by a pair of British entrepreneurs, Jonathan Jacobs and Craig Hardie. From the Salima district in central Malawi, it produces mango and banana puree and fresh fruit for export around Africa, to the Middle East, and to Europe.

When the IFC approved its $5 million investment in Malawi Mangoes in 2014, it was described as an agribusiness project in the soft drink sector, with the loan going to support the company as it tried to establish itself in the country. This would create much-needed rural jobs, the IFC argued, “thus injecting money to the local economy through wages and benefits paid.” Economic growth in poorer countries like Malawi is being held back, the IFC contends, by “the lack of risk capital” needed to “build the dynamic, job-creating companies that drive prosperity.”

To even be eligible for its support, projects must be located in a developing country and “have good prospects of being profitable”—but also “benefit the local economy; and Be environmentally and socially sound.” And though the IFC’s investment location is listed as Malawi, the funds actually go to “Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited.”

Company records in Mauritius and the United Kingdom, where the owners have filed paperwork, reveal that Malawi Mangoes moved its business to Mauritius after it had already started working in Malawi. This is significant because it appears to contradict claims that Mauritius is encouraging investment in Africa that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Malawi Mangoes was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2009, according to financial records filed in London. This U.K. entity was dissolved in 2015. By then, Malawi Mangoes had incorporated two companies in Mauritius (in 2012 and 2013), under the island’s global business system. In other words: Mauritius didn’t facilitate the company’s entrance into Malawi. It had already happened.

This suggests that Malawi Mangoes was attracted to Mauritius by something else: not the chance to move into Africa for the first time, but more likely its low taxes, high secrecy levels, and what the World Bank touts as its “ease of doing business.”

Despite the IFC’s poverty-reducing mandate and its requirement that projects benefit the local economy, the institution, and the World Bank as a whole, has been criticized for years for investing in commercial projects with dubious impacts on poor communities, including five-star hotels, upmarket shopping malls, and even agribusiness projects that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

On its website, the IFC explains how potential investments are reviewed, with proposals that are supposed to contain information such as the company’s finances and expected profits. IFC teams assess whether projects will comply with environmental and social performance standards, which cover issues such as labor conditions, land acquisition, and biodiversity—but not taxation, let alone tax justice.

The IFC’s disclosure explains that Malawi Mangoes is majority-owned by BXR Group, a private investment group in Amsterdam, and that the second-largest shareholder is “well-known fund manager and philanthropist” Stewart Newton. The project’s environmental and social review says Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited is “a holding company that runs an operation in Malawi.” No explanation is provided in the disclosure, however, as to why a company structured like this was deemed a suitable investment for the IFC, or why the entity receiving IFC money would be based on the Indian Ocean island.

Because this company is registered in Mauritius, where such information is not disclosed, we could not determine its annual revenues, profits, or how much tax it pays. However, it was reported locally in Malawi earlier this year that the company had secured 1,700 hectares of farmland near its existing plantations to expand its operations, and that its mango exports so far have already been worth more than $1.4 million.

The IFC’s disclosures also hint at possible problems on the ground in Malawi. In 2014, it said Malawi Mangoes had more than 600 employees, with the lowest-paid workers making just $35 a month. Though this is described as 20 percent higher than Malawi’s minimum wage, the company has also subsidized maize purchases for its workers during periods of the year when they could not afford it. And while the company does buy fruit from small-scale farmers through so-called outgrower schemes, it does not appear that local farmers or the Malawian economy are the main beneficiaries of the company’s activities.

Last year, a report in Malawi’s Maravi Post claimed that a senior chief in the Salima district “made shabby land deals” with Malawi Mangoes for which she allegedly pocketed proceeds and left “affected families” largely uncompensated.

Vigils were reportedly organized for 18 days at Salima District Commission offices to demand her removal as chief. “This land was sold dubiously to foreigners, without consultations but only telling us that it was government which allocated it,” one of the demonstrators, Muhamad Chingomanje, was quoted as saying. “We are not against developmental projects on our land, but … we want to benefit from its proceeds.”

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa says illicit financial flows from Africa could be worth as much as $50 billion per year—double the amount of official international aid budgeted for the continent—with impacts including drained foreign exchange reserves and worsening poverty. Tax havens enable this, it explains, by allowing for the creation of “disguised corporations, shell companies, anonymous trust accounts, and fake charitable foundations.”

The secrecy afforded in places like Mauritius may facilitate illegal practices—though the real story is how tax havens enable aggressive tax practices and legal tax avoidance on a massive scale, with companies taking advantage of gaps and mismatches in tax rules to shift their profits and declare them not where their real business is, but where they’ll pay less. This is part of a larger story about how countries have been sucked into competing with one another to offer the best deal to corporations, regardless of the impacts on their economy and their citizens. Then there is the impact on countries like Malawi, which is even worse for the public purse.

According to the IMF, developing countries’ revenue losses from what’s called “base erosion and profit-shifting” may exceed $200 billion.

This issue has been acknowledged at the very top of the World Bank as well. In 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said: “Some companies use elaborate strategies to not pay taxes in countries in which they work, a form of corruption that hurts the poor. More equitable taxation could easily eclipse official development assistance received by countries.”

Mauritius is an epicenter of this sort of profit-shifting. In addition to its flat tax rate of 15 percent, there is no capital gains tax and no tax on dividends or interest paid to nonresidents. Companies don’t even need to have a direct physical presence with staff on the island: This can also be outsourced to agents of financial services firms, whose employees may act as representatives for many companies at a time—just like those we met in Port Louis, at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address, who appeared surprised to be asked questions about the firm.

Once in Mauritius, it also helps for a business to have more than one subsidiary to take advantage of different incentives offered to different types of companies. Malawi Mangoes’ company records list two businesses in the country: Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited, incorporated in April 2012, and Malawi Mangoes Management (Mauritius) Limited, set up in January 2013. Both are incorporated as offshore companies within the island’s global business system and registered to the same address: “St Louis Business Centre, CNR Desroches & St Louis Streets, Port Louis.”

This is where we went in Mauritius, to ask about the company’s business and why it was running an operation in Malawi from an island so far away. But it’s just a care-of address, at the offices of a financial services firm called Rogers Capital, which helps its customers set up and manage offshore entities, lends its address for their registration forms, and keeps their details under wraps.

That pattern holds for other IFC investments in sub-Saharan Africa, made via Mauritius instead of directly in the countries of operation. In the capital of Port Louis, we had more Kafkaesque experiences. In one small office, on a narrow road in the city’s Chinatown, we found the registered office of CSquared, a broadband internet infrastructure business operating in several countries including Ghana and Uganda that counts Google among its investors. There, the man we spoke to would not even confirm the address of the building we were sitting in.

The IFC says clearly on its website that “tax evasion is unacceptable in any part of a transaction in which the World Bank Group is involved.” It insists that it “exercises due diligence to confirm that the structures in which it invests are chosen for legitimate reasons” and that it’s “committed to advancing the international tax transparency agenda.”

This sounds serious, but the language used also carefully limits the problem to illegal activity. Tax evasion is the illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax. But for multinational companies, there are many strategies to limit tax bills that may be currently legal but still highly questionable—particularly for an institution, backed by the world’s governments, with an explicit mandate to help end poverty and boost “shared prosperity.”

Anti-poverty and tax justice nongovernmental organizations have argued for years that the IFC shouldn’t be investing in companies using tax havens at all, as such structures enable information on money made and taxes paid to be hidden from governments as well as the public. Legitimate reasons for companies to incorporate in tax havens may be a matter of interpretation, but it cannot be publicly scrutinized or debated if businesses’ information is never disclosed.

In 2016, Oxfam accused the World Bank of “turning a blind eye” to the use of tax havens by the companies that the IFC invests in. It also scrutinized IFC disclosure information and found that 25 percent of all of the organization’s investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 were directly allocated to companies incorporated in tax havens, with almost 9 percent of the projects in Mauritius. What’s more, it found that a large majority of firms receiving IFC financing use tax havens, apparently unconnected to their core business, at some point in their corporate structure.

Oxfam demanded that the World Bank “ensure that its clients can prove they are paying their fair share of tax” and confirm that these businesses aren’t taking “advantage of the weakness of the system to reduce their tax bill to the minimum, especially through the artificial shift of profits” to countries like Mauritius. The organization suggested specifically that “responsible corporate tax considerations—beyond legal compliance” should be incorporated into the IFC’s environmental and social performance standards immediately and used to review and monitor their array of investments.

At the time, an IFC spokesperson responded by inaccurately characterizing the NGO’s criticisms as focused on illegal tax evasion, again stressing that “there are legitimate uses for offshore structures.”

This week, an IFC spokesman told Foreign Policy that the organization would only invest in a company if it was “satisfied with the integrity of the client and that the structure of the transaction is legitimate and not designed to be used for tax evasion.” The spokesman reiterated the argument that “Offshore Financial Centers can play a key role in cross-border investment,” especially when a host country lacks certain laws, contract enforcement mechanisms, or shareholder protections. “Appropriate use of intermediate jurisdictions,” he argued, “enables increased mobilization of private capital for investment that helps the poor.”

According to the spokesman, the IFC’s investment in Malawi Mangoes was “to support rural incomes through development of commercial production and processing of mangoes and bananas in a region where poverty is high” and that it was subject to the “policy on use of intermediate jurisdictions” and found to be acceptable. The IFC also pointed out that its performance standards “were developed before some of the public focus on tax and illicit financial flows” and that it was now updating its policies based on new and evolving international standards. It is unclear if Malawi Mangoes would qualify under the new standards.

According to the IFC, Malawi Mangoes has failed to ramp up its production and never generated any profits. This, of course, does not alter the nature of the tax arrangements the company set up for that eventuality.

Malawi Mangoes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last October, the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, revived the old narrative of the island’s dim economic prospects in an interview with the Financial Times. “We are a small island that is limited in many ways. We don’t have any natural resources,” he told the newspaper.

“We need to have an edge over others to be attractive,” Jugnauth added. “I think the advantage in taxation is important.”

At the World Bank office in Port Louis, the argument is much the same. Alex Sienaert, the country representative for Mauritius, said the offshore industry has benefited the island, providing a source of foreign exchange and encouraging kids to stay in school and work hard to get offshore office jobs. He said there is a sense among young people in the country that if “I can qualify as an accountant or a lawyer, there’s a good job for me, an office job, on the island. … That’s been going on for well over a generation now.”

But he acknowledged that “you do hear some concerns.” The offshore industry in Mauritius employs a surprisingly small fraction of the population—just 5,000 workers directly in a country of over 1 million people. And not all boats have been lifted equally by the island’s transformation into a corporate utopia. In March, the World Bank warned in a new 147-page report that inequality among Mauritians has “widened substantially” over the last 15 years, “threatening the standards of living of the poor.”

According to the report, the gap between the incomes of the poorest and the richest 10 percent of households increased by 37 percent from 2001 to 2015. One of the report’s authors attributed this to structural changes, including a “progressive shift from traditional and low-skills sectors to services, notably professional, real estate, and financial services,” which not all workers benefited from. Women, in particular, did not share in the gains, with only 57 percent of them in the labor force by 2015, and women in the private sector have been paid on average about 30 percent less than men.

Sienaert at the World Bank told us, “there’s no question that the tax appeal of Mauritius is an important part of the story,” acknowledging that this is “an increasingly less sustainable way to go.” It would be better for Mauritius to become “a conduit for international companies to come into Africa perhaps for the first time, facilitating new activity that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” he said. “Then you’re in win-win territory.”

“That’s not to say it’s going to be an easy transition,” Sienaert added. Like the March report from the World Bank, he had nothing to say about the IFC’s investments via Mauritius and gave the impression that he didn’t know they existed. And much like the staff at the office where the headquarters of Malawi Mangoes is registered on the island, he appeared surprised by our questions on the topic.

Last weekend, the World Bank brought together country delegations and development experts at its annual meetings in Indonesia. The IFC was there, too. At such conferences, grand statements are made while attendees tend to mill around banners bearing pledges to better the world.

Published: OpenDemocracy (24 September 2018) w/ Mark Curtis

In September 2017, London hosted the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair, the biggest in the world. Delegations of military officials and politicians from across the globe descended on the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands to play pick ‘n mix with the world’s most deadly technology.

We were granted a press pass to the DSEI the day before it opened, despite applying several months earlier and repeatedly checking up. The pass came through only after we threatened to publicise the case. The opaque arms industry and the governments that support it do not like journalists or civil society dampening the buying mood.

Docklands, London

Once inside we saw delegations from nearly every oppressive state in the world walking the air-conditioned halls. At the flagship BAE exhibition, we took a few photos of the Egyptian delegation talking to a stocky BAE official. All the Egyptian military men had obscured their identity badges, but they could not stop us taking photos.

In the middle of this, what looked like a British military official, moustachioed and in full officer garb, told us to stop, that we weren’t allowed to take photos. We protested that we had never heard that. He said it didn’t matter. We asked him whom he worked for. “The Defence and Security Organisation,” he replied. We saw that there were other officials with the DSO badge on their breast. Who were they? Why were they working for BAE Systems?

The Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) – the predecessor to the current Defence and Security Organisation – was set up in 1966 under Harold Wilson’s Labour government and was part of a significant reform of the Ministry of Defence. There was no great fanfare about its advent but the internal reasoning was that Britain had effectively lost its Empire and was looking for ways to retain “clout” on the international stage. Becoming a major arms dealer was one of the ways to do that.

As the Cold War raged, the UK was also losing business to its rivals. The UK share of the world aircraft market fell more than half in the five years to 1964 to just 14%. In this context, a report commissioned by Defence Secretary Dennis Healey recommended the creation of “a small but very high powered central arms sales organisation in the MoD”.

It also recommended that the DSO be headed by an arms industry executive, and this has been the case ever since. Essentially the DSO joins arms industry executives and government trade officials in a concerted effort to sell British weapons of war around the world.

Despite its controversial position in the UK’s export ecosystem, in 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was scrapping the DSO as part of the MOD. The decision was apparently made without the knowledge of BAE - a rare thing in the industry. Gerald Howarth, a shadow defence minister, said at the time: "This is outrageous. DESO [as it was then called] has been responsible for £5bn of British defence exports." But, as Robin Cook said in his memoirs, "I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10.” He added, "Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE."

True to this maxim, the body was salvaged and repurposed as part of the Department for International Trade.

