from Consortium News
When Marco Rubio gathered representatives from 66 countries in Washington in July, his aim was clear and aggressive: target the “resurgence of far-left terrorism.”
Framing the threat as a global emergency, the U.S. secretary of state called on intelligence agencies and security forces around the world to unite to “crush this evil forever.”
“We can, and we must, identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it,” Rubio warned attendees. “Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again.”
Referencing various left-wing guerrilla and political organisations that were active across Latin America in the 20th century, he added:
“Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember — remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN.”
Outside the conference room, the State Department was making the same point to the wider American public.
It released a document on the same topic, which used extremely vague data to draw parallels between the Latin American guerrillas of the 1960s and 1970s and very different situations in Europe and the U.S. to demonstrate that “left-wing terrorism” exists — and has previously been “defeated.”
In Latin America, this messaging amounts to an open endorsement of the state terrorism and genocide that 20th-century military dictatorships and regional repressive coordination efforts — such as Plan Condor, an illegal operation by military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to capture and disappear political opponents across borders — deployed to combat the guerrillas.
Rubio’s threat appears clear: Washington is willing to repeat that extreme state violence — and the egregious human rights violations it led to — in order to stop modern-day “left-wing terrorists.”
Given that no armed movements like those 20th-century guerrillas Rubio mentioned actually exist in the region today, which groups or individuals is the U.S. government referring to?..
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