January 21, 2007    Numerous members of the democratic political party of the U.S. Congress have taken the window of opportunity afforded them by their oh-so-slight majority status to wage an internecine war of words to assist their own politics of hatred campaign and attempt to solidify their voter solidarity with disenchanted left leaning voters across the Americas. Unfortunately, some have set their sights on building voters whom they call “Latinos” and are using Latin American issues as a rallying base. And no sooner than Reid, Durbin and Salazar return to Washington, they set about to prove their new foreign policy bona fides and agree with Hugo Chavez, Morales and Rafael Correa that the sum total of Latin America’s problems are to be laid at the feet of….President Bush.

Basing their new found wisdom regarding U.S.-Latin foreign policy on a recent New Year’s Eve vacation and shopping trip to the Andean nations (covered over by meaningless public comments and shallow and very short meet and greets sandwiched in between shopping and spa events), the new leaders of the U.S. Senate foreign policy wing of the questionable democratically-backed attack on President Bush is a deceptive political trick that actually hurts U.S. foreign policy.

As correctly reported in the AP and El Universal, U.S. Senators Reid and Ken Salazar misled [sometimes called lying] to “special” groups of Spanish speaking media in  “special” politically-charged insider Democrats only message-making moments to falsely state that because President Bush “ignored” Latin America, it is Bush’s fault that Hugo Chavez rose to dictatorial power. The ignorance of the Reid-Salazar inanities sounds as if it was scripted by the well-ensconced `we want Plan Colombia stopped and drugs legalized’ group of Soros-backed ngos and generally useful groups of cynical, limousine liberals who hate just about anything. But Reid and Salazar have ignored Latin American history, ignored the facts, and have ignored their own party’s love fest with Chavez,  Morales and Rafael Correa, as well as Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega. Mssrs. Reid and Salazar have conveniently forgotten that their own Congressman Delahunt is roundly held to avail himself of Nancy Pelosi’s private (aka discreet) U.S. Capitol hide away to regularly meet with his Chavez-backed provocateurs and donors. And Senators Reid and Salazar seem to have amnesia regarding the on-going open line of support for just about all anti-democracy U.S. bashers in Latin America as maintained by Senator Dodd’s princess of leftist regimes, his own staffer Janice O’Connell, coordinating this special string of activists, sometimes called NGOs..

We are already weary of this misinformation ploy underway and yet find ourselves conceding that Salazar has a valid point that the U.S. government ignores Latin America. A good place to begin would be to restore truth in media reporting by Salazar and Reid.

Senator Salazar claims that Bush created a void in Latin America that was filled by Chavez. This is a lie. Hugo Chavez was elected by Venezuelans in the Clinton years and mistakenly hailed by many as the greatest fellow since sliced bread. Clinton’s own team of advisors and pollsters took up well paid positions to aid and abet Chavez’s onward march. No less than Jimmy Carter made tens of millions of dollars soothingly ignoring the stubborn dictatorial machinations of Hugo Chavez. President Bush never ignored or created a void in Latin America but he did not tackle head on the astonishing welter of pro-Chavez actors and the rasher of U.S. paid ngo groups across the democratic party and  who heavily influenced global media, numerous U.S. Congressional actions, and the U.S. Department of State. Venezuelans too played no meaningful role in revealing the crude cover up of the death of democracy in their own nation and the OAS sat on its thumbs, as usual.

Hugo Chavez and his new bag man, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, have their own unique brand of revisionist history. With great frequency they go on and on and on repeating false, revisionist historical tales of global personages. While needing fact based academic rebuttals, their tirades simply gloss over their political goals. This is precisely what Salazar and Harry (`I had a spiritual experience in the Andes’) Reid are up to and it leads to more confusion and instability in the Andean countries. And by  now, Reid has no doubt that Morales, Correa and Chavez too have held their own ‘spiritual experiences’ in the Andes, complete with faux shamans, to embrace their new best pal, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Such spiritual experiences are looking more like nightmares of unbearable proportions. .

While the recent U.S. Senate CODEL to the Andes was in fact a spa and shopping excursion paid for by U.S. taxpayers, what little was ginned up for public release by Reid before and after his spiritual shopping event in the Andes indicates a perversity underway. Reid and Salazar are engineering a false Hispanic voter ploy by wrongly aiding and abetting regimes that are fully embracing narcoterror groups, Hezbollah, and are indeed legitimizing money laundering, regional instability while enhancing Andean militaries of aggression and not self defense.

