Free Republic

Despite new evidence that Venezuela has become a sort of ''Club Med'' for Latin America's violent groups, the Bush administration is unlikely to start its second term taking major steps to isolate leftist-populist President Hugo Chávez. But, eventually, it will probably do so. Judging from what incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate earlier this week and what I have heard in interviews with well-placed current and former U.S. officials, the U.S. strategy will be to wait until Chávez does something really obnoxious in the eyes of the world, which he probably will.

We are going to let go for a while the Anderson case to occupy ourselves with the other political scandal, the one of Granda, the affable "chancellor" of the FARC. This appears to have the façade of pure theater, by both sides. Granda was detained here, by Venezuelan police, and handed over to the Colombian police.... Our hypothesis is that for some reason that this very opaque government will never make public, the presence of the guerrilla chief got uncomfortable for the executive and, in the framework of the new relationship that has developed between Chávez and Uribe ("I swear...