Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker. Anderson had a long piece in the New Yorker in January, describing a nation in disarray.

Consider this about Caracas:

Caracas has deteriorated beyond all measure. It has one of the highest homicide rates in the world; last year, in a city of three million, an estimated thirty-six hundred people were murdered, or about one every two hours.

Chavez’s death means nervous time in Cuba because Venezuelan oil has kept the Castro regime afloat.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frias, who died on Tuesday, from cancer, at the age of fifty-eight, was one of the most flamboyantly provocative leaders on the world scene in recent years. His death came after months in which his health was a national mystery, the subject of obfuscation and rumors; he spent inauguration day for his second term in a hospital bed in Cuba. Vice-President Nicolás Maduro, who made the announcement, is one of the politicians now maneuvering to control Venezuela, where elections will be held within thirty days.

A one-time army paratrooper who served two years in prison after leading a botched military coup against Venezuela’s government in 1992, Chávez emerged from behind bars, after an amnesty, with a renewed determination to achieve power, and sought the support of Cuba’s veteran Communist leader Fidel Castro to do so. In 1998, Chávez won Venezuela’s Presidential elections, promising to change things in his country forever, from top to bottom. Since the day he was first sworn in as President, in February, 1999, he devoted himself to doing precisely that. What he has left is a country that, in some ways, will never be the same, and which, in other ways, is the (more…)

For a purported smart guy, Obama often sticks his foot in his mouth (and his hand over the face of other world leaders in group photos). Twice he pronounced Marine Corps as “corpse,” suggesting his ample staff didn’t catch the blunder the first time or is afraid to correct their boss.

His latest gaffe is a two-fer, getting both his geography and politics wrong.

Yesterday Barack Obama addressed the Summit of the Americas in Colombia and spoke about the conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Falklands. Obama seemed to tilt toward Argentina by calling the islands the “Malvinas” rather than the Falklands, which Argentina insists is their proper name.

Only Obama didn’t say Malvinas, he said Maldives–an entirely different group of islands located thousands of miles from the Falklands in the Indian Ocean:

So with one word, Obama both offended the British and made himself a laughingstock with the Latin Americans. Here in the U.S., we are used to such embarrassing errors by our president, but the international press hasn’t quite caught up.

My complaint, specifically, is about this account of Obama’s gaffe in the Telegraph, not a particularly left-wing paper by British standards. The Telegraph’s article is headlined “Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives.” It begins:

Barack Obama made an uncharacteristic error, more akin to those of his predecessor George W Bush, by referring to the Falkland Islands as the Maldives.

Really? When did Mr. Bush ever display such geographic ignorance? It is Obama, not Bush, who is prone to putting his foot in his mouth in a matter that causes diplomatic embarrassment. Can we finally, after well over three years, leave his predecessor out of it and let Obama own his many gaffes and blunders?

As for the politics, why kiss up to Argentina, which is slowly slipping back into dictatorship? Just today, the Argentine government nationalized the nation’s largest oil company. Last month, they banned foreign books over a contrived concern over lead in ink.

Perhaps Obama forgot that in the 1980s Britain went to war with Argentina — then under a military dictatorship — over the Falkland Islands. Not the Malvinas and certainly not the Maldives.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared Tuesday that he will continue to recognize only Moamer Kadhafi as the legitimate leader of Libya, despite signs the regime is likely in its last throes.

In Libya, Chavez said, there is “only one government, the one led by Moamer Kadhafi,” the Venezuelan leader said, restating earlier criticism of the NATO bombardment that contributed to the collapse of the Libyan strongman’s regime.

“We affirm our solidarity with the attacked and bombarded Libyan people,” he said, in a statement made during a cabinet meeting broadcast by television and radio.

That’s all you need to know about Hugo.

Mary O’Grady

If we are to believe Hugo Chávez, doctors have removed a cancerous tumor the size of a baseball from somewhere inside his body. The type of cancer he has and the stage of its advance remain a Venezuelan state secret, but it is likely that he is a very sick man.

This news, for a leader who is only 56 years old, might have elicited a wide sweep of public sympathy under different circumstances. Instead, Mr. Chávez’s first-class treatment in a Cuban medical facility from a Spanish doctor has served to elevate the resentment many Venezuelans have about the declining quality of health care in their country.

