Massive violent demonstrations in both Chile and Ecuador have created instability that has put into question the survival of democratic governments. Chile’s president has canceled two major international summits due to the violent protests. Dozens of metro train stations have been burned and destroyed in a coordinated matter and 22 people have been killed. In Bolivia electoral irregularities point to Evo Morales following the path of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Maduro’s number two man in Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello on October 20th declared, “of course we are glad that there is a Bolivarian breeze going around all of America … as we go, it is becoming a Bolivarian hurricane that will travel throughout the great homeland of America.”
The consolidation of the Maduro regime into a communist dictatorship continues, and the exodus of over four million Venezuelans from their home country presents a challenge to the Americas. Regional democracies joined together in the Lima Group in 2017 to seek strategies to return Venezuela to the family of democratic nations, but some have continued to ignore the role played by Cuba in creating the present crisis.
There is much coverage of the Lima Group in the mainstream media, but much less coverage of the Sao Paulo Forum, a much older multilateral organization with a different agenda that seeks to spread communist influence and power through the region. This conference of left wing political parties and organizations was founded in 1990 by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Fidel Castro.
In 1990 following a request made by Fidel Castro to Lula Da Silva the Sao Paulo Forum (FSP) was established with the goal “to reconquer in Latin America all that we lost in East Europe.” The FSP is a communist network comprised of over 100 left wing political parties, various social movements, and guerrilla terrorist organizations such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Chilean Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR).
In July of 2019 Venezuelan dictator, Nicolas Maduro, hosted the 25th gathering of the Sao Paulo Forum. The event cost $200 million U.S. dollars to put together. This is at a time when Venezuela is in the midst of an economic crisis were 90% of Venezuelans do not believe they have sufficient resources to buy food. The previous gathering in 2018 was held in Havana, Cuba.
Carlos Alberto Montaner in an important essay, that is reproduced below, analyzes what is taking place in Latin America and the violent protests now underway in Chile.
I don’t believe that the motivation behind the street disorders is a product of the frustrations of the middle classes. I don’t know any reasonable person capable of burning a train station to achieve the quality of life of Americans and Europeans. Chileans do not live worse than Hungarians, Poles or Portuguese. They live better than the Romanians, Bulgarians and Montenegrins, all of them European peoples, and the prospects were that they would continue to improve.
However, throughout my life I have seen many fanatics capable of destroying the foundations of a society, as happened in Cuba or Venezuela, even in Argentina, based on ideological superstitions. They just need to have the wrong ideas and perceptions. They just need to despise the adversary for his imagined failures of character and humanity. They just need to characterize them as “bourgeois at the service of Yankee imperialism” to go out and kill them. Throughout the twentieth century, Nazis, fascists and communists combined killed much more than one hundred million “enemies of the people.”
In my opinion, it is quite clear that the communists wanted to destroy Chile. Why? Because Chile is a harmful example for them. It was a successful society in which they insisted on seeing only the alleged failures. If the most comprehensive of Latin America’s educational successes had been achieved, it was at the cost of exploiting the students, as denounced by the young communist Camila Vallejo, accompanied by her Cuban partner.
The OAS General Secretariat is also aware of this threat and the negative role played by the regimes in Cuba and Venezuela in the region and issued the statement reproduced below on October 16, 2019 .
Organization of American States, October 16, 2019
Statement of the OAS General Secretariat
October 16, 2019
The recent currents of destabilization of the political systems of the hemisphere have their origins in the strategy of the Bolivarian and Cuban dictatorships, which seek to reposition themselves once again, not through a process of re-institutionalization and re-democratization, but through their old methodology of exporting polarization and bad practices, to essentially finance, support and promote political and social conflict.
The “Bolivarian breezes” to which the president of the illegitimate Bolivarian constituent national assembly has referred, have brought destabilization, violence, drug trafficking, death and corruption. The Venezuelan people themselves have paid the highest cost, but the other countries of the hemisphere are also now paying a high price for the crisis caused by the Venezuelan dictatorship.
“Bolivarian breezes” are not welcome in this hemisphere. We strongly condemn the threat of exporting bad practices and destabilization to Colombia made by that person in the Bolivarian dictatorship.
