The 19th-century British roots
of today's São Paulo Forum
by Cynthia R. Rush
Patriots across Ibero-America are right to be alarmed about the activities of Fidel Castro's São Paulo Forum. But they should not make the mistake of assuming that they are dealing simply with a group of communists and narco-terrorists who are out to overthrow governments and establish their Marxist utopias. We are not dealing here with your standard "communist threat."
The ideology guiding the Forum has been around for much longer than Fidel Castro—he is only its creation, and a recent one, at that. In reality, the São Paulo Forum is a continuation of the gnostic, British intelligence-controlled, freemasonic apparatus which, from even before South America's independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, has sought to chain the continent to London's geopolitical goals and bestial moral outlook.
A constant presence throughout this historical period, and one of Britain's primary instruments of destruction in the region, is found in the person of the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), who spent most of his adult life in England under the control of networks established by the founder of British intelligence, Jeremy Bentham, and his protégés such as Lord Palmerston, and John Stuart Mill of the East India Company (See "Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Human Zoo," EIR April 15, 1994). The organizations created by Mazzini and his British controllers, including the Ibero-American offshoots of the Young Europe and Young America movements—Young Cuba, Young Argentina, Young Brazil, and, in the 1940s and 1950s, the Caribbean Legion—sought, as the São Paulo Forum does today, to destroy any potential for the development of the sovereign nation-state, assaulting the institutions which defend and bolster it, such as the Armed Forces and the Catholic Church. They attacked the heritage of the Spanish evangelization of the New World and its Catholic cultural matrix, attempting to replace it with a degraded "Americanist" indigenist culture, based on separatism, "ethnicity," and "telluric emotions."
The end product was a manufactured, jacobin "democracy" which was launched as a battering ram on behalf of Britain's Black Legend—the lie that the entirety of Spain's political system and religious culture was the repository for "authoritarianism" which had to be overthrown. There were legitimate reasons for Ibero-American patriots to seek independence from Spain beginning in 1810, and many of them even looked to the young United States as a model for building sovereign republics. Mazzini's agitation for "national liberation" and "self-determination" was deployed to destroy the patriotic movement which sought to establish a unified Ibero-America. That destruction was a necessary precondition for the subsequent balkanization of the region, which resulted in the nineteenth century becoming, as the British still fondly call it, Ibero-America's "British century."
Breaking with the past?
"The theater of Incan history is the sierra [the mountains].... The sierra is nationality. Peru lives outside itself, cut off from its intimate and true self, because the sierra is superseded by the coast, wedded to Lima.... The monstrous urban plant will grow on the coast, extending its tentacles to the sea.... Civilization will produce its rotten fruits, and its flower of decadence will shine with brilliant colors, and its perverse, exquisite aroma will intoxicate. But one day, the Andean men will descend like the hordes of Tamburlain. The barbarians, for those of this Lower Empire, are on the other side of the mountains. [But] they will carry out the necessary expulsion [of the whites]."
This quote from Tempestad en los Andes (Storm in the Andes), written in 1924 by Peruvian indigenist and theosophist Luis Valcarcel, exemplifies the bestial, anti-western culture these networks advocated. Rejecting the achievements of the Renaissance and the philosophy of natural law, universal history, and universal truth, they made pre-Columbian ethnic culture and indigenism the centerpiece of their cultural ideal. Valcarcel collaborated with José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party and known practitioner of black masses, after whom the murderous Shining Path took its name. Mariátegui's indigenism was encouraged and guided by Emilio Segui, a former secretary to Giuseppe Mazzini, who financed Mariátegui's trip to Italy in the early 1920s to perfect his philosophy of anarchism and violence in politics.
In the prologue he wrote to Storm in the Andes, Mariátegui explained that "faith in the Indian resurgence does not come from a process of material Westernization of the Quechua land. It is not civilization, or the white alphabet which will ennoble the Indian soul. It is myth, it is the idea of the socialist revolution." In his 1925 essay Two Conceptions of Life, Mariátegui wrote that he rejected "the evolutionist, historicist, and rationalist philosophy ... [with] its superstitious worship of the idea of progress." That same year, he elaborated in another essay: "The force of the revolutionaries is not in their science; it is in their faith, their passion, their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force."
