Death Squad Dictator

IBD Editorials ^ | May 13, 2011 | Staff

[Kaslin]

Democracy: How is it that this White House can make a big hullabaloo over what it called a coup in Honduras in 2009, yet ignore last week's news of death squads in Venezuela? Dictatorships and double standards, anyone?

To hear President Obama's top Latin American policymaker tell it, all's fine with our relations in the Americas. Democracy is flourishing, says the soon-to-depart Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, with only a spot of bother from something euphemized as "populism."

"Today most democratic nations of the hemisphere are leveraging democratic success, economic growth to overcome old inequities," he said in a speech last week at the Council of the Americas.

For the Obama administration, that's success, because the U.S. professes democracy as its priority.

At the very moment Valenzuela was making his sunny assessment, London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) released a 300-page analysis of documents from the computer of FARC terrorist Raul Reyes, blown away in a Colombian army raid in 2008.

The report laid out patterns of activity showing indisputably that Venezuela's dictator, Hugo Chavez, is running a death-squad regime.

According to emails in the computer, a Venezuelan internal security officer named Amin asked FARC, the communist drug-dealing Colombian rebels, to send two "comrades" for "special activities" in Caracas in 2002. That meant to eliminate opponents of Chavez's regime and, sure enough, a sniper attack on a big demonstration in Caracas in 2002 that killed three protestors.

[PhilDragoo]

Obama didn't like the protection of the constitution in Honduras--it disrupted the four planeloads of drugs daily dispatched by the demagogue.

Obama supports Hugo--a fellow communist.

Obama supports Ahmadinejad--a fellow Islamist.

Obama seeks to remove secular regimes and replace them with Islamist ones, viz. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria.

[La Lydia]

Uh oh.

[NativeNewYorker]

I assumed the headline referred to POTUS.

[DJ MacWoW]

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[dixiechick2000]

Two words........

He sucks.

Two more words.....

He’s dangerous.

[IBD editorial writer]

Thanks for the post, Kaslin.

One of the most striking things about Obama’s policy team on Latin America is that it’s led by a former LaRaza board member who wrote a book about the awfulness of Pinochet’s Chile called ‘Nation of Enemies.’ In the book, Arturo Valenzuela (and Pamela Constable) completely dismissed the huge body of human rights crimes by the Marxist-Leninist Salvador Allende government. To him, the only bad guy was Pinochet. Which brings to mind the sorry fact that someone who would go soft on Allende would also go soft on Chavez. That explains a lot about his unwillingness to confront the Venezuelan dictator.