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Moscow-Caracas Axis: Maturing after 10 Years of Collaboration
Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president and arguably the second most dangerous commie thug in the Western Hemisphere, after Raul Castro, intends to make his ninth official trip to Moscow in the second half of June. El Universal states that this is Comrade Hugo’s sixth trip, but by our reckoning Chavez has actually averaged about one trip to Russia per year since his inauguration in 1999. After conferring with his handler, KGB-communist dictator Vladimir Putin, Chavez will sashay on over to St. Petersburg where he will attend the Russian-Venezuelan committee for cooperation and planning of joint projects.
This past Monday, strategic partners Chavez and Putin, both of whom along with Noam Chomsky are committed to the destruction of “US unipolar hegemony,” conversed by telephone and set the agenda for their upcoming meeting. According to the AFP and Itar-Tass news agencies, the two leaders discussed bilateral military-technical, energy, financial, and economic cooperation. Chavez dutifully related to Putin his May 24 encounter with Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa (see below) and planned encounter with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, two Soviet allies, as well as his meeting this week with the foreign ministers of the socialist states of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), to which Moscow has expressed an interest in joining. (“Earth to shopping mall regime. Earth to shopping mall regime. Heeellooo, anyone there?”)
Venezuela and Russia held their first-ever joint naval drill in the southern Caribbean Sea last November and later this year are scheduled to hold another combined naval drill in the North Sea, as well as joint air force exercises, presumably in the skies over Venezuela. Last September, in another “post”-Cold War “first,” the Russian Air Force dispatched two supersonic Blackjack bombers to Venezuela for a week-long regimen of maneuvers, as above, over the southern Caribbean. According to the Kremlin media, Russia’s bomber pilots were acquainting themselves with combat in a tropical climate. That’s nice. No worries, mate. Nothing to see here, move along.
Caracas-San Salvador Axis: New Communist on the Bloc
During El Salvador’s March general election, the long-ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) government accused Mauricio Funes, presidential candidate of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), of being in the pay of the Chavezista regime. Although such accusations were stridently denied, it should not be surprising that President-Elect Funes has already made his pilgrimage to the Red Mecca in Caracas. Funes and Chavez are pictured above at Miraflores Palace in Caracas on May 19. In much the same fashion, Paraguay’s leftist president Fernando Lugo, before his formal installation, also flew to the Venezuelan capital to confer with Chavez. Lugo is profiled below.
High on Funes’ agenda was the subsidized oil supply that Venezuela is already funneling to El Salvador via the mayor’s office in San Salvador, which is also controlled by the FMLN, and a joint venture set up by ALBA and called ALBANISA. FMLN party leader Medardo Gonzalez informed Cuba’s Prensa Latina that Venezuela will increase its current oil supply to El Salvador by 10,000 barrels per day. It is expected that El Salvador will, after many years of ARENA’s opposition to Soviet influence in the region, seek membership in the communist-dominated ALBA.
President-Elect Funes, a former correspondent for CNN’s Spanish service, has stated that FMLN cadres, many of whom are veterans of the 1980-1992 civil war, will have a “visible presence” in El Salvador’s new government and that this is “logical.” Funes’ vice president, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, was formerly the FMLN’s battlefield commander who sanctioned numerous assassinations, which means he is a hardened communist revolutionary. Journalist John Thomson, writing for the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research, asserts that Sanchez’s low profile during the election was not accidental:
Veteran local journalist Lafitte Fernandez is one of several with whom I spoke who believe the heretofore unknown role of Sanchez Ceren will be a major issue, once the story becomes widely known. “Sanchez has been practically out of sight, ever since he was nominated,” Mr. Fernandez observed. “They want the presidential candidate, Mauricio Funes, to be the FMLN face, this time, unlike previous elections when the top of the ticket was always a senior terrorist officer.”
