Mexico: The Return of Operation Juárez
by Dennis Small
Two crucial strategic questions were posed by the giant 1.5 million-person demonstration in Mexico City's central plaza, the Zócalo, on Sunday, July 16—beyond the immediate issue of vote fraud in the Mexican Presidential election of July 2, as charged by candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
First: Will Mexico end its 24-year little Dark Age of economic and political devastation, ever since Washington's de facto coup against the outgoing government of President José López Portillo in 1982, and return to its historic nationalist policies of rapid industrialization?
Second: Will the United States in turn come to its senses, and return to the policies of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—and John Quincy Adams before them—of aiding the sovereign economic growth of its nearest neighbor, as the keystone of a broader anti-colonial foreign policy? Will the government in Washington cease its dangerous efforts to impose on Mexico a government of the synarchist Felipe Calderón, whose banker-dictated free-market economic looting policies only guarantee chaos and misery inside Mexico, and further mass emigration of Mexico's economic refugees desperately fleeing to the United States?
Lyndon LaRouche was uncompromising in his formulation of this issue at his July 20 webcast:
"Election fraud has been created.... What happens to us in the United States, if the insanity of these right-wing bills, these border bills, combined with producing a fascist-like turmoil and instability in Mexico below the border, what is going to happen inside the United States? ... You want the whole United States torn apart, from the inside, because you're negligent on this issue? Because the Bush Administration has played a role in taking a guy who has fascist credentials, Calderón, that is, of the Synarchist International, an organization that was brought into Mexico from Nazi headquarters in Berlin and which is a part of the same faction that went into Chile and the Operation Condor in the Southern Cone under the benefit of—Felix Rohatyn, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger. You want that?"
The key to understanding the issue addressed by LaRouche, lies in reflecting on three distinct historic moments involving the policies associated with the name Benito Juárez. We explain.
Juárez, 1865
Benito Juárez was the President of Mexico who defeated the Synarchist-deployed French Habsburg invaders in the late 1860s, with the aid of his friend and ally, Abraham Lincoln.
In early 1865, things were at their worst for Juárez and Mexico. Juárez had been driven out of Mexico City by the invading armies, taking only the nation's flag—and its sovereignty—with him in his Presidential carriage. His republican armies had suffered heavy defeats, leaving the country's most important cities under French rule. Habsburg Emperor Maximilian began to send messages to Juárez, urging him to make peace, and even offering him a post in the empire. Some of Juárez's allies, tired of a war they thought would never end, urged him to accept. Juárez refused, insisting on Maximilian's unconditional departure from Mexico.
It was at that point, in April 1865, that Juárez wrote a famous letter to his family, which began by referring to the U.S. Civil War: "I praise and applaud Mr. Lincoln's inflexibility, for his victory will be all the more beneficial, though it come later, than an earlier peace won by sacrificing humanity." He concluded by pledging: "It would appear that there is no option but to continue the struggle with what we have, with whatever we can, and as far as we can" (see article below).
Understandably, Benito Juárez has always been the Synarchists' worst nightmare in Mexico, especially in combination with Lincoln in the United States.
Juárez, 1982
In May 1982, Lyndon LaRouche visited Mexico and met with his friend President José López Portillo, who asked his visitor what the Wall Street bankers and others intended for Mexico. LaRouche replied that they were out to destroy Mexico with financial warfare, by the Fall of that year—a forecast that was fully borne out.
At the request of nationalist circles around the Mexican head of state, for a policy to address this crisis, LaRouche published the book-length report Operation Juárez in August 1982, which called for reorganizing the pooled debts of South and Central America as a source of long-term, low-interest credit, for great infrastructure and other high-technology projects.
As LaRouche explained in a July 30, 2003 article, "My Unique Role in the Americas":
"That report was the manual guiding my part in the subsequent, August-October 1982 defense of Mexico, against the attack from specific alien forces. These were forces which were in fact descendants of the same Europe-based financier interest on whose behalf France's Napoleon III had deployed Habsburg Maximilian's Nazi-like occupation and looting of Mexico.... Those French troops left under U.S. orders.... That U.S. order led to the downfall of the tyrant Maximilian, and made possible the restoration of the legitimate government of President Benito Juárez. Those were the historical circumstances of the 1860s which I adopted as precedent for the title of my August 1982 document Operation Juárez.... That Operation Juárez report reflects the essentials of my continuing policy for the Americas today."
Juárez, 2006
Addressing the 1.5 million Mexicans who overflowed Mexico City's Zócalo on July 16, López Obrador delivered a speech which escalated the fight for a "vote by vote, polling station by polling station" recount of the Presidential elections, even as the Federal Electoral Tribunal is considering the massive documentation of fraud which his campaign has presented.
López Obrador outlined the movement's next three steps:
- Increase the encampments outside the country's 300 electoral offices where the ballots are stored, not only to ensure that the ballots are not further tampered with, but as centers for organizing the population;
- Carry out "peaceful civil resistance," whose details will be decided by a citizens' committee; and
- Return to the Zócalo on July 30—this time with twice the number of participants.
López Obrador concluded his remarks, as he had many speeches during the campaign, with a promise which resonated historically, for friend and foe alike: "As President Juárez used to say, we are going to save Mexico, however possible, with whatever possible, and as far as possible."
López Obrador faces a number of serious challenges in order to deliver on that pledge. For example, there are those within his own camp who, like some of Juárez's allies, want to throw in the towel and strike a corrupt deal with Calderón and his Synarchist masters. Also, in order to fight through to victory, López Obrador is going to have to broaden the basis on which he is now mobilizing millions of Mexicans, from the limited issues of democracy and vote fraud, to the underlying economic policy questions which he himself raised on occasion during the Presidential campaign. For example, on June 1, he announced that, should he win the July 2 elections, he intended to renegotiate Mexico's debt as President Néstor Kirchner did for Argentina.
The LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) in Mexico has played a decisive role in bringing the underlying issues first posed by LaRouche in Operation Juárez in 1982, into the battle in Mexico today. For example, at the 1.5-million person rally on July 16, a 35-40 person contingent of LaRouche organizers distributed 35,000 leaflets with LaRouche's July 10 statement on Mexico, and they briefed people that LaRouche is fighting around the world to defeat the enemies of Mexico: the same bankers who are also behind the attacks in India, and the escalation to war in the Middle East.
When one person would take a leaflet, frequently everyone around them would demand thier own—"they were like piranhas!" one LYM organizer laughed. In several cases, people began reading the leaflet aloud to clusters of people around them, for the benefit of the elderly and the illiterate.
The LYM carried a giant banner, measuring some 7 meters by 1.5 meters, which summarized their message. It was illustrated by the symbol of Calderón's PAN party, with a big swastika in the middle, and read: "The Dog: Felipe Calderón. Its Owners: The Fascist Bankers. The Solution: LaRouche's New Bretton Woods."