The strategy of destabilization of democracy through the financing of political and social movements has distorted political dynamics in the Americas. For years, the Venezuelan dictatorship, with the support of the Cuban dictatorship, institutionalized sophisticated co-optation, repression, destabilization and media propaganda structures in the region. For example, the financing of the Venezuelan dictatorship to political campaigns has been one of the effective ways to increase capacities to generate conflict.
The crisis in Ecuador is an expression of the distortions that the Venezuelan and Cuban dictatorships have installed in the political systems of the hemisphere. However, what recent events have also shown is that the intentional and systematic strategy of the two dictatorships to destabilize democracies is no longer as effective as in the past.
The OAS General Secretariat reaffirms its obligation to protect democratic principles and human rights, and to defend them where they are threatened. It also remains available to member states in their efforts to address the destabilization factors organized by the Venezuelan and Cuban dictatorship.
Reference: E-081/19
https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=E-081/19
El Nuevo Herald, 27 October 2019
The destruction in Chile
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
Andrés Oppenheimer, the first analyst of Latin American reality in the United States, says that Chilean street riots are the expression of the revolt of a successful society that demands standards of living such as those in the United States or Europe. It is not a poor country that protests due to hunger but, on the contrary, it is a successful nation that wishes to accelerate its development.
“Let’s dissect this,” Jack the Ripper would say. Chile, indeed, is a very successful society. It leads almost all the economic and social indexes of Latin America, including that of honesty (Transparency International). It has reduced poverty levels very noticeably. It has increased the individuals’ lifespans to be among the world’s highest, which demonstrates the quality of its public health services. (The Cuban doctors based in Chile tell me that their Chilean counterparts have much better knowledge, training and equipment than they had on the island.)
To this picture we must add the low unemployment (6.5%), the minimum inflation (2.2%), the high per capita achieved ($24,600) and the undeniable fact that this First World profile is due to the free and open markets, driven, first, by Pinochet. And then to the democracy achieved by the transition, which includes two Christian Democrats (Aylwin and Frei), two socialists (Lagos and Bachelet) and a conservative (Piñera). When the reforms began there were 200 exporting companies. Today there are almost 2,500 and the country has signed dozens of “Free Trade Agreements” with every nation.
I don’t believe that the motivation behind the street disorders is a product of the frustrations of the middle classes. I don’t know any reasonable person capable of burning a train station to achieve the quality of life of Americans and Europeans. Chileans do not live worse than Hungarians, Poles or Portuguese. They live better than the Romanians, Bulgarians and Montenegrins, all of them European peoples, and the prospects were that they would continue to improve.
However, throughout my life I have seen many fanatics capable of destroying the foundations of a society, as happened in Cuba or Venezuela, even in Argentina, based on ideological superstitions. They just need to have the wrong ideas and perceptions. They just need to despise the adversary for his imagined failures of character and humanity. They just need to characterize them as “bourgeois at the service of Yankee imperialism” to go out and kill them. Throughout the twentieth century, Nazis, fascists and communists combined killed much more than one hundred million “enemies of the people.”
In my opinion, it is quite clear that the communists wanted to destroy Chile. Why? Because Chile is a harmful example for them. It was a successful society in which they insisted on seeing only the alleged failures. If the most comprehensive of Latin America’s educational successes had been achieved, it was at the cost of exploiting the students, as denounced by the young communist Camila Vallejo, accompanied by her Cuban partner.
If the average social levels had increased significantly, they exhibited the wrong book by Frenchman Thomas Piketty about capitalism, or the Gini index of Chile (50) to try to prove that the lack of equity was terrible, hiding that the lower Latin American coefficient is that of El Salvador (35), which implies that this data is almost useless. They even concealed that Chile, as it developed, reduced that elusive data. In the year 2000 the Chilean Gini was 55. In 2018 it had already been reduced to 50.
Who were the hooded individuals who committed these excesses against Chilean society? First, I think there is a lot of sinister fun in the incendiary torch. The mixture of youth hormones with political causes is tremendous, as was seen in Paris in 1968. But we must also take Nicolás Maduro and Diosdado Cabello seriously when they indicate that they were the instigators, but the executors were the local communists. It was not a spontaneous explosion, but a thoughtful plan.
As analyst Juan Lehuedé said, in a video that has become viral (Juan Lehuedé: ¿Quién está detrás del desastre?), it is not possible to burn dozens of train stations simultaneously without prior coordination. That is why the United States and Europe will increase sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela. To those nations, the relationship between sin and sinners is very clear.