Paraguay: Fernando Lugo, Hugo's latest buddy

From the looks of it, Paraguay's new president Fernado Lugo is Hugo Chavez's latest buddy. As you can read in Bridget Johnson's article, Latin America’s Latest Marxist Leader Takes Power in Paraguay, Marxist former Bishop Fernando Lugo is the latest of Hugo's friends to come to power with the help of Hugo's oil money. He joins Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Bolivian President Evo Morales, and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa in the choir paid for by Hugo's money. And I'm not including those suitcases full of money Hugo was sending Argentina's Cristina Kirchner.

This means the least competitive economy in South America is now in Chavez's pocket.

Paraguay has elected former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo in spite of the fact that the Paraguayan constitution prohibits ministers of any faith from standing as a political candidate. Lugo claims to have resigned from his position, but unfortunately for him, the Catholic Church isn't amenable to resignations by ordained clergy since ordination is a Sacrament and carries a lifetime commitment. He may be defrocked.

Here is Lugo's BBC profile, which says that Lugo's ready to put the squeeze on Brazil:

In particular he wants Brazil to pay Paraguay a lot more money for the electricity it buys from their jointly-owned Itaipu dam, the world's biggest hydroelectric plant. He says he will take Brazil to the World Court in The Hague if necessary.

He also wants to establish relations with China

Lugo fits the populist cookie-cutter:

They are protectionists, rejecting Washington's proposals for free trade throughout the Western hemisphere, and preferring to build up a South American bloc as a counterweight to Nafta.

They are populists, using public projects to buy support. They are nationalists, picking fights with the US, the World Bank and, when all else fails, each other.

They are, if not anti-democratic, at least anti-parliamentary, articulating their peoples' contempt for politicians: Bonapartists, if you like.

Monsignor Lugo fits the mould neatly. He is a brilliant orator, whether in Spanish or in the indigenous language, Guaraní.

While he recently tempered his anti-yanquismo, he none the less attacked Washington's unhappy record of backing dictators. And, for all his ideological proximity to Brazil's leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, he played on anti-Brazilian nationalism.

Lugo's victory completes the triumph of the radical Left in South America.

Which makes Paraguay ripe for Hugo's Bolivarian Revolution.

The Latin Business Chronicle urges Lugo to follow Chile's example because of the dismal economic conditions after sixty-one years of Colorado party rule:

Paraguay needs to follow Chile's - not Venezuela's - example as a way to reduce the country's poverty and corruption.
...
First and foremost, Lugo should realize that Paraguay's status as the poorest nation in South America is not due to Capitalism, but rather the lack of true free markets. Even after Paraguay became a democracy nearly 20 years ago, the country continued to be dominated by corruption and the rule of influence instead of transparency and the rule of law.

Paraguay has the least competitive economy in all of Latin America, according to the 2007 Global Competitiveness Index from the World Economic Forum. It ranks 121 worldwide among the 131 nations the survey looked at. Its low rank was due to such factors as weak institutions, inefficient infrastructure, insufficient macro economic stability, little innovation and low technology readiness. Paraguay is among the countries with the lowest Internet and fixed telephony penetration in Latin America, according to the 2007 Latin Technology Index published by Latin Business Chronicle, which ranked its overall technology level at 15th out of 20 nations in the region.

Meanwhile, the Milken Institute says that Paraguay ranks as the second-worst in Latin America when it comes to access to capital for entrepreneurs. Only Haiti ranks worse, according to the Capital Access Index released in February. Paraguay ranked in 94h place out of 122 nations worldwide.
...
Transparency International gave the country a score of 2.4 (with 10 being best) on its 2007 survey of corruption perception. That makes Paraguay the fourth-most corrupt nation in Latin America.

Lugo will be following Chavez's example,

n contrast, the radical-populist policies implemented in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador have increasingly deterred foreign investment and in most cases spurred even more poverty. Corruption has also been growing. Venezuela's international ranking has fallen from 71st place (out of 90 nations) in 2000 - when Chavez became president - to 162nd place this year (out of 179 nations), according to Transparency International. Only Haiti is more corrupt in Latin America.

Unfortunately there possibly are dire consequences in the region's security, since Paraguay has significant organized crime and terrorist activity in the TriBorder Area (TBA), which continues to show in the terrorist radar where meetings attended by Hezbollah and al-Qaeda have recently taken place.



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Nancy and the CAFTA

I'll be in NYC for most of today, but Pajamas Media will be posting my latest on Nancy Pelosi and the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

More posting after I get back from New York.

