BoRev.Net

• Venezuelans reflect on the good old days of pre-Chavez free market policies during the 20th anniversary celebration of a popular riot/police massacre.

• Three former FARC hostages take their anger out on their number one jungle enemy: Ingrid Betancourt.

• Justin's got the lowdown on all the modern strongmen who ruled their countries for more than ten years, including Tony Blair, Helmut Kohl, and "Canadian Pol Pot" Pierre Trudeau.

• Everybody loves Evo, especially Mormons for some reason.

• Argentina is now "the only country in the world to which the head of the CIA calls to beg forgiveness."

Like many things owned by oddball cult nut Sun Myung Moon, United Press International often seems stuck in some weird 1950's time warp. But sometimes, when provoked, the head Moonie can bend the space time continuum itself, forcing his beloved wire service to fart out articles about events that happened six weeks earlier as brand new TOP NEWS stories, which is what happened this weekend apparently. So congratulations Evo, you did it again.

You guys know David Sedaris right? He's good for the LOLz. He's got a funny story about growing up as a kid with obsessive compulsive disorder. He'd be walking home from school and pass by, say, a rock, and come down with a sudden, urgent, inexplicable need to lick it. The more he'd try to ignore it or push it out of his head the more powerful the compulsion became. He'd get all the way home and kick around the house, unable to get on with his day until he walked all the way back to that stupid rock and gave it a lick.

Just something to keep in mind when you read the Latin America news. Journalists probably don't start their stories planning to slip in snotty, trite, condescending asides, they just can't help themselves. It's almost a physical compulsion. Anyway yesterday the New York Times ran this story confirming rumors that Fidel Castro has been seen just cold strolling around Havana:

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, a close friend of Mr. Castro, first disclosed in a speech last week that the former Cuban leader had emerged from the hospital and had begun walks through Havana. "Fidel went out and they saw him, Fidel walking in the streets in Havana," Mr. Chávez said. "A miracle. The people cried."

It could not be confirmed whether there had been any crying, as Mr. Chávez said,

Quote for the day:

"There is no Guantanamo in Chile," Francisco Vidal, a spokesman for the Chilean government, said in a statement.

The US State Department pointed its fingers at the human rights situation in other countries without checking its own behavior first, he said, in reaction to the 2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices presented to the US Congress by the State Department on Wednesday.

Chile knows from human rights abuses. President Bachelet's father was tortured and killed by Pinochet's US-backed storm troopers in 1974, while she and her mother "were kidnapped by the junta, locked in a cage without food for a number of days." So naturally their statement was not reported in a single US press outlet, which instead ran zillions of responses from Venezuela and Bolivia.

Here's some free advice: don't fuck with the Uribes or you will end up DEAD, like the president and the army chief of Guinea-Bissau. Apparently there is a downside to this thing, "cocaine."

Move over Sudan, the world's A #1 top human rights atrocity finally got its day in court. Yesterday Venezuelan TV station Globovision made its case before the OAS's Inter-American Court of Human Rights, explaining how anti-television actions, including the non-renewal of RCTV's public broadcast license, are a terrible violation of human rights, globally. They also wanted many dollars.

The human rights court, which deals with important issues involving human rights from time to time, was unimpressed: "The ICHR ruled that the government of Hugo Chávez had not violated any freedoms of expression, property freedoms or broken the laws regarding equality of companies in the privately run media."

Rafael Correa's got the pecks, but "allegedly indigenous" Evo's got balls:

Bolivia is ready to normalize relations with the United States but only if the US government is willing to recognize the new place the coca leaf has in Bolivia's constitution, a top official said.

Colombia's vice president just issued some weird fatwa against California Democrat George Miller. Miller had the audacity to make the obvious comparison between Colombia and other crazy right wing dictatorships, and will now be killed and dumped in a mass grave in Guinea-Bissau, with all the rest.

Movie buffs will remember baggy-eyed thespian Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez from his tender portrayal of Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in the Paramount Pictures 1988 spectacular, Big Top Pee Wee. Tragically, insider Hollywood politics (Scientology) dictated that the Oscar that year would instead go to Tom Cruise's retard-genius brother, Dustin.

But that's all going to change, because the actor met yesterday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, where they walked around and talked about stuff.

"He's nice," the actor told journalists following the encounter at the presidential palace.

