This article appears in the December 9, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Nazi Networks Deploy against Potential New Paradigm in Ibero-America
[Print version of this article]
Dec. 4—For the 36 days between Oct. 22 and Nov. 26, fascist forces in the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz turned the departmental capital and surrounding region into pure hell for its inhabitants, especially its poorer indigenous sectors. Under the leadership of fascist governor Luis Fernando Camacho, a leading figure in the November 2019 “Maidan” color revolution that ousted then President Evo Morales, the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee launched a violent, indefinite civic strike that shut down all economic activity in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s most economically powerful and populous department, to demand that a national census scheduled for 2024 be moved up to 2023.
When the strike was over, Bolivia had suffered over $1 billion in losses and large sections of the city of Santa Cruz had been destroyed.
Arguing that an earlier census date were absolutely necessary to determine how economic resources would be allocated to Santa Cruz by the federal government, strike leaders vowed to continue their action until President Luis Arce gave in to their demands. They warned that any citizen who didn’t abide by the strike, which effectively shut down the economy, public services, transportation and garbage collection, would be severely punished. The census issue was bogus, however. On Nov. 26, when the strike ended, strike leaders accepted the setting of a 2024 census date while crowing they had won a victory and achieved all of the strike’s goals.
Goals? On one level the strike was intended to destabilize President Arce’s government, baldly claiming that another “victory like that of 2019”—the Maidan coup against Morales—would be possible, to remove Arce from power or to make the country ungovernable by organizing similar civic strikes and mass protests around the country. Camacho’s ally Rómulo Calvo, head of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, refers to Arce as “the dictator,” claiming that he only became President in October 2020 through fraud. In August of 2021, Calvo warned, “We have the prescription to overthrow a dictator,” adding, “We’ll never allow the fraud to be forgotten.” Governor Camacho, who had a pathetic showing as a presidential candidate in the same election, has never recognized Arce’s victory.
Secession, the Anglo-American establishment’s long-standing plan to break up Bolivia, promoting the separation of Santa Cruz and three of the country’s southeastern departments from the rest of the country, was clearly at the top of the strike agenda. In 2009 the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, and USAID, among others, tried but failed to carry out a separatist coup against Morales, which would have made Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija, the four departments of Bolivia’s “half moon,” so called because of its geography, into a separate nation.
These agencies are still hell-bent on balkanizing the country along ethnic lines. In a Nov. 23 press conference, Camacho announced that he would soon name a “commission of notables” whose job it will be to determine “the political, economic and social guidelines of Santa Cruz’s relationship with the Plurinational State,” i.e., with Bolivia. That is, secession. The fight for this new relationship, he said, “will go beyond the federalism and autonomies of the past. This will be the battle of all battles.”
The Ukraine Model
Beyond this, the strike was part of a broader geopolitical deployment by the same Anglo-American intelligence networks that control the Nazi-dominated government of Ukraine and its hideous Azov Battalion. Long present in Bolivia, these networks are also active in Brazil and Mexico, as well as in Argentina. This was seen in the Sept. 1 assassination attempt against Argentina’s Vice President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose would-be assassin, Fernando Sabag Montiel, bore tattoos of the same Nazi Black Sun symbol and Iron Cross that cover the bodies of Azov Battalion members in Ukraine.
The October election of Inácio Lula da Silva as President of Brazil has unnerved the Anglo-American establishment, especially its London and Wall Street components, as it creates the potential for shifting the dynamic in Ibero-America toward greater regional cooperation with China and Russia through expansion of the BRICS and the Belt and Road Initiative. Brazil’s alliance with Mexico and Argentina, which will shortly join the BRICS, is key to forging a correlation of forces in the region necessary for establishing the new security and development architecture proposed by the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
As the trans-Atlantic financial system crumbles around them, London and Wall Street cannot allow this to occur. Hence the deployment into Brazil and Mexico of such Anglo-American assets as Steve Bannon and the allied Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), whose Nov. 18-19 meeting in Mexico City brought together prominent radical free trade “Christian conservatives” from North and South America, including the fascist Camacho from Bolivia, to map out a regional campaign to “stop communism.”
That means that both Lula da Silva and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) are targets for destabilization for threatening “democracy”: Lula, the “communist,” is accused of having stolen Jair Bolsonaro’s vote in the Oct. 30 presidential elections through the use of electronic voting machines, and AMLO is charged with planning vote fraud by using electronic voting machines in Mexico’s next elections.
It is unlikely that the mass street protests underway in several Brazilian states, denouncing Lula’s alleged vote fraud, will prevent Lula from taking office or overthrow him once he is President. But the instability created by these actions, combined with significant Brazilian congressional opposition and foreign interference by the likes of Bannon and CPAC, is intended to make the country ungovernable and sink it into chaos, such that any alternative to the current system will be seen as impossible. Something similar is planned against AMLO in Mexico.
