Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Mexicans voted for Plutarco Elias Calles. Argentinians voted for Juan Peron, and then for his wife Eva. Other similar examples exist throughout Latin American countries. Latinos down there are merely reaping what they have sown.
The CIA was founded in 1947. The dysfunctions of Latin American political economy antedate that.
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The man clearly has no knowledge of current affairs in in Latin America and no understanding of how social processes work. I don’t mean compared to an academic specialist. I mean compared to Joe Blow who does a smidgen of research. Latin America’s most salient issue is street crime. You see that in inhomogeneous societies with skewed income distributions. The way you address it is by investing in law enforcement. The CIA did not create the social order in Latin America nor did it manufacture their institutional deficits. Another problem is an incomplete and haphazardly ordered land registry. This has downstream effects because property owners cannot use their real estate as collateral. Another has been a mix of regulatory over-production and haphazard enforcement. Hernando de Soto has delineated the effects of both property titles and the regulatory state on enterprise in Latin America.
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One of the very few governments whose overthrow the CIA orchestrated was that of Guatemala in 1954. The political machine which ran Guatemala from 1944 to 1954 had gone out of its way to make a scapegoat of the United Fruit Company and to antagonize the U.S. Government. Guatemala had a rather unhappy history between 1954 and 1986, but why would you blame the CIA for that and not actors on the ground in Guatemala? And whinging about that will do nothing to address the country’s elevated crime rates and chronic economic underperformance.
There’s a great deal of crookery in Latin American politics. However, the political spectrum there is recognizable and electoral systems and public discussion bump and grind along. Characters like Juan Domingo Peron and Hugo Chavez are quite atypical.
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Electoral competition in Mexico was not the order of the day prior to about 1983. You had some organized opposition, but they had little success. It is more accurate to say there was no vigorous mobilization contra Plutarco Elias Calles.
I bet that priest went to the School of the Americas protest every year.
I wonder if “Fr. Paul” is merely repeating what he was taught in one of our Uber-Modernist seminaries?
Just one more excuse given by unwanted experts on why we “have to” admit everybody.
Modernists make up a lot of “have tos.” That way they can ignore that they’re not doing the real have tos.
Evidently a priest of the Archdiocese of St Paul & Minneapolis, ordained in 2020. Most of his Twitter chatter seems to avoid topical questions other than abortion. Appears to dislike Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson.
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My suspicion is that the source of this shizz is the sort of Minnesota school who fancied Mr. and Mrs. Tim Walz were apposite for positions as schoolteachers.
Trump, in his latest Press conference, was scathing of the Biden administration for lifting oil sanctions in Venezuela. In 2023, the Biden administration purchased 23% of Venezuela’s oil (second after China) then does a backflip a year later and puts a $25mill bounty on Nicolás Maduro head because he interfered with the national elections and inserted himself to remain President despite election results to the contrary. The US under Biden, basically inserted millions into the Venezuelan economy and gave Maduro a lifeline to remain President against the wish of the people…Just saying…
Since Spain’s colonies had no tradition of democratic governance before their independence, it seems no surprise that they have had so much trouble developing it. Brazil seems a somewhat different story and in the 19th century was regarded (according to some sources) as the best managed on the continent; but of course it became independent without the same sort of revolution, with a king of Portugal’s son (left as viceroy) declaring himself emperor.