From Fox News:

In a plea evoking Darth Vader's attempt to turn Luke Skywalker to the dark side, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday urged President Obama to join the socialist movement.

• Remember the good old days in Bolivia, back when everything was great because the white people ran it? Apparently they're still finding secret torture chambers from then.

• Reuters heard a joke that Hugo Chavez made over the weekend and decided to pretend it was serious, because they needed a story and hey why not.

• Nobody is surprised that Miami Cubans would rather tank the entire global economy than scale back some dumb symbolic dig against Castro, right?

• Colombia has pretty much given up on a trade agreement and now is just looking for someone to blame.

• Libya just named some soccer stadium after Chavez, who is really more of a baseball guy. Awkward.

I don't know if you've noticed, but this whole drug war thing isn't working out so good, sweartogod. Fortunately for you dummies, Guardian reporter Rory Carroll knows exactly who to blame:

Across the whole of South America [drug production] has spiked 16%, thanks to increases in supply from Bolivia and Peru. Defenders of the drug war point out that the military-led strategy clawed back territory from armed groups and stabilised Colombia.

Of course, there is this one tiny technical problem with Rory Carroll's otherwise terrific analysis: he is completely full of shit. Here's what the UN Office on Drugs & Crime has to say about that 16% spike:

The total area of land under coca cultivation in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru in 2007 was 181,600 hectares, a 16% increase over 2006, and the highest level since 2001 (although well below figures from the 1990s). The increase was driven by a 27% rise in Colombia (for a total of 99,000 hectares), and smaller increases of 5% and 4% respectively in Bolivia and Peru.

Close the barn door, the crazies have escaped!! It seems that some so-called "academic professionals" (a.k.a. "gay homosexuals") have some pie-in-the-sky leftist ideas about how elections should be run inside the US commonwealth protectorate of El Salvador. They've even made a list of their wacky demands for the Federal Government of America, which include:

• Letting the Salvadorans vote for whomever they want, no matter what US interests may be at stake.

• Respecting the outcome of the election, even if the bad guy wins, and

• "Emphasize that the Government of the United States is committed to working with any political party that wins the Salvadoran Presidency through the exercise of a democratic electoral process and fully intends to work towards maintaining friendly relations with El Salvador regardless of which political party is in government."

Allegedly indigenous "president" Evo Morales is so racist that he refuses to hand his country over to the skinhead groups that want him dead, which is unfair and Mugabe-like.

In her groundbreaking exposé, Atlantic Monthly contributor Eliza Barclay explores how one little Indian stirred up race hatred in a country where repressive minority rule had been working so well for so many years. She asks the big questions: Why do the brown people hate us when we only want best for them? Is the Bolivian economy struggling because of the global economic crisis, or there something more Indigenous afoot? And why do they insist on calling it 'Bolivia' when God already gave it a beautiful name, 'Rhodesia'?

PS: The article is accompanied by a video, which hilariously undermines everything the reporter wrote in the story part, because the Atlantic has been taken over by racist Aymara terrorist hackers. So tricky, those browns.

This pic is the front page of San Salvador's major daily newspaper today. Basically House Republicans have threatened to deport thousands of legal Salvadoran immigrants en masse if the wrong guy is elected. They would also cut off remittances from Salvadorans to their families back home. And this is all just in today's edition.

Yesterday the paper published an open letter to the Salvadoran people from 40 Republicans, expressing their "grave concern that a victory by the FMLN could make links between El Salvador and the regimes of Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, and other states that promote terrorism."

On Monday, they published a "private" letter from Miami Cuban wingnuts to Hillary Clinton saying that if the left wing FMLN candidate won, it would be due to fraud. By way of reality, dude is currently up by 17%.

This would all be terribly frightening if the Republicans actually held any power. Still, they seem to be escalating. If you live in the greater DC area, please keep an eye on your gardener and report any suspicious activity to the proper authorities.

UPDATE: Not so fast.

Oh jeez CNN rounded up top Latin America policy "experts" recently, and they farted out some awesome, awful advice to Barack Obama before his upcoming Summit of the Americas trip. Let's laugh at them, shall we:

First, Iran-Contra criminal Otto Reich (described as just some dude who served "in a number of high-level Latin American posts") compares Latin American presidents to the teens on his block: "Not all the neighbors there are good. Why do we recognize this reality when we lock our doors at night but don't recognize it in our foreign policy?"

Then, as the other Otto pointed out, Inter-American Monlogue douchebag Peter Hakim (pictured!) follows up with this awesome advice: "'He [Obama] shouldn't simply say what the United States is going to do,'" Hakim said. "'He should say what he expects Latin America to do.'"

Great idea! This would be a fanTAStic time to explain to the Latins how they are supposed to behave. Fortunately, Barack Obama has probably never heard of this Inter-American whatever, and to the extent that he'll pays attention to Otto Reich, it will be in the context of putting him in jail where he belongs. At least, we can HOPE™!

"Uribe 'Not Vain,' Says Personal Stylist"

• Obama won't let House Republicans manipulate El Salvador's election results today, much.

• The Invisible Hand god is angry, and exacting its terrible revenge on this one town in Chile.

• Hey look Otto Reich is still the same lying sleazebag he always was.

• Let the president chew his coca, dammit.

• Oh great Peru's economy will now collapse overnight. The country will dissolve and sell itself off to Ecuador, Chile and Boliva, for parts.

Oh Noes! Not even the Peeps in Peeplandia are safe from the Washington Post's increasingly deranged foreign policy positions! In the official BoRev entry to the Post's 2009 Easter Peeps Diorama Contest, deputy editorial page editor Jackson Peep stands on a chair to emphasize the paper's latest global "analysis."

Cross your fingers that we win!! Results will be announced on Easter. Full photo after the jump.

Reagan spins in his grave:

By 8:45pm El Salvador time, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal had released results showing Funes with 51.6% of the vote and Avila with 48.4%. This reflected a tally of 73% of the votes.

Fox and Friends breaks the story! Mauricio Funes has ties to shadowy underground television network, "CNN," and links to the late California strongman, Cesar Chavez.

The great thing about writing about Venezuela is that you can just make anything up, literally, and people will publish it. Mexican politician Jorge Castañeda has turned this 100% true fact into a lucrative business opportunity with Newsweek, and this week he's just cold spinning some crazy yarn about a Terrible Plot he heard about from a "source." It turns out that Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow Raul Castro and become President of Cuba last month, only nobody bothered to report it, until now, to him, anonymously.

God bless the Newsweek editors, who were like, "yeah, whatever" on the story but at least made Castaneda insert the mother of all qualifiers in the last paragraph:

"Needless to say, none of this can be fully substantiated."

Haha, no kidding. Anyway I've got no patience for this Castañeda shitstain, and this other blogger, Machetera, just published a funny little takedown of this whole deal, so you can read more there, yay.

Say, who's this douchely dressed fellow? Why it's Gerry Pasciucco, the former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley and current head of AIG's Financial Products unit! Apparently our entire financial system has all been an elaborate ruse, set up by... the Masons, maybe?...to undermine our faith in Capitalism forever, hoo-ray! It took many decades, but the modern US citizen is finally clamoring for bank nationalization, and state control over the means of production is so now.

Well played, comrade Wall Street, well played.

Remember back in the old days when newspapers and magazines had "staff" and "editors" and their trashy little rags weren't just scratched off by interns and senile old Mexican politicians? On the bright side, at least, we've still got cable teevee news to do all the fancy fact-checking for us! Lord help us.

Yesterday CNN (CNN!) dispatched an investigative reporter to look into that OMG so-obviously sketchy Jorge Castañeda column in Newsweek about Hugo Chavez plotting to overthrow Cuba, I mean really, Cuba? And duh yeah it turns out that he just made it all up. How do we know this? Because they ask him (taking notes, Newsweek?) His reply is just nuts:

Castañeda freely offers that he has no proof, calling his thesis "informed speculation."

"I have no way to substantiate any of this," he said by telephone Tuesday from Mexico City. "I have no evidence of it."

Instead, Castañeda points to an "enigmatic" comment former leader Fidel Castro made in a column after the two men were removed.

• Venezuela is now officially #2 in word in oil reserves, or maybe it's #3, anyway time for WAR is the point.

• After all that talk of Hezbollah "collaborating" with lefty Latin American governments, it turns out that they are operating out of Colombia instead, oops.

• For you domino counters, Chavez is on a 7-1 winning streak.

• DC Councilman switches parties: to the FMLN!

