March 20, 2008 ECrisis returns to a stubborn theme- manipulations on the world stage by politically deemed leaders who are not leaders of men because they are not men in full: they are halflings- partial men who have sold their morals in a Faustian Bargain for expediency, for better manipulation and for greed. We speak of course of Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez who have made pacts with the devil, also called the mullahs of Iran and the FARC for their complicity to manipulate right from wrong for greed and aspirations far, far away from any moral norm.
 
The Venezuelan government wants you to know that the FARC leader Raul Reyes died to bring us all peace. In the criminally enabling worldview of Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa, Reyes was tragically stopped in his onward march toward tyranny for all and crime for his cartels. Criminal cartels, as Chavez's government-paid posters below tell us, bring us peace.

Raúl, a life for peace in Colombia, as sponsored by the Venezuelan government in state mourning for his loss:



Contrary to what the Chavez and Correa governments [if you still want to call them this] tell us, their partner for life Raul Reyes was never an agent of peace for the Andes. He was a terrorist and a murdering thug who held the morals of a cold killer. Peace through violence and deceptive ploys is nothing but a protection racket for the few who conspire with the criminals. The FARC and its state sponsors of terror, called Venezuela and Ecuador, are nothing more than criminal protection rackets calling themselves governments. This needs to stop. This is not peace; this is not diplomacy and this is not acceptable.
 
Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez want you to believe that Raul Reyes was their hero and his death was cause for national sadness. This is pathetic and exhibits the loss of conscience- if they ever had same- by this duo.
 
Ministra Salvador "informed" - also called lied- before the US NGO community on 3-18-08 to express Ecuador's anger that President Bush supports the eradication of the FARC and did not throw in his support for the FARC operatives called Chavez and Correa. She is upset by this? Upset that Bush supports the end of terrorism while Ecuador, like the illicit OAS, cannot even bring itself to even call the FARC terrorists? As noted before the InterAmerican Dialogue reported in the WASHINGTON TIMES, "Mrs. Salvador denied charges that her government had been providing sanctuary to the FARC rebels or that Quito had held informal talks with rebel leaders. She said Colombia has refused to share data from laptop computers they say were found at the FARC camp.

Colombian officials say records on the laptops indicate contacts between the guerrillas and both Ecuador and Venezuela...Maria Isabel Salvador said on a visit here that Quito had won a `clear diplomatic victory' when the Organization of American States earlier this month passed a resolution calling the incursion by Colombian security forces March 1 as a violation of Ecuador's sovereignty and a threat to its territorial integrity.

`It does not surprise us that the U.S. government has supported the Colombian government, because the Colombian government has aligned itself with the United States in all its policies,' Mrs. Salvador said, speaking in Spanish at a briefing hosted by the Inter-American Dialogue.

`We reject this emphatically,' she said. `We have been given no proof, nothing that can be verified about these charges...Latin America `is facing an increasingly stark choice — to quietly accept the vision of the terrorists and the demagogues or to actively support democratic leaders like President Uribe,' Mr. Bush said in a speech last week. Ecuadorean officials noted that Mr. Bush telephoned Mr. Uribe to offer his support, but has yet to contact Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa."
 
In other words, Salvador is not surprised that Bush supports counterterrorism when her own government does and she wants you to loathe Bush because he is against terrorism. We ask our readers: why in the world would Correa and Salvador want us to hate the USA because the USA stands for law and order when Correa/Salvador clearly do not? Why does Ecuador create a fake format of false harm made to end Colombia when Ecuador is the criminally-involved state here?
 
But our intrepid liars named Chavez and Correa want you keep sending you their news that the FARC are great guys and are politically in need of support in Colombia, called Polo Democratico party, to replace democracy. To do this, they are spending lots of money on fake stories- full propaganda- and when Piedad Cordoba steps out from Miraflores Palace, where she is fully funded and scripted with the Chavez propagandists, and in to the light of day also funded and scripted by the likes of Nancy Pelosi's pro FARC counsel inside the U.S. House of Representatives and the FARC enabling committee, also called US AID funding to promote the Piedad Cordoba lecture circuit before U.S. so called tax payer recipients like the Inter American Dialogue, we know that no facts will be traveling with Cordoba's hoodwinking entourage.
 
