[News] Israeli arms industry's "great leap" in Central America

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-arms-industrys-great-leap-central-america/26881 



  Israeli arms industry's "great leap" in Central America

Gabriel Schivone 
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/gabriel-schivone> - 15 March 2019

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Halfway through Donald Trump’s presidency, Israel’s decades-long role in 
Central America is scaling new heights of military and political influence.

Israel has wasted no time securing valuable arms deals in this part of 
the world, deals that now account for nearly 20 percent of its arms 
exports. This scale of activity hasn’t occurred since the Ronald Reagan 
administration in the 1980s, when far-right rulers in Central America 
circled the wagons.

Tacit US approval for the purchase of such weapons has ensured Honduran 
and Guatemalan support at the United Nations for Donald Trump’s decision 
to move the US embassy 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/oh-jerusalem-requiem-two-state-solution/22521> 
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The changeover from Barack Obama’s two terms as president to Trump has 
heralded a resurgence of policy trends among the US, Israel and 
US-dominated Central American countries reminiscent of the transitional 
Carter-Reagan years.

The migrant caravans in fall and winter, meanwhile, have focused 
attention on the plight of Central Americans fleeing three countries 
ravaged by decades of US intervention: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Sparse attention has been placed on how the caravans travel across a 
more than 2,000 mile Israeli-exported military and homeland security 
terrain that has expanded across Central America since the 1980s, 
escalating after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.

The monitored terrain now covers all of Mexico 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-shadowy-role-guatemalas-dirty-war/19286> 
as well as up through, and beyond, the US-Mexico border 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israels-war-industry-profits-violent-us-immigration-reform/13283>. 
Israeli boundary enforcement and surveillance products are deployed 
along the migrant and refugee trail, the subject of this author’s next 
book that traces Israeli involvement throughout the international 
regions between Central America and the US-Mexico border 
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/us-mexico-border-gaza-israeli-tech-wall/>.

As the regional conditions that prompted the caravans’ repeated 
departures demonstrate no signs of quieting, the Israeli arms industry 
interests in the region will likely grow.

But while the military-security dimension is both Israeli and American, 
the US asserts ownership over the geography. In 2012, Alan Bersin, 
Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection under Barack Obama, 
declared 
<http://latinalista.com/general/historic-partnership-agreements-signed> 
that “Guatemala’s border with Chiapas [Mexico] is now our southern border.”

With millions of dollars in US military aid poured 
<http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/10/mexico-us-borderpatrolsecurityimmigrants.html> 
into Mexican immigration enforcement practices, “Mexico is doing the 
dirty work, the very dirty work, for the United States,” observed 
<https://www.businessinsider.com/mexico-now-deports-more-central-americans-than-the-us-2015-6> 
Franciscan Friar Tomás González Castillo.

Castillo runs the “72” migrant shelter to aid Central Americans 
desperate to cross Mexico, which acts, spatially speaking, so much like 
a vertical border of death (rather than a horizontal one) that Mexican 
human rights advocates call the entire country “a graveyard for 
migrants.” 
<https://dawnpaley.ca/2013/06/04/report-dubs-mexico-a-graveyard-for-migrants/>

In effect, with its security aid utilized at all junctions, Israel has 
contributed to the US Border Patrol’s strategic “layered approach 
<http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/10/mexico-us-borderpatrolsecurityimmigrants.html>” 
of ratcheting up Mexico’s proxy enforcement measures.

This is the border-bolstered world that Trump has inherited and is now 
pushing to enlarge.


    Trump’s Israeli “deputy”

By the end of Obama’s tenure, Israel’s burgeoning presence in Central 
America was in the cards. Just ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January 
2017, historian Greg Grandin, writing in /The Nation/ 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/will-the-trump-administration-approve-a-military-deal-between-honduras-and-israel/>, 
advised those watching events to the south: “If you want to know how 
Donald Trump’s Latin American policy will play – and how he might 
deputize Israel to conduct a good bit of it – keep an eye on Honduras.”

