Articles and opinion columns by Latin American analysts who take an unwavering stand for freedom, including members and directors of the IID.
Guatemala truly is a showcase of corporativism. The economy is run by about 15 players who determine market conditions at polo matches. Political parties are organized around the idea that the public treasury is the election bounty. Television radio and movie theatres are monopolized by a single powerful economic group that gets to decide what news is to be spread and what entertainment will prevail in the country. The military is partly penetrated by powerful economic interests and partly by organized crime. Court decisions can be commissioned — should the price be right.
“Without a market in which allocations can be made in obedience to the law of supply and demand, it is difficult or impossible to funnel resources with respect to actual human preferences and goals.” We should follow the evidence; free-markets can best address our preferences and goals.
Hate speech expresses and incites hatred toward other human beings on account of some aspect of their identity. And as people tend to search for a culprit different from themselves when it comes to failure, hate speech facilitates solving the riddle.
The “term narco-state is applied to all such countries whose institutions are heavily and significantly influenced by narcotics’ trafficking and whose leadership are, simultaneously; governmental officials and members of illicit narcotics’ trafficking networks, shielded and protected by their legal immunities”. Narco-politics is “such political activities in which the State’s institutions are gravely influenced by narcotics’ trafficking”.
Today, in Venezuela, there are only two institutions that do not recognize Juan Guaido as the President In Charge and these are; Maduro’s dictatorship and the National Assembly who supposedly wants to end the dictatorship. Guaido is hostage to the sum of minorities who comprise the opposition’s majority and who prevent the President from forming a government.
Without rule of law people do not own their lives, property or a future. Absence of Rule of Law not only defines the political character of a society, but it affects development. The United States is “one nation under God with freedom and JUSTICE for all,” as the Pledge of Allegiance says. “There shall be one rule of Justice for the rich and the poor; for the favorite in Court, and the Countryman at the Plough.”
In Venezuela, the dictatorship is exhausting its last resources, its playing its last pawns, and is trekking towards its unavoidable end. The question remains, however, as to how long that end will take to arrive and what must be done to speed it up and for it to represent a true change for the reconstruction of a society and a state devastated by the intervention of transnational organized crime. In a confrontation, such as the one Venezuelan people are enduring, victory is achieved by the aggregate of one’s own correct decisions and the incorrect decisions taken by the enemy.
And while Lagerfeld the revered genius of sophistication and grace destroyed the revolutionary myth, Mr Raul Castro deceit himself thinking that the Chanel visit was yet another demonstration of the superiority of revolutionary principles over degenerated market democracies. His people on the streets and in the balconies of the scruffy neighborhood harboring Paseo del Prado had other thoughts.
The Lima Group has dismissed the use of force to save Venezuelans from the regime’s barbarism. Maduro is happy. That statement diminishes the Group’s credibility. That’s why it was a mistake for the Lima Group to dismiss the use of force.
The basic element of Castroist Chavist dictatorships is the supplanting of policies and politics by crime as a “group of Transnational Organized Crime”. Everything done by Castroist Chavist governments constitutes a crime, nothing is political. Its control over the States and political positions they have is a major façade of the most important and unprecedented criminal organization known to date. One other source of Castroist Chavist’s revenue is narcotics’ trafficking that now has Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro, and Bolivia with Evo Morales, identified as narco-states,