Here is the promotional tour for the FARC and Chavez's money m adventurism with criminal terrorists, also called "irregulars" by the OAS because the OAS wants us all to believe that Hugo Chavez and the FARC and Rafael Correa are right that the FARC is not a narcoterror group....but "irregulars":
 
In other words, here is the new Queen of the OAS, also called the Queen of the FARC and the Chavez-Correa geopolitical drive to supplant democracy with Marxist criminal scourges:



Piedad Cordoba is not Margaret Thatcher. She is not Queen Elizabeth II. She is not Nancy Pelosi, although the two are friends. She is however a promoter of the FARC and its criminal empire, which is truly evil.
 
One of the FARC's suppliers, Viktor Bout of Russia, previously known as the weapons man for Peru's Montesinos who air dropped weapons in to Colombia for the FARC during the Clinton years when Colombia handed over 1/2 of its lands to the FARC for "peace" even as Montesinos was taking a cool million a year from the U.S. CIA to combat drugs [which he rarely did do as Montesinos continually took money from anyone with no oversight], is currently awaiting extradition from Thailand for his caught on tape operations to deliver to the FARC even more deadly weapons of destruction. Here is the AP update on this aid de camp for the FARC, called peace lovers and also called a tragic loss by Correa and Chavez: " Bout faces U.S. charges of `conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization' for allegedly arranging to sell and transport weapons, including portable surface-to-air missiles, to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But the multimillion dollar deal he thought he had with the Colombian rebels was really the culmination of an elaborate four-month sting operation concocted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and his customers turned out to be undercover U.S. agents, U.S. officials said. Thai authorities have said they are also considering filing terrorism-related charges against Bout. If convicted, Bout could face 15 years in prison on the U.S. charge, and 10 years on the Thai one."
 
The weapons runner and good pal to Raul Reyes and Montesinos, named Bout,  faces charges in a conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization- the FARC, also  supported by the "government" cartels  of Chavez and Correa. This is a crime and if convicted as alleged, Bout faces hard time. For his part, Bout wants us to actually think he was in Thailand for a vacation and that he is just a good Russian businessman. Viktor Bout is a liar. He is in fact one of the world's nastiest illegal weapons dealers and as such, the world should be delighted to be rid of him. Would Correa or Chavez have arrested Viktor Bout? Of course not. He was their friend by many degrees.
 
Instead of being honest about what takes place in the global community, the world wearies of making excuses, also called enabling, of criminals and purveyors of bad ideas. Extracted here from our previously referenced Shelby Steele's brilliant piece from the 3-19-08 WALL STREET JOURNAL are some insights in to the perils of moral relativism, currently playing out across the USA's political campaigns as the media debates the Clinton versus Obama presidential candidacies, this time with a spotlight on the Politics of Hatred currently being sold as mainstream politics inside the USA. Steele writes, "...Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else.

The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. How to turn one's blackness to advantage? The answer is that one `bargains.' Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by `change' or `hope' or `the future.' And he has failed to say how he would actually be a `unifier.' By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way -- it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. ...And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, `I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . .' And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a `blank screen.'

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America")...But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself."

We are asking the question: what kind of bargain is this when politicians cut deals and thrive on manipulating/bargaining?

We acknowledge that politics is, like the art of diplomacy, about deal making. But as we see in the Andes, deal making- bargaining/manipulating- is no substitute for truth telling and essential commitments to accepted norms of all functional societies. Norms like....truth telling, commitment to law, morality come to mind. We do not discount truth telling and then call it helpful simply because it is "politics" or that politics must enable immoral behavior, as is often the case.
 
