>Blogger’s Note: Dear FSB/KGB cyber-snoops: Why don’t you take your vacation on the Black Sea now since I’m taking mine

>Beginning tomorrow your resident blogger will begin a much-needed three-week vacation. I will have limited or no Internet access during this period. Unless a hot war develops somewhere, my next post could be as late as August 24. Assuming the world doesn’t self-destruct before then, we’ll be back at that time to continue our information war against the Communist Bloc. I was thinking of signing off by saying something like: “I’m heading for Central America to fight the communists, but my wife won’t let me.” Instead, I’ll just say “Have a great summer!”

Pictured above: On site for the fourth major Sino-Soviet war game, Peace Mission 2009, Nikolai Makarov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, views small arms of the People’s Liberation Army, at the Taonan tactical training base in China’s Jilin Province, on July 23. The combined military drill, which involved 3,000 Russian and Chinese troops, began in Khabarovsk and ran from July 22 to 26.

>Latin America File: Nicaraguan FM: “Historical” continuity of relations between Managua, Moscow; Ortega: Honduran coup leaders “opened up battlefield"

>Earlier this week we described Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin’s third visit in 12 months to Latin America, a region where as a GRU agent during the 1980s he supplied Marxist rebels with Soviet weapons. Commenting on a bilateral oil exploration protocol signed by Russia and Nicaragua during Sechin’s Managua pitstop, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos remarked to state-run Itar-Tass: “Russia-Nicaragua relations cannot be viewed outside the historical context, without taking into account the relations between the USSR and Nicaragua in the 1980s. When we [Sandinistas] in 16 years returned to power, the first thing we did was restoration of trust-based relations with our friends.”

To curry the neo-Soviet regime’s favor, last August Nicaragua’s past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega rushed to recognize Georgia’s Russian-occupied regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. “We exchanged the appropriate messages and received expressions of gratitude from both countries, as well as the information saying they still had to resolve some problems before launching a practical rapprochement and opening diplomatic missions,” Santos explained.

In these blurbs Nicaragua’s foreign minister admits that there is a “historical” (ideological) continuity between the Soviet Union’s support for the first Sandinista regime 20 years ago and “post”-communist Russia’s support for the second and current Sandinista regime. It can be expected therefore that all of the plans that Moscow and Managua hatched in the 1980s for the subjugation of Central America will shortly come to fruition in a clever package that Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez calls “21^st century socialism.” Incidentally, Comrades Hugo and Dan, we are hard pressed to see how your 21^st century socialism differs from 20^th century socialism which, according to the Black Book of Communism, killed off 100 million people and enslaved hundreds of millions more. But, hey, according to leftists everywhere, we should give peace, love, and totalitarianism another chance.

Just in time to expose US President Barack Hussein Obama’s capitulationist policy toward Latin American communism, war threatens to break out in the USA’s backyard, specifically between the leftist regimes in Venezuela and Ecuador, in the one camp, and the anti-communist government in Colombia, in the other; and between the leftist regime in Nicaragua and the lawful, anti-communist government in Honduras.

The reinstallation of deposed leftist Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, now encamped with both retinue and President Ortega’s blessing immediately south of the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, is just one facet of the Communist Bloc’s program of “21^st century socialism” for Central America. On July 29 Ortega ranted: “The coup leaders who removed Zelaya committed a great error and opened up a battlefield.” For his part, Zelaya admitted: “I am an invited guest of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who supports my using his country as a base.” Zelaya, addressing supporters, is pictured above in Ocotal, Nicaragua on July 29. “We certainly don’t want Zelaya around here anymore,” retorted Francisco Aguirre, Nicaraguan opposition lawmaker in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. “He represents too much of a risk of an armed conflict with Honduras, and he’s doing our economy a lot of harm.”

In Honduras itself the Left continues to mobilize against the constitutional government of President Roberto Micheletti. On July 30, the New York Times reports, Zelaya partisans “peacefully” protested against Micheletti armed with “long sticks and pickaxes,” prompting, in our opinion, an appropriate response from the military, which supports peace talks between the country’s rival governments:

Several people were wounded and more than 100 were arrested Thursday during clashes between the police and supporters of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, in at least four locations. The most intense violence occurred on the northern edge of Tegucigalpa, the capital, where one person was shot in the head. Leaders of the demonstrations accused the police of firing tear gas and live ammunition on peaceful protesters. Television footage showed some protesters armed with long sticks and pickaxes.

This past Wednesday, Nicaragua’s United Nations ambassador Maria Rubiales, Health Minister Guillermo Gonzalez, and Vice Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentschke visited the border camps where Zelaya partisans have flocked, evading capture by Honduran soldiers. As a result of their “assessment” of conditions in the camps, Nicaragua is requesting international humanitarian aid to facilitate the subversive presence of Zelaya’s government in exile.

After the March 2008 Andean Crisis, when Venezuela and Ecuador mobilized their armed forces to their respective borders with Colombia, South America’s ranting red tyrant cooled off for a brief while and feigned friendship with President Alvaro Uribe. However, following international accusations that Chavez funneled Swedish-built 1980s-era surface-to-air missiles to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and news of the planned expansion of Plan Colombia, which will see US counter-narcotics troops deployed at Colombian military bases, the Chavezista regime has once again ramped up its verbal and diplomatic assaults against Bogota. In addition to withdrawing its ambassador from and severing commerce with Colombia, Caracas has accused its neighbor of “warmongering” and posing a “danger for the entire region.” The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry rumbled this week:

Venezuela expresses its indignation due to the irresponsibility of the Colombian government of destroying the efforts made to build a bi-national tie of mutual benefit for both peoples, putting at risk the peace and stability of the region. Colombia seeks to justify the establishment of five U.S. military bases in its territory by making false accusations of weapon supply from Caracas to the Colombian guerillas. Why does not Colombia demand the U.S. or Israel to explain how thousands of weapons made in those countries go to the hands of the guerillas inside Colombia? Colombia had become a continued danger for the entire region, and we call on our neighbor to drop its warmongering policy.

Ecuador’s socialist regime has yet to restore relations with Colombia since the Andean Crisis. As we previously blogged, President Rafael Correa has taken umbrage at reports that the FARC bribed the government in Quito in order to secure safe haven for its guerrillas on Ecuadorean soil. Coincidentally, in August Ecuador will assume the rotating presidency of the South American Defense Council, an organ of the nascent Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), of which Colombia is also a member. “The council will pass to Ecuador a difficult situation because diplomatic relations with Colombia have not yet been restored and diplomatic relations between this country and Venezuela are frozen,” remarked Ecuadorean Defense Minister Javier Ponce. Brazil’s center-left president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is urging the South American Defense Council–which coordinates UNASUR member state defense policies rather than providing a unified military command like NATO–to press Colombia into accounting for the increased US military presence on its soil.

Meanwhile, on July 30 Presidents Chavez and Lula da Silva shared their “concerns” by telephone about the Honduran political crisis and the very real threat posed by US anti-drug operations to their regime’s complicity in the Moscow-directed narco-subversion of the West. According to a press release from Brasilia, Lula da Silva, whose government contains cadres of the Communist Party of Brazil, confirmed his attendance at the 2nd Africa-South America Summit that will take place in Venezuela in September. He also confirmed attendance at his quarterly meeting with Chavez to strengthen bilateral cooperation between the two states. The press released also stated:

They talked about the need to increase international pressure on the coup leaders to guarantee President Manuel Zelaya’s restitution and restoration of democracy in that sister nation. Chavez commented on the danger and the threat that the intention to establish US military bases in Colombia represents, and explained the measures that our government has been forced to adopt to guarantee regional peace and stability. They shared their happiness for the agreement reached between PDVSA and PETROBRAS companies, of great significance to establishing a complementary relation between our countries, to reach full energy sovereignty.

Lula announced that his advisor Marco Aurelio Garcia would visit Caracas this weekend while Development, Industry and Foreign Trade Minister Miguel Jorge will visit Venezuela from August 19 to 20, accompanied by a large delegation of Brazilian business leaders. The Brazilian government’s press release concluded: “They ratified their commitment to continuing their quarterly meetings, leaving as a pending issue to fix the exact date for September, when they should hold the third meeting of the year, in which they are expected to continue strengthening the strategic alliance between Brazil and Venezuela.”

>End Times File: Russia, Iran hold 1st-ever joint military drill, Russian Navy expands Syrian facility, Medvedev presents new world currency

>Last year we posted a number of End Times File articles, especially focusing on the possible identity of the Antichrist, whom we suspect may be the head of state of a major Western European power. Developments in the Middle East once again warrant a brief foray into Bible prophecy, which has a lot to say about the restoration of Israel to its ancient homeland in the last days of history.

Specifically, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel writes, in chapters 38 and 39 of his book, of a massive military coalition that will come against God’s chosen nation in the end times, probably at the beginning of Daniel’s 70^th week, a seven-year period otherwise known as the “time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jeremiah 30:7) or the tribulation (Matthew 24:29). At the head of this confederacy, which will meet its supernatural doom on the mountains of Israel, is Magog (Russia/Soviet Union), followed by Persia (Iran), Togarmah (Turkey), Libya (by name), and the Muslim-Arab states.

All of these countries are now arrayed against Israel, including Turkey which, even though a NATO member, has effectively abandoned its Cold War attachment to the West and allied itself with Russia in recent months. Even though Syria is also closely allied with these countries, Ezekiel makes no mention of this country in his confederacy. Thus, it is possible that the destruction of Damascus, mentioned in Isaiah 17, takes place before the Magog invasion. If the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city is flattened by an Israeli nuclear weapon, then this could serve as an impetus for Moscow, Tehran, and the Muslim-Arab capitals to attempt to wipe out the Jewish state once and for all.

The Soviet strategists have not only assembled the same coalition of nations prophesied in the Old Testament, but they are also positioning their military assets in close proximity to Israel, as the following points demonstrate:

1) the Russian Navy is refurbishing and expanding its maintenance facility in Tartus, Syria, from which it can quickly dispatch warships to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as throughout the Mediterranean Sea

2) the Russian military is deploying sophisticated air defense systems in Syria under the pretense of countering the US FBX-T missile interception radar system in Israel

3) the Russian Ground Forces are establishing a permanent presence in Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia

4) for the first time ever, Russia and Iran, which is seeking full member status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will carry out a two-day joint war game called “Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian.”

This week’s drill, according to senior Iranian port authorities, will involve some 30 warships, including those of the Russian Navy’s Caspian Flotilla, and supposedly enable the two allies to improve their response to regional environmental crises and more effectively execute search and rescue operations.

Another dimension of Bible prophecy is the establishment of a global means of commerce called the “mark of the beast,” mentioned in chapter 13 of Revelation, apart from which no man can buy or sell. In Bible prophecy beasts symbolize Gentile world powers. The founding of a world currency, such as that being promoted today by Western globalists and the Soviet strategists, would presumably provide the “climate” necessary to later implement and receive the Antichrist’s universal mark. The current financial disruptions have in fact provided the globalists and the Soviets with a perfect opportunity to lure national leaders, including US President Barack Hussein Obama, into the fold of the Council on Foreign Relations’ “global governance,” Mikhail Gorbachev’s “state of the whole people,” and Vladimir Lenin’s “world proletarian dictatorship.”

After months of promoting the ruble or some other denomination as a new global currency reserve, on July 10 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flourished a sample of the “United Future World Currency” at his G8 news conference in L’Aquila, Italy. Holding the coin (picture above) between his fingers, the Russian president enthused:

I have some supranational currency in my pocket that I got as a souvenir. This is a test sample of a currency unit under the Unity in Diversity motto. It is called the United Future World Currency. It can already be seen and touched. This is a symbol of our unity and our desire to solve such issues.

This has become a regular theme now. We are discussing the creation or, to be more correct, the appearance of new reserve currencies, including the possibility of making the Russian ruble such a currency unit.

The United Future World Currency coin was designed by Belgian Luc Luycx, who also designed the Euro coins, and is called the “eurodollar” in a symbolic proposal for a common currency to unite both Europe and the United States of America. In recent months both Russia and Red China have called for a “super currency” to replace the US dollar as a reserve currency. French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged his colleagues at the G8 summit, including Obama, to view the dollar’s supremacy as a reserve currency as a thing of the past. “To global crisis we must respond with a reform of global governance,” he declared. Will alleged Soviet mole Obama concede to Sarkozy’s terms and lead the USA into the arms of the waiting Red World Order?

>Latin America File: Zelaya’s exiled government holes up in Nicaraguan border town Ocotal; Russia’s deputy PM visits Caracas, Managua, Havana (again)

>– Deposed Honduran President Sets Up Bases in Nicaragua to Receive More than 3,000 Partisans from Homeland via Covert Cross-Border Routes

– Sandinista Cadres Prevent Opposition Deputies from Delivering Letter of Protest to Zelaya in Ocotal

– Sweden Accuses Venezuela of Transferring SAMs to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

– Venezuelan President Chavez Withdraws Ambassador from Bogota, Second Time Since 2008 Andean Crisis (source)

– Ecuadorean President Correa Joins Venezuelan Counterparts in Condemning Colombia’s Opposition to the FARC, Alliance with USA; Threatens Military Action if Andean Crisis Repeated

Pictured above: Nicaragua’s president and veteran KGB asset Daniel Ortega receives Russia’s deputy prime minister, GRU agent Igor Sechin, at the headquarters of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front in Managua, on July 28, 2009.

Honduras’ deposed president Manuel Zelaya and his government in exile have temporarily holed up in the sleepy Nicaraguan mountain town of Ocotal, near the border with his homeland. The cowboy hat-wearing, cell phone-toting wealthy rancher-turned-socialist races about town in a convoy of white Jeeps and SUVs, trailed by television reporters. Zelaya is closely allied with the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis and other leftist regimes in Latin America, like Bolivia and Ecuador.

In a late-breaking story, Bloomberg reports that Zelaya has set up bases in Nicaragua to receive some 3,000 partisans from his homeland via 300 “hidden routes through the mountains.” In response, Nicaragua’s opposition rightly warns that Zelaya is provoking war between the two countries. Yesterday, deputies from the Nicaraguan Democratic Bloc endeavored to deliver a letter of protest to Zelaya, but they were blocked by cadres of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front along the highway to Ocotal. On Tuesday Nicaraguan opposition leader Eduard Montealegre traveled to Honduras to meet the country’s lawful president, Roberto Micheletti.

Zelaya’s most vocal backer is Venezuela’s USA-bashing communist dictator Hugo Chavez, but his host is Nicaragua’s USA-bashing communist dictator Daniel Ortega, who recently commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution that deposed the Somoza dynasty. Many of the original Sandinistas, like Ernesto Cardenal, have jumped ship since then, accusing Ortega of abandoning the ideals of the revolution in pursuit of personal power. However, the former Jesuit priest and Sandinista culture minister has not abandoned his leftism. Cardenal now sits on Telesur’s board of directors, which is partly financed by the neo-Sandinista regime. By contrast, Nicaragua’s feared but aging former interior minister, Tomas Borge, remained loyal to Ortega and, thus, was appointed the country’s ambassador to Peru, from where in June 2009 he urged Ortega to grant asylum to Peruvian indigenous rebel leader Alberto Pizango. Peru is one of the few countries in Latin America allied with the USA, even though President Alan Garcia is a social democrat.

Lately, Cuba’s USA-bashing communist dictator Raul Castro has not been preoccupied with the political crisis in Honduras but, rather, with re-cementing ties with long-time USA-bashing African allies like Algeria’s ruling National Liberation Front, Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party/Arab Socialist Union, Namibia’s ruling South-West African People’s Organization, and the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. No doubt, too, Comrade Raul is rubbing his hands with delight over the US$150 million loan that neo-Soviet Russia has graciously extended to the fellow red regime 90 miles south of the Florida Keys. The loan will permit Havana to finance the acquisition of Russian-built construction and agricultural machinery. With respect to regional issues Castro also endorses Zelaya’s reinstatement and, with a nod to the Cold War that supposedly ended in 1991, has condemned the interim government leaders in Tegucigalpa as “fascistas” and “golpistas” (coupists).

Relations between Tegucigalpa and Caracas are also tense. Venezuela’s diplomatic corps in Honduras are refusing to comply with a July 21 deportation order issued by the Micheletti government. “We are still in Honduras, and will stay here,” charge d’affairs Ariel Arias protested on July 26 in a phone call to state-owned Venezolana de Television. Arias related that Honduran soldiers arrived at the Venezuelan embassy on the previous day to dislodge the occupants.

Meanwhile, Russia’s deputy prime minister Igor Sechin is reprising last year’s visits to the capitals of Latin America’s Red Axis. In the 1980s GRU agent Sechin was the Kremlin’s middleman for supplying arms to Marxist insurgents in the region. Now the Western Hemisphere’s machine gun-toting guerrillas, like Salvadoran Vice President Salvador Sanchez Ceren and Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, have donned dress jackets and ties, seized the reins of power by way of the ballot box, and signaled Moscow that they are ready to do business with the Soviet strategists. That “business” frequently entails joint energy projects, military acquisitions and upgrades, and a relaxation of travel restrictions between Russia and her Latin American allies.