The scarcity of basic goods in Venezuela is well documented. Just last week, the Venezuelan daily El Universal reported that its own survey of six supermarkets and government-owned food outlets found that out of 16 price-regulated staples, at least 10 were scarce.

Admittedly this was a narrow survey, but it garnered attention because it confirmed the daily experience of millions of Venezuelans. No cooking oil of any variety could be found in the six stores, and this included soy oil, which is not subject to price controls. Regulated cuts of meat were not available in the supermarkets; no price-controlled cheeses were found anywhere; processed corn flour was available in only one store.

…

Yet it is in health care where Venezuelans are feeling the inflation pain most. Hospital services are up 39.7% year over year, doctor and paramedic services are up 21.5%, and the cost of medicines and medical equipment has risen 17.4%.

These cost increases refer, of course, to private clinics and goods that are not subject to price controls. Wherever prices can’t be raised, both quality and supply are deteriorating rapidly.

One needn’t be sick enough for a hospital to appreciate the problem. Venezuelans report shortages of everything from aspirin to cholesterol drugs, and it’s likely this has triggered hoarding, which has exacerbated the situation.

Most medicines sold in Venezuela, prescription or over-the-counter, are imported or contain imported materials. This means that the distributor has to pay the market rate in dollars to suppliers abroad. Obviously if the government sets the retail price below the cost for the importer, the transaction will create a loss.

Chávez-nomics has been even more devastating for doctors in the public hospitals. Dr. Douglas León Natera of the Venezuelan Medical Federation (FMV) told El Universal on June 16 that doctors earn a mere 2,600 bolivars (roughly $325 at the market exchange rate) monthly, and that even though hospitals have become targets of the country’s rising crime, the government has failed to provide protection for health-care staff. Doctors also cite scarce and low-quality resources and long hours. On June 30 the FMV called a strike to protest low pay and arduous working conditions

Lee Stranahan has more thoughts and audio clips on the Pigford scandal.

Let the Rich Get Richer, an essay by Richard Epstein from the Hoover Institution.

Something for Real: Walter Russell Mead writes about the new relationship with South America, particularly Brazil.

Mike McDaniel at Pajamas Media.

Recent revelations about hostile incursions into South America have raised alarm in those who care about U.S. interests and security, particularly in America’s hemisphere. They have also raised questions about whether the Monroe Doctrine — America will tolerate no hostile incursions in her own hemisphere — is dead. These revelations have been, for the most part, ignored by those who care little for American sovereignty and security, such as the MSM and apparently the Obama administration.

Among the two most alarming revelations is the already completed sale and delivery, to Venezuela by Russia, of nearly 2,000 advanced, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles capable of hitting aircraft as high as 19,000 feet. Equally and perhaps more alarming is an October agreement between Iran and Venezuela. The agreement establishes a joint ground-to-ground missile base on Venezuelan soil and calls for the sharing of missile technology and the training of technicians and officers. In addition, Venezuela may use the missiles as it chooses for “national needs” and in case of “emergency.” Several types of missiles will be deployed, giving Venezuela the ability to strike targets throughout South and Central America and throughout the U.S.

The dangers arising from the Marxist, cult-of-personality rule of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez are many. These weapons are only the largest and most destructive purchased or finagled by Chavez. He has also purchased an enormous number of Russian assault rifles — the real thing, fully automatic military rifles, not the non-existent “assault weapons” of gun control imaginations and press releases — and related weapons and ammunition.

Just imagine how much “good” our Democrat betters could accomplish if they could pull this off.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday asked congress to grant him special powers to enact laws by decree for one year, just before a new legislature takes office with a larger contingent of opposition lawmakers.

The measure would give the president the ability to bypass the National Assembly for the fourth time since he was first elected almost 12 years ago.

Vice President Elias Jaua made the request on Chavez’s behalf, saying the president will use the authorization to ensure fast-track approval of laws aimed at helping the nation recover from severe flooding and mudslides that left thousands homeless and in government shelters.

“The measures we have to take are deep. Almost 40 percent of the country was affected” by the heavy rains, Jaua said.

It is expected to win easy approval in the outgoing legislature dominated by Chavez allies.

