Funeral for victims of the December 22, 2007 Acteal massacre in which 45 indigenous people from a nonviolent Catholic civic organization were killed at a prayer meeting by paramilitaries acting in collusion with the Chiapas state police.
1. Human rights violations in Chiapas
2. LaRouchian meddling in Chiapas--news articles and NGO reports
3. LaRouchian propaganda re Chiapas, 1994
4. LaRouchian propaganda and dossiers re Chiapas, 1995
5. LaRouchian propaganda re Chiapas and the Acteal massacre, 1997-2001
6. What U.S. and Mexican government files reveal
7. The LaRouchians in national Mexican politics: smear artists, dirty tricksters and purveyors of anti-Semitism
8. What LaRouche really thinks about Mexico and Mexicans
"Ten years after Acteal: New Massacres Loom in Mexico," by John Ross, CounterPunch, Dec. 21, 2007. "The shooters advanced downhill, firing their weapons as they pushed forward....At the bottom of the hill, the dead were spread around a wood plank chapel where they had been fasting and praying....Most were women, their dead children still clinging to them. The shooters continued down the ravine, taking their time, killing their victims slowly, slicing them open with machetes. Four of the women were pregnant. Marcela Capote, the wife of the catechist, was nearly at full term and they hacked open her womb and yanked out the baby inside and dashed its skull against the rocks."
"Acteal: Between Mourning and Struggle" (Executive Summary), December 1998. Report of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico) on the Dec. 22, 1997 massacre at Acteal. Lays blame at door of the government and criticizes its attempts to institute a coverup. Describes the psychological impact of this horrific event on the families of those killed and the social impact on the thousands who fled in fear from the surrounding communities and ended up in refugee camps.
"Factionalism and Counterinsurgency in Chiapas:
Contextualizing the Acteal Massacre" (2004). This well-informed study by social anthropologist Heidi Moksnes of the University of Uppsala puts to shame the angry, conspiracy-driven, epithet-drenched "intelligence reports" of the LaRouche organization on the situation in Chiapas (see several repulsive examples below). Of course, the LaRouchians regard anthropologists in Latin America as "British agents," collaborators with "narco-terrorism" and bleeding-heart promoters of allegedly subhuman cultures.
English translation of Darrin Wood's "Lyndon LaRouche and the Chiapas paramilitaries" (Nuevo Amanecer Press report, 1996). Wood, who earlier worked on the story of LaRouche's relationship to Spain's GAL death squads, here explores how LaRouchian activities helped to encourage a death-squad mentality in Chiapas in the wake of the 1994 Zapatista uprising. Introduction and footnotes by Dennis King update this article and provide background information for those unfamiliar with recent Mexican/Latin American politics. (Read Wood's original Spanish language article here.)
"LaRouche is behind attacks on Ruiz," Bill Coleman, National Catholic Reporter (June 3, 1994). Describes the "unrelenting" LaRouchian propaganda attacks against Bishop Samuel Ruiz and the Chiapas peace process.
"Threats target Jesuits, Ruiz as Mexican fight for power moves to polls," Patty Coleman, National Catholic Reporter (Aug. 26, 1994). Article says that the LaRouche organization and the Squadron for the Defense of the Catholic Faith were "part of a deliberate right-wing campaign to frighten and discredit any group that sides with the poor in opposing the government and the PRI." Notes how Bishop Ruiz and others in Chiapas were targeted by smears, death threats and other harassment.
"Embattled Bishop Ruiz comes face to face with adversaries," Patty Coleman, National Catholic Reporter (Oct. 7, 1994). Describes how angry anti-Zapatista elements in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, demonstrated against Bishop Ruiz (the man they called the "antichrist") at La Merced Church. Placards supplied by LaRouche's MSIA "depicted Ruiz as a treacherous snake and called upon him to flee for his life."
Assassination attempts against Bishops Ruiz and Vera. From a 1998 joint statement of the Dominican Order of Preachers and Franciscans International to the United Nations: "On November 4, 1997 members of the paramilitary group Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice) carried out an assassination attempt on the lives of Bishop Samuel Ruiz, president of the National Mediation Commission (CONAI), and Bishop Raul Vera, OP in the Northern Area of Chiapas. The following day, they tried to murder Bishop Ruiz's sister."
Hmmm.... the LaRouche organization circulated hate literature against Bishop Ruiz in Chiapas for years, beginning in 1994; the LaRouche organization then cultivated close ties with two Peace and Justice leaders; and Peace and Justice subsequently tried to kill Ruiz. I can't say this is a syllogism, but it is certainly food for thought.
Here we have not just the Jesuits--much demonized by LaRouche--but also the Dominicans and Franciscans expressing concern over human rights in Mexico, and calling on that country's government to "disarm all paramilitary groups operating in Chiapas and to hold them accountable for their violent campaigns against indigenous peoples."
LaRouche's followers try to depict those in the Catholic Church who defend the human rights of the Maya and other indigenes in southern Mexico and the Central American states as radicals beyond the pale of the authentic church. But just who is this authentic Conquistadore church? Col. Seneildin of Argentina's dirty war? Guatemala's commandos? Lyndon LaRouche, who has pressured the women of his cult-like movement to undergo hundreds of abortions, or else (and isn't even a Catholic)?
Maybe it's time for the Vatican to stop sending quasi-official representatives to speak at conferences of LaRouche's Schiller Institute.
Just who was this bishop the LaRouchians wanted dead? Samuel Ruiz died on January 24, 2011. The obituary published by Catholic News Service paints a very different picture of his goals and activities than what one finds in LaRouche's propaganda. For instance:
"In the 1960s, Bishop Ruiz began speaking out against Chiapas' unwritten laws--such as those prohibiting Indians from walking the streets after dark and--even into the early 1970s--forcing them to step off city sidewalks into the gutter whenever non-Indians approached.
"'Don Samuel arrived in a Chiapas plagued by injustices and abuses against indigenous peoples and the poor,' Bishop Vera said.
"'He saw with his own eyes the backs of indigenous men marked by the whips of plantation owners,' who paid 'three cents a day' and forced workers to purchase from company stores with inflated prices, Bishop Vera continued.