Caracas-Quito Axis: Chavez and His “Mini Me” Correa
El Salvador is not the only Latin American leftist country seeking admission to ALBA. On May 24, while hosting Chavez in Ecuador’s national capital of Quito, recently re-elected socialist President Correa announced that his country intends to secure full membership in the organization. Thus far, the ALBA bloc of nations consists of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, and Honduras, and serves as a socialist vehicle to resist the “imperialist” designs of the Washington-led Organization of American States, Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement. Chavez and his Ecuadorean “mini me” signed five cooperation agreements on energy, mining, tourism, agriculture, and banking.
“With these agreements, Liberator Simon Bolivar’s dream of working on the construction of a large homeland comes true,” Correa enthused, referring to the nineteenth-century South American liberal revolutionary, who would have probably condemned communism, then in its infancy. The Ecuadorean president, in the presence of his Venezuelan protector, announced that state-run Petroleos de Venezuela plans to begin construction of a US$10-billion oil refinery on Ecuador’s Pacific coast by 2010.
Moscow-Managua Axis: Cold War-Era Linkages Revived Amidst New Round of Political Repression
On May 18 Nicaragua’s past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega praised Russia for its donation of 130 buses to alleviate the country’s public transit problems. “Brotherly Russia helped us, without any political or economic conditions,” Ortega gushed at a ceremony in the country’s capital, Managua. In September, Nicaragua became the only country other than Russia to recognize the independence of the separatist Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. “The Russian and Nicaraguan people are connected by the long, strong bonds of friendship, and the buses are just one more vivid confirmation of this,” intoned Russia’s consul in Nicaragua, Igor Kondrashev, who was also present at the ceremony. The buses were provided by GAZ Group, Oleg Deripaska’s financially troubled company. The Russian-built buses will be used on suburban routes connecting Managua with regional cities. Incidentally, oligarch Deripaska is buddy buddies with Russian Prime Minister Putin.
This is only the beginning of many bilateral projects planned by Managua and Moscow, as we have blogged previously. Others include replacing Nicaragua’s Soviet-era military hardware with new combat and troop transport helicopters; the rehabilitation of the Soviet-built, never-used, nuclear bomber-capable air base at Punta Huete; the dredging of a deep-water port at Monkey Point on Nicaragua’s anarchic, cocaine-drenched Caribbean coast; and the construction of geothermal energy plants, to be named “Che Guevara” and “Hugo Chavez.”
On the domestic front, Nicaragua’s liberal opposition is coalescing behind the country’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which have declared that they will resist the neo-Sandinista regime’s attempt to quash dissent. The leaders of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH), Federation of Non-Governmental Organizations, and Civil Coordinating Committee released this manifesto to reporters this past Saturday. They singled out the Interior Ministry as spearheading the charge against freedom in Nicaragua, much as the Sandinista Interior Minister Tomas Borge (now Nicaragua’s ambassador to Peru), targeted anti-communists in the 1980s.
CENIDH director Bayardo Izaba noted that ever since the government of President Arnoldo (“Fatso”) Aleman (1997-2002), there have been official attempts to control the activities of NGOs. In 2001 Aleman entered into a sordid agreement with Ortega called El Pacto, the purpose of which was to lock out smaller parties from power while handing control of the levers of state exclusively to the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC). Beginning with Ortega’s re-inauguration as president in January 2007, the neo-Sandinista regime has turned on its former allies in the PLC in order to vanquish all opposition.
Comandante Ortega is also determined to control the pace and direction of Central American integration via his pro tempore presidency over the Central American Integration System (SICA). On Monday Nicaragua’s Vice Foreign Minister Manuel Coronel Kautz insisted that the rotating leadership of SICA should be passed to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom instead of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who is slated to take over in July. Unlike Arias, Colom, Guatemala’s first social democratic president in five decades, is more energetic in his leftist commitments and his pro-Cuban orientation. Arias has shunned all SICA meetings held over the past half-year, three of which convened in Managua.
