Communism's Resurgence

Communism is not dead in Latin America. In fact, the dominoes are falling south of the border, but no one seems to be noticing.

"It's a new day. Communism is dead. It's even dead in Cuba." So declared Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in May 2002. "I hate to say it," she continued, "it's dead." The senator's proclamation was a surprise, no doubt, to Fidel Castro, whose regime was (and is) alive and as Red as ever. It also must have come as welcome news to the people of Cuba, still suffering, after nearly half a century, under Fidel's stifling oppression. Unfortunately, for them, the senator was wrong, as usual.

Conservatives had a field day blasting Senator Boxer's ridiculous epitaph. But while ridiculing her forensic pathology regarding Cuba, her critics frequently repeated Boxer's error by proclaiming that "Communism is dead" in the rest of Latin America.

The supposed corpse of Communism, however, is very much alive. In fact, it is much more dangerously alive than it was when Castro was in his heyday, in the 1960s and '70s, sponsoring revolution and terrorism throughout the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. Consider:

For the past six years, President Hugo Chavez--a self-proclaimed Communist and boon companion of Fidel--has been tightening the vise of dictatorship on Venezuela, the region's key oil-producing country (and the source of much of our imported fuel).

Next door in Brazil, Latin America's largest, most populous nation, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is also consolidating a Marxist regime.

In Argentina, President Nestor Kirchner reversed 15 years of Argentine policy by re-establishing ties with Cuba and cozying up to Castro and Hugo Chavez. In Ecuador, radical Castro-Chavez protégé Lucio Gutierrez is now in control.

Much of Colombia is controlled by FARC, the Communist narco-terrorists who have been waging a murderous terrorist war for 40 years.

United Nations "peacekeepers" occupy Haiti, and that disaster-ridden island may soon see the return of ousted Marxist madman Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Riots in Bolivia caused President Lozada to resign in 2003, and the current president, Carlos Mesa, may soon be replaced by Evo Morales, "indigenous" activist and leader of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party. In the December 2004 local elections, Morales' MAS candidates won many of the city and provincial races.

The Communist Sandinistas have swept back into power in Nicaragua, taking many of the local offices in the November 2004 elections.

The leftist list goes on: Chile's Ricardo Lagos (elected in 2000), Peru's Alejandro Toledo (2000), and Uruguay's Tabare Vazquez (2004). Latin American countries are falling like dominoes. But scarcely anyone is mentioning the Domino Theory — no, make that Domino Reality — playing out right next door.

Mention of the Domino Theory tends to draw blank stares from the under-40 set today. During the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, however, it was a household word and a central tenet of U.S. and Western geo-strategy in relation to the Soviet Union, China, and the Soviet-bloc countries. If the West didn't oppose the Communist forces backed by Moscow and Beijing, the theory went, the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam would fall to Communism, one by one, in quick succession. Millions of people would be slaughtered, and whole nations would be turned into concentration camps. The Asian nations in the region that didn't fall to overt Communist takeover would come under Red China's dominance, nonetheless.

The liberal intelligentsia sneered at such "simplistic" and "paranoid" notions. They were wrong, of course--fatally, horribly wrong. The "simplistic" theory proved to be fact. Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam did fall like dominoes. Millions were slaughtered, and the survivors were enslaved in concentration camps. The rest of Asia has come under China's economic and military dominance.

During the same period that the Asian dominoes were being set up for their tragic fall (the 1950s, '60s, and '70s), a similar scenario was developing much closer to home, on our southern doorstep. Fidel Castro took Cuba and used it as a revolutionary launch pad for the hemisphere. The dominoes began falling in Latin America to Soviet-backed thugs and terrorists: Romulo Betancourt in Venezuela, Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, Juan Jose Arevalo in Guatemala, Janio Quadros and Joao Goulart in Brazil, Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, Salvador Allende in Chile, Omar Torrijos in Panama, Maurice Bishop in Grenada, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

But Communist regimes never stuck in Latin America. The major reason: geography. The Russian and Chinese Communists could not consolidate control by simply marching in massive occupying armies, like they did in Central and Eastern Europe and Central and Southeast Asia. Except for Cuba, that is, where the Kennedy administration gave Castro a security guarantee, pledging not to attempt to overthrow him, and not to allow anyone else to do so either — so long as the Russians removed their missiles. But outside of Castro's protected "workers' paradise," anti-Communist forces (often from the military) regularly toppled the Moscow-Havana puppets.

