Man Up Now to be Proxy Free

April 24, 2010 ECrisis reprints some key materials today, the most honest being a review of the Correa-Chavez-Castro merger under which all Ecuadoreans now suffer: the ALBA super state of communist cartel criminals in a piece by Otto Reich. There is nothing in Reich’s review to dismiss and every word is true, no matter what the dishonest Correa-Chavez-Castro liars tell you.

Correa is a clone of Hugo Chavez, merged in every way. Just read your 9-08 constitution and every Correa merger document with Chavez. Reich tells us, “Chávez has turned Venezuela over to the Castro regime.“ So too has Correa….along with Iran and all its freedom killing disgrace. Reich states, “Last year, Peruvian intelligence services found evidence that Hugo Chávez actively supported the indigenous groups responsible for violent protests in that country. Former Bolivian presidents Jorge Quiroga and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada have charged that the Chávez regime clandestinely financed and supported riots in that country as far back as 2002, which toppled two governments in quick succession and led to the election of the leader of the rioters, Evo Morales. Chávez also actively supports radical groups in Ecuador, which under Pres. Rafael Correa hosted a command, control, operations, and training base for the Colombian FARC until it was destroyed in a cross-border raid by Colombian forces.” Why have no Ecuadoreans stated these facts? Why indeed.

Correa is of course an autocrat- a dictator by any definition. “Following Fidel Castro’s direction, this new gang of autocrats gains power through elections, and then dismantles democracy from within. That has already happened in Venezuela and Bolivia, is happening in Nicaragua and Ecuador, almost happened in Honduras, and could happen in any other nation that falls into the grasp of something called ALBA, the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.”

“ALBA’s hostile-takeover pattern is clear: After gaining power democratically, they use force to intimidate political adversaries and the media; politicize the police and the military and place them at the orders of the ruling party; pack the judiciary with compliant or corrupt judges; rewrite electoral laws to eliminate opposition candidates and parties; seize private property or force businesses to close using bogus charges; incite mob violence to force potential opponents into silence or exile; and attack the churches, civic associations, press, labor unions, and any other civil institutions that dare to challenge the government. Their stated model is Cuba; they seek to replicate the Orwellian dictatorship that rules that island, a pauperized prison-nation whose citizens risk everything to flee.” ECrisis reminds that over 1/3 of all Ecuadoreans have run away in diaspora to other lands while tens and tens of thousands of the globe’s worst scum move in to Ecuador.

Moreover, “Chávez has visited Tehran numerous times, signed many commercial, financial, and other agreements with Iran, hosted Iranian leader Ahmadinejad in Caracas, and facilitated Ahmadinejad’s travel to ALBA members Bolivia and Nicaragua. He has supported Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capable of striking targets in Europe and throughout the Middle East. He is a vociferous enemy of Israel and a supporter of regimes dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the U.S. and the sponsorship of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria.” The same is absolutely true for Ecuador.
 
If you do not know PENULTIMOS DIAS out of Barcelona, you should add them to your reading lists. Like BABALU blog, the day to day story of communist repression by the Castro regime, now active in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador because no one stands up to these liars, perps and pervs, continues onward.

What is important is this: open media and free speech as an essential cannot be compromised or else all else falls around you, deteriorating the quality of life. It is that simple. We commend the SMU campus in Dallas, Texas for working with the Bush foundation to gather scores of bloggers for freedoms. Unlike the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne- which contrary to president Correa’s own liars is  not and never has been a well respected university and is in no way an “Ivy League” elite school. The University of Illinois is a degree mill- a shopping center school for shallow thinkers and is now so disgraced by its abuse of Illinois state monies that no one should consider much about this school except to ponder when the State of Illinois will review its fraudulent budgets for taxpayer abuse in promoting the lies about the great and wise Correa who is neither great nor wise. Indeed, Correa has merged Ecuador with Cuba and Iran in a ruinous, destructive triad of evil and disgrace. One is well advised to act with the Cuban freedom lovers, all based on role models from Eastern Europe and Honduras, which Ecuadoreans for too long refused to study and pretended that these valiant souls mattered nothing in their shallow, vain world. Now….you need them badly.

Cyber-dissidence in Cuba: At a Crossroads
Abril 23, 2010 
 
In recent months, people interested in how new technologies can challenge authoritarian societies have witnessed an interesting debate among researchers, writers and, of course, the bloggers Yevgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky. Various Anglophone media have published the debate, and a good summary can be found in the magazine Prospect (Nos. 165-166, December 2009-January 2010).

It is, in a nutshell, about a dispute over the lessons we can draw from very different phenomena — the post-electoral mobilizations in Belarus in 2006; the demonstrations of the Burmese monks in 2007; and the “Green Revolution” that shook Iran last year — which share one common denominator: the important role played by new technologies in their organization and in the almost instantaneous dissemination of news about government repression.

