According to Wikipedia, Chavez won elections in 1998, 2000, and the recall in 2004. No sign yet that he has suspended future elections. Provide evidence, or shut up Frank. Your position is one of ideology, not fact.

Oh, and don’t you just love this line:
Among the ways Chavez has chosen to tweak Washington s nose is by embracing Cuban President Fidel Castro, who was not invited to the summit because he is not democratically elected.

Maybe Castro could have hired Katherine Harris and that Quimbo from Ohio to get him into the conference.

The last election is not what matters, it’s whether or not there will ever be another. Don’t hold your breath.

Huh? Did I miss where Argentina (or Venezuela for that matter) has degenerated into a dictatorship that forces people into demonstrations, North Korea-style? Last I checked it was a democracy. People are free to demonstrate or not according to their own free will.

Could you provide some actual evidence for this ludicrous statement?

http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4074298

Argentina is seeking a new IMF loan agreement. The fund helped Argentina out of a major economic crisis in 2002. But Argentine leaders have complained that they’re not getting the kind of deal they need now.
“The president was quite firm in his belief that the IMF ought to have a different attitude toward Argentina,” Bush said. But he did not express support for Argentina’s position, instead sticking by previous assertions that he would leave that between Argentina and the IMF.

* * *

In Argentina, Bush will come face-to-face with a man his administration has criticized as a menace to hemispheric stability — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a left-leaning populist who routinely denounces Bush as “Mr. Danger” and refers to the United States as “the Empire.”

Among the ways Chavez has chosen to tweak Washington’s nose is by embracing Cuban President Fidel Castro, who was not invited to the summit because he is not democratically elected.

U.S. officials downplayed any Bush-Chavez subplot at the proceedings.

“This summit is not about Hugo Chavez,” U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters Wednesday. “We’ve had some long-standing concerns about the policy for his government. This is not news.”

Hadley added, “The purpose of the summit is for the democratically elected leaders to get together and reaffirm the fact that there is really a shared vision for the hemisphere that is based on democracy and free markets and free trade.”

Chavez is hardly the most important man in the southern hemisphere, and it’s not hard to get 10,000 people demonstrating — at gunpoint!

The latest coup attempt against Chávez (in 2002, I think) had US fingerprints all over it. Most of our coverage of the event came directly from or was influenced by hard-right anti-Chávez media outlets who controlled practically all information coming out of Venezuela. Furthermore, it was US money that backed the recent right-wing ‘recall’ effort– an effort that was rebuffed by Venezuelan voters.

This isn’t about Ché, or Castro, or any other misrepresented historical (or current) Latin American figures. The protests in Argentina were against the fascistic and neocolonial economic policies fostered by the IMF and the World Bank, two organizations that are partly based in the US. Furthermore, regarding historical context, most Latin Americans know who they have to thank for helping the corrupt right-wing dictatorships that have kept their nations in tatters for decades, and they can clearly see that the Bush administration is the epitome of such Machiavellian influence.

1) I don’t own a Che t-shirt.
2) Your first sentence was incoherent.
3) The guy’s TV bans and chummying up to Fidel Castro (something Pierre Trudeau did, so he’s not alone here) are asinine, but he hasn’t bothered to do something really asinine, like invading Iraq or robbing the poor to give to the rich.

Indeed, considering Bush’s shenanigans in the electoral arena, Bush is more apt for the term “strongman.”