PRESS RELEASE

Major Chilean Daily Publishes Story on LaRouche Campaign vs. Bush's Privatization Drive

Dec. 16, 2004 (EIRNS)—The business section of the Dec. 17 print edition of the Chilean daily newspaper La Tercera, and also its online edition, features an article on Lyndon LaRouche's campaign to halt President Bush's drive to privatize Social Security. The article is accompanied by a picture of LaRouche PAC's "Twins" Bush-Pinochet ad which we used for the leaflet. Except for the tag-on last line retailing the anti-Jewish slander against LaRouche (picked up from the London Economist, no less), the article is straightforward.

La Tercera is one of the two largest press consortiums in Chile, the other being El Mercurio. According to one Chilean source, both are considered "right-wing," with La Tercera particularly close to the military. The fight over the pension reform in Chile itself, however, is now front-page news daily in the Chilean press, as there is across-the-board agreement that changes are required.

The full text follows:

Campaign vs. AFP Carried Out in United States

Just as the U.S. press this week began to explain at length the Chilean pension system to its readers, in light of President George W. Bush's desire to implement a similar system in his country, so too the campaign began against this plan, which has been in place in Chile for 23 years.

An especially aggressive campaign is being led by Lyndon LaRouche, a polemical economist opposed to financial globalization, who has attempted to reach the White House seven times.

A parody of the poster for the film Twins (1988, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito) is published on his webpage, with nothing less than the faces of Bush himself and Augusto Pinochet (see photo). The message says: "First it was Enron. Now George 'Enron' Bush is pushing Chilean dictator Pinochet's Social Security Rip-off—against you!"

LaRouche is the founder of Executive Intelligence Review, a think tank which, in its criticism of the Chilean system, is advised by economist Manuel Riesco, of CENDA. On the basis of the latter's figures, LaRouche says that an enrollee in an AFP since 1981, as compared to one of the same characteristics who kept participating in the public system, "will receive less than half of the pension" of the latter. Riesco this month published a document to this effect on EIR's site.

LaRouche is known for being the only candidate for the United States Presidency who has been in prison, after a polemical and confused trial for tax fraud and conspiracy charges at the end of the 1980s. This 82-year old New England native is also known for his theories about supposed international Jewish conspiracies, according to The Economist.