From Volume 6, Issue 41 of EIR Online, Published Oct. 9, 2007

Ibero-American News Digest

LaRouche Youth in Ibero-America Honor López Portillo

Oct. 1 (EIRNS)—On Oct. 1, the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) in Ibero-America commemorated the 25th anniversary of the historic Oct. 1, 1982 speech given by then-Mexican President José López Portillo before the United Nations General Assembly, with activities throughout Ibero-America. Their goal was to organize their countrymen to emulate López Portillo's courage, and join with U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche to bring about a new international financial system today. López Portillo's statement in 1982—"the place is here, and the time is now"—to change history before civilization collapses in a new dark age, applies even more today.

Events were held in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in Mexico City. Some 20 people attended the two-hour event in the Argentine Congress Annex—12 of whom were youth. The broadcasting of the López Portillo speech over loudspeakers in front of the famous Juárez Monument in downtown Mexico City drew a steady stream of discussions, and a polarized response from the population.

For the occasion, the LYM released a special issue of its electronic publication Prometeo, now circulating around the continent, entitled a "Youth Pay Homage to José López Portillo—25 Years Later." The LYM explained that it is "paying homage to then-President José López Portillo for the courage he had to confront international financial interests ready to destroy our economies." Prometeo points out that the youth of today need to know what López Portillo, the last great President of Mexico (1976-1982), actually did, because they have only heard slanders generated by the financiers, who hate him because he fought to transform Mexico into a modern agro-industrial nation, and fought publicly alongside LaRouche to bring about the just international economic order required for that project to succeed.

Kirchner: We Want a United States We Can Work With

Sept. 29 (EIRNS)—Speaking Sept. 27 at the Global Initiative gathering in New York organized by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, outgoing Argentine President Néstor Kirchner had some words of advice for the next U.S. President, and for a United States he referred to as "beloved."

Kirchner's remarks had a distinct Franklin Rooseveltian tone to them, and reflected ideas that Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly discussed. The world, he said, "must dare to hold a great debate on ideas, so that from the relative truth of each of us, we can formulate a higher truth, that will allow us to arrive at the truth that will bind us all." He expressed his desire "that the United States become much closer to the region. It would be very important. This is a country whose closeness we value, and whose absence we feel when it distances itself" from us.

"In recent years," the Argentine President remarked, "we never felt we were supported by the United States.... We had different visions of the solutions that had to be offered to the world. But, all of our efforts tend toward—and we're sure that future U.S. administrations will also do this—seeking points of agreement with a region that will have to be very important for the United States of America, and that is all of America, all of Latin America."

Kirchner then underscored, "We really hope that we can come together with the United States in the task of building together, to be able to complement each other; and it's not the help that's so important, but being able to work together to jointly build a better society that we have no doubt our brothers and sisters here in the United States also aspire to."

The President minced no words in describing the "disastrous" effects that IMF and World Bank policy had had on his country, and pointed to the irony that with its supposed financial (free-market) "orthodoxy," the U.S. today has a huge deficit, while Argentina's "heterodox"—anti IMF—policies, have allowed it to grow enormously and generate a healthy surplus. Chastising the Bush Administration, he noted that if "during the crisis of 2001-2002, the U.S.A. had responded differently to Argentina"—without the bludgeoning that followed its debt default—"the contradictions would not have intensified as they unfortunately did" in the country, or caused such dire consequences.

Correa Gets a Mandate To Sweep Away Neo-Liberal Economics

Oct. 1 (EIRNS)—With exit polls and a "rapid count" projecting that the government received more than 60% of the vote in the Sept. 30 Constituent Assembly elections, Ecuadorians have given President Rafael Correa a mandate to proceed rapidly, with leading the transformation of the state into an instrument to defend the general welfare.

We have won "the mother of all battles," Correa declared, as the size of his government's victory became clear late on Sept. 30. In interviews and speeches since, Correa and members of his cabinet stress that "dismantling the current economic model, to benefit the most dispossessed layers of the nation," is a top priority of the Constituent Assembly, which is to convene by the end of this month to draft a new constitution. Its tasks include both providing the state with the power to regulate the national financial system and advance crucially needed regional integration projects, such as the Bank of the South, Correa said.

Correa's message to the elite who destroyed the country, the richest 2-3% who made the decisions on people's lives and the nation's resources, who said nothing when 2 million Ecuadorians were forced to leave the country to seek a livelihood, many dying in the attempt, and who are now worried that they are about to lose their privileges: "Take a Valium." The elites screamed that we were dividing the country, he said on Oct. 1. Well, the vote shows that it has never been more unified.

Correa dismissed the drumbeat in the financiers' international media that now Ecuador has joined "an anti-American leftist axis" led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. As he told the Washington Post's nasty Lally Weymouth in an interview published Sept. 30: "We are not anti-American at all.... Perhaps [Americans] can be convinced that we are honest people who are doing what anyone would do in our country with huge inequalities."

Blackwater Recruited Pinochet's 'Dirty War' Criminals

Oct. 5 (EIRNS)—The murderous mercenaries of Blackwater USA, now under international scrutiny for war crimes in Iraq, recruited South American war criminals, particularly in Chile, in one of the clearest examples of Lyndon LaRouche's charge that Blackwater "is an Allgemeine SS"—a private mercenary operation modelled on the British East India Company.

In the Fall of 2003, while the Chilean government and population fiercely opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Blackwater's representative José Miguél Pizarro and his Tactical Network Group, deployed to that country in search of former military commandos to recruit as mercenaries in a colonial army. Pizarro claims to have recruited 750 men to go to Iraq, in flagrant violation of Chilean law.

The destruction and discrediting of Ibero-America's military institutions in the 1980s and 1990s, a prelude to Felix Rohatyn's "Revolution in Military Affairs" now ongoing in the United States, facilitated the task. The fact that Chile experienced a "dirty war"—the savage conflict orchestrated in the 1970s and 1980s by Henry Kissinger's Nazi Operation Condor, which specialized in torture, murder, and disappearances of political opponents—made it a particularly attractive recruiting ground to Blackwater.

As a Kuwait-based intelligence officer told Pacific News Service in 2004, the dirty wars that occurred in several South American nations had produced "military men well-trained in dealing with internal subversives. They are well-versed in extracting confessions [read: torture] from prisoners."

José Miguél Pizarro's role in helping to create what he described to author Jeremy Scahill as "a private army in the twenty-first century," is instructive. He was an ardent defender of Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship and the atrocities it committed. The "commercial manager" of his mercenary recruitment operation was Herman Brady Maquiavello, son of Pinochet's former Defense Minister Herman Brady Roche. When his illegal recruitment in Chile forced him out of the country, he set up shop in Uruguay, boasting that "we are bullet-proof. They can do nothing to stop us."

Chilean officers purged from the military when it was downsized, including those charged with human rights atrocities under the Pinochet regime, eagerly responded to the advertisements that Pizarro brazenly placed in Chilean newspapers. Knowing that their past war crimes could make them vulnerable to arrest, either in Ibero-America or Europe, these mercenaries arranged with Blackwater to travel directly to the U.S.A., and then straight to Southwest Asia, to avoid arrest, according to several Ibero-American media sources.

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