Impartial advice

Nowadays DSO is very visible at arms shows, helping visiting buyers and delegations understand the latest technology offered by BAE Systems and its smaller competitors. It says it offers exporters free support by “company visits ... to [headquarters] in Salisbury to discuss how [we] ... can support you in export opportunities and campaigns,” alongside “impartial military advice ... on products and capabilities to enhance and exploit opportunities in overseas defence and security markets”.

The DSO has around 105 staff in London and another 27 members in its export support team. It also has 20 diplomatic posts overseas with the title ‘First Secretary, Defence and Security’.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, we gleaned information on where DSO has people stationed throughout the world. It said it had 57 officials, including three people in Japan, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Turkey, and the largest number, four, in the US. The UK taxpayer pays for three fulltime staff in Mexico City to sell British weapons to a country ravaged by violence. The UK has exported small weapons ammunition, weapon sights and components for rifles, among other things, to the Mexican military.

Half of the private sector individuals seconded to the DIT have “strong links” to the arms industry. But the government’s help to the arms industry doesn’t end there. When buyers cannot afford British weapons, the government subsidises loans to them through export credit guarantees. UK Export Finance, which is supposed to back all British exports, says 50% of the support it provides (in the form of loans or guarantees) is given to military exports.

The British state is set up to deal arms, and its mission has been successful.

Thatcher and the arms industry

Britain is a country of 65 million people, and the 21st most populous nation in the world, with the 9th largest economy in the world based on GDP (PPP). But this small island, with very little in the way of an industrial base, has become the second largest exporter of arms in the world. Britain is the go-to country for despots around the world who want to ‘tool up’.

Aside from the establishment of the DSO, the key to this is a little-known element of the Thatcher Revolution in the 1980s. The story of Thatcher’s confrontation with the unions and the industries they represented is well known. Thatcher's government emerged victorious and replaced a manufacturing base with the “Big Bang” in the City of London, which drew capital looking for a liberal regulatory environment from around the world. London and the country as a whole is still living with the consequences of this revolution.

But Thatcher wasn’t a total industrial arsonist. There was one industry that she promoted to unprecedented levels: the arms industry. During her tenure, the British economy was given a massive boost from the sale of military hardware, and Thatcher spent a large portion of her overseas trips trying to sell British arms to foreign governments.

In 1985, for instance, Thatcher negotiated what is still the largest ever British arms deal. The Al-Yamamah agreement would see Britain sell fighter jets, missiles and ships to Saudi Arabia worth £42bn. The deal was, though, riven with accusations of corruption and bribery, the extent of which may be never fully known: two National Audit Office reports on the Al-Yamamah have been suppressed because of  “national interest” concerns. Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son, also stands accused of making millions of pounds in “commissions” from the sales.

The deal led to Britain pushing ahead of France and Russia as an exporter of arms, behind only the US. Over the past 10 years, the UK has sold over £122 billion worth of arms around the world, 20 per cent of the global total. Thatcher would regard this as an industrial success story.

Since the Thatcher era, however, warfare has changed markedly. Technology has changed how wars are fought, while many adversaries have splintered and become uncoupled from states. But Britain has maintained its pre-eminence in the industry, nimbly moving on to dominate the cyber sector and private military sector in turn, thanks both to the relationships and capacities offered by the conventional arms industry and to the light-touch regulatory environment fostered during the Thatcher era. No subsequent government since she stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990 has wanted to restrict Britain’s industries of war and repression from having maximum power on the world stage.

Cyber warfare and mercenaries

But the arms industry and the government’s willingness to champion it has also enabled the UK to become a global hub for companies working on the cutting edge of the new cyber warfare. According to Privacy International, the UK has 104 surveillance companies producing technology for export – to foreign governments and corporations – headquartered in the country. That number is more than double the number of companies of the next European country, France, which has 45 companies headquartered in country.

Privacy International, the NGO working on privacy rights, has written: “The UK government … promotes exports abroad through the UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation, for example, proactively assisting surveillance company Hidden Technologies to access markets abroad by providing advice and introducing the company to potential customers.”

The UK has significantly more surveillance technology companies registered in its borders than anywhere in the world outside the US. This technology is being exported, with government approval, to some of the most repressive regimes in the world.

The UK’s role in the US War on Terror since 2001 has given the war industries another fillip. Many of the private military and security companies (PMSCs) in the UK were set up by former soldiers in the British military who left service after fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and wanted to make significantly more money in mercenary work. As Dave Allison, chief executive and founder of Octaga, a Hereford-based PMSC, says: “I left the forces after serving time with the parachute regiment and the Special Forces. I saw a distinct gap in providing security to corporate and private clientele, the various big companies out there that were doing it, it was all basically being driven on price, and we wanted to offer them something a little bit different, something bespoke. We cater for various clientele, from television and film industry, to corporate, government, and private high net worth (HNT) individuals, so it’s really broad spectrum of services we do, we do the physical side, the consultation side, and we do the technical side.” He says business has been roaring since they set up in 2001.

But like the conventional arms industry, these companies are shrouded in secrecy, something the government has no interest in ending. A large reason for the attractiveness of the UK as a destination is that these companies – and those producing conventional arms and surveillance technology – are left alone by government and the media. Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer in International Relations at Westminster University and author of a report on PMSCs in the UK, says that “this is a world where very little is known about what’s going on, no-one is publishing data on this. The government is not publishing lists of PMSCs which are operating, PMSCs themselves if you look on their websites… it (is) just corporate rubbish.”

This combination of learned skills in warfare, liberal regulation, the lucrativeness of mercenary work, and Britain’s global-facing heritage has meant that, today, the UK is the world’s leading centre for PMCS. According to the SiéChéou-Kang Center at the University of Denver, the UK has by far the largest number of PMSCs headquartered in country (199 companies).

So this is twenty-first century Britain. Surveillance system producers, mercenary groups, arms industries are flourishing in the dark. As well as being the financial capital of the world, the UK is right at the centre of the world’s war industry. The latter crown is more embarrassing, so we don’t hear about it, but it has been steadily fostered by successive governments for seventy years.

Livelihoods

Ground zero for the British arms industry – and all the issues it raises in the country -– is Barrow-in-Furness.

While there, we met Norman Hill who has been agitating against nuclear weapons for nearly half a century but it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm one bit. As we walk along the empty road that runs alongside BAE Systems’ imposing shipyard at the edge of Barrow, the veteran anti-nuclear activist speaks at a hundred miles an hour, wanting to get all the arguments against the industry that sustains his town out as fast as possible.

Hill was born in the town in 1941 and has lived most of his life in the town. “I came from a solid working class family. My dad was an engineer in the shipyard,” he tells us. The Barrow shipyard occupies a central place in the production of what is called Britain’s ‘nuclear deterrent’, producing the submarines which carry the missiles and nuclear warheads.

The previous class of nuclear submarines was produced here, as will be the new submarines that will carry Trident. Hill first became involved in the anti-nuclear movement in Barrow in the mid 1970s. There was talk of cruise missiles being deployed in the UK in response to a Soviet build-up the US claimed was a threat to Europe. He thought the idea was madness. Hill’s father worked in the shipyard, but was supportive of his son’s activism. “At that time there were a lot of people in the shipyard who agreed with that position,” he says. Much has changed since then.

“The nest of the dragon is here, pure evil,” he says, pointing towards the shipyard. “The fact that people are dependent on living for manufacturing this obscenity. The submarines themselves are not an obscenity; it’s what they are going to carry. That’s the obscenity.”

The current Trident renewal proposal aims to replace four Vanguard class nuclear submarines with four new submarines of the so-called Dreadnought class. They will have a 30-year life cycle. Each one costs over £8bn. Government policy is to have an ‘active stockpile’ of 160 nuclear weapons, 40 nuclear warheads on each submarine, with up to eight missiles, each of which is longer than Nelson’s Column. They are hydrogen bombs - weapons that have never been dropped outside of tests and have 100 kilotonnes of explosive power, about seven times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “We could have 160 of those,” said Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), an organisation of scientists and engineers concerned about the misuse of science and technology in the UK. “You could literally destroy civilisation with that, basically.”

Crossing the bridge over the Devonshire Dock where the shipyard sits, we see one of the nuclear submarines poking out from under the water. It is hard to fathom that little Barrow, population 69,087, is the central node in the production of a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out civilisation. “No one really thinks about it like this,” Hill tells us as we take in the scene.

Barrow, the biggest town in Cumbria, sits on the outer edge of the Furness peninsula which juts into to the Irish Sea. Half an hour drive north takes you into the tourist hotspot of the Lake District, but Barrow is a world away from there. The shipyard has dominated the town since its inception in the 1870s. 70 miles up the coast is Sellafield, where nuclear waste disposal is a divisive political issue.

The nuclear warheads are produced and maintained at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, a town of just over a thousand people near Reading. The site was the end point for anti-nuclear weapons demonstrators who did an annual walk from London in the 1950s and 1960s. The government owns the site, but private sector contractors operate it. The AWE is run by a consortium of three companies (two of them American) – Lockheed Martin, Serco and Jacobs Engineering. The missiles are made in the US and then rented to the UK. Britain does not own the missiles on which its nuclear warheads sit. Nonetheless, it is considered an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, though it is arguable that only one of the words in the phrase – nuclear – is true.

Barrow shipyard

The Barrow shipyard became part of BAE when Marconi Electronic Systems and British Aerospace merged in 1999. The company dominates the town physically: the shipyard is the first thing you see as you come into the town, eclipsing the rows of one up, one down terraces that line the roads. The company’s logo is all over the town. On one of the main streets in the centre we come across a slab of pavement with BAE’s logo spray-painted on Banksy-style. Up the pedestrianised Dalton Street, which runs to the shipyard from the centre of town, sits a brass monument (paid for by BAE Systems) of workers in heroic poses. ‘LABOUR. WIDE AS THE EARTH’ says one engraving. ‘COURAGE. THE READINESS IS ALL’ reads another.

BAE has essential leverage over every aspect of Barrow because of the jobs the shipyard provides. If anyone proposes something the company doesn’t like, it can say it will shut down the shipyard. But they do not like visitors. After nearly a year of back and forth, BAE Systems refused us a tour of the shipyard or an interview. Meanwhile Unite and GMB unions, both representing workers in the shipyard, said they could not provide any workers or shop stewards to be interviewed. The secrecy of the arms industry is one its most striking features: the companies and these workers are employed on government contracts, paid for by the public. Unite and GMB were big supporters of Corbyn’s leadership bid while being in favour of Trident renewal to save jobs.

In the Furness Railway, a buzzing Wetherspoons pub a stone’s throw from the Labour party’s headquarters in the town, locals eat and drink from early in the morning to late in the night. It’s a regular hangout for young lads who work at the shipyard. We sit down with two who are getting in their evening beers. Jack Burns is a 31 year old steelworker at the shipyard, a place it was always his dream to work in. “I always wanted to work in there but I’ve only been working there for the last year. I’ve had a career in office work and computer work but I like to work with my hands plus my grandparents always worked in the yard. In fact, my great granddad died on one of the boats when he worked in there, before - was born.” Everyone in Barrow has a multi-generational connection of some sort to the shipyard.

Jeremy Corbyn

Has he been worried about Corbyn’s position on Trident renewal? “I don’t care too much about it to be honest with you. It’s just another contract. We just go in. We just do our job. You know? I mean, not many people ask about it and it doesn’t really come up.”

Barrow, a working class town built on manufacturing, is a natural Labour heartland. “But the Labour manifesto actually supported the renewal with Trident. It’s just Corbyn himself that didn’t support it. So, I don’t know. There is worry. I’m certainly worried because I’m only a year deep in my work. I’d like to think that I’ve got a career for life.”

His friend, Josh Crawford, 18, and also a steelworker at the shipyard, chimes in, “Now they’ve passed the Dreadnought and I don’t think they’d get rid of it. But I think it could halt future buildings.”

Corbyn has promised to replace any jobs lost, in the event of not renewing Trident, with high skilled employment in other industries. Doesn’t that assuage their fears? “Actually, no,” says Jack. “If we get rid of the Trident renewal, then they’re not gonna give us any jobs. I think Barrow is only as well known as it is because of the shipyard. I think if you got rid of the shipyard, in Barrow a lot of people would move out. Barrow would become a deserted town. The only reason Barrow is a thriving town is because of the shipyard.”

The fear that promises of alternative employment might not be met is understandable. The Thatcher government made similar promises as it destroyed the mining industry, but never replaced the jobs, leaving subsequent generations deprived and destitute. But to many in the anti-nuclear community, Corbyn is valued because he believes in both nuclear disarmament and in protecting workers.

Jack continues: “I believe him when he says that he doesn’t support Trident, which is actually the missile system. It’s not the submarine. I remember hearing him say that. Just because he doesn’t support Trident doesn’t mean that the submarines can’t still be built. They still have other functions so there is that. I don’t fully understand if he was saying that just to keep some people happy. He doesn’t sort of strike us as the sort of person to keep people happy.”

We ask them if they would consider themselves Corbyn supporters. “I don’t really like the guy personally, but then I don’t necessarily like Theresa May either,” says Jack. “I’m leaning towards Theresa May, but I think that’s because of the fact that I want to keep my job.” Josh adds: “If I had to vote, I’d definitely vote for Theresa May. She wants to renew Trident.”

“So you’d vote on a single issue on this one?” we ask.

“When our job’s put in jeopardy, yes, because this is probably the best paying job I’ll ever have,” says Jack. “And I’ve got a five year old son to support, so if I ended up losing my job simply because Jeremy Corbyn didn’t like it, then that’s probably enough for me to not like him.”

This is the sentiment Hill is up against, and it’s pervasive and understandable.

The behemoth

British governments have long viewed the arms industry as a key mechanism to boost the British economy. Brexit looks set to be the next stage – after the creation of DSO under Labour and the Thatcherite Revolution – in the arms industry's occupation of the British state.

The government claims it has a rigorous export licensing system for its arms exports. Britain has had a defined export licensing process to approve arms sales since 1997, when recommendations in the Scott Report into arms sales to Saddam Hussein were enacted.

Arms companies require licences from the DTI to sell “goods, technology, software or components designed or modified for military use” as well as  “‘dual use’ goods, technology, software, documents or diagrams which meet certain technical standards and could be used for military or civilian purposes”.

But the export licensing system is shrouded in secrecy, with information very difficult to get. In the case of an information request made to the government about surveillance technology sold to Egypt by the UK, further requests were declined because it would “likely prejudice the commercial interests of any companies that may have applied for a licence,” and “would reveal details of the markets that companies are operating in and possibly details of commercial opportunities that are still available.” With this proviso many information requests are turned down.

