The Washington Post implores the president to keep the focus on Hugo Chavez while visiting Latin America:

The Obama administration rightly is attempting to focus its Latin America diplomacy on big countries and constructive players such as Mr. Lula and Mexico’s Felipe Calderón. No doubt Mr. Obama will listen to whatever Latin leaders have to tell him this weekend. But he ought to make clear that for the United States, at least, foreign policy will continue to be linked to democracy — both for those countries that have denied it to their people for decades and those that now may seek to abolish it.

Chavez has certainly been on a tear lately — locking up opponents, monkeying around with mayoral races, sending his thugs out to intimidate the opposition, and positioning himself as president for life.

But that doesn’t mean Obama will make a fuss. That would be so, ehem, divisive. We’d have to take a firm line, incur the wrath of Chavez and his unseemly friends, and undo all that “good will” we earned (we did earn it, right?) from lifting the travel and money transfer restrictions on Cuba. So far that simply isn’t the sort of thing Obama does. He is an equal opportunity ignorer of human rights — whether it is North Korea, Iran, China, or Cuba. So I wouldn’t count on him making a big deal about democracy in Venezuela.