Once Upon a Time in the West

With the election of National Party candidate Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo to the Honduran presidency yesterday, the voters of that country have not only (hopefully) ended the five-month political crisis in Tegucigalpa, but also demonstrated their rejection of Manuel Zelaya’s Red Axis-backed attempt to install a leftist dictatorship in that country. Like Panama’s president, Ricardo Martinelli, wealthy cattle rancher Lobo is a US-educated businessman, and thus can be expected to steer Honduras back into the fold of Washington’s few allies in the Western Hemisphere, which also include Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.

There is one anomaly in the career of "conservative" politician Lobo. In addition to obtaining a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Miami, he is also a Soviet-era graduate of Patrice Lumumba University, Moscow's terrorist-indoctrination center (which is still in operation as People's Friendship University).

Pictured above: President-Elect Lobo talks to reporters in his house in Tegucigalpa, on November 30.

Lobo’s main opponent, Elvin Santos conceded defeat. Santos was backed by the Liberal Party of Honduras. On June 28 the leadership of the Liberal Party deposed colleague Zelaya, another rancher, but one who after his election in 2005 lurched to the political left, embracing Venezuela’s red dictator Hugo Chavez and attaching Honduras to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) in August 2008.

Sunday’s general election also witnessed the election of three vice presidents, 128 Congressional deputies, and 298 mayors. The center-left regimes in Argentina and Brazil, whose embassy in Tegucigalpa continues to shelter Zelaya, and the communist regime in Venezuela have sworn that they will not recognize the election results. “It was a very dangerous signal that ousted President Manuel Zelaya was not allowed to return to his country,” growled Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of South America’s largest country. This past Friday the Union of South American Nations, minus Colombia which refused to send its government ministers to a Unasur summit in Quito, resolved as a bloc to boycott the Honduran election. Afterwards, summit host Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa jetted to Brussels where he endeavored to sway European Union leaders against recognition.

Surprisingly, the Obama White House made an about-face and stated that the USA will recognize the new Honduran president, if the voting is “transparent and fair.” Panama and Costa Rica have also pledged to recognize the winner. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias was heavily involved in resolving the dispute between the post-“coup” government of President Roberto Micheletti and the exiled government of Zelaya. Former Congress speaker Micheletti, who stepped down for a week during the election campaign, addressed local radio on Monday, saying: “Yesterday’s ballot was proof Honduran democracy has corrected its path. Each vote confirms we’re a nation that deserves the respect of all on the international stage.”

The Ibero-American summit meeting in Portugal this week is expected to denounce the Honduran election. This international forum includes Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and 19 Latin American states, including mutual antagonists Colombia and Venezuela. Ibero-American Deputy General Secretary Maria Elisa Berenguer declared her support for Red Axis lackey Zelaya: “We will defend the constitutional order in Honduras.” Although Colombian President Alvaro Colom arrived in Estoril to attend the summit, his nemesis Chavez was conspicuously absent. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Cuba’s Raul Castro were also AWOL at the Portuguese seaside resort. Colombia will probably part company with its Ibero-American colleagues in joining the USA in recognizing Lobo as Honduras’ next president. The United Nations and Organization of American States condemned Zelaya’s ouster shortly after it occurred.

For his part, speaking to Telesur the night before the election, Zelaya denounced Sunday’s election as a “fraud” and pledged to fight until “toppling the dictatorship.” Telesur is a regional television network backed by a consortium of leftist regimes, including Cuba and Venezuela. On December 2 the Honduran Congress will decide whether to allow Zelaya to finish his term before Lobo takes over on January 27. Heather Berkman, a political risk analyst at the Eurasia Group in New York, speculated that “Zelaya may turn his focus now to seeking some form of amnesty from charges of treason and violating a Supreme Court order.” In a post-election analysis, Michael Shifter, vice president of the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue, reflected: “Lobo is going to need a lot of support. No matter how committed and talented he is as a president-elect, he’s going to need the support of sectors in Honduras and of the international community.”

On Saturday Liberal Party candidate Santos vowed to withdraw Honduras from ALBA if he won the presidential poll. At a Saturday press conference in the national capital he stated: “I do not agree that Honduras would continue to be part of that regional group until they know the real benefits it has brought to the country, because it has brought us an enormous problem that currently has divided our people.” According to the Social, External Debt and Development Forum of Honduras, 74 percent of the aid sent to Honduras in 2008 came from Venezuela, the main promoter of ALBA. It is likely that after his installation in January Lobo will terminate Honduras’ involvement in the Havana-Caracas-led bloc of socialist states.

In a related story, Nicaragua and El Salvador closed their customs posts along the borders with Honduras to avoid any possible incidents linked to the Sunday elections. Nicaragua shut down its El Espino, Guasaule, and Las Manos posts on Saturday evening, Honduran police spokesman Orlin Cerrato told media, while El Salvador did the same at noon. Interim President Micheletti responded to the news by blaming Chavez for trying to “apply boycotts to Hondurans right to be free.” Managua and San Salvador promised to open the customs posts again on Monday.

