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miércoles, 4 de diciembre de 2013

One system, one result - the Cuban 5, Laurent Gbagbo, Xiomara Castro

One system, one result - the Cuban 5, Laurent Gbagbo, Xiomara Castro
Tortilla Con Sal
  
Enviado por tortilla en Dom, 12/01/2013 - 13:50

tortilla con sal, December 1st 2013

Each year goes by and still the five Cuban anti-terrorist heroes remain imprisoned in the US criminal injustice system (Rene can hardly feel free while his four comrades remain in captivity). The charges against them are incontrovertibly false. But for sinister reasons of State, the US government continues their grossly unjust imprisonment. The Five, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González are symbols of both undefeated human dignity and the unsurpassed moral calibre of the Cuban Revolution.


Likewise, in Scheveningen near the Hague, Ivory Coast's elected but deposed President Laurent Gbagbo is in prison under the rules of the NATO country dominated International Criminal Court. Even after investigations lasting over two years, in June 2013 the Court was forced humiliatingly to order its prosecutor to find more plausible evidence. Even so, clearly innocent, Laurent Gbagbo remains imprisoned for political reasons. Like the Cuban Five, he too has become an inspiring symbol of human dignity and also of African moral superiority to the injustice of the neocolonial ICC and its political masters.


On November 29th this year, Xiomara Castro the presidential candidate of the progressive LIBRE party in Honduras announced that her party rejected the result of the country's national elections held the previous Sunday. She powerfully condemned the widespread electoral fraud that clearly occurred before, during and, especially after, polling day. While Xiomara Castro failed, under the rules of a corrupt electoral system, to poll enough votes to win the Presidency, the final results still reflect a massive injustice against her party, both in the Presidential vote and in the elections for the Honduran legislature.

The injustice so clearly apparent in all these cases is the deliberate result of oligarchic global corporate capitalism and its regional political imperatives. Each case demonstrates the categorical falsity of the alleged commitment to democracy, the rule of law and due process of the countries of North America, Europe and their allies among the countries of the Pacific. It is no accident that the Cuban Five, Laurent Gbagbo and Xiomara Castro, all represent and promote political ideas and processes challenging the unjust dominance of elite corporate interests over the well being of the global majority.

In the case of Cuba, its direct democracy contrasts favourably with the corruption and exclusion characteristic of NATO country systems of representative democracy. Despite 50 years of economic blockade by the US, Cuba's socialist economy has lifted the country higher in the UN Human Development Index than both neoliberal showcase Panamá and Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Area. The Cuban Five have demonstrated to the world the unquestionable hypocrisy of a US State that protects mass murderers like, among many others, Luis Posada Carriles, who boasts of bombing a civilian airliner, killing over 70 people.

In Ivory Coast, France and its allies in the UN promoted a terrorist war over a decade trying to destabilize the country. In 2010 they intervened in the Presidential elections. Ivory Coast's institutions successfully resolved massive fraud perpetrated by the UN and French presidential candidate. In the end, after the due constitutional process in such cases, the country's Constitutional Court named Laurent Gbagbo as President. As a result, UN and French troops garrisoned in the country intervened, collaborating in the murder of thousands of Laurent Gbagbo's supporters. The UN and France then effectively installed genocidal ex-World Bank functionary Alassane Ouattara as President. Innocent, Laurent Gbagbo remains in a European gaol.

In Honduras, garrisoned by the US military since the early 1980s, the Organization of American States and the European Union have recognized the serious failings of the Honduran electoral system. But since the result favours the US and European candidate, no US troops have been called on to defend democracy. The rule of law and due process in Honduras were bought off wholesale a long time ago by the local US friendly oligarchy. So no decisions will be issued upsetting either corporate elite economic objectives in the country or the neocolonial political status quo. In effect, Xiomara Castro's LIBRE party have suffered an electoral coup to prevent them winning more support for their progressive political programme.

That electoral coup follows the military coup of June 29th 2009. Both are part of an obvious systematic global pattern of aggression, abuse and injustice. The unjust imprisonment of the Cuban Five, the UN and French military coup against Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast and the electoral coup against Xiomara Castro in Honduras all have the same result. They defend the global system of elite controlled corporate capitalism against the interests of humanity's impoverished global majority.

Clearly, other examples of that seamless global reality abound, most obviously in Haiti, for example, or in Syria. In that adverse global context, revolutionary and progressive political movements in Central America and the Caribbean  have dramatically improved social and economic conditions for the region's impoverished majority. They have done so by defeating decades of determined resistance by the US and its allied local elites of the kind so obvious over the last couple of weeks in Honduras.

In Africa especially, the US, France, Britain and their allies are now having to resort to the same kind of destabilization, electoral manipulation and military occupation of which, in Central America, Honduras is the clear prototype. Recently former South African President Thabo Mbeki revealed that former UK Prime Minister, supreme war criminal Tony Blair, worked on plans to attack Zimbabwe. That gives a keen ideological edge to Zimbabwe's election this year by the European Union's African, Caribbean and Pacific partners as co-president of the influential joint standing committee on political affairs of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.

The world remains an enormous ideological battleground between corporate capitalist elites and the global majority. That reality is one of permanent brutal conflict. For the Cuban Five, tireless efforts to free them by their families, the Cuban government and their international supporters face the implacable inhumanity of the US authorities. Xiomara Castro's LIBRE party in Honduras has to work out how to win a structural majority in Honduras in a system rigged by multinational corporate elites and those elites' local allies to stop them. In Ivory Coast, the France and its UN cronies resist the only chance of genuine political progress and reconciliation there, namely, the liberation of Laurent Gbagbo.


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