[1] PRI is the centrist party that ruled Mexico for over 70 years in a kleptocratic and quasi-authoritarian manner, only losing power to Vicente Fox's right-leaning National Action Party (PAN) in the year 2000 elections. Ernesto Zedillo was the last in the unbroken line of PRI presidents, holding office from 1994-2000. Under Zedillo the Mexican military looked the other way as PRI-linked paramilitary groups rampaged through the Chiapas countryside. Ironically, it was the conservative Fox who would take a more conciliatory approach to the Zapatistas, although PRI continues to be influential in the state and the low-grade conflict has not yet ended. (For information on the most recent flare-up of paramilitary violence, click here.)
The LaRouchians enjoyed a certain relationship with the PRI from the late 1970s through the end of its rule in 2000, functioning as dirty tricksters against the party's enemies (especially by waging smear campaigns against PAN) in a manner not dissimilar to how the U.S. LaRouchians served as dirty-tricks specialists for the Republican Party during the same years. It was this longstanding relationship of PRI and the LaRouche movement--which was especially close during the presidency of Jose Lopez Portillo--that caused Darrin Wood to treat with utmost seriousness the evidence of LaRouchian influence over PRI lawmakers in Chiapas.
[2] Cecelia Soto supposedly quit LaRouche’s now-defunct Mexican Party of Labor (PLM) in 1985, and moved towards mainstream politics, but it is unclear when, if ever, she fully broke with LaRouche (in 1992, she endorsed his jailhouse run for the U.S. presidency). In 1994, she was the Presidential candidate of the Labor Party (PT), a non-LaRouchian organization linked to a cult-like Maoist group and with no discernible ties to the labor movement. Soto came in fourth in this election with slightly less than a million votes. In the conspiracy-laced world of Mexican politics, it was widely believed that the PRI had financed her campaign as a “spoiler” race to draw votes away from the main leftist party, the PRD (see FN 9 below). In 2000, incoming president Vicente Fox named her as Mexico’s ambassador to Brazil (one of the most prestigious positions in the Mexican diplomatic service), and she served in that post until 2006.
Marivilia Carrasco remained a full-time follower of LaRouche, serving as a leader of his Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA), until being forced out of his organization in 2003 as part of a general purge of Catholic members. According to an article in the Feb. 25, 2005 EIR, the alleged offenses of the purgees included sending their children to Catholic private schools. Ms. Carrasco was personally accused of (a) attending a spiritual retreat run by Franciscan nuns, (b) visiting a nature preserve in Jallisco that had previously been owned by a relative of the Rothschilds, and (c) receiving flowers on her birthday from a prominent Mexican politician (in other words, of trying to have a semblance of a normal life). The article dubbed Ms. Carrasco and her brother Lorenzo, who had left the LaRouche orbit along with her, “anti-LaRouche fascist traitors.” The MSIA, the article complained, had turned into a “pawn of the same international financier faction that put Hitler in power” (in LaRouche mythology, this means the Rothschilds and other Jewish banking families in London).
[3] This meeting, which occurred in May 1982, appears to have been something more than a courtesy visit. LaRouche's economic and political proposals had been circulating among top PRI leaders for years, and he apparently came away from the meeting with the idea that Lopez Portillo wanted him to develop a definitive plan of action. The result was Operation Juarez, a policy study which was first published on Aug. 2, 1982 and quickly circulated both to the Mexican government and to elites throughout Latin America. This document, which attracted much attention, urged the nations of the region to stand up to the IMF, nationalize their banking structures, and jointly use the threat of the "debt bomb" (the repudiation of the huge amounts they owed to First World banks) in order to negotiate a new world order.
That same month, responding to a capital-flight crisis, Lopez Portillo suspended international debt payments. And, as described by R.T. Naylor in Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (1987), he
ordered troops into the banks to prevent documents from being removed or destroyed, cut telex lines between branches, had guards posted at the homes of the top bank executives, and then made his Sept. 1 State of the Nation address in the House of Assembly, in which he imposed general exchange controls and nationalized the banking system. In October, Lopez Portillo (having temporarily diverted the Mexican public's attention away from his regime's record of corruption) addressed the UN General Assembly in a speech that was not unreasonable in its content but bore an occasional eery resemblance--in its choice of rhetoric--to one of LaRouche's rants. For instance, the Mexican leader warned of the "beginning of a new medieval Dark Age," boasted of how Mexico had begun to "strengthen the dirigist role of the State," and concluded, "Not only is the heritage of civilization at stake, but also the very survival...of the human species." (Click here for text of speech.)
