Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-NY) released a statement today praising former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, despite the latter’s record of harsh crackdowns on his political opponents and state-sanctioned persecution against Venezuela’s Jewish population. Serrano tweeted a statement praising Chavez as an a champion of the oppressed, writing that “Hugo Chavez was a leader that understood the needs of the poor. He was committed to empowering the powerless. R.I.P. Mr. President.” Serrano’s office later released a statement expanding on the tweet:

President Chavez was a controversial leader. But at his core he was a man who came from very little and used his unique talents and gifts to try to lift up the people and the communities that reflected his impoverished roots. He believed that the government of the country should be used to empower the masses, not the few. He understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life. His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere, will be assured as the people he inspired continue to strive for a better life for the poor and downtrodden.”

While even Chavez’s critics admit that he did attempt to address the plight of Venezuela’s poorest, the decline in economic inequality in Venezuela reflected a broader egalitarian trend in Latin America, and can’t be fully credited to Chavez’s policies. However, Chavez’ policies harmed Venezuela’s poorest in other ways: the value of the Venezuelan currency dropped while prices soared, making it harder for people to buy basic necessities, and crime skyrocketed.

Moreover, Chavez hurt the vulnerable in Venezuela in other ways. Chavez’s state-run media hounded Venezuela’s small, beleaguered Jewish population — he himself once said “Don’t let yourselves be poisoned by those wandering Jews.” A study released by the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University found that Chavez’s rule “witnessed a rise in antisemitic manifestations, including vandalism, media attacks, caricatures, and physical attacks on Venezuelan Jewish institutions.” Indeed, roughly half of Venezuelan Jews fled the country because of “the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.”

Chavez also attacked Venezuela’s democratic political system. Human Rights Watch reported in 2012 that “the accumulation of power in the executive and the erosion of human rights protections have allowed the Chávez government to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society.” Contra Serrano’s implication that Chavez’s elections were generally certified as “free and fair by international monitors,” Chavez had not invited international election monitors to observe Venezuelan elections since 2006 (though a delegation from the Carter Center did conduct a limited audit of the 2012 election).

Hayes Brown contributed reporting to this piece.

On Tuesday, Mitt Romney’s campaign debuted a new ad in Florida that shows Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Raul Castro’s daughter saying they’d vote for President Obama if they were American citizens. The Spanish-language ad is similar to work done by conservative outlets, like Fox News and TownHall.Com, trying to connect foreign dictators to Obama. Here’s the Miami Herald’s translation of Romney’s ad:

NARRATOR: Who supports Barack Obama?

CHAVEZ: If I were American, I’d vote for Obama.

NARRATOR: Raúl Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro, would vote for Obama.

CASTRO: I would vote for President Obama.

NARRATOR: And to top it off, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency sent emails for Hispanic Heritage month with a photo of Che Guevara.

CHAVEZ: If Obama were from Barlovento (a Venezuelan town), he’d vote for Chávez.

ROMNEY: I’m Mitt Romney, and I approve this message.

Watch it:

The ad is a hyperbolic play on the right-wing’s baseless paranoia about Obama being “foreign,” a communist and in bed with dictators. And indeed, Chavez and the Castros haven’t exactly said nice things about Obama either. In 2011, Chavez criticized President Obama for being “the president of an empire” and said he little “hope” for the President. For his part, President Obama has called out Venezuela for its repressive policies, saying in December that “we have been deeply concerned to see action taken to restrict the freedom of the press, and to erode the separation of powers that is necessary for democracy to thrive.” Relations between America and Venezuela haven’t changed much since President Obama took office: in 2010 Chavez did not accept the nominated U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela. As a result, the U.S. withdrew a visa for the Venezuelan ambassador. In 2012, the Obama administration expelled another Venezuelan diplomat.

And it’s not just Chavez that’s been critical of the President: Fidel Castro, former leader of Cuba, said about the President’s U.N. speech in 2011, “Who understands the gibberish of the President of the United States speaking before the United Nations?”

