his region last year, even as House International Relations Chairman Rep. Henry Hyde had called upon the VOA board to resume broadcasting to Brazil.

It is hardly news that a political-ideological struggle is under way for control of Brazil. The most populous Catholic country in the world with 175 million people, and home to a thriving Protestant evangelical movement, Brazil is also the birthplace of Marxist liberation theology.

Mr. da Silva’s Worker’s Party already controls the Brazilian state government of Rio Grande do Sul and is reported to be inserting Marxism into public school textbooks and imposing party politics and ideology on the running of the police force.

Nor would the effects of a da Silva victory stop at Brazil’s borders. On Sept. 6, Mr. da Silva said his election would “change many things in the region, with repercussions in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Colombia.” In previous years he had stated he favored nuclear weapons for Brazil and a much closer relationship with Communist Cuba and China, but he had kept his views about international issues out of the campaign. Then on Sept. 13, Mr. da Silva publicly said Brazil should move toward resuming its nuclear weapons program by leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet Washington appears passive.

Mr. da Silva is said to be considering a visit to Washington. U.S. policy is to deny visas to groups and individuals that support terrorism. But Mr. Maisto has given no indication that da Silva, Mr. Castro’s partner in creating the Forum of Sao Paulo, will be denied a U.S. visa.

Mr. Maisto’s tenure as Bill Clinton’s ambassador in Venezuela may shed light on his passive approach in Brazil. Columnist Robert Novak reported that Ambassador Maisto “privately advised Congress not to worry about accession of the leftist populist Hugo Chavez to that nation’s presidency” in 1999.

In office, Col. Hugo Chavez threw out the constitution and sent armed brigades to attack his civic opposition. He began aiding the FARC terrorists trying to subvert Colombia. Former Reagan National Security Council official Constantine Menges warned in 1998 and 1999 that Mr. Chavez would be an ally of Fidel Castro as well as other state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran and Iraq. That has happened. Mr. Maisto saw no such problem

Today Col. Chavez provides a $2 billion petroleum subsidy to Fidel Castro and allies his government with states like Iran, Iraq and communist China.

Mr. da Silva calls Col. Chavez “an example to emulate.” Col. Chavez calls Mr. da Silva “a great man,” and predicts: “The left is going to win in Brazil. Changes are coming step by step on this continent. I think about it day and night.”

Robert Novak reports that since arriving at the Rice NSC, Mr. Maisto has “pressed for normalization with communist Cuba” and has worked to maintain the Clinton-era guidelines that impede a stronger U.S. policy against Colombian terrorist groups.

The Washington-based Center for Security Policy, directed by former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney Jr., describes Mr. Maisto as “a career Foreign Service officer known for his soft line on narco-terrorism and other security issues,” and says he is “a major roadblock to realization of the President’s agenda.”

Has Mr. Maiso provided President George W. Bush the advice and help he deserved as the United States seeks to preserve political democracy and avoid what Mr. Menges recently called the possibility of a “nuclear armed axis of evil in the Americas” including Mr. Castro, Mr. Chavez and a radical da Silva regime in Brazil? We will know next month.

—The Washington Times, October 1, 2002, p. A 17

If you look at Brazil and this week’s elections through the “old eyes” of the revolutionary years of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, you have a right to be worried.

In what must herald an unprecedented configuration of Latin American politics, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva –“Lula”, to everyone in the world—will almost surely become the new far-left president of Brazil after a runoff second election on Oct. 27.

If so, he will (1) break the hold of the oligarchy and mark the first time since the restoration of democracy in 1982 that Brazilians have voted for a non-centrist leader, (2) bring some as yet unidentified left populism to power in the world’s fourth-largest democracy, and (3) throw up for grabs the entire Brazilian economy, the world’s eighth-largest—not to speak of the Washington-inspired “consensus” of the 1990s, which seemed inexorably to be leading the entire hemisphere to free markets and globalized economies.

