The United States, captain and leader of the doctrines fostered by NATO, wants to sweep away the foundations of national sovereignty. It simply wants to take possession of the markets and natural resources of the Third World countries including those that were part of the former Soviet Union, like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and others, while it is already almost the master of the great oil reserves of the Caspian sea. It wants to play the role of a new Roman worldwide super-empire which, of course, will last much less than the Roman Empire and the reach of its ambitions and its clumsiness; and it will meet with universal resistance.

Nonetheless, it is preparing for the development, consolidation and exercise of an boundless empire. Some American analysts and writers from the same group as Ramonet --and Ramonet himself-- denounce the cultural invasion, the almost total dominion over the mass media and the cultural monopoly they are trying to impose on the world thus showing the way the empire's most fervent theoreticians consider culture to be the nuclear weapon of the 21st century. But, there is no need to be so well informed to realize this. It can be seen clearly in everything they do and in the way they do it.

The empire's pretexts? Ah, humanitarian reasons! Human rights is one of the reasons they give for which it is necessary to liquidate sovereignty and internal conflicts that must be resolved with "smart" bombs and missiles.

Whose proposal is this? Looking back, recalling what happened in our hemisphere in the past few decades, who fathered all the coups d'état? Who trained the torturers in the most sophisticated techniques? Who was responsible for there being relatively small countries where more than 100,000 persons were vanished and a total of about 150,000 were killed? Or the fact that, in other nations, tens of thousands of men and women had a similar fate? I am talking here only about people who were vanished after horrible torture. Who trained the sinister culprits? Who armed them? Who supported them? How can they now claim that national sovereignty must be removed in the name of human rights?

A few years ago, they killed four million Vietnamese by dropping millions of tons of explosives on a country that was 15,000 or 20,000 kilometers away. For a long time they kept fiercely bombing with the result of four million people dead and a large number disabled for life. Now, they are asking that sovereignty be removed in the name of human rights.

In Angola, for example, who armed UNITA which for more than 20 years massacred entire villages and killed hundreds of thousands of Angolans? We know very well who did it because we were there a long time supporting the Angolan people against the South African racists. They are still killing there and their favorite leader has hundreds of millions of US dollars in the banks --I do not know who launders the money-- part of which is used to buy weapons, much to the pleasure of arms manufacturers. He controls extensive areas that are very rich in diamonds and has a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Likewise, there has been no repressive government in the world that the United States would not support. How could the apartheid regime have seven nuclear weapons? They had seven when we were there, on the Namibian border and, the United States intelligence service, which knows everything, did not know about it! Did it not know? And, how did those weapons get there? This is one question that could be asked and one of the things that will be known in full detail one day when some documents are declassified, because the day will come when absolutely everything will be known.

One could also ask where those seven nuclear weapons are because their manufacturers say they have been destroyed. That is all that those of the apartheid regime would say. The ANC leaders do not know. Nobody has answered that question. But, again, there are still a lot of questions that have never been answered.

Who supported Mobutu [Sese Seko]? The United States and Europe did. Where are the billions that Mobutu took from the Congo? Which bank is keeping them? Who protected and looked after him or inherited his immense fortune?

I could go on offering many similar examples. Who supported the acts of aggression against the Arab countries? The United States did.

I am in absolutely no way an anti-Semite, far from it. But, we have been very critical of the wars against the Arab countries, the massive evictions, the diaspora of Palestinians and other Arabs. Who supported those wars? And there are many other overt or covert wars and other similar incidents that I am not going to mention which have been done and continue to be done by those who want to sweep away sovereignty or the principles of sovereignty, in the name of humanitarian reasons. Of course, that is only one of the pretexts but not the only one as we see in Africa.

The Africans themselves are rightly concerned about tackling the problems of peace in their continent. They are trying to unite. They have a strong sense of unity. They also have their regional groupings and are trying to settle their conflicts. But who occupied and exploited Africa for centuries? Who kept it in poverty and underdevelopment? Who drew those border lines that cut through ethnic groups now separated by them?

