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The US continues to militarize much of Latin America, spending enormous amounts of cash in order to prop up obedient regimes, train armies and militias, build new military bases, deploy more troops, and keep the military industrial complex fat and happy.<\/p>\n
“In the most expensive initiative in\u00a0Latin America\u00a0since the Cold War,” reports<\/a> the Associated Press, “the\u00a0US has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade.”<\/p>\n “US Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counternarcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers,” while Washington is simultaneously\u00a0“training not only law enforcement agents in Latin American nations, but their militaries as well, building a network of expensive hardware, radar, airplanes, ships, runways and refueling stations,” and justifying it all under the drug war.<\/p>\n The US is building new military bases in Guatemala, Panama, Belize, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n Hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars go to militarizing the region for the benefit of Washington and its corporate collaborators, but it ends up in some very nasty places.\u00a0John\u00a0Lindsay-Poland at FOR details<\/a> some of the human rights abusers Washington is currently supporting:<\/p>\n The\u00a0US\u00a0Southern Command (SouthCom), responsible for\u00a0US military activities in Central and South America and the Caribbean, is assisting the Panamanian border police, known as\u00a0SENAFRONT, by upgrading a building in the SENAFRONT\u00a0compound. The force was implicated in\u00a0killings of indigenous protesters<\/a>\u00a0(PDF) in Bocas del Toro in 2011, and\u00a0fired indiscriminately with live ammunition<\/a>\u00a0(PDF) on Afro-Caribbean protesters last\u00a0October.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And even though there is legislation that bans “most State Department-channeled military aid to the army” in Guatemala, the ban curiously “does not apply to\u00a0Defense Department assistance,” and US military aid to Guatemala has increased more than seven times since 2009.<\/p>\n The contracts included new assistance to the Guatemalan special forces, known as Kaibiles, former members of which have been implicated in giving training to the Zetas drug cartel, as well as the worst atrocities during the genocide period of the 1980s. Two contracts, funded by SouthCom and signed in September, were for a\u00a0\u201cshoot house\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cimprovements\u201d<\/a>\u00a0at the Kaibiles training base in Poptun,\u00a0Pet\u00e9n.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “In addition,” Lindsay-Poland writes, “the\u00a0US\u00a0military spent another $8.1 million on fuel in Guatemala last year, probably for ‘Beyond the Horizon’ military exercises held there and in Honduras from April to July, and perhaps to support\u00a0the deployment of 200 Marines<\/a>\u00a0to Guatemala in\u00a0August.”<\/p>\n The US has recently expanded its mission in Honduras, referred to as Operation Anvil<\/a>. It is run with six State Department attack helicopters and a special team of commando-style Drug Enforcement Administration agents who have now been implicated along with Honduran security forces in the killing of innocent Hondurans on several occasions.<\/p>\n