IN BRIEF
Mexico: Desafuero For a year, from may 2004 to may 2005, an arcane process called desafuero dominated the news and all political conversation in Mexico City—and just a few degrees less so in the...
...He is not the only presidential hopeful within the PRD but after the mobilizations of the anti-desafuero campaign, he dominates his party and will certainly get its nomination...
...The CIA provided him in Argentina the assistance of other Argentine, Chilean, and U.S...
...He studied economics at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, moved to Chile in 1962, worked with the Allende government from 1970 until its overthrow in 1973 and then became a refugee once again...
...They began organizing rural militias and increasing lobbying efforts against agrarian reform...
...But significantly fewer families have been settled than expected...
...By the end of 2003, the II PNRA had not yet entered into law and rural movements were getting restless...
...According to a Mitofsky poll taken just after the desafuero vote in the Chamber of Deputies, 57% of respondents who identified themselves as partisans of the PAN thought AMLO should not be barred from participating in next year’s presidential campaign...
...expatriate Michael Townley was, Contreras declared, put at Pinochet’s disposal by Vernon Walters, Deputy Director of the CIA...
...In 1967, Frank, then living in Canada, had planned to attend one of NACLA’s early organizational meetings but was denied an entry visa by the U.S...
...In response, this past May Day more than 12,000 rural workers associated with the MST, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), Vía Campesina, and a coalition of indigenous peoples, activists and clergy staged a 17-day, 125-mile National March for Agrarian Reform and against neoliberal budget cuts enacted by the government...
...no rigged elections...
...For more information, contact Friends of the MST at www.mstbrazil.org...
...Along with the loss of immunity, the federal indictment would have forced López Obrador out of office and, had he remained under indictment long enough (or had he been found guilty in a court trial), prevented him from running for president in 2006...
...documents declassified in May 2005 indicate that FBI investigators had trustworthy information that Posada and another Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, had organized the bombing...
...His presidency sparked hope among Brazil’s 4.8 million landless families that the country’s rural crisis would receive deserved attention...
...It took the Chamber of Deputies nearly a year to consider the charges...
...Born in Berlin in 1929, Frank came with his family for asylum in the United States in 1941...
...Obviously, it failed to make a credible case, even to its own party faithful...
...He asserted that Townley worked with CIA agents as well as the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM) and the Venezuelan intelligence agency DISIP to carry out the crime...
...Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert, he said, were “assassinated by the CIA agent Michael Townley, with passport and false name supplied by the CIA in the United States in 1973...
...The desafuero had become moot...
...Though the road was never built—the city built an alternate road that bypassed the disputed land—construction did not cease immediately upon the judge’s order...
...It had no ideological or “democratic” ax to grind...
...This was remarkable considering the PAN had spent the past year demonizing López Obrador and defining its own identity as a party opposed to a mayor who had supposedly placed himself above the law...
...The links with CNM and DISIP have long been established, but again, Contreras conspicuously omitted the central, proven role of DINA...
...Augusto Pinochet for his “permanent, ominous silence” and lack of courage in the face of “unmerited sufferings and humiliations” purportedly inflicted on DINA agents by human rights groups and the courts...
...They also sought to gain public support for agrarian reform as well as alternative economic and agricultural policies...
...The commission recommended a program that would settle one million families over a period of four years and provide more support to family farmers...
...Although Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) has made clear that the common enemy of rural movements is the latifundio, and not the state, movements have faced a lack of action from the Lula government...
...On April 7 of this year, 11 months after the charges were brought, the Chamber’s two conservative (though in different ways) parties, Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) and the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), combined to approve the desafuero...
...Despite all this, the government slashed the 2005 budget for agrarian development by half...
...Andre Gunder Frank We mourn the death of Andre Gunder Frank, a powerful and original thinker whose early work on dependency and underdevelopment had a profound effect on the radical re-thinking of development theory in the 1960s and 1970s...
