Several developments over the past week add to my growing sense of pessimism over certain parts of Latin America.

The first is the decision of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to bring on board a senior Cuban official with a long time specialty in internal security and torture to act as a consultant on Venezuela's energy crisis.

What Ramiro Valdes, one of the four remaining "originals" of the 1959 revolution, can bring on the electrical side is open to question, given that Cuba is not a model of electrical efficiency and management. What he can bring is a strong sense of how to control the internal opposition and make repression more efficient, which is his specialty.

This leads to my second concern. As Chávez grows more beleaguered and under siege, the one card he holds to wreak havoc in the region is his relationship with the FARC in Colombia.

Valdes, the old guerrilla with a strong penchant for supporting armed movements, is a likely candidate to help escalate that relationship at a time when the FARC, a designated terrorist organization, has money from cocaine sales to pay for increased training and access.

Another desperate regime, that of Iran, is also scrambling to survive, and the two friends are likely to jointly seek ways to save themselves while sinking their own countries and others.

A third area of concern is increasing violence in Juarez, Mexico, where I just was. The massacre of the 16 young people has brought to the forefront the sense of despair and hopelessness people feel, and the profound disillusionment with the government and its counter-drug efforts.

When people lose all faith in a government, the situation will be very difficult to reverse. The narcos and allied gangs such as Barrio Azteca and Artistas Asesinos feel a complete sense of impunity that is well-deserved. Less than 2 percent of all homicides in Mexico are ever prosecuted and in Ciudad Juarez the numbers are even lower. The military is widely viewed as corrupt and abusive, the federal police generate little trust and the municipal police are viewed as handmaidens of the cartels.

This leads to the type of terror on the streets of a once lovely city, with 2,600 homicides last year and already on pace to surpass that by a significant amount.

A fourth issue is the eroding freedom of expression across the Bolivarian sectors of Latin America. It was driven home to me after the release of our new report on Ecuador, Ecuador at Risk. Not only has the ordered his ambassador in Washington to see if he can sue us, his government has threatened to try to find my sources.

So one can only imagine the censorship that goes on in the local media in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Chilling indeed.

As this German press report shows, we did not go into all the details on Ecuador's problems. It is about to be listed by FATF as a high-risk country for financial transactions because it has not ratified 48 of the 49 conventions on fighting money laundering and terror finance.

As the Hoy newspaper in Quito noted in an editorial defending our report,:

it is not enough to close one's eyes to the facts and consider them to be a plot to smear the government. It is urgent that we redouble our efforts against drug trafficking and revise our policies of who we allow into our country.

My colleague at the International Assessment and Strategy Center Glenn Simpson and I just published a major new study on Ecuador's growing role as a sanctuary for the FARC and Mexican drug trafficking organizations and the regional implications of these developments.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa is a member of the Hugo Chávez-led Bolivarian Revolution, and has had an extraordinary political trajectory. The Belgian and U.S.-educated economist is often said to be "Chávez Lite," because he has not implemented some of the more aggressively-authoritarian measures of the other Bolivarian states.

But, as we document in "Ecuador at Risk: Drugs, Thugs and Guerrillas and the Citizens' Revolution," the FARC in Colombia, having been cleared from the center of the country, are increasingly relying on the Ecuador-Colombia border as a vital resupply region. The camp of senior FARC commander Raúl Reyes, killed in a Colombian attack on March 1, 2008, was in Ecuadorean territory.

Now, the FARC and Mexican drug cartels use Ecuador as a neutral meeting ground, further developing ties that strengthen both groups. Major FARC cocaine laboratories, as well as R&R camps, remain on the Ecuadorean side of the border.

In addition, Correa has developed relationships with Iranian banks under U.S. and U.N. sanction, a move that will help allow Iran to avoid international financial sanctions.

This is the second paper in our series on the effects of the Bolivarian Revolution. The first one, "Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS," can be found here.

As Jackson Diehl writes in today's Washington Post, Hugo Chávez's version of the Bolivarian Revolution is in a deep crisis.

He is enough of a crisis that his pulled force RCTV off the air for refusing to carrying his endless and inane speeches en toto, even though they take hours of air time. Not that there is even the appearance now of freedom of the press, but the price to Chávez's already-sullied international image will be high.

However, I am not sure I share Diehl's optimism that the system is on its way to collapse. It would be in a normal world, but given Chávez's clear willingness to profit from the expanding cocaine trade through Venezuela, he has more of an economic slush fund to draw that could allow him to limp along and keep a deeply inefficient system running.

More evidence of Chávez's ties to terrorist groups is now in hand. The FARC and much smaller (though still declared Marxist) ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional - Army of National Liberation) have reached a ceasefire in order to stop killing each others' troops in the field.

The three meeting to reach an agreement of the two designated terrorist organizations were held in Venezuelan territory to discuss a truce, and were ultimately sign an agreement to jointly confront the Colombian government

Among the points discussed were how to bring the ELN more fully into the FARC's primary umbrella front group, the Movimiento Continental Bolivariano. The MCB publicly held its most recent plenary session in Caracas in December, and named senior FARC commander Alfonso Cano to its directorate.

How to the FARC and ELN support themselves? Primarily through drug trafficking (FARC) and kidnapping and extortion of foreign companies (ELN). Now, Chávez, in return for the safe haven and state support he provides, is able to reap part of the profits these terrorist groups generate.

So, in an ideal world, Chávez would be finished. But he may not be. Perhaps the most important thing, as Diehl noticed, is the growing willingness of other South American leaders to take on Chávez's authoritarism publicly. Like the cancer of not wanting to publicly hold accountable the "Big Men" of Africa (see Mugabe et al), the Latin American democratic nations have tolerated the abuses of Chávez, Ortega, Morales and Correa with an amazing bout of silence and moral cowardice.

