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Militantes da ‘faxina’ reeditam o Cansei
Posted by eduguim on 26/08/11 • Categorized as denúncia





Quem chegasse hoje ao Brasil e lesse os jornais imaginaria que há uma guerra contra a corrupção liderada por uma imprensa idealista. O noticiário exacerbou exponencialmente aquela “cruzada ético-midiática” que permeou a década passada. Se, durante o governo Lula, havia alguma denúncia todos os meses, no governo Dilma o processo foi elevado ao cubo, com várias denúncias sendo espalhadas ao mesmo tempo.

Após os ministros da Casa Civil, da Agricultura, dos Transportes e da Defesa, entraram na mira os ministros da Casa Civil (de novo), das Cidades, do Turismo, das Comunicações e, agora, até o presidente da Câmara dos Deputados (que é do PT, claro).

A mídia, aproveitando-se de que suas denúncias geraram efeitos que as corroboraram – não por que foram irrefutáveis, mas porque o governo cedeu à pressão que desencadearam – intensificou sobremaneira a campanha moralista. Já há movimentos “espontâneos” na sociedade de formação de grupos civis para protestarem “contra a corrupção” em marchas e passeatas.

Os militantes “anticorrupção” da hora reeditam o movimento Cansei, que surgiu durante o governo Lula contando com o apoio de artistas, empresários, das classes mais abastadas e dessa mesma imprensa sempre disposta a fazer campanhas moralistas contra o PT e seus aliados, mas só contra eles.

Com tantas denúncias e demissões, parece haver uma cruzada contra todos os corruptos. E como essas denúncias ganharam credibilidade porque provocaram demissões em massa no governo Dilma, à diferença do Cansei não estão caindo no ridículo.

Seria muito bom que houvesse uma faxina de verdade na administração pública do Brasil, pois a corrupção realmente se institucionalizou neste país. Está entranhada em todos os governos. Em alguns mais, outros menos, mas está entranhada no Estado brasileiro (Executivo, Legislativo e Judiciário). Só que a “faxina” que ocupa o noticiário não é uma faxina de verdade, mas uma campanha para desmoralizar este governo, seu partido, seus aliados e, acima de todos estes, o ex-presidente Lula.

Fosse de outra maneira, não estaria restrita ao governo federal e aos seus aliados. Assim como a mídia fustiga o governo do Rio de Janeiro e, acima de tudo, o seu titular, Sergio Cabral, com denúncias de corrupção e má conduta do governador daquele Estado, se estivesse realmente querendo combater a corrupção fustigaria também os governos de São Paulo ou de Minas Gerais, contra os quais pesam tantas denúncias.

Dito assim de chofre que há denúncias contra os governos paulista ou mineiro, quem não acompanha a política muito de perto ficaria surpreso. Afinal, na imprensa de São Paulo, do Rio ou de Minas não saem acusações ou denúncias contra eles.

As oposições em São Paulo e Minas reclamam de que a mídia ignora os deputados estaduais desses Estados que batem às portas da Globo, da Folha de São Paulo, da Veja e do Estadão, entre outros, pedindo pressão para conseguirem instalar CPIs contra os governos Geraldo Alckmin e Antonio Anastasia. Mas como no tempo de José Serra e Aécio Neves, esses meios de comunicação nem os recebem.

Há deputados paulistas e mineiros com calhamaços de denúncias contra os governos Alckmin e Anastasia. Eles dizem que suas denúncias têm muito mais indícios do que as que estão derrubando ministros de Dilma Rousseff, mas as redações dos grandes meios de comunicação estão proibidas de noticiar qualquer coisa que desfavoreça o PSDB.

Os militantes dessa “faxina” exclusivamente contra o PT e aliados, que poupa políticos de administrações controladas pelos partidos que se opõem ao governo Dilma, reeditam o Cansei. Estão sendo programados atos públicos para baterem com o noticiário. Em breve, as capitais brasileiras estarão vendo esses grupos saírem as ruas com aquelas peruas enfeitadas com jóias e mauricinhos com seus tênis e roupas “de marca”.

Para engrossar grupelhos de dondocas, o PSDB tenta cooptar centrais sindicais que sempre se opuseram à CUT e ao PT, mas que aderiram a Lula na década passada porque, como durante o governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso, sempre estiveram ao lado do poder. Se os tucanos e seus jornais, revistas, rádios, TVs e portais de internet tiverem sucesso, em breve veremos um Cansei vitaminado ganhando as ruas do país.
.Tags: cansei, dilma, estadão, faxina, folha, globo, veja

Guerra civil, sim!

Mesmo um jornal de centro-direita como a Folha, supostamente mais moderado do que o resto dos veículos de direita mais radical que dominam a comunicação no Brasil, parece ter dificuldade de enxergar com clareza e clarividência a questão da violência que, agora no Rio, assume os mesmos contornos trágicos e emergenciais do que aconteceu em São Paulo há poucos meses. Isso fica demonstrado no editorial "Falta de Estado" (31/12, abaixo), que dá diagnóstico absolutamente errado para a tragédia que está acontecendo neste país. Porém, no fim do editorial o jornal acerta ao questionar se o que acontece no Brasil não seria uma "guerra civil". E a resposta é sim, é uma guerra civil, e guerras civis não ocorrem por "falta de Estado", decorrem de sociedades divididas irremediavelmente. E a sociedade brasileira, de certa forma, está dividida, ainda que seja numa proporção de 90% contra 10%, dizendo a grosso modo. A desigualdade brasileira - escrevo a mesma coisa há anos - é uma aberração. Não se conhece situação tão grave em país nenhum. Somos um país em forte processo de industrialização que conseguiu manter a desigualdade rural de países miseráveis da África. Não haverá, portanto, Estado que resolva o problema da guerra civil brasileira por meio de repressão. A única solução é distribuir renda, mas isso passa pela aceitação do processo por uma elite que tem justamente lutado com todas as forças contra um governo repartidor, recusando-se terminantemente a aceitar medidas que suavizem a insana concentração de renda brasileira.

*

Folha de São Paulo, 31 de dezembro de 2006

Falta de Estado
Milícias, atentados, vítimas civis: como atesta o próprio vocabulário, a crise na segurança mudou de patamar DEPOIS das ondas de terror vividas no Estado de São Paulo nos meses de maio, julho e agosto, os bárbaros atentados ocorridos no Rio de Janeiro nestes dias de dezembro vêm como que assinalar, com perversa precisão cronológica, o modo com que 2006 será lembrado na história brasileira mais recente.Os eventos de vária índole que marcaram o ano na esfera político-eleitoral têm sua importância esmaecida quando comparados a tudo o que veio instituir, a ferro, fogo e sangue, um patamar novo de violência e desagregação nas grandes cidades do país.O próprio vocabulário utilizado para descrever essa realidade conheceu uma mudança qualitativa. De há muito no noticiário policial, palavras como "chacina" e "massacre" se tornaram corriqueiras. Todavia até recentemente eram apenas nas páginas dedicadas às crises internacionais, aos países varridos pelo extremismo religioso e pela guerra, que se encontrava -como agora no Rio e em São Paulo- o cálculo do "número de civis" mortos a cada atentado.Conheciam-se, pelo menos desde a década de 1970, os "justiceiros", os "esquadrões da morte". Mas o termo de "milícias", que antes se associava apenas a conflitos como os da África e do Oriente Médio, agora passa ao uso cotidiano no Brasil.Designa, ao que tudo indica, um tipo mais cristalizado de organização e um espectro mais amplo de atividades. Não se promovem apenas atos isolados de extermínio: ao ocuparem determinado morro ou comunidade, as "milícias" cobram taxas e impostos, explorando o comércio de gás e as ligações de TV a cabo. Rivalizariam com os traficantes, por outro lado, em iniciativas de cunho recreativo e assistencial.É bastante conhecida a conceituação do sociólogo alemão Max Weber (1864-1920) segundo a qual o Estado moderno se define pelo monopólio dos meios de coação física legítima num determinado território. Dessa ótica, o Estado brasileiro, ao menos em certas áreas de grandes cidades como Rio e São Paulo, dá alarmantes sinais de colapso.Não é apenas a posse das armas que deixou de ser exclusiva da polícia e do Exército, num ambiente de criminalidade escancarada; em muitas comunidades, também as funções de policiamento, de cobrança de taxas, de atendimento às necessidades sociais e de administração da "justiça" passaram às mãos dos traficantes e das milícias.Um conluio perverso entre ineficiência, corrupção, descaso e cinismo governamentais faz da população pobre das grandes cidades a vítima principal de uma situação que seria eufemismo classificar apenas como um "surto de criminalidade" ou uma "onda de violência": que não seja ainda o caso -esperemos- de dar-lhe o nome, simplesmente, de guerra civil. Escrito por Eduardo Guimarães às 12h18

06 Setembro 2006
A TESOURA DE SARNEY CONTINUA AFIADA MAS A GENTE NÃO DESISTEO texto abaixo é do jornalista Corrêa Neto, foi publicado no site www.correaneto.com.br e reproduzido no jornal Folha do Amapá (www.folhadoamapa.com.br) Sarney não gostou e mandou meter a tesoura.E conseguiu tirar o texto dos dois sites."Macaco aperreado come pimentaNão tenho certeza de que é um dito amazônico, mas se é já passou a ser domínio público nacional, que diz macaco aperreado come pimenta. Político também. Político aperreado perde o senso do ridículo e faz coisas do arco-da-velha, até aceitando descer das tamancas e calçar a sandália da humildade.É o que está acontecendo com o senador José Sarney, que por duas vezes se elegeu senador pelo Amapá passando três ou quatro vezes por aqui, por ano, morando no Maranhão e Brasília, sem fazer qualquer tipo de concessão aos mais pobres, mantendo a pose do terno bem cortado, cabelos com gomalina, sapatos reluzentes e talvez até um banquinho escondido para se manter sempre acima das cabeças dos que formam a plebe ignara, nós, o povo.E podem acreditar! Sarney foi visto ensaiando passos de marabaixo. Que vexame. Sarney, que nunca jogou dominó na calçada do cemitério, nem na frente da casa do Paulino Ramos. Não saiu na Banda nem sentou à mesa de um quiosque da Beira-Rio para ser aporrinhado por algum maluco surdo, tocando brega no mais alto volume no som do carro. Sarney que nunca desfilou na barca do Piratão nem foi a uma domingueira na Boêmios do Laguinho, está ensaiando marabaixo. É, o velho coronel nordestino está mesmo muito aperreado.Quem quiser acreditar em 50% das intenções de votos pode, como pode acreditar em Papai Noel, nos duendes da Xuxa e coisas semelhantes. Se estivesse com essa folga toda, Sarney não estaria descendo em baixadas, abraçando gente pobre, suada, carregando crianças, fazendo coisas que ele nunca fez, pelo menos aqui. A vaidade de Sarney, que é imensa, do tamanho da mediocridade e da subserviência que a alimenta, não permitiria.Mas isso é muito bom. Sarney ainda tem muita coisa para aprender e certamente não vai ter tempo, agora, para todas as lições e, ainda que venha a se eleger mais uma vez, vai lembrar de uma lição que um verdadeiro estadista deixou quando disse: é possível enganar a muitos por muito tempo e todos por algum tempo, mas é impossível enganar a todos por todo o tempo."É por isso que eu continuo dizendo: Xô Sarney!Já são mais 600 páginas na internet enxotando o sarney.