The MERCOSUR meetings in Brazil this week were commandeered by the politics of hatred spewing from Hugo Chavez’s mouth. Chavez intends to convert a nominal customs and tariff union to a political platform to derail the tenants of MERCOSUR plunging what few accords exist into an indefinable, politically motivated rant and chant group in his own image. The current craze for ranting and chanting this communal hatred is guaranteed to replace universally accepted norms of trade and commerce with infantile paroxysms of preferential buffooneries which aid and abet the murky underbelly of the self-enriching cabals who do very well in these synthetically engineered rave parties, sometimes called alternative democracies. Senators Harry Reid and Ken Salazar, badly misled as they are today by their leftist NGO-style advisors and DAILY KOS Chavez-apologists, would do well to follow Bush’s lead and re-engage in statesmanlike behaviors for the good of all the Americas.

Reid is said to have tepidly noted that Chavez seeks to put his “footprint on young democracies.” This vacuous comment is reported to have raised Chavez’s ire. Reid ignores the fact that give or take a few decades here and there of dictatorships, Latin America itself claims that their nations are democracies almost as long as the USA does so claim, never mind that these are structurally weak democracies but none are “young.” Moreover the facts are well in the open that Hugo Chavez does truly fund and tamper with foreign nations, no matter how much he claims to be offended by claims to the opposite. Senator Reid should have noted that Chavez does not use a footprint to install his rampant state kleptocracy but rather uses all means available, mostly cash- lots of cash- plus political manipulations, deceptions, theatrics and extortionary tactics that would make the old mafia blush. Footprint? A far better descriptor would be boot print.  

A good place to begin for Senators Reid, Durbin and Salazar is to actually work with the structure given them by their high offices and actually work with State Department or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee- on the record and with transparency for their concerns. This is a far more rewarding path than hosting snarky little “Latino media” groups at the Press Club and Latino media outreach confabs inside the Capitol to whine and complain politically about President Bush for Democratic Party voter and media relations solidarity while offering no substantive alternatives or definable growth points for the rapidly escalating Chavez-Castro-Ortega-Ahmadinejad Axis of Evil enjoined by Morales and Correa in the Andes, only three weeks’ ago heralded as their new best friends.

- The Editors, ECrisis

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Chávez fills the void left by Bush, says US Senator    1-19-07   El Universal

US President George W. Bush has neglected Latin America over the last six years and left a void that was filled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, said Friday Democratic Senator Ken Salazar.

"We are worried about it. Now we have Chávez, who does not want relations with the United States and is determined to become the leader of South America and Latin America," he lamented.

Salazar made his remarks at the Capitol during a meeting with Hispanic reporters in advance of the stance to be taken by the US Democratic Party on the annual address to the nation to be delivered by Bush next Tuesday, AP quoted.

Because Bush focused exclusively on national security and looked only at Afghanistan and Iraq, he "has created a void in Latin America that was filled by Chávez."

He noted that Peruvian President Alan García defeated the candidate supported by Chávez. "Peruvians said 'no,' because they thought that Chávez was not good for Peru."

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Venezuela's Chavez takes aim at Reid      1-19-07

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of President Bush, focused Friday on a new American target: newly named U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Chavez took issue with comments Reid made just hours earlier to the National Press Club in Washington, citing the Venezuelan leader as among the threats facing the United States in 2007 because "Chavez and (Cuba's Fidel) Castro want to put their leftist marks on young democracies."

Chavez, in Brazil attending a summit of 10 South American leaders, said the Nevada Democrat got it wrong.

Instead, Chavez declared he wants to "put the leftist stamp on the people, those who the imperialist gringos don't want or can't understand because of fear or ignorance."

"I think this leftist stamp in Latin America is going to spread throughout the world because the only the left can provide the transformation we need," Chavez said.

South America has seen a sharp drift to the left in recent years with the election of new leftist leaders.

Reid in December toured South America with five other U.S. senators but did not go to Venezuela.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the bipartisan group led by Reid was trying to counter Chavez's attempts to form an "anti-American bloc" in the region.