Gustavo Coronel has a superb essay  on the utter strangeness of the likes of Jesse Jackson and Danny Glover taking their race—grievance show on the road to Venezuela. Neither showed any interest in this country earlier in their careers, but all of a sudden, now that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has gotten flush with oil money and shown an eagerness to fling it around, these people have suddenly started signalling their lifelong devotion to Venezuela. What could that possibly mean?

These nouveau carpetbaggers are truly subjects for Mark Twain, all tears and flapdoodle — but they are bringing in to Venezuela a destructive idea about race relations based on U.S., and only U.S., experience. Latin America doesn't have any history of racial strife, but given Chavez's need to amass power, it may be starting. Coronel, who is bi—cultural, and has spent many long years in the U.S., both before and after the U.S. civil rights movement, as well as in his native Venezuela. H knows exactly what's going on with Glover and Jackson, and why what the snake oil they are selling is alien to Venezuela.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan—American Alexandra Beech has an important piece on Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez's recent expulsion of U.S. Protestant evangelical missionaries, and shows how this move is a state effort to deprive very poor people of essential help from private missionary aid givers, in a bid to force them into dependence on the state.

This issue is of great significance to the church communities in the U.S. as Technorati and TruthLaidBear searches show. Unlike Jackson and Glover, these missionaries are there to give, not take, and for that reason, they are considered by Venezuela's dictator to be a threat, something that reveals his true intentions for his country.

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