The 2016 $200 million Israel-Honduras security cooperation agreement 
that Grandin flags in his report, has continued to evolve and expand 
since it was signed. At that time, it was lauded as the Honduran 
military’s “great leap” forward by Honduran President Juan Orlando 
Hernández 
<http://www.sre.gob.hn/portada/2016/Diciembre/08-12-16/Honduras%20da%20%E2%80%9Cun%20gran%20salto%E2%80%9D%20en%20esta%20alianza%20con%20Israel.pdf>.

Obama’s outgoing administration had scaled back some forms of military 
collaboration in its last years in office after Honduras overplayed its 
hand by using US-supplied weapons to down civilian airplanes suspected 
of carrying illegal drugs.

The US rebuke, minor though it was, prompted Honduras to look elsewhere 
for military assistance. Israel stepped in to play its historical role 
as a faithful, bipartisan US proxy 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-shadowy-role-guatemalas-dirty-war/19286>, 
just as it did during the Carter and Reagan years.

With Trump in office, it didn’t take long for Grandin’s prediction to 
bear out.

In March 2017, the military business press reported 
<https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/28961> more information on the 
“great leap” deal, according to Israeli human rights and legal sources 
familiar with the agreement. This included a 10-year timeline boosting 
Honduran cyber security, naval and air power. This time the reported 
figure jumped to $300 million. And with continual new components being 
reported <https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/37209>, such as six 
Skylark drones from Elbit Systems, the deal appears to be a work in 
progress.

By implicitly authorizing the Honduras security deals, the US 
“deputized” Israel to gallop into the region and whip up a posse of 
right-wing proxy reinforcements in Central America that the US could 
count on when needed.

By December 2017, massive social upheaval rocked Honduras amidst a 
transparently fraudulent 
<https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/26/incumbent_honduras_president_declares_victory_in> 
election in which the electoral commission, controlled by the incumbent 
president, allowed too many “irregularities” 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/us-recognizes-re-election-of-honduras-president-despite-calls-for-a-new-vote>, 
according to the conservative and usually passive Organization of 
American States in its ignored call for a new election. Facing 
international scandal over the election results, both the US and Israel 
quickly congratulated the Hernández administration on its new lease over 
the country.

The saga continued just days later as an opportunity presented itself 
for Honduras to return the favor to its US and Israeli patrons. 
President Trump’s pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to 
Jerusalem elicited international condemnation, but not from Honduras.

Now that Israel had stepped into the arms breach left by the Obama 
administration, Washington and Tel Aviv could both count on Honduras – 
and neighboring Guatemala, as their other faithful right-wing ally in 
the region – to join the isolated US-Israeli caucus at the UN. A 
toothless UN General Assembly vote <https://undocs.org/A/RES/ES-10/19> 
decreed the embassy move illegitimate, in line with decades of past 
resolutions.

By balking at the UN resolution, Guatemala and Honduras departed from a 
long-held international consensus over the status of Jerusalem. 
Investigative journalist Allan Nairn has noted how Honduras jettisoned 
<https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/26/incumbent_honduras_president_declares_victory_in> 
its own past voting pattern, paving the way to a modern “arms diplomacy” 
– a phrase coined by political scientist Aaron S. Klieman in his 1985 
book, /Israel’s Global Reach: Arms Sales as Diplomacy./


    A history of right-wing arms dealing

Israel’s deepening global pariah status between 1967 and 1982 – 
pockmarked by habitual regional aggressions which preceded multiple 
illegal occupations from Gaza to Lebanon and unlawful annexations of 
East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights – necessitated seeking out other 
pariahs with which to do business. As Michael Shur, director of the 
state-owned Israeli Military Industry (Ta’as) weapons manufacturer, 
remarked in 1983, the “welfare of our people and the state supersedes 
all other considerations,” adding, “If the state has decided in favor of 
export, my conscience is clear.”

