Obama’s Test From Ch
Of all the foreign policy of George W. Bush messes is handing off to President-elect Barack Obama, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is the worst. The two tests that Chavez is key – shaping a long term respectful relationship with Latin America and the short-term terrorist threat in Venezuela – Bush scored an F. Obama’s got real work cut out for him. 200 of its 550 million people who live on $ 2 or less per day, Latin America faces a long-term failure to build a win-win relationship with the economic giant to the north, where GDP per capita is seven times higher than developing below the Rio Grande. The success of 45 million Hispanic Americans who have a per capita basis, three times what their relatives do back home, dramatizes the long-term solution. The modern system of legal creation of wealth in Latin America is ineffective and is not as rapid progress as a large part of Asia or Africa, and that in turn has spurred immigration to the states, including 12 million illegal . The solution was supposed to be the Washington Consensus policies – the balanced budget, increased taxes, fiscal austerity, free trade, combat government corruption and the privatization of state enterprises – which was loan qualifications for the IMF, World Bank and U.S. aid. But this strict policy – which is rarely applied to Washington – not to reduce poverty and failed especially to the Latin American political leaders who had the courage to apply them. Backfire that gave rise to the virulent strain of anti-Americanism that Chávez produced. In 1989 there were riots against the Washington Consensus reforms imposed on President Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela in 1992 were followed by an attempted coup against Chávez launched by Perez, who was deposed shortly thereafter. When Chávez rose from the ashes of the prison to the presidency in 1998 to win. He is savage capitalism and American power since they are subsidized by the U.S. as gasoline buyers. A few years later, similar riots against the rules of Washington ousted President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada of Bolivia, whose request for a $ 50,000,000 loan to President Bush was fired in the Oval Office with the crack “Who am I, Santa Claus?” The result in 2005 was the election of indigenous leader Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia, who like Chavez took the money and false ferocious anti-American discourse. Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, Honduras, and then fell like dominoes in the oil-funded anti-American camp of Chavez, who simultaneously had fifty billion dollars of businesses aligned with the FARC narco-terrorists in Colombia, OPEC, Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, China, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and who trash Bush – who ignored it all, pretending everything was OK. Bush is off hand it to Obama a Latin America that is deeply suspicious of America, where Iranian, Russian and Chinese arms and companies around the circle of Chávez country, where the growing threat of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, money laundering his human and drug trafficking has become the norm, where two U.S. ambassadors were kicked out of Venezuela and Bolivia, where a global recession that is attributed to dissipation U.S., the immigration, poverty, violence and instability worsen throughout the region. More than any of his predecessors since World War II, President Obama has a dramatic change in the relationship with Latin America. For poverty traps, the underlying problem, Obama needs to make the instruments of wealth creation – education, private property, businesses and cheap credit – and the 200 million Latin Americans who live on $ 2 per day. He could use a Marshall plan in which the public and private sectors of the rich democracies in Latin America interact on the ground in the barrios and directly to poor people. The “community organizer” Obama was ever in Chicago is exactly what the Latin American poor need in their corner today. As for short-term terrorist threat Chavez, Obama should go fast. Although the recession has cut Chavez’s oil revenues by more than half, he still has the largest and best equipped standing army in Latin America, the Russian submarines and fighter aircraft, Iranian missiles, uranium mines, Hezbollah and the FARC training and rest camps, and a cocaine and money laundering operation that Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme will look like tiddlywinks. Chavez was armed, scared, trapped and dangerous. He is afraid of being prosecuted for crimes against humanity as he left his office. He’s trapped by falling oil revenues that the props of his personal army, a huge bureaucracy, and half of the total wage bill in Venezuela. A paranoid sociopath, Chavez has lost his bugaboo – Bush – and confronted with a cool, intelligent black replacement. In such cases, he can manufacture a crisis so he can under martial law and a war against the U.S. to declare as Fidel Castro did in Cuba 50 years ago. Expect Iran, Russia and China, perhaps to deny involvement in. To counter Chavez, Obama to U.S. dependence on oil from Venezuela to lift and thus stop subsidizing Chávez state sponsorship of terrorism. This is not as difficult a task as Bush thought, because Venezuela fuels are not needed in a recession. But without U.S. revenues to subsidize his megalomaniacal fanaticism, Chavez will face new enemies among the soldiers closest to him, including thousands Cubans loyal to Chavez money is not his dreams of grandeur. By protecting America Obama could really help the suppressed democracy in Venezuela.