The Legacy of Bolivian Fascism
Because they are so directly connected to developments in Brazil and to the broader Ukrainian scenario activated in Ibero-America, the details of Bolivia’s fascist infrastructure merit further examination. It is well documented that at least 40% of Santa Cruz’s large landowners are Brazilian, largely dedicated to soy production and export, and are fully integrated into the department’s political and economic leadership structures dominated by its free-market business elites. According to a Nov. 14, 2019 article in Diálogos del Sur, they are also generous financiers of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee and were deeply involved in the 2019 coup against Morales.
Sources in Brazil have told EIR that these landowners—whose considerable influence in Santa Cruz’s local politics includes the xenophobic idea that the department’s “European” roots and wealthy “U.S.-centric” lifestyle justify seceding from the rest of Bolivia—are tied into Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing networks in southern Brazil, where there has historically been a significant Nazi presence. During World War II, the state of Santa Catarina, today a stronghold of Bolsonaro’s support, was home to the largest Nazi party outside of Germany.
These are the networks that offered asylum to self-proclaimed “Christian nationalist” Croatian-Bolivian Branko Marinković when he fled the country in 2009 after being implicated in financing an assassination plot against Evo Morales. Multimillionaire Marinković is a financial speculator—most of his wealth is stashed in offshore accounts in Panama—whose family is suspected of having been Ustašhe collaborators of Hitler who fled Croatia for Bolivia after World War II. He not only served as head of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee but was a mentor to Luis Fernando Camacho when the latter served as the vice president of the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC) in 2002. Camacho “earned his stripes” in the fascist paramilitary UJC.
During his ten-year exile in Brazil, Marinković became close friends with then federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro. He returned to Bolivia in January of 2020 amidst rumors that he might run for President, but eventually accepted the post of Planning Minister in the illegally installed government of Jeanine Añez.
The Nazi Rat Line
EIR has learned that the defeated “bolsonaristas” in southern Brazil have been going around the area marking the homes of Workers’ Party (PT) members—the party of President-elect Lula da Silva—with red stars, targeting them for violence and possible assassination. This is the same tactic used by the Azov Battalion and the UJC, founded in 1957 as the “armed wing of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee” by Carlos Valverde Barbery (1928-2011), a leader of the Bolivian Socialist Falange modeled on Spanish fascist Francisco Franco’s Falange.
Valverde Barbery was a collaborator of Klaus Barbie, the infamous chief of the Nazi Gestapo in Lyon, known in France as the “Butcher of Lyon” because of his atrocities. He was spirited into Bolivia in 1950 by CIA Director Allen Dulles’s “rat line” that siphoned Nazi criminals out of Europe into Ibero-America, ignoring their horrific crimes because their “anti-communist” credentials could better serve the nefarious goals of U.S. intelligence in the region.
The CIA protected Barbie, aka Klaus Altmann, as he worked for the brutal U.S.-backed Bolivian dictators Hugo Bánzer and Luis García Meza, using the same interrogation and torture techniques against opponents of those dictatorships that he had perfected in France and at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Valverde became health minister in Bánzer’s government.
Given his collaboration with Valverde, and the fact that he reportedly oversaw several underground paramilitary organizations, it’s likely Barbie also worked with the UJC. According to Towson University professor Nicole Fabricant, in her Dec. 23, 2019 article, “The Roots of the Right-Wing Coup in Bolivia,” UJC tactics included weapons training and the use of literature from Nazi youth brigades “to inculcate members into the group.” Photographs of UJC members show them with right arms outstretched in a Sieg heil salute, wearing shirts with their green cross symbol.
So the tactics employed by the Civic Committee and the paramilitary UJC during the 36-day civic strike are coherent with the Nazi origins of their founding. Like Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), Santa Cruz Civic Committee leaders put out kill lists of opponents of the strike, setting them up for assassination by publicly declaring them persona non grata and “traitors to Santa Cruz.”
Racist UJC squadristi were deployed throughout the strike with homemade incendiary bombs, baseball bats, machetes, barbed wire, and other weapons to beat, whip and kidnap members of poorer indigenous populations—they call them “shit Indians”—that opposed the strike because of the economic hardship it caused. Homes and small businesses were burned to the ground or looted. There were particularly vicious attacks against the Ayoreo Indians, including instances of dragging women by their hair.
CPAC and Bannon
In Brazil, post-election destabilization efforts have focused on street protests in several states to denounce alleged vote fraud by Lula in the Oct. 30 election, as well as to demand a military coup. More recently, protests have taken on an increasingly violent character, adopting tactics similar to those used by the UJC in Bolivia—operating only at night and using homemade incendiary devices, bats, rocks, Molotov cocktails and other weapons.
