Andean FTAS and the Southward Drift of NAFTA; Militarization in Mecca

The U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement was passed by Congress this week. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, defending the agreement against critics who say it will harm the U.S. economy, pointed out that the U.S. is running a trade surplus with the Dominican Republic and five Central American countries as a result of CAFTA. He is right to suggest that the U.S.-Peru FTA will extend the results of CAFTA, which has knocked down protective trade barriers between the richest country in the world and some of the poorest in the hemisphere. CAFTA has slashed agricultural tariffs in Central America and the Caribbean without reducing agricultural subsidies in the U.S., allowing multinationals like Cargill to dump artificially cheapened corn and other exports on places like Guatemala, where 40% of the population lives on the land.

The predictable result? Plantations and textile factories producing for export are seeing greater access to the U.S. market due to their “comparative advantage” of dirt-cheap labor, often paid 60 cents an hour or less. Many of these "local" beneficiaries are subsidiaries of U.S. firms like Dole, Del Monte and RL Stowe Mills. (As the Economic Policy Institute calculates, some 50% of all American-owned manufacturing now takes places outside the U.S. This kind of "intra-firm trade" shows up, misleadingly, as GDP growth in the U.S. and in the "host country" on the macroeconomic ledgers.) Meanwhile, small peasant farmers can't compete with subsidized U.S. agribusiness exports. As FTA cheerleader USAID admits in a report on the effects of CAFTA on Honduras, “only a few of Honduras’ sensitive products will be competitive with those from the United States.”

Regarding Peru, an Oxfam report noted in March: “There are 25,000 cotton producers in the US who receive approximately $3.5 billion per year in subsidies. There are 28,000 cotton producers in Peru who receive no subsidies and who have few alternative ways to make a living. At the moment, Peruvian producers are protected from import surges by a tariff of 12% on cotton imports. This would be removed under the FTA, with devastating results.” Overall, we can predict from CAFTA, the new FTA with Peru, and the ones under discussion with Colombia and Panama, will have the same results as NAFTA. A few thousand manufacturing jobs which pay $1 a day or less will be created, and a far larger number of smallholders will be driven off the land due to export dumping from U.S. agribusiness. Some estimate that 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off the land by NAFTA. CAFTA and the Andean FTAs will generate similar waves of economic refugees, who will then appear in decontextualized, quasi-criminal form in U.S. immigration debates.

Saudi Arabia just signed an $8.9 billion deal with the British government for 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, manufactured by the British firm BAE Systems. This continues an accelerating arms build-up: in February 2007, the Saudis ordered $50 billion in fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, cruise missiles and tanks at an arms fair in Abu Dhabi.

Al-Jazeera reports that BAE Systems was threatened with a corruption probe by the Serious Fraud Office of the British government in 2006. BAE was alleged to have payed Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan $2 billion in bribes over the last twenty years. This was in connection with the biggest arms deal in British history, in which $86 billion worth of arms were sold to the Saudi regime in 1985. Tony Blair said last year that the corruption probe would harm “national security,” which is true, if by "national" he meant "shareholders of the largest defense contractor in Europe."

So, what is Saudi Arabia doing with this costly arsenal? It is worried about Yemeni tribesmen crossing its border at will, as well as its own Shiite population, which could be stirred up by Iran. It is even more worried about its own majority-Sunni population. Since 2003, anti-government attacks have increased in the kingdom of Saud, whose rulers continue to be (correctly)denounced as corrupt American clients by Muslim fundamentalists and secularists alike. In 2006, Saudi car bombers struck the gates of the Abquaiq oil facility, which processes two-thirds of Saudi oil. Although they were unsuccessful (failing to make it past the second layer or security), this may not be true of future attackers.

Most importantly of all, the Saudis are concerned about an Iranian missile strike on Saudi oil facilities in the event of a U.S. attack on Iran. Turki Al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., told the press in 2006 that a U.S. attack on Iran would make “the whole Gulf an inferno of exploding fuel tanks and shot-up facilities" and "shoot up the price of oil astronomically."

The U.S. has a massive naval build-up at Saudi Arabia's doorstep for exactly such an event. The 5th fleet is based in Bahrain, and is there to guard the Persian Gulf shipping lanes to maintain the flow of Saudi oil. Read more!

