In this issue:

Brazil-South Africa-India Cooperation Strengthened

Brazil Government Wavers on Pension Reform, in Face of Strike

IMF Targets Brazil-Argentina Strategic Alliance

Argentine Religious Leaders Confront IMF Chief

Transparency International Gains Another Post in Argentina

Garzon Seeks Anti-Sovereignty Precedent with Argentina

From Volume 2, Issue Number 28 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published July 15, 2003

Ibero-American News Digest

Brazil-South Africa-India Cooperation Strengthened

Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes is on his way to Brazil for a week-long visit, while External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha is in South Africa, India's Hindustan Times reported July 4. Last month, the three nations formed a "Trilateral Joint Commission." Sinha announced in Pretoria on July 3 that the Commission's first formal meeting will take place in India next year. Sinha visited South Africa to chair the 5th Bilateral Joint Commission meeting with South African Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

"I'm very glad that both of them [Brazil and South Africa] have accepted, and we are looking forward to that meeting some time next year," Sinha told IANS in an interview. "South Africa, during the last two years, was leading the Non-Aligned Movement, leading the Commonwealth, and they continue to be, until the next summit takes place, the president of the African Union with which we want to have a very good relationship....

"We have tried to converge our points of view in various multilateral fora. The latest example of this is where both of us have joined Brazil to further our interests. We have set a road map for the future as far as our cooperation trilaterally is concerned and also in the international and multilateral forums. This is a very major advance.

"We have agreed to set up a Trilateral Joint Commission where the three countries will meet every year and discuss issues of common and trilateral concern. We have also decided that we will work for the meeting of the three heads of government in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September."

Also, Defense Minister Fernandes left New Delhi for Brazil, via New York, for a six-day trip. He will discuss defense cooperation and purchase of five jets for the Indian Air Force's communications squadron there, as well as joint defense industry ventures.

Brazil Government Wavers on Pension Reform, in Face of Strike

The strike by Brazil's public-sector unions, which began on July 8, is the first nationwide show of force against the IMF program adhered to by the government of President Lula da Silva since he took office on Jan. 1. Despite the fact that the ruling Workers Party-controlled Unified Labor Federation (CUT) agreed not to strike, 40-50% of public workers did participate, shutting down, among other agencies, the Treasury and Health Ministries. The Federal Police went out in all the states, as did the Customs Service. The latter heavily affected border crossings, airports, and ports, including the country's largest port Santos, in the state of Sao Paulo, where only essential cargo such as medicines and perishables was processed. Closed also were 30 Federal universities nationwide, and courts in key states, such as Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Minas Gerais.

The strikers aim to block passage of the IMF-dictated pension-reform bill, which would savagely cut back public pensions. After three days of the strike, on July 10, Senate President Jose Sarney called a press conference to announce that the governing alliance in Congress would modify the bill. But the modifications would only slightly lessen the chiselling of public pensions: They include such measures as lowering the tax on public pensions above a ceiling ($828 a month) from 11% to 6.5%, and letting civil servants who agree to work another five years retire at full pay, rather than at their average pay over the career, etc.

International financiers immediately threatened that "markets wouldn't look favorably upon any of these changes." Wall Street's Bloomberg wire service and London's Financial Times warned that any concessions would be taken as a sign that the Lula government was not committed to doing whatever it takes to generate funds to pay its debts.

The strike committee, however, vowed to continue the strike until the package as a whole is rolled back. President Lula has yet to weigh in on this battle.

IMF Targets Brazil-Argentina Strategic Alliance

The Brazilian daily Gazeta Mercantil reported July 4 that the International Monetary Fund had prepared a report attacking Argentina and Mercosur (Common Market of the South), demanding more "trade liberalization," and an end to "protectionist" practices. In a document that is a revealing counter to the LaRouche movement's organizing in South America's Southern Cone, and which greatly irritated Brazilian government officials, the IMF particularly targetted Argentina, demanding that it reduce its "controls" on trade, and charging that Mercosur is a "burden" on the country.

The IMF is worried that Argentina is concentrating too much of its trade on the Mercosur countries, whose market, it claims, is not growing as fast as world trade. The report even argues that Mercosur isn't that important, because it operates under a "political prism," whose only purpose is to enhance its influence in negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Expect more of this, and intensifying pressures on both Argentina and Brazil.

What most bothers the IMF is Mercosur's protectionist Common External Tariff (CET), which sets a 13.3% tariff on all goods entering the customs union from non-member countries. The Fund whines that the "real rate of protection" on agricultural goods is actually 30%, and almost 80% for the auto industry, and complains bitterly about other protectionist and anti-dumping measures. It insists that Mercosur take unilateral measures to "liberalize and rationalize its regime of imports, and strengthen its competitiveness."

