Instruction: Write an article about: Brazil’s Lula travels to China and calls to end US dollar dominance. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Brazil, BRIC, BRICS, China, de-dollarization, Dilma Rousseff, economics, iron, Jair Bolsonaro, Lava Jato, Lula da Silva, NDB, New Development Bank, oil, Operation Car Wash, trade, Xi Jinping

Output:
Brazil’s President Lula da Silva took a historic trip to China, where he signed many cooperation agreements and pledged to challenge the dominance of the US dollar.

Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known popularly as Lula, took a historic trip to China this April.
There, the two countries deepened their comprehensive strategic partnership, signing 15 agreements involving trade, scientific research, technology, renewable energy, agriculture, meat production, finance, the digital economy, communications, the media, the fight against poverty and hunger, and even the joint development of satellites and space cooperation.
China pledged investments estimated at around $50 billion Brazilian reais. Symbolically, under one of the deals, a Brazilian factory previously run by US automaker Ford will instead by operated by the Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD.
Lula’s meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing came just weeks after China and Brazil reached a deal to use their local currencies in bilateral trade, excluding the US dollar.
While visiting China, Lula made it clear that de-dollarization is a top priority for his country.
“Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar”, Lula said, according to a report in the Financial Times.
“Why can’t we do trade based on our own currencies?” the Brazilian leader asked. “Who was it that decided that the dollar was the currency after the disappearance of the gold standard?”

Many US politicians were outraged by the historic de-dollarization agreement between China and Brazil.
Neoconservative Republican Senator Marco Rubio fumed on Fox News:
Today, Brazil – in our hemisphere, the largest country in the western hemisphere south of us – cut a trade deal with China. They’re going to, from now on, do trade in their own currencies, and get right around the dollar.
They’re creating a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States.
We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.
China and Brazil signed an agreement to de-dollarize their trade and use local currencies.
US politicians like Republican Senator Marco Rubio are furious, because it means they can no longer destroy countries' economies with illegal sanctions.
More here: https://t.co/9IO1KsEVMo pic.twitter.com/4k8H3GLdqo
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 16, 2023

Lula, now in his third term as president, was unfazed by the criticism in Washington.
The Brazilian leftist leader has already publicly pledged to create a new currency for trade in Latin America. He stated clearly that the goal is to weaken the region’s “dependence on the US dollar”.
Brazil and Argentina preparing new Latin American currency to ‘reduce reliance on US dollar’

“Who decided that our currencies were weak, that they didn’t have value in other countries?” Lula asked while in China.
“Why can’t a bank like that of the BRICS have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and other countries?” he continued. “It’s difficult because we are unaccustomed [to the idea]. Everyone depends on just one currency”.
Lula made these remarks criticizing US dollar hegemony in a speech for the New Development Bank (NDB), the financial institution birthed by the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Lula was one of the creators of the BRICS, back when it was previously just the BRIC. He co-founded the group during his first two terms in office, which ran from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2010.
The leftist Brazilian president has been an outspoken advocate for a multipolar world.
Lula among the founding members of the BRIC
The NDB was meant as an alternative to the US-dominated World Bank, which is notorious for imposing devastating austerity measures and neoliberal economic reforms on countries in the Global South.
On April 12, Lula flew into Shanghai, where the NDB is located. He was the first foreign head of state to visit the BRICS bank’s headquarters.
There, Lula was greeted by his successor, Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff, a fellow member of the left-wing Workers’ Party.
Dilma is now president of the New Development Bank. There, she has pledged to use the institution to fund high-quality “sustainable development” to fight climate change and “promote social inclusion”.
Dilma said the NDB plans to finance “critical and strategic infrastructure projects” like ports, airports, and highways, as well as “more modern models of transportation”, such as high-speed trains, in underdeveloped countries in the Global South.
Um grande dia para o Brasil e os Brics. Participando da posse da querida amiga @dilmabr como presidenta do Novo Banco de Desenvolvimento.
?: @ricardostuckert pic.twitter.com/u6fAiCVFbd
— Lula (@LulaOficial) April 13, 2023

Lula’s trip to China was his first state visit outside of the Americas in his third term.
The Brazilian president traveled to the United States in February, but only for one day. In contrast, Lula spent four days in China – a symbol of how important their alliance is.
“No one will prohibit Brazil from improving its relationship with China”, Lula said during his trip, in a clear message to the United States.
Lula also visited the research center of China’s tech giant Huawei, which has been unilaterally sanctioned by the US – another message to Washington.
Brazilian’s Minister of Finance Fernando Haddad, who joined Lula in China, explained that their goal is “reindustrializing Brazil in partnership with Chinese capital”.
Reporting on the historic trip, S&P Global Market Intelligence noted (emphasis added):
The 20 new agreements have a broad scope, indicating that the Lula administration is looking to prioritize deepening economic ties with China. Lula’s visit to mainland China, which was postponed due to illness, had been planned to last five days and would have included a delegation of around 200 business representatives, compared with the one day that Lula spent in the United States in February, with no clear agreements reached.

When Lula ended his second term at the end of 2010, he was one of the most popular leaders in world history, with a staggering 87% approval rating.
Lula and his successor Dilma transformed the country. In a speech in China, Lula boasted that their Workers’ Party-led governments helped lift 36 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty, taking Brazil off of the UN Hunger Map for the first time in history.
In 2002, the year before Lula entered office, Brazil’s GDP PPP was $1.72 trillion; when he left, it was $2.8 trillion.
Today, Brazil has the eighth-biggest economy on Earth, when measured with purchasing power parity (PPP). It is even bigger than the economies of France and Britain.
When Lula was previously president, Brazil had become the sixth largest, but following a US-backed political coup, Brazil’s economy suffered from years of right-wing rule and aggressive neoliberal policies that devastated the country and fueled deindustrialization.
The biggest economies in the world by GDP (PPP), according to 2023 IMF data
China has the world’s largest economy, when measured with purchasing power parity. It is also among the top two most populous countries (India’s population is expected to overtake China’s in 2023).
For its part, Brazil is the most populous country in Latin America, and the seventh-most populous on Earth.

China has been Brazil’s top trading partner since 2009. Commercial exchange between the two giants has skyrocketed in the past two decades.
The Brazilian government boasted that their bilateral trade increased by a staggering 21 times since Lula’s first visit to China in 2004.
In 2022, China and Brazil did US$150.4 billion in trade. From 2021 to 2022 alone, their bilateral trade grew by 10.1%.

What is unique about this relationship is that Brazil has a significant trade surplus with China, exporting roughly $90 billion in 2022 while importing approximately $60 billion.
In fact, Brazil exports three times more to China what it sells to the United States. (Brazil has a trade deficit with the US.)

Brazil is a commodities powerhouse.
The South American nation is the world’s second-biggest exporter of iron ore.
Brazil is also among the top 10 biggest oil producers. As of 2021, it produced more oil even than Iran, representing roughly 4% of global output.

Under the rule of the Workers’ Party, Brazil had established itself as the sixth-largest economy on Earth.
But years of US meddling pushed the South American giant into recession and stagnation.
A huge drop in commodities prices in 2014 caused significant economic problems. This crash was intentionally pushed by the United States, which massively expanded its own shale production while pressuring Saudi Arabia to overproduce oil to collapse crude prices on the global market, in an effort to hurt the economies of major oil producers Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.
‘Oil war’: How US and Saudi crashed crude prices to hurt Russia, Iran, Venezuela in 2014

Dilma governed from 2011 until 2016, when she was overthrown in a political coup backed by the United States, impeached on an absurd budgetary technicality that far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro regularly engaged in.
Lula was subsequently imprisoned in 2018, on fraudulent charges overseen by the corrupt judge Sergio Moro, as part of the lawfare (judicial warfare) campaign known as Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), which was closely supported by the US Justice Department and State Department.
Brazil’s top court later dropped all charges against Lula. Even the United Nations Human Rights Committee determined that Lula’s civil rights and due process guarantees had been violated.

But the imprisonment of Lula on false pretenses, under Washington’s watch, essentially handed the 2018 election to the fascistic Bolsonaro, who openly praised Brazil’s previous extreme-right, US-backed dictatorship, as well as the fascist junta of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
Bolsonaro rewarded Moro, the judge who jailed Lula, by appointing him as his “super justice minister”. Bolsonaro and Moro then promptly visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to thank the notorious US spy agency.
The US supported the soft coup against Brazil's President Dilma in 2016
Then Lula was imprisoned on fake charges before the 2018 election
Lula was sentenced by corrupt judge and US asset Sergio Moro
Bolsonaro and Moro then visited CIA headquartershttps://t.co/FY8bV1Bebr
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 2, 2023

Under Bolsonaro, Brazil’s foreign policy was totally subordinated to Washington. He eagerly recognized US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidó as the so-called “interim president” of Venezuela, and even supported cross-border terror attacks on the country’s leftist Chavista government.
Donald Trump’s former CIA director turned secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, admitted that Washington tried to use Bolsonaro and his far-right counterpart in India, Narendra Modi, to divide and destabilize the BRICS system.
Remember BRICS? Well, thanks to @jairbolsonaro and @narendramodi the B and the I both get that the C and the R are threats to their people. pic.twitter.com/JwL8E0uJte
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 19, 2021

The geopolitically motivated 2014 commodities crash, US-backed political coups in 2016 and 2018, and six subsequent years of right-wing rule devastated Brazil’s economy.
Brazil-based journalist Brian Mier also explained to Geopolitical Economy Report that “Lava Jato sabotaged the economy, causing a 2.5% drop in GDP by paralyzing and bankrupting Brazil’s five largest construction and engineering companies”.
He pointed to studies that found that the US-backed Lava Jato lawfare led to the loss of 4.4 million jobs.
“Lula and Dilma had quintupled the foreign reserves, and Brazil was prepared for a commodities bust cycle, so Lava Jato had a bigger effect on the recession than the commodities bust”, Mier said.
All of this led to what was essentially a lost decade. The country is only recovering today.

