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The United States Department of Defense has carved up the earth into eleven unified combatant commands. The U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, and the U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, are two of these combatant commands. While AFRICOM encompasses the African continent with the exceptions of Egypt, which is under the jurisdiction of CENTCOM, and Eritrea, SOUTHCOM incorporates the Caribbean and South and Central America and claims to be protecting human rights in the region as a long-term responsibility through the development of “regional militaries,” controlled and facilitated by the U.S. Its mission includes contingency planning, operations (including disaster response and “crisis action”), security cooperation, “the force protection” of U.S. military resources in the region, and “ensuring the defense” of the Panama Canal, a critical geographic node for U.S. commerce and security across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Like AFRICOM does on the African continent, SOUTHCOM works to extend and protect U.S. political and economic interests in the Americas region. And like AFRICOM, the military-first strategy has become the tool to maintain U.S. regional domination, despite SOUTHCOM’s spurious claims of “humanitarian assistance/disaster relief” and counter-narcotics operations. U.S. “Full Spectrum Domination” is SOUTHCOM’s real objective in our region.
Both SOUTHCOM and AFRICOM are extensions of NATO and the militarized assault on the democratic and human rights of Africans by the U.S. with the support of neocolonial forces, as well as an attack on the self-determination of African peoples and nations in the Americas, the African continent, and the world. Domestic and international repression by the U.S. security state are linked. Our oppression crosses borders; so must our solutions. All who support the right of the people to authentic democracy and human rights should stand in solidarity against neo-colonial rule and the imperialism that it protects.
The Black Alliance for Peace stands against the growing influence and power of SOUTHCOM and AFRICOM, and the ever-increasing militarization of the regions that they operate in. We call for international “Zones of Peace” in the Americas and on the African continent. Informed by the Black radical peace tradition, we understand that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the achievement, by popular struggle and self-defense, of a world liberated from nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and global white supremacy.
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