UPDATE
Here's my article at Pajamas Media" Peosi Plays Politics with Colombia Trade Deal

By eliminating the deadline for ratification, Nancy Pelosi proves she is willing to endanger the security of the continent just to show that Democrats are the ones in charge

Go read the rest.

Blogging on the NJ Primary

I'll be reporting for Pajamas Media as one of their SuperTuesday correspondents, so be sure to check there throughout the day.

Death Threats at Princeton: Hate Crime or Hoax?

My article is up at Pajamas Media.

Shootout at the Gare du Nord, and the week's round-up

No Pasaran has the video:

Via Lawyn, Don Suber has the week's round-up, which saved me the work. Also, please visit Pajamas Media daily and check out the Scroll.

Chavenezuela

Updated throughout the day

Chavenezuela, my latest article, is up at Pajamas Media, with videos.

Please also listen to my Blog Talk Radio podcast with guests Thor Halvorssen, President and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, award-winning bloggers Daniel Duquenal of Venezuela News and Views and Miguel Octavio of The Devil's Excrement, and oil industry expert Gustavo Coronel, and please also visit their blogs and websites.

Miguel Octavio will be P.V. Radio's podcast guest tonight at 9PM EDT.

The protesting Venezuelan students have a website (in Spanish) Resistencia Estudiantil Por La Libertad with live radio feed.

This is what the Avenida Francisco de Miranda, one of Caracas's main thoroughfares, looked like last night:


I'll update this post with the latest developments througout the day.

Morning round-up:
Demonstrations were reported in some 100 different municipalities across the country
Chavez declares Globovision an enemy of the state, an "enemy of the homeland".
Venezuela's Totalitarian Turn
Chile defends freedom of expression in Venezuela TV row but the Brazilian government is keeping quiet. At least the Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) refused in a meeting held last week in Asuncion a request from the Venezuelan government to back its closing of RCTV.
An Overwhelming Momentum
Another Cow Put Out To Pasture: Cindy Sheehan's Last Dance
Gustavo Coronel writes A letter to Danny

Noon update:
Adam Housely is back, reporting from the streets of Caracas,
Students from two more universities join in the protests.
Cato Institute: Chavez's Actions Eroding Venezuela's Credibility, Economy
More video, via Oliver

Daniel Duquenal was on a Radio Five Live podcast

3PM update
Gustavo Coronel was interviewed in today's Cato's Daily Podcast
College students in Chacaito filed a civil complaint and are demonstrating (link in Spanish, via Mora.
Pelosi Calls on Venezuela's Chavez to Reconsider TV Shutdown. How do you spell t-o-o l-a-t-e, Nancy?
Venezuelan Revolt

The ruling Chavistas are in a panic. They do not know what to do. Chavez himself mocked the protestors Tuesday and implied they were CIA agents - but Venezuelans noticed that he spoke from the naval airport near Caracas, a place from where dictators are known to flee the country. Venezuelans wondered if he was really that scared because it was an odd location. Meanwhile, other Chavistas have bared their fangs at other TV stations, vowing to shut them - Globovision, the last Venezuelan dissident station, a very tiny one that takes subscriptions and commands only a 5% market share, and CNN, whose fearless Kitty Pilgrim and others have done award-worthy reporting exposing the reality of Chavez's Venezuela for the past few years. Chavez has loudly cursed that reporting.

Venezuelans think that those stations will be shut soon. They don't want any more coverage of the protests that are engulfing Caracas. In their minds, shutting the stations will make information much harder to get. But there's too much momentum to really stop it - Caracas will just become a city of added tropical intrigue with people acting on rumors.

Venezuela Local Debt Plunge Amid Fifth Day of Street Protests
Overreaching Autocrat
Chavez abolishes freedom of the press to stop the spread of soap operas

5PM update
Monkey see, monkey do: now Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia want to do as Hugo Protests in Venezuela; One Hundred High School Students Arrested; Attacks on Media Continue; Bolivian and Ecuadorian Governments Announce Media Crackdown

Adam Housley at Fox News

Richard Miniter's first-hand account at the Iraqi Parliament bombing

... is this morning's must-read:
Richard Miniter, PJM Washington editor, was at the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad when it was bombed this morning killing 8 and injuring over 20

The witnesses I was able to talk to through the chain-link fence of the holding pen said that the bomber seemed to linger at the edge of second-floor cafeteria until a seat at the center table opened up. Then he calmly walked to that table and sat down. The explosion followed in seconds.

The U.S. Embassy translator, an Iraqi with a trim mustache and a baseball cap, confirmed that the bomber selected the center table in order to maximize casualties.

The question is, who else helped the bomber?

I'll be at a seminar this morning but will post later.

In the meantime, please listen to this week's podcast with Pieter Dorsman.

Today at noon: Fausta's Blog Talk Radio live

Today's Fausta's Blog Talk Radio show will feature John Chappell of Inside Europe: Iberian Notes and Jose Miguel Guardia of Pajamas Media and Barcepundit.

We'll be talking about the March 11 terrorist trials, Spanish politics and illegal immigration into the EU.

The call-in number is (646) 652-2639.

Le Monde loves Fidel, and today's items

Via No Pasaran,

Le Monde Diplomatique Director Ignacio Ramonet is gathering a "consencus" of French journalists to write an "authorized" retrospective of Castro's paradise on earth.

Joe is not amused
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Did you listen to my latest Blog Talk Radio?

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One of my childhood heroes, Buzz Aldrin, has an article at PJM, Let's go back to the moon
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ShrinkWrapped is discussing Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes. Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has an absolutely heartbreaking post on the subject.

Do Women Have A Right To Informed Consent?
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Town Commons posts on the Muslim Council of Britain's guidelines for special treatment of Islamic children in the state school system:

• Allowance for girls beginning at the primary school level to wear the hijab
• seperation of the sexes in any sort of physical activity that would allow touching or that involves swimming
• special changing areas for muslim children to change clothes in private
• if you have a school field trip to a farm, muslims must not be allowed to touch a pig
• Parents can withdrawal their children from music classes
• Muslim children should not be asked to draw pictures of humans

Go read the rest.
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Via Larwyn, Hillary Clinton's Confederacy Hypocrisy. Hillary can't remember celebrating Confederate Flag Day back in Arkansas. How convenient.

Terrorists not allowed to use Constitution against us

War Power Game
The coming constiutional crisis

Edwards: Greatest Threat to World Peace is Israel
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Via Maria,
Russian missile "blackmail" won't work, Czechs say

The Czech Republic said on Tuesday it would not be intimidated by Russia over plans to site parts of a U.S. missile defense system on its territory and said attempts at "blackmail" by Moscow would backfire.

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said threats by Russian officials over the plans, which would involve placing a radar system on Czech land and a missile battery in Poland, would only make Czechs more determined to defend themselves.

Dennis Prager on Happiness Is a Moral Obligation

These PU students are making someone happy!
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Cinnammon writes about When Awards Become Politicized
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In a lighter mode,
Accessorize, accessorize I just bought myself one of these:

Handbag and lunch bag in one. And the red matches my nail polish, too.

Vanderleun does it again: The Vision That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Gerard Vanderleun is a wonderful writer and he's got today's must-read: The Vision That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It is no secret that classic liberalism in the mold of FDR, JFK,and LBJ that reached its apotheosis in Hubert Humphrey, has long been consigned to the bone-yard. What has taken its place hates to be tarred with the brush of liberalism because, frankly, it isn't. What now stands in that place is a kind of perverted one-world idealism in which "the world as it is" is constantly measured against "the world as it should be." Old liberalism at least had the argument that it was being done for the greater good. The new perverted variant is one in which policy and plans are made because it makes the initiators "feel good" about themselves. Those that make and support these measures hold themselves as, in the French phrase popular when many of them were young, "cityoen du monde" -- citizens of the world.

You must read every word.

I'll be posting more later today if time allows.

ShrinkWrapped and the blogger's dilemma

Regular visitors to my blog probably realize that I'm a big fan of The Sanity Squad (their latest podcast's up, by the way). Time permitting, I visit each of their blogs at least once daily. I am not by nature a thorough thinker and all four of them are, which is what I like about the Sanity Squad.

ShrinkWrapped started this year by exploring the blogger's dilemma: In Part I, he asks,

First of all, anyone who reads Blogs comes to the Blogosphere with a sense of curiosity and an often uncomfortable feeling that the "framing" of the media narrative, which has been the primary source of our information about the larger world that is not immediately available to our senses, was incomplete at best, and distorted in significant ways at worst. Readers who have progressed to commenting are people who not only have such interests but have taken it upon themselves to take an active role in propelling the discussion forward. By the time a reader/commenter has decided to start their own blog, it is almost always because they feel they have more to add to the expanding Blogosphere discussion than can be contained within even the most felicitous Blogger's comment section. In this way, the Blogosphere is deeply democratic; anyone with the desire and energy can Blog. However, shortly after starting to Blog, all Bloggers face certain dilemmas:

Is the Blog primarily for the expression of my own thoughts and interests (an essentially autistic construction) or do I care about gaining and/or keeping an audience (a jointly constructed dialogue)?