Guarding supply lines

Interfax reports that the U.S. signed a new "military cooperation plan" with Azerbaijan on Friday. In 2003, the Caspian Guard initiative was launched, under which the U.S. would carry out joint military exercises with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. The U.S. has been trying to establish mobile army bases in the country, which is stragically important for two overlapping reasons: the soon-to-be-opened Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the adjacence of Azerbaijan to Iran. Regarding the pipeline, it will enable Caspian oil to be transported through the Caucasus to Ceyhan, Turkey, and is controlled by an Anglo-American consortium led by BP. Regarding Iran, in April it deployed troops to the Azerbaijani border, and there are rumors that Iran has drawn up a list of locations in Azerbaijan that would be bombed in the event of a U.S. attack. Earlier this year, U.S. undersecretary of State Matthew Byrza told a press conference in next-door Georgia that the U.S. was hoping to use Azerbaijani air fields for military purposes, leading some to speculate about a possible "northern front" against Iran. This prompted the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry to issue a statement assuring the world that "Azerbaijan's territory will not be at the disposal of any country for hostile acts against neighbours."

Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to establish an AFRICOM base in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea region, a move that the Nigerian government is trying to block. It is well worth remembering that AFRICOM is taking over what was formerly the responsibility of CENTCOM, which was formed in the 1970s to enforce the Carter doctrine of ensuring U.S. access to Middle East Oil.
The U.S. is also carrying out joint military operations with states in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and West Africa (which will supply a fifth of U.S. oil by 2020) under the rubric of AFRICOM. One such operation in Mali, known as "Flintlock 2007," led Tuareg rebels to fire on a U.S. military plane on Wednesday. Read more!

Taiwan Missile Crisis? And: Indigenous Rights, Global Health Toll from Pollution

Taiwan is one of the largest recipents of U.S. arms, recieving $540 million in high-tech weaponry in 2003 alone. U.S. planners are now worried that China will gain a military edge over Taiwan through a French arms deal with Pakistan. According to Jane's Defense Weekly, quoted by USA Today, Pakistan is developing a JF-17 jet fighter with China, and it is trying to buy air-to-air missiles from the MBDA company, and radar from the Thales company, which use the same technology as the French-built Mirage jet fighters used by Taiwan. The diffusion of this technology to China could tip the military balance in an attempted future annexation of Taiwan. Alexander Neill of the British Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies predicts a "quite vicious" reaction from the U.S. if the deal goes through. My reaction is that the U.S. arming of Taiwan is much more provocative than the Russian arming of Cuba leading up to the Cuban missile crisis ever was, given that China has a more legitimate historical claim to Taiwan than the U.S. did to Cuba. And can we imagine the absurdity of Kremlin officials reacting "viciously" to the diffusion of the missile technology possessed by Cuba to the U.S.?

The U.N. passed a declaration of rights for indigenous peoples on Thursday. 143 countries voted in favor. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand voted against it, while Colombia, Suriname, Guyana, Russia and Namibia abstained. Opponents protested especially the article stating that "indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired." And with good reason: if it were honored, most of the territory in the Americas, Australasia, southern Africa and southern and eastern Russia could be claimed as indigenous property, an alarming prospect for many a priveleged descendant-of-Euro-settlers. As a Reuters article notes, "That could potentially put in question most of the land ownership in countries, such as those that opposed the declaration, whose present population is largely descended from settlers who took over territory from previous inhabitants."

David Pimentel, an ecologist and agricultural scientist at Cornell, has published a study collating "120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases." The conclusion? About 40% of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution! According to the study:
-Almost half the people on earth live in urban areas where inadequate sanitation exposes them to epidemics.
-1.2 billion people don't have access to clean water. As a result, 80% of all infectious diseases are caused by waterborne infections.
-1.2-2.7 million people a year are killed by malaria, often contracted by mosquitoes that breed in polluted water.
-3 million people a year are killed by air pollution.
-5 million people a year are killed by unsanitary living conditions, over half of them children.
-As microbes become more drug resistant, global warming is increasing the ability of parasites and exotic species to invade new areas, leading to increased threats of West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, etc.

Recall that in 2005, the UN warned that there were already 20 million "environmental refugees" worldwide. Desertification in western China and the African Sahel is already generating waves of migrants. Northeastern Brazil (one of the places catastrophically effected by El Niño events in the late 19th century, as documented by Mike Davis in "Late Victorian Holocausts") is already generating "eco-refugees." Rising sea levels in South Asia will perhaps effect the most people of all. Read more!

