Brazil: Prince Philip's WWF Tries to Muzzle EIR

Brazil: Prince Philip's WWF Tries to Muzzle EIR

This press release was issued Aug. 24 by EIR. http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2001/2833brazill_wwf.html


In response to legal charges filed last July 25 by the Brazilian affiliate of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Rio de Janeiro Judge Paulo Mauricio Pereira on August 3 ordered the seizure of all copies of the book The Green Mafia: Environmentalism at the Service of World Government, published in Brazil by Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), the international newsweekly founded by economist and year 2004 U.S. Presidential pre-candidate, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. As of this writing, the judicial order has not been executed by local authorities.
This legal assault by the WWF, the international environmentalist NGO headed by Britain's Prince Philip, occurs as Lyndon LaRouche's influence grows by leaps and bounds internationally, including in Brazil, in light of the ongoing disintegration of the global financial system. Brazil is facing a particularly dramatic situation, given the brutal economic and political crisis that is wracking neighboring Argentina, and which could have devastating consequences for Brazil's financial situation. LaRouche has not only been offering programmatic solutions to the international financial and monetary crisis—concretely, his well-known call for a New Bretton Woods—but he has also been organizing those forces which are capable of implementing those solutions, and putting London and Wall Street's usurious financial system through enforced bankruptcy reorganization. The WWF suit reflects the hysteria that has spread among the international financial oligarchy, as well as their desperation to silence LaRouche, even by taking recourse to measures that are a blatant violation of freedom of expression.
The book The Green Mafia has kicked up a storm inside Brazil. Since its publication in March 2001, nearly 5,000 copies have been sold throughout Brazil, and the book has circulated widely in policy-making circles across the country. It became the center of national debate in May, when a Parliamentary Investigative Commission (CPI) set up by the Senate to investigate the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), held hearings and invited Lorenzo Carrasco, EIR's correspondent in Brazil, to testify at its opening session. The official Senate daily published a summary of Carrasco's remarks, as did various other Brazilian media, all of which identified him as the author of the Green Mafia book.
In January 2001, WWF-Brazil obtained a court temporary restraining order (TRO) which prohibited the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA), a Brazilian political movement founded by co-thinkers of LaRouche, from campaigning against the WWF, or even from publishing any truthful statements about their genocidal intentions and actions. At the time, Brazilian authorities raided the MSIA's offices in Rio de Janeiro, where they seized the remaining copies of various MSIA pamphlets which denounced the WWF's assault against economic development and the nation-state.
The new legal filing of WWF-Brazil is patently absurd. According to the WWF, EIR's book is circulating in open contempt of the TRO against the MSIA, since EIR is alleged to be no more than a front for the MSIA, since EIR "acts through the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement and its organizing committee." The WWF argues that the fact that the book's authorship is attributed to "an EIR investigative team" proves the MSIA's hidden intentions, which "at the very least are strange."
The fact of the matter is that neither EIR nor its representatives in Brazil were ever part of the WWF's original suit, whose scope they are now attempting to illegally broaden.
The height of absurdity of the WWF's filing can be seen in its allegation that the MSIA tried to conceal the fact that the publication of the book was in violation of the court order, by not listing the WWF under the letter "W" in the book's index. Naturally, if these Anglophiles had bothered to look under the letter "F," they would have found the WWF listed as it is properly translated into the language of Brazil: Portuguese.
On Aug. 20, lawyers for the MSIA filed legal papers before Judge Pereira, arguing for the prompt denial of the WWF's intimidatory suit.