Initially inflated by the extensive media coverage of these protests, the expectations of those who saw in the new technologies the key to a new and glamorous form of struggle and political organization, capable to leading civil society to the paths of massive protests, have been somewhat disappointed. The obvious outcome is that none of these movements has succeeded in overthrowing a single regime, although undoubtedly they have weakened them in the face of public opinion. Morozov, pessimistic to a fault, has gone so far as to blame these experts, their politicized programs and the media enthusiasm that causes the cyber-dissidents to undermine the causes they were trying to promote for producing the exact opposite of what they intended: an increase in repression and an extension of the limits of authoritarian surveillance.

Whatever our own position on this debate, we might well applaud the enthusiasm of Shirky with regards to the “organization without organizations,” the “new civic structure,” or the “technological autoimmune disease,” or, alternately, we might align ourselves with the pessimism of Morozov in suggesting that totalitarian states are strong enough to resist popular discontent and to respond to cyber-dissidents with their own weapons. In either case, it is clear that in recent years the landscape of political protests in closed societies has undergone an important mutation associated with the conjunction of new media and technology.

I use the term “mutation” to be clear that it is not just about a new way of transmitting the discourse of classic dissidence, nor is it simply a question of the availability of “new tools” which are clearly more agile and secure compared to passing proclamations or samizdats from hand to hand. The fact is that these new tools, by their very nature, are starting to generate new and contagious forms of social organization; forms that, in addition to translating into more or less massive protests, could also help to reconstruct the fabric of civil society in authoritarian countries.

* * *

Even a society like Cuba, which participates in a marginal way in the explosion of new technologies — keeping in mind that the most optimistic statistics suggest that no more than 10% of the population has Internet access on the island, and at a cost of half the monthly wage to connect for one hour — has managed in a very short time to place itself on the cyber-dissidence map, thanks to the activities of an elite group of people determined to exploit the democratic openings offered by the new media.

The “Cuban case,” in my opinion, is doubly sui generis: In addition to leaping the barriers of technological determinism, it offers clues to trace a “third way” between the “pessimists” and the “optimists” with respect to the real impact of the new media on dissidence.

Almost against her will, the blogger Yoani Sánchez has become the most visible figure of a protest movement that uses the new media to report the daily violations of basic freedoms. Her supporters within Cuba are still a minority, but the tacit sympathy she arouses is increasing, in tune with the demands for change at all levels. Her way of showing the reality that the official media ignores, her growing international recognition and her courageous acts of protest in various public spaces, have earned her a network of support unprecedented in the history of Cuban protest movements. And the support is not only for her, but also for Claudia Cadelo, Miriam Celaya, Orlando Luis Pardo, Reinaldo Escobar, Laritza Diversent, Luis Felipe Rojas and other cyber-chroniclers of disenchantment who have made access to the new technologies their principle instrument of protest.

Inspired by bloggers, rappers or artists who are not afraid to openly share their strong opinions, young people are losing their fear of expressing themselves. At the same time, they are increasingly using Twitter and cell phones to document repression, as well as to report the ever more numerous “leaks” of prohibited information: from the closed-door meeting at the Central Committee headquarters, to the freezing and starvation deaths in the Psychiatric Hospital, to the explicit videos of student protests and police beatings.

Meanwhile, the traditional opposition — fragmented, infiltrated and constantly harassed by the political police — spends years trying to make its grievances more visible. But Orlando Zapata’s recent death in prison after a prolonged hunger strike, and the marches of the Ladies in White through the streets of Havana over the seven years since the Black Spring of 2003, represent a definitive turning point in the history of the dissident movement on the island —and of its coverage by international media.

The Internet and the independent blogosphere have played a fundamental role in this turning point. I am not referring only to the fact that Yoani Sánchez and other bloggers have physically accompanied the courageous Ladies in White in the face of mobs organized by State Security and the Interior Ministry. What is happening is a change in the logic that guides these protest marches: the methods of the bloggers, which have already proved effective in previous incidents, have finally spread to other groups.

To understand this we must go back to August 2008, when Yoani Sánchez and a group of friends decided to carry out a protest at a concert of Pablo Milanés and other “officially-approved” musicians at the Anti-Imperialist Bandstand in Havana. The purpose of the protest was to demand the release of the recently-arrested rocker Gorki Águila, leader of the punk band Porno Para Ricardo, whose irreverent lyrics exceed all the limits of what is permissible under Cuban censorship.