The ad’s accusation that “Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency” sent emails with a picture of Che Guevara is also missing a key bit of context. Susie Goldring, an EPA employee, sent the email. She says she “had no idea who the person on the wall in the photo was” and quickly apologized for sending the email. The EPA also clarified that the “email was drafted and sent by an individual employee, and without official clearance.”

The ad might represent the Romney campaign’s last-ditch efforts to increase its support in the Latino community. Thus far, polls have shown a wide gap between the two candidates with 77 percent supporting President Obama and only 23 percent supporting Mitt Romney.

Rosa Hombredela, a Cuban-American, told the Miami Herald that the ad disgusted her because it reminded her of “the same infectious style of politics that put Castro in power has germinated in Miami making it a banana republic. I was born in Cuba, raised in the United States, I’m a woman, a Republican and I voted yesterday for President Barack Obama. Proud to say so.”

In a very matter-of-fact television interview earlier this month, President Obama said Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian machinations have “not had a serious national security impact on us.” Hard-pressed to find points of divergence between his own national security policies and Obama’s, Mitt Romney — focused on Chávez’s “military ties with Iran” — blasted the president as “simply naïve,” and called his comment “disturbing.”

One wonders if Romney feels the same way about Air Force General Douglas Fraser, who, as the head of Southern Command, has responsibility for U.S. military operations in Latin America. Asked by the Associated Press if Venezuelan arms purchases and weapons development posed a threat to the U.S., Fraser said:

From my standpoint, no, I don’t see it that way. I don’t see them as a national security threat.

…As I look at Iran and their connection with Venezuela, I see that still primarily as a diplomatic and economic relationship.

The experts side with Obama and Fraser on this question. Riordan Roett, who directs Johns Hopkins’ Latin American Studies Program, said Chávez “poses no security threat to the United States or anyone else.” Roett dismissed Romney’s outrage as “just pure electoral politics.” Another expert said in 2009, “They just don’t have the stuff that could pose a serious threat to the United States.”

On Afghanistan, Romney was for listening to the generals before he was against it. Maybe he should lend them his ear, at least for a while, on Latin America, too.

In an interview with a Miami-based Spanish-language media outlet, President Obama gave this banal answer to a question about the supposed “threat” Venezuela poses to America: “what Mr. [Hugo] Chávez has done over the last several years has not had a serious national security impact on us.”

Right-wing hawks immediately jumped on the line as evidence of the President’s supposed naïvete on foreign policy. Mitt Romney — who doesn’t really have much of a foreign policy game this election season — got in on the action too, claiming Obama’s statement shows “weakness”:

This is a stunning and shocking comment by the President. It is disturbing to see him downplaying the threat posed to U.S. interests by a regime that openly wishes us ill. Hugo Chavez has provided safe haven to drug kingpins, encouraged regional terrorist organizations that threaten our allies like Colombia, has strengthened military ties with Iran and helped it evade sanctions, and has allowed a Hezbollah presence within his country’s borders. And he is seeking to lead — together with the Castros — a destabilizing, anti-democratic, and anti-American ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ across Latin America.

Romney’s not wrong to deplore the odious pseudo-dictatorial Chávez government (he could have mentioned its nasty habit of using state media to push anti-Semitism), but Obama has the same view – in the next sentence of his answer, the President said “My main concern when it comes to Venezuela is having the Venezuelan people have a voice in their affairs, and that you end up ultimately having fair and free elections, which we don’t always see.” Indeed, Obama didn’t downplay Chávez’s antipathy towards the United States — he was simply suggesting Chávez was too weak to follow through on his words.

On this point, the experts are with Obama. Riordan Roett, who directs Johns Hopkins’ Latin American Studies Program, said Chávez “poses no security threat to the United States or anyone else,” calling Romney’s statement “just pure electoral politics.” American diplomats think of Chávez’ so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” as a farcical failed model that is “imploding under its own weight” and that the best way to respond to Venezuelan rhetorical provocation is to simply “not take the bait.”