"'He also knew female indigenous subjected to 'law of the first night',' in which the bosses take the virginity of young women in their employ, Bishop Vera said." It should be clear from the above which side of the fight for human rights the LaRouche organization is on, in spite of its occasional forays into pseudo-leftist jargon.
Amnesty International reports on death threats against Father David Fernández and the Jesuit Order (1995). The Jesuits were a frequent target of smear campaigns by LaRouche's Mexican organization (see example in Part 5 below). For instance, the allegation mentioned in the Amnesty International report that the Jesuits were supporting guerilla activity in southern Mexico and in Central America--although not directly attributed to the LaRouchians--had been a staple of EIR and MSIA propaganda for years. Father Fernández was singled out because he was the head of PRODH, the Jesuit human rights organization in Mexico, and thus was frequently quoted in the media as a strong opponent of the PRI government's policy of repression in Chiapas. The LaRouchians well knew the violent political conditions in Mexico--and that their accusations could easily cause the death of Father Fernández and of Jesuits on the ground in Chiapas. But LaRouche's cowardly propagandists were simply following on of their leader's conception of assassination by proxy--make the targeted political figure a target of hate in a volatile political climate and then wait for a third party to do the deed.
Racist rant against the Maya and other Amerindians (Chap. 11 of EIR's The Plot to Annihilate the Armed Forces and the Nations of Ibero-America, 1994). This book was finished prior to the Jan. 1994 Chiapas uprising (indeed, the Spanish language edition was published in 1993) and was widely circulated over the next few years among Mexican military officers. Chapter 11 is filled with artfully worded racist descriptions of indigenous peoples in Central America and the Amazon basin. The authors' claim that today's Maya are descended from a "failed" civilization that was "saved" from the consequences of its failure by the arrival of the enlightened Conquistadores. Suggests (shades of Mein Kampf) that the ungrateful indigenous wretches are now plotting to stab in the back and dismember the nation-states of the region. Says that some indigenous leaders in Central America today are also attempting to promote a "bestial concept of 'Indian religion.'" Calls the Yanomami tribal reserve in the Amazon rainforest a "zoo," and expresses indignation that a British museum with the backing of the Human Genome Organization intends to preserve frozen samples of the tribe's gene pool.
The remarks about the Yanomami, which also include accusations of cannibalism, could be regarded as especially offensive considering that The Plot was published only a few months after the widely publicized Haximu Massacre--in Brazil near the Venezuelan border in July 1993--during which gold miners working illegally within the Yanomami reserve killed at least 16 members of the tribe, including infants, children and elders.
The Mexican government and military have always been racist against indigenous people, treating them in a manner comparable to how rural African-Americans were treated under Jim Crow in the deep South. But did El complot para aniquilar a las Fuerzas Armadas y a las naciones de Iberoamérica help to further dehumanize the Maya and other Indians in the minds of Mexican Army officers so they would be more inclined to allow the Chiapas paramilitaries to carry out murders, rapes and massacres?
"Will the narco-terrorist insurrection in Chiapas be Mexico's 'Sarajevo'?", Carlos Cota Meza, EIR (March 11, 1994). The author absurdly compares the Jan. 1994 military offensive of the Zapatistas--which lasted only a few days and in which most of those killed were from the ranks of the insurgents (144 dead according to the Mexican Army, about 1,000 according to the Zapatistas)--to the genocidal killing of over 100,000 people and "cleansing" of 2.2 million by the likes of Slobodan Miloševic and Radovan Karadžic in the Balkans. Cota Meza even claims that the lightly armed indigenous minority in Chiapas (about 30 percent of the population) was planning to conduct ethnic cleansing against the state's majority--a majority that was backed by tens of thousands of Mexican Army troops. (In fact, most of the violence and land evictions in the past had been--and over the next 17 years would be--directed against indigenous peoples.)
Cota Meza alleges that the Zapatistas want to "dismember" Mexico and "expunge the precept that the family is the basis of society and represents Western Christian tradition." He supports the Chiapas cattle ranchers and other large landowners who allegedly had requested a military crackdown through "public advertisements." [One must ask if LaRouche's operatives help write these ads, just as they helped write publicity for "wise use" ranchers in the United States during the same decade?] Cota Meza also praises the actions of an "enraged crowd" in Altamirano which supposedly chased the president of the National Human Rights Commission from the town after he "arrived...to defend the 'human rights' of 10 nuns belonging to the Order of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, accused by the town of being EZLN members." [Again: did leaflets or other literature from LaRouche's MSIA help to whip up this crowd?]
The accusations that the Zapatistas are comparable to the Bosnian Serb genocidalists (not just to the assassins at Sarajevo) and to the totalitarian Shining Path in Peru (another LaRouchian claim) are answered by Peter Rosset, Ph.D., an agricultural ecologist who was the Executive Director of the Stanford University Regional Center in San Cristóbal de Las Casas in 1992-1993:
"If this [the Zapatista uprising] is an ethnic rebellion, and indeed the vast majority of the fighters barely speak Spanish, why do their press releases contain no statements of ethnic nationalism? Rather than rejecting the legitimacy of the Ladino Mexican state, they use the constitution to justify their actions. Their 'Declaration of the Jungle' contains the following language, reminiscent of the U.S. declaration of Independence:
"'We call upon Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution which states 'the people have at all times the inalienable right to alter or change the nature of their government.' Therefore, in accordance with our Constitution, we issue this DECLARATION OF WAR....People of Mexico, we call for your total participation in this struggle for work, land, housing, food, health care, education independence, liberty, democracy, justice and peace.' "This is no declaration of ethnic warfare. It is strikingly different from the words used by the Shining Path in Peru or the Bosnian Serbs. In fact, taken as a whole, the various press releases of the Zapatistas paint a picture of an uprising of the poor, regardless of ethnicity, calling for basic human rights. It is likely that the mixing in of Spanish speaking peasants in the Lacandon settlements contributed to the inclusionary, rather than exclusionary, nature of their rhetoric.
