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So when the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was raised, people around the world breathed a sigh of relief. It was generally accepted that it would only be a matter of time before communism fell everywhere, including Latin America. But instead, something else happened south of the border — it morphed and continued its march through the region with unprecedented ease.

Now, there is a new wave of people fleeing Latin American tyranny and arriving in Miami. Jorge Bastidas, 57, was a successful small business owner on the touristy Venezuelan island of Margarita when avowed socialist Hugo Chavez seized the reins of power in 1998. A lot of Venezuelans liked Chavez in the beginning, Bastidas said, “but once in power, he took off the mask and revealed a monster.” The effects of his policies soon hit home.

“When he took over, the economy of our island was devastated,” Bastidas told The New American. “It went down and down and down until whole shopping malls, hotels, restaurants — all kinds of businesses really — were forced to shut down. And we got caught up in this too — it was horrible.”

In addition to the economy crumbling, crime and insecurity exploded, as persecution of the political opposition began. “I was a member of an organization that was opposed to Chavez,” explained Bastidas, also a father of two children. “And so, it happened: Any person who did not support him became his enemy. We were persecuted to the point where it became intolerable, and so when the opportunity arose, we had to leave.”

Bastidas has not returned home since that fateful day, but if Chavez is ever ousted, he would like to. Unfortunately, though, he isn’t hopeful. “That man will never — never — leave power through votes, of this I’m certain. He cheats!”

Not everybody was as lucky. Many middle-class business owners have had their businesses and property seized and have nowhere to run. And as Chavez grows increasingly authoritarian — backed up by friendly neighboring regimes, a seemingly endless supply of “petrodollars,” and shiploads of sophisticated Russian weaponry — Venezuela has unquestionably descended into full-blown totalitarianism.

The socialist leader routinely threatens to jail political opponents, even arresting a sitting Governor for allegedly conspiring against him. The former Defense Minister was also imprisoned after publicly opposing Chavez’ unconstitutional power grab to remain in office indefinitely.

The regime shut down six television stations just this year for failing to broadcast all of Chavez’ speeches. It has closed dozens of radio stations that were not sufficiently supportive. Now, Chavez wants to jail broadcasters who don’t abide by his “regulations.”

Leftists Advance: Nation by Nation
The Venezuelan people are not the only ones suffering under this resurgence of fanatical left-wing leaders.

The BBC reported in 2005 that 75 percent of South Americans were governed by leftist rulers, all of whom had risen to power in the preceding six years. And the trend has only accelerated since then, with some analysts using the term “Pink Tide” to describe the phenomenon that has enveloped Latin America.

Bolivia: With strong backing from Chavez, former coca farmer Evo Morales of the Movement for Socialism assumed power in 2006. His party now controls about two-thirds of both Parliamentary houses and has already “redistributed” over 60,000 acres of land. Foreign capital has nearly vanished. But incredibly, the government promises to intensify its efforts.

Ecuador: Radical leftist Rafael Correa, another proponent of Chavez’ “21st Century Socialism,” became President in 2007. “Socialism will continue,” he boldly announced after being elected, ending his victory speech with communist mass-murderer Ernesto Che Guevara’s famous words “Hasta la victoria siempre” (until victory always/forever).

Brazil: Latin America’s largest nation has been under the thumb of a charismatic radical left-wing President since 2003 — though he does a better job of concealing his true intentions than other rulers in the region. A former labor leader who helped found the Workers’ Party, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has poured vast sums into wealth redistribution and various “anti-poverty” schemes. Though widely seen and presented as a “moderate,” he is far from it. In conjunction with communist despot Fidel Castro, “Lula,” as he is affectionately known, spawned a powerful socialist cabal that united leftist terrorists, social movements, and political parties in an astoundingly successful effort to conquer Latin America for the Left.

Nicaragua: Revolutionary Marxist and Sandinista Daniel Ortega re-assumed leadership in 2007, despite a long record of violent rule and accusations by his stepdaughter of systematic sexual abuse (he was never prosecuted owing to governmental immunity and the statute of limitations). In a bid to extend his power, Ortega’s first act in 2010 unconstitutionally extended the terms of corrupt but supportive judicial officials under the guise of “stability.”

Other nations that have come under control of leftist leaders in the last dec-ade include Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean nations, and more. Many of the rulers came to power in questionable elections, with accusations of fraud running rampant. And in the few nations that have not already fallen to extremist left-wing governments, leftist forces often represent the main opposition parties. Examples of this include Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica.

