Blogging the democratic revolution
Venezuela’s Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has a stunning piece translated from the Mexican press about the extent of Hugo Chavez’s and Fidel Castro’s political meddling in Mexico and its elections. That’s MEXICO – right on our border, walking distance from San Diego and El Paso and Laredo and Matamoros and Yuma – that Mexico! The extent of the cash shoveling and gunrunning is far deeper than anyone knew, and extends even to violent groups who have commenced blowing up banks in Mexico these days, over free trade. Which just happens to be what Chavez has declared war on. With Chavez’s…
…through free trade. It’s put Mexico on the world map as a player, while Venezuela grows ever less significant. The Fox-Chavez spat just brought it all to everyone’s attention. Investor’s Business Daily has the editorial here. Meanwhile, via Boz, I read in Marcela Sanchez’s pretty good column of the critical need for free trade and all the Neanderthals in Washington who are blocking it. She’s right, but doesn’t mean they should not be fought. The whole story is here. Andres Oppenheimer hit a true home run, one of his best columns, called ‘Chavez Started It’ describing what went on at…
Where’s the hemisphere going politically? Boz has an excellent news roundup showing the latest political cross currents. Among these are a poll showing left-leaning Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador dropping down in the Mexican polls, Evo Morales of Bolivia apparently ticking downward, Michelle Bachelet of Chile a little lower and possibly facing a runoff and Lourdes Flores in Peru holding her lead (and I’m really glad the godawful Alan Garcia can’t get more than 15%). There are a host of smaller indicators of public sentiment too. Go read the whole thing here.
In the wake of the Fox-Chavez spat, Mexico’s leftist presidential frontrunner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has slid by nearly 8 basis points in the presidential polls. From a Goldman Sachs research note: Gentlemen, Start Your Engines – AMLO Slightly Down on the Polls According to pollster Mitofsky, in November Lopez Obrador (AMLO) lost some ground in the opinion polls, falling to 29.5% in November from 37.9% in August. Most of the intentions to vote lost by AMLO went to PANista candidate Felipe Calderon, who climbed to 24.4% in November from 20.2%. Madrazo (PRI) remained stable in second place in the…
Miguel Buitrago at the first-rate MABB blog has the whole dynamic explained. The short story is this: Based on current polls, far-left leader Evo Morales is in nearly a tie with his nearest rival. Due to how legislative seats are distributed in the Senate, Morales may not get the majority of votes he needs in the upper house of Congress to become president. In the lower house, the outcome is more uncertain. If the polls are right, this is very good news in one sense – that Morales won’t be able to confiscate land and energy through the power of…
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, one of the gold standards of Latin American journalism, has a great new Spanish-language blog with The Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank in Oakland. It’s full of excellent items, and has contributions from first-rate journalists and thinkers from all over the hemisphere. It’s so nicely done – and already I can see it’s going to be a success – Alvaro has an item here about Patricia Poleo, whose case we have been following at Publius, among other topics. Check it all out here.
Relations have been strained between Mexico and Venezuela since the conclusion of the free trade summit of the Americas. The precise issue at stake: Free Trade. This Sunday, Chavez on his radio program launched a huge hurl of insults directed at President Vicente Fox, resulting in demands from Mexico for an apology within 24 hours: Academic Elephant puts it best here: President Fox has demanded a formal apology and threatened to downgrade diplomatic relations with Caracas. Good for him. Chavez should learn that not all of central and Latin America will roll over for his petrodollars and that his gross…
Just a month to go before Bolivia’s elections and Eduardo Avila has a roundup of the week’s sentiment from Bolivia’s growing blog community. His excellent Global Voices roundup is here.
It’s final. A court in Colombia has ruled that President Alvaro Uribe can run for office again. A constitutional change is now in effect to allow a president to run for a second term. We’ve been waiting for this news for a long time and it’s reason to celebrate. Uribe is the most popular leader, probably in the world, with a phenomenal 80% approval rating. He’s got it because he’s a revolutionary leader in every sense of the word. No region on earth lacks leadership so sorely as Latin America. President Uribe is a major exception, and his achievements, bringing…
While much of South America continues to wrassle over whether free trade is of any benefit to them, Asian giant India – once an inward-looking, narrowly nationalistic state – has now called for a free trade pact for South Asia – or, SAFTA. What a democratic revolution, given what India was in, say, 1970! With perfect intellectual clarity, India’s prime minister has stated the facts on NAFTA, CAFTA and all the other recent trade agreements, citing a slew of data, from how third-country factories go up in free trade states, to statistics about the tripling of trade – and wholeheartedly…
Boz has an excellent roundup of all the week’s polls around Latin America as this critical coming election year beckons. It’s two weeks’ worth this time. Read it here.