On that occasion, while Yoani and her friends were beaten and dragged away by State Security agents, they managed to record the sounds of their protest and subsequent beatings, and quickly posted the audio on the internet. Just before the protest, a group of Cuban bloggers-in-exile had circulated an “Open letter to Pablo Milanés and other Cuban musicians,” which was picked up by the major press agencies and ultimately signed by prominent musicians and political organizations such as Amnesty International.
This letter, sent to thousands of email addresses inside and outside the island, triggered a chain reaction. A feeling of discontent had taken hold among many people, in Cuba and abroad. The repression against Yoani and her friends was the definitive catalyst of the protests. The Cuban authorities — faced with the cameras of the international press outside the court where Gorki Águila was being tried — were forced to undo the judicial pantomime they had launched against the musician. Five days after his arrest on a charge of “pre-criminal dangerousness” the charge against Gorki was reduced to “disobedience.” Slapped with a 600 pesos fine, which was paid from exile and delivered to the authorities in 5-cent coins, Gorki closed the episode with a mocking performance, which was also seen as the first victory of the bloggers’ tactics in Cuba.

The Castro regime has serious cause for concern if, as happened a few weeks ago, traditional dissidents and bloggers choose to make common cause on several fronts, calling on the international press and foreign diplomats to act as witnesses and taking advantage of the mechanism of “information cascades,” as described by Susanne Lohman, and applied by Shirky to digital activism.

“When a small group is willing to take public action against a regime, Shirky writes, —and the regime’s reaction is muted, it provides information about the value of participation to the group of citizens who opted not to participate. Some members of this group will then join in the next round of protests. In turn, further non-reaction by the regime will provide additional information to the next group of ‘fence-sitters,’ — thereby increasing participation. Consequently, strong reaction by the regime can be effective in putting down insurrection, but at the same time risks constraining and, in extreme cases, delegitimizing the regime itself. If the regime acts late, it can thus lose in one of two ways: the insurrections can win, or the state can win, but at Pyrrhic costs.”

In countries such as China and Iran, with a high rate of connection, technology reduces the marginal cost of protest and is a fairly simple way to convert the passive “fence-sitters” into demonstrators at critical moments. In Cuba, for now, limitations in Internet access make this scenario an almost utopian perspective. There is, however, another way to spread the message, which first passes through the Cuban Diaspora and then returns to the Island through media such as satellite TV or blogs read by Cubans. It takes longer but it is no less effective.

One good example is the recent campaign #OZT: I accuse the Cuban government. In barely a month, through Twitter and the Internet, a handful of activists have managed to gather almost fifty thousand signatures condemning the death of Orlando Zapata and supporting the release of the political prisoners in Cuba. Among them are hundreds of public figures ranging from Pedro Almodóvar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Fernando Savater, to Roberto Saviano and Anthony Appiah. The media effect of this campaign has been overwhelming and has successfully affected the Cuban reality. Three prominent young intellectuals, members of Cuba’s Artists and Writers Union, UNEAC, have decided to add their names, knowing the consequences which may befall them. Though few in number, they have a kind of immunity: were they to face repression, the subsequent wave of solidarity would encourage more people to get off the fence, causing major problems for the regime.

This has been the great lesson of Yoani Sánchez, learned by both the Ladies in White and cyberactivists-in-exile: Use the new media and the opportunities of the Internet to develop a win-win scenario of media transparency; no matter how it responds — whether with indifference or repression — the government is seen to be weak.

* * *

Yoani Sánchez and the Cuban bloggers have not only made it possible to know a reality silenced by the official press (as Yoani herself often repeats, “We have shattered the monopoly over the control of information”), but they have also in a way made it “trendy” — in the benumbed Cuban society — to exercise forgotten freedoms. The same journalism student who a few months ago reproached Yoani for being part of “a media campaign,” now uses his blog to report a case of corruption and then to confess his disappointment over the lack of an official response.

The resonance of the Cuban blogger phenomenon in the media around the world, and its massive support from exile, suggests a hopeful perspective in the necessary process of rebuilding the social fabric damaged by decades of censorship and repression. But it has also forced the Cuban government to devise counteroffensive cybernetic strategies. Telling examples include: the renovation of government websites; a major presence on the social networks; the creation of a platform of official blogs designed to slander and criticize the independent bloggers; and the mission of fighting the “Internet campaigns against Cuba” which have centered on trusted students at the University of Computer Sciences. Once again, however, the government is too late. Their blogs have very little presence on the search engines; their ability to mobilize the media is notably inferior to that of thousands of activists and bloggers in exile, and their technical capabilities can’t compete with those in the democratic world.

Unlike the sophisticated cyber-control measures implemented by the Chinese government or the Iranian regime, the Cuban government’s strategies have been clumsy in the extreme. The pro-government counterinsurgency has a limited captive audience, and is difficult to expand in the short term because there is less and less consensus around official discourse, including within the ranks of officialdom. Other control mechanisms — such as blocking the DesdeCuba platform, the use of spy software in Internet cafes, hotels and youth clubs, or the control of institutional email networks — have shown themselves to be, by and large, irrelevant in the face of the stubbornness the cyber-dissidence and the Creole ability to circulate all sort of things in all sort of ways. For once, the forbidden is winning the battle, at least among the minority of the public represented by Cuban Internet users.

