Concern For Latin America

Submitted by Brendan (United States), Nov 15, 2006 at 02:00

One of our major demographic contributors in the future will be Latin America, and I am concerned about its future.

That continent has achieved impressive economic growth over the past decade, but there seems to have been little if any correlation between economic growth and the emergence of a strong social order. Columbia, Mexico, and many of the other leading nations of Latin America have become unacceptably corrupt and violent.

Now a new generation of militant anti-democratic leftists have taken power in Venezuala, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, and they are fomenting the civil war in Columbia and trying to set up a shadow government in Mexico. This would all seem solveable in the long run, and one might even regard the emergence of some benign welfare statism (such as exists in Brazil) as a positive economic stimulus in these excessively stratified societies. One might argue things are on track and these events are just part of the birth pangs, but if militant Islam takes root in Latin America that will not be the case.

It is for this reason that I regard with great concern rumors of an emerging collaboration between the Chavez regime in Venezuala and Hezbollah militants who are indoctrinating natives in the southern part of the country, near the Columbian border. While I think the US made the right decision by supporting democracy after the coup in Venezuala (our foreign policy would have lost credibility without it), if the rumors are true we need to apply a new Monroe doctrine to this part of the world and kick Hezbollah out now. Otherwise the future in America will be so bad that we will literally wind up being nostalgic for Steyn's pessimistic vision of the future.

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