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Instapundit Whines "Slow News" While Ignoring the Americas
Monday, May 09, 2005   By: Juan Paxety

Like he needs a link, but Instapundit is whining about there being not much news.  He's not looking in the right places. Glenn, I know I'm not Ann Althouse, Mickey Kaus or Jeff Jarvis, but you might look into these developments:

  • Nicaragua's democracy is officially at risk according to The Miami Herald.  The newspaper reports the two folks running the country are dismantling former democratic checks and balances.

The duo behind these political shenanigans are former dictator Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista Party and former president Arnoldo Aleman of the Liberal Party. Mr. Ortega, who has never won a free election, controls the National Assembly through his party's votes in collaboration with Aleman and his party. Aleman is serving a 20-year sentence for embezzling tens of millions of dollars during his 1996-2001 term. But house detention hasn't stopped Aleman from doing deals with Mr. Ortega.

As they say, read the whole thing.

  • Daniel writes extensively about the takeover of Venezuela by the strongman Hugh Chavez.  Why should we care?  Venezuela is a relatively nearby neighbor that exports a lot of oil to the U.S. Chevron/Texaco buys oil there and Citgo is owned by Venezuela. All the while, turmoil in the country producing 200,000 barrels a day LESS oil than its OPEC quota.  In his latest post, Daniel writes about hugo's lust for attaining and keeping power:

The real unknown thus becomes how he is going to manage it. Through the past 6 years we have seen his doggedly thirst for power overcome any obstacle. Now we have a political system almost totally at his service. That his opposition has gone from blunder to blunder does not explain all. Like all the great megalomaniacs of history, Chavez has known how to adapt to circumstances, how to backtrack when needed, how to switch policies as required. His political genius, if evil, cannot be denied. But so was the political genius of Hitler, Francia, Stalin, Mussolini, Castro, Peron, or even Napoleon III.

Now we seem to be reaching the decisive time where all such systems must once and for all establish their unchallenged control. It is a testimony of Venezuela basic democratic culture that after 6 years Chavez has not quite managed to feel secure enough in office that he needs still a new offensive to complete the job. Within the next two years we will witness that offensive as Chavez will annihilate any democratic hope in Venezuela, leaving violence as the only way out of that first XXI century Latin American dictatorship.

Again, read the whole thing.

We don't see any of this on the pages of Instapundit.  Look on a few other blogs, Glenn. Heh.

Update - If that weren't enough, now there is a new TV network set up to broadcast across South America. It's styled after al-Jazeera and is backed by Venezuela and hugo.

Telesur, short for "Television of the South," is billed as a commercial-free, hemispherewide counterbalance to North American media. It is slated to begin broadcasts within a few weeks. 
        
"Soon we will have Telesur, a channel with information for South American countries, because is not possible that Venezuela and the other southern countries depend only on information from CNN," Mr. Chavez said during a March press conference in Paris, according to a report on a Venezuelan government Web site.

Like al-Jazeera, Telesur is backed by oil money. (Hat tip to Quid Nimis.)

 

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