Provocative Humanitarianism?
Bashing Hugo Chavez at the New York Times
By DAVE LINDORFF
What do you call a nation that provides medical aid to desperately poor people in Mexico, heating assistance to low-income families in the U.S., crucial project financing to some of the poorest countries in Africa, and aid to impoverished Caribbean island nations?
If you're the New York Times, you call it "provocative," and you call the leader of that country "the next Fidel Castro."
Venezuela, under President Hugo Chavez, has been turning its increasingly valuable oil reserves into an engine for development, not just in Venezuela, where the revenues are being used to finance schools, housing and job creation for the nation's long-suffering and long-ignored poor, but also across Latin America, in the process creating a new model for Latin America-one which challenges the imperial domination of the United States.
In an April 4 page one article that reeks of Cold War rhetoric, Timesman Juan Forero warns that with Venezuela's oil revenues rising 32 percent last year, Venezuela's foreign aid spending "now surpasses the nearly $2 billion Washington allocates annually to pay for development programs and the drug war in western South America." (The drug war is foreign aid?)
Quoting only Chavez critics-both political opponents within Venezuela, and U.S. government and right-wing think tank members in the U.S.-Forero paints an ominous picture of a budding threat to U.S. influence in the Americas.
The most appalling quote comes from John Negroponte, the overall director of intelligence services in the U.S., and a man with a long history of meddling in the affairs of, and indeed subverting the governments of nations in Latin America. Mr. Chavez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country," Negroponte is quoted as telling Forero.
This from an official of a nation that has so far wasted $500 billion destroying a nation in the middle east, that is making preparations for going to war against yet another nation in the middle east, that has subverted nations from the Tierra del Fuego to the Yucatan, including Venezuela, and that, it must be noted, has been for years ignoring "very real economic development and social needs" inside its own borders.
Given the fact that no one has accused Chavez of any of the kind of subversive or heavy-handed pressure of the kind for which the U.S. has become notorious-only of providing much needed financial aid to less fortunate countries-what exactly is so awful about a an oil-rich country like Venezuela spreading the wealth?
The only negative things Forero can seem to come up with are that Chavez has been derisive of President Bush, referring to him in speeches as a "donkey," "drunkard" and "coward," and that right-wing critics have accused him of "mismanagement" and "populist decadence." Heck, Bush faces worse invective than that at home.
Even the comparisons between Chavez-the twice-elected leader of Venezuela-and Castro, the aging dictator of Cuba-are tendentious at best. Cuba, desperately poor and the victim of decades of U.S. trade embargo and subversion policies, has admittedly on occasion offered at least rhetorical support for anti-U.S. rebels, as in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Chavez, while openly espousing anti-imperialist views and seeking to challenge U.S. dominance in Latin America, has never been accused of fomenting rebellion in the region. Indeed, if there is anything about Castro's Cuba that Venezuela under Chavez has been emulating it has been Cuba's commendable practice of furnishing of doctors and teachers to needy regions of Latin America.
Would that the U.S. would engage in more of this kind of "influence peddling," and less of the kind that involves arms sales, military bases and the training of secret police in the fine art of torture.
Imagine a Latin America where the U.S. and Venezuela vied in seeing who could provide more doctors for the peasants of Guatemala and Brazil, or who could provide lower-interest loans for water projects in Bolivia or Ecuador. Imagine, for that matter, a Philadelphia where poor people didn't have to depend upon handouts of cheap oil from Venezuela to keep their apartments warm through the winter because of federal cuts in heating oil assistance programs.
Imagine, while we're at it, a New York Times that could write a front page article about the wasteful militarism of America's increasingly dictatorial President George W. Bush, juxtaposed against the unmet "economic development and social needs of his own country."

© 2006 Eric Margolis
September 07, 2006

DEAR RUMMY
To US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Dear Rummy: In your speech to the American Legion in Salt Lake City last week, you compared critics of your wars abroad to appeasers of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney repeated this same bizarre theme to the convention.Allow me to disagree, Mr. Secretary.I’m also a member of American Legion and I don’t agree with all those well-meaning but insular vets who cheered you in Utah. What most of them know about Iraq or Afghanistan wouldn’t fill a golf ball. So you may hornswaggle those good souls by claiming the administration is re-fighting World War II against `Islamofacists,’ ie reborn Nazis disguised as wicked Muslims. What ever would we do without those all-purpose Nazis? I hear you called Saddam Hussein a `Nazi.’ Excuse me, were you not the Reagan Administration official who went to Baghdad in 1983 to offer Saddam military, financial and intelligence support in his war of aggression against Iran? Time for your memory pills, Rummy. In late 2001, I opposed keeping US forces in Afghanistan, fearing they’d get stuck in a no-win guerilla war – which is just what has happened. Before you invaded Iraq, I repeatedly wrote that Saddam had no wmd’s, and predicted the US would face guerilla and civil war, and a financial debacle, not the flowers promised by giddy neocons. It’s time to get out of these lost wars before another American soldier dies. I guess that makes me a 1930’s-style `appeaser’ and a lefty. Hardly. I’m not one of the Munich crowd. Next to my desk, I have a large framed `Certificate of Recognition’ bearing the great eagle seal of the United States attesting to my service to the nation during the Cold War. It’s signed by you, Mr Secretary. At home, I keep my army uniform just in case WWIII erupts – not the absurd, fairy-tale claims we are waging a third world war against a rag-tag bunch of Muslim extremists being pumped out by the neocon fib factory, but a real war. My father fought in a real war, World War II, as a US Marine. He landed on Iwo Jima. Your bosses never served in the regular military, and never heard a shot fired in anger -except when blasting defenseless animals. Rummy, as one of the few Bush Administration hawks who actually served in the armed forces, I had hoped you would not stoop to such absurd claims generated by the very same Pentagon neocons former Secretary Colin Powell called `crazies.’I know the President’s new buzzword is `Islamofascist.’ It focus-groups well in the Bible Belt and Miami. But I’m deeply disappointed you would stoop to such cheap, insulting Dr Goebbels -style propaganda. As an educated man, you know fascism is a phenomena of western industrial states in which racists and militarists join hands with conservative parties and the military industrial complex to form the fascist, corporate state. Fascism is unknown in the Muslim World. Mussolini and Hitler were Christians. The real closet fascists are in North America. `Islamofacist’ is as meaningless as that favored term of anti-Semites, `Judeo-Nazi.’I’m a reluctantly retired Cold Warrior, not an appeaser. I’ve never appeased anyone. But as an old soldier, modest military historian, and war correspondent, I’ve learned all good generals know when to retreat. Retreat is as useful maneuver as attack. Only fools stay put.Brainless slogans like `stay the course,’ and `we won’t cut and run’ bring applause at Legion conventions, but they are a recipe for military defeat. It was precisely Hitler’s monomaniacal refusal to allow his 6th Army to retreat from encirclement at Stalingrad that brought Germany its greatest defeat. Your $300 billion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going nowhere. As a Vietnam-era vet who enlisted in wartime to serve his country, I can tell you that pulling out of Vietnam, however painful and humiliating at the time, was also absolutely the right decision. By refusing to withdraw from the lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what you are doing is sacrificing soldier’s lives, and $6.5-7 billion a month, to save the skins of your political masters who lack the courage and patriotism to admit the failure of their foolish imperial dreams. Forget WWII and face facts. The US is not fighting Hitler, George Bush is no Winston Churchill, and Muslims are not Nazis in turbans.

Ordena Hugo Chávez la expropiación de central azucarera
Agencias
10/09/2006 20:59
Caracas. El presidente de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, ordenó este domingo la expropiación de una central azucarera y cancelar la concesión para administrar un puerto en el occidental estado de Trujillo, se informó aquí.
En su programa dominical de radio y televisión Aló presidente, Chávez ordenó al Ministerio de Agricultura y Tierras la expropiación de la central azucarera en Motatán, y al Ministerio de Infraestructura cancelar la concesión administrativa del puerto La Ceiba.
Chávez justificó sus acciones porque en el caso de la factoría azucarera, se han dedicado a "explotar y explotar" a trabajadores, que en los últimos meses sufrió varias huelgas de más de 200 trabajadores que reclaman derechos laborales.
Afirmó que los administradores privados del consocio local Sur Andina de Puertos, que recibieron la concesión en 1990, ganan dinero pero siguen sin realizar "inversiones para modernizarlo".
"Así no sirve. Todo cae sobre el Estado para que se enriquezca el privado. Han debido invertir, modernizar el puerto. Se acaba la concesión del puerto de La Ceiba recuperemos el manejo de inmediato", ordenó el mandatario.
Advirtió que la policía militarizada apoyará la operación de recuperación para modernizar de inmediato el puerto que está ubicado al sureste del Lago de Maracaibo.

