Blogging the democratic revolution
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is losing his UN Security Council bid badly. Now Chile has come out and said it won’t vote for him, but will abstain through the first round. Socialist Chile was one Chavez insisted he had in the bag. Well, he no longer does. The UN goes to the vote tomorrow and…
An Andean woman casts a ballot outside Quito today Source: Associated Press, via Houston Chronicle Ecuador’s beautiful women wait in line to vote Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News I am in shock. I was so depressed about the electoral prospects of Ecuador, where a Chavista prettyboy, Rafael Correa, was leading all polls, that I had…
Ecuador goes to the polls this weekend and Nicaragua and Brazil are white-hot races. Boz has all the latest polls – including updates on Bolivia and Peru – plus links to many good analyses, it’s content-filled on key issues and one of his best. Well worth reading here. Not sure what he’s talking about with…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls it just spreadin’ revolution. The rest of the hemisphere has a plainer word for what he’s up to: Meddling. And ohhh, he’s been out meddling! Nobody in the history of the Americas, including the U.S., has been ever accused of meddling so often from so many places as he has….
An Avalancha. You don’t even need to speak Spanish to know what it means. Source: The Devil’s Excrement, which has tons more, keep scrolling. Too busy to write anything but the Avalancha presidential election rally in Venezuela over the weekend has yielded some unbelievable photos. Manuel Rosales of Venezuela is mounting a ferocious challenge to…
Geraldo Alckmin drove Brazil’s popular incumbent President Lula into a runoff Oct. 29 with a powerful showing in Sunday’s election. The guy rocks. Source: AP, via BBC photo gallery A massive political earthquake is shaking Brazil right now and practically no one in the mainstream media (BBC a notable exception!) is really covering it. This…
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his challenger, Geraldo Alckmin Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Singapore Today is election day in Brazil, and for 126 million Brazilians, time to decide who their next president and congressional representatives will be. Via the Washington Post, AP has a good primer on the nuts and bolts of how Brazil’s…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis writes that he’s still shaken after being attacked by a horde of 80 Chavista thugs at a campaign rally in the obscure town of Valera in the high Andean mountain state of Trujillo, over in Venezuela’s mostly rightwing west. Trujillo’s a tiny state, with a population only at 608,000, and sort…
Alek Boyd has more continuing coverage of the Manuel Rosales presidential campaign that is challenging the presidency of Hugo Chavez. Alek reports that Rosales is attracting huge, growing crowds out in the Venezuelan burgs and boondocks. He has some choice quotes from locals and some descriptive writing on what it all looks and feels like….
Venezuela tonight held its first presidential debate. But it wasn’t quite like any other debate I’ve ever heard of. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez refused to participate of course, due to a congenital inability to share the television screen with any other human being. The Caracas megalomaniac just can’t make himself do it. But that was…
Boz at Bloggings by Boz has a must-read collection of poll numbers, many the last pollings that will be available before elections next week in Brazil and Nicaragua. He has a special item on Brazil here, as well. I love his item on what Guatemalans have on their minds, it’s something that will provoke a…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis has an interesting item up about his trip to the slums of Caracas. You know, THOSE slums, the pivotal no-man’s-land where no one is safe, but everything hinges on, in December’s coming Venezuelan presidential election. Chavez is a populist and has maintained power on the backs of this poor vote. Alek…
Rightwing Swedish babes celebrate their victory over socialism Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News In a wonderful surprise, Sweden’s center-right bloc has defeated the long-ruling socialist coalition, in Sunday’s parliamentary election, 48%-46.2%. A new government is being formed now. The winners are a four-party bloc who’ve been out of power for 25 years. They have just…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s foreign advisory team, based at the Miraflores presidential palace, are deep into the task of getting him reelected for the third time, something they may succeed at, given Chavez’s manipulation of the electoral system. Yes, you heard right, foreign as in foreigner. Which sounds pretty disgusting. Shouldn’t one be a citizen…
Venezuelan exile Alek Boyd went back to Caracas for a visit after several years living in England, and has asked us to flag his chronicles of his tour there, where he will be covering the campaign of Manuel Rosales. Sounds interesting enough. In his first dispatch, he writes a fair and accurate account of arriving…
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, still refusing to concede the July 2 election Source: Agencia EFE, via Yahoo! Mexico A Spanish newspaper today warned that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who refuses to concede the election he lost last July 2, is gravely abusing not only Mexico’s democracy, but his own political viability and his left cause…
Remember Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador? The Obragore of Mexico? Today Mexico’s election arbitrators told him to get lost. Mexico’s electoral tribunal making its ruling on July 2’s election Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News Today the Mexican electoral tribunal ruled that there was no cheating in Mexico’s July 2 presidential election, and all of his 300-plus…
For a long long time, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez polled high numbers in opinion polls. Often it was as high as 70% approval. When I was in Caracas, a prominent think tank analyst pointed out to me that about 7% of the population was and always would be hardcore communist. Another 30% to 40% after…
Do my eyes deceive me? The most leftwing alternative-media newspaper, SFWeekly, in the U.S.’ most leftwing alternative city, San Francisco, has given one heck of a thrashing to the world’s most leftwing alternative Sandalista nuisance group, Global Exchange. The leftwing newspaper’s charge? Rampant Sandalista meddling! SFWeekly is laying it on thick against the leftwing “revolutionary”…
Curious about the political temperature in this hemisphere? Wondering what the average Mexican thinks of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s nonstop protests? Want to hear how the Panamanian public feels about the canal expansion or what the Ecuadorean public thinks about its current plate of candidates for its election, come October? Check out Boz’s poll roundup…
Campaign kickoff rally for Manuel Rosales in Caracas Saturday Source: The Devil’s Excrement, which has a lot more here Is there any greater losing proposition than trying to win an election as a non-Chavista in Venezuela? The courts are stacked, the electronic fingerprint machines ensure that HOW you voted is recorded and delivered to the…
Pitched battle on the streets of Kinshasa, ahead of a controversial election Source: AP, via Yahoo! News Ahead of Congo’s first democratic election in 45 years on Sunday, street battles are engulfing the capital of Kinshasa. At issue is electoral fraud. And the indifference of the international community, which, having spent $400 million for supposedly…
Boz has lots of bad news for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, in new polls from Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and all the other hot spots around the hemisphere. It’s an edifying read this week in this post here.
Supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in another protest. Source: The Scotsman Defeated Mexican presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is not going down without a fight. He refuses to accept the results of the July 2 election. It was a hard fought presidential race and he lost by a narrow margin, which has got…