On Monday Sechin arrived in Caracas to discuss plans for a high-level bilateral commission and what will probably be Chavez’s ninth or 10th pilgrimage to Moscow since becoming president of Venezuela in 1999. No date has been officially announced for Comrade Hugo’s visit. Sechin explained that he would also discuss joint gas and oil and electricity-generating projects with Rafael Ramirez, Chavez’s Energy and Oil Minister and communist boss of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the showpiece of Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” Sechin will also visit the world’s largest field of heavy and super-heavy crude oil near the Orinoco River. There he will review in situ the prospects of creating a Soviet-Venezuelan oil consortium to include Gazprom at the helm, as well as Rosneft, LUKOil, TNK-BP, Surgutneftegaz and, of course, PDVSA. The Orinoco oilfield under consideration is estimated to contain some 235 billion barrels of crude.

Specifically, the Kremlin has agreed to form a venture between OAO Gazprom’s Latin American division and PDVSA-Servicios, the state oil company’s oilfield services subsidiary, to recover drilling rigs and gas compression equipment. Incidentally, the chairman of Gazprom is Viktor Zubkov, an “ex”-CPSU cadre whose son in law is Russia’s defense minister. Between 2007 and 2008 Zubkov also held the post of prime minister. “Russia plans to become one of the biggest foreign investors in Venezuela, using a joint bank to fund Venezuelan infrastructure and development projects,” reports Bloomberg, “Venezuela has reached out to Russia in an attempt to obtain financing and reduce dependence on the U.S., the country’s main trading partner.” “Thank you for believing in us, for believing in Venezuela, like we believe in Russia,” gushed Chavez to Sechin on state television.

Sechin and Chavez also signed an agreement expanding military cooperation between the two communist states, which is already extensive, although the previous link provides no details on the nature of the military cooperation. Last week, however, South America’s red tyrant announced that he intended to “double” the Venezuelan army’s firepower by purchasing at least 100 Russian T-90 main battle tanks.

Afterwards, Chavez praised the deals as a fitting culmination to the “dialogue” started with Russia during President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Caracas last November: “These deals contribute to the establishment of a multipolar world order with reduced U.S. global dominance. Our positions on the issue coincide with the Russian president’s. Cooperation with Russia will bolster the process of integration underway in Latin America.” As we have stated for months here at this blog: the Soviet strategists are eagerly guiding the process of political, economic, and military integration in Latin America to further communism’s conquest of the Western Hemisphere. Expect no resistance to this plan from alleged Soviet mole Barack Hussein Obama, the president of the USA.

On Tuesday Sechin touched down in Managua for the third time in 12 months. He is expected to meet President Ortega, with whom he will discuss joint projects in electricity generation, increasing bilateral trade, and oil exploration off Nicaragua’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts. “We are currently holding discussions on a whole range of areas of energy cooperation,” enthused Igor Kondrashev, Russia’s ambassador to the Central American country, adding, “In Nicaragua there are very good prospects for prospecting and extracting oil on the Atlantic and Pacific shelves.” Last year, KGB asset Ortega became the only world leader to join Moscow in recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s breakaway regions. It appears that his fidelity to the Soviet strategists has reaped dividends. Last December when Comandante Ortega flew to Moscow for the first time since the Cold War President Medvedev, a Soviet Komsomol graduate, addressed the former guerrilla leader as “comrade.”

Significantly, Sechin’s arrival in Nicaragua coincides with the establishment of Honduras’ pro-communist government in exile just south of the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. We have no reason to believe Sechin will chum around with Zelaya, but we are still waiting for Russian military engineers to show up and renovate the never-used Soviet-built runway at Punta Huete, north of Lake Managua. This particular project was publicized last year during one of Sechin’s previous materializations in the Nicaraguan capital. In 1987 US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, now retired and on the speaking circuit, warned policymakers about Punta Huete, which can accommodate Russia’s strategic bombers, like the two Tu-160s that were deployed to Venezuela last September. Perhaps Russia’s military engineers and covert operatives, playing up the role of “touristas,” will once again flock to Nicaragua on a new visa-free regime implemented earlier this year.

After stopping by Caracas and Managua, on July 29 Sechin flew to Havana, where he formalized bilateral protocols drafted earlier this year in Moscow. Back in January Sechin and Ricardo Cabrisas, Vice President of the Cuban Council of Ministers who was then visiting the Russian capital, inked an agreement by which the same consortium of Russian energy companies mentioned above will establish a joint oil exploration project with state-run Cubapetroleo. Last October Cubapetroleo announced that Cuba may have more than 20 billion barrels of oil in offshore fields. The communist island currently produces 60,000 barrels of oil per day. Oil to be produced by the Soviet-Cuban consortium will be exported to the USA, which is already partly dependent on Russian petroleum via LUKOil, the People’s Republic of China, and the European Union. Somehow, I rather suspect that the US government, which has since November 2008 been dominated in all branches by the communist-infiltrated Democratic Party, will not be displeased about Russian oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico even as it forbids US companies from drilling off its own shores.

Meanwhile, even as the Kremlin’s old/new weapons supplier for Latin America’s insurgents makes business calls in the region, Chavez’s serpentine attempt to export red revolution to neighboring Colombia, by aiding the Marxist guerrillas there, has once again reared its ugly head. On Monday the Swedish government demanded that Venezuela explain how AT4 rocket launchers, produced by Saab Bofors Dynamics and sold to Caracas, ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

“We have asked the officials of the government of Venezuela to give us information on how they believe this material was found in Colombia,” related Jens Eriksson, a political advisor to the Swedish ministry of commerce. Eriksson added: “We have it confirmed that a small amount of [defence] material made in Sweden has been found in a FARC camp. No Swedish company had ever been granted a permit to sell to Colombia.” Tomas Samuelsson, chief executive of Saab Bofors Dynamics, confirmed that the weapons found by Colombian authorities were indeed made by his company.

Yesterday Colombian President Alvaro Uribe warned that “The FARC are now are seeking to buy some surface-to-air devices to try and shoot down our planes. We are asking for help from the international community to thwart such attempts.” Uribe’s vice president, Francisco Santos, elaborated: “In several operations in which we have recovered weapons from the FARC, we’ve found powerful ammunition (and) powerful equipment, including anti-tank weapons which a European country sold to Venezuela and which turned up in the hands of the FARC.”

Venezuela’s Interior Minister Tareck El Aissami denounced Sweden’s statements as a “new attack” against his country, while Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro described them as a way for neighboring Colombia to “justify” its recent “military pact” with the USA. Earlier this month, Bogota agreed to the presence of US troops at three military bases for counter-narcotics operations. The Latin American Red Axis has likewise denounced the presence of US counter-narcotics troops in Honduras. Incidentally, this past week, in another series of developments that exposes the animosity between Venezuela and Colombia, Maduro accompanied Zelaya to the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, while Uribe informally but sympathetically received a delegation from the Micheletti government. Both Tegucigalpa and Bogota consider themselves to be victims of aggressive communist designs emanating from Caracas.

The FARC, the Western Hemisphere’s chief source of “red cocaine,” liaises with the ruling and non-ruling communist and leftist parties of Latin America via the low-profile narco-terrorist Sao Paulo Forum, brainchild of retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Last Sunday Ecuador’s socialist president Rafael Correa, a sort of Chavez “mini me” and Castro “mini mini me,” joined his Venezuelan comrades in blasting the Colombian government for its opposition to the FARC and alliance with the USA. “If Colombia attacks Ecuador again, as it did in Angostura in March 2008, our country will give a military response,” he threatened, conceding that the FARC was indeed based on Ecuadorean soil:

I will not allow foreign soldiers to invade my homeland, as happened on March 1, 2008, when Colombian troops bombed and entered a secret guerrilla camp in the northern part of Ecuador. At the time we resorted to diplomatic means and Bogota was condemned by the Organization of American States.

However, they have maintained Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos’ stance, insisting on the preventive war doctrine. It will be dangerous if Colombia’s ex-defense minister assumes power [as the next president], but it will be a decision by the Colombian people.

Correa, who has been accused of drug trafficking and accepting bribes from the FARC in exchange for hosting the Colombian guerrillas in his country, sarcastically urged Uribe to submit to a lie detector test “to see who has relations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or drug trafficking.”

The bellicose rhetoric emanating from Quito, Havana, Caracas, Managua, and La Paz confirms MSM reports that Latin America’s Red Axis leaders are determined to transform their bloc of socialist nations, called the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, into an “anti-imperialist” military coalition with Soviet teeth. Errant ALBA member Honduras may be the Red Axis’ first target, while anti-communist hold out Colombia may be its second target.

>Blogger’s Note: Red World 2009 map updated

>We have updated our Red World 2009 map, linked in the right column, to reflect a few changes, not the least of which is our belief that under the Soviet-backed presidential administration of Barack Hussein Obama the United States of America has fallen under partial communist control.

>Latin America File: Zelaya briefly crosses border, confronts Honduran army, holds cell phone interviews; Micheletti denounces provocation

>Late Friday, reports CNN, ousted president Manuel Zelaya lifted a border chain and briefly crossed several yards onto Honduran soil, after leading a 20-vehicle convoy over two days from Managua. Since his ouster on June 28 he has turned the Nicaraguan capital into a base of operations, with counterpart Daniel Ortega’s complicity. Along the way, Zelaya held news conferences and conducted “numerous” cell phone interviews. He was also accompanied by the foreign minister of Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez, the deposed leader’s most strident backer.

Upon arriving at the border, Honduran army Lt. Col. Luis Roicarte, with whom Zelaya had been previously talking on the phone, informed the exiled president: “You can’t cross the border.” Zelaya replied, “I can cross,” and then did so (pictured above). “I am not afraid when I work for a just and noble cause,” Zelaya boasted to someone on a cell phone moments after crossing the border, surrounded by reporters and rejoicing supporters. Honduran soldiers pulled back about 25 meters (80 feet) from the border to watch Zelaya as he held more cell phone conversations and media interviews. Manuel’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, told CNN en Español that she was being “prevented” from joining her husband. After several hours, Zelaya wrapped up his publicity stunt and walked back to Nicaragua.

In response to this provocation from this compliant lackey of the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis, Honduras’ lawful government once again warned Zelaya that he would be arrested if he pushed deeper into the country. Yesterday interim President Roberto Micheletti insisted that he was willing to continue peace talks with his rival, as brokered by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. “I offered several days ago to give up my position if Mr. Zelaya would stop inciting his followers to violence,” Micheletti told CNN en Español, which once employed El Salvador’s leftist president Mauricio Funes. Micheletti continued: “Zelaya had no intention of returning to Honduras. He went back to Nicaragua to keep causing problems. We have received information that they want to continue with these type of actions that only incite the public. There has been no coup because in a coup the military remains in power.”

Somewhat surprisingly, leftist US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Zelaya’s actions: “We have consistently urged all parties to avoid any provocative action that could lead to violence. President Zelaya’s effort to reach the border is reckless. It does not contribute to the broader efforts to restore democratic and constitutional order in the Honduras crisis.” The State Department also issued a travel warning to US citizens in Honduras or contemplating a trip to that country.

While Zelaya paraded for the cameras at the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, Micheletti supporters held a large and colorful rally in San Pedro Sula. Zelaya partisans amassed in El Paraiso, about 12 kilometers (7 miles) from the border with Nicaragua. They were met there by about 1,500 police and soldiers. The police and soldiers fired tear gas at the demonstrators for about 15 to 20 minutes. Two people were wounded. Honduran police and soldiers erected numerous roadblocks between Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan border, and established an immediate curfew in the area until 4:30 a.m.

>Latin America File: Zelaya, Venezuelan FM arrive at Nicaraguan border town, Honduran military closes crossings; Tegucigalpa expels Chavez’s diplomats

>– Honduran Labor Unions Stage General Strike in Support of Zelaya’s Reinstatement as Country’s President; Zelaya Partisans Flock to Nicaraguan Border to Welcome Deposed Leader

– Honduras’ Interim Foreign Minister Holds “Informal” Meeting with Colombian President, Uribe Expresses Support for Micheletti Government

– Vexed by Reports of Planned Deployment of More US Counter-Narcotics Troops in Neighboring Colombia, Chavez Announces Intent to Purchase More than 100 Russian T-90 Main Battle Tanks, “Double” Venezuelan Army’s Firepower

– Red Cocaine Tracks: Since Zelaya’s Ouster 14 Drug Planes, Most Registered in Venezuela, Have Landed in Different Parts of Honduras

– Venezuelan Foreign Ministry Slams Israeli “Ultra Right,” Denies Country Harboring Hezbollah Training Camps near Colombian Border and on Caribbean Island

We regard both Honduras and Colombia as victims of common external aggressors, such as Hugo Chavez. Chavez is a highly dangerous neighbor, who was on the verge of extending his model to Honduras.
– Interim Honduran Foreign Minister Carlos Lopez, interviewed by Bogota’s La FM radio, July 22, 2009

Pictured above: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez contends that Costa Rican counterpart Oscar Arias, who is mediating between Honduras’ rival governments, is simply acting on orders of the US State Department.

Political tensions are once again on the rise along the Honduran- Nicaraguan border, just as they did during the 1980s, when US-backed Contra rebels based in Honduras launched sorties against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s first Sandinista regime. Indeed, it appears, as we have suggested in recent months, that the Cold War has returned to both Central America and South America.

Earlier today deposed Honduran president Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya, a wealthy rancher- turned-socialist and lackey of the Havana-Caracas- Managua Axis—arrived at the small Nicaraguan city Esteli, 25 miles south of the Honduran border. Since his ouster on June 28 Zelaya has jetted about Central America, with at least one sidetrip to the USA, on an aircraft supplied by Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez. However, he has spent most of his time in Managua where, with the guidance of Comandante Ortega and other regional leftist leaders and their representatives, he has plotted his return to his homeland. No doubt buoyed by their attendance in Managua of various festivities associated with the 30^th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Zelaya arrived in Esteli in the company of his foreign minister Patricia Rodas and Chavez’s foreign minister Nicolas Maduro. “We will present ourselves in front of their bayonets and see if they lower them,” Zelaya vowed yesterday in Managua.

Zelaya’s presence near the Nicaraguan-Honduran border threatens to escalate the nearly four-week conflict between Honduras’ rival governments and follows a breakdown in peace talks mediated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. Arias, like Ortega, has reprised his role from the last decade of the (first?) Cold War. The Organization of American States, under the leadership of Chilean socialist Jose Miguel Insulza, is pressing for further negotiations. “What we’re lacking isn’t a new offer by President Arias but a response to the last offer he made,” Insulza lamented to reporters in Washington DC yesterday. “A rejection would lead us down the road to confrontation.”

Meanwhile, the Honduran military has closed down the border with Nicaragua as Honduras’ largest labor unions stage a general strike in support of Zelaya’s reinstatement and Zelaya partisans flock to the border to welcome their exiled leader. The strike was declared on Monday by the country’s main unions, the Unitary Federation of Honduran Workers (FUTH), the Confederation of Honduran Workers, and the General Workers’ Central. “We reject [President] Roberto Micheletti’s rules because he was imposed by force and no one owes obedience to a usurper government, as established in Article Three of the Constitution,” declared Juan Barahona, FUTH chairman and Zelaya ally. According to Barahona in Honduras “the progressive forces remain on their feet in a way not seen since the Cold War.”

Citing sources in the Nicaraguan media and government, the Chinese media reports today: “Nicaragua media said that over the frontier Honduran police and soldiers were deployed in nearby areas, seemingly in a tense waiting for order to act. Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister Ana Isabel Morales told official Radio Nicaragua that her government ‘is observing the situation to take necessary measure as to guarantee our citizens’ safety.’” The Honduran embassy in Managua, which is still under the control of the deposed government, indicated that Zelaya may also attempt to enter Honduras via Guatemala and El Salvador, both of which feature leftist regimes subservient to the Red Axis.

Even as he heads for the Honduran border, Zelaya is still alleging that the country’s chief general, Romeo Vasquez, plans to kill him upon his return. “I believe they have the intention to do it. They are hiring armed groups. He [General Vasquez] has clearly said that he will have me killed before my return or after I enter Honduras,” the deposed president complained in a telephone interview with Honduras’ Radio Globo. He added: “If Romeo does not kill me, I will go to my town to visit my family, and any direct harm will be the responsibility of General Romeo.”

This past Tuesday the de facto government of Honduras, which your resident blogger believes to be the constitutional one, ordered Venezuela’s diplomatic staff to leave the country within 72 hours. “The Foreign Ministry has requested the honorable embassy of Venezuela the withdrawal of its administrative, technical and diplomatic staff in a term of 72 hours due to the threats of using force, the interference in internal issues as well as the lack of respect to the territorial integrity,” stated Honduras’ interim Deputy Foreign Minister Martha Lorena Alvarado. In response, Uriel Vargas, first secretary of the Venezuelan embassy in Tegucigalpa, refused to pack his bags and go home. “We do not recognize the government led by Roberto Micheletti,” Vargas retorted, “It is a coup government, supported by bayonets.”

In our opinion, the fact that Honduras’ de facto government restrained itself from expelling Venezuela’s meddling diplomatic corps several weeks ago, that is, promptly after Chavez threatened to invade the Central American country, is a testimony to the legality, integrity, and peaceful intentions of President Micheletti’s government. Commentator Hans Bader explains how Zelaya’s ouster and his replacement by former congressional speaker Micheletti was not a military coup d’etat but, rather, the constitutional removal of an incipient leftist dictator allied with Latin America’s dangerous Red Axis.

