Like Nicolás Maduro.

The Venezuelan dictator says he’s “breaking relations” with WhatsApp because it’s allowing folks to express too much criticism of the massive, brazen, knuckle-dragging election fraud he committed on July 28 — when he declared himself the winner of a presidential contest the world now realizes he lost by millions of votes.

That’s right, Maduro is severing diplomatic ties with the Republic of WhatsApp. It’s somewhere on the world map; just Google it, you’ll find it. Anyway, Maduro has expelled its ambassador. So no more arepas for you, WhatsAppians! (Is that what you call people from WhatsApp?)

Ah, if only Maduro’s bulla was the only bulla we have to listen to now, as Venezuelans and the international community try to figure out how to dislodge one of the most disastrous and despotic Latin American leaders of this or any century — and as those who defy him are getting rounded up and sent to prison camps.

Maduro’s opposition challenger, Edmundo González, won two-thirds of the July 28 votes. But Venezuela’s mafioso socialist regime, including the military, is digging in to keep Maduro in power. And so this is when we start hearing the lefty-loosey and righty-tighty bulla about how to solve the Venezuelan crisis — neither of which actually does.

Let’s start with the lefty-loosey bulla — the tiresome, Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing apologetics from the left exhorting the world to loosen pressure on Maduro right now because, well, as a socialist his heart is always in the right place and, besides, he wouldn’t have to act like a tyrant if the U.S. and other fascist forces hadn’t declared war on his country.

And who better represents the lefty-loosey dogma than Colombian President Gustavo Petro — the former leftist guerrilla who always checks his spine at the cloakroom when dealing with his ideological hermano next door.

Not only can Petro not bring himself to say publicly that Maduro’s victory claim is ludicrous; last week, Colombia abstained from an Organization of American States vote on whether to demand Maduro publish the July 28 vote tally — which Maduro disgracefully refuses to do.

Instead, Petro blathers that we shouldn’t “fall into the strategy of war and the separation of peoples” and urges Maduro and Venezuela’s opposition to pursue a rapprochement — even if that means leaving a brutal and ruinous autocrat unchecked in the Miraflores presidential palace for at least another six years.

And, oh yeah, the imperialista U.S. should lift all sanctions against said autocrat.

I’m all for dialogue — if it leads to Maduro conceding a democratic election result. What insults me and every democrat on the planet is Petro’s suggestion that Maduro and the two-thirds of Venezuelans who want him gone should hug and patch things up now.

It’s as if Petro were a 20th-century policeman telling a physically abused wife and her abuser husband to just work things out.

Petro has company — most notably fellow Maduro-coddling leftist presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.

But there’s a legion of bulla counterparts on the righty-tighty side — like Florida’s own Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s leading conservative cries to have the Biden administration re-tighten the economic sanctions screws on Venezuela to make Maduro cry uncle.

Rubio asserts this crisis never would have happened under former right-wing President Donald Trump and the oil sales embargo he slapped on Venezuela.

That’s right — because under Trump, the Venezuelan opposition never even remotely approached the electoral corner it’s painted Maduro into now. And it has done so thanks largely to the electoral negotiations and agreements, which included an easing of oil sanctions, that Biden’s overseen.

Rubio’s right to condemn Maduro’s criminal betrayal of vote-respecting pacts like last fall’s Barbados accord. But the senator himself looks like a retro cop — telling us to punish the abusive father by heaping more suffering on his kids.

That’s essentially what re-applying the full Trump penalties package, rather than focusing on targeted sanctions, would mean at this point for already desperate — and emigrating — Venezuelans.

So please, all the lefty-loosey and righty-tighty Venezuela zealots, spare us your bulla — and try using your noggins now.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

There’s always been an eerie physical resemblance between 20th-century Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez and 21st-century Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. The jet-black helmets of hair. The bulldog cheeks. And the bushy mustaches — the source of Gómez’s nickname, El Bagre, or The Catfish.

But now the political likeness is complete as well.

There’s the medieval brutality: Gómez was a homicidal degenerate who collected torture methods instead of stamps. Today, Maduro is accused by the U.N. of crimes against humanity.

There’s the magical-realist orgy of corruption: Gómez stole so much of Venezuela’s oil wealth, and Maduro has allegedly trafficked so much cocaine through the country, that one was and the other is among the world’s criminally richest men.

