Blogging the democratic revolution
Despite the arrest of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, the further slaughter of hundreds more, and the trial the leaders of the democratic oppositions, the United States will not be joining other World Bank donors in revoking aid to the Meles regime. According to the article, the U.S. doesn’t feel this is necessary as there has been progress toward democracy and because the aid is being used for development projects and the combating of AIDS. Therefore, the aid is actually being used to help foster democracy. Or so the argument goes, which is why the ambassador has called the idea of…
What I reported here on the Caracas coffee shortage turns out to be a part of a much larger story many details of which I saw in different areas of the country. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has forced producers of coffee to sell their beans below cost, or face confiscation of assets. He’s also done the same for meat, as we reported here. And when I was in Caracas, a full-page ad taken out by Polar Group in El Universal warned that it was the same dynamic with corn flour – and that the company was unlikely to survive on…
That’s Strike Two for the Venezuelan dictator. Joining Mexico, Peru has pulled its ambasssador from Venezuela on the grounds that it’s now openly meddling in Peru’s presidential elections. Yesterday, far-leftist Presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, Evo Morales’ Peruvian ideological soulmate, decided to join the cavorting with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in public photo opportunities to consolidate the Axis of Evil, as Daniel in Venezuela notes. Just coincidentally, Humala was in Caracas for the festivities with the other two. It’s no coincidence that political meddling was one of the reasons Mexico also pulled its ambassador from Caracas last November – and…
In a recent poll, Russian citizens picked superlatives for their politicians, naming among others who is the most honest, the smartest, and even who is the sexiest. As for the latter, ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the ironically named Liberal Democracy Party took the prize for the sexiest politician in the country. Just take a look at this handsome mug. He’s no pre-poison Yushchenko. I don’t see him going in the Babes Of Politics section anytime soon!
…in the context of Latin America’s failed economic reforms is a truly interesting comparison. After all, failed reforms in Latin America have left it at the mercy of increasingly hostile, unproductive, dead-end leftist leaders, while rule-of-law-loving Estonia has seen itself vault to nearly first-world status in just a few short revolutionary years. Mary Anastasia O’Grady has her new Index of Economic Freedom out, with a discussion of Estonia’s “revolutionary reforms” (you think she reads Publius???) and of Latin America’s increasingly braked reforms, something worth considering as we watch Latin America slide ever further into the leftist vortex of no return.…
Fausta’s come up with a fierce photoessay showing all the hugging with all the whos that Hugo Chavez has done this past year. It’s her inimitable contribution to the year’s many lists. Blech! You gotta see it right here! Hat tip: Val at Babalu.
It’s written all over the visa lines, stretching from Mexicali to Caracas, from Havana to San Salvador, from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil, from La Paz to La Paz – and like the Drug War, its most violent edge is at the 1400-mile-long U.S. Mexican border, from Matamoros and Brownsville to Tijuana and San Diego where thousands of immigrants from all over the hemisphere and elsewhere walk through scorched no-man’s-land deserts and dangerous smuggler routes full of human barbarians – all for the chance to come here illegally as something better than living in their hellish homelands. There’s an immigration crisis…
The gas crisis that has shaken relations between the Ukraine, Russia, and the European Union is now over. The air is clearing, but whatever the politicians are saying now, the damage has been done. So the question begs: who came out on top of this? Or perhaps we should be asking who came out on bottom, and though the answer may seem counter-intuitive at first, the answer is Russia. President Putin was embarrassed late last year when his favored candidated in the Ukrainian presidential election, Viktor Yanukovich, was defeated by pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko following the Orange Revolution. Demand for…
I was trawling around on one of my favorite Web sites, The Real Cuba, and happened upon a whole section called ‘Cuba B.C.’ or ‘Before Castro.’ It’s a huge collection of photos of what Cuba looked like before Fidel Castro turned it into a communist wasteland, rife with poverty, corruption, absence of truth, and total decay. How strange to look into the window of the past and see a society completely comparable to our own, completely similar in development and dynamism. Those days are gone, of course, in the name of Castro’s so-called ‘revolution.’ More and more, that looks like…
Tens of thousands of Chilean copper-mining contractors have gone on strike for higher bonuses in a time of record-high copper prices. They’re contractors rather than employees, and don’t exactly have a contractual right to demand this money. But for the same reason that uninsured New Orleans homeowners still seek money from Uncle Sam, even though they didn’t buy any of the cheap, available, and pro-offered flood insurance from him, it’s nevertheless natural to ask. Times are unusual and politicians often respond to large numbers of people making the same request. It’s not unexpected that they might ask their owners for…
Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace outlines in a brief policy paper what the current strategy for Iraq should be. To sum it up, the current momentum toward federalism is irreversible and the most important thing is to 1) convince Sunnis to accept it and 2) make sure that they get their fair share of the oil in their region. The U.S. can use troops withdrawals as a confidence-building measure that will eventually lead to this and, subsequently, a drop in violence. I agree that the oil distribution issue is probably the biggest issue facing the success…
Michael Totten has a really good piece in today’s Opinion Journal talking about how it is Lebanon, not Iraq, that is the Middle East’s first liberal democracy. I’m certainly inclined to agree with him. Lebanon is just about everything we could hope to strive for in Iraq over the next decade. A lot of his article focuses on the electoral system used in Lebanon, which is very strange by Western standards but guarantees people’s liberties by forcing the different groups in the country to share power. He says that, “Syria and Iraq, which also are composed of rival ethnic-religious sects,…
By calling them exactly what they are. It’s a thing of beauty. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe had this to say about the charmers who have been waging a murderous narcoterrorist war against Colombia’s resistant people for the past 44 years: “In addition to being thieves, they are buffoons. In addition to being kidnappers, they are loudmouths,” Uribe said of the FARC leaders. The best part of this news story is the FARC’s reaction back to Uribe after he spoke the plain truth. May it be their epitaph. The whole story is here.