Supranational Integration
In addition to the proliferation of left-wing regimes, a variety of new supranational governments are emerging that threaten to centralize the left-wing totalitarianism and impose it on the few remaining holdouts.

One of the most dangerous transnational leftist integration schemes is the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), which includes Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and Saint Vincent. The regional union is held together by disdain for the United States, capitalism, and liberty in general. It has already begun using a new transnational currency known as the SUCRE in commercial exchanges through the ALBA bank, and further “integration” is planned.

A broader regional government known as the Union of South American Nations includes every nation on the continent (except French Guiana, which is part of France). The “Bank of the South,” or BancoSur, is headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, while the “South American Parliament” will likely be located in Bolivia. Currently led by socialist Ecuadorian President Correa, the scheme includes a military alliance called the South American Defense Council, a developing “common market,” and even plans to introduce a common currency. The integration process, modeled on the European Union, is expected to be completed in less than a decade.

Driving Force
Socialism’s present stature in the southern latitudes shouldn’t have been altogether unexpected, as the poor and middle classes in those countries revolted against false promises made by power-hungry “rightist” politicians and governments that sold the people on a type of corrupt capitalism peddled as free-market capitalism. While purporting to support freedom and free markets, these leaders often engage in a type of crony capitalism instead of true liberalization-oriented reforms.

In nation after nation that was supposedly turning toward capitalism, the state provided absurd benefits to politically connected businesses or elites at the expense of the people (like selling state-owned enterprises or assets at fire-sale prices to the ruling elite, who then improperly reap massive profits and continue to run inefficient monopolies).

With promises of prosperity, leftist regimes have been able to dupe the peoples into voluntarily surrendering their freedom, property, and any legitimate chance at future prosperity.

But this phenomenon alone could not possibly account for the firm grip that statists now hold over the reins of power in Latin America. Other factors figure in.

According to acclaimed Brazilian writer and philosopher Professor Olavo de Carvalho, over a dozen current governments in Latin America are connected through a shadowy, powerful, and little-known organization called the Foro de São Paulo (São Paulo Forum — FSP). The name refers to the Brazilian city where it was founded in 1990 by Castro, the Sandinistas, and Lula (the supposedly “moderate” president of Brazil). It is essentially a network comprised of over 100 leftist political parties, various social movements, and several guerrilla terrorist organizations such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Chilean Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), among others. In recent years, bad publicity has forced the FSP to discourage leftist terrorist groups from sending official representatives to meetings. But according to experts and various reports obtained by The New American, this is merely a public-relations gimmick.

President Lula, who led the FSP for many years, defended the group and its collaboration with the FARC and other terrorist groups, saying that “18 years ago, in almost every South American country, there were political currents which argued that the only possible way to achieve power was violent struggle,” the AFP reported in a 2008 article. “In 1990, we created the São Paulo Forum, where we invited the entire Latin American Left to participate.”

Carvalho told The New American that the FSP “is the strategic command of the communist and pro-communist movement in the continent.” According to the group’s founding declaration, the mission is to, among other objectives, “renew leftist and socialist thought” and “to reaffirm its emancipating character.” Eventually its aims grew to include Latin American “integration” as well. And this is exactly the trend that has taken hold in the region.

Attempts to contact a spokesman for the FSP were unsuccessful. But despite the claims of its defenders, critics argue that the FSP is much more sinister than simply a “democratic” leftist vehicle.

But how did this secretive group become so powerful? “The Forum would never have accumulated so much power if its activities had been denounced from the outset, but during 16 years, big media and the establishment, in Latin America and in the U.S., refused to touch upon the subject, handing to the strategists of the communist revolution the protection of silence,” said Carvalho, possibly the most important individual involved in exposing the FSP.

Another factor is the support of powerful converging interests that include everything from governments and monopolistic businesses to drug traffickers and criminal organizations. “Legal parties cover up the activities of criminal groups, and these provide undercover financial resources to legal parties,” explained Carvalho.

Another crucial factor in the Latin American leftist resurgence is the assistance of former Soviet officials and other international connections, according to Toby Westerman, editor of International News Analysis and author of Lies, Terror and the Rise of the Neo-Communist Empire — Origins and Direction.

