Mexico's LaRouche Youth
Make Castañaeda Crawl
by Gretchen Small
The growing LaRouche Youth Movement in Mexico delivered a potentially mortal blow to one of the International Synarchists' principal projects to rip that country apart, when they derailed the Presidential campaign of former Secretary of Foreign Relations, Jorge Castañaeda, Jr. In back-to-back interventions, the young activists deflated campaign events in mid-September, in the industrial city of Monterrey and the capital Mexico City.
Presidential elections are in 2006, and many Mexicans dismiss the early bid of the despised former Foreign Secretary as some personal power bid, not a threat to the nation. LaRouche movement organizers have been told that they should concentrate on greater political enemies, because Castañeda has no real power base inside the country, and little or no chance of being elected. But many a country has been destroyed by such "insider" evaluations of national politics, which foolishly fail to take into account the global strategic forces deployed to determine what appear to be "local" politics. As we detail in the profile of him which follows, Castañeda's campaign today—whatever happens in 2006—is a threat to Mexico's national existence, not due to his domestic power, but because he is the instrument of an imperialist neo-conservative operation to break up Mexico.
Luckily for Mexico, the LaRouche movement there thinks strategically, from the top.
Mexico's Schwarzenegger
Castañeda's campaign travels had gone well until Sept. 8, when he hit Monterrey. The arrogant candidate, accustomed to being fawned over by other Wall Street lackeys, found a different welcome waiting for him: A dozen-plus LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) members showed up at his campaign event, armed with leaflets titled, "How Are Arnie Schwarzenegger and Castañeda Alike?" and banners denouncing his ties to Dick Cheney's "Houston Oil Cartel" and to George Soros. Their persistent questions as Castañeda spoke, threw the candidate into a fit.
The LYM promised him: "We are going to follow you everywhere, and finish you off, the way we'll finish off Arnold Schwarzenegger."
The intervention was featured by the local media. Journalists reported Castañaeda's sarcastic exclamation, "Ah! my good friend Lyndon!" as he left his ruined event, and noted he was referring to the United States' Lyndon LaRouche. Castañaeda assured reporters, however, that "I don't think I'm going to find them everywhere."
Three days later, on Sept. 11, Castañaeda had his next campaign event scheduled at one of the nation's leading scientific training centers, the National Polytechnical Institute (IPN) in Mexico City. Regular LYM deployments and pedagogicals at the IPN have turned that institution into a hotbed of discussion of LaRouche's ideas. The LYM was out early on Sept. 11 at the campus, preparing its reception for Castañaeda. When he arrived, he couldn't get out a sentence without hearing the truth. At his introduction, an organizer denounced him as an agent for Soros, out to legalize drugs. At his plan was to double oil exports, others yelled: "To sell it to Halliburton, Dick Cheney's pirates!" His state of agitation worsened when he heard: "We're the LaRouche Youth Movement, and we'll follow you everywhere."
On Sept. 12, every major newspaper in the country reported that Castañaeda had fled his IPN event in a panic, crawling on his knees and climbing through a broken window, to escape a crowd of 500 students and professors not fooled by his "Ideas for Change." His flight from the cries of "Cheney's puppet!" "Traitor!" and "Sell-out!" became the buzz of the country's TV and radio talk shows, and in the political gossip columns.
And so was the fact that, just as in Monterrey three days before, it was the LaRouche movement that did it.
La Crónica reported that Castañaeda "lamented that this was the second time in which sympathizers of the U.S. labor [sic] leader Lyndon LaRouche had been present to wreck an academic event." He told Reforma daily, with some awe, that the LaRouche youth are "a complete machine, because they had people in Monterrey and people today in Mexico City." A leading national radio commentator, sympathetic to Castañaeda, demanded authorities investigate, claiming, absurdly, that it takes "a lot of money" to make such interventions.
A column in El Heraldo summed the situation up: "Castañaeda ran into a serious roadblock in his run for the candidacy. The shouts of youth from the Politécnico forced him to hide.... He now knows that if he's serious about it, so are others."
Lincoln-Juárez Alliance
On Sept. 15, the national daily Milenio attempted to defend Castañaeda with a front-page slander against LaRouche. Milenio zeroed in on what most upsets Castañaeda's backers: "With these groups of Mexican youth," the daily reported, LaRouche intends to develop "a cross-border alliance ... that will revive 'the tradition of the alliance between [then-Mexican President] Benito Juárez and Abraham Lincoln, in favor of the sovereignty of Mexico' and against the hidden alliances of George Bush and George Soros." This is, indeed, the policy promoted by LaRouche, most famously in his 1982 development strategy for all of Ibero-America, entitled Operation Juárez. Castañaeda's owners fear Mexican leaders could turn to it.
Mexicans once again discovered, that LaRouche and his people intend to revive U.S.-Mexican cooperation for development, defeating Castañeda in the process. Milenio moaned that he may face more such interventions. The IPN group of "the LaRouche Youth Movement ... is only one of at least 30 already active in different centers of higher learning in Mexico," the paper worried, adding that the LYM is expanding worldwide.