De facto apartheid, Desertification, Extinction, Airstrikes...Another beautiful day!

It has been noted by many commentators that 9/11 is not only a notorious day in the United States. On 9/11/1973, in a military operation coordinated with the CIA, the Chilean military bombed the Chilean presidential palace, precipitating the suicide of Salvador Allende and allowing General Augusto Pinochet to take power.

On 9/11/1977, white South African security forces beat black activist Steve Biko in his prison cell in Port Elizabeth. He was found dead the next day. South African president Thabo Mbeki paid tribute to Biko on the 30th anniversary of his murder by the apartheid regime in a memorial lecture in Cape Town yesterday. He said:

"I speak here of the challenge to defeat the centuries-old attempt to ... treat us as children, to define us as sub-humans whom nature has condemned to be inferior to white people, an animal-like species characterised by limited intellectual capacity, bestiality, lasciviousness and moral depravity."
[...]
"We must ask ourselves whether the majority of our people, for whose freedom Steve Biko sacrificed his life, are truly aware that they too are people and whether they do not still regard themselves as appendages of our self-appointed superiors.
"Has the majority taken advantage of its victory in 1994 to repudiate the practice of resorting to forced gestures of friendship it does not desire?"

Forced gestures, indeed. Who can make "friends" when white economic domination continues in South Africa today, 13 years after the official end of apartheid? According to a UN FAO report from July 2007, some 57,000 white South African farmers currently own 80% of the arable land in the country. White-owned farms in South Africa take up 1,300 hectares on average, and are 250 times the size of the average black-owned farm (which is usually on more arid land). They employ over a million workers, or about 11% of the entire formal sector workforce in South Africa. Meanwhile, about half of all black South Africans fall below the government's official poverty line of R354, or the equivalent of less than $50 per month. While over 60% of black South Africans are poor, only 1% of white South Africans are poor.

Similarly, the white minorities in Namibia and Zimbabwe still own about half the arable land in those countries. In Zimbabwe, what land reform has taken place under Mugabe has elicited political interference from Britain and the U.S., including funds for opposition parties and perhaps coup attempts. (Not to mention bizarro-world tantrums about Mugabe's "reverse racism" in the Euroamerican media. It's as if the descendants of black colonizers controlled half the arable land in western Europe and the U.S.) Just imagine what they'd do if land reform in South Africa became an actuality?

These issues will only become more urgent in the coming years, as (largely Northern-induced)climate change decreases the quantity of arable land on Earth. Last Friday, M.V.K. Sivakumar of the U.N. Meteorological Organization told a U.N. conference in Madrid that desertification caused by climate change would threaten the global food supply in the 21st century:

"Today we feed the present world population of 6.3 billion from the 11 per cent of the land surface that can be used for serious food production. The question is: Will we be able to feed the 8.2 billion that we expect to populate the globe in 2020 if even less land is available for farming?" he said.
[...]
Sivakumar said that in some regions the spread of deserts and the salination of once arable land was already well under way. In the future it would be most widespread in drier areas of Latin America, including in farming giant Brazil.

In Africa, increasing climate variability would create major problems for farmers, who are likely to see their growing seasons getting shorter and crop yields cut, especially in areas near already arid and semi-arid regions. [end quote]

Simultaneously, "development" experts continue to push the cultivation of cash crops for export rather than food crops for consumption. As Iain Boal pointed out in an interview published at Counterpunch, people are starving in Zimbabwe while planes full of cut flowers leave Harare for the European market.

In other climate change-related news, The World Conservation Union just published its annual Red List, according to which over 16,300 species (out of the 41,415 species considered) are threatened with extinction. List manager Craig Hilton-Taylor told Reuters that the estimate, which calculates an extinction rate 100-1,000 times higher than normal, is "just the tip of the iceberg."

And it turns out that Syrian accusations about an Israeli airstrike on September 6th were true. U.S. officials told Reuters that the strike was aimed at Iranian weapons being smuggled to Hezbollah through Syria. According to CNN, the strike was coordinated with Israeli ground forces, apparently explaining the mobilization at the Golan border. The above-quoted "U.S. officials" also practically announced that U.S. forces helped coordinate, or at least were privy to, the operation: "Sources in the U.S. government and military confirmed to CNN's Barbara Starr that the airstrike did happen, and that they are happy to have Israel carry the message to both Syria and Iran that they can get in and out and strike when necessary." Or: our attack dog is ready to bite again. Read more!

