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January 16, 2024

Why is Samantha Power gushing about Guatemala's new left-wing president?

By Monica Showalter

A day after President Trump's former National Intelligence Advisor Ric Grenell posted a series of tweets about disturbing U.S. embassy behavior in Guatemala City against its outgoing conservative president, in came the newly elected one, a leftist, and USAID Director Samantha Power sounded as though she had a color revolution going.

Her effusive, gushing tweets were unusual for a U.S. official about a Latin American country's election.

It started with the waiting, like this was a rock star ready to walk onto the stage:

 

 

The backdrop is that this was a bitterly disputed election, with the conservatives crying 'fraud' and attempting to make their views known in the streets and halls of the legislature.

Power, though, somehow had all the answers.

 

Did she count the ballots herself? There is no way she could have known that even if this wasn't a foreign country she doesn’t even speak the language of.

But all was free and fair, she claimed, much as Jimmy Carter once did during Hugo Chavez’s deeply disputed recall referendum of 2004.

I like this response to that:

 

 

 

 

Ric Grenell had a good observation, too, seeing something funny going on:

 

The typical behavior from the Biden administration, and many administrations, really, is to ignore Latin American elections. This one seemed routine, it wasn't the overthrowing of a dictator, though the leftist side may have claimed that, and Power's interest is so unusual it draws attention in itself.

Joe Biden took nearly a week to congratulate Argentina's libertarian Javier Milei after his blowout victory last November, after all.

This one practically got a minute-by-minute roundup, from Power herself, deeply ensconced in the foreign matter, as if she had a stake in it.

And she gushed more:

Even cabinet members got gushes from the Bidenite fangirl with the taste for color revolutions:

Then the climax -- el presidente Bernardo Arevalo himself with Samantha, shaking hands centered for the portrait at the top of the presidential palace, looking as though he's meeting another head of state and not the lowly USAID director. 

 

That's the kind of positioning used for meetings between heads of state, or in the case of the U.S., the vice president and a head of state, if they bother at all. Kamala Harris got this kind of treatment when she paid a visit to Guatemala as part of her "border czar" role.

But somehow, Arevalo is treating Power as a head of state.

Which raises a lot of questions. Why is the Biden administration so gushy about this left-wing president whose loyalty is to anti-American dictators like Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega and the Castro oligarchs of Cuba? Shouldn't he be treated with kid gloves at best, and a few quiet warnings not to try anything more typically? The U.S. has this guy's back? He's not even our friend, let alone our ally and he's in office based on a very disputed election where the opposition is crying fraud. What's more, it comes just as Grenell reported that U.S. embassy personnel were caught threatening officials of the previous administration as if they had it in for them -- and as if they had already cast their lot with Arevalo, which is pretty unacceptable as foreign meddling.

Did Power engineer something in that country, some Chicago-style rigging, gone international? Some Zuckerbucks here, some ballot-harvesting there? I don't know, but it is a matter of record that she's been curiously interested in Guatemala from the get-go. Back when Kamala Harris was lazily ignoring the border and blundering in her diplomacy, I noted that Power had been busy as a bee with her aid schemes and massive reporting focused on this country. I wrote this in June of 2021:

Actually, Power has beavering away on this as administrator of USAID — her project to nation-build the migrant-exporting part of Central America.  She's doing the legwork and homework as one might expect it would be done.

Her coming mission to the three countries of the Northern Triangle is everything Harris's wasn't.  Based on the detail, it was the result of actual staff work, meetings, working details, gathering information — all things Harris has shown no propensity to engage in.  Harris just makes it up as she goes along and laughs off tough reporter questions, even from journalistic marshmallows such as CBS's Lester "fairness is overrated" Holt.

As Surber notes, she's from "the bullpen."  So it's not surprising.  Power lives and breathes this stuff.

Power is all in nation-building and cut her teeth during the Soros color revolutions of the 1990s, focusing at the time on genocide in Bosnia.

Somehow Harris and Power never seemed to get together about it, which might have seemed logical for them to do, given the out-of-control U.S. southern border and Guatemala's role as a transhipment point for migrants.

Which brings up the last point: Why is the Biden administration so gushy with this guy and so out to "get" the last administration? Likely because the outgoing president, Alejandro Gianmattei, actually tried to stop the border surge, and made it public that Joe Biden had rung a dinner triangle for cartel human smugglers to recruit migrants for big dollars. For that, the Bidenites claimed corruption all over the place with Gianmattei's administration, which as facts come out, wasn't the case. Will they now claim corruption all over the place with Arevalo? Don't hold your breath -- Arevalo and the region can see that Power is sucking up to him, as if she's gotten "her people" into the Guatemalan presidential palace, just like the United Fruit Company used to do.

Is Arevalo a puppet of the U.S., or is Power just glad to see him? It's not clear at this point, but the whole thing looks strange. One thing that's very likely is that nobody in Guatemala now is going to try to stop the migrant surge, but there will be plenty of hands out for spoils and "aid" from the U.S. It's like the U.S. has bought someone and would like to get its money's worth. But that's not what normal people consider democracy.

Image: Twitter screen shot 

 

 

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