photo from Wikimedia Commons The other day, President Obama was “fortunate” enough to receive an unexpected backing: ”I hope this doesn’t harm Obama, but if I was from the United States, I’d vote for Obama,” said Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela and staunch anti-American. Though this was an endorsement Obama would have loved to avoid (and accusations from the Republican camps immediately appeared) it was certainly...
...tion, privatization and the elimination of government spending. After decades of slow or negative growth, explosive economic crises, stagnation and highly skewed income distribution, politicians like Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez have rejected what financier-philanthropist George Soros has called “market fundamentalism”–and often the United States and its “imperialistic” economic policies along with it. In its place, they have attempted to ins...
A 2002 anti-Chavez rally, from Wikimedia Commons I’ve been meaning to write about the Venezuelan elections for a while, but I never truly found the incentive to do so until I ended conversing with a group of students with close ties to Venezuela on the eve of the elections. Although most of them do not live there anymore, they spent significant time growing up in the country and hold strong ties to it. As we spoke of tomorrow’s democratic ultim...
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador from Wikimedia Commons Few things are more painful to watch than a country that suffers from amnesia; a country that decides to forget over six decades of corruption, violence, and impunity. The country pretends to have forgotten how difficult the road to real democracy in Mexico has been, and instead is determined to vote for the reelection of what writer Mario Vargas Llosa once described as the “perfect dictatorshi...
You have to admit: The current crop of Latin American socialist leaders is the gift that just keeps on giving. December brought us Venezuelan Prime Minister Hugo Chávez’s declaration that the CIA was behind a plot to infect leftist Latin American leaders with cancer. Not to be outdone on the Ridiculous Scale, Comrade Cristina Kirchner of Argentina chose January to beat our favorite dead horse: the territorial status of the Falkland Islands – e...
Anyone remember the FTAA? Probably not. The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) was supposed to be revolutionary. Lowering or eliminating tariffs on thousands of goods in every country between Canada and Argentina, the treaty was heralded as a breakthrough in Western relations when first announced at the 1994 Summit of the Americas. But today, the FTAA is dead in the water. Instead, as a result of domestic and international hand-wringi...
...cades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.” NED has funded movements that have countered leftist candidates and opposition movements. Their targets range from Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez to leftist professor unions in France. Some of this funding went to pay for political consultants and advertising campaigns meant to spread pro-American political sentiment in countries worldwide. $550,000 was given t...
This past Tuesday, United States law enforcement announced that they had foiled a plot by the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US in Washington, DC. Unsurprisingly, this news generated headlines across the globe. This has all the makings of a Tom Clancy novel – a foreign government, let alone Iran, contemplated a political assassination on American soil. Yet, this is not the most bizarre part of the story. The Unite...
...towards market-based economics is inevitable. While it is a mystery how Fidel continues – against all odds – to cling to life, he cannot (like state-planned economies) live forever. Now if only someone would tell that to Hugo Chávez....
“The time is ripe for change in Cuba.” Many have made this claim before, and many have been dead wrong. Indeed, the Cuban Castro regime, having survived to see ten U.S. presidents come and go, outlasted an embargo for over fifty years while maintaining its communist-authoritarian integrity. His rule has inspired, as of late, a spate of rather pessimistic literature. There is great doubt as to the ability of a democratic movement to come about in...
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