Venezuela is not a particularly popular topic in Washington these days. To most, the bombastic rhetoric that President Hugo Chávez throws to the airwaves on an almost weekly basis has instilled an innate ‘mute’ response from those in the American foreign policy sector. Indeed, at times the elaborate feuds of the Venezuelan regime play out more as a flailing telenovela than international diplomacy.

Behind the scenes however, political rip tides are stirring Caracas in the midst of upcoming federal and municipal elections at the year’s end. On such accord, a rising young politician, Mayor Leopoldo López of Chacao, made it a point to visit the United States this past week to convey a sense of both the elections’ significance and shine light on its already fraudulent bearing.

Featured in Monday’s Washington Post op-ed , López is among hundreds of opposition candidates that have been blacklisted by the government well before the ballots are to be cast by the greater public. Jack Diehl of the Times explains:

“Two weeks ago, Venezuela’s national electoral council, dominated by Chávez followers, moved to ban López and 371 other candidates from the Novemeber state and local elections, which are shaping up as the most important since Chávez was first elected nine years ago. This broad exclusion was based entirely on the finding of another Chávez appointee, who ruled that each of the candidates was guilty of an administrative or legal offense, though none has been judged in court.”

To this end, López spoke before a forum organized by the Inter-American Dialogue, in which he outlined the progress made in the Cachao municipality of Caracas, the growing necessities of the Venezuelan populace, and the fallacies contrived by the regime to undermine ‘alternative’ governance (Audio here).

According to López, the current regime holds a grip on a near 90 percent of the political system, making it difficult to maneuver on strategic and tactical levels before the monopoly. He himself has been a victim of three assassination attempts and a kidnapping in 2006, both events he attributes with certainty to the government for his discrepancies in policy.

In step with this rhetoric, López attributed the following paraphrase to Chávez himself earlier this year:

“We are confronting a possible war if we lose the regional elections in November [...] If we lose regions like Caracas, like Miranda, like Táchira, we will be in a state of war.”

Framing this motive, López cites clear breach of the Venezuelan Constitution in Articles 65, 42, and 289, which declare a citizen eligible to run unless convicted by a judicial body of a criminal offense, and in the latter article describes the limited role of the board itself to exercise nullifying powers. In an ironic twist, Chávez had been brought before the Supreme Court on such criminal charges after his manufactured coup in 1992. Even so, the decision had not been one strong enough to dispel him from the ballot box in 1998.

Despite the hostilities and a regime hell-bent to derail any potentially successful candidate, the mayor maintains that these elections must be seen in context of the 2007 mandate that aimed to indefinitely renew his executive role. It marked Chávez’s first rebuff since his election in 1998. From there, he argues a fundamental campaign for change must be fortified by a few pillars:

• A united, ‘alternative’ platform to bid for political office

• Subsequent need for such platforms to reach and conduct “good governance” on a regional and local level

And if López and other ‘alternative’ candidates were able to show some success at the polls in November?

Amid his discussion before the forum, the mayor underlined a handful of issues not handled adequately in the mind of the Venezuelan public :

• Public safety (He cites Caracas as the most dangerous city in the hemisphere with 70 murders per 10,000 inhabitants)

• Food shortages

• Housing

• Corruption

• On the international front, the state’s alleged relationship with the FARC and its diplomatic stance with regional players, including a “fundamental reshaping of relations between North and South America”

Although López carries many ambitions and insights, unless significant pressure is leveraged on Chávez in the coming months from fellow American states or domestic fervor, its seems unlikely he, nor the rest of the near 400 blacklisted candidates, will have the opportunity to lay their hand to the table. Nonetheless, the mayor’s visit has seemingly stirred the pot in Caracas, as the regime ponders the prospects of an microscope of the eroding democratic trends of the Venezuelan state.

Update: Upon his return to Caracas this past week, the mayor was subsequently detained at the airport for two hours and purportedly roughed up physically by unidentified officials. He described his treatment on Venezuelan television as unacceptable. His claims were later to be satirized across several programs.

Beatrice Murch via Flickr

One can imagine the blustery state of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez upon discovering a U.S. naval plane had entered the country’s restricted airspace off the Carribean coast this past Saturday. At this point though, he probably plays to the tune of vindication among his naysayers— those who find his prophecy of imperial gringos sweeping the Bolivarian homeland a bit, hmm, off kilter.

U.S. officials acknowledged yesterday that the incursion did indeed occur, albeit by pilot error in a counternarcotics mission. The flight reportedly veered into Venezuelan airspace near a Presidential estate and military compound, restricted to both civilian and official aircraft.

Whether this was purely a case of a disoriented crew or true probing by the administration officials is at this point rather irrelevant, as Chávez doesn’t take much to spook these days. After the coup plot launched in 2002 on his own presidency, purportedly by CIA-sponsored dissidents, Chávez is all but convinced the United States continues to mark him. In the past few months his rhetoric has elevated with the Colombian intrusion upon Ecuadorian territory in its operation against the FARC camp, March 1 of this year.