"The broad appeal of the Zapatista message has led to a degree of David vs. Goliath sympathy among the general population of Mexico, provoking large solidarity, marches...." (Read Dr. Rosset's full statement here.) "Negotiations with the Zapatistas: a Camacho coup d'etat in Mexico," Hugo López Ochoa, EIR (March 18, 1994). Two months after the Zapatista (EZLN) uprising, the LaRouche organization was already voicing fierce opposition to the cease-fire agreement and any negotiations over partial autonomy for indigenous peoples.
López Ochoa singles out Bishop Ruiz, calling him the "theology of liberation bishop" and the "real chieftain" of the EZLN "narco-terrorists." Alleges that the EZLN is being protected by "Anglo-American intelligence" and "powerful groups of speculators and financiers" (e.g., George Soros) with the aim of splitting Mexico in two (leaving a mestizo nation and "an Indian one") and "dismantling" the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which, according to López Ochoa, has a fifth column within its ranks. The article calls on President Salinas to break with the evil international bankers as the precondition for launching a "successful military offensive against the Zapatistas."
Essentially this article favors a massive Guatemala-style army crackdown in Chiapas even though the EZLN had ended its military offensive and negotiations were in process. (In the 17 years since, the EZLN has not launched any further offensives, in spite of brutal provocations by PRI-backed paramilitaries.)
"Will Colosio's British assassins kill Mexico, too?" Gretchen Small, EIR (April 8, 1994). When Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the ruling PRI, was killed by a lone assassin, the LaRouchians attempted to use the event to whip up the Mexican generals and PRI's leaders for a major assault on the Zapatistas. (Note: Although many Mexicans believe that Colosio's rivals in the PRI were behind his slaying, there was no evidence then, and none has emerged in the years since, that the Zapatistas--or the Jesuits or the Jews--had anything to do with it.)
LaRouche: the indigenous peoples of Latin America are "sick, dying drunks"...a "pestilence" (Morning Briefing, Sept. 25, 1994). This is LaRouche's response to the massacre of the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon two months earlier and to the ongoing Mexican military and paramilitary crackdown on the Maya and other indigenous people in southern Mexico. It is found under the subhead "Creating a Discontinuity to Save Our Nations":
"Let's take the case of Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas. Let's take the Yummy-yummy [Yanomami] Indian or the Miskito Indians, all these kinds of thing... LaRouche then, typically, zigzags momentarily into an erstatz anti-racism, claiming that the people who champion the land rights of Amerindians, and call them indigeous people, are the real racists who supposedly want to keep these peoples in a primitive state. But this is just a game intended to give his ideologically corrupt followers a rationalization for their organization's virulent racism--so they participate in it in a deniable and guilt-free way. But once LaRouche has delivered these pro forma remarks he throws off his mask of reasonableness completely and unequivocally:
"The reason that they support the Cree claims in Canada, or the Yummy-yummy Indians, who are nothing but a bunch of sick, dying drunks, who are not really a tribe, not really a people. As Fernando [Fernando Quijano, LaRouche's then top aide] pointed out, could you imagine the ambassador, the representative from the Miskito Indians, who came to the United States, his name is Steadman Faggot? That's not a culture. In any case, the Chiapas Project is what? It's a project of the World Wildlife Fund....They're running the Yummy-yummy Indians and all the other pestilences that are being run..." And when LaRouche launches into a racist rant, anti-Semitism is sure to follow like night from day. So who does he say is behind the indigenous rights movement?
"We've got to say: 'These are the forces of the enemy of humanity. Here is the organizational structure of this oligarchy and its apparatus, which is being deployed against us...' And the assumptions we have to eliminate, are the assumptions which cause us [to tolerate] this force, the primate among parasites, and that which it represents, the international Venetian Party, the oligarchy." EIR "dossier" (1995) on the EZLN falsely names many individuals and over 100 Mexican and foreign organizations as supporters of or participants in Zapatista "terrorism." Since LaRouche's literature circulated widely at the time among PRI caciques and paramilitary leaders in Chiapas, as well as within the Mexican military, these accusations were no laughing matter. The dossier attacked, especially, the Catholic church in Chiapas, claiming that Bishop Ruiz was the secret leader of the EZLN (under the code name "The Mayan Prince") and that "8,000 catechists" in the Bishop's network "operate as organizers and coordinators for the EZLN." Such propaganda helped to create the ideological climate in which paramilitaries carried out numerous acts of violence, including the 1997 Acteal massacre against Las Abejas, a Catholic-led group that supported the EZLN's social justice goals but advocated only nonviolent means.
EIR "dossier" (1995) on the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Over the first five years after its founding in 1989, hundreds of members of the PRD--one of the three major parties in Mexico--had been murdered by PRI thugs. In the midst of the Chiapas crisis, this report added fuel to the anti-PRD fire with false accusations that the party supported terrorism and was provoking violence against police, PRI members and oil installations. Describes the PRD as a "coalition of communist fiefdoms" that includes "activists with narco-terrorist backgrounds" trained in Moscow, North Korea, etc. Claims the PRD "has led the defense of the EZLN's 'human rights' and is currently its electoral arm." (Regarding PRI-instigated attacks on PRD members in Chiapas and elsewhere, read here.)
"London's terrorism support apparatus: environmentalism, indigenism, and NGOs," Joseph Brewda, EIR (Nov. 10, 1995). According to Brewda--a member of LaRouche's security staff who has since left the organization but continues to support his former comrades by keeping his mouth shut about their criminal activities--the Zapatista uprising was part of a "British" plot by way of "an international network" of narco-terrorists with a cover of legitimacy being provided by human rights groups. (Note that EIR puts the term "human rights" in quotation marks, thus implying that indigenous people either don't have such rights or simply don't need "protecting"--another word EIR feels should be surrounded by quote marks.) Brewda's article scorns all efforts by the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Red Cross, Oxfam, the Nobel Committee and evil, evil anthropologists to protect indigenous peoples in Chiapas and elsewhere in Latin America. Not surprisingly, the top "British" plotters in Brewda's scenario are Jews--George Soros and Teddy Goldsmith.
