According to international press reports, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is planning to visit Russia, Belarus, and Iran later next week. In Moscow, he will sign a series of agreements on trade and technology. The Obama Administration needs to let its Moscow counterparts know that unbridled support of a mercurial Latin American politician, including weapons and dual use technology transfer, may threaten the “reset” policy between U.S. and Russia. Yet, Moscow has much to gain from its flourishing relationship with Caracas. First, when the Venezuelan leader last visited Moscow in September …
The radical left in Latin America often prides itself in its ability to stir up the masses and make nations ungovernable by elected officials and representative governments, especially centrist or conservative regimes. But when popular unrest or insubordination, threatens a Leftist leader, the Left cries “coup” and “conspiracy.” The current situation in Ecuador following clashes between the government of Rafael Correa and striking police officials is unclear. Political instability is nothing new to Ecuador. It has had eight presidents in the last 13 years. Since his election in 2006, Correa …
With due respects to Abraham Lincoln, one can say that Venezuela is a “house divided against itself.” The question for the Obama Administration is how long this important nation can remain half free and half a Hugo Chavez fiefdom. A powerful tug-of-war is underway between those who support Chavez’s radical, anti-American program of “Socialism of the 21st Century” and those in Venezuela who have had enough and believe that tyranny, repression, and economic misery take root in the accumulation of unchecked executive power. Chavez took a pummeling in the September …
While Colombia’s new president Manuel Santos was at the United Nations today, he received welcomed news: Colombia’s military had located and attacked a camp belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Killed in the assault was Jorge Briceno (born Victor Julio Suarez, AKA El Mono Jojoy) second highest FARC commander, military mastermind, and emblematic hard-line leader. Santos called it a “historic moment.” As chief of the Eastern Bloc, Briceno commanded the largest single body of FARC fighters. He was also an architect of the terrorist strategy of kidnapping …
Most Venezuelans do not want to live in a socialist/authoritarian state. Most aspire to live productive and independent lives and escape poverty through work and property ownership. They hope to remain free citizens in a genuine democracy rather than red-shirted comrades in a communist clone. On September 26, Venezuelans will vote for the 165 members of the national assembly that approves future laws, and, at least in theory, reflects the consent of the governed. Hugo Chavez’s poll numbers continue to sink. His 21st century brand of socialism suffers the same …
In yesterday’s New York Times, International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen reported: “Since taking office, President Obama has reached out to the Muslim world as a whole, to China, to Turkey and to Iran, but has devoted scant serious diplomatic energy to Europe.” Cohen then went on to quote prominent Paris-based defense analyst Camille Grand: “Europe is the object of benign U.S. neglect. Obama has not established or re-established a strategic relationship with any single European country or with Europe as a whole.” This analysis is dead on. In their …
Like all good socialists Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez believes private property is theft, so he wants to steal it back in the people’s name. Chavez remains on an expropriation roll, having gobbled up huge sections of the Venezuelan economy, reportedly $22 billion in transactions in the past four years. For the powerful and prominent he has offered compensation, drawing on Venezuela’s oil wealth, but for many promises and litigation lead only to misery and despair. Franklin Brito was a 49-year agronomist and modest property owner with a grievance against the Venezuelan …
In the run-up to her (or perhaps husband and former President Nestor Kirchner’s) expected bid for re-election in 2011, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is flexing her government’s muscles to pressure the media for favorable coverage. Opposition leaders, however, call it an attempt to silence critics. Fernandez is sending draft legislation to Argentina’s Congress mandating governmental regulation of “the production, sale and distribution of newsprint in the public interest.” The Kirchners are taking yet another page from Hugo Chávez’s playbook. He clamped down on freedom of speech in Venezuela …
On August 13 El Nacional, a Venezuelan daily, published a disturbing photograph of corpses piled up in a Caracas morgue. The photograph drove home an indisputable fact: Caracas has become one of the most dangerous places in the Americas. Reports the latest Economist: Venezuela’s national murder rate is 75 per 100,000 people, up from 49 just four years ago, twice the rate in neighboring Colombia where guerrillas continue to wage war and an astonishing 220 per 100,000 people in Caracas, higher even than in Mexico’s drug-ridden Ciudad Juárez.
Always impulsively anti-American, Venezuela’s authoritarian populist President Hugo Chavez is once more attempting to cast himself as the victim of campaign of lies and calumnies conducted by the Obama Administration. In another act of bullhorn diplomacy, Chavez announced on August 8 that Larry Palmer, U.S. ambassador- designate to Venezuela, “disqualified himself as ambassador. He disqualified himself by breaking all the norms of diplomacy by attacking us, and even the Armed Forces.” Chavez continued: “The best thing that the U.S. government can do is to seek another nominee to be considered, …