...He will be missed...
...Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro Cuban terrorist, is a former CIA operative who was involved in the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Contra war of the 1980s...
...A total of 175,485 people were evicted in 2003, an increase of 263% from the year before...
...In 2003 alone, 73 rural leaders were assassinated, a 70% increase from the number killed in 2002...
...Embassy, and Fuentes was secretly transferred to Villa Grimaldi, where he permanently disappeared...
...But there were none of the usual corruption or abuse-of-power charges one has become used to in Mexico: no hand in the public till...
...Contreras included a list of over 580 persons with information supposedly clarifying their disappearances...
...He thanks Dan LaBotz and Irene Ortiz for helpful comments on this uniquely Mexican event...
...Indeed, the barring of his presidential candidacy was a major goal of the desafuero...
...And according to another national poll, taken at the same time, Panistas were evenly divided as to the “justice” of the desafuero...
...Americas: Condor Figures Reappear Two dirty warriors associated with Operation Condor, the Cold War-era assassination program organized by six South American militaries, resurfaced recently...
...On May 13 Contreras submitted a notarized document to the Minister of Justice and the Supreme Court strenuously defending DINA’s behavior during Chile’s dirty war...
...Macedo de la Concha’s bill of particulars alleged that in 2001, López Obrador’s municipal government had ignored a judicial order to cease construction of an access road to a public hospital through a piece of land whose ownership was in dispute...
...He is wanted by Venezuela and Cuba for the 1976 Cubana jet bombing in which all 73 passengers died...
...Right-wing U.S...
...While Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1970) proposed a new interpretation of the historical dynamic of the region, ReOrient (1999) presented a totally different perspective of the historical process of development, of capitalism and its expansive dynamic, as well as a fundamental critique of what he considered a Eurocentric view of this process...
...Pressure is legitimate and the government should dialogue with the movement to carry out the goals of agrarian reform...
...Contreras also repeated his often-asserted claim that the CIA was the perpetrator of these crimes, but added new details...
...CIA agents as well as the extremist right-wing movements Triple A and Milicia...
...The landed classes and agro-export interests have exerted tremendous pressure on the courts, which have increasingly sided with large landholders in land disputes, ordering the highest number of evictions since the CPT began documenting such cases in the late 1970s...
...He died of cancer on April 23...
...He was a friend of NACLA, a contributor to the early NACLA Newsletter (forerunner to the Report) and an influential intellectual presence at NACLA’s founding and subsequent development...
...He omitted mention of notorious DINA detention centers such as Villa Grimaldi, where many died under torture...
...links to Latin American state terror and Operation Condor...
...Two and a half weeks later, on April 24, López Obrador convoked a “silent march” through the streets of Mexico City in opposition to the desafuero...
...Her new book is Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005...
...national Ronni Moffitt, in a Washington D.C...
...When asked whether the process was “just” or “unjust,” 35% came down on either side of the issue, the rest being undecided...
...López Obrador has now announced that he will step down from the mayoralty of his own accord to run for president...
...He spent the rest of his life as a prolific researcher and writer in many parts of the world...
...And he was a warm friend...
...It was a hard sell for Fox’s government and, in the end, the Mexican public refused to buy it...
...In addition, the legal and political uncertainty of the process began to seriously destabilize the country’s political, economic and social life...
...The march set off from Goiânia in the central Brazilian state of Goiás on May 1 and ended in Brasília, the nation’s capital, on May 17...
...Three days after the march, Fox fired Attorney General Macedo de la Concha and called for reconciliation...
...At the Brasília negotiations, Workers’ Party (PT) President José Genoino said, “Agrarian reform is a result of the combination of efforts from the street and from the government...
...He now lives under an assumed name in the United States as a result of a plea bargain in the Letelier case...
...Embassy, it remains unclear what his links to the CIA were...