As a member of the security staff, Brewda would have known that EIR's reports and analyses were being circulated in Spanish translation to right-wing military and paramilitary groups in countries where indigenous people were demanding their rights. With his theory of giant guerrilla support networks, Brewda might as well have been painting a bull's-eye on civilian indigenous leaders, priests who supported indigene rights, human rights observers and even Red Cross workers. North American readers can smile all they like at Brewda's typical LaRouchian exaggerations, but many of the people who ran the military and government-backed paramilitary networks in Latin America during the 1990s were ripe for precisely this type of excuse for torture, rape and assassination.
"London's irregular warfare vs. nations of the Americas," Dennis and Gretchen Small, EIR (Nov. 10, 1995), with point-by-point rebuttal by Dennis King. The Smalls claim that "Fidel Castro's assets are working overtime to create a a new narco-terrorist force." But behind Castro is the "London-centered" oligarchy which (the article quotes LaRouche as saying) is "at the extremes of hysteria, in its determination to destroy existing nation states."
The Smalls cite a book by Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte (a Nazi war-hero friend of LaRouche's) on how to fight irregular warfare, but complain that the alleged U.S./British puppet governments of Argentina, Mexico, etc. are "purging from their ranks, and those of their armed forces, any officer or civilian who sees the danger and wishes to fight." Also the Smalls depict the EZLN in Chiapas as an utterly evil force protected by a giant international network of "feminists, environmentalists, gays, indigenists, human rights activists" and, of course, the "liberal media." If it weren't for these groups, backed by London and Washington, "the Mexican government and military could have wiped out the EZLN long ago. The same hold true for every country of Ibero-America." Hmmm…wipe 'em all out? Just how many tens of thousands of peasants' lives are you talking about, Mr. and Mrs. Small?"
"Now, everybody is a 'LaRouchista,'" EIR, Jan. 1, 1997. This article by Carlos Wesley--who, in the 1980s, served as an intermediary between LaRouche's private spooks and General Manuel Noriega's regime in Panama--has a populist emphasis. Wesley describes an anti-IMF speech by Marivilia Carrasco in León, Guanajuato, in which the MSIA leader warns that if LaRouche's program is not adoped, "Mexico will disintegrate under 'narco-terrorist mercenaries, such as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, who are working for the British Crown to destroy the sovereign nation-state.'"
Also described is an MSIA forum in Mexico City to stir up the public against the IMF. Supposedly, the forum was part of a giant mobilization, but among the endorsers only six are deemed worthy of mention, including Noriega (Wesley discreetly avoids mentioning that the general was serving a very lengthy sentence in a Florida prison for drug trafficking ), Col. Mohamed Alí Seineldín (jailbird hero of Argentina's dirty war and multiple coup attempts, and former security advisor to Noriega), and Mexican Congressman Walter León Montoya--who was cited by Darrin Wood (see above) as a leader of the sinister Paz y Justicia paramilitary band in Chiapas. This reference to León Montoya in such illustrious (to the LaRouchians) company suggests that the MSIA was already in touch with Paz y Justicia many months prior to the massive upsurge in violence against indigenous minorities and the attempt to assassinate Bishop Ruiz.
Note: In 2010, León Montoya was arrested and charged with the murder of an environmental activist who was leading protests against a Canadian mining operation with which León Montoya's trucking company had a lucrative contract (read here). The suspect is being held in prison in Chiapas awaiting trial. As he was involved at the time in conflicts with powerful political figures in Chiapas, it is possible that he was framed (read here). It is also possible that the case will be dropped at some point--even if he was not framed--since local political leaders are not for the most part enthusiastic about environmental causes in Chiapas, a state rich in natural resources.
"Massacre in Chiapas furthers British plot to destroy Mexico," EIR, Jan. 23, 1998. This is one of the more obscene (politically) articles that members of LaRouche's Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA) produced about Chiapas. Written in response to the international uproar over the Acteal massacre three weeks earlier, authors Marivilia Carrasco, head of the MSIA, and her associate Hugo López Ochoa let;Acte try to craft a spin that would place the blame on the Zapatistas and the local Catholic diocese. (Note: the people who would eventually be tried and convicted for the massacre this crime were all members of right-wing paramilitaries--and it occurred while 40 members of the state police were parked only 200 meters down the road. The police officers did nothing to intervene even though the gunshots and the screaming continued all day beginning around 11 AM. (It would later be revealed that the attackers had been provided with guns and fake uniforms by the state police, after receiving training from a noncommissioned Mexican military officer who'd been ordered to do so by his superiors.)
According to the EIR article, "the intellectual and material authors of the crime, which bore the marks of a satanic ritual, are still unidentified." Since LaRouche publications had already, repeatedly, accused Bishop Ruiz and the Zapatistas of encouraging satanism in the form of Mayan paganism, this sentence is in fact slyly suggesting that Ruiz, etc. engineered the massacre. The same suggestion was made more strongly in the following passage:
"The Acteal massacre was timely for the EZLN, giving it the opportunity to wash its hands of the massacres and crimes it had committed...and to retake the political initiative for a final offensive to break the Zedillo government's resistance to the British plan to balkanize the country through the creation of autonomous indian regions. This would make the country ungovernable, and would quickly destroy the nation-state." The sociopathy of this article resides in the fact that LaRouche's MSIA was trying to shift the blame for the massacre onto the Zapatistas and the Catholic diocese simply by regurgitating in a new context the same arguments that the MSIA and the international LaRouche movement had used since 1994 in their efforts to encourage right-wing paramilitary style violence in Chiapas as well as an all-out Mexican Army offensive against the Zapatista villages in which thousands might have been slain.
LaRouche's Mexican organization grudgingly admits its involvement with Paz y Justicia paramilitary leaders. This EIR article (Jan. 23, 1998) comments on and then quotes in full the MSIA's reply to charges in the daily El Universal that the LaRouche organization had ties with a notorious paramilitary group in Chiapas. The MSIA acknowledges that Chiapas rightists Walter A. León Montoya and Alí Cancino Herrera "made presentations against the British and the Zapatistas at Schiller Institute events in France and Germany....[They] were accompanied on their European tour by Mexican MSIA President Marivilia Carrasco..."