British arms export 'controls' seem more about facilitating exports than restricting them. The licensing system still allows half of all UK’s arms sales to go to the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, currently undertaking a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen, using British-supplied warplanes and missiles. Since 2008, the UK has sold £10.8bn of weapons to the Saudis, by far the biggest market for UK companies. The British government has rejected repeated calls to halt arms sales to Riyadh.

In some conflicts, the government just does not know if its weapons are being used. Earlier this year, Turkish military forces intervened in the mainly Kurdish-controlled province of Afrin in northern Syria, in an operation widely criticised by human rights groups. In answer to a parliamentary question, the British government stated: “We cannot categorically state that UK weapons are not in use in Turkish military operations in Afrin”.

‘Responsible’ arms exports

Another major problem is that, as the government admits, “We do not collect data on the use of equipment after sale.” It is hard to see how this is consistent with government claims that it operates a 'responsible' arms export policy.

The same government department set up to promote and facilitate arms exports is meant to regulate them, too. Licences are provided by the Export Control Organisation (ECO), which is part of the DIT. And it shows.

Levels of sales of British arms to countries around the world often correlate with an uptick in violations of human rights norms in those countries. The majority of British arms go to the Middle East, particularly the Gulf region. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring when authoritarian governments cracked down on protest movements and dissent, the British government did not blink. Arms continued to flow, in fact, in nearly all cases the increased demand was met by more British arms. Countries where repression has deepened in recent years, such as Egypt, Israel and Bahrain, remain significant recipients of British weapons and military equipment.

The problem is not just that British equipment might be used to crush legitimate dissent; it is that the supply of weapons to security forces sends an overall message of support for what they are doing. It can also enhance the international legitimacy of repressive states and reduce the political space for opposition forces to challenge them.  

BAE Systems is the jewel in the crown of the British arms industry. Other significant companies in the country include Rolls Royce, Babcock, Serco, Cobham, QinetiQ, Meggitt, but BAE is in a class of its own. A large majority of UK arms procurement goes straight into the coffers of BAE. Through an FOI we submitted, we discovered that the UK consistently awards contracts worth over $3bn a year to BAE Systems - around 10% of its total outlay. BAE, actively involved in the Yemen war as a supplier of aircraft and technical military assistance to the Saudis, made profits of £792m in the first half of 2018.

BAE profits

BAE's profits are very important to the UK government, which is a key reason it maintains such a close relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has 6,000 BAE staffers in the country, according to the Labour MP, Graham Jones, who we met in Portcullis House. Jones was recently appointed chair of the Committee on Arms Export Controls in Parliament. In our hour-long meeting, he spent considerable time defending Saudi Arabia’s record in Yemen, and insisted there was no evidence British weapons had been used in atrocities. He said he had a very strong aversion to the reporting of NGOs on the situation in Yemen.

It is hard to know the extent of lobbying by BAE in the UK, but in the US things are more transparent. In trying to drum up business in the US, BAE has put a lot of money into its lobbying operation in Washington DC. According to records, Podesta Group, which is now under investigation in the Russia-Trump inquiry, received most money from BAE in 2017.

Through the FOI, we obtained recognition that it had been “established from the records ... that BAE Systems did once form a part of a business delegation that accompanied the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for International Trade on a visit to India in November 2016.” This was Theresa May’s first bilateral meeting since becoming Prime Minister. May said: “The UK and India are natural partners – the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy – and together I believe we can achieve great things – delivering jobs and skills, developing new technologies and improving our cities, tackling terrorism and climate change.” Securing contracts for BAE Systems was obviously a large part of this.

We also requested the FCO briefing notes for Theresa May's April 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia. After being kept waiting for eight months, we were told they came under a national security exemption. A lengthy discussion had obviously taken place inside the department.

There is a revolving door between the MOD and DTI and the arms industry. Through another FOI request, it was revealed that in one year, from 2006 to 2007, 36 former employees of the MOD applied to join BAE Systems. These employees use the knowledge gained from MOD to earn bigger sums in the private sector, and may end up back at DSO.

BAE is heavily involved in many centres of learning in the UK, making it indispensable to young engineers getting an education. The company has partnered with Cranfield University to boost Britain’s engineering skills through a new post-graduate engineering apprenticeship programme, which will provide learners with a valuable Masters-level qualification. Richard Hamer, director of education and skills at BAE Systems, said it was part of the company's "on going commitment to nurture talent and high-end skills.” Britain’s top universities have received at least £83m worth of funds during 2014-17 from firms involved in the arms trade.

Unions are also a very powerful lobby for the arms industry. By making the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft and Britain’s nuclear submarines, BAE employs 34,600 people in the UK, out of 83,100 worldwide. Workers from BAE Systems recently travelled from across England to the Houses of Parliament to lobby MPs and demand that the government “takes back control of Britain’s defence capability and spends the UK’s defence budget to support jobs in Britain rather than in factories overseas”. The lobby was organised by Unite, the UK’s largest defence union, following plans by BAE Systems to cut nearly 2,000 jobs. The cuts, which will see significant job losses in Typhoon and Hawk aircraft production as well as RAF base support and at BAE’s marine division, came amid warnings that nearly 25 per cent of the UK’s military spending will benefit US factories and firms such as Boeing by 2020.

Is there an alternative?

Military industry in the UK is made up of close to 2,500 companies, generates £33.5bn in turnover and employs 128,000 people, according to the government.Yet even from this high base, the government is currently seeking, in effect, to further militarise the British economy and society. The 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review was the first time the UK officially recognised promoting prosperity as a national security task. Ministers have said that "Strategic exports are now a core activity for the Ministry of Defence so we are calling on companies to play their part in increasing defence export sales and attracting inward investment into the UK".

The government's new Defence Industrial Strategy, announced last December, and its new Combat Air Strategy, announced earlier this year, both envisage deepening UK industry's reliance on the military sector for jobs and growth. Indeed, the government has recently come to a stunning but little-noticed conclusion about its industrial strategy, saying that "British prosperity relies on defence".  A government-commissioned review of defence’s contribution to national economic and social value, released last month, concludes that " defence and the defence industry reaches every corner of the UK and is central to employment in so many cities and towns" but that more can be done to promote its role in promoting the UK's technological future.

But is Britain's military-industrial complex truly in the public interest? Could the 26,000 highly skilled researchers, designers and engineers currently working in the military sector be better deployed elsewhere?

A defence diversification strategy

Jeremy Corbyn has called for a Defence Diversification Agency and has said in the event of non-renewal of Trident that investment would save all the jobs and put people to work in other high-skilled socially-useful industries such as renewable power. Research shows that when evaluated on a cost-per-job basis, jobs in the arms industry are more costly than nearly every other sector.  A University of Massachusetts study concluded that, if the US government invested $1 billion in alternative civilian sectors rather than on military production, it would generate up to 140% more jobs; $1 billion military spending was found to create 11,200 jobs whereas education spending creates 26,700 jobs and health spending 17,200 jobs.

A recent report by the Nuclear Education Trust in the UK calls for the development of a defence diversification strategy, something that UK governments have never formally championed. The report does not pretend diversification will come without costs in terms of some jobs losses. But it notes that employment in military manufacturing is anyway falling. The number of jobs in the arms industry is less than a third of the level in 1980 (then over 400,000) - a long-term decline substantially due to the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the work carried out in the UK, automation and globalised supply chains.

By contrast, employment in 'new' industrial sectors is rising and could benefit from a broad arms conversion programme. For example, the German renewable energy industry already employs 380,000 people and this is expected to rise to 600,000 by 2030 as the country increases the proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources. Unite, which has persistently called for defence diversification and backs Corbyn's support for defence diversification, notes that legislation is needed to create a statutory duty on the Ministry of Defence and its suppliers to consider diversification. "Without legislation, history tells us that voluntary mechanisms do not work, as defence companies are unwilling to take the risk of entering new or adjacent markets", Unite says.

The UK’s military role in the world and Brexit

If the case for diversification is strong, why have successive UK governments not taken it up? One reason is certainly due to the short-term upheaval in some areas where military industry is important. But there is a more generic issue: the British military-industrial complex is seen by senior military and political figures as an essential part of the UK's military role in the world.

The UK's two new aircraft carriers, being built at a cost of over £6 billion, don't just create British jobs, they will “transform the Royal Navy’s ability to project our influence overseas”, the government has said. Indeed, the plan is for these carriers to deploy “in every ocean around the world over the next five decades”. The new platforms are appearing to take Ministers back to the glory of days of empire in what the Head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Philip Jones, has calleda "new era of British maritime power". To add to their new bases in the Gulf, military chiefs are now also talking about projecting power beyond the Middle East to the Indian Ocean and beyond and considering setting up new bases in South East Asia.

Here is where we come back to promoting UK commercial interests – with the addition of a small matter called Brexit. In a speech to an audience in Washington in 2016, Admiral Jones said: "Now that our Government seeks to extend the UK’s economic partnerships post-Brexit, the Royal Navy stands ready once again to be melded and aligned for best effect with our nation’s growing global ambition". Jones says that to promote UK commercial interests, the Royal Navy must have a "formidable presence on the global stage" especially given Britain's dependence on the sea for imports and exports.

So Brexit is driving UK leaders' new military ambitions. Or perhaps providing an easy cover for their ambitions. Either way, the whole strategy raises concerns. Does this enhanced global military strategy have public support? It is hard to say because it has been so little debated. The public is surely even less likely to support future entanglement in wars in Asia than it does Britain's current wars in the Middle East.

Published: The Intercept (11 May 2018)

DRIVING INTO CHELTENHAM from the west, it is hard to miss the offices of Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency. The large, doughnut-shaped building sits behind high-perimeter fencing with barbed wire and many levels of security. The facility – used to eavesdrop on global emails and phone calls – is located on the edge of the sleepy Gloucestershire town, which feels like an incongruous location for one of the world’s most aggressive spy agencies.

Cheltenham has a population of just 117,000 people, and GCHQ’s presence has turned the area into one of Europe’s central hubs for companies working in the fields of cybersecurity and surveillance. GCHQ says it employs almost 6,000 people in Cheltenham and at some smaller bases around the U.K., although the agency has in recent years secretly expanded its workforce, reportedly employing thousands more staff.

People in the area are now talking of a cyber “corridor” that stretches for 50 miles from Malvern, just north of Cheltenham, all the way to Bristol, where the Ministry of Defence has its equipment and support headquarters at Abbey Wood. Many quaint English towns, known for their farming and country pubs, have seen an influx of companies dealing in cybersecurity and electronic spying. Even office space on former farms is being used for this burgeoning industry.

Chris Dunning-Walton, the founder of a nonprofit called Cyber Cheltenham, or Cynam, organizes quarterly events in the town attended by politicians and entrepreneurs. “Historically, there has been a need for the companies that are working here to be very off the radar with their relationships with GCHQ and to some extent, that does exist,” says Dunning-Walton. But since Edward Snowden leaked information in 2013 about GCHQ’s sweeping surveillance activities, the agency has been forced to come out of the shadows and embrace greater transparency. One consequence of this, according to Dunning-Walton, is that GCHQ is now more open to partnering with private companies, which has helped fuel the cyber industry around the Cheltenham area.

Northrop Grumman, the world’s fifth-largest arms manufacturer, has located its European cyber and intelligence operations in Cheltenham, where it has two offices in the center of the town. In the nearby city of Gloucester, a 20-minute drive west of Cheltenham, Raytheon, the world’s third-largest arms company, in 2015 opened a Cyber Innovation Centre that it says is focused on “big data, analytics and network defense.” BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, the cyber arm of the world’s fourth-largest arms company, also has offices in Gloucester, where it says it “delivers information intelligence solutions to government and commercial customers.”

Many of these companies are secretive about the work they do – especially when it concerns surveillance technology – and refuse to speak to the media. But L3 TRL Technology – which is based in Tewkesbury at the northern tip of this new cyber corridor – does grant an interview via email.

L3 says it provides “electronic warfare” equipment that can jam communication signals and gather intelligence. A spokesperson for the company says it plays “a crucial role in counter terrorism and the protection of military forces with our electronic warfare solutions.” He declines to provide any information about any of the company’s customers. But a video posted on YouTube by a Middle Eastern news agency reveals one potential client: It documents a recent meeting between L3’s parent company and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the UAE military.

According to government records, the U.K. has sold weapons and other equipment worth £7.3 billion ($9.9 billion) to the UAE in the past decade, including components for telecommunications eavesdropping technology and “intrusion software,” which is used to hack into targeted phones and computers.

Another Cheltenham-based company is CommsAudit, whose flagship product is a surveillance system called Spectra Black, a portable device that can monitor cellphone calls and other wireless communications. CommsAudit did not respond to a request for comment and does not publicly disclose the identities of its customers. The company was, however, showcasing its products at the 2017 DSEI arms fair in London, which was attended by government delegations from across the world.

Latching onto this wave of innovation, last year, the British government pledged £22 million ($30 million) in funding for a new cyber business park on a patch of land close to GCHQ’s headquarters. “It will act as a ‘honeypot’ for cyber security and high tech supply chain businesses,” the promotional literature said, creating 7,000 jobs, while boosting the number of private companies in the area that can then potentially become GCHQ’s clients. There is a lot of largesse to go around. GCHQ takes the majority of the share of the roughly £2.8 billion ($3.8 billion) budget for Britain’s intelligence services and has twice the number of personnel of MI5 and MI6 combined.

David Woodfine, a former head of the Ministry of Defence’s Security Operations Centre, worked inside GCHQ’s Cheltenham headquarters for two years. He left in September 2013 to found Cyber Security Associates, a Gloucestershire-based company providing cyber consultancy services to the public and private sector.

Woodfine says toward the end of his tenure at GCHQ, there was a realization that the agency needed to partner more with private industry. “From a GCHQ perspective, I think their whole attitude has changed from quite a hard approach – ‘we’ll keep everything in-house’ – to ‘actually, we need to open up.’ They changed their recruiting, their apprenticeship schemes, so they are attracting more young talent into their organization.”

The National Cyber Security Centre – which opened in 2016 under the remit of GCHQ – is currently piloting new “Cyber Schools Hubs” in Gloucestershire. The idea is to send staff into local schools to “encourage a diverse range of students into taking up computer science,” in effect grooming the next generation of cyber-competent spies.

GCHQ offers meager salaries compared to the private sector, but the agency can offer prospective employees the chance to work with technologies that they could not use anywhere else – because if they did, they would be breaking the law. “That’s a good way of retaining people on public sector pay,” says Woodfine. “So you can argue that they don’t join for the money, they join for the ability to learn and to test their techniques and their abilities.”

