In this issue:

New York Times Opens Fire on Lula Government

Brazil Official: Mission Is To Build the Future, Not the Market

BNDES Finances Trans-Continental Railroad

Bush Team Launches 'Free Cuba' Project

Chavez Arrest of Colombians Sets Stage for Reprisals

From Volume 3, Issue Number 20 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published May 18, 2004

Ibero-American News Digest

New York Times Opens Fire on Lula Government

In the midst of the accelerating global financial meltdown, the New York Times published a filthy, personal attack on Brazilian President Lula da Silva, the which slyly raises the specter of Lula's resignation, and a possible military coup. Thus has Wall Street officially ended its truce with the Lula government.

The New York Times piece, published in the newspaper's May 9 Sunday edition, portrays Lula as a bumbling drunk, whose "fondness for drink" is of increasing concern to politicians and the country. The author, Times correspondent Larry Rohter, retailed press gossip and innuendos, and listed purported diplomatic gaffes by Lula, as "evidence" that Lula is a drunk, and therefore, failing as President. Lest the message be missed, Rohter included a paragraph asserting that Brazilians worry about "any sign of heavy drinking by their Presidents," because the unexpected resignation in 1961 of "notorious tippler" President Janio Quadros led to instability, and a military dictatorship.

The Lula government demanded a retraction of the slander from the Times, charging that it represented an offense not only to the person of the President, but to the office of the Presidency, and the nation itself. When the newspaper's editors stood by the story, Rohter's visa was ordered cancelled on May 12, and he was given eight days to leave the country. The order provoked howls of "censorship" from many sides, but Foreign Minister Celso Amorim defended the decision: "This is not about freedom of speech. It's about [a] story that is libelous, abusive, dishonest and an affront to the country.... The individual is unfit to practise journalism." President Lula invited the Times to send in 100 other journalists, but insisted Rohter leave. On May 13, a Brazilian court issued a stay of execution on the expulsion order, until a higher court hears the case.

The New York Times, founded as a joint project of Wall Street and southern Confederate interests, opposes the crudeness of the neo-conservative lunatics running the Bush-Cheney Administration, in favor of a more "liberal" form of global imperialism. In particular, the newspaper's financier owners are determined to crush any effort to build the alliance of sovereign governments which U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche is organizing, to push aside the bankers, and take charge of reorganizing the collapsing international financial system on behalf of humanity.

Brazilian officials recognize that, as Planning Minister Guido Mantega said, there is "a broader purpose" behind the slander. Several suggest that the interests behind the Times seek to sabotage the aggressive independent international diplomacy adopted by the Lula government, particularly on the eve of the President's historic May 21 trip to China. That view fails to take into account, however, that it is not what the Lula government has done so far which worries these interests, but rather fear over what it might do in the near future, as the entire international financial system disintegrates. Should Brazil finally decide to put the interests of the people before the debt, as Argentina's Nestor Kirchner has sought to do, it could rally South America as a whole behind LaRouche's New Bretton Woods solution.

Brazil Official: Mission Is To Build the Future, Not the Market

"What Is Missing Is State Investment," to build the economy, Carlos Lessa, president of Brazil's state-owned National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES), told Jornal do Brasil in a polemical interview published on May 5. Under Lessa's direction, the bank has returned to its original mission of channelling state investments to maximize the development of the nation as a whole.

"What is the dream of the Brazilian? To have a society with a higher per capita income and sovereignty. What is the national mission? It is in the future, and it has no relationship with the market," Lessa told Jornal do Brasil. "The market doesn't build the future; it is for the present. The role of the BNDES is to build the future. The BNDES is the second-largest development bank in the world. What backs up the BNDES? The future of the country. The market doesn't do this. Does the market have any interest in the poor person who doesn't have money for anything?"

Lessa defended his decision to have BNDES buy back stock in two of the giant state sector companies which were privatized under the previous government: Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) and Embratel. CVRD is a company which embodies "the greater part of the Brazilian future; it controls a large part of the country's logistics," including railways, ports, and coastal shipping, as well as holding the best iron ore mines in the world, he pointed out. Likewise, the telecommunications company Embratel "is a piece of the country's future," which never should have been privatized the way it was. Lessa called it "reckless" to have left the entire national communications system in the hands of a private operator.

What the country needs to grow, he insisted, is public investments. The government must increase its rate of investment to a minimum of 20% of its GNP, because government investments promote growth. They should focus on areas of high social return, such as sanitation, civil construction, and infrastructure. Sanitation projects, for example, are "spectacular for generating employment," and little of what they require needs to be imported. People who don't have water and sewage are very poor people, who don't have money to pay for it, so the investment has to come from the government, Lessa emphasized.