One of the primary organizing tools of this political current in the twentieth century, has been the publication of "cultural" magazines, such as Amauta, published in Peru by Mariátegui, and Sur magazine, founded by Víctoria Ocampo in Argentina. British historian John King, in his history of the Sur project, described Mariátegui's Amauta magazine as "perhaps the most interesting attempt in Latin America to fuse a radical line in politics with the cause of modernism in art."
It was the precursors and architects of modernism and cultural deconstruction, including the founders of the Frankfurt School of the 1930s, who were idolized by these networks: Pre-Raphaelite John Ruskin, Nazi philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—to whom Mariátegui dedicated his works—Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, and Pablo Picasso, to name a few. King adds that out of that admiration came "the interest in black culture, seen in Picasso's work of the 1920s; in French writer André Gide's visit to the Congo, and the development of black American music such as jazz." A synthetic "Afro-Cubanism" was fashioned out of what King described as intellectuals' fascination with Oswald Spengler's idea of "living close to the soil, at one with the rhythms and essence of nature." Likewise, Ocampo's American mentor, Waldo Frank, an advocate of "integral communism" who advised Mariátegui, Peruvian politico Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and Mexico's Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas, advocated the "cultural union of the Americas through the minorities."
Brazil's Landless Movement, an appendage of the São Paulo Forum-allied Workers Party, embodies this same ideology today. They argue that "the land is a mystery," which it seeks to "spiritualize" through violent land invasions. In the nineteenth century, José Martí, one of Mazzini's key operatives in the Cuban independence movement and a hero of the São Paulo Forum today, wrote that revolution will be made by "natural man ... the autochthonous mestizo" who, governed by his primitive emotions, race, and virility, "is prepared to seize respect by force from those who wound his susceptibilities." It is understood, he said, "that a country's form of government must accommodate itself to its natural elements; that absolute ideas ... must now be put into relative form." Nativism and "the fire of the heart" will free America, not "false erudition."
Not even the name of the São Paulo Forum's magazine, América Libre—Free America—is original: José Martí's magazine was named Nuestra América—Our America. América Libre Editor Frei Betto, in his address to the Fourth Plenary of the São Paulo Forum in Havana, emphasized the historical continuity of this project, stating that América Libre "lies in the tradition of Nuestra América, of José Martí, and also that of the magazine, Amauta, which José Carlos Mariátegui did in Peru." David Viñas, one of Victoria Ocampo's closest collaborators, today serves on América Libre's editorial board.
Separatism and revolution
Mazzini sent his lieutenant, Giuseppe Garibaldi, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where for ten years (1837-47), with the aid of the Young Argentina and Young Brazil organizations, he worked as a British operative in the Southern Cone. He organized a separatist movement in southern Brazil, and joined British and French naval forces in their attempts to overthrow the government of Argentine "dictator" Juan Manuel de Rosas, whose crime was his refusal to grant Britain free navigability of Argentina's rivers.
In Brazil, Garibaldi linked up with exiled members of Mazzini's Young Italy, such as Giovanni Battista Cuneo. Through Tito Livio Zambeccari, another exiled Mazziniite, Garibaldi contacted "revolutionaries" in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, became their mentor, and introduced them to Mazzini's ideas. One leader of this grouping was Bento Gonçalves da Silva, for whom Zambeccari was secretary, whose plan was to sever Rio Grande from the Brazilian monarchy and create an independent republic. One Garibaldi biographer reported that the group's political slogans were "in line with the tradition of Rousseau, of the French revolutionaries of 1789, and Mazzini."
Based in Rio Grande and later Montevideo, capital of the buffer state of Uruguay created as a result of British manipulation of Brazil and Argentina in 1828, Garibaldi organized a foreign legion of Italian exiles, Europeans, and a sizable number of North Americans, with the aim of "liberating" Rio Grande from the Brazilian monarchy, and uniting it with one or two provinces he intended to pull out of Rosas's Argentine Confederation, to form a new nation that would advance the British cause in the region.
In the end, Garibaldi's separatist plan failed, but his efforts contributed to Rosas's final overthrow in 1853.
Cuba: Mazzini's paradise
If there is any country in Ibero-America which has served as a laboratory for the application of Mazzini's concept of "national liberation," and all of its bestial cultural offshoots, it is Cuba itself. It is this history which explains Cuba's coordinating role today in Britain's São Paulo Forum project.
Cuba's strategic importance was understood early on by such republican humanists as Alexander von Humboldt and John Quincy Adams, as well as by the Young America slavetraders of the American Confederacy. As the Southern Standard, an American newspaper which expressed the views of the latter grouping, boasted in 1854, "With Cuba and Santo Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world."
