Left Turn In South America

Let's have a look at how important it is for America to have a president who is very familiar with the world. The single most important task of a president is dealing with the outside world.

During the Cold War, the U.S. Government was determined that Communism not be allowed to spread beyond Cuba in the western hemisphere. The best-known leftist insurgencies were the Shining Path in Peru and the FARC in Colombia. But the right-wing governments that were supported by the U.S. in the interest of battling Communism were much too harsh and dictatorial and the effort backfired.

The recently-elected president of Brazil is a former marxist guerrilla, who was once jailed and tortured by a right-wing regime. Her predecessor, the socialist Lula da Silva was almost certainly the most popular national leader in the world. During his tenure Sao Paulo, which is just about the biggest city in the world, implemented a campaign to remove business advertising on it's streets.

In neighboring Argentina, the leftward Peronista movement is still alive and well after having once been overthrown by the right-wing 1976-82 dictatorship and it's notorious "Dirty War" against socialists. The recently deceased former president Nestor Kirchner was probably almost as popular as Da Silva.

Bolivia and Venezuela are led by two well-known socialists, Evo Morales and the successor to the late Hugo Chavez.

I was really taken aback by the miners that were recently rescued in Chile. They announced that they intended to take all of the money earned by appearences, put it into a common pot and share it equally among them. Such a display of pure socialism would surely have brought a smile to Salvador Allende, whose government was forcibly replaced by that of the harsh right-wing Augusto Pinochet .

Colombia seems to be the one exception to this rule as it recently elected a rightward president.

Communism is not an issue anymore. The point here is how important it is to have a president who knows how to deal with other countries.