Outside the Internet, however, the repression is much less subtle and more effective, ranging from sophisticated mechanisms to listen to the telephone network, to the beatings and acts of repudiation organized by the political police against anyone who dares to protest in public.

Thus, we arrive at a critical crossroads: government restrictions on Internet use have turned the web into a minority space for claims of freedom, but it is still not strong enough to convene massive social protests. At the same time, outside this virtual world the repression leaves little space for actions that could trigger a kind of wake-up call and lead the population at large to join the dissidents in the streets.

The extent to which Cuban cyber-dissidence might circumvent this dilemma is something that will be seen in the coming months. What recent weeks have demonstrated is that when a synergy develops between traditional dissidence and cyber-dissidence, the government is forced on the defensive.

April, 2010

Ernesto Hernández Busto
Barcelona

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Sound familiar yet? And, as always we wish the Cuban opposition godspeed. Soon enough, the Cubans will realize that their island prison is theirs: the Castroites are fleeing- with their dirty money- to Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina. This leaves the gulag empty….of cash and of manpower. For now, the appearance of death from the Castro regime- the thugs, the beatings and the cruel deaths continue were one to even question the horrifying, bankrupt Castro dictatorship…now taking its better trained personnel and its money to other zones, leaving Cuba to rot under their oppression, services by porn tourism, sex slaves and drug runners. Do you seriously think that the almost 100,000 so called Cuban doctors- aka slaves of Castro- now working at God knows what- in the Andes are going back? No indeed they are not. And what, with unemployment so very very high, does Ecuador need with imported-forced labor from Cuba? These are not doctors. These are not even persons fully literate in Spanish. They are called well trained-well educated. That too is a lie.  Why are they in Ecuador? Because….you let them.

Inside Ecuador- and we know a lot about this- all web sites are watched by the Correa team of goons. Moreover, any opposition e mail lists are not only watched by the Correa goons but the messy, sloppy and ultimately disgraceful abuse of any opposition e mail lists- because you let this happen- shows a stunning full infiltration of one group’s e mail lists with all others. Competing so called opposition e mail groups watch their member names used for e mail lists by others who do not have nor hold the same outlook. This will always lead to dumbed down, ineffective communications which ultimately reveals that the opposition actors use and abuse each other with not one iota of respect for the other…only how much they can suck off of someone else’s hard work. This is no way to stand together in unity to restore democracy’s goals. In-fighting and infiltration are your own doing as each tries to out manipulate the other. The Cuban dissidents oddly know this now. Ecuadoreans pretend that each can out manipulate the other and still Ecuador looks stupid.

The Cuban dissidents are doing what Ecuador is not doing: they have tightened up their message, have stuck to the primary approach and support each other. It is that simple. This was not always so. Of course those who warred with each other are….now dead or still in a Cuban prison, often called a hole in the dirt. Cubans have learned the hard way. We do not advise 45 years of horror to finally give up the Ecuadorean addiction to manipulating dishonestly all around you.

Here is another take on the cyber community trying to get freedoms restored:

The Wall Street Journal
OPINION
APRIL 24, 2010
Miss Me Yet? The Freedom Agenda After George W. Bush
Dissidents in the world's most oppressive countries aren't feeling the love from President Obama.
By BARI WEISS

Dallas

No one seems to know precisely who is behind the "Miss Me Yet?" billboard—the cheeky one featuring a grinning George W. Bush that looks out over I-35 near Wyoming, Minn. But Syrian dissident Ahed Al-Hendi sympathizes with the thought.

In 2006, Mr. Hendi was browsing pro-democracy Web sites in a Damascus Internet café when plainclothes cops carrying automatic guns swooped in, cuffed him, and threw him into the trunk of a car. He spent over a month in prison, some of it alone in a 5-by-3 windowless basement cell where he listened to his friend being tortured in the one next door. Those screams, he says, were cold comfort—at least he knew his friend hadn't been killed.

Mr. Hendi was one of the lucky ones: He's now living in Maryland as a political refugee where he works for an organization called Cyberdissidents.org. And this past Monday, he joined other international dissidents at a conference sponsored by the Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University to discuss the way digital tools can be used to resist repressive regimes.

He also got to meet the 43rd president. In a private breakfast hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Bush, Mr. Hendi's message to the former president was simple: "We miss you." There have been "a lot of changes" under the current administration, he added, and not for the better.

Adrian Hong, who was imprisoned in China in 2006 for his work helping North Koreans escape the country (a modern underground railroad), echoed that idea. "When I was released [after 10 days] I was told it was because of very strong messaging from the White House and the culture you set," he told Mr. Bush.