ABAIXO A CENSURA!

ABAIXO A CENSURA!

In Mexico, a Class War Looms
John Ross
Mexico City
The seven-judge panel known as the TRIFE, charged with deciding the legitimacy of Mexico's murky July 2 election and confirming the new president, is the nation's court of last resort. What the judges decree is literally the last word, the end of the line; there is no appeal.
On September 5, the last day the Constitution mandated the TRIFE to rule on the most hotly contested balloting in Mexico's checkered electoral history, the judges pronounced their verdict: Outgoing President Vicente Fox's unconstitutional intervention in the electoral process on behalf of his handpicked successor, Felipe Calderón, had put the election "at risk." Moreover, the financing of months of commercial spots that labeled leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) "a danger for Mexico" by transnational and national corporations was patently illegal and influenced voters.
The electoral tribunal also noted that Calderón, the PAN candidate who had been declared the winner by the much-criticized Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) by a razor-thin .55 percent of 41.6 million votes cast, had been awarded tens of thousands of votes that could not be substantiated. The TRIFE, in a partial recount of less than 10 percent of the 130,000 precincts held two weeks before the final decision, had annulled 237,000 votes, more than Calderón's supposed margin of victory.
And the winner was? Calderón, a 44-year-old former energy minister and the scion of a founding PAN family. The party was birthed by Catholic bankers to beat back "Bolshevik" President Lazaro Cardenas during the Great Depression.
The illogic of the TRIFE verdict inflamed several thousand AMLO supporters gathered outside the tribunal's bunker in southern Mexico City. "Fraude!" "Rateros!" (Fraud! Thieves!) they screamed, as the judges were escorted by military police to their expensive vehicles. López Obrador had long accused the seven judges of bowing to Fox government pressures in exchange for personal benefit--three of the TRIFE members are expected to be promoted to the Supreme Court in the coming Calderón administration.
López Obrador points to the tribunal as a glaring example of Mexico's corrupted judiciary and calls for a "radical renovation" of the nation's institutions.
For López Obrador, the confirmation of Calderón's disputed victory signals the end of the line in a grueling, three-year struggle for the presidency during which Fox and his attorney general repeatedly tried to keep him off the ballot, even threatening to jail him on a trumped-up contempt-of-court citation--and the beginning of a new stage of resistance to what the leftist characterizes as the imposition of Calderón upon the nation.
That resistance was graphically illustrated on September 1, when 155 senators and Congressional representatives of AMLO's three-party "Coalition for the Good of All" seized the podium of the Mexican Congress to prevent Fox from pronouncing his final State of the Union address. The takeover was seen as a dress rehearsal for Calderón's December 1 inauguration as Mexico's new president.
The confrontation took place in an ambiance of high tension, with the Congress surrounded by thousands of federal police and members of Fox's presidential military guard. Ten-foot metal barricades and army sharpshooters posted on nearby rooftops kept López Obrador's supporters from gathering within shouting distance of the Congressional compound.
The military is soon expected to evict tens of thousands of AMLO diehards who have been encamped since July 30 on Mexico City's most traveled thoroughfares and in the great Zócalo plaza, protesting the manipulated election. In a prerecorded speech to the nation on the night of the TRIFE's confirmation, Calderón went out of his way to praise the Mexican military as one of the nation's most cherished institutions--López Obrador has often called upon the generals not to allow the army to be utilized in a political conflict against his people.
On September 15, the eve of Mexican Independence Day, President Fox intends to deliver the traditional "grito" of "Viva Mexico!" from the balcony of the National Palace overlooking the Zócalo. AMLO's supporters have vowed not to yield the plaza and to proclaim their own grito to the nation on that day.
Another flashpoint will come September 16, when a major military parade will be staged to commemorate the 196th anniversary of Mexico's liberation from Spain. López Obrador has summoned as many as 1 million delegates from all over the country to converge on the Zócalo that day for a "National Democratic Convention" that is expected to declare a "government in resistance" and formulate strategies to prevent Calderón from ruling for the next six years.
For the new president, the task of governance will not be an easy one. The country is divided in half geographically (Calderón won the industrial north, López Obrador the highly indigenous, resource-rich south) and by critical issues of class and race. The breach between the brown underclass and the tiny white elite that Calderón represents will limit his ability to institute the free-market neoliberal policies that his campaign championed.
The president-elect will no doubt seek to split AMLO's forces, offering members of López Obrador's Congressional delegation minor Cabinet posts and canonazos ("cannonades" of pesos) to neutralize the coalition's strength in the new legislature, where it is now the second-largest political force. Calderón cannot pass proposed constitutional changes such as the promised privatization of the national petroleum monopoly PEMEX without a two-thirds majority in both houses.
Calderón is also expected to pump windfall profits from $70-a-barrel oil into social programs to undercut López Obrador's deep support among the underclass, an obligatory strophe for unpopular Mexican presidents.
As was the case with Carlos Salinas after the long-ruling (seventy-one years) PRI party stole the presidency for him back in 1988 from López Obrador's onetime mentor and now archrival, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, Calderón will have more support outside Mexico than inside. Both George Bush and US Ambassador Tony Garza were quick to congratulate Calderón following the July 2 balloting. Now that the TRIFE has confirmed his "victory," Washington and European Union members--like Spain's prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero--are eager to get in on the ground floor of the PEMEX fire sale and will seek to legitimize Calderón's presidency beyond Mexico's borders.
But within the boundaries of this distant neighbor nation, diminishing AMLO's immense popularity and isolating him from his political base may not be all that simple. Whenever challenged by the Fox administration, López Obrador has been able to mobilize millions. Following the disputed July 2 election he has organized the largest political demonstrations in the history of the republic. Calderón's only option may be mano dura, the "hard hand."
Fox's attorney general, Carlos Abascal, has already warned that should López Obrador form a parallel government, he could be tried for usurpation of powers, a crime that carries a hefty prison sentence. López Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution is being threatened with the loss of its electoral registration for preventing Fox from delivering his State of the Union address. But in the past, such threats have succeeded only in boosting AMLO's numbers.
Indeed, López Obrador's commitment to resisting the Calderón presidency could well come down to eliminating his physical presence altogether. Such a development has ample historical precedent in Mexican power politics. In 1994 PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was gunned down after he turned against his predecessor, Salinas. Agrarian martyr Emiliano Zapata met a similar fate in 1919 when he proved too troublesome for the Carranza government. One of López Obrador's role models, Francisco Madero, was assassinated soon after the stolen 1910 election that triggered the Mexican revolution and eventually installed him as Mexico's first democratically elected president.

