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Reporter's Notebook: David Keating

Where in South America is Sun Myung Moon?

I am not sure if this person has been discussed here but I thought it interesting enough to post and let y'all run with it.  

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon should be fairly famous to most people.  Here is the Wikipedia file on him (although the neutrality of the article is "disputed" through the wikipedia system): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon

Exerpt:

"After the end of the Japanese occupation of Korea, Moon personally suffered the brutal excesses of North Korean communism and he found a fellow opponent of Communism in Ronald Reagan. Moon spent a billion dollars of church funds to support the conservative, influential Washington Times, which in 2002 he called "the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world." And decades after Congressional scrutiny and a prison term for tax fraud, his generosity to the New Right (including opening an account for the "Contra" part of the Iran-Contra equation) has earned him a world of deference from his former enemies."

The main part of this post is below from a pretty famous webblog.  So what do you think?   From the blog that broke the story of Moon's connections to Washington politics:

http://www.iapprovethismessiah.com/

Comes the point of posting here:

Thursday, October 14, 2004
Paraguayans accuse Moon of carving out an empire of smack

Exerpt:

"Since 1999, Rev Moon has built his personal empire which begins on the marshy banks of the River Paraguay and stretches beyond the hazy, level horizon through 600,000 hectares of arid land - equivalent to more than two Luxembourgs - punctuated by solitary clusters of withered trees and sad bushes which struggle desperately for air.

The scorching sun beats relentlessly on one of Latin America's most desolate zones. It is here in the northern province of Chaco, directly above the GuaranI aquifer, the largest resource of fresh drinking water in the world, where Moon's associates claim he wishes to build an ecological paradise.

Nevertheless, national Senator Domingo Laino sees a different pattern in Moon's acquisitions. "There are two principal branches to Moon's interest in Paraguay," he said, "control of the largest fresh drinking water source in the world and control of the narcotics business", which is so prevalent in this area. "President Lula told me that Brazil took serious measures to curb Moon a few years back as it became evident that he was buying up the border between our two countries," said the senator.

Allegations from local law enforcement officials support this claim. The so-called Dr Montiel, Paraguay's drugs tsar from 1976-89, said: "The fact that they came and bought in Chaco and on both sides of the Brazilian border is very telling. It is an enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades and indeed the available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises." "

Exerpt:

"Not content with expanses of potentially invaluable land, Rev Moon has also taken over entire towns, including factories and homes. In Puerto Casado, tensions between Moon disciples and locals led to violent confrontation over the last year following the closure of the only source of work, a lumber factory, and the dismissal of 19 workers who tried to form a union in order to demand an eight-hour day and the national minimum wage of GBP80 sterling per month.

According to Senator Emilio Camacho: "The Moon sect is a mafia. They seek to subvert government control and are effectively building a state within a state. I believe they are hoping the local population will leave so they have unquestioned authority in the zone and are free to do whatever they want." "

Comments

The Source Is the Irish Times

Very interesting post, David.

I just wanted to clarify one thing: the quotations you use from the "iapprovethismessiah" blog come from an article in the Irish Times.

Here's the direct link to the text you cite.

Whether or not, as the Paraguayan official quoted in the article implies, the Moon organization is directly involved in narco-trafficking or not, the land grabs are disturbing for many reasons...

Once more, foreign powers trying to take the Amazon and nearby swamplands from Latin America and put it under foreign control. It's a powderkeg that may explode one of these days in South America. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

More information

Thanks Al,

If you dig around the Net for Moon you will find a very strange and disturbing tale.  I thought you would be especially interested in his activities in Latin America.  Did you notice this guy owns the Washington Post?  He also recently purchased UPI.  He also appears to have strong ties to the US government; especially the current administration.  I wonder if he and Murdoch get along...

I can offer one more piece of information for now (maybe more in the future as I come across it).  I wrote to the National Security Archive at George Wasshington University, one of my favourite FOIA research groups.  They have a fantastic website that you probably already subscribe to but if not:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

There is tons of articles on Latin America, including PDFs of the scanned documents from FOIA requests.  In one instance I read the transcript of President Ford and Secretary Kissinger giving Sudharto (Indonesian President) the green light for his invasion of East Timor...

Anyways, I emailed GWU's NSA staff and asked if they had any documents related to Moon.  This was the reply I recieved:

Dear David,

   I searched our published and nonpublished collections and found only one mention of Moon, Sun Myung. It was in our published collection titled: "Nicaragua 1978 - 1990" which is on our Digital National Security Archive.  The document is a five page cable dated March 8, 1985, sent from the US Embassy in Nicaragua by Harry E. Bergold Jr. to the US Department of State. The cable subject is "GON Toughens Its Stand On The Opposition". The reference to Moon reads "Barricad also charged that Pedro Joaquin Chamorro attended a session organized in Paris recently by the USG and followers of Sun Syung Moon" (I assume the Syung is a typo for Myung)

  I hope this information will be of interest to you.

  Thank you for your interest in the collections of the National Security Archive.

Mary Curry, Public Service Coordinator and Research Associate
202-994-7000

Moon owns the Washington Times...

... not the Washington Post. Next to the Washington Times, Murdoch's Fox News actually does seem "fair and balanced" sometimes.

Thank you

for the correction Dan.  Sorry, I was in a hurry to post something.  I haven't had much time for this type of thing lately.  I just wanted to get Moon on your radar as he may be quite entrenched in your region.  If you scan around for his aims, or goals, I think you might find even more cause for alarm.  

Mooney track site

Here's another site for you -

The Moonsters

MOON: Madmen Overtaking Our Nation

--and apparently Brazil as well.

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