Articles and opinion columns by Latin American analysts who take an unwavering stand for freedom, including members and directors of the IID.
In Bolivia, the dictator was ousted but not the dictatorship and there is neither transition, nor democracy. To end the dictatorship and regain democracy, we must go back to the “rule of law” with the Republic of Bolivia. The Bolivian peoples’ mandate to the Interim President is THE TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY and such transition starts by ceasing the dictatorship’s usurper legal constitutional framework and going back to the REPUBLIC OF BOLIVIA. This is how the dictatorial state ends. Until such a time and way, the “Rule of Law” is regained, the government is but the continuation of the dictatorial regime because it acts under the rules of the dictatorship and elections will be nothing more that another act of the “vote-catching dictatorship”.
A just government relies on a social contract freely entered into by free citizens. Thus, the scope and authority of that social contract extends only to those citizens that have agreed to be bound by the provisions of the contract. This is the essence of citizenship. So, as the argument goes, a social contract where anyone can join in defiance of the community of existing members is no social contract at all. Birthright citizenship is inherently self-contradictory.
In short, Transnational Organized Crime is slowly and silently taking over the US. This seems to me to be a greater menace to democratic institutions than the police. It would thus follow that we concentrate in devising ways to curtail their profits as wisely counseled many moons ago by Professor Milton Friedman. But I am afraid I sustain a very unpopular and minority vision of our problems.
The problem, really, was that the Castros saw Cuba only as a base of operations to act in the international arena against Washington and against the hated “capitalism.” That was their leitmotif. Cuba was already a danger, but not having eliminated that infectious focus allowed it to metastasize to other nations, such as Venezuela, and there’s a risk that it will continue to expand to Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, all countries of the Andean arc. So far, Washington has limited itself to imposing sanctions and showing its fangs, but Latin American countries have no foreign policy, except Cuba and Venezuela, and I don’t think they will change. I would start by recommending Americans to read Carbonell’s book. It is very good.
The 21st century is characterized by the existence of “two Americas”, the democratic one and the dictatorial other. The Coronavirus pandemic has created situations of fear, stress, and distrust with collective quarantines and confinements that have generated social and economic crises that become political crises. The worldwide calamity is being taken advantage of by Castrochavism -comprised by Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and their allies- to conspire and meddle in Americas’ democratic States with the objective of destabilizing, weakening, and if possible, toppling their governments. We live in a time of the dictatorships’ new attacks against democracies, taking advantage of conditions stemming from the worldwide crisis. It is the confrontation axis of the 21st Century -that of the “two Americas”- that will only change when the region regains freedom and democracy, stops the regimes of disgrace, usurpation, and of narco-states. It is not a political attack, it is Organized Crime that holds political power, it is Castrochavism spreading violence directed from Cuba and operated from Venezuela.
According to Joel Kotkin, the late period of the Industrial Age brought with it the development of a new stratus within the middle class. This is described by Kotkin as the clerisy “a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions notably universities, media, non-profit world and the upper bureaucracy”. The clerisy is the enabling class to implement the vision of the mega rich people which he describes as oligarchs. The clerisy and the oligarchs -who hold 50% of worldwide assets- envision a hyper regulated world that quenches innovation and private initiative. A controlled Medieval Village.
Prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua’s 21st Century dictatorships were already in extreme crises. Their features of transnational organized crime, institutionalized violation of human rights and their nature as narco-states linked to terrorism, had placed them in a terminal situation of being spurned by their people and sanctioned by the international community. In the Coronavirus pandemic they are doing what they know best to do; they increment internal violence, falsify data and information, and escalate their conspiracy to destabilize the region’s democracies. The Coronavirus pandemic could be used to prolong the permanence in power of Castrochavist dictatorships, but it could also determine their quicker demise and the ending of the disgrace they represent.
But what happens when individuals in other nations do not value freedom as we do? Should they be forced to be free? Historically, it cannot be argued that freedom is a universal value. Freedom is most easily defined as having the ability to act without constraint. Freedom is related to, but not identical to the concept of liberty. To be free is to be self-determining; to have liberty is to be liberated from something. Liberty is associated with institutions; freedom is personal. Freedom may not be a universal value, but it is an enduring one.
The quality of Uruguay’s leadership and the outstanding results of its pandemic control policies drove the “Fundación Libertad” chaired by Mario Vargas Llosa to issue a communique promoting the region wide adoption of Uruguay’s approach to combating Covid-19. In particular, “Fundación Libertad” emphasized the contrast between public policies in Uruguay and those adopted by Argentina which issued home arrest orders to its citizens; increased expenditures and killed economic activity. In a nutshell Argentina created the conditions to develop an economic Tsunami after Covid-19 is contained. And this will certainly make headlines. Uruguay on the contrary will most probably carry on unnoticed but its citizens are way happier than those of Argentina.
Fauda means “chaos” in Hebrew and Arabic. It is the name of a magnificent Netflix series. Is it a realistic series? Yes, but only in a certain way. Disbelief must be discarded, as is often the case in theater, and we must assume that the same secret war crew operates consistently without being detected in a small territory like Ramallah, which is a sort of city the size of a postage stamp. There is no human way for Arabs and Israelis to reach reasonable agreements. As long as the Palestinians dream of throwing the Jews to the sea, that’s not possible.
