Ibero-American Memorial for LaRouche:
‘A Great Man Has Left Us,
But He Has Left Us His Ideas’

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this article]

April 22—An Ibero-American Memorial was held on April 11 to honor the great American statesman and world citizen, Lyndon LaRouche, the second of a series of such memorials. The first was held in South Africa,[fn_1] and memorial events will be held in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere over the coming months. The Ibero-American event was sponsored by the Schiller Institute; it linked together, in a videoconference format, live meetings in five cities (Mexico City, Querétaro and Hermosillo in Mexico; Lima, Peru; and Buenos Aires, Argentina), and was moderated from Purcellville, Virginia.

The gatherings brought together some 200 associates and friends of the LaRouche movement, who heard sections of recorded speeches by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, as well as messages of condolence received since LaRouche’s death on Feb. 12 of this year from prominent individuals from around the world who knew LaRouche and had worked with him—such as Ramsey Clark (former Attorney General of the United States), Sergey Glazyev (adviser to the President of Russia), Col. (ret.) Bao Shixiu (Professor at China’s Academy of Military Sciences), and others.

The audience—about half of whom were university students and other youth—also watched a video report on Lyndon and Helga LaRouche’s historic 2002 visit to Brazil, as well as dramatic footage of Mexican President José López Portillo’s October 1982 address to the United Nations General Assembly, which strongly reflected his personal discussion with Lyndon LaRouche in July of that year, and López Portillo’s December 1998 joint conference with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, where he issued his now famous call: “It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche.” LaRouche’s contributions to the science of classical culture were also highlighted by video clips of Norbert Brainin, lead violinist of the Amadeus Quartet.

The gathering also heard video tributes to LaRouche received from prominent political, trade union, government and social leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, testifying to the impact that LaRouche’s work had on their countries—of which we publish significant excerpts below.

After listening with concentration throughout the first part of the nearly two-hour program, individuals from the five gathered audiences in turn took the floor to express their deep appreciation for what LaRouche had done for them, their countries, and their ideals. There was general excitement at the recognition that the Memorial they were participating in showed that the LaRouche movement in Ibero-America is alive and kicking, and is a force to be reckoned with. Youth from Mexico and elsewhere took the lead in this discussion, recalling the way that exposure to LaRouche’s ideas had changed their lives and given them meaning—a gift which they hoped to pass on to future generations.

We first present excerpts from the opening remarks to the Memorial by its moderator, EIR Ibero-American Editor Dennis Small, followed by the excerpted messages, in the order they were delivered at the event.

Opening Remarks

Dennis Small: Gathered for this Memorial are five meetings being held in three countries: Mexico, Argentina and Peru. That is not an accident, because these are three of the four Ibero-American countries that Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche visited personally over the years (the fourth was Brazil). In the cases of Mexico and Argentina, he met with the Presidents of those countries during his visits, and this is just a small indication of the impact that his ideas had, and continue to have, across the continent . . .

As most of you know, Lyndon LaRouche passed away this past February 12. A little over 30 years earlier, on December 2, 1988, Lyndon LaRouche and a number of his associates were found guilty in a corrupt political trial in Alexandria, Virginia. Mr. LaRouche was sent to jail on January 27, 1989—30 years and three weeks before his death. The intention of those who jailed him, as in the case of the jailing of other great statesmen, such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, was to silence him, silence his ideas, and destroy his movement. They did not succeed in doing that.

The enemies of LaRouche, the guardians of the British imperial system, of the City of London and Wall Street, are totally convinced that now, with the physical passing of LaRouche, that finally his ideas and his movement will vanish. It is our intention, with the help of this series of memorials, to prove them wrong: that they have failed, and they will not achieve that. They truly believe that Man is nothing but flesh and blood, and exists only in the here and now. And that when he disappears physically, the power of that individual to change the physical universe that surrounds him, including the political universe, also disappears.

But that is based on a false idea of the nature of Man. Lyndon LaRouche dedicated his entire life to the idea that Man is creative and that he acts within a physical universe which is also creative. And that the essence of Man is creativity, which is something that goes way beyond the here and now, and is a substantial form of power which goes way beyond the finite time that he lives on this Earth. There is a simultaneity of eternity. Man, his soul, his mind, is immortal in that sense. And the best proof that that concept of Man is correct and that the contrary concept, that of the imperial system, is false, is this very process of memorials to Lyndon LaRouche.

