As fierce fighting continues in Ukraine and British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss determines to arm Taiwan to fight China, Ecuadorian bananas have found themselves smack in the center of NATO’s campaign to crush Russia. The key to getting Russia to hoist the white flag and surrender her bountiful resources to the Anglo American alliance is, it seems, not only to deprive Russia of Ecuador’s bananas but to ensure the Russians cannot source their banana supply elsewhere.
If truth has been the first casualty of NATO’s Ukrainian war Ecuador, it seems, must be the second. In 2021, Ecuador received $706 million for exporting bananas to Russia, $142 million for shrimp, $99 million for flowers, $28 million for fish, and $17 million for coffee. Russia accounted for 20% (about 85 million boxes) of the total volume of Ecuador’s exported bananas. Now, as there is nowhere to sell and store them, those 85 million boxes, like so much of Latin America’s other embargoed produce, must be destroyed on Uncle Sam’s ignorant orders.
Ecuador is not NATO’s only innocent victim. Paraguay, one of Latin America poorest countries, was a major exporter of cattle meat to Russia; in 2021, it exported 79,213 tons of cattle meat to Russia, for which Paraguay received $314 million, chicken feed to NATO but critical foreign currency to Paraguay.
Brazil, which already has oceans of U.S. inspired economic problems, received over $760 million from Russia: $343 million for soybeans, $167 million for poultry meat, $133 million for coffee and $117 million for cattle meat. And, as for Mexico, which exported cars, computers, beer, and tequila to Russia, from where it imported much needed fertilizers, as its agricultural sector is now collapsing because Russian fertilizer is embargoed, Uncle Sam can expect droves more of incoming, impoverished wet backs to exploit and look down upon.
These Ecuadorian farmers, who have more pressing and immediate issues to worry about than the Biden family’s Ukrainian bio labs, are NATO’s real targets. Their banana harvest rotting, their Russian fertilizer and Russian markets embargoed, they face not only ruinous bills but the pleading eyes of their impoverished wives and children, those pleasant, pleading waifs NATO’s NGOs like to splatter over the begging bowl appeals they use to paper over their own culpability in pauperizing Latin America’s children, NATO’s eternal targets.
Though Russians will survive the loss of Ecuador’s bananas, they are not the sole target of NATO’s Reconquista. The real plan is to isolate Russia and to again subjugate Africa and Latin America so that their resources may again be plundered.
Though few would need reminding of the United Fruit Company turning so many Latin American countries literally into banana republics, one should look again at how the charitable French threw the children of Saigon crumbs, like they were so many feral chickens or how the civilized British used the plumper children of India and (again impoverished) Ceylon as live bait for their crocodile hunting expeditions.
One of my own most abiding memories is sleeping in an outhouse next to one of Del Monte’s Mindanao banana plantations during an ISIS military advance. When I awoke, literally with the cock’s crowing, I thought the air force were playing 7th Cavalry as planes were buzzing about overhead. Gingerly jumping down off my perch to avoid the family pig, I went outside to feel what I thought was rain. The planes were dousing us with all kinds of cancer inducing pathogens to keep Del Monte’s bottom line in order and to hell with the externalities of drenching the paupers down below. Though I have witnessed similar blighted lives in the Mexican Highlands and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, I don’t have to endure, as they do, this toxic American largesse from womb to tomb. In that respect I am, as America’s hypocrites say, privileged.
And, thankfully, for my own moral compass, I remain shocked that these descendants of crocodile hunters and crumb dispensers won’t change their ways until they are made to. Even if we put to one side Lithuania’s Siege of Kaliningrad and Norway’s Siege of Barentsburg, NATO has even bigger provocations afoot. Though G7’s declaration that it will dictate the price Russia can sell its oil and fertilizer at is one of the biggest such provocations, it is, hopefully, the banana skin that will bring these arrogant thugs back to earth with an almighty bang.
Even if Russia and Latin America are to be Hitler’s Poland or another open air Gazan prison where NATO counts the calories the inmates are allowed have to keep them barely alive, Russia and Latin America cannot and will not tolerate that. Latin Americans cannot be NATO’s eternal vassals. They too, like their confrères in Vietnam and the Philippines, deserve a fair shake and a world with hope and achievable dreams. They deserve something more than Del Monte and the USA and if, along with Russia and China, they have to fight for it, so be it.
All of which brings us back to British chartered accountant Liz Truss and her sinister lobbyists in the Reform think tank group. It has often been quipped that, though accountants can add and subtract, they cannot multiply or divide, the implication being that strategy is not their strong card. Certainly, if Truss’ ignorance of Russian geography or her pronouncements on Taiwan are the benchmark, grand strategy is not Truss’ forte.
The Taiwanese issue, as well as related issues concerning the Straits of Taiwan and the South China Sea can and will only be solved by the countries contiguous to them. Not only are they not the business of Perfidious Albion but Truss’ promise to tool up Taiwan is criminally incendiary and useless, as nothing, least of all the machinations of a fading imperial schemer, would stop a determined Chinese attack.
Not only does China, like Russia and Ecuador, deserve her place in the sun but China is, in fact, the world’s second biggest banana importer. The way forward for the world is to allow Russian and Chinese children munch away on Ecuadorian bananas and even to allow the children of Syria and Gaza savor such childish treats as well, to stop feeding those children crumbs and using them for NGO bait.
The world, then, is at a critical inflection point as it pits the children of Ecuador, Paraguay, Russia, China, Vietnam, Gaza, the Philippines and Syria against Del Monte, Hunter Biden and Liz Truss in a fight to the death where there must only be one winner, where Hansel and Gretel, along with Masha and Mishka and Ecuadorian bananas must prevail over NATO’s wicked witches.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation online journal.