The Economist:

IN A remote corner of Bahia state, in north-eastern Brazil, a vast new farm is springing out of the dry bush. Thirty years ago eucalyptus and pine were planted in this part of the cerrado (Brazil’s savannah). Native shrubs later reclaimed some of it. Now every field tells the story of a transformation. Some have been cut to a litter of tree stumps and scrub; on others, charcoal-makers have moved in to reduce the rootballs to fuel; next, other fields have been levelled and prepared with lime and fertiliser; and some have already been turned into white oceans of cotton. Next season this farm at Jatobá will plant and harvest cotton, soyabeans and maize on 24,000 hectares, 200 times the size of an average farm in Iowa. It will transform a poverty-stricken part of Brazil’s backlands.

Three hundred miles north, in the state of Piauí, the transformation is already complete. Three years ago the Cremaq farm was a failed experiment in growing cashews. Its barns were falling down and the scrub was reasserting its grip. Now the farm—which, like Jatobá, is owned by BrasilAgro, a company that buys and modernises neglected fields—uses radio transmitters to keep track of the weather; runs SAP software; employs 300 people under a gaúcho from southern Brazil; has 200km (124 miles) of new roads criss-crossing the fields; and, at harvest time, resounds to the thunder of lorries which, day and night, carry maize and soya to distant ports. That all this is happening in Piauí—the Timbuktu of Brazil, a remote, somewhat lawless area where the nearest health clinic is half a day’s journey away and most people live off state welfare payments—is nothing short of miraculous.

These two farms on the frontier of Brazilian farming are microcosms of a national change with global implications. In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets (see chart 1). It is the first country to have caught up with the traditional “big five” grain exporters (America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union). It is also the first tropical food-giant; the big five are all temperate producers.

The increase in Brazil’s farm production has been stunning. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais ($23 billion) to 108 billion reais, or 365%. Brazil increased its beef exports tenfold in a decade, overtaking Australia as the world’s largest exporter. It has the world’s largest cattle herd after India’s. It is also the world’s largest exporter of poultry, sugar cane and ethanol (see chart 2). Since 1990 its soyabean output has risen from barely 15m tonnes to over 60m. Brazil accounts for about a third of world soyabean exports, second only to America. In 1994 Brazil’s soyabean exports were one-seventh of America’s; now they are six-sevenths. Moreover, Brazil supplies a quarter of the world’s soyabean trade on just 6% of the country’s arable land.

Washington Post

ONE OF the principal goals of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s foreign policy is preventing governments or international organizations from telling the truth about him. Over the past couple of years, captured documents and other evidence have established beyond any reasonable doubt that Mr. Chávez’s regime has provided haven and material support to the FARC movement in neighboring Colombia — a group that is known for massacres of civilians, hostage taking and drug trafficking, and that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the European Union. That places Mr. Chávez in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and, at least in theory, exposes him to U.S. and international sanctions.

Luckily for Mr. Chávez, the Obama administration and other Security Council members have shown little interest in recognizing what, in terms of state sponsorship of terrorism, amounts to a smoking gun. But discussion and debate about the evidence — such as Colombia’s recent presentation to a meeting of the Organization of American States — makes this ostrich act difficult to continue. So Mr. Chávez has dedicated himself to bullying and intimidating those who dare to speak publicly about what everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows to be true.

His most conspicuous recent target was former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who ordered the report to the OAS shortly before leaving office. Mr. Chávez’s response to the maps, photographs, videos and other documentary evidence laid out by Colombia’s ambassador was to immediately break diplomatic relations and to threaten war. When Mr. Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, signaled that he was ready to address the FARC problem through private discussions, the Venezuelan caudillo instantly reversed himself. On Tuesday he traveled to Colombia to meet Mr. Santos and agreed to restore relations.

Mr. Chávez also focused his attention on Larry Leon Palmer, the veteran diplomat nominated by the Obama administration as its next ambassador to Venezuela. Some Republicans question whether the United States should retain ambassadorial relations with Mr. Chávez’s government, and the nominee received a searching set of “questions for the record” from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s senior GOP member, Richard G. Lugar (Ind.).

To his credit and that of the State Department, Mr. Palmer answered truthfully. He said that he was “keenly aware of the clear ties between members of the Venezuelan government and Colombian guerrillas.” He said that he was “concerned” that two individuals designated as international drug traffickers by the Treasury Department “are high-ranking officials of the Venezuelan government.” He reported “growing Cuban-Venezuelan cooperation in the fields of intelligence services and the military” and “morale and equipment problems” in the Venezuelan army.