BNDES Finances Trans-Continental Railroad

Brazil's National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) will help finance a Trans-Andean railroad from Argentina to Chile, as part of the "Trans-Andean Bioceanic Corridor of the South," that will eventually unite the Argentine port of Bahia Blanca and the Chilean port of Talcahuano, various Argentine dailies reported on May 5. BNDES will provide $150 million for the 220 km. railroad that the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht will build from the city of Zapala in the Argentine province of Neuquen, to the Chilean city of Lonquimay. The government of Portugal will provide another $48 million for the first 55 km. portion of that railroad to be built.

The railroad is part of the broader project to link the rail grids of Mercosur countries (Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina) with Chile, an associate member of that common market, allowing these countries access as well to Southeast Asian markets.

From a broader, continental perspective, the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) has just presented a book "Rails With a Future: Challenges for South America's Railroads." An exhaustive study on the current status of the continent's railroads, the book is intended to be a contribution to the debate on regional and continental integration, through railroad development. Within the framework of the Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA), the CAF is financing a number of ambitious transportation projects to promote regional integration.

The Brazilian construction giant, Odebrecht, historically committed to a pro-development perspective inside Brazil, is engaged in a number of integration projects continentally now. Petrochemical workers from the four permanent members of Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay), meeting in Salvador, Bahia on May 5, took note of Odebrecht's expanded role in the petrochemical sector—Odebrecht recently formed the largest petrochemical complex in Ibero-America, through its purchase of the Brazilian company, Braskem (formerly Copene)—in their seminar "Analysis of Economic and Productive Integration of the Mercosur Oil and Petrochemical Sectors, and Organization of their Workers." The labor representatives said their meeting was particularly crucial in the context of strengthening Mercosur, as a counter to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). They noted that the Brazilian state firm Petrobras is also acquiring a number of companies in the region, making it a formidable economic force in the region.

Bush Team Launches 'Free Cuba' Project

Undeterred by the disaster of its effort to bring "democracy" to Iraq, President Bush's "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba" issued its report on May 6, outlining how it intends to: (1) "bring an end to the ruthless and brutal dictatorship" in Cuba; "assist the Cuban people in a transition to representative democracy"; and "assist the Cuban people in establishing a free-market economy." Over the next two years, the U.S. intends to spend $59 million on the project, broken down as $36 million for the Cuban opposition movement (including supporting family members of the opposition); $18 million for assuring regular broadcasts to Cuba (a "dedicated airborne platform" for Radio and TV Marti is to be purchased); and $5 million for public diplomacy efforts.

In a demonstration of the Bush-Cheney beastmen's idea of "freedom," new restrictions have been slapped on remittances and gifts sent from the U.S. to Cuba; family visits to Cuba will be allowed only every three years, with visitors required to get a "specific license" from the U.S. government to visit only immediate family; law enforcement and sting operations [sic] against "mule" networks getting money into Cuba are to be stepped up, and a Cuban Asset Targetting Group established to investigate hard currency movements in and out of Cuba; labor and NGOs are to receive training on how to file international suits, complaints, etc.

A State Department post of "Transition Coordinator" for Cuba is to be established, and discussion begun on how to "create the core institutions of a free economy," once the dictatorship has been removed. Other countries are to be pressed to join this "Free Cuba" project.

Chavez Arrest of Colombians Sets Stage for Reprisals

With great fanfare, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced on May 9 that Venezuelan military forces had raided a farm owned by Roberto Alonso, a Cuban-Venezuelan leader of the radical Democratic Block opposition group, where they arrested 88 Colombian paramilitary fighters, who were preparing to attack Venezuelan military installations, assassinate him, and trigger a coup. Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel charged that the governments of Colombia and the United States were behind the operation, claiming, in a crude parody of the documented charges against the Venezuelan government, that the Colombian government "exports violence, it exports guerrillas, and it exports paramilitaries." Rangel promised that arrests of opposition leaders would follow. By the end of this week, the number of people arrested in this alleged plot had passed 100.

The Venezuelan opposition, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, and Organization of American States Secretary General Cesar Gaviria cast doubt on the Chavez government's story. No weapons (other than one pistol) were found, and the Chavez government has yet to provide any documentation to the Colombian government, of its charge that former Colombian soldiers were among those arrested. The more centrist faction of the Venezuelan opposition charge that the whole thing was hoked up, to distract from the final voting on the recall referendum scheduled for the end of May (where the opposition will try to verify hundreds of thousands of signatures on the recall which the government threw out on technicalities), and set up conditions to suppress all opposition.

However, whether this particular paramilitary operation was real or not, the radical right wing of the opposition associated with Alejandro Pena, an asset of Spanish Franco-ite Blas Pinar reconstituted fascist international, and the radical right Miami Cuban exiles, are actively creating a "Contra" operation inside Venezuela. Alonso, on whose farm the alleged squadristi were found and whose father participated in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is a prominent leader of that wing of the opposition. Either way, this is another case of how the right- and left-wing synarchists feed off each other's violence.

All rights reserved © 2004 EIRNS