In the wake of Sunday’s shocker first presidential election in that pivotal country of 170 million people, when Lula received

a stunning 47 percent of the vote, forcing him to move toward a runoff, analysts were holding their breath. Professor Riordan Roett, the Latin American specialist at Johns Hopkins University, tells me: “If Lula does what he has said—defaults on [Brazil’s] external debt and doesn’t pay back its loans—it will be bad for all of Latin America.” And Peter Hami, president of the Inter-American Dialogue here, predicted in The Washington Post: “A regionwide financial breakdown could follow,” making everyone think of Argentina’s essential dissolution this year.

And so in those “old eyes,” the images are of a clear return to the old socialist and anti-American left that haunted Latin America through the eras of Soviet influence, Cuban-backed guerilla movements, and statist and centralist “import substitution” models of the economies.

But if you look at Brazil through “new eyes,” you swiftly become less worried than totally confused.

Lula is your classic born-in-poverty, former working man and labor organizer, a burly 57-year-old man of decency and concern for others. Charming and bearded, he is smart without being brilliant and thoughtful without giving up his early socialist leaning. This is his fourth run for the presidency. His major gesture to Brazilian respectability is that he now wears a dark suit.

His best pals in Latin America remain Cuba’s cold customer, Fidel Castro, and Venezuela’s hot romantic, Hugo Chavez. Across the ’90s, when the International Monetary Fund stepped in to stave off Brazilian collapse, Lula looked at such outside controls as making Brazil “submissive toward the U.S.” He still sees the Washington-based Free Trade Area of the Americas in particular as a “plan for U.S. annexation of Latin America” and globalization, and as an unmitigated disaster.

Behind the resuscitation of this old leftist ideology lie two decades of trouble for Brazil, which now threaten to boil over across the continent as old ideological “truths” become ever more gray and ungraspable. Between 1900 and 1980, whether under military dictatorship or democratic government, the Brazilian economy expanded by a respectable 6 percent a year. But the Brazilian currency lost more than one-third of its value last year, and stocks lost more than half of their dollar value. Principal research institutes show incomes have plunged by one-third since the late 1990s, when the economies were really open but were also struck by the Russian, east Asian and then Argentine failures.

And the decline is occurring not only in Brazil: The U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America has projected that by the end of the year, Latin Americans in general would be poorer than they were at the beginning.

Not surprisingly, these failures are being blamed on the programs of free market liberalization, tied to globalization, pushed relentlessly by the United States in the ’80s and ’90s, and generally known as the Washington Consensus. That consensus is now the target of dire disillusion across Latin America, as individual salaries have plummeted or, in the case of Argentina, virtually disappeared. In many cases, the hopeful privatization of public services has resulted only in enormously higher prices—in Brazil, between 1995 and 2002, the prices of telephone, water and electricity rose more than 78 percent over the increase in general prices.

Meanwhile, leftist candidates across the continent are watching the “Lula Phenomenon,” men like Bolivian coca-grower Evo Morales, who almost won his country’s presidency earlier this year.

It must also be said that Lula and his constituency are different. His new left is not violent, but is composed of irregular movements like the “Sem Terra,” the popular citizens’ movement to gain land for the landless, and of an entire lineup of “formers”—former Roman Catholic liberation theology activists and ex-guerillas, as well as urban and ecological activists who are having some real effects in terms of deliberately small actions in cities like the thriving Porto Alegre.

Meanwhile, Lula himself says he has changed and mellowed, particularly regarding the economy and outside aid. So, Lula and his new left could be expected to…well…to do exactly what?

The real story of this election is that nobody knows what to do next, unless a huge and unwieldy country like Brazil can somehow build in higher education and cultural factors amenable to development, as successful little countries like Singapore and Taiwan have. The real question is what anyone can accomplish in such a moment in history.

“I don’t know if there is a new ‘ism,’ ” Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue says thoughtfully. “There’s clearly a looking inward. There’s not going to be a radical departure. In my view, there’s just a lot of groping around out there.”

So in the end, only three things become clear. (1) The socialist and leftist models of the ’70s and ’80s have not worked, (2) the Washington Consensus hasn’t worked, and (3) there aren’t going to be any military coups from Washington, as there were in the past when a leftist seems to be gaining power anywhere in the hemisphere—if only because today’s Washington barely cares where Latin America is. The world after Oct. 27? Leave your book open.

