Communism Thrives South of the Border

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com Friday, June 6, 2003

While Washington’s attention is focused on the Middle East, communism and communist terrorism are threatening America's security in Latin America, where another Axis of Evil is spreading its tentacles throughout the region.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is getting credit from the Internatinal Monetary Fund and Wall Street's useful idiots for following the orthodox economic policies of former president Fernando Cardoso while plunging his nation into communism and allying himself with Fidel Castro and Castro's puppet in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

So radical is the regime under Lula that the Rio de Janeiro city council recently declared President Bush persona non grata by passing a resolution offered by Fernando Gusmao, a councilman affiliated with Brazil's Communist Party.

Brazilian-American Gerald Brant, a writer and former candidate for Brazil's congress, wrote that "anti-American sentiment has grown so high in Brazil that President Bush received a lower approval rating among Brazilians than Saddam Hussein in an opinion poll conducted during the war in Iraq by the respected IBOPE Institute. This phenomenon has some relation to the Brazilian Workers' Party's (known as PT) attitudes towards the US."

When Lula was running for the presidency, Brant reported, he covered up PT's historic radicalism, but once elected he was able to pacify Wall Street while giving itself cover to gradually renationalize formerly privatized assets. "This strategy has worked brilliantly, so far," Brant wrote.

"While Brazil's new socialist government has drawn applause from the IMF and financial circles for continuing former President Cardoso's orthodox economic policies in order to maintain bond and currency market stability, it has adopted an aggressive and nationalistic foreign policy clearly based on PT doctrine."

'Offsetting Our Losses in Eastern Europe'

Brant points his finger at Lula's foreign policy adviser, Marco Aurelio Garcia, a notorious hard-line Marxist operative and founder and executive secretary of Sao Paulo Forum, a coalition of leftist parties and revolutionary movements dedicated, Garcia says, to "offsetting our losses in Eastern Europe with our victories in Latin America."

In other words, rebuilding shattered world communism in Latin America.

A NewsMax.com investigation has revealed that Garcia, in his role as head of Sao Paulo Forum, controls and coordinates the activities of subversives and extremists from the Rio Grande to the southernmost tip of Argentina.

This new axis of terrorism begins in Cuba, then works its way down to Colombia, financed with Venezuelan oil billions, and ends in Lula's Brazil.

In a policy dictated by Havana, Garcia has shown special interest in terrorist Manuel Marulanda Velez, a.k.a. "Tirofijo," leader of the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Every year since 1990, Garcia has made it his priority to meet with FARC. The meetings have not just taken place in Havana (with Fidel Castro himself being always present), but also in Mexico, where Marco Aurelio Garcia traveled to meet with FARC member Marco Leo Calara on Dec. 5, 2000.

What they talk about is a matter that remains behind closed doors. But every time they meet, FARC always increases its attacks in the weeks that follow, with a high cost in loss of human lives.

Brazil's foreign policy, under the guidance Garcia, will be designed in Havana. Garcia's Brazil will actively work against United States policy, starting with its policy toward Castro. "We'll attempt to eliminate the trade embargo against Cuba," he promises.

Garcia describes PT as "radical, of the left, socialist." But he is more than radical, and more to the left of mere socialists. Garcia is, in fact, a hard-line communist. He wants to revive communism.

The Communist 'Agenda Is Clear'

In an article which he wrote about Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto," he concluded: "The agenda is clear. If this new horizon which we search for is still called communism, it is time to re-constitute it."

Whereas Lula strives to fool the world about the true nature of his Marxist regime, Garcia makes no bones about what is going on. "We have to first give the impression that we are democrats, initially, we have to accept certain things. But that won't last."

Since Lula took power on January 1st, his government:

• has gone back and forth on abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and building nuclear weapons.

• has gone back and forth on offering exile to Saddam Hussein.

• has refused the Colombian government's request to consider the FARC terrorists.

• shored up Chavez with oil shipments during the height of the Venezuelan opposition's strike.

• declared a "strategic partnership" with communist China.

• abandoned scientific cooperation agreements with the U.S.

• appointed a self-defined Trotskyite and a Communist Party leader as cabinet ministers.

• repeatedly compared Free Trade Area of the Americas to "U.S. annexation."

• vocally supported France's anti-war efforts.

• lobbied Chile to vote against the U.S. on the U.N. Security Council and abstained from condemning Castro's crackdown on dissidents at the U.N. Human Rights Committee in Geneva.

All of these are ominous signs for the future of Latin America. As Richard Nixon once remarked, "As goes Brazil, so goes Latin America". If that's true, Latin America is headed for a communist takeover.

Brant wrote: "Lula's brand of socialism is becoming a role model for he entire region. Analysts consider Nestor Kirchner's Presidential election victory in Argentina a boon to Mercosul (the customs union between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) and a serious setback for the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) negotiations with the US."

Brant worries that "the entire South American continent may be getting off the train." Note:

• Chavez has announced he is not going to resign peacefully despite massive Venezuelan discontent with his rule.
• Leftist regimes are also in power in Chile and Ecuador and spreading fast.
• In Bolivia, rebel leader Evo Morales could stage a coup or, at the very least, continue to destabilize the government.
• In Colombia the communist FARC and ELN narco-terrorists are besieging the government.

"Fidel Castro's wildest revolutionary ambitions," warned Brant, "are being fulfilled right under the nose of the Bush administration. As Castro once said, "The US can't attack us if the rest of Latin America is in flames."

Our Leftist in Brasilia

Most shocking is the fact that elements in the Bush administration, including U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Donna Hrinak, is an ardent Lula backer, Brant reveals.

Brant says that Hrinak's sympathies for Lula's Marxist party are "so notorious that the running joke in Brasilia was to ask whether she would show up at Lula's inauguration in a red dress."

According to Brant:

• Hrinak publicly applauded the global appeasement movement and agreed to meet with Hussein's ambassador in Brasilia at PT's suggestion, just weeks before her boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, requested that all countries expel Hussein's diplomats.
• Hrinak recommended the U.S. provide financial assistance to Lula's flagship "Fome Zero" (Hunger Zero) social assistance program even though the PT picked a clearly anti-American slogan for the program specifically, "A nossa Guerra é contra a Fome" (Our war is against hunger).
• When prime-time TV ads sponsored by PT and its allied parties such as PC do B (Brazilian Communist Party) and PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party) attacked President Bush for his position on Iraq, Hrinak failed to defend Bush.

At home in the U.S., Brant says, Clinton leftovers such as national security adviser John Maisto seemed to be calling many of the shots on Brazil policy.

President Bush will meet with Lula at the White House on June 20.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Bush Administration

Castro/Cuba

Latin America

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