you. tonight on our t.v. the american war you've never heard of we all know about afghanistan iraq and the operations in pakistan but south of the us border a covert war that's tearing latin america part will shed light on the conflict and tell you who's profiting from the chaos. what's around the world you've seen the power of new generations rising up and thrown out the status quo in the arab spring to the occupy movement millions of voices have made their message clear now a few more adding to the mix and causing an election uproar and mexico details ahead. it's friday june twenty ninth seven pm in washington d.c. i'm having martin and you're watching our t.v. everyone knows that the u.s.

is waging a war in afghanistan iraq pakistan and many other countries around the arab world but a lot don't know that the u.s. is also waging war and latin america last saturday the d.h. shot and killed a drug suspect in a remote area of honduras this happened only weeks after hundreds of police advised by the da killed four civilians traveling by boat it's all part of a new aggressive drug enforcement strategy called operation and bill in which a team of d.n.a. agents along with six u.s. state department helicopters are working with the police to fight the drug war now the u.s. tonight has responsibility for the latter but the incident has raised concerns about u.s. involvement in the region so should the u.s. be interfering with these countries to fight the drug war talk more about this i was joined earlier by adrian pyne a professor at american university your first discussed increasingly high homicide rate in honduras. in particular its jump since the coup in two thousand and nine which the us supported by basically by funding and approving fraudulent

and violent elections carried out by the same military that carried out the coup and and then continuing the farce of recognizing a government that the hundreds themselves and recognize that it took several years for other countries to recognize and continuing to fund the military and the police force that carried out the coup and that have there's been no reckoning for for that act of violence and usurpation of democracy in honduras and could it be argued the u.s. military should be there because of this violent astronomical violence so it's ordinary oh well what the u.s. should have done is to not support a coup in the first place that created the atmosphere for impunity and the kind of violence that we're seeing now what the u.s. has done is poor money into institutions that themselves in fact are at the lead of drug trafficking in honduras the military and the police are famously corrupt in honduras and they're not getting any better by massive infusions of u.s.

taxpayer dollars in fact they're just getting more powerful let's take a look at the bases that are developing in the region right now if we could just see. i don't know if we have it ready but but there's a ton of bases that are developing right now here we go we're looking at it right now those i mean how long has the u.s. really been involved i mean they're developing new bases all the time how long has the us been involved in this region oh i mean the u.s. has been involved in latin america for centuries i mean you know if you're going to drug war yeah i mean in terms of the drug war we you know we've seen in particular we've seen in the example of colombia with plan colombia the escalation of the kind of model for the drug war that we're seeing now implemented in honduras and of course we're also hearing that the afghanistan and iraq models are being applied in honduras where we're hearing that celebrated by the new york times which is sent

embedded reporters in with the u.s. military in honduras and of course before a rock we heard about the el salvador and honduras options being exported to iraq that is the sort of the cia trained torture model in those countries that worked in the one nine hundred eighty s. being used in iraq and now it's being sent back to honduras and the result is the kind of massacres that we saw on the miskito region over the past two months do you think that the u.s. is using the drug war to just expand it solved militarily in the region and just grow more influence absolutely that's one of the things that the u.s. is using to expand itself militarily it's also you know it's also using its support for coups in throughout latin america the most recent coup of course being in paraguay which is another country where u.s. would like to expand its military influence since it currently does not have bases

in the southern cone that have the reach that it would like to have and so you know we're going to see the u.s. supporting the coup just as it supported the coup in honduras and there have been several military bases open in honduras since the coup so there's a direct relationship there how can you. a lot of people don't realize that this is happening i mean when you hear the drug war you think of taking out cartels in mexico and you know all these kind of things that you don't really think about the u.s. actually having its military dea agents killing people in latin america right well it's not even it's military it's you know law enforcement so it's like having a hundred police officer coming to the united states and carrying out assassinations in the u.s. i mean imagine how ludicrous that would be that's what's happening in honduras in latin america you know people haven't heard about it because because the u.s. is marketing it as a solution as bringing security when in fact what it's doing is bringing the opposite of security it's bringing terror to latin america and throughout latin

