A few months ago, in the best tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, warned of the danger of extra-hemispheric countries appropriating Latin America's natural resources.  Without any dissimulation, she reminded the U.S. House of Representatives that the region accumulates 60% of the world's lithium and that it was worrying that it was in the hands of "our adversaries".

Now the General has gone a step further by referring to the "conflict in the domain of information" and lashing out against prestigious media such as the multinational teleSUR and the Russian Sputnik and RT in Spanish, which have -- as she acknowledges -- more than thirty million followers.  Although she is obviously concerned that they are successfully challenging the hegemony of the major Western media, the general disqualified their work with the argument that "they spread disinformation and undermine the democracies of the hemisphere".  She promises, at the same time, to make amends for this shortcoming.

It is a familiar story. In the mid-1930s, another U.S. General, Smedley D. Butler, claimed to have served with honors for three decades in the military as a "gangster in the service of capitalism" in half the world, including Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Honduras.  He claimed he could have given Al Capone some pointers, because if Al Capone, as a gangster, operated in three districts of one city, he himself, as a U.S. Marine, had operated on three continents.

Now this new gangster wants to decide not only over our natural resources but also over which media we have the right to see.  Every time the United States announces that it is going to impose democracy, regime change comes with a club and dictatorships.

From Casa de las Americas, we send our solidarity to teleSUR and to all those media that open fissures in the single thought.

October 13, 2023

Source; Cubadebate