Westerman told The New American that a worldwide alliance including Communist China, Islamic fundamentalism, Iran, leftist Latin American rulers and guerrillas, and other forces were all collaborating in a war against the United States, united by their “anti-human, anti-God” ideology. “[The Russians] are running the same game, just slightly different — it’s more of a franchise operation than a central corporate operation, if you will. But if you take Russia out of it, the whole thing collapses.”

Indeed, the Russians have been supplying advanced weaponry to regimes like Chavez’. Russian National Security Council Chief Nikolai Patrushev actually attended the most recent ALBA summit last year. And China and Iran have both jumped on the bandwagon as well, cooperating with a variety of unsavory Latin American governments in myriad sectors and projects.

“We are creating a new world, a balanced world. A new world order, a multipolar world,” Chavez told reporters during a visit to Communist China, one of many. His “new world order” includes China, Iran, Japan, and a significantly weakened United States, he explained.

The Latin American leftists and the FSP have also received support from more “mainstream” Western European groups as well. The “European Left” (EL), a group that describes itself as an alliance of “left socialist, communist, and red-green parties in the European Union,” met in 2009 with representatives of the FSP and entered into a number of agreements for mutual assistance. To that end, the groups also developed “a linking mechanism, efficient and stable, between the [FSP] Secretariat, its regional secretaries, and the Executive Board of the EL,” according to a joint statement released by the EL.

So aside from any genuine discontent with false leaders on the so-called Right and the false image they have attached to free markets, there is a complex, interlocking network working in unison to advance what is essentially a new socialist revolution in Latin America. Hiding in the shadows, this network has had remarkable success in achieving its goals. And though the role of the U.S. government is hotly debated, U.S. policies are certainly not helping matters.

U.S. Involvement
Nearly every expert interviewed by The New American for this story had a different take on how the United States factors into the leftist resurgence. One view is that the U.S. government is secretly waging war against the leftist advances — at least the “21st Century Socialism” faction. “Bolivia and Ecuador, and more generally the region’s burgeoning social movements and Left political forces, are as much targets of this counteroffensive as Venezuela,” said William Robinson of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at the University of California. He claims the U.S. government is using a sophisticated combination of “military threats and hostilities with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures and the mobilization of political opposition forces inside the country” with the aim of provoking Chavez and other regimes into a “crackdown that transforms the democratic socialist process into an authoritarian one.”

But is the “Yankee empire” really waging a covert battle against the forces of communism and socialism in Latin America? Probably not, according to most analysts. One expert dismissed the notion as “nonsense.” If anything, the U.S. government has remained largely indifferent, he said. Others argue that the United States has, in fact, aided the revolution.

While the U.S. government has traditionally been perceived as opposed to leftist regimes in Latin America, the Obama administration took a different stance in Honduras, openly siding with Chavez, Castro, and the FARC in demanding the return to power of Honduras’ criminal leftist President Manuel Zelaya after he was ousted for flagrant constitutional violations.

There has also been indirect U.S. involvement in the region, and this may prove more important than overt actions such as intervening on Zelaya’s behalf. The United States is likely one of the largest financiers of the leftist movements in Latin America, whether intentionally or not. Half of Venezuela’s oil is sold to the United States, for example, while Chavez uses his petrodollars to help finance the socialist revolution throughout the region.

And while the U.S. government stifles and blocks domestic oil exploration (forcing consumers to purchase it from leftist Latin American regimes or anti-American Middle Eastern governments), it is simultaneously helping finance Brazil’s government-owned oil firm Petrobras’ offshore exploration to the tune of billions of U.S. dollars. In addition, $1.8 billion in U.S. foreign aid flowed to regimes in Latin America and the Carribean just in 2005, including more than $50 million to Brazil.

Of course, no discussion of U.S. involvement in the region would be complete without mentioning the role of Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative. Essentially, the United States unconstitutionally provides billions of dollars, weapons, training, and intelligence to partner nations in Latin America — Mexico and Colombia in particular — in a supposed effort to combat the drug trade. But the effect of this “war” has turned out to be a boon for certain well-connected, leftist narco-terrorist groups, especially the FARC, which had many of its competitors eliminated courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.

Analysts interviewed by The New American for this story had varying opinions about the anti-drug “aid,” with some arguing that it is indispensable and others claiming it is counterproductive. But as the War on Drugs intensifies, supply inevitably diminishes and risk increases, thereby raising prices and making the trade more lucrative and by extension providing more funding for leftist Latin American guerrillas and terrorists to purchase weapons and spread their ideology. It also gives leftist leaders a rallying cry to unite their populations against foreign intervention and a scapegoat on which to pin the results of their disastrous policies.

Consequences
The statist swing in Latin American governments has not delivered on promises of decreasing poverty or improving life for the common people. In fact, it has done the opposite.

Venezuela, despite its oil revenues, has been forced to start rationing water and electricity, even though the country has bountiful fresh water supplies and some of the largest known oil reserves in the world. And despite government efforts to boost domestic food production, the nation has been forced to import ever increasing amounts just to sustain itself. Chavez was also forced to devalue the Venezuelan currency in January. And if the nation continues on its current path, the devastation will only intensify.

Ecuador, Bolivia, and other leftist regimes find themselves in a similar situation. And Cuba, which has suffered under decades of communist authoritarianism, is the most extreme testament of the horrors wrought by central planning: It is one of the poorest nations on Earth (along with other communist states like North Korea).

“All of these countries, especially Venezuela and Ecuador, are running their economies into the ground,” University of Miami’s Department of International Studies Chair Bruce Bagley told The New American, referring primarily to ALBA members. “The state-run economies of Latin America in the past have proven disastrous and they’re going to prove disastrous now.… So, I do see that socialism of the 21st century is on its last legs.” But the expansive role of the state in Latin American economies, according to Bagley, will continue for a long time to come.

Outlook
But there may still be hope. After electing hard-core socialist president Michelle Bachelet in 2006, Chilean voters in January rejected the radical Left and instead opted for the more moderate Sebastián Piñera, who represents what is considered a “center-right” party. In Panama, voters last year threw out committed leftist Martín Torrijos and replaced him with the supposedly more freedom-friendly Ricardo Martinelli.

A top Latin American executive with a Fortune 50 multinational firm spoke with The New American on condition of anonymity and explained that he remained optimistic about the future business climate in Latin America, citing Colombia as one example of a nation that has made progress and continues to move in a positive direction. “Obviously, businesses are looking to invest in places with stable and reliable economies,” he said, adding that this could potentially improve the political environment of the region.

There is also a large coalition of groups opposed to the FSP and the leftward march of the region’s governments. The Union de Organizaciones Democraticas de America (UNOAmerica) is a Latin American umbrella group with around 200 member organizations. It exists to promote freedom and counter the FSP and its authoritarian allies in the region. And its president, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, remains optimistic about the future of freedom as well.

“[The FSP] has built within it the seeds of its own destruction,” Esclusa told The New American from the jungles of Colombia. “Once they are in power, they are not able to create wealth, so eventually, the movement will be defeated.… But even though it is destined to fail, in the meantime, it can destroy a lot.”

But while some analysts think the resurgent Left will inevitably fail, others are not so optimistic. Brazilian Professor Carvalho thinks more drastic measures are required. “The Forum can only be stopped if the legal political parties in its membership are taken to court for the criminal activities covered up and protected by the organization,” he explained.

And the time for that might well be running out: “When we present these facts to self-proclaimed right-wing leaders, to business leaders and even to high-ranking army officers, they chicken out and pretend they didn’t see anything,” Carvalho told The New American. “Meanwhile, communist militants keep securing positions in the judiciary, so that as time goes by any lawsuit brought against this alliance of leftists and criminals becomes ever more unlikely to succeed.”

The New American: Could you please tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, your work, your philosophy, and what motivated you to become involved in exposing the Foro de São Paulo?

