IBERO-AMERICAN NEWS DIGEST
Argentine Electricity Blackout Shows Need for Government Credits
Argentina had one of the biggest electricity blackout ever on Sunday, Nov. 24, affecting 13 million people. The four-hour blackout was reportedly due to a technical problem with a transformer at the Transener Company's Ezeiza substation, which then knocked out, in chain reaction, a large part of the national electricity grid. Transener will be fined 2 million pesos, and an investigation is underway to determine the cause.
Affected were the entirety of Buenos Aires province, including the capital, as well as portions of 10 other provinces. Consumers were left not only without electricity, but in many cases without water as well, as water treatment plants shut down. Nor were trains or subways moving. The blackout raised fears of a repeat of the summer of 1999, when residents of Buenos Aires were left without electricity for 11 days, resulting in dozens of deaths, illness, and shutdowns of business.
A knowledgeable source told EIRNS that the problem is that Transener doesn't have the funds to invest in new transmission lines, and is forced to overload existing lines beyond their capacity. This situation, added the source, shows why only the state can make the kind of long-term investments in infrastructure development necessary for the good of the population. Long-term, low-interest loans must be available to finance such development through state-run banks, he said. This cannot be left in private hands. The IMF's proposal to raise rates is absurd, he said, not only because it is "cruel and genocidal," given the extreme and rising amount of poverty, but also because it won't work. The IMF is insanely demanding that Argentina allow privatized utility companies to raise their rates, supposedly to raise funds for investment.
Some have called it "suggestive" that the blackout occurred just as the government is negotiating with the privatized utility companieslargely Spanish and French-ownedover the issue of raising rates. Alberto Lippi, spokesman for energy distributor Edenor, warned that should rates not be increased, blackouts will occur "with greater frequency." Ariel Caplan, a consumer representative on the committee which is negotiating with the utilities over the rate hikes, correctly called this "extortion against the government and consumers."
Deadly Shortages in Argentina Portend Social Explosion
There is an explosive social situation in Argentina's Tucumanlo Province, where there are 12,000 undernourished children, and 434,000 people classified as "indigent" out of a total population of 1.3 million. The Nino Jesus Hospital, the only pediatric hospital in the province, cannot handle the number of severely undernourished children in its care. There aren't enough beds, and children are lying in chairs and in the hallways. As soon as one child leaves the hospital, another is admitted to take its place. Last winter, some children had to share beds.
Juan Masaguer, director of the Provincial Health System, warns that nothing will change if "we save a child in the hospital, but then send him home, where he will eat little or nothing, as his father has no decent job with which to feed him." Without "wages, or decent jobs, no family can survive," says Dr. Angel Gonzalez, of Nino Jesus hospital.
Tucuman also is short of food. Twenty-four tons of food donated by Spain, Finland, and Japan have arrived in Argentina, and are being sent there. Starting Nov. 25, under the direction of First Lady Hilda "Chiche" Duhalde, and the Secretary General of the Presidency Jose Pampuro, the food distribution program will get under way. But, despite a splashy display by Mrs. Duhalde, regional leaders say the real problems aren't being addressed. Dr. Elena Abraham de Cordoba, who runs the Santa Ana Hospital in Tucuman, warns that her medical center has the same budget it had in 1991, but now, with 60% unemployment in the region, it is impossible to care for the poor.
Doctors, nurses, and other personnel of the Nino Jesus Hospital in Tucuman have written a letter to Mrs. Duhalde entitled "Others Make the Decisions, We Just Watch [People] Die."
Colombia's Former Finance Minister Accused of Pushing Genocide
Intensive organizing by Lyndon LaRouche's Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA) in Colombia, against the influence of former Finance Minister Rudolf Hommes on the current government of Colombia, has begun to bear fruit. In the past week, two sharp attacks were published against Hommes, who could wreck the new government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez should he continue as Uribe's adviser.
A Nov. 21 opinion column by respected commentator Octavio Arizmendi in Portafolio, a neoliberal economics offshoot of the daily El Tiempo, was provocatively entitled "Hommes: Genocide in Agriculture?" It denounced Hommes' recent proposal that Colombia should import any and all foodstuffs from abroad, whenever it can be bought more cheaply than producing it in Colombia.
