Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

In War — A Crime Against Humanity (Hojas del Sur / Amazon 2015), I discussed the need to strengthen the commitment of international and multilateral institutions to each other and to the establishment of world peace. I said at the time that the UN needed to be restructured to keep the five veto-holding powers on the Security Council from manipulating war and peace according to their own geopolitical agendas, and suggested that the NATO alliance should be bolstered and used to reestablish and maintain peace in areas of the world within their sphere of influence where armed conflicts emerge. Above all, however, I stressed the importance of democracy as the mortar that cements together the building blocks of world peace. I emphasized the importance of not only unifying Western democracies, but also of promoting democracy throughout the world as a major ingredient in the mix of international cooperation and the eventual abandoning of war as a means of settling international dispu...

Those of us who grew up in the South America of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s know all too well about how fragile democracy is. The maximum outward manifestation of the death of a democracy is that culminating moment when tanks roll out of the military bases and onto the streets, elected leaders are exiled or jailed, constitutional guarantees are suspended, and repression of the citizenry is installed as the governing norm. But this is seldom a surprise first sign of the collapse of freedom and democracy. Quite often democratic institutions are in such a debilitated state that a dictatorial takeover is almost a foregone conclusion. Other times these institutions have been so infiltrated by populist and/or other autocratic elements that a coup per se is rendered completely unnecessary and redundant. In these cases, democracy merely whimpers and dies in the chokehold of a political elite or dictator, with no one mounting any sort of vigorous defense until it’s too late. And many time...

Since its independence in the early 1800s, Venezuela has had, like many of its South American neighbors, a checkered history of pendulum swings between democracy and despotism. Also like many of its neighbors, however, it has had a history of democratic vocation that has led its people to repeatedly seek a resurgence of democratic vigor every time authoritarianism has reared its head. Protests in Caracas But unlike other major democracies in the region, petroleum-rich Venezuela is currently experiencing a deepening autocratic trend that has not only accompanied but also fueled the economic and social crisis set off in that country by a worldwide nose-dive in crude prices since 2014. In this sense, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy has been the lack of diversity of its economy. But both the boom and bust in oil revenues has played into the hands of that nation’s self-style “Bolivarian” authoritarians, in the first case permitting the implementation of far left populis...

Emmanuel Macron, a win for Western democracy Vive la démocratie française! Liberal democrats throughout Europe and around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief this past weekend after French voters overwhelmingly chose against the far-right, anti-European Union project of extreme right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen. But while initial numbers demonstrated her opponent, Emmanuel Macron, to have won a decisive landslide victory, deeper analysis leaves room for grave concern about where the tides of French democracy will go from here and about the trends among French voters that may well reflect those emerging in the rest of Europe and, indeed, the West as well. First of all, it’s important to note not only who voted for Macron and Le Pen, but also who didn’t.  About nine percent of those who voted in Sunday’s presidential election cast either blank or spoiled ballots. For the most part, these were probably not erroneous votes, but purposely adulterated or uncompl...