Of course, the MSIA denies that it--or León Montoya and Cancino Herrera--could possibly have anything to do with rightwing paramilitaries, because such groups don't even exist! The "only leaders of paramilitary groups that exist in Chiapas are [Catholic bishop] Samuel Ruiz and his swarms of narco-terrorists"! Hmmm...if the Mexican Army backed right-wing paramilitaries didn't exist, then who killed 45 unarmed indigenous people at the Acteal chapel on Dec. 17, 1987? And just who'd been assassinating indigenous people throughout Chiapas--for years--to keep them in their place (like Blacks in the U.S. South during the Jim Crow era)?
The claim that the only "paramilitary" group in Chiapas was the EZLN itself was the standard line of the PRI, the military and the caciques--and would be thoroughly discredited by the Mexican media. As a 1998 summary by Jessica Parsons and Christopher Day stated:
"On December 15 [1997] General Secretary of Chiapas, Homer Tovilloa Cristiani issued a statement that there were no paramilitary organizations operaing in Chenalho, echoing an earlier statement by Governor Ruiz Ferro that the only armed group in Chenalhoi was tghe EZLN. Shortly thereafter it was revealed that Ruiz Error and Tovilla Cristiano had directed $650,000 US in state social development funds to Paz y Justicia. The document directing the monies in three payments between August 1996 and May 1997 was also signed by Mexican Federal Army General Mario Renan Castillo of the 7th Military Region in Chiapas, which includes Chenalhó....
Documents from the Mexican Ministry of Defense exposed in the January 4 [1998] issue of the newsweekly Proceso clearly spell out the government's strategy. One document authored by General Antonio Riviello Bazan and 7th Military Region Commander Miguel Angel Godinez...explicitly calls fro the government to create paramilitary organizations, force the concentration of the Zapatista's bases of support and deprive them of life's necessities in order to destroy their morale and break their support for the EZLN." (Read the full text of the summary here and the Proceso article here.) The cynical EIR regurgitation of the line of Chiapas state officials is also flatly contradicted by an official MSIA statement published in the same issue (see previous item) which states:
"As might be expected, this situation [the existence of Zapatista affiliated villages claiming autonomy], has encouraged the formation of opposed paramilitary groups, since the presence of government forces of law and order in these regions is almost non-existent." (emphasis added) This is the ludicrous type of mixed messages that occur when you have a fascist cult in which knowledge is compartmentalized and where top members have made so many sleazy deals with death squads, cocaine dictators, neo-Nazis and secret police agencies that they can't always remember the appropriate line to be spouted.
The EIR article concludes that the Zapatistas "must be disarmed, and the Constitution's rule must be reestablished over the entire national territory, putting an end to the so-called 'autonomous areas.'" Readers should note that Carrasco and López Ochoa make no mention of disarming the paramilitary squads set up by the Army, the PRI and the caciques--the squads that exist in one MSIA statement and don't exist in the other. And the ultimate message from the MSIA? To hell with the National Mediation Commission, to hell with any further attempts at peaceful resolution of the Chiapas conflict...let the killing begin!
"The 'apostles of hypocrisy' in Chiapas," Carlos Cota Meza, EIR (July 24, 1998). Article is an all-out attack on clerics who support the peace process and social justice for the indigenous minority in Chiapas. Calls Bishop Ruiz an "apostate" and says he's the "real commander of the Zapatistas." (Given the social and ethnic tensions and right-wing hysteria in Chiapas at the time, the accusation about Ruiz leading the armed struggle amounts to urging the Chiapas paramilitaries to kill him--indeed, Ruiz had been the target, along with his coadjutor, Bishop Raul Vera, of an unsuccessful ambush by the LaRouche-connected Peace and Justice paramilitaries on Nov. 4, 1997 (which was followed the next day by an attempt to kill Bishops Ruiz' sister).
Cota Meza expresses great indignation against David Fernández, head of the Jesuit human rights organization PRODH, who had staunchly supported Bishop Ruiz's work in Chiapas. The LaRouchian writer takes the fact that Father Fernández, like human rights workers in general, supports equal rights for gays and lesbians, and turns this into a tirade against "deviant homosexual passions." Given the rabid hatred and fear of homosexuality that permeates the LaRouche organization, the statement was clearly intended as a justification for demonizing Fernández. And given the homophobia in much of Mexican society, the final two paragraphs--which quoted from a Mexican Council of Bishops condemnation of homosexuality--were clearly meant to intensify the effects of the other smears against the Jesuits and to encourage third-party attacks on them.
"EZLN Coup in Mexico Sets Stage for Dismembering Mexico," Gretchen and Dennis Small, EIR (April 13, 2001). More special pleading for an all-out offensive in Chiapas. The authors argue that the "very existence" of the Mexican nation is at stake since if the indigenous peoples in Chiapas are allowed any autonomy they will inevitably set up their own country. The Smalls link this to a larger plot, claiming that "narco-terrorist armies are expanding over great swaths of territory" and all of Ibero-America is at risk.
In a typical Orwellian trick--apparently motivated by the need to provide cover for LaRouche's new recruitment efforts among left-leaning students on U.S. college campuses--EIR now calls the Zapatistas in Chiapas "fascists." Presumably this semantic alchemy also transforms the Chiapas paramilitaries into "anti-fascists."
And similar semantic trickery is used re the Chiapas Amerindians: If they were to accept a subordinate role in Mexico without autonomy they could be welcomed into the fold as partners of Western Christian civilization. If they persist, however, in demanding autonomy (and land to grow coffee beans or set up eco-tourists lodges) then they will be allowing themselves to be transformed by the Jesuits, the anthropologists, the Jews, etc. into a separate cultural "subspecies" with all the consequences that flow therefrom.
This type of thinking is rather like that of the Spanish Inquisition in its war against religious heretics--only this time it's a matter of killing culture-heretics to save their cognitive potential (LaRouche doesn't really believe in an immortal soul) from being blocked, and their brains from remaining in, or falling back into, the hideous condition of subspecies-hood.
"The 'Anti-Globalization' Zapatistas' New Globalism," Ruben Cota Meza, EIR (May 25, 2001). Cota Meza alleges a plot by Rothschild cousin Teddy Goldsmith--who is identified as a "Franco-British magnate," i.e., a cosmopolitan (wink, wink)--to promote "radical pluri-cultural ecologism" by way of Zapatista "terrorism." The author is especially incensed over the promotion in Chiapas of cooperatives for small indigenous coffee growers (at the expense, presumably, of corporate agrobusinesses and of ranchers who had backed the paramilitaries) and complains that Starbucks is buying coffee from the cooperatives as a result of "terrorist-like methods of pressure and blackmail."
"Rebellion in Chiapas and the Mexican Military," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 109. Summary of U.S. intelligence documents re Chiapas released under the Freedom of Information Act that may shed light on the LaRouche organization's relationship to the Mexican military. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable dated Jan. 27, 1994 says:
"[t]he Mexican military is trying through a variety of means to show that the EZLN force it now combats is a bigger than life underground group of vast international connections. A good portion of the Defensa claims to substantiate that image have been patently incorrect..." Another late January cable reports that the Mexican military had "asked through many channels--including non-governmental sources--for contributions of names of suspected or possible members, supporters or contacts of EZLN" and had obtained lists that included virtually all the priests, friars and nuns in the Chiapas diocese from 1959 to the present. Cable says "these names are now on the Mexican military's list of known EZLN members" although "we have been told that the military has no way of knowing whether or not most of the people...are, in fact, in any way involved or connected [with EZLN]."
Considering that the Mexican generals had been so impressed by the LaRouche organization's counter-insurgency ideology that they'd published their own edition of The Plot to Annihilate the Armed Forces and the Nations of Ibero-America, it's almost certain that they would have accepted eagerly any input from the "non-governmental source" known as the MSIA. And in fact, the LaRouchians would publish in EIR in 1995 (see previous item) a dossier on the EZLN and its support networks that claimed that "8,000 catechists in the networks of
Bishop Ruiz...operate as organizers and coordinators of the EZLN" (this expands the suggested list of targets for repression way beyond "all the priests, friars and nuns in the Chiapas diocese").
And the same dossier would also finger a vast number of Mexican civil organizations (for instance, it says: "Of the 254 NGOs listed in the directory of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights, approximately 90% make up the EZLN's support network." It would appear that LaRouche's followers not only wanted to turn Chiapas into a killing field but also were envisioning a nationwide roundup of noncombatants such as occurred in Chile and Argentina in previous decades...
The Mexican Army's October 1994 plan for crushing the Zapatistas, Proceso (Jan. 4, 1998). Carlos Marín analyses the strategy produced by the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), headed at the time by Gen. Antonio Riviello Bazán, for saving Mexico's sovereignty from the threat of indigenous peoples in Chiapas who supposedly have a "genetic" tendency to make trouble and would dismember Mexico and create a new Central American state of their own. (Actually, the EZLN has advocated autonomous local communities for indigenous peoples while calling for a larger social justice agenda for all Mexicans that gained widespread support in the nation at large.) The plan includes (a) supporting civilian paramilitary groups and (b) displacing indigenous people from their homes and farms to order to deprive the EZLN of a support base. (Both of these tactics would in fact be utilized--with paramilitary violence playing the key role in forcing indigenes to flee their homes and gather in refugee camps.)
There are a number of elements in the thinking underlying this plan--including the laying of heavy blame on the local Catholic diocese and foreign anthropologists, and the fear that foreign powers might interfere to destroy the nation--that appear remarkably similar to passages in EIR's The Plot to Annihilate the Armed Forces and the Nations of Ibero-America. The EIR book was completed in 1993 and thus does not place a major emphasis on any EZLN threat, although EIR and Resumen ejecutivo would become obsessed with the EZLN as soon as the January 1994 uprising began. The book probably does not reflect a pre-existing Mexican military policy: the uprising caught the Mexican Army by surprise and Mexican intelligence units had very little information about the enemy--indeed, didn't even have analysts who could speak the tribal languages--according to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reports at the time.
Nevertheless, The Plot (which the Mexican military reprinted in an edition of their own), as well as other EIR propaganda that focussed specifically on the EZLN and the Catholic church in Chiapas, may have had some influence on the Mexican government's murderous strategy concocted in the midst of the Bishop Ruiz-led peace talks--talks that the government would later sabotage.
Defense Intelligence Agency report suggests that Mexico hired Argentine ex-military human rights abusers to help repress Chiapas rebels. The DIA cited an article from Clarín, Argentina's largest daily: "Argentine specialists in urban guerrilla warfare are reported to be acting as advisors to Mexican military and police forces in their fight against the [Zapatistas]....Argentine Minister of Defense Oscar [Camilion] publicly denied that any active duty Argentine military personnel were operating in Mexico as either observers or advisors. His denial, however, left open the possibility that either former...or retired military officers may be working in Mexico without the official sanction of the Argentine government."
The DIA also summarized a report from the Buenos Aires Herald: "In March of 1994, the Mexican government was reported to have sent a delegation to Buenos
Aires to obtain information about the methods used in Argentina during the...'dirty war' of the 1970's. Many of the Argentine military officers who were the leaders during the dirty war were found guilty of human rights abuses, sentenced to jail, and discharged from the military. Although their jail sentences were latter [sic] pardoned by presidential decree, they were not reinducted into the military. Camilion was reported to have said that it would not be strange for such unemployed military officers to pack their bags and work in Mexico."
In other words, they probably were helping the Mexican army. And there is a very good chance that some of these "advisors" had prior contact with the LaRouche organization, which had staunchly supported the military uprisings by the Carapintadas (painted faces) in the 1980s that resulted in pardons for military human rights abusers--and which also had developed a warm relationship with imprisoned Carapintada leader Seineldin. (See Lyndon LaRouche Watch's menu of documents on the LaRouche organization's Argentine connections here).
So, were the LaRouchians in Chiapas working directly with the Argentine advisors? Is this yet another example of the carapintada-LaRouche alliance to save the armed forces and nations of Ibero-America from "annihilation"?
Reports on Bishop Ruiz from the files of Mexico's Federal Security Directorate (DFS). Documents of Mexico's brutal and corrupt (and now defunct) secret police, obtained by Artículo7, reveal a pattern of smears and exaggerations against Bishop Ruiz and the Church in Chiapas dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s--long before the formation of the Zapatista movement. The DFS regarded as subversive Bishop
Ruiz's policy of allowing catechists to minister to the people's spiritual needs in places not served by priests. This is a theme that the LaRouchians would harp on in the 1990s.
A report from 1981 describes information provided by the Secretary General of LaRouche's Mexican Party of Labor (PLM), Marivilia Carrasco. The report was signed by DSF chief Miguel Nazar Haro, who had been a high level participant in Mexico's "dirty war" against leftists. Carrasco's allegations probably received Nazar Haro's personal attention because the PLM had caught the fancy of his boss, President José López Portillo, who would become a fan (of sorts) of LaRouche's ideas.
Carrasco accused Bishop Ruiz of working for the "Anglo-American financial oligarchy" and of inciting violence. She also tried, bizarrely, to link the bishop to Carlos Hank González, then the regent (mayor) of Mexico City and later a major drug trafficker.
In 1981, the PLM was the central vehicle for LaRouchism in Mexico, later to be replaced by the MSIA, which Carrasco would also run. At the time she provided her accusations to the DSF, one of her co-leaders of the PLM was Cecilia Soto, who would later serve six years (2000-2006) as Mexico's ambassador to Brazil.
Nazar Haro, sacked only a few days after López Portillo left office, would become notorious for his participation in the torture of political prisoners (see Mexican prosecutors' report here). He was regarded so highly by the CIA that it moved to quash a U.S. prosecution of him in the early 1980s--while he was still at the DSF--for running a car theft ring (read here). On March 3, 2004, The Los Angeles Times reported that the former secret police chief had just been hit with back-to-back indictments by two different Mexican federal judges for his involvement in atrocities during the country's "dirty war"--first for the "1975 kidnapping of an urban rebel who was never seen again" and second for the "1974 disappearance of a Communist rebel leader." (Read a collection of LA Times articles on Nazar Haro here.) Nazar Haro and DFS have also been linked to narcotics trafficking and the 1985 torture-murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena (read March 1990 cable from American Consul in Hermosilla, Mexico to the U.S. Customs Service in Washington at pp. 26-27 here).
The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico (RAND Arroyo Center, 1998). The Arroyo Center is federally funded and is sponsored by the U.S. Army. This study was prepared for the Army under Contract No. DASW01-96-C-0004. Although not a polemic against LaRouche, it does a pretty good job of demolishing what it calls "alarmist views" about the Zapatistas. Says the group evolved from an emphasis on guerrilla action to the practice of "netwar," resulting in the Mexican Army's heavy presence in Chiapas being countered by a "swarming" of NGOs (the concept of "swarm" here is clearly used in a humorous rather than nasty way). The report suggests that the government and the Zapatistas continue to seek some common ground, even though on very narrowly focused issues. The authors don't regard the Zapatistas or even the Marxist guerrillas in a nearby state as being a major threat to the Mexican nation. They advise the U.S. to adopt a "tempered rather than alarmist view" and to be wary of "close association" with "heavy-handed" policies if the Mexican military should revert to such methods(see pages 111-112).
LaRouche & Co. are mentioned in a footnote of pp. 81-82:
"There are reports, mostly from activists, that Lyndon LaRouche's organization was providing material support and ideological guidance to already well-established paramilitary forces in Chiapas. It has been sending books, articles, pamphlets, even e-mail, arguing that the U.S. and international capitalist organizations like the Internationl Monetary Fund (IMF) are trying to destabilize Latin America." It's noteworthy that the authors don't describe who LaRouche is, apparently assuming that their readers already know about him. The characterization of his message focuses on the more "rational" aspect of it and doesn't give the full flavor of his racism, alarmism and fanatical incitements to violence; but, hey, it's just a footnote.
"Behind Mexico's big narcotics bust," Josefina Menéndez, EIR (Nov. 27, 1984). This article is a smear of the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN)--the chief rival of the then-ruling PRI. Article calls the PAN the "party of drugs" (as if the PRI had clean hands!) and boasts that the Mexican Party of Labor (the name used by the LaRouche organization at that time) had passed out 300,000 leaflets linking the PAN to gun running and the "international drug mafia." Claims that the PAN promotes "Nazi policies" but also that it is backed by "the Sinarquist international network," i.e., the Jews. Boasts that the leaflet was "reproduced in a majority of the state newspapers in the north, center and south of Mexico, as well as by radio and even on television." The aim? "[W]ithdrawal of the PAN's registration as a political party." (LaRouche's minions have used such smear tactics and dirty tricks in the country's politics since the 1970s. It's widely believed that for most of this period they've been in the pay of the PRI--the huge and famously corrupt party that controlled Mexico in a quasi-authoritarian fashion for over 70 years, losing the presidency to the PAN's Vicente Fox in 2000 but remaining quite powerful throughout the country.)
The Big Smear. Front and back cover of the English language translation (1985) of book by LaRouche's Mexican Party of Labor devoted mostly to attacking the PAN. Typical headings in the table of contents: "The Nazi-Communist Conspiracy," "The Controllers of the PAN in the U.S.," "Gnosticism, the Religion of the PAN," and "Why the PAN Hates Benito Juarez."
"Mexico's LaRouche Youth Make Castañeda Crawl," EIR (Sept. 26, 2003). Boasts of the LaRouche youth group's harassment of Presidential hopeful Jorge Castañeda, who is Jewish, in the period leading up to the 2004 elections. Note that the headline refers to the "LaRouche Youth" (like the "Hitler Youth"), although the text of the article refers to the LYM. What's the real message of the headline? That a reborn Hitler Youth made a Jew crawl in the dirt?
