The War of All the People elucidates the ideological and political war against the United States, capitalism, and the widely accepted tenets of modernity. Spearheading this war are Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, two “revolutionary” leaders who have forged an active alliance hell-bent on destroying the established order in the developed world. Adopted as the operative name of his war on U.S. “imperialism,” the “War of All the People” is Hugo Chávez’s plan to supplant U.S. dominance in the hemisphere with “twenty-firstcentury socialism.” Although U.S. presidents and policymakers have treated Chávez’s antics with benign neglect thus far, his 2010 missile accord with a soon-to-be nuclear Iran has escalated the threat to an unavoidable level. Chávez’s ability to thwart sanctions on Iran by providing oil, and possibly uranium, to the corrupt regime makes his bluster more sinister than the simple rant of a third world caudillo.
The War of All the People goes beyond merely pondering the unlikely alliance between seemingly antithetical cultures. Scholars, students, and policymakers will learn about the long history of cooperation between Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups, from the radical mecca of Algiers in the 1960s, where Che Guevara and Amilcar Cabral both resided, to the Tricontinental Conference in Cuba in 1966, which first brought Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat together.