Our intention is to achieve the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, not only because he was innocent, and those of us who went to jail with him are likewise innocent of what we were charged with—which the enemy knows perfectly well. We want justice for LaRouche in that regard. But justice for the man is justice for his ideas, and this is what concerns us most of all, because the ideas of LaRouche must become the living force to change the world, and it is that which the speculative financial enemy most fears.

The London Times about a week ago published an article as a kind of obituary on LaRouche—they took six weeks after his death to decide what they were going to say about him! Interspersed among the lies upon lies in that article, they said that there are two things that really worried them about LaRouche. The first was the influence LaRouche had in the Ronald Reagan government with regard to the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative and what that means for changing the entire international strategic order. And the second was that LaRouche met with Mexican President José López Portillo in 1982, and that they were acting together to totally change the international financial system. That is quite interesting.

The real problem the British Empire faces is something that they refuse to recognize. For this, I would like to briefly refer to Nicholas of Cusa, the 15th century philosopher and founder of modern physical science, who said the following: “Mind is the same as the soul of a human being. . . . Mind is a living substance. . . . Its function in this body is to give it life, and because of this it is called soul. Mind is a substantial form or power.”‘

What we would like to do in this Memorial to LaRouche, is to explore some aspects of that “substantial form or power” of his ideas. In addition to a discussion about his ideas in economics; in addition to some aspects of his work in science and classical culture; in addition to his work on the subject of the nation-state; perhaps the most important idea of all underlying all of the rest is LaRouche’s constant central point about the fundamental nature of Man: that Man as a species is different and superior to any other animal species, in the sense that the characteristic that distinguishes us is our creative capability, which is what also gives us morality. . . .

Lyndon LaRouche is perhaps best known in many parts of the world, including Ibero-America, for his economic proposals, and his battle to the death against the City of London and financial speculation, and in favor of world development based on great infrastructure projects, the establishment of a new credit system modeled on the system first developed by Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States. In this field, one of LaRouche’s best-known works is Operation Juárez, which came out of his relationship with Mexican President José López Portillo.

Now, it is true that LaRouche met with López Portillo in Los Pinos, the Presidential palace, in July 1982, after various earlier visits to Mexico. But in LaRouche’s mind this was not simply a relationship between himself and the Mexican President. LaRouche was working on a much bigger grand design, which was how to entirely get rid of the existing bankrupt and genocidal international monetary system, and replace it with a just New World Economic Order.

During this same period, LaRouche also met with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in order to organize a combination of forces capable of doing this.

And the third key piece in his grand design in statecraft on an international scale, was U.S. President Ronald Reagan. LaRouche was in dialogue with Reagan and the people around Reagan on exactly these same issues. When Reagan arrived in the Presidency, LaRouche saw a golden opportunity to achieve a combination of forces perhaps sufficient to bring about this profound international change he was working on.

Now there is an important parallel here which I would like you to keep in mind. The relationship which LaRouche developed with Reagan was a relationship on the basis of organizing him around ideas, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative and the economic program presented in Operation Juárez, because Ronald Reagan was not a President run by the Establishment. He was not a President run by Wall Street. He had his problems, his weaknesses, he made his mistakes, to be sure; but LaRouche saw in Reagan the possibility of achieving an international combination of forces that would be both sufficient and capable of destroying not merely the British Empire as such, but the principle of empire itself.

Lyndon LaRouche, in the years before his death and as we in his movement continue to organize in the same regard today, are organizing to bring together around LaRouche’s proposals four world powers that have the ability to jointly change the entire planet, and bring about a New World Economic Order. And those are the United States, Russia, China and India. And other countries could then unite around those four leading powers.

And in fact today, we have a President in the White House who, like Ronald Reagan, is not run by the Establishment. That’s why they have tried to overthrow him. That’s why they have organized any number of completely false scandals against him, including supposed collusion with the Russians. And it is quite important, even though we don’t have time to go into this in detail tonight, that the same people who today are activated against Donald Trump—people from the FBI, from the Justice Department, from the CIA, and from British intelligence above all—are the very same people who sent Lyndon LaRouche to jail.

So this combination of political forces that were not under the control of the Establishment that LaRouche was working on back then, is a valuable lesson to us today as to how we have to use those same ideas to organize similar forces today.