Arizmendi says this would throw 30% of Colombia's population on the garbage heap. Hommes' policy, called apertura (economic opening) policy, was implemented when he was Finance Minister to then-President (and now OAS Secretary-General) Cesar Gaviria (1990-94). It was a disaster, says Arizmendi, going "against reality, justice, and the welfare of the Colombian agro-producer." He adds that Colombia's entering a Free Trade Area of the Americas without protection would cause "genocide by starvation against 30% of the country which is agro-dependent."
Outraged by the charge of genocide, Hommes called Arizmendi's column "falsified" and "excessive." Hommes then gave a dictionary definition of "genocide" which confirmed the accusation. Hommes is no stranger to genocide. As a board member of Violy Byorum & Partners, the investment firm which introduced the Grasso Abrazo into Colombia, Hommes has done his best hand Colombia over to the murderous narcoterrorist FARC ("Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,") which was literally "embraced" by Wall Street's Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange.
The second attack on Hommes came in a Nov. 25 editorial of the opposition newspaper El Nuevo Siglo, which said Hommes blindly follows the directives of the IMF due to sheer stupidity on all matters economic. The editorial said that under Gaviria, instead of bringing an "avalanche" of prosperity, Hommes "contributed indirectly to the rise in misery and violence" in Colombia. Hommes' forced opening of the Colombian economy, apertura, said El Siglo, caused the bankruptcy of the agricultural sector, and a "terrible hemorrhage of foreign exchange" from the '90s till the presentmoney which could have gone for development.
Ecuador Could Face 'Argentine-Style' Blowout in January
Ecuador has elected Lt. Col. Lucio Gutierrez as President, but the new 45 year-old President, a follower of Jacobin Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, has no inkling of what is about to hit him. He won 54% of the vote, defeating Alvaro Noboa, a billionaire tycoon, with 110 companies who became the country's wealthiest man through real estate deals and using child labor on his banana plantations.
Until the Oct. 20 first round of the elections, Gutierrez, who was an activist in the World Social Forum circuit, campaigned on reversing dollarization, assuring cheap housing and free health care, and fighting corruption. He allied his party, the January 21 Patriotic Society (named after his 2000 coup), with the leading "indigenous" party of Ecuador, Pachacutik, and the Sao Paulo Forum-member Popular Democratic Movement.
But now, Gutierrez says, "Ecuador needs to generate credibility in the international arena." His new tune is to promise not to touch the dollarization program, and seek a standby loan with the IMF, as well as more foreign investment in the state-owned oil and electricity sector.
Ecuador faces $2.1 billion in debt due next year, an enormous sum for this small country. Because the dollar is its currency, it cannot print any money of its own, but depends solely on the foreign exchange it can earn from oil, bananas, shrimpand what remittances Ecuadorans working abroad send back home. Bloomberg financial wire service says Ecuador will have to reach an agreement with the IMF to get $240 million, and run a 6% primary budget surplus (surplus before debt payments are paid), to have any hope of meeting those payments. The IMF is demanding savage cuts, including an end to subsides on cooking gas.
Knowledgeable Ecuadorans warn that the country faces "an Argentine blowout," perhaps as early as January. But Ecuador is already one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. Since 1999, some 20 of the country's 41 banks have gone belly up, 3 million people have lost their savings, thousands of small companies have disappeared, and a half-million Ecuadorans have emigrated. According to the Washington Hispanic: 74% of its 12 million people now live below the poverty line; 50% of the workforce is unemployed; one-third of the population has no access to potable water; 70% of the people do not have access to medical or health attention; 64% of the children between 6 and 15 years of age, are without schooling.
Soros-Linked Ruling Party Loses Peru's Regional Elections
In the Nov. 17 elections for regional governorships in Peru, President Alejandro Toledo's Peru Possible Party lost all but one of the 25 posts. Toledo's Presidency has been so bad, that he made former President Alan Garcia of the APRA, who left the country at the brink of disintegration, look good. APRA won 11 of the 25 contested seats. Political independents, who are reportedly mostly leftist militants, took another eight regions.
