A Club of Slugs.

Caffeine is lethal to slugs: Chavez beware.


The gastropods called slugs (Derocerus reticulatus) are pretty repulsive mollusks: they are slimy, slippery and, being invertebrates, slide around. They often feed on excrements. Given these less than ideal characteristics and their habit of attacking agricultural crops they are targeted by man. All in all they offer such a repugnant view that they were the objects of a Hollywood horror film (Slugs, 1988). I find these specimens an adequate symbol for much of our Latin American and Iberoamerican political leadership today in power. I am talking about people like Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, Raul Castro, Rafael Correa, Cristina Kirchner, Evo Morales, Fernando Lugo, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Miguel Angel Moratinos, Lula, Insulza and some others who are not in power but tried to be, like Peru’s Ullanta Humala or Mexico’s Andres Lopez Obrador. This group is spineless, as slugs are. They have renounced democracy and respect for human rights and have adopted obsolete ideologies that have field wherever they have been put in practice.
This club of slugs has principal members, such as the ones above mentioned but also have Associate members, also referred to as fellow travelers, “sandalistas” or Assholes without Frontiers. Among these we can list Hollywood actors and directors like Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, writers like Ignacio Ramonet, Think tank gurus like Washington’s Larry Birns and Mark Weisbrot, U.S. public figures like Don King, Jesse Jackson, Cindy Sheehan and Joseph Kennedy, college professors like Miguel Tinker-Salas, mercenaries like Richard Gott, Roy Carson, Juan Carlos Monedero, Marta Harnecker and Norberto Ceresole (RIP), turncoats like Roy Chaderton and Alfredo Toro Hardy, rogue leaders from other countries like Mugabe, Ahmadinejad, Lukashenko and Qadaffi. Some of these associates are not naïve, they get paid in dollars, will not accept Bolivar’s.
The existence of this club is one of the worst news the region has received in many years. The club is made up of political extremists, basket cases with deep complexes of inferiority, greedy characters, who are tying to destroy the values that characterize the western civilization: individual freedom, human rights, democracy and free markets. They are often authoritarians, enjoy abusing their power, are intolerant of dissidents and utilize national assets as their personal property. They use these “qualities” to consolidate power and to try to keep it indefinitely. Their behavior violates the most basic moral values and principles. Chavez violates the constitution and protects terrorists; Castro is a murderer an a dictator; Cristina accepts illegal money; Morales abuses his presidential powers; Correa is arrogant and anti-democratic; Ortega is a rapist and a thief; Lugo is a lying fornicator; Insulza is biased and manipulative; Zapatero and Moratinos prefer to kowtow to despots to the defense of their national dignity; Lula is a double faced hypocrite; Umala and Lopez Obrador are dangerous demagogues.
It is worrying to see how the democratic countries of the hemisphere have not faced up to this club of slugs. It is only recently that Canada and Panama started to voice their disapproval. The U.S. Congress is starting to understand the dangers; the European Union just beginning to criticize their antics. Fear, excessive pragmatism and the smothering of principles for the sake of commercial interests have delayed their action unduly.
Hugo Chavez should be very careful. Caffeine has been found to be lethal to slugs.