Brain Drain from Venezuela: Newsweek (Interesting timing for this to appear!)

[flamingdem]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/207382

*** I've met many of these Venezuelans -- new communities of Venezuelan professionals have sprung up out of nowhere -- not all Chavez
haters but not willing to live under his leadership, they head north.

After a decade of 21st-century socialism, the chief export of Venezuela and its allies seems to be the intelligentsia.

Mac Margolis
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jul 27, 2009

For just a moment, in the early days of his presidency, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez looked almost like a healer. "Let's ask for God's help to accept our differences and come together in dialogue," he implored his conflicted compatriots in 2002. Instead, what Venezuelans got was an avenger. The government is seizing privately owned companies and farms. Labor unions have been crushed. Political opponents are routinely harassed or else prosecuted by Chavista-controlled courts. And now, after a decade of the so-called Bolivarian revolution, tens of thousands of disillusioned Venezuelan professionals have had enough. Artists, lawyers, physicians, managers, and engineers are leaving the country in droves, while those already abroad are scrapping plans to return. The wealthiest among them are buying condos in Miami and Panama City. Cashiered oil engineers are working rigs in the North Sea and sifting the tar sands of western Canada. Those of European descent have applied for passports from their native lands. Academic scholarships are lifeboats. An estimated 1 million Venezuelans have moved abroad in the decade since Chávez took power.

This exodus is splitting families and interrupting careers, but also sabotaging the country's future. Just as nations across the developing world are managing to lure their scattered expatriates back home to fuel recovering economies and join vibrant democracies, the outrush of Venezuelan brainpower is gutting universities and think tanks, crippling industries, and hastening the economic disarray that threatens to destroy one of the richest countries in the hemisphere. Forget minerals, oil, and natural gas; the biggest export of the Bolivarian revolution is talent.

The Bolivarian diaspora is a reversal of fortune on a massive scale. Through most of the last century, Venezuela was a haven for immigrants fleeing Old World repression. Refugees from totalitarianism and religious intolerance in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe flocked to this country nestled between the Caribbean and the Andean cordillera and helped forge one of the most vibrant societies in the New World. Like most developing nations, the country was split between the burgeoning poor and an encastled elite. But in the 1970s and 1980s, Venezuelans were the envy of Latin America. Oil-rich, educated, with a solid democratic tradition, they lived a tier above the chronically unstable societies in the region. "We had a relatively rich country that offered opportunities, with no insecurity. No one thought about leaving," says Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations who lives in New York. "Now we have rampant crime, a repressive political system that borders on apartheid, and reverse migration. Venezuela is now a country of emigrants."

It's much the same all over the Axis of Hugo, the constellation of nine states in the Andes, Central America, and the Caribbean that have followed Chávez in lockstep in the march toward what he calls 21st-century socialism. In the name of power, justice, and plenty for the downtrodden, the leaders of the "Bolivarian alternative" in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua are rewriting their constitutions, intimidating the media, and stoking class and ethnic conflicts that occasionally explode in hate and violence. The overthrow on June 28 of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, a key Chávez ally, is the latest example of the blowback from the Bolivarian revolution.

The middle classes and the young are taking the brunt. A study just released by the Latin American Economic System, an intergovernmental economic-research institute, reports that the outflow of highly skilled workers, ages 25 and older, from Venezuela to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries rose 216 percent between 1990 and 2007. A recent study by Vanderbilt University in Nashville showed that more than one in three Bolivians under 30 had plans to emigrate, up from 12 percent a decade ago, while 47 percent of 18-year-olds said they planned to leave. Many established professionals have already made up their minds. "I ask myself if I'm not patriotic enough," says Giovanna Rivero, an acclaimed Bolivian novelist who is leaving for a teaching job at the University of Florida and has no plans to come back. But "Bolivia is coming apart. There are people who've known each other all their lives who don't talk to one another anymore."