—The Washington Times, October 10, 2002, p. A 19

Resisting Terrorism: What You Can Do
By Michael Bauman

The recent spate of terrorist atrocities, coupled with heightened military tension both at home and abroad, have led many Americans to ask, “What can I do? I’m only one person.”

This essay is intended to answer that important question and others like it. While one person might not be able to change the world, one person can make a difference in his or her own corner of the world –- and that is a task worth doing. For the sake of brevity, we will focus our attention here on airline travel, especially since that activity is common to many Americans and is one of the public venues most likely to witness terrorist action.

Anti-terrorist preparedness begins long before boarding the plane, and it begins with your passport. If you intend to travel overseas, make note of your passport number and of its date and place of issue. This information will aid you in replacing your passport should it be lost or relinquished to a hijacker. You must keep this information in a place other than your wallet or your handbag because those items, and your passport, are likely to be taken from you in the early stages of a hijacking. If you have traveled to Israel, and if your passport has an Israeli entrance or exit stamp, you might be perceived by Islamic terrorists as an Israeli sympathizer, a perception that might endanger you or your family. If your passport has such a stamp, you can request a replacement. Or, if you intend to visit Israel, you can request that the Israeli officials not stamp your passport, a request they normally honor.

Hijackers are often sensitive to the literature passengers bring on board, especially pornographic and political literature. While readers of the Schwarz Report don’t need to be lectured on literature in the former category (which Islamic hijackers find greatly offensive), our readers do need to know that literature opposed to Islam or to communism is also highly unwelcome. The Schwarz Report, which is both Christian and anti-communist, is precisely the sort of literature about which you need to be aware. In this instance, we invite you to leave it home. Your safety is enormously important to us.

When dressing for your flight, it normally is best to select clothes that are comfortable and inconspicuous -– comfortable in case of a long-lasting hijacking ordeal, and inconspicuous so that you do not catch a hijacker’s eye from the front of the plane and get chosen for ritual execution, a not uncommon action intended to paralyze large numbers of people with fear and thereby to establish power by the few over the many. Of course, if you are military personnel, you should travel in civilian clothing whenever permissible. US military personnel have sometimes been the first persons injured in a hijacking. Don’t let that be you.

If you take prescription medicine, you must remember not to put your medicine in your checked baggage. If your plane is

hijacked, that hijacking might take several hours, perhaps even days, to play out. If it does, you are without your medicine all the while. Instead, keep your prescription medicine with you in your carry-on luggage. If you can, keep it in the original packaging so as to avoid dangerous guessing by persons not familiar with English.

Once you reach the airport, you protect yourself best by using curbside check-in whenever possible, which frees you from standing in at least one long line. In the past, both in the US and abroad, terrorists have bombed or gunned down passengers who were simply waiting to check-in. Once checked-in and through security, try to select a place to wait that is away from large glass windows and from trash receptacles. Should you be in an airport during a bomb-scare, do quickly, precisely, and calmly whatever the proper authorities command. If you hear gunshots, get down immediately. You cannot outrun bullets.

If you find yourself in the middle of an airline hijacking, remember to do whatever your flight crew instructs you to do. They are trained in such matters and are your best guides. Never permit yourself to be belligerent to hijackers, even though belligerence is exactly what you feel. Instead, seek to be quiet and unobtrusive. Talk to no one, especially if you do not know who is sitting next to you. During a hijacking, it sometimes happens that not all hijackers reveal themselves immediately. Some remain quietly in their seats. If you talk to someone next to you, you might be talking to a hijacker. Or, you might be talking to someone who will compromise your safety and betray your confidences for their own well-being. In other words, whenever you can, be quiet and be polite. If terrorists ask your opinion on delicate political issues, especially regarding US policy, remain noncommittal and tell the terrorists that you do not have enough knowledge to make an informed statement. Listen carefully to what they say, but do not volunteer your own opinions or be sycophantic toward theirs.

If your valuables are taken during a hijacking, you are best advised not to resist, even though the articles in question are important to you. Your safety is paramount. Do not risk it for material things.