Olavo de Carvalho: Notwithstanding having been a leftist militant as a teenager, I lost any interest in politics after severing my ties with the Left when I was 20 years old in 1969. From that time on, until I was 38, I worked as a text editor for newspapers and magazines and dedicated my free time to the study of philosophy, literature, cultural history, ancient esoteric traditions, and comparative religion. Though I delivered an occasional lecture here and there, I was happy to live as an anonymous scholar, perfectly unknown to public opinion and academic circles. It was only in the late ’80s that my attention was drawn to the ongoing destruction of high culture in Brazil, and I started to take notes on the alarming stupidities that were published in ever growing quantities by very influential Brazilian opinion makers, both academic and journalistic. Bit by bit I grasped the political factors that had generated that state of affairs, and in 1993 I wrote a book, The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, about the overtaking of higher education by the communist militancy, which was not at all interested in high culture, but only in gaining political power and profiting from the general dumbing down of Brazilian students. In 1995 I wrote The Garden of Afflictions, a study on the evolution of the idea of “Empire” in the West, since the times of Julius Caesar to the advent of the New World Order…. The following year I collected my notes about Brazilian cultural decay and published them under the title of The Collective Imbecile, … leading some big newspapers to hire me as a weekly political columnist…. Meanwhile, I had founded an electronic newspaper, Mídia Sem Máscara (“Unmasked Media”), that intended to correct the most flagrant distortions of the news published by the big media…. In 2005, as I was getting tired of receiving weekly death threats from leftist maniacs, I found it was a good idea to accept a job as a Washington foreign correspondent that was offered to me by a traditional Brazilian business newspaper, the Diário do Comércio (“Business Daily”), and here I am living in Virginia with my family. I love to be here, because Americans, though already infected by the neo-communist virus, are not yet so stupid as Brazilians have become.

TNA: To what extent has the leftist movement gained power in Latin America? What factors led to this resurgence and how was it possible?

Carvalho: Communist and pro-communist parties rule about a dozen Latin American countries today. This fact, by itself, is enough to prove that the “end of communism,” proclaimed by the Right soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, is a myth. World communism was never only an appendix of the USSR. It actually created the USSR, not the other way around. It existed a century before the Russian Revolution and continued to exist after the nominal extinction of Soviet power. What made the resurgence of communism easier — not only in Latin America, but around the world — was the cowardly timidity of Western right-wingers who, instead of taking the opportunity of the fall of the USSR to punish the communists for their crimes, chose instead a policy of “extending them a hand,” as if asking for their pardon for having defeated them, and offering them all sorts of aid, enabling them to reappear with a new or attenuated identity, even protecting them from being called “communists” (the fashionable euphemism is now “populism”). I believe that this absurd surrender of the winners was also stimulated by powerful globalist circles, whose interest in establishing worldwide bureaucratic controls converges with the objectives of the communists. The number of billionaire companies which came to openly contribute to leftist parties is enormous. I call “meta-capitalists” the individuals and groups which grew so wealthy with the market economy that they can’t stand anymore being at the mercy of the free market and seek, instead, to control everything, supporting bureaucracy instead of capitalism. Meta-capitalists are natural allies of the communists.

An event that clearly symbolizes this union of apparent adversaries was the tributes paid to Lula, the Brazilian President, who in the same week was honored by the World Economic Forum in Davos, for his conversion to capitalism, and by the São Paulo Forum, for his allegiance to communism. The contradiction is only apparent. At the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, which for public opinion embodies the opposite of the Davos Forum, the main demand was for a greater control over the world economy by big international organizations. Nobody there asked for shutting down the IMF or the World Bank, what they wanted was the integration of “civil society” — i.e., the World Social Forum — into those organizations. Many European NGOs [non-governmental organizations] which participate in the World Social Forum have a seat at the meetings of the World Bank and other international organizations. The “ideological” contrast serves only as propaganda. What we have is a gigantic symbiosis of all globalist and statist forces around the world.

TNA: How have the Foro de São Paulo and its members managed to become so influential? How can they be stopped?

Carvalho: The São Paulo Forum, created by Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Fidel Castro in 1990 with the goal of regaining in Latin America what had been lost in Eastern Europe, is the strategic command of the communist and pro-communist movement in the continent. Its membership includes over 100 legal political parties as well as criminal organizations of drug traffickers and kidnappers, such as the FARC (“Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia”) and the Chilean MIR (“Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria”). Legal parties cover up the activities of criminal groups, and these provide undercover financial resources to legal parties…. During 16 years big media and the establishment, in Latin America and in the United States, refused to touch upon the subject, handing to the strategists of the communist revolution the protection of silence. Some of them, such as the expert in Brazilian affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kenneth Maxwell, even openly denied the existence of the Forum, though by that time I had already published, in my electronic newspaper Mídia Sem Máscara, the complete official proceedings of its annual meetings, which revealed with total clarity the scope of its ambitions and goals.