In Venezuela, Chávez has pushed hard against anyone who refuses to accept his party line. Daniel Benaim was one of Venezuela's top independent television producers, turning out prime-time entertainment and game shows for national channels with Canal Uno, a leading production house. "We had 160 employees and a 24/7 operation," he says. But after the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the government cracked down on independent media, and programming budgets dried up. In a month, Canal Uno was down to four employees and heading for bankruptcy. Benaim redirected his business to serve the international advertising market and raked in prestigious international awards, including multiple Latin Emmys. But opportunities for non-Chávistas in Venezuela had withered. One by one, he watched the people he trained over the years leave the country. "I used to give angry speeches about the brain drain. Now I have to bite my tongue," says Benaim, who is also moving to the U.S. "We had the best minds in the business, and now there's nothing for them here."

One of Benaim's associates was Gonzalo Bernal Ibarra. He, too, had soared up the career ladder in broadcast television and until recently ran a campus network that reached 100,000 students. Everything changed in late 2007, when Chávez lost a referendum to rewrite the Constitution and began to crack down on his media critics, including Bernal. Strangers in jackets with weighted pockets—dress code for Chávez's military-intelligence police—began to follow him day and night. Then Congress was set to pass a bill obliging schools to teach 21st-century socialism. "I didn't want my kid learning that crap," says Bernal. Even shopping became a trial as spiking inflation and government price controls emptied the supermarkets of basic goods like milk, eggs, and meat. One day in late 2008, Bernal opened a bottle of whisky and held a yard sale. "I got drunk and watched my life get carted away," he says. He now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, and is trying to adapt. "I was living in the most beautiful, wonderful, funny country in the world. Now a third of my friends are gone. In another 10 years, Venezuela is going to be a crippled country."

No industry has been harder hit by the flight of talent than Venezuela's oil sector. A decade ago, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) ranked as one of the top five energy companies in the world. Everything changed under Chávez, who named a Marxist university professor with no experience in the industry to head the company. PDVSA's top staff immediately went on strike and paralyzed the country. Chávez responded by firing 22,000 people practically overnight, including the country's leading oil experts. As many as 4,000 of PDVSA's elite staff are now working overseas. "The company is a shambles," says Gustavo Coronel, a former member of the PDVSA board who now works in Washington, D.C., as an oil consultant. Until 2003, researchers at the company's Center for Technological Research and Development generated 20 to 30 patents a year. Last year it produced none, even though its staff had doubled. PDVSA produced 3.2 million barrels of crude oil a day when Chávez took control. Now it pumps 2.4 million, according to independent estimates.

The decline has spread across Venezuelan society, heightened by cronyism, corruption, and censorship. In May, on the pretext that scientists were pursuing "obscure" research projects such as "whether there is life on Venus," Chávez began to slash budgets at the university science centers, where the country's cutting-edge public-health research was carried out. Instead he poured petrodollars into official misiones científicas (scientific missions), where the purse strings are controlled by Chávez allies. Now the country's most respected research institutes are falling behind. Earlier this year Jaime Requena, a Cambridge University–trained biologist at the Institute of Advanced Studies, was forced into retirement and stripped of his pension after publishing a paper charging that scientific research in Venezuela was "at a 30-year low." The number of papers published by Venezuelans in international scientific journals has fallen from 958 to 831, a nearly 15 percent drop, in just the past three years. At 62, with an aging mother, Requena has few options: "It's not easy to get another job at my age. I would leave Venezuela if I could. My friends and colleagues all have."

An estimated 9,000 Venezuelan scientists are currently living in the U.S.—compared with 6,000 employed in Venezuela. One of the victims is an internationally acclaimed life-sciences expert who quit his job as chief of a major research laboratory in Caracas to try his luck in the U.S. in 2002, but always nursed hopes of returning. "I sent the government a number of proposals and they never got back to me," he says, asking not to be named for fear of reprisals against his relatives in Venezuela. "Now it's all about politics. If you are not with Chávez you will never get grants. You will be persecuted. This is a war on merit." Venezuelan medical science, he says, is groping in the dark. "The last epidemiological report Venezuela published was in 2005," he says. "We don't even know what diseases we have and whether they are increasing or decreasing. This is the Cuban model, of keeping people in the dark."

