In this issue:

Uribe Names Cartel 'Godfather' To Negotiate with FARC

Bishop Compares Chavez to Franco, Hitler, Sandinistas

Mexican Congress Buried Wall Street VAT Tax Plan

Is Brazil To Get the Iran Treatment?

Lula Government Sets Record Budget Surplus in 2003

Brazil To Fingerprint Americans

From Volume 3, Issue Number 1 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Jan. 6, 2004

Ibero-American News Digest

Uribe Names Cartel 'Godfather' To Negotiate with FARC

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe made the suicidal move on Dec. 20, of inviting 90-year-old former President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen to preside over a negotiating committee intended to facilitate a "prisoner swap" with South America's largest cocaine cartel, the narco-terrorist FARC.

The idea of a "humanitarian" prisoner exchange had been repeatedly rejected by Uribe throughout his first year in office, as a foot-in-the-door to renewing the "peace talks" with the FARC, which had led to unprecedented national destruction during his predecessor's term. Uribe's readiness to take that step now not only reveals the tremendous pressure he has been under internationally to yield on this question, but also shows how weakened he has become since putting his prestige on the line for a hated IMF program, which was defeated in a national referendum earlier this fall.

Adding to the disaster, is Uribe's choice of Lopez Michelsen to head the negotiating commission. Lopez was identified by the LaRouche movement in the 1970s as "the Godfather" of Dope, Inc. in Colombia. It was under Lopez Michelsen's Presidency (1974-78) that drug traffickers first established an empire in Colombia, and his regime legalized the laundering of drug money, "no questions asked," through the Central Bank. Thereafter, his political machine fought to legalize the drug trade, and at every point that Colombia's patriots rose up to wipe out these killers, Lopez Michelsen stepped forward to defend them. Most famous, was Lopez's personal meeting in 1984 with the heads of Medellin cocaine cartel in Panama, just one week after cartel hitmen assassinated Colombian patriot and LaRouche movement friend, Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla.

Lopez's first move after being named by Uribe, was to give an interview to the leading Colombian daily El Tiempo, announcing that he had been given "full autonomy" by the Uribe government, and had begun contacts with "the interested parties"—i.e., the FARC. Asked about President Uribe's demand that any FARC terrorists released from prison be deported from the country, Lopez Michelsen rejected the idea outright. "My opinion is that, if they are going to be freed, no conditions can be put on them when they are freed. Freedom consists of not having any conditionalities on your behavior."

Lopez Michelsen defended the FARC, and its tactic of kidnapping hostages for a prisoner exchange. "You have to put yourself in the shoes of the other party," he argued. "The recourse to arms or to attacks to produce certain results, in the eyes of those who commit them, and those that inspire them, is a method to achieve the goals of social justice. They themselves, in their hearts, do not consider themselves criminals, but promoters of a doctrine different than that of the State."

President Uribe's office immediately issued a communique, insisting that Lopez would be bound by the government's security policy (i.e. was not "fully autonomous"), and that any prisoners freed would have to give credible guarantees that they would not "commit further crimes," i.e., return directly to the FARC.

Bishop Compares Chavez to Franco, Hitler, Sandinistas

In an explosive interview published Dec. 22 in Venezuela's El Universal, the head of the Roman Catholic Bishops' Council in Venezuela, Msgr. Baltazar Porras, charged that the Chavez regime is attempting to repeat what "the fascisms and the autocracies" attempted to do during the 20th Century: "cover the political with the mantle of the sacred and religious, to justify their actions." The regime is out to discredit national institutions, and eventually replace them with others, more docile before the government, the Catholic Church included, he explained.

Asked by El Universal, "Are you saying that the intention is to create a type of new lay cult?" the Bishop replied: "This is what the national catholicism of Francoism was, and also the lay liturgy, as Hitler's presentations were called. This is also what was attempted in Nicaragua, with the Sandinista Popular Church."

Although Monsignor Porras did not use the term "synarchist," he went after the two facets of Synarchism—"right-wing" fascism, as seen in Franco's Spain, and the "left-wing" theology of liberation, as seen in Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s—as the same project. Tensions between the Catholic Church, as an institution, and the Chavez regime have been so tense, that Msgr. Porras stayed at the home of the Papal Nuncio (which has diplomatic immunity) for two months this past fall. When Chavezista supporters began defacing statues of the Virgin in Caracas on Dec. 5, Porras charged that the regime was attempting to set off a repeat of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, this time in Venezuela.

The Chavez government, from its outset, had a strategy to "penetrate, divide, and control the Catholic Church," Porras said in this latest interview.

The Chavezistas are using "the cliche" that Jesus was a revolutionary, to say that if he were here today among us, he would use a red beret [a Chavez symbol], to fight for the revolution, the Bishop noted. "We are witnessing a type of modern idolatry," in which "power, pleasure, politics, the revolution ... are seen almost as deified." This making of power into something sacred, creates an injustice, and is an attack on human rights, he said, because it subjects them all to the supreme law of the revolution, of the regime, and the Ayatollah. An anachronistic plan, not only in the Western Christian world, but also among Muslims."