The LaRouchians would later complain that Lopez Portillo's version of Operation Juarez came a cropper because the leaders of other major nations in the region, such as Brazil and Argentina, failed to recognize the potential of such financial Bolivarism. However, there was a bit more to the story than that--Lopez Portillo, far from challenging the international banks, was actually taking steps to ensure they would get paid promptly. Naylor, an economics professor at McGill University, notes that it was clear at the time to the Wall Street Journal and others that the PRI was using the nationalization "farce" to "whip up nationalist fervor in order to get popular support prior to implementing a harsh IMF austerity package when the country was already crushed by debt and depression." And through what mechanisms would the debts to the North American banks get paid?
[W]hen Mexico imposed foreign-exchange controls, it also established priorities for the use of foreign exchange. First on the list came the servicing of public-sector debt. Once the domestic banks were nationalized, their debts to international banks also became a public-sector obligation, sharing first claims on the available supplies of foreign exchange. A spokesman for the Bank of America, the institution with the largest single "exposure," i.e., with the most to lose, in Mexico, declared, "The decision announced by President Lopez Portillo has the merit of putting the Mexican state clearly behind its banking system." LaRouche would continue over the years to lavish praise on Lopez Portillo--who left office in late 1982 and would end up the most reviled ex-President in Mexico's history. It is possible that the NCLC leader, who is poorly informed on economics, never understood what had really happened--that his organization's proposal had been used as a cover in achieving the opposite of what he had fantasized about. (Although the policy study bears LaRouche's name, the coherent portions of it had largely been crafted by his in-house economist, who would later leave the organization and, after reestablishing a normal life, become for awhile the global head of debt research at the investment banking subsidiary of...Bank of America!
According to reports in EIR (and I have no reason to doubt the facts it presents on this point), Lopez Portillo reciprocated LaRouche's praise, especially after becoming partially paralyzed and developing other serious ailments in the 1990s. He appeared with Helga Zepp-LaRouche before the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics in 1998, where he said it "is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche" (click here). The following year, he issued a call for U.S. citizens to give LaRouche their "timely recognition and support" in the 2000 elections (click here). In 2002, he sent a speech to be read at a conference of LaRouche's MSIA in Guadalajara (addressed also in absentia by LaRouche and Argentina's imprisoned carapintada hero Col. Seineldin), saying he was sorry that LaRouche, like himself, could not be personally present to "enlighten us with his expert teaching" (click here). When Lopez Portillo died in 2004, members of the Mexican wing of the LaRouche Youth Movement showed up at the wake to sing "Oh, Freedom," thus demonstrating, according to EIR, that "the nationalist fighting spirit of Don Jose Lopez Portillo would continue to live on in us."
[4] Samuel Ruiz was the bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, for 40 years (from 1959 to 1999). As mediator between the Mexican government and the EZLN, he played a crucial role in decreasing the level of violence and would receive the Pacem in Terris award in 1996. The LaRouchians hated him because his peacemaking undermined their fantasies of instigating a bloody counterinsurgency. They also hated him because of his strong support for Mexico's indigenous peoples, whom LaRouche regards as cultural subhumans standing in the way of economic development. Make no mistake about it: The strong language in LaRouche publications and placards attacking Bishop Ruiz was intended to motivate the paramilitaries in Chiapas to do to Ruiz what was done to Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980.
[5] This accusation can be regarded as an attempt to incite violence by the paramilitaries and sabotage the cease-fire that Bishop Ruiz had negotiated, thus exacerbating the problems in Chiapas in such a manner as to encourage the Mexican armed forces to take a direct role in the nation's politics.
[6] The reference to the Ecuadorian movement Alfaro Vive, Carajo! shows how sloppy LaRouche's research can be. This guerrilla outfit was largely wiped out by Ecuadorian government forces in 1986, and its remaining members officially ended their armed struggle and became an electoral party in 1991--three years before the EIR report on the Zapatista movement was released.
As to the explosion of the arsenal in Managua, far from presaging a narco-terrorist onslaught this event actually proved a major embarrassment to the Sandinistas and cost them heavily in the next election. Apparently they had been hedging their bets, like the rightist groups which stored their arsenals in safer locations. The LaRouchian analysis seemed to dismiss the common sense notion that during a reconciliation process the important thing is not that all the guns be turned over, but that they not be used against one's opponents.
