Madam, - Seán Edwards (March 12th) replying to my letter of two days earlier, betrays a certain naivety in his assessment of the Latin American political scene both past and present.
He is narrowly correct in his statement that President Chávez of Venezuela never avowed any ambition to remain in office except by election, as indeed he must do under the present constitution. However his recent (unsuccessful) effort to change that constitution to permit him to reign as president-for-life and to emasculate the Venezuelan legislature was hardly the action of a convinced democrat.
Mr Edwards's claim that Bolivar liberated Bolivia, as well as Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru, is untrue - as the liberator never set foot in that country nor played any part in its struggle for independence, although it is named after him. The failure of Bolivar's own efforts at uniting the various states of Latin America is best summed up by the words he uttered on his death-bed, "America is ungovernable. I have ploughed the sea!"
Nor is the "depressingly long line of megalomanic Latin American despots" composed exclusively or even in its majority of "allies of the United States".
Among these, Francisco Solano López, the Paraguayan dictator who simultaneously took on Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the suicidal and extremely bloody War of the Triple Alliance (1865-70), certainly was not a creature of the Colossus of the North any more than Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican dictator for over 30 years who made the remark: "Poor Mexico. So far from God. So close to the United States".
Among the three whom he mentions, Batista was initially convenient to the US, though not installed by it, and was eventually dumped in favour of Fidel Castro who turned out to be a spectacularly bad investment.
Somoza and his dynasty certainly were the creatures of Uncle Sam, as initially was Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The latter eventually pursued an independent and - from the US viewpoint - inconvenient course in his foreign and domestic policies, which among other insanities included a plot to assassinate the Pope!
Although the overthrow of the marginally democratically elected Marxist Allende administration in Chile by that country's military was welcome to Big Brother up north, the Pinochet regime was so far from being an ally of the US that it was subjected to a boycott and an arms embargo - the latter initiated by our own dear Senator Ted Kennedy of Chappaquiddick fame.
Among Latin American despots who were certainly neither the creation or the ally of the United States were Perón of Argentina, "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela and a string of others.
In his statement that Iranian nuclear weapons technology does not exist, Mr Edwards is again narrowly correct, although it is certainly at a level of development sufficient to worry such organisations as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission. Iranian President Ahmedinajad's avowed ambition to wipe Israel off the face of the earth should not be ignored in this context.
I am in complete agreement with Mr Edwards regarding the grotesque disparity between rich and poor throughout most of Latin America and I do not deny President Chávez's cultivation of the Venezuelan under-classes which form his political base, although this is motivated by political expediency rather than altruism.
Mr Edwards will also be surprised to learn that I agree that the role of the United States in its relations with its southern neighbours, which it regards as essentially a source of cheap labour and raw materials, varies from the merely disreputable to the utterly reprehensible. However, the US is not the sole source of all evil in Latin America and Mr Chávez is certainly not a benevolent philanthropist but rather a dangerous despot who is a menace to hemispheric and indirectly even world peace and stability. - Yours, etc,
ADRIAN J ENGLISH, Kilcolman Court, Glenageary, Co Dublin.