Trouble in South America

Fire of Liberty

John O'Sullivan has a great column in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times on the troubles that are emerging in South America. It seems the various nation's in South America are slowly sliding towards leftist/populist politics with less than savory leaders who rife with anti-American sentiments. To see how bad the situation is, just read a small bit of O'Sullivan's piece:

All that has been lacking for a really serious crisis has been a leader like Castro and a unifying revolutionary ideology like Marxism to exploit and shape this instability. And both may now be available. Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, is the leading anti-American figure in Latin America who is also forging alliances with anti-American regimes from China to Iran. He is a more effective opponent than his close ally, Fidel Castro, because he sits on enormous oil revenues which grow daily with the price of oil.

Like Peron, he uses this windfall to buy a temporary domestic popularity through social spending on poorer Venezuelans. Like Castro he assists terrorist movements against pro-American regimes like the Colombian government. And he is currently building up his military and purchasing weaponry. Yet he enjoys respectability and influence among other Latin American leaders. He is the most active agent in such schemes as the South American Bank. And he is rapidly creating a continent-wide leftist movement under the Banner of the "Bolivarian Revolution" -- a glamorous but not very coherent mish-mash of the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s, the semi-academic "dependency" theories of the 1970s, and the anti-globalization attitudinizing of the 1990s.

Chavez's main political strength is that he was elected democratically; his main political weakness is that he is not governing democratically. Rather, he is harrying political opponents like a pro-democracy NGO activist who is threatened with prison for accepting a $30,000 grant from Washington's National Endowment for Democracy.

I hope someone is watching this and drawing up some contingency plans or policies on how to prevent a further slide into chaos. We cannot afford more folks like El Hefe(Castro) and El Hefe II(Chavez) in our Southern Hemisphere.