With great wisdom, really great wisdom, the Africans, from the time they started emerging as independent states, set out the principle of the inviolability of the frontiers whereby the inherited borders were sacred. Otherwise, a huge number of conflicts would have unleashed in Africa.

The colonial powers created all that. They are responsible for centuries of exploitation, backwardness and poverty. Are we going to resort to a racist interpretation of the reasons for the poverty of those African peoples when it is a known fact that, in that continent, various civilizations had attained remarkable progress at a time when in Berlin, Paris and many other places of civilized Europe there were only wandering tribes? A thousand years before, there already existed a civilization in Egypt, Ethiopia and other parts of Africa.

The United States emerged as a nation only 20 centuries later. What is the cause of that poverty if not the colonialist, slavery, neo-colonialist, capitalist and imperialist system that reigned in the world in the past centuries? Why could those peoples not benefit from the fruits of science and human progress? Those who exploited them for centuries are guilty for this.

At one time, they also had China semi-colonized and humiliated. It is common knowledge that, in the past century, they used cannon shots to open up Japan's ports to world trade. It is a known fact that the British empire sent its troops to conquer a portion of Chinese territory and, in a coalition with other European powers and the United States, it sent troops as far as Beijing. Thus came the opium war, invasions and wars to sell opium.

Now they want to invade countries where poppies are planted, and not by the country but by a number of hungry and sometimes desperate people. Impoverished nations, aware of the huge market for drugs in the United States --one which was not created by a Latin American country or any other nation in the world-- plant poppies or coca for the colossal consumption of the industrialized and rich countries.

The question could be asked of how much drug per capita is consumed in the United States of America and in Europe. Possibly much more than in Brazil or Argentina, Uruguay or Paraguay, Central America or Mexico, or even in Colombia itself. The market is up North. It was a disgrace for our countries, those where the crop arose, that there was such a high demand in the United States.

This is important because yesterday was hardly the first time that they publicly tried to promote the doctrine that they have been elaborating against sovereignty, that they have been discussing among themselves and with other NATO members, the one they have been advancing little by little, step by step.

The so-called global threats are also considered enough reason to fully justify an intervention. We will quote four of those threats: drugs, terrorism and the possession of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, this has nothing to do with them. They can have all the weapons of mass destruction they want, thousands of nuclear weapons, as it is the case of the United States. They can also have rockets that, with great accuracy, they can position anywhere in the world and a whole arsenal of laboratories devoted to producing biological weapons --they have used biological weapons against us-- and any other kind of weapons. They have reached agreements among themselves to eliminate chemical and biological weapons. But, at the same time, they develop other even more deadly weapons.

According to the doctrine described, a Third World country could have a nuclear weapon and, for that reason, become the target of a sudden air strike and invasion. And, what about all those who possess nuclear weapons? It is a matter of wars, either pre-emptive or punitive, to preserve the monopoly of nuclear weapons and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction which are very far from being humanitarian.

The fourth reason is the massive violation of human rights.

Up to now, the great promoter, the great patron, the great fatherly educator and supporter of those who committed massive violations of human rights has been the United States of America. Massive destruction of the infrastructure and economy of a country, as it has just happened in Serbia; genocide using bombs to deprive millions of people of crucial services and their means of life; genocidal wars like the one launched against Vietnam. They were the culprits.

I am not talking of the time when more than half of Mexico was conquered. I am not talking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a terrorist experiment into the effects of nuclear weapons on cities where hundreds of thousands of people lived. I am talking about things that have happened since World War II. Who were their allies? Why did the Franco government in Spain remained in power for almost
30 years after the end of a world war against fascism that lasted six vicious years and cost no less than 50 million lives? Because he had the support of the United States which wanted to have military bases there. Who supported utterly repressive governments in countries like Korea? They did. Who really supported the massive carnage of ethnic groups like Chinese, for example, or of communists or left-wing people in Indonesia? They did. Who supported the horrendous apartheid regime? They did.

There has been no bloody and repressive government, no massive violator of human rights that has not been their ally and has not been supported by them. In the case of Duvalier --to give you an example closer to home-- who supported him? They did, until one day when they intervened in Haiti to overthrow him, for humanitarian reasons.