On April 13, Lula met with New Development Bank officials in Shanghai. The Brazilian government published an official transcript of his remarks.
Lula recalled that the 2008 financial crash was caused by “greed” and risky financial speculation. Today the crises continue, Lula noted, with large banks like Credit Suisse collapsing.
“I think the world has never needed an instrument to help in the world’s development as much as it needs it now”, he said of the NDB.
In light of this instability, the NDB offers “extraordinary hope”, Lula argued.
“We have to be more concerned with serving the countries that are most in need of money”, the Brazilian president said. He argued that their goal should be to “help the neediest and poorest countries”.
“I hope that this bank is able to lend money for the development of the African continent. I hope that this bank is able to have money to lend to the poorest countries in Latin America”, he urged.
Bom dia no Brasil! Em Xangai, participei da posse de @dilmabr como presidenta do Novo Banco de Desenvolvimento dos Brics e visitei a fábrica da Huawei.  O NBD é uma grande iniciativa para um desenvolvimento mais equilibrado do mundo.
?: @ricardostuckert pic.twitter.com/VhUc4qNLfr
— Lula (@LulaOficial) April 13, 2023

While in China, Lula tweeted:
It is a dream of developing countries to have an instrument that invests in their development.
During the 8 years I was in the presidency, I tried to create a Bank in the South, which would allow investment in the necessary things in our region, without submitting to the rules of the IMF.
He added:
The BRICS Bank represents a lot for those who dream of a new world.
The dream of creating the BRICS was for an instrument of development, which will certainly be strong, with the goal of benefiting countries. If not, we will never have the poorest countries be able to develop themselves.
It would not be fair if we ended the 21st century as we started the 20th century, with those who were rich getting richer and those who were poor getting poorer.
Se não, nunca teremos os países mais pobres conseguindo se desenvolver. Não é justo terminarmos o século XXI como começamos o século XX, com quem era rico ficando mais rico e quem era pobre mais pobre.
— Lula (@LulaOficial) April 13, 2023

As Dilma Rousseff was officially sworn in as director of the New Development Bank, Lula delivered another speech.
He said the NDB has potential to “become the great bank of the Global South”, praising it as a “tool for reducing inequalities between rich countries and emerging countries”, which could help prevent “social exclusion, hunger, extreme poverty, and forced migration”.
“Many developing countries are accumulating unpayable debts”, Lula warned
“The unmet financing needs of developing countries were and remain enormous”, he added.
Lula called the NDB a “milestone” in South-South cooperation.
“For the first time, a development bank with global reach was established without the participation of developed countries in its initial phase”, the Brazilian leader said.
The NDB is “free, therefore, from the shackles of conditionalities imposed by traditional institutions on emerging economies. And more: with the possibility of financing projects in local currency”, he continued.
Lula explained, “The creation of this Bank shows that the union of emerging countries is capable of generating relevant social and economic changes for the world. We don’t want to be better than anyone else. We want opportunities to expand our potential and guarantee dignity, citizenship and quality of life to our peoples”.
“The New Development Bank has great transformative potential, as it frees emerging countries from submission to traditional financial institutions, which try to govern us, without having a mandate to do so”, he added.
Lula noted that, in Brazil, the NDB has helped finance infrastructure projects, income support programs, sustainable transportation, climate change adaptation, sanitation services, and renewable energies.
Referring to the former Brazilian president affectionately as “comrade Dilma”, Lula emphasized that her new global leadership role is an important accomplishment for women’s representation.
He also noted Dilma’s revolutionary struggles in the 1970s “to put into practice the dream of a better world”. Dilma had been part of the leftist resistance against Brazil’s US-backed fascist dictatorship, and she was imprisoned and tortured.
Lula explained:
“The time when Brazil was absent from major world decisions is in the past. We are back on the international stage, after an inexplicable absence. We have a lot to contribute to key issues of our time, such as mitigating the climate crisis and fighting hunger and inequality.”
“It is intolerable that, on a planet that produces enough food to meet the needs of all humanity, hundreds of millions of men, women and children have nothing to eat.
It is inadmissible that the irresponsibility and greed of a small minority put the survival of the planet and of all humanity at risk.
Brazil is back. With the willingness to contribute again to the construction of a more developed, fairer and environmentally sustainable world.
In another Brazilian government statement, Lula stated:
We want the Brazil-China relationship to transcend the trade issue; we want to have a deep relationship in science and technology; partnerships between universities to have more Brazilian students in China, and more Chinese students in Brazil.
We count on China in our fight for the preservation of planet earth, defending a healthier climate policy. That is why an energy transition is extremely important, so that we can produce cleaner energy, especially wind, solar, and biomass energy.
Brazil is committed to achieving, by 2030, zero deforestation in the Amazon, and to making our contribution to preserving the planet.
We are convinced that the development of Brazilian agriculture does not need irresponsible deforestation, let alone fires. Brazil can practically double its agricultural production by recovering degraded land, without having to cut down a single tree.
For his part, Chinese President Xi said:
China has a strategic and far-reaching relationship with Brazil, which has a place of priority in our foreign relations. You are our longtime friend.
The Brazil-China relationship, in healthy and stable development, will play an important role for peace, stability, and mutual development, for both countries and the world.


Instruction: Write an article about: China deepens ties with Venezuela, challenging US ‘hegemonic mindset’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: BRICS, China, gas, Iran, Nicolás Maduro, oil, sanctions, Venezuela, Xi Jinping

Output:
Condemning Washington’s “hegemonic mindset” and sanctions, China strengthened its strategic partnership with Venezuela. The oil-rich South American nation’s President Nicolás Maduro took a historic trip to Beijing, and applied to join BRICS.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro took a historic trip to China this September. There, the two nations signed 31 comprehensive agreements and formally “upgraded” their relations to an “all-weather strategic partnership”, one of Beijing’s highest designations.
China and Venezuela jointly blasted the “hegemonism” of the Western powers. Beijing formally condemned the illegal sanctions that Washington has imposed on Caracas.
Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized this his government will “firmly support” Venezuela’s “just cause against external interference”.

The global political and economic order is changing rapidly.
One of the biggest shifts the world has seen in the past 20 years is in relations between China and Latin America.
At the beginning of the 21st century, there was not much trade between China and Latin America. But in the past two decades, their economic relations have skyrocketed.
Today, China is the second-largest trading partner of the region, after the United States. There are nine countries in Latin America that trade more with China than any other nation. (The United States is Mexico’s biggest trading partner, and Mexico has the second-biggest economy in Latin America. But if Mexico is excluded from the data, China becomes Latin America’s top trading partner.)
Among the Latin American nations that already trade more with China than the United States are the largest economy in the region, Brazil; as well as the third biggest, Argentina; along with one of the world’s top lithium producers, Bolivia; the second-largest copper producer, Peru; and the country with the biggest known oil reserves: Venezuela.

Venezuela has a lot of economic potential, but has suffered for years under a brutal economic war waged by the United States.
In 2019, the Donald Trump administration launched a coup attempt. Washington claimed a little-known right-wing opposition politician, Juan Guaidó, was the supposed “interim president” of the country, despite the fact that he had never participated in a presidential election.
The United States pressured countries around the world to recognize Guaidó as the supposed leader of Venezuela.
At the same time, the United States imposed upon Venezuela one of the most grueling sanctions regimes in history.
Washington’s goal was clear: to destroy Venezuela’s oil sector, thus starving the leftist government of revenue and leading to its overthrow.

For a century, ever since oil was discovered in Venezuela, the South American nation’s economy has been extremely reliant on one industry: oil.
This over-dependency is a problem that predates the Bolivarian Revolution declared by revolutionary socialist President Hugo Chávez at the turn of the 21st century.
Long before Chávez was born, Venezuela has been a petrostate. The government has historically relied on exporting oil to get revenue to fund social programs. This was the case even when the state was controlled by right-wing political parties.
The US sanctions on Venezuela began in 2015, when the Barack Obama White House issued a bizarre executive order “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela”.
When Trump entered office in 2017, he drastically escalated the economic war on Venezuela that Obama had started into a full-on embargo (like the blockade Washington has illegally imposed on Cuba for more than six decades).
US sanctions have devastated the Venezuelan economy. According to the top United Nations expert on the issue, special rapporteur Alena Douhan, Washington’s unilateral coercive measures, which are illegal under international law, resulted in the Venezuelan government losing 99% of its revenue.
Independent experts have reported that US sanctions have caused at least tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Venezuela, perhaps more than 100,000.

While it is widely known that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, what is much less known is that the South American nation’s crude is very heavy.
Venezuela’s oil needs a lot more processing than the lighter crude of other countries. It must be diluted, blended with lighter crude or liquids like naphtha.
US sanctions have aimed expressly at trying to prevent Venezuela from importing the diluents it needs to process its oil. This was yet another part of Washington’s strategy to destroy Venezuelan oil production, to starve the government of revenue.

