 Hi, everyone. Welcome to what the app is going on in Latin America. This is CodePink's weekly webinar of 20 minutes of hot news out of Latin America and the Caribbean. We broadcast every Wednesday, 12 p.m. Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific, and we focus on hot topics in the hemisphere. Today, we are going to be in conversation with Fulton Armstrong, who is a fellow at American University, and we're so fortunate to have him with us. Let me give you a brief. He has a lengthy resume to share with all of you, but let me give you a brief rundown of his experience. So he has followed Latin American affairs for almost 30 years in a number of U.S. government positions. He served as a senior professional staff member responsible for Latin America on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from July 2008 to October 2011, where he also worked closely with the committee's investigations team. Prior to that, he served in the executive branch in a series of policy and analytical positions. Among other senior positions, he was national intelligence officer for Latin America, the U.S. intelligence community's most senior analyst, 2000 to 2004, and for six months, he was the chief of staff of the DCI crime and narcotics center. So this is specifically his background that we want him to share with you today. We're going to talk, start our conversation with the Department of Justice's indictment of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on narco trafficking charges last Thursday. And, and then explore the foreign policy objectives behind that indictment, and the history of this practice throughout the hemisphere and then talk in more detail about the statistics of the actual narcotics industry trade here in the Americas. So welcome Fulton so pleased to have you I'm very honored that you accepted our invitation to join us today. Happy to be here. Happy to be here. This is one of many things that are going on in Latin America that that it's good that people are looking at. I mean I can start with the indictment the indictment was is for me a little bit of deja vu all over again because in my salad days I was an officer serving on a task force. And that was that that was formed during the crisis in Panama, when the US government in fact ironically or not so ironically, a fellow named Elliott Abrams was profoundly involved in the Panama issue during that period of time and we also highlighted him for behavior related to narcotics narcotics trafficking. I really hard to weigh the quality of evidence in the two cases, but as a policy tool indictment is a very dangerous one, because you make things radioactive without having yet had a trial. So in this case of Manuel Noriega he was indicted, we then tried a series of economic measures and diplomatic strategies etc to force him out of office, and that failed of course and we wound up doing an invasion in December 1989 that wound up killing a number of civilians innocent civilians. And in this case it's a little different obviously the situation has developed over over a number of years, the US government was trying very hard, going back to Bush Cheney, frankly, to build a case for an indictment against Travis. And part it's because that border between Columbia and Venezuela has traditionally been porous and traditionally bad guys move from one side to the other, relatively routinely, and yes there have been bad officials on both sides that have been directly or indirectly involved or benefited from that drug trade in the area. It was very different, however doing an indictment against the sitting head of state and major commanders and it's yet again different that you're going to put blood money on somebody's head of a $15 million reward for leading to the arrest or capture of a sitting head of state. Now it's true the US government continues, it sounds a little bit bizarre to refer to him as the former regime. And that's exactly how Barr introduced the indictment last Thursday. They were indicting the former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. So they, so in their minds they're not indicting a sitting president. Right. The rationale behind that. I mean, since January 2019, we have recognized and we used our diplomatic muscle to get some 50 some other countries to recognize Juan Guaidó as the president, but still there's no one debating and including in the opposition, including Guaidó's own people, that Maduro is still the head of state. He still runs the government. He still has territorial control, bureaucratic control, economic control, the central bank, etc. So we've basically like a mischievous boy pulling the wings off of a fly. We've pulled the wings and the legs off of much of the Venezuelan economy, for sure, and done a lot of diplomatic pressure on him for sure, but he is still the sitting head of state. When you do this, it's part usually of a broader strategy. I don't think that they really want to send a DEA plane down there to pick them up. I think what they're trying to do within their broader strategy is what they've been trying to do for a number of years now and that is to prompt someone to go in and remove this man, to rid us of this priest, and if they can't get a popular revolt on the streets by... Which they haven't achieved yet. I mean, I would argue for 20 years the US government's been trying to achieve