Via Global Voices, we learn that Boz has his own list of Top 10 Americas Stories Of 2005, in a different – but well-reasoned and interesting – take from my own 2005 list earlier this week. Check it out here.
It looks like Nicholas Burns has been making some promises — promises I like! Turning to the agenda for 2006, Burns said the United States wants to continue to work through NATO as the core trans-Atlantic link but to broaden and extend NATO????????s mandate to Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In working with the European Union, ???????the next great mission for us together is spreading the freedom we enjoy in Europe and America,??????? Burns said. ???????We also need to complete our work in Europe by attending to the Balkans, Ukraine and Russia,??????? he said. ???????We need to continue fostering…
Former Vice President Khaddam, never a favorite character of mine, quoted Assad as having threatened Rafik Hariri before his assassination and now the Syrian government wants to try him for treason. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of “The Bold and the Syrian.” DAMASCUS (AFX) – The Syrian government will try on high treason charges former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam, who has accused Damascus of involvement in the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, and investigate him for corruption. The announcement came after Khaddam’s explosive allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had threatened Hariri before his death, which he made…
In Hugo Chavez’s 21st Century Socialist Venezuela. El Universal has a superb roundup of the year, documenting the continuous stream of expropriations defacing Venezuela as its democracy slides into tyranny. Read it here and here.
From Venezuela’s government propaganda, a news organ called Venezuelan Global News reports meat shortages in Caracas, calling attention to a problem that obviously is being discussed in the streets by Venezuela’s poor, a topic Venezuela’s private-sector media, or at least the mainstream English-language media, may have missed. This is the first I have heard of this shortage. The meat reportedly in short supply is pork legs, used in the making of Venezuelan Christmas hallacas (we’d recognize that as a tamale over here), a traditional Christmas food. Although I had not seen any reports of pork shortages in the press, the…
Instead of letting them phase in following the New Year, President Yushchenko wants to hold a popular referendum on the constitutional changes that were agreed upon during the Orange Revolution last year. I smell a — dun dun dun — political ploy! KIEV (Reuters) – President Viktor Yushchenko said on Friday constitutional changes reducing his powers from the New Year could destabilise Ukraine and suggested he might call for a referendum on the matter. The changes, approved by parliament a year ago at the height of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”, were part of a deal to win broad agreement on restaging…
I see problems with this on multiple levels. CAIRO, Dec. 30 – Egyptian riot police officers rushed into a crowd of unarmed Sudanese migrants early Friday morning, killing at least 23 people, including small children, after the group refused to leave a public park it had occupied for three months hoping to press United Nations officials to relocate them. The Sudanese – thousands of men, women and children – were packed into what amounted to a traffic island in an upscale neighborhood. They had fled war-torn Sudan, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Cairo – across…
These guys have the right idea. In a rare protest against an official media crackdown, about 100 journalists from one of China’s most aggressive daily newspapers have gone on strike after the paper’s editor and two of his deputies were fired, local journalists said Friday. The editor of The Beijing News, Yang Bin, and deputy editors, Sun Xuedong and Li Duoyu, were dismissed Wednesday as part of what media watchdog groups describe as a sweeping government campaign to tighten control over the media and the Internet. The striking journalists, about a third of the staff, stopped work on Thursday after…
On January 1st, CAFTA is ready for implementation. The nations of Central America have just a few things to do to get it all in place but on a rolling basis, they will be set to get involved with the opportunities of free trade and with it, all the prosperity that follows. After NAFTA was implemented, Mexico’s stock exchange rose 200% in the years that followed. So it shall be with CAFTA. Central America should prepare to be a big global player, a known name, a symbol of excellence, and a rich, prosperous region that has broken all ties to…
Now that I’ve fully recovered — it was so bad that it must have been bird flu — I can finally get back to what’s going on with the Iraqi election results. Only it’s already beginning to wind down. The political groups are criss-crossing with dozens of talks all over the country to work out a compromise. New elections are certainly out of the question, but it looks like some of the demands of the Sunnis and seculars will be fulfilled and the Shia-Kurdish alliance will evolve into more of a national unity government. Final results will be released in…
VCrisis has several good pieces tonight on Argentina but one that caught my eye an event I knew about – that Argentina’s largely leftist press is on the take, with a few isolated exceptions. Now many of those exceptions are under attack as the Nestor “Anti–Summit of the Americas” Kirchner regime strengthens and consolidates its power a la Hugo Chavez. Press freedom is beginning to wither there for those who are not on the take. The story is here.