Bush in Latin America: Too Little, Too Late?
By Douglas Farah
The overall agenda for Bush's belated trip to Latin America is clearly to try to counter the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Iran's new best friend in the hemisphere and weapons purchaser extraordinaire.
As my friend Jorge Castaneda writes, it is an attempt at Chavez containment that is "too little, too late."
I have recently written about the emerging terrorist threats from Latin America, and the potential for alliances among terrorist groups, drug trafficking organizations, Central American gangs and weapons merchants.
By ignoring Latin America for six years, the United States has set the stage for a strong and perhaps irreversible (at least in the short term) trend for which we will pay a steep price-the rise of a nationalist ethos that is rapidly allying with radical Islam, at least on a tactical level. Chavez, flush with oil money, can keep several such government afloat (Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Nicaragua) at least for a while. My full blog is here.
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