Ibero-American News Digest
LYM Puts LaRouche at Center of Mexican News
Mexican politics was set on its ear this week by well-targetted interventions by contingents of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) in Monterrey and in Mexico City, the nation's capital, which ruined the campaign appearances of Presidential once-hopeful Jorge Castaneda. Castaneda's campaign, as EIW has reported, is backed by the king of drug legalizers, international speculator George Soros, and other financier interests who view him as their man to privatize Mexico's energy sector. By Sept. 12, national dailies, as well as radio and television news, were buzzing over how the campaign of the hated former Secretary of Foreign Relations had been finished off by Lyndon LaRouche's people. (See LaRouche Youth Movement digest for more on Mexico.)
Mexican President Tries Again for Deregulation
President Vicente Fox dumped his Secretary of Energy on Sept. 2, after announcing in his State of the Union speech the day before that Congress must pass, quickly, the "structural" reforms demanded by foreign creditors: the privatization of electricity, lifting of labor guarantees, and tax reform. Fox named the national president of his PAN Party, Felipe Calderon, to replace Ernesto Martens as his Secretary of Energy. Calderon knows nothing about energy, but he is reportedly being called in for his political "negotiating" skills, as if Congress's refusal to permit the privatization of the energy sector were merely a matter of poor "handling."
Leaders of the synarchist PAN Party replaced other technocrats in top government posts, as well. Former Jalisco Governor Alberto Cardenas was named Secretary of the Environment, and notorious Milton Friedman acolyte Luis Pazos was named to head the National Public Works and Services Bank (Banobras).
Foreign bankers have upped the pressure on the Fox government to deliver on promised looting rights. London's Financial Times ran an editorial Sept. 1, pronouncing that Fox must "tell Mexicans ... of the costs of failing to make progress [on reforms]," and specifying that "complacent and inactive cabinet ministers should go."
Government Minister Santiago Creel told the media on Aug. 27 that the government would get the fiscal, energy, and labor reforms passed by the end of 2003.
Mexican Nationalists Hit Fox's Energy Deregulation
PRI Senator Manuel Bartlett, who led the successful drive to stop the Fox government's attempt to privatize electricity in 2002, reiterated, after President Fox's State of the Union, that national interests will ensure that the privatization of Mexico's public electricity industry will not pass. Anyone with a brain can see that deregulation and privatization have proven to be a disaster, from Argentina to the United States, he reminded people.
In the midst of this heated debate, 4 million people, in five southern Mexican states, were left without electricity in the early hours of Sept. 2, when a blackout hit the Yucatan peninsula. This included the Cancun resort, where tens of thousands are now gathered for the latest round of World Trade Organization negotiations.
Senator Bartlett set off quite a uproar, when he charged that the blackout was the result of deliberate sabotage by the government. Like other governments around the world who were planning to privatize, the Fox government has reduced maintenance on the generating plants and sub-stations, in order to create problems, which the create the idea "in public opinion that public utilities don't work, and they should be handed over to foreign capital."
FARC, United Nations Peace Talks Pushed
Negotiations between representatives of Colombia's narcoterrorist FARC, and representatives of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, are being mooted for the near futuredespite the fact that neither the hard-line Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe, nor the UN, nor even the Brazilian government, which will supposedly host such negotiations, has officially called for, or endorsed such talks.
In fact, it appears more than likely that the FARC, fully aware that it cannot win on the battlefield against the Colombian Armed Forces, is hoping to use the emotion-laden issue of a "prisoner exchange" to pull the UN into the picture, and bring about Uribe's capitulation by that route. For weeks, the FARC has been releasing videos and photos, and permitting journalist interviews with some of its more prominent hostages, to encourage sympathy for such an exchange. Right on cue, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department has expressed its support for "the UN's efforts to establish a dialogue with the FARC, in hope of bringing about a lasting peace in Colombia."
President Uribe has been adamant that he will undertake no dialogue with the FARC until they agree to a ceasefire, something the FARC cannot do without losing its blackmail weapon: terror. Former Colombian President and terrorist mouthpiece Alfonso Lopez Michelsen stepped into the picture recently, to try to tilt the balance in the FARC's favor. He mobilized several other former Colombian Presidentsalong with several desperate families of FARC hostagesto sign an appeal to both Uribe and FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, urging a negotiated "prisoner exchange" with the FARC on "humanitarian grounds." The FARC has been urging an exchange of the 70 civilian, police, and military hostages it is holding, for the release from prison of some 400 or more FARC terrorists. A furious Uribe lashed out at the ex-Presidents this week for daring to put the Colombia's head of state and the head of a criminal/terrorist organization on the same footing.
IMF Policies Behind Health Crisis in Uruguay
Uruguay's public health-care workers, including doctors, voted Sept. 12 to end a month-long strike, after accepting a less-than-satisfactory wage offer from the government. Of 60 hospitals represented by the National Plenary of Public Health Officials, ninerepresenting 1,200 workersopposed the settlement but will apparently abide by the majority vote and return to work next week.
Uruguay has been in deep economic crisis for some time, as a result of the Batlle government's harsh, IMF-dictated economic policy. In 2002, the economy shrank by 10.8%, but President Jorge Batlle insists the government's chief priority is balancing the books and paying the foreign debt.
The Uruguayan Medical Union (SMU) and the Federation of Public Health Workers (FFSP) launched their strike to demand a $68 monthly wage increase, above the $170 monthly which health-care workers, on average, currently receive. The 9,800 health-care workers and 2,000 doctors who struck had occupied five hospitals to press their demands, but the government insisted that the Ministry of Public Health "had totally exhausted its resources," and could only offer a small increase. As part of the settlement, the government has promised to release the retained wages of those who had occupied the hospitals.
At least 1.7 million people in Uruguay50% of the populationdepend on the country's public-health system for medical care.
EIR's Exposé of Leo Strauss Still Making Waves in Ibero-America
So deeply has EIR's exposé of the fascist Straussian currents behind the Bush Administration penetrated into Ibero-America, that on Aug. 31, Mexican daily Milenio, and even the LaRouche-hating Argentine Jacobin daily Pagina 12 published a lengthy and fairly competent article on the subject, drawing entirelybut without attributionfrom EIR's coverage.
The article was written by one Juan Gelman, who quoted post-Sept. 11 statements from both President George Bush and Richard Perle, and matching themif not word for word, then at least sentiment for sentimentwith xenophobic and war-mongering statements issued by Hitler's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Gelman wrote that while the Bush Administration is not strictly a Nazi regime, it does share many ideological similarities. Gelman goes on to insist that these similarities "are no coincidence. The majority of the so-called neoconservatives, or chickenhawks, in Washington follow the teachings of Leo Strauss."
Gelman gives a brief but effective synopsis of Strauss's formation, including reference to his two Nazi "mentors," Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, Strauss's entrenchment first within the U.S. university system, and then establishing a school of thought which shapedand continues to shapethe so-called "new right" in the United States. The Straussians, says Gelman, manipulate concepts of patriotism and religion, and have determined that humanity is intrinsically perverse, and the common people incapable of comprehending the Platonic concept of truth, thereby requiring an elite to rule over them.
Where Gelman misses the boat, is in assigning Bush a Machiavellian role in this conspiracy as "both the great simulator and the great dissimulator," while leaving Vice President Dick Cheney to fade, unmentioned, into the background as, simply, part of Bush's "circle" of Straussian co-thinkers.
|