Venezuelan Caudillo, Hugo Chavez, was lying when he asserted that he had not interfered in Honduran affairs. He said, “We’re not an interventionist government… It’s cooperation, a mechanism of cooperation with countries that have been exploited”.
Generally, our society is very tolerant of leftwingers and extremely suspicious of rightwingers, even moderate ones. In this permissive atmosphere leftwing strongmen can tell outrageous lies and threaten war with impunity. They are mostly tolerated.
One month after former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya congratulated Chavez for winning a constitutional amendment that lifted term limits on elected officials in Venezuela, Zelaya called for a referendum in Honduras that would allow him to run for re-election. Within several months the Honduran government was united against Zelaya. The country’s Supreme Court, Congress and human-rights ombudsman all declared the referendum illegal.
Yet it was Chavez who printed up the ballots and delivered them to Honduras.
When the nation’s top military chief refused to defy Honduran law by distributing the illegal Venezuelan ballots he was fired by Zelaya. Since the government and the military (which is normally responsible for distributing ballots) were against the referendum, Zelaya resorted to extralegal means to force the vote. He organized a mob and stormed the Tegucigalpa airport to seize the ballots. Zelaya was at the head of the mob as it tore down the gates of the base and swarmed past riot police protecting it.
Of course this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the interventionist foreign policy of the Venezuelan government. One by one the new democracies of Latin America are being subverted by Chavez and his allies.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, democracy spread like wildfire throughout Latin America because leftwing revolutionaries lost their funding and suffered a serious political defeat. Only Cuba resisted change. Now militant Socialists have regrouped and have followed a similar path that the Nazis took to seize power... the subversion of representative democracy.
Don’t be fooled…
