Before criticising the security law recently put forward by the Venezuelan government, we should take a moment to consider the fact that it is under persistent low-level (and occasionally intense) attack from the world’s only superpower. Chavez’s fear of being Allende‘ed is certainly more justifiable than Gordon Brown’s fear of monstruous terrorists slipping through the net after four weeks in custody (when just two more weeks would have been enough to nail them). Nevertheless, comparisons to the Patriot act and its UK equivalents are perhaps justified, and so I’m glad to see that the law is to be rewritten in consultation with civil rights groups. Not a bad idea. While you’re doing your ringrounds Gordon, I’m sure you have Sami Chakrabati’s number.

Then there’s Bolivia, where the Eastern states have been voting, one by one, for autonomy from the central government. This has less in common with Scotland’s vague struggle for independence than with the issue of “States’ rights” in relation to the Civil Rights movement of the US. When the federal government moved against the apartheid system of the South, you see, it was in fact oppressing the states, depriving them of their innate right to oppress their black populations. In Bolivia, a near-revolutionary movement of the mainly brown masses has put a brown socialist into the President’s office with a strong mandate for nationalisation and redistribution of the nation’s resources. And in the regions where those resources can be found, the mainly white rich folks are having none of it.

That the results of the autonomy referenda have all been overwhelmingly positive, however, doesn’t tell us that the whole Eastern half of the country wants to jealously guard its gas and oil wealth. There were none of the usual international observers checking that everything was above board, a great many people boycotted the elections to undermine their legitimacy, and those inclined to vote “no” anyway faced massive intimidation from the neo-nazi student groups allied with the autonomists. President Morales can’t even visit parts of the country without his supporters facing terrifying racist attacks like this one; the autnomists claim that they’re resisting the repression of the central government, but they really represent reactionary forces of the most vicious kind.

If you really want to see state repression in Latin America, try Colombia. President Alvaro Uribe can’t stand by watching his entire party go to jail, one by one, as their links to right-wing death squads are brought to light. So he’s going after the opposition, en masse, calling them (and Chavez) stooges of the FARC. His evidence? A laptop that the Colombian army seized from the FARC a few months ago. Interpol say that there’s no proof that the Colombian regime definitely just made the whole thing up, and the entire anglophone press seems to interpret this as proof that the Colombian regime definitely didn’t just make the whole thing up. For more on the magic laptop and the Colombian paramilitary scandal, I recommend Toni Solo’s editorials at the Fanonite blog; BoRev.net is also great.

Anyway, when I say that the Colombian army seized the laptop from the FARC, I forgot to specify that they seized it in Ecuador, after a massive, illegal cross-border raid. This kind of behaviour earned it the censure of pretty much everyone else on the continent; in the words of Chavez, Colombia is now the Israel of Latin America. It’s certainly America’s favourite deputy gendarme in the region, and its rapidly growing army is now considerably larger than Israel’s, and overtaking Brazil as the largest in the region despite having a much smaller population. Plan Colombia remains the Empire’s most effective weapon against the people of Latin America.

Oh, and then there’s Peru: Alan Garcia is a fat imperialist. Evo Morales is worried.