It is clear to all but the most blinkered observer that Iran's recent presidential election was a sham. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent "victory" over challenger Mir Hussein Mousavi, and the violence that followed, confirmed that the Islamic Republic is a brutal police state that crushes dissenting voices. Most governments around the world have refused to congratulate Ahmadinejad, realizing that such a gesture would merely legitimize the stolen election and discourage the pro-democracy protesters marching in the streets.
Unfortunately, various foreign officials--mainly from Middle Eastern countries and authoritarian regimes--did congratulate Ahmadinejad. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez was among them. He applauded the Iranian president's "very big and important victory." Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government denounced foreign criticism of the election as a "vicious and unfounded smear campaign." Prior to the election, Chávez had referred to Ahmadinejad as "a courageous fighter for the Islamic Revolution, the defense of the Third World, and in the struggle against imperialism." Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega sent Ahmadinejad a congratulatory note that began with "Beloved Brother Ahmadinejad" and ended with this: "With love and admiration always, your brother salutes you." In the middle of his letter, Ortega wrote: "I send you a fraternal revolutionary greeting, from this country and this revolution that saw the light of victory in the same year of 1979 when Iran rose up and liberated itself to found the Islamic Republic and its own Revolution." (Ortega must still appreciate the millions of dollars in aid that Iran sent his Sandinista government in the years following their respective revolutions. Those loans, incidentally, have never been repaid.) That Chávez and Ortega would gush over Ahmadinejad's election "win" is not surprising: Both are anti-American radicals who enjoy close relations with Iran. Indeed, quietly but deliberately, the Iranian government has been expanding its reach into Latin America. Earlier this year, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that he was "concerned about the level of, frankly, subversive activity that the Iranians are carrying on in a number of places in Latin America, particularly South America and Central America."
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