Category: Foreign Policy

New Argentinian president Christina Kirchner tries her hand at distracting Argentinians and the world from her domestic problems by raising the specter of another war in the Fauklands (AFP link);

Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands, which remain in British hands after the 1982 war between the two countries, is “inalienable,” President Cristina Kirchner said Wednesday.

“The sovereign claim to the Malvinas Islands is inalienable,” she said in a speech marking the 26th anniversary of Argentina’s ill-fated invasion of the islands, located 480 kilometers (300 miles) off shore.

The April 2, 1982 invasion prompted then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to deploy naval forces to retake the Falklands, known as the Malvinas in Spanish.

The short, bloody conflict led to Argentina’s surrender on June 14, 1982 after the death of 649 Argentines and 255 Britons.

Kirchner’s problems actually began before her election when it was discovered that she was using hundreds of thousands of dollars from Venezuela’s socialist president Hugo Chavez in her campaign. A courier from Chavez was stopped at the airport in Buenas Aires with a suitcase stuffed with $800, 000 in what is now known throughout the region as “maleta-gate“.

Yesterday, her latest challenge conditionally ended when farmers ended their three-week strike (Miami Herald);

Thousands of farmers on Wednesday lifted a three-week strike that produced food shortages at markets throughout this 40 million-person country and represented the biggest challenge so far to President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

The farmers didn’t achieve their main goal, killing an increase in export taxes on soybeans and sunflowers, but they said they would wait, for at most 30 days, for negotiations with the government to move forward. Speaking at a rally in the central Argentine city of Gualeguaychú, a spokesman for the country’s four main farm associations said farmers would go back to blocking roads and withholding their production if negotiations failed.

Such measures have stopped tons of meat, fruit and other food from reaching markets, especially in Buenos Aires. Farmers began lifting roadblocks throughout the country Wednesday morning.

Farmers have criticized what they said are crippling price freezes, export bans and tax hikes that the government implemented. The moves have targeted the country’s powerful farm sector, which produces about 60 percent of Argentina’s exports.

Mary Anatasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal wrote that the farmers rose up against Kirchner’s “facism”;

Argentina has been growing fast — better than 8% a year — since 2003. But this has largely been the result of the combination of a natural bounce after a collapse and a global boom in commodities. Meanwhile, simmering just beneath the surface of the recovery remains the fundamental contradiction that provoked the 2001 economic crisis. To wit, while a strong peso made Argentines prosperous in the 1990s, it was incompatible with the rigid, closed economy. The situation is the same today: Either the economy is opened, labor markets are made flexible and the business climate improves or the government clings to a weak peso policy as a way to compensate for an uncompetitive economic model and inflation comes back. Take your pick.

By choosing the latter, the Kirchners have won the support of that segment of the Argentine economy loyal to the principles of 20th-century fascist Juan Peron. These include labor militants, government bureaucrats, the Peronist political machine and the likes of Mr. D’elía, whose thugs act as Mrs. Kirchner’s informal enforcers. But by generating inflation and provoking shortages Kirchneromics is also fueling widespread discontent.

So taking a page from Hugo Chavez’ book, who has alternately told Venezuelans that he was targeted by the United States and Colombia for assasination, Kirchner decided to fan the flames of patriotism by flexing her military muscles, just as the military junta did twenty-six years ago. But, I’d remind Ms. Kirchner that the war against Britain ended up costing the junta their jobs eventually.

Another Chavez acolyte, Daniel Ortega, is trying the same tactic in poverty-stricken Nicaragua by making noise about some islands in the Caribbean with Colombia (Reuters link);

The two nations, separated by Panama and Costa Rica, lay claim to the isolated Caribbean Islands San Andres and Providencia off Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, as well as several keys and some 50,000 sq km of fishing waters.

Colombia told the court in June border disputes were inevitable after the fall of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the one in question was “definitively settled” in 1928, when Nicaragua and Colombia signed a treaty granting Colombia sovereignty over the islands.

But Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s annulled the accord and argued it was signed while Nicaragua was under U.S. military occupation.

Many Nicaraguans consider the treaty a U.S. payoff to Colombia for arranging the independence of Panama from Colombia in order to build the Panama Canal.

If the US unilaterally abrogated a treaty, you’d hear the screaming from one corner of the globe to the other, but communists and socialist are stroked by the world’s Left and the media as a whole.

Photo from Reuters

(It’s not my fault he looks like Mickey Mouse in this picture – blame Reuters)

So much Chavez buffoonery today, I just couldn’t let it pass without comment. The Miami Herald writes about Chavez’ supposed fascination with the death of Simon Bolivar;

Bolívar, a leader of the revolution that freed Colombia and its neighbors from Spanish rule, died in Santa Marta 16 days later. ”It was easy to recognize,” reported the attending physician after an autopsy, that he died from tuberculosis.

But Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez — whose devotion to Bolívar knows no bounds — is questioning that verdict and suggesting he was poisoned by oligarchs in neighboring Colombia — his main current foe after the United States.

Chávez has created a high-level commission, led by his vice president, to open Bolívar’s coffin and ”clear up the important doubts woven around the death of the Liberator,” according to the Official Gazette.

Chávez has even questioned whether Bolívar’s remains actually lay at the National Pantheon in downtown Caracas, about 10 blocks from where he was born in 1783.

”I swear I will not rest in the search for the real truth,” Chávez said in December, promising “an investigation with all the resources Venezuela can offer.”

Historians dispute Chavez’ fixation;

Referring to Chávez’s suggestion of assassination by poison, [Germán Carrera-Damas, Venezuela’s most prominent historian on Bolívar’s era] said, “There’s just as much evidence to say that Bolívar died from a fall in the bathroom. This is just a decoy by Chávez. When things get difficult at home for him, he invents something to distract people.”

[…]

David Bushnell, a retired University of Florida expert on Bolívar, tied Chávez’s comments about Bolívar’s death to the president’s verbal attacks on Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whom he has called a ”puppet” of the Colombian oligarchy and a ”lapdog” of the United States. The two countries engaged in a weeklong diplomatic crisis that ended earlier this month.

”Chávez says that the enemies facing him are the same ones who faced Bolívar,” Bushnell said by telephone from Gainesville. “If they killed Bolívar, according to Chávez’s thinking, then it would follow that they’re trying to kill him.

”It’s nonsense,” Bushnell added. “In Latin America in the 19th century, they used gunfire, not poison. What Chávez is claiming sounds like a Renaissance Italy tactic. I can’t think of any leading figure from 19th century Latin America who was killed by poison. A lot were shot, though.”

Bloomberg reports that Chavez has plans to begin seizing “idle” farm land. Apparently, milk producers and farmers are causing the wide spread food shortages by failing to plant and produce, according to Chavez;

“We have to intervene in all idle land,” Chavez said today during a ceremony to commemorate the government’s nationalization of a milk plant, in comments broadcast by state television. “We have to make them produce.”

Chavez is using rising revenue from oil exports to try to resolve politically sensitive shortages of basic foods like milk, beans and beef before state and municipal elections scheduled this year.

But, The Devil’s Excrement writes that the Chavez family in the state of Barinas, Venezuela has already started buying up parcels of land, making them one of the largest landowner families in the area;

[Wilmer] Azuaje all of a sudden got ambitious and sensing the weakness of the Chavez name in Barinas, decided he could be Governor. Thus, despite the express prohibition by Chavez for people to announce candidacies, Azuaje announced he was running in November. However, he also decided to go for the jugular and denounced the Chavez family for corruption, saying they have accumulated large pieces of land, most of which they keep in somebody else’s name.

He brought the evidence to the Comptroller’s Commission of the National Assembly and the stuff is apparently quite thorough, so much that they had to admit it as evidence and open an investigation.

Even Leftist Venezuelanalysis (generally written and maintained by US Leftists in support of Chavez and his revolution) reports on this tidbit;

“This cannot be socialism,” Azuaje asserted, and asked that the Comptroller`s Commission travel to Barinas and speak with those involved in the contracts to verify how Izarra and Báez were able to pay for the farms. He also denounced that the roadways in and around the farms owned by Chávez family members are better kept than statewide roads.

Chavez is still haunted by Raul Reyes’ computer hard drive, so he pretends that it couldn’t have survived the attack according to Daniel at Venezuela News and Views;

Chavez, scared shitless of the Reyes computer, is trying to promote the thesis that if Reyes was killed he certainly could not be survived by his computer. People like me, scientists by trade, know very well that if the bulk of Reyes body survived then there is a very good chance that the hard drive of his lap top could also make it.

Of course, the best way for Chavez to redeem his image is shut down opposition media (BBC link);

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government is holding a series of events in Caracas to counter “media terrorism”.
[…]
“Chavez’s government denies media outlets that are not subordinate to his hegemony access to public information”, David Natera, publisher of Venezuela’s Correo del Caroni newspaper, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

So, let’s recap; the oligarchs in Colombia are trying to kill Chavez because they killed Bolivar; while Chavez’ family is buying up land, and he’s trying to nationalize land (I remind readers that all politics in agrarian Latin America revolve around land reform), and to keep everyone quiet about his failures and FARC buffoonery, he tries to shut down the opposition media.

I’m sorry but I don’t see the resemblance between Bolivar and Chavez.