ABSTRACT
Persian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been all over Latin America, opening embassies and supposedly making people like him, while proclaiming grandly, “While the Western countries were trying to isolate Iran, we went to the US backyard.” There is no popular emotion in Iran for Latin America, and what support there is in Iran for the hemisphere “is an artificial creation of the Iranian state media,” according to one speaker. Yet in once-democratic Venezuela, the pivot of the new grouping within Latin America, people are quite aware that their world is changing dramatically. If the axis continues to thrive in the manner in which these countries intend it to, it could establish a genuine threat to American stability, markets and energy. It has met with barely any resistance at all from the hated “El Norte”, with minimal coverage in the “yanqui” press—so most Americans don’t even know it exists.