Make way for a worthy challenger to the title of Leader of the Racist Rant Pack
commentarist Stephen Lendman writes: Move over Bill, Chris, Michelle, Rush, Sean, & Company ... make way for a worthy challenger to the title of leader of the racist rant pack holding court weekday evenings on his hourly show on CNN.
Who would have thought back in the days when this well-known cable TV financial news anchor was CNN's executive vice president and then president of the ill-fated CNNfn program he launched that one day he'd switch roles on the network and become the managing editor and anchor of a nightly news program he calls Lou Dobbs Tonight.
And who might have guessed this well-thought of financial host would transform himself into a raving racist never letting a program pass without blaming all the country's ills on the poor and desperate people "the color of the earth" south of the border for practically everything going wrong in the country from the fraudulent war on terrorism to the falling dollar.
He does it on the nightly segment he calls "Broken Borders," and it hardly matters to this anchor/commentator (or most any other one on corporate-run TV) that these people only come here in desperation because the 1994 NAFTA trade agreement destroyed their livelihoods and lives at home, and the only way they can find work to feed their families is to come el norte.
It would never occur to this program host or CNN's management that they they owe their audience an explanation why most people everywhere have no wish to leave their native lands, move to a strange new one where they don't speak the language or have any ties, and face a hard period of adjustment along with leaving their loved ones at home to do it. They only come here or elsewhere because they have no other choice if they wish to survive, and instead of blaming them, we instead should expose and denounce the US-led NAFTA-codified dictates that caused their immiseration in the first place.
What You Won't Hear About Immigrants On CNN
Most immigration, legal and illegal, around the world is the result of unemployment, poverty or conflicts forcing desperate people to move to more developed countries to find jobs or safety unavailable at home. According to the International Labor Organization, it's not just a US problem. It's a global one that in 2005 forced 200 million people to emigrate to a new country, up from 175 million in 2000 and 82 million in 1970. With at least half the world's population living in poverty and the numbers increasing annually (and a number of serious conflicts ongoing as well), is it any wonder so many of them are on the move each year seeking relief to be able to survive.
It's not getting any easier for them as the US and Western imposed globalized so-called neoliberal "free market" economic model is little more than a race to the bottom driven by giant corporations exploiting the developing world and its people for greater profits. It's what Michel Chossudovsky wrote about in his important 2003 book titled The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order. In it he explains the current WTO/IMF/World Bank imposed system is one of "capital creation through destruction." It creates big profits for transnational corporations at the expense of mass and growing poverty, human misery, the ability of the planet to sustain life, and eventually will lead to less demand for the exports these corporations need to continue increasing their profit growth. So why would smart corporate CEOs be willing to do this knowing a day of reckoning is ahead. Simple - today they reap the big profits they seek and Wall Street and investors demand and manana is for a future CEO to worry about. For the poor and desperate people south of our border and around the developing world, manana is today, and millions of them are on the move because of it.
Why Programs Like Lou Dobbs Tonight Get Regular Air Time
So why does CNN put up with the kind of demeaning and racist programming Lou Dobbs specializes in? Simple, because it draws large audiences meaning CNN (self-dubbed "the most trusted name in news") can charge premium rates to corporate advertisers that want their message heard on highly rated programs. It's the profit motive stupid like it always is. If it sells, it gets air time because that's what this business or any business is all about. Understanding that, you might believe TV networks would consider running porno films every night in prime time if they could get away with it as apparently that kind of material and gambling draw the largest audiences online. They surely would attract a big following on prime time TV as well although advertisers would have to be innovative in drawing audiences to their message after they'd been watching that other fare.
But as long as advertisers love it, will pay well for it, and it's allowed over the airwaves, CNN lets Dobbs get away with his crusading advocacy journalism that clearly crosses the line and violates the basic principles of honest news reporting. It's delighted to give him an hourly weekday sound stage to preach his message of hate and misinformation that fills the CNN airwaves with vitriolic language like "alien invasions" and "inundations" (illegal ones, of course).
At other times he's called Mexican immigrants an "army of invaders" wanting to reannex parts of the Southwest -- meaning, of course, their presence in large enough numbers threatens our white Anglo-Saxon culture. Still other outbursts refer to "illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some of our national treasures."
He also claims "the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans (with) deadly imports" of diseases like leprosy and malaria.
What's most troubling is people believe this stuff, and he's winning awards for his work. In 2004, Dobbs received the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration and the Man of the Year Award from The Organization for the Rights of American Workers for the other more credible regular segment he features on his program -- the corporate outsourcing/exporting of US jobs to low-wage developing countries resulting in this nation joining the race to the bottom along with all the others exploiting working people for profit.
Dobbs is very hard line as a managing editor as well having the final say on what issues are discussed and who appears on his program. He makes no bones about wanting to avoid alternate views to his own and has said in so many words that the truth is what he says it is. To keep it that way, he carefully chooses guests whose views match his own making sure other versions of the truth almost never have a voice on his air time. So for viewers wanting to understand what the immigration issue is all about, they'll never find out tuning in to Lou Dobbs Tonight. But for extremist hate-mongers like the vigilante Minutemen, self-appointed to guard our southern border, challenge dark-skinned workers at day labor centers, and use violence with impunity to do it, Dobbs is preaching to the choir. Their hate-filled white-supremacist message to their followers is much like what Dobbs and his guests tells their audience -- that Latino immigration here is "a silent Trojan Horse invasion that is eroding our culture." What they never explain is that demonizing immigrants and controlling their movement across borders is part of an imperial elite strategy used to exploit workers for power and profit and use xenophobic-induced fear as a way to help do it.
Dobbs Has Lots of Company In the Race-Baiting Game
It wouldn't be so bad if Dobbs and a few others were just outliers running counter to most other programming where viewers wanting objective journalism could still get it. But expecting that from the Fourth Estate anywhere on corporate-run television would be as likely as finding carnivores that were vegetarians. Just on CNN alone, Lou Dobbs has an array of worthy challengers. Take longtime anchor and commentator Jack Cafferty on air in the afternoons. He's as scornful of immigrants' rights as is Dobbs and derides them with vicious hate-talk like "mobs of illegal aliens ... who don't belong here ... and have no rights."
He calls for "pull(ing) up the buses (demanding) these people ... show their green cards ... and the ones that don't have them, put them on the buses and send them home."
While Cafferty doesn't say how he wants these people assembled to prove their legal residency status or citizenship, it sounds like he favors neighborhood and house-to-house searches to find them.
In other words, in Cafferty's strange mind, brown-skinned people are criminals, don't belong here, have no rights and should be deported back where they came from. Apparently it never occurred to Cafferty, Dobbs or other CNN hosts and commentators just as guilty at times of hate-talk that these so-called 'illegals" give back far more than they get here. They pay billions of dollars annually in taxes and get few social services for them in return. So the net-net from them is they help grow the US economy, and their employers value their services. If these immigrants, legal or illegal, weren't here and wanting work, the employers hiring them would be hard-pressed to fill the jobs most others don't want.
Spreading fear and hate is also the tactic former CNN commentator, now ensconced as an MSNBC political analyst, Pat Buchanan perfected years ago and is now preaching in his outrageous new book called State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. In it, Buchanan makes it sound like "the barbarians" are at our gates, they have us surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned, and our days are numbered as they're about to take us over, destroy our society and culture and make us over into whatever it is Buchanan thinks they have in mind. Buchanan has never shied away from controversy on-air, in his syndicated column or in an August 8 online one in which he referred to George Bush's "La Raza immigration policy, featuring amnesty and a 'path to citizenship' for 12 million illegal aliens, (and) pardons for all businesses that hired illegals." Thirty years ago while condemning Hitler as an anti-semite and racist, he praised the Nazi leader as "an individual of great courage" and wrote of his "genius (being) an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality ... of the statesmen who stood in his way."
It sounds a lot like sympathy with and praise for a man most consider the most heinous of all 20th century dictators.
He's also been on the extreme fringe in his views about African-Americans and the civil rights legislation so essential to them and once when serving in the Nixon White House told the President "the integration of blacks and whites - but even more so, poor and well-to-do - is less likely to result in accommodation than....in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed....by government side by side with the capable." He's also said and written much that makes him fair game to be called an anti-semite and equal opportunity racist believer in white superiority, opposed to gay rights, demeaning of women and their rights, a believer that Christianity is the superior religion to all others, and hostile to the notion that real democracy is preferable to "quasi-dictatorial rule" from his undisguised admiration for Hitler's "courage (and) genius" and praise for the dictatorships of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile calling them both "soldier-patriots."
