Don't look now but American neglect in the region is leading to an Ortega victory in the next Nicaraguan election.

Bart, how come it's always America's fault? Whether we leave them alone or get jiggy with them, whatever bad things that happen to/with them, it's always our fault.

We can take care of the Sandanistas as easily as we took care of Sandino. Who does this Ortega guy think he is, Saddam Hussein? And just think, this time there won't be any John Kerry around to screw things up.

ray,

Because whether we want to admit it or not, we have a century and a half old history of screwing around in that country, from William Walker to the installation of the Somoza regime to the defeat of the Sandinistas. Because they are an impoverished near-neighbor which can be troublesome to us as a potential terrorist base and as a drug-transit point. Because American companies like United Fruit and slimeballs like Carl Lindner have been exploiting the place for about a century. Because once the Sandinistas were thrown out, we promised to help them out and didn't in any substantive way, preferring instead to assist Muslims in butchering Christians in the Balkans, and propping up terrorist scum like the Saudi royal family.

None of this is to excuse the grotesque corruption and ineptitude of the Aleman and other conservative governments of Nicaragua. Nor do I have any intention of claiming the Sandinistas were anything other than perhaps the world's dopiest insurgents.

But to believe that rational policy-making should cause America to just walk away from a neighboring nation that it saw as a problem is just delusional. Especially when that nation is a small one of about 5.5 million, or 8 congressional districts. The creation of a civil order down there wouldn't have cost more than maybe $5 billion. We did it in Costa Rica 60 years earlier. Hell, Bill Clinton's bimbo eruptions probably cost the taxpayer more money.

Bush can't be everywhere in the world every second 24/7. Yes. Latin America is vulnerable to Muslim takeover, but hopefully those countries will learn a lesson from Afghanistan and Iraq and keep their heads down. Also Ortega got funds from Cuba via the USSR. Those funds are gone.

Muslim terrorists aren't getting paid by Saddam
Hussein anymore and the Saudi's may be rethinking their funding of terrorists too.

Things really are getting better and by the time Bush's second term is over, the world will be that much more improved.

We were stunned when vacationing in Tobago/Trinidad last spring. The papers were full of local disputes and turf wars between Muslims and Hindus???? Very little world news beyond the AP headlines of the day. No indication at all that Muslims terrorists were on the islands.

If you didn't know better, you might have thought you were in India not the West Indian islands. The island people we encountered at the airports, hotels, restaurants, etc. seemed friendly and easy going, but few of them loomed large on the political scene at least according to the local press.

It does not require a 'Muslim takeover' any more than Kim's nuclear Wal-Mart requires him to be a Muslim. In the next election, Little Danny Ortega is expected to win, due to disenchantment with the conservatives, who have proved to be both corrupt and inept. The Sandinistas were of course both during the 80s but voters have short memories.

When Ortega gets elected, he will allow the Jihadniks to move money through Nicaragua, use the nation as a staging area and hideout. Jihadniks will get a piece of the drug action, as they do in the Ciudad del Este region of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. Little Danny Ortega needs money and the Jihadniks will give him more than the Soviets ever did.

If it mattered back in the 80s, it matters more now. Terrorists based there can get here by bus.

In Trinidad, a few years back a group of Muslims tried to stage a coup, holding the Prime Minister hostage.

Even back when it was founded in the 1960s and the town was called "Puerto Presidente Stroessner", smuggling was a major factor in the Paraguayan economy. As long as Brazil and Argentina keep in place their nationalistic, mercantilistic economic policies, despite things like Mercosur, those incentives will be there and gangsters will exploit them.

As for Nicaragua, we'll know the fix is in if Jimmy Carter shows up to bless the results.

In the next election, Little Danny Ortega is expected to win

That's been said before...

I don't get the problem. We've fixed Nicaragua twice already, we can fix it again.

Matt,

In the last few years, leftist idiots have won free elections in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador and are likely to win in Peru, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Torrijos' son is in charge of Panama right now. I would not be so sanguine about Ortega's chance of failure, despite his Minnesota Viking-like ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

BTW, the thought that Alan Garcia, who was such a corrupt failure in pre-Fujimori Peru that he made Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan, is leading every current poll there is staggering.

Lou,

The image of the Gringo stomping around Latin America imposing a local gangster like Somoza, Huerta or the clowns who replaced Arbenz in Guatemala is precisely the image we don't want if we don't want to be stuck running an angry, truculent expensive empire in perpetuity. Because we lack the tenacity to stay around to manage things so that 'our gangster' doesn't go off the deep end(Somoza in Nicaragua) and the stomach to do the nasty stuff which putting down popular rebellions occasionally requires(pulling the rug out from under Rios Montt in Guatemala or Major Bob in El Salvador), our best alternative is to find some permanent way out of the chaos.

We need to do for Nicaragua what we were able to do in Costa Rica.

I still want to know what Iran-Contra Scam was about.

Bart:

Lula has not been proven to be the wild socialist people predicted 2 years ago. Perhaps he has matured, perhaps he is constrained, perhaps he is a CIA agent. Who knows? But with the exception of Chavez, are any of these leftists really dangerous? The tide of free trade will wash them all away, given time. And if a nation chooses foolishness (like Peru), well - we can't help them.

Bart: Look at it this way: given the choice between setting up and maintaining a Somoza-like regime and suffering an al-Qaida base on the other side of Mexico, what should we be doing?

I doubt it will come to that: there won't be any Brezhnev or Kerry to back up the Commies in Nicaragua this time.

It's not Lula who scares me, it's his Rolodex. If he tries to persist in his Third Way-style reforms, some of his comrades at the PT will make him disappear.

Nestor Kirchner, the President of Argentina, who is threatening a default on his nation's IMF loans is a bigger worry. The domino effect of a whole series of Latin American populists deciding that stiffing the IMF is a good way out of their financial binds ain't good for the American economy or the stock market.

Lou,

We'd probably opt for the Somoza solution again but every time we go to that well we increase anti-Americanism throughout the region. Three decades afterwards we'd be faced with more insurgency. The cycle just keeps repeating.

Our policy should be to encourage the development of civil society in the region which doesn't exist much outside of Belize, Costa Rica, Chile and Uruguay. If they developed enforceable property and contract rights, a halfway honest judiciary, they'd be a lot further along and the various demagogues like Chavez or weirdos like the Shining Path would have no constituency.