It's U.S. Supported Colombia's Uribe Who Sounds like the Latin American Dictator

Editor's Note: This originally appeared on AlterNet's blog, PEEK.

If you read the Washington Post as religiously as I do, you probably have a pretty good grasp of the taxonomy of Latin American leaders.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a brutal dictator whose crimes include saying mean things about George W. Bush, sponsoring leftist terror groups, using Venezuela's oil revenues to sway elections in the region and, perhaps most egregious of all, banning the Simpsons! Oh, and winning a bunch of elections.

He's followed by evo Morales, who is a walking, talking race card and just won't let bygones be bygones when it comes to Bolivia's traditional elites -- those friendly light-skinned plutocrats who own all the land. He's a dictator too.

Then there are "moderates" like Chile's Michelle Bachelet. She might call herself a socialist, but Chile's into "free trade" and has a privatized Social Security system from the Pinochet era, so, meh.

Colombia's Alvaro Uribe, of course, is a close Washington ally, a recipient of massive amounts of U.S. security assistance and is widely regarded as a beacon of democracy. Yes, he's a former narco-terrorist who was a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar, and, yes, labor leaders and protest organizers are routinely assassinated in Colombia. And, sure, Uribe's cousin and close confidant was arrested last week for his ties to right-wing terrorist groups -- joining "More than 30 current or former members of Congress, the vast majority allies of the president, [who] have been arrested for allegedly backing and benefiting from the illegal right-wing bands" -- and, OK, now there are allegations that Uribe himself might have had a hand in the assassinations of 15 lefties in the 1990s.

But he's a bulwark of democracy, dammit, and we have to sign a trade deal with him before those socialists ban The Family Guy.Then there's Ecuador's Rafael Correa -- young, good-looking and not at all fond of neoliberalism. The LA Times' handy pocket guide to Latin American politics lists him as a "Harvard-trained Chavez ally" (He never attended Harvard, but, you know, the facts don't much matter when reporting on Latin America).

Correa is trying to clean up his intelligence agencies, which he says are "totally infiltrated and subjugated to the C.I.A." He's also booting the U.S. out of an airbase it’s very much enjoyed using for the past decade. According to the New York Times, "the agreement, negotiated under extreme economic distress by a Ecuadorean president who was overthrown months later, includes no rent for Ecuador." Sweet deal, and losing it has ruffled some feathers in the seat of Pax Americana; as our friend the Borev* noted, "the U.S. Southern Command is cutely pretending to 'respect Ecuador's decision' until his plane goes down mysteriously over Panama or something."

Correa's recently been in the news for his high-profile clash with Uribe, whose administration bombed Ecuador last month, possibly with U.S. help. Reuters tells me that Correa is "facing ire" at home for constantly dissing Uribe "because Ecuadoreans want him to focus instead on fighting inflation and spurring an anemic economy."

Correa, whose confrontational style discomfits many Ecuadoreans, still refuses to restore ties or even talk with his conservative counterpart, limiting his comments to a public discourse laced with accusations such as "bare-faced liar."

According to the country's most influential pollster Cedatos-Gallup poll, Correa's popularity bounced at the height of the Colombia crisis in mid-March to 66 percent ... but that support began to erode as the spat dragged on, dipping to 62 percent by April.

(Side note: the first quotes are from the story's lede and the fifth paragraph; the fact that Correa's approval rating has in fact declined just a tad, from a peak of 66 percent to a still-quite-impressive 62 percent, is found buried in the 20th and penultimate graph. Noam Chomsky said that one should always read the final three paragraphs of mainstream news stories first.)