In this issue:

Venezuela's Chavez Threatens 100 Years War in Ibero-America

Dangerous 'Debate' Triggered by Huntington 'Hispanic Threat!'

Castaneda Rides Waves of Mexican 'Videogate' Scandals

Bush Team: No Army; No Donors Conference for Haiti

Lula Pleads with World Leaders: Get the IMF To Ease Up

Lula's Party Demands Economic Reforms—'Without Adventures'

From Volume 3, Issue Number 11 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Mar. 16, 2004

Ibero-American News Digest

Venezuela's Chavez Threatens 100 Years War in Ibero-America

On March 7, the psychologically unstable President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela devoted his weekly Sunday TV broadcast to a five-hour diatribe, denouncing what he portrayed as the Bush Administration's role in attempting to overthrow his government. Chavez warned that "Venezuela is not Haiti, and I am not Aristide"—in reference to the heavy-handed U.S. removal of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office. Chavez threatened that, in the event of continued U.S. interference, his "Bolivarian revolution has enough allies on this continent to launch a Hundred Years' War, and not just on Venezuelan territory."

Chavez is unbalanced, but this is not an idle threat. According to representatives of Haiti Progress and the Haiti Support Network, who recently met with the deposed Aristide in the Central African Republic, the Bush Administration removed Aristide from power at the point that "Venezuela was in discussion about sending troops to support Aristide." Chavez has also developed a strategic alliance with Colombia's FARC narcoterrorists, Bolivian and Peruvian coca-grower insurgents, and other armed Jacobin movements across Ibero-America.

The latest phase of the crisis in Venezuela emerged from the collapse of a year-long effort by anti-Chavez forces there to force a recall vote against the President, when the National Electoral Council ruled that the opposition had not collected enough signatures, as we reported in last week's Digest.

With the ruling on the petition signatures, the splits in the opposition have deepened, with one faction urging continued appeals to the Supreme Court to overturn the Electoral Council, and another calling for nationwide civil disruptions, to the point of ultimately provoking a Haiti-style intervention by U.S. Marines, and Chavez's ouster. Thus, a left-vs.-right civil war is taking shape in Venezuela—with both sides being run by international synarchist financial circles.

Dangerous 'Debate' Triggered by Huntington 'Hispanic Threat!'

As intended, "Clash of Civilizations" promoter Samuel Huntington has set off a heated "debate" over whether there is a "Hispanic Threat!" to the United States. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Foreign Policy magazine kicked off the campaign with its splashy March/April cover story on Huntington's latest thesis: that the new enemy image for the U.S. is its largest minority, the 15% of its population who are Hispanics. (See Indepth, EIW #10).

Business Week's March 15 cover screams: "Hispanic Nation. Hispanics are an immigrant group like no other. Their huge numbers are changing old ideas about assimilation. Is America ready?" The article purports to be an "independent" take on the Hispanic "problem," but it rehashes the absurd "arguments" Huntington employed. Such as: Are people who speak two languages fluently, rather than only English, real Americans? In its own small contribution to preparing race war, Business Week features data showing that "Latinos" are being hired more than black Americans, acknowledging that Hispanics' "willingness to work for less pay may play a role in their faster hiring rate." (Average weekly earnings of Hispanics are 15% less than what African Americans make, and 31% less than whites, Business Week reports.)

London's Economist magazine thinks Huntington "has some serious points on his side," but warns that "the cost of closing the borders would be far bigger than keeping them open, by starving the economy of some of its most energetic workers." These immigrants are, after all, "a wonderful source of cheap labour."

A healthy tirade against Huntington's "pseudo-academic xenophobic rubbish," written by the Miami Herald's Andres Oppenheimer, was published as an op-ed in a number of Knight-Ridder papers around the country, however. Oppenheimer suggested national protests be held against Harvard University and Simon & Schuster (publishers of Huntington's new book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity).

Castaneda Rides Waves of Mexican 'Videogate' Scandals

Televised "exposes" of a Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) leader stuffing dollar bills into suitcases, and another gambling in a Las Vegas casino, hit Mexican airwaves in the first week of March, setting into motion a wild frenzy of corruption charges and counter-charges, which now dominate the "news" and commentary in Mexico.

The question to ask is: Cui bono? The answer appears to be: Those forces out to blow up the Mexican political class, which has stubbornly refused to pass Wall Street's economic reforms (privatization of energy, a value-added (VAT) tax on food and medicine, etc.) That includes George Soros's pet Presidential candidate, Jorge Castaneda, whose campaign theme has been that Mexico's political system must be ripped apart, before economic reforms can be rammed through.

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analysts interviewed by the Mexican daily El Independiente, argued that political life in Mexico has become scandal-ridden and frivolous, because the economic structural reforms have not been implemented. President Vicente Fox's Secretary of Government, Santiago Creel, used the corruption scandals to argue, like Castaneda, that before attempting "structural reforms," there must be a reform of the state and "the political system," which he charged has "conspired" to block the kind of dialogue necessary to get economic reforms passed.