And — as Maduro confirmed unequivocally a week ago — there’s the monstrous rape of democracy: Gómez ruled Venezuela for 27 years. Maduro, who came to power 11 years ago, threatens to rule for at least another six now that he and his mafioso regime have engineered the most Neanderthal electoral fraud the western hemisphere has seen in more than a generation.

Venezuela had other despicable dictators before Maduro. Cipriano Castro. Marcos Pérez Jiménez. And Maduro has sealed his place in that ghastly gallery.

But the Gómez comparison matters most. That’s because much of the aura of the socialist “revolution” Maduro heads relies on the ancestral claim of its founder, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He insisted his great-grandfather was the llanero, or cowboy, Pedro Pérez Delgado, aka Maisanta — who led a guerrilla campaign against Gómez’s dictatorship.

This week, Maduro desecrated that people’s lore like a dog hiking his hind leg over a Caracas fire hydrant.

He is Gómez, not the guerrilla.

How else to describe Maduro’s obscenely brazen theft of last Sunday’s presidential election? His utterly implausible declaration that he somehow defeated opposition challenger Edmundo González, 51% to 44% — when every credible exit poll showed him losing to González by a landslide of 30 points or more, after every credible voter poll had showed him losing to González by 40 points or more?

How else to characterize his refusal to provide the opposition and the international community with any legitimate proof of his illegitimate victory? His withholding of the precinct-by-precinct tally of Sunday’s vote — his middle finger flashed at every country and respected election observer organization that’s calling out his scam, which is so knuckle-dragging it makes ogrish ballot burglaries like Mexico’s in 1988 and Panama’s in 1989 look sophisticated?

How else to cast his threats to arrest not only González but opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose overwhelming popularity with voters caused him to bar her from running in Sunday’s election? His thug military’s attacks — and those of his thug street enforcers known as colectivos — on Venezuelans who’ve taken to the streets to protest his Gómez-ish despotism?

It’s sad but unsurprising that Latin America’s more retro and spineless leftists — led by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombian President Gustavo Petro — gave their ideological bro Maduro a pass this week by abstaining from an Organization of American States vote to demand he cough up the actual election data. (The resolution failed as a result.)

Still, genuinely 21st century-minded Latin American leftists like Chilean President Gabriel Boric and Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo aren’t buying Maduro’s appalling, 20th century-style lie.

So maybe — just maybe — conscientious leftists in the Americas are coming to the gut-wrenching realization this week that unconscionable leftists like Maduro are clubbing leftism’s image to a bloody pulp and kicking it into a ditch to die.

Maybe — just maybe — it’s dawned on them that Latin American leftism today doesn’t evoke cowboy lionhearts like Maisanta but rather caudillo losers like Maduro.

Maybe — just maybe — they’re shamed by the fact that even reactionary autocrats like Gómez presided over economic growth, while a “revolutionary” like Maduro has engineered the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history. An emergency that’s forced a quarter of Venezuela’s population to emigrate in the past decade.

Even so, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’ll shame Catfish II into giving up power — because, like Catfish I, he had no shame to begin with.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

But in Venezuela, it’s the dictator, President Nicolás Maduro, who is suddenly begging his main opponent, Edmundo González, to agree to acquiesce if he loses the July 28 vote.

Why? We’ll get to that in a moment — and let’s just say the answer’s got me feeling really nervous.

But first, let’s just say that before this week I was feeling really borne out on Venezuela — where I’ve long contended the best way to topple Maduro’s brutal and disastrous socialist regime was through dogged, long-term electoral negotiation, and not the instant, delusional gratification of threatening (usually from restaurants in Doral) a U.S. military invasion of Caracas.

And I’ve cited templates — especially the 1990 electoral ousters of two notorious Latin American dictatorships, the right-wing tyranny of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the left-wing despotism of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. In both instances, the opposition, the U.S. and the international community slowly but surely convinced the autocrats (or bullied them, in Ortega’s case) to hold free and fair contests and, more important, to swallow the unfavorable results.

Could that actually be happening in Venezuela this summer? For the moment, anyway, it’s looking more likely than anyone would’ve imagined a few months ago.

Under the pact he signed last fall in the hopes of getting out from under U.S. economic sanctions, Maduro has had no choice (so far) but to accept the candidacy of González — who is leading Maduro in just about every voter poll by as many as 40 points. On Tuesday, Maduro said he’s willing to ink another pact to respect the presidential tally, and he called on González to join him.

And yet … this is where I start to feel I may not be so borne out when this is all over.