Bloomberg News

The former president, now sporting a deep tan, didn't mention President Obama once on or off the record. The most he would say was, "I'm really concerned about an isolationist mentality . . . I don't think it lives up to the values of our country." The dissidents weren't so diplomatic.

Mr. Hendi elaborated on the policy changes he thinks Mr. Obama has made toward his home country. "In Syria, when a single dissident was arrested during the administration of George W. Bush, at the very least the White House spokesman would condemn it. Under the Obama administration: nothing."

Nor is Mr. Hendi a fan of this administration's efforts to engage the regime, most recently by deciding to send an ambassador to Damascus for the first time since 2005. "This gives confidence to the regime," he says. "They are not capable of a dialogue; they don't believe in it. They believe in force."

Mr. Hong put things this way: "When you look at the championing of dissidents . . . and even the rhetoric, it's dropped off sharply." Under Mr. Bush, he says, there were many high-profile meetings with North Korean dissidents. "They went out of their way to show this was a priority."

Then there is Marcel Granier, the president of RCTV, Venezuela's oldest and most popular television station. He employs several thousand people—or at least he did until Hugo Chávez cancelled the network's license in 2007. Now, he's struggling to maintain an independent channel on cable: Mr. Chávez ordered the cable networks not to carry his station in January. Government supporters have attacked his home with tear gas twice, yet he remains in the country, tirelessly advocating for media freedom.

Like many of the democrats at the conference, Mr. Granier was excited by Mr. Obama's historic election, and inspired by the way he energized American voters. But a year and a half later, he's disturbed by the administration's silence as his country slips rapidly towards dictatorship. "In Afghanistan," he quips, "at least they know that America will be involved for the next 18 months."

This sense of abandonment has been fueled by real policy shifts. Just this week word came that the administration cut funds to promote democracy in Egypt by half. Programs in countries like Jordan and Iran have also faced cuts. Then there are the symbolic gestures: letting the Dalai Lama out the back door, paltry statements of support for Iranian demonstrators, smiling and shaking hands with Mr. Chávez, and so on.

Daniel Baer, a representative from the State Department who participated in the conference, dismissed the notion that the White House has distanced itself from human-rights promotion as a baseless "meme" when I raised the issue. But in fact all of this is of a piece of Mr. Obama's overarching strategy to make it abundantly clear that he is not his predecessor.

Mr. Bush is almost certainly aware that the freedom agenda, the centerpiece of his presidency, has become indelibly linked to the war in Iraq and to regime change by force. Too bad. The peaceful promotion of human rights and democracy—in part by supporting the individuals risking their lives for liberty—are consonant with America's most basic values. Standing up for them should not be a partisan issue.

Yet for now Mr. Bush is simply not the right poster boy: He can't successfully rebrand and depoliticize the freedom agenda. So perhaps he hopes that by sitting back he can let Americans who remain wary of publicly embracing this cause become comfortable with it again. For the sake of the courageous democrats in countries like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Colombia, China and Russia, let's hope so.

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ECrisis also notes that Mr. Reich does not call the Raul Reyes FARC intel camp bring down as a bombing. It was not a bombing. It was a raid. A legal, well planned raid to shut down the FARC intelligence and command center operating inside Ecuador with Correa’s well paid plantation rental zone…not that far from Lago Agrio. Do you seriously believe that Obama would have approved Uribe’s raid on the FARC camp inside Ecuador? You can ask Obama’s own Soros man Dan Restrepo or Arturo – I love Mexican peasant revolt studies –Valenzuela. You can ask. Of course they would not have approved this legal act. They are currently busy helping pay the disinformation actors who continue to lie about the Andes- lies which lock you in to possibly decades of unfree life.

We hope our readers stop calling this a bombing. It was a raid. You can of course review the media photos of the raid: noticeable- and contrary to Correa’s bald lies- there are no bomb craters- no holes in the ground. Bombs blow up things upon detonation. Raids get in and get out. This was a raid. You can tell Correa and Mrs Hodges’s paid US AID propagandists inside Quito to stop lying and calling this an illegal bombing. It was a raid. You can also tell Cesar Montufar to get with the truths on this and stop lying. And while you are at it, you can ask both Hodges and Montufar just how much US tax money was spent illegally to support their support efforts to install the Cuban-ALBA constitution inside Ecuador in 9-08. Go ahead- ask. It is your right. And then ask yourself what you are doing to get rid of this horrible constitution either by full replacement or full amendments thereto.

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE                     

Otto J. Reich

April 23, 2010 4:00 A.M.

21st Century Socialism
The attempt to destroy democracy in Latin America.

The Obama administration started out on the wrong foot in world affairs. It used techniques better suited for domestic political campaigns — popularity contests — in its foreign policy. In our own hemisphere, the result was confusion for our allies and our enemies alike.