In his new book, already a best-seller from all the free media exposure it's getting, Buchanan conducts a verbal racist jihad against all non-European immigrants meaning all those not white. He uses language like the US must keep "Americans of European descent (from becoming the) minority (in order to) survive (and George Bush's immigration policy) will lose the American Southwest to Mexico linguistically, ethnically, (and) culturally (and the Southwest) part of America is moving back to Mexico, from whom we took it in 1848." He further wrote "We are witnessing how nations perish....We are entered upon the final act of our civilization....Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war....(we're losing ground) in the midst of a savage culture war (and) The first imperative is an immediate moratorium on all immigration ... but even (then), success is not assured."
Buchanan also believes the Bush immigration policy is "economic treason against the American worker ... (will result in) the complete Balkanization of America, (and) by 2050 America will be a Third World country... Our great cities will all look like Los Angeles today. Los Angeles and the cities of the Southwest will look like Juarez and Tijuana."
With views like these, it would seem Pat Buchanan would rank high on the list of the kind of guests Lou Dobbs wants to feature on his nightly program even though he now works for a competitor.
Another Longtime CNN Anchor Who Excels In A Different Kind of Race-Baiting - Against Muslims
One other CNN stalwart also deserves mention and considerable scorn. He's longtime CNN reporter and anchor Wolf Blitzer who daily spews a different brand of racism along with the usual mix of US empire-supportive lies, myths, rationalizations and lots more heard all over the corporate media airwaves.
Blitzer currently hosts a weekday afternoon program called The Situation Room as well as the Sunday Late Edition talk show. He began his journalism career with Reuters in their Tel Aviv bureau before moving to Washington as White House correspondent for the hard line ultraconservative Jerusalem Post. He's held a number of positions at CNN as military affairs reporter during the Gulf war, White House correspondent and more. What's ignored about Blitzer that should stir controversy is that at one time he was a lobbyist for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
That and his one-time connection to the Jerusalem Post are part of his roots making it impossible for Blitzer to be objective reporting on anything about Israel or events in the Middle East. It's easy and probably accurate to see him as AIPAC's on-air man at CNN. It's also no surprise that the preponderance of guests he has on with him share his views which are clearly one-sided and strongly pro-Israel.
Blitzer, his guests and others like them can't hide their disdain for Muslims they demean by inference as well as in language like "Islamic fundamentalists," militants, gunmen, terrorists and "Islamo-fascists." It's always been part of Blitzer's stock and trade which he clearly showed right after the high-profile Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing in April, 1995. He was quick on air to baselessly accuse Arabs (meaning Muslims) of an act of terrorism against the US even though US Army and Gulf war veteran Timothy McVeigh later was arrested, convicted and executed for the crime.
That faux pas hardly mattered to Blitzer as throughout his career he's been consistently one-sided in his reporting on the Middle East that's never viewed Arabs, their Islamic religion or culture favorably.
In fairness to Blitzer, culturally sanctioned forms of bigotry directed against Arabs and Islam have always been tolerated in the US going back decades. It's especially evident in the media and Hollywood films where Arabs have long been the butt of language referring to them as "camel jockeys, desert warriors and terrorists."
Post-9/11, however, that kind of characterization rose to an unrelenting Islamaphobic frenzy with the US in the vanguard of a new Western crusade against Islam though never calling it that. It's part of the Bush Administration's Messianic mission and need for convenient scapegoats to allow it and the interests of capital it represents free reign to pursue their quest for world dominance using preventive war and state-sponsored terrorism as the way to get it.
Today that quest is centered in the Middle East and its vital oil reserves with the US and its Israeli ally jointly waging illegal wars of aggression with the aid and comfort given them by on-air empire-backing and racist flacks like Wolf Blitzer who never met a US or Israeli initiated war he didn't love and support.
It passes without irony or notice that this kind of racist warfare happened once before 900 years ago in the First Crusade. Back then Pope Urban II (no doubt seen as a good Christian then and now) launched an earlier holy war against Islam and Muslims to regain control of the Holy Land and sacred city of Jerusalem for Christianity. When his forces entered the city, they slaughtered the Muslims, Jews and even Eastern Christians living there believing no doubt they got their marching orders to do it from the Almighty. Today, a modern-day empire is on the march, and their faithful servants like Wolf Blitzer and his on-air guests spew their message of hate and support for it to convince a naive public tuning in it's the right thing to do, it's spreading democracy and Western civilization, and it will make us more secure and the world a better place for everyone.
What's Never Allowed On-Air In Contrast To What Always Is
It also passes without comment or notice that no subject is more sensitive in the West and over the corporate airwaves than any criticism of Israel. It's never aired because the corporate media won't allow it to be. In the US especially, it's the metaphorical "third rail" on-air and in politics.
Touch it and pay dearly -- severe denunciation, labeled an anti-semite or self-hating Jew, even ostracism.
Today the powerful AIPAC Jewish lobby (Blitzer's former employer) has a lot to do with this and is part of an unholy alliance with the equally powerful Christian fundamentalists in the US and dominant neoconservatives running the Bush administration, Republican party and the country.
It's unwritten and unspoken, but their message is clear and emphatic - no criticism of Israel is ever allowed and full unconditional support and encouragement is always extended to the Jewish state no matter what it does.
Whatever action Israel takes is thus viewed through the lens of self-defense, but whenever an Arab state or group like Hezbollah or Hamas defends itself against an Israeli attack it's called terrorism. It's always this way even when Israel is the aggressor, which is nearly always the case, as it was on June 25 when it invaded Gaza and the West Bank (again) and attacked the Palestinians and again on July 12 when it (again) did the same thing to the Lebanese.
The Bush administration, US Congress, UN, world community and dominant corporate-run media voiced their wholehearted approval and support for what Israel did on both occasions and condemned the Palestinians, Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists. It's impermissible to have it any other way, and it's always that way on programs like the ones Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs host and in the language these hosts and their carefully chosen guests use.
The Dirty Business of Serving the Interests of Wealth and Power By Any Means
Since when do wars ever do anything besides cause more wars. And how do mass deaths and destruction from them or virulent racism at home supporting them do anything but anger those on the receiving end making them want to strike back in retaliation. It hardly matters in the corporate media world where TV hosts, commentators and those allowed air time with them take full advantage of their public platform to spread hate messages beneficial to those they represent and support but harm their targets and the rest of us.
Program hosts like Lou Dobbs and Wolf Blitzer would never even consider the wars they feel are justly waged were and are in violation of international laws under the Hague Regulations, Geneva Conventions and UN Charter. It's of no concern to them or any of the other on-air (or in print) US and pro-Israel flacks and propagandists that include most all high-profile TV hosts, commentators and so-called pundits.
Their stock-in-trade is disinformation so viewers not on to their dirty business only get the one-sided views the more savvy among us know are false, disingenuous and harmful to those on their receiving end.
Blitzer, like Dobbs, Cafferty, other CNN regulars and the whole unhealthy array of others all over the corporate radio and TV airwaves and in print like Pat Buchanan are there to do the job they're paid for and have shown they're willing to sell their souls to do it. They do it so the interests of wealth and power are well served and allowed to pursue the benefits they seek by whatever means they choose to get them. In that kind of world, wars are good because they're good for business and racism is allowed because easy to pick on scapegoats are needed, it never hurts the bottom line to demean and slander them, and it's always OK in the empire when the targets are people of color, the poor, unwanted immigrants, and especially Muslims collectively referred to as radical Islamists, militant jihadists and Islamo-fascists. It doesn't matter that most Muslims or people of any religious faith or race are just ordinary people like us in the West wanting to live their lives in peace and care for their families.
But the message delivered on the corporate-controlled airwaves rarely ever explains that. Alternative voices of reason and sanity are mostly shut out so the public can't hear views denouncing wars, racist hate, religious intolerance, and the need to work together for social equity and justice for all. The public also never hears that all religious faiths range in diversity and practice from liberal to fundamentalist, and aside from a small segment of extremist outliers in them all (Christianity and Judaism included), their adherents most often express their beliefs and live their daily lives according to the core principles they all espouse of moderation, tolerance of others and non-violence.
They hear none of that in the corporate media because that kind of thinking and discussion isn't good for business that thrives on conflict, dominance of the strong over the weak, and exploitation of the developing world and the people in it for profit. That kind of sanity and understanding also isn't good for the highly-paid on-air empire-backing flacks like Dobbs, Cafferty, Blitzer and the rest spreading the same kind of one-sided hateful, destructive messages. Their salaries depend on how well they serve their corporate employers, the numbers of viewers and listeners they get to tune in to hear them, and the bottom line profits the media giants get from the unrelenting cultural war they wage on-air for them.
Our leaders call it "Western civilization," a corrupted notion of moral superiority that our way is best and all others are inferior to it.
They want to export it to the world whether or not it wants it and at the barrel of a gun if it doesn't.
The on-air empire flacks like Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer and the rest are there for one purpose -- to help them do it.
Stephen Lendmanlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net -- also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com