Spain abolished Freemasonry in Cuba in 1824, but secret lodges sprang up nonetheless, to agitate for the island's phony "independence," often in collusion with U.S.-based Freemasons, among other things to ensure the continuation of the institutions of slavery and free trade. In the 1850s, Mazzini's Young America and Young Cuba movements fomented revolution on the island against Spain, while simultaneously organizing the invasion of mercenaries from New York—the "filibusters"—who hoped to seize control of the island, and annex it to the Union as a slave state.
Mazzini and his followers set up a vast organizing and propaganda apparatus in Italy on behalf of Cuban independence, some of whose members subsequently traveled to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and then remained in the country for decades afterward.
Many of these Mazziniites were crucial in shaping the island's political and educational institutions, and training several generations of "liberal youth," many of whom served in the Castro government after 1959. These included the founder of negrismo ("blackness"), Fernando Ortíz Francisco, who created Cuba's school of cultural relativism, and wrote the defining works on history, ethnology, linguistics, archeology, and political affairs. In 1926, he co-founded, with poet Nicolás Guillén, the Society of Afro-Cuban Studies, thus elevating synthetic "Afro-Cubanism" to the status of Cuba's "authentic" culture, in opposition to the legacy of the Spanish evangelization and European Renaissance. After Castro seized power, Ortíz set up the cultural department of the Ministry of Education.
London's Caribbean Legion
The Castro government was a direct product of this Mazziniite current, put in power by the group which dominated the politics of the Caribbean area in the decade of the 1940s and 1950s, the Caribbean Legion. The Legion, a group of "ex"-communists who publicly converted to social democracy but whose philosophical outlook remained that of the secret masonic lodges of the Caribbean and Central America to which many of them belonged, organized one guerrilla invasion after another in the area, before they became the great "democrats" of the region: Venezuela's Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rómulo Betancourt; Costa Rica's Pepe Figueres; Cuba's Carlos Prío Socarrás; and Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.
These "democrats" financed Fidel Castro's return to Cuba in 1958 to oust Fulgencio Batista—Prío Socarrás reportedly provided a quarter of a million dollars to Castro's operation—and maintained their ties to the island under various guises in the decades following. The Legion was run by British assets in the U.S. intelligence community, such as the Dulles brothers, and the British intelligence-controlled Permindex organization, of which Prío Socarrás was a board member. Permindex was later instrumental in organizing the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and attempts against the life of France's Charles de Gaulle.
The presence among the Caribbean Legion of Haya de la Torre, founder of Peru's APRA party, reflects the group's ideological origins, as well as its British "mother." His "Indo-Americanism," orginally intended to be a continental movement, was a gnostic belief-structure created to oppose Peru's Spanish, Catholic political and cultural heritage, and Haya made no bones about his British ties. In 1927, he boasted that the interim headquarters of APRA's executive committee were based in London. Even members of Mexico's Communist Party, at the time Haya was in exile in Mexico, considered Haya to be "an agent of British imperialism," and pointed to the fact that he was stipended by a wealthy, "pacifist" British lady, Ann Melissa Graves. In his 1985 book Mito y Realidad. Haya de la Torre, Orígenes del APRA, Peruvian historian Pedro Planas Silva published a photograph of Haya wrapped in a British flag, standing in the library of Protestant minister John MacKay. "His relations with MacKay, with Melissa Graves, and other British political personalities, generated such suspicion, that he came to be considered a 'spy' of the British Empire," Planas wrote.
Newspeak 'democracy'
All of the elements which go into the São Paulo Forum's political and cultural agenda today can be identified in the writings and subversive activities of these Mazzinian networks of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Central to that agenda was a fraudulent "democracy" like that demanded by the International Monetary Fund today. In 1942, Waldo Frank met and talked with APRA founder Haya de la Torre, who was then in hiding in Peru. The last true democracy in Ibero-America, was when the Incas ruled Peru, Frank told Haya. "That was the last true unity of South Pacific America. Its base was a democracy; and the base of the new unity, the new stability, will have to be democratic." In his program for hemispheric union, Frank proposed "at least a negative guarantee of basic democratic governments ... in the form of a refusal to recognize obvious dictatorships.... The American republics, considering themselves a family, have the right to keep their democratic house in order.... Of course, enforcement should always be a joint, collective effort" (emphasis added).