The logic of Israeli arms transfers to other world outcasts was obvious. 
Tom Buckley of /The New York Times/ asked Shmuel Mirom, an Israeli 
embassy official, why Israel was willing to sell arms to Guatemala 
during the purported US arms embargo then in place in spite of what 
Amnesty International called 
<https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1981/03/19/guatemala-a-government-program-of-political-murder/> 
President Fernando Romeo Lucas García’s “government program of political 
murder.” Mirom replied: “We would rather sell them toys, I assure you, 
but it is weapons that they want to buy, and we have to keep making 
weapons to remain an efficient source of supply for our own army.”

Yohanah Ramati’s estimation, put bluntly 
<https://www.merip.org/mer/mer140/israel-guatemala#_1_> in 1985 when she 
spoke as a former member of the Israeli parliament’s foreign relations 
committee, further clarified Israel’s position: “Israel is a pariah 
state. When people ask us for something, we cannot afford to ask 
questions about ideology. The only type of regime that Israel would not 
aid would be one that is anti-American. Also, if we can aid a country 
that it may be inconvenient for the US to help, we would be cutting off 
our nose to spite our face not to.”

The feeling was mutual, as a Guatemala City political and business 
leader observed: “We are isolated internationally. The only friend we 
have left in the world is Israel.”

This “friendship” with Guatemala was the single biggest reason why the 
Israeli arms trade in Central America enjoyed a golden age after 
receiving a green light 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-shadowy-role-guatemalas-dirty-war/19286> 
from the US. The Israel-Guatemala 
<https://nacla.org/article/israeli-connection-not-just-guns-guatemala> 
relationship thrived so much that Israel eventually planned to set up 
Guatemala’s very own munitions factory to mass produce Israeli guns and 
armaments, even Guatemalan-model combat tanks.

Guatemala wasn’t Israel’s only beneficiary, or ally, in the region. 
Although mainstream US media have studiously avoided pulling from their 
vast (yet, at the time, underreported) historical archives of Israeli 
involvement in Central America, the countries themselves can’t hide the 
record.

Honduras, for its part, received a transfer of Israeli fighter jets on 
top of its receipt of Israeli small arms, artillery, ammunition, 
transport aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft. All this came in while 
Honduras was both collaborating with Salvadoran state counterinsurgency 
efforts and providing the largest base of operations for the US war of 
aggression against Sandinista-led Nicaragua.

At that time, Israel provided El Salvador with approximately 83 percent 
of the arms (including napalm 
<https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/09/world/salvador-officer-said-to-have-told-of-napalm-use.html>) 
the state used against the Salvadoran population during its 
counterinsurgency wars between 1980-1992 that killed 
<https://nacla.org/blog/2016/05/24/migration-reparations> more than 
75,000 civilians.

Costa Rica, too, has its own past of Israeli state security aid (arms 
and training of police forces despite having no military), including a 
tristate US-Israel-Costa Rica settler-colonist-modeled “land 
development” project in which it militarized its border with Nicaragua 
during US-sponsored state terror and aggression there.

Although Israeli military export sales are underreported for this 
period, political economist Shir Hever 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/shir-hever> and other experts 
estimate that Israel’s global arms sales were then a “significant” part 
of Israel’s industrial sector. By the mid-1980s, Latin America amounted 
to half of all Israel’s known global arms sales.

In recent years, Israel’s Latin American arms market consistently 
accounts for a sizable 18 percent of Israeli arms sales worldwide, in 
terms of major conventional weaponry. Israel today remains a major 
player in Guatemala’s private security 
<https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/system/files/publications/wp144_argueta.pdf> 
and resource extraction 
<http://www.albedrio.org/htm/otrosdocs/comunicados/ElObservador-InformeespecialNo.14-2018.pdf> 
industries.


    Mixed results

The jockeying for diplomatic favors in exchange for arms deals also goes 
back decades, as scholars Milton Jamail and Margo Gutiérrez document in 
their 1986 book, /It’s No Secret: Israel’s Military Involvement in 
Central America/. Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica, at times, had 
their diplomatic missions based in Jerusalem.