jornalismo marrom Embaixador venezuelano critica Veja e Abril
O embaixador da Venezuela no Brasil, Julio García Montoya, enviou uma carta a Roberto Civita, presidente da Editora Abril, na qual critica duramente a postura jornalística adotada pela revista Veja e por sua equipe editorial. O documento é datado de 06/02. Ele compara os colunistas da publicação a Joseph Goebbels, ministro da propaganda de Hitler. A carta de Montoya é uma reação à matéria “Com dinheiro do povo”, publicada na edição N° 1941 da revista, de 01/02/2006. A matéria e a carta do embaixador, na íntegra, foram publicadas no Portal Comunique-se, em 10/2/2006..[+]

En Espanol:
Los turbios negocios de la familia Bush en Venezuela
Edgar González Ruiz escribe: El gobierno de Bush Jr. ha promovido una sangrienta intervención militar en Irak y ha tratado por todos los medios, desde el cuartelazo hasta la vía "democrática", de desestabilizar al gobierno de Hugo Chávez, en Venezuela. Las dos naciones tienen en común sus enormes recursos petroleros.
Get thee behind me...El gobernador de Florida, Jeb Bush, hermano del presidente Bush y gobernador de Florida ha sido uno de los más estridentes promotores del derrocamiento de Chávez, a quien ha llegado a llamar "un tipo loco" a cuyo gobierno es "aislarlo en la comunidad internacional es importante". Según el cuestionado gobernador "El apoyo que recibe Chávez de (Fidel) Castro y el apoyo que Castro recibe de Chávez los incita. Aislarlos tendría un potencial significativo para la región, para América Latina".
Pero, independientemente de la implausible retórica de defensa de "la democracia" con la que se intenta justificar la desestabilización de Venezuela, el clan Bush ha tenido desde hace mucho tiempo intereses y vínculos en ese país, concretamente con empresarios multimillonarios que, al igual que Jeb, no han hecho su fortuna beneficiando a otros, y con conocidos personajes del exilio cubano que han pasado por Venezuela.
En un reportaje del periodista Gerardo Reyes, difundido el 19 de noviembre de 2000 desde Miami, se menciona que en 1977, cuando su padre fue nombrado director de la CIA, Jeb se estableció en Venezuela como representante del Commerce Bank, de Tejas, perteneciente a James Baker, quien era amigo de Bush Sr. y fue después secretario de Estado. Para entonces, Jeb hablaba español con fluidez gracias a su relación con la mexicana Columba Garnica, que es su esposa, por lo cual "la familia fue aceptada rápidamente por la rica sociedad petrolera de Venezuela".
En 1980, cuando su padre fue electo vicepresidente se encaminó a Miami, a la que considera "la ciudad más internacional del país". En los años siguientes, para hacerse millonario Jeb se unió al urbanista cubano y directivo de la anticastrista Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana, Armando Codina, con quien ganaba grandes comisiones, hasta de 50.000 dólares, por conseguir inversionistas a la firma de Codina, en lo que era un obvio tráfico de influencias.
Se relacionó también con Miguel Recarey, empresario cubano-americano que fue acusado de un fraude millonario con dinero federal aportado a sus centros médicos en Miami. Recarey desvió dinero destinado a servicios públicos de salud de Miami, para organizar, a través de su firma, la International Medical Centers (IMC), servicios hospitalarios para los mercenarios de la Contra nicaragüense. Asimismo, Jeb recibió 75 mil dólares de esa empresa para encontrarle un nuevo local, labor que nunca llevó a cabo.
Con ese tipo de negocios, en 1994, a sus 41 años, Jeb tenía una fortuna de más de 2 millones de dólares. Tres años después, Recarey dijo que «compraba influencias» a Jeb Bush y otras figuras políticas poderosas en los años 80 y que gastó una buena cantidad de dinero en contratar a Jeb Bush y a personas cercanas al ex presidente Ronald Reagan y al entonces vicepresidente George Bush para tratar así de evitar que los inspectores federales acabaran cerrando sus negocios. Después de sacar unos 300 millones de dólares de las arcas del Estado, Recarey se escapó precisamente a Venezuela para después volar a España. Al conocer estas acusaciones, Jeb lo negó todo: los cheques que recibió de Recarey eran fruto de comisiones de la venta de bienes raíces.
Es bien sabido que desde la gobernación de Florida, Jeb Bush ha apoyado a sus amigos y socios del exilio cubano radical, que a su vez han participado en diversos tipos de operaciones de Venezuela. En 2001, Jeb Bush, y los congresistas Lincoln Diaz-Balart e Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, junto con la Fundación Heritage y el senador republicano de extrema derecha Jesse Helms, apoyaron la nominación del exiliado cubano Otto Reich, ultraderechista de negra trayectoria, como secretario asistente para el Hemisferio Occidental del Departamento de Estado. Reich encabezó la Oficina de Diplomacia Pública del Departamento de Estado durante el gobierno de Ronald Reagan y fue embajador de Estados Unidos en Venezuela de 1986 a 89. Asimismo, se le ha acusado de apoyar el fallido derrocamiento de Chávez en 2002, cuya cabeza visible fue empresario Pedro Carmona, presidente de la patronal venezolana Fedecámaras y con intereses en el sector petrolero. Entre las primeras medidas que anunció el efímero dictador en su gobierno que sólo duró 48 horas fue que duplicaría la cantidad de petróleo exportada por Venezuela y que suprimiría las exportaciones a Cuba, medidas evidentemente dictadas por el gobierno de Bush, principal promotor del golpe contra Chávez.
También en 2002, el senador demócrata Christopher Dodd dijo que cuando era embajador, Reich había ayudado a Orlando Bosch, exiliado cubano acusado de terrorismo, a escapar a Estados Unidos. Bosch había estado en prisión en Venezuela en relación con el bombazo que derribó en Barbados un vuelo de Cubana de Aviación en 1976. En febrero de 1987 Orlando Bosch salió libre de la cárcel venezolana y se allí se dirigió ilegalmente a Estados Unidos gracias a una visa que le tramitó Reich. En ese país fue rápidamente detenido por no haber respetado la libertad condicional. Ante ello, la Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana, así Ileana Ros-Lehtinen y Jeb Bush, quien entonces trabajaba con ella, organizaron una intensa campaña para su liberación.
Además de Bosch, también participó en el atentado el anticastrista Luis Posada Carriles, quien, según anota el periodista colombiano Hernando Calvo Ospino, desde 1967 trabajaba para la CIA en Venezuela como "asesor de los cuerpos de seguridad encargados de reprimir a las organizaciones de izquierda". Añade Calvo Ospino que el proceso contra los culpables del bombazo, "fue accidentado debido a la sucesión de recursos de la defensa". Tuvo que trasladarse el sumario al fuero militar, pues la jueza que seguía el caso en lo civil lo dejó por amenazas de muerte. Elio García, presidente de la Corte Marcial, no cedió y le asesinaron a su hijo. "Con tales antecedentes se tendría que ser muy ingenuo para no pensar que la complicidad de la CIA estaba por algún lugar. Mas suspicacia se crea cuando el gobierno estadounidense decide no aportar ni una frase de información al sumario sobre Posada o Bosch".
Billionaire Gustavo CisnerosPero otros miembros de la familia Bush tienen también relaciones importantes en Venezuela. Luego del fallido golpe de Estado contra Chávez se señaló como una de sus principales promotores a Gustavo Cisneros, magnate de la televisión y amigo del ex presidente George Bush padre. Cisneros negó públicamente su papel en un supuesto golpe de Estado, pero el semanario Newsweek apuntó que Pedro Carmona "fue visto salir de la oficina de Cisneros" antes de ir al Palacio de Gobierno para jurar como presidente provisional. Según Newsweek, el legislador venezolano Pedro Pablo Alcántara declaró a la revista que la breve dictadura de Carmona fue organizada en las oficinas de Cisneros, y que éste fue "el jefe supremo" del supuesto complot. La publicación señaló también que Otto Reich había hablado con Cisneros "dos o tres veces" durante la intentona. Una de las llamadas fue hecha por Cisneros para avisar a Reich el sábado 13 de que una multitud de enfurecidos partidarios de Chávez había rodeado el edificio de su emisora de televisión, Venevisión.
De acuerdo con fuentes venezolanas, el jueves 11 de abril de 2002, cuando se produjo un enfrentamiento entre chavistas y antichavistas, con un saldo de unos 25 muertos, la mayoría de ellos del bando de Chávez, Pedro Carmona no estaba en la marcha sino, invitados por Cisneros, estaba cómodamente instalado en el búnker de Venevisión, junto con el presidente de la Conferencia Episcopal, Baltazar Porras, el empresario periodístico Rafael Poleo y otros personajes.
No es raro, por ende, que se haya identificado a Cisneros como el prospecto de Bush para enfrentar a Hugo Chávez en las futuras elecciones presidenciales, que se podrían adelantar si la oposición ganara el próximo referéndum cuya realización está siendo apoyada por Estados Unidos.
De 57 años, Gustavo Cisneros Rendiles tiene una fortuna de alrededor de 5 mil millones de dólares, una de las mayores de América Latina, luego de la del mexicano Carlos Slim. Cisneros ha ocupado el puesto 94 de los 500 más ricos del mundo según la revista Forbes.
De ascendencia cubana, Cisneros es el mayor accionista de Univisión, la principal cadena de habla hispana de Estados Unidos y posee en algunos países canales de mucha audiencia como Venevisión en Venezuela, ChileVisión, Caracol Televisión de Colombia, Caribean Communications Network, también tiene la embotelladora Panamco y es accionista de Coca Cola, la transnacional de la cual por cierto fue empleado el hoy presidente mexicano Vicente Fox. Junto con su cónyuge, Patricia Phelps, ha figurado en la lista de invitados ilustres de la Casa Blanca incluidos por Ronald y Nancy Reagan. Se ha señalado que en la relación amistosa de Bush padre con Cisneros pesa el proyecto empresarial de primero de ellos de incorporar a la empresa estatal Petróleos de Venezuela a su lista de negocios en Texas.
Gustavo Cisneros comparte excursiones de pesca lo mismo en Venezuela que en Florida con su amigo George Bush, y demostrando que el capital no tiene escrúpulos ni ideología también cultivo relaciones con el gobierno de Bill Clinton de cuyo Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores Cyrus Vance fue interlocutor.
Cisneros pertenece al Consejo Internacional de Asesores de la Sociedad de las Américas (The Americas Society), asociación "sin fines de lucro" donde participan también David Rockefeller y el empresario mediático chileno Agustín Edwards, quien fue una de las piezas claves en la conspiración contra el gobierno constitucional de Salvador Allende, para lo cual recibió apoyo de la CIA.
En enero de 1985, fueron arrestados en Venezuela varios simpatizantes del líder estadounidense Lyndon Larouche y les confiscaron 200 copias de un libro titulado Narcotráfico S. A. (Dope Inc.), donde se afirmaba que la familia Cisneros tenía conexiones con personajes e instituciones dedicadas al lavado de dinero. Años después, los editores presentaron documentos que afirmaban que el 14 de febrero de 1985 un avión ejecutivo de Pepsi-Cola Corp. de Venezuela, operado por una empresa de la familia Cisneros (Aeroservicios Alas), fue sometido a una inspección por agentes del Servicio de Aduanas en Hollywood, Florida, que encontraron una bolsa con 50 gramos de cocaína en su interior. Cisneros admitió el incidente del avión pero alegó que el servicio de aduanas no había formulado cargos.
Hermano de Gustavo y segundo en el manejo del emporio familiar, Ricardo Cisneros resultó involucrado en el más estruendoso escándalo financiero de la historia de Venezuela: el descalabro del Banco Latino en 1994, a raíz de lo cual, una juez venezolana dictó orden de arresto contra Ricardo acusándolo de fraude en su calidad de miembro de la junta directiva del banco. Según la acusación los directivos del banco aprobaron créditos a empresas -algunas de su propiedad- por encima de los límites establecidos y desviaron fondos del banco. Ricardo, quien estaba fuera del país cuando se libraron las órdenes de captura, permaneció en el exterior.
Por otra parte, colaborador venezolano del presidente Bush Jr es Luis Giusti, quien funge como su asesor en asuntos energéticos. Luis Giusti, quien fue presidente de Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) de 1994 a 1999, pretendió la privatización de esa empresa estatal. Según el economista petrolero Rafael Quiroz, Giusti siempre cuestionó el patriotismo, el nacionalismo y la soberanía, alegando que tales términos "había que adecuarlos a las realidades del mundo de hoy", para dar a entender que había que desprenderse de PDVSA. "Aquí se esgrimen consideraciones de soberanía y de patriotismo. Ya basta de eso". (El Nacional, 7 de julio de 1998, página E/2), argumentaba Giusti. Luego en agosto del mismo año (1998) durante la 54 Asamblea Anual de Fedecámaras afirmó: "Yo creo que la empresa debe ir a colocar sus acciones en el mercado". Al dejar su cargo en PDVSA, Giusti fue a radicar a Estados Unidos ".para retornar laboralmente a la Shell Petroleum Corporation, a la que muy probablemente nunca dejó de servir. Allí, como eficiente "Shell-man", trabaja ahora para sus antiguos patronos y hoy también convertido en "Bush-man" asesora al presidente estadounidense George W. Bush en su Plan Energético para el hemisferio...
Edgar González Ruiz es un escritor mexicano y autor del libro Cruces y Sombras.

Critique
Le Brésil avant la présidentielle

Le président Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva brigue un second mandat le 1er octobre. A cette occasion, deux ouvrages esquissent un bilan de la première expérience gouvernementale de la gauche brésilienne.
Auteur d'ouvrages de référence sur l'Amérique latine, le politologue et diplomate Alain Rouquié élargit d'emblée le propos. Il cerne les atouts et les faiblesses du Brésil, puissance émergente, très active sur la scène régionale et internationale. Tout en utilisant la trajectoire de Lula comme un fil conducteur, Le Brésil au XXIe siècle : naissance d'un nouveau grand plonge résolument dans l'histoire du pays-continent, celle de la période contemporaine surtout, sans négliger pour autant l'héritage colonial ou le XIXe siècle.
D'une plume alerte, Alain Rouquié parcourt les mouvements de population et les relations interraciales, marquées par l'esclavage, les mécanismes d'exclusion et l'apprentissage de la citoyenneté, la montée en puissance de l'Etat et sa projection diplomatique. Il parvient ainsi à insérer l'élection d'un ancien ouvrier tourneur à la présidence de la République dans une vaste introduction aux réalités du Brésil, à la fois pédagogique et nuancée.
Alain Rouquié estime qu'il y a une continuité "inavouable" entre les deux présidences du social-démocrate Fernando Henrique Cardoso et le premier mandat de Lula da Silva. "La période 1995-2006 forme politiquement un ensemble unique et cohérent", écrit-il, tout en admettant que "la présidence Lula n'est pas seulement le couronnement de l'ère Cardoso".
Pourtant, si "les deux partis sociaux-démocrates rivaux sont arrivés au pouvoir avec des programmes similaires", il faudrait expliquer pourquoi le Parti de la social-démocratie brésilienne (PSDB) de M. Cardoso et le Parti des travailleurs (PT) de l'actuel président se trouvent dans des camps opposés.
En tout cas, entre le brillant sociologue et le syndicaliste charismatique, l'auteur n'hésite pas : "Il existe un avant et un après F. H. Cardoso."
L'ouvrage Le Nouveau Brésil de Lula regroupe les communications présentées lors d'un séminaire universitaire. Des réflexions stimulantes abordent des questions aussi diverses que la discrimination positive et la démocratie participative, les programmes sociaux et la redistribution des revenus, les mutations du PT et les scandales de corruption suscités par ses alliances politiques, les recompositions religieuses et leurs retombées électorales.
LE BRÉSIL AU XXIE SIÈCLE : NAISSANCE D'UN NOUVEAU GRAND d'Alain Rouquié. Fayard, 410 p., 24 €.
LE NOUVEAU BRÉSIL DE LULA, Daniel van Eeuwen (dir.). Editions de l'Aube, 350 p., 28,40 €.

