Ibero-American News Digest
LaRouche Video-Conference with Argentine Students Nov. 11
The LaRouche Youth Movement in Argentina announced this week that EIR founder Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. will hold a video-conference on Nov. 11 with students at the campuses of the National Technological University in the city of Rosario, and the national capital, Buenos Aires. Students at both campuses will be able to engage in a dialogue with LaRouche. LaRouche's address is titled: "The Issue Is the Sovereign States of the Americas."
Others around the world can watch the video conference on the Internet, as it will be broadcast simultaneously, in both English and Spanish, on the www.larouchepub.com and www.larouchepac.com sites.
IMF Forces Argentina To Farm for Export
Argentines ate better in 1965 than they do today, and responsibility for that lies at the doorstep of the IMF.
The IMF policy imposed on the country since the mid-1970s had already, by the mid-1980s, forced changes in food consumption patterns, especially among the poor. High-quality animal protein, fruits, vegetables, and dairy were increasingly replaced by pasta and bread, although the former were still present in the diet.
Over the past decade, however, Argentina's food-producing capabilities were systematically destroyed, replaced by large-scale soy production for export. While rice, corn, wheat, and sunflower production declined in significant percentages between the 1996-97 and 2001-02 harvests, soy production increased by 75%. Lands traditionally used for cattle grazing and beef production declined, to make way to soy production for export. By 2003, soy represented more than 50% of the 70-million-ton harvest, becoming the country's most important agricultural product.
As poverty increased over the 1990s, the nutritious diet traditionally consumed in Argentina was also destroyed. Foreign multinationals, such as Monsanto, did their part, running campaigns promoting consumption of an almost exclusively soy-based diet, instead of animal protein (beef, dairy, eggs). At the beginning of 2003, per-capita beef consumption had fallen to 51 kg annually (about 110 lbs), compared to 61.4 in March 2002a decline of 10 kg in one year!
In a July 20, 2003 article published by the Argentine daily Clarin, agronomist Walter Alberto Pengue placed the blame squarely on the imposition of the free-market and privatization process under IMF dictates. Those policies weakened state-run regulatory technical agencies and led to unbridled growth "of a few crops of interest only to foreign markets," reducing Argentina to a deindustrialized raw-materials producer, he charged.
Thus, over the past decade, pork production declined by 37.2%. The number of pig breeders dropped from 6,000 to 1,200, and idle capacity in pig slaughterhouses reached 70%. The picture is the same for dairy farming. Between 1996 and 2000, the number of dairy farms in the country declined by 27.3%; between 1999 and 2002, milk production dropped from 10 billion liters annually to 8 billion.
'You Can't Starve People To Pay the Debt'
So said Eduardo Miras, Archbishop of Rosario and president of Argentina's Episcopal Conference. In statements made Oct. 6, he said that the debt has to be paid, but not by killing people; not if it means that people don't eat for five years. "Who of us at this stage of life doubts that the interest charged us is absolutely usurious?" Always outspoken on the debt, Msgr. Miras also said that sovereignty "isn't just a matter of stopping them from stealing an island, or a piece of our territory, but also not allowing them to impose ways of governing on us." The people have to be governed by their democratically elected leaders, and thus they must also think carefully about whom they elect.
Argentina's Nuclear Medicine Is Still World-Class
Argentina is the only Ibero-American producer of nuclear-medical technology to treat cancer, which it has already exported through agreements with Brazil, Bolivia, Egypt, Syria, India, and Colombia. In March 2005, it is scheduled to begin export of the first of 18 nuclear radiology centers to Venezuela, the largest such agreement in its history, worth $100 million. This state-of-the-art technology is expected to cover 90% of Venezuela's cancer-treatment needs.
It is precisely this kind of scientific achievement the financier forces behind the IMF seek to destroy in Argentina. The radiology centers are designed and built by the state-owned company Invap, which is known internationally for the nuclear reactors it has built and exported to several nations for research purposes. As part of its policy of strengthening the role of state-owned companies, the Kirchner government has particularly encouraged Invap's overseas agreements. The company is also building radar systems for the country's Air Force, and has many other impressive achievements in related fields.
Budget Cuts Compromise Kirchner's Security
A security incident with Argentine President Nestor Kirchner's "Tango 01" airplane has rattled the government. On Oct. 19, with Kirchner and two other cabinet ministers onboard, an explosion occurred in one of the Boeing 757's engines shortly after takeoff, and a turbine caught fire, making it necessary for the aircraft to make an emergency landing. Initial press reports charged that, due to delays in the bidding process for the maintenance contract, the plane was long overdue for an extensive "C"-level maintenance check, usually requiring 60 days. In fact, it had been deemed unfit for any travel outside the country.
A full investigation of the incident is underway. It has also come to light that other aspects of the Argentine President's security have not been fully funded, due to budgetary problems.