some sort of revolt against the Shavista movement. Right. I mean, since Chavez's first election, in 1998, there have been elements of the US government who have had that as one of their primary objectives. Even when the presidents themselves, I worked in the, you didn't mention in my bio because it is a long bio, but I was one of the directors. I was one of the directors of the National Security Council when Chavez, President-elect Chavez, came to the White House and I wasn't in the meeting itself, but I prepped President Clinton for it and the National Security Advisor of Court and then I've got a full debrief afterward and we decided, the president decided back then with the Secretary of State, Albright's full support that we're not going to make this guy and our enemy. We don't agree with some of what he wants to do. We don't, we're a little bit nervous that he can't pull it off, etc., but let's not make this into an enemy versus enemy sort of thing. But there were elements of the American bureaucracy that said, well, the president can say what he wants to say. I have my own agenda. And so you're technically you're right that for 20 years elements of the US government have been going after him. But this indictment really kicks things up a notch. And there are some weird, I don't like conspiracy theories, but there are some weird coincidences with the timing of the indictment. It's coming just as the country is entering a crisis with the Coronavirus, just at a time that Maludo taking the high road, which he doesn't often do had offered to negotiate with Guaido on finding a way for them to open a political and operational path for the delivery of immigrants to the Venezuelan people during this Coronavirus thing and Guaido was was talking. He was talking. This is not the first time that the Guaido and or his emissaries were talking and it looked like there was some sort of progress that at least on limited areas they were going to sit down and do what adults are supposed to do. And that is to negotiate solutions. And then surprise surprise this indictment happens. The other weird element of the story at this time for which it's really difficult to find corroboratory information is this fellow named Cleaver Alcala, a former Brigadier General that's been over in Colombia, associating with who knows whom was by his own admission, part of a $10 million arms delivery that was going to go to a buddy of his on the Venezuela border for who knows what sort of activity and Cleaver Alcala was was one of the indicted officials, and he handed himself over to DEA and say here come and take me come and take me is very friendly sort of thing it's almost as if a reunion there of people. So he is correct me if I'm wrong but he is also wanted by the Venezuelan government correct for for plotting against the government in Colombia. It was cashiered two or three years ago and went to Colombia so big cashiered military guys already on somebody's list for some sort of activities. It's not surprising that there've been for many years perhaps even the 20 years that you were referring to. There have been enterprising Venezuelan rebels, if you will, who have found friendships over in Colombia, and been part of various plans, none of whichever really is fully clarified there was a time back in gosh, when it was and it was after the coup against Chavez would have been 2003 2004 that a group of paramilitaries Colombian paramilitaries had been discovered at a Finca somewhere outside Caracas is mostly kids 3540 young men who had been at least doing PT physical training. They didn't have hadn't received their weapons yet but they were training with these wooden carved rifle like sorts of things. The thing goes owned by a prominent Cuban American who, and then the story just disappeared. So it's not, it's not uncommon for you to have the 10 for us to sort of try to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but but be denied the validation of the information in a way that we can really see what's going on. So this. And you mentioned Elliott Abrams and of course, you know we've seen him in various parts of Latin America. And, and he has a history of operations such as this and forwarding us economic and foreign policy objectives. And that happened in the last few days is the repositioning of the Southern command and the Caribbean, and I can't correct me if I'm wrong I'm not sure if this was before or after Thursday's indictment. So what was that a hearing on the hill last summer where Admiral Fowler, who is the Admiral for the Southern command for our viewers, who testified in front of Congress, as far as what he needed budget wise to, I believe he said to retool his fleet for foreign aggression in the atmosphere. And it appears that he's moving his ships closer to the Venezuelan coast. And I wonder if you can comment on that. I can't really I saw I saw the same quotes come out of the hearing I thought his wording was at a minimum a bit on the, the rare side. Usually one doesn't use those terms and I don't remember the exact quote myself either, but it's part of his job is to have military readiness. Part of his job is also sort of semi political he has to work with the State Department, and he lives in Miami, which is the, the nexus for a lot of the political pressures be brought to bear on issues like Venezuela. And for the movement of