In this issue:

LaRouche Youth Challenge Mexico's Fox at Americas Summit

Ibero-American Leaders Slam Bush Agenda at Monterrey Summit

'Bush Proposes United States Be Banned from OAS'

Chavez Plays 'Bad Boy' at Monterrey; Denounces U.S. 'Interference' in Venezuela

Chavez Threatens Total War vs. Opposition

Uproar in Mexico Over Deployment of U.S. Security Officials on Mexican Soil

From Volume 3, Issue Number 3 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Jan. 20, 2004

Ibero-American News Digest

LaRouche Youth Challenge Mexico's Fox at Americas Summit

Arriving in Monterrey, Mexico in advance of the opening of the Americas Summit Jan. 11, Mexican President Vicente Fox and his wife received a bit of an education as they left after mass at the cathedral. They were greeted by three members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, who called on Fox to make sure he addressed the problem of the foreign debt at the summit. In particular, he was urged to raise the issue of forgiveness of the Ibero-American debt when he spoke with President Bush. Fox was assured that Mexico's true friend and "good neighbor," was U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.

During the exchange, videotaped and recorded by the numerous media present in preparation for the summit, Fox was offered LaRouche's Road to Recovery book, as a gift from the LYM, who urged Fox to "read the proposals of the Democratic pre-candidate with the greatest popular support in the United States." A little slow on the uptake, Fox's response was to ask if the book was for him, to which a LYM member responded, "Of course, but read it!"

Afterwards, while several LYM members were being interviewed by the leading national newspapers La Jornada, El Universal, Milenio, Reforma, and other national and international journalists, another LYM member pursued Fox and his entourage with shouts: "Fox, don't pay the debt at the expense of the Mexican people!" As a result, another cluster of reporters gathered around, including cameramen from Univision, the largest Spanish-language TV channel in the United States, with whom the LYM discussed the significance of Fox's policies to privatize electricity, "reform" labor, and impose value-added taxes on food and medicine—all to pay off the foreign debt. The Univision people asked, "Who are you?" The LYM members replied: We are the youth movement of Lyndon LaRouche, and support his ideas. One reporter repeated, "You're with the Democratic candidate?" to which he received a loud, long: "Yeeeesss!"

The efforts of the LaRouche Youth Movement to bring some reality to the Summit of the Americas was rewarded by a wide variety coverage on radio and television Jan. 11, and several national newspapers the following day, which reported that LaRouche's youth had challenged the President, and even, in come cases, that he had received LaRouche's book.

Their efforts included also the participation of some 30 youth from both Monterrey and Mexico City in a march which (while not garnering the attention that the larger march of the "anti-globalization" lunatics drew by marching in the nude, painting walls, and so forth), nonetheless made LaRouche's presence known. Among their posters and chants were: "Down with Bush, We Want LaRouche!" "Bush Is an Idiot, Cheney's Pet Dog," and "Cheney, Terrorist; Fox, Synarchist!" They also chanted "Who Is the Axis of Evil?: The IMF and World Bank!" Once again, the LYM's enormous banner, declaring "LaRouche: Mexico's Ally Against Cheney and the IMF," and "Put the IMF into Bankruptcy; for a New Bretton Woods with Justice and Development" drew a lot of foreign journalists and camera crews.

Ibero-American Leaders Slam Bush Agenda at Monterrey Summit

As expected, little happened at the extraordinary Summit of Heads of State of the Americas held in Monterrey, Mexico on Jan. 12-13. Summits of the Americas have been held every four years since 1994, but this one was convoked only two years after the last, at Canada's initiative, in an attempt to make a semblance of "doing something," in the face of accelerating political and economic disintegration of Ibero-America. The official agenda for the meeting was how to address poverty and the current "crisis of governability."

Public discussions, certainly, were a dialogue of the deaf. President George Bush stuck to the policy of "free trade solves all," which has brought Ibero-America to the pit in which it finds itself today. The U.S. position at the summit was outlined most succinctly by Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, in a Jan. 6 speech on summit objectives at the Council of the Americas. The number one answer to poverty, he said, is "protecting property rights"—and he made clear he meant foreign investors and creditors, primarily. The second priority, said Noriega, is to facilitate the flow of remittances to the region through the major banks, because this money—sent back home by the millions of Ibero-Americans working in largely low-wage jobs, under precarious conditions (poverty, unsafe working conditions, threat of deportation, etc.), in the United States, because the economies of their own countries have been destroyed under free trade—has become the largest source of foreign revenue for many countries in the region.

What gave U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche a real chuckle, however, was the report that President Bush had raised the issue of "intellectual" property rights—a scarce item in and around the Bush Administration, indeed!

It was Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who most sharply denounced the free-trade policies of the past decade, which insisted such privatization and market reform would bring prosperity. The 1990s, said Lula, "was a decade of despair. It was a perverse model that wrongly separated the economic from the social, put stability against growth, and separated responsibility and justice." So, too, Argentine President Nestor Kirchner stated that "it is unacceptable to insist on recipes that have failed."