However, the numerous US coup attempts have failed. Still today, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is firmly in power. He continues the legacy of the Bolivarian Revolution that was initiated by his predecessor, Chávez.
Maduro is also deepening Caracas’ alliance with Beijing.
This September, the Venezuelan leader took a seven-day trip to China, which both Beijing and Caracas described as “historic”.
Maduro met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and signed 31 comprehensive agreements, involving collaboration in a wide array of areas, including economic integration and trade, geology and mining, health, technology transfer, construction of public housing, energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, and even outer space.
During Maduro’s trip, Xi also announced that China had “elevated” its diplomatic relationship with Venezuela.
Beijing previously considered its ties with Caracas to be part of a “comprehensive strategic partnership”. Now, China calls it an “all-weather strategic partnership”.
This means that Venezuela is among China’s closest allies, at the same level as Pakistan, which is one of China’s neighbors and plays an important role in the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global infrastructure project.
In his remarks upon meeting with Maduro, President Xi said that “China will continue to firmly support Venezuela’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty, dignity and social stability, as well as its just cause against external interference”.
China and Venezuela released a joint statement calling to “oppose all forms of hegemonism and power politics, oppose all forms of unilateralism”.
Beijing-based newspaper the Global Times, which is close to the government, described Maduro’s trip writing: “The further consolidation and elevation of bilateral relations also suggests the irreversible momentum of South-South cooperation, which leads to win-win results and unity among the developing world rather than certain Western countries wrestling for power out of a hegemonic mindset”.
For his part, Maduro said the two nations’ growing relations are part of a “new era”. He added, “We have a relation of deep friendship, of successful cooperation. Our relations have been a model for the Global South”.
The Venezuelan president added that China has been the “great motor of development in a new era of a multipolar and pluricentric world”.
Maduro emphasized that the partnership between Venezuela and China is “not about dominating countries, much less taking their resources or wealth. On the contrary, we are working for the development of industry, agriculture, technology, the capacity to make jobs and satisfy the needs of the peoples. It is the century of a different world, pluripolar and pluricentric”.
La asociación estratégica entre Venezuela y China no es para ir contra nadie, ni dominar países, ni mucho menos para quitarle los recursos o riquezas a las naciones. ¡Al contrario! Trabajamos para desarrollar la industria, la agricultura, la tecnología, la capacidad de generación… pic.twitter.com/hduaDl9IBa
— Nicolás Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) September 14, 2023

China has the world’s largest economy, when its GDP is measured at purchasing power parity.
China is also the world’s biggest importer of both oil and gas. It needs stable, reliable energy partners, particularly as Washington pressures countries to minimize their relations with Beijing.
Venezuela not only has massive oil reserves, but also very significant gas deposits.
BP reported in 2021 that Venezuela has proven gas reserves amounting to a staggering 6.3 trillion cubic meters, larger than those in Saudi Arabia (6 trillion), the United Arab Emirates (5.9 trillion), and Iraq (3.5 trillion).
In recent years, the Venezuelan government has slowly expanded exploration, looking for more gas fields.
China is slowly trying to end its reliance on fossil fuels. Beijing recognizes that climate change is a very serious threat, not only to the planet, but to its own national security.
In fact, China is the world’s leader in renewable energy, representing more than 80% of global clean energy manufacturing investment.
Beijing is on the path to install more solar panels in 2023 than the United States has installed in the history of the technology.
But, in the short- to medium-term, China still needs a lot of oil and gas, and Venezuela is a natural energy partner, with a government that Beijing can rely on not to betray it and ally with Washington.
China installed 96.6 GW of solar power capacity in 2022: 42% of the entire planet (231 GW)
China had a total of 462 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) power installed as of 2022: 37.5% of the global total of 1233 GW
China has more solar power installed than these countries COMBINED:… pic.twitter.com/tL81uR0nOZ
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 18, 2023

Maduro’s trip to China came just a few weeks after a historic summit of the BRICS, in which the bloc founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa formally invited six countries to become new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Venezuela has formally applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc as well.
China has publicly endorsed Venezuela for membership. Brazil, under President Lula da Silva, has also made it clear that it supports Venezuela joining BRICS.
The fact that Iran is now integrating into the bloc shows that countries in the Global South are increasingly willing to challenge the illegal unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States.
In fact, in July, Iran also became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an important institution for security policy in Eurasia. Other members include China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and numerous Central Asian nations.
China has deepened its alliance with Venezuela mere months after helping to broker a historic peace breakthrough between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
For decades, the United States pressured Riyadh to wage a proxy war against Tehran, in hopes of weakening and eventually toppling Iran’s post-revolutionary government.
Today, Iran and Saudi Arabia certainly are not allies, but they have normal diplomatic relations and will work alongside each other members of BRICS.
Developments like these show that, while the United States wages wars and seeks to overthrow governments across the planet, China encourages peace, diplomacy, and stability, in the name of “win-win cooperation” and mutually beneficial economic development.


Instruction: Write an article about: Corruption exposed: US meddled in Ecuador’s election, using Julian Assange as bargaining chip. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli, Correísmo, Ecuador, Fernando Villavicencio, Julian Assange, Lenín Moreno, Rafael Correa, WikiLeaks

Output:
A former minister of Ecuador testified that the US government conspired with a right-wing political party to run a disinformation campaign against the leftist Correísta movement, backing a millionaire banker for president in exchange for giving up journalist Julian Assange, who had asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Ecuador’s former energy minister testified that the US government conspired with a right-wing political party to run a disinformation campaign against the leftist Correísta movement of ex President Rafael Correa.
He said that US “federal agents” pledged to help “influence” the 2017 presidential elections and support the candidacy of conservative millionaire banker Guillermo Lasso in exchange for the promise to turn over journalist Julian Assange, who had been given asylum by Correa and was stuck living for years in Ecuador’s embassy in London.

The former energy minister, Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli, had fled a corruption investigation in Ecuador and was living as a fugitive from justice in the United States in late 2016 when he was offered large sums of money and US government protection in return for reading a carefully prepared “script” that made false accusations of corruption against Correa and his Vice President Jorge Glas, who was later imprisoned on highly dubious charges.
Pareja testified that the federal agents also coerced him into making false accusations against a US citizen, so they could justify their involvement in the Ecuadorian case. This led to the US national being arrested and imprisoned for three-and-a-half years.
Lasso ended up losing the 2017 election (before going on to win the 2021 election), but his victorious opponent, Lenín Moreno, later betrayed Assange anyway, letting British authorities raid the embassy, imprison the WikiLeaks journalist, and prepare to extradite him to the United States.
Ecuador’s former energy minister, Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli, in 2016
The revelation of this extraordinary example of Washington meddling in another country’s election came from one of the top officials in Ecuador’s oil industry.
Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli had served as head of the state-owned oil company Petroecuador, and later became Correa’s minister of hydrocarbons.
In 2016, Pareja was named in the Panama Papers leak of offshore bank accounts, and he was forced to step down as energy minister. In 2017, he was sentenced to several years in prison on charges that he used his position in the state oil industry to enrich himself and his friends.
The name Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli has become practically synonymous with corruption in Ecuador, so much so that he is commonly referred to as “Capaya” (an abbreviation of his name).
On November 9, 2022, Correa published on Twitter a written testimony that Pareja had provided from prison in May 2019. The affidavit, which is signed by Pareja and includes his thumbprint, exposes the scandalous US government-backed plot to meddle in Ecuador’s 2017 presidential elections to hurt the left wing.
La única organización criminal que se puede probar es entre Villavicencio y Pareja.¿También en esta ocasión Villavicencio le pasó los guiones??#LosCorruptosSiempreFueronEllos pic.twitter.com/FEbUwsZdlj
— Rafael Correa (@MashiRafael) November 10, 2022

Rafael Correa shared the scandalous 2019 testimony in response to evidence-free accusations of corruption that Pareja Yannuzzelli made against the former president in a politicized hearing organized by the National Assembly’s auditing committee on November 9, 2022.
This committee is run by Fernando Villavicencio, a notorious right-wing Ecuadorian political operative who is closely linked to US intelligence agencies.
Today Villavicencio is a member of the National Assembly, but he first made his name as a high-profile opposition activist during Correa’s two presidential terms from 2007 to 2017.
Villavicencio was a key figure in the lawfare (judicial warfare) campaign against Correa. He ran a viciously anti-Correísta media outlet, which – with funding from the US government – consistently spread thinly sourced rumors of corruption about the leftist president.
In 2010, Villavicencio even played an important role in a failed coup attempt against Correa.
Villavicencio enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight in 2018, when he collaborated with British newspaper The Guardian in co-authoring a highly dubious smear piece against Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks adamantly insisted the article was false and created a legal fund to sue The Guardian.
In the tweet below, Villavicencio (on the right, with the glasses) boasts of working with The Guardian reporters Luke Harding and Dan Collins on the allegedly fake story:
Una de mis mayores experiencias periodísticas fue trabajar durante meses la investigación sobre Assange con los colegas del diario británico The Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins y con la joven periodista Cristina Solórzano de @somos_lafuente pic.twitter.com/IQbZwAkKNx
— Fernando Villavicencio Valencia (@VillaFernando_) December 2, 2018