During the 1990s, while Establishment analysts were proclaiming Communism dead in Latin America, Castro was busily building a hemispheric network that would focus on taking power by the ballot as well as the bullet. One of the most important parts of that network is the Sao Paulo Forum, a veritable Who's Who of terrorist groups and revolutionary parties that proudly boasts regular attendance by national presidents, other prominent politicians, labor leaders, and NGOs (non-governmental organizations).

The Sao Paulo Forum (SPF) was created in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1990, under the official sponsorship of Fidel Castro and Brazil's Communist Workers Party, headed by Lula da Silva, now president of Brazil. Member organizations of the SPF include the Communist Parties of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. "Former" terrorist groups that have gone political, such as Nicaragua's Sandinistas and El Salvador's FMLN, are also SPF members. So are organizations that are currently on the U.S. State Department's list of active terrorist groups, such as Colombia's FARC and ELN, the Tupac Amaru of Peru, Chile's MIR, and the Basque ETA of Spain.

The SPF conferences regularly feature guests and observers from Communist governments such as North Korea and Vietnam, as well as the Communist Party of the United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Sinn Fein (the political arm of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, IRA). In short, the SPF is a global Terrorists-'R'-Us, where leaders of terrorist states and terrorist groups are allowed to vote and are given a podium from which to pontificate on human rights, justice, and democracy. Besides Cuba's Fidel Castro, SPF stalwarts include Brazil's Lula, Venezuela's Chavez, Ecuador's Gutierrez, Uruguay's Vazquez, and many other current and former government leaders.

Amazingly, the meetings, deliberations, and connections of the Sao Paulo Forum rarely merit even a mention in the major U.S. media. Nor do members of Congress or the Bush administration express concern over SPF membership when ladling out more foreign aid, or when planning political and economic "integration" with these new "partners" under bilateral trade agreements or the proposed 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). And while the White House and the internationalist architects of the FTAA herald the progress they are making toward "hemispheric security," many of the Latin American regimes they are partnering with are deep in bed with the drug cartels, narco-terrorist groups, and a vast and growing array of Middle Eastern terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and PLO — that have established a huge presence, especially in Venezuela and in the Tri-Border Area of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina.

The Sao Paulo Forum is a continuation and expansion of the Tricontinental Conference, the Soviet terror operation that spawned the modern global terrorist phenomenon four decades ago. The Tricontinental made its debut appearance in 1966 with a gathering of world terrorist leaders in Havana. Although it was hosted by Fidel Castro, who became the titular head of the ongoing Tricontinental terror wave, the whole affair was completely a Moscow-run global strategic offensive. Planning for the Tricontinental had been set in motion by the Soviet Politburo at least as early as 1964, under the guidance of Boris Ponomarev, head of the Kremlin's International Department. The 1966 Havana conference brought together more than 500 representatives from Communist parties, revolutionary organizations, and terrorist groups from around the world. Cuba became the chief center of terrorist training, under the direction of Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kochergine and 10,000 Soviet military "advisers." Additional Communist-bloc trainers from Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and East Germany supplemented Cuba's massive Soviet contingent.

The direct continuity from the Havana-based Tricontinental Conference to the Sao Paulo Forum can be traced easily through personnel, parties, philosophy, and practice. The personnel/party pedigrees are so obvious that veteran Latin American observers and journalists have to be willfully blind not to notice.

For starters, there's Fidel himself, kingpin of the Tricontinental and a venerated co-founder of the Sao Paulo Forum (SPF). Castro has hosted a number of the annual SPF conferences in Havana and has attended most of the other SPF gatherings as they have rotated throughout Latin America. Additional comrades at SPF from the Tricontinental days include Daniel Ortega, Sandinista chief and co-founder of SPF; Shafik Handal, FMLN terrorist group founder and former general secretary of the Communist Party of El Salvador; Leonardo Boff and Frei Betto of Brazil, two of the leading lights of "liberation theology" since the 1960s; Marco Aurelio Garcia, Brazilian Communist and SPF executive secretary; Mario Marulanda Velez, maximum leader of FARC, Colombia's narco-terrorist army; and Ahmed Ben Bella, former Algerian dictator and 1960s leader of the Communist FLN terrorists in Algeria.

