Terrorist worship in Venezuela

Houston Chronicle:

The late Colombian guerrilla leader Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda stands as such a reviled figure in his homeland that a Bogota magazine recently tried to determine who had caused more death and destruction: Marulanda or drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

But in oil-rich Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez is leading a socialist revolution and reaching out to rivals of the United States, Marulanda's March death of a heart attack at age 78 prompted eulogies and the construction of a bronze bust of the rebel commander.

Located in a Caracas slum, the monument was unveiled in a recent ceremony attended by 300 spectators, including Freddy Bernal, the mayor of a district of downtown Caracas who ordered the bust.

At the ceremony, where an American flag was burned by revelers, Bernal lauded Marulanda as "a revolutionary who gave his life for the cause of liberating Colombia."

Afterward, the Colombian Congress declared the mayor persona non grata.

The Foreign Ministry of Colombia, the United States' closest ally in South America, lodged a formal complaint, saying that Marulanda was involved in drug trafficking, homicide, kidnapping, child recruitment and the use of land mines.

The monument "offends the dignity of Colombia," added Manuel Ramiro Velasquez, a Colombian senator. Tens of thousands of Colombians, including many civilians, died in the 40-year war started by Marulanda.

Yet, from Simon Bolivar to Augusto Sandino to Che Guevara, revolutionary figures have been celebrated in Latin America. But much to the chagrin of the Colombians, Chavez's Venezuela is one of the few countries to take a shine to Sureshot and his Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

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But in the halls of the Colombian Congress, Velasquez, the senator, sees Marulanda in a darker light.

The dead rebel, he said, "represents 40 years of barbarity, kidnappings and assassinations."

Most people now recognize what a monumental failure communism was outside of the few willfully ignorant like Chavez and Castro. There are very few people who could build a monument to a failed revolutionary who fought for a failed economic model. Most people are intuitively smarter than that.

Liberals have also had a blind spot to the inhumanity of communism and its adherents. It is not by accident that communist have been the biggest mass murderers in history. They can not maintain power without genocide because communism is so alien to the human spirit.