At first glance, it would of course seem a good thing for democracy that Maduro is pledging to bow to what looks like an inevitable butt-whipping next month. Then, with a bead of cold sweat running down my forehead, I remember a key difference between this moment and 1990.

Which is this: Before those free and fair elections in Chile and Nicaragua 34 years ago, Pinochet and Ortega were pretty sure they’d win.

I remember, in fact, going door to door in Managua and other Nicaraguan towns in 1990 querying voters about their preferences. My colleagues and I came away fairly convinced that Ortega and his Marxist Sandinista party had the election sewn up — that they could afford to allow a transparent contest. But it turned out those voters were punking us: challenger Violeta Chamorro spanked Ortega by 14 points.

Maduro, on the other hand, has been served alarming notice — not just by polls but by the sea of Venezuelans coming out to rallies for González and opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose own candidacy Maduro has barred — that the only way he can win is by massive fraud.

Therefore, I’m not so naïve to see democratic spirit behind Maduro’s let’s-respect-the-results gesture.

He’s already disinvited E.U. observers to monitor the July 28 election; he’s made it next to impossible for the millions of Venezuelan expat voters around the world to cast ballots. Now, Maduro’s goading González to swear by oath that he’ll embrace a vote Maduro is sure to lose — which simply signals to me that Maduro has resolved to steal that vote.

How he’ll rob it is really the only suspense left for this election. He may still find a specious way to disqualify González from running. Or he may just wait until election day and rig the ballot-counting computers — which in this case would require more processing capacity and electrical power than it takes to mine Bitcoin. Neighboring countries like Brazil might suffer blackouts.

But maybe there is one element of surprise we’re not seeing. Perhaps the opposition, the U.S. and the international community are convincing (or bullying) Maduro to accept his downfall with promises that he and his top henchmen — including his sinister enforcer, Diosdado Cabello — won’t face prison afterward, in Venezuela or anywhere else.

If Maduro signs that deal, then I’ll feel borne out.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

The first outrageous thing is, well, the outrage — because the tour itself was not outrageous.

It was, by all accounts, a benign exercise in bilateral aviation security cooperation that the U.S. ought to be conducting with Cuba, since about 30 flights move between Miami and Havana on most days.

Given that most of the passengers on those flights are Cuban Americans, you’d think Miami’s politicians — no matter how much this community understandably despises and distrusts Cuba’s communist dictatorship — would want to make sure airport safety is in sync on both sides of the Florida Straits. The U.S., after all, follows similar joint air safety protocols with other regimes Americans despise and distrust, like communist China’s.

But this is Miami, where it’s custom to shoot from the hysterical hip first and ask adult questions later — if ever. So every politico who can find a microphone or a reporter’s handheld recorder is screaming that the Biden administration just gave masked Marxist ninjas the keys to MIA’s air traffic control tower.

Nevertheless, the second outrageous thing is how outrageously optics-oblivious the TSA looks right now. It apparently did not give Miami-Dade County officials, who run MIA, a heads-up that the Cuban apparatchiks would visit secure airport areas like checkpoints.

That matters because the U.S. still has Cuba on its state sponsors of terrorism list. Granted, on May 15, the Biden administration removed Cuba from its list of countries that don’t help in the fight against terrorism — and there is no reason except Miami politics that Cuba still belongs on the more serious state sponsors list. But TSA should have reassured Miami-Dade officialdom beforehand that these Cuban tours at U.S. airports are beneficial as well as routine.

In fact, they took place even when Donald Trump, every hardline Cuban exile’s divine instrument on Earth, was president.

The bottom line: somebody, anybody at TSA should have taken into more sensitive account that this is Miami, for God’s sake! Any issue here that involves Cuba, whether it’s transportation security or ropa vieja recipes, is an anti-comunista powder keg that shameless political climbers can ignite under the slightest pretext to scare votes their way.

The TSA might have made a mental note, for example, that the Miami fuse is especially short these days when it comes to Cuban espionage. It was only a few months ago the world learned that former top U.S. diplomat and now convicted spy Manuel Rocha was a loyal spook for the Cuban regime for years, including the time he worked at the U.S. mission in Havana.

Rocha’s case has heaped a certain PTSD on the Cuban-American community — which still remembers the Cuban spy network that slithered into Miami and was responsible for four Cuban exiles getting shot down and murdered in small aircraft near Cuba by regime fighter jets in 1996.