Violent actions have taken place in the states of Rondonia, Pará, Paraná, Mato Grosso and Santa Catarina, among others, and law enforcement and state government authorities are preparing to apply the government’s anti-terrorist law, originally enacted to target the radical left, to prosecute the protesters as terrorists.
An election complaint filed by Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, calling on the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to invalidate all votes cast on more than half the electronic voting machines used on Oct. 30, was shot down by Tribunal President Alexandre de Moraes, who said the filing had been made in “bad faith,” provided no evidence of fraud, and was only intended to promote “antidemocratic and criminal movements.” Calling the filing “offensive to the democratic state and rule of law,” he imposed a $4.3 million fine on the Party.
But the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting that took place in Mexico City Nov. 18-19 provided the international support Bolsonaro seeks to bolster his claim that he was the victim of vote fraud. The array of far-right speakers included Steve Bannon and his pal Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of outgoing President Bolsonaro, who was a star of the event. Bolivia’s Luis Fernando Camacho was scheduled to speak via video, along with other supporters of his fascist Santa Cruz uprising. Attending from Argentina was Javier Milei, the neoliberal Libertarian presidential candidate who is close to Bolsonaro and to the corrupt former Argentine President Mauricio Macri. The Pinochet-linked former Chilean presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, defeated by Gabriel Boric earlier this year, and Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei were also in attendance.
Many of the speakers have reportedly signed the so-called Carta de Madrid (The Madrid Charter: In Defense of Freedom and Democracy in the Iberosphere) issued in October 2020 by Spain’s Synarchist-tainted Vox party, which warns that the “advance of communism is a serious threat for prosperity and development” of our countries.
In his speech, Bannon echoed fellow speaker Ted Cruz, Republican U.S. Senator from the border state of Texas, in attacking Mexican President López Obrador, whose government is already the target of a neocon destabilization. He bombastically warned that AMLO intends to employ electronic voting machines in Mexico’s next elections to commit a Brazilian-style vote fraud, bellowing that “Mexico’s sovereignty is at risk” because of AMLO’s “populism and nationalism.” Co-sponsoring the event was Mexico’s Movimiento Viva México, a virulently anti-López Obrador operation founded by former TV soap opera actor turned religious fundamentalist Eduardo Verástegui.
AMLO Turns the Tables
But on Nov. 27, AMLO turned the tables on these foreign destabilizers when he mobilized 1.2 million Mexicans to march with him to Mexico City’s giant Zócalo central square, where he gave a report on the first four years of his government. This large, very festive gathering attracted delegations from all around the country, each carrying signs identifying their regions and chanting slogans such as, “AMLO, you are not alone,” “It is an honor to be with Obrador,” and “Mexico is my party.”
Although a powerful show of force, the shortcoming of the pro-AMLO march—as with Argentina’s Alberto Fernández government and the incoming Lula administration in Brazil—is the lack of an efficient economic development policy to replace the current looting by Wall Street and the City of London. Without such a clear policy perspective, such massive popular outpourings often dissipate quickly. With that in mind, the Schiller Institute was also present and used the occasion to distribute 2,000 leaflets next to its very large banner reading, “Citizens of the World, Unite. Stop Nuclear War! For a New World Economic Order: Schiller Institute.”
The pro-AMLO mass mobilization stood in sharp contrast to the 60,000-person “March for Democracy” held Nov. 13, organized by the far-right opposition, and held in a wealthy area of the city to denounce AMLO’s “undemocratic” electoral reform. In his hour-and-a-half speech, the President began by noting how happy he was that there were so many young people at the march, and then reviewed his government’s efforts especially to “put the poor first,” and push aside the oligarchy’s grip on the government. He also emphasized that Mexico’s foreign policy is one of—
non-intervention, self-determination, cooperation for development and the peaceful solution of disputes; we act on the basis of the idea of universal brotherhood.
AMLO also implicitly warned the right-wing opposition being mounted against him, including those from outside the country. Mexico, he said, is a “sanctuary of freedom,” and of the right to freedom of speech and dissent today. Just a week earlier, he noted, “the most famous personalities of the world’s ultra-right held their summit here”—a reference to CPAC—“without any obstacle.”
Of course, he added, “we never again wish to apply Article 33 of the Constitution, and we do not want anyone to call anyone a pernicious foreigner.” What he didn’t say, but which everyone knows, is that Article 33 states that “foreigners may not in any way participate in the political affairs of the country,” and grants the President “the power to expel from national territory any foreigner, according to the law and after a hearing.”
