Ibero-American News Digest

Key Colombian Institutions Turn to LaRouche

March 18 (EIRNS)—Lyndon LaRouche addressed a packed auditorium at the Nueva Granada Military University in Bogota, Colombia today, on the subject, "Proposals To Solve The Global Economic Crisis." The two-hour videoconference was sponsored by the Association of Graduates of the Economics Department of that University, with the support of the university's Department of Economic Science. (See EIR, March 27, 2009, for a transcript of LaRouche's remarks.)

Under the leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, with conditional support from the United States, Colombia has succeeded over the past seven years in driving back the narcoterrorist armies which had seized control over up to 40% of national territory under the protection of the British liberals. Those hard-won gains, however, are now threatened, by the disintegration of the global free trade economy to which the national elite had been blindly committed, and the renewed assault from the British Empire's Dope, Inc.

The first question to LaRouche addressed a central strategic issue being fought out across the Americas today: What effect would legalizing drugs have on the economy? President Uribe has been engaged with virtual hand-to-hand combat on this issue with former Colombian President César Gaviria, one of Soros's top hitmen in the continent, since Uribe began organizing last year, internationally and within Colombia, against the drug cartels' legalization strategy.

LaRouche was uncompromising: "Legalizing drugs would mean the death of the economy.... Drug traffic was invented by the British as a way of destroying countries.... This traffic is a mass murderer of individuals, is a mass murderer of nations. Any toleration for legalization of drugs is implicitly a crime against humanity."

Gaviria Still Campaigning Drug Legalization

March 16 (EIRNS)—Drug kingpin George Soros's agents in Ibero-America, such as former Colombian President César Gaviria, are furious over the results of the March 11-20 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND) in Vienna. The political declaration emerging from that gathering rededicated member-nations to wiping out the scourge of drugs by 2019, and rejected Soros's fraudulent "harm reduction" approach, which is just a cover for outright legalization.

"Absurd!" cried Gaviria, during a March 14 speech in Asunción, Paraguay, before the Inter-American Press Society. One of three co-chairs of the Soros-sponsored and -financed Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (LACDD), Gaviria told his audience that drug decriminalization is the only rational option for Ibero-America. The UN, he said, only offers "foolish promises" to eradicate the drug trade through continued application of the United States' failed "prohibitionist" model.

"We can't adopt the U.S. model," Gaviria declared. "Nor can we wait for the UN to give us permission" to try a different approach, such as that used by many European nations, where dope-cafes are proliferating. Gaviria complained that the United States blocks any attempt to seek "alternative" approaches internationally, and Cuba, Russia, Iran, Colombia, and other countries, as well as the Vatican, share the U.S.'s view on this issue.

Gaviria's remarks were echoed a day later by former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who told the daily La Tercera that all nations should "evaluate" the LACDD report issued Feb. 11, calling for marijuana decriminalization throughout the Americas.

U.S.-Mexican Anti-Drug Fight Gets Underway

March 27 (EIRNS)—The visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Mexico March 25-26 established the groundwork for the kind of intelligence and operational cooperation between the United States and Mexico required to defeat the London-centered drug trade.

Recognizing the drug cartel war which exploded against Mexico under the watchful eye of the Bush-Cheney regime as a national strategic threat to the United States itself, the Obama Administration has put together a policy package vis-à-vis Mexico, which, while not sufficient to solve the problem, contains several of the principal elements long identified by Lyndon LaRouche as necessary for any workable strategy, including real-time sharing of intelligence and non-lethal surveillance technologies (satellites, imaging, etc.), and respect for sovereignty.

The self-righteous Mexico-bashing which previously dominated Washington, is being trumped by official acknowledgement that the drug problem is a "two-way street," as President Obama put it: Drugs come up from Mexico, but weapons and cash flow south from the United States. This new tone is also heard in U.S. Congress, which held some ten committee hearings on the border crisis in March alone, where discussion focussed on how the U.S. could clean up its own side of the border, and come to the aid of its neighbor.

On the eve of Clinton's trip to Mexico, top officials from State, Homeland Security, and the Justice Department announced the beginnings of a comprehensive plan to take the fight to the Mexican drug cartels operating on the U.S. side of the border. While underfunded, it sets in motion expanded use of technology at the border, and beefing up "prosecutor-led, intelligence-based task forces" to go after the money and head honchos of the cartels in coordination with Mexican officials. The arrests of three top cartel leaders, from the Sinoloa and Gulf cartels in the week before Clinton's trip, indicates that intensified intelligence coordination between the U.S. and Mexico is already underway.

Clinton's message in Mexico, was that the United States views its relations with that country as "one of the most important relationships that exists between any two countries in the world," extending beyond the fight against drugs which is, nonetheless, the "co-responsibility" of both nations. In their joint press conference, Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa called Clinton's meeting with President Felipe Calderón "extremely fruitful." Clinton announced that "Mexico and the United States will establish a bilateral implementation office ... where Mexican and U.S. officials will work together, side-by-side, to fight the drug traffickers and the violence which they spread."

Homeland Defense Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder will follow up, attending an April 1-2 binational conference on weapons trafficking in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Presidents Obama and Calderón will then meet in Mexico on April 16-17, before the Summit of the Americas.

Missing in the cross-border agenda thus far, is a policy to address the economic crisis which the drug trade feeds off. The LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) and the LaRouche movement in Mexico are finding great interest in their proposal that the solution can begin with cross-border cooperation on great projects such as Mexico's Northwest Hydraulic Plan, a tri-state water management project known as the PLHINO, which has been on the books, ready to implement, for decades.

Sonora PRI Candidate Champions PLHINO Project

March 26 (EIRNS)—Sen. Alfonso Elías Serrano, an outspoken supporter of the Northwest Hydraulic Plan, or PLHINO, won a landslide victory in the Mexican PRI party's March 8 primary for candidate for governor of the state of Sonora. There was a record turnout for the open primary (anybody could vote, not just PRI members), and Elías won with almost 65% of the vote. The CTM labor federation played an important role in organizing support for Elias.

In both the U.S. and Mexico, the LaRouche movement has been mobilizing to get the PLHINO underway, as the key to preventing chaos on both sides of the border. This tri-state great water project has been planned and studied for more than three decades. With Mexico now on the Obama Administration's agenda, the LaRouche movement's concept of the PLHINO as the element of cross-border economic development which needs to be added to U.S.-Mexican cooperation, is beginning to spark the imagination of serious officials in Washington.

Elías is no Johnny-come-lately to the fight for the PLHINO. In November 2007, he identified the project as emblematic of the kind of change required in how people think, in the closing speech to a packed audience at a forum organized by the LaRouche movement-founded "Pro-PLHINO Committee of the 21st Century." We must turn away from the errors of NAFTA, back to the commitment to think about the future, as the way to solve day-to-day problems, as "normal people" did four decades ago, he stated.

What is at stake with the PLHINO, he added, "is a question of recovering, as a nation, the vision of the future that we had in the days when great infrastructure projects were proposed in Mexico; in the days when advances were made in space exploration internationally; in the days when our universities carried out ambitious research toward eradicating diseases and epidemics in the world." Senator Elías subsequently fought to get funding for the PLHINO project.