Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is a liar and a troublemaker. Congressmen and columnists can say this, but President Obama is correct not to do so, even though his critics want a tougher U.S. policy against the Venezuelan.
A testament to the success of diplomatic finesse is that Chávez and his pan-regional socialist dreams have been losing ground in Latin America since the inauguration of Obama and his appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
In the past week alone, two Chávez allies have broken ranks. Ecuador and Venezuela were teamed against neighboring Colombia over a guerrilla war there. But Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa has just accepted an olive branch offered by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.
Ecuador's vice president went so far as to add that his country would not let Chávez drag it into war with Colombia, and its defense minister snubbed a renewed Venezuelan attempt to classify Colombia's FARC guerrillas as legitimate state actors. The minister said that Ecuador had "zero tolerance" for the FARC. While Venezuela clearly harbors and funnels arms to the FARC -- despite Chávez's patently false denials -- American and Colombian officials say that Ecuador has been cracking down on the guerrillas along its border. A Colombian raid of a FARC camp inside Ecuador in 2008 led to a rupture in relations between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the Paraguayan Congress forced leftist President Fernando Lugo to withdraw a bill that would have allowed Venezuela to join the Mercosur trade pact that also includes Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Brazil had rejected Venezuelan membership last year.
In Honduras, the Chávez-led move to restore his friend Manuel Zelaya as president has been losing steam as much of the rest of the continent has come to grudgingly accept that Zelaya was at least partly to blame for forcing a constitutional crisis. His ouster was hardly a standard coup. The military sent him out of the country after the Supreme Court ordered his arrest for violating the constitution. Zelaya was attempting to follow Chávez's demagogic example of using plebiscites to gut the country's democratic institutions. The de facto civilian government there continues to insist that it will allow Zelaya's return only to stand trial.
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