Venezuela has reason to celebrate this morning, Nov. 12, after last night’s rescue of kidnapped baseball star Wilson Ramos. The Washington Nationals catcher, who had come home to play in the winter league, was abducted by gunmen at his mother’s home Wednesday night in Valencia, southwest of Caracas, in the first known kidnapping …
Venezuela
The Wilson Ramos Kidnapping: Another Major League Reminder of Venezuela’s Crime Crisis
When I was a graduate student in Caracas in the 1980s, some of my best memories were hanging out at the Estadio Universitario during the winter baseball season, when Venezuela’s Major League Baseball stars would come home to play for teams like the Leones and the Tiburones. I used my expired Chicago Sun-Times intern press pass to …
Why Hugo Chávez Should Do the Right – and Smart – Thing and Let Leopoldo López Run
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights concluded this week what just about everyone in the western hemisphere already knew: leading Venezuelan opposition politician Leopoldo López was denied due process of law in 2008, when socialist President Hugo Chávez’s government barred him from running in elections for six years because …
How John Galliano’s Criminal Conviction Sets a Poor Example for the Developing World
Few would disagree that disgraced British fashion designer John Galliano was acting like a drug- and alcohol-addled jerk. On two separate occasions at the same Paris bar last October and February, he unleashed anti-Semitic insults and was caught on video saying he loved Hitler. But if Galliano’s tirades were socially disturbing, a …
The Real Cancer Behind the Ill Health of Two Dictators
Earlier this week, the German tabloid Bild published an exclusive: Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan, was said to be in convalescence following surgery in a hospital in Hamburg. Without disclosing its sources, the tabloid claimed Nazarbayev underwent a procedure to his prostate — what likely could be treatment for …
Venezuela’s Bicentennial: Should Chávez Re-Examine Bolívar – and His Revolution?
George Washington and Simón Bolívar are rightly remembered as the New World’s greatest independence heroes, but the anti-democratic flaws each possessed are too often forgotten. Washington was a slave-owner, a fact most Americans disregard during commemorations like this week’s July 4 fete. Likewise, the Caracas-born Bolívar …
Hugo Chávez Reveals His Battle With Cancer: Will It Affect His Re-election Battle?
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose health has been a subject of intense speculation since he underwent surgery for a pelvic abscess in Cuba on June 10, revealed during a televised address from Havana Thursday night, June 30, that he’s also battling cancer. Chávez insisted he was in the process of a “full recovery” …
Chavez’s Health Postpones a Summit: Will He Return For Venezuela’s Bicentennial?
It’s hard to imagine Hugo Chávez missing July 5. El cinco de julio was going to be a confluence of everything the socialist Venezuelan President lives for politically: It’s Venezuela’s bicentennial, a chance for Chávez to revel in the aura of his Bolivarian Revolution’s namesake, 19th-century South American independence …
Where’s a Deposed Dictator to Go? Five Top Tyrant Retirement Homes for Gaddafi
With NATO ever more confident of, and explicit about, deposing Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan leader losing even some of his longest-standing supporters in Africa, the question increasingly becomes not whether he will go but, assuming he survives, where. Here’s five possible retirement homes for the 69-year-old.
1. Zimbabwe. Even if …
Extraditing Drug Lord Walid Makled: Why Bogotá Snubbed Washington
Is it another sign of Washington’s withering clout in Latin America? Or does it indicate the rule of law’s rising stature in the region? Or will it just let Venezuelan officials who are allegedly in the pockets of drug lords off the hook? When it comes to Colombia’s final decision to extradite alleged narco-kingpin Walid Makled to …