ships, I don't know if ships have been moved into the area. I wouldn't be surprised but remember that moving ships around is often much more of a gesture than it is planning when you're really doing a plan. You don't advertise it by moving stuff around. And if it's posturing so to speak. I think it's show, perhaps if in truth, if indeed something is going on, but also coronavirus changes the game quite significantly. Okay, you're not going to put, you're not going to put American troops on the ground in the middle of what's for the US, a health crisis, and where you could be going into a hornet's nest a biological hornet's nest in some of the barrios and ranchos in Venezuela. So, I doubt it. If one were to really get weirdly conspiratorial stuff. What you see in some of the rhetoric, especially the rhetoric coming out of the State Department, even though people that State Department claim that they want to promote peace processes and stuff, they want to promote the elite albums rolled out his grand plan, which really isn't much of a plan. Yesterday, it's basically going back to square one and say the immediate this and the immediate that and that we're going to support in his talkers he doesn't feel that our candidate will be will will not become interim president but our candidate Juan Guaidó will be our preferred candidate in the in the new newly scheduled elections, and all that that part of the rhetoric has been has laid the ground and one of this has gone for some sort of weird little military type of thing, but I'm, this really puts us in the conspiratorial column right here for which evidence is very shady, but they are talking about the hemispheric threat. And you talk about hemispheres, you're basically laying the groundwork and you say this regime must end and language like that. And we had these funny things that came out of the Pence office but it came also out of the State Department to the paid a visa employees that have been under house arrest pending investigations as hostages. But when you do that, and you're, you're, you have these goofy scenarios of arms moving around and you have these areas where you're trying to provoke remember the the so called humanitarian aid distribution efforts at the Santander Bridge over on the Colombian border in Cúcuta, Cúcuta last year, you have these you know military aircraft showing up for our viewers this was February 23 of 2019. When you have these straws in the wind, you have to be very careful analytically, not to have the straws come together. They might be straws that the regime as they like to go to a former regime is supposed to see and supposed to be shaking in its boots. But, but it at first for which it doesn't work. When you do these sorts of things, especially when you indict members of the military I command, you actually increase their loyalty. Even if you've seen signs that the military itself is very, very anxious about what's going on in a country. When you indict them and you basically make them a group they're going to hang as a group. Frankly, but it's not totally wacky for those straws in the wind which might be signals to be construed by people as some form of pre staging of American aggression of US aggression. I don't think it works though, frankly on the ground, because the Venezuelans people, they're very hungry. They're very scared. They're also suffering from exhaustion and fear, and all of that. The message that we want to be giving them at this point is that we're turning up the pressure cooker and hopes that they explode, and that somehow the mess is going to lead to a pro US pro pro our values sort of government. I, I would add to that that I think my personal experience there in Venezuela and over the years is that putting this pressure for regime change on the people has is uniting the more moderate people into a, I would say more moderate opposition in dialogue with the Shavista government to preserve national sovereignty. There's a great sense of nationalism developing in response to these regime change efforts, and also in response to unifying to battle this, you know, the COVID-19 the coronavirus. And that was, yeah, I think you're right that that although Venezuelan nationalism has been formed in funny little ways because it's a rentier economy. It's economy that is has been as dependent on its markets as anything that's homegrown. And when you have a rentier economy, all economic things become perverted and political things become perverted around that one commodity. And that's how you could have Punto Fajismo, where Tweedledee and Tweedledum share power they alternate power among them, and you have then the neglect of the quality of your political institutions. In some cases where the national definition was formed against the US, for example, there are there are serious Cuba scholars who would say that Cuban nationalism, if you take out the anti US part of it, it's sometimes hard for Cubans to articulate it, even though they have a they have a really rich sense of nationhood and cultural identity and all of that. Venezuela doesn't have as rich a set of other nationalist attributes as, for example, Cuba would have or Mexico would have. It's more like Central America, where it has really not done that national identity thing in the healthiest possible way. But you're right that what we're doing is by isolating people in the