The State Department announced today that “Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru from September 8-10 to strengthen key U.S. partnerships in our region. During the trip, he will meet with the new De La Espriella government in Colombia, President Noboa in Ecuador, and the new Fujimori government in Peru.”
Other than a passing reference to a discussion of U.S. support for Colombia in the wake of the August 10 earthquake, the agenda announced is the jargon used for the Trump administration’s policy of forcing the rest of the Americas to accept U.S. military deployments in their countries ("enhanced cooperation in the shared fight against narcoterrorism, which threatens our hemisphere"), and to only trade and accept investment from the U.S., and definitely not from China ("the benefits of deeper commercial relationships between our countries).
“Throughout the trip, the Secretary will reaffirm the Trump Administration’s commitment to a secure, prosperous, and democratic Western Hemisphere”—a commitment just demonstrated, once again, in Venezuela this week, in the Pentagon’s agreement with a richly-hated Venezuelan sleazeball with a history of money-laundering and profiteering off poverty, for control of a goodly portion of Venezuela’s oil resources which the Trump administration is seizing for the United States.
