José R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.
Hugo Chávez has once again made headlines around the world with another of his inane comments. This time, he suggested that the United States may be responsible for several Latin American heads of state, himself included, having recently been diagnosed with cancer.
The problem with these periodic outbursts is that they only reinforce the tendency to dismiss the Venezuelan populist as a clown who poses a threat to no one and therefore deserves no special concern. Quite the contrary; Hugo Chávez remains a very real danger to democracy and stability in Latin America, and no one should allow his buffoonish behavior to obscure that fact.
As if to reinforce that, his latest utterance comes amid an announcement that Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is making yet another trip to Caracas as part of a four-nation visit to Latin America starting next week. Coming at a time of escalating tensions between the United States and Iran over Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons program, Ahmadinejad’s latest foray into the Western Hemisphere can only be described as provocative and dangerous, for a region that has no strategic interest in the international dispute with Iran.
President Barack Obama raised the stakes further in recent comments to the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal, in which he said that Chávez’s ties to Iran “have not served the interests of Venezuela or the Venezuelan people” and expressed concern about Chávez’s anti-democratic behavior and his failure “to contribute to the security in the region.”
“Here in the Americas,” he said, “we take Iranian activities, including in Venezuela, very seriously and we will continue to monitor them closely.”
Days later, The Washington Post ran a front-page story, “Iran seeking to expand influence in Latin America,” that quoted a former CIA officer as saying, “For Iran to be so active in Venezuela and for the Quds Force to be there can only suggest Iran is serious about asymmetrical force projection into our neck of the woods. If Israel bombs Iran, we may well see retaliatory strikes aimed at U.S. interests coming from these Quds Force guys in South America.”
Further raising the temperature was a report last month by the Spanish-language network Univisión, an investigative documentary on “The Iranian Threat” that included incriminating information on Venezuelan and Iranian diplomats in Mexico discussing waging cyber-attacks on sensitive U.S. computer systems, including those of nuclear power plants.
At the same time, U.S. law enforcement officials revealed details of an investigation into a Lebanese bank in Canada that laid out Hezbollah’s sophisticated global money-laundering operations that includes direct involvement by senior officials in the lucrative South American drug trade.
At the center of the Iran-Latin America nexus stands Hugo Chávez. And that’s no laughing matter. The disturbing reality is that, over the past several years, Chávez has allowed Venezuela to be converted into one of Iran’s most important international platforms for evading sanctions and conducting asymmetric warfare against the United States. It’s a dangerous game, but one that until now has been virtually cost-free for Chávez. Hopefully, President Obama’s comments mean that those days are over and the Venezuelan strongman will finally be held to account for his destabilizing behavior.