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“Our relationships, our leadership, and our influence in the Western Hemisphere are paying the price,” Kelly said.Some experts warn against being too alarmist, and say Russia, China and Iran do not have the ability or desire to project military power beyond their borders. Army War College adjunct professor Gabriel Marcella said Russia's maneuvering is more about posturing than a real threat. "Latin America is seen as an opportunity to challenge the United States in terms of global presence," he said. "They want to show the flag to assert their presence and say they need to be counted on the world stage." Other experts said the encroachment of rivals has huge economic implications for the U.S., which has more trade partners in Latin America than in any other region in the world. 

“[Russia’s presence] serves to destabilize what has become a more stabilized, middle class continent with an increasing respect for the rule of law. ... Any type of unsettling of that environment will scare off investors,” said Jason Marczak, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.“Market economies and democracies are fundamental for trade, for jobs, and for stable investment environments," he said. Marczak noted the instability in Venezuela, which is facing civil unrest from anti-government protestors.“In Venezuela, a lot of the money that’s been able to prop up President Chavez and now Maduro has been Chinese money,” Kelly said. 

And while Chinese investment in Latin America could have positive aspects for the region, it could also make it more difficult for U.S. official to push labor and environmental safeguards that it argues are building blocks for democracy, Marczak said.  Angel Rabasa, a senior political scientist at RAND, said cuts to the defense budget are going to accelerate a long trend of U.S. neglect and disengagement with Latin America. According to Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), there are 10 countries in Latin America that currently have no U.S. ambassador because they either haven’t been nominated yet or confirmed, a sign that the region is seen as a low priority.“We will be losing the ability to influence developments in a region that is very important to us because of proximity,” Rabasa said. 

From Ecuador, Snowden could travel widely. Everything from the splendor of Bolivia's Lake Titicaca to the vibrancy of teeming Caracas awaits him. With luck, he might even be able to visit Guatemala in September to attend the grand festival being planned for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacobo Arbenz, the reformist president who the United States deposed in 1954.

Morales also questioned Washington's discourse of democracy. “How can you speak of democracy when you label countries of peace and democracy a threat to your security? … How can you speak of democracy when you send troops around the world menacing the sovereignty of other nations … How can you speak of threats to your security when your country is the largest producer of weapons in the world … weapons that are killing hundreds of thousands.” Morales also questioned Washington's discourse on human rights, saying it is the country that resorts to torture more than any other around the world, and when in the United States they have a grave crisis of racial discrimination and a serious human rights issue involving police against minorities. Evo Morales told Obama that the United States doesn't need to help Cuba, “what it needs to do is repair all the damages it has caused in that country.” Toward the end of his speech during the second day of the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Morales criticized the United States for insisting on the aggressions against Venezuela despite the fact that 33 countries in the region have rejected them, while only two have agreed with them.

Speaking to Venezuela´s growing relationship with China, Venezuelan Vice president Jorge Arreaza stated “China is a great potential, and it is not imperialist. It is a great potential that wants for all of us to have a repectable and dignified living standards.”

Juan Ramon Quintana, Bolivia’s minister of the presidency, emphasized the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia’s direct role in the plot, according to teleSUR: “In 2007 the embassy of the United States installed a Center of Operations in order to execute a civil-prefectural coup to apply plan A, which was the coup, and plan B, which was the assassination.” TeleSUR noted that, “Relations between the U.S. and Bolivia have been strained since 2009, when President Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador from the country for supporting [an] opposition-led conspiracy against him,” a move that led then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to accuse the president of “fear-mongering.”

In addition to her bold confession and Clinton’s embrace of the far-right narrative in the Honduran episode, the Latin America chapter is considerably to the right of even her own record on the region as secretary of state. This appears to be a political calculation. There is little risk of losing votes for admitting her role in making most of the hemisphere’s governments disgusted with the United States. On the other side of the equation, there are influential interest groups and significant campaign money to be raised from the right-wing Latin American lobby, including Floridian Cuban-Americans and their political fundraisers.