The overriding objective of U.S. policy — in Latin America and elsewhere — should be to advance U.S. national interests, not to curry favor with foreign leaders. If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so much the better. But when we try to befriend undemocratic leaders and ignore their belligerence in the process, we neither become better liked nor advance our interests. Some of the despots in Latin America to whom the Obama administration extended an open hand, only to encounter a clenched fist, include the rulers of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, and Honduras’s former president José Manuel Zelaya.

Foremost among our national interests is security, but, caught up in trying to be liked, the administration is underestimating the threats we face. The main threat to the peace, freedom, prosperity, and security of the U.S. and the Western Hemisphere comes not from military coups, but from a form of creeping totalitarianism that calls itself 21st Century Socialism; it is allied with some of the most virulent forms of tyranny and anti-Western ideology in the world. 

Following Fidel Castro’s direction, this new gang of autocrats gains power through elections, and then dismantles democracy from within. That has already happened in Venezuela and Bolivia, is happening in Nicaragua and Ecuador, almost happened in Honduras, and could happen in any other nation that falls into the grasp of something called ALBA, the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.

ALBA’s hostile-takeover pattern is clear: After gaining power democratically, they use force to intimidate political adversaries and the media; politicize the police and the military and place them at the orders of the ruling party; pack the judiciary with compliant or corrupt judges; rewrite electoral laws to eliminate opposition candidates and parties; seize private property or force businesses to close using bogus charges; incite mob violence to force potential opponents into silence or exile; and attack the churches, civic associations, press, labor unions, and any other civil institutions that dare to challenge the government. Their stated model is Cuba; they seek to replicate the Orwellian dictatorship that rules that island, a pauperized prison-nation whose citizens risk everything to flee.
 
ALBA was conceived in Havana decades ago but is financed today by Venezuela’s petrodollars. It is actually the revival of Fidel Castro’s goal of uniting international radical and terrorist movements of the developing world under his leadership, a movement that in the 1960s he organized as “The Tricontinental.”

The first foreign country Fidel Castro visited after the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship, in 1959, was Venezuela. While there, he secretly asked Venezuelan president Romulo Betancourt for $300 million (over $3 billion in today’s dollars) to “undermine the Yankees” in Latin America. Betancourt, a center-left leader but a committed democrat, flatly turned Castro down. Three years later, Castro was supporting guerrilla warfare in Venezuela and sending an armed expedition of Cuban soldiers to join Marxist rebels in an attempt to destroy Venezuelan democracy and acquire its oil wealth. Today, thanks to Hugo Chávez, Castro has achieved that goal.

Castro targeted Bolivia in the 1960s because of its strategic location and enormous mineral wealth. Bolivia has land borders with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Chile — more than two-thirds of South America. In 1967, Castro’s bloodthirsty lieutenant Ernesto (Che) Guevara selected Bolivia as the site on which to begin his Communist takeover of the continent. Guevara failed miserably, but today, another Castro follower, Bolivian president Evo Morales, is executing Guevara’s plan.

U.S. policy cannot be focused solely on the ALBA alliance, but neither can it ignore ALBA, because the Havana–Caracas–La Paz Axis is undermining the peace and prosperity of the rest of the hemisphere.

For example, Venezuela has played a destabilizing role in Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua, and above all Colombia, where Hugo Chávez maintains explicit strategic and political alliances with the narco-terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). (The term “narco-terrorist” is not mine; it is applied to the FARC by various agencies of the U.S. and European governments.) Just last month, the Spanish government accused Chávez of supporting the Spanish Basque terrorist group ETA as well as FARC.

Not satisfied with merely supporting FARC and allowing guerilla leaders and fighters to hide, train, and recuperate inside Venezuelan territory, Chávez has repeatedly closed its commercial border with, and threatened war against, Colombia. The impact on the Colombian economy has been devastating.

The U.S., Colombia, and other governments in the region have abundant evidence of massive flows of FARC-controlled cocaine through Venezuela. Senior Chávez-regime officials have been designated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as drug kingpins and active collaborators in FARC drug trafficking. These kingpins include the current head of Venezuela’s military intelligence services, Gen. Hugo Carvajal, former interior and justice minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, and former political-police (Disip) chief Henry Rangel Silva. Weapons are smuggled to the FARC through Venezuela with the active collusion of senior Chávez regime officials including Army Gen. Clíver Alcalá Cordones.

Last year, Peruvian intelligence services found evidence that Hugo Chávez actively supported the indigenous groups responsible for violent protests in that country. Former Bolivian presidents Jorge Quiroga and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada have charged that the Chávez regime clandestinely financed and supported riots in that country as far back as 2002, which toppled two governments in quick succession and led to the election of the leader of the rioters, Evo Morales. Chávez also actively supports radical groups in Ecuador, which under Pres. Rafael Correa hosted a command, control, operations, and training base for the Colombian FARC until it was destroyed in a cross-border raid by Colombian forces.