• OMG OMG OMG! Actual AP headline from today: "U.S. falls to Venezuela"

Oh lord, today Foreign Policy Magazine takes a look at Jorge Castañeda's fake Cuba conspiracy story, and decides that it really doesn't matter if he made the whole thing up:

To be fair to Castañeda, "informed speculation" is probably the best we're going to get in terms of Cuban political analysis at the moment. His theory seems as good as any of the others (It is a bit strange that Chavez hasn't publicly commented on any of this yet.) and at least it has the virtue of being entertaining.

Naturally, Foreign Policy is not only owned by Newsweek, it's run by the former Venezuelan government official generally held responsible for the country's worst human rights disaster in modern history.

Hey look Venezuela is in the semifinals for the world baseball thingy! Earlier this week NPR ran an important story about the crushing divide in Venezuelan society. On the one hand there are the baseball players, who tend to come from modest backgrounds and generally support Hugo Chavez, and then there are the fancy Venezuelans who like to fly to Miami to watch baseball games and drink exotic cocktails like "$8 Miller Lights." They don't much care for this Chavez character.

So now you've got the situation where Venezuelans will fly to another country to watch their team, and then boo their own players when they get there, or loudly cheer when they strike out. Anyway there's a metaphor for the overall opposition strategy in there somewhere. Why are you so divisive, Baseball?

"Praise be to God that we armed one side of El Salvador's brutal civil war, needlessly extending it and intensifying the body count for many years, otherwise our sworn enemies, the FMLN, would never have been elected to power twenty years later. This is a tremendous victory for the United States, and a crushing defeat for Hugo Chavez. The Salvadoran people should be forever grateful to us for our benevolent love."

We may be paraphrasing slightly, but the insane Washington Post editorial board has finally weighed in on the Salvadoran elections. Lucky us! It is a weekend, tho, so if you need a dose of not-deranged analysis the Guardian's got it.

We all had our little laugh this week when Former Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Jorge Castañeda admitted making up a whopper of a story in Newsweek, about Venezuela invading Cuba. But liars usually don't tell their first lie in a big-time publication like Newsweek. Sometimes they start small, say in Foreign Affairs. So does this make Castañeda a pathological liar, a compulsive liar...or something else entirely?

We've got "informed speculation"--and a poll!--after the jump.

By Revolter:

Last week Frank Duran, the center of the trumped-up Valijagate escandalo, was sentenced in the Florida Southern District Court to 4 years in prison.

The prosecution and the judge both acknowledged that he did not commit espionage or otherwise threaten any U.S. interests. Instead Judge Joan Lenard stated Duran was being sent to prison because "[t]he respect of the sovereignty of the United States is paramount," which is pretty ironic from a Latin America perspective.

According to the Spanish-language press, Duran's family and friends "erupted in shouts and hugs of joy" when the sentence came down. The prosecution had asked for 13 years, but lead DOJ attorney Tom Mulvihill later said that the 4 year sentence was "just and exemplary." And looking back at the sentences of the 3 defendants who plead guilty and cooperated with U.S. authorities, it's actually surprising that Duran didn't get more time for fighting the charges.

So what gives? Did the DOJ and the judge feel badly for upending Duran's life on a never-been-used-like-this statute and a politically motivated trial? Or did Duran give up dirt - real or invented - on his ties to the Venezuelan government since the verdict? Probably the latter.

According to one blogger, Duran negotiated a reduction in his sentence by dishing on the business dealings of ex Vice-President Jorge Rodriguez. Apparently Rodriguez has something to do with Smartmatic, the company that operates many of the voting machines in Venezuela - and the US.

So keep your eyes open for the soon-to-be-released FBI evidence that Hugo Chavez rigged the elections for Obama, making Maria Telpuk the most important force of the 21st century thus far. Awesome.

So you lost your house and your last tax dollar went to AIG's hooker parties or whatever. Life sucks up here in North America. But guess which part of the world the UN economic somethingorother credits with dramatically reducing the inequality gap?

Well which *half* a region, anyway. As Oxfam notes:

"The most notable reductions ... were recorded in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Significant improvements were also observed in Bolivia, Brazil and Nicaragua."

It occurred to me that people still don't understand what Colombia's "false positives" scandal is all about, so I made a little flowchart to break it down (click to make it bigger.)

Human Rights groups are upset because this scenario has played out roughly 1,192 times since 2002, including "535 [instances] between January 2007 and June 2008 alone," but yesterday President Alvaro Uribe disputed those numbers, claiming that only 22 people have been murdered by the state in this manner. Apparently all of the other bodies found in mass graves were put there by journalists and human rights activists, who are really just bloodthirsty terror-Communists in disguise. Colombia is the greatest democracy in the history of the universe, the end.

