It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Chavez is threatening military reprisal for a cross-border raid that US-backed Colombia executed into Ecuador over the weekend. The Colombians were looking to strike against the leftist revel FARC, apparently successfully. They recovered the laptop of a top FARC leader with some interesting files inside.
Mr. Chavez, who has established ties with Ahmadinejad, is linked in these files to the FARC rebels. Chavez sounds just like his Persian friend when he denied the authenticity of these files, just like the Iranian government did when evidence surfaced of recent nuclear weapons development (see below). (Chavez also attempted to insult Colombia by calling it the "Israel of South America.")
Apparently, FARC also has dreams of trading uranium. Whether there are nuclear ambitions are involved is not clear, as it may just be a profit-making venture. However, if they are serious in this matter, they have a natural ally in Ahmadinejad.
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True enough, I suppose, but I kind of think this overestimates the degree to which Chavez is a threat to the U.S., which IMO serves only to bolster his ego and his stature among fellow anti-American leaders.
If you've listened to the stuff he's been saying, it's pretty clear that he's paranoid, and if he did start anything with Colombia over this, he'd be committing suicide. Even with FARC help, Venezuela's military is no match for Colombia's US-supplied forces.
I actually think, given the U.S.'s past actions in the region, that Chavez's paranoia is somewhat understandable. Chevez and the FARC seem to think we're still playing by the Reagan playbook, paying the Colombian government to fight them for us. But we're not. The Cold War is over, and America's concerns in the region are now only getting their oil and keeping out their cocaine (the latter being the sole reason we give so much aid to Colombia, not that its made a difference). Chavez doesn't seem to get that as long as he keeps the oil pumping, the U.S. couldn't care less about his buffoonery...and rightly so.
Chavez certainly is not the same threat that Ahmadinejad is -- I guess they are not alike in every respect.
Our (pretty awful) Cold War policies in Latin America certainly seem to have continued to a certain degree under Bush. Maybe this is because he is naturally drawn to right-wing governments like Colombia's in the midst of leftist South America. Not that either of them are really great choices.
They were pretty much the same under Clinton too. It's just the same old drug-war dysfunction and economic hypocrisy toward South America that we get from both parties. (I will concede that backing the failed 2002 coup against Chavez was dunderheaded, not something Clinton would have done, and probably the biggest reason for Chavez's paranoia). It's pretty depressing, especially in light of the fact that I have no clue what other options we have.
The real problem for the U.S. in all of this is, as with everything else, is that it's just one more factor inflating oil prices.
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