america and you know there have been there is a letter from ninety four congress people that was signed a few months ago asking for an end to u.s. military and police aid to honduras including training there was a letter signed by four hundred academics that led by honduran academics asking for the same thing and they've basically been ignored by the state department and the obama administration what do you think about the drug war just in general i mean this is a war you've been waging pretty much since nixon and it just seems like there's no solution really to the drug war there's always going to drugs you know and hearing things like this that the u.s. is really entrenched in itself in latin america but at the same time banks profit immensely off the money that's funneled and well it's a race to the drug war is a way to criminalize black people in the united states and it's a way to militarize latin america provides a justification for both of those things. it puts people in our whole hemisphere

in danger and we do see profit for a very few people including militaries in particular who end up controlling the drugs because they have such power and there's so much cash going into them so you know i think the drug war is is really a way it's a mechanism of social control and it also supports undemocratic regimes. let's hear really quickly from the president of ecuador your government close the u.s. space mountain. can you tell me why you decided to close this base because they said that here you know as if they do it to you except having a base set up in your country. in any case if the matter is as simple as i want. to set up a us base in it could do but if we can give the go ahead as long as we all grow

into a mission set up and. they should agree. why do you think that the us feels the need to penetrate all these regions with the military and just set up all these strategic things i mean we just heard from him he said yeah let us set up a base in miami then if you're going to come and try to do it here u.s. government is protecting us corporate interests throughout latin america and throughout the world there's you know there's resources structuring going on in honduras that the u.s. has you know great economic interests in and also it's not just honduras you know when we're talking about the region hundred s. has been a key strategic point for much of latin america that is for u.s. operations military operations and much of latin america so with the base in monta removed and in ecuador there was a much greater need for honduras to remain a military stronghold for the united states so that the united states could act

threaten lean towards country was like venezuela for example so you know it's the u.s. still acting like an empire and you know and trying to cloak it in a legal istic framework and as if it were a defense of security rather than creating terror and insecurity so do you think that the u.s. shouldn't be there to help at all i mean with such instability poverty and such high and murder going on all the time is there anything the u.s. could do to help without interfering either the u.s. could fix its own democracy so that it actually is by the people and for the people and not by the corporations and for the corporations and at that point we would be able to act in solidarity with the people in honduras who have been working so hard to have their own. sovereignty and to have their own democracy and to be able to fix their own problems we have been actively preventing them from fixing their problems and what we really need to do is step back and stop feeding the monster as

the as the rector of the university whose son was killed by police called it. what other mechanisms are we using for the drug war in these regions i mean are we using drones are we using any other sort of military machinery and just expect that's a good question actually there is there is in it's looking like drones are going to be increasingly used in this war and we see a lot of evidence to that effect we see drones being purchased for her for this purpose and also we see the kind of mapping projects that are particularly useful for for drones for unmanned. drones to be. to be to be able to target populations and so mapping projects being funded by the military so drones will be more easily able to operate in regions that are primarily regions that are indigenous or are present and where there is

a potential for resistance movements against the kind of large scale extraction extractive projects that the united states is sponsoring very tightly together with its with with the u.s. military and almost some sort of when you're describing this you're talking about the middle east right now i mean afghanistan and iraq the same kind of operations going on i mean when people hear the cold are killing people i mean what is there a lot of the u.s. is violating by going over there and just taking people out what the d.a. claims is that i mean the law is that the da da agents can only kill people in self-defense and so every time they kill people they're claiming that it was in self-defense but their claims are really unbelievable of for example you know the first time they're in a helicopter and somebody fires or they think somebody fires on them with a gun while they're in a helicopter and they respond with a barrage of gunfire and kill four people in

a passenger canoe. for indigenous people who are traveling back home it's really you know just impossible to believe that this is actually self-defense but they're claiming that every time and and no it's not legal for the da to be to be otherwise taking people out and you know even if it's legal for them to be killing people in self-defense i think we have to ask if it's ethical for them to be there doing this leading these kinds of operations in the first place because what we heard from the people in our us the town where the four indigenous people were killed was that following the murders d.h. and slanted and from everybody in town it was clear that they were leading the operations not just acting in a sort of a dead visor stand back fashion very interesting i think a lot of people would be of to learn that is actually going over there and doing things like this thank you so much for coming and that was adrian pyne professor at american university with the mexican election only days away there's

a growing uncertainty over who will be mexico's next leader front runner and then yet though hold a wide lead going into sunday's election by leftist candidate that is not a well lopez obrador and what would be the country's first female leader host of pheno vasquez mutha this uncertainty stems from the u.s. soil one hundred thirty two movement or i am the one three two movement that is now being referred to as the mexican spring a student movement against pena nieto p.r.i. party which is dominated mexico sometimes ruthlessly for most of the twentieth century and here to join me to talk more about this movement and the elections jose quintus student activist jose thanks so much for joining me talk a little bit about why we haven't seen much about what's going on in mexico on the media right now. well as everybody knows right now in mexico it's a penny and yet though the pretty pretty has a very wide grip on the media and especially in the media we're talking to us tech

and we're talking at televisa which is you know wall so how can i say they are the ones promoting benyon yet though so when if their ally it's opinion yet of course they don't want this movement you know going very public not getting a lot of attention because they don't want the left wing they don't want and there is money to a lot of sort of order to be heard over to get more attention so i think it's kind of like a guild if you could say that's trying to control mexican politics in the sense that they don't want the people to know about this movement especially because of the place where this woman started in the nursery that you bet on many gonna it's you know a how can i say it or university full of kids you know from the political elite or at least the economic leader in mexico so when it comes to that you know the this movement kind of like me and yet the look bad so they don't want

you know that movement to tarnish bang it was moving how can i say their opinion it was momentum or so-called momentum because they say that but it goes ahead you know with these with these polls so the reason the main reason they don't want. i mean this movement to go public or to go you know more public than they wanted to go is because it can ruin the so-called momentum opinion yet the. interesting point has a talk about how this momentum and the movement really has galvanized going to the background on what's been going on. so the with the movement started at one receives a better america which as i said you know is usually this is a school that gives access or is composed of you know kids of the political leader the economically and what happened was that the students started drilling binion yet so they really started asking him tough questions questions that he didn't want to hear like even answer and after a while they asked him about an incident that happened while he was the governor

the governor of the state of mexico and during this discussion they asked him about an incident where they had to authorize the use of police force against these protesters the student protesters and when they asked him if he supported it or if you would do it again banana to say gladly or do it again just to restore the order and it's obviously got the grunt you know a lot of students and after that it's pretty much been it though. didn't want anything more to do with that so he actually like it's good left the schools through the bathroom and through like a v. so the stairs to students would find out and when they left they booed him and then in a recess bonanzas campaign in response to this what they did is that they said like oh no this movement was created by on the rest manuel lopez overloading the leftist wing. so what happened is that these students you know despite fear despite

many other emotions or many other risks that come with that in mexico especially like from journalists or from people who are protesting what they did is they went on you tube and on you tube each one of them showed their credential from the university to prove that they were students of the university that they weren't paid by you know the left to swing or any other interest and in turn it was one hundred thirty one hundred thirty one students who did this and one hundred thirty one student said look here's my credential i'm a student who is just fed up with the system with the regime we want mexico to be what it could be and that's where the term was coined on one hundred thirty two and sell it to show that we're in solidarity that they're in solidarity with one hundred one hundred thirty one students who chose to rebel against being at the end chose to rebel or you know just show that they're fed up because you know mexico the situation that it's in or of the economic the political situation in syria now is definitely not where it should be so this this movement is more of solidarity

