Al Gore's Crowded Bed: Bush, Barrick Gold, and General Pinochet

This article appears in the April 20, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

by Cynthia R. Rush

The fact that Barrick Gold was one of the principal sponsors of Al Gore's upcoming appearance in Santiago, Chile, as the keynote speaker at the May 11 conference, "Global Warming and Climate Change: The Time To Act Is Now," ignited a public outcry from several Chilean environmentalist groups which, along with an international spotlight placed on the case by the LaRouche Political Action Committee's website (www.larouchepac.com), has forced Barrick to withdraw its sponsorship from the event. Gore, for his part, is trying unconvincingly to distance himself from Barrick.

Some of the Chilean groups have limited themselves to denouncing Barrick's environmental crimes—polluting the air with toxins and destroying Chile's glaciers—and ask how the great champion of global warming could possibly associate with a monster such as Barrick. A distraught Sen. Alejandro Navarro, Socialist Party head of the Senate Environmental Committee, reported April 7 that he was writing a letter to Gore to warn him of what "his visit's ties to Barrick Gold have provoked, so he can evaluate the impact this will have on his speech." In a statement issued on her website, Fabiola Marín Salgado of the Vida Autónoma organization, stated the same day that "every environmentalist in Chile would like to warn him that his image as an environmentalist will be ruined if he attends events sponsored by Barrick Gold." Gore's association with Barrick shows "callousness," she said.

A handful of groupings has gone further and posted exposés published by EIR in the late 1990s on Barrick's role in African genocide, and its links to the covert intelligence apparatus run by former President George H.W. Bush and other characters and institutions whose allegiance is to the Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy.

But everyone is missing the fundamental point that the blimpish Gore's association with Barrick Gold isn't a fluke. He shares the company's outlook of racism and genocide, and has the exact same financial and political backers. These include the Bush family—you ask, but aren't they Republicans?—and major figures in the global Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy and raw materials cartels. George H.W. Bush sits on Barrick's International Advisory Board, along with former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Barrick Chairman Peter Munk a protégé of the British royal family, is a member of the environmentalist millionaires' grouping known as the "1001 Club," along with genocidalist Maurice Strong.

Barrick's African Genocide
When these criminals talk about "saving the environment," they mean getting rid of a large portion of the human race, especially darker skinned populations. Barrick's record in Africa makes the point.

During the 1990s, when Al Gore was Vice President, and also serving as chairman of the U.S.-South Africa Binational Commission (formed in 1994), the Toronto-based Barrick Gold was in the forefront of an "economic invasion" of the minerals-rich nation of Zaire. In 1996, Barrick Gold simply moved in and laid claim to gold mines at Kilomoto and Doko, in the northeast province of Haut-Zaire. Others joined in the stampede, including the hoary Anglo American Corp. (based in South Africa), and the newly formed America Mineral Fields (AMF, a British Commonwealth company, founded in Canada in 1995, for "exploration" purposes), which locked in a deal for the mammoth Kipushi copper mines in Shaba province. When even all these give-away deals—signed as preliminary contracts with Mobutu Sese Seko, the President of Zaire—weren't enough for the Anglo-Dutch commodities cartel, they pursued a "regime change."

On May 9, 1997 in Lubumbashi in western Zaire, representatives of a dozen financial entities associated with the mining cartel (diamonds, cobalt, copper, gold, zinc, tin, barite, boron, magnesium), met with Laurent Kabila, who took power over Zaire and its 45 million people less than two weeks later. All told, the raw materials grab, chaos, and strife cost millions of lives in the heart of Africa.

What About Pinochet's Nazis?
While ecology groups say they are perplexed by Gore's association with Barrick, they haven't said "boo" about the even more glaring fact that individuals and institutions tied to the bloody 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet against then-President Salvador Allende, and subsequent 17-year Nazi-style dictatorship, are sponsoring the Santiago conference.

Gore's invitation to speak there came from multi-billionaire magnate Sebastián Piñera, failed 2005 Presidential candidate and also the driving force behind the creation, in Chile, of the "National Committee of Support for Al Gore's Candidacy for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize." Sebastián, who with affiliated companies is paying a whopping $200,000 to bring Gore to Chile, is the brother of fascist José Piñera, Pinochet's Labor Minister who privatized Chile's once excellent state-run social security system in 1981.