In Central America, Chávez actively supports the Sandinista regime of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. Next door, Chávez financed and encouraged Manuel Zelaya’s efforts to violate the constitution and laws of Honduras. The disruption to the economy of Central America of the six-month-long Honduran political crisis is said to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to those impoverished economies. Chávez used Venezuela’s oil resources to strengthen El Salvador’s Marxist FMLN party, and poured millions of dollars into both El Salvador’s and Panama’s presidential elections. (One of his favored candidates succeeded, the other failed.) Mexico’s intelligence services have found links between the Chávez regime and radical groups in that country.

Venezuela’s oil wealth has been used to influence Caribbean states through the PetroCaribe program, through which these countries can acquire oil on credit. A few forward-thinking Caribbean leaders, in Trinidad-Tobago and Barbados for example, have warned that PetroCaribe is saddling the Caribbean’s poor island nations with a debt burden they will never be able to repay. But cheap oil today is politically appealing.

PetroCaribe has allowed Chávez to manipulate the Organization of American States, as evidenced before and during the Honduras crisis. The OAS supported the ALBA position of returning the law-breaking Manuel Zelaya to power in contravention of a unanimous vote of the Honduran Supreme Court. (To be fair, the Obama administration also supported Zelaya until persuaded to reverse itself by a bipartisan group of senators and representatives. According to one Democratic member, the policy was “the most wrong-headed” he had ever seen from the State Department.)

Recently, Chávez named Honduras’s ousted would-be dictator Manuel Zelaya as the head of PetroCaribe’s “Political Council” — a body that does not yet exist. Chávez obviously created this position as an excuse to give Zelaya a salary with which to travel the Americas doing Chávez’s bidding.

There is another country, Argentina, that, although not a member of ALBA, bears watching. Agentina suffers from a lack of transparency, massive official corruption, harassment of private enterprise, manipulation of the free market and the institutions of democracy, and authoritarian tendencies. Its ruling presidential couple, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, have close ties to Cuba and Venezuela.

It has been well documented that Pres. Cristina Kirchner received millions of dollars from Hugo Chávez for her election campaign, money taken illegally from the Venezuelan state, introduced illegally into Argentina, and given to the Kirchner campaign in violation of Argentine law. The transfer of that money in 2007 was exposed in detail in a federal trial that took place in Miami, Fla. It is well known — but not yet documented or publicized — that similar transfers have taken place in at least a half-dozen countries in this region.

Like Castro’s before him, Chávez’s ambitions are global, and the principal goal of his international activities is to undermine or cripple U.S. strategic interests in the world, not just in the Americas. Chávez is very open about his determination to bring down what he calls the U.S. Empire.

To this end, Chávez has forged strong bonds with undemocratic states such as Russia, Belarus, and Iran. Chávez has signed numerous economic and military agreements with all three countries. For example, up to this year, he had purchased over $4 billion in Russian military equipment, including state-of-the art SU-30 fighter-bombers (similar to our new F-22 Raptor), hundreds of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, and a factory in which to build untold numbers more of that iconic Russian weapon. He invited the Russian navy to maneuver in the Caribbean for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Russia’s hard-line prime minister, Vladimir Putin, visited Venezuela in April and signed an additional $5 billion arms deal with Chávez, plus oil agreements said by experts to be very favorable to Russia.

Chávez has visited Tehran numerous times, signed many commercial, financial, and other agreements with Iran, hosted Iranian leader Ahmadinejad in Caracas, and facilitated Ahmadinejad’s travel to ALBA members Bolivia and Nicaragua. He has supported Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capable of striking targets in Europe and throughout the Middle East. He is a vociferous enemy of Israel and a supporter of regimes dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the U.S. and the sponsorship of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria.

During Chávez’s eleven years in power, Hamas and Hezbollah have established a presence in Venezuela. Israeli military intelligence recently disclosed that a shipment of arms seized last November by Israeli commandos departed from a Venezuelan port and docked in an Iranian port before sailing through the Suez Canal bound for Lebanon. The weapons, including missiles, reportedly were to be delivered to Hezbollah.

Chávez has turned Venezuela over to the Castro regime. Today, there are between 40,000 and 50,000 Cubans in Venezuela on official missions, by the Chávez regime’s own admission. Since 2005, Venezuela’s armed forces have been obliged to embrace Cuba’s national-security doctrine, which considers the U.S. the greatest external threat to the survival of the 21st Century Socialist revolutionary regime in Caracas.

In spite of all this, there are policymakers in Washington, D.C., who maintain that the Castro-Chávez-Morales alliance is no more than a nuisance. But Chávez, because of his bottomless oil-money barrel, is the principal source of subversion in Latin America today. It is time to confront him. It is time to care less about what others think of us and focus more on what they do to us.