A GCHQ employee can work with the agency for a few years, learn about its tools and methods, and then take that knowledge with them to a job in the more lucrative private sector, where there are plenty opportunities for surveillance innovation. According to the London-based advocacy group Privacy International, the U.K. has 104 companies producing surveillance equipment for export to foreign governments and corporations. Only the United States – with 122 companies – has more.

SINCE 2013, SALES of surveillance and hacking technology have been controlled under the Wassenaar Arrangement, which was signed by 42 countries, including the U.S. and most of Europe. The arrangement is intended to prevent authoritarian regimes from obtaining arms and sophisticated spy tools that could be used to commit human rights violations. However, it is not legally binding. And the U.K. has continued to sell eavesdropping equipment to a number of countries with questionable human rights records, such as Honduras, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, China, and Qatar.

Inside the bustling Victoria train station in central London, Digital Barriers, the world’s premier video analytics company, has its offices. Video analytics sounds like an arcane branch of the high-tech industry, but in terms of surveillance technology, it is a field that has rapidly advanced in recent years. Zak Doffman, chief executive at Digital Barriers, founded the company in 2010 after recognizing that in the area of video intelligence, there was a gap in the international market. Digital Barriers’s technology is designed to analyze video – and identify people’s faces – in real time, where the cameras are placed, rather than having to rely on retrospective analysis.

In its London offices, the company demonstrates to this reporter how even with a scarf wrapped around a person’s face, its software can successfully identify them within a few seconds using a standard surveillance camera. Facial-recognition technology is notoriously inaccurate and can produce false positives, but Digital Barriers claims its software can pick out obscured and blurred faces in crowds and match them with photographs that are held on databases or published on the internet. It is, the company says, most useful for counterterrorism operations. But in the wrong hands, wired up to a nationwide camera network, the technology could potentially be used to trace the movements of millions of people in real time. “We built the business primarily in the public sector working for government agencies,” says Doffman. “We are now working increasingly in the private sector with the commercial customers.”

Digital Barriers’s website boasts that it has clients in more than 50 countries. Doffman won’t reveal the names of his customers, and when questioned about the export licensing process, he says the company’s products are exempt. “It’s not export control per se,” he says, “so there’s no formal restrictions on the technology.” What would he do if countries with authoritarian governments wanted to buy the system? Doffman says only that Digital Barriers has a “moral code on this stuff.”

Published: Real Media (6 March 2018)

If you were somewhere near London and at a loose end in the last week of January, you could have attended FOUR different arms fairs.

All interests were catered for somewhere across the capital. If armoured vehicles were your bag, the annual exhibition at Twickenham Stadium could provide your fix. If you preferred Surface Warships then the Hilton at Canary Wharf was hosting the “world’s premier international conference for all elements of the surface fleet community”. For those more into military helicopters or cyber warfare, there were fairs for that too.

This might seem like an excessive amount of arms jamborees for one week and one city.

But since the so-called War on Terror began in 2001, and Britain intensified its own role with the Iraq invasion in 2003, London has become the global showroom for the products of war.

That week in January 2018 was excessive, but by no means unique.

On a website that aggregates arms fairs happening around the world, London is by far the most frequently cited location. And last year London hosted the biggest arms fair of them all, Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI).

How Did This Happen?

Since the time of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1960s, British administrations have viewed the funnelling of taxpayer money into the domestic arms industry as a tacit function of their role.

It protects “vital jobs,” they posture–which is partly true. The more salient reason however, especially in the post-imperial period, is a desire to maintain British dominance as colonies achieved independence.

A large arms industry–with government guarantees and support–would increase British clout on the international scene.

When Labour’s Foreign Secretary Denis Healey set up the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO) in order to utilise the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and corporate executives to promote UK arms abroad, it was in the context of many countries overtaking Britain in the sales of arms.

Britain could not face losing its empire and its ability to spread violence around the world for a profit.

The industry became more entrenched during the Thatcher era after the privatisation of British Aerospace. Now there was a significant profiteering motive to maintaining British arms industry dominance–many shareholders depended on our companies being able to secure deals from autocracies in the Middle East.

The Iraq war put Britain at the centre of global conflict once again. Add to this its geographical position and a government at pains to put arms at the forefront of any post-Brexit development model and you can start to understand why the merchants of death are descending on our capital.

I have attended a number of these arms expos over the past six months and they are bizarre affairs. Organisers do their best to keep things as opaque as possible–journalists are not welcome. I tried to get press accreditation for the bi-annual DSEI for two months. In the end, accreditation arrived the day before the event was due to start.

The process was overseen by CMS Strategic, a PR agency. When I called they kept saying I had been OK’ed but not passed by security clearance. After saying I would go the press if they didn’t give me a pass, they were pushed towards action.

Such reticence is typical. Industry publications are allowed in, but if you are looking at this from the outside, they don’t want you there.

Inside DSEI, both long halls at the Excel Centre on the London Docklands were stuffed full of guns, missiles and ammunition. As far as the eye could see.

Delegations of Generals from places like Equatorial Guinea and Bahrain stalked the floors talking to the chubby English executives of BAE Systems and other weapons manufacturers.

Each country had its own “pavilion” where they could showcase their ammo, missiles, guns, snipers, or whatever machinery of death they specialised in. In the British section, amongst the grand BAE Systems display, government officials talked delegations through the latest gadgets on offer.

These government officials also protect the delegations and arms dealers from journalists.

As I tried to snap the Egyptian delegation, I was told by a DSO official that photos were not permitted inside. This is not a policy that I have ever seen.

Every stall has endless brochures, and there is very little due diligence performed on those exhibiting. At DSEI, I found an Indian firm called Aglaya with a big “CYBER WARFARE” sign in front of its booth. The sales executive peddled his security wares at the world’s largest arms fair from a camping chair with a few small signs.

Funnily, Aglaya was advertising a tool to detect cellphone tracking devices called “rouge [sic] base station catcher,” misspelling ‘rogue.’ They were advertising “Zero day exploits”–or ways of hacking computer systems that are not known by the cyber industry.

And it’s not just London.

This web of expos and fairs has proliferated around the UK. From the Herefordshire Defence and Security Expo to Cyber Security Bristol, the UK has become the global hub for weaponry showboating events and the selling of violence equipment.

The shows draw delegations from some of the worst regimes in the world, from Egypt to Myanmar.

Most of the arms fairs are sponsored by arms manufacturers and often by government departments, whether it be the Department of International Trade or the Ministry of Defence.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

I was standing open-mouthed outside the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince 18 months after the earthquake had devastated the city when a man approached selling his paintings. “What do you think of that?” he said, pointing to the collapsed palace behind us. I told him the truth: I was finding it hard to come to terms with the completeness of the destruction. The man, who later told me his name was Charles Renodin, smiled slightly. “Tell the world how we are living,” he requested. “Let them know.” He paused and added, “I live in the camp there,” pointing across the road, where opposite the crumbling presidential palace a vast expanse of tents – emblazoned with the logos of the US, China, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, all competing shamelessly for brand recognition – spread out as far as the eye could see. “After the earthquake I lost my mum, my dad, one daughter, so I had to move to this camp. I don’t like it, it’s full of corruption, it’s run by gangs, and the little girls have to sell their bodies to eat,” he told me. “Little girls,” he added for emphasis. “Maybe eight or nine years old, getting raped every day. The police don’t do anything about it, the country has no law.” He told me that the Haitian people refer to the palace behind us, which should be a point of pride, as the “Devil’s House”. “It’s full of so much corruption, they don’t care about the people, they just want to make money, when the money comes they take it for themselves.” He was waiting on a house now so he could leave the camp, but he didn’t think it would happen any time soon: “The government has no plan.” In the camps, it was particularly bad news for women: “Because there is no work, women have to sell their bodies just to eat, the only job they have is to have sex for money. Men have to steal stuff – they have no choice.”

Like most in Haiti, Charles had an ambiguous feeling toward the thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in his country. “Some come to help, some come to make money, they like us living like this because they make more money.” It is easy to dismiss such sentiments, but the global “rescue” industry really is big business. There is often a direct and positive correlation between American influence over smaller countries and the crises they experience. “After the earthquake they would give us food, water, but now everything has stopped. If you go inside this camp you don’t see water, people have to walk six miles to get water. That’s why crime is up.” He became more agitated. “Everything is crazy right now, we’re living just like animals. There is no everyday life, nobody has a job.” Haiti has arguably had more US intervention in the last hundred years than any other country in the world – that it ended like this is not wholly accidental. As Doctor Maigot poignantly says to Mrs Smith, an American, in Graham Greene’s The Comedians: “In the Western hemisphere, in Haiti and elsewhere, we live under the shadow of your great and prosperous country. Much patience and courage is needed to keep one’s head.”

The following day, I was driving down a long, dusty and typically bumpy road in the middle of Port-au-Prince when I came across some imposing metal gates. Behind them stood the E-Power electricity plant. The site was unlike the rest of the city, which lay in complete ruin, even a year and a half after the earthquake: it had burnished sheet-steel doors and perfectly tarmacked roads. I was on assignment with the Financial Times and being escorted in a 4x4 by the World Bank, which had its own particular kind of tour that seemed to ignore the massive tent cities whizzing past our windows. Here was the optimistic vision, they told me. In a capital city where electricity blackouts were a nightly occurrence, E-Power was the kind of company the international financial institutions (IFIs) running Haiti believed would lead “reform” – by taking power away from the state-run company, and running the business for profit. My World Bank guide was adamant that this was the way out of Haiti’s tragic past and present. I soon found out the company was founded in 2004 by a group of Haitian venture capitalists excited by the departure of social democratic President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The aim, they said, was to “offer a solution to power generation in Haiti”. Sure enough, some years later, in 2006, the new US-backed President René Préval launched an open bid for a contract to provide electricity to Port-au-Prince. Seven companies took part. E-Power won.

For many in the Haitian business elite, such economic liberalization was to be the model for the new Haiti being built after the devastating 2010 earthquake. “The earthquake created trauma that could have been better exploited,” Pierre-Marie Boisson, board director at E-Power, told me as we sat in the upmarket air-conditioned offices at the plant. “Because of the political process that took place after that, it took too much time.” He added: “Earthquakes should be an opportunity because it destroyed. Where it is destroyed, we have to build. When we have to build we can create jobs, we can create a lot of changes, we can change a country.”

However, Mr Boisson’s cynicism about the slow rate of “exploitation” of the “opportunities” provided by the earthquake was not quite accurate. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the opportunity afforded by the destruction wreaked on Haiti was capitalized on immediately. As the dust was still settling in Port-au-Prince, the World Bank, the IMF and their regional analogues, alongside various US agencies – what became the de facto government in the absence of a Haitian alternative – carved up the society’s different sectors and doled them out among themselves. The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) got education and water, the World Bank bagged energy, while the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – a body that will be examined later in this book – gratefully accepted the planned new industrial parks. Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, told me how it worked: “We basically have agreed that where we have each of us the competitive advantage, we then divide … the sectors among ourselves, and add in some sectors which go together.”

The mass privatization of state-run assets and the turning of Haiti into a Caribbean sweatshop – via an export-led garment production and cheap labor model that the US and the IFIs had been pushing from the mid-1990s through the 2000s – were now distinct possibilities. This could be enforced with minimal push back from a decimated civil society and a denuded government. All the extra-Haitian bodies, particularly the US government, shared this vision. “There is a lot of agreement, so I would say one of the unusual and very positive aspects about this project is that it is really done in partnership,” Jean-Louis Warnholz, a State Department official working on Haiti, told me when I was back in New York. (Mr Warnholz asked not to be named, but Haitians deserve to know the officials who are designing their destruction.) Haiti was to be the next Top Model on the World Bank and IMF catwalk. The “partnership” (in which the Haitian people had no part) believed that rebuilding the capabilities of the Haitian state should play no role in its reconstruction. Instead, the solution to Haiti’s problems lay in the creation of a flourishing private sector. “What’s really going to change Haiti and make this process different from all the previous ones is the development of the private sector, and I think there’s a consensus in that,” Agustín Aguerre, the Haiti manager for the IADB, told me. The bank disbursed $177 million in grant money in 2010 – more than any other multilateral source – to push this agenda. “Private sector is the big difference, it’s what will be creating wealth, creating jobs, not the public sector,” he added. It seemed there was no alternative.

After the election of President Michel Martelly in May 2011, things remained easy for this private-sector-led “consensus”: the IFIs and US not only had their Shock Event, but also their Shock President. Aristide, who was president in 1991, 1993–94, 1994–96 and 2001–04, continues to be the most popular politician in Haiti, but is banned from standing again for the presidency. In Martelly, the US government had found its “Chicago Boy”, a more-than-willing partner for their economic program (“Chicago Boys” is a term which refers to the University of Chicago economists who helped dictators impose neoliberal capitalism in its early stages). All the major business groupings and IFIs I spoke to in Port-au-Prince were effusive in their support for the president. Carl-Auguste Boisson, general manager at E-Power, told me: “I am pleased by what I heard Martelly saying about the importance of private investment, especially when he was campaigning he was talking about things like providing private provision of public services.” Kenneth Merten, the then US ambassador to Haiti, was similarly excited about the new president’s privatization agenda. “A few privatizations of flourmills, but aside from that you haven’t had much of anything in past decades,” he told me. “That’s the element that’s been lacking here, you need a government that understand investment and I think Martelly and his folks do.” For the US, a pliable figure like Martelly had been a long time coming. Despite many decades of effort, Haiti had not completely succumbed to the plans that its major patron had for it. And such recalcitrance had been causing increasing consternation in Washington.

History’s long shadow

In 1990, after the first democratic elections in Haiti’s 200-year history, the US became hopeful of breaking up the corrupt state institutions which had been run as the personal fiefdoms of Papa and Baby Doc, the US-backed Duvalier dictators who had ruled Haiti viciously for nearly 40 years. Private capital would then be able to penetrate deeper into the country, and an economic model conducive to the interests of the rich countries could take firm root. But it wasn’t going to plan. Instead of the US-orientated “reformer” many in Washington had hoped for, a huge mass movement, named Lavalas (“the flood”), propelled the social democrat priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide to a landslide victory. Over the next 20 years, the democratically elected Aristide would be ousted twice with US support, while the democratic hopes and dreams of Haiti’s people would be quashed time and again. Aristide had become a nuisance in the eyes of Washington and so when he was put back in power in 2001 it was under the tacit agreement that he would allow the World Bank, the IMF and the US to institute their plan. It had been 11 years since the democratic elections, and still economic “reform” was slow. Something had to change: democracy was fine, but it had to be of use.

