IBERO-AMERICAN NEWS DIGEST
FARC Narcoterrorists Try To Assassinate Presidential Candidate
Alvaro Uribe Velez, the hard-line front-runner in next month's Presidential elections in Colombia, narrowly escaped death April 14, when a bomb planted by the narcoterrorist FARC along the route of his motorcade, in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquila, was set off by remote control. The heavily armored car he was travelling in with a Senator, his campaign manager, and several others, was badly damaged, and its wheels destroyed, but the armor protected the occupants--and the motor--long enough for the driver to move the car to another location where police moved the candidate, under guard, to the nearest police station.
Four people were killed, a three-year-old girl lost a leg, two motorcycle policemen are in "guarded condition" in the hospital, and at least a dozen more were injured by the bomb, which flung a bus next to Uribe's car across the road.
Uribe immediately told the press that he would not be intimidated from campaigning, but both he and the other candidates acknowledged that a genuine political campaign is next to impossible, because of the FARC's terrorism. Instead, candidates will have to rely on media and closed-venue events. Colombian President Andrés Pastrana said he might give the candidates more free television time to help them campaign more safely.
Presidential candidate Gen. (ret.) Harold Bedoya, who led a political battle against appeasement of the FARC narcoterrorists, said that the attack on Uribe was not only aimed at the population and at democracy, but that it "demonstrates the lack of a state, since measures to guarantee Colombians' lives have not been taken. We need a President with leadership, prepared to 'put his pants on.'"
The FARC's current strategy is to avoid direct confrontation with the military--now that the Colombian government has ended years of fruitless negotiations, and determined to end the threat militarily--and to focus instead on generating maximum panic among the population. The use of sophisticated chemical bombs, and remote timing devices, suggests the involvement of terrorist trainers from the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatist ETA. Officials believe that the FARC is patterning some of its terrorist strikes on terror and spy movies. Thus, the FARC's dramatic mass kidnapping last week of half the Cali Assembly, using what was virtually a cinematographic scenario--including the FARC contingent's disguise as members of a bomb squad checking the Assembly building, and the slitting of the throat of one of the guards--is reminiscent of a Mission Impossible movie.
In its March 25 issue, Newsweek magazine had published a veiled death threat against Uribe. The article, by Joseph Contreras, smeared Uribe as an extremist, narco-linked friend of the paramilitaries, whose election could be a threat to U.S. interests. It included a death threat against the candidate: "It seems nothing short of an assassin's bullet can stop the maverick politician from winning the May election." Newsweek, which is owned by Wall Street/Lazard Freres-controlled Washington Post interests, has been insisting that any shift in U.S. or Colombian policy to take on the FARC and ELN would only unleash death squads and the narco-paramilitaries.
The attempt on Uribe Velez's life occurred on the same day that FARC ally Hugo Chavez was reinstalled as President of Venezuela, following an abortive coup against him. It would appear that the same "Grasso Factor" which protects the FARC in Colombia, backs Chavez. (The "Grasso Factor" refers to New York Stock Exchange head Richard Grasso, who made a pilgrimage on behalf of Wall Street interests to the FARC's jungle headquarters, known as "FARClandia," in July 1999, to discuss investments with the narcoterrorists.) This Wall Street corruption was the subject of a lengthy special report, "To Stop Narcoterrorism, Shut Down Dope, Inc.," published by LaRouche in 2004, Lyndon LaRouche's campaign committee.
Courts Strip Colombia's Anti-Terror Measures as Bombings Escalate
An attempt by the national legislature to endow Colombia's security forces with wartime capabilities for confronting the FARC, were sabotaged April 12, when the Constitutional Court declared the National Security Law, enacted last February, to be unconstitutional. Among other things, the law created throughout southern Colombia military theaters of operation, which subordinated civilian authorities in war zones to military oversight. Incredibly, the Court ruled that the majority of the articles of the new Security Law threatened the "fundamental rights of Colombians." Those same citizens are undoubtedly asking how giving the FARC free rein, guarantees their "fundamental rights." Both President Pastrana and Vice President Gustavo Bell lamented the loss of what they called this "crucial instrument," and promised that new legislation would soon be forthcoming.
In just the past week, the FARC has set off car-bombs in Villavicencio and Bogotá, sent rockets against the offices of RCN national radio in Bogotá, and kidnapped half the Legislative Assembly of Cali.
FARC 'Ambassadors' Flee to Venezuela
The two most prominent mouthpieces of the FARC outside of Colombia, "Olga Marin" and "Marcos Calarca," were forced to abandon their "embassy" in Mexico City, after Mexican President Vicente Fox was convinced by Colombian President Pastrana last week to shut down the FARC office there. On April 13, the two were lined up to take a flight to Havana, when they suddenly changed their minds, and took off for Venezuela instead. Venezuelan authorities have refused to confirm that they are currently in that country, but with the return of Hugo Chavez to power there, there is every reason to believe that the FARC's new safe haven (replacing their "DMZ" in Colombia), is now in next-door Venezuela.
In Argentina, FARC spokesman Javier Calderon is apparently also running into problems. At least one Argentine Congressman, Miguel Angel Toma, has presented a bill demanding that Calderon be arrested on sight.
Buenos Aires Archbishop: Take Responsibility for Rebuilding the Nation
In a recent conference on education, Buenos Aires Archbishop Julio Bergoglio, S.J. warned, that the task of rebuilding Argentina can't be left to politicians: "We've seen what happens when economic and political power become separated from people." Argentina has been subjected to a "model built around specific economic interests, excluding the majority, generating poverty and marginalization, tolerating all kinds of corruption, while not touching the interests of the most concentrated power. And haven't we formed part of that perverse system, partially accepting its principles (as long as it didn't affect our pocketbooks), closing our eyes to those being pushed aside and overwhelmed by injustice?"
Argentina's crisis "is now at its greatest inflection point," Bergoglio said. A decision must be made "that Argentina will continue to be a nation; to learn from the painful experience of recent years, and start on a new path, or sink into misery, chaos, the loss of values, and our decomposition as a society." Nor is it the case, he warned, that failure to correct mistakes automatically means that the country will be condemned to repeating them eternally, because "the rope can only stretch so far."
Argentine Congress Passes 'Dracula' IMF Measures
Argentina's Congress has passed the "fiscal pact" by which the provinces agree to cut their budgets by 60%, as the International Monetary Fund has demanded. The agreement eliminates the fixed amount of Federal revenue-sharing funds the government was supposed to send to the provinces each month, and commits the provinces to reducing their total budget deficit by 3 billion pesos this year, and achieving a balanced budget in 2003. But no governor, with only a few exceptions, can even say where these cuts are supposed to come from. The IMF knows--it had hinted it might grant $700 million to the provinces to help finance their deficit, but only if governors showed a willingness to cut expenses--wages, pensions, and health and education expenditures, for starters.
Under the new deal, the Federal government agrees to pay 56.7% of monthly tax revenues to the provinces, and keep 42.3%--but, if revenues drop, as they have been doing, there won't even be a fixed minimum of revenue-sharing funds guaranteed for the provinces. This is just another way the Fund has of turning the screws on the governors, forcing them to accept further "adjustment." Based on March's tax revenues, the provinces received $200 million less than they would have received under the old system. And provincial tax revenues, in towns and municipalities, are dropping to the range of 30%. In Buenos Aires province, which is supposed to bear the brunt of the $3-billion budget cut by reducing expenditures by $1.5 billion, Gov. Felipe Sola angrily stated, "We can't accept that everything that an international agency says is holy Scripture."
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