Ibero-American News Digest

LYM Gives 'Powerful Gift' to Mexican Peasant Federation

On March 12 in Mexico City, the 420 delegates attending a national conference of the Cardenista Peasant Federation (CCC) had the privilege of listening to the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), whose members sang to, and briefly addressed, the gathering that had been called to develop an agenda of actions against the final stage of NAFTA, which will wipe out Mexican agriculture. Delegates from all of Mexico's 32 states attended the CCC's national forum on "Food Sovereignty, Competitiveness and Rural Financing," at which EIR's Ibero-America editor Dennis Small gave the keynote speech, on "The Crisis of the International Financial System and Its Effect on Mexico: Three Lies and Three Truths."

Concluding with a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas together on the screen, Small told people that great infrastructure projects and development can be undertaken; the U.S. can return to FDR's policies, and Mexico to those of Cardenas. He pointed to Lyndon LaRouche's creation of the most important political weapon existing worldwide: his youth movement, which made it possible to tilt the recent electoral balance in the U.S. against Dick Cheney and George Bush, and their plans to eliminate sovereign nations. "A LaRouche Youth Movement also exists in Mexico, and there is right now a group of the LYM youth, who want to give you a gift," Small told the audience.

The LYM chorus then rose to sing three songs to the meeting: "On Tortillas" (as a canon sung to the music of Funiculi Funicula); Beethoven's Freundschaft (in German); and lastly, a canon, "The Biofools," written by LYM member Laura Flores on global warming and Al Gore. As corn tortillas are the basic staple in the Mexican diet, the peasants really enjoyed the tortilla song, in particular, although the Al Gore song provoked a lot of laughter, too. Two LYM organizers then briefly addressed the conference, explaining how singing is a political weapon, and how they organize the population daily, in the streets and wherever possible.

In discussions after the session, some of the delegates said they would put their children in touch with the LYM. Others, such as one rural teacher, said that he would arrange for LYM organizers to address his students. Organizers wanted to hold a meeting on the spot with young CCC delegates. Some peasant leaders spoke with the youth about pulling them into organizing plans "they are about to launch." Contacts in various states were made, and the literature table was swamped at the end of the session.

The issue on the table at the CCC forum, and the reason EIR was invited, is that under NAFTA, on Jan. 1, 2008, the few shreds of protectionism still left to Mexico on products such as corn, are to end, which will finally finish off Mexican agriculture. Mexican rural producers, the majority of whom are small farmers or from the ejidos, a form of cooperative, will not survive, and will be driven to join the masses of emigrants to the United States.

Introduced by a CCC leader as a "former political prisoner in the U.S.," Small explained how the world had arrived at the current situation, and the importance of defeating Cheney and his puppet Bush. He presented a series of new graphs on the financial disintegration of globalization, the effect of that disintegration upon the Mexican economy, and the destruction of Mexican agriculture. He developed LaRouche's solution to the crisis by changing the United States, and the possibilities that opens for Mexico, cooperating on such great infrastructure projects as greening the Great American Desert.

The delegates paid close attention throughout (including whistling and booing every time Bush was named). The solutions to Bush's three lies also provoked a lot of discussion, with 18 questions posed, the majority of which were about NAFTA, with a number on global warming. People were clearly thinking seriously about the current crisis. Questions included such remarks as, "I believe your presentation is true to the reality of the problems we face"; how can this situation be changed, if "those who govern keep kissing and hugging the U.S. President?"; and "I want you to provide us with the material you presented here."

The Issue for Ibero-America Was Never 'Bush vs. Chavez'!

The media hype surrounding George Bush's March 8-14 trip to Brazil and four other Ibero-American nations played it as a mega-showdown between the U.S. and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. After Brazil and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) March 9 to "Advance Cooperation on Biofuels," Bush himself mouthed the same nonsense, arguing that dependence on oil is a "national security issue," because "dependency upon energy from somewhere else [i.e., Venezuela] means that you're dependent upon the decisions from somewhere else" (emphasis added). Venezuela currently provides oil assistance to 17 Caribbean, Central, and South American nations.