In the post-Summit-of-the-Americas, wake, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has lashed out at Mexican President Vicente Fox, publicly hurling a slew of insults at the unexpected star of the Argentina gathering. Fox was so brilliant and forceful in his advocacy of free trade for the Americas that he actually did manage to draw a few cameras away from the Argentina rent-a-mob smashing shops amid exhortations by Chavez, through his own considerable star power. That was a disaster for Chavez. Now, the Venezuelan dictator has struck back. Chavez does this as Mexico is in the throes of an election to be held…
And now for a truly satisfactory little tidbit, The Hill Rag reports that the 15 brave pro-CAFTA Democratic Congressmen who bucked their party leadership in the name of free trade for Central America, and who were politically threatened by vengeful union thugs for doing it – are now reaping big rewards from campaign contributors grateful for their effort to stand up for revolution. Oh it is good news! Donations are flowing left and right to these Congressmen who resisted lunatic economics against free trade in the name of helping Central America’s poor and everyone else too. Free trade lifts business…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has hurled a major strike at the free press. Patricia Poleo, the fearless journalist who exposed government shenanigans over a mysterious car-bombing last year of a prosecutor, has been arrested — and along with a military man, a banker and a Cuban exile, charged with the murder herself. The background to her story is here, here, here, and here. Poleo is a dissident, and has even organized protests against Chavez, like this one we blogged here, but she has never engaged in or advocated violence against the Chavez regime. Her only obsession seems to have been…
Hardcore leftwing ‘activists’ aligned with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Cuban despot Fidel Castro and Bolivian coca-growing champion Evo Morales have served legal papers charging genocide to Bolivia’s finest former president, the elderly Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a superb democratic revolutionary leader who in the early 1990s slew South America’s highest-ever inflation rate, began Bolivia’s natural gas expansion and set his country on the road to first-world prosperity – until he was detestably ousted from power by communistic road-blockers acting as a gang of thugs. He was the first Bolivian I had ever met. I talked with him and wrote about…
A lot has happened in Bolivia since last week. For one thing, elections were declared Dec. 18. That’s probably the most gripping story in the Bolivian blogosphere, and for obvious reasons – democracy has been put back on its rails – or well, apparently, the perspectives are different. Eduardo Avila at Barrio Flores has his first rate roundup of all the news reported around on Bolivian events at Global Voices. Read the whole thing here.
Luis Ramirez at Voice of America, the best correspondent in East Asia, as we and even Amnesty International have noted before, has come up with some kickass reporting on …. North Korea’s rich elite and the continuing famine in North Korea. It is fearless journalism, and like none other you have read. Even people who look down on VOA have admitted to being stunned by the first-rate quality of this reporting. The award-winning Voice of America bureau chief in Beijing went to Pyongyang and has since come out no-I-wasn’t-fooled journalism on this dark, closed, monstrous totalitarian dictatorship, the very worst…
Awhile back I was disagreeing with someone I respect on the nature of France and its need for democratic revolution, same as the rest of the unfree world. Today, I feel sad but sort of vindicated. The eighth day of rioting in France can’t be called a democratic revolution, but it’s the end result of what happens when you don’t get one. The persistent joblessness, the inability to assimilate immigrants, the government control of every aspect of life and above all the lack of freedom are exactly what’s behind this spreading explosion. Yes, France needs to expand its democracy. Badly.…
Try as he did, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez still hasn’t made America’s coveted ‘Axis Of Evil’ list of nations. But it’s not all a vale of tears for him, he did get Venezuela promoted to ‘Rogue State,’ right up there alongside Syria, quietly raising the likelihood of military conflict with the U.S. No fireworks, no glory, no presidential speeches denouncing him as ‘evil.’ But it is certainly an accomplishment, a badge of honor, a gang tattoo, in Chavez’s circle of friends. Chavez will have quite a bit to talk about at the next UN cocktail party before this new status…
Here in the states, we all had a good laugh when Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez denounced Halloween as part of ‘the U.S. culture of terror.’ He also said that Halloween costumes were terrible efforts to scare people as well as alien to the Venezuelan culture. By the sound of it, you could almost imagine that he actually believed that Halloween’s playful merrymaking with ghosts and goblins was actually real to him. To U.S.-Americans, Chavez sort of sounded like a stereotypical backwoods Christian fundamentalist preacher. I grew up with such people and remember hearing the exact same exhortions against the ‘celebration…
Miguel Buitrago has done a very valuable translation of an interview with Felipe Quispe, a Bolivian romantic indigenous leader running for president whose views are even more extremist than those of Evo Morales. It’s positively surreal but an absolute must-read for perspective on what an out-of-it space case this guy is in this election year. He discusses the coming bloodshed he sees as inevitable, his study of Machiavelli, his burning desire for power, his priority of employing all the unemployed intellectuals and his inability to compromise politically on anything. Quispe reminds of Grenada’s Eric Gairy. Read the whole thing here.
Aleksander Boyd has posted a long and extensive report on the state of democracy in Venezuela from its leading democracy advocate, Sumate. The report shows in precise terms the parlous state of Venezuelan democracy and the news is not good. But it is a very important and historic report and Alek read all of it and urges the rest of it to do the same. He writes: Sumate has produced the most comprehensive report about the state of democracy in Venezuela. I highly recommend to read through and analyse the facts presented. By far the best resource for information on…
El Universal has its weekly Venezuelan land-expropriations roundup, illustrating how the increasingly Marxist government is taking ever greater numbers of rights from the people. The disturbing string of ongoing confiscations is here.
Argentina is rapidly hurtling toward the front of the news with the upcoming Summit of the Americas and President Bush’s visit to the beautiful but sinking-economically-to-the-bottom country. All this will be front page by the end of the week. David Sasaki at Global Voices has an excellent blog roundup on all that’s being written in the blogosphere on events in Argentina. It’s a good baseline for news you can’t get anywhere else. Read it here.
Felipe Calderon’s entry into the Mexican presidential race for 2006 creates a whole new dynamic in the election. It’s something I’ve believed since the beginning. Calderon is from the right-leaning PAN party, same as incumbent President Vicente Fox, but he comes across as a different player because he wasn’t Fox’s choice as successor. Fox himself is viewed as a disappointment by many Mexicans for his failure to really reform the country. He’s not an utter disaster but there’s nothing worse than soured hopes from a man who was brought to office as Mexico’s first opposition candidate in over 70 years…