The Father of All Bombs, Israeli Spy Flights, Pax Amerafrica, Apartheid Nuke Smugglers

There has been a great deal of speculation about how Russia will respond to the Eastern European missile defense system the U.S. is planning. This "defense" system is being widely interpreted in Russia as an offense system, not a means of preventing a Russian first strike, but of disabling a Russian retaliatory strike in the event of a U.S. first strike. This is exactly how the testing of a Chinese missile defense system was interpreted in the U.S. media last summer, although mainstream commentators wouldn't dream of applying the same standards to US we apply to THEM.

Anyway, now we know. According to Reuters:
"Russia has tested the world's most powerful vacuum bomb, which unleashes a destructive shockwave with the power of a nuclear blast, the military said on Tuesday, dubbing it the "father of all bombs". The bomb is the latest in a series of new Russian weapons and policy moves as President Vladimir Putin tries to reassert Moscow's role on the international stage."

The article goes on to say that:

"The main destruction is inflicted by an ultrasonic shockwave and an incredibly high temperature," the reports said. "All that is alive merely evaporates."
[Deputy Armed Forces Chief of Staff Alexander] Rukshin said: "At the same time, I want to stress that the action of this weapon does not contaminate the environment, in contrast to a nuclear one."

Good to know that it evaporates flesh in an eco-friendly way.

Meanwhile, Israel is playing with fire again. A few weeks ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced that Israeli troops would be withdrawing from the Golan border. Since July, the Israeli government has deployed thousands of IDF reservists to the border of the Golan Heights, a piece of Syrian territory Israel siezed during the 1967 war, for military exercises. Rumors of war with Syria have been heating up in recent months, and it appeared that Barak's announcement was a sign of eased tensions. Then, on September 6th, four Israeli warplanes, travelling faster than the speed of sound, invaded Syrian airspace after midnight. They reportedly entered from the south and reached the vicinity of Tal Abyad, on the northern Syria-Turkey border. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Syrian officials at the U.N. on Tuesday said that the craft engaged in an airstrike against an unspecified target, while Israeli officials said they were on a reconnaissance mission, but were forced to drop their munitions in order to increase speed and altitude after being fired on by Syrian troops.

So what were they doing? According to Sami Boubayed at Asia Times, Syria recently purchased ballistic missiles from Russia. He quotes Israeli "counter-terrorism expert" Boaz Ganor's statement that Israel was "collecting intelligence" for long-range missile installations in the north. If a Lebanon-style conflagration erupts, Israel may find itself simultaneously at war with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinans in Gaza and the West Bank.

U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops continued their offensive inside Somalia on Tuesday, bombing the Mogadishu international airport and siezing towns all through southern and central Somalia. The U.S. is participating in many of these operations, and is even carrying out airstrikes inside Somalia. The perception that the U.S. is extending its sphere of occupation from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Horn of Africa is, inevitably, leading to an extension of the resistance it provokes. General John Abizaid recently made a visit to Addis Ababa, and there are other visitors. According to McClatchy, "Hundreds of foreign fighters, primarily from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Asian peninsula, reportedly have arrived in recent days to bolster the CIC [Council of Islamic Courts]."

Oh, and the South African government has uncovered evidence of a nuclear smuggling ring operating in 30 countries. Members include engineers involved in the apartheid regime's nuclear weapons program, which was dismantled in 1994. Read more!

Economic News 9/12

While many people were thinking about non-state terror yesterday, the wheels of state terror were being liberally greased with a new round of arms sales. According to the Financial Times, one of the world's biggest arms fairs opened in the Docklands section of London on September 9th, and is scheduled to run through today. 1,300 companies from 30 countries will be present. There will be military delegations from some 36 countries, including Libya, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and China, taking their pick from a plethora of grenade and rocket launchers, depleted uranium shells, warships, and the like. Who is the organizer? The second-largest arms dealer in the world, the British government. From the FT article:

"The show is a brainchild of the Defence Export Sales Organisation, a part of Britain's defence ministry devoted to promoting arms exports. British defence companies say Deso has played an important role in making sure the UK defence industry has not shrunk along with the rest of the country's manufacturing capacity."

