lunes, 17 de agosto de 2009

Why is the Obama administration trying to help Hugo Chavez?

Anastasia O'Grady's answer:
Mr. Obama has expressed the same views on Honduras as Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), who holds that the interim government must be forced to reinstate Mr. Zelaya and who has, over more than two decades in office, consistently allied himself with socialist causes in Latin America.

I'm not so sure. Obama may be "tacking to the left, like O'Gragy says, but on the other hand, she asumes some overall plan on his part, like a bait and switch from his pragmatic, post partisan campaign persona. I doubt that there is such a plan. Obama is plainly in over his head and the government is being run by whichever of his advisors he trusts at the moment. Right now, according to press reports, that would be Rahm Emmanuel. Emmanuel wants to allign the US more with Chávez for his own ideological reasons.

Most people in Latin America loathe Chávez and his followers. Most people have some memory of some form of autocratic government, which Chávez and his followers certainly exemplify. Most people in Latin America are therfore looking for the US to stand up to Chávez instead of bending over for him to ram it in like he did last weekend. He was in Ecuador , where :
he launched a virulent assault on the U.S. military, reiterated his commitment to spreading revolution in the region, and threatened the continent with war. Mr. Zelaya was by his side.
O'Grady says thatif Honduras has been able to "neutralize" Chávez, we should be celebrating it, not siding with hin against the people of Honduras and around the region who loathe Chávez-style authoriarianism.

Meanwhile, Chávez accuses the US of planning an invasion of Venezuela (to take its oil, of course) and to meet this threat, he is arming himself with Russian arms and treaties.

So, we have a typical Latin American dictator spewing conspiracy theories about the US while making traties with our enemies--Russia, Iran, Hezbollah--and dealing drugs through the FARC. Then we have our president sucking up to him in public. Even so, Chávez persists in making Obama look like a fool:
“Señor, lea las ‘Venas abiertas de América Latina’ (libro de Alberto Galeano que le regaló), porque creo que anda perdido en la nebulosa de Andrómeda, anda perdido, sin horizonte, creo que están entrando en un laberinto, si le damos el beneficio de la duda. Está confundido, nosotros no le que estamos pidiendo que intervenga en Honduras, le estamos pidiendo que el imperio retire sus manos de Honduras y sus garras de América Latina, ya está bueno”, señaló.

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