“Hi. I am Private Vasquez. I am serving at the US Al Tanf base, district of Zabadani, Syria. Nice to meet you, sweetheart." Just like that, a chat through social media begins, costing millions of dollars to men and women all around the world, but especially in the collective West. That message and the following ones are accompanied by photos of sexy US Army male or female personnel, depending on who is on the other side of the line. In weeks, they earned their victims’ trust until they fall in love with what in reality is a member of a criminal gang ready to take the final step. Once the incautious has bitten the trap, the hoaxers promise their new sweetheart that they will visit them during their next leave. Having excited their victims, they say they will send a suitcase in advance full of one hundred US dollar notes or gold bars that they have encountered in that fictional Syria that they have described before and where locations don’t match at all. They ask for an address and then a credit card number to pay the courier. As the US Army admits, thousands have been victims of this plot. One single lady lost US $450,000.  

This reveals much more than the simple mechanism of one of the hundreds of cyber hoaxes of our time. First of all, it crudely exposes the real legacy of the US intervention and still illegal occupation in Syria... A policy against international law that has been nurturing all kinds of crimes, from terrorism to this grotesque social media plot that has cost millions of dollars to US propaganda victims worldwide... the very ones who have been conveniently brainwashed to believe that the US in Syria – as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya… – was a positive and necessary force. Otherwise, at the first contact with the hoaxers, the victims would have directly faced them numbering all the US misdoings in Syria, from where everyday petrol, antiquities, water, wheat, and other resources and goods are stolen from the areas of northeast Syria where the US and Turkish invaders operate in coordination with local non-state militias. Thus, the hoax also reveals the influence of the collective West propaganda and the extension of the damage caused to their anesthetized constituency. They are paying double for this kind of interventionism by Washington and its allies, first, through their taxes, then channeling their hard-working savings to criminal organizations operating thanks to the US presence in Syria and its promotion through mainstream media intoxication. 

However, this coarse and vulgar plot reveals much more than all that. It exposes the astonishing and unstoppable decadence of the United States, a power that just one century ago had full credit in Bilad Al-Sham. Back then, its people expressed to the King Crane Commission sent by President Wilson that they wanted to live in a united and independent state, which guaranteed its unique ethnic and religious diversity. In a Congress with full participation, Syrians also told the Commission that they didn’t want to be under any influence of France or the United Kingdom; imperialist and colonial powers well known for centuries in natural Syria. A landslide majority also rejected the creation of the Zionist entity promised by the British and French to European Jews already on the move to Palestine. Because of all this, Paris and London blocked any possibility to respect the will of Syrians, even though the US was then ready to honor its word. 

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One century ago, the US was just becoming a regional power in the Western Hemisphere. As a former colony, it rejected any form of old fashion colonialism of the European style, not to mention imperialism, a category that academically cannot be fully applied to the US. Of course, in those years, it was starting to exercise the B side of Monroe’s 1823 Doctrine. The idea of the Americas, as a united continent joined militarily and politically against a European comeback, was giving way to “America for the United States of America." There were interventions, mainly in the Caribbean and Central America, but even though Washington fell short of becoming a real empire, those who govern the territories they occupied through viceroys came directly from the metropolis. That’s much more than instigating a coup d´état here and there or decisively influencing the economy of a country. Illegal and brutish policies don’t equal imperialism, which, as history tells, is a governing and political category much more repressive and difficult to get rid of.  

From that start in the Americas, in the last one hundred years, the US has slipped to what it is now. A full supporter of "Israel", a power that invades countries regardless of the mess it creates, since Vietnam on, incapable to win a real war or to establish any comprehensive form of government in those countries invaded, with Iraq and Afghanistan being cases in point. Worse, it’s already becoming a failed and rogue state without a real army to back its increasingly hysteric bravado. As Robert Kaplan describes in his book Imperial Grunts, for decades, the US Army is dramatically mutating. From the national and drafted one that won the First and Second World Wars to one depending on outsourcing in the form of mercenary contractors or on newcomers that are offered the green card or US citizenship if they enroll. People that not necessarily understand or share the geopolitical goals of the country they are going to serve abroad. 

From that thread, we have Private Vasquez. Of course, a fictional character that - as the hoaxers know well - faithfully represents the current composition of the US Army. But what is worse, it exposes the failure of US policies during the last century. The hoax represented by Private Vasquez is the final distillation of that US that one century ago could have been a force of good but instead extended their Latin America’s policy to the rest of the world, with all its excesses, double standards, and muddy and stinky legacy where common criminals prosper.