“We can’t afford to put Central American integration at risk,” Coronel opined to the Nica Times. Costa Rica, the English-language news source points out, has been the least receptive Central American country to regional integration, refusing to join the Central American Court of Justice, the Central American Parliament, and the CA-4 immigration initiative. Venezuelan strongman Chavez has not hesitated to express his disdain for Arias, who spearheaded the Esquipulas Peace Agreement that ended Central America’s civil wars of the 1980s. “My experience is that these meetings are not good; the agendas are not made to address the principal problems facing Central American countries,” retorted Arias in statements published in the Costa Rican daily La Prensa Libre. Nicaragua’s neo-Sandinista regime, however, has interpreted President Arias’ stance as a personal insult against President Ortega, who has over the last six months set the SICA agenda.
It should be observed that Latin America’s Red Axis is using ALBA, SICA, the Caribbean Community, and the Union of South American Nations, as well as regional institutions like the South American Defense Council (a counterweight to NATO), the Bank of the South (a counterweight to the World Bank and the IMF), and TeleSur (a counterweight to the not-so-leftist North America media), to transform the Western Hemisphere into a regional socialist monolith under Moscow’s tutelage.
Catholic-Communist Cohabitation in Paraguay (In More Ways than One)
Meanwhile, Paraguay’s first-ever leftist president, Fernando Lugo, has admitted that he fathered a child out of wedlock. The boy is now two years old. Big deal, right? Ahem, Lugo was a Catholic cleric, under a vow of celibacy, when his relationship with a female parishoner became a little too friendly. Two other women have come forward to claim he is the father of their sons. Lugo has meekly agreed to submit to a DNA test. He calls clerical celibacy a “flawed” institution. Indeed.
In a related story, President Lugo dismissed the chiefs of Paraguay’s army, navy, and engineering corps for permitting 800 Marxist youth from across Latin America to host a three-day congress at a military facility, in early May. While Lugo refused to comment on the dismissals, opposition leaders called on the president to also sack two government ministers who allegedly sponsored the gathering, namely, Youth Minister Karina Rodriguez and National Emergency Minister Camilo Soares. Although Paraguay was perceived as a bastion of anti-communism during the Cold War, it appears that the country’s armed forces are infiltrated by communists at the highest level.
During Lugo’s stint as liberation theologian, moreover, the “Red Bishop,” as he is known, denied any affiliation with Venezuela’s red dictator Chavez. After last year’s election in Paraguay, then president-elect Lugo suddenly materialized in Caracas where he shmoozed with Comrade Hugo. “I hope the friendship between Venezuela and Paraguay may be a symbol of brotherhood and solidarity within Latin America,” gushed Lugo. For his part, Chavez urged Lugo to lead Paraguay into full membership in ALBA.
The New Washington-Havana Axis? Obama’s Overtures to KGB Asset Raul Castro
Finally, in a sign that the Obama administration intends to defrost the last vestiges of the Cold War in Latin America, the White House, reports UPI, has sent Cuban diplomats an official request to resume talks about the migration of Cuban citizens to the USA. The discussions, which were suspended in 2004 by President George W. Bush, had been held every two years, with Cuba and the USA alternating as the venue. “We intend to use the renewal of talks to reaffirm both sides’ commitment to safe, legal and orderly migration,” explained Sara Mangiaracina, a US State Department spokesentity.
In our assessment, this is a foolish policy on President Barack Hussein Obama’s part, but it reflects his subterranean socialist commitments and his pro-communist orientation. Havana’s Intelligence Directorate, as we have stated before, will no doubt use the Washington-initiated detente to infiltrate even more KGB-trained communist agents into the USA.
Once Upon a Time in the West 
>I wonder how the Western far left sleeps at night knowing that they justify these overtly pro-Soviet regimes in Latin America that come to power via democratic vote. I’m sure the Western far left is already rooting for Hezbollah in Lebanon to implement the same process as well.