By sharing Pareja’s incriminating 2019 affidavit on Twitter, Correa was highlighting Villavicencio’s hand behind the November 9, 2022 hearing, which clearly aimed to demonize the leftist former president and disparage Correísmo, which still remains the most popular political movement in Ecuador.
The devastating May 2019 affidavit demonstrates that Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli (Capaya), who is still in prison on corruption charges, is a hired gun who will happily spread false claims to undermine Correísmo.
Capaya became a household name in Ecuador back in 2016, when he was serving as minister of hydrocarbons. In April of that year, international media outlets published the Panama Papers, a massive leak of information about offshore bank accounts.
Pareja Yannuzzelli’s name appeared in the Panama Papers, setting off a scandal in Ecuador. Correa was still president at the time, and in May, Capaya was forced to resign and was replaced with a new energy minister.
The Correa government immediately began investigating Capaya’s web of corruption, and found his family had stashed millions of dollars in bank accounts in Panama.
Yet while he was being investigated, Capaya managed to flee Ecuador in September.
Capaya opened his testimony noting that, by December 2016, he “was in the United States in a complicated situation.”
While in Miami, Florida, the Ecuadorian fugitive from justice was contacted by César Monge Ortega, the president of the right-wing political party CREO.
Ecuador’s current president, the conservative multimillionaire banker Guillermo Lasso, is a leader of CREO. Monge was one of Lasso’s closest allies, referred to in the Ecuadorian media as “the right hand of Guillermo Lasso.” He served as the president’s minister of government until Monge died from cancer in July 2021.
Ecuador’s minister of government and former CREO leader, César Monge Ortega, before his death in May 2021
Back in 2016, Monge asked Capaya to join a smear campaign against the presidential candidate who would represent the leftist Alianza País party in the upcoming 2017 elections, Correa’s former Vice President Lenín Moreno.
“He offered me an important sum of money and federal North American protection,” Capaya wrote.
At the time it was widely assumed, even by Correa himself, that Moreno would continue his socialist political program.
Moreno did run on a left-wing presidential campaign, but after entering office, he did a political 180. Moreno turned hard to the right, repressing, imprisoning, and exiling Correísta politicians.
He also stabbed Julian Assange in the back, reversing Correa’s pledge to protect the WikiLeaks publisher. The Moreno government had given the Australian journalist Ecuadorian citizenship in 2017, but in April 2019 it issued a “temporary suspension” of Assange’s new nationality – an action that Ecuadorian experts say had no legal basis.
Then, Moreno even let British authorities violate his own country’s sovereignty by storming the embassy – which constitutes Ecuadorian territory under the Vienna Convention in international law – in order to arrest Assange.
Correísta politicians have alleged that Moreno was bribed and/or blackmailed by the US government, as he obediently fulfilled all of Washington’s foreign-policy goals, collaborating closely with the Donald Trump administration, removing Ecuador from the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) and Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and even recognizing US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidó in Venezuela.
Hoy hablé con el Presidente @Lenin Moreno: #Ecuador respalda la necesidad de conformar un Gobierno de Emergencia Nacional en Venezuela para salvar a nuestra gente.
Abordamos también la situación de nuestros migrantes en ese país y las acciones que estamos tomando para apoyarlos. pic.twitter.com/zqdWFIxzDD
— Juan Guaidó (@jguaido) May 20, 2020

Few people would have expected back during Ecuador’s presidential election in 2017 that Moreno would go on to govern like this. The country’s right-wing opposition was concerned that Lenín Moreno (who, after all, was named after the Russian revolutionary) would continue Correa’s leftist program.
So in December 2016, César Monge Ortega, the leader of Lasso’s right-wing CREO party, tried to recruit Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli (Capaya) for the disinformation campaign against Correa, Moreno, and their Alianza País party.
Capaya wrote in his 2019 testimony that he initially declined the offer, but that Monge was persistent.
“Monge insisted to me that I could contact North American federal agents that were working with CREO for a long time, and they would provide me with protection and stability in the United States,” Capaya said.
“He assured me that the American Democratic Party was committed to backing Lasso’s presidential candidacy in exchange for Julian Assange, to expose his link with the current president of the United States,” Capaya continued.
This comment suggests that Democratic Party leadership had been convinced that US President Donald Trump was somehow connected to Assange, a baseless conspiracy theory that was fueled by Fernando Villavicencio’s extremely questionable report in The Guardian.
Capaya went on: “Finally, one day Monge visited me with [US] federal agents and together they guaranteed me protection in the United States in exchange for my participation in the smear campaign against Alianza País in order to influence the presidential elections in Ecuador in 2017.”
Ecuador’s current president, Guillermo Lasso
Capaya said that, after this in-person meeting with the US federal agents, he accepted their offer.
His role was to make outlandish accusations Correa (who was still president at the time), his government, and his party.
“They gave me a script created and prepared by Fernando Villavicencio, who according to Monge had been contracted by the party CREO,” Capaya said.
He continued: “They told me that in order for there to be an agreement, I had to follow the script to a T. To this end, we met various times in Miami between December 2016 and January 2017. These videos subsequently were made public on social media after February 2017.”
Capaya stressed that “a big part of the script” was dedicated to accusing Correa and his other Vice President Jorge Glas of corruption.
“They made me name third parties that I don’t know,” Capaya recalled. He wrote that the US “federal agents” heavily pressured him to name people such as Frank Roberto Chatburn Ripalda, a Miami-based financial advisor with dual US and Ecuadorian citizenship.
“Despite that I told them on more than one occasion that I never had any relation with him and that he was not being investigated or processed in Ecuador, they expressly told me that in order for there to be an agreement it was required to mention Chatburn, because he had US nationality and with that the federal agents could justify their participation and initiate actions against him in the United States,” Capaya said.
The US Justice Department subsequently charged Chatburn with money laundering and imprisoned him for three-and-a-half years.
Chatburn was not the only one who ended up burned by Washington.
Capaya concluded his testimony lamenting that Monge, his CREO party, and the US federal agents later abandoned him when Moreno won the presidential election.
They failed to fulfill their side of the promise. Capaya was later captured in Ecuador, and put behind bars, where he remains today.
Yet the scandal goes even deeper. Monge was not the only right-wing opposition figures whom Capaya was conspiring with.
As a fugitive from justice living in Miami in late 2016 and early 2017, Capaya also met with right-wing multimillionaire bankers from Ecuador’s notorious Isaías family.
The Isaías Brothers, William and Roberto, are ferociously anti-Correa oligarchs who fled their country of birth and moved to the United States, with millions of dollars of stolen money, during Ecuador’s economic crash of 1998 and 1999.
This massive crisis, known as the infamous “feriado bancario,” bankrupted millions of working-class Ecuadorians, depleting their savings by devaluing the national currency, the sucre, with runaway hyperinflation.
The banker who helped cause this meltdown had been affectionately known as Ecuador’s “super minister of the economy,” and had been lauded by the international financial press: none other than Guillermo Lasso, an ardent neoliberal Chicago Boy who now serves as president.
Lasso and his banker friends, who had held their illicit wealth in dollars, became millionaires thanks to the feriado bancario. Meanwhile, the sucre became so worthless that Ecuador surrendered its monetary sovereignty and adopted the US dollar as its official currency. This remains the case today.
From Miami, the Isaías Brothers have also used their stolen money to fund the campaigns of US politicians – both Republicans and Democrats – including Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and even former President Barack Obama.


Instruction: Write an article about: Brazil’s ex-president Dilma Rousseff: US-China conflict is neoliberalism vs socialism. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Brazil, BRICS, China, Dilma Rousseff, economics, neoliberalism, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff analyzes the US-China conflict as “a rivalry of two systems,” a struggle between neoliberalism and socialism. Condemning US sanctions and “dollar hegemony,” she called for Latin America “to break with the Monroe Doctrine.”

Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff has condemned US meddling and “hybrid war” in Latin America, while simultaneously praising China for creating a new model of economic development that challenges US-led neoliberal capitalism and the “Washington Consensus” imposed on the world.
“We want, basically, to be able to break with the Monroe Doctrine,” Rousseff said, referring to the nearly 200-year-old colonial doctrine in which the US government claims Latin America as its geopolitical “backyard.”
“We want Latin America to be for the Latin Americans, and not as the US wants it, in the Monroe Doctrine, which means Latin America for the North Americans, precisely the opposite,” the former Brazilian head of state added.
“The so-called hybrid war unleashed by the US through second-generation coups, lawfare processes, and sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela led to a great setback, returning to the continent the inequality, misery, and hunger that had been overcome, or that it was about to get over,” she lamented.
A leader of the left-wing Workers’ Party, Rousseff served as president of Brazil from 2011 until August 2016, when she was overthrown in a soft coup backed by the US government and her country’s powerful right-wing corporate oligarchy.
Rousseff spoke about the increasing conflict between the United States and China not as a mere interstate dispute, but rather the result of “a rivalry of two systems”: US-led neoliberal capitalism versus socialism with Chinese characteristics.
“The so-called Washington Consensus, a concept adopted by conservative Latin American governments, imposed the deregulation of the economy, the drastic reduction of the role of the state, and the abandonment of social and development policies,” she said.
These neoliberal capitalists “condemned Latin America to be the most unequal continent in the world, with reduced economic growth, concentration of wealth and income, and specialization in the production of raw materials,” Rousseff commented.
The former Brazilian president praised China for creating a “new development paradigm” based on “shared development” and “common prosperity.”
China and Russia are also leading the development of a “new geopolitical pole,” she said, and this offers opportunities for Latin America to be more independent.
Rousseff made these comments in a panel event on March 19, a virtual conference titled “21st Century Socialism: China and Latin America on the Frontline,” organized by the group Friends of Socialist China.
Geopolitical Economy Report obtained a copy of Rousseff’s Portuguese-language prepared speech, and has translated some of her key points into English below.

“Brazil always had a position of absolute independence with regard to international relations, with all countries in the world,” Dilma Rousseff emphasized at the beginning of her talk.
“Latin America wants to have an autonomous and independent position,” she said. “It is not possible to continue reproducing the inferiority complex of the conservative elites and oligarchies that have done nothing but submit to the United States in a shameful way.”
Rousseff argued that China has played an important role in balancing Latin America’s political and economic relationships, so the region is not so dominated by Washington. In this sense, Beijing has helped the region maintain independence and strategic autonomy.
China is Brazil’s largest trade partner, and the largest trade partner for many other countries in the region, she noted.
“Latin America’s position is not with the United States,” she stressed. “Latin America’s position affirms sovereignty, our position is independence, at the side of China. And this independence is not just for individual countries; it’s for the region.”
Rousseff emphasized the importance of institutions like the BRICS, the framework integrating Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
The BRICS “sought to reduce this unfair asymmetry” represented by institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which are dominated by the United States and Global North countries, she noted.
“Compared to the US, China has more respect for the role played by international organizations,” Rousseff added. Beijing defends multilateralism while Washington has attacked the United Nations and withdrew unilaterally from the Paris Agreement, she recalled.
Unlike the United States, Rousseff argued, China has been a more equitable partner. And leaders in the Global South are increasingly looking to Beijing for lessons on how to develop their own countries.
Dilma Rousseff applauded China for its “extraordinary development,” and for lifting more than 800 million people out of absolute poverty.
She noted how China was an exemplary model for managing the Covid-19 pandemic, juxtaposing it against the public health disaster in the United States, where nearly 1 million people have died.
China’s success in the pandemic, and its leading role in sending vaccines and protective equipment around the world, reflects its relative rise, whereas Washington’s failure shows its comparative decline, Rousseff argued.
The former Brazilian president traced the beginning of Washington’s new cold war on Beijing back to the 2008 financial crisis. While the West was suffering, the crash did not significantly affect China, Rousseff noted. This led US elites to decide that China had to be contained; its economy had to stop growing so rapidly.
The Barack Obama administration’s attempt to create a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was aimed at economically isolating China, she stated.
Rousseff called this part of a larger US “containment policy,” and argued it is “extremely flawed and harmful to everyone.”
US policy toward China subsequently “became very aggressive” under Donald Trump, and while the Joe Biden administration has tried to portray itself as more “diplomatic,” she noted, Washington has still pushed a needlessly hard line against China.
Speaking of the US “prejudice” toward China, Dilma Rousseff noted that Western politicians have espoused chauvinistic views that China, or any other nation, could not develop without adopting their own model based on the free market and liberal democracy.
Although she refrained from referring to the conflict as a new cold war, the former Brazilian leader stipulated that the crisis in US-China relations is a result of their two contrasting economic systems.
“China has become a kind of factory for the world, while the US has de-industrialized, losing economic muscle and transforming itself into a kingdom of finance, with a fantastic concentration of income and wealth.”
Neoliberalism is specifically what “laid the foundations for the decline of the US,” Rousseff said.
There are three serious problems caused by neoliberalism, she argued: “the financialization of the economy, the increase in income and wealth inequality, and the erosion of democracy.” And these ills “are prevalent in all capitalist countries.”
“The biggest problem with this system is the widening gap between rich and poor,” Rousseff cautioned. She cited Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who “admitted that 40 years of neoliberal practices have severely weakened the role of the state and public health policies, rendering the West helpless in the face of the pandemic.”
“China is accelerating its policy toward a society where equity prevails,” she said, “while in capitalist countries, including the US, per capita income has concentrated and jobs have stagnated or shrunk. Social wealth is rapidly concentrated and the richest 1% is getting even richer.”
“The financialization of the economy as a result of neoliberalism is the culprit that kills the dynamism of the capitalist system itself. Credit and finance gradually become obstacles rather than driving forces of production.”
“The pursuit of limited government, uncontrolled labor market liberalization and the pursuit of profits lead to a rapid accumulation of financial wealth for those at the top of the social pyramid and de-industrializes the economy.”
Rousseff contrasted these systemic problems of neoliberal capitalism with the alternative proposed by Beijing.
“China’s strength lies in its pursuit of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” she argued. “This path follows the law of the market, but attaches strategic importance to the role of the state.”
“The market mechanism and macro-regulation complement each other in China. Open to domestic and foreign private investment, it has increasingly controlled the distortions of oligopoly and speculation.”
Chinese “regulation of economic activity acts to preserve competition and avoid financial bubbles and market distortions,” while the state ensures stability with “tighter control over real estate and tutorial services.”
Rousseff praised China for creating a “new development paradigm” based on “shared development,” and commended Beijing for its idea of common prosperity.
The United States has historically had excellent systems of education, science, and technological development, but this intellectual infrastructure has been in decline since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and is at threat because the ultra-capitalist model has led to a massive disinvestment, Dilma Rousseff argued.
On the other hand, China has become the world’s new leader in science and technology, thanks to its heavy public investment and state leadership, she said.
China’s progress led Washington to launch a “technological lockdown” on Beijing, she noted, pointing to the ongoing “chip war” over control of semiconductors.
The world knows that the Chinese company Huawei has the best 5G technology, and it is also cheaper than its US competitors, Rousseff stated. But “the US tries to prevent other countries from using Chinese 5G technology, even if they don’t have alternatives of their own to offer.”
Meanwhile, neoliberalism has led to technological stagnation, the former Brazilian leader stated, because “companies only want and can only make money quickly, bringing limits to R&D activities.”
China’s historic development, economic growth, and scientific and technological advancement have created opportunities to challenge “US dollar hegemony,” Dilma Rousseff argued.
“In the financial sector, US dollar hegemony faces new challenges. As a global currency, the US dollar holds an irreplaceable position in international trade and payments. This has made the dollar a weapon of retaliation and a tool of extortion against other countries.”
“Here in Latin America, we have two terrible examples: 60 years of blockade against Cuba, and now more recently the blockade on Venezuela, at a time of pandemic.”
“The US government has been imposing far-reaching sanctions on foreign banks and companies that do business against the US’s wishes with countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and now Russia. They use their national jurisdiction as an international weapon. Given this, it is unlikely that the dollar will remain irreplaceable forever.”
Dollar hegemony is also based on the SWIFT inter-bank messaging system, Rousseff said, which Washington has turned into a financial weapon.
China began testing its own alternative to SWIFT as far back as 2015, she noted, and it is still being developed, but this process has been accelerated by the war in Ukraine.
The People’s Bank of China has been testing digital currencies, including its own sovereign digital renminbi, Rousseff added.
She criticized the US strategy of “decoupling” from China, calling it “absurd,” because Beijing is thoroughly integrated into the world economy, in complex webs that involve many nations.
“In 2019, around 100 countries around the world traded and invested more with China than the US, and that number is still growing,” Rousseff said.
China signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in 2020, she noted. This free trade agreement in the Asia-Pacific region involves nearly one-third of the global population and 30% of the global economy, making it larger than the European Union.
The global political and economic system is in a process of fundamental change, Dilma Rousseff said. And “there is no more significant geopolitical consequence today than the growing strategic partnership between China and Russia.”
“Ironically, it is precisely the maximum US pressure on Russia and the containment of China that played a key role in bringing the two countries closer together,” she added.
“The economic sanctions stemming from Russia’s annexation of Crimea and now the war in Ukraine are strengthening a new geopolitical pole, and accelerating changes that would only come slowly.”
In regard to the war in Ukraine, Rousseff complimented China for maintaining a neutral policy. The former Brazilian president called for peace while emphasizing how NATO helped to create the conflict in the first place.
She emphasized that Latin America must unite and maintain an independent foreign policy, while seeking opportunities with this new geopolitical pole.
Latin America needs to adapt to the changing economic order, she argued, to reduce its dependency on export of commodities, and “seek re-industrialization with new characteristics,” to partake in the new “technological revolution.”
“Whoever remains as a mere importer of this technology,” she said, “will remain on the periphery, submitted and subordinated to foreign interests and policies.”
“The transformation of the productive model is the main challenge for Latin Americans, to recover a path that allows them to achieve considerable economic growth with social justice.”
“Producing and exporting mineral or agricultural commodities alone does not support equitable growth. Another model is needed for our region to reach high levels of industrialization and have a great capacity to add value to production based on the quality of education and work and scientific-technological innovation with the generation of better jobs.”
Regional integration is a key part of this process, Rousseff stressed.
“A true integration of Latin America is essential,” she said, noting the region has nearly 1 billion people, with “fantastic natural resources,” including oil, minerals, agricultural products, and water reserves.
“The creation of UNASUR and CELAC was the political-institutional framework needed to ensure our autonomy and independence and enable an integration that would not only be commercial, but also productive, industrial, and educational, in order to reduce asymmetries and inequalities between countries and regions.”
Progressive governments in Latin America need to increase the “presence of the state in the economy, the defense of the sovereignty of nations and democracy, and an open geopolitical relationship,” she added.
China’s economic partnership and its Belt and Road Initiative offer many possibilities for the region, presenting an opportunity to be more independent, Rousseff argued.
What “is wanted is Latin America for Latin Americans,” she said, “to be able to break with the Monroe Doctrine.”