The Forum can only be stopped if the legal political parties in its membership are taken to court for the criminal activities covered up and protected by the organization. Brazilian President Lula, who chaired the Forum for 12 years, signed in 2001 an agreement of full support to the FARC, the same organization which provides training and military assistance to criminal gangs in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, such as the PCC (“First Command of the Capital”) and the “Red Command,” which kill tens of thousands of Brazilian citizens every year. When FARC or MIR agents are arrested in Brazil, immediately Lula’s [Workers’] Party, the PT [Portuguese: Portido dos Trabalhadores], acts to free them. What is this if not complicity in crime? … Meanwhile, communist militants keep securing positions in the judiciary, so that as time goes by any lawsuit brought against this alliance of leftists and criminals becomes ever more unlikely to succeed.

TNA: What role have the Brazilian government and Lula in particular played in expanding the leftist movement’s power in Latin America? Is Lula a radical leftist, a moderate, or somewhere in between? What do his policies -indicate?

Carvalho: Lula’s ideological convictions don’t really matter, because they don’t even seem to exist. What exists is his loyalty to his cohorts in the militancy and to the commitments he made to the entities of the São Paulo Forum, which, if unfulfilled, would bring against him all the Latin American Left, leaving him without any support, not even from the Right, which is by now so weak that its support is worthless. A mediocre man doesn’t act out of convictions, but according to the objective pressures of his group of reference. It’s a waste of time to ask whether he “is” a true communist within himself or not. Within Lula there is only emptiness and meanness, but around him there is a well-organized structure of revolutionary power which he serves well and will never stop serving.

Foreign observers let themselves be impressed (or pretended to do so) by Lula’s “orthodox” economic policy and therefore concluded that he had changed his ideology. This is total nonsense. Lula only adopted these policies so that he would not have to fight two fronts simultaneously. Following the example of Lenin’s “New Economic Policy,” he sought to appease foreign investors while consolidating the power of leftist organizations in internal politics (using copious amounts of public money to finance them), and boycotting the Right in such a way that it is not able, as he himself recently declared, even to present its own candidate in the upcoming presidential elections [in October]. This will be the third presidential election without any right-wing candidate. As soon as it felt that the control of the Left over the country had been consolidated, the ruling party threw off its mask of moderation and began to propose radical measures such as state control over the media, the right of leftist organizations to invade and take rural properties as they see fit, etc.

TNA: Do you see the leftist resurgence as a monolithic threat under central control or rather as a splintered movement with various factions? Why? Assuming they exist, who are the leaders?

Carvalho: Throughout history the revolutionary movement has never depended on monolithic control to be able to grow and prosper. Even during the period of Soviet hegemony, the expansion of communism coexisted perfectly well with the deep internal dissent that separated the Soviets from the Chinese and from the radicalism of Latin America guerrillas. In the last dec-ades, the communist movement has perfected even more its capacity to deal with a variety of internal dissidences, using them as camouflage and as instruments to adapt itself to local situations. The linear party hierarchy, which had always been more an appearance than a reality, has been totally replaced by a flexible organization of “networks” connected via the Internet…. In Latin America, the leadership of the revolutionary movement still belongs to the founders of the São Paulo Forum: Lula, Marco Aurélio Garcia, Ricardo Kotscho, and others.

TNA: What role have Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan Petrodollars played in this resurgence? Is the Cuban government an important player?

Carvalho: Hugo Chavez is only a scarecrow that the Latin American Left waves before the world to distract the attention away from the São Paulo Forum, which is the true strategic command of the Latin American revolution. Cuba and Venezuela are important as shelters for terrorists and drug traffickers. In Venezuela and other Spanish-speaking countries ruled by the São Paulo Forum, there is strong and organized opposition, while in Brazil all that is left is the Left itself, which controls the scene absolutely.

TNA: How significant and deep are the ties of leftist leaders and political parties to terrorism and crime?

Carvalho: In Brazil, federal judge Odilon de Oliveira gathered proofs showing that FARC’s narco-guerrillas … control a large chunk of local criminality. As a result, he became the most persecuted man in Latin America and now has to live as a prisoner in his own office, not being able even to go out to visit his family…. The FARC also provide guerrilla training for the militants of the “Landless Movement” (MST), an ironic name because that entity is one of the biggest landowners in Brazil today. The MST invades farms, destroys produce and equipment, sends away the (true) workers, and is invariably rewarded for its actions, receiving enormous sums of federal monies and the property of the invaded farms. Even more ironically, the main factor for Brazil’s economic success is the productivity of its big farms…. As for the Cuban government, its connections to drug trafficking have been proved several years ago in the book The Mafia from Havana: The Cuban Cosa Nostra…. The same connections exist with the Venezuelan government, as demonstrated by a report of the U.S. Congress from July 2009…. In Brazil, the alliance between the FARC and local criminal gangs has made it absolutely impossible to control crime activity. Nowadays, some 50,000 Brazilians are murdered every year. Instead of repressing the gangs that produce this insanity, the government grants them territorial autonomy and is even cynical enough to propose, as a remedy, disarming the honest population.

