Meet Robert Pastor: Father of the North American Union

Articles

By Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events Online, July 25, 2006

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16189

Robert Pastor intends to give away U.S. sovereignty to a newly forming North American Union exactly as he gave away the Panama Canal to Panama during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

As we are taught in grade school, George Washington is the Father of our nation. If the North American Union comes into existence as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) asserts, then we all better get prepared for a new hero. Robert Pastor is the person most likely to be proclaimed the father of the North American Union, a designation consistent with his decades-long history of viewing U.S. national interests through the lens of an extreme leftist almost anti-American political philosophy.

Dr. Pastor’s early professional career involved a working association with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Here he participated on the Ad Hoc Working Group on Latin America, which produced a 1977 report, “The Southern Connection: Recommendations for a New Approach to Inter-American Relations,” arguing for the U.S. to abandon our anti-communist allies in Latin America in favor of supporting “ideological pluralism,” a code word for the revolutionary socialist forces taking hold in Latin America, including the communist Sandanistas... Author David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org identifies the IPS as “America’s oldest leftwing think tank”...

From February 1975 to January 1977, Dr. Pastor was executive director of the Linowitz Commission on U.S./Latin American Relations...

In December 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Pastor to be U.S. ambassador to Panama.... The nomination failed, however, and was withdrawn by the administration in February 1995, after then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) swore to prevent a Senate vote on Pastor’s nomination. Helms, who had vehemently opposed the turn-over of the Panama Canal, placed much of the blame squarely on Pastor...

Dr. Pastor has also co-authored a 1989 book with his long-time friend, Jorge G. Castañeda, who began his career as a member of the Mexican Communist Party....

Castañeda was an aggressively pro-illegal immigration foreign minister when he accompanied President Vincente Fox in the U.S. in 2001. Those were the days when Vincente Fox was declaring himself to be the president of 100 million Mexicans at home and 23 million Mexicans in the United States. Castañeda also attended with President Fox on a three-day state visit to pre-9/11 Washington. There in a joint statement on Sept. 6, 2001, the two leaders announced a bilateral “Partnership for Prosperity,” which after 9/11 evolved into the trilateral summit statement of a “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” announced in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005. Castañeda is probably best remembered for telling in 2001 a group of mostly Latino union workers that Mexico was going to press for “the whole enchilada,” intending to legalize all illegal Mexicans aliens in the U.S.

In his pressing enthusiasm for realizing the NAU, Robert Pastor argued in a 2004 article in CFR’s Foreign Affairs, entitled “North America’s Second Decade,” that the United States would benefit by giving up U.S. national Sovereignty. “Countries are benefited,” he wrote, “when they changed these [national sovereignty] policies, and evidence suggests that North Americans are ready for a new relationship that renders this old definition of sovereignty obsolete.”

Characteristically, Dr. Pastor has seen the U.S. as a North American bully that needs to be restrained, for the good of the region and possibly even for the good of the world....

In 2004, Dr. Pastor declared his support for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. Dr. Pastor’s 19-page curriculum vitae (c.v.) on the website of American University where he is currently a faculty member documents that Dr. Pastor has served as an adviser to every Democratic Party presidential candidate for three decades, since he first supported Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Dr. Pastor was the co-chair of the May 2005 CFR report, “Building a North American Community,” argued that the Security and Prosperity Partnership signed by President Bush with Mexico and Canada on March 23, 2005 should become by 2010 a “North American economic and security community, the boundaries of which would be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter.” According to his published c.v., Dr. Pastor was the “principal editor” of this CFR report as well as the vice chair of the task force that produced it.

The May 2005 CFR task force report made clear that the borders between the U.S. and Mexico and between the U.S. and Canada would be erased, with the only border to be protected to be around North America. As the report stated on page 3, the boundaries of the North American Union “will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe.” The “outer security perimeter” referred specifically to the border around Canada, the U.S., and Mexico -- such that the borders between these countries would be virtually erased....

Dr. Pastor himself proclaims that the May 2005 CFR task force report on which he was vice chair and principal editor was a “blueprint” for the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). In his June 2005 testimony to the U.S. Senate, Dr. Pastor informed the Foreign Relations Committee of this link:

Entitled “Building a North American Community,” the report offered a blueprint of the goals that the three countries of North America should pursue and the steps needed to achieve these goals.

The CFR report, under Robert Pastor’s direction, recommended expanding the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) into a North American military command, creating a North American Development Fund to help pay for Mexico’s economic development, establishing a North American Union Court to resolve disputes, establishing a North American Advisory Council to serve as the NAU executive branch, and creating a North American Inter-Parliamentary Group to act as NAU lawmaker....

Critics who argue that the NAU is a “conspiracy theory” are well advised to take a hard look at Robert Pastor. With U.S. policy toward Latin America, Dr. Pastor first approached the issue in writing (for the radical IPS, as we have noted), next as a university professor, and finally as a government official. Had John Kerry won the 2004 presidential election, Robert Pastor most likely would have emerged with a government position from which he could have pursued his NAU agenda. Given the re-election of George Bush, Dr. Pastor has surfaced within the CFR , an influential “think-tank” NGO whose history of impacting U.S. policy would suggest the CFR impact on (http://www.SPP.gov) could easily be more than academic.

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