Disaster relief and closings served as pretexts for U.S. base expansion

Evidence

The first opportunity came with the damage caused in Nicaragua by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch. The Command coordinated a $30 million relief effort for America’s former enemy and used the opportunity to expand its operations in the region. The following year, Southcom used the closing of bases in Panama as a pretext to set up four new U.S. air bases in Ecuador, Aruba, Curaçao, and El Salvador. And with the “war on drugs” providing a public rationale for broadening U.S. military activities in Latin America, by the end of the 1990s Southcom saw its budget expand more than any of the other regional commands. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 298

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the motif of pretexts for imperial expansion — humanitarian and anti-drug rationales masking military footprint growth, echoing the Pentagon’s stated rationale of base deployments being forces for good.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 298