I just watched a segment of Lou Dobbs, in which he took time from his usual denunciations of illegal immigrants long enough to describe Michelle Bachelet's triumph as the latest in a string of leftist victories in Latin America--followed up by a map of the region showing Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba in red. John Foster Dulles couldn't have done better.

The Dobbs piece made no mention of the fact that the same center-left alliance in Chile has now won four consecutive elections in Chile, nor that Bachelet succeeded a wildly popular Socialist whose policies were neither anti-American nor anti-capitalist, nor that the Brazilian and Argentine administrations have done little or nothing to harm US economic or strategic interests. To classify these three governments with Fidel Castro's dictatorship is absurd.

More important, such classification blinds the public--where knowledge of Latin America isn't high anyway--to the dilemmas posed by Bolivia and Venezuela, where anti-American leaders rule after capturing elections that weren't wholly free and certainly without having demonstrated any respect for other aspects of democratic culture, such as the law or civil society. Bush's policy of ignoring Latin America represents the most tempting alternative to dealing with figures such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, except that there's little sign to date that the policy has worked.

Anthony Paul Smith - 1/17/2006

the two will be killed soon enough. History, as you surely know, often repeats itself.