government we have people unify around them, and we make opposition minded people more and more nervous. And then they go toward either towards supporting the government, or they became rigidly neutral. And you have the split of the opposition that Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo Lopez his true mentor the real power exactly behind Juan Guaidó is Leopoldo Lopez who's been living in the Spanish Embassy, since the failed coup of April 30, 2019, there are many failed coups so we have to actually give the date of that. Leopoldo and know that that a lot of people don't really want to support them. And there are good thinking moderates within the opposition, but whose good voices get lost in the mix. We get subterfuge by US dialogue and potential intervention when you see more moderates wanting to dialogue with the current government and wanting to find an internal solution among themselves. That always seems at least from the US narrative to be subterfuged from Washington, any attempt to solve the issue, other than what the US wants. In other words, our foreign policy are in our most noble moments in our foreign policy are when we remain committed to process. We can have a preferred outcome, but our, but our commitment should be to process when we let elections move their own way, when we let negotiations move their own way, and we let historical forces work themselves out and let the compromise be that way, rather than our commitment being to a preordained conclusion. When we have a preordained conclusion, we wind up neglecting processes and then splitting the decent forces that are that should be driving those processes and weakening them. And I agree with you on that. You know, listening to you talk about allowing the process to, you know, run its course. There's something that we're working here within code pink on our Latin America team is, as far as identifying and defining our overarching theme and we are all the three of us Michelle you're Well, we're all opposed to the strict reinforcement of the Monroe doctrine. And I believe it was during the Roosevelt administration where the president said we're not going to dominate the hemisphere we're going to practice a good neighbor policy. Am I correct in understanding that and to me that sounds like what you're saying is let, let the process run its course. You know, and, and see and then manage, perhaps, you know, in a more diplomatic manner, the outcome. Right. And accept it, accept it. That's the key word. Yes, I mean there's an evolution each one of our presidents, whether it goes back to Roosevelt, or JFK in the 60s, where he tried his initiatives in Latin America. And certainly, I watched very closely the Bill Clinton era where we actually began apologizing for atrocious behaviors of the past that we had been involved in in Guatemala and Chile, etc, and other places. It's been evolutionary and of course Barack Obama at his first summit of the Americas in 2009 said, I refuse to call it our backyard. This is our neighborhood. These are not our, our little boys and girls these are our partners, and he tried to really build a partnership with them. It's evolutionary because no one's, no one has really had this happen. The bizarre thing though is that even though that has been historic trend over so many years that the Trump administration first, first in his first secretary of state and now with Pompeo, have proudly said that the Monroe doctrine is alive and well. And then Miami last year and John Bolton did it and stuff. So it's a little bit weird that, you know, what do they think their real constituency is. And if they think this is all about Florida, they might look over their shoulder that there are now about 150 to 200,000 angry Puerto Ricans to whom throwing paper towels after the hurricane was was not a gesture of friendship but was an insult. To our own citizens. To our own citizens to our own citizens. Yeah. So I know you, you mentioned that you, you had a maximum of 30 minutes and we're at 1230 right now. Are you able to give us just a two minute summary of the actual narco trafficking trade coming out of Latin America what the principal roots are. And all of us, I think all of us viewing and in watching today we all know the United States is the largest market in the world. And we never talk about addressing that as part of the solution so can you give us a quick before we let you go. Yeah, we, it's funny how we apply certain analytical principles on issues in some cases but we don't and others. Because we usually use market, market economic print, models to understand things and in this case that we don't want to, we are the market. Every nickel, every nickel that all of the violent people between the producers the actual cocoa growers and the consumers, every, every nickel that they're fighting over every drop of blood that they're shedding, including many, many innocent people in Mexico and Central America, we're the ones that are funding all of those various activities so was if we established that when when I was in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee you mentioned that I was on the investigations team. We once did a little bit of an investigation it's very hard to do this investigation because it mixes the foreign policy with the domestic policy. So we would get these briefings from the State Department dinell