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Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee engaged in a marathon mark-up of the State Department budget authorization bill. One of the most stunning votes was a party-line 22-20 victory for an amendment that defunded the Organization for American States (OAS), the multilateral group of Western hemisphere democracies formed under U.S. leadership in 1948.

The funding, which accounts for about half of OAS’ budget, doesn’t amount to much — just $48 million. So why did House Republicans, led by right-wing Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), vote for Rep. Connie Mack’s (R-FL) amendment eliminating it? Because, Mack said, the OAS was supporting U.S. foes. The Associated Press reported on the mark-up:

Mack insisted that the measure did not represent isolationism but rather was targeted at an organization that backs Venezuela and its U.S. foe, President Hugo Chavez.

“Let’s engage our allies and friends, but let’s not continue to support an organization that’s perpetuating some countries’ ability” to destroy democracies, Mack said.

Likewise, Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) criticized Cuba’s human rights record as the amendment was being debated.

But the OAS’ close allegiance with Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela are both highly suspect — as in: not actually true.

Cuba is not even a member of the OAS, as Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) pointed out. At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin adds that in 2009 the OAS lifted its ban on Cuban membership, but the democratic threshold for membership remains in place — and so Cuba, for now, is out.

And the OAS has actually strongly criticized Chavez and Venezuela twice in the past two years. In early 2010, the OAS issued a blistering report about Venezuela’s human rights record and slipping democratic credentials. In January of this year, OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza criticized a Venezuelan law passed in December as being “completely contrary” to the Inter-American Democratic Charter passed by the OAS in 2001. Insulza added that the issue would likely come before the OAS.

As Daniel Larison points out at the American Conservative, the OAS might not do a whole lot, but its work is “fairly innocuous or even constructive when it comes to election monitoring and development aid.” At such a small cost — 0.02 percent of what the U.S. will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan this year — it hardly seems worth cutting and running from OAS by the logic of completely flawed and hollow reasoning.

Earlier this week, The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté announced a partnership whereby they would work together to publish findings from 1,918 U.S. embassy cables — dated between 2003 and 2010 — from Haiti.

Now, the two papers have released their first article about the cables. In “The PetroCaribe Files,” Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives review an ordeal discovered within the cables involving an oil and development deal Haiti was negotiating with Venezuela and Cuba between 2006-2007.

As a part of the deal struck that year, Haiti would join the Venezuelan-led oil alliance known as PetroCaribe and it would purchase oil “only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest” — a remarkably good deal for the Western hemisphere’s poorest country.

The U.S. embassy at the time noted that Haiti would save a hundred million U.S. dollars a year under the terms of the PetroCaribe deal; the saved dollars would then be earmarked for development in schools, health care, and infrastructure. Yet, under the charge of ambassador Janet Sanderson, the embassy immediately set out to sabotage the deal.

In a classified cable, Sanderson noted that the embassy started to “pressure” Haitian leader Rene Preval from joining PetroCaribe, saying that it would “cause problems with [the United States.]” Major oil companies — such as ExxonMobil and Chevron — began threatening to cut off ties with Haiti, and Sanderson repeatedly met with the energy firms to assure them that she would pressure Haiti at the “highest levels of government.” The U.S. embassy also continually warned Preval against traveling to Venezuela and collaborate with other left-wing governments in the region.

Despite this intimidation campaign, Haiti successfully completed its deal with PetroCaribe, rebuking both its superpower neighbor and the combined threats of the world’s most powerful oil corporations. Yet the story of the PetroCaribe deal outlined in the cables is a powerful tale of how multinational corporations have exerted pressure on the U.S. government to undercut development in the emerging world economies.

On Wednesday, The Nation and Haiti Liberte will publish articles detailing a campaign by the United States that pressured the country against bringing its minimum wage to $5 dollar a day. This campaign was allegedly waged under the Obama administration, where Sanderson currently works as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.