Guatemala, the first country to place its embassy in Jerusalem, 
retreated 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-trump-take-note-how-jerusalem-went-from-hosting-16-embassies-to-zero-1.5627682> 
to Tel Aviv in 1980, obeying a UN dictate to withdraw diplomatic 
missions after Israel enacted a “basic law” codifying its 1967 
annexation of East Jerusalem. Guatemala’s reversal also came after 
Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia threatened to boycott Guatemalan 
cardamom, which then generated a revenue of some $70 million, mostly 
from Arab states.

 From the 1980s through today, Israel’s “arms sales as diplomacy” has, 
at best, achieved mixed results. In October, for example, the UN General 
Assembly elected 
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/palestinians-win-vote-to-chair-group-of-77-developing-countries-at-united-nations-1.6569036> 
Palestine to chair the G-77 convention of developing nations, a title 
usually reserved for states. The resolution passed despite US and 
Israeli opposition. Honduras abstained and Guatemala did not bother 
casting a vote.


    Pariahs against the world

As the US has sparked a revival of 1980s-era Israeli involvement in 
Central America, the region’s two leading client states, Honduras and 
Guatemala, have been cultivating right-wing domestic rule.

Both Guatemala and Honduras remain politically isolated in the region 
and dependent on US aid. The countries’ behavior at the UN over 
Jerusalem came as leaders in both countries were seeking favor with Tel 
Aviv that would, in turn, earn them goodwill in Washington. While the US 
increasingly follows its own tune in world affairs, antagonizing allies 
and foes alike, the US, Israel, Guatemala and Honduras, global pariahs, 
big and small, continue to stick together.

The latest president of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, whose support base 
includes the rightist Guatemalan military, has been embroiled 
<https://progressive.org/dispatches/guatemala-president-vendetta-corruption-commission-180905/> 
in a corruption investigation but is eager to assure Washington that he 
can tough it out while at the same time looking to be rewarded 
<https://progressive.org/dispatches/republicans-fueling-assault-on-anti-corruption-Guatemala-Abbott-190117/> 
for moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Morales will surely want to avoid 
the fate of his predecessor, former President Otto Pérez Molina, who was 
forced out of office on corruption 
<https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2018/09/13/guatemalas-government-races-to-scrap-an-anti-corruption-commission> 
charges (along with every single one of his ministers) and remains 
incarcerated.

Israel’s role in the region has received scant media scrutiny over the 
last 30 years, making the limited coverage in the late 1970s and 1980s 
seem copious by comparison. At that time, Israeli involvement in Central 
America was underreported by generally uncritical US media and mostly 
met with silence by leftist and progressive forces – a recurring concern 
slowly being broken 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/opinion/sunday/martin-luther-king-palestine-israel.html>.

Meanwhile, observers lamented their place in the crossfire between armed 
guerrillas and state security forces. In 1983, Guatemalan journalist 
Victor Perera asked 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=5-YDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PT24&ots=hGQuw-9tij&dq=%22rios+montt%22+israel&pg=PT27&hl=en#v=onepage&q=%22rios%20montt%22%20israel&f=false> 
a grave digger in Chichicastenango, who was burying a local townsperson 
slain by the Guatemalan military, if anyone had taken up arms against 
the state since the killing.

“Even if we wanted to join the guerrillas, where would we obtain arms?” 
the gravedigger asked in reply. “In church they tell us that divine 
justice is on the side of the poor, but the fact of the matter is, it is 
the military who get the Israeli guns.”

Today’s Trump era presents an opportunity to raise oppositional voices 
as a revival of 1980s-era Israeli security and arms diplomacy deepens 
its shadow over Central America and beyond to potentially greater levels 
than ever before.

If today’s grave-digging truth tellers in the region aren’t abandoned 
but supported at the source by more solidarity efforts that started in 
the 1980s and continue today, Israel may find it harder to keep its 
footing in the region.

/Gabriel M. Schivone is a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona 
and author of the forthcoming book/ Making the New “Illegal”: How 
Decades of US Involvement in Central America Triggered the Modern Wave 
of Immigration /(Prometheus Books)./


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