Yesterday, while Hondurans rejected an attempt by the region’s Red Axis to subvert their country, thousands of miles to the south Uruguayans ratified the Communist Bloc’s four-year-old grip on their country. Fifty percent of voting Uruguayans chose Broad Front candidate Senator Jose Mujica as the country’s next president. Mujica, a former member of the urban guerrilla army known as the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement, spent 12 years in solitary confinement during military rule in the 1970s and early 1980s. He twice escaped from prison. Ironically, Mujica's nickname "Pepe" is the same as Lobo's. It is expected that the 74-year-old Mujica, now perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a “moderate” leftist, will continue the economic policies of his predecessor, President Tabare Vasquez, Uruguay’s first socialist president.

Mujica and Vazquez are pictured above.

In 2005 the Broad Front, which includes the Communist Party of Uruguay, ended a 150-year power lock in Montevideo by the National and Colorado parties. Mujica founded the Movement of Popular Participation, one of the members in the ruling coalition. Since taking office, Vazquez cut the national unemployment rate to 7.3 percent from 12.3 percent, supported record foreign, including Red Chinese, investment, increased social spending, and boosted wages. Vasquez was constitutionally barred from running for another term. Incidentally, this barrier has not prevented other Red Axis leaders, such as Chavez, Ortega, Correa, and Morales, from each subverting his own country’s constitution to consolidate a communist dictatorship.

The grandfatherly but self-avowed “hot-headed” Mujica is known for his insulting comments about other South American leaders, including Chavez, whom he calls “authoritarian.” We rather suspect that such remarks are disingenuous since many other center-left politicians in the region, like Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo (“The Red Bishop”), distanced themselves from Venezuela’s red tyrant prior to their election, but then appeared in smiling photo ops with Chavez after they were safely elected.

Elsewhere in Latin America the following ex-guerrillas either hold posts as political executives or aspire to such posts, or were closely associated with others who were guerrillas:

1. Cuban President Raul Castro (2008-present) is the de facto leader of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba (CPC). He is a former member of the Soviet-backed 26th of July Movement, which in 1961 merged with the Popular Socialist Party and Revolutionary Directorate March 13th to form the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations. In 1965 the latter became the CPC.

2. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega (1979-1990, 2007-present) is the leader of the twice-ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). After seizing power in 1979 the FSLN established the Sandinista Popular Army as Nicaragua's revolutionary armed forces. In 1995 the EPS was rebranded as the Nicaraguan National Army.

3. Salvadoran Vice President Salvador Sanchez Ceren (2009-present) is the former battlefield commander of the Soviet/Cuban-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a guerrilla army that turned into a political party in 1992.

4. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (1999-present) founded the subversive Cuban-backed Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) in 1982, which staged two failed coups d’etat against President Carlos Andres Perez in 1992. The MBR-200 later became a political party called the Fifth Republic Movement, which in 2007 merged into the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

5. Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera (2006-present) is currently a member of President Evo Morales’ ruling Movement toward Socialism, but he is a former ideologist of the Cuban-backed Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, which was organized by infamous revolutionary Che Guevara in the 1960s.

6. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (2006-present) is a long-time member of the Socialist Party of Chile, the party of Soviet/Cuban-backed predecessor Salvador Allende. Between 1985 and 1987 Bachelet had a romantic relationship with Alex Vojkovic Trier, spokesman for the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, the armed wing of the Communist Party of Chile.

7. Brazilian politician Dilma Rousseff, President Lula’s chief of staff and chairwoman of Petrobras’ board of directors, aspires to the presidency of that country in 2010. Although currently a member of the ruling Workers’ Party and previously the Democratic Labor Party, Rousseff began her political career in the urban guerrilla organizations known as the National Liberation Command and VAR Palmares.

Iranian Dictator Conducts Whirlwind Tour of Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela, “Comrade” Mahmoud Joins Chavez in Denouncing “Imperialism”

Into this subversive network of resuscitated Latin American communism steps the Islamo-Nazi dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, who on November 26 completed a three-nation tour of the Western Hemisphere that included Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela. In Brazil Ahmadinejad secured Lula’s support for Iran’s controversial nuclear program, while in Bolivia he signed two memoranda of understanding with Morales. In Caracas Iran’s wanna-be Mahdi linked arms with Chavez and, sounding like a true communist, denounced “imperialism”: “Today the people of Venezuela and Iran, friends and brothers in the trench warfare against imperialism, are resisting. They will stand together until the end.” In Spanish Ahmadinejad shouted: “Viva Venezuela! Viva Chavez!”

Sizing up the meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Chavez referred to his unannounced trip to Havana early last week, several days before Cuba’s Bastion 2009 military drill. There he met for seven hours with ailing former president Fidel Castro. Chavez related Fidel’s greeting to “Comrade” Mahmoud: “Fidel told me: ‘Tell Ahmadinejad that reaching Venezuela is like reaching Cuba, because it's the same homeland. So I'm also welcoming you to Cuba, brother.’” Venezuela’s opposition protested Ahmadinejad’s arrival. “Venezuela's democrats repudiate the visit of the undesirable Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Venezuela,” Table of Unity opposition group declared, adding: “Ahmadinejad's alliance with Chavez is dangerous.” A statement from Venezuela’s Jewish community stated: “Ahmadinejad is an ominous character who could produce greater misery for mankind.”

By the way, Comrade Fidel's comment about Cuba and Venezuela being the "same homeland" is not too far from the truth. In 2007 Chavez and the Castro Bros. batted about the idea of uniting the two communist states into one federation. This Leninist vision may yet come to pass.