If you need to get up to visit the washroom, ask permission first. If you rise and attempt to walk around without permission, you will be perceived as a threat and might be injured. By the same token, because Americans tend to be slightly larger in stature than persons of many other cultures, if you stand quickly or unexpectedly next to a terrorist, you will seem a threat and you could be injured.

Do not be in a hurry. Remember that, in many instances, nothing happens right away. Prepare yourself mentally by settling in for the long haul. When something does happen, for example a rescue attempt by police or military authorities, be sure to get down as low as you can into the space behind the seat in front of you. Keep your feet out of the aisles. Stay down until you are told to get up – by the rescue team or the flight crew. Terrorists will want you to stand and to take the bullets meant for them. Don’t do it.

Cuba’s Mata Hari
By Georgie Anne Geyer

A quiet little mystery surrounding Cuba and American intelligence is beginning to unravel in inner circles around Washington. The protagonist is an unlikely Mata Hari—a dowdy female spy who managed to fool just about everyone in the American intelligence establishment for nearly a generation.

Ana Belen Montes? American intelligence inspectors wondered when they became suspicious two years ago of the leading Cuban analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Oh, no, not her. She was too quiet, too unassuming, too dull—she took part in her condo management (which we all know indicates a self-sacrificing and abstemious soul).

If the great, glamorous and enthusiastically sexually inclined female spy Mata Hari had a daughter—in crime—it would hardly be mousy little Ana Belen.

But on Sept. 21, 2001—so soon after September 11 that it gave everybody in security and in Latin American affairs a distinct jolt—Ana Belen Montes was picked up by the Justice Department for espionage for Cuba. Three weeks ago, she was sentenced to 25 years in prison, apparently avoiding the death penalty only because she agreed to cooperate with American authorities and “tell all.”

What exactly has Montes told American authorities? More important, what did she tell Cuban authorities from the masses of supposedly “safe” materials she had access to since she became their active recruit in 1985? And most important, what did Havana pass on to its “friends,” such as Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq?

Anyone who thought that the 45-year-old Montes—the daughter of Puerto Rican parents, born on a U.S. military base in Germany, who earned advanced degrees from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies—was alone in her work was surely wrong. Only this last week, the United States asked at least four of the Cuban diplomats at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington to leave. The reason was spying.

Yet in all of these fascinating—and potentially ominous—developments, the U.S. government has offered not

a peek at the Montes case or what the woman, who says she was helping Cuba out of sympathy for its plight and because she abhorred American policy toward Cuba, had actually compromised.

It is this fact that is making suspicious and informed onlookers here wonder what exactly this woman, who was so swiftly arrested after September 11, gave away.

She almost surely effectively neutralized American military suspicions of Cuba during her long period as head of the Defense intelligence Agency’s Cuba desk. It was to Montes’ work that we can trace a number of specific movements on the part of the military that announced to the world that Cuba was no longer a threat to the United States.

The DIA’s 1998 report claiming Cuba was no danger and discounting risks the island was developing chemical and biological weapons (which Fidel Castro is) can now be seen as blatant disinformation planted by Cuba. Yet, it convinced many American military officers and emboldened Americans on the left who wanted to end the American embargo against Cuba and helped to form a more accommodating attitude toward the communist regime.

The only one who stood up against the report and its new interpretation of events was Defense Secretary William Cohen, but his doubts were eventually overtaken by others’ assurance that Cuba was no threat.

In fact, Marine Gen. Charles Wilhelm, then head of the U.S. Southern Command, went to Cuba and was quoted as saying that the Cuban military had “no capacity whatsoever to project itself beyond the border of Cuba.” Other generals traveled to Cuba and came back obviously enchanted with their rum-cigars-and-conversation treatment by Fidel, the consummate seducer.

But there is something else peculiar in this little drama. Mr. Castro has been waging a fervent international campaign to get the U.S. to free five other purely Cuban spies, those arrested in Miami trying to infiltrate American facilities. But curiously enough, there has been not a peep from Mr. Castro regarding his favorite Mata Hari. One can only intimate from this that hers is a sensitive case, for reasons we can only guess at. Maybe someday our government will give us a clue.

