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Club of Three: Venezuela and Brazil bar leading presidential candidates from running for office
By Monica Showalter The American Thinker
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/club_of_three_venezuela_and_brazil_bar_leading_presidential_candidates_from_running_for_office.html

Under the news radar, two ugly power grabs from a pair of would-be Marxist dictators were announced yesterday from South America.

From socialist Venezuela:

CARACAS (Reuters) -Maria Corina Machado, one of the favorites to win the Venezuelan opposition's nomination for president in an October primary, has been barred from holding public office for 15 years, the country's controller general said in a letter.

Machado, a 55-year-old industrial engineer and former lawmaker, is leading polling for the 13-candidate primary, convened to select a unity candidate to face socialist President Nicolas Maduro in a 2024 election.

A previous ban placed on her has been expanded because Machado supported sanctions by the United States on the Maduro government and backed former opposition leader Juan Guaido, the letter said.

From socialist Brazil:

Brazil's far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro vowed Friday to appeal a court ruling barring him from public office for eight years over unfounded attacks he had made against the country's voting system.

The ruling renders the 68-year-old ineligible to stand in the next presidential election in 2026 -- opening the contest for a new leader for Brazil's political right.

Bolsonaro was tried by the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) over claims he made in a televised meeting with foreign diplomats in July 2022, during which he claimed electronic voting machines in use since 1996 compromised election transparency.

Sound like any place you might know?

It's like a Club of Three, given that the third person up for barring is President Trump. He's in very good company with these top leaders, and vice versa.

What we have here is the entrenched left seeking to knock out its potential opposition after falling in the polls as election time beckons. The backdrop is years of economic and political mismanagement from the incumbents and the aim has been to achieve total, permanent power. If that can't be accomplished through elections, then the next step has been to shut the opposition down.

The grounds for the barrings in these South American incidents aren't accusations of taking, say, $30 million in bribe money. These were speech crimes, process crimes, flimsy pretexts never before seen back when these countries were functioning democracies. The political aims have been obvious to all. And it's no surprise that with these same incumbents in power, there also have been credible accusations of election fraud or suspected election fraud.

Rigging has existed in both places, but the one thing that's different here is that they've gotten pretty bold and brazen about it, not even trying to cover up the flimsy politicized pretexts for these ultimate power grabs.

That might just coincide with what's going on in the U.S., where the left has demonstrated that it will do anything -- anything -- to bar President Trump from re-running for office.

They like flimsy pretexts, too.

And while these countries are perfectly capable of commiting fraud on their own, one can't help but think maybe the Democrat adoption of these banana republic ways of keeping the oppositiion from power, might just be influencing their actions.

It's sad stuff, more of the ugly foreign policy influence of Joe Biden, who, as Bob Gates has said, has been wrong on just about every foreign policy issue.

Biden and his Democrats have opened the gates to these emboldened tyrannies to bar their opposition leaders on ridiculous grounds. The path to this sorry state of affairs, was paved by Democrats, who are still hammering away at their grand mastertask of barring President Trump from ever running for office, and barring American voters, from choosing the candidate that they want.