The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him. “We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”McClatchy, however, located one of his alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him. “They submitted us to torture, twice a day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”According to Carrasco, the torture unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids, genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.“He was the person who tortured us, with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts, which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic behavior.”

Despite very graphic torture accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.

As the center supported Garcia Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications chief said.Last September, Andersen filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen. Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment. “It’s shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said. The details uncovered about Garcia Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.“The American people deserve to know that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.

While most of the concerns focused on Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University school.He was hired at the request of the Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls Downie, the center’s director at the time. “The Colombians wanted, for his own safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie. “This is a guy we certainly wanted to have as a professor.”Human rights groups, however, criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province, where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for the Washington Office on Latin America. “If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”“Having officers like that, the implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.

2. Latin America and the Caribbean calls for end to U.S. meddling in member countries CELAC – created in opposition to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States – firmly rejected U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, calling them a violation of international law and a threat to peace in the region.

In another knock to the interventionist attitude by U.S. policy makers, CELAC also reiterated its proclamation from its 2014 summit declaring Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace. The regional bloc called on the international community to “respect this proclamation in its relations with the member states of CELAC, including the commitment to non-intervention, direct or indirect, in the internal affairs of any other state and to respect the principles of national sovereignty, equal rights, and the self-determination of peoples.” 3. CELAC calls for Obama to end U.S. Blockade on Cuba The CELAC bloc and its member states overwhelmingly backed the decision by the United States and Cuba to restore diplomatic relations and called on U.S. President Obama to end the blockade on Cuba.

4. Leaders call for Puerto Rico to be included in future CELAC meetings Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega offered his speaking time to Puerto Rican independence leader Ruben Berrios Martinez, who called on the bloc to support the island’s struggle against colonialism. Regional leaders responded with calls for independence for the island and a commitment to include representation from the island in future meetings of CELAC.

The bloc also approved resolutions backing Argentina’s claim to the Malvinas as well as supporting the peace process in Colombia. The special declarations also called for a new international financial structure, financing for development projects and demanded action on climate change.

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s. What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds. In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited. Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”

A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that  transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing: (U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing. A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.

But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.” The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states. A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)

VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”

The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America. For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.” The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.

According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations. “Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”

What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.” The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.”

Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.

The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports. “I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept. His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.

The real question is this: if concern over suppression of political rights is not the real reason the U.S. is imposing new sanctions on Venezuela (perish the thought!), what is? Among the most insightful commentators on U.S. policy in Latin America is Mark Weisbrot of Just Foreign Policy. Read his excellent article for Al Jazeera on the recent Obama decree on Venezuela. In essence, Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates, and this simply cannot be permitted (such countries are always at the top of the U.S. government and media list of Countries To Be Demonized). Beyond that, the popularity of Chavez and the relative improvement of Venezuela’s poor under his redistributionist policies petrifies neoliberal institutions for its ability to serve as an example; just as the Cuban economy was choked by decades of U.S. sanctions and then held up by the U.S. as a failure of Communism, subverting the Venezuelan economy is crucial to destroying this success. As Weisbrot notes, every country in the hemisphere except for the U.S. and Canada have united to oppose U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) issued a statement in February in response to the prior round of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela that “reiterates its strong repudiation of the application of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law.” This week, the chief of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) issued a statement announcing that “UNASUR rejects any external or internal attempt at interference that seeks to disrupt the democratic process in Venezuela.” Weisbrot compares Obama’s decree this week on Venezuela to President Reagan’s quite similar 1985 decree that Nicaragua was a national security threat to the U.S., and notes: “The Obama administration is more isolated today in Latin America than even George W. Bush’s administration was.”

If Obama and supporters want the government of Venezuela to be punished and/or toppled because they refuse to comply with U.S. dictates, they should at least be honest about their beliefs so that their true character can be seen. Pretending that any of this has to do with the U.S. Government’s anger over suppression of political opponents — when their closest allies are the world champions at that — should be too insulting of everyone’s intelligence to even be an option.