— Between 1981 and 2004, Otto J. Reich served Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush in the National Security Council, as assistant secretary of state, U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, and special envoy for Western Hemisphere affairs. This article is adapted from Congressional testimony he delivered on March 10 before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

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We suggest that our readers- and anyone who cares about Ecuador and Venezuela stop doing what too many Venezuelans and of course every single person working for the U.S. Department of State and the current White House do:  stop pretending that Otto Reich is evil and a liar. Some of our editors advise that we not say this but it must be said- Reich is not a liar. Obviously there is not one dishonest word in this report or any of his work. Clearly all Ecuadoreans and Venezuelans owe Otto a debt of gratitude for even his short words about the region’s dire plunge in to evil by its own hands. Like all Latin American truth tellers- and real cyber and media dissidents, the US government has posted a Do Not Disturb sign outside the US government and all its embassies. You can ask Amb Heather Hodges, recently busy flying in liars like Castro-adoring U.S. Congressman McGovern {D-Massachussetts]  to boost, approved by US  Speaker Nancy Pelosi and expand the fake lawsuit against Chevron Texaco- using Ecuadoreans and the Correa government to steal from Chevron- what she and her thousands of paid persons are doing to bring up the curtain of open media and free speech in Ecuador and drive out the Cuban spies. For our part, we have never understood why Obama and the U.S. Democrats support the attorney Donziger-Correa extortion racket against Chevron. Not only is the so called law suit a fraud but the Ecuadorean people are the victims of this law suit fraud for all will pay and pay for the fraud underway. You can of course tell Correa, Obama and Donziger that you will not pay for nor be party to this fake law suit. The fake law suit in Lago Agrio is only about making money for Donziger and his pals plus Correa: it is not about cleaning up PetroEcuador’s oil dumping grounds. Again- you can ask Correa or Hodges for the facts. Yes- you can ask. You can also choose to stop being Correa-Castro and Chavez’s proxy. This will require that you man up. You can also stop being Correa and the U.S. Democrats’ proxy in a law suit which you are paying for and of course will lose because it is a fake lawsuit. You can stop being a proxy of Correa’s scam to self enrich at your expense.

 Like all good Marxists, fake so called opposition to Correa in Ecuador revere the Castro communists and refuse to grow up and stand for something- anything- remotely akin to restoring freedom in Ecuador. But- hey! You can ask. You can also ask Amb. Hodges why her own embassy refused to attend a talk given by Reich the last time he was in Quito. This was before her time but the mindset and her decision makers are still active….actively lying a lot about Ecuador and its criminal cartel merger with Castro-Chavez and Iran.  Did Correa tell you about all his massive, state merger deals with Iran and Chavez?  Did Arturo Valenzuela or the disgraced for his past proclivities [although deserving credit for some very very tiny truth telling advances of late] Cesar Montufar- whose own checkered history reveals him to be undependable, manipulative and manipulated? No- these victors of vapidity and temerity remain…inchoate. Partial; truths are like partial sex- unsatisfying, synthetic and ultimately unhelpful and dishonest.  Any single Ecuadorean and North American could have- and should have- stated or written exactly what Otto Reich has so done today. Why the running away from the truth?

We also hope that you do not forget to extend your respectful gratitude to Mr. Reich. He is actually just about your only friend because….friends do not lie and friends want a better tomorrow…not more lies, more manipulations and more evil.  You think Rafael Correa is your friend? You think that friends should lie to you and merge your being with Iran and Castro’s Cuba? You think that Correa’s goons should use the citizens of Ecuador to boost a fake lawsuit against Chevron Texaco- a phony lawsuit as it is today which will cost Ecuadoreans hundreds of millions not just from disgrace and revulsion of honest investors? Is that helping you yet? And why we wonder would any Ecuadorean let this phony lawsuit against Chevron go on and on and on- costing you money and creating Ecuador as a Gone Out of Business nation for its stubborn promotion of fraud? You are either a party to the Donziger-Correa fake lawsuit, as Ecuadoreans for you are and will pay for this or… you are not. You are… their proxy today. You do not have to be anyone’s proxy.

Who do you believe-? Correa or Mr. Reich? One is a truth teller and the other is not. You can choose to stop being a proxy for Iran, for the FARC, for Hezbollah, for Chavez, for Donziger’s ridiculous law suit and for Correa’s self enrichment games. No man is free as a proxy. Just ask the Cubans…or better yet- the Ukrainians, the Czechs, Hungarians and the Poles. They know what it is like. Do you enjoy living your life under the cloud of manipulators and selfish liars who just use you? If not- now is the time to MAN UP.  The truth will start to set you free…proxy-free.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis