Articles and opinion columns by Latin American analysts who take an unwavering stand for freedom, including members and directors of the IID.
The Cuban peoples’ courage, mobilized since the 11th of July 2021, has unleashed an irreversible process towards freedom and democracy and has empowered the oppressed peoples. The group of dictatorships, with Cuba as the head, comprised by Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, do not have; the backing of the people, the financial resources, have lost their myths and have been relegated to remain as a structured group of transnational organized crime.
Whataboutism degrades the level of discourse from rational criticism to petty bickering. I suppose it is natural to find forms of whataboutism in many domestic arguments. But notice how Vladimir Putin, Raul Castro, Nicolas Maduro and other heads of illiberal regimes use whataboutism as their default answer to any criticism.
Transnational Organized Crime penetration has proceeded slowly but steadily not only in Asia where Myanmar and Afghanistan are the opium and heroin leaders but in Latin America it has managed to initiate phagocytosis of the institutional frameworks of Colombia, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Paraguay.
What is happening in Chile? Even for Chileans it is difficult to provide a good answer as well as to find the exit for the tunnel. For me, the best word to describe 2021´s Chile is uncertainty. It has the name of the main political responsible, President Sebastián Piñera. It also has a collective face, that of the voters, the ones who elected the 155 constituents that will write the proposal for a new constitution.
Dictatorships, with Cuba as head and model -that turned 20th century Castroism into 21st century Castrochavism- are governed by a structured transnational group that acts in concert, committing crime to indefinitely hold power in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, obtaining directly or indirectly economic, political benefits and impunity. By its very nature and fundamental components, in democracy organized crime does not have an ideological, or political status.
With presidential elections in Honduras, Colombia and Brazil in 2022, the U.S. needs to establish an immediate coherent policy for Latin America. We cannot let China, Russia, and Iran use the chaos in the region to promote their interests in the area, contributing to further instability and further undermine regional democracies.
I have argued elsewhere that Latin American politicians, and leftist intellectuals in particular, have become “wound collectors” that always manage to blame the United States, or multinational corporations for all the ills that afflict the region. The authoritarian predisposition is to always blame problems on outsiders. Sadly, Latin culture is not, preeminently, a culture of personal freedoms, openness, tolerance, intellectual experimentation, and democracy.
In the midst of the irrevocable ascent of crudity and its powerful and numerous representatives the world was gifted by Japan with an opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic Games full of grace, elegance and kindness towards other human beings and the planet.
Within this scenario of attacks against the OAS to coverup the crimes of Cuba’s dictatorship and those of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua’s (countries that all have repression, political persecutions, imprisonments, and exiles), the President of the U.S. has nominated Professor Frank O. Mora as U.S. Ambassador to the OAS who has promised to be “an administrator of United States’ values such as democracy and human rights in the hemisphere and beyond”.
Fortunately for the hemisphere the signs that the porous, corporativist and rent seeking state created during the Spanish conquest is falling apart regionwide are astoundingly evident . Unfortunately it is at a time when the US is immersing itself into a period of isolation very similar to that prevailing at the dawn of the 20th century.
