Articles and opinion columns by Latin American analysts who take an unwavering stand for freedom, including members and directors of the IID.
Mercedes — like Remedios the Beauty — was a transforming human being who through love and discipline tamed the wild talent of her husband so that he would produce not only the trail blazing novel of the 20th century but ground breaking stories about the miracles of underdevelopment.
Organized crime uses it (politics is the art of what is possible) to maintain its presence in politics, to sustain its despicable laws, to continue controlling legislators, judges, and government officials to protect ill-gotten fortunes, to coverup narcotics’ trafficking, and above it all to have “impunity”..
The Palestinian leadership’s rejection of peace offers reflects its own rejection of a Palestinian state. The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat once joked that the Israelis want a Palestinian state more than the Palestinians do. He wasn’t wrong. The Palestinian leadership is not interested in an independent state because they know that the Palestinian government would likely collapse and that, in a worst-case scenario, a brutal civil war could ensue. Therefore, the status quo of the Israeli occupation is convenient for them, as they continue to receive money from foreign sources, security from the Israelis, and a scapegoat for the absence of peace.
“ The day Latin America spouses the rule of law it will become a powerful player in world affairs ” these were Brent Scowcroft’s words in October 1989 in San Jose Costa Rica while attending the celebration of the 100th anniversary of democracy in the tiny central American nation. We were talking about the impact that the Initiative for the Americas launched by President George HW Bush would have on the region. I thought it would be a gamechanger that could unleash the creative forces of a continent that had missed every other opportunity to develop.
President Alvaro Uribe Velez has had the most outstanding role in the open denouncement allegations and the effective fight against Castrochavism and its operations of narcotics’ trafficking, guerrilla, terrorism, and intervention. Not only has he defended Colombia, but he also defended the Americas. He inflicted hard strikes such as the bombing raid at Angostura, when Rafael Correa had turned Ecuador into a narco-state, part of the system lead by Castro and Chavez.
It appears that we tend to choose our party affiliations based more on who we are -our social identity- than on what we think. We adopt political beliefs, attitudes and values that reinforce and rationalize our partisan loyalties. For most of us, partisanship is more a judgement of where “people like me” belong than a reflection of political ideology.
Colombia has cultivated support to the rule of law and has up to now been a firm partner of the U.S. and liberal democracies in the fight against terrorism. But the Uribe case seems to point to the unbundling of this civic culture, as drug interests further penetrate state institutions initiating the stage pf phagocytosis where institutions are mere platforms to launch criminal activities.
The spectacular start of President Jeanine Añez tenure, marked by the Bolivian peoples’ hope to regain freedom and democracy, was shattered by agreements and covenants made with the dictatorship that left her subjected to the legislative, the judges, and the entire dictatorial system because she did not restore the Republic and illegitimated herself when she decided to be a candidate in the elections in which she was supposed to be a guarantor and not a candidate. Some people were changed, but not the system and Bolivia went from having a dictatorship with a functional opposition to having a government functional to the dictatorship.
In the first years of the so-called Cuban revolution, the regime announced through Che Guevara and Fidel Castro the “strategic objective” of flooding the United States with drugs to attack its youth. Narcotics’ trafficking is part of the means of the Cuban dictatorship’s anti-imperialist fight that now has been re-created within Castrochavism as expressed by its spokesman Evo Morales who in April of 2016 at the United Nations stated that “the fight against narcotics’ trafficking is an instrument of imperialism to oppress the nations.”
The world was astonished thirty years ago when Iraq´s dictator Saddam Hussein attacked and invaded his tiny oil-rich neighbor of Kuwait. On August 2, 1990, the post-Cold War order confronted its first international crisis. Iraq violated the territorial integrity of a sovereign state and two days later announced that Kuwait became its 19th province.