The Bolivarian diaspora seems to be getting worse. Though census data are patchy, Latin American analysts say that out-migration from Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador has created sizable enclaves in the U.S., Spain, Colombia, and Central America. Panama City glistens with new buildings built by moneyed Venezuelan expatriates, who number some 15,000, up from a few thousand at the beginning of the decade. So many Venezuelans have flocked to Weston, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, that locals call it Westonzuela. "There is hardly a middle-class family in Venezuela without a son or daughter abroad," says Fernando Rodriguez, a columnist for the anti-Chávez newspaper Tal Cual. In fact, far more people from the Bolivarian countries might be emigrating if it weren't for the global recession and rising hostility to outsiders. Venezuelan emigrants do not qualify as political refugees and enjoy no special advantage in the fierce competition for the 400,000 H1B work visas issued yearly by the U.S. for highly skilled migrants, three quarters of which go to Indians, who have an edge because they can speak English. "One reason we are not seeing more dislocation from these countries is that many people have no place to go," says Alejandro Portes, a sociologist who studies global migration at Princeton University.

Latin America has seen this before. Virtually the entire Cuban middle class fled to the U.S. after Fidel Castro's revolution, turning Miami into a business hub for Latin America while Havana moldered. The Cold War, stagflation, serial debt crises, and massive unemployment drove the brain drain through the 1980s, Latin America's lost decade, especially in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru and throughout Central America. By the early 2000s, some of the countries convulsed by dictatorship or guerrilla insurgency, such as Chile and Peru, had managed to reverse course, making their societies prosperous and safe. But other countries have struggled to bring their expatriates home. In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia had become synonymous with cocaine, violent crime, and guerrilla warfare, all of which drove some 4 million Colombians from their homes. Targeted by kidnappers and political thugs, tens of thousands of middle-class professionals left the country. In 2002 President Álvaro Uribe declared war on drugs and crime, and now onetime bandit cities like Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá are safer than ever and have even become models for the rest of crime-ridden Latin America. Yet the brain drain has not reversed. "Either the have found the American Dream or they are not yet convinced that it's safe to return," says Jorge Rojas of Codhes, a Colombian think tank that tracks refugees. "It shows how difficult it can be to recover lost talent."

For the nations of the Bolivarian revolution, this means some dark days are likely to be ahead. Even the wealthiest nations could ill afford to lose their best and brightest, and Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua have all fallen in the World Economic Forum's Competitiveness Index. Fitch Ratings recently demoted Bolivia's, Ecuador's, and Venezuela's debt to junk status, while the World Bank placed all three in the bottom quarter in its ease-of-doing-business survey, along with most of the African continent.

Though much has been made of how developing-world migrants can mitigate underdevelopment by sending precious savings back home, remittances will not close the widening talent gap that is sapping societies of their ablest hands. "If a 20-something engineer or computer specialist leaves the country, who cares? But in 10 years we'll be feeling the loss," says Rául Maestres, a human-resources expert in Caracas whose son and daughter recently left Venezuela—he to work at a U.S. architecture firm, she to study advertising in Buenos Aires. "When you think about the opportunities we have lost, you could sit down and cry."

Still, there may be a glimmer of revival. Ostracized at home and unwelcome abroad, expatriate communities are trying to turn distance into strength. Using the Web, universities, and the expatriate grapevine, foreign nationals from the populist countries are talking to each other and building ties with dissidents around the world. Back home, opposition movements are making a stand, launching protest marches and candidates in a major city in each country—Guayaquil in Ecuador, Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia, and Maracaibo in Venezuela. "We are putting together a web of exiles as a counterbalance to authoritarianism," says Coronel, who is tapping the diaspora for a gathering in Ecuador or Argentina in the next few months. "You could call it a kind of Axis of Freedom." That may sound optimistic, given the stranglehold Chávez and his followers have on their countries. But considering the growing numbers and brainpower of Latin America's new dissidents, uniting their voices just might make a difference.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/207382
© 2009

[magbana]

