PRESS RELEASE

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Screwball Internet Slander of LaRouche
Launched in Venezuela

June 19, 2004 (EIRNS)—According to a press release issued today by Executive Intelligence Review magazine (EIR), U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche yesterday described a June 10, 2004 Internet article circulating under the byline of "Venezuelan journalist Ernesto J. Navarro," as a "screwball attack on me, an obvious piece of garbage for anyone who knows anything. But in these days of international terrorism, you've got to look at garbage with more than simple disdain, but with an eye on counterintelligence."

LaRouche, who is also the founding editor of EIR, noted that "our first inclination was to ignore it, but this may have some significance for those concerned with counterintelligence, and therefore we are putting out our view of the matter." LaRouche suggested that the following considerations be kept in mind:

1. The article in question, "Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) Wanted To Assassinate the Pope in Venezuela," lies that Lyndon LaRouche was "implicated" with the TFP in the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Navarro wildly characterizes LaRouche as "an extreme right-wing terrorist, and the ideological mentor of the TFP in the U.S." Besides these overt fabrications, Navarro hides from his readers what is well known to Venezuelan authorities and others: that LaRouche and his associates in Venezuela played an important contributing role in the banning of the fascist TFP sect from Venezuela in 1985.
   
   
2. The article goes on to attack Alejandro Peña Esclusa, one of the leaders of the current militant right opposition to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (whom author Navarro fervently defends), and lies again in asserting that Pena is Lyndon LaRouche's representative in Caracas to this day. As is well known, Peña was associated with LaRouche until the spring of 1998, when he broke with LaRouche as part of his conversion to extreme religious kookery and overt association with Synarchist fascist leaders, including Spain's Franquista thug Blas Piñar. Piñar's circles, LaRouche has explained, are the leading likely culprits involved in the March 11, 2004 terrorist bombings of Madrid train stations.
   
   
3. The Navarro article was posted to the radical Chavista Venezuelan website aporrea, and also to the website of the University of Guadalajara (UdG) Radio in Mexico. From the UdG, it was picked up and re-run on Argentina's Argenpress and Brazil's Adital sites. All of these can be broadly characterized as sites which promote diverse "leftist" causes, including many which blend over comfortably into support of narco-terrorism. Of these, the UdG site is of particular interest: Over the last year, it has consistently promoted the output of the Carrasco grouping of former LaRouche associates, who broke with LaRouche over their support for Synarchism—and in particular of the same fascist Blas Piñar that the UdG's erstwhile target, Alejandro Peña, also endorses!

As LaRouche put it, the Navarro slander "appears in connection with a group which is associated with the Carrasco family, and the Carrasco family are, of course, tied to Blas Piñar—although Peña himself is tied to the fascist movement in Spain of Piñar. So we wonder, who is trying to do what to whom? Is this sibling rivalry among some fascists? When you think of the fact that Chavez is a fascist, too, and Peña is attacking Chavez, that would make sense," LaRouche concluded.