In this period, René Préval, a former ally of Aristide who served as president from 2006 to 2011, seemed to offer some hope for the Americans. “In the context of the developing world, we would most accurately describe him as a neo-liberal, particularly in that he has embraced free markets and foreign investment,” notes one of the US embassy’s diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks, sent from Port-au-Prince in 2007. But the leader the US was really after in that period looked more like Haitian-American businessman Dumas Siméus. A resident of Texas, he assured the US embassy, according to a diplomatic cable sent in 2005, “he would manage Haiti like a business”. The same cable added: “Displaying abundant charm and energy, the 65-year-old said he had decided to run for President not only for Haiti’s benefit, but also as a gesture of thanks to the United States.” He was very clear about how he would do this: “The University of Chicago alum pledged to bring the ‘Chicago Boys’ to Haiti and establish a road map for change, promising investors would return.” It was exactly what the US embassy wanted to hear; Siméus was the candidate they had been searching for. The cable concluded by noting that the millionaire Texan was a “potentially viable candidate” who could, unlike Aristide, “govern responsibly and maybe effectively” – code in this case for “in the US interest”. The US deemed Martelly similarly “responsible”.

But in many ways, US exasperation at the apparent reluctance of Haiti’s leaders to sell off their country’s assets and create an economic playground for foreign capital remains hard to understand. From the mid-1990s through the 2000s, the “Chicago Boys” had to all intents and purposes come to Haiti; the process of opening up Haiti’s economy to the predations of foreign capital was well under way. The fetish of foreign investment was firmly rooted. In 1996 for example, the Haitian government had already, as one diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks noted, “established legislation on the modernization of public enterprises, which allows foreign investors to participate in the management and/or ownership of state-owned enterprises.” Moreover, a November 2002 law explicitly acknowledged the “crucial role of foreign investment in assuring economic growth and aims to facilitate, liberalize, and stimulate private investment in Haiti”. The law gave foreign investors exactly the same rights and protections as Haitians. Months earlier in 2002, the Haitian parliament had voted for a new free trade zone law which provided “zones” with fiscal and customs incentives for foreign enterprises – for example, a 15-year tax exemption. In other words, post-Aristide, the government had “seen the light” and embraced the US-led vision for the post-dictatorship Haiti.

But these steps, it seems, were not enough. Only a “Chicago Boy” would do. Another WikiLeaks cable noted that in 1996 a “modernization commission” was set up to decide whether management contracts, long-term leases or capitalization was the best option for each of the companies to be privatized. The commission would also decide how much the Haitian government would retain of each asset, with a cap at 49 percent – a minority stake, stripping the Haitian people of control over their own industries.

This had an immediate effect. In 1998, two US companies, Seaboard and Continental Grain, purchased 70 percent of the state-owned flourmill. Despite this “progress”, a diplomatic cable from 2005 lamented, “Some investments, however, still require government authorization,” adding, “Investments in electricity, water and telecommunications require both government concession and approval. Additionally, investments in the public health sector must first receive authorization from the Ministry of Public Health and Population.” It sounded like a reasonable demand from a sovereign country, but a sovereign country is exactly what the US didn’t want Haiti to be. Two years after Aristide had been spirited out of the country by the Bush administration and the local oligarchs, and just before the victory of the “neoliberal” Préval in 2006, the US embassy noted witheringly: “Since the privatization of the cement factory, privatization has stalled and appears to have been put on hold.” It added plaintively: “None of the major infrastructure-related enterprises (the airport, seaport, telephone company or electric company) have been privatized.” The document continued: “Although these entities were supposed to have been privatized by 2002, persistent political crises, strong opposition from the former administration, and a general lack of political will have delayed the process indefinitely.” The cable then noted a more plausible reason why this massive privatization program had not been enacted quite as smoothly as the US had hoped: ”Some opposition to the privatization of state enterprises continues from groups such as employee’s unions who have expressed opposition to workforce reductions that privatization might entail.” Those pesky Haitians.

By 2008, then, the US embassy was disconsolate at the slow rate of progress and local intransigence. “Despite assurances that privatization is still a priority for the government … we are increasingly skeptical that privatization, in whatever form, will happen,” one cable noted. “Time is running out.” The US, however, remained steadfast. “We will continue to advocate strongly on behalf of privatization and/or private management,” one cable noted. It further advocated using IFIs such as the World Bank and the IMF to bribe the democratic government of Haiti, one of the staples of the “structural adjustment programs” explored later, although it is rare to see it spelled out in such clear language. “[The US embassy] repeats its recommendation … that privatization be a requirement under future agreements with the IFIs … to be negotiated with the new government,” the cable to Washington noted.

The shock

Bribery might prove an effective strategy toward the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but it would still be messy. There was after all a Haitian parliament, populated with nationalist elements, which could continue to stall or even kill the massive privatization program the US favored. But as the US was honing its strategy for its latest push, on January 12, 2010 a huge earthquake hit Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in the history of the world. More than 300,000 people were killed, while millions became homeless. The capital city lay in ruins, including the majority of government ministries as well as the presidential palace. What was left of an already strangled civil society and social institutions was destroyed. Haiti was a blank slate.

The US and its allies in the IMF and World Bank did not waste any time – this was their opportunity to push through the radical neoliberal program from the 1990s with little resistance. The opposition to this privatization program – which had ranged from quasi-nationalist politicians to worker-based collectives – had all but disappeared. Without a government in place to agree or disagree with the US and the IFIs, which were soon running the country, Haiti was ready for the “shock doctrine” – the radical economic prescriptions enforced throughout the world and outlined in Naomi Klein’s eponymous book. Klein’s argument was that these policies were so unpopular among the populations of the target countries that the agents of big capital, such the IMF and World Bank, would wait until there was a crisis “real or perceived”, when people could not organize resistance, to push the reforms through. This is what happened in Haiti.

The first step was to entrench a decision-making system that took all power out of the hands of accountable democratic institutions run by Haitians. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which became the country’s most powerful decision-making body in the aftermath of the earthquake, was the perfect example of this move. The IHRC was set up ostensibly to coordinate the response and spend donor money in the absence of a Haitian government. It had 26 members, 12 of whom were Haitian, leaving them without a voting majority (just as they were not allowed a majority stake in their industries). To those Haitian members, it was obvious they were window-dressing. In a December 2010 letter of protest to the IHRC chair, former US president Bill Clinton, they complained of being “completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC”, as well as having “time neither to read, nor analyze, nor understand – and much less respond intelligently – to projects submitted”. According to one journalist based in Port-au-Prince: “These twelve board members surmised that their only function is to rubber-stamp, as Haitian-approved, decisions already made by the executive committee.”

That was exactly the perception that the US and the IFIs were trying to avoid. When officials from the US and international agencies in Haiti were interviewed they were at pains to explain how they were “working for the Haitians” and the phrase of the day was “Haitian-led”. It was the same all over the world – the US and its agencies were adept at making their domination be seen as demanded by the victim. In truth, there was, and continued to be, minimal Haitian involvement in the reconstruction (outside the business elite). An article in the Washington Post put it bluntly in January 2011: “There is a dramatic power imbalance between the international community – under US leadership – and Haiti. The former monopolizes economic and political power and calls all the shots.” The financial benefits to the American private sector of this set-up were immediately obvious. An Associated Press investigation found that of every $100 of Haiti reconstruction contracts awarded by the American government, $98.40 returned to American companies. The focus was never on building up indigenous capacity; any work was to be outsourced to foreign companies or NGOs by the IHRC. It was about making money for rich Americans. After Michel Martelly was sworn in as president in May 2011, it took months for the former pop star and former member of the savage Tonton Macoute militia (formed by the US-backed dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier) to form a government, as his candidates for cabinet positions were repeatedly rejected by parliament. By the time his administration was in place in June 2011, 18 months after the earthquake, the coordinates of the economic reconstruction were already in place. Martelly’s hands were tied by the very IFIs which claimed to be subordinate to the Haitians. Though in Martelly’s case his hands didn’t even need to be tied – he was a willing “shock president”.

There were three elements that the US and IFIs wanted to build the “new Haiti” around: high-end tourism; export-processing zones; and a resurgent private sector in control of the previously state-owned assets. It was the racket’s standard playbook. The architects of the reconstruction actually had other countries in mind that they believed could serve as a model. One was the Dominican Republic, the country next door to Haiti, which had long been an oasis for private capital in the Caribbean. In Haiti, using the model of its Hispaniola neighbor, the IADB planned to spend $22 million on a high-end tourism resort near the 19th-century citadel at Labadee, a port on Haiti’s northern coast. Mr Almeida, Haiti manager for the IADB, told me the bank’s money would “provide the means for the private sector to come and invest”, adding that “in [the Dominican Republic] everything they have is all private. The airport is private, the roads are private, even the internal roads. So we could do the same thing [in Haiti].” (In the initial carve-up of Haitian society, the IADB was given road infrastructure.)

The other opportunity that had to be taken advantage of was speeding up the privatization process. The World Bank used the example of Teleco, formerly the national telecom operator, which in 2009 the bank’s private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), had helped partially privatize. (The IFC was, incidentally, the brainchild of Nelson Rockefeller in 1951.) Mr Naim, the private-sector Haiti manager for the World Bank, told me that Teleco was an example of what the government should do to the ports and the airport. “[They can] really transform these assets that generally the government handles poorly,” he said, adding that “It’s better for the government to focus on social things” and let these assets be privatized. Teleco itself is now due for complete privatization under the guidance of the IFC. For the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it is hard – possibly even suicidal – to argue with the World Bank. In March 2010, the bank promised $479 million in grants; the IFC put $49 million-worth of direct investment into Haiti’s private sector.

With Teleco on its way to privatization, the IADB had its own plans for the national water and sanitation authority (Dinepa), which had come under its domain in the initial carve-up. The bank soon handed over the authority’s management duties to the giant Spanish company Aguas de Barcelona, which won a three-year contract to train and assist workers, and for which they received millions of dollars. “Many local companies are taking control of small towns’ water systems,” Mr Aguerre of the IADB told me excitedly. This essential commodity and basic human right was now being turned into a for-profit venture. “We are seeing good examples of places where no one paid for water services, and little by little they are paying,” he added. Experts from Aguas de Barcelona became the leaders of discussions concerning the investment needed in Haiti’s water system and the process of opening bids to different contractors for the completion of new pipelines and other systemic improvements.

In education, the IADB’s plans were no different. Thanks to decades of neoliberal policies that prioritized the private sector above the Haitian ministries, even before the earthquake 80 percent of educational services were delivered outside the state (primarily by international bodies or the private sector). As a result, only half of school-aged children in Haiti went to school. For the IADB, this did not prove the folly of their enterprise. Contrariwise, they concluded that it meant they had not gone far enough. “It’s too ambitious to think you can turn it around,” Mr Aguerre said. The IADB settled on a voucher program that will allow the government to retain some “quality control”, but means that education will be completely privately run. To ensure full access, the plan creates a publicly funded but privately run education system. The small print is that this public subsidy will cost the Haitian government about $700 million a year, seven times what it spends now on education. With no new revenue streams evident (in fact, as we shall see, the government’s tax base was being all but destroyed), the obvious implication was that full access was not an aim (or even a hope). When the IADB’s promised $500 million over three years runs dry, more than half of Haiti’s children will still be locked out of the school system. The IADB rationalized this arrangement by arguing that the private sector would pick up the slack – explicitly holding Haiti’s kids ransom to Hollywood film stars. “There are many private actors willing to put money in,” added Mr Aguerre. “Half of Hollywood is interested. Everyone wants their Susan Sarandon School of Arts.” Incidentally, Martelly has been approving of both vouchers and subsidizing private schools as methods to rebuild the Haitian education system.

With the complete privatization of telecoms, water and education, the final piece in the jigsaw for the IFIs and the US became the new “industrial parks” or “integrated economic zones”. These, so the propaganda went, would ensure the economic growth that could put Haiti and its people back on their feet. But two years after the quake, more than 500,000 Haitians still lived in ad hoc camps around Port-au-Prince and 8 million still lived without electricity. The throngs of jobless who lined the capital’s streets are a reminder of the 70 percent unemployment rate. “We need to be realistic and understand that it’s still five years after Katrina and New Orleans is still being rebuilt, it’s 10 years after September 11th and that site isn’t rebuilt complete, the process takes time,” Kenneth Merten, then US ambassador to Haiti, told me, adding, “One of the things Haitians can really do themselves is to move quickly on making a business-friendly climate.”

It might perhaps be hard for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in ad hoc campsites to do that. In Haiti, I went to the La Piste camp, a barren enclosure with rows of one-bedroom “houses” on steeples. The owner of one, a middle-aged woman, spoke to me slowly via an interpreter. She was a single mother with three children with no means of income. She was living off money the Red Cross had given her, alongside selling some trinkets, although customers are few and far between. “It’s much better here than the last camp,” she told me. In the last place she and her children lived, like most others, in a tent, which meant they were subject to the rain and animals who decided to look in. “This is a house, it’s safer,” she said, but added that the fence of the camp should be higher, or be turned into a security fence because of the burglaries. She also said the lack of lighting puts them in danger: it is pitch black at night and easy for people to break in. You realize walking around La Piste that these people are completely at the mercy of nature – be that the elements, or their fellow man or woman. There is no security, there is no rule of law, and there is no place to go with grievances; there is merely the hope that someone is looking out for you. Hope cannot thrive in such an environment. “I would like to have hope,” she told me, her face blank, refusing any emotion at all. “I just don’t know who is going to make anything happen.” It seemed rude to ask how she planned to make a business-friendly climate for foreign investors in Haiti.

Therapy

The 30-minute drive to Codevi industrial park from the airport in northern Haiti is the smoothest in the country. In a place famed for its poor infrastructure, particularly its undulating roads, the park and the surrounding area are something of an oasis. Beyond the small bridge and metal gates which divide Codevi from the town outside, there’s everything that the average Haitian doesn’t have: paved roads, a functioning health service, employment and even a (small) trade union – the only one in the country. The 2 million square foot Codevi Park was originally built by a Dominican textile company, Grupo M, on the Dominican side of the border, but operations were expanded to Haiti in 2003 (with the help of a large investment by the World Bank).