Chile's new president Sebastián Piñera, has publicly called out the authoritarian regimes and stated his position that Chile does not view their regimes as the future of the hemisphere. Colombia, Peru, Panama and Honduras have to truck with the Bolivarians and Ecuador seems to be backing away from the once vice-like union with Venezuela.

Ultimately, taking away his international stature will hurt Chávez more than his economic crisis. He has a slush fund for his economy but not for the growing willingness to confront his thuggish regime.

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report broke the story that the U.S. State Department Tariq Ramadan's ban from entering the United States. Ramadan , an influential European leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was long banned because of alleged ties to terrorist activity.

The lifting of the ban, ordered by Secretary of State Clinton, is a significant victory for the Brotherhood, who has sought to frame the issue of Ramadan's exclusion as one of academic freedom rather one of national security. Ramadan was ecstatic, saying on his blog:

Today’s decision reflects the Obama administration’s willingness to reopen the United States to the rest of the world, and to permit critical debate. Coming after nearly six years of inquiry and investigation, Secretary Clinton’s order confirms what I have affirmed and reaffirmed from day one: the first accusations of terrorist connections (subsequently dropped), then donations to Palestinian solidarity groups, were nothing more than a pretense to prohibit me from speaking critically about American government policy on American soil. The decision brings to an end a dark period in American politics that saw security considerations invoked to block critical debate through a policy of exclusion and baseless allegation. Today I am delighted at the decision.

The truth of the grandson of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, is far more complex, and there is little doubt that, in the end, he is an agent of radicalization rather than peace. A rock star in the European Muslim scene, Ramadan, despite weak academic credentials, has been offered a teaching position at Notre Dame University.

As noted in this extensive review of "Brother Tarik: The Doublespeak of Tarik Ramadan," by French journalist Caroline Fourest, the definitive look at Ramadan's cannon, he is intent on saying one thing to Western audiences while something else to his followers. They often do not match up.

This is typical of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is eager to use the freedoms that would never exist under the caliphate is so desires to create, in order to promote its totalitarian vision. It demands the right to be heard while being unequivocal in its unwillingness to view as equal anyone who does not embrace its view radical Islamism. While it is willing to use the democratic process to achieve its goals, often putting it at odds with militantly violent groups such as al Qaeda, in the end the Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden share an identical vision of what the world should look like under Allah's rule.

In keeping with this, Ramadan's choice of language is also interesting (al Qaeda attacks are "interventions," jihad is entirely peaceful, Anwar Sadat was not assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood but "executed," etc.) His numerous lies have been exposed exposed, his refusal to condemn stoning as a death sentence well documented and his convenient belief that only Muslims can understand the Koran has been rehashed.

But as Fourest, who did not expect to become convinced of Ramadan's radicalism and duplicity, asks: "Do we have a providential man we can expect to modernize Islam and encourage dialogue between civilizations? The answer is no and it is high time we put an end to our naivete, lest we become accomplices."

One of the striking things in the three most recent high profile jihadist attacks -- the "Underpants Bomber," the Ft. Hood assassin and the attacker on the CIA base in Afghanistan -- has been the attackers themselves.

While many studying terrorism have understood that the threat is not from the dispossessed of the earth, but from an educated elite in the semi-Westernized (or completely Westernized) world who radicalize in different ways.

Yet there is still a policy, going back many years and continued now, that aims at a completely different social and economic demographic -- the poor and wretched of the earth who are believed to be angry at the U.S. and the West for its policies in the Middle East.

We spend vast amounts of money to convince one group that we have virtually no way to reach that they should like us, while having little strategy to deal with those who have repeatedly shown themselves to be the greater danger.

Yet we have Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London; and Nidal Hasan, who was born in Arlington, graduated from Virginia Tech and did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed.

One of the chief radicalizing influences in the case of the latter two was Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who did not rise out of the teeming ghettos or dirt-poor villages, but family that lived in the United States, a country he returned to in order to study at George Washington University.

Perhaps this will put an end to the myth of the poor and wretched jihadist waging a form of religious class struggle.

As Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, we are seeing a "international jihadi elite" that resembles international elites of the Bolshevik days who were no more working class than the Tsar. As she notes:

These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, "Westernized" parents who sacrificed for their education -- though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't "make it," or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies.

What makes this slice of Islamists so difficult to counter is that they move with ease in Western societies, acquire passports or citizenship in countries that do not arouse suspicion, and have no ethical difficulties in hiding their Islamist beliefs if necessary to advance the cause of

How to counter this is something we should spend much more time on than trying to figure out how to get the average Yemeni to embrace Western liberal democracy.

One of the fascinating things to note is the perceived affinity by many of the international jihadists with the radical left or radical right. Defne Bayrak, the wife of al Balawi, wrote a book titled "Bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East," apparently trying to link the two to liberation struggles of the poor. Iran's Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez (along with his acolyte, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega) regularly link the authoritarian governments of the Bolivarian revolution with the repressive Muslim revolution of Iran.

On the other side, one of the great deniers of the Holocaust was Ahmed Hubber, a neo-Nazi leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, and others like him.

It is interesting to note that Hubber, like Chávez and those who claim the mantle of the revolutionary left, was welcomed by Ahmadinejad. Perhaps that is because all three totalitarian tendencies, from the neo-Nazi to the 21st Century Socialism to Islamism, have more in common than any of them would care to recognize.