1. If the family has the money, the kids get the education, and obtain

the best jobs. Just like Cuba with the beginning of the revolution, it lost doctors, scientists, professors. Cuba knew that in order to sustain itself it had to educate its population and include those who never before were able to crack the door open. Of course, lucky for Cuba that the oligarchy fled to Miami because now Cuba can boast of REVOLUTIONARY doctors, scientists, professors, etc.-- the best kind! If Chavez is not assassinated or overthrown, Venezuela will find its way as well.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Great comments, magbana. It shows depth, and caring to write that. n/t

[flamingdem]

3. It's a complex issue

So many young Cubans want to leave Cuba, or have left Cuba. There are very few opportunities to succeed there in financial terms. There is no middle class to speak of and the doctors make $30 a month if they don't practice in the black market in some way. I'd say there is major disconnect to overcome..

Whether you can truly call the professionals in Cuba "revolutionary" is up for debate, imo. Everything there is in shade of gray and informed by day-to-day survival requirements.

IMO, in the case of Cuba it is important not to project onto the people. I can say I know the doble-cara, two-faced dance that characterizes that society.

Honduras on the other hand is more black and white. The majority vs. the oligarchy. The middle class fears being chomped there, as they do here, but in a different way. In Cuba, they were chomped and there is no provision for them to have a place there currently. The "middle class" in Cuba is living on remittances or otherwise connected. They do not want a middle class there. Most of us would like to live in that category or near it but they do not have that opportunity.

[Judi Lynn]

4. It's important to be aware of what the conditions were for the vast majority in Cuba

prior to the revolution, to realize the depths and intensity of their radical racist attitudes, and their extreme, outrageous cruelty toward the people who did all the work since the time of slavery.

It's also important Americans arguing in favor of the old regime acknowldge the vicious nature of the government which employed the services of death squads, like the one organized and operated by a prominent Cuban newspaper owner and Senator, Rolando Masferrer, the monstrous squad of sadists known as "Masferrer's Tigers." People were beaten, tortured, sometimes to death, tossed into the street, or even, for shock value, hung from lampposts, or even, as it happened at Santiago de Cuba, cut into pieces which were hung from trees.

Here's some writing by New York Times journalist, Herbert Matthews, who covered Cuba, along with others, at the time. Don't bother to read me the opinion of Matthews from the Miami Cubans as they have done everything in their power to discredit him, and have become obsessed, overwrought, deranged on the subject of a journalist who dared not to put their interests first.

New York Times
June 10, 1957.pp. 1, 10.

Populace in Revolt in Santiago de Cuba
By Herbert L. Matthews

Special to The New York Times

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, June 9 – This is a city in open revolt against President Fulgencio Batista.No other description could fit the fact that virtually every man, woman, and child in Santiago de Cuba, except police and army authorities, are struggling at all costs to themselves to overthrow the military dictatorship in Havana.

What applies to Santiago de Cuba can be applied with much the same terms to the whole province of Oriente, at least the eastern end of the island.It is the most heavily populated and fertile region of Cuba, and is traditionally the home of the struggle for Cuban liberty.If Havana had anything like the civic resistance movement of Santiago de Cuba, the Batista regime might have ended a long time ago.

It is one of the most extraordinary atmospheres ever encountered by this correspondent in many countries and during many periods of stress and war.The tension is almost palpable and is certainly very dangerous for the regime.Santiago de Cuba is a city living in a state of fear and exaltation, and it is the exaltation that dominates.

The fear is injected by what leading citizens of the city recently branded as a “reign of terror” imposed by the tough chief of police, Lieut. Col. José Maria Salas Cañizares, whom General Batista sent here two weeks ago to try to crush the rebellious spirit of the citizens.

For many months there have been waves of violence and of counter-terrorism by the authorities, but the last two weeks this correspondent was assured, have been the worst.The police chief, according to reliable witnesses, began his lesson to the inhabitants by having his men drive around the city to beat men and women haphazardly.In this way, Colonel Salas Cañizares let it be known that the people had better stay home in the evenings.