Mr. Chávez once again was quick to respond. On his weekly television show on Sunday, he announced that Mr. Palmer would not be allowed to take up his post in Caracas because “he has disqualified himself by breaking all the rules of diplomacy, by prejudging us.” He said that the Obama administration would have to “look for another candidate.” The State Department responded that it was sticking with Mr. Palmer. It should. If ignoring the facts about Mr. Chávez is a requirement for sending an ambassador to Caracas, then it would be better not to have one.

Another one of Oliver Stone’s pals (Castro being numero uno), Hugo Chavez, is showing just how nutty he is by digging up Simon Bolivar’s bones.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ordered Bolivar’s tomb be opened because he suspects he was murdered.

Most accounts maintain Bolivar died from tuberculosis in Colombia in 1830.

Mr Chavez announced the exhumation of his hero on Twitter, saying he “wept with emotion”.

“What impressive moments we have lived tonight. We have seen the bones of the Great Bolivar!” he tweeted from the national pantheon in Caracas.

“That glorious skeleton must be Bolivar, because his flame can be felt. Bolivar lives!” he added.

I’d say his bones prove otherwise.

More than 50 experts including criminal investigators and forensic pathologists have been examining the remains to see if Bolivar was the victim of a conspiracy rather than disease, according to Venezuela’s attorney-general, Luisa Ortega Diaz.

“We have important discoveries that will be announced to the nation at the appropriate moment,” she said.

Maybe Chavez is being wily, using the Bolivar shtick to distract his people from his ruinous rule.

But the biggest question is where’s Geraldo in this story?

Where’s the beef in Venezuela?

…Cold cases are empty — or display only chicken — at many of Caracas’ butcher shops. Chain supermarkets and crowded municipal markets often offer cuts, but only in small quantities.

Butchers and wholesalers say they have the same problem facing many other industries: government price controls have eliminated profit margins. The recent arrests have prompted some to stop selling beef altogether for fear of ending up behind bars — adding to the scarcity.

Even tyrants cannot overthrow the laws of economics.

“We’ve been working all our lives here and we’ve never been through this before, where they take you away, strip you, take off everything down to your underwear and then put you in a cell,” said butcher Omar Cedeno, who was held for two days before being released last week.

He said officials of the consumer protection agency arrived at his Caracas shop with military police, and after citing him for selling beef above the regulated price one official asked him to follow them to “have a chat.”

Cedeno was taken away in a truck with soldiers to Fort Tiuna, where he was held along with seven other butchers. They were taken the next day to a courthouse cell, where they were strip-searched, he said.

Looking for hidden beef?

Next up is  Cuba, the worker’s paradise where healthcare is free — just don’t ask for antibiotics.

Facing a shortage of rice and anxious to reduce the cost of importing it, Cuba is calling on citizens not to hoard the grain — no mean feat in a country that is the seventh largest consumer of rice per capita worldwide.

“We are demanding discipline and order in purchases,” state-run Radio Rebelde said during its Friday newscast. “Don’t allow, under any circumstances, people to hoard rice so they can later sell it at a higher price.”

The communist government subsidizes rice and sells it in government farmer’s markets for 3.50 pesos per pound, about $0.17. But rice has become so scarce in recent weeks that “certain unscrupulous people are hoarding,” reported the station, which broadcasts across Cuba and is among the most listened to nationwide.

Cuban officials have repeatedly said they hope to increase rice production and cut imports because of rising prices for the crop, most of which cash-short Cuba has imported from Vietnam in recent years.

I’ve experienced a number of earthquakes over 23 years in Southern California.

Most are amusing in an odd way: Angelenos feel the quake, quickly ascertain whether it’s big or not, then start offering their Richter guesses.

The 1994 Northridge quake was different. It felt like a bomb exploded and no one was laughing. In an instant we knew it was serious.

Northridge was a 6.7 quake, or the equivalent of a 16.2 megaton explosion.

Last night’s 8.8 quake in Chile was the equivalent of a 15.8 gigaton explosion.

A tip for Obama: if Hugo Chavez, Danlle Ortega and Fidel Castro are for something, take the other side. Instead, Obama has joined them in condemning the “military coup” that ousted President Mel Zelaya.

Apparently, Obama’s advisors haven’t looked closely at the situation. This wasn’t a banana republic coup, it was a nation standing up for the rule of law against a rogue president.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in the WSJ:

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya’s next move will be. It’s not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

And for that, they are being condemned.