...For the first time, Contreras asserted that Pinochet directly ordered two infamous Condor assassinations: of Chileans Carlos Prats (1974) and Orlando Letelier (1976...
...The marchers retreated from Brasília peacefully on May 19, vowing to keep pressuring the government to comply with its promises...
...It is a process employed only on rare occasions, when evidence indicates that an official has committed a serious crime...
...About the Author Hannah Wittman is part of Friends of the MST-North America, Cornell University...
...But the Paraguayans acted with the collaboration of Argentine intelligence and the U.S...
...During the first two years of Lula’s presidency, land occupations and rural conflicts increased sharply...
...Previous accounts of the assassination posited that Townley recruited the Cubans in New Jersey in 1976...
...Our friend Carlos Vilas writes from Argentina: “Andre was a vigorous thinker whose work had a powerful influence on two generations of intellectuals and political activists, and stimulated important debates...
...Contreras claimed Townley was sent to the meeting as Pinochet’s personal delegate...
...The cases of Contreras and Posada thus raise new questions about U.S...
...Similarly, Contreras claimed that the CIA was behind the assassination of Letelier and his aide, U.S...
...At the same time, the landholding elite felt threatened by the institutionalization of what they called “populist rhetoric” advocating social justice through land redistribution...
...Townley did confess his involvement in these two murders, as a DINA assassin, and there is evidence that Milicia did work with him...
...no disappearance of political opponents...
...On May 4, 2004, Mexico’s attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, acting on behalf of President Vicente Fox, brought a bill of particulars against Mexico City’s popular center-left mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), along with a request that the Mayor be stripped of his immunity from prosecution...
...All this stimulated the May Day march, which used media and local roadside assemblies to raise awareness of the government’s obligation to provide sufficient credit for smallholders and to comply with its promise to settle 400,000 families by the end of Lula’s term...
...The business community, in particular, began to fear that it would soon suffer from the instability stemming from this perceived attempt to bar a candidate because of a minor, disputed, non-pecuniary infraction...
...According to the II PNRA, which deems access to land an essential step towards social inclusion and economic development, 85% of farms take up just 20% of arable land, while landowners who own more than 2,500 acres (comprising less than 2% of all farms) account for almost 44% of Brazil’s arable land...
...Popular movements now find themselves at a strategic crossroads...
...According to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) of the Catholic Church, not since the mid-1980s had Brazil experienced so many rural conflicts...
...After delegations of marchers met with Lula and with the presidents of each house of Congress in Brasília on May 17 and 18, the government promised to settle 400,000 families by 2006, reverse budget cuts to the Ministry of Agrarian Development, revise productivity criteria used to expropriate idle land, hire 1,300 new staff numbers at the Federal Institute for Land Reform (INCRA), provide food for camped families and increase agricultural credit for settlers...
...Desafuero charges must be brought before the country’s lower legislative house, the Chamber of Deputies, and must be accompanied by a bill of particulars that would serve as an indictment...
...Andre was also a sharp interlocutor, always willing to offer and receive criticism...
...This new document indicates that U.S...
...And while he was close to the U.S...
...Brazil: Landless Pressure Government When long-time union leader luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected Brazil’s president in October 2002, one of his first actions was to commission the Second National Plan for Agrarian Reform (II PNRA...
...The judge who prosecuted the Letelier case in Chile, Adolfo Bañados, told the Chilean daily La Tercera: “It is very possible that the CIA participated, but I reiterate that it was in combination with DINA, which had, definitely, major responsibility...
...Moreover, an FBI agent involved in the Letelier case confirmed that Posada had participated, along with other Cuban terrorists, in a meeting in the Dominican Republic in which both the airline bombing and the Letelier assassination were planned...
...In between, many other works opened new perspectives to academic and political discussion...
...About the Author J. Patrice McSherry teaches political science at Long Island University in Brooklyn...
...Another newly declassified FBI document of November 1976—shortly after Letelier’s assassination—provides even more stunning information...
