Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Venezuela: Where’s Francis?

Sam Gregg writes, As Venezuela burns, many Latin Americans ask: “Where is Pope Francis?”

With Venezuela imploding, many wonder why Pope Francis seems slow to condemn a left-wing populist Latin American dictatorship that’s brutalizing the population of an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Gregg points out,

A second factor worth considering is that Venezuela’s crisis doesn’t fit into Pope Francis’s standard way of explaining contemporary political and economic problems. It’s very hard for the pope to blame Venezuela’s problems on the tyranny of Mammon, financial speculation, free trade agreements, arms-dealers, nefarious “neoliberals,” or any of his usual list of suspects.

Venezuela’s problems are clearly the result of socialist policies being imposed by a left-populist regime upon its own people. The Venezuelan bishops haven’t hesitated to describe this as the “fundamental cause” of Venezuela’s woes. The Chavez-Maduro regime has certainly created, to use Francis’s words, “an economy that kills.” But it’s not a market economy. It’s a socialist economy freely chosen and created by Venezuelan leftist-populists. There are no mysterious forces “out there” which forced Venezuela down this path (though functionaries imported from Communist Cuba have been doing their best to keep Maduro in power since 2014). While Maduro regularly blames “Yankee imperialism,” Venezuela’s disastrous situation is squarely the fault of left-wing populist Venezuelans who, like all socialists, refuse to acknowledge that such policies always lead to long-term economic ruin and can only be maintained in place by governments prepared to use “extra-constitutional” methods.

The Venezuelan Catholic leadership formally meets today and is expected to issue a formal statement defending religious freedoms.

UPDATE
Linked to by Doug Ross. Thank you!

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Pope Francis is against populists, after he was for them

Pope Francis’s socialist slip continues to show,
On the ‘Invasion’ of ‘Libertarianism,’ Pope Francis’ Ignorance Is Showing. Stephanie Slade writes,

My main critique, which I published here at Reason on the eve of his 2015 visit to the United States, was that the pontiff’s ignorance of basic economics has led him to a bad conclusion about which public policies are best able to reduce the crushing yoke of poverty in the world. I went on to encourage him to consider that, as a matter of empirical fact, markets are the single greatest engine for growth and enrichment that humanity has yet stumbled upon.

Francis believes that “the libertarian individual denies the value of the common good,” and that populism is “the fruit of an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and ‘looking beyond’ their own narrow vision.”

Odd words from the guy who entertained in the Vatican iconic left-wing populist Cristina Fernández de Kirchner five times during her tenure as populist president of Argentina.

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Says the guy who hosted Cristina 5 x at the Vatican: UPDATED

Pope Francis issues veiled warning about Donald Trump: ‘Populism is evil’. Pontiff also confesses to moments of spiritual doubt in interview with German newspaper Die Zeit

The pope told Die Zeit on Thursday “populism is evil and ends badly as the past century showed.”

Throwback Thursday to June 2015:

It’s up to you, gentle reader, to decide whether the frequent visits have anything to do with Cristina’s newly-found adherence to the Catholic Church, her fondness for shopping in Rome, well-timed junkets, or the desperate need for favorable publicity

UPDATE

A little humor at The Onion:
Pope Francis Spotted Sunbathing Nude In St. Peter’s Square

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Colombia: Santos-Francis-Uribe meeting UPDATED

Last Friday Juan Manuel Santos and Alvaro Uribe met at the Vatican with Pope Francis to discuss the so-called peace agreement with the FARC.

“The Santos and Uribe boys, please go to the principal’s office”

It was part of Santos’s Nobel Peace Prize Victory Tour™, which so far includes pressuring the Spanish government to censor advertising billboards.

The WSJ reports,

Pope Francis Tries to Mend Colombian Rift Over Peace Accord With FARC. Pontiff holds meeting with President Juan Manuel Santos and his political rival, Álvaro Uribe (emphasis added)

The pope first held separate private meetings with each of the two men. Then the three met for an encounter in which Mr. Santos and his rival sat side by side across a desk from the pope. The arrangement was unusual because it seemed to suggest equal standing between Mr. Uribe and Mr. Santos, a head of state.

The Holy See said the pontiff “spoke about the ‘culture of encounter’ and emphasized the importance of sincere dialogue between all members of Colombian society at this historical moment.”

But it was clear that Mr. Uribe maintained his tough stance against the accord, which he says amounts to granting impunity by permitting former FARC commanders to hold 10 seats in congress.

Uribe’s correct; the current deal, redrafted on December 1 and fast tracked by the Supreme Court on December 14, legitimizes the FARC and turns it into a political power.

Francis’s spokesman said he won’t go to Colombia until the peace agreement is “bulletproof.”

Uribe spoke to the media after the meeting,

“I summarized to Pope Francis the basic elements on which there are disagreements and told him I hope they are allowed to be changed”

Among the Twitter reactions:

“After talking to Santos // After talking to Uribe”



Post corrected for HTML error.

UPDATE:
Colombian media reports that Santos wanted to discuss the peace agreement with Pope Francis. Pope Francis thought it would be a great idea, and to have Uribe join them. The Vatican sent a plane to fetch Alvaro Uribe, who flew in, attended the meeting, did not give into pressure, and flew back home right away.

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The tweeted mini-Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

It was a busy week and weekend, so this week’s Carnival is brief,

ARGENTINA

BRAZIL

COLOMBIA

LATIN AMERICA

PUERTO RICO

VENEZUELA



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Venezuela: Pope Francis intervenes

Following the talk of impeachment after the government cancelled the recall vote, Nicolás Maduro made an unscheduled stop by the Vatican, where Pope Francis advised Maduro to hold talks with the opposition (emphasis added),

In a statement, the Vatican said the pope received Mr. Maduro “within the framework of the worrisome, political, social and economic situation that the country is going through.”

“The Pope thus invited the President to undertake with courage the path of sincere and constructive dialogue, to alleviate the suffering of the people,” the statement added. Mr. Maduro, in a message posted on his official Twitter account, called it an “excellent private meeting with deep spirituality.”

A spokesman for Mr. Maduro and Jesus Torrealba, head of the Democratic Unity Roundtable, a coalition of opposition parties known as MUD, said the talks would begin Sunday on Margarita Island under the mediation of the Vatican and the Union of South American States, known as Unasur.

This latest political theater will work to Maduro’s advantage:

  1. The pressure is now on the opposition, again.
  2. It provides the regime an opportunity to defuse unrest.
  3. The Pope has already given Maduro legitimacy, with an added a special frisson of “consulting to a Higher Power” for the gullible, by receiving him.
  4. The Catholic Church gives its imprimatur to the talks by acting as mediator.
  5. The Church-mediated talks are a very important distraction from the country’s ruinous state, and will change nothing.
  6. In the immediate future, it waters down the impact of the protests scheduled for tomorrow.
  7. More importantly, as the article mentions, “Indeed, the announcement, which surprised some of the country’s top opposition leaders, many of whom apparently weren’t included in the talks, risks a split in the antigovernment alliance.”

Indeed, the Vatican meeting and the upcoming talks serve the only purpose of providing Maduro with a screen to which hide his denial of democracy,   to borrow the WaPo’s phrase.

The Washington Post editorial board recommends instead that the United States should be coordinating tough international action. I estimate a zero chance of that.

Related:
Caracas Chronicles translated the Vatican Communiqué

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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No, if you are Catholic, you can not be pro-abortion

Pro-abortion Democrats like the Catholics for Choice, Nancy Pelosi, and Tim Kaine call themselves Catholic but ignore the Church’s doctrine on abortion, a doctrine dating back to the origins of the Church, either out of convenience, political expedience, willful ignorance, or moral obfuscation (or a combination of all) to promote the Hillary agenda and their party’s culture of death.

Read my post, No, if you are Catholic, you can not be pro-abortion

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Argentina: Perilous papal peronist politics

Dr Samuel Gregg’s special report:
Poverty, Politics, and the Church in Pope Francis’s Argentina. Argentina is trying to break with 70 years of populism, corruption, and general economic decline. But in the age of the Argentine pope, what role will the Church play in this process?

Some of the same reform-minded Catholics, however, also mentioned that Pope Francis’s undisguised skepticism about economic liberalization and markets in general—which they describe as having become more rhetorically-charged and even radicalized since his election to Peter’s Chair—is helping fuel populist opposition to long-overdue changes.

They—and I—doubt this is the pope’s intention. Nevertheless, they point to speeches such as Francis’s remarks to the World Meeting of Popular Movements in Bolivia last year, delivered while sitting next to Bolivia’s arch-populist president Evo Morales. Such remarks, they claim, provide cover for Argentina’s own career-populists: people who, for all their talk about defending el pueblo, oppose any meaningful change to a status-quo that maintains their power but which has steadily eroded the Argentine economy’s ability to lift the poor out of their misery.

Read the whole thing.

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