Above photo: Luís Abindar with Mike Pompeo. Getty Images.
The Adventures of Pompeo in the Transfer of Leadership in the Dominican Republic.
The U.S. gave particular importance to the inauguration of the new president of the Dominican Republic, Luís Abindar by sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, accompanied by the Assistant Secretary for Hemispheric Affairs Michael Kosak.
That’s enough to show the geopolitical importance that the super-power has given to this country and to this island that it shares with Haiti, after the liberation of Cuba – a historic feat in our Caribbean region, – defined as the border of the empire and the hinge between the Pacific and Atlantic. Also because of its closeness with two other countries emancipated from U.S. colonialism, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
This is an island with two nations that have suffered from foreign intervention and repeated imperialist invasions, and, in our case, a country that has been absolutley captured by the Pentagon after our most recent attempt to change ourselves into a sovereign nation in 1965 (following Cuba’s path in our own manner) precisely due to the popular-democratic revolution of 1965 which was blocked by the landing of 42,000 invading US Marines.
Since then we’ve been unable to break these powerful chains. Every time there are attempts in our country at changes out of the control of the US, the shackles are tightened.
The empire doesn’t hesitate to impose its orders, often gift-wrapped and adorned with pretty phrases. When they wear out one formula, they construct the replacement and fix it in place. This has occurred and it is occurring now. To give continuity to this imperial task, the Super-CIA arrived, sometimes also in the role of US Ambassador.
The next shift of caretakers are fresh and well oxygenated as they rise on the wave of anti-corruption and anti-impunity that damaged the rule of the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana-PLD and their forced efforts at continuity, after having exercised governmental and state control for 16 straight years, with the support of the brutal neighbor of the North.
It was no longer possible to maintain this however without great risks for the stability of the system of domination, and so months ago Washington and the opposition forces under their control prepared a replacement. Pompeo’s role was to direct the orchestra with some supporting cast, among these the unspeakable Organization of American States – OAS.
Pompeo came to the culmination of this first phase of the re-adaptation and smooth continuity of our colonial status and did so especially to secure some fundamental aspects of his stated policy on U.S. hemispheric affairs. Two interviews and two invitations symbolize the progress of the re-colonization work, duly renewed.
First, his farewell encounter with defeated ex-president Danilo Medina, entirely disgraced to the point of being subject to legal charges, together with his main collaborators. This was a meeting full of hypocrisy and pretense, in which Pompeo finished up by praising him as an ally in the fight for democracy.
And to follow-up, he had a meeting with the incoming president, Luís Abinader, meant to seal the new alliance “to promote democracy, transparency, and security’ on the continent, according to of course to the limits and conditions set down by The Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, and its OAS.
Above all: “hemispheric security” against any twitch of independence and any plans for or exercise of sovereignty and anti-neoliberalism. This included orders to limit relations with China and to distance ourselves still further from Cuba.
But it would not be complete without the key point being made that the new government, the ambassador and the president came out from this meeting held in the National Palace ( built in the style of the U.S. Capitol Building) tied down and formally committed to applying to the agreement drawn up between the Lima Group, the International Liaison Committee, the European Union and the U.S.
This agreement formalizes the decision to fight together for a “transition to democracy in Venezuela” along with siding with the colonialist gangster faction headed by the self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó and with an appeal to the Rio Pact (The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance – TIAR) as a useful instrument to revitalize the efforts to reverse the main achievement of the Bolivarian process – the self-determination of the Venezuelan people.
All this, in the context of a national ceremony at which there were very few invitees but which did include two versions of the lowest scum of Latin-Caribbean politics: President Juvenal Moises of Haiti and the representative of President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras.
At the end of Pompeo’s visit, which ironically occurred on the 157th anniversary of the Dominican Restoration War, which freed the Republic from Spanish annexation, the so-called new Government of Change added to our condition of a country that has suffered U.S. intervention, the adding itself to the practice of intervening in the affairs of other countries, on the tail of decadent western imperialism. Shame! An unpardonable decision.
Translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau