6-14-08, 11:32 am

The US is becoming more and more restless with the liberating winds that blow in Latin America. That was the reason the Pentagon decided to reactivate the Fourth Fleet and detach it to the Caribbean and the South American seas.

As the 'Figaro online' reports that the aircraft carrier 'USS Boxer' stationed off the El Salvador shores is already being used as an example for the kind of 'humanitarian operations,' with which the US Navy claims to justify its presence in a continent, where it uses any pretext to endeavor a military aggression. That same warship turned into a floating hospital is supposedly at the disposal of the peasants who are in need of getting surgery for cataracts. So much generosity and concern over the health of the people of El Salvador is surprising, knowing that more than 40 millions of North American citizens do not have any health service rights, in their own country. [El Salvador will hold national elections in early 2009, in which the Bush administration backed presidential candidate is more than 20 points behind in the polls. --Ed.]

At the beginning of the 1990s, the German army, the 'Bundeswehr,' had begun moving beyond its country's borders by setting up a military 'humanitarian' hospital in Cambodia. Since then, article 26 of the German Constitution, which expressly forbids Germany's participation in aggressive wars, was torn apart with the well-known results of the conversion of the European Union into an imperialist political military block. Nowadays, any pretext, including providing aid to populations struck by natural catastrophes, is an excuse to promote militarism and war.

In the US model where the Pentagon, in synchrony with the great monopolist corporations, decides the fundamental military aims, signals the conversion of existing political institutions into little more than signing off on decisions made elsewhere. In the capitalist countries, the dismantling of the so-called rule of law by those who constantly invoke it is much more advanced than what can be supposed by the more distracted constitutionalists.

But so much 'humanitarian' war and 'capitalist' generosity cost money that the workers and the people are obliged to pay to benefit the great imperialist powers.

Capital needs to impose its strategy, even if only to invoke uncontrollable and infallible supranational powers, under which the people have to obey and submit in silence. That is the principle function of the European Union. It is deeply regrettable that Socrates has turned his back on the people of his country, turning himself into an 'servant carrier' of the EU German presidency, to the extent that Angela Merkel would treat the Portugal's prime minister as if he were the chancellery gardener.

By helping to intensify the liquidation of the social and labor rights and by joining war and militarism, the government and the Socialist Party leadership of Portugal has done what Karl Marx confirmed 160 years ago in his 'Manifesto of the Communist Party,' when explaining that 'bourgeois socialism resumes to the statement, that the bourgeois is a bourgeois–for the benefit of the working class.'

From Avante. Rui Paz works with the International Department of the Portuguese Communist Party.