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez reported that during his 50-minute meeting with International Monetary Fund chief Horst Koehler during the summit, he had urged the IMF to exclude infrastructure investment as part of the calculations of the fiscal deficit ceiling the IMF regularly imposes, as part of its conditionalities, on these countries. He emphasized that he was speaking in the name of all the Ibero-American countries. "We need more space for social investment.... The IMF and multilateral (financial) institutions can help us, and should help us, by accepting the suggestion of all the South American countries that infrastructure investment not be included under the fiscal ceilings. If we need to build a roadway or waterway required internationally, why should we include this under the fiscal ceiling? By not doing so, we will have the opportunity to make investment advances that will have a major social impact."

'Bush Proposes United States Be Banned from OAS'

That were the appropriate headline for the report that the Bush Administration proposed, at the Jan. 12-13 Monterrey Summit, that a "corruption clause" be added to the charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), under which countries deemed to have corrupt governments be excluded from the organization, and banned from further hemispheric meetings! The Foreign Minister of Canada, Bill Graham, reported that the proposal faced "a lot of resistance. All countries have corruption," he said. "Who will decide whether a country is invited or not?" Dick Cheney's Halliburton, perhaps?

Chavez Plays 'Bad Boy' at Monterrey; Denounces U.S. 'Interference' in Venezuela

Drawing comparisons in the media to Fidel Castro's behavior at an Americas economic summit in Monterrey two years earlier, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stirred up a hornets' nest at the first day of the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey Jan. 12, thereby providing President George Bush and the neo-cons with a handy punching bag, and distraction from the real issues that need to be discussed: the debt, the collapsing economy, and Lyndon LaRouche's solutions.

Before leaving Caracas, Chavez gave an interview to Venezuelan daily El Universal, in which he charged Bush and company with "paving the way" for Chavez's overthrow and/or assassination, and declared that U.S. interference in Venezuelan affairs would "not be tolerated." Chavez was infuriated by statements of U.S. National Security Advisor Condeleezza Rice in support of the Venezuelan opposition's recall referendum against Chavez, which will be ruled on, for or against, by Venezuela's National Election Commission in the first week of February.

Arriving in Monterrey, Chavez immediately denounced the summit itself as a farce and "a waste of time," and attacked globalization, neo-liberal economics, and Bush's Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), as the cause of economic crisis and collapsing governments in Latin America. He snubbed Mexico's Vicente Fox, calling him a lackey of the U.S., and met instead with Mexican political opposition figure Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, whom Chavez dubbed "an old friend."

Chavez Threatens Total War vs. Opposition

In an interview published Jan. 13 in El Universal, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez responded to warnings that if his government continues to block the opposition's recall initiative, there will be violence. "I don't fear violence. I have already gone through this, and I have learned. If they [the opposition] insist again on taking the path of violence, it could be their end, physical or political, because if they try to get military units to rebel, I have given instructions to the military to meet them with bullets."

He added, "When I led an uprising (February 1992), I was met with bullets, and went to prison. I didn't come out and hide behind a skirt or a television station, or a bunch of people in a plaza. If we again face a situation of businessmen shutting down their businesses, I have the decree ready to seize them. Even better, to hand the companies over to the workers. I have the decree ready. And if some television stations call on the people to rebel again, I'll take them over also. The decree is ready.... I would give the order immediately: Take them by assault...."

He added: "I am protected by the Constitution. I have given proof of utmost tolerance, but I am not yielding any more. I am psychologically prepared...."

Uproar in Mexico Over Deployment of U.S. Security Officials on Mexican Soil

The deployment of U.S. security officials in Mexico, under the pretext of securing airline flights into the U.S., has provoked an uproar. At least 50 FBI, Homeland Security, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other U.S. armed agents were deployed to Mexico's principal airports, at the outset of the United States' "Code Orange" terror alert over the holidays, to oversee inspection of baggage and passengers on flights into the United States. The high visibility of the agents, combined with the hours of flight delays which resulted, generated banner headlines in the dailies. Whether the deployment is temporary, or will continue, was unknown.

The Cardinal of Mexico City, Norberto Rivera, protested. "No country ... should come to intervene in Mexico," he said. Measures may be required to provide security for passengers, but they must be under the command and leadership of the state, or they violate national sovereignty. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, leader of the leftist opposition PRD party, wrote that any self-respecting government would follow the example of the Brazilian judge who, citing the principle of reciprocity in relations, ordered that U.S. visitors entering Brazil face the same requirements as Brazilians entering the U.S. (being fingerprinted and photographed).

As the debate heated up, El Independiente published a front-page story on Jan. 5, headlined: "Fear that the U.S. Will Install Military Bases in Mexico." The article reports on a document prepared in April 2003 by officers from the three Mexican military branches, analyzing the implications of the U.S. national security doctrine of preventive war. There is "profound concern" among the Mexican officer corps, El Independiente wrote, that were Mexico to become the site of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, under the pretext of "guaranteeing U.S. national security," the United States might force Mexico to participate in a hemispheric police force and accept U.S. military bases on Mexican soil, "with the resulting harm to Mexican sovereignty, free determination, and independence."

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