A Sign of Things to Come??

Madman Hugo Chavez just got his a$$ handed to him, losing his bid for Venezuela to secure a seat on the U.N. council and on top of that, that powerhouse of a country, Guatemala, received more votes.

All that travelling around the world, spending Venezuela's money and popping off about the "evil" USA got him squat, Chavez gets only 76 votes to Guatemala 109. But it gets worse: the second round saw Venezuela lose two votes to get 74 while Guatemala went up to 114.

And it got even worse as, very symbolically, Spain announced at the last minute that it would vote for Guatemala ending officially the Spanish support to Chavez, a support that has only brought problems to Spain.

And it is still worse because Chile got entangled in an unnecessary internal political struggle that forced it at the last moment to announce an abstention (showing that it is always a risky proposition to support Chavez, even discretely).

And to top it off the Ecuadorian openly pro Chavez came in second with barely 22% when polls were predicting a possible first round win at 40%. It seems that the last minute Noboa anti Chavez rhetoric paid off handsomely and gave him 27% (1). A difficult second round for both of them whereas it was predicted 2 weeks ago that Correa would either win outright or have an easy second round.

Bad day for Chavez.

December is weeks away, things will get very interesting down there, and it looks more and more like Manuel Rosales will defeat Hugo Chavez and will become Venezuela's next President.