Honduras’s Zelaya was lawfully removed from office by soldiers acting on orders of his country’s Supreme Court (and replaced by the speaker of Honduras’s Congress) after he, too, sought to rewrite his country’s constitution to allow him to seek another term in office. (Honduras has had such a problem over the years of corrupt presidents using patronage, fraud, and intimidation to get reelected over and over again that Article 239 of its current Constitution immediately strips presidents of their office if they even propose ending term limits, and Article 272 of its Constitution authorizes the military to remove presidents who seek to evade term limits).

Zelaya used money from Venezuela’s dictator and blackmail to try to extend his rule, illegally cutting off funds to municipalities whose mayors who refused to back his referendum to rewrite Honduras’s Constitution to extend Zelaya’s tenure in office. Zelaya was planning vote fraud on a vast scale.

. . .

Honduras’s president was constitutionally removed pursuant to Articles 239 and 272 of the Honduras Constitution. Moreover, he was removed not by a “small group,” but with the unanimous support of the Honduras Supreme Court, the almost-unanimous support of Honduras’s Congress, and much of Honduran society. For each of these separate reasons, it was not a coup.

Bader notes that even “liberal” (leftist) scholars in the USA conceded that Zelaya’s ouster took place according to the stipulations the Honduran Constitution, although his forced exile at gunpoint was probably illegal, a fact admitted by the Honduran armed forces’ top legal adviser. “Zelaya was planning vote fraud on a vast scale,” Bader contends, an outcome that was no doubt rigged by way of referendum ballots printed in Venezuela.

While no country has formally recognized President Micheletti’s government, the center-right government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe confirmed on Wednesday that Uribe held an “informal” meeting with interim Honduran Foreign Minister Carlos Lopez. Interviewed by Bogota’s La FM radio about the meeting, Lopez described his reception by the Colombian president as “sympathetic.” Lopez told La FM that he and his colleagues sought an audience with the Colombian president because “We regard both Honduras and Colombia as victims of common external aggressors, such as Hugo Chavez. Chavez is a highly dangerous neighbor, who was on the verge of extending his model to Honduras.” Lopez is correct in his observation. The common bond between the governments of Honduras and Colombia remains a stubborn opposition to the spread of Chavismo, a virulent form of Latin American communism. “In the framework of the process of facilitation for the Honduras situation, led by the president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, a Honduran commission was received informally,” the Colombian Foreign Ministry admitted in a statement.

After nearly 50 years, a Soviet/Cuban-backed Marxist insurgency, which now enjoys Venezuela’s patronage too, continues to rage in the jungles of Colombia, prosecuted by two guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller, less well-known National Liberation Army (ELN). This past Sunday, reports the Latin American Herald Tribune, at least three people were killed and 20 others, including two police officers, were wounded when guerrillas from FARC’s 6^th Front attacked the southwestern Colombian town of Corinto. This was the fourth attack this year by the FARC on Corinto, which is in Cauca province. The civilians killed in the attack were caught in the crossfire between the guerrillas and police, the Bogota daily El Tiempo reported.

Several days later, on Wednesday a bombed planted by the ELN killed a mounted Colombian police officer near the border between the provinces of Casanare and Boyaca. The police were participating in a ceremonial caravan commemorating the route traveled by Simon Bolivar’s troops almost 200 years ago. The Colombian Defense Ministry announced later that pamphlets found in the vicinity of the blast bore the name of the ELN, rather than the FARC, which was initially suspected.

Bogota enjoyed considerable ideological, logistical, and material support from the government of former US President George W. Bush. However, the Obama White House’s commitment to deploy more US troops to Colombia to combat narco-terrorism has provoked Chavez into yet another spluttering fit. On Tuesday South America’s red tyrant ranted: “Venezuela will review its diplomatic ties with Colombia if the country authorizes the installation of U.S. military bases close to Venezuelan border. U.S. military bases on Colombia’s border with Venezuela represent a threat to our country. Colombia is opening its doors to those who constantly attack us and to those who are getting ready new attacks against us.” Last year, following the week-long Andean Crisis, Caracas severed diplomatic relations with Bogota but restored them in early 2009. Venezuela’s red regime only recently restored diplomatic relations with Washington DC after falling out with the Bush Administration.

In response to his own paranoia, on Thursday Chavez announced that he intends to double the firepower of Venezuela’s army by purchasing at least 100 Russian-built T-90 main battle tanks to augment an aging fleet of 80 French-made AMX-30 MBTs and 24 AMX-13C light tanks. On national television he boasted that his government was already negotiating these orders with Moscow: “We are going to buy more tanks to have an armored force at least twice the size of what we have today. We need to strengthen our forces on land, at sea, and in the air and we are going to continue doing that.” Between 2005 and 2007 neo-Soviet Russia signed 12 contracts worth more than US$4.4 billion to supply arms to oil-rich Venezuela, including diesel-electric submarines, fighter jets, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, and Kalashnikov assault rifles. Last November Russian and Venezuelan naval task forces held their first-ever combined drill in the southern Caribbean Sea.

In many previous posts we have explored the Chavezista regime’s involvement in Moscow’s narco-subversion plot against the USA, a plot that has produced a trail of red cocaine from the FARC’s killing grounds in Colombia to the US-Mexican border via Panama, Nicaragua and, with Zelaya’s complicity, Honduras. Along this theme, on Wednesday of this week two narcotics operatives were killed when their aircraft, which was loaded with cocaine, crashed while trying to land on a highway in the Caribbean region of that country. The plane caught fire after hitting a power line near La Masica, a city some 300 kilometers (186 miles) north of Tegucigalpa. Honduran officials have not determined where the plane originated, how much cocaine it was carrying, or the identity of the crew. As of June 28, when Zelaya was deposed, however, at least 14 drug planes, the majority of them registered in Venezuela, have landed in different parts of Honduras.

Finally, this week the Chavezista regime also lashed out at the “ultra right” government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for accusing Venezuela of harboring Hezbollah terrorist camps at Guajira, near the Colombian border, and on Margarita Island, near Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. Dora Shavit, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, articulated the charge in an interview with El Tiempo. The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry shot back:

Those ridiculous statements are part of a plan plotted by the Israeli ultra right, in order to encourage and promote actions of different kinds against the Venezuelan government and people. The terrorists who put risk on the life of thousands of innocent people are not being trained in the Venezuelan Guajira, but in the quarters and public buildings of Israel.

Relations between Jerusalem and Caracas worsened in the new year when Chavez condemned Israel for retaliating against missile attacks originating from Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Incidentally, over the last two years Lebanon has become a de facto failed state under Hezbollah’s domination. The Tehran/Damascus-backed political party-terrorist army wields veto power in the Lebanese government, controls much of the countryside in the southern part of the country, and has targeted Israel with thousands of rockets.

>Latin America File: Red Axis leaders rally in Managua on 30th anniversary of Sandinista Revolution; Ortega rejects idea of UN troops in Honduras

>– ALBA States to Hold Summit in Bolivia in September, Host Evo Morales Follows Hugo Chavez in Once Again Raising Subject of Transforming Alliance into Military Coalition

– US and Cuban Military and Medical Personnel Hold Mass Casualty Drill at Guantanamo in Sign of Thawing Relations between Washington DC and Havana

Pictured above: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega shakes the hand of Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro in Managua last Sunday, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary celebration of the Sandinista Revolution. Behind the two men are Cuban Vice President Esteban Lazo (left) and de facto Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas (right).

On the evening of July 19, just as Hondurans began observing a re-imposed curfew, a bomb that caused no serious damage exploded at the Lawyers’ College in the capital Tegucigalpa. The building is situated close to busy restaurants and night clubs. Since the June 28 coup that brought down President Manuel Zelaya, two bombs have exploded in the offices of broadcaster Canal 11 and those of the state’s Migration Agency. Two more were found and defused.

That day Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who is mediating peace talks between Honduras’ rival governments, cautioned that he needs more time to resolve the political stalemate and warned of civil war between the opposing camps behind de facto president Roberto Micheletti and de jure president Manuel Zelaya. “It wasn’t possible to reach a satisfactory accord on my proposal,” Arias told reporters on Sunday, adding: “I want to take 72 hours to work more intensely. Because what is the alternative? There could be a civil war and bloodshed that the Honduran people don’t deserve.” Defying international pressure and resolutions, Micheletti, backed by the Honduran Supreme Court, Congress, and military, refuses to allow Zelaya to return for the remainder of his term, which ends in 2010.

Thus, Arias has proposed an amnesty for all parties, Zelaya’s return to power in a temporary national unity government, presidential elections in October, an end to attempts to modify the constitution, and the creation of an international commission to oversee implementation of the agreement. The Costa Rican leader also called for the military to be placed under the control of Honduras’s elections regulator for one month prior to the presidential vote. A counter-proposal from Micheletti’s delegation insisted that Zelaya could come home only to face a tribunal.

On Saturday Arias flew to Managua, where Zelaya has spent much of his time in exile, to hold further talks with the deposed president. At the same time, Patricia Rodas, foreign minister under Zelaya called for a “march” on the Honduran capital if the acting government did not restore Zelaya by sundown. “Their time is up. It’s over for the coup leaders,” Rodas threatened, speaking in the Nicaraguan capital on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. “We’ll open up the borders of Honduras to conquer our homeland.” By Sunday the Zelaya camp acquiesced to further negotiations brokered by Arias.

The leftist administration in the Obama White House continues to press for Zelaya’s reinstallation. “We’ve obviously seen the report about the talks and the proposed 72 hour delay,” blathered Rob McInturff, a State Department spokesentity. He added: “We’re just following it closely and waiting to see what’s going to happen next. In the end this has got to be a solution from Hondurans for Honduras. We’re looking for a peaceful resolution… These players at the table have it in their power to come to that and we’re hoping that they’ll do everything they can to reach that resolution.”

On July 19 a former guerilla leader in Guatemala joined the communist presidents of Venezuela and Bolivia, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, in warning of more “right-wing” coups in the region. Pablo Monsanto, one of four commanders of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit, declared: “There is a risk that other coups will occur in Latin America. If the coup survives, it will represent a huge reverse for Latin America. The Honduran coup was encouraged by a powerful economic group and backed by the United States.” Monsanto then hinted that future armed insurgencies in the region were possible if Honduras’ military-backed government did not back down: “Armed rebel movements are not appropriate for the new democratic trend in the region, but are now a real fact that would have to be faced in the wake of a post-coup government that repressed its population by force.” Monsanto’s threats typify communist tactics: If the bourgeoisie will not peacefully submit to a proletarian takeover, then the reds will take up arms and employ revolutionary terror.

By accepting Arias’ call for an extension of the peace talks, the Zelaya camp will actually gain time in order to continue organizing its forces on the ground to stage a “popular insurrection” against the Micheletti government. In the hours after the June 28 coup the subversive, leftist forces in that Central American country rallied under the banner “Popular Resistance Front,” but have since adopted the label National Resistance Front against the Coup. Last Friday thousands of “anti-golpistas” blocked thoroughfares in Honduras, holding up traffic to and from the capital Tegucigalpa, along stretches of the Pan-American Highway, and into and out of neighboring countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador. Juan Barahona, president of the United Workers’ Federation and a close ally of Zelaya, announced that protestors also blocked the road that runs to the Caribbean city of Puerto Cortes, close to San Pedro Sula.

Meanwhile, over the weekend a march staged by 5,000 Zelaya partisans headed for the presidential residence, to reaffirm in the presence of the army, Hondurans’ alleged support for the “constitutional” president. Ramon Alegria, a campesino and leader of the National Resistance Front against the Coup, told Caracas’ Bolivarian News Agency that the Honduran media is trying to demoralize protestors and generate a “climate of terror” favorable to President Micheletti.

Pictured here: FSLN supporters converge in Managua last Sunday.

Over the weekend former guerrilla leader and current Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega rejected the idea of deploying United Nations peacekeeping troops in Honduras to defuse political tensions. “The only viable way to solve the Honduran crisis,” he demanded, “is a full respect by the post-coup leader Roberto Micheletti for the resolutions passed by the Organization of American States and the United Nations. We call on Honduras’ soldiers to stop repressing their brothers and to stop dyeing the territory of brother nation Honduras with blood.” The head of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front uttered these comments while addressing half a million people during a military ceremony commemorating the 30^th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

Significantly, Ortega once again denied that he would send troops to Honduras to restore Zelaya. He also slammed a proposal by the US government to expand its military presence in Colombia, describing the plan as tantamount to an “occupation” of that country that threatened neighboring Venezuela and the entire region. “We want no more US bases,” Ortega ranted, “The United States cannot continue this arms race in Latin America.”

Comandante Ortega also used the occasion to sway the Nicaraguan masses into accepting his re-election in 2011, a practice currently forbidden by the Nicaraguan Constitution and one which led to Zelaya’s ouster three weeks ago. Ortega’s close allies Chavez, Morales, and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa have already taken this route by legally abolishing term limits on their presidency, a move that would potentially enable them to finish the communization of their respective countries.

In attendance at the Sandinista revelries were delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile participated in the ceremony. The last two nations sport center-leftist regimes that have no scruples rubbing elbows with Latin America’s Red Axis, embodied in the states comprising the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).

Unable to attend the red festivities in Managua, Chavez, mimicking Fidel Castro’s regular “Reflections” column, conveyed his “good wishes” for Central America in a weekly missive instead:

If Nicaragua won on July 19, 1979, sooner or later Honduras will also triumph. Be strong and resist, Hondurans. That truth and fate will be on your side. When the peoples strive to conquering freedom, no one can stop them. The Sandinista liberating exploit is alive today in Nicaragua, a country that, as always, is ready to be free and sovereign.

My happiness is incomplete as our sister Honduras is going through a dark time. It has been twenty two days during which the most despicable of Honduran oligarchy has sought to change the course of history. But their thirst for power will never be able to make the Honduran men and women, heirs to [Francisco] Morazan, yield.

Meanwhile, even though the MSM reported that within 24 hours of the Honduran coup Chavez placed his armed forces on alert and threatened to intervene militarily if his diplomats in Tegucigalpa were killed or kidnapped, Chavez is denying that he ever had any plans to invade Honduras. Denouncing the Micheletti government, the pro-Chavez Venezuelanalysis.com quotes Comrade Hugo as retorting last Friday:

They [the post-coup government] are preparing a massacre and washing their hands of it in advance. But the strategy is so clumsy that it will be difficult for the sensible world to believe. How far will they go? They don’t have limits, this mafia, their criminal advisors who have so much blood on their hands, so much torture and persecution of the people.

Now [Micheletti] is going about saying that Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez are preparing the invasion of Honduras. Further, he says that there are Venezuelan terrorists in Honduras throwing grenades and bombs, and he goes about saying that Chavez will be to blame for the deaths that there’ll be.

Pictured here: FSLN supporters party under banner depicting Latin America’s Red Axis leaders: Zelaya, Correa, Fidel Castro, Ortega, Chavez, and Morales.

While covering the political crisis in Honduras we have repeatedly suggested that Latin America’s Red Axis is contemplating military intervention to restore their lackey Zelaya, and provided documentation to support that contention. The circumstantial evidence continues to mount. Speaking on Monday on Bolivian state radio, Morales urged the ALBA states to “increase military cooperation” and made a direct link between that proposal, ALBA’s success as a project promoting regional integration along socialist lines, and the Honduran coup. “Members of the Alba trade bloc should concentrate their efforts on issues involving armed forces, social movements and political parties,” he demanded, adding: “This coup is a threat against the continued growth of Alba.”

ALBA leaders will hold their seventh summit in Bolivia in September. If Zelaya has not re-assumed the presidency by that point, then removing the Micheletti regime will no doubt be high on the agenda at that planned communist strategy session. Honduras, after all, is an errant member of ALBA.

A related story reveals the careful steps that the Obama White House is taking toward Havana and its disinterest in resisting Latin American communism. The Canadian media reports that on July 16 150 US and Cuban military and medical personnel participated in a mass casualty drill on both sides of the perimeter of the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. “The bilateral fenceline drill exercises began in 1999, when the U.S. naval station and Cuban authorities agreed to conduct annual first responders and emergency response drills at the Northeast Gate,” intoned US Navy Lt.-Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, speaking from a prepared account. DeWalt elaborated:

Helicopters of the Cuban Frontier Brigade crossed the lines to conduct a water drop to extinguish the fire. There was . . . a mass casualty drill conducted where U.S. naval hospital and Cuban frontier medical brigade personnel established a command triage centre on the Cuban side of the fence line.

