EIR HIGHLIGHT
Who Harbors Terrorist FARC
Cartel? The 'Grasso Factor'
The quagmire of U.S. policy, announcing its intention to destroy one limb of international terrorism, while de facto giving active support to others, is starkly revealed in EIR's Oct. 12 report by Gretchen Small and Valerie Rush: Wall Street's biggest players promote the FARC narco-terrorists. The White House, under new questioning, is unable to deny this bending of U.S. policy. Here is the report's introduction.
In his much-cited national address on Sept. 20, President George Bush announced his government's commitment to carry out a war on terror "until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated," wherever it exists around the world. What about the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), right here in this hemisphere?
The FARC is on the State Department's official list of terrorist groups, with which the U.S. government will have no dealings—supposedly. The FARC is so heavily involved in all aspects of the cocaine trade, that it is the world's number-one drug cartel, controlling about two-thirds of the cocaine that enters the United States every year. It systematically perpetrates hideous crimes, including kidnapping and murdering civilians, and forcibly impressing thousands of children into guerrilla military service. And the FARC has already spread its narco-terrorist activities to neighboring Andean nations, and threatens the security of the United States itself.
And yet the U.S. State Department continues to actively promote the Colombian government's criminal policy of so-called "peace negotiations" with the FARC, under which, three years ago, they were granted a vast "demilitarized zone" (DMZ) in the cocaine heartland of southern Colombia, and from which they today exercise de facto control over about half of the national territory.
The answer to this rather obvious, but most embarrassing, question, lies in what can be called "the Grasso factor." This refers to the famous photograph of New York Stock Exchange President Richard Grasso embracing Raúl Reyes, the head of FARC finances, in the cocaine-producing DMZ of Colombia. What that photo merely typifies, Lyndon LaRouche and EIR have documented over decades: The FARC, like all terrorist groups around the world, are nothing but instruments of irregular warfare deployed by powerful financial groups in order to achieve their political goals.
This is as true in Afghanistan as it is in Colombia. The only serious war against narco-terrorism is one that begins by going after the "Grasso factor"—the powerful financial oligarchical interests—running the irregular warfare in each regional theater.
That, unfortunately, is not the way Washington is approaching the Sept. 11 terror atacks in this country; nor is it the way it is approaching Colombia's FARC.