“It was created as a vision of expansion that Grupo M had to look for as the Dominican Republic became more complicated competitiveness-wise,” Joseph Blumberg, vice-president of sales for the company, told me as we sat in his air-conditioned office inside the park. “Haiti offered us the competitive edge that we needed in this region to maintain ourselves with the US market.” He added: “It had a labor cost which was the lowest in the region.” The minimum wage in Haiti now is 150 gourdes ($3.70) per day, which is nearly half that in the Dominican Republic. This “competitive edge” – in a layperson’s terms “slave wages” – combined with favorable trading terms with the US had caught the eye of the IFIs in the aftermath of the earthquake. The aim was to rebuild Haiti as a Caribbean sweatshop that could enjoy the full fruits of the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity for Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 2006, granting tariff-free access for Haitian textile exporters to the US market. This was followed by increasingly favorable terms through HOPE II, in 2008, and the Help Act after the 2010 earthquake.

Parks like that at Codevi are known in the IFIs’ literature as integrated economic zones (IEZs): places where infrastructure, welfare services and other services are provided for the lucky few behind imposing metal gates. The literature justifying their existence argues that prospective foreign investors put off by the decrepit or non-existent roads, electricity-grid and water system throughout Haiti would here have access to a ready-made mini-city. There was already a huge industrial park of this kind near the airport in Port-au-Prince called Sonapi, which is fully owned by the Haitian government and had, at one point, nearly 40 companies based there. But the new IEZs would be under the sole control of its initial investors – mainly USAID and the IADB. This raises the question of what will happen outside these so-called “poles” of economic activity. What would the incentive be for the central government to develop infrastructure and social services throughout the country if they are being built on this micro-scale? And where would the money come from? Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, admits this is a problem; he told me that industrial parks “may not be sustainable if you were to do it as a policy everywhere”.

Codevi is essentially an “export-processing zone” (increasingly common in the “developing” world) where exports pay no tax to the central government and there is no customs duty on imported materials. “You’re in an extra-territorial concept so that your goods come in and out very quickly without much paperwork,” said Armando Heilbron, a senior private-sector development specialist at the World Bank working on the IEZs in Haiti. Therefore, Haiti’s reconstruction will take place in isolated small “poles”, primarily in the northern part of the country, while the rest of the country’s infrastructure and welfare services will fall further into disrepair.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the industrial parks is the unscrupulous nature of the companies that populate them. The public relations tour of Codevi, with its stops at the local doctor and training facilities, is a relief after experiencing the destruction that has been wrought in the rest of the country. But the tour does not include many of the most important episodes in its establishment. Codevi was originally built on farmers’ land against their will – a process that destroyed the region’s agricultural infrastructure to create sweatshops. It was a parable for the economic reconstruction that occurred after the earthquake. The diplomatic cables recount that there had been a “long-standing labor dispute between Dominican manufacturer Grupo M and workers in Ouanaminthe”. One said: “According to Yannick Etienne, a labor representative, the fight has its origins in the closed-door negotiations that established the Free Trade Zone (FTZ). The farmers were left out of the negotiating process until the day of the FTZ ground breaking ceremony in 2002, when they were told their land was being expropriated. Grupo M eventually published a social compensation plan in 2003, however, it came too late for the farmers whose land was already gone, and whose suspicions of the Dominicans were already aroused.”

Grupo M and its patrons at the World Bank do not, of course, tire of outlining the countless benefits that accrue to the local population because of Codevi. Every program of exploitation has an ideology bolted on to legitimate it to the world – but also to those benefitting: very few people want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back. When I asked to speak to workers, two were dutifully brought out to give monosyllabic positive comments about their jobs, perhaps wary of the manager sitting next to them. Neither was a member of the union, I soon found out. In fact, Grupo M claims it has no conception of how many workers are in the union. “Very little,” is all Mr Blumberg would tell me. “It’s not part of their priority. They’re happy and when the workforce is happy they don’t mind if anybody is doing anything for them or not.” However, according to the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the soothing words of Mr Blumberg do not reveal the whole story. “Dominican unions allege [Grupo M] discriminates against labor organizers, fires their members, and has created a fraudulent ‘scab union’ in order to circumvent the legitimate one,” one cable notes.

It is clear that something similar has happened in Haiti. Grupo M did have a stronger union once – before it was busted after trying to exercise its rights. Just months after Codevi opened, the workers began complaining of “exploitation and mistreatment” by the management of Grupo M. Rounds of strikes and violence by union members were followed by a “series of employee terminations by the company throughout that summer”.

Mr Blumberg explained it thus: “When we had the first union, there was a lot of growing pain. They didn’t have the right groups guiding them, there were a lot of radicals, a lot of leftists.” But, he added: “In the end, everything was straightened out and we’re in peace and we’re fine with the union.” The union had been co-opted. Workers’ rights would not be a high priority for the economic model that would design the new Haiti. In fact, the plan was predicated on the lack of rights for workers. In an internal IFC document that was presented to the Haitian government, the administration was implored to amend the labor code in order to “lift restrictions on 24/7 multi-labor shifts” while “streamlining” the process by which night-time salary supplements could be done away with. The plan was also predicated on a lack of tax revenue. Another incentive for the foreign companies was the so-called “economic free zones” (EFZs), which offer companies tax and duty-free rights if they set up operations in Haiti. In reality, these zones do not exist in physical space but rather constitute the whole country. In other words, Haiti would now be tax-free for foreign investors – further disabling the Haitian government’s ability to rebuild any public institutions. In 2011, the Haitian government brought in an estimated $1 billion of revenue, much less than the per-capita rate in sub-Saharan Africa.

The answer to this dilemma for the IADB was the “multiplier effect” whereby companies supplying services to the population would in turn have more income and therefore pay more tax to the government (at some time in the distant future). “It’s on that side that we see the benefits of anchoring in the zones and having these companies come, even if under the current regime they do not pay taxes for a while,” said Mr Almeida, IADB country director for Haiti. The idea essentially is that around the industrial estates other smaller Haitian businesses, such as travel agents and grocery stores, will pick up the slack of lost tax revenue. The problem for the IFIs was that even with slave wages and lax labor regulation it was proving hard to attract foreign investment. In the face of such reticence from investors around the world, Haiti should have focused on building indigenous capacity, perhaps through a massive public works initiative and the construction of state-owned facilities, like Sonapi. Haitians were instead again put at the mercy of international capital and its “race to the bottom”. For the US embassy, the only thing going for Haiti was that its people were made to work for peanuts. “Haiti has the lowest wages in the western hemisphere,” boasted one US embassy cable. To Haitians it was nothing to boast about. Camille Chalmers, a local economist, told the Financial Times that the wages paid in the textile sector, Haiti’s biggest industry, were a “veritable scandal”.

Amid manifold reservations from both international investors and labor-rights groups, the IADB and USAID finished the construction of the flagship project in the economic reconstruction of Haiti: the Caracol industrial park (CIP), just 40 miles down the well-paved road back toward the northern capital of Cap-Haïtien. The CIP was inspired by the perceived success of Codevi, with those designing Haiti’s new-look economy trying to attract investment with the benefits that drew Grupo M into the economy: cheap labor and geographical closeness to the US, the world’s largest market, where its exports are duty-free. It is one of five planned. The US poured millions of dollars into the CIP, but only Sae-A Trading, a South Korean textile company, has been enticed to set up shop in the park (and according to people involved in the deal, Sae-A was promised a rent holiday of four years). Sweatshop-based development had, in fact, never provided more than 100,000 jobs even in the 1980s.

The fact that the US taxpayer is building industrial parks for the benefit of South Korean companies also raised eyebrows. The US may be the most active foreign country involved in the reconstruction, but even its companies are still keeping their distance. “We are professional beggars,” Mr Aguerre, the Haiti manager for the IADB in Washington, told me. The Haitian people would become beggars, too. For example, an internal IFC document on proposed IEZs argues that the reconstruction should be “propelled by private-sector-led development” even though the same document admits that “the existing Haitian Free Zone, Industrial Park and Investment Code policy and regulatory regimes have not been effective in attracting investments that are needed to create jobs”.

“To say that the private sector is rushing into Haiti right now would not be exactly what’s happening,” Pamela Cox, the World Bank’s vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean, told me when I met her in Washington. So why were these institutions focusing so much on a foreign-investment-led reconstruction, rather than building up domestic and public Haitian capacity? Was the fact that this would not make any westerners rich merely a coincidence?

There are still further complications; namely, that offering generous inducements to foreign companies will adversely impact businesses already in Haiti. Grupo M, for example, is fearful of what the incentives offered for the CIP and other IEZs being planned might mean for it. “[New foreign companies] have to train their workforces, they have to prepare themselves for what is coming,” said Mr Blumberg, vice-president of sales at Grupo M. “We want a level playing field if you will. We understand that [foreign companies] are getting a lot of things via grants and via sponsorships from different sources.” But if investment is not forthcoming or indigenous industries are stifled, as many predict, Haiti will suffer stagnation and destitution for another generation.

Enthusiasm from donors for aid and other forms of sovereign investment is now dwindling as the international community loses interest and the financial crisis continues to bite. The Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF), which aggregates funds from countries and NGOs to fill gaps in investment, has raised $352 million so far, but, “We’ve reached a plateau,” Mr Leitman, head of the HRF, told me. “I think the donors have been cautious and reluctant to contribute new money.” In March 2010, at a major pledging conference held in New York City, $4.6 billion was promised for the first two years of reconstruction. Only $1.9 billion of that ever materialized. “If you look at estimates made about rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake, they were huge, you know $15 billion, even more than that,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC, told me. “They haven’t come up with anything like that, even a fraction of that. It’s a small country but it’s still 10 million people and so if you don’t clear the rubble, you don’t have roads, you don’t have housing, you don’t have water, you don’t have sanitation, so what kind of economy are you going to get out of that? That’s the real problem.”

The real fear back home in Washington, however, especially among politicians, is migration and drugs. “They feared Aristide was a Castro want-to-be,” Larry Birns, an analyst in Washington, told me. “US policy has never been concerned with building a viable economy. The policies they followed destroyed Haiti’s economy.” On assuming power, Ronald Reagan proposed the Caribbean Basin Initiative to try, in a familiar story, to bring foreign investment to the region. It was a method of regaining control of the region, which seemed to be going on an independent path. Reagan even invaded Grenada on spurious grounds in 1983 to push that effort. The initiative was a failure, bringing little to no investment, but control was exerted. In that respect it was like John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America, which sought to bring the region away from Soviet influence, under the guise of “development” and “investment”. The prevailing sprit now in Washington is that Haiti is messy, and people will openly tell you (off the record) that Haiti is beyond the capacity to be reformed, a “loser situation”. They favor what they call “keeping it on life support” so that the US doesn’t get too many people coming in (Haitian refugees dying on the beaches of Florida caused havoc for Southern politicians in the 1980s). But what the US never seems to understand about Haiti and elsewhere is that you cannot have a society operate like clockwork when you have for years persistently undermined all credible efforts for that society to function in an effective way. Haiti is now actually well below its per capita income of 1960, the only country in the hemisphere to have made no progress in that period. Ironically, the economy grew from 1960 to 1980 under the Duvalier dictatorships because, despite their brutality, they actually had a development strategy. It wasn’t great but it did move the country forward. This is true for a lot of the region where many countries had more growth under dictatorships because they had more control over policy than they did in a more democratic era when, in the subsequent neoliberal phase, the World Bank and the IMF controlled policy, and nobody allowed them to have a development strategy. From 1991 to 1994 and from 2000 to 2004, in fact, there was a deliberate strategy to destroy the economy, and that’s how they got rid of President Aristide both times. “This is more about power. It’s hard for people to believe this, but the US really does care who runs the government,” said Mr Weisbrot. “They’ve overthrown the government twice, the US, Canada, France, and their allies. 1991 was more covert but it did come out that the CIA paid the people who did the coup, and they also financed death squads in the period after.”

Robinson Deese’s story shows the human side of this brutality. “After the earthquake everything turned terrible,” he told me, as we sat in his bedroom. He lost his home and moved with his four children and wife to Golf, one of the biggest camps in Port-au-Prince on the capital’s only golf course. But he was given a lifeline. The Red Cross – one of the most influential and powerful NGOs working in Haiti – offered him a rent subsidy to move his family into permanent accommodation. The charity gave him 4,000 Haitian dollars toward the yearly rent of 6,000 Haitian dollars. (Prices have ballooned since the earthquake because of the squeeze on supply.) Now he lives in one small and sweltering room with six other people, including his wife, children and brother. Formerly a tailor, his working life was destroyed when he lost all his sewing machines in the earthquake. “We have to manage with this because we have no means to rent a bigger place right now, I have to work for other people now,” he said. “I preferred to take the subsidy because I didn’t have a piece of land where I could build a shelter. I decided the best option would be to start a small business for myself while I tried to save money, maybe get a piece of land.” He was also awarded a $500 Livelihood Grant to start a business, which he said was not going well so far. In these conditions, saving is hard for a family like this, as he has to stump up money for tuition for his kids’ schooling as well as for books and uniforms. The Red Cross has helped countless people this way – it is one of three options they offer to some of the 500,000 Haitians still living in tent cities around Port-au-Prince. The other two are building a T-shelter on a greenfield site, or finding someone who will let them do it. But the program is a parable of the short-termism that has overtaken the reconstruction of Haiti. Mr Deese only qualifies for this subsidy for a year. After that, he and his family are back at square one unless he finds a job, which with 80 percent unemployment seems unlikely. “I can’t say I will have enough to cover next year’s rent,” he admitted. “It doesn’t stress me out right now, I know that I can work, I have two hands to work with.”

No room for an alternative

Haiti is a notoriously difficult country to operate in: its institutions are frail, weakened by years of underinvestment, and the system is riven with corruption. For the economic managers post-earthquake, this was the default reasoning for their reliance on the private sector and “export-led” reconstruction. But there was nothing inevitable about such a program. There were plenty of reconstruction plans that could, most likely would, have created a fairer and more sustainable future for Haitians. The problem was and remains that these plans go against an ideology purveyed by the IMF, the World Bank and the US. For example, the Haitian government could have rebuilt the country’s crumbling infrastructure with a modern-day equivalent of the Marshall Plan from donors, which would have created public-sector jobs for Haitians to construct roads, ports and energy infrastructure which has either been non-existent or in disrepair. Everyone, after all, puts infrastructure as among the top problems for making Haiti work. Some 10,000 jobs could have been created just clearing the rubble. The Red Cross has, for example, created hundreds of jobs for Haitians reusing the rubble to build bricks and other building materials, clearing the city and creating employment. “We’re the only ones doing it,” the co-coordinator of the program in Port-au-Prince told me. “At the moment, now, all the rest goes down the dump, and the cost of processing it is about the same as taking it down to the dump.”

