LaRouche and López Portillo Address Meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico

PRESS RELEASE

LaRouche and López Portillo Address Meeting in Guadalajara To Define Way Out of International Financial Crisis

GUADALAJARA, Mexico, Aug. 24, 2002 (EIRNS)—Historic presentations by the former President of Mexico, José López Portillo, and current U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., keynoted the continental meeting, "Mexico-Brazil-Argentina: The Hour of Integration; March Towards a New Bretton Woods," organized by the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA), and held in Guadalajara, Mexico Aug. 22-23. More than 250 people filled the auditorium, where the seminar commemorated the 20th anniversary of the publication of Operation Juárez, the book-length study written by LaRouche in 1982, after meeting with López Portillo, then President of Mexico.

The meeting, which was transmitted live to all of Guadalajara via Radio Universidad, and worldwide, in both English and Spanish, by Internet at www.larouchepub.com, took place in the midst of an ongoing global financial crisis which, if not resolved, LaRouche said, could bring the world into a new Dark Age like that of the 14th Century. To solve the crisis, Ibero-America and the United States must form an alliance, such as that forged by Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juárez to defeat both the British monarchy and the Hapsburgs, in the 19th Century.

Addressing the seminar, in addition to LaRouche and López Portillo—who sent a written speech, as he was unable to attend in person for health reasons—were Col. Mohamed Ali Seineldin, who spoke by telephone from the Campo de Mayo prison in Argentina where he is unjustly imprisoned; retired Brazilian Adm. Sergio Tasso Vasques de Aquino; retired Argentine Maj. Adrian Romero Mundani, and Marivilia Carrasco, president of the MSIA of Mexico.

LaRouche, who could not travel to Guadalajara because Mexican authorities would not grant the security conditions required for his visit, said that, to understand the situation in the world today, it is necessary to go back 20 years, when the first great crisis in relations between the United States and the other nations of the Americas erupted, with the April-June 1982 Malvinas War, and the subsequent crushing of Mexico, in the period beginning August of that year. The United States, LaRouche said, was founded to foster what is known as the general welfare, or Common Good, but from the outset the oligarchy tried to destroy that, and to keep any other country which reflected the success of the American Republic from emerging elsewhere in the world.

"That changed, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's government, in the Civil War within the United States," he said. In Europe, "the British and a fascist ruler, Napoleon III, the Emperor of France, combined forces to invade and crush Mexico, crushing the legitimate President of Mexico, Benito Juárez.

"At the close of that period, after the fascist tyranny of the Emperor Maximilian, who was essentially a Hapsburg puppet, a British puppet, the French were kicked out of the Americas," he said, and "Juárez, after a series of events, reestablished the Republic of Mexico."

"Since that time, the ebb and flow within the United States, has determined U.S. relations with Mexico. They were better under Franklin Roosevelt; terrible under his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt," he said. "But then came 1982: A new monetary system had been put into place, in 1971.... A literally fascist tendency in the United States, of sympathizers of the former Confederacy," took power with Richard Nixon, and set out to eliminate "not only the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, but the legacy of Lincoln and all other great founding figures of the United States.

"Mexico began to feel the pressure. In 1982, at the point that the Brzezinski Administration—the Brzezinski who actually controlled the Carter Administration, who dictated most of his policies, including those toward Mexico—Mexico came under tremendous pressure, as did Argentina, and Brazil, and other states. The determination was, then, to destroy the independence of all of the states of Central and South America. That was the intention; I knew it. I was involved, at the point, in mobilizing a defense of Argentina, against British imperialism, in the case of the so-called 'Malvinas War,'" LaRouche said. Although some in the Ronald Reagan Administration were friendly with him, Caspar Weinberger and others "managed to push full U.S. support of the British toward the crushing of Argentina in the Malvinas War."

"In that period, I met briefly with President López Portillo, in his office, and we discussed the matter. And he asked me: What is the fate of Mexico, in this situation? And I said, 'Well, the intention in Washington and New York, is to crush you, with a blow to come down no later than September of this year.'

"And from that discussion, and discussion with others in the Americas, there came my determination to set forth a policy, as an economist, which would be adequate to deal with the crisis, which was then, at that time, coming down on all of the states of the Americas: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, foremost." There was a brief period, said LaRouche, in which it appeared that his proposal, called Operation Juárez, would be adopted. But, pressured by forces within the United States, the President of Brazil and the government of Argentina abandoned Mexico and President López Portillo to their own fate."

Had Operation Juárez been adopted, the Ibero-American countries "would have been able to defend themselves, and also to win the United States government to cooperation with them."

"Unfortunately, that did not occur. Henry Kissinger went to Mexico in October, for example; other pressures came down; U.S. State Department officials, from that point on, said, 'This guy LaRouche will never be allowed in Mexico, again.' I was considered too dangerous to be turned loose. So, that's what it was."

We are now at the tail-end of an international monetary system, and, either we replace it by returning to a system along the lines of the old Bretton Woods system, or the nations will die, he said.

"Only if we can win that fight, will we have the correlation of forces, to give the Americas as a whole, the justice which they are presently being denied. And thus, the tradition of Lincoln's implicit alliance, with Benito Juárez, and the struggle for the development of a true Mexican Republic, is the precedent to which we must turn today."

We Want A Better World

In his speech, former President López Portillo (1976-82) lamented the fact that LaRouche was not present personally in Guadalajara "to enlighten us with his expert teaching, although, of course, I am happy, and send my greetings, to his worthy spouse, Helga Zepp." López Portillo said, that "if we want a better world, and we do, we must march towards a New International Financial Order which serves the needs of the powerful countries, and of those which, not being so, wish to resolve their national population's social problems." He said that, when he was President of Mexico, "I had to take recourse to nationalization, since I believed that the State, not being able to betray itself, would be the best instrument to manage the savings of the nation, with the intelligence that we did not expropriate the depositors, but only the system itself."

Argentina's Colonel Seineldin told the participants in the seminar that "each time that you gather to try to uphold our America, hope blossoms for the Possible America, the dream made mission by the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement, under the strategic conception of the worthy gentleman and patriach of humanity, Dr. Lyndon LaRouche." He warned, that "within this chaos, we must face the new threat, which is that of the integration of our nations into the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) project, which would be the final Anglo-American blow to achieve total submission and poverty.

"This situation renews the call to the worthy spirits of the nations of America. There is no time to wait for other considerations; the predator is inside our houses," he warned. "America is of and for the Americans, with our talent to think, and our leaders to do what must be done," he said. "America is Possible."

In her opening speech, Marivilia Carrasco pointed out that this meeting had brought together "the protagonists of a great historical moment, and to build the bridges necessary to emerge victorious from earlier defeats." She added: "The alternatives are clear: Either Ibero-America unites to fight for a global solution to this generalized systemic crisis, and that necessarily implies an alliance with the forces Lyndon H. LaRouche represents in the United States; or, divided, we shall succumb as nations, disintegrated, worn down by internal battles, overrun by violence, drug-trafficking, hunger and disease."

The meeting continued on Aug. 23, with various working sessions, in which other speakers from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru made presentations.