Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Folha de S. Paulo, July 24, 1982 (*)

With the cessation of hostilities in the Falklands, all international relations in the Latin American world - which had suddenly become poisoned - seem to have returned to normalcy. This is especially true of the most acute point of tension between Venezuela and Guyana, the Essequibo territory. Of course, the legal and diplomatic question regarding this dispute still depends on a solution. But the possibility of armed conflict seems out of the question, at least in the short or medium term.

However, the lesson that remains after this whole commotion is how artificial are these tensions among us, sister nations of South America. No one seriously bothered about our territorial disputes, most of which lay half-forgotten in dusty old file cabinets. As soon as the media emphasized them, they began to agitate like ghosts; but they returned to the archives as soon as the media took them off the spotlight. This means their substance was mostly propaganda.

However, despite this artificiality, it does not seem to me that such questions have lost all relevance. Because the very cause that artificially made such disputes very dramatic at a given moment can work to bring them back to the surface as well.

By saying this, I am being consistent. Indeed, in more than one statement to the daily press I affirmed that Soviet Russia stood behind the incipient diplomatic-military upheaval on our continent. This is part and parcel of their earnest commitment to kindle various and simultaneous wars that would throw into chaos the largest bloc of Catholic population in the world. Russia would offer military and technical aid to certain nations. For its part, the United States would be compelled to offer aid to countries not supported by Russia. Thus, the conflict would be internationalized and at the same time would assume a strong ideological character. This is all the more so since, inside different countries, communists and anticommunists would start fighting to seize power. You would have a South American war and a world war, along with an ideological revolution on the continent. War and revolution would quickly interpenetrate and South America’s bloody panorama would make it resemble an immense Vietnam. The rest is obvious.

What is the basis for all these conjectures? It is the nexus between the Anglo-Argentine war and the simultaneous offer of Russian aid, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the sudden flaring of dormant disputes to which I have just referred. If the Falklands war had continued, and if tension over other disputes had worsened and degenerated into wars, all of South America would stand to lose and Moscow would enormously profit. And if Moscow would profit, one must be morally certain that it stood behind everything. This is how police reason to find crime perpetrators, and political observers, to discover plot authors.

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Furthermore, Fidel Castro has issued an expressive document that favors this political conjecture. On January 16, 1966, 27 Latin American delegates present in Cuba for the Tricontinental Conference in Havana founded the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), “to use every means available to achieve [sic] liberation movements.” The following year, also in Havana, OLAS promoted a Latin American Peoples' Solidarity Conference. In April of the same year, "Che" Guevara, then honorary president of the Conference, issued a message developing Fidel Castro's (i.e., Moscow’s) communist program: creating “two, three or many Vietnams” with the goal of inciting guerrillas throughout the world (see Orlando Castro Hidalgo, Spy for Fidel, E. A. Seemann Pub,1971). This is an old plan, which one can see has been frustrated by several previous attempts and has reemerged only recently with this attempt to provoke wars among South American nations. Historical evidence thus corroborates the conclusions of political reasoning.

I am persuaded that the Vietnamization of South America is old plan that Moscow will absolutely not give up. And if a new political complication tending to vietnamize us appears in the horizon, this article will be as useful as a notary public deed. For it will prove that Moscow was behind this new complication from the beginning.

* Excerpts from an article by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira published in Folha de S. Paulo, July 24, 1982, under the title ‘Garantia notarial, tabelioa’.