Beyond the Border Crisis, a Red Curtain Stretches Southward | RealClearPolitics
Leftist leaders instead set about to find better ways of doing business. From Moscow to Beijing to Havana, the left charted a course not to defeat democracy and tear down its market-based principles through direct confrontation, but to manipulate electoral systems in fledgling democracies, flood Western universities with Marxist ideology, and use rapidly expanding global corporate and banking sectors to finance its meteoric rise from the ash heap of history.
To that end, in what became known as the Sao Paulo Forum, Castro and the other leaders from leftist Latin American parties plotted their comeback in annual strategy sessions. The forum s first victory came in 1999 with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, among others, followed. Today, the ruling parties in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Peru, Saint Lucia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico and Bolivia, as well as the incoming government in Honduras, all are members of the Sao Paulo Forum.
Since 1990, when Castro s Cuba was the only leftist regime in power in Latin America, communist-backed parties have gained control of approximately half of the governments in the region. Closer geographically to the United States, only Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica remain non-members of the Forum in Central America. For its part, El Salvador and its protean leader Nayib Bukele (pictured) have fallen under the siren spell of the Chinese Communist Party in the past year.
The U.S. response to the rising red tide to its south has been largely passive. The same national security apparatus that once fought bloody proxy wars in Central America to stop the advance of communism one inch north of Nicaragua now idly watches Mexico slip incrementally toward socialism as its massive, state-protected criminal organizations flood U.S. streets with China-sourced fentanyl and methamphetamine. The decades-long U.S. reluctance to address the extent of corruption in the Mexican political system has reaped catastrophic consequences.
Farther south, China has taken advantage of the astonishing Biden administration indifference toward two historical migrant source countries, Honduras and El Salvador, amid a historic immigration crisis. The Biden administration has steadfastly refused to engage either country diplomatically, and El Salvador s Bukele has in turn taken significant steps both toward autocratic rule at home and China-backed unification with its Honduran neighbors. Honduras, which is developing a rapid rail system connecting the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean as a Panama Canal shipping alternative, figures to be a key commercial hub for Chinese Communist Party expansion into Central America.
Those darn Communists. Always fomenting revolutions, undermining institutions, and the like. They are a caution.