In which your lazy scribbler finally gets her ass-kicking boots on again

Watch out for this man; he was recently arrested, and a good thing, too.

Okay. I’ve been sitting on this one long enough. Time for me to translate what the lamestream media will never tell you, yes?

The Venezuelan far-right-winger, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, former member of the Tradition, Family and Property sect (TFP), has been linked to several coup attempts in Venezuela and, along with two ex-military men from Argentina, is now suspected of human-rights violations in conjunction with assassination plans, along with a band of foreign terrorists recently captured in Bolivia.

“The Venezuelan engineer Alejandro Peña Esclusa, bitter opponent of the government of Hugo Chávez, is at the head of UnoAmérica, the crusade against ‘leftist’ governments in Latin America. Bolivia and Venezuela head the list of ‘concerns’ of the organization, which recruits ‘faithfuls’ and finances the right-wing in Colombia,” reads an article in the Argentine daily, Página/12.

The Argentine paper explained that the vice-president of Bolivia, Alvaro García Linera, had asked the Argentine ambassador in La Paz, Horacio Macedo, for his assistance in controlling the border regions “because of the presence of Argentine activists in various parts of Bolivia.”

Days later, the Bolivian police crushed a band of suspected terrorists in a raid at the Hotel Las Américas in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Three men were killed and two more arrested.

According to Página/12, one of the Argentine ex-militaries was the “carapintada”, Jorge Mones Ruiz, who during the 1980s participated in an attempted coup against the Argentine government of Raúl Alfonsín. Those who took part in the uprising had been the beneficiaries of an amnesty which granted immunity to uniformed repressors operating during the military dictatorship of 1976-83.

Página/12 reports that Mones Ruiz found new allies as “the Argentine delegate of UnoAmérica–an ultra-right-wing organization attempting to be the counterpoint to UNASUR. He travelled to Bolivia and had contacted Eduardo Rózsa Flores“.

After the Pando massacre, which took place on September 11, 2008 and resulted in the deaths of 11 Bolivian peasants at the hands of separatist bands, the citizens of Bolivia became alert to the sudden appearance of unknown organizations, which attributed to themselves the task of investigating the events of that day. These groups came with the objective of obfuscating the reality of the massacre and deceiving the people, but were unable to do so thanks to the decisive participation of UNASUR and the UN itself.

Later, the Bolivian right began a campaign urging the government of Evo Morales to free those they called “political prisoners”, under the slogan “Free the Truth”; the activists wore black T-shirts with that saying, and white rosaries around their necks. A Sunday mass at the cathedral of Santa Cruz de la Sierra marked the launching of the operation, which was widely covered, in typical fashion, by the main television channels of the region, and in which the criminals were presented as “prisoners of conscience”.

Due to the failure of those plans, UnoAmérica intervened, intending to take on the role of the impartial investigator of the Pando massacre. One of the organization’s spokespersons called a press conference (again, in Santa Cruz) in which he affirmed, with an absolutely straight face, that the government was the guilty party, in a typical move to criminalize the victims.

UnoAmérica is a very recent organization; it was founded in December, 2008, in Colombia. Member organizations swear that their mission is to counteract the parties that participated in the São Paulo Forum, and which today form the governments of various countries in South America. They claim that these same governments have traded the firing squad for constitutional reforms, which will become the “greatest dangers” to freedom and democracy.

The director of the organization, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, was denounced a few weeks ago for his blatant interference in the Salvadoran elections, on behalf of the right-wing ARENA party, which is founded and financed by paramilitary death squads.

The UnoAmérica website presents Peña Esclusa as a former candidate for the presidency of Venezuela, and this is true: the last time he ran for election, he obtained 0.04% of the vote, or precisely 2,424 votes.

He is a personage intimately associated with the worst causes: promoter and spokesman in Venezuela for the TFP sect, a Catholic cult which is ultra-fundamentalist and antisemitic; he has also worked for years alongside Lyndon LaRouche, Ronald Reagan’s advisor and conspicuous representative of the far-right in the United States.

As well, one of the principal members of UnoAmérica in Argentina is Patricio Videla Balaguer, son of a famed military putschist of the 1950s, and a putschist himself during the “carapintada” uprisings of the 1980s. He is a prominent member of organizations such as TFP and “Parallel History”, which defends the genocide perpetrated by the Argentine junta and criminalizes its victims. For this reason, it is no coincidence that Videla Balaguer is also a member of that organization, and demands in his writings the convening of “a permanent commission to defend human rights”, promoted and co-ordinated by UnoAmérica.

Translation mine; linkage added.

Touching, isn’t it, how the fascist far right in Latin America sticks together? Argentine putschists and Venezuelan unelectables helping a death-squad party in El Salvador and a band of Hungarian-Romanian-Croatian-Irish mercenaries in Bolivia? Almost brings tears to my eyes. These poor souls will never get power the proper way, so they have to stage all kinds of lame stunts (and murderous coup attempts) to gain a toehold.

Only, alas for them, that’s not working either. Evo’s federales put the boots to the mercenaries, and the government of El Salvador is formed by the leftist FMLN party, not ARENA. Chavecito keeps getting himself re-elected (go figure, the man is popular!), and so does Evo. Moreover, both have succeeded in getting new constitutions written and passed by popular vote in Venezuela and Bolivia. The will of the people prevails.

And THIS is what UnoAmérica calls a “threat to freedom and democracy”. Makes you think, no? And also makes you want to keep an eye on these false fronts, I hope.