from on DCP and the White House and, and from the DEA that had these maps of Latin America that had various arrows of different colors, and the arrows were very thick to show how much stuff was coming up creeping up to our border, and every one of the arrows some would go through the Caribbean some would go to Caribbean and then into Mexico some would come up the Pacific, etc. And one of those arrows stopped at the US border. Because the war on drugs has never really been fought the same way of the US, as it's been fought. We haven't done it with blood and weapons in the United States the way we've asked the transit countries to do it, including the Central Americans all of whom have gotten corrupted in the process, and Mexico, all of them got corrupted so they're huge costs on this. The fact is that the flow is now more complex than before before we had cocaine, and we had opium. We had heroin, and we had marijuana that usually come flowing through these various rivers up into the United States. It's changed now of course with methamphetamines with fentanyl. And things that can be made in labs, often right in right somewhere in Mexico. So that the trade has changed but the fundamental truths of what we're talking about particularly when you're going to be indicting sitting heads of state is that the flow of the of the volume of coca coca base, or coca paste and cocaine. The flow has remained largely the same despite our investments in at least $10 billion in plan Columbia. And then if you look at the Mexican part Medida, which projected somewhat down into Central America, another billion or two who knows how much that the flow has been the same. The same maps that we had back in the 1980s probably would show the flow now. Some of this stuff would go. Yes, some of the stuff does go through Venezuelan border areas, but most of it does not. Most of it does not. And as I said, the vast majority of it does not. The vast majority of it. Do not. In most countries, such as Honduras, the United States is still backing the sitting precedent whose brother was was prosecuted successfully last fall for narco trafficking. I had a prosecutor and I was an intelligence analyst not a legal case builder, but I would think that the legal case builders the ones who were funneling information to prosecutors could put together a lot stronger set of arguments about Juan Orlando involvement. And then you can Maduro's personal involvement. Now, could Maduro, like any president, his predecessors, even before Chavez, they'd be held responsible for for things that happen in the border area, particularly corruption involving local officials. Technically, morally you could hold them that but that's not indictable sorts of behavior, but most of the drugs have never come through Venezuela, this so called cartel de solace that is being used being trumpeted in the in the indictment documents. No, no serious analyst that I know of outside of government I don't know what they're saying inside of government right now. But no serious observer today would say that this is that there is such a cartel. It's a vehicle of convenient way of pegging a name on something that's almost impossible to verify and therefore you can get away with saying in public. So it's very, it's very nerve rattled. It's very nerve wracking that we have these very precious analytical tools intelligence tools analytical tools prosecutory tools. We have grand juries we have all of these mechanisms that are supposed to be above politics, but seem to basically be used to make a political point as a broader policy of one particular administration. So, with that, I will let you go, you've given us 36 minutes of just fascinating information and a terrific conversation and I'm so pleased and honored to have met you and I hope that we can come that you can come back and we can explore different issues related to US foreign policy in the hemisphere as a whole Latin America and the Caribbean specifically. And I look forward to, to another conversation with you. Okay, my pleasure. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye bye my pleasure. And so I will just let the reviewers just know I posted a few things in our, in our chat there's an action posted at code pink dot org. It's actually code pink dot org slash Venezuela underscore charges it's a sign on letter that we would encourage you to to add your name to to retract the indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and to attract and to retract the indictment based on on much of what you heard this afternoon regarding the manipulation of US foreign policy tools to affect regime change in a country and we've seen this multiple times throughout the Americas. With the United States, and also please join us next week, Wednesday, 12pm Eastern, 9am Pacific on what the F is going on in Latin America, and one other thing that you can do educational tool that I would encourage you to do is to listen to code pink radio every Thursday 11am Eastern 8am Pacific on WBAI out in New York City and WPFW out of Washington DC that's a live show 11am Eastern and 8am Pacific. Okay everybody thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Thank you for your patience with some of my technical glitches on the at the 12 o'clock hour. I look forward to you joining us again next week. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.