Instruction: Write an article about: Nicaragua is world’s #1 country where citizens feel at peace, Gallup poll shows. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Gallup, Latin America, Nicaragua

Output:
A poll by mainstream firm Gallup found that Nicaragua is the No. 1 country in the world where citizens feel at peace. Nine of the top 14 countries are in Latin America. But the US constantly attacks the Sandinista government and imposes sanctions on it.

(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
A poll found that Nicaragua is the top country in the world where citizens feel at peace.
The United States and Western media outlets have long demonized Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and its President Daniel Ortega, sponsoring violent coup attempts against him and imposing illegal unilateral sanctions aimed at hurting the Central American nation’s economy.
But studies show that the Sandinista Front is very popular among the Nicaraguan people, who enjoy a high quality of life compared to their neighbors.
CNBC reported this January that Nicaragua is the “No. 1 country where people say they are ‘always’ at peace“.
Of the top 10 countries where people said they always feel at peace, seven of them are in Latin America. https://t.co/15DiFGkkBu
— CNBC Make It (@CNBCMakeIt) January 8, 2023

This is based on a survey conducted by the mainstream firm Gallup.
Gallup interviewed adults in 122 countries across the planet. They found that 34% of people on Earth “always” feel at peace, while 39% “often” do, 17% “rarely” do, and 5% “never” do.
Nicaragua came in first place, with 73% of its population reporting it “always” feels at peace.
Gallup noted that “Latin American countries dominate the ‘always at peace’ list worldwide”.
There are 14 countries in the world where the majority of the population “always” feels at peace. A staggering nine of these 14 are in Latin America.
Nicaragua is No. 1, followed by El Salvador at No. 3, Panama at No. 4, Honduras at No. 5, Paraguay at No. 6, Dominican Republic at No. 7, Uruguay at No. 8, Colombia at No. 12, and Mexico at No. 14.

Gallup wrote:
The plethora of Latin American countries that top this list may not be entirely surprising: Many of these same countries regularly rank among the most likely in the world to report experiencing positive emotions each day, such as feeling well-rested, smiling or laughing, learning something interesting, feeling treated with respect, and experiencing enjoyment.
Compared with their counterparts in Latin America, people in countries in Northern America — including the U.S. (28%) and Canada (26%) — are significantly less likely to say they always feel at peace with their thoughts and feelings.
Nicaragua is also the No. 7 in the world in terms of gender equality. It has the highest level of women’s representation in all of the Americas.
While Nicaraguans are nearly three times as likely to feel at peace than North Americans, the US government has frequently attacked the nation’s Sandinista government, claiming democratically elected President Daniel Ortega is “authoritarian”.
This is despite the fact that 77.4% of Nicaraguans support Ortega, according to a late 2022 study conducted by one of the leading polling firms in Central America, M&R Consultores. (US President Joe Biden had just a 37% approval rating in the same period.)
Ortega is consistently one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.

In 2018, the United States supported a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua. In this rare moment of instability in an otherwise very safe country, right-wing extremists backed by Washington used bloody tactics to try to overthrow President Ortega.
When the coup failed, the US and European Union imposed several rounds of devastating unilateral sanctions on Nicaragua, which are illegal under international law.
Despite the fact that numerous polls like these show that Nicaraguans feel very safe, the US State Department has since 2018 issued an annual travel advisory, discouraging tourists to visit the country.
Washington claims the Central American nation is dangerous, suffers from supposed “arbitrary enforcement of laws”, and has “limited healthcare ability”.
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government created a system of free universal healthcare for everyone. The United States, on the other hand, has one of the most expensive and inefficient healthcare systems on Earth, and medical expenses are the cause of two-thirds of US household bankruptcies.
As part of its hybrid war on Nicaragua's Sandinista gov't, the US State Department renewed its travel advisory, to discourage tourism and hurt the economy
The reasons given are absurd. Nicaragua is the safest country in Central America and has free healthcare (even for tourists) pic.twitter.com/r7YndbwVob
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 5, 2022


Instruction: Write an article about: Honduras’ new president recognizes Venezuela’s real gov’t; coup leader Guaidó loses drug-trafficking ally. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Honduras, JOH, Juan Guaidó, Juan Orlando Hernández, Manuel Zelaya, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela, Xiomara Castro

Output:
Honduras’ new President Xiomara Castro, the country’s first democratic leader since a 2009 US-backed coup, broke ties with unelected putschist Juan Guaidó and recognized Venezuela’s constitutional President Nicolás Maduro.

Honduras’ new left-wing President Xiomara Castro took power on January 27. The same day of her inauguration, she re-established relations with the real, constitutional government of Venezuela’s elected President Nicolás Maduro.
Castro is the first democratic leader of Honduras since a 2009 military coup, sponsored by the United States, overthrew former President Manuel Zelaya, Castro’s husband.
The previous right-wing regime of notoriously corrupt Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was deeply involved in drug trafficking, had recognized US-appointed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó as supposed “interim president.”
The loss of Honduras is another blow to Washington’s ongoing coup attempt against Venezuela’s leftist government. A former top ally of Guaidó admitted that, as of January 2022, fewer than 15 countries recognize the Venezuelan putschist.
Recuperando la Embajada de #Venezuela en #Honduras después que el impostor enviado por Guaidó la dejara abandonada y en deplorable estado. ¡Bienvenida excelentísima Embajadora Margoth Godoy! ¡Viva Venezuela!@LabGIPP_Libre @XiomaraCastroZ @NicolasMaduro pic.twitter.com/9LcibRz2Yq
— Fernando R. Raudales (@NoSoyBotCreanme) January 28, 2022

Venezuelan diplomats restored their control over their lawful embassy in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa on January 27.
The foreign minister of Venezuela, Felix Plasencia, was in Tegucigalpa to attend Xiomaro Castro’s inauguration. He called to “advance on the path of integration, progress, and understanding,” and said, “Long live the integration of our peoples!”
En nombre del Pdte. @NicolasMaduro y nuestro pueblo de Venezuela agradecemos todos los gestos de cariño y respaldo, expresados por el pueblo valiente de Honduras iQue viva la integración de nuestros pueblos! pic.twitter.com/frLOntpChn
— Felix Plasencia (@plasenciafelixr) January 28, 2022

Venezuela’s new ambassador to Honduras, Margaud Godoy, said it was an “honor to share with the first woman president of the brotherly republic of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, with whom, hand in hand with President Nicolás Maduro, we will keep strengthening our historic links that unite our countries.”
Que honor compartir con la primera mujer presidenta de la República hermana de Honduras @XiomaraCastroZ , con quién de la mano del Presidente @NicolasMaduro seguiremos estrechando lazos históricos que unen a nuestros países.Juntas en Victoria!#Volvimos #Honduras ?✊ pic.twitter.com/DNzxAfHD1a
— Margaud Godoy Peña (@MargaudGodoyP) January 28, 2022

On January 29, Honduras’ new foreign minister, Enrique Reina, delivered Godoy her official credentials, in the presence of Venezuelan Foreign Minister Plasencia.
Recibimos las copias de estilo de la Embajadora @MargaudGpsuv  en compañía del Canciller @PlasenciaFelix para el restablecimiento de relaciones diplomáticas con la República Bolivariana de Venezuela pic.twitter.com/1fwG8hJ2BZ
— Enrique Reina (@EnriqueReinaHN) January 29, 2022

From 2009 to 2022, Honduras was governed by a series of right-wing authoritarian regimes that stole elections in broad daylight.
These regimes, which enjoyed staunch support from the United States, were also deeply implicated in drug trafficking and organized crime networks.
Xiomara Castro represents the leftist Libre Party, which is led by her husband Manuel Zelaya, the former democratically elected president of Honduras, who was overthrown in the 2009 US-backed coup.
Castro and the Libre Party won Honduras’ November 2021 elections in a landslide.
Previous right-wing Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) had recognized putschist Juan Guaidó from the very beginning of Washington’s coup attempt in Venezuela, launched in January 2019.
Guaidó repeatedly thanked Honduras’ JOH regime for its support. In a surrealistic moment following a May 2020 virtual meeting, Guaidó even publicly thanked JOH for “his support in the fight against drug trafficking.”
In reality, JOH is closely linked to drug trafficking, and reportedly used huge sums of drug money to fund his right-wing National Party.
Conversé con el Presidente de #Honduras @JuanOrlandoH. Agradezco su apoyo en la lucha contra el narcotráfico y el respaldo a nuestros migrantes.
Urge el Gobierno de Emergencia Nacional en Venezuela para salvar al país. La presión del mundo es vital para lograrlo. #UnidosSePuede pic.twitter.com/kRCRVbGM84
— Juan Guaidó (@jguaido) May 20, 2020

JOH’s brother Antonio “Tony” Hernández is in prison in the United States for drug trafficking. In October 2019, a US district court convicted Tony of trafficking approximately 200,000 kilograms (440,000 pounds) of cocaine and machine guns.
The court added that Tony Hernández “funneled millions of dollars of drug proceeds to National Party campaigns to impact Honduran presidential elections in 2009, 2013, and 2017.”
According to the court, Mexican drug lord El Chapo even paid JOH $1 million to help him rig Honduras’ 2013 national elections.


