Blogging the democratic revolution
Source: Daniel’s Venezuela News & Views What do 70,000 unsolved murders look like? That’s what Venezuelans tried to show today in a unique and passionate protest in Caracas. The most visible legacy of Hugo Chavez’s regime is murder. As the entire governmental infrastructure becomes politicized, one hard hit section is the police. Bad cops, so long as they are Chavistically loyal, are the ones hired, while the ethical cops get thrown out. Not only that, the government is focusing its resources on prosecuting political, not criminal, cases. That leaves the cops who could make a difference out of luck. Lastly,…
The spectacular decline in the visual appearance of Caracas, Venezuela, once one of South America’s smartest cities, continues to be noted. Caracas under the Hugo Chavez dictatorship is getting that telltale ‘Havana‘ look, as a result of the same types of policies that made Havana the heap of rubble it now is. We’ve recently noted this slideshow from The Real Cuba, and now Daniel at Venezuela News & Views, fresh from an eye-opening trip to Caracas, notes the decline and rubbishification of Caracas – as well as its new signs of massive Stalinist propaganda – in an informative and interesting…
For the 45,873th time, communism has failed. Forced confiscations of once-productive farms have left Zimbabwe a hollowed out shell of itself, its people hungry and starving, its government without revenue, and its infrastructure a smoking ruin. How many times do people need to learn this? Is there ever such a thing as learning from others or the past? Does everyone on earth need to learn everything the hard way individually? How anyone could support communism after this is beyond stupid. It can only be evil. Hugo Chavez of course has yet to learn. Anyway, Zimbabwe’s government has “invited” farmers of…
Boli-Nica has a tremendously important piece about the role of the Internet is having on burning down Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s lead in Mexico’s presidential election to be held on July 2. Well, we here certainly don’t like the guy! But more importantly, Boli points out how Mexico’s bloggers are warning, criticizing, exposing and ridiculing the supposedly untouchable AMLO, whittling down the leftist demogogue’s once-powerful presidential lead, which is now down to 3 or 4 points at most and still falling – with a good long three months for it to fall farther. Mexicans can’t stand this kind of nonsense,…
Cuba’s state-controlled press has just reported that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is proposing a new federation of “autonomous” nations in one big Bolivarian union. It’s a massive show of self-aggrandisement (for who would rule such an entity but Chavez himself?), but also an incredible call to regess to the failed past. Chavez has dressed it up in the aggrieved language of preserving indigenous identity, something that makes sense from his point of view because he is most likely to entice into this the supporters of leaders like Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ollanta Humala of Peru, who have no knowledge…
I downloaded Pajamas Media’s first podcast directly to my 1 GB flash mp3 player, and listened to it on the way home from work. Wow! I think it worked out really great. Austin Bay hosted Glenn Reynolds, Tammy Bruce and Eric Umansky, and they discussed Iraq, Iran and more. I thoroughly enjoyed it: familiar blogs crackled to life, and it felt as one must have felt on first hearing a radio broadcast, although the sound quality was — slightly — better. It’s interesting and exciting, and I would gladly recommend it. Invisible Ämp3’sÅ Crackle with life Bright ÄtransistorsÅ bristle With…
Russia took over the rotating chair of the Group of Eight (G8) Presidency on January 1, 2006, and therefore Russian President Vladimir Putin will host the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006. Putin has made it clear that he wants ???????Energy Security??????? to be the number one topic of the summit, and it appears that he will get his way. The Russian government wants the summit to be a success and wants to pull it off without any public disputes, however, the US, behind closed doors, is making it clear that Iran must be on the agenda????????threatening that…
The Shia-led United Iraqi Alliance, which is the largest bloc in parliament and is therefore constitutionally obligated to nominate for approval the prime minister, has decided within itself to scrap Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its candidate for the post and has instead voted to nominate someone new. His name is Jawad al-Miliki. No comment yet from the Kurdish, SUnni, and secular parties. BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s ruling Shi’ite Alliance nominated Jawad al-Maliki as its new candidate for prime minister on Friday in an effort to end four months of political paralysis over the formation of a new government. No immediate reaction…
King Gyanendra finally addressed the people. The result was less than miraculous. In it he promised to return executive power to the people and asked the Seven Party Alliance to name a new prime minister. Meanwhile, the current government would continue to function until that happens. Nothing about giving up his power. Nothing about restoring the elected parliament. Nothing actually addressing the demands of the people. There will be no rewriting of the constitution and there will be no bringing of the Maoists into the mainstream. What the King has offered them is going back to square one. Simply put,…
Boz has his weekly polls roundup from around the Americas, and first, the best part: Spanish voters rank Chavez and Castro as rock bottom from among the region’s leaders. Chavez’s trips to Spain, where he made an incredible fool of himself, obnoxious all the way, must have had something to do with this. Castro, meanwhile, speaks for himself. He’s also got updates from Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua, all well worth seeing here.