The Sao Paulo Forum is guided by a coordinating body called the Working Group, comprised of the Communist parties of Cuba, Brazil, and Uruguay, and representatives of such terrorist groups as the FSLN, FMLN, FARC, and ELN. Like the Tricontinental, the SPF's conferences are drenched in the Marxist dialectic and replete with denunciations of "Yankee imperialism" and "savage capitalism."

In 1966, at the Havana Tricontinental Conference, Castro's revolutionary sidekick, Che Guevara, called for the "creation of two, three, many Vietnams," meaning that Communists throughout the world should create multiple war fronts that would overwhelm the response capabilities of the U.S. military. Che's war cry was picked up and echoed by leftists across the globe and has remained a theme of Fidel Castro's Tricontinental/Sao Paulo Forum axis. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is determined to implement Che's famous war cry and to carry on the Communist legacy of his aging compadre, Fidel Castro. Chavez lionizes the "martyred" Che Guevara and was interviewed in 2004 by Che's daughter, a Communist propagandist and physician who lives in Cuba.

Hugo Chavez has made a point of praising, visiting, and embracing the most totalitarian regimes in the world. He was the first head of state to visit Saddam Hussein in Iraq after the Gulf War. He has allied himself closely with Red China, Russia, Iran, Libya, Algeria, Syria, and, of course, Cuba. His administration praises the Communist regime of North Korean madman Kim Jong Il — leader of an economic basket case, as well as a human rights hellhole — as a model for Venezuela's development. On October 12, 1999, during a state visit to China, President Chavez proudly announced: "I have been very Maoist all my life." He praised Mao Zedong, one of the greatest mass murderers in history, and let it be known that he viewed Chairman Mao's program as a model for his own Venezuelan revolution.

Chavez calls his program a "Bolivarian revolution," claiming inspiration from the popular 19th-century South American independence fighter Simon Bolivar. But it is clearly more Marxist and Maoist than Bolivarian. Recognizing that his hold on power was tenuous, Chavez imported thousands of Cuban agents masquerading as teachers, health professionals, scientists, and sports instructors. Their job is to organize his Bolivarian Circles — the Communist mobs patterned after Castro's Committees in Defense of the Revolution. At the same time, Chavez has brought in hundreds of intelligence agents from Castro's DGI (Cuba's version of the KGB) to help take over and purge the Venezuelan military and police of counter-revolutionary elements that pose a threat to his total consolidation of power.

In 2003, General Marcos Ferreira resigned as head of Venezuela's border control agency, DIEX, and presented documents and his own eyewitness accounts of the Chavez government's close cooperation with global terrorist groups. According to Gen. Ferreira, thousands of fraudulent Venezuelan identities were issued to members of known terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, on orders from top officials in Chavez's government.

Reportedly, nearly 4,000 fraudulent documents were issued between 2000 and 2002. The largest batch (2,520) were given to Colombians and the second-largest category (1,279) went to individuals of Middle Eastern origin. Ferreira said that on over 35 occasions he was told by Chavez's Interior Minister, Rodriguez Chacin, to allow groups of undocumented aliens into the country.

Chacin, who has been Chavez's principal liaison with Colombia's FARC narco-terrorist army, repeatedly pressured Ferreira to launder the identities of terrorists and narco-traffickers operating in Venezuela or transiting the country, often en route to or from Cuba. The identities he laundered included those for a network of people who raise funds for the Hezbollah terrorist group in Venezuela. "I quit my job when I got tired of doing dirty work for Chavez with the Cubans looking over my shoulder," Gen. Ferreira told reporters in October 2003.

