From Volume 3, Issue Number 52 of EIR Online, Published Dec. 28, 2004

EIR Exposes Hit-Man Operation Vs. Mexico Development
by L. Wolfe

Dec. 23 (EIRNS)—The devastating poverty of Mexico that continues to drive millions of its citizens across the U.S. border in search of jobs, is directly attributable to efforts led by bankers' thug and former Secretary of State George Shultz, and others, to sabotage economic growth in Mexico. In the latest of its case studies, prompted by John Perkins' underground bestseller, "The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," EIR magazine provides a description, from the inside, of the pitched battle between the Hit Men and patriotic forces in Mexico and their allies for the right to develop the Mexican economy.

EIR's Gretchen Small points out that EIR and the LaRouche movement are in a unique position to descibe this battle, since they were right in the thick of it. Lyndon LaRouche and his associates were in direct collaboration with the central protagonist from the Mexican side, the late President of Mexico, José Lopez Portillo, with whom LaRouche met in 1982, and who refused to knuckle under to threats from the international financiers and their agents in the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. government.

Betrayed by agents in his own country, and by weak leaders in other Ibero-American states, Lopex Portillo lost that battle, but the war continues.

Oil and Development

Small discusses the idea of Lopez Portillo and other Mexican patriots, to use the nation's oil resources as the means to secure not merely "money," but economic development, through cooperative trade deals. Such deals, as proposed with the Japanese, would have provided funds for large infrastructure and industrial projects, which would have improved the standard of living for all Mexico's people. The Japanese deal was well on its way to realization, when the Economic Hit Men stepped in to sabotage it in the late 1970s.

At the center of this battle were the genocidal ideals of former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's infamous National Security Memorandum 200, which stated that the resources of the developing sector were not to be consumed by its peoples, but were the "strategic" property of the Anglo-American powers and their allies. The program of this crowd was to loot nations such as Mexico, while speeding up the process by which large portions of their populations would die, after having been exploited. In the case of Mexico, Small explains, this enforced population reduction program translated into the insane vision of genocidalist William Paddock, a cohort of Shultz and fellow financier George Ball, and his population control freaks, who called for reduction of Mexico's population by one-half: "Shut the borders and let them scream!"

To enforce this, came a cascading series of threats to Lopez Portillo and others to halt development projects, threats that demanded repayment of usurious debt under banker-dictated austerity. As Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is reported to have stated, the U.S. would never tolerate the development of another Japan south of the border.

The Debt Bomb

Lopez Portillo, collaborating with LaRouche, attempted to turn the growing debt forced on Mexico by the bankers into a weapon to be used against their corrupt financial system. LaRouche crafted a plan for continent-wide debt moratoria and economic development, "Operation Juarez." As Lopez Portillio expounded before the United Nations on the principles of a just, new world economic order, and as LaRouche worked within sections of the Reagan Administration close to the President for the acceptance of the concept, the Hit Men, including Shultz, used threats and sabotage to block them.

The crisis came to a head in 1982-83, with the Mexican President taking the bold step of reacting, as LaRouche had proposed, to an attack by the international bankers and their Hit Men on the Mexican peso, by nationalizing the banking system and exchange controls, while halting debt payments. If even Argentina or Brazil had backed Lopez Portillo, taking similar actions, the whole rotten financial edifice of the Hit Men could have been toppled; but those countries instead succumbed to pressure.

The battle was lost, but the war goes on today, Small reports; a war in which Lopez Portillo's resistance exemplifies the courage needed to win.

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