Chaque jour, l’armée israélienne bombarde le territoire de Gaza, dont elle s’est retirée l’été dernier. Des civils sont tués alors que les Etats-Unis et l’Union européenne maintiennent leur blocus contre le peuple palestinien. Pendant ce temps, des millions de Palestiniens de la diaspora continuent de vivre dans des camps, notamment au Liban, où, malgré quelques améliorations récentes, leur sort reste précaire.

Par Marina Da Silva Journaliste.
L’attentat qui a frappé un responsable du Djihad islamique palestinien et son frère à Saïda, chef-lieu du Liban sud, le 27 mai, a ravivé le processus de déstabilisation que connaît le pays. D’autant que, le lendemain, l’armée israélienne a effectué des bombardements (sans précédent depuis son retrait, le 25 mai 2000) sur la bande frontalière, dans la Bekaa et près de Beyrouth, en riposte à des tirs de roquette imputés au Hezbollah et au Front populaire de libération de la Palestine - Commandement général (FPLP-CG) de M. Ahmed Jibril ; ce qui a relancé le débat autour du désarmement du Hezbollah et des Palestiniens. Oubliés de l’histoire et des négociations, ces derniers, qui pour la plupart vivent dans des camps, se voient à nouveau propulsés sur le devant de la scène politique, où ils tentent de faire valoir le droit au retour auquel ils n’ont jamais renoncé.
« Les camps de réfugiés, et Aïn Héloué tout particulièrement (1), sont régulièrement présentés par la presse nationale et internationale comme des zones de non-droit qui abriteraient des criminels et des extrémistes islamistes, s’énerve l’une des habitantes, Khadda. Mais le camp, c’est nous : plus de quarante-cinq mille personnes, attachées à leur identité et à leur histoire ; et non quelques incontrôlables, tout au plus deux cents, qui sont aussi le produit d’une précarisation et d’une impasse politique. » Elle est la première à redouter les tensions et les conflits armés qui minent le camp, le plus grand du Liban, en bordure de Saïda. Elle a d’ailleurs fini par s’installer à l’extérieur, mettant en péril l’équilibre familial : son mari, qui tient un petit commerce, demeure sur place, et ses enfants reviennent systématiquement au camp chaque fin de semaine. Mais, plus que des accrochages, Khadda est surtout fatiguée de l’étranglement économique d’Aïn Héloué, de la misère qui s’affiche ostensiblement dans les ruelles étroites et insalubres, et dans les maisons en lambeaux, servant de terreau à la radicalisation islamiste.
L’invasion israélienne de 1982 et le départ forcé de l’Organisation de libération de la Palestine (OLP) et de ses combattants ont marqué un tournant. L’organisation fournissait en effet du travail à près de 65 % des Palestiniens et assurait le financement de structures sanitaires et éducatives également ouvertes aux populations libanaises démunies. De plus, les Palestiniens du Liban ont eu le sentiment d’être les oubliés des accords d’Oslo de 1993, l’OLP concentrant ses efforts diplomatiques sur la Cisjordanie et Gaza. Enfin, les fonds des pays européens ont été détournés vers ces territoires, et les budgets que l’United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA – office de secours des Nations unies (2)), les agences des Nations unies et les organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) internationales consacraient au Liban ont été drastiquement réduits. Les camps, touchés de plein fouet par la guerre et les difficultés économiques, sont devenus des espaces de repli.
Les organisations islamistes, principalement le Djihad islamique et le Mouvement de la résistance islamique (Hamas), ont su se tourner vers les couches les plus pauvres de la population en leur fournissant une assistance matérielle qui fait cruellement défaut. Le Hamas a su profiter de la colère suscitée par la déportation au Liban sud de quatre cent quinze Palestiniens proches de l’organisation, en décembre 1992, puis de la politique israélienne des « assassinats extrajudiciaires », en particulier celui du cheikh Ahmed Yassine en mars 2004 et celui d’Abdelaziz Al-Rantissi le mois suivant, dont les portraits sont partout. Sa victoire aux élections législatives palestiniennes de janvier 2006 le renforce également au Liban.
Oum Fadi, proche du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine (FPLP), surprise « comme tout le monde », n’en fut pas moins contente du résultat et de ce qu’il signifiait comme choix « contre la corruption et pour la revendication des droits palestiniens, dont le droit au retour ». Comme beaucoup d’autres, elle ne reconnaît plus Aïn Héloué, où elle a mis au monde ses enfants à une époque où les camps étaient le symbole de l’activité politique et de la construction d’une société palestinienne dans l’exil : « Aujourd’hui, la population est prise en otage par des factions politiques qui règlent leurs comptes. Il y a régulièrement des morts, et les gens ont peur. Mais ils ne veulent pas partir, car le camp est un espace collectif qui symbolise toujours l’attente du retour et la lutte pour nos droits. » Le 1er mai, un membre du Fatah a été tué par un islamiste d’Usbat al-Ansar (Ligue des partisans, groupe salafiste supposé entretenir des liens avec Al-Qaida (3)), venant s’ajouter à une liste déjà longue. Ces affrontements sont autant d’ordre politique que criminel, ils dépassent souvent des enjeux internes, s’inscrivent dans une stratégie de tension – manipulée par différents services secrets – et viennent brouiller les cartes. Aïn Héloué reste le symbole du camp politique où tous les partis palestiniens ont pignon sur rue, véritable capitale des Palestiniens en exil.
« La situation est sensible », dit sobrement M. Abou Ali Hassan, ex-dirigeant d’Aïn Héloué et maintenant en poste à Mar Elias, le petit camp majoritairement chrétien de Beyrouth, où il est responsable des relations avec les partis politiques libanais : « Le désarmement des organisations palestiniennes, exigé par la résolution 1559, adoptée par le Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies en septembre 2004, à l’instigation de la France et des Etats-Unis, constitue un des dossiers de la vie politique libanaise (4). Le gouvernement d’union nationale de Beyrouth a formé un comité chargé de négocier le désarmement des bases installées en dehors des camps, et la réglementation des armes à l’intérieur. Nous travaillons à la création d’une délégation unifiée et à ce que ce dossier ne soit pas traité sous un angle uniquement sécuritaire mais à ce que les résultats fassent avancer nos droits politiques et améliorent la situation humanitaire dans les camps. » La réouverture de la représentation de l’OLP, le 16 mai 2006 à Jnah, dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth, représente pour M. Hassan un signe politique fort : « Le gouvernement ne veut pas employer la force sur cette question, et c’est surtout la présence armée palestinienne dans une douzaine de bases, dispersées dans la plaine de la Bekaa et dans la localité côtière de Nahmé, à quinze kilomètres au sud de Beyrouth, qui pose problème. »
Dans ce contexte troublé, les déclarations de M. Mahmoud Abbas, le président de l’Autorité palestinienne, lors de sa visite à Paris, en octobre 2005, selon qui les Palestiniens vivant au Liban devaient « se soumettre à la loi » et qu’ils s’y trouvaient en « invités » ont été mal perçues.
Les journaux libanais font régulièrement état d’infiltrations de militants palestiniens de Syrie vers la plaine orientale de la Bekaa, qui ont conduit l’armée libanaise à fermer une quarantaine de points de passage illégaux entre les deux pays et à resserrer son étau autour des positions palestiniennes relevant d’organisations prosyriennes basées à Damas, comme le FPLP-CG, le Fatah-Intifada (une scission du Fatah, conduite par M. Abou Moussa) et Al-Saika (l’aile palestinienne du parti Baas au pouvoir en Syrie).
« Parce que nous avons conduit la résistance armée contre Israël, que nous restons actifs et influents, nous sommes vus comme un obstacle à la paix », commente Nabil, responsable du comité populaire au camp de Baddaoui, près de Tripoli, dans le nord. Avec ses maisons moins encastrées, ses voieries et ses canalisations d’eau refaites, Baddaoui, plus éloigné de la zone du conflit, pourrait sembler paisible ; mais, pour Nabil, la guerre reste une menace : « Les avions israéliens continuent à survoler le Liban régulièrement, du sud au nord et du nord au sud, en toute impunité. » Et puis « Sabra et Chatila resteront à jamais dans nos mémoires : nous avons été massacrés malgré la protection de la force internationale. Les armes dans les camps sont là pour assurer notre propre protection (5) ».
Mais la question des armes fait surtout écran aux conditions de vie et de relégation des Palestiniens. Selon l’UNRWA, les réfugiés palestiniens au Liban seraient, en mars 2006, quelque quatre cent quatre mille dont deux cent vingt mille résideraient dans la douzaine de camps répartis dans le pays. A Beyrouth : Mar Elias, Bourj Al-Barajneh, Sabra et Chatila, Dbaye. Au sud, près de Saïda : Aïn Héloué et Myé Myé ; et de Tyr : Al-Buss, Rachidiyé, Bourj Al-Chemalhe. A Tripoli, au nord : Nahr Al-Bared et Baddaoui. Et à l’Est, dans la Bekaa : Waweel. Il faut ajouter des « regroupements », c’est-à-dire des petits camps-ghettos illégaux, non reconnus par l’UNRWA et ne relevant pas de son assistance. L’armée libanaise maintient sa pression autour des camps, en particulier ceux du Sud, qui abritent quelque cent mille réfugiés, et dont les entrées et les sorties sont contrôlées et soumises à des obtentions de permis. Le Fatah y reste la plus puissante organisation, tandis que dans les camps de Beyrouth, du Liban nord et de la Bekaa les prosyriens ont gardé une importance significative et que partout le renforcement des organisations islamistes est notable, plaçant selon les observateurs Fatah et Hamas au même niveau.
Interdit d’être médecin, architecte...
Selon l’UNRWA, 60 % des réfugiés palestiniens vivent en dessous du seuil de pauvreté, et leur taux de chômage atteindrait 70 %. Il leur était jusqu’à présent impossible d’exercer quelque soixante-douze métiers, hors des camps, interdit d’y introduire des matériaux pouvant servir à la construction, et ils ne peuvent quitter le territoire libanais ou y revenir sans l’obtention d’un visa dont la validité dure au maximum six mois.
M. Trad Hamadé, ministre libanais du travail, proche du Hezbollah, a signé un mémorandum, en juin 2005, en faveur des Palestiniens nés au Liban et inscrits sur les registres du ministère de l’intérieur qui lève en partie l’interdiction de pratiquer un métier. Mais cela ne concerne pas les diplômés palestiniens, qui ne pourront toujours pas exercer la médecine, le droit, l’architecture... Pas un mot, par ailleurs, sur la réforme de 2001 qui avait interdit aux Palestiniens d’acheter des maisons et des biens immobiliers au Liban, entraînant de véritables imbroglios juridiques, notamment en matière d’héritage.
Mme Samira Salah est directrice du département des affaires des réfugiés palestiniens de l’OLP et coordinatrice de la campagne pour les droits des réfugiés palestiniens au Liban et le droit au retour, prévu par la résolution 194 des Nations unies. Pour elle, les dispositions du ministre du travail représentent un progrès, mais ne changeront rien concrètement : « Des propositions avaient déjà été faites en 1995, indiquant qu’un Palestinien né au Liban avait le droit de travailler à condition de disposer d’un permis de travail. mais ce permis reste quasi impossible à obtenir, et la proposition du ministre n’inclut pas l’accès à la sécurité sociale et aux assurances. » Cette campagne a été mise en place début avril 2005 par un collectif qui regroupe vingt-cinq associations palestiniennes, le Conseil national palestinien, le département des affaires des réfugiés de l’OLP et des membres de la « société civile » palestinienne. Elle organise des ateliers de réflexion et des formations au sein de la société palestinienne et veut gagner le soutien de la population libanaise afin de créer un large mouvement de pression politique. Sous le mot d’ordre « Droits civiques jusqu’au droit au retour, ensemble avec les Libanais, nous résistons à l’implantation et à la naturalisation des réfugiés », elle formule quatre revendications principales : droit au travail, droit à la propriété, droit d’association et droit à la sécurité. Ces revendications ne sont pas nouvelles, mais elles n’ont jusqu’à présent jamais reçu de réponse.
Jetés dans l’exil par centaines de milliers lors de la création de l’Etat d’Israël en 1948, les réfugiés sont quelque quatre millions, soit près de 60 % de la communauté palestinienne, et vivent à 90 % dans les territoires palestiniens et les pays arabes limitrophes. Les Palestiniens du Liban (6) cristallisent les enjeux politiques les plus exacerbés aussi bien à l’échelle libanaise qu’à l’échelle régionale. Ils viennent rappeler que l’évolution du conflit israélo-arabe est aussi liée à la solution du problème des réfugiés.
Marina Da Silva.