Visiting Monterrey on March 3—where he was confronted by the LaRouche Youth Movement once again—Castaneda came out swinging that the corruption scandal demonstrated the need for reforms of the institutions, and for "citizen candidacies," because the political parties have been "discredited." His opportunism was such, that one of Nuevo Leon state's best-known journalists, Gilberto Marcos, asked him: "Where do you place yourself in the scandals?... Could it be that they benefit you?" Castaneda replied coyly: "I wish I was intelligent enough to have planned this."

Mexico's "Mr. Anti-Corruption" then met at the end of the week in Miami with Venezuelan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros, the same billionaire who frantically went to a corrupt Venezuelan court to ban circulation of EIR's Spanish-language edition of Dope, Inc. in 1985, because it contained a chapter detailing Cisneros's ties with international drug-money laundering interests. Both were in Miami for a big Ibero-American policy conference sponsored by the glitzy Poder magazine. Cisneros—who has his own Presidential ambitions in Venezuela—reportedly welcomed Castaneda as "the next President of Mexico."

Bush Team: No Army; No Donors Conference for Haiti

"There is no need for a Haitian Army. I was here when President Aristide disbanded it, and that was the correct thing to do at the time," U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. James Hill stated, "forcefully," during a tour of Port-au-Prince March 5. So much for former State Department officer Lawrence Pezzullo's suggestion, the previous week, that mid-1990s plans to use the military as an engineering corps be revived.

State Department spokesman Ereli stated at the March 5 briefing, that he hadn't heard of anyone raising the idea of convening an international donors conference to drum up aid for Haiti. "I don't see a concerted effort on that idea.... It's not something under active consideration right now."

What is being worked on, with great energy, is getting the Haitian Coast Guard back in shape, so it can stop Haitian refugees from leaving by boat. According to Associated Press, the Bush Administration told Congress that it will pay the salaries of the Haitian Coast Guard for up to three months, and repair damage to its facilities. The Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. Embassy paid a visit to Coast Guard headquarters, "to assess the security situation for the anticipated return of asylum-seekers intercepted at sea."

Coast Guard salaries shouldn't be much of a drain on the U.S. Treasury. Dr. Philippe Desmangles, a surgeon at Port-au-Prince's only "well-functioning" hospital, Polyclinique Centrale, reported to the New York Times that he is "one of the best paid doctors in the country," making about $45 a week. Dr. Desmangles bitterly noted that U.S. Marines deployed into Haiti had "secured an empty palace," but provided no security for the hospital.

Lula Pleads with World Leaders: Get the IMF To Ease Up

Brazilian President Lula da Silva spoke by phone with British Prime Minister Tony Blair for 25 minutes on March 6, and met with the Prime Minister of Portugal, Durao Barroso, on March 8, during the latter's visit to Brazil, urging each to help change IMF policy, before Ibero-America blows sky-high. According to Jornal do Brasil March 5, he began calling world leaders on this theme on March 2, and has spoken with the heads of state of the U.S., Spain, France, and Germany, plus the above two. It is reported that he intends to call Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi next.

According to Lula da Silva's International Advisor, Marco Aurelio Garcia, in the latest two discussions, Lula asked both leaders to help not only Argentina, but the countries of the region as a whole, who need to be allowed to develop. "We have other countries which are facing difficulties also. Peru and Ecuador are being harshly penalized. They are paying what they cannot," Garcia said.

Brazil is proposing two changes in IMF policy with developing countries:

(1) that "productive investments" by public companies, states, and muncipalities be excluded from the calculation of primary budget surplus (revenues minus all expenditures except debt service)—i.e., to make those investments a priority over debt payments; and

(2) that some kind of "preventive insurance" credit line be established to protect developing countries from external crises.

Lula's Party Demands Economic Reforms—'Without Adventures'

A statement, issued by Brazilian President Lula da Silva's Workers Party (PT) National Executive Committee, following a meeting between Congressional and party leaders in Sao Paulo on March 5, bravely states: "The PT is the party of economic growth, of income distribution, employment generation, and social inclusion. We are going to work tenaciously so that the government implements the measures necessary for 2004 to mark the beginning of a new and sustained cycle of economic and social development in the country, through changes in economic policy necessary for the implementation and consolidation of all our social, economic and administrative programs, and of development."

Municipal elections next October are looming, and the PT has been dealt a double blow: record unemployment and income drops in Lula's first year of office, followed by a corruption scandal involving party officials on the take from the numbers racket.

Already nervous about Argentine developments (see InDepth this week), Lula reportedly lit into the party leadership, and PT national president Jose Genoino issued a "qualifier." The PT wants changes, but without "adventures or ruptures," Genoino said, in an interview posted to the party's website. Now the watchword has become that changes in "microeconomic" policy are needed, but not in the "macroeconomic" policy which has been so "successful." Which translates into not touching debt payments, or the IMF's primary budget surplus which is killing the country. So much for PT "tenacity."

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