The real issue is that the world economy is blowing apart, and the propaganda that biofuels and ethanol development will create Ibero-American jobs, income, and better living standards—as both Brazilian President Lula and Bush emphasized—is intended to pull giant Brazil away from regional integration efforts, and into the hoax that will kill millions in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

The MOA the two Presidents signed states that they "intend to begin work in Central America and the Caribbean to encourage local production and consumption of biofuels, with a view to continue joint work in key regions across the globe." As the Brazil correspondent of Argentina's daily Clarin bitterly noted March 9, Bush will carry his plan to the other nations on his tour. For Guatemala, the proposal "is to turn these small countries to paradises of monoculture, whether it be corn or sugar cane, to provide [the U.S.] with raw materials."

Lula, displaying the deadliest form of Brazilian pragmatism, sounded dangerously like Al Gore during his March 9 press conference, claiming that "We ... who have polluted the world so much in the 20th Century, need to make our contribution to de-polluting it in the 21st Century." Bush did not back down on reducing the 54 cents-per-gallon tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol, but Lula smilingly told reporters that it will take a "lot of conversation and convincing" to get Bush to change his mind. "It's a process," he said.

Bush, meanwhile, tried to show that he was "one with the people," by joining Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and wife Laura in a favela (slum) in Sao Paulo, where he danced the samba with poor children.

Gore Accepts Invite from Chilean Fascist To Pump Global Warming Hoax

Chilean multi-millionaire Sebastian Pinera, failed right-wing 2005 Presidential candidate, and brother of Pinochet-era social security privatizer and CATO Institute fascist Jose Pinera, has extended an invitation to Al "Gordo" (in Spanish, gordo means fat) to come to Chile to speak on global warming. Sebastian, who ran for election as a self-described "Christian humanist," was, in fact, the candidate favored by the University of Chicago, Shultz-Rohatyn crowd that put Hitlerian dictator Augusto Pinochet in power in 1973. The Chilean population wanted none of this, and elected Socialist Michelle Bachelet instead.

Now, at the very moment that the issue of nuclear energy is being hotly debated in Chile, Sebastian Pinera has used the ill-gotten fortune he obtained under Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, to offer fellow failed U.S. 2000 Presidential candidate Al Gordo $400,000 to speak on May 11 at the "Global Warming and Climate Change: Time to Act" conference in Santiago.

In early 2006, the LaRouche movement used the example of what Pinochet's Labor Minister Jose Pinera did to social security in Chile in 1981, to defeat George Bush's plan to do the same in the U.S., giving the Democratic Party much needed ammunition. Now, "Democrat" 'Al Gordo' is going to Chile, whose President Bachelet is a close friend of Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He'll be sidling up to Pinera, who has branded Bachelet as "incompetent."

Invitations to Fat Al are also coming in from other unsavory quarters. In Brazil, former disgraced President Fernando Collor de Mello, who was thrown out of office on corruption charges in 1992, has wangled an invitation for Gore to appear on an as-yet-unspecified date before the Senate Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee to discuss global warming. Now a senator, Collor de Mello is head of the newly created subcommittee on Global Warming of the same committee, and is using the fraudulent IPCC report as the basis for his subcommittee's work.

Then in May 10 and 11, Gore will be the keynote speaker at the First Biofuels Congress of the Americas, to be held in Buenos Aires. However, Eduardo Ferreyra, president of the Argentine Foundation for Scientific Ecology, charges that Gore is a hypocrite "of Galactic proportions," whose gigantic consumption of electricity and natural gas at his Tennessee mansion in 2006 was 20 times the national average and valued at $30,000. At this rate, Ferreyra notes, "Gore has become the "Louis XV of the 20th Century, yet this Louis XV advises us to 'save energy, or the world will come to an end.' "

Ferreyra's foundation describes itself as a group of individuals knowledgeable in many fields of science, who, like the scientists who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, are "worried about the emergence of an irrational ideology which opposes scientific and industrial progress, and prevents economic and social progress." One of the links it provides is to 21st Century Science and Technology magazine, founded by Lyndon LaRouche, which it describes as containing many "excellent" and "politically incorrect" articles.