Instruction: Write an article about: Top Biden official: US would overthrow Colombia’s new left-wing president 40 years ago. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Colombia, Gustavo Petro, Joe Biden, Juan Gonzalez, Nicaragua, Venezuela

Output:
Biden’s top Latin America advisor Juan González threateningly said of Colombia’s new left-wing president, “40 years ago, the United States would have done everything possible to prevent the election of Gustavo Petro” and “sabotage his government.”

The top Latin America advisor for US President Joe Biden, Juan Sebastián González, threateningly said of Colombia’s new left-wing president: “40 years ago, the United States would have done everything possible to prevent the election of Gustavo Petro, and once in power it would have done almost everything possible to sabotage his government.”
González is the Western hemisphere director for the US National Security Council (NSC). He previously worked in the State Department and NSC in the Barack Obama administration.
González made these incendiary comments in Spanish in an interview with the Colombian media.
Obliquely acknowledging the long history of US meddling in Latin America’s sovereign internal affairs, González added, “Those are the policies of the Cold War, that to a certain point today for some people are a justification from revisionist perspectives that characterize the policy of the United States in the context of a local manifestation of an empire.”

Petro is Colombia’s first ever left-wing president. He is a former revolutionary with socialist armed movement M-19, which signed a peace treaty and demilitarized. Petro subsequently established himself as a lawmaker and became mayor of the capital Bogotá.
Although he ran a center-left campaign harshly condemning the socialist governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua, Petro has tempered his criticism since entering office.

In the first vote by Petro’s administration at the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) on August 12, Colombia refused to join in the politically motivated condemnation of Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. Colombia was absent from the vote, alongside the governments of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, and El Salvador, which abstained.
Petro has also rapidly pursued the normalization of relations between Colombia and its neighbor Venezuela.
Just a few days after winning the election in June, then President-elect Petro held a phone call with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, discussing plans to reopen the border and establish peace.
The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, announced on August 16 that the parliamentary body was coordinating with Colombia’s Senate in order to re-establish formal commercial and diplomatic relations.
Petro was inaugurated on August 7. The ceremony was full of important political symbolism. Petro requested that the sword of anti-colonialist leader Simón Bolívar be present.
Colombia's armed socialist and anti-imperialist group M-19 put down its weapons in 1990 after signing a peace treaty with the government
M-19 became a legal political party. Its leader Carlos Pizarro was a presidential candidate
But Colombia's intelligence agencies murdered him
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 16, 2022

At the inauguration, Petro was also given the presidential sash by María José Pizarro, a lawmaker from Petro’s left-wing Pacto Histórico party and the daughter of Carlos Pizarro.
Carlos Pizarro was the leader of the revolutionary socialist 19th of April Movement (M-19) that Petro had been involved in in his youth.
The M-19 demilitarized in 1990 after signing a peace agreement with the Colombian government. Having put down its weapons, M-19 became a legal political party, and Carlos Pizarro was its presidential candidate.
But just a few weeks after signing the peace deal, the Colombian state murdered Carlos Pizarro, in an operation organized by the feared Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), a notorious intelligence agency that acted as a kind of secret police.


Instruction: Write an article about: ‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, cartels, Dan Crenshaw, drugs, Lázaro Cárdenas, Lindsey Graham, lithium, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mexico, Mike Pompeo, oil, Venezuela, war on drugs

Output:
Mexico’s leftist President AMLO condemned “hypocritical” Republicans who want the US military to invade, declaring “Mexico is an independent and free country, not a US colony or protectorate!” In a massive rally, López Obrador also celebrated the expropriation of oil and lithium, condemning exploitative foreign corporations.

Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) organized a massive rally in the heart of the capital, honoring the anniversary of the country’s nationalization of its oil reserves and expropriation of foreign corporations.
AMLO also used the demonstration as an opportunity to publicly condemn US politicians who have proposed militarily invading Mexico to combat drug trafficking.
“We remind those hypocritical and irresponsible politicians that Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or a protectorate of the United States!” López Obrador declared.

“They can threaten us with committing some kind of abuse, but we will never, ever allow them to violate our sovereignty and trample on the dignity of our homeland!” he asserted.
AMLO added, “I want to make it clear that this is no longer the time of [Felipe] Calderón or [Genaro] García Luna, that it is no longer the time of the shady links between the government of Mexico and the agencies of the US government”.
The Mexican leader then led a chant: “Cooperation? Yes. Submission? No! Interventionism? No!”
AMLO delivered this fiery speech on March 18 in the Zócalo, the plaza in the heart of Mexico City.
His government officially convened the event to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the 1938 oil nationalization by revolutionary former President Lázaro Cárdenas.
The poster of the Mexican government event celebrating the 85th anniversary of the expropriation of oil by President Lázaro Cárdenas
López Obrador dedicated half of his hour-long speech to discussing the history of the Cardenista revolution, and the lessons it provides for today.
AMLO praised Cárdenas for challenging foreign corporations and defending national sovereignty, while redistributing land to the poor, protecting labor rights, encouraging unions, and forming an alliance with workers and peasants against the “conservative oligarchy” that had ruled Mexico during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, before the 1910 revolution.
The speech was one of the most passionate examples of López Obrador’s left-wing nationalist ideology.
AMLO made clear parallels between the government of Cárdenas and his own government today, between Cárdenas’ oil nationalization and López Obrador’s nationalization of Mexico’s lithium reserves.
El zócalo lleno conmemorando la expropiación petrolera, la defensa de la soberanía y la cuarta transformación. pic.twitter.com/qefBTHwh0w
— Dra. Claudia Sheinbaum (@Claudiashein) March 19, 2023

This March, a series of far-right US politicians from the Republican Party have called for the military to invade Mexico, in the name of supposedly fighting drug cartels.
Extreme-right Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claimed in a March 15 tweet that Mexican cartels “are planting bombs on our land in our country”. (She posted a photo which did not show a bomb, according to US Border Patrol, but rather “a duct-taped ball filled with sand that wasn’t deemed a threat to agents/public”.)
“Our US military needs to take action against the Mexican Cartels”, she insisted. “End this Cartel led war against America!”
Greene is a Donald Trump loyalist and supporter of the neo-fascist QAnon cult. She ran for office inciting violence against the left, shooting and blowing up the word “socialism” in her campaign ads.
Explosive found by Border Patrol Agents Jan 17th.  Agents have surveillance of who brought it in and when and confirmed it was the Cartel.This changes everything. Not only are the Cartels murdering Americans everyday through drugs and crime, but now they are planting bombs on… pic.twitter.com/8uxwbd1sOn
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) March 15, 2023

But Greene is far from alone.
Republican Congressmember Dan Crenshaw has introduced multiple bills to authorize the US military to attack cartels in Mexico.
Legislation that Crenshaw introduced in January cites the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was passed a week after the 9/11 attacks, in order to justify the US military to invade Mexico.
In an op-ed, Crenshaw compared Mexican drug cartels to ISIS, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.
The Republican lawmaker also called for the US to impose sanctions on Mexico – one of its top three trading partners.
The Mexican drug cartels are an enemy every American should want to defeat.
We can’t let this chance to save American lives pass us by. My thoughts in @USAToday: https://t.co/AbIhC1qFIw
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) March 8, 2023

Greene wrote that she is “proud to co-sponsor Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s legislation to declare WAR on the Mexican cartels”.
“We must authorize the use of military force to eliminate the thugs who are smuggling drugs and illegal aliens across our southern border”, Greene insisted.
The far-right Republican also suggested that Washington should impose sanctions on Mexico.
“There is a war going on that affects every single American, but it’s not in Ukraine or the Middle East, it’s on our Southern border”, Greene declared.
I’m proud to co-sponsor @RepDanCrenshaw’s legislation to declare WAR on the Mexican cartels.
We must authorize the use of military force to eliminate the thugs who are smuggling drugs and illegal aliens across our southern border, leading to crime and the murder of countless…
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) March 14, 2023

In the US Senate, another Trump ally, Lindsey Graham, wants the US military to intervene in Mexico.
“We are going to unleash the fury and might of the U.S. against these cartels”, Graham proclaimed in a March 8 press conference.
Graham compared Mexican drug cartels to ISIS and al-Qaeda, referring to them as “narcoterrorists” and calling to “give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist”.
Trump’s former CIA director and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, published an article declaring, “It Is Time for America To Declare War on the Drug Cartels“.
“As Secretary of State, I suggested we use drones to strike the cartels”, he boasted.
With blatantly neocolonial rhetoric, Pompeo claimed that Mexico has a “total lack of sovereignty”. (In his memoir, Pompeo admitted that the Trump administration tried to overthrow Venezuela’s government because it supposedly put “out the welcome mat for Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and the cartels in a twenty-first-century violation of the Monroe Doctrine“, referencing the 200-year-old colonial doctrine.)
As Secretary of State, I suggested we use drones to strike the cartels.
Here's why:https://t.co/hdys6kVK98
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) March 17, 2023

