>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Jan. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>SOCIAL CRISIS DEEPENS IN ECUADOR
>
>By Andy McInerney
>
>Mass anger continues to swell as Ecuador President Jamil
>Mahuad fights to stabilize capitalist rule in the Andean
>nation. Despite a plan to "dollarize" the economy and a
>government declaration of a national state of emergency,
>workers and peasants are preparing for battle.
>
>Like several South American countries, Ecuador is facing
>its worst economic crisis since the depression of the 1930s.
>The economy shrank by 7 percent last year. Inflation is
>running at 60 percent. The cost of living is about $200 per
>month--while the monthly minimum wage is $45.
>
>This devastation is compounded by the International
>Monetary Fund's plans to impose more severe austerity
>measures on Ecuador's working class. On Jan. 10, Ma huad
>announced plans to base the economy on the U.S. dollar--
>buying up the national sucre at a rate of 25,000 per dollar
>and eliminating it for all but petty transactions. That
>would put Ecuador's monetary policy in the hands of the U.S.
>Treasury in Washington.
>
>The plan also calls for privatizating most state-run
>companies and raising the prices for gas, electricity,
>telephones and other basic utilities. Both the IMF and
>Washington support the plan.
>
>Opposition is building, however, from a wide spectrum of
>social forces--ranging from Indigenous groups to oil workers
>and students. The powerful Confederation of In digenous
>Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) called for an "uprising"
>beginning on Jan. 15 and leading to a seizure of the capital,
>Quito. These forces are demanding Mahuad's removal.
>
>Mahuad responded by declaring a state of emergency. He
>deployed over 30,000 troops to prevent Indigenous peasants
>from blockading roads. Police arrested three leaders of
>popular organizations and over 150 students.
>
>CONAIE spokespeople reminded the government that its
>members are rural people and know the countryside well. They
>threatened to have Quito completely surrounded by Jan. 18.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <008b01bf6511$daf67ea0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] Albright in Colombia: Is U.S. aggression in the works?
>Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:49:54 -0500
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Jan. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>ALBRIGHT VISITS COLOMBIA:
>IS DIRECT U.S. AGGRESSION IN THE WORKS?
>
>By Deirdre Griswold
>
>Is the U.S. ruling class going down the same road in South
>America that led to disaster in Vietnam--that is, trying to
>suppress a growing revolutionary struggle with military
>"advisers," arms and tons of money?
>
>In both Colombia and Ecuador, all signs point to rapidly
>escalating U.S. intervention to prop up governments
>threatened by mass movements.
>
>Washington has also set its sights on the progressive
>government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, but conceals
>its deep hostility because of his huge support in the polls.
>
>ALBRIGHT VISIT AN ALARM BELL
>
>Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Colombia in
>mid-January to trumpet a $1.6 billion package of mostly
>military aid that vastly increases U.S. involvement in the
>civil war there.
>
>Colombia is already the third-biggest recipient of U.S.
>military aid, after Israel and Egypt. This visit by the
>highest-ranking U.S. official in 10 years should be an alarm
>bell alerting the progressive and anti-war forces here.
>
>Colombia has been in deep depression and a state of
>revolution for years now. The unions, the peasants' groups,
>all popular organizations are led by Marxists.
>
>A decade ago, the Patriotic Union, a progressive electoral
>coalition supported by the Communist Party, won thousands of
>government seats around the country. But the corrupt ruling
>oligarchy unleashed death squads--paramilitary forces mostly
>organized by the drug cartels--against the political
>opposition. They murdered thousands of leftist elected
>officials.
>
>That's when the left pulled back from the elections and
>concentrated on the armed struggle. Today this struggle is
>led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--FARC-EP--
>and the Army of National Liberation--ELN.
>
>The guerrillas have been winning this struggle. Now the
>Marxist FARC-EP controls an area in southern Colombia the
>size of Switzerland. It has been involved in peace talks
>with the government of Andres Pastrana for the past year.
>
>Enter the Pentagon and State Department.
>
>The last thing Washington wants is a peaceful resolution
>that would allow the left a deciding role in Colombia's
>future. That would spur on revolutionary mass movements
>throughout Latin America, which U.S. capitalists have
>considered their playground for exploitation since the
>Monroe Doctrine.
>
>ECONOMIC CRISIS SPURS REVOLUTION
>
>The crisis has grown as bourgeois governments find it
>impossible to pay even the interest on the unjust "debt" owed
>to imperialist banks and governments--which have grown rich
>off the super-profits extracted from these same countries.
>Washington knows that the masses hate its "free market"
>doctrine allowing huge U.S. corporations to grab the land and
>resources as part of "privatization." This doctrine has led to
>the decimation of social services, huge layoffs and the loss
>of national sovereignty.
>
>But on Jan. 11 President Bill Clinton, in announcing that
>the United States plans to quadruple its aid to Colombia, said
>this will "help Colombia promote peace and prosperity and
>deepen its democracy."
>
>Clinton doesn't exactly have a reputation for honesty. How
>does the Washington foreign policy establishment--which does
>the bidding of the corporations, not of U.S. workers--expect
>to sell the people here on a war to protect the status quo in
>a part of the world that so desperately needs social change?
>
>The magic word is drugs. For several years now, the Clinton
>administration has been pushing an aggressive public-relations
>campaign smearing the revolutionary guerrillas as "narco-
>terrorists." This was escalated when a general, Barry
>McCaffrey, was appointed head of the so-called "war on drugs."
>
>The corporate media here obediently repeat the official line
>that the Colombian government is the good guys and the
>revolutionaries are nothing but drug lords.