TNA: To what extent and in what way is the U.S. government involved in the region?

Carvalho: For several decades now, the attitude of the American government in the area has been ambiguous, to say the least. Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia only offered economic and military aid to the Colombian government on the explicit condition that … criminal organizations of a political nature be preserved [from] any damage. The result was that the old cartels were destroyed and the FARC became the absolute rulers of drug trafficking in the continent. In reality this kind of “war on drugs” is a war that favors the Left against Latin America. The Department of State is well informed about the São Paulo forum and its Brazilian leadership. When it supports Lula under the pretext that he is “a moderate,” in contrast with the “radical” Hugo Chavez, it is actually camouflaging the real danger so that it may grow sheltered from the sight of any intruder.

TNA: What role are multilateral and supranational institutions like ALBA, MERCOSUR, the Andean Community, and UNASUR playing in all of this? Could the integration process be used to eventually absorb all of Latin America under authoritarian control?

Carvalho: All these organizations were created under the inspiration of the idea of free trade, and there were even some people who saw in them a sign of formidable capitalist progress. However, we now understand that free trade is a double-edged sword, which can also be used to dissolve national sovereignties and to build upon their rubble a new structure of supranational power. Many political analysts who only look at things from an economic point of view fail to notice such danger. They imagine that the expansion of commercial ties is by itself a vaccine against communism…. Well, in today’s Latin America, the Left practically has the monopoly of political action in its hands, and indeed this is so much so that all those organizations you have mentioned — all of them — are being used for the creation of a kind of Union of Latin American Socialist Republics.

TNA: How serious is the threat of this resurgence? What do you see happening in both the near future and the long run?

Carvalho: There is no unified answer that applies to all Latin America. The situation is different in each country. For example, however unbelievable it may seem, there is a strong and organized resistance against the rise of neo-communism in Venezuela. Colombia, likewise, is a remarkable center of resistance. On the other hand, nowhere else has the Right been so utterly destroyed as it has been in Brazil, which is, for this very reason, the headquarters of Latin American revolution. When former Venezuelan presidential candidate Alejandro Peña set up UnoAmerica (Association of Democratic Organizations of the Americas), the only international organization devoted to fighting communism, he found no difficulty in obtaining effective support in most of the Spanish-speaking countries, but he has always had great difficulties finding support in Brazil…. In other countries, however, the Left is not so culturally hegemonic, which has made possible the organization of an effective and strong anti-communist action. From this point of view, then, Venezuela is in a better situation than Brazil, for if in the former country, the Right has been oppressed, in the latter it has already died, being now necessary to create a new Right out of nothing. In this sense, American political analysts are always getting it all backwards: They are alarmed at Venezuela and do not understand that the headquarters of the revolution is in Brazil.

The most obvious thing about the analysis of history and society is that when a situation changes considerably, you can no longer describe it with the same concepts as before: in order to account for unheard-of facts, not classifiable under known categories, you have to create new concepts or perfect the old ones through criticism.

With the stage of world government implementation already in full swing, it is pathetic to notice that political analysts, whether in academia or in the media, continue to offer the public analyses based on the old concepts of “national state,” “national power,” “international relations,” “free trade,” “democracy,” “imperialism,” “class struggle,” “ethnic conflicts,” etc., when it is clear that none of those bear much relation to the facts of today’s world.

The most basic events of the last fifty years are: first, the rise of the globalist élites, detached from any identifiable national interest and engrossed in the building not only of a world state, but a unified and entirely artificial planetary pseudo-civilization, conceived not as an expression of society, but as an instrument for the control of society by the state; second, the fabulous advancements of the human sciences, which have placed in the hands of those élites means of social domination never dreamed of by tyrants of other times.