[7] Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) would be elected president of Brazil in 2002 and re-elected in 2006. He enjoys excellent relations with the United States, works well with the Brazilian business community and, most important, has strong support from the Brazilian people, who gave him over 60 percent of the runoff vote in both elections. He is currently attempting to carry out a $250 billion development project to upgrade Brazil's transportation and energy networks--precisely the kind of giant project that the LaRouchians claim to support. In an opinion article in Scientific American (February 2008), Lula described his government's plans for massive spending on science and technology education for the nation's children--again, something that the LaRouchians have advocated (albeit with goals radically different from those of the Brazilian government).
The attacks on Lula by LaRouche’s publications in the 1990s are good examples of how LaRouche so often makes groundless accusations--and how he is almost always wrong in his predictions. Lula was not then, and has never become, a threat to "western civilization"; Bishop Ruiz never instigated any wave of guerrilla attacks (in fact, he encouraged nonviolence); the national reconciliation process in Guatemala and Nicaragua, far from being a ruse by leftwing narco-terrorists and their alleged "British" controllers, has succeeded quite well over the years (with both of these Central American countries at peace today under civilian rule); and the Zapatistas in Chiapas never became a threat even remotely comparable to Peru's "Shining Path" movement.
[8] It was the PRI-backed paramilitaries, not the EZLN, that would drive over ten thousand indigenous people from their homes and land during the mid-1990s.
[9] The PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) is the most left-leaning of the three major parties in Mexico. It was launched in 1989 by dissident PRI leaders along with members of pre-existing parties representing various segments of the Mexican left. Among the founders was Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who had won the 1988 presidential election as the candidate of a center-left coalition but had been denied victory through PRI-orchestrated electoral fraud. For the LaRouchians--smear artists against Cardenas throughout the 1988 campaign--to be spreading in the mid-1990s the lie (click here) that the PRD was the political arm of the Zapatistas, was no laughing matter. It may very well have helped to trigger violence against PRD activists in Chiapas and elsewhere.
Such violence against the party of the left was already a serious problem in Mexico even before the Zapatista uprising. In January 1994, the Mexican government's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) published the results of an investigation of 140 human rights violations--including scores of killings--allegedly committed against PRD members during Salinas's years as President. The PRD released figures in June 1994 regarding 246 killing of its members up to that time, and claimed that arrests had been made in only one-fourth of the cases. (Click here for more details from Human Rights Watch's 1995 report on Mexico.)
Thus, when the LaRouche organization indirectly urged violence against PRD members (by equating them with the EZLN) it was doing so (a) to a nationwide PRI-affiliated and/or far-right audience which knew it could commit such acts with relatively impunity and (b) in a political climate in which such acts had become almost routine. But the danger of such propaganda was compounded many times over by the fact that it was being circulated on the ground in a violently polarized locality filled with armed factions. As the 1997 Human Rights Watch report on Mexico noted:
In other words, the conflict with EZLN in the southern part of the state was being used by PRI members as an excuse to settle scores with PRD members and to seize their lands in an area safely removed from any threat of serious retaliation. And the violence was being perpetrated by the very group that Chiapas human rights activists say was working with LaRouche's MSIA. This is yet another reason to regard the LaRouche organization's accusations against the PRD as a cynical attempt to incite violence against people who were hated by the LaRouchians for ideological reasons.
[10] The local PRI caciques (political bosses) definitely were not fond of Father Padron. In 1991, they tried to frame him on charges that he'd destroyed a woman's radish patch and killed her chickens. The New York Times (click here) described the unravelling of this absurd charge after evidence emerged that the complainant was involved, along with PRI officials in Simojovel, in an almost comically transparent land swindle. But in 1994, the hostility of the caciques to the liberal-minded diocese in Chiapas became much more dangerous. The attempts of the LaRouchians, other rightist groups and the PRI to whip up hatred against Bishop Ruiz and his priests, nuns and catechists was touched on in National Catholic Reporter articles that year (click here and here). Further evidence in found in EIR issues from the mid-1990s; for instance, a 1995 dossier on the EZLN (click here) which alleged that "8,000 catechists in the networks of Bishop Ruiz" were operating as "organizers and coordinators of the EZLN." (This dossier had almost certainly been presented earlier in some form or other to PRI officials and the Mexican military.)
The Mexican army had made similar expansive claims of its own the previous year, based in part on information from certain private sources. According to a highly skeptical U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report dated Jan. 27, 1994:
We know, for example, that the [Mexican] military asked through many channels--including non-governmental sources--for contributions of names of suspected or possible members, supporters or contacts of the EZLN, and that among the lists given them was the entire list of Dominican priests in Chiapas; the names of all Mexican priests regardless of location in the country who attended the 1968 church meeting in Medellin, Colombia, which was the beginning of the Liberation Theology movement; and all of the foreign-born Catholic priests, friars, and nuns who have worked in Chiapas since the beginning of Bishop Samuel Ruiz' incumbency as Bishop of San Cristobal (he has been Bishop there for more than three decades). We have learned reliably that all of these names are now on the Mexican military's list of known EZLN members....We have been told that the military has no way of knowing whether or not most of the people on its list are, in fact, in any way involved or connected. The Mexican military's belief in the usefulness of such a list, and the underlying attitude toward the Chiapas clergy that this belief reflected, would have consequences over the following years. In 1998, Bishop Ruiz summarized the escalating pressure on his diocese as follows:
Expulsion of seven priests under false accusations; refusal of residency to foreign pastoral workers; the imprisonment of four priests under false charges and in clear violation of their human rights; the closure of some 40 churches (some occupied by the army); arrest warrants for numerous priests, nuns and missionaries; pressure on various peasants to testify that the diocese delivers arms to the communities; directives to various communications media to distort the news; creation of a lynching climate; profanation of the holy sacrament in various churches by the security police. [11] The incident in question did not involve the courts or any governmental agency. A private "good government" organization with no legal authority asked U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) to respond during the 1982 Democratic primary contest to a complaint filed by his LaRouchian opponent, one Melvin Klenetsky. According to Klenetsky, Moynihan had engaged in unfair campaign practices when he called Klenetsky's group anti-Semitic. Senator Moynihan responded with a several-hundred-page brief on the LaRouchians prepared by his attorney, which resulted in the private election-monitoring group exonerating Moynihan. (I am not aware that Klenetsky's complaint referred to the use of the word "Nazi" although four years later, in a speech commenting on the victories of two LaRouche followers in primaries for statewide office in Illinois, Senator Moynihan did refer to them as "neo-Nazis.")
The Moynihan-Klenetsky dispute was apparently confused in the above article with a libel suit LaRouche filed in federal court in Virginia in 1984 against NBC and the Anti-Defamation League. One of LaRouche's complaints was that he had been libelled when NBC aired on its "First Camera" news program an interview with ADL fact-finding director Irwin Suall in which Suall called LaRouche a "small-time Hitler." The jurors in this case found that the disputed statements from the First Camera expose of LaRouche, including the comparison of him to Hitler, were not libelous. Expressing their disdain for LaRouche (who had testified at length on the witness stand), the jurors also voted to award NBC $3 million in damages on a counterclaim against him.
[12] This quote is from LaRouche's The Case of Walter Lippmann (1977). The page from which it is taken also includes a comment on the Mexican-American War of 1848 that is sharply at variance with LaRouche's oft-professed concern for Mexico's sovereignty. Click HERE for page image.
[13] In 1997, a former Salisbury, N.C. police officer, L.C. Underwood, was convicted of the murder of Gunnarsson and sentenced to life plus forty years. The jury believed the prosecution's claims that Underwood had killed Gunnarsson for carrying on an affair with Underwood's ex-fiance. Underwood and his supporters have a website http://plantedevidence.com that argues with surprising persuasiveness that the wrong person was convicted--and that the police ignored the confession of another local man with whose wife Gunnarsson was involved. Underwood argues that this other man (who disappeared from the area and was said to be living under an assumed name) is the real killer. Underwood draws no links to the Palme slaying even though his website includes statements from witnesses claiming that Gunnarsson had bragged to them about killing the Swedish prime minister. A leading Swedish journalist and expert on the Palme murder investigation, Anders Leopold, came to Underwood's defense in 2005, after studying the convicted man's case for over a year. In a public appeal to the U.S. media, Leopold focussed on the evidence presented by Underwood's supporters indicating that the other local man had committed the murder for purely personal reasons. But Leopold also stated he was "firmly convinced that the assassination of Viktor Gunnarsson...is connected to the biggest crime in Swedish history" (click here).
Violence [in 1996] tore particularly at the northern zone of Chiapas state, which lies beyond the area where Zapatistas and the Mexican army faced off beginning in January 1994. There, operating with the tacit and sometimes explicit support of the government, groups of armed civilians, linked to the ruling...PRI...violently expelled their ideological opponents from communities. Opponents of the PRI were also killed, apparently for their political beliefs. In Tila municipality, Human Rights Watch/Americas interviewed refugees from Miguel Aleman, Nuevo Limar, Susuchumil, Tzaquil, and Usipa, all of whom were expelled from their homes because of their support for the...PRD...The victims identified their assailants as members of Peace and Justice (Paz y Justicia), a group founded in 1995 by members of the PRI.
