Small began his visit Jan. 10, with an early morning appearance on one of the country's most widely viewed television/radio programs, run by veteran journalist Dr. Julio Hazim. Later that day, Small addressed a forum at the Economics Department of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo--the first university to be established in the Americas, in the early 1500s, where some 125,000 students are enrolled today. There, a gathering of 300 students and faculty were challenged by Small to “think outside the box” in coming up with new solutions to the systemic financial crisis afflicting the world today.

Several days later, Small carried LaRouche's message to CODIA's audience, which not only included Dominicans, but also delegates from similar professional organizations from throughout the region. In a meeting afterwards with Small, the CODIA leadership pledged the use of their facilities for future LaRouche broadcasts and conference presentations.

 A Long-Standing Presence

LaRouche's unique analysis of the ongoing world crisis was already familiar to many Dominicans. Not only have supporters of LaRouche's international movement been active in this nation of 10 million; his views have been routinely aired in interviews and newspaper columns. Indeed, LaRouche was interviewed just this past September on Julio Hazim's TV program, later rebroadcast both inside the Dominican Republic and via cable TV in the United States, where 1 million Dominicans live.

Earlier in 2023, the Spanish edition of the book The ABCs of Nation-Building was launched inside the Dominican Republic by a national book-store chain in Santo Domingo. ABCs combined two reports, Alexander Hamilton's famous 1791 Report on Manufactures, and Lyndon LaRouche's “Economic IQ Test.” At the press announcement of the book, LaRouche representative in Santo Domingo Jorge Meléndez emphasized that it “dethroned the myth of globalization.”

Small's Jan. 10 appearance on the Hazim program, originally scheduled for 20 minutes but then doubled, featured questions posed by two journalists with apparently contrasting viewpoints. One, with a leftist profile, disagreed with Small's characterization of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as “a Jacobin,” but then proceeded to defend the Jacobin mob of 18th-Century France as “a positive force” that helped bring down the Ancien Régime. Small pointed out that the Jacobins were deployed by the British oligarchy of that period against republican forces in France who allied with, and hoped to replicate, the American Revolution. Chávez and his thugs today, Small insisted, divert the Venezuelan people from nation-building solutions into mindless and violent rage against each other.

When the journalist continued to insist that Chávez was a dedicated opponent of the International Monetary Fund, Small referred to Chávez's repeated insistence that “every cent” of the Venezuelan foreign debt would be paid, despite the rapidly growing impoverishment of his country's population. Small declared, “The IMF doesn't care whether you sign with your left hand or your right, as long as you sign.”

The other journalist, a “Marxist turned neo-liberal,” attacked from the right, responding to LaRouche's proposal that Brazil break with the IMF system, with the furious demand that Small “name me one success story of any country which has broken with the system.” Small detailed the successful nationalist measures Malaysia has taken, leaving his interviewer sputtering. Painting a world without the straitjacket of the IMF and globalization, Small elaborated on LaRouche's proposals for criss-crossing the Earth with high-tech infrastructure projects like the Eurasian Land-Bridge.

A University Intervention

Under the title “The End of Globalization and the LaRouche Solution,” Small addressed a forum organized by the economics department of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo. Although turnout was expected to be low, because students were still registering for the new semester, the forum rapidly swelled from 30 to over 300 people, including several dozen professors. Small addressed the nature of the world crisis, and developed LaRouche's programmatic solutions. He used two graphics--a photo of China's new, high-speed magnetic levitation (maglev) train, and the infamous photo of New York Stock Exchange President Richard Grasso embracing narco-terrorist FARC leader Raúl Reyes in the cocaine jungles of Colombia--as a jumping-off point for discussing the two opposing conceptions of the nature of man.

In the ensuing question period, one Fernando Peña rose to defend the FARC cocaine cartel, and to rant against Small for “defending capitalism.” Peña was known to everyone in the audience as a top representative of the FARC in the Dominican Republic. He had personally brought Raúl Reyes to the country years earlier, to speak in that very auditorium.
Small responded that Marxism suffers from the same materialist viewpoint of man as the British empiricist outlook of the financial oligarchy, which is how Wall Street's Grasso and narco-terrorist Reyes could indeed share an embrace. The audience was challenged to look past Peña's axioms--”left versus right” and “communist versus capitalist”--and see that the neo-liberal Davos World Economic Forum, and the Pòrto Alegre World Social Forum of the FARC and its ilk, ultimately represent the identical worldview, leading to a New Dark Age. Small argued that an opposite approach--economic reconstruction and continental integration--is required, and that LaRouche-allied forces across Ibero-America are constructing such an institution, known as the Guadalajara Forum.

The keynote address to the 40th anniversary conference of CODIA came on Jan. 12. Small detailed for the engineers and architects in the audience how to organize the reconstruction of the world economy, through great projects like the Eurasian Land-Bridge and linked counterparts in the Western Hemisphere. Faced, at first, with pessimistic comments that the “imperialist” United States would never permit this, Small attacked the anti-”gringo” attitude so prevalent in Ibero-America. He outlined the history of the American System of political-economy which built the economic might of the United States, “a history unknown in the United States as much as elsewhere.” An encouraged audience besieged him with questions and congratulations for directly addressing the issue that was on all minds.

Afterwards, before 30 prominent CODIA members and international guests, CODIA president Olmedo Caba Romano announced that an “historic decision” had been reached: CODIA would offer its facilities and co-sponsor a meeting for Dominicans to participate in LaRouche's worldwide Internet webcast on Jan. 28. The same decision was announced by the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, whose facilities also broadcast LaRouche's speech.
 

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