In a much publicized response, Chávez then mobilized 10 battalions to the border to showcase his opposition to external meddling (ironic given the favoritism he’s played toward Colombian insurgent operations). This event comes amid his voiced conspiracies that either American and/or Colombian troops, under U.S. command, will commence subversive operations in Venezuelan territory.

In any case, Chávez fails or chooses to ignore, that while he remains a nuisance to the Bush administration, commercial ties are strong with the region’s economic partners and to the U.S. itself. Also, in addition to the Latin American agenda remaining on Washington’s backburner much of Bush’s tenure, any attention/resources diverted from the Middle East will likely land on the doorstep of the southern neighbor, Mexico, who is toe to toe with narco factions on its northern border front.

In any case, Chávez is likely to continue this posture with the upcoming U.S. adminstration and its allies, out of sheer political benefit and a degree of wariness. When the characteristic red flannel is traded for a plush robe, his security detail will still sweep the closet for unbeknown spooks or disgruntled venture capitalists. After contemplating the latest grudge to air in the next round of Aló Presidente, he might reach under his pillow to grasp a close guarded trinket— perhaps the Liberator’s long lost sword. We can bet though, the lights shall stay on through the night at Miraflores.

Bernardo Londoy

It looks like Uncle Sam’s tree fort may be out of commission soon enough in Ecuador. In a familiar twist, the U.S. strategic footprint continues to ebb from yet another round of regional diatribe. Ecuadorian officials have fervently voiced opposition to renewing a bilateral agreement which currently permits a U.S. outpost on a national military base in the coastal city of Manta. Amidst the public jousting, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, acknowledged this past Friday that U.S. officials have lobbied the transfer of the FOL (Forward Operating Location) to the Pacific theatre of its northern neighbor.

According to the U.S. State Department, the current FOL stationed in Manta, Ecuador fulfills the following:

“The mission of the FOL is to help Ecuador protect the sovereignty of its territory against the transnational crime of drug trafficking. We are supporting efforts in the Eastern Pacific to intercept the flow of drugs that threatens the health, safety and economic stability of our hemisphere. Our cooperation with Ecuador is producing positive results.”

Translation: the post functions as a minor node for the fabled U.S. ‘War on Drugs’. Much akin to its counterpart in Colombia, U.S. civilian and military presence remains rather limited in its numbers and scope. Framed as a 10 year deal, the American FOL in Ecuador commenced in 1999 and is slated to expire, without renewal, in November 2009. The station is permitted at any one time to host up to 500 U.S. personnel, yet according to the State Department its current capacity employs far fewer:

“There are approximately 15 full-time U.S. personnel who work at the FOL to support the anti-drug flights. Depending on the number of flights at any given time, on average 150 pilots, crew members and other U.S. support personnel might be situated at the FOL for brief periods of a few days or weeks.”

These flights operate within the framework of aerial reconnaissance, essentially relaying intelligence for mobilization of Ecuadorian forces against suspected narcotics operations in their territories. Much of this is carried out by private contractors in the ‘grand’ Andean plan to eradicate the crop at its source.

While President Rafael Correa would like to wholly brand the outpost a bellicose infringement of sovereignty under the guise to dethrone his populist regime (though CIA appears active in country), it really amounts to King-Kong rhetoric among the region’s caudillos. The political move to rebuke the Gringos represents both an opportune moment to demonize complicity with American foreign policy, and to also undercut the Colombian position on FARC hits in Ecuadorian territory early March.

In recent years the traditional string of military assistance and training to pan-American countries has waned from levels of the 20th century fusion. Brazil, Panama, Argentina and Puerto Rico among others are ceasing to send their top commanders to the School of the Americas for operational training by U.S. forces. Among these countries, too have been the closing of U.S. operations centers positioned to maintain logistic projection of force and counter the surge of transnational organized crime (TOC) in the SOUTHCOM theater. The anomaly to this crescendo has been Colombia.

However, with the current freezing of the free trade agreement (TLC) in US Congress, it shall be a bit of a dance for President Álvaro Uribe regarding American operational expansion in country. Is he perturbed by the calls to further curb human rights abuses from U.S. public figures amid their very request to bolster American counternarcotics operations? While he entertains absurdly high approval ratings at home, his clout among the region’s trading partners dissipates with each passing confrontation. Can he afford ruffling the feathers yet again?

It seems likely that the already scant American presence in Ecuador will indeed wither by 2009, but it is yet to be gauged whether any strategic gain would merit either party with an outlying FOL on the Colombian coast. Perhaps more fundamentally it flaunts the U.S. loss of touch with the reality in Latin America.