Word: ecuador
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...world leaders rattle a saber as flamboyantly as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does. On Sunday, in a piece of vintage Chavez theater, he ordered thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after that country's military had ventured a mile into Ecuador on Saturday to kill Raul Reyes, a top commander of Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The left-wing Chavez called conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a "criminal" and a "lapdog of the U.S. empire," warning ominously that "this could be the start of a war in South America...
...wary of his government's alleged ties to Colombia's bloodthirsty right-wing paramilitary armies and because of human rights abuses by the Colombian military. Nor is he getting global kudos for sending his troops over a neighbor's border on Saturday in an operation denounced by Ecuador's leftist President and Chavez ally Rafael Correa as a brazen violation of sovereignty. But the hemisphere has cooled considerably toward Chavez's antics, and his defense of the FARC, which earns hundreds of million dollars a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting cocaine trafficking, isn't winning him much international sympathy...
...would be ill-advised for Chávez to try to revive the idea of nixing presidential term limits, as he hinted this week he may do. (The Venezuela vote may also give other Latin American countries - especially Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador - second thoughts about giving their own Presidents more if not unlimited terms.) Unlimited reelection was arguably the proposal that repelled voters most, and to ignore that reality would only invite trouble. Instead, says Bart Jones, author of a new Chávez biography, !Hugo!, it's time for Chávez and chavistas "to stop thinking about the Bolivarian Revolution...
...many observers fear that Latin Americans, as they so often have in their history, are again willing to give leaders like Chavez inordinate, and inordinately protracted, powers. Chavez, critics complained, was in fact leading a trend of what some called "democratators" - democratically elected dictators. His allies in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, are hammering out new Constitutions that may give them unlimited presidential reelection. The fact that Venezuelans this morning resisted that urge - and that Chavez so maturely backed off himself when he saw it - may give other countries pause for thought as well. It could even revive...
Given how profoundly Chávez has altered hemispheric politics in recent years, it's not surprising that he seems to be leading the so-called democratator trend in the region. In Bolivia and Ecuador, left-wing Presidents and Chávez allies Evo Morales and Rafael Correa are hammering out new Constitutions that would let them run for re-election indefinitely. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega, hoping to relive the broad Marxist powers he enjoyed as President in the 1980s, is ruling virtually by decree. In Argentina, many suspect that the leftist husband-and-wife team of outgoing President Nestor Kirchner...