They are doing so, as far as could be seen, for Santiago de Cuba is almost a dead city after 9 or 10 o’clock at night, whereas it is normally gay and thronged with men and women at this hot time of the year.

Four Youths Slain
The worst act of terror, which the Santiagueros universally attribute to the police, occurred the night of May 27.The morning after, the bodies of four youths were found hanging from trees, two on one side of the city and two on an other.They had been tortured, stabbed and shot before they were strung up.
This caused such a sense of horror and revulsion that a large group of women of the city prepared last Sunday for a demonstration of protest, gathering first for a mass in the cathedral.A number of policemen, armed with submachine guns, were sent into the church to walk around and intimidate the women.The maneuver failed, but when the women tried to form a parade, it was roughly broken up, witnesses said.

Two mothers of the slain youths arranged to see this correspondent secretly late one night, along with some parents and relatives of other youths slain, as the relatives believe, by the police.At the last minute the relatives sent word that the police had threatened them with dire consequences if they talked too much.

However, many other persons have come forth, either openly or secretly, to tell of incidents.The risk was considerable for all such persons, for the police had been trying to keep the closest watch on this correspondent from the moment of his arrival three days ago.

Many Come Forth
Yet representatives of virtually every element of Santiago de Cuba’s society—business and professional groups, workers and trade union leaders, all the lay Catholic organizations, a delegation representing peasants and civic organizations from outside the city, students, the rector of the University of Oriente and his entire professional council and the Rotary, Lions and other civic organizations—did make contact with this correspondent.
Many of the leading citizens came in person or sent invitations to their homes.Dozens of humble persons accosted me on the streets and elsewhere to shake hands, partly to thank The New York Times for what is considered its effort to present the truth about Cuba in its news and editorial columns, and partly as a gesture of defiance against the authorities.

For instance, a group of nine trade union leaders, representers of the province, came to see me at the hotel yesterday afternoon.

Reprisals Expected
“If we escape only with arrest and questioning and are not beaten up, we will be lucky, for the police are watching us and will know our names,” their chief spokesman said, with the concurrence of the others.“But we gladly accept that probability.
“None of us is political or partisan.We speak to you as Cubans.We represent and we are the people of Cuba and we are against Batista and his clique.You may be sure that all workers are good Cubans and feel the way we do, all except our top national leaders, who are chosen by Batista and are in his pay.”

Everybody I saw was convinced that the police authorities had orders from Havana to refrain from any act of terrorism during the three days I was here.They were all certain that the authorities wanted to forestall the Times’ publishing any first-hand account of Government counter-terrorism.For this reason, The Times gets credit for having given Santiago de Cuba three days of peace, such as this tormented city has not known in many months.

More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cuban-rebels/NYT-6-10-57.htm







The mothers, as they run up to speak to the U.S. ambassador, to beg for his intercession with the government.



Protesting mothers get the firehoses from the police.

[flamingdem]

5. I appreciate the historical references but the issue is the future

and it doesn't look good for Cuba now because of the recalcitrance of the government to implement real change, and especially to implement transparency. They do not trust their own people enough to lighten up.

The original reasons for the revolution do not justify clamping down on the ability of Cubans to have their own businesses or leave the country. The young people are saying that for the first time openly but change is achingly slow there. Talk to some Cubans. They will tell you that life on the island is tough, and not just economically, it's the way the repression filtered into so many aspects of life there and how ideology is utilized to control and empower certain sectors there. Legal recourse is not available. The Hondurans with their poverty have more power for true bottom up empowerment than the Cubans. They have more room to move and organize.

The embargo and US aggression, while truly damaging, is sadly used by the sectors in Cuba to prevent freedoms that the Cubans deserve. It's beyond ideology, but the abusive use of ideology is part of the issue.

[Billy Burnett]

7. How do you define middle class? Based on US overconsumption standards?

America's middle class is a mirage of credit. Lose your job and therefore your health care and you are fucked in America. Out in the streets.

Cubans have accomplished what FDR's creation of the middle class intended. Affordable housing, water, electricity, education, strong labor unions, health care, basic income guarantee and security.

Yes, there are significant numbers of Cuban youth wanting to experience entry into a more stratified economy, but the vast majority have been well educated with the understanding of the un-sustainability of unchecked capitalism, wealth, and uberconsumption. Cubans in Cuba know well the pitfalls of American/western capitalism, still, there are the rebellious youngsters who don't give a crap about these things - now. But they will, and they have a clear perspective of and are informed by the REAL day-to-day survival requirements of the people, not just themselves.

[flamingdem]

11. Only the elite in Cuba can afford toilet paper Billy

The people with toilet paper are the priviledged and those who run Casa Particulars or who get remittances. That should put things in perspective.

The libretta is being phased out and they don't get enough to live on. This is what every Cuban has shared with me but only because I speak Spanish and only because I hung out long enough to see for myself how things work. Without preconceptions, and without an agenda to see what I wanted to see. A tourist usually gets to see the better off Cubans, the taxi drivers, the Casa owners, the entertainers, medical people. It's all about your connections there and it's not a meritocracy. If you don't play the game you live without

I took a friend there to a hospital where he was mistreated in my opinion. He had to pay for medicine, though it was not very much. The Chilean medical student poked a pen at his wound and gave him a script for penicillin. He almost lost his foot because it was an inappropriate medicine, did I mention the Chilean had to be "paid?". He could not get to the hospital because there is only one vehicle to carry people to the hospital for the entire population of Central Havana. A neighbor wanted to charge $5, that is a typical rate, but his monthly salary is $8 per month. Then he found a good real Cuban doctor who was not on a mission, but there aren't many left there now, Cubans get stuck with foreign students, and this doctor said he had to have Cipro. There was none in the country except al nivel hospital and the only way to get it was bribery. This story is nothing unusual in Cuba. The people suffer there and the health system is no picnic. They made him hop around the hospital even though there were gurneys. I saw this happen. Yes he finally got treatment but it was not easy.

I don't disagree that they are also critical of the US, but not our standard of living, of greater concern is crime and health and to some extent education. Life is Cuba is hard. Housing is substandard or non-existant in the urban areas. This is all documented. I am highly aware of the struggles they go through and I am a realist. It's not a life any of us would want so I don't particularly feel it necessary to trumpet their accomplishments though considering they have done a lot. I think much of the dysfunction is due to the bloqueo but like I said a lot of it is entrenched, and idealism about the system is in short supply in today's Cuba.

[EFerrari]

6. This article is right wing spew.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Absolutely. The author was discussed here last week. Repellent disappointment for a "journalist." nt

[magbana]

9. On your comments that the "intelligentsia" are not willing to live under

Chavez' leadership. Yes, but it is more complex. It's Chavez' leadership that has helped the majority of the people in the country, poor and many of color, to be in the driver's seat. Suddenly the elites woke up one morning and the maid has the same rights as they do and tells her employers that she will need to take off a few hours each week to go to her literacy class.

These white folks in Venezuela and those just recently re-located to the US are scared shitless of this phenomenon. The advances in Venezuelan society increasingly curtail the elite's ability to exact capitalist repression based on the twin themes of race and class.

I say after a decade of 21st century socialism, Venezuela's chief export is SOCIALISM.

[Peace Patriot]

10. I'd say Oil War II-South America is on. The propaganda, psyops, disinformation and

brainwashing are intensifying beyond levels that even I would have imagined--and I've been closely watching this phenomenon of the demonizing of Chavez and the Latin American left for half a decade now. It has never been this bad. It is not yielding to President Obama's stated goals of creating a respectful and cooperative US foreign policy in Latin America. And if you look at what the US is actually doing in Latin America, under Obama, as opposed to what Obama is saying, you see preparations for war--such as the five US military bases that are being built in Colombia, Venezuela's hostile neighbor, which is receiving $6 BILLION US taxpayer dollars in military aid--to a military with one of the worst human rights records on earth--or the Bush Junta's reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, which has even Lula da Silva alarmed. He said that the 4th Fleet poses a threat to Brazil's oil fields. Everybody knows that it is a threat to Venezuela's Caribbean coast oil.

Propaganda, psyops, disinformation and brainwashing cost a lot of money and take a lot of concentrated effort by skilled liars. They do not occur for no reason. They are a tool of tyrants, that is most often used as preparation for war. We saw a highly successful and expensive campaign of this kind just recently--the WMDs in Iraq (that were not in Iraq). We are seeing the same kind of campaign against not just Chavez, but also Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador (on Colombia's southern border)--both countries members of OPEC, both with big oil deposits, both with leftist governments using the oil profits to benefit and bootstrap the poor, and with both of their oil provinces run by rightwing governors, bordering Colombia.

What are these five US military bases in Colombia for? And don't tell me the "war on drugs," because that is ridiculous from every angle of view (the failed, corrupt, murderous "war on drugs" and the "drugs" never stop coming). What is the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (already harassing Venezuela with overflights of its territory) for? What was the US/Colombia bombing/raid on Ecuador early last year--orchestrated from the "war room" in the US embassy in Bogota-- for And what was all that business in Bolivia, in September, with the white separatist uprising against Evo Morales' government funded and organized right out of the US embassy?

Some of these WASTED US taxpayer billions, and nefarious activities, are connected to 'mere' war profiteering. For instance, more billions are going Mexico in military aid, which has a rightwing government that wants to privatize Mexico's oil. And yet more to Peru, which is using it to crush peasant farmer/indigenous revolts against the rape of the Amazon and labor exploitation. Our government has corpo/fascist interests of all kinds--some of them to line the pockets of war profiteers, others to destroy any real democracy. Some involving Chiquita (in Colombia and Honduras--the recent incarnation of the hideous "United Fruit Company"). Some Monsanto and biofuels. Some chemical corps (for toxic pesticide spraying, to drive small farmers off their lands). Some Dyncorp (which had the lucrative military contract at the Manta, Ecuador, US military base--now evicted and 'looking for work'), and innumerable military contractors, arms manufacturers and private armies. There are enormous profits to be made from the "war on drugs," and benefits to fascist forces in the militarization and nazification of countries. And many South American countries, at long last--with the success of leftist democracy--are turning against this horrible "war." The Bolivarians have taken the lead on this, and that is one reason for our corpo/fascists to demonize them.

But I think there is worse yet to come that this demonization is the harbinger of--a war to regain US global corporate predator control of Venezuela's and Ecuador's oil, in particular--and possibly others. South America has lots of oil--essentially undefended, there for the taking, in the minds of people like Donald Rumsfeld (whom I believe is involved this war plan).

The Obama administration's action--only apparent now as inaction (we don't know the whole story yet)--on the rightwing coup in Honduras (traditional "lily pad" for US aggression in Central America--it doesn't have oil, but it does have strategic location)--has me extremely concerned that Obama is on board for this oil war, or is complicit in the prep for it (and it will be left to some Diebolded-into-office Puke to carry it out). Adding fuel to this concern is that John "death squad" Negroponte is advising Hillary Clinton on Latin America! (--the very man who sent the death squads into Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s). Respect? Cooperation? Did Obama really mean those things, but doesn't have the power to implement his own policy? Or were those stated goals just cosmetic and hypocritical? I don't know. But I have to say that it is not looking good for any kind of "new" US foreign policy in Latin America. It is not just looking "same old, same old" (exploitation, support of fascists, many horrors); it is looking worse. It is looking like Oil War II.

[flamingdem]

12. Where are the Newsweek writers dealing with Colombia

I find the news about Colombia totally disturbing. I'd like to see the mainstream do an accurate piece on Colombia instead of the endless jammering about Venezuela.

[flamingdem]

13. Huffington stoking the flames about Chavez with "worst world leaders" poll

Whoever said it on this thread was correct. There is a smear campaign against Chavez going on. Or Hugo sells news in the case of Huffington.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/20/top-10-worst-world-leader_n_241456.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/20/top-10-worst-world-leader_n_241456.html