…charge your political opponents with trumped-up crimes.

Leopoldo Lopez won his last election as mayor of an affluent Caracas district with 81 percent of the vote. Women supporters mobbed him at a recent Mother’s Day appearance, posing for photos while he and his wife handed out roses.

But the popular politician’s plan to challenge incumbent Juan Barreto, mayor of Greater Caracas, later this year could be thwarted by 26 criminal charges against him — accusations Lopez says were trumped up by an operative of President Hugo Chavez.

He’s not alone.

Nearly 400 others — mostly opposition politicians — have been barred from running for office in state and municipal elections in November by Venezuela’s top anti-corruption official, a close Chavez ally.

Comptroller General Clodosbaldo Russian made public what critics call a “blacklist” of candidates in February. Though none has been formally charged with a crime, Russian argues that law allows him to prohibit all 386 from running for office while he investigates charges ranging from nepotism to illegally awarding public contracts.

Let’s see what Bill Ayres (Obama’s pal), Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte have to say about their hero, Hugo.

Opening a UN forum on the global impact of climate change on indigenous peoples, Mr Morales said that capitalism should be scrapped if the planet is to be saved from the effects of climate change.

“If we want to save our planet earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system,” he said.

Bolivia’s left-wing president said unbridled industrial development was responsible for the pillaging of natural resources.

From an essay on the wonders of capitalism:

In 1820, 85% of the world’s population lived on today’s equivalent of less than a dollar per day. By 1950, this proportion had fallen to 50%. Today it is down to 20%. World poverty has fallen more in the last fifty years than it did in the previous five hundred.(11) This dramatic reduction in human misery and despair owes nothing to aging rockstars demanding that we ‘make poverty history.’ It is due to the spread of global capitalism.

Capitalism has also made it possible for many more people to live on Earth and to survive for longer than ever before. In 1900, the average life expectancy in the ‘less developed countries’ was just thirty years. By 1960, this had risen to forty-six years. By 1998, it was sixty-five years. To put this extraordinary achievement into perspective, the average life expectancy in the poorest countries at the end of the twentieth century was fifteen years longer than the average life expectancy in the richest country in the world—Britain—at the start of that century.

By perpetually raising productivity, capitalism has not only driven down poverty rates and raised life expectancy, it has also released much of humanity from the crushing burden of physical labour, freeing us to pursue ‘higher’ objectives instead.

Austin Bay on the tensions building between Venezuela and Colombia:

The real news behind South America’s latest border fracas is Colombia’s looming victory in its own narcotics-powered civil war.

This is a victory Colombia’s chief international antagonist, Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez, fears — for several calculating reasons.

Let’s start with Colombia’s slow and grueling democratic accomplishment. On Feb. 5, hundreds of thousands of Colombian citizens marched in the capital, Bogota, in a mass protest against crime and terrorism. Their anger had an explicit political target: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known by its Spanish acronym, FARC.

Seven years ago, Colombia was being kidnapped, murdered and blown to shreds. In the dark year 2001, rebels kidnapped over 2,500 people. Rebel groups of the left (FARC) and right (AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) fought one another and the government. Six thousand people died in the crossfire. The Colombian Army remained, for the most part, on the strategic defensive.

The grim years of murder stripped FARC of its vestigial Marxist political veneer, revealing it as a drug army attempting to hijack a nation. Colombians turned against FARC. In 2002, Colombia began hammering out an incremental victory over FARC and other narco-gangsters. (Critics of democratic Iraq, take note.)

By 2005, the Colombian military’s counterinsurgency operations and the government’s tough reform programs had clearly squeezed FARC into a few hard jungle corners. FARC, however, maintained bases in Ecuador (definite evidence) and –Colombia alleged — inside Venezuelan territory.

This week, Colombia launched a strike against a FARC base in Ecuador. Tired of terrorism, Colombia is not going to let FARC thugs hide in Ecuadorian or Venezuelan jungles. Moreover, the Colombian government now says FARC intended to attack Colombia with “dirty” (radioactive) bombs in a desperate blitz to cow the populace. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe said, “We cannot allow terrorists who seek refuge in other countries to spill the blood of our countrymen.”

Ecuador and its ally, Venezuela, responded by threatening Colombia with war.