—The Washington Times, Nov. 12, 2002, p. A 18

In noting the passing of Harry Hay—the man who first organized homosexuals as a political minority—no mainstream media outlets reported that Hay was an advocate of pedophile rights and the notorious group NAMBLA.

NAMBLA is the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a group that advocates for the legalization of sex between men and boys, and an end to all “age of consent” laws.

Hay, who died on October 24, at age 90, formed the first American homosexual activist group, the Mattachine Society, in 1950. He conceived of the idea of organizing homosexuals at a time when most were afraid to even be discovered as such. Hay was also a committed Communist who married to hide his homosexuality so that he could join the Party.

He went on to found The Radical Faeries, a shamanistic spirituality movement for homosexual men. “Gay pride” parades frequently include local contingents of “Faeries:”—semi-naked men prancing and dancing in variations of Native American rituals.

Hay strongly opposed the notion that “gays” should assimilate into larger “straight” culture. Thus, in the eighties and nineties, when homosexual activists began banning NAMBLA from “gay pride” parades to clean up their public image, he and other “gay” liberationists were outraged.

In 1994, Hay, then in his eighties, was among the signers of a “Spirit of Stonewall” proclamation that argued that efforts to ban NAMBLA from the New York “pride” parade violated the spirit of the original Stonewall “rebellion,” which is revered by homosexual activists as the spark of the modern “gay rights” movement. (In 1969, homosexuals and others then regarded as deviants rioted in response to a police crackdown of the Stonewall Inn in New York City.)

The Spirit of Stonewall (SOS) declaration read in part:

“Stonewall was the spontaneous action of marginal people oppressed by the mainstream—of teenaged drag queens, pederasts, transsexuals, hustlers, and others despised by respectable straights and ‘discreet’ homosexuals.

“SOS is an ad hoc committee of lesbian, gay and other individuals and groups formed to bring Stonewall 25

[celebrating the 25th anniversary of the riots] back to the principles of gay liberation. We focus on one of the most glaring departures from those principles: the attempt to exclude [NAMBLA].

“NAMBLA’s record as a responsible gay organization is well known. NAMBLA was spawned by the gay community and has been in every major gay and lesbian march. …NAMBLA’s call for the abolition of age of consent is not the issue. NAMBLA is a bona fide participant in the gay and lesbian movement. NAMBLA deserves strong support in its rights of free speech and association and its members’ protection from discrimination and bashing.”

In 1986, Hay’s pro-NAMBLA activism had a role in what became known in homosexual circles as the “Harry Hay incident.” As part of a protest against the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, Hay taunted organizers for excluding the North American Man/Boy Love Association by wearing a sandwich board that read, “NAMBLA Walks with Me.” This event is chronicled by Hay’s biographer, homosexual writer Stuart Timmons, in The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement. The book includes a photo of Hay in the NAMBLA sandwich board.

More recently, Hay wrote an essay for the pederasty magazine GAYME, according to a “queer” magazine Web site. GAYME is a magazine for men who are sexually “into boys,” according to one Web reviewer. It is produced by former NAMBLA Bulletin editor Bill Andriette.

Timmons’ sympathetic biography of Hay reveals that he had his first homosexual sexual encounter at age nine, with another boy. At age 14, in a grove of trees, he “discovered his first [homosexual] lovemaking” with a 25-year-old sailor named Matt. Hay refused to describe the experience as “molestation,” according to Timmons, “to make the point of how sharply gay life differs from homosexual norms.” The account continues:

“As a child,” [Hay] explained, “I molested an adult until I found out what I needed to know.” …Far from being an experience of “molestation,” Harry always described it as “the most beautiful gift that a fourteen-year-old ever got from his first love!”

A Nexis database search of Harry Hay obits in over 30 print news outlets—including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Time Magazine—turned up no mention of his pro-NAMBLA advocacy.