“The geographic remoteness has traditionally served as a shield from public scrutiny,” suggests CanWest News Service, “hence prior drills can easily have occurred undetected.” Canadian journalist Steven Edwards then quotes a “prominent Cuban exile” employed by the US government. This source doubts the US-Cuban drills occurred to “any great extent” prior to Raul Castro assuming the presidency in February 2008:

Under Fidel Castro, if the Cuban people found out that there were joint exercises, how is the spin possible of the mighty giant of the north threatening to invade Cuba? This has been Fidel Castro’s line for decades. No way under Fidel Castro did he allow military exercises where American military was going over the fence. This is Raul. But it also means that this is new.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Moscow- Beijing Axis to hold 25 joint war games in 2009, Peace Mission “anti-terrorist” drill follows Xinjiang riots

>– Russian Navy Updates:

1) Chief of Russian General Staff Warns Ukrainians: No Plans to Leave Base in Sevastopol after Lease Expires in 2017

2) Navy Implements Upgrades to Maintenance Site in Syria, Deploys New Task Force to Gulf of Aden

3) Navy Successfully Launched Two Sineva SLBMs Last Week, Plans More Bulava SLBM Trials in Late July

– Castro Replicates Medvedev’s Recent African Tour: Visits Soviet Allies Algeria, Egypt, Namibia, and Angola; Attends Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Transfers NAM Chairmanship from Self to Mubarak; NAM Condemns Honduran Coup

Although we have blogged about the increasing tempo of Sino-Soviet military exercises, the Indian media, citing Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, reports that the Moscow-Beijing Axis intends to hold 25 joint drills this year. Russia and China advance their political-military coordination through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This busy schedule of war preparations has already included the Norak Antiterror 2009 drill that took place in Tajikistan in April, Peace Mission 2009 that will take place in Russia and China between July 22 and 26, and Peace Mission 2010, which has been bumped up to take place in Kazakhstan in September of this year. We have no specific information at this time about the other planned maneuvers.

About 3,000 Russian and People’s Liberation Army troops, as well as 300 pieces of artillery and about 40 tactical combat aircraft, will participate in Peace Mission 2009’s battlefield simulations (pictured above). Unlike the first Sino-Soviet war game, Peace Mission 2005, Moscow will not be contributing strategic bombers to the maneuver. “Under the legend of the joint exercises,” reports The Hindu, “Russian and Chinese troops will engage a large terrorist outfit that has seized a Chinese town. The scenario was approved way back in February, but the recent Uighur riots in the Xinjiang province have lent eerie relevance to the war games.” Incidentally, on July 19 state-run Itar-Tass reported that during a Peace Mission 2009 training session an aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force crashed as its two-member crew attempted to destroy a target from at altitude of 200 meters. Both pilots died. Human error was blamed for the crash.

One would almost surmise that the ruling Communist Party of China secretly fomented the Muslim riots in Xinjiang in order to justify the development of a Communist Bloc military coalition that would have placed NATO generals on the edge of their seats during the Cold War. This, no doubt, is why the Soviets and Red Chinese feigned animosity during this period. According, however, to Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian State Duma deputy suspected by British authorities of murdering FSB/KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, the Cold War “never ended.” Guilty or innocent of the charges, Lugovoi is absolutely right.

In 1991 the Cold War entered a more deceptive and therefore more dangerous phase under the guidance of Soviet strategists like Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Gennady Zyuganov, and others. Be assured, of course, that NATO, “a large terrorist outfit” in the minds of most communists, is the target of these back-to-back war preps. Since the phony demise of communism in Eastern Europe, neo-Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China have openly united as “one clenched fist,” just as forecast by KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn 25 years ago in his first book New Lies for Old (1984) and elaborated upon in The Perestroika Deception (1995, 1998).

In a related story, Russia’s top general Nikolai Makarov has warned Ukrainians that the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet has no intention of leaving its Sevastopol base in 2017, when Moscow’s lease with Kiev expires. The chief of Russia’s General Staff explained: “We have not set ourselves the goal of leaving Sevastopol. We also plan to build Black Sea fleet facilities near Novorossiisk.” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited the missile cruiser Moskva in Novorossiisk on July 14, at which time he was briefed that the future naval base in that city, which is located on Russia’s stretch of the Black Sea coast, will be fully serviceable by 2020. The chief of the Federal Agency for Special Construction, Nikolai Abroskin, stated that the three-phase construction program totals about 92 billion rubles (US$2.85 billion).

General Makarov, who was also visiting Novorossiisk, revealed that last Monday the navy successfully test-launched two Sineva submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The first launch was carried out by a Delta IV-class nuclear-powered submarine assigned to the Northern Fleet, based near Murmansk. The RSM-54 Sineva (NATO designation: SS-N-23 Skiff) is a third-generation liquid-propellant SLBM that entered service with the Russian Navy in July 2007. The Sineva can carry four to 10 nuclear warheads.

The Kremlin’s Bulava SLBM, by contrast, has enjoyed only mixed success, having failed in five out of 10 test-launches over the last several years. Navy commander Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky recently stated that the next test of the Bulava will occur in late July, one of a total of four or five trial launches slated for this year. Defense Ministry officials plan to put the Bulava into service by the end of 2009 when, along with the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile, it will become the core of Russia’s nuclear triad. “Just you wait a little, and it will be launched,” promised Makarov, who was a battalion commander in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany during the Cold War.

The Russian nuclear triad consists of silo-based and road-mobile ballistic missile systems, attack submarines armed with sea-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers armed with nuclear bombs and nuclear warhead-tipped cruise missiles. The US Armed Forces possess all of these delivery systems too, with the exception of road-mobile systems. The new strategic arms reduction treaty that will replace START 1 in December 2009 will, within the next seven years, limit both nuclear powers to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads and between 500 and 1,100 delivery systems.

The Kremlin continues to re-project its influence throughout and around the Horn of Africa region by contributing a new task force to the United Nations-sanctioned anti-piracy flotilla in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. On July 20 the first deputy chief of the Russian Navy revealed that the force will consist of the Admiral Tributs destroyer with two helicopters and a naval infantry unit. The task force will arrive in the Gulf of Aden in late July and patrol the waters off Somalia until November, at which time it will be replaced by another task force. “We are deciding on the composition of the next task force to be sent to the region around the Horn of Africa in November,” Vice Admiral Oleg Burtsev explained.

Around 35 warships from 16 navies are currently deployed near Somalia’s lawless shores. The Russian Navy joined the international armada in October 2008. Three warships have so far participated in the mission: the Baltic Fleet’s Neustrashimy frigate, and the Pacific Fleet’s Admiral Vinogradov and Admiral Panteleyev destroyers. Somalia possesses a weak, internationally recognized government, but anarchy and Islamic insurgency have characterized the region since 1991, when Somalia’s communist dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown.

In addition to re-projecting its influence in northeast Africa, the Kremlin is also beefing up its military presence in the Mediterranean Sea by upgrading a Soviet-era naval maintenance site near Tartus in Syria, a long-time Soviet ally controlled by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and the Syrian Communist Party. About 50 naval personnel and three berthing floats are currently deployed at the Tartus site, which can accommodate up to 12 warships. State-run Novosti quoted a “high-ranking navy source” as saying that “Two tug boats from the Black Sea Fleet will deliver a new berthing float to Tartus. Following modernization, the Russian naval maintenance site in Tartus will become fully-operational.”

According to the Russian Navy, its base in Syria significantly boosts the force’s operational capability in the region, including its participation in the UN anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden. Rather than beginning their voyage from the Black Sea, Russian warships based at Tartus are capable of reaching the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar in a matter of days. In January Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, stated that the General Staff supports the navy command’s proposal to develop naval infrastructure outside Russia, including Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

The Soviet Navy once maintained a base in Libya, a fact that no doubt prompted long-time dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi (“Duck”) to offer this option to the Kremlin again when he visited Moscow last fall. Apparently, terrorist mastermind-turned-nice guy Qaddafi fears a repeat of Operation El Dorado Canyon, when the US Air Force bombed his residence and assorted Libyan military assets in 1986. Under the Islamo-socialist Obama Administration in Washington DC, though, this scenario is not likely.

During the Cold War, however, the Kremlin did possess a naval base at Aden, in what was then the Democratic People’s Republic of Yemen (Communist South Yemen), which merged with the Arab Republic of Yemen (North Yemen) in 1990 to form the current Al Qaeda-infested entity known as the Republic of Yemen. Although Ali Abdullah Saleh, once president of North Yemen and now president of post-merger Yemen, is not a communist, Moscow has during the last year re-vitalized its Cold War-era alliance with this ruthless tyrant. Confused? Don’t be. The existence of the Moscow-Tehran Axis, for example, proves that the Soviets are only too happy to forge strategic partnerships with Islamic dictatorships.

Elsewhere in the Communist Bloc, Cuban dictator Raul Castro made his second journey since February to Algeria, where the National Liberation Front has ruled since the rebels achieved independence from France. Havana and Algiers have been closely allied since 1963, when Cuban troops helped Algerian counterparts fend off Moroccan forces in a brief border war. In Algeria Castro conferred with revolutionary counterpart Abdelaziz Bouteflika on issues of international, bilateral, and regional cooperation, including the 15^th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Cuba has led the NAM since the organization’s 14th summit transpired in Havana in 2006. During the latest summit, however, the rotating three-year NAM chairmanship will be transferred from Castro to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. The NAM includes many dozens of Third World countries laboring under Marxist or Arab socialist dictatorships. In reality, the Non-Aligned Movement is not “non-aligned” at all but, rather, aligned with Moscow.

After rubbing elbows with his NAM buds in Algeria and Egypt, Castro materialized in Namibia, replicating part of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s recent tour of Africa. “Your visit provides a valuable opportunity to further consolidate the excellent bilateral relations and the longstanding bonds of friendship and solidarity that exists between our two countries,” Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba gushed when Castro arrived in the Namibian capital Windhoek. According to Pohamba, Namibia intends to expand cooperation with Cuba in infrastructure development, agriculture, fishing, and health. Castro, like Medvedev, will also meet Sam Nujoma, former Namibian president and ex-commander of the South-West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), before flying to Angola for a two-day visit.

Political ties between Havana and Windhoek were reinforced at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, when Cuban troops joined their Angolan counterparts and SWAPO guerrillas, under the command of Soviet generals, in ousting the South African Defense Force from southern Angola and South-West Africa, then a de facto province of South Africa. “We will never forget the proud years in the trenches in Angolan soil and the sacrifices Namibians, Cubans and Angolans made to liberate southern Africa from apartheid South African rule,” enthused Castro. Namibia, which achieved independence in 1990, hosts more than 140 Cuban “health professionals” (communist ideologists?), while more than 130 Namibians are studying in Cuba (where they are no doubt receiving hefty doses of Marxist indoctrination).

On July 20 Castro wrapped up his African tour by flying to Angola’s capital Luanda, where he was welcomed by Angolan Prime Minister Antonio Paulo Kassoma and other senior government officials (pictured above). On Tuesday he will meet privately with Angolan counterpart Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has held this post since 1979. The Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has ruled the country since 1975 when independence was achieved from Portugal. The Chinese state media reports: “Angola and Cuba share historic cooperation and friendship relations which can date back to the early stages of the Angolan liberation struggle during the 1970s and 1980s when Angola fought against foreign aggressions to maintain the country’s territorial integrity.” Cuba’s communist dictator will complete his Angolan adventure on Wednesday.

>Blogger’s Note: Your resident blogger interviewed on political crisis in Honduras, communist threat in Latin America

>Last week an American Christian pastor with an Internet radio program interviewed your resident blogger for the fourth time in three years. The subject, of course, was communism as a threat in the 21st century, with a special focus on the political crisis in Honduras. Since I prefer to post anonymously at this site while the interviews were conducted under my real name, it may be some time before I create links to the interviews. However, I am pleased that I was once again able to propagate the “Final Phase” message. Thanks again, too, to all of our visitors here.

>Latin America File: Fidel Castro calls on USA to withdraw troops from Honduras, Ortega accuses Micheletti of fomenting war against Nicaragua

>– Chavez Defends Fellow Drug Runner Zelaya against Honduran Media Charges, Bemoans Stories about “Mysterious Venezuelan Light Planes” Arriving in Honduras “Loaded with Dollars and Drugs”

Pictured here: On July 5 Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega welcomes ousted Honduran counterpart Manuel Zelaya to Augusto Sandino International Airport in Managua. In his first attempt to return to his homeland, Zelaya initially intended to land at Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa, but the Honduran military blocked the runway, forcing the pilot to divert the flight. Toncontin is normally used for both civilian and military aircraft.

The circumstantial evidence is mounting that Latin America’s Red Axis leaders, mainly Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega, are building a case to justify military intervention in Honduras on behalf of deposed leftist lackey Manuel Zelaya, possibly in conjunction with Zelaya’s reported return to his homeland on July 18. The war drums from Havana, Caracas, and Managua are indeed deafening. However, the shopping mall regime is not paying attention, having already forgotten about the March 2008 “Andean Crisis,” when Venezuela and Ecuador deployed troops and tanks to their respective borders with Colombia after Colombian soldiers attacked a jungle camp maintained by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia on Ecuadorean soil. A weeklong showdown ensued between these countries, almost bringing South America to the brink of war.

Historically, it should be recalled, belligerent nations will often accuse their intended victims of “provocations” to cloak an otherwise naked act of aggression. This was the case in September 1939 when Nazi Germany staged a provocation and attributed it to Poland in order to justify Berlin’s invasion of the other country.

From the safety of Guatemala City and Managua this week, wealthy rancher-turned-socialist Zelaya openly called for a popular insurrection to overthrow the de facto government of President Roberto Micheletti. According to Micheletti, Zelaya reportedly intends to sneak back into his homeland from Nicaragua this weekend. Two weeks ago the former congressionial speaker accused Ortega of moving his troops to the two countries’ common border, a charge that Nicaragua’s past/present Marxist dictator and a spokesman for the Nicaraguan National Army (NNA) promptly refuted. In response to Chavez’s declaration within 24 hours of the June 28 coup in Tegucigalpa that he had placed his armed forces on alert and would intervene if Caracas’ diplomats were harmed, Micheletti also warned that Honduras was prepared to repel a Venezuelan-led invasion of his country.

Now Ortega is accusing Micheletti of fabricating an “armed incident” between their two countries. Speaking on Thursday night at a photo op with Guatemalan indigenous leader and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu, Comandante Ortega lashed out at the Honduran coup leaders:

We have been informed of plans to dress Honduran troops with uniforms from the Nicaraguan National Army and attack Honduran military facilities to justify a confrontation. The usurper government has stepped up patrols along the borders with our country, with troops and all types of arms, including antiaircraft [units] that could be a prelude to a provocation. The de facto government wants to make the situation worse to cover up its crime.

Ortega once again protested that his troops were not mobilizing along the northern border with Honduras, adding: “We reject any campaign orchestrated against Nicaragua and Venezuela by infiltrating commandos from other nations.” On the presidential website, Ortega alleged that Washington was conspiring with Nicaraguan business leaders to overthrow his second Sandinista regime, but confidently bragged that the country’s armed forces and police stood behind his government: “They’re thinking about a coup in Nicaragua to create chaos and anarchy and to call US troops to come take the government away from the people. Honduran business leaders and US officials had a hand in Zelaya’s removal, even if President Barack Obama didn’t have any idea the coup was coming.”

With Venezuela contributing the bulk of such forces, the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis can hurl 660,000 troops at Honduras’ 20,000 troops. Any observer with the most rudimentary knowledge of military logistics and geography will appreciate the fact that Cuba and Venezuela must employ suitable modes of transportation to fly or ship their troops to Central America.

Not so coincidentally, former dictator Fidel Castro, enjoying his retirement after many years of oppressing the Cuban people, has called on the USA to withdraw its troops from Honduras to “ease the situation” there:

The only correct decision at this moment is to demand that U.S. authorities stop interfering and providing military assistance to coup leaders and withdraw their troops from Honduras. The civil coup in Honduras has created a really complicated situation in Latin America, which cannot be resolved by traps, cunning and lies.

Lying through his teeth as usual and conveniently ignoring Cuba’s subversive influence throughout the region, the 82-year-old revolutionary added: “New details of U.S. involvement [in the coup] emerge daily and it [the coup] will result in a broad resonance across the whole Latin America.” The region’s Red Axis leaders have presumably concluded that armed intervention on their part in Honduras, with US troops on the ground, could be problematic, militarily, politically, and diplomatically.

An editorial in an online Cuban youth newspaper correctly recognizes the Honduran political crisis as a test of the Obama White House’s resolve to defend its alliance with Honduras, the relevance of the Organization of American States, and the viability of the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis. Enrique Ubieta Gómez says: “This is the battle that is being fought today in Managua by the presidents of the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for Our America) and which will be faced tomorrow by the Honduran people. This battle will define the destiny of Our America.”

Incidentally, Fidel’s younger brother Raul, the Cuban president, recently wrapped up a trip to long-time ally Algeria, his second since February, and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where he transferred the chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) from himself to Egypt’s socialist dictator Hosni Mubarak. The NAM, following the lead of the United Nations, Organization of American States, ALBA, and Caribbean Community also passed a resolution on July 15 condemning the Honduran coupists and calling for Zelaya’s re-installment as president. Incidentally, the NAM has for decades described itself as “non-aligned,” but in reality is subserviently aligned with Moscow.

We suspect that Raul Castro, Chavez, and Ortega, with the exiled Zelaya in attendance, concocted the scenario now unfolding in Central America at the emergency summits of ALBA, the Central American Integration System, and the Rio Group that took place in Managua on June 29, the day after the coup. Regular visitors to our blog may recall the photograph of Zelaya joking around with Chavez and Ortega that we posted on June 30. Honduras’ deposed president did not look too crestfallen over his circumstances. Since communists think long term, it is likely that elements of the plot to establish a leftist dictatorship in Honduras via a constitutional referendum were contrived well before the military-backed coup.