Perhaps most importantly, Haiti could have focused on creating a new agrarian economy, a sector which had been thriving before President Clinton dumped tonnes of US rice in the country in the 1990s, destroying Haitian agriculture by completely distorting trading terms, something that will be explored in a moment. About 60 percent of the Haitian population, or 4 million people, live in rural areas. Promoting community-owned agricultural land would have instantly depopulated the overcrowded capital and provided a sustainable way of feeding its people (with any leftovers ready for export). It was never even discussed.

“Agriculture is still missing,” Mr Naim at the IFC told me. The IFC is yet to make one loan to an agricultural small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), instead training its focus on agribusiness rather than the smallholders that Haiti needs. Likewise, the World Bank has admitted that not enough priority is being given to agriculture. It has put $55 million into a new agricultural program (in the grand scale of things in Haiti, peanuts). “This is our first true agricultural project,”  Mr Abrantes acknowledged. The US government claims it is not ignoring agriculture. The ambassador to Haiti told me the US has invested $200 million in the sector already; but, once again, the focus remains on produce for export as opposed to providing for the Haitian population, large portions of which are starving. The IADB, on the other hand, contends that infrastructure is important but “there are other needs” (such as “investing in the private sector” in order to import seeds). The bank has a plan to get a private company to buy the mangoes, centralize them, distribute them and then send them to the exporters. “We’re changing the dynamics of how we can do agriculture in Haiti,” said Mr Almeida at the IADB. This new dynamic is straight out of the neoliberal guidebook: providing vouchers to small producers so they can buy seeds through imports. With no public or community-held land, such ventures have to date not got very far. “It’s not a big number of jobs,” Mr Almeida admitted.

The internal Haitian market continues to be ignored by all parties, a travesty considering that 90 percent of eggs and poultry consumed in Haiti come from the Dominican Republic, while 80 percent of rice is imported. Changing that state of affairs through publicly funded subsistence farming is not an option. “When I say agriculture I say agribusiness,” said Mr Almeida. The alternative, which is unthinkable in the world of these institutions, is that money is provided to subsidize domestic small-scale rice production.

Published: Alborada (21 December 2017)

In 1971, while still embroiled in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon announced a new war. This one was not against an ideology or regime, but a collection of inanimate substances. Nixon’s war would be one of the defining planks of domestic and foreign policy during the next 45 years, and it goes on.

By the late 1980s seven Latin American or Caribbean countries accounted for the vast majority of all marijuana, cocaine, and heroin that illegally entered the US. The region has been the centre for War on Drugs foreign policy.

Since the early 1970s the US has spent upwards of a $1 trillion and seen thousands of people killed in the fight to eradicate production. The U.S. federal government spent over $15 billion dollars in 2010 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $500 per second.

In 1986, President Reagan had formalised the program with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act and even during the Cold War, the problem was more concerning to the US population than any other. In an article written in 1988, Bruce Michael Bagley notes that: “Control of drug trafficking ranks higher than immigration, foreign debt, and communist expansion in Central America as a priority issue in US-Latin American relations.”

A March 1988 New York Times/CBS News poll revealed that 48% of those surveyed believed drug trafficking was most important foreign policy issue facing the nation. (63% said stopping drug trafficking was the top priority as opposed to 21% who thought stopping communism was more important.)

These attitudes, in the context of the still-ongoing Cold War, reflected decades of intense propaganda by the state and, following it loyally, the majority of the US media. But why was such effort put into promoting the War on Drugs by the political class? Was it just concern about the prevalence of drugs consumption and production? Or were there deeper causes?

Whatever the answers, after nearly 50 years of the Nixonian War on Drugs barely anyone says it has been a success. “Despite the increases in resources, manpower, drug seizures, and arrests, however, no one in the US government can realistically claim that the war on drugs is being won,” notes Bagley.

In Washington, most will say privately that the policy doesn’t work and is too expensive. “I’ve been struck by the criticism when speaking in private conversations with members of Congress who are perceived as hardliners on the drug war,” Michael Shiftner, an analyst in Washington DC, told me. “But they don’t want to be caught in position that says this is a failure when they don’t have an alternative.”

Nearly all the academic literature on the War on Drugs in Latin America has focused on analysing this failure from a shared premise: that the goal of the War on Drugs in Latin America is bring down production and trafficking of contraband narcotics. We need to reappraise that assumption, placing the War on Drugs in its geopolitical and historical context, and analysing its ascent from a ‘realist’ perspective which reveals it is much more about statecraft and control than drugs.

This explains why it continues to be financed at such high levels, yet can point to very few successes on its own terms. As Figueredo has put it: “The mobilization of an external threat, real or fictitious, and the belief in its intrinsic superiority have historically been important aspects of the discourse of U.S. policy.” So with the War on Drugs.

The successes are actually largely unknown, and for a reason. They largely revolve around destabilisation of governments and popular movements under the guise of the War on Drugs - results far away from the surface rationales offered by Washington and the War on Drugs ideological supporters. 

Academic work by Peter Dale Scott and Alfred W. McCoy has actually documented the networks of the global drugs industry and the participation in it of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the Latin American context, this was most clearly elucidated in the Kerry Committee report (named for then-Senator John Kerry) which investigated the drug laundering network throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and its implications for US foreign policy.

It is clear economic aid has always been an essential instrument for US strategy. In this context, the Colombia Plan and its successor, the Patriot Plan, as well as the Merida Initiative, should not be seen as drugs-related but rather tools for protecting U.S. and related interests. “This process is part of a complex and dangerous dynamic of stabilization-destabilization in which participating Latin American governments play an essential role,” notes Mariana Ortega Breña.

The War on Drugs use as an imperial stratagem that revolves around the militarisation and securitization of the region is reflected by the ebbing and flowing of resources as and when it seems to moving away from US orbit. The 1980s under Reagan and the “threat” of Communism in Central America saw a huge uptick in resources assigned to the program. Since 1999, with the advent of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and then more independent leaders arising in Honduras, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina, US hegemony in the region came under significant strain. Resources to fight “drugs”, the vast majority of the money going to military purchases, ramped up again, particularly in Plan Colombia (which began in 2000) and then the Merida Initiative (2006).

The US War on Drugs in Latin America is part of a package that is bequeathed on countries that reside in the orbit of US power. In countries where leaders and governments have arisen that are opposed to US programs in the region, often the DEA and other agencies involved in the War on Drugs have been expelled. In 2008, two years after he came to power, President Evo Morales of Bolivia expelled the DEA from his country. Coca production subsequently fell.

On a local level, the economic and political elites (that tends to be a tautology in Latin America) have used the War on Drugs to shore up their power domestically as well as use the resources to damp popular unrest. Local elites have also worked to allow multinational corporations and local corporations have the ability to discipline dissident and recalcitrant populations around mineral sites.

Published: Novara Media (10 December 2017)

Norman Hill has been agitating against nuclear weapons for nearly half a century but it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm one bit.

As we walk along the empty road that runs alongside BAE Systems’ imposing shipyard at the edge of Barrow-in-Furness, the veteran anti-nuclear activist speaks at a hundred miles an hour, wanting to get all the arguments against the industry that sustains his town out as fast as possible.

Hill was born in Barrow in 1941 and has lived most of his life in the town. “I came from a solid working class family. My dad was an engineer in the shipyard,” he says.

The Barrow shipyard occupies a central place in the production of what is called Britain’s ‘nuclear deterrent’, producing the submarines which carry the missiles and nuclear warheads. The previous class of nuclear submarines were produced here and the new submarines which will carry Trident will be built here.

Norman Hill, 45 year veteran of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in Barrow-in-Furness.

Hill first became involved in the anti-nuclear movement in Barrow in the mid 1970s. There was talk of cruise missiles being deployed in the UK in response to a Soviet buildup the US claimed was a threat to Europe. He thought the idea was madness. Hill’s father worked in the shipyard, but was supportive of his son’s activism. “At that time there were a lot of people in the shipyard who agreed with that position,” he says. Much has changed since then.

“The nest of the dragon is here, pure evil,” he says, pointing towards the shipyard. “The fact that people are dependent on living for manufacturing this obscenity. The submarines themselves are not an obscenity, it’s what they going to carry. That’s the obscenity.”

The current Trident renewal proposal aims to replace four nuclear submarines (called Vanguard class) with four new submarines (called Dreadnought class). They will have a 30 year life cycle. It’s over eight billion pounds per submarine. The current government policy is to have an ‘active stockpile’ of 160 nuclear weapons, 40 nuclear warheads on each submarine, with up to eight missiles, which are longer than Nelson’s Column. All these are hydrogen bombs, weapons that have never been dropped outside of tests and have 100 kilotonnes of explosive power, about seven times the size of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. “We could have 160 of those,” one scientist tells me. “You could literally destroy the whole of civilisation with that, basically.”

Crossing the bridge over the Devonshire Dock where the shipyard sits, I see one of the nuclear submarines poking out from under the water. It is hard to fathom that little Barrow, population 69,087, is the central node in the production of a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out civilisation. “No one really thinks about it like this,” Hill tells me as we glance over.

Barrow, the biggest town in Cumbria, sits on the outer edge of the Furness peninsula which juts into to the Irish Sea. Half an hour drive north takes you into the tourist hotspot of the Lake District, but Barrow is a world away from there. The town has been dominated by the shipyard since its inception in the 1870s. 70 miles up the coast is Sellafield, where nuclear waste disposal is a hot button issue. There had been plans for a massive subterranean store, but it was vetoed by Cumbria county council.

The nuclear warheads themselves are produced and maintained at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, a town of just over a thousand people near Reading. The site was the end point for anti-nuclear weapons demonstrators who did an annual walk from London to Aldermaston in the 1950s and 1960s. The government owns the site, but it is operated by private sector contractors. The management of the company is held by a consortium of three companies (two of them American) – Lockheed Martin, Babcock International and Jacobs Engineering. The missiles are made in the US and then rented to the UK. Britain does not own the missiles on which its nuclear warheads sit. Nonetheless, it is considered an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, though it is arguable that only one of the words in the phrase is true.

The Corbyn conundrum.

With the current standoff between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, Hill’s activism has taken on a new urgency. And he has also found an unlikely ally in the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran anti-nuclear campaigner and vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). “There is support for Corbyn in this town,” says Hill. “But it’s not necessarily over the Trident issue.”

The local Labour MP, John Woodcock, and the main unions representing workers in the shipyard, Unite and GMB, are solidly behind Trident renewal and maintaining Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal. But it wasn’t always this way. From 1966 until 1983 Albert Booth was the Labour MP. Totally opposed to nuclear weapons, Booth was a leading figure in the demonstrations against the Polaris submarines being built in Barrow.

But when Margaret Thatcher was elected for a second term the slogan for Barrow was ‘Trident means jobs’. Cecil Frank, Barrow’s Conservative MP from 1983 to 1992, coined the catchphrase ‘If Labour is elected, what will the lads do on Monday?’. The inference was that because Labour had a position of nuclear disarmament the jobs would disappear.

Meanwhile promises were made to the people of Barrow on the number of jobs created and the economic spillover from the Trident programme. ‘Boomtown Barrow’ was the vision.

“The people of this town fell for this, that it meant jobs,” says Hill. At that time, Vickers-Armstrong employed 14,000 workers. That figure is now closer to 5,000. Despite this, the government still points to jobs as the major rationale for its outsized support for the arms industry.

Woodcock, Barrow MP since 2010, says it’s not just about the economics. “There is a very important cultural identity for Barrow as a shipbuilding town,” he says. But, he says, Barrow is the jewel in the wider crown of advanced manufacturing jobs. He doesn’t believe the jobs could be transferred to other industries and doesn’t see anything wrong with the UK having a nuclear deterrent. “I happen to firmly believe that the world should have submarines, and I believe that the UK should maintain a nuclear deterrent while other countries have the the ability to threaten us.” He tells me calls for alternative employment are “totally fanciful”.

The Barrow shipyard became part of BAE when Marconi Electronic Systems and British Aerospace merged in 1999. The company dominates the town physically: the shipyard is the first thing you see as you come into the town, eclipsing the rows of one up, one down terraces that line the roads. The company’s logo is all over the town. On one of the main streets in the centre I come across a slab of pavement with BAE’s logo spray painted on Banksy-style. Up the pedestrianised Dalton Street, which runs to the shipyard from the centre of town, sits a brass monument (paid for by BAE Systems) of workers in heroic poses. ‘LABOUR. WIDE AS THE EARTH’ says one engraving. ‘COURAGE. THE READINESS IS ALL’ reads another.

BAE have essential leverage over every aspect of Barrow because of the jobs the shipyard provides. If anyone proposes something the company doesn’t like, it can say, well, we’ll shut down the shipyard. But they do not like visitors. After nearly a year of back and forth, BAE Systems refused me a tour of the shipyard or an interview. Meanwhile Unite and GMB unions, both representing workers in the shipyard, said they could not provide any workers or shop stewards to be interviewed. The secrecy of the arms industry is one its most striking features: the companies and these workers are working on government contracts, paid for by the public.

Unite and GMB were big supporters of Corbyn’s leadership bid while being in favour of Trident renewal to save jobs. Corbyn, for his part, said in the event of non-renewal that investment would save all the jobs and put people to work in other high-skilled socially-useful industries such as renewable power. Research shows that when evaluated on a cost-per-job basis, jobs in the arms industry are more costly than nearly every other sector. That is especially true now as the jobs producing submarines have become more capital-intensive and more goes on materials and complex equipment, so there is less that gets to workers.

Alternatives.

20 miles across the waters of Morecambe Bay, in a small community on the outskirts of Lancaster, there is an example of a project that is the opposite of everything that Barrow is: sustainable, modern, and built on the ideals of environmental protection and peace. Lancaster Co-Housing is a eco housing development set up by local people with the aim of building cutting edge eco-houses and running them all off of local renewable energy. The energy they use is generated by a community-run hydropower plant on the river, which generates enough electricity for 250 homes.

At the community, I meet Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), an organisation of scientists and engineers concerned about the misuse of science and technology in the UK. The group recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.

SGR has long been involved in campaigns against nuclear weapons, particularly studies of the immediate effects of the explosions and the resulting nuclear winter and climate issues. “We estimate that just one Trident submarine load of nuclear weapons could cause enough smoke to create such a cooling of the climate that it would lead to mass crop failures and global famine affecting somewhere between one and two billion people, so possibly a third of the population of the planet. That’s just one submarine load of Trident nuclear warheads.”

