John Pilger (www.johnpilger.com) argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor.

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In a ruling against ExxonMobil Corp., a British judge canceled on Tuesday an order to freeze US$12 billion of assets belonging to Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.

“I have decided that the legal order of freezing assets” issued on January 24 against PDVSA “must be revoked,” Mr. Paul Walker in charge of the case declared to the court.

“This is the beginning of the end of the pestering campaign of ExxonMobil against PDVSA and Venezuela,” said the Venezuelan Ambassador to London, Samuel Moncada, according to AFP.

“We are pleased since the English Court rejected the fact of being used as an instrument of ExxonMobil in order to impose in the international panorama over Venezuela,” the ambassador Moncada added.