Ibero-American News Digest

Zapatista Advocate Claims Nazi Carl Schmitt as EZLN's Own

Even as members of Jose Maria Aznar's right-wing fascist Popular Party are invoking the name of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt to support their calls for a military coup against Spanish Prime Minister Jose Rodriguez Zapatero, in Mexico, a prominent supporter of the Zapatista National Liberation Army announced that the Zapatistas' policy, too, is based on Schmitt's theory of friend and foe and the destruction of the State.

Thus, exactly as Lyndon LaRouche has warned, we see how Schmitt's work is very broadly spread among both "right" and "left" wings of the Synarchist movement, particularly in the Spanish-speaking regions of the world. Schmitt's philosophy comes from Hegel and from Sauvigny, LaRouche commented, in discussing the simultaneous public hailing of the Nazi theorist in Spain and Mexico. It is the Romantic theory of law, he emphasized, noting that anarcho-syndicalism is still synarchism. It's left-wing fascism.

The Mexican support for Schmitt came in a Jan. 24 article in the national daily, La Jornada, by Zapatista supporter Luiz Hernandez Navarro. This is the same Hernandez Navarro who in July 2001 interviewed Italian left-synarchist Tony Negri—the Italian terrorist who had corresponded avidly with Carl Schmitt in earlier days—for La Jornada, on Negri's vision of a new, anarchist-riddled global empire to replace the nation-state. La Jornada has been the leading national mouthpiece for the Zapatista insurgency since it began in 1994.

The Zapatistas have decided to march an organizing force throughout Mexico in the run-up to the July 2006 Presidential elections, in order to build a "non-state public sector," Hernandez wrote, to thus deepen "the deterioration of the state monopoly on political decisions, a tendency described, years ago, by the theoretician Carl Schmitt. According to the German political scientist [sic]: 'The days of Statism are coming to an end... The State as the model of political unity, the State as the head of the most extraordinary of all monopolies, that is, of the monopoly of political decision, is at the point of being overthrown.' Unlike the hypocrisy of institutional politics, in which the contenders refuse to recognize that they have enemies ... [the Zapatista march] calls things by their name, and refuses to abandon the idea of enmity."

Hernandez Navarro asserts that the Zapatistas are part of a "new hard left, born outside the traditional political classes," who reject the reformism à la Lula, and have emerged as a governmental option in various Ibero-American countries.

Argentina Launches Battle Against Rapacious Monsanto

The Kirchner government of Argentina has joined with Dutch and Danish importers of Argentine soy flour in a legal suit against the Monsanto Corporation, a leading world food cartel. Last June, in an attempt to force Argentina to pay royalties on the use of Roundup Ready genes, which is not patented in the country, Monsanto sued Dutch and Danish importers of Argentine soy flour, charging them with patent infringement and violation of its intellectual property rights. This week, Monsanto stopped a shipment of 5,900 tons of Argentine soy flour in the port of Liverpool using the legal proceedings as a pretext. Over the last two weeks, the multinational stopped two other Argentine shipments in the Spanish ports of Bilbao and Santander.

In a Feb. 7 press release, Argentina's Agriculture Secretary Miguel Campos charged that with this action, Monsanto is seriously damaging Argentina's exports, causing a reduction in the export revenue that is used by the government to finance social programs. Eduardo Buzzi, head of the Argentine Agrarian Federation (FAA) accused Monsanto of violating international treaties, adding that its illegal action reflects "one more chapter in Monsanto's commercial voraciousness." Carpab, another agricultural organization, pointed out that Monsanto's legal suit in Europe was filed while negotiations with the Argentine government were taking place in Buenos Aires. Carpab called on the state to immediately seize all of Monsanto's assets inside Argentina, and urged producers not to purchase any of the company's products.

Provocations Launched Against Kirchner

Protests by oilworkers in the town of Las Heras, in Argentine President Nestor Kirchner's native province of Santa Cruz, ended in tragedy Feb. 6, when provocateurs infiltrated the oilworkers' storming of a local police station and killed one unarmed policeman and wounded several more. Those involved in the shooting reportedly had FAL rifles and sophisticated telescopic technology, and may be linked to the extreme leftist Workers' Pole group.

In statements Feb. 8, President Kirchner said, "It was no accident that these events took place in my province, and that these events would have occurred in a town as beloved as Las Heras." Kirchner's own statements, and those of close advisers, strongly implied that the incidents were an attempt to discredit the President and his political project for Argentina. Towns like Las Heras, which prospered during the 1980s, were devastated by the 1993 privatization of the state oil firm YPF, which caused unemployment to soar. The only jobs available now are with private oil companies, which have refused to hire locally. Las Heras, and many other towns in Santa Cruz's interior, are therefore socially volatile, lacking infrastructure, educational facilities and jobs. Between 1997 and 1999, twelve young people, averaging 25 years of age, desperate about having no future, committed suicide in Las Heras.

President Kirchner vowed that these incidents "won't cause us to lose our calm," or to "deviate from the path of coexistence." Argentines must never forget what they suffered in the dark days of dictatorship, when hooded and armed men committed unspeakable atrocities. That cannot be allowed to happen again.

LaRouche Youth Movement in Mexico Calls for "'Nuclear Option' To Stop Fascism"

"No, not a nuclear bomb. Nuclear energy," a LYM statement issued on Feb. 7 begins. The LYM explains:

"In late January, Mexico's Energy Minister announced that the Fox government would promote the building of a single, new nuclear energy plant in the country, in a location to be decided before Fox leaves office in December 2006.

"The LaRouche Youth Movement of Mexico does not think that we should be building one nuclear plant: We need 20! We have to return to the nation-building policies of ex-President Jose Lopez Portillo, including building 20 nuclear energy plants, dozens of new industrial cities especially near the coasts, and, in general, exchanging our oil for advanced technology. We have to rapidly industrialize, achieve food self-sufficiency, and—most important of all—create millions of new productive jobs, and educate and train the new generations of young Mexicans for them, so that our nation's most valuable resource, its people, stay at home to contribute to national development.

"Ya basta with the brain-drain, where our population is being dumped into slave labor conditions in the United States!

"Such a nuclear-centered development program is the key to Mexico's 2006 Presidential elections. This is the opportunity for Mexico to end the nightmare of the last two decades of neo-liberal economic policies; to drive all vestiges of synarchism from national politics and return to its republican roots; and to resume its rightful, historical role as a leader in Ibero-America. This is the opportunity to put an end to the fascist economic policies of the synarchist international bankers globally. And Mexico has important, powerful allies in that battle." (See www.larouchepac.com/spanish for full statement.)

Uribe Goes to Washington for Free-Trade Pact

With the negotiations for a free-trade agreement between Colombia and the U.S. entering their 15th session in Washington next week, with no sign of a break in the impasse, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe opted to weigh in. He and his entourage of ministers flew to Washington on Feb. 13 to meet with President George W. Bush and, it is expected, push the negotiations to a rapid conclusion.

The Uribe government's fear is that, now that the statement has carried into the electoral period in Colombia, the opposition will use the unpopularity of the free-trade agreement as an electoral weapon against the government in upcoming legislative, then Presidential elections. Indeed, as the widely read magazine Portafolio reported Feb. 9, even if Uribe manages to get the agreement signed in Washington, the real battle will take place in the Colombian Congress, which has to ratify the agreement. Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo, a staunch opponent of the agreement, insists that opposition is widespread and growing within both houses of Congress, where the coffee, rice, sugar, poultry, and other threatened agricultural producer federations have significant lobbying influence.