by WAYNE MADSEN
Desi Bouterse
any of Venezuela’s friends at the CARICOM Summit were equally disturbed by the Obama administration’s «bullying» of not only Venezuela but that nation’s Caribbean allies in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the alternate Latin American/Caribbean alliance formed by the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to provide the hemisphere with a counterweight to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS). ALBA includes as members many of the nations whose leaders met with Obama at the CARICOM summit. These included the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
However, America’s chief bullying target in Jamaica and Panama was not Venezuela’s president but Suriname’s president Desi Bouterse, the current chairman of the Guyana-based CARICOM, a position that rotates between leaders of the member states every six months. Although Bouterse temporarily chairs CARICOM, he decided at the last minute to forgo traveling to Jamaica for the leaders’ summit between Obama and CARICOM, an organization for which Bouterse remains the titular head until June 2015. It is certain that Obama, who disinvited Bouterse from a U.S. mission reception for heads of state and government at the United Nations General Assembly annual meeting in 2010, let it be known to CARICOM that he did not want the Surinamese leader present at the Montego Bay, Jamaica summit venue.
Bouterse’s sudden change of plans was because the United States began proffering to certain media outlets the idea that Bouterse could be arrested in Jamaica on a Europol arrest warrant that was issued for cocaine trafficking before he was elected president in 2010. Bouterse was charged with illegally shipping 474 kilograms of cocaine to South Holland. In 2000, a Dutch court sentenced Bouterse to 11 years in prison in absentia. Until he became president of Suriname and gained diplomatic immunity, Bouterse refrained from traveling internationally. The American charge that Bouterse and his son have used Suriname as a narcotics transit point was put to shame when just prior to the Jamaica and Panama summits, the Suriname police destroyed 109 kilograms of cocaine. That came after the police destroyed 430 kilograms of cocaine in January. However, the charge of narcotics smuggling is a familiar U.S. strategy used to undermine foreign, especially Western Hemisphere leaders. Similar charges were leveled by Washington against Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuela’s Maduro and Chavez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. All the charges were rank propaganda and were totally without merit.
Maduro, Ortega, and Correa were all present with Obama at the Panama summit. However, Suriname was forced to be represented by its permanent representative to the OAS in Washington, Niermala Badrising. In Jamaica, Suriname, instead of being represented by the current chairman Bouterse, the country’s seat was occupied by Suriname’s «special ambassador» to the United States, Subhas Mungra.
Bouterse’s attorneys in the Netherlands claim that the narcotics indictment of and arrest warrant for Bouterse were based on trumped up charges resulting from false evidence and perjury. The lawyers claim that the drug charge against Bouterse was politically-motivated because the then-Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, and his top officials, including Justice Ministers Winnie Sorgdrager and Ernst Hirsch Ballin and former Attorney General Joan de Wijk, wanted to please the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency by abusing the Dutch criminal system. It is noteworthy that one of the Dutch government’s chief prosecution witnesses against Bouterse, Belgian drug lord Patrick van Loon, later recanted his testimony upon which the Bouterse guilty verdict was largely based.
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