"LaRouche's Voice Heard in Mexican 'Mega-March' Against Usury," EIR, Dec. 12, 2003. "Mexican nationalists are on the move," boasts EIR. Here we see LaRouche & Co. playing the anti-Semitism card on behalf of the out-of-power PRI against Vicente Fox's PAN government and also in support of PRI members in the Chamber of Deputies who were in the process of removing their own party chief, Elba Esther Gordillo. (EIR called her "a 'traitor' fronting for the userers"--thus attempting to add a dimension of ideological hate to what was in essence a conventional power struggle in a party still reeling from its historic defeat in 2000.)
The LaRouchians suggest that proposals to privatize the state owned oil and utility companies are part of a "Wall Street-London financier" plot, and their use of the word "usury" is supplemented by a focus on individuals widely known to be Jewish, in this case George Soros and his "pet Mexican asset, Jorge Castañeda." The article ruminates on how "the bankers' boys" are intending to "pulverize" the PRI, and how Castañeda supposedly advocates policies that would "shatter the institutions which hold Mexico together." However, EIR hopes for a "rebellion of nationalist political forces against the destruction wrecked [sic] by usury"...hmmm.
"How the 'LaRouche Youth' stalked and threatened Jorge Castañeda," Diario Monitor, April 18, 2004 (translation into English). Someone really, really wanted Castañeda out of the 2006 Presidential race, and the LaRouchians stepped up to the plate. Article by Juan Carlos Romero and extensive footnotes by Lyndon LaRouche Watch show how independent reform candidate Castañeda's Jewish enthnicity was made an issue by LYM activists who dogged him on the pre-campaign trail, vowing "we are going to finish you off." Footnotes discuss the LaRouchians' frequent use of references to "usury" and cosmopolitan "treason" to drive home their message of hate.
Castañeda, Soros and the "British." This is a LaRouche political action committee press release from Jan. 9, 2009 that would have been circulated in a Spanish language version by the Mexican LYM. Calls Castañeda a "Soros agent" working to block U.S.-Mexican cooperation against the drug cartels. Also says Castañeda is a "well-known British agent-of-influence" (i.e., is well-known to be of Jewish ethnicity) "whose career has been dedicated to the destruction of the sovereign nation-state on behalf of private banking interests" (i.e., is one of those cosmopolitan Jews whose loyalty is to the giant international conspiracy of the Rothschilds and other alleged "oligarchs"). Further, the release complains that Castañeda had been named in 2003 to the "Soros-financed" Human Rights Watch's executive board. Human Rights Watch just happens to be one of the international organizations that stand as a bulwark against the escalation of murderous violence by the Chiapas paramilitaries against indigenous peoples--violence that LaRouche (and the PRI) encouraged for so many years. Thus we see here--implicitly--the merging of anti-Semitic and racist themes that is so common elsewhere around the world and which LaRouche expressed in a U.S. context by his 2010 rants calling for an "Ides of March" type removal of President Barack Obama and the purging of those of Obama's advisers who were Jews (the "pragmatists").
Former Mexican President praised LaRouche in 1998 interview with EIR. For those who think the LaRouchians are too nuts to gain any influence in Latin America, this is a cautionary example. Here's José López Portillo, President of Mexico from 1976 to 1982, calling for LaRouche's pet project, a "new Bretton Woods system." López Portillo says he still stands by the LaRouche-drenched speech about a New Dark Age that he gave at the UN in 1992 after meeting with LaRouche. And he says: "As President, I had a relationship with Mr. L.H. LaRouche of respect for his solidly independent and tenacious position which I share in large measure..."
One of the things López Portillo, who died in 2004, and LaRouche had in common was a tendency to ruminate about Jewish machination in thinly veiled language. Asked by EIR about "Shylock, the usurer of The Merchant of Venice," the former President inveighed at some length against "usurious" conditions, pounds of flesh, etc., saying: "We [Mexico] resorted to Shylock to sell him our petroleum blood, before he could try to cut the flesh, and so we could pay him his due."
And López Portillo continued: "I...know how to deal with Shylock. When I issued categorical instructions, in 1982, that Mexico would declare a suspension of payments, the U.S. negotiators withdrew the unacceptable conditions, not without first obtaining some other usurious benefits."
"The Cult Leader meets the Kleptocrat-in-Chief." A tongue-in-cheek view of López Portillo's relationship with the LaRouchians. If you subtract anti-Semitism and DSF torturers from the equation, the story of this match made in hell is actually quite funny.
"We do not regard all cultures and nations as equally deserving of sovereignty or survival." Here's the page image of this LaRouche statement from his prescription for fascism in the United States (The Case of Walter Lippmann, 1977). Note that LaRouche's two examples of the undeserving are (a) native Americans and (b) the nation of Mexico at the time of the Mexican-American War of 1848. The propaganda LaRouche and his minions aimed at the Mexican military in the 1990s--in an attempt to persuade them to launch a bloody crackdown on indigenous peasants in Chiapas--emphasized the first example but was understandably silent about the second one.
2. LaRouchian meddling in Chiapas - news articles and NGO reports
Samuel Ruiz García, 1924-2011.3. LaRouchian propaganda re Chiapas, 1994
4. LaRouchian propaganda and dossiers re Chiapas, 1995
5. LaRouchian propaganda re Chiapas and the Acteal massacre, 1997-2001
6. What U.S. and Mexican government files reveal
Marivilia Carrasco of the MSIA. Her organization broke with LaRouche in 2003, but it continues to advocate what one might call "LaRouchism without LaRouche," concentrating on environmental issues.
Miguel Nazar Haro (born 1927), assassin and torturer during Mexico's "dirty war" against leftists. He founded the White Brigade death squad and then served as the nation's secret police chief during the Presidency of the late José López Portillo (a friend of the LaRouche movement). Nazar Haro become notorious as the protector of the Guadalajara drug cartel, which prospered while he was Mexico's top cop.7. The LaRouchians in national Mexican politics: smear artists, dirty tricksters and purveyors of anti-Semitism
8. What LaRouche really thinks about Mexico and Mexicans