Sabotaging CELAC - The US and Sweden

Jorge Capelán, RLP, TcS.

The governments of the United States and Sweden are conniving directly with an extreme-right wing network in Latin America in a move to sabotage the summit meeting in Santiago de Chile of Heads of State from the European Union (EU) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). To do so they are working with the CIA and the most reactionary elements of the anti-Cuban mafia in Miami.

This week the Chilean Crónica Digital news outlet reported that the Swedish embassy in Santiago and the extreme-right wing Centre for Openness and Development in Latin America (CADAL), an Argentine think tank, with the help, needless to say, of the US embassy, prepared for January 24th , two days before the summit begins, an event called “Promoting International Democratic Solidarity” with the main objective of attacking the Cuban Revolution and Cuba's President Raul Castro.

The fundamental objectives of this event seem to be to create a problem for Chilean President Sebastian Piñera while trying to skew the summit climate away from any serious discussion between a European Union beset by very serious crises of all kinds and a Latin America more and more united and independent.

The active participation in this move of Sweden, a country increasingly regarded as a slavish follower of the United States, probably seeks to put pressure on those members of the European Union more readily open to taking the summit seriously.  However, the latest condemnation in Venezuela of plans to assassinate Vice-President Nicolás Maduro and the President of Venezuela's National Assembly Diosdado Cabello indicate that even more sinister motives may lie behind the organization of the CADAL event.

According to the report in Crónica Digital, the organizers of CADAL's meeting of continental reactionaries are

- Lawrence Corwin, regarded by the Cuban authorities as a US CIA official who was stationed in Cuba between 1998 and 2001;
- the Swedish diplomat Anders Ingemar Cederberg, who dedicated himself full time during his period in Havana to interfering in Cuba's affairs to the point that the Cuban authorities made formal protests to the Swedish government;
- Mijail Bonito Lovio, Secretary for International Relations of a body called  Independent and Democratic Cuba (CID);
- CADAL's Program Coordinator, Micaela Hierro Dori;
- and, finally, 18 politicians of the extreme-right wing American Parliamentary Democratic Alliance (APDA).

CADAL is an extreme-right wing network, based in Buenos Aires, from where it works to carry out an intensive program of propaganda and political pressure against the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, led by Cuba and Venezuela.

Formed on February 27th 2003 in Buenos Aires, CADAL has counted among its members very well known personalities and ideologues of the Latin American right wing with roots in the fascist dictatorships that submerged the Southern Cone in desolation during the 1970s. One notes the presence, for example, of Danilo Arbilla, former Press Secretary of the Uruguayan dictatorship (and also ex President of the Inter-American Press Society); Hugo Martini, former editor of the Carta Política magazine, the ideological organ of the Argentine dictatorship and also of General Pinochet's former Labour Minister José Piñera, whose brother Sebastián is today the Chilean President.

One might add to that list many other names that would make this article far too long to read, but it is worth mentioning too the mastermind of the plan to provoke the ethnic break-up of Bolivia, Mark Falcoff, a member of the US Council for Foreign Relations who has served as an expert adviser in seminars organized by CADAL. A couple of other names also should not go unmentioned, the Venezuelan right wing ex-presidential candidate  José Manuel Rosales, his Bolivian soul-mate Jorge ”Tuto” Quiroga and the reliable Swiss army knife of right-wing provocateurs in Latin America, the Cuban Carlos Alberto Montaner.

CADAL has relations with all the most recalcitrant right wing extremist organizations in Latin America but of special interest have been its contacts with the Directorio Democrático Cubano and individuals like Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, and the ex-head of the US immigration service Emilio Gutiérrez, a tireless protector of super-terrorist Luis Posada-Carriles.

Of particular interest is this network's relationship with Sweden. In February 2011, CADAL awarded Swedish diplomat Anders Ingemar Cederberg the Prize for Committed Democracy for services rendered in Cuba. In April of that same year, CADAL brought him to Argentina to make a private report of his destabilization activities while representing Sweden in Havana. CADAL published a book based on that exchange, funded by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in which Cederberg relates with complete lack of inhibition his “heroic” exploits as a spy with diplomatic immunity in Cuba.

However, the love affair between CADAL and Sweden dates back much further than Cederberg, since one of CADAL's first funders was the think tank of the Swedish employers' organization Timbro. Furthermore, Swedish right wing activist, former Chilean Mauricio Rojas has been one of the most loyal advisers to CADAL over the years from his position on the organization's “Scientific Council”.

Despite the reputation of Olof Palme, the kingdom of Sweden has a very poor image in Nicaragua thanks to the notorious behaviour of Sweden's last ambassador there, Eva Zetterberg, now Sweden's representative in Chile. From supposedly progressive concerns, Eva Zetterberg routinely intervened in the country's political affairs as if she were simply one more politician of the centre-right opposition Sandinista Renewal Movement. An idea of her unreconstructed colonial attitudes, which she shares with many of her European Union colleagues, can be gleaned from a remark that she made once in an interview with Tortilla con Sal prior to the 2006 Presidential elections.

She remarked that, in her opinion, the IMF and the World Bank have to intervene in Nicaragua because  Nicaraguans are incapable of managing their own affairs. For years, this inexorable drift in Eva Zetterberg's ideological career has been very clear. After Managua, it took just four months for her to be assigned to the attractive post of Sweden's ambassador to Santiago de Chile.

Now, Eva Zetterberg and her colleagues have set to work completely unreservedly, helping grease and shift the gears of the psychological warfare machinery assembled over decades by the CIA and the Latin American right wing. Zetterberg has had a disappointingly predictable career. From being an ardent supporter of armed struggle in the 1970s, she lapsed into eurocommunism in the 1980s, advocated non-governmental activity in the 1990s and now languishes in the fetid ponds of the corrupt, global right wing.

CADAL's attempt in Santiago to sabotage the EU-CELAC summit will flop. With the peoples of Latin America now wide awake, the relentless historical flow that has broken open Cuba's isolation is far too strong to be stopped. To the frustration and dismay of the US and Swedish governments and their right wing regional allies, those currents are carrying Latin America towards its definitive independence.