The topic is hideous but it’s getting harder to ignore: Venezuela is becoming the New Medellin, an emerging drug-trafficking capital for our hemisphere. It’s a big change. As brave President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia crushes Marxist narcotraffickers in his own country, these same narcos are finding greener pastures by moving next door, to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It represents a historic shift because Venezuela’s lawmen have always fought Colombian drug traffickers like cougars to keep them out. Today, Hugo Chavez embraces these same dopers as Marxist allies in his struggle against U.S. “imperialism.” You can imagine how dispiriting this must be…
Thomas Friedman has a terrific new piece out in Foreign Policy magazine, describing something I have discussed earlier, the creepy inverse relationship between rising oil prices and declining freedom. As oil prices have shot up, many oil producing countries and regions – Venezuela, Iran, Russia – have correspondingly lost their freedoms. Others, like Nigeria and Aceh, have seen a rise of gangs and rebels, making life hell, just as surely as a tyrant. The article is not out on the Web yet but you can buy the issue, which is loaded with several good articles of great relevance. The newly…
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is really starting to tumble in the Mexican presidential polls, to be held July 2. He’s still ahead, but now only by 3 or 4 points. And with three months to go before election day, his trajectory is down. Reuters has a new story here showing that for the first time in three years, he’s starting to really look shaky. AMLO is the favored candidate of the Hugo Chavez left in Mexico. But Chavez, ironically, is the main cause of AMLO’s downfall. The more Hugo Chavez talks, the more anti-U.S, rage he spews, the more insanity…
Yesterday, at a meeting with the Algerian speaker of parliament, Ammar Sadani (or Saadani), the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that the years of “discord” among the Muslim countries was over. These years of discord had allowed Israel to occupy Palestine and for the West to dominate the lands of Islam. But, the “enemies” of the ummah had been weakened by recent developments in the Middle East, and, Ahmadinejad said, Iran and Algeria could change the balance of power in the Middle East against Israel and the United States. Sadani, in support of the Iranian president, responded, ever carefully, by…
Cuba Liberal has a 58-minute-long must-see video, in Spanish, about the horrific tortures used by the Castro’s regime against all who oppose him. The video starts with the liar Castro claiming that “nobody has ever been tortured or mistreated in Cuba”. But the reality is all the opposite. Watch the video here .
Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent newspaper editor and politician on the left, has said he will run for president against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in December’s election. It’s a fascinating decision. Petkoff is an ex-leftist guerrilla who can’t stand Chavez. He was also a good government infrastructural minister who really got things done. He’s extremely competent, and I don’t care what he claims his political orientation is. He does thing right. Petkoff posts on English-language Venezuelan blogs on occasion and the one striking thing I noticed about him from his posts was his brilliance and confidence, even if I did not totally…
You thought commissars were a thing of the past? Not at UCLA. Here in the states, a fierce debate is going on as to whether illegal immigrants should all walk out on their jobs on May 1 to make a political point, one that says the U.S. economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. It’s a takeoff on a clever movie that came out recently called ‘A Day Without A Mexican.’ The problem is, if the immigrants do this, they’ll probably be fired from their jobs, negating the point of being an illegal immigrant altogether. And being fired could leave such…
I hate to have to waste bandwidth on this but there are still people out there who think Hugo Chavez has improved the situation in Venezuela, and is only in power because he is popular. Having been there and talked to people, I strongly doubt it. But I also used my eyes. If it’s true that Chavez is popular because he’s made things so much better for the poor, how come this is the Caracas reality today? The above PowerPoint presentation, courtesy of The Real Cuba shows the deterioration of Caracas from 1998, the last year before Hugo Chavez took…
Chinese President Hu Jintao is in the United States to meet with President Bush this week amid much fanfare. Undoubtedly any meeting between the leaders of these two countries will be historic. On the one hand you have a longtime military and economic superpower, and on the other you have a country that hopes to be that within a few decades. There????????s a lot to discuss on the table. Trade and development. Bilateral relations and common concerns. Human rights. This visit, however, will be very different from previous ones. When President Bush visited China in November last year, something unprecedented…
Nepal continues to be gripped by a national strike jointly called by the seven-party political alliance and the Maoist insurgency. People have been staying home from work and protesting in the streets, putting pressure on King Gyanendra to restore democracy in the country. So far, he has been unyielding. The political parties have called for people to take to the streets en masse Thursday, break through the police barriers, and surround the presidential palace. Diplomatic efforts to stop Nepal from falling deeper into crisis are continuing, with the arrival Wednesday of an Indian envoy offering to mediate between King Gyanendra…
Another day, another 20,000-vote narrowing in the gap between Lulu Flores and Alan Garcia, the two candidates vying for second place in Peru’s electoral race, which will go into a second round next month. Yesterday, Flores was trailing Garcia by 93,000 votes. Today, it’s 71,000 votes. There’s still about 8% of the votes to be counted. If you ask me, I think the odds are starting to go into her favor, if these expat trends continue. She’s behind but she’s also got the momentum from voters. Can it last for eight percentage points? I am starting to cross my fingers.…
Ralph Peters, writing an exclusive on Real Clear Politics notes some reservations about the very concept of democratic revolution, saying it’s a tool that requires skills and people who are just beginning to use the tool often don’t have the right skills. Do you agree with Ralph?
Tim’s El Salvador Blog has a fascinating update and discussion of the famous “14 families” who supposedly rule and control El Salvador. I remember how big a deal that was during the El Salvador War in the 1980s. Today, they are now the “8 Conglomerates.” The discussion is also important, and I half agree with each of the sides. Number one, I do think there’s such a thing as oligarchs in Latin America and while their billions do not bother me, and I make no advocacy of taking them away, they frequently are where they are due to certain privileges…
Kyrgyzstan, formerly the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic during Soviet times, gained its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Askar AKAYEV became President of Kyrgyzstan and the country seemed to be on the road to democracy. However, over time corruption became rampant, the country suffered from a poor economy, and there was blatant nepotism in the country. This led democracy activists to protest against his government. The Kyrgyz non-governmental organizations (NGO) and many young people began protesting the corruption, and against unfair parliamentary and presidential elections. The Kyrgyz government cracked down on…
According to Peru’s official election results page, the battle for a second-place spot for the May runoff shows that free-market Lourdes Flores is beginnning to sharply gain on disastrous ex-President Alan Garcia. If she can completely overtake Garcia, she will be the one to face Ollanta Humala in May, and may well win. As Peruvian expat votes roll in, there’s now less than a 100,000-vote difference between Garcia and Flores. Garcia’s lead above Flores is just 93,818 votes. A few days ago, it was over 200,000 votes. The expats seem to be making a difference. Lobo en Peru has some…