IBERO-AMERICAN NEWS DIGEST
Great Projects Top Agenda of South American Summit
The heads of state of the 12 nations of South America held their second-ever continental summit in Guayaquil, Ecuador on July 26-27, amid the greatest crisis faced by those nations since their independence battles nearly 200 years ago. The President of Uruguay, and the Prime Ministers of Guyana and Surinam, could not personally attend, but sent representatives, owing to crises at home.
The summit was dismissed in the international media as an insignificant meeting of Presidents who are about to leave office. It is true that five of the Presidents are scheduled to leave office by March 2003 through elections, and another four heads of state face political crises so great they could be run out of office on a rail at any time. But it would be a mistake to ignore the revived drive for integration underway across all Ibero-America, in which the South American summit process is playing, right now, the most interesting part.
The first such summit was held Aug. 31-Sept. 1, 2000, in Brasilia, at the initiative of Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. There, then-President Alberto Fujimori of Peru gave voice to the explosive political potential inherent in the idea of integration under today's conditions of global catastrophe. In his address to the gathering, Fujimori called upon his fellow Presidents to join forces, stop the bankers' bleeding of their resources through debt manipulations, fight to ensure that their nations finally develop, prosper, and, perhaps, establish a future "United States of South America." Sources in the region informed EIR recently, that Fujimori's visionary speech of a year ago had received prior approval from several of the Presidents attending the Brasilia summit.
Fujimori was ousted less than three months later by a Project Democracy-run coup, which had full political and economic backing from Wall Street and the U.S. State Department; but the movement towards integration was continued. The Brasilia summit established a regionwide network, the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South America (IIRSA), to coordinate the physical integration of this largely undeveloped continent.
IIRSA has drawn up plans for long-needed projects to integrate the continent from north to south, from the Orinoco River in Venezuela to the southern tip of Argentina, and from east to westjoining, finally, the Atlantic to the Pacific. A series of beautiful color maps, depicting the corridors of development which are envisioned growing around these infrastructure "great projects," can be viewed at www.iirsa.org. Figure 1 shows the overview map.
IIRSA's progress was a principal item on the agenda of the second summit in Guayaquil. The Heads of State were presented reports on 162 transport, energy and telecommunications infrastructure projects identified thus far by IIRSA.
- Development Is a Human Right -
None of the Presidents at Guayaquil were as daring as Fujimori two years ago. Nor did they evidence publicly any recognition that they cannot build what they want to build, nor even defend their nations from outright destruction, without breaking with the failed global monetary system killing their countries. They refused, reports make clear, to face the fact that free trade must be dumped, insisting instead on the contradictory demand for fair free trade, and focusing much energy on attacking recent moves to revive protectionism in the United States and Europe.
There was much discussion of the need to get around the critical financing bottlenecks, which make it impossible for their nations to get credits to build even basic hydroelectric projects. But no one admitted that there is no solution within this dying financial system; nor, that their nations are not suffering mere "financial turbulence," but a terminal crisis of the global system, from which they can escape only by battling for an return to economics based on the nation-state.
The tone of the Presidents was angry, however, and the agenda was the right one. The 34-point "Consensus of Guayaquil On Integration, Security, and Infrastructure for Development" signed by the heads of state at the summit's conclusion, expressed an intention to secure human rights for their peoples, including their "universal and inalienable right to development."
Exactly 180 years ago, the principal liberators of South America, Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, met in Guayaquil to coordinate the final independence of the Spanish colonies in South America, Ecuadoran President Gustavo Noboa noted in his speech inaugurating the summit. Today as well, he said, the Presidents met to discuss "the destiny of our peoples." The objective of the IIRSA project founded at the Brasilia summit, is to make a tangible reality, the ideal of integration inherited from the founding fathers. "Today, however, its realization has become an imperative which cannot be put off, if we truly wish to overcome underdevelopment and all its consequences, the most painful of which are poverty, ignorance and migration."
Ibero-America is extremely vulnerable, Noboa acknowleged. And a principle factor in that vulnerability is "the heavy weight of servicing the foreign debt," which permanently channels off the resources which we need so our people can reach "the standard of living to which they have a right as human beings."
- Free Markets Are Not Functioning -
In an echo of the future envisioned by Fujimori, Noboa reminded his fellow heads of state, that the project begun in Brasilia two years ago, seeks not only to build physical projects which connect and integrate the region, but to realize something even greater, "the construction of an integrated space," which can politically defend the fundamental interests of South American peoples. Having laid the bases for a "South American Project," Noboa asked the meeting in Guayaquil to "consolidate, deepen, and expand it. Current reality demands an overview and common action."
The other speech which helped define the summit was that of the previous summit's host, Brazil's President Cardoso. He said that free markets and the international financial system, as presently conceived, are not functioning for all, and that the financial markets "destroy in a short time, what took years to build.... This is a world of unilateralism," which must be made more democratic, and less egotistical.
Several specific initiatives were adopted. One, was to concentrate efforts on developing an integrated energy grid and services, with an eye to drawing up a specific plan. The final statement identified the electrification of Ibero-America's marginalized rural and urban areas as "one of the greatest political, social, and economic challenges facing the governments of the region."
The Presidents were also adamant, that they will not accept any supranational intervention into their neighbor. South America will not endorse any intervention by the United States, nor any other country, in the Colombian conflict, Noboa stated at the summit's close; there will be no continental military force formed to intervene.
This article was written for EIW by Gretchen Small.
Former Mexican President López Portillo Targetted for Prosecution
On July 30, the Mexican daily El Universal published a front-page story, reporting that former Mexican President Jose López Portillo (1976-1982) would be hauled before the "Special Prosecutor on Past Political and Social Movements." The new post, created by the government of President Vicente Fox, has López Portillo's name on a list of those under investigation for alleged human-rights violations. Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto would not, however, say when the former President would be supoened to testify.
As EIW reported in its InDepth coverage last week (July 29) (See: "Mexico in the Crosshairs of Human Rights 'Mafia' "), the Special Prosecutor's investigations into alleged human-rights violations, even wild charges of "genocide," against a growing list of former Mexican government officials, including also former Mexican President Luis Echeverria (1970-1976), backed by Project Democracy's well-paid "human rights" shocktroops, are not aimed at securing justice, but the destabilization of the institutions of the Mexican Presidency and Armed Forces, so as to place Mexico under supranational rule.
Details are sketchy so far on the case being put together against López Portillo, but it should be kept in mind that Wall Street interests have never forgiven the nationalist President for the bold attempt, toward the end of his Presidency in 1982, to implement Lyndon LaRouche's "Operation Juarez" strategy for Ibero-America: to use "the debt bomb" to force the industrial nations to help reorganize the world monetary system to foster production. López Portillo later urged that LaRouche be exonerated following his unjust imprisonment in 1989, and, in 1998, spoke at a joint seminar with Helga Zepp-LaRouche in Mexico City, where he stated that the world must listen "to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche."
Guatemalan President Suspends Executions in Answer to Pope
Guatemala's President Alfonso Portillo declared July 28 that he will suspend application of the death penalty in his nation for the remainder of his term in office, until January 2004. Portillo announced that he made the decision in response to a request from Pope John Paul II, who had sent a letter to the President before arriving in Guatemala on July 29, requesting that he abolish the death penalty.
On July 29, President Portillo followed up with a request to the Congress, that it abolish the death penalty altogether. This is in stark contrast to what happened in 1983, when the Pope made a similar appeal, before an earlier visit. On that occasion, then-President Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt responded by executing six people, three days before John Paul II's arrival.
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