Do you realize what I mean? It is the development of a whole philosophy aimed at sweeping away the United Nations Charter and the principles of national sovereignty. The doctrine can be divided into three categories of intervention: humanitarian interventions due to internal conflicts; interventions due to global threats, which we have already described, and interventions due to external conflicts, to which are added the very confusing Yankee concept of "diplomacy supported by force". This means, for example, that if Colombia cannot solve its internal conflict --a difficult battle, of course-- if it cannot achieve peace, for which many are working, including Cuba, this could become a reason for intervention. At the same rate, if it does not succeed in eradicating drug cultivation it could be the target of an armed intervention.

I have tried to collect precise information on what is happening with drugs in Colombia, how encompassing the phenomenon is and how many hectares of drug are planted. Some have told me that there are about 80,000 hectares of coca, just coca. It has been growing. And some have talked to me about up to a million people working in the cultivation of coca and the harvesting of leaves.

I asked about coffee and they told me that there are problems because the salary of a coffee harvester can come to 10 or 12 US dollars while those who harvest the coca leaves or clean the plantations, weed the crop and do other similar activities, earn five or six times higher wages.

What I do not know yet is whether they fertilize it although that is, seemingly, a natural process. Perhaps, with a certain regime of rain and climate the coca plant fertilizes itself. Maybe it is like the marabú. The marabú is a very harmful plant for agriculture here, terribly aggressive and thorny. It reproduces and spreads easily. It cannot be used to feed the animals but it is a leguminous plant, so it does not need to be fertilized. It feeds itself from nitrogen through the nodular bacteria in its roots. Apparently, something similar happens with the coca.

Can you imagine what the situation must be like in a country where a million people in the rural areas can earn 50, 60, 70 US dollars in the coca fields while the same working day in other crops would bring them 10 US dollars at most? And, at harvest time --and coca can be harvested three times a year-- it is only a matter of pulling off leaves.

Trying to learn about this I have almost become an expert by now, just by asking questions. I say: "Tell me, explain to me, are they all small plantations?" They tell me: "No, there are large estates of hundreds of hectares and plantations of as much as thousands of hectares". I ask: "How much earns, for example, somebody with a hectare of coca?" "That one receives the least," they say. The others receive more: the ones who turn it into the basic paste, the other ones who refine it and, fundamentally, those who market it. Before that phase, many airlines, transport companies and firms providing other services obtain high incomes. When such a cancer is introduced in a society it becomes a real tragedy, in every sense, because the danger that internal consumption may spread is multiplied.

We are striving against it ourselves. You were saying that tourism should not affect culture or damage the national identity but it can sometimes damage health, if prostitution, for instance, is promoted.

When I talked to you about the US dollar, I told you that it circulates here. The measures that we have had to take made its circulation necessary. Well, but that dollar neither escapes the country nor becomes volatile. It is a dollar that circulates here whose value decreases every day. It has to do with a historical stage. At the moment, we are not so interested in lowering its value, rather, depending on the resources available, we are interested in raising wages in Cuban pesos, without letting the peso lose its current parity in US dollars.

It is good not to be a part of the International Monetary Fund!

The truth is that the circulation of the US dollar, coupled with the unrestricted entry and exit of a lot of visitors, can encourage the drugs trade and the cultivation of drugs which forces us to be very watchful.

Taking back the problem of Colombia, somebody told me: "One hectare of coca can provide an income of up to 4,000 US dollars." I said: "And if it were planted with corn, in that tropical and rainy plain?" You all know that the Colombian plains are not a corn-growing area. The corn-growing area is a bit further North, at the same height as the central plains in the United States and also at the height of Europe, although corn originated in this hemisphere, in Mexico, Central and South America. Therefore, I assure you that planting corn there without fertilizers or anything would hardly give the peasant one ton per hectare. A ton of corn on the international market is worth more or less between 100 and 150 US dollars. In Argentina and other places, the export price has decreased to 90 US dollars. We have to import them so, we know the cost of each of these grains.

