Any day now… riiiiiiight

I don’t know whether they serve cocktails at Russian Security Council meetings or not, but one has to wonder what Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, the former FSB head,and now Secretary of the Security Council was on when he spoke to the media about Latin America.

Patrushev predicted that, given emigration from Latin America through Mexico, it’s only a matter of time (not knowing any Russian, it’s not clear if he meant sooner or later… much later perhaps), Mexico would re-take the territories lost in 1848. Payback, apparently, for US intervention in Latin America going back to the Monroe Doctrine (its 200th anniversary being celebrated… or regretted… this year).

Patrushev’s odd prediction came on the heels of what might or might not be fair, saying (translated from Russian to Spanish to English):

“Tthe US acquired the status of a great economic power based on cynical actions — seizing territories and resources; exploiting peoples and benefitting from the war affecting other countries… Latin American leaders make no secret that awareness of the destructive role of the US has become widespread. The Guantanamo base is considered a direct theft of Cuban sovereignty. And this is just one of the many examples of the systematic usurpation of the independence of Latin America [at a time when]the US has become a champion of the violation of the sovereignty of countries, in the number of wars and conflicts unleashed and in the brutal and illegal repression of foreigners.”

Rubbing salt into the wound, Patrushev calls the United States ingrates… the Russians having saved the country during it’s own War of Independence and the Civil War. HUH? well, I suppose Catherine the Great gave Washington some financial support and during the Civil War the Russian fleet patrolled US harbors (to keep the French and British… both leaning towards the Confederacy) from blockades.

Most of the resporting on this I’ve seen here has been of the WTF? variety, only the nutty Alfredo Jalife-Rahim (who no can figure out why the old spinner of Jewish and/or gringo conspiracy theory is still given a column in the otherwise respectable La Jornada) taking this seriously. If I were to take Patrushev’s remarks as more than a “one-off”, I might look to the Zimmerman Note for a clue as to what he intended.

Whether the Germans were really serious about assisting Mexico in an attack on the United States back in 1915 has neally been established. Zimmerman himself later said it was a ruse that backfired… more an attempt to create a “border crisis” in the United States that would distract it from intervening in the European war.