Meanwhile, Latin America’s Red Axis leaders converged in yet another strategy session in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. There the country’s communist president Morales hosted Chavez, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, as well as the vice president of Cuba’s council of ministers, Jorge Luis Sierra, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana, Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez, and Honduras’ de jure foreign minister Patricia Rodas. The restoration of Zelaya to the Honduran presidency occupied an important spot on the meeting’s agenda. The summit included a military march-past consisting of troops from the host nation Bolivia, as well as Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru.

On the streets of Honduras’ second largest city, San Pedro Sula, two left-wing activists, Roger Bados and Ramon Garcia were slain this past weekend by unknown gunmen. Both Bados and Garcia were cadres of the Democratic Unification Party (PUD), a haven for the country’s communist guerrillas. Bados was a local PUD chairman and a member of the Popular Bloc, a coalition of 30 workers’ organizations, while Garcia had taken part in pro-Zelaya demonstrations, proving that Honduran communists support the exiled president. However, don’t be surprised if the world’s leftist press resurrects stories about “right-wing death squads” in response to these slayings.

Red Cocaine Tracks in Honduras

Regional integration in Latin America under communist guidance is only part of the story behind Zelaya’s ouster. Last Sunday the Castro Brothers’ disciple Chavez also demanded that Obama withdraw US troops from Honduras. Up to 600 soldiers assigned under the US Southern Command are based at the site of the Honduran Air Force Academy in Soto Cano, which is located about 60 miles northwest of the national capital Tegucigalpa. The world press, including Kremlin-run Novosti, normally mischaracterizes Soto Cano as a US military installation, which it is not. The primary responsibility of Joint Task Force-Bravo is to interdict the Western Hemisphere narcotics trade, which begins in guerrilla-held territory in Colombia and other communist-controlled spots in South America; migrates through Central American transshipments spots like Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala; daily besieges the Mexican government and civilians with heavily armed cartels; and spills over a porous border into the USA.

In 1990 terrorism and national security expert Joseph Douglass published Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West, which exposed the Communist Bloc’s use of the international narcotics trade as a weapon to demoralize and debilitate the West prior to the initiation of military operations in a hot war. Twenty years ago in Latin America the cast of cocaine-carting communist characters included the Castro Bros. in Cuba; Maoist Tomas Borge and the Ortega Bros., Daniel and Humberto, in Nicaragua; the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador; and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. At the time Panama’s military strongman Manuel Noriega also “dabbled” in the narcotics trade. Toward the end of his dictatorship, Noriega, who is not a communist, shifted allegiance from the US Central Intelligence Agency to Cuba’s Directorate of General Intelligence, prompting his forced removal by President George H. W. Bush in 1989.

Eighteen years after the Cold War supposedly ended, however, the Communist Party of Cuba still oppresses the people of that island; the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) is once again consolidating its dictatorship in Managua; former FSLN interior minister Borge has been assigned to Nicaragua’s embassy in Peru, the past killing fields of the resurgent Shining Path guerrillas; the FMLN transformed itself into a political party and peacefully assumed control of the reins of government in San Salvador, and the FARC continues to plot the demise of the “imperialist, fascist, bourgeois” government in Bogota. For his part, Noriega completed his US sentence in September 2008 but, from the confines of his Miami prison cell, is still fighting an extradition request from the French government. Panama’s new right-wing president, Ricardo Martinelli, has indicated that Noriega is not welcome to return to his homeland.

In addition to these veteran actors in Moscow’s subversive drama, new communists have taken up residence on the bloc, including Chavez who, on one of his annual trips to Moscow, received the commendation of communist party boss Gennady Zyuganov as a “reliable friend,” and through whom FARC commanders are seeking to purchase late-model Russian-built surface-to-air missiles, now in the possession of the Venezuelan armed forces. Other faithful South American errand boys for the Soviet strategists include Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador, both of whom have rather tellingly shut down Washington’s counter-narcotics operations in their respective countries. On July 17, in fact, the US military halted operations at its base in Manta, Ecuador, a presence that the socialist regime in Quito views as “unconstitutional.”

Stuffed in the financial backpockets or riding on the ideological coattails of these hard-core commies are Latin America’s unprincipled center-left leaders, such as Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Paraguay’s Lugo, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, Guatemala’s Alvaro Colom, and Grenada’s Tillman Thomas who, in the presence of the Cuban vice president, recently renamed his island’s main airport after deceased Marxist dictator Maurice Bishop, Fidel’s faithful friend.

Both Chavez and deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya have also been accused of complicity in the drug trade. Ironically, after the coup that deposed Zelaya, Chavez stepped up to the plate to defend his stooge against these charges, which appeared in the Honduran media. “Now they are accusing Zelaya of being a drug-trafficker,” moaned Zelaya’s chief backer, adding: “they say it in 100 newspapers, as article and breaking news. They report that since the ousting of Zelaya–a constitutional ousting, they say–mysterious Venezuelan light planes stop arriving there loaded with dollars and drugs. Thus, they use this ghost for anything, for ousting governments, for killing people.”

Chavez refers to the “ghost” of Venezuelan complicity in Moscow’s red cocaine plot. There is no ghost. The Chavezista regime’s integral role in that scheme is well documented. With typically breathtaking communist hypocrisy, Chavez ranted: “The coup d’état in Honduras marks a resumption of the aggression on the peoples of this continent; that is why all the peoples in this continent must stand up in the fight against dictatorship and imperialism that became a tyrannical government in Honduras.”

>Latin America File: Zelaya confers with Colom, Ortega; Honduran bloggers: Agents provocateur infiltrating country to support insurrection

>– Micheletti Government Reimposes Curfew Ahead of Anticipated Unrest, De Facto President Offers to Resign to Preempt Turmoil but Insists Zelaya Cannot Return

– Communist Nightmare in Venezuela:
1) PDVSA Boss: State Oil Workers Must Join Socialist Battalions, Counter-Revolutionaries to Be Purged
2) Chavez’s Land Redistribution Program Impoverishes Country
3) National Guard Clashes with Protesters at Opposition- Controlled Police Station

Pictured above: Honduran soldiers.

On Tuesday Honduras’ exiled president Manuel Zelaya showed up in Guatemala City to confer privately with fellow center-leftist, President Alvaro Colom, who welcomed this puppet of the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis with open arms. Reiterating Monday’s call for a popular insurrection to topple the military-backed regime of rival president Roberto Micheletti, Zelaya declared upon his arrival in Guatemala City:

This weekend we are planning many internal activities in the country. We are not going to rest, and the public is not going to rest, because the right against oppression is a right that people have. In this case the public has a right to defend itself. That leads to a general insurrection. That leads to a permanent insurrection by the people against the government.

The next day Zelaya left Guatemala for Nicaragua, to confer with one of his main supporters, past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega in what is probably the deposed president’s fifth appearance in Managua since his ouster on June 28. Guatemala, unlike Honduras, is not a member of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, but does belong to the Central American Integration System (SICA). On July 1 Ortega handed over SICA’s rotating presidency to Costa Rican counterpart Oscar Arias. Guatemala, however, has signed onto Hugo Chavez’s Petrocaribe, by which Venezuela’s red regime props up regional allies with subsidized oil.

On Tuesday Zelaya’s host Colom requested Caracas to provide more intelligence with respect to Chavez’s assertion that a coup d’etat is brewing against his own government. “I can attest to a coup attempt in Guatemala,” Comrade Hugo ranted last Friday. At that time Chavez and sidekick Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president, asserted that the leftist regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were in danger of being overthrown by their respective militaries and business oligarchies. This is not likely in Nicaragua, though, where “hardline” Sandinista Omar Halleslevens is the army’s top general. We have no independent intelligence to confirm Chavez’s assertions which, more than anything else, are probably designed to generate a pretext for Red Axis military intervention in Honduras.

Meanwhile, in the streets of Tegucigalpa the military-backed government has reimposed a curfew in advance of the public unrest that Zelaya has called for this weekend. De facto President Micheletti has offered to resign to preempt an uprising, but only if Zelaya does not return, which has consistently been the interim government’s chief condition for a peace settlement. In a troubling but not surprising story, Canada Free Press reported on July 16 that agents provocateur are infiltrating Honduras from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to aid Zelaya partisans in staging a rebellion. Citing bloggers on the ground in Honduras, this conservative Canadian news outlet states:

Hondurans are trying to get word out by Twitter that they are receiving threatening text messages on their cell phones tonight, telling them to stay inside and not leave their homes tomorrow night. “Now more than ever I will be the first one out the door,” Honduran Pedro Martinez told Canada Free Press tonight. Pedro Martinez is the pseudonym we gave to the young Honduran professional that Canada Free Press (CFP) walked through Twitter hookup last week. “Tomorrow might be a bad day,” Pedro tipped off CFP on twitter. “People are infiltrating Honduras thru (sic) Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua with the intention to create chaos.”

Canada Free Press then quotes Micheletti as saying: “There are reports, I don’t know if they are real, I haven’t been officially informed, that there is a group of armed people and that Zelaya is going to enter over the Nicaraguan border this Saturday.” Nearly two weeks ago Honduras’ de facto president asserted that Nicaraguan troops had been deployed to the two countries’ common border.

In a related story, US Ambassador to Nicaragua Robert Callahan has denied that Washington orchestrated the June 28 coup that ousted Zelaya. Callahan was responding to charges uttered by Chavez on his regular Sunday TV-radio rant-in “Alo Presidente.” Callahan insisted that US President Barack Hussein Obama recognizes Zelaya as the legitimate president of Honduras. In fact, Callahan elaborated, US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens afforded protection to Zelay’s wife and one of his sons at his residence during the coup. “We have also supported the efforts from the Organization of American States and from Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to find a constitutional, peaceful and quick solution to this problem,” Callahan assured reporters.

On Sunday, Chavez urged Washington to remove its “puppet regime” in Tegucigalpa. “If the United States really does not back the coup it should withdraw its troops from the Palmerola military base,” he chided, referring to Soto Cano Air Base’s other name. Soto Cano is home to the Honduran Air Force Academy and is not a US military installation, as commonly reported. During the 1980s US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North used Soto Cano, which is 60 miles northwest from Tegucigalpa, as a base of operations to support the Contras against Ortega’s first Sandinista regime.

Incidentally, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez has broken ranks with leftist clergymen in the region, such as ex-bishop Fernando Lugo, president of Paraguay, by blaming Chavez for Honduras’ internal crisis and urging Zelaya not to return to his homeland. “This gentleman [meaning Chavez],” protested the good cardinal, “has tried to put his hands here. I wish him to leave us alone, to devote himself to rule his country and that is enough. No life should be lost for political reasons that may be solved through dialogue.”

Elsewhere in Latin America, the Chavezista regime in Venezuela has encountered some hiccoughs of late. The ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s land confiscation program has not yielded the bumper crop predicted by the country’s communist leaders but, instead, has impoverished the country. Lately, too, Chavez and his henchentities have chided state oil employees for not yet joining workplace “socialist battalions.” “By now, there should not be a single counter-revolutionary in the heart of our company, our industry,” Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez warned PDVSA workers at a rally. “There cannot be a single PDVSA installation where socialist committees do not exist. Whoever is not in a committee will be suspected of conspiring against the revolution.” In Cuba the communist dictatorship exercises control over the population through local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, while in Nicaragua the neo-Sandinista regime has set up Councils of Citizens’ Power, replicating the functions of the 1980s-era Sandinista Defense Committees.

Yesterday in Curiepe, a small town east of Caracas in Miranda State, Venezuela’s National Guard clashed with protesters when they tried to re-assume control over a police station controlled by a leading opponent of the Chavezista regime. The New York Times reports that “The protesters hurled rocks, bottles and homemade bombs. Troops in riot gear fired tear gas at the crowd.” State Governor Henrique Capriles criticized the National Guard for acting like the “militia of a political party.” On July 21 Caracas Metropolitan Mayor Antonio Ledezma and three state governors will travel to Washington to meet with the general secretary of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza. Ironically, they will advise Insulza, a Chilean socialist who backs Zelaya’s reinstatement, that Chavez has stripped them of most powers and functions.

>Blogger’s Note: Neo-Soviet Russia’s Leninist Leadership chart updated

>We have updated our Neo-Soviet Russia’s Leninist Leadership chart. There are two changes. Last year Nikolai Makarov replaced Yuri Baluyevsky as Russia’s top general. In addition, Oleg Shenin, mastermind behind the potemkin anti-Gorbachevist coup of August 1991 and gray eminence behind the Soviet strategic deception died on May 28 of this year. Of the older generation of high-profile Soviet strategists, only Mikhail Gorbachev, Yevgeny Primakov, and Eduard Shevardnadze remain. The torch of Soviet communism’s quest for global domination will therefore in all likelihood be passed to Gennady Zyuganov, the 65-year-old chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

>Latin America File: Micheletti-Zelaya peace talks fail; deposed president issues 1-week ultimatum to military-backed regime to relinquish power

>– Chavez Says Honduran Peace Talks “Dead,” Demands “Gringo” Troops withdraw from Honduras, Urges “Patriotic” (Leftist) Elements in Honduran Army to Stage Counter-Coup

– Venezuelan Dictator and Bolivian Counterpart Morales Accuse “Oligarchies” in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua of Seeking Ouster of Leftist Regimes

Pictured above: Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales attend the Central American Integration System (SICA) summit in Managua on June 29. Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia–the countries of which these men are presidents–are not accredited observer states at SICA meetings. However, these men, who are all communists, have a vested interest in reinstalling their puppet Manuel Zelaya into the Honduran presidency. How far they will go and how low they will stoop should become apparent in the weeks ahead.

Some months ago the people of Honduras woke up to the fact that their country was being absorbed into the regional Communist Bloc via the leftward drift of President Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya and his slavish allegiance to Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez. Then, on June 28, in what was essentially an anti-communist putsch, the leadership of the ruling Liberal Party disavowed its colleague and, with the assistance of the armed forces, roused a pajamas-clad Zelaya from bed and marched him off to an airplane bound for Costa Rica. Although the brain-dead MSM will never describe the Honduran coup as “anti-communist,” this is the testimony of the Honduran armed forces’ top legal counsel Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, a veteran of the counter-insurgency operations of the 1980s.

This past weekend de facto Honduran President Roberto Micheletti and Zelaya failed to reach an accord in San Jose under the aegis of President Oscar Arias, who purportedly hosted the de facto and de jure presidents of Honduras in his kitchen. During the “peace talks,” which were endorsed by the Organization of American States (OAS), the two politicians did not actually meet with each other directly. For his part, Zelaya continued to insist upon returning to his homeland as lawful president, against Micheletti’s threat to have him arrested. On arriving back in the Honduran capital, Micheletti sarcastically stated of his rival: “We are in agreement with his return here–but to be sent directly to the courts.” On Saturday Zelaya traveled to the Dominican Republic, then Washington to discuss the political crisis with officials of the Obama White House.

Prior to the conference the neo-Sandinista regime in Managua refused to grant permission to the Honduran Air Force to transport Micheletti through its airspace. This fact prompted us to speculate that Nicaragua and Venezuela, both of which possess Soviet/Russian man-portable surface-to-air missiles, were planning a “surprise” for Micheletti over the Caribbean Sea or Pacific Ocean. No such “surprise” materialized, as Honduras’ interim president returned safely home, but the Red Axis propaganda machine continues to beat the war drum against the post-coup government. The invective, bombast, and accusations emanating from Caracas over the weekend are particularly strident.

Yesterday Zelaya himself issued an ultimatum to the Micheletti government by demanding that the coup leaders relinquish power by the end of this week and permit him to re-assume his post, or face “alternative measures.” Speaking from the Honduran embassy in Managua, where he has visited four times since the coup, the deposed president stated: “The only objective of the dictatorial coup plotters is to use the mediation process and good will of Oscar Arias to distract people and prolong their dictatorship.” He then offered an ominous warning: “The people have a right to insurrection. Let me come back and it will be me with my people and you with your bayonets – and instead of shooting innocent kids, shoot me.”

Zelaya appears to be lifting a page from his paymaster Chavez’s script. During a Friday press conference in Caracas, Comrade Hugo, who has already suspended Petrocaribe oil shipments to Tegucigalpa, demanded that Honduras’ regular trading partners halt all commerce with the country until the Micheletti regime is toppled. On the same day, he also rebuked the USA’s leftist secretary of state, Hillary Clinton for endorsing the peace talks in San Jose, pronouncing them “dead” and branding Micheletti a “usurper.” “It was a grave error,” Chavez piously informed reporters, “It’s turned into a very dangerous trap for democracy that sets a very grave precedent.” Chavez described the actions taken by Washington against the “coupists” as “timid” and “contradictory.” He demanded that President Barack Hussein Obama impose economic sanctions on Honduras and withdraw his ambassador in Tegucigalpa. He mentioned that on Thursday he spoke by telephone with US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon to articulate his views.

Chavez also accused “right-wing movements” in countries allied with Venezuela, including Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Guatemala, of plotting to destabilize their leftist governments. Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, however, denied that such a plot existed against his government, a stance backed by the country’s defense minister and armed forces chief Abraham Valenzuela, who stated: “The army is one of the few institutions that on a daily basis helps defend the rule of law and the country’s institutions.” Referring to the May 10 murder of prominent Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, Bolivia’s communist president Evo Morales chimed in: “The oligarchy invented a death to remove Colom from power.” In a video released after his demise, Rosenberg alleged that President Colom, First Lady Sandra Torres, presidential aide Gustavo Alejos, businessman Gregorio Valdez, and “top executives” of the public-private Banco de Desarrollo Agricola were plotting to kill him.

On Sunday, during his regular weekly rant-in, “Alo, Presidente,” Chavez characterized the political situation in Honduras as “explosive,” intimating that “some members” of the military in that country may “take action” to restore Zelaya, who could arrive in his homeland “at any moment.” The Venezuelan dictator accused Micheletti of “violating” the Honduran constitution and stated that Micheletti, not Zelaya, would be arrested. “The situation is an explosive situation,” Chavez admonished. Referring to putative leftist elements in the Honduran military, he added: “Don’t be surprised if a patriotic current comes out of the military.”

Even though Obama, a pro-Islamic socialist, has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, Chavez accused Washington of backing Zelaya’s ouster. “The new specter that the bourgeoisie and the Yankee empire have invoked throughout the continent isn’t socialism and isn’t communism, it’s Chavismo,” he bemoaned, seemingly tongue in cheek. During the same televised program, Chavez also demanded that the USA withdraw its up to 600 troops from a Honduran air base at Soto Cano: “If the U.S. really was against the coup it would have already withdrawn its troops from the Palmerola military base. Obama, pull your gringo soldiers out of Honduras, deprive the rebels of aid, freeze their accounts, stop giving them visas, and you will see how their rule ends.”

At the same time, Cuban-based Prensa Latina has picked up and reproduced for online publication the feverish ramblings of US leftists like Michael Parenti, whose lead-in for the article “The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?” runs as follows:

First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas (known to many of us as “School of the Assassins”). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.”

Parenti offers no documentation for this supposed conspiracy between the US and Honduran military brass, while President Obama turned a blind eye. However, he should consider seeking employment in Venezuela as Chavez’s speech writer.

The cumulative result of this Red Axis propaganda, in our opinion, is to provide these regimes with an excuse to coerce Honduras back into the fold. In past posts we have presented evidence that Latin America’s Red Axis leaders might be building a case to assemble a multinational military force to invade Honduras and reinstate their puppet, who is also a close ally of Raul Castro and Daniel Ortega. Some factors that prompt us to think along these lines include the following:

1) in January 2008 Chavez proposed transforming the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) into an “anti-imperialist” (anti-USA) military coalition

2) within 24 hours of the Honduran putsch Chavez placed his armed forces on alert and threatened to intervene if his diplomats in Tegucigalpa were harmed

3) within 24 hours of the same the Red Axis leaders, with the exiled Zelaya in attendance, converged in Managua to strategize at emergency summits of ALBA, the Central American Integration System, and the Rio Group

4) the following Friday Castro chaired a session of Cuba’s National Defense Council to assess the communist regime’s war readiness

5) during the week following the coup de facto President Micheletti accused Venezuela of preparing an invasion force and Nicaragua of moving troops to its border with Honduras.

If such a scheme is in fact in the works, then the Three Amigos—Castro, Chavez, and Ortega—may seek the imprimatur of the United Nations, OAS, the South American Defense Council—an organ of the new Union of South American Nations—and/or ALBA before commencing military operations. Ortega, for example, does exercise some “pull” in the UN by way of Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, former Sandinista foreign minister, Catholic priest, and president of the UN General Assembly.

Meanwhile, the military-backed government in Honduras has lifted its two-week curfew even as it detained six journalists employed with Caracas-based Telesur and state-run Venezolana de Television on Sunday. The journalists were taken to police headquarters for five hours and their passports confiscated. They were then taken to their hotel, their passports returned, and ordered not to leave until immigration officials arrived. “They told us we should leave the country because our security wasn’t guaranteed and we were at risk here,” complained Larry Sanchez, a Telesur technician who was among those who were detained. “‘We have intelligence and we’re following you,’ they said.” This was the second time since the June 28 coup that Telesur journalists have been detained. On the day following Zelaya’s ouster, Honduran soldiers arrested Telesur journalists at gunpoint in their hotel rooms, but later released them.

Founded in 2005, electronic media platform Telesur is funded by a multinational consortium of leftist regimes in Latin America, including Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. With the exception of Argentina and Uruguay, Telesur has overlapping membership with ALBA. Telesur is widely perceived by Latin American conservatives as a vehicle for promoting Marxism, “progressive” causes, regional integration, and anti-USA sentiment. It is critical of governments allied with Washington in the region, such as Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. US actor Danny Glover, along with many other left-wing “intellectuals” from the Western Hemisphere, sits on Telesur’s Board of Directors. Even though Cuba co-sponsors the TV network, its programming is censored on the island.

>Useful Idiots Bin: Obama meets Zyuganov in Moscow; red leader urges lifting of Cuba embargo, scrapping NMD plans, praises White House economic policy

>US President Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-Islamic socialist who bears the hallmarks of a Soviet mole. Following his election last November former Soviet dictator Mikhail (“I’ll Always Be a Communist”) Gorbachev urged Obama to implement perestroika (socialist restructuring) in the USA. Then, on March 20 Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, held an under-reported secret meeting with Gorbachev in the White House. We can only speculate that the former Soviet dictator once again urged Obama to communize America. In June, using the financial crisis as pretext, Gorby urged the leaders of the world to implement perestroika on a global basis.

During his first trip to Moscow earlier this week Obama met Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev, with whom he negotiated a replacement document for START 1, committing the US military to severely reducing its nuclear arsenal and the number of its delivery systems, as well as restricting deployment of these weapons to US territory. Obama also met with Russia’s KGB-communist dictator, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, at the latter’s Novo-Ogarevo residence outside Moscow, on July 7 (pictured above).

Significantly, while in Moscow, Obama also met the man whom we consider to be the real ruler of Russia, namely Gennady Zyuganov, Stalinist leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The CPRF is the main successor organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which still exists in phantom-like fashion across the “former” Soviet republics in the form of Oleg Shenin’s CPSU and Zyuganov’s Union of Communist Parties-CPSU. In previous posts, we reported that Putin and Medvedev “regularly” consult with Chairman Zyuganov, suggesting that the two men are competent frontmen for the Soviet strategists. Shenin was the mastermind behind the potemkin anti-Gorbachevist coup of August 1991 and is a gray eminence behind Soviet politics today.

During his encounter with Zyuganov, Obama apparently received his marching orders for US foreign policy. The Cuban state media reports that the Russian communist leader personally urged Obama to lift Washington’s 50-year-old economic blockade of Cuba, release the so-called “Cuban Five” spies from US prison, suspend plans to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization still further (that is, to include Georgia and Ukraine), and renounce the “useless” anti-missile system to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic. “Coincidentally,” Medvedev and Putin promote the same positions as official state policy. In other words, Russia’s politicians are all cut out of the same bolt of red cloth.

After meeting Obama, Chairman Zyuganov enthused about the White House’s economic policy: “I said that I had thoroughly studied the U.S. president’s anti-crisis program, that I liked it, as well as that it is socially oriented and primarily aimed at supporting poor people and enhancing the state’s role. I said all this to President Obama.” One blogger wryly comments: “Somehow I don’t think you’ll be seeing that endorsement on Whitehouse.gov.” Indeed.

If Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton follow through with some or all of these friendly recommendations, then it should be obvious that the White House has become functionally subordinate to the Kremlin. However, if Obama was a real patriot, like Ronald Reagan for example, if he was a real US-born citizen, if was not a communist dupe, then we could possibly expect him to call the Soviets’ bluff. Yes, the Cold War would be reactivated in earnest, but at least the enemy would once again be known and opportunities could be sought to finally crush the Bolshevik serpent in its lair.

>Latin America File: Zelaya, Micheletti attend 2-day peace talks brokered by Arias; Nicaragua forbids Micheletti to fly to Costa Rica via its airspace

>– Blast from the Past: Arias’ Impartiality as Peacemaker Suspect since Costa Rican President Shut Down CIA Base Supplying Contras during First Term (1986-1990)

– Honduras’ De Facto Foreign Minister: Cuban Professionals Indoctrinating and Organizing “Shock Groups” in Tegucigalpa

With the endorsement of the Organization of American States, under the leadership of Chilean socialist Jose Miguel Insulza, and the USA’s leftist administration, as represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias will reprise his role as peacemaker, first earned in the 1980s, by brokering a two-day peace conference between de jure Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and rival Roberto Micheletti. The talks will take place in the capital of Costa Rica, San Jose, and begin on Thursday. There will be no “tête-à-tête meeting,” though, between the exiled Zelaya and Micheletti. Honduras’ interim government has promised to hold elections, but vows to arrest Zelaya if he returns to his homeland, which he unsuccessfully attempted last Sunday. The ousted president has pledged to attempt another re-entry into Honduras, this time covertly.

On June 28 Micheletti obtained power on the heels of the region’s first post-Cold War era coup. Since his election in 2006 Zelaya’s chummy relationship with communist dictators Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega has led Honduras into formal association with the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis via the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas. This unholy confederacy, contends the leadership of Honduras’ ruling Liberal Party, was the primary motivation behind Zelaya’s interest in abolishing presidential term limits via a constitutional referendum. The Iranian state media correctly reports: “Honduran coup leaders accuse the deposed president of far-left policies that ‘threatened’ the interests of the country–a charge Zelaya denies.” Incidentally, in a previous generation “far left” meant “communism.”

Meanwhile, the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis is making good on earlier pronouncements about “punishing” the military-backed government of President Micheletti. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many other Latin American countries, for example, have already withdrawn their ambassadors from Tegucigalpa. In another “penal” act, Communist Cuba has withdrawn a contingent of 143 education professionals from Honduras. This is a good thing, Si? However, a “large” medical brigade will remain in the Central American country, reports the Havana Times, which rejects de facto Honduran foreign minister Enrique Ortez’s accusation that the Cubans are organizing and indoctrinating “shock groups” in Tegucigalpa.

On Wednesday Venezuela also confirmed that it cancelled its daily shipment of 20,000 barrels of oil to Honduras. “Venezuela cannot give benefits from Petrocaribe to a dictatorship, and even less to a small group of businessmen who made a coup,” Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez piously intoned, conveniently ignoring the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s crackdown on opposition television and radio stations. By cutting off Petrocaribe’s oil supply to the Micheletti regime, Caracas is simply proving that subsidized petroleum is a conduit by which Chavez promotes and supports his leftist allies in the region.

In a related development, last Sunday Micheletti accused Nicaragua of provocatively moving troops to the Honduran border, a charge that both Ortega and a spokesman for the Nicaraguan National Army, formerly the Sandinista People’s Army, swiftly denied. Independent confirmation of these troop movements in Nicaragua is not yet forthcoming and Micheletti is not publicizing the source of his intelligence. In any case, Ortega now feigns support for the peace talks but he is clearly not willing to make things easy for the post-coup government in Honduras.

To that end, the Iranian media reports that Managua will not permit the Honduran Air Force to transport Micheletti to Costa Rica via Nicaraguan airspace. Nicaragua, of course, is the only geographical barrier between Honduras and Costa Rica. While not posing an insurmountable barrier to Micheletti’s journey to San Jose, Ortega’s “difficult” behavior will require the Hondurans to re-route the acting president’s flight over the Pacific Ocean or the Caribbean Sea. Managua’s determination to hinder Micheletti’s journey begs the question: Is there an unpleasant surprise waiting for the Honduran leader and his entourage as they fly over the tropical waters, either coming or going? Not so coincidentally, both Nicaragua and Venezuela are known to possess man-portable surface-to-air missiles, the former hailing from the old Soviet era, the latter representing the most advanced Russian military technology.

Zelaya contends that General Romero Vasquez planned to assassinate him during the coup, but decided in the end to exile the president. However, perhaps Latin America’s Red Axis leaders are plotting to bump off Micheletti, thereby facilitating the reinstatement of their compliant lackey. A few naval speedboats from Nicaragua, otherwise employed in the Moscow-directed narcotics trade, some military intelligence from Cuba or Venezuela, and a dash of plausible deniability could create a power vacuum at the top of the military-backed regime in Tegucigalpa. On July 9, however, the New York Times reported that both Zelaya and Micheletti arrived safely at the site of the peace conference, Arias’ personal residence in a posh San Jose neighborhood. The same source pointed out that Zelaya “had not come to negotiate, but to set the terms of his return.”

Mildly center-leftist, Arias does not openly associate with Latin America’s Red Axis, but his stance toward the first Sandinista regime is worth recalling. At the link above the New York Times, quoting Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the US National Security Archive, provides some historical context. “During the 1980s Mr. Arias was a thorn in the side of the Reagan administration,” Kornbluh relates. At the time, of course, the White House was fighting a proxy war against Ortega’s first Sandinista regime via the Contras. The newspaper continues:

Mr. Arias’ predecessor, Luis Alberto Monge, received hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid and turned a blind eye as the C.I.A. used northern Costa Rica as a strategic outpost to supply the rebels. But when Mr. Arias took power in 1986 [for his first stint as president], he discovered and closed down a secret landing strip in northern Costa Rica the agency had used to supply contra rebels in neighboring Nicaragua.

Kornbluh is quoted as saying: “He was throwing a monkey wrench into the contra war in the name of peace.” In 2009 does Arias have another monkey wrench up his sleeve that will offer a quick fix for Zelaya and the Three Amigos, Castro, Chavez, and Ortega? If nothing else, Arias will go down in history as a sort of Costa Rican version of Jimmy (“Peanuts”) Carter.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Russian troops transported to China for Peace Mission 2009, wrap up Caucasus 2009 drill near Georgia

>– President Obama Meets Medvedev in Moscow, Facilitates Long-Time Soviet Goal

– START 1 to Expire in December, Successor Document to Restrict US Atomic Warheads to “Sovereign Territory,” Force Withdrawal from Western Europe, Elsewhere (Korean Peninsula?)

On Wednesday 1,300 Russian troops near the city of Ussuriysk, in the country’s Far East, began boarding a Chinese train that will transport them to Shenyang Military District by July 13. There the two communist superpowers will carry out their fourth joint war game, Peace Mission 2009, after decades of feigned hostility. Under cover of an “anti-terrorist drill” the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is the institutional embodiment of the Moscow-Beijing Axis, will continue its preparations for war against the West.

The Russian contingent in Peace Mission 2009 is organized into a reinforced motor-rifle battalion and an airborne assault company. Accompanying the servicemen will be 160 pieces of military hardware, including 70 tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other armored vehicles. About 20 military aircraft will participate, including Il-76 transport planes, Su-25 jets, Su-24 tactical bombers, Su-27 jets, Mi-8 helicopters, but no strategic aviation. Russia’s top brass is expected to arrive in the area of the exercises on July 11 to coordinate with Chinese counterparts both the unloading of military cargo and the operational details of Peace Mission 2009. The People’s Liberation Army will contribute an equal number of troops, weapons, and ammunition.

The first three joint Sino-Soviet military exercises were Peace Mission 2005, Peace Mission 2007, and Norak Antiterror 2009. The first two were held in Russia and the People’s Republic of China, while the third was held in Tajikistan in April. Peace Mission 2010 is slated to take place in Kazakhstan. Russia and China are apparently no longer holding combined war games every other year but, rather, emboldened by the West’s apathy, carrying out back-to-back exercises in the same year.

In his 25-year-old predictive work, New Lies for Old, KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn warned that after the fake demise of communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet strategists would openly ally themselves with the Red Chinese in “one clenched fist.” This remarkable “prophecy” has been vindicated many times since Moscow and Beijing healed their “breach” in the 2001 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.

Elsewhere in Russia, near the partly occupied country of Georgia, 8,500 troops have completed the wide-ranging Caucasus 2009 drill in the regions of Krasnodar, Stavropol, Astrakhan, Volgograd, and Rostov, as well as in the restive, internal republics of North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Karachay-Cherkess. Joining the soldiers of the North Caucasus Military District were air force and anti-aircraft units, and troops from the Novorossiisk naval base on the Black Sea, the Caspian Flotilla, the regional border department of the Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB) for the Southern Federal District, and the North Caucasus command of the Interior Ministry.

“During the exercise a wide spectrum of adequate military measures was carried out to ensure the security of Russian citizens and the safety of transport facilities, energy communications and strategic objects as well as measures aimed at protecting Russia’s economic interests,” explained Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Bobrun, spokesentity for the hosting military district.

Under cover of last year’s Caucasus Frontier 2008 drill the Russian armed forces invaded Georgia via the separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Even the MSM has been speculating over the last several months that Russia intends to finish off last year’s business by besieging Tbilisi and overthrowing the government of President Mikhail Saakashvili.

Following the Soviet military campaign in Georgia last year Russia’s brass acknowledged its inability to collect reliable battlefield intelligence, a deficiency that led to the downing of a Backfire bomber by a Georgian surface-to-air-missile. Accordingly, the Russian military has purchased 12 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from Israel, which also supplied weapons and training to the Georgians in past years. Vyacheslav Dzirkaln, deputy head of Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, confided that the main goal of the purchase was to scrutinize the Israeli achievements in the development of spy drones in order to build reliable UAVs domestically. According to various estimates, the Russian armed forces need up to 100 UAVs and at least 10 guidance systems to maintain effective battlefield reconnaissance in case of any military conflict.