I have not talked about wheat which cannot be planted there. Corn, for example, can be planted for self-consumption or to market it. How much is the producer paid for his ton of corn that the middleman then sells in the market? On the other hand, if custom barriers are also removed then the grains produced abroad would enter freely. That is what the United States wants from its trade agreements with Latin America.

In that case, the Colombian would eat American corn because it is produced cheaper than Colombian corn. They obtain six, seven or more tons and cultivation there is very mechanized. They produce it cheaper than the French. The French should be careful about American corn because they will put it in France at a lower price than it costs to produce a ton of corn there. That is why agricultural issues become the great obstacle for the free-trade agreements.

The Yankees are reckoning: "I will give you some industrial advantages as soon as possible. I will give you an X number of years for you to start reducing the tariffs on the grains that I will export until the day that entry is unrestricted." We know very well what is going to happen: these countries will end up with no corn farming, then corn will be very expensive and to the extent that the price rises there will not be any other corn but the American’s.

But, how much would our farmer earn after changing a hectare of coca for one of corn? Instead of 4,000 US dollars, he would earn whatever he is paid for his corn by a middleman or by a chain of middlemen. It might be 60 or 100 US dollars. So, where are the possibilities for alternative crops?

They have already created a drug culture. They have alienated millions of people with their voracious market and their money-laundering. It has been the United States banks that have laundered the vast majority of the funds coming from drugs. They are not just a market but practically the financiers, the drug money launders. Moreover, they do not want to spend money to really eradicate the growing of coca or poppies, although they invest billions in repressive procedures.

I think that, theoretically, there might be a solution but it would cost billions of US dollars, even if those resources were rationally invested. What are they going to do with the men who live massively on drug growing. Are they going to be exterminated? They could also go there themselves and invade that country on account of "a global threat" even if the drug problem cannot be controlled with simple repressive measures. Of course, invading it would be madness because the heat in the forests of the Colombian plains would finish off their soldiers used to drinking Coca-Cola on combat missions, cold water at every hour, ice cream of the best quality. Actually, Vietnam is a well known case in point and they get more and more used to every kind of luxury and comfort.

The mosquitoes and the heat would almost suffice to finish them off but they could cause a real disaster if they intervened there to eradicate drugs. Certainly, that would not be the kind of war to use B-2 bombers because the coca crops cannot be fought with laser-guided bombs, smart missiles or planes. There, they would surely have to go in with ground forces, either to wipe out an irregular force in the jungle or to eradicate crops. On the other hand, since they describe guerrilla warfare as terrorism, insurgency and a great risk --practically a global threat-- there we have a country with two possible pretexts for intervention. I am talking of two categories: internal conflicts and drugs. Two causes for intervention according to the theories they are trying to impose.

Would an invasion or the bombing of Colombia solve the internal conflict? I wonder if NATO could solve that problem now that it is establishing the right of action beyond its borders. In principle, they agreed on that during the 50th anniversary celebration. Along such lines you can imagine so many cases. Is there anybody who believes that could be the solution?

I know, through opinion polls, that in their desperation at the violence and the problems in the country, not a few people in Colombia itself --actually a number of people worth taking into consideration-- have expressed support for the idea that, if there is no other solution to the violence, it be resolved through the intervention of an outside force.

Of course, the fighting and patriotic tradition of the Colombian people should not be overlooked. I am sure that such an act of madness against a country like Colombia, in the style of what they did in Serbia, would be a disaster, absolute madness. But, no one knows, really, since International law, the principles of respect for sovereignty and the United Nations Charter no longer provide a reliable coverage and that could be a decision taken on their own by a Mafia armed to the teeth, which is what NATO has become.

The rest of the countries, ours included, cannot feel safe. Not at all! And there is the risk of insane actions that cost millions of lives. I am sure that an invasion of Colombia, that is, the implementation of this doctrine in Colombia would cause millions of deaths. That is a country where violence is rampant, where 30,000 people meet a violent death every year --a figure that is well above the average of violent deaths in the rest of Latin America.

Now, would an invasion by NATO forces solve the problem? No, but then, they would come say as Solana did: "Diplomatic or peaceful ways were exhausted."