COMMENTARY A generation ago, U.S. cold warrior Henry Kissinger coddled Latin America’s right-wing monsters. Today the region’s tyrants are left-wing — and so are their Kissinger-esque enablers.
An old political cartoon by Manuel Guillén of the independent Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa has resurfaced on social media in recent days — and it helps explain why democracy has died, and may stay dead for many years to come, in Venezuela.
Guillén’s 2017 caricature shows Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro clubbing a woman representing democracy to a bloody pulp, the way his security forces were savaging pro-democracy demonstrators that year — barbarity a U.N. report designated as crimes against humanity. Standing next to Maduro is his compinche, or comrade, Nicaraguan dictator and fellow leftist Daniel Ortega.
“Get back and don’t get involved!” Ortega shouts at horrified onlookers. “This is a matter of Venezuela’s national sovereignty and self-determination!”
It’s a brilliant if brutal satire of the non-interventionist credo that Latin America’s leftists all too often unpack as a cowardly code of silence, an omertà that seals their lips whenever ideological blood brothers commit heinous crimes.
Like Maduro’s epic theft of Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election and his regime’s fierce clubbing of pro-democracy demonstrators in the aftermath.
Meme-savvy folks are now replacing Ortega’s face in Guillén’s cartoon with those of the Latin American leftist leaders who could but won’t exert real pressure on Maduro to step down. There’s the mug of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, of course. But another presidential puss drawn into the frame — and the one most deserving of that shame at the moment — is Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
1. ¿Que tanto se parece Mèxico a Venezuela?
¿Que se debe de aprender del caso venezolano?
¿Es López un dictador frustrado?
Les cuento en el siguiente hilo 🧵. pic.twitter.com/UMicokt4hD
— Linda Sofia. 👸 ☘️ (@LindaDimitrova) August 8, 2024
Since Venezuela’s election, almost 2,500 opposition supporters have been arbitrarily arrested and 27 have been killed in Maduro’s crackdown on dissent. Nevertheless, this week López Obrador, known as AMLO, said Mexico is for now dropping out of talks with Colombia and Brazil — whose president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is another fellow leftist — on solving the crisis.
READ MORE: Dear lefty-loosey, righty-tighty zealots: spare us your Venezuela ‘bulla’
And the really jaw-dropping part of AMLO’s gutless abdication? He’s decided we should all let Venezuela’s Supreme Court — a lapdog chamber that performs every service for Maduro except brushing his mustache — decide the election fraud dispute, as Maduro has asked the “justices” to do.
AMLO no doubt also thinks a panel of vampires would impartially judge Dracula. Or other caped and bloodthirsty monsters like the late Chilean military dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
That’s why Guillén’s cartoon is such an instructive window into Venezuela’s nightmare. Petro, Lula and AMLO are hardly the western hemisphere’s first tyrant-enablers. Before them, a generation ago, the tyrants being enabled were more likely right-wing than left-wing — and were most notoriously enabled by an American named Henry Kissinger.
As Secretary of State to then President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, Kissinger coddled the likes of Pinochet, Argentina’s “Dirty War” junta, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner and a host of other reactionary despots across South America. As long as they were considered bulwarks against communism — as long as they fit into Kissinger’s conservative cold-war ethos as snugly as Maduro wears Petro’s and Lula’s and AMLO’s lefty dogma — they were awarded his own silence.
Nauseating irony
And, for them, the silence was golden. Pinochet’s reign of terror, for example, lasted 17 years, thanks in no small part to yanqui omertà. Even after Kissinger left power, his playbook remained open well into the 1980s with the Reagan Administration’s coddling of homicidal right-wing regimes like El Salvador’s and Guatemala’s.
The nauseating irony is that back then, Latin American leftism was at least known for a certain courage, if only because it stood up to that retro arrangement — and paid for it with countless people tortured, disappeared and killed.
But today, courage has morphed into Kissinger.
AMLO thinks Venezuela’s high court will rule justly on Maduro’s stolen election. He no doubt also believes a panel of vampires will impartially judge Dracula.
In the 21st century, leftism itself is the regressive set-up. Petro, Lula and AMLO, who govern the region’s three largest countries, are the ones aiding and abetting the longevity of Latin America’s aptly branded troika of tyranny — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — not to mention apologizing for the iron-fisted Russian and Chinese regimes that patronize it.
And, at least in Mexico’s case, the scenario isn’t likely to change any time soon. AMLO’s protégé, President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, this week dismissively said the Venezuelan tragedy “has nothing to do with me.”
Not surprisingly, Sheinbaum’s face shortly after showed up in Guillén’s cartoon on social media — ordering us all to get back and don’t get involved.
Henry Kissinger would have been proud.
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Publish date : 2024-08-14 23:00:00
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