Anti-communist women from Santa Cruz are detained in Bolivia by police enforcers loyal to the leftist government of Evo Morales, which is showing growing intolerance of political dissent. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened them today for their refusal to support Morales.
Source, all photos: Getty Images

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has warned the Bolivian babes of Santa Cruz that he’s coming after them. He declared them people of the ‘extreme rightwing‘ and warned that any refusal to support the oppressive greedy hand of the Evo Morales government, which is characterized by its confiscations, will be met by force – from him. As if the internal affairs of this country were ever any of his business! “We will not remain with our arms crossed,” Chavez said from Montevideo. In short, Chavez is menacing the freedom-loving babes of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, like a gangster.

Chavez’s new use of the term “rightwing extremists” is noteworthy. It probably didn’t come from him, but from his minime in La Paz, President Evo Morales. It has an eerie echo of the Clinton administration’s rhetoric, back when Bill Clinton and Al Gore effectively used it against Newt Gingrich and the battered Miami Cubans in the 1990s.

I find that interesting because Clinton’s recently been seen consorting with and advising Morales about political matters, so this new Chavista use of the word ‘extremist’ as a weapon against political enemies seems to have Clinton’s fingerprints all over it. I suspect Clinton told Morales of the term’s effectiveness and Morales asked Chavez to use it as the magic word to discredit his growing opposition. But unlike Clinton, Morales seeks to consolidate power on the Chavez and Castro model. If my theory is correct, I really wonder why Clinton’s doing this.

Miguel Buitrago at the estimable MABB blog has carefully noted the growing alarm around the Bolivian blogosphere about Morales increasingly dictatorial style.

He notes this excellent, if ominous, essay by Miguel Centellas, at the always reliable Ciao!, and he has links to other blogs, too, even from newly worried people of the left.

The people of Santa Cruz have been holding fearsomely large and growing protests against Morales, a punky syndicalist thug of a president, in a last-ditch effort to stand up for their rapidly evaporating rights.

The fact that the thuggy Chavez has now shown up south of the equator and threatened to use force on Bolivia’s democrats from the eastern provinces does not sound very good at all. A brutal leftist thug of his stripe can only mean to take the country over.