with those students who chose you know to. to stick up for mexico to stick up for mexico and to stick up for. well mexico could be it's not it's not it's not a case of you know you support the left wing you support the right wing it's not a case of that it's just a case of giving mexico an opportunity to be what it could be to be just you know a country that has a lot of resources as a lot of potential but it's been plagued with political corruption and a media that is very one sided it does seem like the spirit of dissent is alive and well with the occupy wall street movement in the arab spring and now we see this movement going on in mexico but jose i mean mexico is notorious for voter fraud so even if something does happen that can galvanize people to really out the regime how can we trust the results of that's that's a good it's

a good point i mean i think. there's there is one of the other a couple days he doesn't doubt it if fraud happens you know if there's even mathematical studies that were done by i think scientists in europe that shows there the mathematical you know things behind the fraud that supposedly happened to the six and it did happen because there's there are studies done on that and like you said it's not mexico's notoriously known for that so but the interesting is that yesterday they signed kind of like a like a truce or like the end of campaigning for all of the four candidates in mexico and with there's. there's been rumors or not necessarily rumors but that's supposedly on tomorrow or not today friday that. is supposed to be protesting in front of the fed internationally. regulating body for the elections. and i really

feel like you know with with that happening it's showing that and then also there's a lot of groups that are for example there's a lot of groups that are going to monitor the elections to make sure that you know they're not switching out the c.s. the you know the ballot boxes they're not switching them out and putting votes in so there's a big movement i think the seams of that entails movement has galvanized not necessarily galvanized distrust against the ruling regime the party in that bond but distrust towards the whole system in mexico so it's making people more conscious that if you don't want this fraud to go through we need to all unify and we need to you know be aware of the ballot boxes that when you know that we need to have people looking and also there's a lot of what they call the undocumented. i forget the word but people that are just coming in and just supervising the ballot boxes what about the drug one hundred thirty tomorrow are all the civil movements that are happening they always

just and especially the youth movements yes what about the drug cartels do you think that bill be using intimidation or threat tactics to try to influence the election in any way yeah i mean i don't hold any i don't i don't think they're not incapable of definitely the drug cartels are also they're filtered into the government so i definitely think that they're i mean the violence is not stop the violence has gotten worse and i definitely think the cartels have been best interest to keep the ruling regime in either the body because there are definitely more how can i say. as long as order is not as long as there's no water in mexico the cartels are fine you know and the last thing they want is they want to they don't want to candidate who's going to restore order or at least you know try to help the people because the cartels are predators in terms of when they see that there's no water they they're more dominant so they're definitely going to use

intimidation in the sense that they don't they don't want to bring the border so they're definitely going to use intimidation that's just my opinion on the matter thank you for that and jose just to wrap it up where do you see this going you know there are definitely problems with the voting system but there is a you know mass movement and and it's starting a dialogue and it's starting to get people really galvanized behind this where do you see it going. you know for look after july first after the elections i feel like if. let's say painting at the windsor wins you know the two candidates for a bond i just see it as a return to mexico has been suffering these past years these past fifty sixty years since world war two where the party and the major ruling powers have become puppets of imperialism. so i feel if that happens mexico is just

going to fall into a deep depression worse than it already is if you know they can if for some reason you know on there is manuel lopez obrador wins or require that he wins it'll be something different and i'm not saying that you know them winning that'll be the solution to the problem but i feel like it's definitely something different and i feel like with the youth matches the youth movements that are happening right now people are becoming more conscious and becoming more conscious they're not going to allow the country to fall into that kind of depression so i feel like if as long as somebody different wins somebody different wins you know if it be quiet which i don't think is an avenue to be on there is one little road that's a step in the right direction and with an educated youth that is not going to take not going to take these. catered politics you know to the political elite to the economic elite you have what do you think there's anything the learn from the occupy wall street movement and the arab spring for this movement. oh definitely