Porras charged that the regime is aiding little-known religious grouplets, which are neither evangelical, nor the "historic denominations." Aids include providing visas for foreign promoters of these grouplets to enter Venezuela easily, while representatives of the traditional religions are giving difficulty. These new pseudo-Christian or Santeria [voodoo] sects could not survive long in Venezuela, were they not receiving economic and logistical support, he said, adding that the other traditional churches and non-Christian religions are also worried about this phenomenon.

Mexican Congress Buried Wall Street VAT Tax Plan

President Vicente Fox's renewed attempt to impose the Value-Added Tax (VAT) on food, medicine, books, magazines, and newspapers was voted down before it even got to the floor of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. Raising money by taxing food and medicine, so that all Mexicans, no matter how poor and starving, can escape paying Mexico's debt, was one of Wall Street and London's principal demands upon the Fox regime.

On Dec. 21, despite personal phone calls from the Secretary of the Treasury to various Congressmen, byzantine dilatory parliamentary tactics by Congressmen from the ruling PAN party, and a last-minute "offer" by the Secretary of Government to lower the proposed VAT tax from 6% to 3%, the Fox tax bill was voted down in the Treasury and Public Credit Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, by 15 to 13. The committee then voted up a tax bill which simply continues most of the current taxes and tax levels, into 2004.

President Fox went on national television that night to denounce the vote as a "historic error," charging that the country was being held "hostage" to "political forces which put the interest of faction before that of the nation." The President's attempt to lay the blame for his fiasco on the opposition party, the PRI, which booted out its Congressional faction leader, for trying to put through the Fox VAT tax, could not hide the plain fact, however, that a majority of the Mexican Congress refuses to pass Wall Street's looting package.

Following lengthy wrangling, the Mexican Congress finally passed a 2004 general budget on Dec. 31, as it is required to do by law.

Is Brazil To Get the Iran Treatment?

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is pressuring Brazil give it access to the country's uranium-enrichment plant, which will begin producing fuel in May 2004 to be used at the two Angra dos Reis nuclear plants in Rio de Janeiro. The enrichment technology, which is now being installed at a factory of the state-run Nuclear Industries of Brazil (INB), located in Resende, in Rio de Janairo, was developed entirely within Brazil, designed and produced by Brazilian Navy's Aramar Experimental Center, located in Ipero, Sao Paulo.

IAEA officials say that without having access to the enrichment centers, they have no way of verifying that Brazil won't produce more than the quantities of enriched uranium allowed, or that the fuel won't be "clandestinely" siphoned off and used "for other purposes."

Although IAEA inspectors have visited Navy installations in Ipero several times in recent years, they have never been allowed to see the uranium enrichment machines, or learn anything about their technical specifications. Among other things, the Navy's determination to guard the uranium-enrichment technology, which it developed secretly in the 1980s with civilian scientists, is linked to its plan to develop a nuclear-powered submarine, considered crucial for the country's technological independence.

Some months ago, the IAEA began intensifying the pressure, demanding that Brazil allow for more "rigorous" inspections of its nuclear installations. Then, at the beginning of December, Olli Heinonen, head of IAEA's Safeguards Department, sent a letter demanding that the agency be allowed to inspect the machines before they go into operation next May, telling the Brazilians they expected an answer by the first of the year.

Brazil says the IAEA's fears are excessive and unjustified. The country is a signator to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and is committed to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Yet both the IAEA and the U.S. government insist additionally, that Brazil sign an NPT protocol, which would also allow inspectors access to the companies which supply parts and equipment to the Navy's nuclear program.

Lula Government Sets Record Budget Surplus in 2003

For the first 11 months of 2003, the Brazilian government produced a primary budget surplus—funds set aside to pay the debt—of 4.94% of gross domestic product, far above the 4.25% of GDP established in its agreement with the International Monetary Fund. To accomplish this "feat," the government cut investments to less than a third of the already too low investments made in the last year of the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which preceeded Lula in office. That is, while in 2002, the Cardoso government invested R$10.1 billion, the Lula government invested only R$3 billion, a infintesimal amount for a country the size of Brazil.

The Planning Ministry has said it plans to increase investment in infrastructure and social areas to R$8 billion in 2004—still under 2002 levels.

Brazil To Fingerprint Americans

Beginning Jan. 1, all U.S. citizens visiting Brazil must be fingerprinted and photographed upon entering the country, judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva ruled Dec. 31, in reciprocation for the new U.S. regulation mandating the fingerprinting and photographing of Brazilians (and citizens of 26 other countries) entering the United States. "I consider the act [by the U.S.] absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," Judge Sebastiao's court order said.

The same day, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry filed a formal request with the U.S. government, that Brazil be removed from the list of countries whose citizens are so treated upon entering the United States. The judge's order mandating reciprocal action by Brazil, however, may not be to the government's liking. Sources at the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism told the media that the Tourist Ministry may seek an injunction against the court order, fearing that U.S. tourism to Brazil might be affected.

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