CONFERENCE REPORT
Mexico-Brazil-Argentina Meeting:
'The Debt Must Suffer, Not the Debtors'
by Our Special Correspondent"We are all Argentina now": Conference chairman Marivilia Carrasco expressed the urgent mission—stopping a continent-wide economic catastrophe—which brought nearly 300 political, military, and constituency activists from Ibero-America's three largest nations together in Guadalajara, Mexico on Aug. 22-23. Lyndon LaRouche (by phone hook-up from the United States), former Mexican President José López Portillo, and other leaders addressed the historic meeting on the 20th anniversary of LaRouche's Operation Juárez economic integration strategy, written after he had met with then-President López Portillo, and of López Portillo's nationalization of Mexico's banks and declaration of a debt moratorium. The sessions, called "Mexico-Brazil-Argentina: The Hour of Integration; March Towards a New Bretton Woods," were broadcast live on Guadalajara's Radio Universidad, and worldwide on the Internet on www.larouchepub.com.
Political and retired military leaders from Brazil joined economic constituency activists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, behind the general leadership of LaRouche's Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA). Argentina's hero of the 1982 Malvinas War, Col. Mohamed Alí Seineldín—a prisoner of the country's disastrous International Monetary Fund (IMF) regimes of the past ten years—addressed the conference by telephone from an Argentine military prison.
LaRouche had intended to be present pesonally in Guadalajara, but Mexican authorities denied him the necessary security conditions to do so. In his keynote address, delivered by phone hook-up, he demanded that, to stop the economic disintegration, "the debt must suffer, not the people." He warned that any further bending to the IMF's and Wall Street's forced collection of hundreds of billions of dollars of absolutely unpayable debt, will throw the nations of the Americas into a dark age of untold misery like nothing seen since the 14th Century.
A Revived Operation Juárez
The last 12 months' descent of Argentina—until recently the most industrially advanced nation in South America—into generalized poverty and economic chaos, by following IMF prescriptions, has struck the patriots of the entire continent like a lightning bolt. Brazil is now within months of following Argentina into default collapse; Mexico is heading downward as even its maquiladoras shut down. Col. Romero Mundani reported scenes of Fourth World starvation of children in once-proud food-producer Argentina, which started tears of indignation and determination.
In 1982, the United States' betrayal of the Monroe Doctrine, by siding with Britain in the Malvinas War and opposing the nationalist economic measures of López Portillo's Mexico, began a period of "colonial" regression of every economy in Ibero-America. LaRouche was the lone American leader publicly fighting both those betrayals 20 years ago. But now, the United States-centered global economic collapse, on top of 20 years' looting and immiseration of Ibero-American labor forces, has set off an Africanization of the continent, led by the terrible disintegration of Argentina (see article, p. 4).
LaRouche's movement alone has spread the two truths upon which the Guadalajara conference was based: first, that economic collapse is spreading not from Argentina, but from the huge debt bubble known as the U.S. economy; and second, that the Ibero-American nations' only chance of survival now is through a continent-wide battle for economic integration through great projects of infrastructure. "Integration now!" read the banner at the podium in Guadalajara, in Portuguese and Spanish. This conference of leading patriots of the three nations, followed from five "Argentina-Brazil: The Moment of Truth" conferences organized by the MSIA over the past year in cities near the common border of those nations. Another large meeting is set for Paraná in Brazil in September. In Argentina, wide coverage of the Guadalajara meetings on Buenos Aires's radio stunned the Jacobin "World Social Forum" forces of George Soros (see article in this section).
The objective now is a revival of LaRouche's 1982 Operation Juárez strategy with the immediate aim of a New Bretton Woods conference. "If we want a better world, and we do," President López Portillo told the conference, "we must march toward a new international financial order." The message of the former Mexican President, the presentation and dialogue with Lyndon LaRouche, the remarks of Colonel Seineldín and Marivilia Carrasco, all from the Aug. 22 first session, follow.
