Al
The CIA's plan against
Mexico
By Jesús Arboleya Cervera
arboleya@progresosemanal.com
Contrary
to my practice, I am going to talk about something of which I have no proof.
Therefore, I don't expect anyone to believe me. What I primarily hope for is to pique people's curiosity and maybe
encourage an investigation into the subject. You can even take this as the
exclusive fruit of my imagination and read it as if it were literary fiction.
Nevertheless, if someday this tale is shown to be real, don't assume that I'm a
diviner; it's just that the cards are marked.
Because
every lucubration emerges from a proven truth, I would like to make two
irrefutable statements. First: Mexico's political sectors are plagued by an
endemic corruption; second: the U.S. espionage services have penetrated them to
the core.
The
Mexican politicians who have been agents of the Central Intelligence Agency,
presidents included, number into the dozens. At least the CIA
believed them to be its agents,
inasmuch as personal interests are paramount in that business, and many see the
CIA as a springboard to achieve their purposes and enjoy some impunity for their
excesses. Therefore, neither them nor the agency are trustworthy; fidelity in
this case is as ephemeral as the love of a prostitute.
During
the decades the Partido Revolucionario Institucional ruled, these ills became
part of the environment and were as common as
tacos. Even so, the PRI was so
powerful that on occasion it abandoned its subordination to the United States
and assumed a nationalist posture that affected (at least occasionally) the
United States’ hegemony.
That kind
of inconsistency annoyed the U.S., and the solution to reduce the PRI's
influence consisted in “broadening [Mexico's] democracy.” That explains the
“generational changing of the guard” promoted by Salinas de Gortari, the shot in
the head administered to candidate Colosio, and Zedillo's “revolt” against the
PRI itself. That paved the road “without trauma” for the conservative government
of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) led by Vicente Fox, Coca-Cola's man in
Mexico. “The pause that refreshes” might well have been his campaign slogan.
However, the “broadening of democracy” also has some drawbacks.
As the
conservative government wears out, the left has emerged as a strong competitor
to attain the presidency in the next election. This is not a radical left but an
offshoot of the PRI as a result of the degree of political depravity achieved by
the administrations of Salinas and Zedillo. Subcommander Marcos is not among its
leaders and no type of uprising against the neoliberal order is contemplated.
The left's principal achievement has been to control the government of the
capital through Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a charismatic and efficient
politician who has based his campaign on the fight against corruption.
The
similarly corrupt news media set out to discredit him. “Secret” videos of
officials linked to López Obrador allowing themselves to be bribed or gambling
away fortunes in a Las Vegas casino became more popular in Mexico than
telenovelas.
The
campaign against the left even targeted the president of the Green Party,
showing him to be contaminated, even if he claimed to be an ecologist.
Nevertheless, the question posed by López Obrador is legitimate: Who filmed the
videos? Why did a Vegas casino (which undoubtedly has many things to conceal)
authorize such an intrusion into its own privacy?
Although
the offensive is focused on the left, particularly on López Obrador with the
intent of removing him from the game, its effects go beyond that. The campaign
tries to wipe out what seemed to be the cleanest aspect of Mexico's political
system, so as to break it down and make way for new political forces that will
save the U.S.-made “democratic aperture.” The agent entrusted with all this is
Jorge Castañeda.
Practically everyone is certain that Castañeda is a CIA agent. If he isn't, he
should be, because he sure acts the part. From being a former leftist with a
rare guerrilla vocation (into which he attempted to involve Cuba), Castañeda
ended up as Fox's minister of foreign relations, an appointment that even the
PAN rejected because it considered him to be a stranger in its ranks.
The way
people phrase it, Castañeda's appointment was Fox's payback to Zedillo for his
cooperation – Castañeda was an “intimate” aide to the former president – and a
guarantee of fidelity to the United States. As expected, the new minister became
the architect of a Mexican strategy of absolute subordination to U.S. policy.
Lucky for Fox, Castañeda was no longer in office when the war on Iraq began; the
minister's excessive zeal against Cuba had cost him his job.
Castañeda's democratic “conversion” included being everywhere while being
nowhere, and switching sides several times. He spent a convenient period of
preparation at Harvard, wrote a couple of books that attempted to discredit the
Latin American left and to minimize the figure of Che Guevara (Castañeda
believed that Che was a revolutionary because he needed to produce adrenaline to
reduce his asthma attacks), developed an unhealthy antipathy toward the Cuban
revolution, and cultivated a convenient alliance with the Cuban-American extreme
right.
Castañeda
has just announced his candidacy for president. He said he is supported by
“independent entrepreneurs,” but added that he hopes to lead a “popular” and
“transparent” movement separate from the other parties – though he hopes to
count on them. He said he will fight against the corruption of an “exhausted”
political system and vowed he will use the nation's resources to improve
Mexicans' education and their access to the job market. Fox should be wary;
Castañeda says he's still the president's friend.
Upon
hearing all this, some might think of another mutation, perhaps a
“retrometamorphosis” that will turn Castañeda into another Hugo Chávez. That's
doubtful; the people who learned first of his plans live in Miami. Most likely,
Miami is home to many of the “independent entrepreneurs” who will contribute to
his campaign or launder the money of others who don't want to appear in public.
That is why Miami is the “capital of the capital” of Latin America, rather, of
the United States and its associates in Latin America.
As
reported in the Mexican press, a journalist who interviewed Castañeda in Miami
attempted to ingratiate herself with the “future president” and unwittingly
unveiled the essence of the plan.
“For a
project of this magnitude, you will surely need two things: the entrepreneurs
and the press,” she said. A bit disconcerted, Castañeda replied: “And the people,
the people.” But the journalist, naive though she may have seemed, was right.
What you find in Miami is not the people but the entrepreneurs, the controlled
press and the CIA.
Jesús
Arboleya, who holds a doctorate in historical science, is a professor at the
University of
Havana. He
has written books and articles about Cuban emigration and U.S.-Cuba relations.
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