>
>It's all complete fantasy. It is widely known that the real
>drug lords in Colombia are fanatically right wing and have
>financed the dirty war against the left. The reason there's a
>revolution in that country is that the capitalist economy
>geared to producing whatever the U.S. market demands--
>including cocaine--has failed to provide a decent living for
>the majority of the people. It enriches foreign investors
>while making a few Colombians, including the drug lords,
>immensely wealthy.
>
>Even Colombian President Andres Pastrana admitted in a July
>29, 1999, interview with the Argentine newspaper Clarin,
>"There is no evidence at the moment that the FARC are drug
>traffickers." The Colombian president, who had been meeting
>with the FARC, said, "I would never talk with the drug
>traffickers."
>
>A spokesperson for the FARC, Ivan Rios, told Radio Cadena
>Nacional on Jan. 12 that the $1.6 billion the United States is
>giving Colombia is not to fight drug trafficking.
>
>"This is a highly dangerous step to escalate the conflict
>raging in our country," said Rios. It is "an excuse to move
>forward with the counterinsurgency war in Colombia."
>
>He added, "The U.S. government lacks the moral authority to
>say that it is waging a just war on drug trafficking because
>it created the problem and it is profiting from that
>business."
>
>Perhaps he was thinking of U.S. Army Col. James Hiett,
>formerly the head of Washington's "anti-drug" program in
>Colombia. Hiett was quietly reassigned in August 1999 after
>his wife was charged with sending packages of cocaine to the
>United States using the U.S. Embassy's mail service. Or of the
>charges publicized a few years ago that Washington financed
>the Contra war against Nicaragua by introducing crack into
>inner-city U.S. communities.
>
>The FARC answered the announcement of new U.S. military aid
>with four simultaneous attacks on police stations and banks
>on Jan. 13.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <009101bf6512$45b0e1e0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] 100,000 honor Luxemburg-Liebknecht
>Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:52:54 -0500
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Jan. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>DEFYING POLICE AND NEO-NAZIS:
>100,000 HONOR LUXEMBURG-LIEBKNECHT
>
>By Greg Butterfield
>
>Some 100,000 people marched in Berlin Jan. 15 to mark 81
>years since the murders of communist heroes Rosa Luxemburg
>and Karl Liebknecht.
>
>An army of police ringed the march. Snipers looked down
>from rooftops. They were supposedly there to guard
>protesters against neo-Nazis.
>
>But most marchers believed the show of force was really
>meant for them.
>
>Workers, students and militants were undeterred. They
>marched defiantly, denouncing Germany's aggression against
>Yugoslavia in collusion with the United States and NATO.
>Germany's Social Democrat/Greens coalition government led
>the charge to war last year.
>
>The anti-war thrust gave the yearly commemoration special
>significance.
>
>This year's mass demonstration was originally scheduled
>for Jan. 9. After a neo-Nazi terrorist, Olaf Juergen Staps,
>threatened to machine-gun march organizers and throw
>grenades at the crowd, the Berlin police had the pretext
>they needed to ban the march.
>
>More than 3,000 leftists defied the police ban Jan. 9 and
>staged protests throughout Berlin. They explained that the
>German government and ruling class have long fostered neo-
>Nazi movements while trying to repress the revolutionary
>left, immigrants, labor unions and the women's movement.
>
>That day police arrested 219 and injured dozens more in
>street fighting.
>
>The leadership of Party for Democratic Socialism, which is
>the main organizer of the annual event, went along with the
>police ban to the disappointment of militants. But the
>rescheduled march turned out to be a big success. It showed
>the cops and the Berlin Senate that progressives refuse to
>submit to right-wing intimidation.
>
>The PDS--the official successor to East Germany's
>Socialist Unity Party--was the only party in the German
>parliament to oppose the war against Yugoslavia.
>
>WHO WERE LUXEMBURG AND LIEBKNECHT
>
>Luxemburg and Liebknecht were among the first socialist
>leaders to stand up against their own government during
>World War I. They denounced the war as imperialist and
>called on workers and soldiers to resist.
>
>They also fought the official leaders of the Social
>Democratic Party who backed the war effort. Liebknecht was
>the only member of the German Reichstag, or parliament, to
>vote against war credits in 1914.
>
>Along with Lenin's Bolsheviks in Russia, Luxemburg and
>Liebknecht's Spartakus movement rallied revolutionary anti-
>war forces throughout Europe. Later they founded the
>Communist Party of Germany.
>
>On Jan. 15, 1919, the two revolutionary fighters were
>arrested and murdered by the military, which was acting in
>collusion with the Social Democratic government. The
>military had just repressed a failed workers' uprising in
>Berlin.
>
>ECONOMIC UNREST IN TODAY'S GERMANY
>
>The reactionary crowing that followed the fall of the
>Berlin Wall 10 years ago and the subsequent destruction of
>the socialist German Democratic Republic has been washed
>away in a tide of economic crisis and social disaster in the
>east.
>
>Neo-Nazi violence has skyrocketed. So have racist attacks
>on immigrant workers from the Middle East and Southeast
>Asia.
>
>Unemployment is at record highs in the east, especially
>among women. Women's rights--including reproductive
>freedoms--have been set back. Workers' social gains are
>under attack throughout Germany.
>
>Now a massive political scandal has embroiled former
>German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Christian Democratic
>Party. Kohl has admitted to accepting more than $1 million
>in secret donations from an arms dealer for his far-right
>"German Unity" party faction.
>
>Today Rosa Luxemburg's last message to her comrades rings
>true:
>
>"Even in the middle of the battle, amid the triumphant
>screams of the counter-revolution, the revolutionary
>proletariat must make its reckoning with recent events and
>measure these and their results on the scale of history.
>Revolution has no time to lose, it marches on--over the
>graves, not yet filled in, over `victories and defeats'--
>towards its great tasks.
>
>" `Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your
>`order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear
>ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass
>of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'"
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
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