I posted about John Perkins at The Daily Irrelevant a couple of years ago.
He had just launched his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” and recorded an interview with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now.
At the time it struck me that I knew that several things were economically wrong with the world (to put it mildly), and although I could see a splintered and fractured picture of events, I felt I lacked an over-arching explanatory view that would help me make sense of the forces shaping the world.
( Brief summary: From 1971 to 1981 John Perkins worked as a chief economist for Chas. T. Main, a Massachusetts-based international strategic consulting firm. During this time Mr. Perkins said his job was to trick developing countries into taking enormous loans from the World Bank in order to construct or repair their domestic infrastructure. These loans were given with the understanding that these countries would then use those loans to pay U.S. corporations to complete these constructing and engineering projects. The author writes that when these developing countries were eventually unable to pay off these sizable debts, the United States, World Bank, or IMF would step in and control the country’s security arrangements and budgetary structure.)
I read the book. The lights came on. I recommended the book to others. I bought the book again and gave it to others. John Perkins really dishes the dirt.
So that was then, and this is now. The USA has taken its eyes off the ball in South America during the last couple of years whilst it has been embroiled in its disastrous forays in the Middle East. Events move on down South, however, and a new breed of politician is starting to regain the limelight , if not the power itself, in South America.
However, Perkins still warns that what happened to altruistic, left leaning politicians of the past, such as Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama, can happen to the new upstarts of South America unless they watch their backs very carefully.
The Bolivia Solidarity Network are waving a warning flag now, especially in regard to Evo Morales.
As Perkins says:
My job was to get them, and for me to convince these countries to accept these very large loans, to get the banks to make the loans, to set up the deal so that the money went to big U.S. corporations. The country was left holding a huge debt, and then I would go in or one of my people would go in and say, “Look, you know, you owe us all this money. You can’t pay your debts. Give us that pound of flesh.”
The other thing we do, Amy, and what’s going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations, Mr. President. Now that you’re president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. We have several hundred million dollars in this pocket if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I’ve got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out….
I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means, and I can also – if he doesn’t accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying – that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don’t overthrow him, we’ll assassinate him. And these people all know the history. They know that this has happened many, many, many times in the past.
It couldn’t be clearer, really. This is from the horse’s mouth.
Democracy! Freedom! Pshaw!
