Mexico's most prominent former foreign minister has issued a call to "undertake the necessary ideological struggle to check" Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and the transitioning regime in Cuba.
It's a near-surprise call from a onetime Marxist who, as his country's top diplomat from 2000 to 2003, had aggressively challenged the United States and worked to dismantle the inter-American security system.
Commenting on President Bush's "too little, too late" trip to Latin America, Jorge G. Castañeda writes in the Washington Post that momentum in the region has shifted away from the United States and toward America's adversaries, and that it's time to take action.
"The balance of forces in the region has shifted. Not only has the leftward tilt persisted - with electoral victories in Nicaragua and Ecuador, unprecedented near-misses in Mexico and Peru, unexpected advances in Colombia - but the Venezuelan president's influence has expanded," Castañeda writes. "Hugo Chavez has found his sea legs and assembled an impressive array of tools to seduce the region."
Castañeda (pictured) outlines concerns about the rise of the hard Left, adding that it's one thing if Chavez wrecks his own country, "but if he seeks to extend his concentration of power in Venezuela or elsewhere, that is everyone's business. It is time for others to say so and to undertake the necessary ideological and political struggle to check Chavez and Havana, both rebutting their populist fallacies and failures and vaunting the merits of the democratic alternative, a globalized market economy, imperfect as it may be."
The former diplomat argues that US leadership against the Caracas-Havana axis would be counterproductive, and that Latin American leaders should mount the counteroffensive: "Mexico's [President] Felipe Calderon is ideally suited to engage Chavez and the Castro brothers in the inevitable ideological fisticuffs."
A wonderful suggestion! This blogger made a similar point two years ago, before Calderon's election, in a Center for Security Policy paper arguing that Latin American leaders must take the lead against Chavez.
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