Sebastián tried to win the Presidency in 2005 posing as a "Christian humanist" and touchy-feely environmentalist who was concerned about "the poor." But in fact, he was the preferred candidate of the University of Chicago's George Shultz-Felix Rohatyn crowd that installed Pinochet in power in the 1973 coup. The Chilean people didn't buy his story, and elected Michelle Bachelet instead. And today, statesman Lyndon LaRouche has noted, by inviting the anti-African racist Al Gore down to Chile, Sebastián Piñera has fully exposed himself.

Then there's the other sponsor, the right-wing daily El Mercurio whose owners, the Edwards family, have served the British monarchy dating back to the 19th Century, when it fought to ensure that nothing even remotely resembling the American System of political economy would ever take root in Chile. In 1973, editor Agustín Edwards was a leading organizer of the Pinochet coup, along with Henry Kissinger and Rohatyn's International Telephone & Telegraph Co. (ITT). The daily is a proponent of the Mont Pelerin Society's fascist economics and continues to defend the late Pinochet.

Given these facts, the question is whether Gore is travelling to Chile to help the Nazis overthrow President Bachelet. Right now, Piñera is running a nasty campaign to force her out of office, putting himself forward as the man who can save Chile from the "chaos" he says she has created. What he means by that, is that Bachelet's efforts—albeit timid ones—to move Chile away from the brutal economic model imposed by Pinochet's "Chicago Boys," and still largely intact today, will not be tolerated.

As LaRouche observed April 9, "We have not yet gotten to the bottom of the Nazi connections behind the late dictator Pinochet from Chile. The Nazi is dead, but Nazism is not. And we see this in the attacks coming from various quarters on President Bachelet, which are obviously coming from the undead fascists of the Nazi tradition of the late dictator Pinochet"

LaRouche added that these are people who may be in cahoots with a filthy character from Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandro Peña Esclusa. Peña, a former member of the LaRouche organization, subsequently became an advocate of the Pinochet dictatorship and associated with Pinochet's circles in the 1990s, and is now associated closely with the fascists in Spain and Italy, as well as the U.S. and his own country.

Bush's Gore
The Bush family directly, or banking and political interests intimately linked to the family, are among the backers of the two other conferences at which Gore is the keynote speaker. Jeb Bush's Inter-American Ethanol Commission (IEC), founded in December 2006 to resurrect the failed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) through biofuel promotion, is a major sponsor of the First Biofuels Congress of the Americas on May 11 in Buenos Aires.

One of the IEC co-chairmen is Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and former Colombian ambassador to the United States. The IADB, whose activities are now virtually indistinguishable from Jeb's IEC, is organizing the April 19 conference in Miami, sponsored by the free-market business grouping Poder New American Alliance-Green Forum, and Kissinger McLarty Associates.

The Kissinger connection is relevant here. In a fit of self-promotion, the IEC held a conference April 2 in Washington, D.C., "Towards a Hemispheric Biofuels Market: The Outlook for Private Investment." Aside from the three co-chairmen, Jeb Bush, Moreno, and Brazilian agri-business tycoon and former Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues, the other speaker was former Kissinger Associates executive David Rothkopf. Rothkopf presented the study he had prepared for the IADB, "A Blueprint for Green Energy in the Americas," which he euphorically described as a call to transform the Caribbean into "the Gulf of Ethanol,"—an alternative to the Persian Gulf that will reduce dependence on Mideast oil.

Cuban President Fidel Castro's recent charge that the Bush biofuels push is the "internationalization of genocide," published as the lead item in the April 3 Granma Internacional, didn't sit too well with this crowd—and most emphatically not with Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who has declared that biofuels are "my obsession."

The Cuban leader took aim at the March 31 Camp David meeting between Lula and George Bush, in which ethanol production, and particularly the Brazilian model of ethanol based on sugarcane, was a key agenda item. Describing Cuba's own brutal history of sugar production based on slave labor and colonialism, Castro asserted: "No one has answered the fundamental question. Who is going to produce—and where—the more than 500 million tons of corn and other grains that the U.S., Europe, and other wealthy countries need to produce the huge number of gallons of ethanol that the large American and other corporations demand in exchange for their costly investments?" Where, he added, "are the poor nations of the Third World to find the minimal resources for their survival?"

On April 4, a very defensive Marco Aurelio García, Lula's foreign policy advisor, responded to Castro's article with the clinically insane statement that hunger in the world "is not a problem of lack of food, but lack of income." Garcia's remarks—which are characteristic of the Baby-Boomer generation's magical belief that economics is based on money, as opposed to physical production—are all the more stunning coming from a top spokesman for the Lula government, whose policy priority has purportedly been "Fome Zero," or "Zero Hunger."