Borrowing George W. Bush-era “war on terror” rhetoric, Pompeo referred to the cartels as “narco-terrorist entities”, and insisted that “the U.S. government should designate the major drug cartels – the Gulf Cartel (responsible for the recent kidnapping and murders), the Cartel Del Noreste, the Cartel de Sinaloa, and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion to name a few – as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO)”.
Pompeo also tried to link China to Mexican drug cartels as well, without any evidence. He asserted that the US war on cartels “will require going after the Chinese Communist Party-backed entities that are funneling precursor compounds to cartels”.
In his March 18 speech, López Obrador declared:
Friend, I cannot forget to mention that, in recent days, some legislators from the United States, who are accustomed to hypocritically throwing stones while forgetting that they live in glass houses, have a propagandistic plan. As we say here, in popular language, they are scheming. And for electoral purposes, political operatives are saying that, if we don’t stop the traffic of fentanyl to the northern border, they are going to propose in Congress that North American soldiers occupy our territory, to fight organized crime.
First, I want to make it clear that this is no longer the time of [Felipe] Calderón or [Genaro] García Luna, that it is no longer the time of the shady links between the government of Mexico and the agencies of the US government.
The most important thing is that, from here, from this Zócalo, the political and cultural heart of Mexico, we remind those hypocritical and irresponsible politicians that Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or a protectorate of the United States, and that they can threaten us with committing some kind of abuse, but we will never, ever allow them to violate our sovereignty and trample on the dignity of our homeland!
Cooperation? Yes. Submission? No! Interventionism? No!
AMLO then shouted out the following words, and the audience replied: “Oligarchy? No! Corruption? No! Classism? No! Racism? No! Freedom? Yes! Democracy? Yes! Honesty? Yes! Social justice? Yes! Equality? Yes! Sovereignty? Yes!”
The president concluded his speech chanting: “Long live the oil expropriation! Long live the workers and technicians, of before and today, in the national oil industry! Long live General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río! Long live Mexico! Long live Mexico! Long live Mexico!”
Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas declaring the nationalization of the railroads in 1937
AMLO spent the first half of his speech discussing the legacy of leftist former President Lázaro Cárdenas.
He explained:
General Lázaro Cárdenas did not hesitate to rely on those below to carry out his transformation. The general’s strategy can be summarized in three important, consecutive actions. First, he gave land to the peasants and helped the workers. Then, he motivated them to organize. And finally, with that social base, he was able to carry out the expropriation of the oil and other national resources, which Porfirio Díaz had given away to individuals, fundamentally to foreigners.
In the Cardenista strategy, the most important thing was meeting the economic and social demands of the peasants and workers.
…
It is undoubtable that the peasants saw in Cárdenas a faithful representative of the revolutionary cause. The agrarian reform ensured that many people were loyal to the Cardenista government, and from then on, there was an alliance between the peasants and the state.
Moreover, during Cardenismo, the workers felt that their labor rights were guaranteed, with strict adherence to the law. Cárdenas respected the economic struggle of workers for better salaries and better labor conditions.
…
The organization and political mobilization of the masses advanced the goal of valuing the economic independence of our country.
Thereby, with the expropriation of the oil corporations, national goods and resources were returned to the nation, which since the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz had been in the hands of foreigners.
…
There has not existed in Mexico a president as close to humble people as General Cárdenas, nor a president as dedicated to the cause of social justice.
For example, already as president, in power in 1935, he wrote in his notes the following: “Ending the miseries that the people suffer from is above all other interests”.
…
I quote General Cárdenas; he says: “We made considerations of the circumstances that could arise if governments like those of England and the United States, in the interest of supporting the oil companies, pressured the government of Mexico with violent measures. But we also took into account that there is already the threat of a new world war with the growing provocations of Nazi-fascist imperialism, and that this would stop them from attacking Mexico in the case of the expropriation, among other reasons”.
And taking advantage of this circumstance, on March 18, 1938, the oil expropriation was carried out.
…
He then made known, by radio, to all of the nation, the step taken by the government, in defense of its sovereignty, reintegrating into its domain the oil wealth that, as the same general said, “Imperialist capital has been taking advantage of to keep the country in a humiliating situation”.
In response to Cárdenas’ expropriation of Mexico’s oil wealth, AMLO explained, “The millionaires requested a US [military] intervention. They complained to the United States”.
He then added with a sarcastic tone, “That sounds familiar, that sounds familiar, that sounds familiar”.
The millionaires “went and complained so that [the United States] would come here to protect their companies”, AMLO added.
But the threat of Nazi Germany and the clear signs that World War Two was coming prevented the US from militarily intervening to stop the nationalization, López Obrador argued.
He also noted that the US leader at the time was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom AMLO referred to as “one of the best presidents that that country has had in all of its history”.
“But the corporations were not as conscious and respectful” as FDR, López Obrador continued.
Foreign corporations thought that “Mexicans were born to enrich foreigners”, he said, “and that God put important natural resources below Mexico’s soil to increase the fortunes in the treasure chests of the exploiters and concessionaires”.
AMLO recalled that Cárdenas’ government was forced to “confront a boycott, pressures, and acts of sabotage promoted and funded by the foreign oil companies in our country”.
The Mexican president continued:
The oil expropriation caused deep discomfort among a minority, above all among the wealthy at the time, in sectors of the middle class, and in the majority of the media.
It is interesting, and this is a lesson, to highlight that, historically, the right wing always regroups when a democratic change is trying to be carried out, and it becomes plainly intolerant, and even violent when it comes to social demands in favor of the people and the control of the nation.
López Obrador discussed the example of Francisco Madero, a leader of the Mexican Revolution who governed as president from 1911 to 1913, but who was toppled and murdered in a coup d’etat sponsored by the United States and carried out by the right wing.
AMLO emphasized:
Let us remember that the overthrow of President Madero, our apostle of democracy, relied on the intervention of the US ambassador, but that overthrow was carried out by internal right-wing groups that had previously promoted a campaign of hatred and smears, consisting of ridiculing the leader, President Madero, in their newspapers, to the point of treating him as crazy and spiritualist.
As an example of the long history of Mexico’s right-wing elites betraying their country’s national interests in collaboration with foreign corporations, AMLO pointed out that the country’s right-wing party PAN, which governed from 2000 to 2012, had been created in 1939 as a representation of the wealthy oligarchic forces that opposed Cárdenas’ oil expropriation.
The Mexican president finally summarized his discussion of Cárdenas: “In this brief history, there are greater lessons. The main one is that only with the people, only with the support of the majority, is it possible to carry out a popular transformation to guarantee justice and confront the reactionaries who don’t want to lose their privileges”.
Later in the March 18 speech, AMLO boasted of the unprecedented social spending his government has carried out:
All of the [government’s] savings are used to finance social programs, such as pensions for the elderly, support for people with disabilities, single mothers, peasants and fishermen; with scholarships for students from poor families; internet for everyone; programs to build and improve housing; favorable loans; fertilizers and guaranteed prices for small producers in the country; the Wellness Bank; the drive for public education and health care, universal and free.
This year, more than 25 million people will receive direct support totaling 600 billion pesos. In other words, out of the 35 million homes that there are in the country, 71% are already benefiting from at least one of the social programs.
With this policy of attention to the neediest, the most vulnerable, and especially the youth, we have also been able to reduce crime
…
[These policies] have allowed us to avoid more debt. We have not requested additional debt since we are in government.
…
The price of gasoline, diesel, gas, and electricity has not increased.
…
Also, public investment has increased, which did not happen for many years. This year, more than 1 trillion pesos will be spent on public works. That is to say, we are going to keep building roads, bridges, trains, airports, hospitals, universities, markets, sports facilities, piers, and natural, recreational, and ecological parks.
…
In the time that we have been in government, the minimum wage has increased by 90% in real terms, and more than double at the border.
Do you remember what the lying technocrats said about raising the salary, that there was going to be inflation? Pure nonsense! That is not true.
Of course we have to increase wages in a responsible way, to strengthen the internal market, as we are doing, and thereby to achieve well-being for our people.
…
“We have also directed our resources and efforts toward achieving food self-sufficiency and energy self-sufficiency.
…
We can ensure that we are guaranteed to have oil sovereignty. Next year, we are not going to buy gasoline, diesel, or other oil products abroad. We are going to process all of our raw materials.
…
And recently, the lithium was nationalized, strategic minerals used in making batteries, for electric cars and the storage system for clean energy. It fills me with pride to remember that.
While listing the accomplishments of his government, López Obrador also referenced the negotiations in 2018 and 2019 that led to replacing NAFTA with the new United States – Mexico – Canada Agreement (USMCA).
AMLO said with pride:
We were able to remove from the free trade agreement a broad chapter that compromised our oil in that agreement and put in its place a small paragraph that I am going to read to you.
It says that the United States and Canada recognize that “Mexico reserves its sovereign right to reform its Constitution and its domestic legislation; and Mexico has the direct, inalienable, and imprescriptible ownership of all hydrocarbons in the subsoil of the national territory”.
The Mexican president added:
We are going to continue with that collective conscience. We are going to continue pushing back against the dirty war, the smear campaigns, and the manipulation attempts that they will continue to carry out because they have no other choice, our adversaries and their media outlets, sold out, bought up, in the hands of members of the corrupt conservative bloc.
But at the same time, we must have faith in the wisdom and loyalty of the people.
…
I maintain that, whatever they do, the oligarchs will not return to power. An authentic and true democracy will continue to prevail in our beloved Mexico.