Blogging the democratic revolution
Today’s the Big One, Peru goes to the polls today. I’ll have something up on that in a minute but here is an important background topic I post as a sidebar: Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s political meddling in Peru during its election. At times, it’s been the central issue of the entire Peruvian campaign in the second round. Meddling is such a vague term. If a foreign leader expresses preference for a certain candidate in another country’s election, I don’t exactly consider it major meddling – I consider it really just dumb. After all, voters do not have to heed…
I visited Yaracuy, Venezuela, a few months ago. It’s an agricultural state famous for its sugar and it looks like this: A Yaracuy sugar farm But the atmosphere was tense everywhere, for land wars were going on, and people were getting their farms confiscated. That wasn’t the only fear. Every day, I witnessed people worrying about kidnappers grabbing them for ransom. Farmers cellphoned their wives every few hours from the fields and the pickup trucks to assure them so that they didn’t worry. Everyone tried to keep a low profile because fear reigned the day. Still, the fear of the…
It’s happening in three countries of the Americas, simultaneously at this very moment: Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. In at least two of the three cases, Venezuela and Bolivia, there’s a rapidly building case for civil war as productive land owners seek to defend their life’s work from the Mugabization of it all into smoking ruins. Bloodshed will follow. Land wars are nothing new in Latin America but they haven’t happened in about two decades, so this is a negative new development powerfully signalling a spread of tyranny. In every land war, a dictator seeks to destroy the very concept of…
The Big One, Peru, is ahead tomorrow. Will it a Chavez pawn take power in Peru? Voters go to the polls about it in just a few hours… Boz has the last and latest polls on that, and more polls from around the Americas in this key election year. Go see if Hugo Chavez really is a goner in Peru or not. Boz has got it here.
Nazanin, a 17-year-old Iranian girl, who was attacked by an Iranian rapist thug in a Tehran park as her weaselly, masculinity-challenged ‘boyfriend’ ran away, was left to defend herself with a small knife, and in the course of that act, accidentally killed the vile bastard, who is now in hell where he belongs. But that wasn’t enough for Iran’s mullahs. Showing the depth of their ethics, they insisted that SHE, the helpless teenager, was the real criminal, and Iranian society could simply not exist in its current form if Iranian rapists were not allowed to do as they wished to…
Whenever Sandalistas gather in Caracas, the net result is a grotesque orgy of consumption, where leftwing political tourist after leftwing political tourist buys up Che t-shirts, Hugo Chavez barbie dolls, hippie bracelets, Castro bumper stickers, tapes of Chavez’s speeches, pot-leaf ski caps, fake Birkenstocks, Hugo-Chavez coffee cups, hammer and sickle posters, Allende backpacks and anything else the exporting merchants of capitalist China can dream up, sure these suckers will buy, mom’s credit card or not. These vast Sandalista bacchanals help these leftists feel good about themselves as they consume away like Roman epicures – amid the sea of quietly piled-high…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez addressing OPEC this morning Source: Associated Press, via Yahoo! OPEC is holding its quarterly meeting in Caracas right now and sure enough, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his new best-friends-forever in the Iranian regime have sought hard to cut oil production to drive up prices and stick it to the Americans. That’s gone over like tar sands in the Hummer tank among the OPEC heavies, and these nations, mostly Arabs, who KNOW what the oil cycle is like, and who know that $70 a barrel oil is always a prelude to $8 a barrel oil, have…
I don’t know exactly why but this manic photo caption by Castro-regime Cuban boat refugee Charlie Bravo at KillCastro absolutely cracks me up every time I read it. See what you think here.
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! I never thought I would utter such words. A long time ago, Alan Garcia was Peru’s pain-in-the-ass leftwing president, from 1980-1985. He was only 35 then, and apparently not the same person he is now. He’s grown up. And he’s turned his spectacular talent to be a pain-in-the-ass to the guy it belongs on: Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Garcia’s reading Hugo Chavez precisely in bullseye language that resonates with Peruvians … and with me. He’s telling Hugo Chavez to his face exactly what a creepy tinpot dictator he is, which is something Chavez needs to hear.…
Celebrating democracy, with a great leader they voted for and won! You know what this means … I don’t have to explain a thing… Source: Reuters, via Yahoo!
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Colombia is headed for the polls today, and wonderful President Alvaro Uribe is likely to win in a landslide. He only needs to get past the 50-percentage point mark to avoide a runoff, and that’s likely to be a piece of cake for him. He’s got a 30-point lead in the polls over his nearest rivals. It’s not hard to see why. Uribe’s brought confidence, security and prosperity to Colombia, something it’s not seen in decades, something that looks so fresh, so beautiful, so different, so amazing … how could Colombians not pass up on such…
East Timor, with less than a million people, is like a small town, with small-town niceness … and small-town small-mindedness. It’s also coming off a 25-year populist guerrilla war for independence, meaning that there are a lot of unemployed soldiers and guerrillas around, without a purpose. The barely-developed half-island won its independence from Indonesia in a 1999 referendum that came about by fluke, when, in an unguarded moment, the loose-tongued, clownish Soeharto successor, BJ Habibie, said that if the Timorese really wanted a referendum, he’d darn well give it to them. It turns out they did. And independence, after decades…
Why is this man smiling? And why should we smile back? This may shock you, but he’s happily, shamelessly taking credit for the U.S. House and Senate votes on immigration this week. He didn’t have all that much to do with it, except a little and except that it was none of his business. Nevermind. We gotta smile back. Fox’s political party is reaping big from these immigration reform bills being hashed out in Washington. And Mexican elections are around the corner. With World Cup headed at us like a freight train in June, something that will stop all political…
A few days ago, I was blogging about the tombs of Imogiri, near Yogyakarta, in central Java, discussing them as the place I was at onset of Indonesia’s democratic revolution in 1998. Today, those tombs are at the epicenter of the deadly earthquake in Indonesia, centered in Bantul. Hospitals are overflowing and more than 3000 are known dead in the first 12 hours, it will soar much higher. I noted earlier that Indonesia has a lot of eerie coincidences. I just wish this wasn’t one of them. There are people I know there, and I am quite worried. I will…
Students are protesting in Iran, and according to this report, it’s against Iran’s nuke program. Some of it has turned violent. Police are blamed. GatewayPundit has the scoop, and a tremendous roundup of this big potential democracy revolution here.
