Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Chavez and the banana-left alliance

Carlos Alberto Montaner:

Military leaders in Brazil are uneasy about Hugo Chávez. It is not comfortable to coexist with a neighbor intent on creating a militia with a million armed men.

The most benign hypothesis is that the militia is actually an occupation force devoted only to throttling the Venezuelans and controlling and patrolling a national dictatorship more or less patterned after the Cuban model.

The most worrisome theory believes that, in addition to oppressing the Venezuelans, a military apparatus of that size will end up developing international operations against the neighboring countries.

Brazilians are not unaware that when the Cuban army became the largest in Latin America it ended up invading Angola and Ethiopia with tens of thousands of soldiers, who -- from 1975 to 1989 -- fought in Africa the longest war ever waged by a foreign force: 14 years.

The military brass in Chile is just as uncomfortable. They sense that Chávez's growing militarism will metastasize throughout the continent, so they're starting a costly program of rearmament.

Nobody believes the tale that the million militiamen have been summoned to repel the United States. It's peculiar that two socialist governments are watching with the greatest concern the upsurge in Latin America of a militaristic left, inevitably destined to attack its neighbors. This phenomenon has spawned a new expression, conceived to describe the chavista trend: the banana left.

...

Chávez is the quintessence of the banana left. The banana left, forever angry and on a constant war footing, is Marxist, anti-West, authoritarian, irresponsibly populist, an enemy of the market, and on an apostolic mission to create a phantom revolution, rescued from the wreckage of the Cold War.

...

There is yet an additional danger. The banana left is not just an ideological space; it is also a political franchise for adventurers hungry for power, who seek an easily identifiable label. Thus, when the ineffable ''madman'' Abdalá Bucaram returned to Ecuador after his long exile in Panama, he insinuated that he had become a born-again chavista.

Several decades ago, in the midst of the Cold War, former communists such as Arthur Koestler and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz predicted that the final battle would be waged between them and those who remained faithful to Stalinism. In fact, things developed otherwise, but in Latin America today it is possible to predict something similar: The war confronting moderate socialism is against the banana left. That's where its most dangerous enemies grow and multiply.

Right now Chavez is a more dangerous enemy than bin Laden because he has the means to do more dmage to the US. Right now he has the Veneuzelan owned oil company sell off refineries in the US, why? Does he not want to have any assets in the US when he makes his next move?