Chavez's 11 Year Itch - Still Threatening Freedom in Latin America

The latest temper tantrum from Venezuela's Chavez is a shot across the bow of Colombian president-elect Juan Manuel Santos ahead of the peaceful handover of power on August 7 from Alvaro Uribe.

The break in relations with Colombia is also a distraction from Chavez's misrule resulting in economic destruction and social polarization at home.

Obviously Chavez was not amused by Colombia's evidence of FARC training camps in Venezuela.

Venezuela is lorded over by a former army colonel whose policies are deliberately zapping its democratic traditions and oil and gas wealth.

Chavez's bankrupt statist-Castrista policies have caused acute food shortages, and an electricity crisis.

 The ''Cubanization'' of Venezuela unsurprisingly has brought the same miserable results Castro,Inc. wrought on its prison paradise island.

The free press hangs by a hair as the last opposition redoubt, Globovision, feels increased hostility as a Chavista is installed on its board and the Venezuelan despot becomes a majority owner of the media giant, a move roundly criticized.

Venezuela's embrace of Iran, serving as a FARC-drug link, and coziness to international terrorists make it a pariah regime.

Indeed, as long as the Chavista regime remains in power, freedom hangs in the balance in Latin America. Colombia, a democracy, is an obstacle to Castrista Chavism, and thus draws Caracas' ire.

Chavez is so desperate to rally his countrymen he recently ordered national hero Simon Bolivar's body to be exhumed.

The former army colonel debases Bolivar's legacy of freedom in South American history by tapping it to describe his totalitarian revolución bolivariana. But Bolivar liberated, not enslaved, his followers.

Chavez's eleven-year itch as a complete failure presiding over Venezuela is to threaten his democratic and market-oriented neighbor and try to deflect scrutiny from the indisputable fact that statism is an unmitigated disaster every time and everywhere it is tried.
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