From Volume 7, Issue 34 of EIR Online, Published August 19, 2008

Ibero-American News Digest

Webcast with Zepp-LaRouche: Do You Want To Eat?

Aug. 13 (EIRNS)—"Do You Want to Eat? Join LaRouche's New Bretton Woods." Helga Zepp-LaRouche will hold a videoconference on Aug. 19 with live audiences gathered in three Ibero-American countries on that topic (6 P.M. EDT, at www.larouchepub.com/spanish).

The Argentine gathering is being co-sponsored by the LaRouche Youth Movement and "Compromiso K," a youth group in that country that supports President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The Mexican meeting will be held in an auditorium of the federal Congress, and the Colombian event will be held at the auditorium of the Trade Union of Employees of the Bank of the Republic.

Bolivia Vote Keeps Opportunities Open in South America

Aug. 11 (EIRNS)—The large majority won by Bolivian President Evo Morales in yesterday's referendum on whether he, and the prefects of the country's nine departments, should stay in office, buys South America space to continue battling for continent-wide development, against British plans for balkanization and genocide.

Morales received 67.4% support, including votes of 30-40%, variously, in the opposition-controlled departments.

The magnitude of the vote demonstrates that two-thirds of the people do not want anything to do with the British strategy of regime change, whatever they may think of their current President.

Lyndon LaRouche noted that Morales' victory gives him some respite from British attacks, along with backup from some of the other South American Presidents. If there was any consuming ambition to get Morales out, that just got shot down.

The country remains highly polarized, with six of the prefects receiving similarly strong majorities, including most of the five provinces pressing for autonomy from the national government. The British-controlled leadership of the Santa Cruz department, rabid free-trade ideologues who are de facto gunning to bust up Bolivia, announced that Santa Cruz and four other eastern departments will go on strike against the government on Aug. 19, while raving that no member of the national government is welcome in "their" departments.

While the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) as a bloc, and the member-states individually, welcomed the potential to establish calm in Bolivia, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose meddling in Bolivian affairs has fueled polarization, issued a statement promoting the Morales government as a project for ethnic Indian nationalism.

Soros Strikes Again: Pushes Dope in the Americas

Aug. 15 (EIRNS)—George Soros has added to his holdings in Brazil in recent months, purchasing one ex-President, along with major stock positions in the oil and mineral giants Petrobras and Vale.

Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), backed by Soros's money and key players in his international drug-legalization apparatus, has organized a "Latin American Drug and Democracy Commission" to campaign for Soros's drug legalization. The 18-member commission, founded last April 30 in Rio de Janeiro, argues that controlling production of drugs has failed; combatting drugs is too expensive, anyway; so society should give up the idea of getting rid of narcotics, and opt for "harm reduction" measures and "decriminalization."

The new commission, in short, is a new instrument for Britain's Opium War against the Americas.

With Cardoso, Soros purchased two other former Presidents to co-chair this Latin American Drug and Democracy commission with him: Colombia's César Gaviria (1990-94), infamous for having knowingly permitted the drug mafia to control a Constituent Assembly which rewrote the Constitution during his term; and Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000).

Leading funders of the new commission are Soros's Open Society Institute, the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Institute, and the Soros-funded Viva Rio NGO.

Guiding the commission is Amsterdam's Soros-funded Transnational Institute, otherwise active in the British government-linked project to legalize the opium trade in Afghanistan. The Transnational Institute, with Soros's Open Society Institute, ran the Coca 90's project which organized the coca-growers in the Andes region of South America as a battering ram for legalization. Another key agent in that Coca 90's project, Peru's Diego García-Sayan, also Soros-financed, is a member of the commission.

Among the other members of the commission are such British agents as Brazil's João Roberto Marinho, the former head of Prince Philip's genocidal Worldwide Fund for Nature in Brazil, and Peru's perverse liberal, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose 1990 Presidential campaign was run by Soros's compadre, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, now, U.K. Minister for Africa, Asia, and the United Nations, and reportedly a leading British conduit to U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Transnational Institute's Martin Jelsma told the founding meeting of this new commission that "there is not going to be a world rid of drugs." Their job is to get a turn internationally, away from the "U.S. approach" of a war on drugs, to the "European approach," of harm reduction, in the upcoming ten-year assessment of the UN General Assembly Special Assembly (UNGASS) on drugs. The commission will meet in September in Bogota, and in February 2009, in Mexico City.

Brits Want Argentine President Out of the Way, Now!

Aug. 12 (EIRNS)—As the global financial crash accelerates, so too does the political warfare directed by London and Wall Street against Argentine President Cristina Fernández and her husband, former President Néstor Kirchner, who currently heads the Peronist Party.

The argument coming from various of the British Empire's most unsavory quarters is that the Kirchners have "mismanaged" the economy, applied the wrong policies, brought the country to the brink of another debt default, and refuse to fire key personnel disliked by London and Wall Street. The vultures' real concern, however, is that the Kirchners don't find it necessary to crawl for the British, and are moving back into the reactivated Ibero-American Presidents' Club. Therefore, they have to be removed.

Walter Molano of BCP Securities demands exactly that, in an article in the Aug. 11 Latin Business Chronicle. He uses the Aug. 8 plunge in Argentine bonds as evidence that the Kirchners are incompetent and must be ousted because they no longer have any "credibility" or political "clout." The debate taking place in Buenos Aires, Molano claims, is whether the President and her husband will last for more than another three or four months. "It's not a question of 'if' but 'when' the Kirchners will be ousted," he insists.

Cuba Announces Doubling of Rice Production in Five Years

Aug. 10 (EIRNS)—According to Cuba's Deputy Agriculture Minister Juan Pérez Lamas, the Cuban government plans to double rice production in the next five years. The effort will involve state-owned enterprises, cooperatives, individual farmers, and family plots and farms run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, Cuban News Agency reported.

The announcement follows a fierce food security campaign undertaken by the Cuban government. Earlier this year, President Raúl Castro had announced agrarian reforms aimed at stimulating food production. The moves include the planting of idle lands around the cities, while also making arable land more available in the countryside.

Marcio Porto, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Cuba, noted the determination of the Cuban government to tackle the food crisis, and praised the technical cooperation the government has always offered to other Caribbean countries through the FAO.

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