The FARC struck bargains with Viktor Bout and Montesinos in the 1990s to deliver weapons to the FARC. With those weapons, the FARC killed a lot of innocent lives in many ways. Correa and Chavez want you to think that this is morally expedient- morally acceptable and that the Faustian Bargain they have struck with the devil, sometimes called the FARC, is a bargain needed. We disagree. The duplicity of Chavez and Correa betrays us all. And as Steels correctly notes tells the story of men who once flew so high in public opinion but forgot to become themselves- men in true with core commitments to moral behaviors. They chose to bargain with the devil, make the Faustian Bargain with evil and for this, we denounce both Chavez and Correa as unacceptable and note they both need to go.

The world does not need manipulators in place of leadership. The world needs none who have no moral compass and neither do Ecuadoreans who only think about themselves as if the world stops inside their tiny borders, when it does not.
 
Moral relativists, manipulators, sold-out politicians do indeed have an Achilles Heel. Always. This is precisely why it is never helpful to elevate so called leaders who are readily brought low by their own complicity with their own manipulators and weaknesses.
 
We have said before: no mas cucarachas. No more vermin. They are coming out of the woodwork today. They call this diplomacy. We call it an infestation.



Do you know what Rafael Correa's Achilles Heel is? Is it his honesty? Is it his integrity? Is it his removal of Ecuador's congress, courts and total control of all government and media? Is it his complete support for Iran and Chavez and the FARC? An honest answer will help your thinking.
 
Today the clarion call goes out to insist that Colombia release all the FARC operational archives, as captured by the Colombians, to the tender and utterly incompetent mercies of the pro FARC OAS. The magical reality, also called lying, think set goes that the OAS must have the full materials. Never mind that the OAS has refused to even acknowledge UN Resolutions about terrorism and its own OAS resolutions about terrorism so as to- what do they call it-? prove to Ecuador that the U.S. Democratic Party and the Soros NGOs are right when they call Rafael Correa a strong friend to the USA and our ally? And why in the name of heaven would Colombia be stupid enough to actually fall for the lie once again that the OAS would fairly deal with the FARC after what they just Resolved- which was to resolve that the FARC is not a terrorist group and therefore legitimate and never to be wholly condemned- and why would Colombia ever ever trust Insulza who could not even decide if Ecuador's fake so called proofs were not equal to the legitimate proofs from Colombia? Never mind that Insulza pre-rigged his little decision making adventure last week to not include forensic specialists or fact finding professionals in his fake non-fact finding expedition, pre rigged as it was to find nothing substantive. To hand the FARC materials to the OAS is to hand the FARC materials to a kindergarten- incompetent, undereducated, politically maligned and debauched. Far better to set up a Nuremburg style court to actually perforce adults to consider the profound criminal materiel.

There is precedence for this. then again, Latins refuse to study World War II in general [check their public school text books] so the lessons may have to be reminded or provided. But indeed there is precedence and that is the right path to trod. Handing over the FARC materials to the OAS is to doom law and order and substitute it with a kindergarten. The FARC knows this. For their part, they want the OAS to take this on. They know, as we know, that the OAS will never stand against the FARC. They did not on March 17 and they will not in the coming months.
 
The OAS will never be the right venue for determining the value of the Reyes-FARC road map. To even suggest this is impossibly naive and neglects just who runs the OAS today and why the OAS leadership is adamant to craft harm against Uribe, install regional narcostates and press more hatred for democratic principles, still missing from the OAS. The OAS itself is a joke and of course has no capacity for enforcement of anything whatsoever- so....what is the point anyway? The OAS can kick out member states but to date they have refused to act responsibly about Ecuador, the FARC, and Venezuela so why would any trust them to act responsibly today? A new independent Nuremburg trial is the only appropriate setting. We say: bring it on or reveal one self as afraid of the facts and hiding from justice. There is precedence for this- judicial precedence.
 
- Pedro Camargo for ECrisis