In previous posts we considered Israel’s background involvement in the Russian-Georgian conflict from the vantage of Bible prophecy, especially the predicted Russian-Persian-Arab invasion of Israel, which we believe will take place at the beginning of the seven-year tribulation prophesied by Daniel.

Meanwhile, on Monday US President Barack Hussein Obama, a socialist enamored with Islam, wrapped up his first official meeting with Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow. There Obama, whom we regard as a likely Soviet mole, promised to slash the US atomic arsenal from 2,200 operational warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years. The US military will also be required to limit the number of strategic delivery systems to between 500 and 1,100 units. Theoretically, the Kremlin will be obligated to make the same cuts to its nuclear stockpile . . . but don’t hold your breath.

The new strategic arms reduction agreement will replace the START 1 pact, which will expire in December. President Medvedev, a former Soviet Komsomol graduate and compliant lackey of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia’s KGB-communist dictator, enthusiastically called the treaty a “basic element of our mutual security.” The document states formal ratification will take place in the “near future” and would be in effect for 10 years.

Significantly, under the new treaty the USA and Russia can only deploy warheads on their “sovereign territories.” Furthermore, START 1’s successor does not address civilian nuclear cooperation in the sphere of third countries. These stipulations will therefore obligate the USA to remove its nuclear warheads with associated delivery systems from Western Europe, a long-time Soviet goal. Conversely, Russia can continue promoting “civilian” nuclear energy programs in communist dictatorships like Venezuela and Cuba and Islamic dictatorships like Iran, as well as covertly doing the same in other communist dictatorships like North Korea. Along this theme Obama and Medvedev discussed Tehran and Pyongyang’s nuclear programs.

“North Korea has abandoned its own commitments and violated international law,” the US president intoned, praising the neo-Soviet leadership: “That’s why I’m pleased that Russia joined us in passing UN Security Council resolution that calls for strong steps to block North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.” This is the same UN resolution, by the way, that forbids the US Navy from forcibly interdicting North Korean vessels suspected of transporting weapons of mass destruction. So much for “strong steps.” “It is of common knowledge that the situation on the planet depends on the situation in the Korean Peninsula, in the Middle East,” Medvedev replied piously. The dangerous political “situation” in the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, however, is largely the result of Soviet machinations over many decades.

>WW4 File: S. Korean, US government websites paralyzed by sustained DOS attack beginning July 4; intel officials in Seoul suspect NK cyberwarfare unit

>Civilian and military intelligence officials in South Korea, according to a major news agency, believe that on July 4 computer hackers in North Korea and/or communist sympathizers in South Korea launched cyber attacks that totally or partly paralyzed government websites in the Republic of Korea and the USA for at least four days. The sites of 11 South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, and the headquarters of the ruling Grand National Party, were knocked offline or experienced access problems as of late Tuesday. There are no reports of similar cyber attacks in other Asian countries. However, US government websites were also affected over the Independence Day holiday weekend, including those of the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, and Transportation Department.

Pictured above: Employees of the Korea Internet Security Center monitor the effects of North Korea’s latest cyber-salvos against the South.

On Wednesday the state-run Korea Information Security Agency in Seoul revealed that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 computers overseas were infected and employed for the cyber attack. The agency believes that “The attack was thoroughly prepared and committed by hackers at the level of a certain organization or state.” South Korean and US authorities are cooperating in the investigation.

In May the South Korean media reported that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was operating a cyberwarfare unit that specializes in hacking into South Korean and US military networks to glean classified information and disrupt service. The latest denial of service attack on South Korean and US computer networks was unusually lengthy and sophisticated and, suggests Yonhap news agency, possibly bore the hallmarks of Chinese hackers. We have previously reported on successful Russian and Chinese attempts to disrupt the Pentagon’s computer network and/or drop the electrical grids in the Continental USA. The Communist Bloc may very well launch a cyberattack against civilian and military computer networks in the West in the days or hours prior to a sneak military assault.

>Latin America File: Zelaya regroups with allies in San Salvador, plots 2nd attempt to return to Honduras, but not by “regular entry points”

>US Secretary of State Clinton Announces Costa Rican President Arias to Mediate Conflict between Rival Honduran Governments

This past Sunday Honduras’ military-backed government prevented Manuel Zelaya’s airplane, a jet loaned by Venezuela’s communist thug-in-chief Hugo Chavez, from landing at Toncontin airport by blocking the runway with police and military vehicles. The deposed president began his flight from Washington DC, where he received the blessing of the Organization of American States (OAS) to return to his homeland and reassert his credentials as democratically elected head of state/government.

While in flight Zelaya communicated an order to the armed forces to receive his entourage. No doubt this order was countermanded by the de facto government of former congressional speaker, President Roberto Micheletti. Meanwhile, on the ground thousands of Zelaya partisans surged through the fence enclosing Tegucigalpa’s airport, but were repelled by soldiers who used tear gas, rubber bullets, and live rounds.At least five people were hit by gunfire and at least one killed.

Deterred, the deposed president flew to Managua, where he has received considerable support from Nicaragua’s past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega, and then San Salvador. There Zelaya, in collaboration with other regional leftist leaders who converged in El Salvador’s capital for that purpose, began to plot another attempt to return to Honduras. Present in San Salvador were Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo (“The Red Bishop”), and Jose Miguel Insulza, a Chilean who heads up the OAS. After KGB assets Chavez, Ortega, and Raul Castro, these individuals, in our opinion, represent the “second rank” of trenchant opponents to political and economic freedom in Latin America.

Both Zelaya and Micheletti, it should be noted, are members of Honduras’ ruling Liberal Party. However, repulsed by wealthy rancher Zelaya’s leftward drift since his election in 2006, the communist orientation of his domestic advisers, and his allegiance to Chavez, the Liberal Party has disowned Zelaya. Significantly, since the June 28 coup that ousted Zelaya, leftist groups have made no attempt to hide their support for Zelaya by organizing the People’s Resistance Front to overthrow the post-coup government. Significantly, the Communist Party USA has also denounced the “brutal” coupists and praised the Obama White House for acknowledging Zelaya as Honduras’ legitimate president.

On Monday Zelaya’s housing minister, Luis Roland Valenzuela, speaking in the Honduran capital, announced that his boss will make another attempt at returning to his homeland on July 8, but not through the “regular” entry points. Zelaya, he explained, will attend a press conference in Washington on Tuesday to announce his plans after a possible meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a leftist whose husband Bill, the former president, is a suspected KGB asset. “They deceived us,” Valenzuela complained, citing an alleged agreement with interim President Micheletti that would have allowed Zelaya to land. The Micheletti government denies that any such agreement was reached. “Have no doubt, I will return to Honduras,” Zelaya vowed to reporters in Managua, adding: “But I won’t say how, because otherwise they will wait for me in any town or state.”

Since the June 28 coup the military has arrested nearly 800 civilians for defying a government curfew, although most have since been released. Pictured above: Zelaya partisans protest outside the US embassy in Tegucigalpa on July 7. Note obligatory Che Guevara flag.

Meanwhile, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a new European Union-style organization with overlapping membership in ALBA (Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia), has joined the global chorus condemning Honduras’ military-backed government. On July 6, the foreign ministers of Uruguay and Chile argued that UNASUR can arbitrate the conflict in the Central American nation. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, an East German-educated socialist who has praised the legacy of Soviet/Cuban pawn Salvador Allende, is president pro tempore of UNASUR. Both Bachelet and OAS chief Insulza are cadres of the Socialist Party of Chile.

The Regional Military Threat Posed by the Havana-Caracas- Managua Axis

Within 24 hours of the June 28 coup in Tegucigalpa Chavez declared that he had placed his armed forces on alert and threatened to intervene if Venezuela’s ambassador was killed. It is significant that Honduran soldiers singled out the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan ambassadors for rough treatment, suggesting that the Micheletti government takes a dim view of these countries and their alliance with Zelaya. The ambassadors, however, were not “kidnapped” as the leftist press crowed.

On several occasions last week Honduras’ de facto president, without citing specific intelligence, alluded darkly to military forces that were preparing to invade his country and reinstall his opponent as head of state/government. Last Sunday Micheletti accused Nicaragua of deploying small squads of troops along their common border in a “psychological invasion” designed to intimidate Hondurans into accepting Zelaya’s return. “We have been informed that in the sector of Nicaragua, some troops are moving toward the border,” Micheletti contended in a televised news conference on Sunday. Ortega protested the charge: “There is no such conflict with Nicaragua. Our nation is not sending troops to Honduran territory. We are keeping our troops in their normal positions, where they have always been to protect national sovereignty.”

During the first Sandinista dictatorship, Nicaragua’s army, with 80,000 conscripts, was the largest in Central America. Although the Sandinista People’s Army was purportedly deprived of its Marxist foundation in the 1990s and is presently a mere shadow of its former strength, according to a 2005 US Defense Department assessment the commander of the Nicaraguan National Army is a “hardline Sandinista.”

In addition to pertinent military news from Venezuela and Nicaragua, it is worth observing that last Friday, four days after attending the Red Axis strategy sessions in Managua, President Castro chaired a meeting of Cuba’s National Defense Council. Reports on war readiness were delivered by officials of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba, the Communist Youth League, the Interior Ministry, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, and the provincial defense councils. Castro assessed the results of the training of regular troops and the Territorial Militia Troops, and advances made in the maintenance, modernization, and production of arms. He confided to those present that in 2003 the communist regime believed that then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was planning a “huge attack” against the island. In a related story, Cuba’s Bastion 2008 military exercise was postponed after last year’s devastating hurricane season, but we await its execution some time in 2009.

The Honduran armed forces coup, in our assessment, has raised the specter of a regional military threat posed by the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis. Along with Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, and Libya, the administration of President George W. Bush rightly identified Cuba with the “Axis of Evil.” In February 2008 President Chavez floated the idea of transforming ALBA, then known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and since June of this year as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, into an “anti-imperialist” (meaning anti-USA) military coalition.

Last month ALBA, founded in 2004, expanded by three countries and now embraces: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Notably, the first five countries are ideologically aligned with Moscow and recipients of Russian military hardware. Since the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front assumed control of the reins of government in El Salvador earlier this year, it is expected that that country, too, will shortly hook up with ALBA.

In view of the new episode of political instability in Central America, therefore, we believe that the coordinated movements of the Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Russian militaries in the Western Hemisphere bear close watching. Last year the MSM extensively covered Russia and Venezuela’s first-ever joint naval drill in the southern Caribbean Sea, as well as the week-long deployment of two Tu-160 Blackjack bombers at a Venezuelan air base. Both events were “post”-Cold War “firsts.” Not content with these anti-USA provocations, Moscow and Caracas have planned more combined maneuvers.

In itself, of course, the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis poses no threat to the USA, often touted as the world’s sole post-Cold War superpower. Nicaragua’s standing army has 14,000 active personnel, Cuba 46,000, and Venezuela 600,000. Spurred on by Russia and using a United Nations or OAS resolution as pretext, though, this communist troika could potentially threaten errant Red Axis members like Honduras, which boasts 20,000 troops, or anti-communist holdouts like Colombia, which has about 420,000 troops whose battle-readiness has been tested by the government’s decades-old war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua should also be viewed as potential bases either for Soviet subversion or a strategic nuclear attack against North America. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the under-reported arrival of Russian bomber crews in Cuba in 2008 to identify suitable refueling sites for their aircraft offer historic and contemporary proof that such a scenario is possible again.

Ortega and Arias Revive Cold War-Era Schism between Central America’s Center and Far Left

Incidentally, the return of the Sandinista National Liberation Front to open power in Nicaragua in 2007 should trouble that country’s southern neighbor Costa Rica, which has no standing army. On July 1 Ortega, president pro tempore of the Central American Integration System (SICA), reluctantly handed over this office to Oscar Arias, the mildly center-left president of Costa Rica. Instead, the Sandinista leader wanted to transfer the presidency of SICA to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, a devoted center-leftist who is chummy with Cuba and Nicaragua. Arias was not Ortega’s first pick since Costa Rica’s commitment level to SICA is less than that of its partners, whereas Nicaragua’s communist dictator is a staunch advocate of regional integration.

Twenty years ago, in a previous incarnation as Costa Rican president, Arias was instrumental in establishing the peace accord that ended Central America’s insurgencies, forcing the Soviet/Cuban-backed guerrillas to discard their machine guns in favor of voting machines. No doubt Ortega remembered this fact when he tapped Arias. No doubt, too, Latin America’s Red Axis leaders will bring considerable pressure upon Arias to support full-blown regional integration in Central America. On July 7 US Secretary of State Clinton announced that Arias will reprise his past role as peacemaker by mediating the conflict between Honduras’ rival governments.

>Latin America File: Honduras’ de facto president: Nicaraguan troops moving toward common border; Zelaya’s flight to Tegucigalpa diverted to Managua

>Just as we expected, it appears that Latin America’s Red Axis leaders, primarily including Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega, are prepared to use military force to reimpose their leftist lackey Manuel Zelaya upon an unwilling population. Honduras’ de facto President Roberto Micheletti, Reuters reports today, has announced that Nicaraguan troops are moving toward the two countries’ common border:

Honduras’ interim President Roberto Micheletti said on Sunday Nicaraguan troops were moving to the mutual frontier and urged Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to respect Honduran sovereignty.

He gave no further details about troop movements in Nicaragua which shares a border with Honduras to the southeast of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.

His comments came as ousted President Manuel Zelaya attempted to fly home a week after he was ousted in a coup. Zelaya is a left-wing ally of Ortega and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.

The interim government said it had contacted the Organization of American States to express its willingness to enter dialogue. The OAS earlier on Sunday suspended Honduras for refusing to reinstate Zelaya.

For its part, the Nicaraguan military denies that it has moved troops to the country’s northern border with Honduras, which served as a base for the Contras during the 1980s civil war against the first Sandinista regime. “Brother Honduran soldiers, brother Honduran officials, I want to assure you, swearing before God and nation, that Nicaragua is not deploying troops towards Honduras, and that we are not preparing any kind of attack on Honduran garrisons on the border,” past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega protested on domestic radio. Nicaragua’s top general, Omar Halleslevens, is regarded by the Pentagon as a “hardline Sandinista.”

Managua has also denounced statements issued by the Micheletti regime to the effect that the communist governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have armed Zelaya partisans ahead of his publicized return today. Denis Moncada, Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), refuted the allegations before the OAS General Assembly on Saturday.

In another previous post we suggested that military intervention to restore Zelaya to the presidency was a possible topic on the agenda of the leftist leaders who converged in Managua on Monday. There Ortega hosted the meetings of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Central American Integration System, and the Rio Group. At the time we quoted Micheletti as saying: “I have come to the presidency not by a coup d’etat but by a completely legal process as set out in our laws. Furthermore, I would like to warn Venezuela that our country is ready to go to war if there is interference by this gentleman [meaning Chavez]. Several battalions of troops were being prepared outside of Honduras for intervention.”

Last Monday, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador halted cross-border trade with Honduras. Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom is a compliant, pro-Cuban center-leftist, while the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front recently assumed control of El Salvador’s presidency for the first time.

On Friday Honduras’ military-backed government withdrew from the OAS, seeking to preempt today’s expulsion from that body. Zelaya, risking arrest, intends to return to his homeland in the company of fellow leftists, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and the OAS’s Chilean chief Jose Miguel Insulza.

On Sunday, reports the AFP news agency in a late-breaking story, military personnel and thousands of Zelaya partisans surrounded the airport in Tegucigalpa. Military vehicles blocked the runway to prevent Zelaya’s plane from landing (pictured above). The deposed president, who began his flight at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC and was accompanied by other aircraft containing the officials mentioned above, was forced to land in Managua.

In a related story, the newly inaugurated president of Panama, business magnate Ricardo Martinelli, has vowed to challenge the leftward shift in politics that has characterized Latin America over the last decade. Last Wednesday he promised: “I will challenge the ideological pendulum in Latin American by promoting free economics.” Intriguingly, Cuba sent a representative to attend Martinelli’s inauguration: Vice President Estaban Lazo Hernandez.

>WW4 File: N. Korea test-fires seven tactical missiles today, launched four on Thursday; Russia bolsters anti-missile defense in Far East

>The Republic of Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reports that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) fired four short-range missiles off its east coast on Thursday evening. The projectiles, which flew about 60 miles, were identified as KN-01 missiles with a maximum range of up to 100 miles.

On Saturday the DPRK test-fired seven more tactical missiles from sites along the country’s east coast. The missiles are estimated to have a maximum range of about 300 miles, much farther than the salvo fired previously. Their launch was apparently timed to coincide with Independence Day in the USA.

In reaction to a mid-June report in the Japanese media suggesting that Pyongyang might fire a long-range missile toward the Hawaiian Islands in early July, the Pentagon has bolstered anti-missile defense around the Aloha State. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura confirms that a long-range missile launch by the DPRK this weekend is possible.