Al-Qaeda yields to the elusive cells of the chatroom
By Stephen Fidler and Edward Alden
Published: September 10 2006 19:05 Last updated: September 10 2006 19:05
What has become of al-Qaeda since September 11 2001?
“Everything has changed,” says Scott Atran of the University of Michigan. US-led military action in Afghanistan deprived al-Qaeda of its operating headquarters soon after 9/11, along with much of its leadership. With them, the organisation led by Osama bin Laden and his chief ideologue, Ayman al-Zawahiri, lost much of its capability to plan and direct sophisticated terrorist attacks. Now, it is best understood, he says, as “a media-driven transnational movement that has excited young people all over the Muslim world”.
Mr Atran is building a database of identified terrorists in south-east Asia and Europe in an effort to understand what drives a proportion of those excited young people to violence. Most who turn to terrorism are what his colleague on the database project, Marc Sageman of the University of Pennsylvania, calls “groups of guys”.
These are “action-oriented groups of young men” aged between 15 and 30 – most often gathered in groups of eight – who might originally have got together to play cricket or football.
Preliminary results from the database suggest more than 80 per cent of them are radicalised in the west. Some 70 per cent come to these groups through friends, 20 per cent through kin and just 10 per cent through the Islamic schools or madrassas located overwhelmingly in Indonesia and Pakistan. Eight per cent are Christian converts to Islam.
They are younger, too. The average age of people arrested in the past two years who are allegedly affiliated to al-Qaeda is 22 compared to 26 a few years earlier. Mr Atran says this is because the internet is drawing people together through chatrooms.
The internet is also drawing women to the cause – a potential new nightmare for security forces. Women can hide behind the anonymity the internet offers, says Louise Richardson, a terror expert and dean of Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, adding: “This is increasing the number of potential recruits.”
The image of al-Qaeda is of a crafty, intelligent, innovative adversary. But says Mr Atran, most of these groups are anything but innovative – recycling old tactics, as suggested by the alleged London airliner conspiracy uncovered last month, which replayed that of the so-called Bojinka plot of 1994-95. “Most of these people are a bunch of amateurs. But they are running rings around the most powerful military and intelligence organisations around the world,” he says.
Bringing down decentralised networks such as these are hard for organisations arranged hierarchically, such as western governments and military establishments. Kathleen Carley at Carnegie Mellon University, who has done modelling work on networks, says: “Trying to destabilise a cellular distributed network using tactics designed for hierarchies is likely to be ineffective.”
Many analysts say part of al-Qaeda’s increasingly sophisticated communications strategy – which includes internet-distributed video with a new al-Jazeera-style logo – is in part designed to make Mr Bin Laden and Mr al-Zawahiri appear to be at the centre of events that they do not control.
Yet some people who follow al-Qaeda closely say the two men would be content with developments since 9/11. Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident who lives in London, says the two mapped out a three-stage strategy in 1997. The idea was “to drag America into the game”.
Step one was to bring more recruits to the cause: the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania brought thousands to Afghanistan and led to “a surplus of suicide bombers”, he says. Step two was to bring about a polarisation between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds: the heavy-handed US response to 9/11 has helped to encourage this, particularly since the invasion of Iraq, which he describes as “a gift that al-Qaeda never dreamed of”.
Step three was what he calls “the pacification of the single superpower”: the idea that the US, because of divisions at home, would withdraw from the Middle East, leaving the jihadis to operate freely in the Muslim world and take over governments there. According to this analysis, the plan is currently between stages two and three.
(Mr al-Fagih has been designated by the United Nations, following a US request, as an individual belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. He denies he supports terrorism.)
Christopher Hiffelfinger, an analyst of jihadi ideology at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, says Messrs Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have repeatedly suggested a strategy that has been described as “bleed-to-bankruptcy”: to make it so costly to fight the jihadis that the US will eventually draw back from Muslim countries.
Some calculations suggest that al-Qaeda is doing pretty well on this score. Using the term employed by the Pentagon’s latest four-yearly defence review to describe the war against terrorism, Mr Sageman observes: “So far the total [US] costs in the ‘Long War’ – if the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iran are added to lost revenue from 9/11 and the added cost of defending the homeland – may come close to a trillion dollars. On the other hand, al-Qaeda’s cost so far has been a few million dollars.”
Mr Hiffelfinger says that since it was deprived of its haven in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has become a “vanguard” organisation, an inspiration for Muslims rather than a driver of specific plots. So, as the phenomenon it set in train grows rapidly, “al-Qaeda itself becomes less and less relevant”.

Sommet des non alignés
Du 11 au 16 septembre se tient à Cuba le quatorzième sommet du Mouvement des non alignés. Il réunit des délégations de 115 pays — souvent conduites par des chefs d’Etat ou de gouvernement —, soit une majorité de membres des Nations unies. Y prendront part également une cinquantaine de pays invités.
Issu de la conférence de Bandung (1955), le Mouvement des non alignés a marqué l’histoire de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, la lutte pour la décolonisation, pour un nouvel ordre économique international, pour une politique indépendante des deux blocs.

Las Vegas Sun Chavez Accuses U.S. of Aiding OppositionBy IAN JAMES ASSOCIATED PRESS CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has accused opposition presidential candidates of taking orders and receiving secret funding from the U.S.... (photo: RNV gov)Caracas Election Photos US Venezuela

The Guardian Campaign Trouble Reported in VenezuelaCARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Demonstrators hurled rocks and bottles and gunfire rang out Thursday as Venezuela's leading opposition presidential candidate toured a slum stronghold of President Hugo... (photo: UN)

BOMBA TUCANA: ACM acusa FHC de usar CAIXA DOIS

Trechos de uma entrevista do senador Antonio Carlos Magalhães (PFL-BA), ao jornal Folha de São Paulo, publicada no dia 13 de março de 2002.Folha - Houve caixa 2 na campanha presidencial de Fernando Henrique? ACM - Em 94, participei de uma reunião em que o Eduardo Vieira (o então banqueiro José Eduardo Andrade Vieira) disponibilizou R$ 5 milhões para a campanha do Fernando Henrique. E ainda indicou a pessoa que ia tomar conta dos recursos, um aposentado do banco Bamerindus em São Paulo. Eu digo a você, pela memória de meu filho (Luís Eduardo Magalhães, morto em 98), que é verdade. Eu estava na reunião.(...)Folha - Isso aconteceu antes do início oficial da campanha? ACM - Antes. Estava se pensando em como Fernando Henrique ia andar de avião, por exemplo, e o Andrade Vieira ofereceu o avião do Bamerindus. Folha - O dinheiro doado pelo Andrade Vieira foi contabilizado?ACM - Foi tudo extra-oficial.