Venezuela Archives - Foreign Policy In Focus

Iran’s Adventures in Latin America

by Richard Javad Heydarian | Nov 18, 2010

As the United States continues to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, the Islamic regime is engaging in a foreign policy counter-attack with profound strategic consequences. The theater of strategic warfare between the United States and Iran has expanded well beyond the Middle East.From sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, Iran is selling arms, offering aid and investments, and otherwise establishing a new pattern in south-to-south relations as it battles what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls “Western arrogance.”

Is Chavez Following Iran Down the Radioactive Brick Road?

by Russ Wellen | Oct 6, 2010

It might be easier to talk Venezuela off the nuclear-weapons ledge if the U.S. weren’t so intent on filling the coffers of its own nuclear-weapons industry.

Recent Colombian Mass Grave Discovery May Be “False-Positives”

by Conn Hallinan | Aug 1, 2010

“False positive” is the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and dressed them up in insurgent uniforms to fake the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy.

John McCain and the International Republican Institute

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi | Jun 27, 2008

Senator John McCain presents himself as a what-you-see is what-you-get presidential candidate: clean, pragmatic, following his convictions even when not politically expedient. He considers himself to be someone who would make an excellent foreign policy president.

Sharp Attack Unwarranted

by John Feffer, Stephen Zunes | Jun 27, 2008

Gene Sharp, an 80-year-old scholar of strategic nonviolent action and veteran of radical pacifist causes, is under attack by a number of foreign governments that claim that he and his small research institute are key players in a Bush administration plot against them.

The Andean Crisis

by Laura Carlsen, John Feffer | Mar 19, 2008

On the first day, Colombian military and police forces launched an attack on an encampment of the Colombian guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in Ecuadorian territory, killing over 20 people.

Nonviolent Action and Pro-Democracy Struggles

by John Feffer, Stephen Zunes | Jan 24, 2008

The United States has done for the cause of democracy what the Soviet Union did for the cause of socialism. Not only has the Bush administration given democracy a bad name in much of the world, but its high-profile and highly suspect “democracy promotion” agenda has provided repressive regimes and their apologists an excuse to label any popular pro-democracy movement that challenges them as foreign agents, even when led by independent grassroots nonviolent activists.
In recent months, the governments of Zimbabwe, Iran, Belarus, and Burma, among others, have disingenuously claimed that popular nonviolent civil insurrections of the kind that toppled the corrupt and autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in recent years – and that could eventually threaten them as well – are somehow part of an effort by the Bush administration and its allies to instigate “soft coups” against governments deemed hostile to American interests and replace them by more compliant regimes.

Siesta time for the World Bank

by Nadia Martinez | Jun 20, 2007

The problem with the World Bank is much bigger than its president, Paul Wolfowitz.

Venezuelan Youth Street Culture Festival

by Emily Schwartz Greco, James Suggett | Jun 7, 2007

The brim of a young hip-hop artist’s beige beanie hides a quarter of his face as his peers observe cross-legged from the concrete below. His cheek and lips grip the microphone intensely. The timid posture of his thinly adolescent frame can barely contain the newly found power and energy budding from each stomp he plants on the rickety stage in a weedy university parking lot in Mérida, Venezuela.

Adios, World Bank!

by Nadia Martinez, Emily Schwartz Greco | May 4, 2007

As the controversy around Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz’s uncertain future as president of the World Bank intensifies, the financial institution is not only losing supporters. It’s also losing victims. In Latin America, countries are paying off their World Bank loans early, cutting off ties with the Bank, and creating their own financing instruments to replace the world’s oldest multilateral lending agency.