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 Gustavo González, 10th December 2006
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died Sunday afternoon in Santiago at the age of 91, will be remembered in Chile as one of the key figures of the 20th century, leaving behind a legacy in which human rights crimes and corruption overshadowed the status of statesman to which he once aspired.
He was facing legal action in four human rights cases and two cases of illicit enrichment and corruption when a heart attack landed him in the Military Hospital -- his refuge since 2000, where he evaded legal action thanks to controversial diagnoses of senility --for the last time on Dec. 3.
Astute, obsequious and sly were adjectives that since the Sept. 11, 1973 coup d'etat best described the army chief who overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) on that date.
Pinochet, who was born in the port city of Valparaiso, 120 km west of Santiago, on Nov. 25, 1915, ruled Chile with an iron fist for nearly 17 years, and served as army chief for a quarter century. |
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 Mark Weisbrot, 11th December 2006 President Hugo Chavez’s landslide victory in Sunday’s election provides an opportunity to open a new chapter of US-Venezuelan relations. It was one of the most internationally monitored elections in recent memory, with observers from the Organization of American States and the European Union once again approving the results and the process. This is the fourth time that Chavez has stood for election and won, if we include the recall referendum of August 2004, which he won by a similar margin. As the famous Brazilian sociologist Helio Jaguaribi recently remarked, Chavez is “the most elected president in the hemisphere.” This would be a good time for President Bush to call and congratulate President Chavez, and bury the hatchet with our fourth largest oil supplier. To those who object that Chavez called President Bush “the devil” just last September at the United Nations, it is worth noting that on Thursday President Bush called to congratulate left economist Rafael Correa, the newly elected president of Ecuador. When asked about Chavez’ UN speech last September, Correa had commented that it was an “insult to the devil,” and added a couple of choice remarks of his own about President Bush which do not need to be repeated here. |
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4th December 2006, The Independent (UK)
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez won re-election by a wide margin today, giving him another six years to solidify his self-styled social revolution and further his crusade to counter US influence. |
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 “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-live it” - George Santayana
As we now have it, globalization can be defined as an ideology that identifies the Sovereign Nation-State as its key enemy, basically because the State's main function is (or should be) to prioritize the interests of the Many - i.e., "the People" - over the interests of the Few. Accordingly, the forces of globalization seek to weaken, dissolve and eventually destroy the very foundations of the Nation-State as a basic social institution, in order to replace it with new supra-national worldwide social, political, economic, financial and military management structures. Such structures tie in with the political objectives and economic interests of a small number of highly concentrated and very powerful groups and organizations which today drive and steer the globalization process in a very specific direction.
These power groups consist of private interests which have succeeded in achieving something that is unprecedented in all of human history, and which we describe as the privatization of power on a global scale. |
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 The electoral victory of left economist Rafael Correa marks the eighth time in the last 8 years that a presidential candidate running against the "Washington Consensus" or "neoliberal" reforms in Latin America has won. (This does not count the re-elections of Lula Da Silva of Brazil and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela).
This is out of 11 elections where such a candidate existed, and in the three remaining elections - Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru - the left candidate came very close. In fact, in Mexico Andres Manual Lopez Obrador may even have won - we don't know because the election was very close and there were so many irregularities; and Oton Solis of Costa Rica, who lost a recount on March 7 by 1.2 percent, was a victim of bad polling: pre-election polls erroneously showed him to be trailing by an insurmountable margin, leading to a record-low turnout. |
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 The signs point to the fact that the symbol of the Cuban revolution is reaching the end of his road. Even if it does not formally mark the definitive end of almost fifty years of undisputed leadership at the helm of the island republic, Fidel Castro’s handing over of power to brother Raul in late July is surely a precursor to what will happen sooner rather than later. A hypothetical post-Castro Cuba has been promoted by the U.S. power structure for a long time. In the initial decades after the 1959 revolution, the hope persisted that the revolution could be undermined, in spite of the fact that the incessant efforts of the CIA to assassinate Castro never met with success. More recently, new conjectures on what will become of Cuba after Castro have started to make the news as it has become clear that Fidel’s health is slowly failing. |
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17th November 2006 - Gregory Wilpert, Venezuela Analysis Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) and a delegation of the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding yesterday, which will guide the EU election observer team for the December 3 presidential elections. |
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