Argentina: Thousands of Argentinians turned out on Monday to hear a long farewell speech by visiting the Cuban President, Dr Fidel Castro, who upstaged Mr Nestor Kirchner on his first day as president of Argentina.
"I will never forget what you have done for me tonight, allowing me to leave happy and forever thankful," Dr Castro told 15,000 mostly young admirers from the steps of the Buenos Aires University law faculty.
His strongly anti-US speech was originally intended for 2,000 people inside a lecture hall, but was moved outside where all the unexpectedly large gathering could see him under a chilly, starlight night.
Dr Castro (76) was among 13 heads of state who attended Sunday's inauguration of Mr Kirchner, who spent most of Monday meeting them and promising to "work with everyone" to bring Argentina out of its worst economic crisis.
The Cuban leader, criticised recently over the heavy jail sentences handed down to a group of political dissidents, called the US government "a specialist in lies" bent on "imposing its universal neo-fascist theory" on the world and vowed that the Cuban revolution he headed would "never surrender, never stop fighting".
"I'm not exaggerating or overdoing it," he said, "when I tell you that one day I heard that 60 or more countries could become the target of surprise or preventive attacks" by the US, Dr Castro said, referring to the much-criticised new US policy of pre-emptive attack on rogue nations such as Iraq.
He thanked Argentina for "taking a hard swipe at neo-liberal globalisation" by electing a forward-thinking politician like Mr Kirchner to office.
A progressive member of the Peronist Party, Mr Kirchner defended on Monday the use of public works projects to drive the economy and rejected Argentina's neo- liberal experiment through the 1990s under former president Mr Carlos Menem, which led to the country's economic meltdown.
The crisis has left half of the 36 million people living below the poverty line and has sent unemployment soaring to nearly 25 per cent.
Mr Kirchner also confirmed his strategy of strengthening Mercosur, a South American free trade area consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.
Mr Kirchner on Monday held meetings with Spain's Prince Felipe, followed by the Uruguayan President, Mr Jorge Batlle. He also met presidents Mr Lucio Gutierrez of Ecuador, Mr Alejandro Toledo of Peru, Mr Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada of Bolivia and Mr Alvaro Uribe of Colombia.
Also at the inauguration were Mr Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Mr Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala, Dr Castro and Brazil's Mr Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Mr Kirchner's is expected, within the next three months, to meet President Bush in Washington.
In an earlier speech on Monday, Dr Castro justified the recent executions in Cuba of three hijackers who had seized a ferry in an attempt to flee the island, saying they were players in an effort to spark war between the United States and Cuba. - (AFP)