The TSA might have recalled that historical nugget before hosting a Cuban delegation at Miami’s airport this week without notifying Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava — a Democrat whose re-election effort you’d think the Biden administration would want to assist this year.

But it undermined it instead by bringing Cuban communists to MIA without pre-advising the locals — on, of all days, May 20, the 1902 Cuban independence day that Cuban exiles celebrate.

In a larger sense, that’s a reminder that Beltway Democrats still really don’t get the reality that Florida Latinos are not the Latinos the party takes for granted in the rest of the country.

It’s reminiscent of the Biden administration’s move a few years ago to take Colombia’s defunct Marxist guerrilla army, the FARC, off the U.S.’s terrorist list. That was good policy served with bad optics: It failed to consult Florida’s large Colombian community, a bitter swath of whom suffered FARC violence.

Still, all those outraged Miami politicos who are sure TSA exposed MIA to the DGI (Cuba’s spy service) might themselves remember Cuba also has aviation security concerns. It has ever since Cuban exile terrorists carried out the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger airliner that killed all 73 people onboard.

That, too, was an outrage.

Tim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

It means Cubans are feeling a special brand of desperation. As the communist island’s economy sinks ever deeper into the Caribbean, the endless food shortages and power outages and regime oppression seem to weigh more heavily on them than the risk of long prison sentences does.

What it doesn’t mean, however, despite all the bloviating we’re hearing on both sides of the Florida Straits, is that either the Cuban dictatorship or the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba is about to fall.

Both those things are what the people of Cuba need — but they’re not what the politics of Cuba want. And when it comes to Cuba, there and here, politics always matters more than people.

So don’t expect much of anything from the Cuban regime, or from the Cuban exile leadership that controls the U.S.’s Cuba policy, in the way of helping actual Cubans survive. Both sides are driven only by the survival of their zero-sum agendas.

For the regime, that means keeping its perpetual, pyrrhic chokehold on power and scoring the immediate end of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. For the exiles, it means the regime’s immediate surrender of power or else the perpetual, pyrrhic continuation of the embargo.

Sure, we can remind ourselves all we want that the exiles and the regime are obdurately out of step with their respective countries.

Polls have long indicated that while most Americans revile Cuba’s dictatorship, they also think it’s time to lift the embargo. After 62 years, they see what it glaringly hasn’t done — topple the regime — and what it glaringly has done — namely, add to the misery the regime has already heaped on the average Cuban while gifting said regime a handy scapegoat for all the misery.

More than 30 years of reporting on and in Cuba have also shown me that even Cubans who still believe in the Castro revolution are fed up with the economic and human rights yoke the regime keeps clamped on the population. And they see the realpolitik writing on the wall: They know they can’t expect the U.S. to drop the embargo as long as their regime keeps ruling like North instead of South Korea.

But none of that matters. The exiles and the regime are the duopoly, the Google and Apple, of the Cuba situation.

So all we’re hearing now from Cuban regime leaders are the usual delusional denials that their iron-fisted statist incompetence has anything to do with the Cuban people’s suffering and the new burst of protests. “It’s solely the criminal U.S. economic blockade!” were the screams from Havana pressers this week.

All we’re hearing from Cuban exile leaders now are the usual disingenuous declarations that their sledgehammer sanctions have nothing to do with the Cuban people’s suffering and this new burst of protests. “No protester has mentioned the embargo!” were the screams from Miami pressers this week.

Yet what really screams to be mentioned this week is that both sides, in fact, have recently had the opportunity to help the Cuban people — by helping the island’s fledgling private sector — but kicked it in the teeth.

Just about everyone outside the exile-regime complex agrees that pymes — the small- and medium-size private enterprises Cuba legalized three years ago — are the only thing about the nation and its economy that works and works independently of the regime.

The prospect of the pymes thriving scares the Bolshevik bejesus out of the regime hardliners, because it would mean an ideological concession to the capitalist exiles. So those dinosaurs are keeping the pymes reined in.

The prospect of the pymes thriving also scares the diaspora daylights out of the exile hardliners, because it would mean the Cuban people themselves can thrive without the Miami-engineered annihilation of the regime. That too is intolerable — so the exile bosses have worked tirelessly to thwart the pymes and falsely discredit them as accomplices of the regime.

