Blame game
First, we get an op-ed wanted to blame the United States for everything in Paraguay. Now Andres Oppenheimer wants to blame governments that don't go after Venezuela.
Excuse my impertinence, but Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and several other Latin American countries deserve much of the blame for the recent forced exit of former Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo.
They have remained silent before so many violations of democratic rights in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba in recent years that they have helped create a climate of “anything goes” in the region.
Come on. I feel certain that Paraguayan leaders were not thinking about Venezuela when they planned Fernando Lugo's ouster. If anything, they thought about Honduras, where just waiting it out gets what you want. They also probably thought about Brazil, and figured Dilma Rousseff would not want to go to the trouble of reversing events.
At any rate, regime change and, say, attacks on the media are apples and oranges. Both involve democracy, of course, but someone plotting the former will not be considering the response to the latter.
1 comments:
If anything, they thought about Honduras, where just waiting it out gets what you want.
Okay, but that point seems to defeat your other point that the United States shares none of the blame for what follows the Honduras debacle. Given that the United States was a clear impediment to an acceptable resolution to the Honduran coup (as you yourself seemed to begrudgingly concede at the time), the United States would seem to share some responsibility for what follows the Honduras debacle.
Incidentally, I agree with you (1) that the countries that have the most power to affect the situation in Paraguay are Brazil and Argentina and (2) that they may be dropping the ball there, but that wasn't the situation in Honduras, and you know it wasn't the situation in Honduras. The United States was the only country with the capacity to effectively work to overturn the Honduras coup, and it did more than merely drop the ball on that count. It obstructed an acceptable resolution to the Honduras coup in ways that were far more egregious than whatever mistakes Brazil and Argentina might be making now.
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