the the arab spring was all fostered by youth educated youth and i feel like this is what the c. one hundred thirty two i am a hundred thirty two women backed off of educated youth that are just fed up and with the occupy wall street the same you know it's people just being fed up with the neoliberal imperialist. doctrine that's filtered into our economic and political and social system so i think that they're taking pages out of using social media facebook there's a. there's a lady who wears a mask in mexico it's on why do you who is riling people up to there's l there's a ton of people in mexico especially journalists who are and dana you know putting their lives in danger who are trying their best to inform the people because the major outlets the levees at their best they aren't doing the job they're catering so i feel like they're taking from the positives from those movements in terms of those you know those educated youth are just people that are just fed up with the

system and trying to at least get that out there so there are different points of view and when you have those different points of view and then you have somebody different in office you know it's very there's no we're you know at least it's a change that if it's something different and it will change the whole international political arena with all these actors you know at least you'll have somebody different and these mexico will be heading in a better direction because you have those educated youth and then you have different leadership is just something different i never could go wrong with you know educated youth and. i just i just see it as their learning decile they're definitely learning from those movements and building it is it is building definitely internationally right now and it's really interesting to see this going on in mexico thanks for coming on thanks for coming on and explain it all thank you student activists consequences. and speaking of the old obvious movement the occupy d.c. movement has officially returned the fierce and square here in washington last night

they started putting up tents and a banner that says occupy d.c. here to stay reoccupation comes days after the protesters decided to pack up leave and operate out of an office space instead occupy d.c. started last october but in february the u.s. park police began strictly enforcing regulations that prohibit campaign they said that demonstrators could maintain pens in the park but couldn't actually camp and then the occupiers would be back in a macpherson comes right in time for the occupy convention protesters are planning to rally independence mall in philadelphia in the next few days events start tomorrow and run through july fourth which is independence day here in the u.s. fifteen hundred protesters are expected to take part in the marches and other activities at the city's annual independence day festivities so this is a sign that the occupy movement is trying to regroup and gain traction ahead of the fall elections only time will tell one thing is clear spirited dissent is alive and well and the occupy movement is not over. all right folks well times are tough there's no question about that people are going to scale back on what they buy and

really decide why is this spend a little money they do have but exactly how much money do you need to live comfortably well host of the resident laurie her finest hit the street the big apple to find out. how much of an annual salary would make you feel think that's this week let's talk about that but you found one you wrote for you that would be enough for you i think it would be good seventy five. hundred grand hundred grand. forty thousand dollars some preserve the fund really survive with forty thousand dollars around a bit hundred fifty thousand per couple or so that would make you feel like that's all i would say probably. two hundred thousand dollars that's a lot yeah why do people want so much money and in the united states all we think about is consumption but everyone knows that the things that you own own you and

that the simple life can make you happy why does no one subscribe to that it's just philosophical it's what we grew up with it's what we were trained with it's what we believe if you think the answer varies from country to country in terms of success oh i'm sure does so what do you think on the scale americans fit and. do we need more money or less money more. yet because we have all the stuff especially in america a money is everything america is a money well we like to live you know because we can. live well you know schoolteachers are definitely are in more banks why do you think that schoolteachers earn so much less than people who don't necessarily add as much value as you do i think it's because we're just good natured and we are caring and we don't we're not in it for the money sound yes so those kinds of jobs are going

to get paid less because you're not greedy as much money as i need. to live healthy and with my family. and just to be lucky i think that's that's all i don't need that much money no more than that no more than that do you think if you made more than matt you'd be happier that's no i think you spend what you make so no matter what you're just going to spend what you make yes so if you make eighty thousand dollars you're going to spend more i'm going to spend more and i'm getting a bigger house and a bigger boat and everything else to go with it you don't need that stuff. yes a view of. the bottom line is your annual salary might increase but that doesn't mean your happiness will necessarily increase with it. now does it for now for more on the stories we covered dot com slash our to.