SGR has also been at the forefront of looking at conversion issues for defence jobs. On jobs in Barrow, “they’ve already gone through a transition,” says Parkinson. “Part of the problem there is that has left a lot of people out of work, because regeneration funding hasn’t gone in and it’s necessary. But there are alternative jobs being created there. There’s a marina being started. One of the great travesties of Barrow is that there are offshore wind farms being built just off Walney Island, just off the coast there, and very few of the jobs are going to Barrow. So, building the turbines isn’t even done in Britain, although it’s starting to. But building the turbine nacelles, the turbine blades, and all of that could be done in Britain, as industry starting in Britain, but not in Barrow, to do that. But most of the historical stuff is being done overseas. Some of the installation jobs have gone to Barrow, but not many. And it’s such a missed opportunity.”

One of the inspirations for this type of thinking is the 1976 Alternative Corporate Plan for Lucas Aerospace (AKA Lucas Plan). Produced in response to announced job cuts, the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee produced the plan to advocate for the manufacture of socially-useful products. In the 1980s there was a plan drawn up by researchers working with trade unions on a Lucas Plan for Barrow which envisioned Barrow converting to produce offshore wind turbines and wave and tidal energy generators. It was dismissed by the company management. But in hindsight it would have been a good move – in terms of global growth industries, renewable energy technology is one of the fastest expanding. On the other hand, nuclear submarines are up and down.

A factory making wind turbines in Hull now employs 900 people. Meanwhile the BAE Systems factory nearby in Brough has recently been laying off workers. In Barrow, no such investment has been made in alternative industries.

Parkinson says research on ‘skills matching’ has shown the many similarities between shipbuilding and submarine skills and those needed in the offshore energy industry. “There’s a lot of fluid dynamics involved. If you’re looking at wave energy and tidal energy, you’re looking at motion of water, and that’s what you look at when you’re designing submarines. And then you’ve got propeller blades for submarines, and you’ve got turbine blades for wind turbines. There are skills that aren’t really miles away from each other.”

Why are the unions so resistant? I ask Stuart Gilhesey, native of Newcastle who is GMB regional organisation officer for BAE Systems, which covers the shipyard at Barrow. “Well historically if you look at what’s happened to the Tyne, that’s my example because that’s where I come from, renowned for shipbuilding, many companies based in arms industry, that’s not been replaced. You can have these great lofty ideals – who doesn’t want a nuclear free world? It would be great, absolutely brilliant – but in reality these ideals don’t always come into reality, you can have these ideals that a lot of labour – trade unions – have, but will what should happen actually happen?”

The community.

In the Furness Railway, a buzzing Wetherspoons pub a stone’s throw from the Labour party’s headquarters in the town, locals eat and drink from early in the morning to late in the night. It’s a regular hangout for young lads who work at the shipyard. I sit down with two who are getting in their evening beers. Jack Burns is a 31 year old steelworker at the shipyard, a place it was always his dream to work. “I always wanted to work in there but I’ve only been working there for the last year. I’ve had a career in office work and computer work but I like to work with my hands plus my grandparents always worked in the yard. In fact, my great grandad died on one of the boats when he worked in there, before I was born.” Everyone in Barrow has a multi-generational connection of some sort to the shipyard.

Has he been worried about Corbyn’s position on Trident renewal? “I don’t care too much about it to be honest with you. It’s just another contract. We just go in. We just do our job. You know? I mean, not many people ask about it and it doesn’t really come up.”

Barrow, a working class town built on manufacturing, is a natural Labour heartland. “But the Labour manifesto actually supported the renewal with Trident. It’s just Corbyn himself that didn’t support it. So, I don’t know. There is worry. I’m certainly worried because I’m only a year deep in my work. I’d like to think that I’ve got a career for life.”

His friend, Josh Crawford, 18, and also a steelworker at the shipyard, chimes in, “Now they’ve passed the Dreadnought and I don’t think they’d get rid of it. But I think it could halt future buildings.”

Corbyn has promised to replace any jobs lost with high skilled employment in other industries. Doesn’t that assuage their fears? “Actually, no,” says Jack. “If we get rid of the Trident renewal, then they’re not gonna give us any jobs. I think Barrow is only as well-known as it is because of the shipyard. I think if you got rid of the shipyard, in Barrow a lot of people would move out. Barrow would become a deserted town. The only reason Barrow is a thriving town is because of the shipyard.”

The fear that promises of alternative employment will not be carried through is understandable. The Thatcher government made similar promises as it destroyed the mining industry, but never replaced the jobs, leaving subsequent generations in the grips of deprivation and destitution. But to many in the anti-nuclear community, Corbyn is so valuable on this issue because he’s someone who believes seriously in both nuclear disarmament and in protecting workers.

Jack continues: “I believe him when he says that he doesn’t support Trident, which is actually the missile system. It’s not the submarine. I remember hearing him say that. Just because he doesn’t support Trident doesn’t mean that the submarines can’t still be built. They still have other functions so there is that. I don’t fully understand if he was saying that just to keep some people happy. He doesn’t sort of strike me as the sort of person to keep people happy.”

I ask them if they would consider themselves Corbyn supporters. “I don’t really like the guy personally, but then I don’t necessarily like Theresa May either,” says Jack. “I’m leaning towards Theresa May, but I think that’s because of the fact that I want to keep my job. Josh adds: “If I had to vote, I’d definitely vote for Theresa May. She wants to renew Trident.”

“So you’d vote on a single issue on this one?” I ask.

“When our job’s put in jeopardy, yes, because this is probably the best paying job I’ll have ever have,” says Jack. “And I’ve got a five year old son to support, so if I ended up losing my job simply because Jeremy Corbyn didn’t like it, then that’s probably enough for me to not like him.”

This is the sentiment Hill is up against, and it’s pervasive and understandable.

Published: Zed Books blog (22 April 2015)

I appreciate the Guardian publishing a review of my book The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the Masters of the Universe - it's great to see the nice comments about the book in the review, and I definitely take some of the criticisms as coming from a good place.  

I wanted to reply to what I feel are a few mischaracterisations, and to take the discussion forward about how we challenge the global elite.

Conspiracy theories

The review, by Steven Poole, starts by bracketing the book with conspiracy theories.

It is disappointing that it is not mentioned that I was a reporter for the Financial Times for a number of years and much of the reporting is based on what I saw while there. It was not a book written by a paranoid me sitting in my bedroom in my boxer shorts watching the Zeitgeist documentary on repeat. It was a book written by talking to those at the heart the racket in London, Washington DC, and New York.

Having initially been politicised by the war in Iraq, my time at the FT convinced me that it was in fact the massive concentrations of private wealth – in corporations, banks, insurance companies – that sway public policy in our society. I don’t think that – especially not these day – counts as a conspiracy theory.

Institutional structure

Steven says I see an “evil cabal” even though I go to great pains throughout the book to get away from the idea of anyone being “evil” or “good”. It is the institutional structure erected around our world that matters. As I write in the introduction:

Whether the individuals staffing the racket be nice or horrible, good or bad, well-meaning or psychopathic – the institutions they serve continue to extinguish the yearning for independence of people the world over.

And again in the Honduras chapter, when talking about USAID workers:

I believe it would be impossible to not imbibe all these false theories about US benevolence – many of these people are good people who want to believe they are doing the right thing. It is the institutions that are pathological; they are merely its human form, so convoluted forms of legitimisation are a must.

Steven says I call “all foreign-aid workers” “dupes” who believe “myths” when in fact in that sentence I was talking about the people who are “staffing the racket” – USAID and the IMF are the two institutions I mention. Of course, I wasn’t talking about all foreign aid workers – and never mentioned upstanding organisations like Oxfam or ActionAid.

I don’t think you need to be “brilliant” to look beyond the indoctrination in our mass media and university system by the way. It’s really easy – you just need to not work for an institution invested in the system itself. I couldn’t do that at the Financial Times, now I can, it’s that simple. More people would do it if paying their mortgage didn’t depend on believing these myths about the global economy and US benevolence.

Investment and development

On the Delaware Nation tribe criticism – the racketeers;haveworked to keep the tribes in the US poor and undeveloped (best evidence is to go to a reservation, the uniform poverty is not some coincidence). But of course there has been some investment where the big investors have sensed they can make a killing. Steven perhaps confuses investment (which often sucks money out rather than develops) with bringing generalised development. This is a common misconception, and is talked about in the book at length in the context of Haiti and Bolivia.

Kosovo and Haiti

I have never denied Srebrenica or the atrocities carried out by Serb forces in the 1990s. But it is not “risible” to state that “Nato bombed Kosovo in 1999 to ensure the breakup of Yugoslavia”. In the Turkey chapter,

I write about the massive terrorist war launched by the Turkish state against the Kurds in the southeast of the country in the 1990s (same period as Kosovo). We should ask ourselves why NATO wasn’t bombing Istanbul instead of Belgrade during that period. Many more people were killed in the terrorist war in Turkey, but not only did the US not bomb Istanbul, it was in fact selling the Turks the weaponry to embark on this program of ethnic cleansing.

You don’t have to be a supporter of Slobodan Milošević to try to look past the war propaganda and attempt to understand why NATO chose these atrocities – rather than the many others in the world during that period – as being in need of “humanitarian intervention”.

The paragraph on the Duvalier dictatorships mischaracterises what I say. I have nothing but contempt for the brutality inflicted on the Haitian people by the US-backed Duvalier dictators. But this was a nuanced point that needed the following sentence to understand it fully. Here it is:

Ironically, the economy grew from 1960 to 1980 under the Duvalier dictatorships because, despite their brutality, they actually had a development strategy. It wasn’t great but it did move the country forward. This is true for a lot of the region where many countries had more growth under dictatorships because they had more control over policy than they did in a more democratic era when, in the subsequent neoliberal phase, the World Bank and the IMF controlled policy, and nobody allowed them to have a development strategy.

Published: Action on Armed Violence (20 October 2017)

Britain is a country of 65 million people, the 21st most populous nation in the world, with the 9th largest economy in the world based on GDP (PPP). So how did this small island, with very little in the way of an industrial base, become the second largest exporter of arms in the world? How does it lead all European countries in the number of surveillance and cyber warfare companies registered within its shores? Why is it home to the largest number of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in the world? How did Britain become the go-to country for despots around the world who want to ‘tool up’? The answer goes back to a little-known element of the Thatcher Revolution in 1980s Britain. The story of Thatcher’s confrontation with the unions and the industries they represented is well known. Thatcher emerged victorious and replaced a manufacturing base with the “Big Bang” in the City of London, which drew capital looking for a liberal regulatory environment from around the world. London and the country as a whole is still living with the consequences of this revolution every day. But Thatcher wasn’t a total industrial arsonist. There was one industry that she promoted to unprecedented levels: the arms industry. During her tenure, the British economy was given a massive boost from the sale of military hardware, and Thatcher spent a large portion of her overseas trips trying to sell British arms to foreign governments. In 1985, for instance, Thatcher negotiated what is still the largest arms deal in history. The Al-Yamamah deal would see Britain sell fighter jets, missiles and ships to Saudi Arabia worth £42bn. The deal was, though, riven with accusations of corruption and bribery. The extent of such may be never fully known: two National Audit Office reports on the Al-Yamamah have been suppressed because of apparent “national interest” concerns. Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son, also stands accused of making millions of pounds in "commissions" from the sales. Thatcher rapidly expanded the markets for British arms exports, but this program had always been a bipartisan affair. In fact, it was Harold Wilson’s Labour government which set up the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO), an organisation meant to mobilise civil servants and arms industry executives in a coordinated campaign to sell British wares around the world.

What it means, today, is that the UK stands as the second largest exporter of arms in the world, according to the UK government itself. According to the Department for International Trade and its Defence and Security Organisation (the modern version of Wilson’s DESO) in the decade from 2007 to 2016 “the UK successfully retained its position as the second largest defence exporter globally. The UK is also Europe’s leading defence exporter ahead of Russia and France.” Since the Thatcher era, however, warfare has changed markedly. Technology has changed how wars are fought, while the adversaries have splintered and uncoupled from the state. But Britain has maintained its pre-eminence in the industry, nimbly moving on to dominate the cyber sector and private military sector in turn, thanks both to the relationships and capacities offered by the conventional arms industry that already exists but also to a light-touch regulatory environment that was fostered during the Thatcher era. No subsequent government since she stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990 has wanted to restrict the industries of violence from having maximum power on the world stage. The UK’s existing arms industry and the government’s ability to promote it has made the UK a global hub for companies working on the cutting edge of the new cyber warfare. According to Privacy International, the UK has 104 surveillance companies producing technology for export -- to foreign governments and corporations -- headquartered in the country. That number is more than double the number of companies of the next European country, France, which has 45 companies headquartered in-country.

Privacy International, the NGO working on privacy rights, has written: “The UK government ... promotes exports abroad through the UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation, for example, proactively assisting surveillance company Hidden Technologies to access markets abroad by providing advice and introducing the company to potential customers.”

The UK has significantly more surveillance technology companies registered in its borders than anywhere in the world outside the US. This technology is being exported, with government approval, to some of the most repressive regimes in the world. The UK’s role in the US War on Terror from 2001 until today has given the war industries another fillip. Many of the PMSCs in the UK were set up by former soldiers in the British military who left service after fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and wanted to make significantly more money in mercenary work. As Dave Allison, chief executive and founder of Octaga, a Hereford-based PMSC, says: “I left the forces after serving time with the parachute regiment and the special forces. I saw a distinct gap in providing security to corporate and private clientele, the various big companies out there that were doing it, it was all basically being driven on price, and we wanted to offer them something a little bit different, something bespoke. We cater for various clientele, from television and film industry, to corporate, government, and private high net worth (HNT) individuals, so it’s really broad spectrum of services we do, we do the physical side, the consultation side, and we do the technical side.” He says business has been roaring since they set up in 2001. But like the conventional arms industry, these companies are shrouded in secrecy, something the government has no interest in ending. A large reason for the attractiveness of the UK as a destination is that these companies - and those producing conventional arms and surveillance technology - are left alone by government and the media. Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer in International Relations at Westminster University and author of a report on PMSCs in the UK, says that "this is a world where very little is known about what’s going on, no-one is publishing data on this. The government is not publishing lists of PMSCs which are operating, PMSCs themselves if you look on their websites… it (is) just corporate rubbish.”

This combination of learned skills in warfare, liberal regulation, the lucrativeness of mercenary work, and Britain’s global-facing heritage has meant that, today, the UK is the world’s leading centre for PMCS. According to the Sié Chéou-Kang Center at the University of Denver, the UK has by far the largest number of PMSCs headquarted in-country (199 companies).