Criminal 'Maras' Gangs Menace Western Hemisphere
Emergency law enforcement meetings are being held across North and Central America, as governments attempt to respond to the spread of the "maras": the tens of thousands of youths in organized-crime-run gangs.
The origin, extent, and bestiality of the maras provides a hideous picture of a New Dark Age: it is a presageso far, "only" in the hundreds of thousandsof what Lyndon LaRouche has warned will become tens of millions of homeless people migrating from place to place across the globe, in search of a life, where there is none to be had, if global policies are not changed.
Largely made up of poor youth, these gangs moving back and forth across borders from Panama to the United States, have become a leading armed branch of the drug trade. They work for migrant-labor traffickers and terrorize, maim, or kill any immigrant who gives them trouble. Distinguished by hideous tattoos, and using satanic hand-signals as part of their cult formations, these youth have become so dehumanized that they have adopted beheadings as a means of reprisal.
By April 2004, the Mexican Government Ministry's Under Secretary of Immigration and Religious Affairs, Armando Salinas Torres, recognized publicly that the maras have become a matter of "national security" for Mexico. Over the course of 2004, Mexican authorities carried out raids against these gangs in states covering virtually the entirety of Mexico: from Chiapas and Oaxaca along Mexico's southern border with Guatemala; to the states of Mexico, Puebla, Hidalgo, and Veracruz in the center of the country; to Tamualipas, Coahuila, and San Luis Potosi, along Mexico's northern border with the United States.
And beyond Mexico:
* Saul Elizar Hernandes, the Salvadoran police official who currently heads Interpol's Central American office, told the General Assembly of Interpol in early October that, more than terrorists, the maras are the threat to the region, and they are growing at an "alarming" rate.
* On Oct. 13, Mexico's Secretary of Government Santiago Creel met with the Guatemalan Ministers of Defense and Interior, to discuss a "joint operation" to deal with the "maras." The officials stressed the need for an "integral approach" (i.e., not just law-enforcement methods) to this phenomenon, which they called a product of "social inequality."
* In mid-October, Salvadoran police chief Ricardo Meneses Orellana visited Santa Ana, California, to set up an information exchange program between Salvadoran and Californian law enforcement officials on these cross-border gangs.
* Virginia's (infamous) Congressman Frank Wolf is giving big publicity to the growing (real) threat which the maras have become on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. The FBI's gang task force has been meeting with local officials in Virginia, North Carolina, and other Eastern states.
Bolivian Government Again Faces Mass Protests
Tens of thousands of Bolivians poured into the capital city of La Paz on Oct. 18, demanding the nationalization of the nation's oil and gas resources, and the defeat of President Carlos Mesa's proposed Hydrocarbons Law, which would impose a more gradual approach to regaining state control over this resource, which is key for Bolivia's national development. (For their part, the oil and gas companies operating in Bolivia have declared even Mesa's more cautious bill unacceptable, and are threatening to pull out of Bolivia, if any of their existing, highly lucrative contracts are changed in any way.)
The marchers included the Bolivian Workers Federation (COB), miners, farmers, students and teachers, coca growers, artisans, and Indian activists. They surrounded the Congress, demanding to meet with legislators, and threatening to block highways and other actions until their demands are met.
Among the miners were some who carried sticks of dynamite in their hands, while a column of the cocaleros (coca-grower "activists") were led by former Congressman and terrorist provocateur Felipe Quispe.
The marchers were also demanding the conviction and jailing of former President Sanchez de Lozada and his ministers, for corruption and betrayal of national interests. The marchers are giving the Mesa government 90 days to nationalize the nation's reserves of hydrocarbons and to jail Sanchez de Lozada.
Cocaleros Revolt in Peru's Puno Region
A state of emergency was declared in part of the department of Puno, Peru on Oct. 20, following the deaths of three people, and wounding of more than a dozen others, in a clash between police and some 800 cocaleros who attempting to seized the San Gabon hydroelectric plant. The plant supplies electricity to Puno, the department's capital and home to 100,000 people. The 800 were a contingent of the 2,000-plus cocaleros who began a mass protest, after federal authorities began destroying over 7,400 acres of coca crops and 10 coca-paste laboratories recently discovered in the area, which borders Bolivia. The cocalero uprisingwhich included dousing a policeman with kerosene, an effort to burn him alive which was stopped in timewas backed by the Mayor of San Gabon, who is now threatening more radical action.
The government of President Toledo charges, with good reason, that the drug-traffickers instigated the revolt.
Living conditions in Puno, however, are unbearable. The same day the revolt occurred, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) issued an urgent request for more money for its emergency food supply program for the south of Puno, where people are receiving only half of their daily food needs, after the worst winter in three decades destroyed the bulk of the area's cereal crops and many animals. Even before this winter's weather, a 2003 WFP study found that up to 91% of the children under age 5 in Puno suffered from malnutrition.
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