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Obama and Kuczynski each promised to do all they could to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling.
If you search for Colombia on The Nation's website, you will see how key the country has been in regional politics.
America's militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history.
In the 1960s, after the Cuban Revolution, CIA and FBI agents often coordinated their activities with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
Hillary Clinton's progress as a public figure and politician can, in fact, be indexed perfectly by her relationship to Henry Kissinger.
According to some tallies, since 1776, the United States has been at war 93 percent of its existence, passing through a mere 21 years of peace.
The unraveling of America's long mid-century domestic consensus, which ran from about 1941 to 1966, had begun earlier, under Lyndon B. Johnson.
The argument that capitalism was dependent on slavery is, of course, not new. In 1944, Eric Williams, in 'Capitalism and Slavery,' made the case.
Caceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible.
In 2015, El Salvador suffered nearly 50,000 cases of dengue. Cuba had 1641 cases, no deaths, and one of the lowest incidence rates in the Americas.
In Honduras, in particular, Hillary Clinton as Obama's secretary of state was instrumental in legitimizing the coup's subsequent death-squad regime.
Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched.
Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than any other American nation and was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish the institution, in 1888.
It wasn't until 1973 that Congress and journalists began to investigate 'Operation Menu,' around the same moment that the Watergate scandal was unfolding.
Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.
Without U.S. input, the countries of South America joined forces in 2008 to shut down a coup attempt in Bolivia and prevented a war between Ecuador and Colombia.
The first mention of a 'ranger' is as early as 1622, during the 1622 Powhatan rebellion, a near-successful effort to drive the British out of what is now Virginia.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was an active promoter of increased resource extraction in Latin America, pushing both fracking and the privatization of petroleum production.
In its original version, the FTAA was meant to be a special carve-out for Washington and Wall Street as global 'free trade' advanced under the umbrella of the Doha round of the WTO.
'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.
In 1954, Guatemala's deposed president, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, was forced to strip down to his underwear and photographed before being allowed to leave the country.
After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 but then supported it as secretary of state.
In 2012, Hillary Clinton's State Department, acting through its ambassador, Mari Carmen Aponte, threatened to withhold critical development aid unless El Salvador passed a major privatization law.
There was a brief moment, after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, when even Bill Clinton recognized what had been done to Haiti in the name of 'free trade': the destruction of local markets and rice production.
The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.
The story of how Chile, in the decades after its 1973 coup and death of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, became one of the most neoliberal societies on the planet is well known.
As first lady, Hillary Clinton spent the early months of her husband's administration drafting healthcare-reform legislation, only to see it put on the back burner by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
America is exceptional, it is asserted, because, with the exception of the abolition of slavery, it has been able to extend the promise of liberal reform mostly peacefully, through its democratic institutions.
According to Colombia's respected Escuela Nacional Sindical, as of April 2015, 105 union activists had been executed in the four years since Clinton's free-trade treaty went into effect. That's just trade unionists.
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a 'highly advantageous mutual bargain' between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East.
Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China - 'rapprochement' - and improved relations with the Soviet Union - detente - which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty.
Hillary Clinton became secretary of state under Barack Obama. It's hard to convey just how stunningly cynical she has been on Colombia: In 2008, running against Obama, she opposed, in unambiguous terms, a free-trade deal with Colombia.
Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, heavy-handedly provoked South American governments on any number of issues, including a rush to endorse the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, which only worked to steel resistance and build solidarity.
Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.
In Texas, the rangers were established on an ad hoc basis in the 1820s to protect the settlers making inroads into Spanish borderlands. Soon, Mexicans and Mexican Americans replaced Native Americans as the prime target of ranger repression.
Migrants don't come to the United States because, as Ambassador Aponte argued in her press conference, of 'lies' told by smugglers that, once here, you can't get deported. They come because their countries have been destroyed by U.S. policy.
Since 2010, Hillary Clinton's State Department, with the aid of Brazil, France, and Canada and in league with the Clinton Foundation and other 'philanthropists,' put into place something like a never-ending coup, an everlasting intervention.
As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.
In 2000, just before leaving the White House, Clinton ratcheted up military aid to Colombia. Plan Colombia, as the assistance program was called, provided billions of dollars to what was, and remains, the most repressive government in the hemisphere.
The removal of the British after the American Revolution opened the floodgates of paramilitary ranger power. For instance, in 1786, ranger units, including one that included Daniel Boone, attacked a number of friendly Shawnee towns along the Mad River.
Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.
Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his re-election on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African-Americans from federal jobs.
At issue when professional sports teams take the name of Native Americans is the problem of mimicry: having appropriated the land and wealth of America's vanquished peoples, settler culture then appropriates the supposed values and spirit of the vanquished as well.
One of the things that has made America exceptional - compared to other crisis-prone and class-conflicted countries - is that it has long enjoyed a benefit no other modern nation in the world could claim: the ability to engage in ceaseless, endless movement outward.
Defenders of Wilson are correct to beg for context when considering his legacy. But it is they who ignore the context: the role Wilson played in using war, including Haiti's racist counterinsurgency, to nationalize white supremacy, militarism, and Christian evangelism.
Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation's place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.
One of the first things the PT government did when it took office in 2003, after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidency, was to create a 'dirty list' of hundreds of companies and individual employers who were investigated by labor prosecutors and found to be using slaves.
Berta Caceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people.
Even before the expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West, slavery was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade, and insurance companies underwrote it.