Many other government, police, and military officials, including former Chavez loyalists who have become alarmed by his growing totalitarian rule and his increasingly open ties to Cuba and terrorist groups, have provided evidence reinforcing Ferreira's charges. Air Force Major Diaz Castillo, who fled to the U.S. in 2002, says that in 2001 he was put in charge of a mission by Chavez to fly $1 million in cash aid to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. According to Castillo, he flew the cash to the Venezuelan embassy in New Delhi, India, and it was then funneled through Pakistan — with the assistance of the UN High Commission for Refugees — to al-Qaeda as "humanitarian" assistance.

Colonel Jesus Urdaneta, Venezuela's former intelligence chief and a former friend and military colleague of Chavez, has produced documents proving that Chavez and Chacin had entered into secret agreements with FARC to provide the terrorists with munitions, money, fuel, and other support. Urdaneta has characterized those agreements as treasonous.

Because Venezuela is blessed with the Western Hemisphere's largest proven conventional oil reserves, the Chavez regime automatically boasts considerable prestige, revenue, and political leverage, not only in Latin America but throughout the world. Chavez has been using these assets shrewdly to expand his influence in OPEC, the Organization of American States, the United Nations, the Group of 77 developing nations, and other forums. Chavez has been subsidizing Fidel Castro with below-market-price oil and is buying favors in the region with preferential oil prices for Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Bolivia, Panama, Belize, El Salvador, and other countries. And since Venezuela consistently has been one of the top four foreign suppliers of oil to the U.S., Chavez exercises significant leverage over U.S. economic and political policies as well.

In 2004, Chavez entered into a massive military contract with Russia's Vladimir Putin, for a reported $5 billion in armaments. Chavez is buying attack and transport helicopters, MiG fighters, and other advanced weapons that will dramatically alter the military-political balance of the region.

No, Communism is not dead in Cuba. Neither is it dead in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and the other countries of Latin America. On this score, Senator Boxer and many other like-minded "experts" are, as usual, dead wrong. If we close our eyes to the Communist resurgence throughout our hemisphere and to the forces that are propelling this revival, we will soon find ourselves isolated and surrounded by nations controlled by hostile regimes.

==Also, it's extremely difficult--if not impossible--for me to take anyone seriously who cheers foreign dictators while considering our President and John Ashcroft to be jack-booted thugs.

Who cheered foreign dictators?

==For some reason, actions to destablizie the former are good and laudable while action against the latter are "internationalist" and only serve to bring about "the new world order."

I think they were just pissed that Pres. Bush went to the UN to ask "Permission" to go to war with Iraq.

Communism is alive in USA too. Indian Communists have systematically infiltrated the humanities departments of various American universities and have set up several charities in USA. Since Nehruvian-STALINISTS were in power in India for decades, they made sure that they would give recommendation letters (needed for admission to American universities) only to Communists when the candidate was applying to the humanities departments in USA.

==Also, it's extremely difficult--if not impossible--for me to take anyone seriously who cheers foreign dictators while considering our President and John Ashcroft to be jack-booted thugs.

Who cheered foreign dictators?

The John Birch Society and its publications, that's who. They've cheered George Papadopoulos, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, Rafael Trujillo, etc., etc., etc. All the while every American President regardless of party or ideology was a "conspirator" and a jack-booted thug.

==For some reason, actions to destablizie the former are good and laudable while action against the latter are "internationalist" and only serve to bring about "the new world order."

I think they were just pissed that Pres. Bush went to the UN to ask "Permission" to go to war with Iraq.

You're wrong. They were adamantly opposed to the war in Iraq regardless of its justification and remain opposed to any war against an Arab or moslem state. In fact, several years ago they ran an article to "head off" the current anti-moslem "crusade" by claiming that moslem are simply good family people like you and me, but are being presented as enemies by the "internationalists." Now, I wonder who they meant by that, hmmm?

As a matter of fact, even while they oppose pacifism they oppose all wars as artificial creations of their "conspiracy." They've even claimed to regard the Cold War against Russian Communism to be an "Insider"-controlled conflict, yet they always seem to approve of the war against Communism even as they proclaim it to be phony.

The JBS main duty in life is to mainstream traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by taking the word "Jew" out of them but nevertheless leading to many people so exposed to eventually become anti-Semites (and the same goes for their political fronts, the Buchananites and the "Constitution Party"). I'm a former member and I have no use for them whatsoever.

"I hate to say it," she continued, "it's dead." The senator's proclamation was a surprise, no doubt, to Fidel Castro, whose regime was (and is) alive and as Red as ever. It also must have come as welcome news to the people of Cuba, still suffering, after nearly half a century, under Fidel's stifling oppression. Unfortunately, for them, the senator was wrong, as usual.

Boxer is wrong and she knows it; communism is alive and well and is trying to make a comeback under other socialist and neo-liberal guises. Thanks for the ping, TTS. Interesting article indeed.

<<<"It's a new day. Communism is dead. It's even dead in Cuba." So declared Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in May 2002. "I hate to say it," she continued, "it's dead.">>>

Spoken in May 2002, and NOBODY made a big stink about her remarks at the time? I am astonished. Pray, tell us ALL, Senator Boxer, why do you "hate to say it?" Be specific, BahBah - or else I will have to draw my own conclusions as to the source of your chagrin - and I will not be charitable!

The Gipper's work, it seems, is not done after all. Not only do we face a global alliance of loosely knit Islamofascist theocrats who wear no uniforms, offer no mercy to civilians, and call no particular nation home, but also we are now confronted with a renovated and renewed cadre of Marxists and Maoists seeking the same goal they have always sought.

Worse, these two philosophical factions seem more intertwined than tree roots, and are more than willing to: use one another, abuse one another, hide behind one another, fight one another's battles in the press and on the streets, fund one another's enterprises, deny one another's existence, and lie pathologically and without conscience at the drop of a hat.

Great Gipper, we need you now more than ever! And Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, and Barry Goldwater, and Chambers...

Everybody get your guns cleaned and oiled, your knives sharpened, your pantries stocked - it looks to me like we have work to do!

Every FReeper has their own reasons for choosing their particular screen handle and accompanying 'tag line'. This article highlights the motives behind mine.

Simply stated, given the myriad threats rising against my country in this day and age, it is no longer sufficient to just be a conservative.

That went out the window when the centrist/moderate Democrats became Leftists, the Leftists became Socialists, and the Socialists became nakedly angry Communists and hateful, vandalising, Anarchist Lunatics! They are no longer willing to participate in our political process, to have to compete in the marketplace of ideas, in aboveboard public debate. Now they march in the streets spewing scripted rhetoric that most of them could not read or spell to save their souls.

Now I must be the American Arch Conservative; one ready for battle.

Yes, the JBS publication publishes many good columns, but I did see problems here and there in it. ...extremely insidious organization--most insidious I've analyzed over the decades. The various discussions within the JBS (including Web boards) are much worse.

I communicated with JBS people for years while trying to figure their agenda out, and concluded that the JBS is at least an anti-Israel magnet. Internal discussions do continue to rage between neo-Nazi JBS members and others who oppose their efforts. Friendlies who join the JBS tend to leave it sooner or later.

...problem for the likes of the JBS, Pat Buchanan and all, is that most communists in the world now are also working along with the Islamist terrorists against Israel. Another problem for them is that fascism is now exposed for what it is--national socialism wherever it rises, whether in a party like the old German National Socialist Workers Party or the old US National Socialist White People's Party (and all of its other contemporary guises).

All of that said, yes, the JBS does try to recruit as many good writers and gather as many good publications as it can. But writers who submit material to TNA do so without knowing what creeping other agenda lurks behind all of that.

BTW, the last information I posted to JBS boards was much about UFOs.

problem for the likes of the JBS, Pat Buchanan and all, is that most communists in the world now are also working along with the Islamist terrorists against Israel

Actually they have some pretty good articles about that subject.

The Enemy Within

Terrorism's True Roots

PLO: Protected Lethal Organization

Hard Left's "Right-Wing" Kin

Terror Trail: WTC, OKC, 9-11

OKC’s Mideast Connection

Because of the left's tireless efforts against the CIA and on behalf of Communist activity in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, it's not dead.

Perhaps Boxer was referring to the possum living in her hair.

Here's a classic example of decades of the American left's devotion--to Communist enemies of freedom:

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