It was Publius’ and Venezuela Today‘s scoop last May 10. Hugo Chavez has a new role in Hollywood, not as an Oliver-Stone conspiracy hero, but as a videogame villain. Apparently, he caught wind of our post because we were the only ones posting about it, and has now blown up, calling it a CIA conspiracy and all kinds of entertaining things that ensure his reason for being in the world videogame pantheon of villains. Enjoy this news here!
The Miami Cuban community is often maligned as a bunch of “older Cuban men” who’ve not been able to get over the loss of their “stuff” from the thieving and murderous reign of Fidel Castro. They are portrayed as troglodytes, fanatically rightwing, living in the past, playing dominoes, recalling the good old days, sexist and totally irrelevant. Definitely not the “in” crowd to such “cognoscenti” who dismiss them. Well, Miami Cubans have a way of throwing those stereotypes right back in the faces of their accusers, who are often U.S. leftist ignoramuses with no understanding of the Cuban-American experience, no…
I have dreaded this topic, because I hate the revolting Jimmy Carter more than anything. The only good thing Jimmy Carter did was give back the Panama Canal and make me a flaming Reagan Revolutionary. In other words, he’s a perfect example of a stopped clock being right exactly twice a day. Everything else Carter ever did was not only bad, it was PROFOUNDLY bad. He’s a textbook example of what not, what never, to do. That’s why his Carter Center’s coming back into the news is so utterly repellent. But come back he is. He’s sent his emissaries back…
Economist Steve Hanke has a brilliant essay in today’s Wall Street Journal on his experience and knowledge of Montenegro. Professor Hanke is one of the most important sources of reliable information on the country’s progress and very knowledgeable about the leadership of the country. Notice that recurring theme of currency turmoil that has begun to recur in the Fareed Zakaria essay on populism and on the Pedro Camargo Ecuador essay – it is the very same story, in spades, in Montenegro. Currency devaluation and economic mismanagement are as good triggers as any for independence and democratic revolution. For Montenegro, the…
Nutsy leftwing conspiracy-theory-loving Hollywood director Oliver Stone repudiated Hugo Chavez’s claim that Stone would be making a movie, all about him. And that’s not surprising. Stone is trying to go mainstream in the U.S. film scene, cranking out a watchable, straightforward, decent portrayal of 9/11 cops in his upcoming World Trade Center movie, which is probably well worth seeing when it arrives in August. Even if it were a crappy movie, I’d go see it anyway, based on Stone’s public repudiation of the brutal Venezuelan dictator this week. That stung Chavez hard, in a way the dictator didn’t expect. After…
Peru held important presidential debates this weekend, which seemed to show lightly socialist Alan Garcia holding his ground against Chavista favorite Ollanta Humala. Garcia currently has about a 13 percentage point lead. Alvicho at Off Topic has an excellent roundup of all the blog and other news sources on this landmark debate, to give you a feel for how it all went and what it means here.
Dear old Gus Dur of Indonesia is the one of the best Muslims I have ever known. He’s a holy man whose life of prayer reflects vividly in the life he leads. He is humble, gentle, kindly and noble. I used to talk to him back in Jakarta, years ago, before he became Indonesia’s first democratically elected president as Abdurrahman Wahid. Gus Dur is his Javanese nickname and he was the leader of the PKB party in the post-Soeharto ruins, and with Amien Rais of the more Islamic-fundamentalist Muhammadiyah/PAN faction, and Megawati Soekarnoputri of the very secular, abangan, ecumenical PDI-P,…
So goes the apocryphal “chutzpah” story of the man who was put on trial for killing his parents and asked the judge to show him some mercy for being an orphan. Such also is the world of Chavistas who get caught with their hands in the till. Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles has a short “stomach turner” on a local Chavista official, who ripped off the state coffers bigtime, and then after he was caught, started hollering political persecution – using the very language of political dissidents. Francisco says this is not only infuriating but downright dangerous for the real…
Ahead of December’s presidential elections, Venezuelans don’t have many avenues within their own government to plead for free and fair elections. Political power is consolidated into the hands of a single party, and what’s more, that one party is very closely aligned to the ideals of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who has not allowed a free and fair election in Cuba in 47 years. As a matter of fact, Castro’s operatives taken over many operations of the Venezuelan government, without even a smokescreen of “assistance,” but just as pure undisguised control. What’s at stake in this December vote is Hugo…