Whether it’s the regime or the exiles, that takes a special brand of cynicism.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

To paraphrase the movie “Brokeback Mountain,” I doubt the U.S. and the international community know how to quit those folks. But if they don’t, we shouldn’t expect post-Henry Haiti to look better a year from now or even five years from now.

Constitutionally, the 74-year-old Henry probably shouldn’t have been Haiti’s prime minister for one day, let alone more than 30 months.

Although then-President Jovenel Moïse had tapped Henry to be his new PM a couple days before Moïse was brutally assassinated in July of 2021, Moïse had not yet made it official and Henry had not yet been sworn in. As a result, under Article 149 of Haiti’s Constitution, the still legitimate PM at that moment, Claude Joseph, should have continued leading Haiti’s government as president of the Council of Ministers until a replacement for Moïse could be elected.

And the thing is, for all the criticism we heap on Haiti’s dysfunctional democracy, most Haitians got that point. So they weren’t too pleased when the U.S., the U.N. and a Mount Olympus of other developed countries and organizations, known as the Core Group, overrode the constitutional thing and more or less forced Henry on them as their prime minister — because the Core Group considered Henry a better bet to stabilize Haiti after Moïse’s murder.

Memo to the Core Group: Stay out of Las Vegas, because your betting skills are really lame.

I don’t know if Joseph would have been a better bet, and I’m well aware Henry is a respected neurosurgeon and children’s health advocate. But I do know Joseph couldn’t have been a more disastrous caretaker-government chief than Henry.

Henry not only failed to stabilize Haiti and hold desperately needed elections, he’s cluelessly overseen its plank-walk to the edge of national abyss. Even the violent gangs that were already terrorizing Haiti before Moïse’s assassination considered Henry a sort of imperial imposition on the country. So they used their hatred for him, and his arrogant refusal to give up power, as an excuse for the orgy of murder, kidnapping and economic ruin they’ve sledgehammered down Haitians’ throats since 2021.

Yet the U.S. and the Core Group kept doubling down on Henry at the roulette table — until it became horrifically obvious this month that those gangs are now the real power in Haiti. Last week, the international community finally prodded its catastrophic bet to announce he’ll resign.

Resign, that is, as soon as a transitional governing council is in place to usher Haiti to the public security and presidential vote that Henry couldn’t or wouldn’t secure.

Assembling that council will be grueling. But it marks an opportunity to start identifying and promoting a fresher, less corrupt leadership cohort in Haiti. People who consider democracy an essential objective instead of an optional inconvenience.

People who want to disarm Haiti’s gangs rather than sponsor them as their personal political street enforcers.

Too many if not all of Haiti’s leaders since the fall of the monstrous Duvalier dictatorship in 1986 have fallen into the latter camp. And they’ve all too often, if not always, been endorsed by the U.S. and international community as “the best bet” — even a vulgar, authoritarian clown like Moïse’s predecessor, Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, who was the Obama administration’s bet.

Now is the moment to pass the torch in Haiti — and pass it with more input from Haitians themselves for a change than from Core Group diplomats. I often hear younger names like James Beltis, a leading member of the group of civic and political leaders known as the Montana Accord that’s put forth one of the stronger proposals for a path back to steady governance in Haiti, or Velina Charlier, who is one of the country’s leading anti-corruption voices, as examples of the sort of 21st-century democrats who are significantly better long-term bets.

I’m not saying Beltis or Charlier should necessarily be on Haiti’s new transitional council. I am saying they represent the contingent of Haitians who should occupy it.

The Haitians who give us reason to finally quit Haitians like Henry.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

And what more fitting, if mystifying, way to observe it in Miami than to watch our Cuban-American members of Congress endorse the one U.S. presidential candidate who’d cravenly appease Russia’s bloody, barbaric dictatorship — to the benefit of Cuba’s dictatorship, not to mention Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s?

Republican U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar is just the latest to give former President Donald Trump a gushing endorsement on social media (including a post on X, the Elon Musk-owned Russian appeasement platform formerly known as Twitter). In it, she checks off all the scourges she claims we didn’t have during Trump’s first administration, including “weak foreign policy.”

Salazar, though, conveniently forgot to put an asterisk there that says: that is, if you define Trump’s weak-in-the-knees treatment of Russian gangster-tyrant Vladimir Putin as strong foreign policy. And hats off to Trump’s GOP primary opponent Nikki Haley for that spot-on description of Trump’s bootlicking esteem for Putin, which he displayed again this week by not decrying the death — which was perhaps state homicide — of jailed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Yes, I’m aware Salazar condemns Russia’s ongoing seizure of Ukraine. I also applaud Cuban exile groups like The Center for a Free Cuba for signing an open letter that urges Congress to “provide Ukraine the desperately needed security assistance to thwart Russia’s onslaught.”

Cuban and other Trump-supporting Latino cohorts here do seem to get that part. But that just makes it all the more astonishing that MAGAtinos are blind, willfully or not, to the fact that Trump’s doing more than anyone to cripple that desperately needed Ukraine assistance. To the reality that Trump is the cult puppeteer threatening GOP U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson with a pink slip if he lets the Putin-thwarting aid even come up for a vote in his chamber this year.

It’s all too reminiscent of other senseless MAGAtino paradoxes — in Cuban, pro-Trump Hialeah they despise Obamacare because it’s dastardly socialismo, so just ignore the fact that they have the country’s highest Obamacare enrollment — and in this case it’s senselessly self-defeating.

I understand that MAGAtinos believe that Trump is tougher with the left-wing regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. That he’ll twist their arms and make them cry uncle. But, after covering Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for more than three decades, I also appreciate just how maniacally resilient those regimes are — in no small part because they can count on larger, Darth Vader allies like Russia to keep their dark, dilapidated mini-empires operable.

That is, as long as Darth Vader himself can keep his Death Star from stalling out — which is exactly what Trump’s blockage of Ukraine funding does for Putin.

If you needed any reminding of that dastardly dynamic, check out Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s tour through Cuba and Venezuela last week. It was an eye-poking victory lap after the death of Navalny, Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka and Trump’s strangling of aid to Ukraine.

It was Darth Vader’s friendly little drop-by to say: All’s well again on the Death Star, so you can crank up the tropical totalitarianism — you can keep tossin’ those human rights gusanos and escualidos in the slammer, muchachos, ‘cause we’ve got your back.

Salazar — not to mention Miami’s other Cuban-American Trump-toady Congress members, U.S. Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez, as well as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio — know that. So do MAGAtino leaders in the Venezuelan exile community.

So why, in the names of José Martí and Simón Bolívar, do they look away from Trump’s toadying to the Russian despot whose despotism he aspires to? Why do they indulge his back-stabbing betrayal of a Ukrainian democracy that he despises because, like those RINO elections officials who wouldn’t steal the 2020 election for him, it didn’t acquiesce to his demands to lie and claim Joe Biden had corrupt ties to Ukrainian business?

Why, bottom line, do MAGAtinos keep quiet as Trump does nothing less than undermine the one cause they claim to champion more than any other: the downfall of authoritarian socialismo — the liberation of their patrias?

And when you’ve explained that to me, tell me why they keep enrolling in Obamacare.

Tim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Miami got a big kick hurling that word “parody” to disparage the sensible immigration reform legislation that sensible Senate conservatives had crafted. Rubio and the Republican Party killed the bill so their presumptive presidential nominee and cult leader, former President Donald Trump, can use the border crisis as an issue against President Joe Biden.

But I hope Rubio ducked when “parody” morphed with astonishing speed into a boomerang that came flying right back at his and the GOP’s heads.

Because right now they’re the ones who look like the parody — a satire of MAGA conservatives who can be counted on time after time to reflexively do the right-wing thing instead of the right thing.

Piñera, who was 74, was not that kind of conservative, because he’d already seen how the right-wing thing — or the left-wing thing or any extremist thing — can poison a country like rabies. He came of age during Chile’s monstrously fascist Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. His family was part of the conservative elite that backed that regime; his brother served in Pinochet’s cabinet.

But Piñera, like most Chileans, voted against extending Augusto Pinochet’s rule in a 1988 referendum that ushered the military tyrant out of power. And when Piñera became Chile’s president in 2010, as a billionaire, he usually showcased a more constructive conservatism — which felt reminiscent of the Richard Lugar Republicanism I grew up with in Indiana.

He demonstrated it on the one hand by pushing pro-business policies that helped make Chile Latin America’s most prosperous country per capita. Meanwhile, however, he also went all out in 2010 not just to save the 33 Chilean miners trapped 2,000 feet below the Atacama Desert for 70 days, but to enact sweeping labor reforms in the aftermath, including a tripling of Chile’s mine-inspection budget.

When I interviewed Piñera shortly after the miners’ rescue, he said the experience had made him more bent on “closing [Chile’s] giant gap between the richest and the poorest, so we don’t have people living on two distinct planets.” He stressed that meant “getting our business owners to see that we need not only innovation from them but social responsibility as well.”

To be sure, Piñera made his share of conservative mistakes — especially in his second presidency, from 2018 to 2022, when he sent out the military to quell massive protests against that wealth chasm, which lingers in Chile like the odor of spoiled sea bass. Still, Piñera’s legacy matters because he showed post-Pinochet Chileans that a conservative can display the right, not just right-wing, stuff.

Even the young, leftist president who succeeded him, Gabriel Boric, said after Piñera’s death this week: “He was a democrat from the very beginning and genuinely sought what he believed was best for the country.”

Pan back to the U.S. — to the parody of conservatives who genuinely seek what they believe is best for Donald Trump. That lampoon was on full display this week when Rubio, fellow GOP Florida Sen. Rick Scott and House Republicans like Miami Congressman Carlos Gimenez vilified the very immigration reforms — especially a tightening of the dysfunctional asylum system — they’ve spent years screaming about and dressing up in camouflage on border visits for.

Why did they do a hit on the measure? Because El Donaldo told them to — because he needs chaos optics on the border, not reform, to make his racist demonization of immigrants look presidential come November.

But what he’s got now, in February, are the optics of a hypocritical GOP standing in a circular firing squad.

And that gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight image only got worse when House Republicans’ efforts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the border emergency went down in humiliating defeat Tuesday night — because three GOP members couldn’t bring themselves to mock the U.S. Constitution that way.

Or because, in other words, a trace of the sensible conservatism Sebastián Piñera kept alive in the Americas may still be alive in America.

Tim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

Don’t get me wrong; I applaud the humane work they do to help immigrants — especially in a state like Florida, where politicians shamelessly stroke their xenophobic MAGA base by demonizing the same migrant labor that keeps whole sectors of this peninsula’s economy afloat.

But this particular email felt self-defeating. It was a call to get out during President Joe Biden’s visit to South Florida and protest his immigration negotiations with Republicans.

And it troubled me on two important counts.

First, it denounced the sort of policy concessions Biden is having to make in order to ameliorate fears that even liberal voters harbor about the disaster on the U.S. southern border — an emergency that threatens to bury his re-election bid and lift Donald Trump to the presidency again. The key issue is a wrecked asylum system and growing demands to tighten and manage it again — instead of letting it continue to be the get-into-America-free turnstile that’s drawing unprecedented waves of migrants to the Rio Grande.

Even the New York Times — not exactly Fox News, guys — has been warning of that dysfunction for some time. In a new analysis this week, Times immigration writer Miriam Jordan reminds us that, largely because of the asylum system’s nuclear meltdown, “[i]n December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.

“It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000 mile southern frontier,” Jordan notes. “They are also certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay.

“Forever.”

Her point: That’s not how Americans or the citizens of any nation expect their immigration system to be run. And as I’ve written before, in commentaries that get me lots of angry e-mails from liberals, those open-border optics promise anti-immigration political consequences — namely, the White House return of immigrant-demonizer-in-chief Trump.

Nonetheless, the South Florida immigrant advocates accused Biden of dealing “with radical Republicans to dismantle our asylum system.”

No, he hasn’t. Nor has he “sold out immigrants to fund war efforts,” as the advocates’ email goes on to assert.

Which brings me to their second distressing mistake: a failure to appreciate how the tragedy in Ukraine affects the tragedies in all the radioactive pockets of this hemisphere — especially Venezuela — that are driving so many desperate migrants northward.

The advocates blast Biden for haggling with the GOP over immigration in order to secure new funding to help Ukraine beat back Russia’s invasion. Like Trump himself, the advocates apparently think the U.S. shouldn’t be involved there.

Again, that’s not only the wrong stance — it’s also self-defeating. Wrong because the U.S. has a serious stake in thwarting Vladimir Putin’s barbaric aggression against not only Ukraine but democracy worldwide. Self-defeating because letting Putin have his way only emboldens Putin wannabes — like Venezuelan President/Dictator Nicolás Maduro — whose authoritarian catastrophes are largely responsible for the immigration catastrophe the U.S. is living now.

Or have the advocates not heard that last fall Venezuelans became the largest national group arrested for crossing the southern border illegally?

Since Maduro took power a decade ago, more than a fifth of Venezuela’s population has fled the country’s humanitarian crisis — the worst in modern South American history. As long as he and his tyrannical socialist regime remain in power, the situation only stands to get worse.

In recent days, that regime has made it chillingly clear it has no intention of allowing a free and fair presidential election this year, which Maduro would likely lose. This week it called the U.S. “yanqui mierda,” or Yankee s—, for threatening to re-impose economic sanctions if it doesn’t allow the Venezuelan opposition’s primary election winner, María Corina Machado, to challenge him.

So it would seem the last thing the U.S. wants to show the despot of a migrant-disgorging country like Venezuela is that the U.S. can’t stand up to a monster like Putin.

If you’re an immigrant advocate, that’s a short-sighted invitation to more — and more politically costly — immigration mess.

Tim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.

They’re not rebels anymore; they’re rulers. They hold large swaths of the western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande — and these days it feels as if they’re locked in a ghastly, Putin-esque game of geopolitical one-upmanship.

No sooner does a heavily armed Haitian gang fire on a hospital in Port-au-Prince brimming with mothers and babies, than a Mexican cartel stages a deadly drone bomb attack on a small community of innocents in Guerrero. That’s followed days later — just last week, in fact — by Ecuadorian narco-thugs storming a TV news station in Guayaquil, during a live broadcast, brandishing explosives and ramming their gun barrels into the necks of horrified hostages.

Ecuadorian police eventually arrested those 13 gunmen, after they’d shot a TV cameraman in the leg (not fatally). But the mayhem, part of a new burst of gang violence plaguing Ecuador in recent years, is just the latest reminder that homicidal delinquency keeps short-circuiting fledgling democracy in much-too-much of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Or have you not seen recent U.N. figures that show the region accounts for 25 of the world’s 33 highest national murder rates — including eight of the top 10, starting with Jamaica at No. 1? If this were an economics column, I’d say bloodshed represents an inordinate share of the continent’s GDP.

So it’s tempting to fall into the currently fashionable response to this nightmare and hail the rise of la mano dura — so-called iron-fisted leaders like Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. He’s getting away with running for a second consecutive term next month — in brazen violation of El Salvador’s Constitution — because for now he’s reined in the vicious, tattooed street gangs known as maras.

Problem is, Bukele’s done it by essentially suspending due process and throwing almost 2% of his country’s population behind bars. Nevertheless, law-and-order advocates across the Americas, including conservatives in America, are hyping the Bukele blueprint as the answer to Latin America’s organized crime pandemic. Ecuadorians I spoke with this week, there and here in Miami, said Ecuador’s new, young president, 36-year-old banana fortune heir Daniel Noboa, should imitate Bukele now if he ever wants to wrest his country back from the narco-cartels.

Trust me, I understand that impulse — and I of course wish Noboa success with the 60-day state of emergency (or “internal armed conflict,” as he’s calling it) that he’s declared. But I hope he also understands a key reality: this poison was brought to Ecuador and so many other Latin American countries largely by precisely what so many folks right now say is its antidote.

That is, the Bukele-esque dismantling of democratic, constitutional, institutional structure — the mano dura panacea. Los narco-mafiosos amassed their power from Guerrero to Guayaquil thanks to the fact that democratic institutions in Latin America, especially judicial systems, have never really had a chance to function. And they’ve had so little chance to function because leaders like Bukele time and again are allowed to suffocate them.

So while Latin America obviously has to focus on the horror that’s bookending this week on one end — the outbreak of gang barbarity in Ecuador that started last Sunday when a top cartel leader escaped from prison — I urge the region to glance at the hope that’s bookending the week on the other side: this Sunday’s inauguration of a new president in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo.

It’s a constitutional transfer of power that almost didn’t happen. The constitution-trashing powers that be in Guatemala, kindred spirits of the constitution-trashing power next door in El Salvador, fought tooth and constitution-trashing nail to disqualify Arévalo’s election victory. That’s because his anti-corruption platform — his plan to have democratic institutions function — scares the banana-republic bejesus out of them.

An angry protest partnership of Guatemalans and the international community — including, to his credit, Sen. Marco Rubio (but not, to their shame, Miami’s U.S. representatives) — finally defeated the country’s obstructionist corruptos. It’s a potent shot in the arm for Latin American democracy — a reminder that democracy’s institutions do have a future there.

And if they do, then it’s a good bet that democracy’s Antichrists — the gangs and cartels — don’t.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for Miami NPR affiliate WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.