LAROUCHE IN MEXICO:
`I Think We're at
A Breakthrough Time'
by Dennis SmallHenry Kissinger had said it would never happen again, but it did.
Back in the early 1980s, Kissinger had sworn that never again would Lyndon LaRouche be allowed to visit Mexico—as he had four times between 1979 and 1982, under the Presidency of José López Portillo—and use the unique characteristic of the U.S.-Mexican relationship to turn the entire world upside down. Working closely with López Portillo, LaRouche had placed the issue of a top-down reorganization of the international financial system at center stage of world events, and using the programmatic concepts laid out in his 1982 study Operation Juárez, LaRouche nearly succeeded in putting the entire IMF-based system out of its misery.
Kissinger—and his synarchist banker masters—never forgave López Portillo nor LaRouche for that effort, and vowed that the American statesman would never again be allowed to gain such a strategic handle.
But, as has often been the case, Kissinger was wrong. LaRouche visited Monterrey, Mexico during the last week of March 2006, his third such visit to the north of Mexico in three and a half years. In November 2002, he had travelled to Saltillo, Coahuila to keynote an economics symposium at the Autonomous University of Coahuila. In March 2004, he visited Monterrey, invited by the Technological Institute of Monterrey to address an international conference on economics. And now again, in March 2006, the Tec (as it is known) invited LaRouche back, as we reported last week.
As he had 20 years earlier, LaRouche used his broad-ranging public and private policy discussions to shape not only Mexican and regional politics, but also the global strategic issues of finance and development—issues which are not being faced in the United States today.
Unlike the 1980s, LaRouche's principal interlocutor in this task today is not the current government of Mexico, which is headed by the lightweight Vicente Fox. Rather, at the far end of South America, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner is playing the leading role in uniting the continent around ideas akin to those associated with LaRouche. In fact, Kirchner is in many ways beginning to fill López Portillo's shoes.
As LaRouche put it in discussions with members of the LaRouche Youth Movement during his recent Monterrey visit:
"I think we're at a breakthrough time. The thing is, there's a difference in South America....
"People are waiting for an expression of unity, which is now coming into being, from Argentina north—it's coming. And it's power. And it connects to what we're doing, in the United States and Europe, especially the United States. Ideas as power."
Referring to the July Presidential elections in Mexico, LaRouche laid out a precise strategic orientation:
"You have an assortment of Presidential candidates for the July elections. Which is going to win? Well, you have got ideas who might win—but so what? What are any of .them going to do, independently? Nothing....
"The secret to power here lies in getting effective unity among some parts of South and Central America. What will determine things is what happens in the United States in the remaining months of this year, that's where the decision is going to come from. So, these two forces are crucial....
"We have to build two points of attack: one inside the United States, and one in the attempt to build a movement of unity among the nations of South and Central America."
Mexico, LaRouche noted, must resume its rightful leadership role on the continent, as López Portillo did back in 1982.
Over the course of his five-day stay in Monterrey, LaRouche repeatedly emphasized that, over the next three months, a global financial tsunami is going to hit and will redefine the political map of today's world. More than personalities, what must be discussed are the policies of economic cooperation and development urgently needed to survive and surmount the shocks to come.
Specifically, LaRouche emphasized the need for massive public-sector investment in water, transportation, and power systems, which would have a technological spillover effect in industry, agriculture, and in the urgently needed creation of millions of new jobs. He declared that Mexico should strengthen its oil sector in order to negotiate oil-for-technology agreements to move the country quickly into the age of nuclear power. Nuclear energy, he explained, is necessary not only to replace petroleum, which must be exploited more and more as a feedstock for chemical and other industrial processes, and less and less as an energy source, but also for the desalination of sea water, as key to solving critical water shortages in Mexico—especially in the arid northern region—as well as in many other parts of the world.
These and related programmatic issues were most fully addressed by LaRouche in a public meeting he held in Monterrey with politicians, trade unionists and others, which we reproduce immediately below. The driving force for such revolutionary changes, LaRouche explained, must come from young adults, youth in the 18-25 age bracket. They are "not only a generation to inhabit the future, but a generation which will create the future!"
LaRouche's lengthy dialogue with a meeting of 100 such youth—LaRouche Youth Movement members and guests from Mexico, Argentina, and the United States—is the second major feature we present as part of this package.