According to a UK government website, Deso was "set up in 1966 to promote UK arms exports overseas." Deso has been dumping more weapons than usual onto the global market in recent years. Between 2001 and 2006, Britain exported £26.5 billion (or $53.8 billion) worth of weapons under the auspices of Deso, "helping to secure tens of thousands of British jobs," the FT says. British arms sales to Africa almost quadrupled between 1999 and 2004, for example, surpassing the £1 billion mark in 2005. But this is not enough. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is reportedly going to shut Deso down, not because he is worried about state violence, but because he wants to increase "institutional alignment across government." He is, the FT says, "moving [Deso's] responsibilities to where the rest of British export promotion lies - within the newly named Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform." This is the body that handles promotions for all UK exports--from subsidized beet sugar to, now, depleted uranium tank shells.

In indirectly related news, oil prices reached a record high yesterday at $78.23 a barrel, and OPEC pledged to increase production by 500 barrels a day. According to the New York Times, this will not have much of an effect on oil prices, as "[t]he market consensus was that there would be a big drop in oil supplies in the inventory data to be reported Wednesday by the United States Department of Energy."

The Chinese trade surplus with the United States continues to widen, totalling $103.3 billion for the first eight months of 2007. But the U.S. is not China's biggest trading partner:
"China’s August exports totaled $111.3 billion, while imports were $86.4 billion, according to the customs agency. European nations were the biggest trading partners, with exports to Europe rising 31.3 percent, to $23 billion, and imports from there up 21.8 percent, at $10.2 billion."

It has to be remembered that a huge chunk of these exports are not manufactured by independent Chinese firms, but by Chinese subsidiaries of European, North American, Japanese and Korean multinational corporations using cheap Chinese labor. According to one estimate, no fewer than half of all Chinese exports are "intra-firm" trade, e.g. trade between the branches of a single, usually foreign corporation.

On the other side of the Pacific, low interest rates have stimulated deficit consumer spending on foreign-manufactured goods and real estate in the U.S., leading to a bizarrely lopsided economic situation. The combination of automation and outsourcing continues to reduce U.S. manufacturing employment (which is likely to become as marginal as agricultural employment in the near future), while employment in sectors like construction (fuelled by the housing boom), retail (fuelled by consumer spending) and health care continues to grow. As Thomas Paily puts it at Asia Times, "The overall picture is one of a distorted expansion in which manufacturing continued shriveling while imports and services expanded. This pattern was carried by an unsustainable house-price bubble and rising consumer debt burdens, and that contradiction has surfaced with the implosion of the subprime-mortgage market and deflation of the house-price bubble." Read more!

News Round-Up 9/11/07 II

Every year, a chunk of the Amazon rainforest the size of Connecticut is cut down, releasing a huge quantity of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Amazon still comprises some 300 million hectares of tropical forest, comparable to the Indian subcontinent, and home to an estimated 90% of the species on Earth. At present rates, this hub of fecundity will be a barren moonscape by the end of the century. Deforestation comprises an estimated 70% of greenhouse emissions from Brazil, which has become the fourth-largest emitter in the world. The largest is the United States (and you wonder "why they hate us?"), the second-largest is China, and the third-largest is Indonesia (which is massively cutting down its own rainforests for palm-oil plantations, among other things).

In other news, how do U.S. planners feel about the increasing presence of China in Africa as a raw-materials (especially petroleum) consumer? One word: AFRICOM. Ryan Henry, deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, describes in a Reuters story the conditions under which the U.S. might, Afghanistan/Iraq-style, invade an African country:

"It would depend on a myriad of circumstances. If we thought that someone was going to unleash an attack somewhere in the world that was on the scale of 9/11 or greater, we're obviously going to do something about it," he said.
But "it's obviously best to work with the host country," Henry added.

And what are the potential "host countries"? The U.S. is not only positioning troops in East Africa, where U.S. helicopter gunships reportedly carried out air air strikes in Somalia in January 2007. There, Al-Quaeda links can be found with at least some plausibility, but the U.S. is (with little subtlety) establishing bases in the neighborhood of West African petroleum sources: Mali, Senegal, Niger and Ghana. Bases will also be established in Algeria and Morocco, where an estimated 25% of "foreign fighters" in Iraq are said to originate. But the more important context is the ongoing struggle between Nigerian militants and the extraction of Nigerian oil by Shell, Chevron and other multinationals; the recent discovery of oil in Ghana; and ongoing oil extraction in the Gulf of Guinea and Angola. The U.S. gets over a fifth of its oil from Africa every year, and will soon get over a quarter; those supplies will evidently be ensured at gunpoint.

