What are we going to do about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin America, appeals to the left to understand how everything Chavez does goes against everything they believe.
He’s spending money on an arms buildup, he’s creating a huge militia that answers to him and not to the armed forces. He sells his oil to the US and profits from the refining of his high-sulfur oil.
And in Venezuela, poverty has gone up on his watch.
Vargas is wrong, of course. The left doesn’t care what Chavez does and whether he goes against everything they believe. What counts for the left is that Chavez is against the US. With the end of the cold war we can see that during the cold war the international left was not so much on the side of the Soviet Union as against the United States. Today, with the Soviet Union gone, the left sides with anyone willing to cock a snook at the US.
Is Chavez a fascist dictator? Who cares? At least he is trying to make trouble for the United States.
That is what it means to be on the left. It means that you are against the United States of America.
So what should we do about Chavez? Probably not very much. Hugo Chavez is going to end up ruining Venezuela, and a couple of other South American nations as well. Maybe he’ll have a cozy little war with one of his neighbors. But he will leave behind poverty and despair.
And that is a tragedy. Vargas writes that
There are between 30,000 and 50,000 Cuban advisors in Venezuela, helping with everything from building up the intelligence system to lending “social” services in the government-funded “missions.”
I wonder what the Cubans in Venezuela will do after Fidel shakes off this mortal coil.
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