Regardless of whether one thinks this evidence is sufficient (the U.S. press has not reported most of it), it is little wonder that the governments in the region are convinced. Efforts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela have been underway for most of the past 15 years. Why would it be any different now, when the economy is in recession and there was an effort to force out the government just last year? And has anyone ever seen an attempted ouster of a leftist government in Latin America that Washington had nothing to do with?Because I haven’t.

The face of Washington in Latin America is one of extremism. Despite some changes in other areas of foreign policy (e.g., Obama’s engagement with Iran), this face has not changed very much since Reagan warned us that Nicaragua’s Sandinistas “were just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.” He was ridiculed by Garry Trudeau in “Doonesbury” and other satirists. The Obama White House’s Reagan redux should get the same treatment.

"You won't find reports from the CIA, Mossad, or the MI5 in my files. I have no doubt that there is a link between them and the Argentine intelligence agency, but I never dealt with any foreign intelligence agencies," Nisman said, two days before he was found dead.The US embassy in Buenos Aires declined to discuss its officers' interactions with Nisman. "We will not comment on the contents of these alleged cables that purport to include classified information," an embassy spokesman told VICE News.

The relationship was apparently so involved that Nisman apologized for not letting then-ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne know that he would call for the arrest of former president Carlos Menem in relation to the case."AMIA Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman called the Ambassador on May 23 to apologize for not giving the Embassy advance notice of his request for the arrest of former President Menem and other [government of Argentina] officials for their alleged roles in the cover up of the 'local connection' in the 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center," says a cable from May 2008.The prosecutor also apologized that the judicial order coincided with a visit to Argentina from the former deputy director of the FBI, John Pistole, adding it was "completely unintentional," the cable shows."He noted that he was very sorry and that he sincerely appreciates all of the [US government's] help and support and in no way meant to undermine that," the cable continues.

The cable also notes that US officials "have for the past two years recommended to Nisman that he focus on the perpetrators of the terrorist attack and not on the possible mishandling of the first investigation."Santiago O'Donnell, author of two books based on the cables released by Julian Assange, said in an interview that the leaked cables show the US influenced Nisman throughout his work on the AIMA bombing investigation."The embassy gave instructions to the prosecutor Nisman for him to follow the Iranian lead, and not follow other leads, like the Syrian lead, or the local connection, because that would detract from the terrorist image that the US was trying to impose on Iran," O'Donnell said.President Kirchner this week proposed in a nationally televised address to disband and reform the government's intelligence agency. In doing so, she said rogue government spies were responsible for Nisman's death. Opposition voices, meanwhile, said the reform plan for the Secretaría de Inteligencia, or SI, would further politicize the work of the embattled spy agency and make it more responsive to the president's political whims.

Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor who accused Argentina's president of a cover-up plot over the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center before being found shot to death, met repeatedly with the US embassy in Buenos Aires during his investigation, leaked diplomatic cables show.Nisman gave US officials advanced notice on his procedural moves and was apparently coached by the embassy in "improving" his requests for arrest warrants for Iranians that Nisman suspected of carrying out the deadly attack against the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association, or AIMA, according to cables published by Wikileaks."Embassy can now more logically approach the [government of Argentina] about [its] anticipated next steps and ways we might be able to coordinate outreach to other governments [...] to bring attention to the warrants and pressure to bear on Iran and Hezbollah," says one US cable dated November 1, 2006, after a meeting with Nisman.

Honduras wasn’t paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s. “Zelaya’s overthrow created a vacuum in security in which military and police were now focused more on political protest, and also led to a freeze in international aid that markedly worsened socio-economic conditions,” Mark Ungar, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, told The International Business Times. “The 2009 coup, asserts [Tulane] professor Aaron Schneider, gave the Honduran military more political and economic leverage, at the same time as the state and political elites lost their legitimacy, resources and the capacity to govern large parts of the country.” El Salvador and Guatemala, also narcostates devastated by decades of U.S. support for oppressive, corrupt right-wing dictatorships, are suffering similar conditions.

Talk about brass! The United States does it everything it can to screw up Central America — and then acts surprised when desperate people show up at its front gate trying to escape the (U.S.-caused) carnage. Letting the kids stay — along with their families — is less than the least we could do.