Daniel, Joaquin and Hugo

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Two of the best-known revolutionary figures from Central America’s former guerrilla wars have staked out opposite sides on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his controversial decision to shut down a frequent government critic, Radio Caracas TV.

For Joaquin Villalobos, once a rebel strategist in El Salvador and now a frequent critic of the left, Chavez is a faux revolutionary and his media takeover a misguided power play. “In Venezuela there was no revolutionary rupture like in Cuba and Nicaragua,” Villalobos, who relocated to Oxford, England after the Salvadoran civil war, wrote in the Spanish daily El Pais. “The anti-capitalist revolutions emerged more from dictatorships than from poverty. In Venezuela there was no dictatorship and poverty wasn’t important in the rise of Chavez, although it is now in his defense.”

But Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, leader of the 1979 overthrow of the Somoza dynasty, defended Chavez as a brother-revolutionary and demeaned the massive student protests against Chavez in Caracas. Ortega, reelected last year, said he saw parallels in today’s Venezuela with U.S.-led efforts in the 1980s to undermine his Sandinista leadership.

“The young, especially university students, should always be in a position to foment revolutionary thought, not the counterrevolution,” said Ortega, who stopped in Caracas to show solidarity with Chavez en route to an overseas trip to Libya, Algeria, Iran and Italy.

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andres D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires