If preparation for the violent plunder of Venezuela’s oil and other mining-energy, aquifer and biodiversity riches was one of the main hidden objectives of Rex Tillerson’s tour through various countries in Latin America, the other was to continue with the militarization of the subcontinent under the facade of the war on drugs and terrorism and the clandestine policies of regime change.
The “American War Machine,” as Peter Dale Scott calls it, answers to the “Deep State,” that is, to a secret parallel government organized by the military, police and intelligence apparatuses, financed by the criminal economy and integrated into the Wall Street financial and banking system, which is in charge of formulating and instrumenting the White House foreign policy and its open or secret operations for the benefit of the giants of the oil sector, like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Not in vain, the Donald Trump cabinet is in the hands of a troika of generals: James Mattis (Defense), H. R. McMaster (National Security Advisor) and John Kelly (White House Chief of Staff).
Since the epoch of John F. Kennedy, and more profusely starting with the Clinton administration, high-ranking military and intelligence officials have become “partners” of industrial corporations, and through the lucrative business of war helped to extend the market system and open new “economic borders” to large manufacturers of arms and of security and technology sales, like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, United Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
The problem with those corporations is that they need to feed themselves every day with new wars; that’s why they have to invent them. And that is also why all the wars are based on the deception and the manipulation of the masses –like the non-existent chemical weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein in Iraq− and/or the systematic deceit through the mass media and the “internal archives” of the government of the United States (US).
A new factor exists in the conjuncture: the national security strategy of the Trump administration, announced on December 18, 2017, places fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) as the essential decisive element to ensure the economic vitality of the US, its military strength and its geopolitical weight. Militarization of energy policy will be the axis of Trump’s national security policy, not only for obtaining “energy independence,” but also for confronting the “rival powers” (China and Russia) that challenge US supremacy and for achieving “total energy domination.”