PRESS RELEASE
Key Colombian Institutions
Turn to LaRouche
March 23, 2009 (EIRNS)—U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche addressed a packed auditorium at the Nueva Granada Military University in Bogota, Colombia, on March 18, on the subject, "Proposals To Solve The Global Economic Crisis." The two-hour discussion, by videoconference, was sponsored by the Association of Graduates of the Economics Department of that University, with the support of the university's Department of Economic Science.
A transcript of LaRouche's presentation is available at EIR.A video of LaRouche's presentation and the question-and-answer period which followed, is available at larouchepac.com, in English and Spanish.
The address to this university, a key institution of higher learning for the military, national police and defense sector generally which is open to all, signals a significant institutional opening to LaRouche, in this nation where the iron grip of British domination of politics and economics had censured virtually all mention of his existence in the media for two decades.
Under the leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, with conditional support from the United States, Colombia has succeeded over the past seven years in driving back the narcoterrorist armies, under the protection of the British liberals, which had seized control over up to 40% of national territory. Those hard-won gains, however, are now threatened, by the combination of the disintegration of the global free trade economy to which the national elite had been blindly committed, and renewed assault from the British Empire's Dope, Inc. and its lead drug-pusher, George Soros.
The Lyndon LaRouche Association of Colombia intervened in the resulting intellectual crisis, by setting out to rebuild the Colombian current of American System of Economics which last flourished under Rafael Nuñez, Colombia's President from 1880-1882 and 1884-1888. The Association polemicized among the economics departments of universities across the country around the ideas of LaRouche, the leader of American System today, and kept key Presidential offices and other institutions advised of the explosive interest in LaRouche's ideas in the nation's universities and academic centers where the hegemony of British free trade is being shattered by the crisis it cannot explain, much less remedy.
Close to 600 students attended LaRouche's Nueva Granada presentation, along with 11 professors and nine military officers. He received prolonged applause at the end of his presentation, and various of those attending expressed the same reaction: "This is a strange 'Yank', who on the one hand defends his country as a patriot, while promoting policies which contradict what the United States has represented up to now."
The first question to LaRouche addressed a central strategic issue being fought out across the Americas today: what effect would legalizing drugs have on the economy? President Uribe has been engaged in virtual hand-to-hand combat on this issue with former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, one of Soros's top hitmen in the continent, since Uribe began organizing last year, internationally and within Colombia, against the drug cartels' legalization strategy.
LaRouche was uncompromising: "Legalizing drugs would mean the death of the economy.... Drug traffic was invented by the British as a way of destroying countries... This traffic is a mass murderer of individuals, is a mass murderer of nations. Any toleration for legalization of drugs is implicitly a crime against humanity."
No narrow, local questions were asked; all were focused on similarly strategic issues: how credit functions; the effectiveness, or not, of the IMF; the danger of war; environmental policies; etc. For the transcript of the opening remarks, see EIR.
