Obama is not interested in dealing with the murderous Chavez

Death Squad Dictator

Democracy: How is it that this White House can make a big hullabaloo over what it called a coup in Honduras in 2009, yet ignore last week's news of death squads in Venezuela? Dictatorships and double standards, anyone?

To hear President Obama's top Latin American policymaker tell it, all's fine with our relations in the Americas. Democracy is flourishing, says the soon-to-depart Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, with only a spot of bother from something euphemized as "populism."

"Today most democratic nations of the hemisphere are leveraging democratic success, economic growth to overcome old inequities," he said in a speech last week at the Council of the Americas.

For the Obama administration, that's success, because the U.S. professes democracy as its priority.

At the very moment Valenzuela was making his sunny assessment, London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) released a 300-page analysis of documents from the computer of FARC terrorist Raul Reyes, blown away in a Colombian army raid in 2008.

The report laid out patterns of activity showing indisputably that Venezuela's dictator, Hugo Chavez, is running a death-squad regime.

According to emails in the computer, a Venezuelan internal security officer named Amin asked FARC, the communist drug-dealing Colombian rebels, to send two "comrades" for "special activities" in Caracas in 2002. That meant to eliminate opponents of Chavez's regime and, sure enough, a sniper attack on a big demonstration in Caracas in 2002 that killed three protestors.

Venezuela's government also asked FARC to send experts in handguns, explosives, remote-control detonators and car bombs. Who, other than death-squad regimes, needs such tools? Yet, President Obama naively shook hands with Chavez at the Summit of the Americas in 2009, based on the premise that Venezuela is a democracy like any other.

Colombia (which is believed to have commissioned the IISS report) is suddenly glad-handing Venezuela, with President Juan Manuel Santos calling Chavez his "new best friend."Valenzuela calls these regimes "nations we disagree with." Unfortunately, that's why the Obama administration doesn't want to confront them. This has led to some peculiar behavior by allies such as Colombia.

Santos is extraditing drug traffickers who've collaborated with the Chavez government to Venezuela instead of to the U.S. He is also keeping under wraps additional FARC computers captured since 2008. These documents are said to contain even more damning information about Chavez's activities involving drugs and global terrorism.

Why is Santos doing this? Because he sees no regional leadership from the U.S. The U.S. is only willing to confront nations such as Honduras that try to save themselves from Chavez's brand of totalitarianism. In 2009, Honduras became a U.S. pariah state facing months of isolation and sanctions.

As for Chavez, he not only makes a mockery of democracy. He aligns with terrorists, drug dealers and rogue states. The latest is that he runs a death squad regime, yet the U.S. response is dead silence. Indictments of Chavista officials remained sealed at the Justice and Treasury departments to avoid confrontation. And U.S. officials say again and again all's well in the hemisphere.

"Regrettably," says Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, "Assistant Secretary Valenzuela's tenure at the Department of State was marked by abject failure by the U.S. to stand up to the attacks against democracy and fundamental freedoms by the likes of Chavez, Ortega, Morales, Correa and the Castro (brothers). U.S. interests have suffered as a result."

A good start would be to make Venezuela a pariah state.