In July, NATO deployed six warships to orbit the African continent, passing the Niger Delta in what was widely seen as a show of force.

In South, some 2.5 million people have been made homeless by flooding due to heavy rains. An estimated 30 million people in Assam, Bihar, Bangladesh and mountainous Bhutan (due to the flooding of Himalayan streams) have been effected. More than half of Bangladesh is covered in floodwater. Thousands of familes are living in bacteriologically dangerous relief camps along embankments and highways.

Meanwhile, Afghan insurgents contine to attack police and military affiliated with the U.S. occupation forces. 26 Afghans, half of them civilians, were killed in a crowded market in southern Afghanistan on Monday night. There have been 107 suicide bomb attacks in Afghanistan in 2007, a 69% increase over the same period in 2006, according to the New York Times. Read more!

News Round-up 9/11/07

"At least" six oil and natural gas pipelines were attacked on opposite ends of the Mexican state of Veracruz on Monday night. The pipelines were all operated by the Mexican state oil monopoly, Petroeleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX. An unexploded bomb in the town of Antigua was found with the message, "Alive they took them, alive we want them. EPR." This signifies the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario, or Popular Revolutionary Army.

The EPR first attracted attention by targeting military and police in a series of attacks in Mexico's Guerrero state in the 1990s. In 1996, over 100 men and women affiliated with EPR and armed with semi-automatic weapons attacked police stations and army barracks in Aguas Blancas, Guerrero. Guerrero is a poverty-wracked state notorious for drug smuggling (including opium poppy cultivation) and abuses against indigenous Mexicans by the military and police. EPR are also active in Oaxaca and the Mexico City region.

It is extremely difficult to differentiate actions by the EPR from actions by other guerilla groups and by local gangs and criminal elements, as the government usually blames the EPR or other guerillas for all acts of violence by unknown perpetrators. EPR have been blamed, for example, for the incitement of a mob to lynch two police officers in a southern Mexico City neighborhood in November 2004; encouraging violence during the Oaxaca teachers' strike in summer 2006;
and five bombings in Mexico City (in which no one was injured or killed) in November 2006.

Then, on July 5th and July 1oth, 2007, there were eight bombings of three separate pipelines in Guanajuato and Queretero operated by PEMEX, which EPR reportedly took credit for. According to the McClatchy Wire Service, the bombings were done using "sophisticated European-style plastic explosives," leading some to doubt that the EPR were not really responsible. Media reports described flames shooting 100 feet in the air, and the fire burning were 36 hours, although no one was injured. In a subsequent communique, EPR was reported (emphasis on "reported") to have said that they were engaged in a "national campaign of harassment against the interests of the oligarchy and of this illegitimate government that has been put in motion." The phrase "illegitimate" obviously reflects the view many Mexicans have of Felipe Calderon, who, like Bush in 2000, is believed to have stolen a very close election. EPR also "said" that the bombings would continue until the government released two members captured in Oaxaca in 2006. The bombings caused the temporary closure of several plants: auto (Nissan, Honda, and General Motors), and food processing (Hershey's and Kellog's). The result was millions of dollars in lost production time. Meanwhile, the flow of natural gas from Mexico City to Guadelajara was disrupted, as were pipelines serving Veracruz and Guanajuato.

The tactic of bombing pipelines has been practiced hundreds of times by FARC in Columbia, and some have suggested that poverty and oppression in Mexico are producing a Columbia-like situation of endless, low-intensity warfare between the state and non-state actors allied with and against the state. It has also been pointed out that the nature of the attacks suggest substantial knowledge of Mexico's energy infrastructure.

Then, on August 31st, a car laden with explosives was found in the parking garage of Mexico City's highest office tower, and 11,000 employees were evacuated. A few days later, the Mexican web site cedema.org posted a message attributed (again, with unknowable accuracy) to the EPR, which supposedly took credit for the car bomb and called Felipe Calderon a "fawning fascist who insists on destroying Mexico."

And now this. As in Nigeria, Columbia, Ecuador, Indonesia and elsewhere, we see that raw materials cannot be easily extracted from a country while its population is left to rot by the state and multinationals. Read more!