—Culture and Family Report, October 30, 2002

Communist Rap
By L. Brent Bozell III

During the last weeks of May, Dick Cheney, Robert Mueller, Donald Rumsfeld and, for all I know, Willard Scott once again warned of modern-day threats to America. Meanwhile, a piece by David Segal of the Washington Post inadvertently reminded us of a time when our primary foe was communism — and that not a few journalists were oblivious to the wretched nature of this movement.

Segal, who covers pop music and really oughtn’t wander far from that genre, earned his “Useful Idiot Award” with a May 22 article that dealt cluelessly and flippantly with Oakland-based communist rapper Raymond “Boots” Riley, who leads an outfit called the Coup. Plenty of critics, Segal among them, chose the Coup’s Party Music as one of last year’s best albums.

Riley is politically noxious. He refers to this country as the “United Snakes,” believes that “the American flag … stands for oppression, slavery and murder,” and asserts that before the state-controlled economic system he desires to be achieved, “there’s going to be a fight from the people who traditionally maintain profits, and it’s not only going to be a fight of words. … It’s going to be a fight where people are attacked.”

In 2001, Riley intended the cover for Party Music to depict him setting off an explosion and fire at the World Trade Center as “a metaphor for destroying capitalism — where the music is making capitalist towers blow up.” The artwork was shelved in the wake of the Sept. 11 atrocities, a bow in favor of sensitivity but an act of hypocrisy nonetheless. The terrorists behind 9/11 shared Riley’s hatred for the American system, but their actions showed the real-life consequences of this hatred.

Yet Segal repeatedly declares that he finds Riley’s work amusing. He calls the World Trade Center cover art “jokey” and a bit later describes a track called “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” as “tongue in cheek.” In his most elaborate encomium to Riley’s supposed wit, Segal states, “Most radicals are insufferably dull and humorless. Riley, on the other hand, sells communism not just as a way to seize the means of production but also as a shortcut to the all-night dance bash of your dreams. Riley thinks Bolshevism can be a hoot, and even if you consider that cockamamie, his attempts at persuasion are wry and winningly subversive.”

Suggested summer reading for Segal: The Gulag Archipelago. “Genuine pariahs are now a rarity in pop music,” Segal

salivates, “and the Coup is among the very last. If nothing else, [Riley’s] agitprop rap expands the surprisingly narrow bandwidth of what is deemed outrageous these days, which is what pop at its tweaking best often does.”

In truth, Riley is anything but a pariah, what with critics such as Segal lauding him. And only someone thoroughly ignorant on the subject could suggest that communism “tweaks.” It doesn’t. It brutalizes, with tens of millions of murdered victims as its global monument.

“Party Music looks like it will be one of those peculiar triumph-fiascoes of art in the tradition of Citizen Kane,” Segal prophesies, “a work hailed by critics that failed in the marketplace and then vanished from sight, at least for a while.”

Thank God the public isn’t as jaw-droppingly naïve as Segal, who took part in a chat on the Post’s Website on the day his story ran. I’m happy to report that he faced some tough questioning about his enthusiasm for Riley and the Coup. To someone who sensibly enough noted that both communism and Nazism are “disgusting,” Segal replied, “I see a big difference between an ideology, like Nazism, which was explicitly genocidal, and communism, which is not.”

In another answer, Segal claimed that “The politics of [Party Music] aren’t all that interesting to me,” even though downplaying politics in a discussion of Riley would be equivalent to downplaying food in a discussion of Julia Child, which is why Segal didn’t.

Finally, after someone posted a rundown of death tolls under Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, et al and added, “Check out The Black Book of Communism for the story of communism and its inherent link to genocide,” Segal wrote, “To be clear, I wouldn’t recommend communism for anyone, anywhere, ever.”

Actually, I doubt that many readers thought the piece endorsed Riley’s politics. But in a sense, that would have been preferable to Segal’s elitist, arrogant, too-clever-by-at-least-half approach: It would have acknowledged that communism matters. One simply cannot treat as trivial, as “a hoot,” this blight on history that remains a malign and menacing, if diminished, force.

Riley can hang out on the ash heap of history all he wants, but that doesn’t mean Segal should visit him there and make it sound like a holiday in the sun.

—Insight, July 1-8, 202, p. 46