It couldn't happen to a better fellow. Toledo was placed in the Presidency by a U.S. State Department "Project Democracy" coup, and a least $1 million from drug-legalization kingpin George Soros.
The defeat is not without irony. It was Toledo's regime which created the "regions" in the first place, under the decentralization law it championed, which hands the regions a wide range of powers previously held by the central government, including control over almost a quarter of the national budget.
Toledo is now scrambling to come up with some basis to continue to govern, without any power base. The Financial Times of Nov. 18 asserted that the vote turns Alan Garcia into Toledo's "virtual equal," under the new political structure. One immediate measure the government aims to take, is to modify its own decentralization law, to tighten fiscal oversight over the regional governments, before the new governors (known as "regional presidents") take office Jan. 1.
Fujimori Reminds Peruvians That He Will Run in 2006
Former President Alberto Fujimori reminded Peruvians two days after the mid-term election that he intends to run for President in the 2006 elections. His statement, faxed into Peru Nov. 19 from Tokyo, where he is in exile, declared: "I am not a commando out of combat. I am a commando who expects to return to active duty, to find, together with all Peruvians, the light at the end of the tunnel."
Fujimori in his two Presidential terms defeated the narcoterrorism which had exploded under the previous Alan Garcia regime. He was thrown out of power after winning an election for a third Presidential term, in 2000, by the same Soros-State Department coup which installed the incompetent Toledo in power.
Is Iran-Contra's Otto Reich Being Replaced?
Not many Ibero-American government officials are shedding tears over the news that a replacement may be coming for Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Otto Reich, an old operative tarred with the Iran-Contra scandals of the Reagan-Bush secret-government era.
Neo-conservative Reich only got the Assistant Secretary job through a temporary appointment by George Bush a year ago, when the Senate refused to hold hearings to ratify his appointment. When Congress adjourned last week, Reich's temporary appointment ended, and he was shunted off to a newly invented position of Western Hemisphere "special envoy." The State Department could not define that position when asked on Nov. 25. However, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that Reich's replacement, J. Curtis Struble, is "the bureau's most senior point man for officials from the Western Hemisphere." Struble had been Reich's subordinate.
Reich's neo-con supporters say they expect Bush will send Reich's name back to the Senate, now controlled by the GOP, but even that may fail to get him confirmed, reports the Miami Herald. A number of Republicans oppose Reich because of his hawkish views on Cuba, especially over continuing the embargo. Some Republicans from the economically devastated Farm Belt want the embargo lifted, in order to sell U.S. agriculture products to Cuba.
'Mega' Organized Crime Moves into Argentina
Two of the leading scions of the Meir Lansky-organized crime empire in North America, Michael Steinhardt, benefactor of "Joe Lieberman, Inc." and the Democratic Leaderhip Council, and Seagram's magnate Edgar Bronfman, head of the World Jewish Congress, have moved into Argentina, to link up with partners of U.S.-based drug legalizer George Soros.
Steinhardt and Bronfman, who founded the super-billionaires Zionist mafia group "Mega," have joined with Soros' Argentine partner Eduardo Elsztain to form a new "investment" firm, Ifis (Financial Investments of the South). Seventy-five percent of Ifis is foreign-owned, and other Manhattan-based partners are Millennium Partners and individuals such as Sam Zell, Aron Wolfsohn, and the Glick family, all Manhattan based. The other 25% is owned by Elsztain and other Argentines.
Ifis has also bought up 51% of Cresud, and 20% of Irsa, two holding companies in which Soros used to own a significant share, but from which he largely pulled out in 1998 as the economy plummeted. Irsa's stock is worth 10% of what it was in the mid-1990s, when Soros bought up huge amounts of real estate in the country.
According to Elsztain, a member of the rightwing Jewish Lubavitcher sect, "sophisticated investors" like Steinhardt and Bronfman see a good opportunity in Argentina, despite the fact that the economy is in deep depression. The "investment opportunities" are in highly indebted companies, land, and tourist sites. What hedge-fund king Steinhardt will do with them bears further investigation.
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