Argentine Religious Leaders Confront IMF Chief

International Monetary Fund Executive Director Horst Koehler got an earful from Argentine religious leaders, when he met with them on June 28 in Buenos Aires. Several Roman Catholic bishops joined the president of the Federation of Evangelical Churches, the head of the AMIA Jewish Social Welfare agency, and a leader of the Islamic community, to blast the IMF's policy of foisting an "immoral debt" on Argentina. Monsignor Jorge Casaretto, head of the Caritas charity agency, told the Fund's Director that the "common good" had been trampled on by "corporative interests" in Argentina. When Koehler blathered something about the need for "ethics," Monsignor Casaretto sharply replied, "What moral support do those countries have which now demand ethical attitudes from us?" referring to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Monsignor Agustin Radrizzani added that human solidarity was ignored, when numerous loans "multiplied the foreign debt," which he called "immoral." With the "abusive" interest rates the country had to pay, he said, the debt "was paid, many times over." This unnerved Koehler, who had expected the religious leaders to offer self-criticism, and he defensively asked what they had been doing when the policy of "convertibility" (the peso-dollar peg) was voted up. Several of the leaders charged that Koehler was "confusing our roles ... you're speaking to us as if we were officials, but we represent the victims!" After Koehler mumbled something about the "great defect" of Argentines, the Evangelical leader asked "Why did you lend to someone who you knew couldn't pay?" It can be concluded, he said, that the purpose was to "create an unpayable debt to subject the debtor to permanent tribute."

Transparency International Gains Another Post in Argentina

Argentine President Nestor Kirchner's nominee for the Supreme Court, Eugenio Zaffaroni, is an operative of Prince Philip's anti-government hit squad, Transparency International. A criminologist close to Luis Moreno Ocampo, the anti-military Chairman of Transparency International for Latin America and the Caribbean, who headed the prosecution team against nationalist Col. Mohamed Ali Seineldin in 1991, Zaffaroni is a proponent of drug legalization, as well as of a parliamentary system. He was a key figure in the sweeping 1997-98 "reform" of the Buenos Aires provincial police, which privatized security functions, and dismantled the Peronist political-machine-based police institution. Zaffaroni's police reform in Buenos Aires province was a security-stripping operation, supposedly aimed at eliminating the police's "military thinking," which ultimately left the province vulnerable to the crime wave resulting from IMF-provoked economic collapse.

Zaffaroni is slated to replace Julio Nazareno, who resigned as President of the Supreme Court at the end of June. Nazareno faces fraud and corruption charges.

Garzon Seeks Anti-Sovereignty Precedent with Argentina

Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon, the proponent of an "international justice" system who made a name for himself in the prosecution of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, has officially resubmitted his request for the extradition to Spain of 46 Argentine military officers accused of human-rights violations. Spanish lawyer Carlos Slepoy, one of Baltazar's associates, made the announcement July 8, and said that Garzon wants to put the accused officers on trial in Madrid, because they acted as "repressers" during the time Argentina's 1976-83 military junta was in power. Additionally, he imposed "preventive embargoes" of the officers' assets in the amount of 2.6 million euros, to be offered in compensation to the families of the officers' alleged victims.

In 2000, Garzon had made the same request for the 46 officers' extradition, but it was rejected at that time by the government of Fernando de la Rua. This time, however, the Kirchner government appears willing to play ball. Deputy Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana reported that President Kirchner will overturn Decree 1581, which mandated the Foreign Ministry to reject all extradition requests related to crimes committed "on national territory or locations subject to national jurisdiction," as soon as an extradition request comes in for Argentine officers to appear in foreign courts for human rights violations. Kirchner's Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa, who was part of the "anti-corruption" apparatus in the failed Frepaso government of 1999-2001, and spent time in Italy studying the "Clean Hands" operation there, has said that any human-rights crime "not tried in Argentina, will be tried abroad."

Garzon and the other participants in this operation have made clear their intent is to use the Argentine cases, to set precedents which establish a de facto "international justice," overriding sovereignty. On the weekend of June 28-29, an Argentinian, Ricardo Cavallo, was extradited from Mexico to Spain, to be tried in Garzon's court, for alleged human-rights violations committed in Argentina in the 1970s. A lawyer with George Soros's Human Rights Watch, Reed Brody, celebrated that Garzon-initiated extradition as "the first time ever that one country has extradited a person to another country, to stand trial for human-rights crimes that happened in a third."

All rights reserved © 2003 EIRNS