Pictured above: A Seoul pedestrian passes by a television screen showing news of the North Korean missile launch mentioned above.

Not so coincidentally, Interfax reports that the Russian military has deployed an early-warning missile launch system in its Far East to guard the country against external threats including, apparently, Communist North Korea. Under cover of such deployments, of course, the Kremlin, in the event of a nuclear exchange, is also protecting itself from a US counterstrike via Alaska or the Pacific Ocean.

Last week, the ROK’s defense ministry informed parliament that the military was boosting its pre-emptive strike capabilities to counter the North’s nuclear missile threat. According to Yonhap, the South Korean military has forward deployed air and artillery assets to the Yellow Sea border region to counter possible North Korean gunboat or missile attacks. Meanwhile, black-clad, heavily armed commandos attached to the coast guard, known as the Special Sea Attack Team, are training to interdict weapons of mass destruction on the high seas under the aegis of the US-led, 90-nation Proliferation Security Initiative.

Currently, a US Navy destroyer is shadowing the North Korean freighter Kang Nam 1 in the South China Sea. The freighter’s movements are also being monitored electronically at the South Korean Coast Guard station at Incheon. Incheon was the scene of General Douglas MacArthur’s September 1950 seaborne landing that turned the tide of the Korean War.

Under the leadership of conservative President Lee Myung-bak, South Korean Coast Guard cutters mount 20 mm rotary chain guns and, in the event of war, they would support naval operations. “The guidelines for rules of engagement have changed,” explained Coast Guard spokesman Yun Byeong-du, adding: “In the past, vessels had to get permission from the Blue House [presidential residence] to retaliate. Now it is up to captains.” “The Coast Guard,” opines the Washington Times, “is just the front line in the toughest South Korean defense posture in more than a decade.”

“North Korea is the weakest state in the region,” comments Dan Pinkston, director of the International Crisis Group’s office in Seoul, “They don’t have the technological or economic base to compete conventionally, so they have to rely on asymmetric capabilities.” For this reason, argues Kim Shin-jo, a Northern defector captured during a 1968 raid from the South, the DPRK will rely on its 120,000-strong commando force and insurgent forces in the ROK. The last could include an uprising led by “affluent, sophisticated and well-informed southerners,” meaning communist sympathizers, a possibility recently acknowledged by General Walter Sharp, commander of US forces in Korea.

>Latin America File: Insulza visits Honduran coup leaders, opponents; Micheletti regime preempts expulsion from OAS, withdraws from organization

>– Honduras’ Top Army Lawyer: Generals Exiled, Rather than Arrested, Zelaya to Avoid “Burying a Pile of People,” “Most of the Military” Will Resign if Deposed President Returns

– Up to 600 US Troops Stationed at Soto Cano Ordered to Stay on Honduran Army Base; Joint US-Honduran Military Exercise Suspended; Cuba’s Official Media Identifies Base as Hub of Intrigue against Zelaya

Zelaya’s allegiance to Chavez is difficult to stomach. I would have a hard time taking orders from a leftist. He used soldiers as political tools. [Wealthy rancher] Zelaya is a leftist of lies.
— Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, top legal advisor to Honduran army, veteran of counter-insurgency operations of the 1980s

On Friday Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), arrived in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to urge the interim government of de facto President Robert Micheletti to stand down and make way for the restoration of the democratically elected Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya, ousted by the military last Sunday morning and exiled to Costa Rica. Insulza, the Cuban News Agency reported, met with members of Honduras’ Supreme Court, parliamentarians, and representatives of the popular movements and union organizations opposed to the military coup. “We are not going to Honduras to hold any negotiations,” Insulza admonished the day before, “We are going to demand the end of what has been done thus far and to look for ways to bring the country back to normality.”

Insulza announced his trip to Tegucigalpa while visiting Georgetown, Guyana, where he was attending the 30th Meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the Caribbean Community (Caricom). On Wednesday the OAS passed a resolution demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement within 72 hours, a deadline that will expire on Saturday. Caricom also expressed its support for Zelaya’s return to power. In addition to the OAS and Caricom, on Tuesday the United Nations General Assembly, under the presidency of Sandinista cadre/Catholic priest Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, passed a unanimous resolution condemning the coupists and urging Zelaya’s reinstatement. D’Escoto’s paymaster is Nicaragua’s past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega, who is leading the charge against Honduras’ new military-backed regime.

For his part, Micheletti, who was formerly speaker of the national congress and next in line of succession to the presidency, insists that the transfer of power was according to the constitution. Zelaya, however, has pledged to return to his homeland this Sunday, in the company of Insulza, Cristina Kirchner and Rafael Correa, the presidents of Argentina and Ecuador respectively, and serve out the balance of his presidency, which expires next year. Insulza, a Chilean, Kirchner, and Correa are all leftists so their animosity to the Honduran coupists is to be expected. Pictured above: Micheletti addresses supporters at a rally in Tegucigalpa on July 3.

Not surprisingly, the vindictive communist dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has suspended subsidized deliveries of oil to Honduras to punish the military-backed regime that deposed his compliant lackey. On Venezuelan television last night former paratrooper Chavez pathetically denied claims that Petrocaribe’s energy supplies to Honduras on preferential terms had constituted “financial assistance” to Zelaya. No doubt, too, Comrade Hugo, will absolve himself of all involvement in the shipment of referendum ballots to Honduras for the purpose of helping Zelaya subvert the constitution of that Central American country and establish a left-wing dictatorship.

At the same time, opposing demonstrations in support of the rival Micheletti and Zelaya governments continued in cities throughout Honduras. Leftist groups have come out in full force to rally behind the deposed president. Juan Barahona, leader of the United Workers’ Front, has joined with other Zelaya partisans to create the People’s Resistance Front. Pro-Zelaya protests have occurred in Tegucigalpa and the northern city San Pedro Sula. At least two pro-Zelaya demonstrators were killed, at least 60 others injured, and over 270 arrested. In the opposing camp, pro-Micheletti supporters formed the Civic Democratic Unit, staged a sit-in in the capital on Tuesday, rallied in the southern city Choluteca on Wednesday, and held rallies in San Pedro Sula on Thursday.

In an interview with the Miami Herald the Honduran army’s top legal advisor, Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, acknowledged that military brass “circumvented” laws to forcibly remove Zelaya. It was the first time any participant in the coup admitted committing an offense. “We know there was a crime there,” conceded Inestroza, adding: “In the moment that we took him out of the country in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. What happens is that that crime, the moment that the circumstances that it occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.”

Zelaya was ousted in a predawn raid at his house after he vowed to resist a court order that ruled a non-binding referendum to be held that day illegal. The wealthy rancher had clashed with the attorney general, the Supreme Court, congress, the armed forces normally under his command, and even the Catholic Church. Instead of being arrested to stand trial for abuse of power and treason, the military grabbed Zelaya from bed at gunpoint and forced him onto a plane bound for San Jose, Costa Rica. “What was more beneficial, remove this gentleman from Honduras,” Inestroza explained, “or present him to prosecutors and have a mob assault and burn and destroy and for us to have to shoot? If we had left him here, right now we would be burying a pile of people.”

Speaking for both himself and many other career soldiers in Honduras, Inestroza confided: “Zelaya’s allegiance to Chavez is difficult to stomach. I would have a hard time taking orders from a leftist. He used soldiers as political tools. Zelaya is a leftist of lies.” Referring to the communist insurgencies and civil wars that wracked Central America in the 1980s, Inestroza, now 54 years old, recalled:

We fought the subversive movements here and we were the only country that did not have a fratricidal war like the others. It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible. I personally would have retired, because my thinking, my principles, would not have allowed me to participate in that.

I am 54 years old. I left my youth, my adolescence and part of my adulthood here — an entire lifetime. You should understand it’s very difficult for someone who has dedicated his whole life to a country and an institution to see, from one day to another, a person who is not normal come and want to change the way of life in the country without following the steps the law indicates.

Even though Article 24 of Honduras’ penal code would apparently exonerate the generals who directed the coup, Inestroza still fears a political slaughter if Zelaya returns: “I will resign and leave the country, and so would most of the military. They would come after us and the other political leaders who were involved in this.”

On Thursday, the possibility that Zelaya could return to his old job became more likely when Micheletti moderated his rhetoric somewhat, offering to hold early elections or a referendum that would permit his deposed rival to finish out the remaining months of his term. The latter, however, would be “difficult” to implement immediately. The potential for a mass resignation of patriots from the Honduran military, however, would enable Zelaya to stack the armed forces with officers sympathetic to his leftist ideals and the process of Latin American integration that has bound Honduras’ destiny with the Havana-Caracas Axis. Zelaya’s restoration would also be a victory for the region’s Red Axis leaders like Chavez, Ortega, Raul Castro, and others.

However, late on Friday, after Insulza’s visit to Tegucigalpa, the Micheletti regime hardened its position again and preempted the OAS’s threat to expel Honduras by voluntarily withdrawing from the organization. On July 4 the Voice of America reported: “The Supreme Court of Honduras told OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza Friday that its decision to oust Mr. Zelaya is irreversible, and that the leftist leader would be arrested if he returned home.” In addition to the resolutions passed by the OAS, the Caribbean Community, and the United Nations condemning the military coup, the World Bank is suspending loans and the US State Department is considering freezing aid to the Central American country. Thus, the political and economic isolation of Honduras grows and, in our assessment, the potential for a showdown between the country and a pan-Latin American military coalition increases.

Meanwhile, in the wake of last Sunday’s coup, a joint US-Honduran military exercise was suspended. Accordingly, up to 600 US troops stationed at Soto Cano Air Base under Southern Command’s Joint Task Force-Bravo have been ordered to stay on base until the political turmoil in Honduras blows over. The US Armed Forces uses the Honduran military base for counter-narcotics interdiction and humanitarian missions. Incidentally, the official communist propaganda machine in Cuba was quick to identify the US military presence in Honduras as a hub of intrigue against Zelaya and his government. Similar imprecations against Washington’s “meddling” in Honduras issued from the mouth of Chavez this week too.

>Latin America File: Zelaya, backed by UN, OAS, accompanied by Kirchner, Correa to return to homeland this weekend; Micheletti: "No way, Jose"

>Ballots for Zelaya’s Constitutional Referendum Potentially Ending Presidential Term Limits Printed in Venezuela

The war of words between, in the one camp, the military- backed government of de facto Honduran President Roberto Micheletti, formerly the speaker of that country’s congress, and, in the other camp, the deposed president Manuel Zelaya, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations is heating up. Zelaya, accompanied by fellow leftist presidents, Cristina Kirchner of Argentina and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, is threatening to return to his homeland this weekend, after the OAS’s 72-hour ultimatum for reinstating the head of state.

Pictured above: On Monday Cuba’s communist thug-in-chief Raul Castro arrived in Managua for emergency sessions of the Bolivarian Alliance (formerly Alternative) for the Americas and the Rio Group. He is greeted by President Daniel Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, who heads up the neo-Sandinista regime’s Councils of Citizens’ Power. Castro characterized the Honduran coup plotters as “fascists.”

Micheletti has vowed that Zelaya will be arrested upon his arrival in Honduras and would be able to avoid that fate only by entering the country at the head of a foreign army. “Zelaya,” he declared, “has already committed crimes against the constitution and the law. He can no longer return to the presidency of the republic unless a president from another Latin American country comes and imposes him using guns. Seven and a half million Hondurans will be ready to defend our territory against a foreign invasion.”

Is it possible that Zelaya’s comrades in the region’s Red Axis, particularly Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega were drafting this very scenario in Managua on Monday? There’s no question that the Chavezista regime had every intention of helping Zelaya establish a left-wing dictatorship via the constitutional referendum slated for last Sunday. The ballots, after all, were printed in Venezuela and impounded at a Honduran military base.

Will the UN and OAS, moreover, sanction a Cuban-Venezuelan- Nicaraguan intervention force in Honduras? Will we witness a dry run for Red Dawn 2? Your resident blogger may post the following headline in the weeks ahead: “Communist troops invade Honduras from Guatemala and Nicaragua.” US President Barack Hussein Obama will no doubt look the other way and the shopping mall regime will heave a great sigh. At the very least, the Honduran coup could provide impetus for the Havana-Caracas-Managua Axis to transform ALBA into a military alliance, a subject that Chavez first broached in January 2008.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: 4th Sino- Soviet war game to begin July 22; 8,500 Russian troops drill near Georgia; US Air Force preps for nuke war

>Russian and Chinese troops will begin their fourth joint war game, disguised as an “anti-terrorist” operation, between July 22 and 26. Dubbed “Peace Mission 2009”, the drill will involve 2,500 military personnel, who will arrive at the deployment area on July 14. The first phase of the exercises consists of military and political consultations and will be held in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s Far East, while the second and third phases will take place outside Baichen in northern China. Lt. Gen. Sergei Antonov, spokesentity for the Russian General Staff, commented: “Peace Mission 2009 will become an important step in the development of the Russian-Chinese partnership and their armed forces.” Pictured above: Russian soldiers.

Not too far away from the site of Peace Mission 2009, of course, political tensions between North and South Korea are on the rise. In late May, after detonating its second test nuclear bomb, Pyongyang scrapped the 1953 armistice that halted hostilities, but did not establish a peace treaty, with Seoul.

Under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the first-ever Sino-Soviet exercise, Peace Mission 2005 took place in Russia and the eastern Chinese province of Shandong, involving warships, aircraft, and over 10,000 servicemen, including marines and paratroopers. Russia and China also hosted Peace Mission 2007, when then President Vladimir Putin announced the resumption of long-range bomber patrols. Most recently, the SCO states held Norak-Antiterror 2009 in Tajikistan in April. Peace Mission 2010 is slated to occur in Kazakhstan, obviously next year.

Meanwhile, under the aegis of the Caucasus 2009 war game, the Russian armed forces appear to be positioning themselves for another invasion of the former Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the site of a tremendous tug-of-war between the Soviet strategists and NATO, which is attempting to woo Tbilisi into its fold. In late July and early August of last year the Russian military prepared to attack Georgia under cover of the Caucasus Frontier 2008 drill.

“The Caucasus 2009 war games,” opines CBS News, “are being seen by many experts as a warning shot for nearby Georgia, where the government says it has rearmed armed forces and where NATO recently wrapped up its own exercises.” A Russian Defense Ministry official related that more than 8,500 troops will take part in the drill, along with nearly 200 tanks, armored vehicles, 100 artillery units, and several units from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The exercises are being personally overseen by Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of Russia’s General Staff.

In addition to the military personnel that will participate in Caucasus 2009, more than 6,000 Russian troops have been illegally stationed in each of Georgia’s breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia has also been building military bases, storage facilities for supplies, and roads in the two regions, which Moscow and Managua alone recognized as independent. Last month, NATO wrapped up four weeks of training exercises in Georgia. Even though just a few hundreds troops participated, Russia was annoyed, branding them a provocation.

Deputy Defense Minister Col. Gen. Alexander Kolmakov was quoted by Kremlin media on Monday as saying that Caucasus 2009 was adjusted as a result of the NATO games and would be “quite major, as compared with those that were conducted in Soviet times.” Over the weekend, Russia and NATO agreed to resume military ties that were suspended after last August’s Caucasian War.

Pictured here: The iconic, 1950s-era B-52H Stratofortress still comprises part of the backbone of the US Air Force’s strategic bomber fleet.

In spite of the fact that the USA now faces the socialist, pro-Islamic administration of President Barack Hussein Obama, the military is still prudently preparing to counter a strategic nuclear attack. Although there is much discussion about the threat posed by Iran and North Korea’s missile capabilities, the fact of the matter is there are only two states that possess the ability to annihilate the USA: Russia and, to a much lesser extent, the People’s Republic of China. The US Air Force reports on the Global Thunder 09 exercise underway at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota:

A B-52H Stratofortress soars through the air during the rapid launch portion of Global Thunder 09 here June 30. Global Thunder 09 is the USSTRATCOM Field Training Exercise and Battle Staff Exercise designed to exercise all mission areas withprimary emphasis on Nuclear Command and Control (NC2). Global Thunder 09 provides training opportunities for component, task force, unit, forces, and command posts to deter, and if necessary defeat, a military attack against the United States and to employ forces as directed by the President.

Global Thunder 09 coincides with the routine launch of an unarmed Minuteman 3 ICBM from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 30. The missile struck a target near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The local media reported on the coordination between military personnel at Vandenberg and Minot:

A task force from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., worked with members of Vandenberg’s 576th Flight Test Squadron to ready the missile for the test. Airmen from the 576th also installed test-specific equipment such as tracking, telemetry and command-destruct systems necessary to collect data and meet 30th Space Wing safety requirements.

“These are dangerous times we’re living in right now,” said Lt. Col. Lesa K. Toler, the 576th Flight Test Squadron commander and the mission director for this test launch.

“It’s extremely important our combatant commander has the capabilities he needs to perform the mission of fighting and winning our nation’s wars,” Toler added. “Testing an operational asset pulled from the missile field at Minot provides us confidence our weapon system is capable of performing when needed.”

“The Air Force,” the same article concludes, “conducts several Minuteman tests each year to verify the weapon system’s reliability and accuracy. Some 450 Minuteman 3 weapons sit on alert in and around Malmstrom AFB, Mont., F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo. and Minot AFB, N.D.”