Ibero-American News Digest

Ecuador Official Endorses Call for Global Glass-Steagall

Sept. 13 (EIRNS)—In a live discussion on the air this morning on Ecuadorian radio, Pedro Páez, head of Ecuador's Presidential Commission for the Design of a New Regional Financial Architecture, stated: "I agree fully with the idea of a global Glass-Steagall, to purge the financial system of the parasitic hypertrophy of speculative instruments," and return to a credit system for productive investment among sovereign nation-states.

Páez, for many years a leading figure in President Rafael Correa's economic cabinet and long familiar with Lyndon LaRouche's economic policies, was interviewed, along with EIR's Dennis Small, for 45 minutes by radio host Patricio Pillajo. Páez was responding to a briefing by Small on the global financial meltdown underway, and the latest advances in the battle to reinstate Glass-Steagall in the United States—along with the other points in LaRouche's seven-point plan, including removing President Obama from office immediately, and returning to a Hamiltonian credit system.

Páez also argued strongly for policies of food self-sufficiency, attacking the use of speculative instruments such as credit default swaps and naked short-selling, which destroy people's very ability to eat; and for regional infrastructure projects like a South American continental railroad.

Pillajo asked Small to elaborate on LaRouche's demand that Obama be removed from office immediately, noting that this was essentially an internal U.S. matter. Small replied that it was an internal matter, only in the same way that removing Adolf Hitler was an internal German matter. We Americans have to make sure it happens, he said, but the survival of the planet depends on our success. Small also encouraged listeners to visit the LaRouchPAC website (www.larouchepac.com), and to view the latest video there on the truth behind the 9/11 attack.

Brazil Prepares Cadre for a Nuclear Future

Sept. 18 (EIRNS)—Fukushima's post-tsunami problems will not stop expansion of Brazil's nuclear program, Energy Minister Édison Lobão stated on Sept. 15. Brazil intends to carry out the completion of its long-planned third reactor, Angra 3, at which over 3,000 people are already working, and to decide in 2012 where the next four nuclear plants will be built, Lobão told a conference in Rio de Janeiro. Reevaluations of Brazil's nuclear facilities carried out by the state nuclear company Eletronuclear and Energy Research Company (EPE), ordered after Japan's incident, concluded that Brazil's nuclear facilities are absolutely secure.

Lobão pointed out that what happened in Japan "was not a nuclear problem, but a problem of a tsunami and an earthquake," and he pointed to China, which is building 28 reactors and plans to build another 100 over the next 40 years, as exemplary of the future.

In São Paulo the same day, the head of Brazil's Energy Research Company. Maurício Tolmasquim, did his best to dampen such technological optimism, stating, for his part, that Brazil would finish Angra 3, but that would be the limit of any expansion of its nuclear plant. Tolmasquim insisted the future lies in a return to a Middle Ages dependence on hydroelectric, wind, and biomass power.

More telling than words, however, are the hands and feet, and the best sign that Brazil is carrying forward its decision to revive a vigorous national nuclear program, despite the naysayers, is the steps underway to establish the country's second nuclear engineering program, at the University of São Paulo's Polytechnic School (Poli-USP). The program is to open its doors for the first class in March 2013, on a campus built adjacent to the Brazilian Navy's Aramar Experimental Center in Iperó, São Paulo, where the Navy is building Brazil's first nuclear-powered submarine. The Nuclear Energy Research Institute's Brazilian Multipurpose Reactor (RMB), whose primary mission will be to produce medical radioisotopes, is also planned for the same site.

Prof. José Roberto Castilho Piqueira, vice-director of the Poli-USP, reported on Sept. 12 that the Navy has begun demarcating the land for the new nuclear engineering campus. The curriculum will not be limited to building nuclear generating plants, he emphasized, but will also include materials processing, an area with a great future for the country, given its wealth of uranium, along with medical applications and pharmaceutical production.

The critical bottleneck faced in carrying through on Brazil's hard-fought decision last year to restart an expanding nuclear program, is training sufficient cadre of qualified young nuclear scientists and engineers. Thus, this second program is underway, to supplement Brazil's first nuclear engineering program, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which graduated its first class in 2010.