Messages of Tribute to Lyndon LaRouche

Mario Roberto Morales is a Guatemalan writer, university professor and journalist. He holds a doctorate in Latin American Culture and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and a 2017 Doctor Honoris Causa from San Carlos University in Guatemala. He won Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize for Literature in 2007. He has been a university professor in the U.S., Guatemala and Costa Rica.

Good evening. I am very happy to participate in this Memorial to Lyndon LaRouche, an intellectual, visionary political thinker, whose ideas not only remain alive as theories, but above all they are taking shape in practice throughout the world.

I think this memorial is also very timely, because his ideas and proposals for an alternative globalization to neoliberal planetary suicide, are without question as of now the only visible alternative for the necessary change in paradigm on the planet. Both for saving the planet, as well as to save humanity.

China’s New Silk Road initiative and Russia’s initiatives for pacifying the world through a physical, productive globalization, returning to the creation of substantial real growth, instead of this unproductive, parasitical, speculative capitalism of great financial centers such as Wall Street and the City of London, are a solution which is not only feasible, but necessary, indispensable, almost a matter of life and death. Not only for the West, and not only for the East, but for the whole world, whose interconnectedness now is not only inevitable, but absolutely necessary. . . .

LaRouche’s ideas were visionary, and the fact that China is putting them into practice with undeniable success, and that Russia, for its part, is managing to deter any return to the warmongering and arms build-up on which neoliberal globalization is based, is certainly impressive. The case of Venezuela now is emblematic of that tension.

Thus it is a great honor for me that I have been asked to pay tribute to this U.S. thinker who has undoubtedly left a legacy which is rightly going to continue to generate commentary and critical theory.

Max Ibañez is a veteran trade union leader in Bolivia. He was formerly Secretary of Grievance Resolution of the National Federation of Electrical and Telephone Workers of Bolivia, and he was a founding member of the Schiller Institute Trade Union Commission.

On the 13, 14 and 15 of July of 1985, the Schiller Institute Trade Union Commission convened its First Continental Trade Union Conference with trade unions from various countries in Ibero-America, with prominent participation from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Mexico, and from us in Bolivia.

That is where we first learned of the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, and from that time forward, the Schiller Institute Ibero-American Trade Union Commission began to spread those ideas in the trade union movement.

At that meeting we drew up a joint strategy for the labor movement, with the goal of mobilizing our countries to overcome the problem of the foreign debt and the austerity programs of the IMF, and against the drug trade that was spreading as a result of those austerity programs.

The Schiller Institute got right to work and the next year we published the book Ibero-American Integration: How to Create 100 Million New Jobs by 2000. That book became our main organizing tool across the continent. . . .

At one of those conferences, one of the participants was a trade union leader from Cochabamba, Evo Morales, today President of Bolivia. We spoke about how to create productive jobs in an economy driven by scientific and technological development; about great mining, agricultural and industrial projects; about the complementarity of our countries and great infrastructure projects, high speed railroads, highways, ports, airports, and science-cities.

As you know, these ideas have now spread across the whole continent and the entire world, thanks to China’s New Silk Road initiative. Mind you, I’m talking about 33 years ago, when all of that seemed to be a science fiction dream!

In Bolivia we have now begun to build that future based on scientific and technological progress, which we learned from Lyndon LaRouche. And I don’t think I’m deceiving myself when I say that, slowly, we are now no longer the poorest country in South America, which is how we were viewed 33 years ago.

But we are now moving forward, and on that path the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche and his personal character have been our guide, and they will continue to be.

Marino Elsevyf Pineda is an attorney in the Dominican Republic. He was the only Ibero-American jurist who travelled to the United States to join Ramsey Clark, Amelia Boynton Robinson and others on the Schiller Institute’s Martin Luther King Tribunal, seeking the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.

It is my great joy to commemorate Lyndon LaRouche, a man who established new paradigms for humanity.

I met Lyndon LaRouche in 1985, in Boston. And then I had the opportunity to participate in the Martin Luther King Tribunal when he was unjustly imprisoned through the machinations with which the Justice Department used false evidence to prosecute his ideas, prosecute his ideology.

To remember Lyndon LaRouche is to establish the parallel idea that humanity must reconstruct itself with a new financial architecture, under the postulates of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

And now, we face this great immigration crisis, incited by groups, by persons, by financial cartels. These migrations can only be solved with development, with infrastructure projects such as those which Lyndon LaRouche put forward in Operation Juárez in 1982, during the government of Mexican President José López Portillo. . . .

Humanity can only transform itself by abandoning geopolitics and embracing the international cooperation of China, Russia and the U.S. through a New Paradigm for humanity, as the great Lyndon LaRouche believed, dreamed of, and designed.

Dr. Julio C. González is the former Technical Secretary of the Presidency of the Nation of Argentina from 1973 to 1976, and he has been Professor at the Lomas de Zamora National University in Argentina from 1989 to the present. He is on the international advisory board of the Schiller Institute.

Lyndon LaRouche developed the concept of physical economy. He emphasized that it is sovereign nation states that are responsible for creating credit, money, and banking, financial and trade regulations. He emphatically stated that man does not merely live, but that he lives together with other men. And that states do not exist, but they coexist. That is the world community, which cannot coexist with international free trade imposed by those whose only goal is a speculative economy and the benefits of a privileged sector: speculators and usurers.

Lyndon LaRouche back in the 1980s conceived of the idea that the solution to the tragedy of geometrically increasing debt and interest, is to establish a debtors’ club based on universal opposition to financial speculation, which is the problem that annihilates life, procreation, and physical and intellectual creation.

Patricio Ricketts is a former Education Minister of Peru, a leading historian, author, journalist and political analyst. He was a strong defender of Peru’s national sovereignty against the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) onslaught, two narco-terrorist groups with powerful international financial and political support, such as that of George Soros.

In remembering Lyndon LaRouche, I share the sorrow of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, his wife and staunch supporter. Recalling him, although we met only briefly, we mourn. We think once more of his vigorous person, vast reach, ebullient creativity and polemical alacrity, which sometimes called to mind Don Quixote de La Mancha, battling the scoundrels encountered along the way.

He was daring, self-controlled, unique, alert, a lover of polemics like few others, which were perhaps delightful and sporting for him: thus his abundance of tenacious enemies. . . .

Over more decades than can be easily counted, his frequent warnings and early and repeated foresight into all kinds of matters were notable. It is worth recalling some of his forecasts. Like his repeated warning of the catastrophic collapse of dizzily-rising financial aggregates and derivatives, until what he called his typical collapse function, the short circuit of speculative growth along with a productive downturn, came to pass. Or the heinous spread of Soros’s pro-drug evil.

Fortunately, his encouraging and healthy successes were plentiful. Among them, his reasoned and early celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, as well as the instructive presentation of the effect produced by the totality of the German miracle’s fortunate economic decisions and harmonized policies, which was the mainstay of Europe. Likewise, his forecasts of the miraculous resurrection of China, Russia’s recovery, and the “fantasy,” which today is in full swing, of very rapid [maglev] trains suspended on air, were way ahead of their time. From afar he foresaw and announced the continents coming together, a spider’s web of railroads everywhere: the New Silk Road. In short, passages from a new version of Jules Verne.

Peru was present in his thinking, aspirations and concerns.

In the border conflict, he supported our just position, finally agreed to by our brotherly parties with international blessing.

He was uncompromising and exemplary in his fight against terrorism in all its forms; he deplored the insane inflation; he supported foreign aid for recovery; he was interested in the progress of the Armed Forces and in the soundness of civilian economic, financial and social positions. He was, in sum, a friend. He could be counted on.

Rear Admiral (ret.) Hugo Ramírez Canaval is one of the most distinguished leaders of the Peruvian Navy. In 1988 that institution published the book, Modern Irregular Warfare, by Friedrich von der Heydte, with an introduction by Lyndon LaRouche, for its senior officers to study and analyze. It proved vital to their understanding of the new type of narco-terrorist enemy that the nation was facing.

It is an honor to speak to you about Lyndon LaRouche, a great friend of Peru in its worst moments. While they speak today about the dictatorship of [President Alberto] Fujimori, this was a man who supported Fujimori in saving a destroyed, shattered country, with no foreign accounts, kicked out of international banking.

Mr. LaRouche spoke up for Peru many times in the United States. He prefaced a book about the famed irregular warfare [by Prof. Friedrich August von der Heydte], and he included us within that concept. How could we not continue to be grateful to this man? . . .

I feel very honored to speak about this gentleman whom I always admired for what he said or did for Peru. For me, Lyndon LaRouche has been a mentor, the creator, the one with the basic or initial idea with which Mr. Trump is now dealing with the powers of the world. Mr. Lyndon LaRouche was the one with the idea that Peru had to forge ahead and succeed; and we did so! . . .

My tribute and memorial to Lyndon LaRouche, who was a friend of Peru. May God keep him close and let him continue to look after Peruvians.

Ramón Emilio Concepción is an attorney in the Dominican Republic, having received his law degree Summa Cum Laude from the Dominican World University. He is a pre-candidate for the Presidency of the Dominican Republic for the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM).

While it is true that when someone great dies, it is humanity’s loss, in the case of Lyndon, affectionately called Lyn, as all of us who are his followers called him, his leaving of course leaves a void. But at the same time it leaves strength.

The power of the ideas he spoke of on innumerable occasions fills us with strength, with courage, with rigor, to continue upholding his ideas.

I remember when I was very young, in 1984, how startled I was when I read Dope, Inc. Later, I came across [Alexander] Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures,” “Report on the National Bank,” and “Report on Public Credit.” In short, the works which this outstanding man leaves us with are many and immeasurable. But one which caused a sensation from the beginning, his great dream, his great goal, which today is becoming a reality, is the Belt and the Road, referring to the integration of the world through infrastructure projects under the Eurasian Land-Bridge, today known as One Belt, One Road.

Happily for humanity, China is developing extremely rapidly. This is due in large measure to the efforts of Lyn and dear Doña Helga. Without Helga, LaRouche perhaps would not have been so great; and without LaRouche, perhaps Helga would not be so great.

But these things happen in life, in humanity. When two great individuals join together, what results is great, that is the efforts of this married couple and what their Schiller Institute have done for Humanity.

We should not feel sorrow because Lyn has gone. On the contrary, we should be happy, because he left us the power of his ideas. He is immortal precisely because of the great vigor with which he used the ideas which he had. And which he leaves all of his followers worldwide, leaves us here in this small country, the Dominican Republic. Without Lyndon it would not have been possible to put up the fight we did. And even though the creators of the current bankrupt predatory model have defeated us, partially, thanks to Lyn’s ideas we were able to defend strategic areas which will help development when his ideas come to power in the Dominican Republic.

All his effort, all his sacrifice, all his studies, all his reports, had a fundamental core: the dignity of the human being.

For that alone Lyndon has already gained immortality, and belongs among the greats! . . . Words don’t come to mind, perhaps, which do justice to him. I simply want to say: he was a great person, but he has not left. He left in a figurative sense.

But his ideas remain; his work remains; his efforts remain.

Jaime Miranda Peláez is the former President of the Small Landowners Association of the Yaqui Valley and then of the state of Sonora, and former President and current Advisor to the Agricultural Credit Union of Cajeme in Mexico.

I have been a farmer all my life, and Lyndon LaRouche had a great impact on my life and my way of thinking from the time I began to read his writings, particularly his proposal for the Northeast Hydraulic Plan and his great knowledge of economy and agricultural questions.

Yes, “There Is Life After the Death of the IMF” was the document which most affected me. I remember perfectly when the problem of Mexico’s past-due farm debt exploded in 1992. [LaRouche activist] Alberto Vizcarra came to a general meeting of Yaqui Valley farmers to argue that we should propose to the government that it write off the past-due debts, restore parity prices and subsidies for frontier agricultural research, and reject the Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] which had been already discussed with the Bush government.

Very determined, we organized the following year, on August 19, 1993, a caravan of tractors from Ciudad Obregon to the airport in Guaymas, more than 129 kilometers away, in temperatures reaching up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Surrounding the Guaymas airport with 150 tractors, we got then President Carlos Salinas de Gotari to grant us a “15-minute” interview which went on for more than half an hour because of the bombshell which we came to propose to him: write-off of the farm debt, fair parity prices, and the conviction that Mexican agriculture and the economy of the country would be destroyed by the trade opening with the United States: “for the above reasons,” I told him, “Mr. President, do not sign the Free Trade Agreement, because it will destroy the national economy.”

That phrase has remained with me for my whole life, and I still remember it as if it were yesterday. Obviously, he did not pay attention to us, but he was very startled by the level of the argument which we made to him.

Today, 27 years later, I am very proud that this document, based on Lyndon LaRouche’s economic method, was totally prophetic. The ideas of Lyndon LaRouche are being implemented now in the entire planet, with the New Renaissance that he developed, with the New Silk Road, which he envisioned before anyone else. And while there is sadness at the passing of a human being with a creative mind so invaluable for humanity, I know that the seed which he planted has already produced fruits which shall last for centuries. And that, at my ninety years, makes me happy.

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