• Of course Alvaro Uribe is still going to get his third term. He's just going to be a dick about it

• "President Chavez recently said to a leader of the Venezuelan Jewish community, 'This country is as much yours as it is mine.'"

• Peruvian President won't let Peru get saddled with a leftist leader after he's gone, even if all the stupid voters want one.

• Bolivia celebrates the saddest little holiday ever.

• Who's going to be the next domino to fall? Oh right of course, "Milwaukee."

Oh crap, now a mosque was robbed in Caracas but DON'T PANIC, this isn't a sign of a government sponsored anti-Muslim agenda, as AP was quick to point out:

"The mosque is located in downtown Caracas, where a scant police presence makes robberies and murders relatively common."

Editor's Note: Traveling for work, sorry for post gap. Who knew Chicago had such crappy WiFi?

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, on the world banking crisis:

"This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing."

He added: "I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimised more than any other should pay for the crisis."

Here we go again. As everybody knows, way back in 2004 the Venezuelan opposition organized a referendum on whether or not to keep Hugo Chavez around for the rest of his term. There was a big campaign, a zillion international observers and a jaunty campaign song. Chavez won in a landslide, and aside from some incompetent "statistical analysis" from two impossibly shoddy opposition academics, nobody much questioned the results. Not the principled opposition, not the Bush Administration, nobody.

But then last week the some CIA guy, working for Obama for crying out loud, raised this old discredited statistical analysis from the dead in an offhanded comment to some McClatchy reporter and now we have all have to waste our Sunday afternoon reminding people what dumb jackasses Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Rigobon were five years ago.

So set your iPod to Maroon Five and slap on your Kerry for America t-shirt, because we're going back to 2004, after the jump.

Gentle Readers: Please take a moment to read this important letter to the Washington Post, and if you agree, click here to lend your voice to the struggle for democracy, transparency, and justice. All we are saying is: give the peeps diorama a chance!

DEAR WASHINGTON POST

On March 15 you received an official entry in your third annual Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest. Quite simply, it is one of the greatest entries you are ever likely to receive should we be blessed with 100 years of Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contests, and yet we fear that circumstances may (neon) color your ability to grant this objet d'art the recognition it deserves.

You see, the Washington Peeps Ed Board Diorama Thingy™ depicts the Post's marshmallowy descent into gelatinous right-wing foreign policy goo. For this reason we understand that there may be a certain amount of conflict within your institution about granting this piece your recognition, but that would not be fair.

To be sure, if execution were the primary criteria, would there be any question about the entry's sweet, sweet virtues? Take another look at those hand-stained hardwood floors, the sculpted-to-scale clay pencil holders & coffee mugs, to say nothing of the individually costumed and coiffed characters based on actual members of the Washington Post editorial board.

This subject is sticky, and we will not sugarcoat our request: we believe that the official Washington Peeps Ed Board Diorama must be included in your winners' circle. Any other outcome would be a tooth-rotting travesty of justice. And without justice, can there ever truly be Peeps?

Sincerely yours,

The Undersigned

Click Here to sign on to this important letter right now.

"Adventure" travel magazine Outside has a story on Venezuela this month. Great! The country's brimming with backpacky water-jumpy beachcomby anaconda-wrangly good times, right? Um, no. Apparently their pussy freelancer got mugged in Maracaibo so the whole article is this dude crying about "the crime," and "the socialism." Seriously who vacations in Maracaibo? This is how they promote their story:

We provided an irresistible challenge for our nomadic wordsmith: Seek out the abundant natural treasures of Chávez's Venezuela (and check out those legendary oil fields) as a plainclothes Yankee devil. And, you know, come back alive.

Hey maybe Outside Magazine should have gone there instead, it sounds nice! Words fail:

"We also saw the military dogs and they gave us a cute demonstration of their obedience", added Mendoza. "All the army people behaved themselves very well with us".

"We visited the detention camps and saw the jails, where they bathe, how they are entertained with movies, art classes and books", she added. "It was very interesting". The young Venezuelan added that "the water in Guantanamo Bay is sooooo beautiful. It was incredible and we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour."

Update: Oh dear God. The Miss Universe Pageant has been forced to respond.