As early as several decades ago, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), the creator of general systems theory, aware that his contribution to science was being used for undue purposes, warned, “It is perhaps the greatest danger of the systems of modern totalitarianism that they are so alarmingly up-to-date not only in physical and biological, but also in psychological technology. The methods of mass suggestion, of the release of the instincts of the human beast, of conditioning and thought control are developed to highest efficacy; just because modern totalitarianism is so terrifically scientific, it makes the absolutism of former periods appear a dilettantish and comparatively harmless makeshift.”

In his 1998 book, L’Empire Écologique: La Subversion de l’Écologie par le Mondialisme (The ecological empire: the subversion of ecology by globalism), Pascal Bernardin explained in detail how the general systems theory has been used as a basis for the construction of a world totalitarian system, which in the last ten years has definitively gone from blueprint to patent reality—a reality which is clear to all but those who do not want to see. Von Bertalanffy, however, was not referring only to his own theory. He speaks of “methods” in the plural, and ordinary citizens of democracies cannot have any idea of the plethora of scientific resources now at the disposal of the new lords of the world. If von Bertalanffy had to mention names, he would not have omitted Kurt Levin, perhaps the greatest social psychologist of all times, whose Tavistock Institute, in London, was founded by the global élite itself in 1947 for the sole purpose of creating means of social control capable of reconciling the permanence of formal legal democracy with the total domination of the state over society.

Just to give you an idea of how far all this goes, the educational programs of almost all nations of the world—which have been in force for at least twenty years now—are determined by homogeneous rules directly imposed by the United Nations, and calculated not to develop children’s intelligence or conscience, but to make them docile, malleable, morally characterless creatures, ready to adhere enthusiastically and without discussion to any word of command which the global élite may deem useful for its objectives. The means used to achieve this are “non-aversive” control techniques conceived to make their victim not only feel as if he is acting of his own free will when he yields to impositions from authority, but also to develop an immediate reaction of irrational defense to the mere suggestion that he should critically examine the subject in question.

It would be a euphemism to say that mass application of such techniques “bears influence on” public education programs: these techniques are the whole content of current schooling. All disciplines, mathematics and science included, have been reshaped to serve psychological manipulation purposes. Pascal Bernardin himself meticulously described this phenomenon in his 1995 book Machiavel Pédagogue (Machiavelli the Educator). Read it and you will find out why your child cannot solve a quadratic equation or finish a sentence without lapsing into at least three solecisms, even though he comes back from school bossing you around like a people’s commissar, demanding “politically correct” behavior of his parents.

The quickness with which sudden mutations of mentality—many of which are arbitrary, grotesque, and even absurd—are universally imposed without meeting the least resistance (as though they had emanated from an irrefutable logic and not from despicable Machiavellianism) could be explained by the simple school brainwashing that prepares children to accept new fashions as divine commands.

But obviously, school is not the only agency engrossed in producing such results. Big media, now massively concentrated in the hands of globalist mega-corporations, play a fundamental role in dumbing down the masses. In order to achieve this, one of the most widely employed techniques nowadays is cognitive dissonance, a discovery made by psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989). This is how it works. If you read today’s newspapers, you will see that Tiger Woods, the golf champion, one of our most beloved citizens of late, is now under heavy attack by newspapers and TV news shows because the poor man has been found to have mistresses. Scandal! Horror! General indignation threatens to drop half of the adulterer’s sponsorship deals and strike him off of the list of the “beautiful people” who appear on advertisements for sneakers, bubble gums, and miracle diets. But there is a telltale detail: beside the protests against the sportsman’s immorality, there are fierce attacks on “right-wing extremists” who do not accept abortion, gay marriage, or the inducing of children to premature sexual delight. The two moral codes, mutually contradictory, are simultaneously offered as equally obliging and sacrosanct. Excited and impelled to all kinds of sexual debaucheries, while at the same time threatened with character assassination in case he may practice them even to a modest degree, the anguished citizen reacts through a kind of intellectual breakdown, becoming a servile fool who no longer knows how to orient himself and who begs for a voice of command. The command can be empty and meaningless, as for example “Change!,” but when it is uttered, it always sounds like a relief.

Blaming scientists for this state of affairs is as idiotic as pinning the blame for murders on weapons. Men like von Bertalanffy, Levin, and Festinger created instruments that can serve both the building up of tyranny and the reconquest of freedom. It is we who have the obligation of taking those weapons out of the hands of their monopolistic owners and learning to use them for the opposite purpose, freeing our spirit instead of allowing it to be enslaved.

Translated by Alessandro Cota
Revised by Donald Hank