Colombian LaRouche Movement:
Vote for Great Projects, Maglev
The following leaflet, "Vote for the Darién Train and the Metro for Bogotá," was put out on Sept. 20 by Maximiliano Londoño as president of the LaRouche Association in Colombia, and by the Colombian chapter of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), to intervene in the Oct. 28 national elections. The leaflet specifically addresses the race for mayor of Bogotá, in which Samuel Moreno is running as the candidate who favors a metropolitan train system for the capital city. The Moreno campaign decided to print 50,000 copies of this leaflet, which are now being circulated in Bogotá by mixed squads of LYM and Moreno campaign organizers. The leaflet was translated from Spanish for EIR.
Only here in "Macondo" would there be discussion over whether there should be a Metro in Bogotá and whether Colombia should have electric trains and magnetic levitation trains, while in the rest of the world, nations are going ahead and simply building these great projects. The government of Japan has announced that it will abandon its bullet trains, which travel at more than 300 km an hour, because that technology is already obsolete, and will replace them with maglev trains that travel at more than 500 km an hour. The Russian government announced in April that Russia will build a tunnel under the Bering Strait, to connect the Eurasian continent with the Americas.
Thus, one would be able to travel in electric trains from Madrid, Spain, or any other European capital, across the entire European continent, follow the nearly 10,000 km of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Russia, go to Alaska through the Bering Strait Tunnel, cross Canada, the United States, Mexico and Central America, to arrive at the Darién Train (with which the misnamed Darién Gap would be eliminated) between Colombia and Panama. From there, one could continue on two or three railroad branches (one along the Pacific coast, one along the Atlantic coast, and another down the central region of South America to cross Brazil), to reach the south of the continent in Patagonia, Argentina.
Any traveler, from any nation in the world, could arrive in Bogotá by this World Rail Land-Bridge (that is to say, the current Eurasian Land-Bridge with its extension to the American continent) and could travel within the city on a modern Metro, through which one could connect to every regional, national, and international railroad network. At least 8,000 km of wide-gauge rails in both directions and totally electrified, would traverse Colombia from North to South, and from East to West.
To prevent this great project of world integration from being carried out—at least with regard to Colombia, which is a key link in this global network of development and infrastructure corridors—the oligarchy has to date succeeded in halting the construction of modern railroads, which thus far has included the Metro for Bogotá, Cali, and Barranquilla. The Anglo-Dutch oligarchy has sponsored the political careers of the enemies of modern railroads, to keep Colombia as a feudal state. It was the international financial pirates, who intend to run the world from Wall Street and the City of London, who invented the so-called Transmilenio system, an elephantine and inefficient bus system, in place of the absolutely essential urban electric trains. The Transmilenio is the largest and most costly fraud to be imposed on Colombians on orders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, agencies which represent the decaying international financial cartel which is today suffering through its worst crisis.
American statesman and economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. is the architect of the proposal to build a new, just international monetary and financial system, to replace the decrepit and usurious IMF. This New Bretton Woods, or new international financial architecture, will generate enormous volumes of long-term, low-interest credit to finance great infrastructure projects associated with the World Land-Bridge. It was precisely to discuss these questions and the ongoing collapse of the current international financial system, that the movement associated with LaRouche held a conference in Kiedrich, Germany Sept. 15-16, attended by 350 people from 40 nations, entitled, "The Eurasian Land-Bridge Is Becoming a Reality."
Financing the Metro
There are many ways that building a Bogotá Metro could be financed. First, a Financial Reconstruction Corporation (or some great national infrastructure fund) must be established, authorized to issue bonds. This was the model used by [U.S. President Dwight] Eisenhower to finance the construction of the United States' great highway sytem. In addition to this concept of a Capital Budget, a portion of Colombia's foreign reserves could be channeled into that fund for financing infrastructure (and the Bogotá Metro, in particular). This is precisely the idea behind the Bank of the South: to create a financial instrument, part of whose reserves would be designated for financing great projects, rather than permitting our money to sit in foreign banks, which use the funds but don't lend them to us when we need them.
In the early years of the U.S. Republic, the first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, issued money that was used as credit for financing the development of manufactures (industrialization), mechanization of agriculture, and promotion of great infrastructure works. The primary issuance of money was backed by the production of machine tools and tangible goods, which counteracted any inflationary tendency.
LaRouche has warned that the U.S. housing crisis and collapse of the dollar are only a manifestation of the explosion of the financial bubble that has been building for the past nearly 40 years, since the United States abandoned the policy of encouraging industry and science that was promoted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a policy with which he pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, and saved humanity from the threat of the Nazi dictatorship.
The oligarchy is hysterical over the candidacy of Samuel Moreno Rojas for Mayor of Bogotá, among other reasons, because he is the grandson of Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (and because he has expressed his support for the proposal to build a modern transport system for the city, around a Metro). The oligarchs in our country, peons of the international financial speculators, get goosebumps when they think about the mere possibility that a person might escape the iron-fisted control of the usurers' cartel that has long run the country, and could win a key governing position in Colombia.
It was President Rojas Pinilla (1953-57) who built a large portion of what little there is of national infrastructure in Colombia, including the El Dorado airport and 18 others. From the very beginning, Rojas had reserved lands for the expansion of a second airport runway, but afterwards, President Alberto Lleras Camargo gave those lands away, and now it will be necessary to buy them at astronomical prices. In the end, Rojas had paved nearly all of the major highways, and had built a large portion of the aqueducts, sewer systems, and highways across the nation.
Also, in 1956, Rojas created the Colombian Institute of Nuclear Affairs, through which we became pioneers in this field of scientific research. Rojas also contracted the services of David Lilienthal, who, during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration in the U.S., ran the famous state-run Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Lilienthal proposed to Rojas that the Cauca and Sinu river basins could serve as the underpinnings of a Colombian TVA system. The TVA built electrical energy plants, dams, canals, aqueducts, hospitals, highways, universities, and more.
To take up the path of development, jobs and peace, vote in favor of the Darién Railroad and the Bogotá Metro. Organize your family, friends, and fellow citizens to give their support to these initiatives that will offer Colombia the possibility of becoming a genuine industrial and agricultural power, to create the jobs necessary so that we don't have to export our own citizens, as is happening now. More than 5 million people have had to leave the country because here, they can't even earn the miserable wages they can earn as slave labor in the U.S. and Europe.
Colombia should join the World Land-Bridge without delay, beginning with the construction of a Darién Train and a Metro for Bogotá.