Yesterday in Part II he explains, from the psychological point of view, that

No one is likely to Blog on a daily basis unless they are driven for internal reasons. Such reasons include the obvious conscious desire to convince people of a point of view and to engage in a discussion but other, less conscious desires, for recognition, for a sense of community, to reinforce one's moral and ethical virtue, all play a role. There are also other, often more conflicted and/or problematic desires expressed through blogs, exhibitionist impulses, authoritarian impulses, narcissistic impulses (for worshipful acolytes.) All of these kinds of desires plus many others, are undoubtedly part of the mix of rationalities and irrationalities that are summed by our executive apparatus (our Ego, to put it into more Psychoanalytic terms) and expressed as a Blog.

Once I decided to start my own blog, the biggest decision was whether to blog under my real name. I'm sure I have, as ShrinkWrapped puts it, as many exhibitionist and narcissistic impulses as the next blogger (and heavens knows I'm as vain and superficial as the next blogger, too).

However, vain and superficial as I am, I'm not inherently a trusting person. I didn't want to attract weird characters by blogging or otherwise. At the same time, living in an area where being regarded as "not a liberal" is a social faux pas, it was time that I expressed my opinions freely. After pondering this for several months, I started blogging under my own name.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that people thought I was posting under an assumed name. Fausta is my real name (I was named after my maternal grandmother, not after any historical, literary or operatic characters). I was also surprised that I have as much of an audience as I do (when I started the blog I thought Mom and a couple of friends would be it), for which I am exceedingly thankful. A great deal of the subjects I post about come from emails I receive, and from others' opinions on my posts. So, to answer ShrinkWrapped's first question, I blog both to express my opinions and to engage in a dialogue.

In the past year and a half, there's an added component to my blogging: Meeting other bloggers. While all along I've participated in virtual communities through several groups like The Cotillion, the Liberal Hawks listed on the sidebar, and the Cuban, Venezuelan and Spanish bloggers I correspond with every day, I first met other bloggers at the Pajamas Media Inagural. Later on I went to dinner with Judith and others, to Washington, DC, to lunch with Dr. Sanity, and entertained a new friend from Brazil from the Liberal Hawks group. As Richard Fernandez said in his Blography podcast, the Internet has facilitated social interaction. Without any exception, all the bloggers I've had the privilege of meeting are intelligent, personable, sociable people and I'm honored to be in their company.

ShrinkWrapped also raises the issue of what makes a traditional liberal as opposed to a modern liberal. While SW doesn't dwell on that point, there's the greater issue of the level of discourse: My experience has been that the more I distance myself from a modern liberal point of view in my posts, the more aggressively obnoxious the comments and emails become. At one point last year I disabled the comments section because I was simply fed up of being called names - and it wasn't just being called a moron, like it happened with the global warming posts. Since I will not take abuse from anyone - never have, never will - I stopped taking comments. I even came up with Fausta's corollary:

The amount of animus generated by a post is directly proportional to its distance away from the modern liberal stance

As I explained in SW's comments section, a year ago I wrote a post on why I used to be a liberal where I said that "Coercion, collectivism, and governmental disregard for the value of the individual have become part and parcel of liberalism." I received several very hostile emails after that. One of the more memorable emails was from a woman writing in Spanish demanding that I explain myself to her, since I obviously was a fake convert to what she believed to be "conservatism" and had never been liberal, and a fake Hispanic because all Hispanics are liberal. I wrote back in Spanish telling her that not only was I a native Spanish speaker but that I would never presume to impose my demands on anyone, explanation or not.

Because of that post I was condescendingly told by Mahablog (who believes that I can't discern what a "real liberal" is), "Fausta, dear, you are extremely dim. And extremely dangerous." Only two of my comments at her blog were not deleted (link at my sidebar, if you want to look it up), and all the comments of three other people supporting my point of view were deleted.

The issue is not whether I'm extremely dim, as Maha put it; maybe I am. The issue is not whether I'm dangerous; I don't see how I can be dangerous. I'm simply another blogger. The issue is that, as ShrinkWrapped said, I strongly feel that I was and remain a traditional liberal who has been abandoned by modern liberalism. Expressing that sentiment provoked a heck of a reaction.

Because of these experiences, I do not expect that "the weight of the argument must be borne by those who support, in effect, losing the war", to use ShrinWrapped's words, or that the weight of any argument, for that matter, will be carried by present-day liberals.