International Relations

Facing a possible debacle in March 2009, the Salvadoran right and Washington have gone into overdrive, trying to tarnish Funes by linking him to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.  The governing party ARENA in fact has accused Funes of being a “little Chávez.”

In an effort to rollback social and political change in Bolivia, the U.S has funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups through USAID and the NED. What’s more, USAID explicitly supports demands of the right wing for greater regional autonomy in the east. It’s not the first time, however, that the U.S. has sought to encourage secessionist sentiment within South American regions possessing rich natural resources. Venezuela came first.

Masquerading under the banner of "nonviolent action," the Albert Einstein Institution has come to play a central role in a new generation of warfare, one which has incorporated the heroic examples of past nonviolent resistance into a strategy of obfuscation and misdirection that does the work of empire.

Perhaps one of the more unlikely but compelling stories to come out of South America has to do with the budding strategic relationship between Venezuela and Argentina. Together, the two countries constitute a formidable bloc that could make all the difference in defining South America’s future geopolitical trajectory. 

Even if the laptops are found to have belonged to members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), there is no evidence that the publicly available documents support any of the extreme claims by the Colombian government that Venezuela and Ecuador had any sort of financial relationship with the rebels.

John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor.

Sunday’s presidential election in Paraguay, which has brought former Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo to power, stands to shake up Paraguay’s politics and could even exert an impact upon the course of wider hemispheric integration.

Of all the nonsense that we hear regularly about Venezuela, the idea that the country is a "security threat" is probably the most ridiculous. For six years now Washington has been sporadically accusing Venezuela of links to "terrorism."

The political strategy is clear: facing an uphill battle for his trade deal in Congress, Bush hopes to intimidate the Democrats by linking them to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Either pass my deal, Bush is saying, or allow Chávez to further expand his geopolitical influence in South America.

Members of the Penobscot Indian Nation are spearheading opposition to a congressional resolution that would designate Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism.