Opinion: Latin leaders embarrass themselves by supporting Gadhafi

By Andres Martinez

Posted: 03/09/2011 01:57:31 PM PST

Updated: 03/09/2011 04:15:23 PM PST

Hugo Chávez is trying to come to the rescue of his friend and fellow "colonel," Moammar Gadhafi. The Venezuelan president has offered to mediate Libya's civil war and warned against any foreign intervention in support of Libya's opposition, which now controls much of the east of the country, including the port of Benghazi, home of the Hugo Chávez soccer stadium. The Venezuelan government even railed against the move to oust Libya from the United Nations Human Rights Council because of Gadhafi's violent crackdown on his own people.

The attempt by Chávez (winner of the Gadhafi International Prize for Human Rights in 2004) to play a role in Libya's future is unlikely to amount to more than a quixotic gambit, though it remains a distinct possibility that Gadhafi could find himself a comfortable retirement home in Venezuela (some reports in the British news media already have one of his sons hiding out on Venezuela's Margarita Island). But Chávez's solidarity with Gadhafi (whom he has compared to Simón Bolívar) speaks volumes about the fate of democracy and human rights in the region -- in Latin America, that is.

Disturbingly, Chávez isn't Gadhafi's sole ally in this hemisphere. Fidel Castro (Gadhafi Prize, 1998) has long been a comrade in arms, and the Cuban Foreign Ministry has accused the United States and the Western news media of instigating the current violence in Libya.

And no world leader has been

as bizarrely effusive about Gadhafi in recent days as Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega (Gadhafi Prize, 2009). The Sandinista leader has boasted of frequent calls with the Libyan leader, whom he described as waging a great battle to defend his people.

"I have transmitted to him the solidarity of the Nicaraguan people," he told a rally in Managua, even as Gadhafi was unleashing foreign mercenaries against his own population.

The Latin American left's pathetic infatuation with Gadhafi -- a symptom of anti-imperialist solidarity run amok -- shows the immaturity of Latin America's civil society and is a blow to democratic values everywhere.

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's embrace of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in recent years is even more troublesome, especially because Lula is by any other measure a man of impeccable democratic credentials. The point is that even he has to play this tiresome game: If you are on the side of "the people," that means you embrace certain rogues around the world who've stood up to the Yankees, starting with the Castro brothers in the region, and thugs such as Gadhafi and Ahmadinejad farther afield.

We can only hope that the horrible images out of Libya will make this game harder to play. Latin leaders (of all ideological persuasions) have arrogantly considered foreign affairs their exclusive prerogative, divorced entirely from whatever constraints they face at home, and this excessive compartmentalization breeds moral blindness.

But blindness is harder in this age of instant global communications. Venezuelans see what is happening in Libya and are asking pesky questions about why their leader compared Gadhafi to Bolívar and gave him a replica of their liberator's sword. And Nicaraguans have every right to ask why their collective solidarity is being offered to a despot intent on killing his own people.

The tragedy of the Latin left's knee-jerk alignment with the likes of Gadhafi, and the unquestioned championing of sovereignty over any international scrutiny or enforcement of human rights, is that it mocks the very values that courageous democratic leaders such as Lula fought for when his country was governed by an oppressive military regime.

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ANDRES MARTINEZ is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times