Miguel Buitrago of the excellent MABB blog has a fascinating post on the different political party programs of the candidates for Bolivia’s elections. He lines them all up side by side, helpfully laid out in bullet points.

Read the whole thing here.

My own analysis on one detail: Take a good look at the hard-left plan of action for the Evo Morales MAS program – and then notice the packaging – it bears all the earmarks of U.S.-based Sandalista organizations for its otherwise communistic program. Twenty years ago, did leftists package their collective farms and forced indoctrinations as ‘microenterprise’? Try collective farm. But that’s what Morales is doing now. Those buzzwords are served up to win support from the U.S.-based left, and I suppose, the westernized, educated Bolivian middle-income voters who feel ‘guilty’ and who have no memory of the past false promises of communism. But I’d be surprised if such terms were real winners for poor people as priority issues. The Morales program is a creepy hybrid of the foundation-funded U.S. Sandalista-left NGOs which have been mixing it up with the IMF/World Bank left. The net result is this kind of slick marketing for the same old leftwing ideas that have failed everywhere else communism has been tried. I think Morales has a sophisticated effort to win the support of the SUV left back in the U.S. who will give flack to the Bush administration, covering his flank there, when the U.S. inevitably opposes the collectivization of that society.

If you don’t believe such things can happen in our modern age, go take a look at what’s happening in Venezuela, something the international left is all of a sudden very SILENT about. Is it embarassment? Is it something they secretly wanted all along, back in the days when they were trying to convince the world that Chavez’s opponents were merely ‘oligarchs?’ The one thing it isn’t is taking responsibility for one’s unconscionable actions, taking away whole nations’ freedom.