...In Mexico, a desafuero is the removal of a public official’s privileged immunity (fuero...
...car bombing...
...Mexico: Desafuero For a year, from may 2004 to may 2005, an arcane process called desafuero dominated the news and all political conversation in Mexico City—and just a few degrees less so in the rest of the country...
...But Townley was certainly a DINA operative...
...He taught us that history and economics can be seen from several angles,” comments NACLA founding member Mike Locker, “not just from the side that has the resources to write it—and that every action has a corresponding reaction...
...In known Condor cases in which individuals were detained/disappeared in one country and secretly handed over to others, Contreras also withheld and manipulated data...
...FBI sources reported that Guillermo Novo, a CNM member who assisted Townley in the Letelier crime, had traveled to Chile in early 1975 and initially planned the Letelier assassination then with right-wing Chileans...
...According to the MST, of the 115,000 families proposed for 2003, barely 14,000 families were settled, and in 2004 the government expropriated only enough land to settle 50,000 more...
...About The Author Fred Rosen is one of NACLA’s editors...
...But Contreras’ report was an exercise in gray propaganda, a mix of truth and deception aimed at deflecting responsibility from DINA...
...It simply demonstrated that, though temporarily out of power, it remains a force to be reckoned with in Mexican politics...
...In particular, the movements demanded the expropriation of the largest estates, a constitutional amendment limiting the size of landholdings and initiatives promoting a regionally diverse, self-sufficient family-based agricultural model that would ensure food security for the country while protecting the environment...
...Declassified CIA documents also confirmed that Posada was a CIA informant until at least June 1976, when the meeting occurred...
...It tipped the scales...
...The charter demands policies to radically alter the current predatory model of agricultural development that “concentrates land, income and power...
...He listed Chilean Isaac Fuentes Alarcón, for example, as detained by Paraguayan police and killed in Paraguay in an escape attempt...
...A week later the new attorney general dropped all the charges...
...intelligence knew of the assassination plans far in advance, yet failed to deter the Condor apparatus or warn Letelier, who was living in Washington...
...That perception grew when López Obrador began to command a two-digit lead over his nearest competitors and, more significantly, began to summon significant numbers of his followers onto the streets on a fairly regular basis...
...no selling of high-priced favors...
...Lula promised to re-settle 400,000 families during his first term and regularize the land tenure situation of another 500,000...
...The PRI might have stayed the course of the desafuero, but the PAN was losing its constituency and had to back down...
...Only members of López Obrador’s center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), along with a few minor party deputies voted against...
...An estimated 1.2 million people took part, making it the largest protest march in Mexico’s protest-laden history...
...But many are disappointed with the government’s performance, or lack thereof, in securing land reform and alternative policies for economic and agricultural development...
...In response, more than 45 social movement organizations, rural unions, pastoral commissions and research agencies joined together in 2003 to sign a “Land Charter” defending land reform and family agriculture...
...Manuel Contreras, currently in prison for the 1975 disappearance of a left-wing activist, is the former chief of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), Chile’s secret police, and a former CIA asset...
...Consulate in Montreal...
...The PRI did not fair as badly...
...In an honest count, he is the odds-on favorite to win the presidency next summer...
...Chilean human rights groups were quick to point out errors and disinformation in Contreras’ data...
...The second dirty warrior to resurface, Luis Posada Carriles, clandestinely entered the United States in April 2005 to seek asylum and was finally apprehended by authorities over a month later...
...For example, Contreras claimed DINA was responsible for only 80 of the disappearances, when in fact it carried out the majority of human rights crimes...
...Orlando Bosch, who was living in Chile and involved in the Condor prototype at that time, told an FBI source that the Chilean terrorist organization Patria y Libertad, to which Townley and other DINA operatives belonged, and the Cuban forged an agreement to assassinate Letelier...
...He sharply criticized Gen...
Vol. 39 • July 2005 • No. 1
