Blogging the democratic revolution
Miguel Octavio has some utterly repulsive photos of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in the throes of love. Look at those two embrace! What’s hard to believe is that Mugabe, one of the world’s foremost creators of famine and hunger today, was so much as allowed in at this United Nations conference in…
Transparency International’s famous corruption perceptions index for 70 countries of the world was released this morning. Notice those nice Estonia and Barbados ratings! Notice those hideous Burma and Belarus ratings! The press release and the list of rankings is here. UPDATE: Veneuzela’s Aleksander Boyd has some additional commentary here.
Venezuela’s bloggers have found a call from the BBC World Services to submit questions to Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez online. This event probably is part of a coordinated propaganda effort from the Western hemisphere’s communist tyrants to reach out to the outside world through the Internet. Fidel Castro did almost the very same thing last…
Gustavo Coronel has a haunting essay about the terror that stalks the Venezuelan countryside, with cattle-rustlers, marauders, professional killers, paramilitaries, mercenaries, narcoterrorists and Chavista death squads. No one is safe at night – or even at day. Payoffs to different kinds of criminals to prevent them from murdering and pillaging is a way of life…
Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has an excellent weekly news roundup of events in Venezuela, complete with a variety of media links showing through little turning points Venezuela’s slide downward into totalitarianism. Read it here.
Whatever you do, go to THIS democratic festival celebrating of the dawn of freedom and not this Chavista one representing the road to Castrodom. IndyMedia has its announcement up on the Chavista Challenge in Chicago, with all the details about the players – CITGO cheap gas, Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover…all the Huey-Long-style pork-barrel tools that…
Right in the middle of fermenting Panamanian unrest over pension reform, coupled with pot-stirring by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, our Daniel of Yaracuy, Venezuela, found himself in the middle of Panama on a work visit. From shopkeepers, he learned of corrupt Chavista officials blowing in to Panama for shopping trips and money-laundering ventures, sure in…
Ever since Gail Collins wrote her infamous editorial blasting Venezuela’s battered opposition for crying fraud in the 2004 recall referendum, I have had a change of opinion, to say the least, about the New York Times. I didn’t have it before – for a rightwinger, I have a remarkably high tolerance for left bias in…
This really happened yesterday. Francisco Toro writes: Twenty guys with BIG GUNS storm into your apartment one night. They say they’re from the Prosecutor General’s Office. They’re looking for materials relating to … Tulio Alvarez’s “terrorist activities.” …. They leave, a bit embarrassed. The next day, the prosecutors’ office says it has no idea who…
An unusual piece of news – Barbados wants nothing – NOTHING – to do with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s pork-barrel spending on cheap oil for his small Caribbean neighors. Tiny but responsible Barbados knows that nothing comes ‘free’ and has no intention of giving away its sovereignty for a barrel of Chavez’s oil. This represents…
Amid a huge hullabaloo first reported by blogger Daniel Duquenal here and here, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela offered to finance a Brazilian samba school to dance in his honor. But being Hugo Chavez, he suddenly … didn’t come up with the pledge money. This, despite, the Brazilian school’s efforts to accomodate him, to print up…
Venezuela’s oil, however you think it should be allocated, belongs to Venezuela. But that’s not how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez sees it. He’s now on the verge of appointing a hardcore German Marxist who had and maybe still has ties to the Baaden Meinhof terrorrists to lead Venezuela’s oil company. Not unreasonably, Alek, who is…
For all those who imagine that ‘land reform’ based on the confiscation of private property yields anything but Zimbabwe, Miguel Octavio has a sad news item describing how confiscated land in Venezuela’s western Zulia state a couple years ago has since gone from productive to fallow, the inevitable end-product of socialist redistribution. It’s something nations…
The news announced over the weekend that Venezuela was seeking to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, just happened to coincide with Pat Robertson’s claims (which were in the news months ago) that Venezuela is cozying up to Iran for nuclear purposes. (We know, Pat.) Francisco Toro has some very interesting thoughts about this baffling trend…
Why does Chavez remain popular? Here’s a frank and intelligent discussion of the matter in terms even I can relate to here.
Besides the end of property rights, Venezuela also is turning into a financial madhouse. Almost every blogger I can find on Venezuela is commenting about it how Venezuela’s central bank, the guardian of its very currency, is under attack by the Chavista dictatorship. The Financial Times reported here that Venezuela’s central bank shifted up to…
I was going nuts, there was no Boli-Nica for weeks, and the whole world seemed … gray. At long last he is BACK and he’s got a funny new post up on Hugo Chavez’s latest scheme to build a ‘national computer.’ Boli, we want more! Boli describes Hugo Chavez’s latest schemes with state-financed computers, how…
Tuesday’s essay on property rights by the great Carlos Alberto Montaner, has awesome intellectual firepower. He is the best writer I know of anywhere in the world, and this is his most luminous essay. Montaner writes about how the destruction of property rights, as is happening in Venezuela, makes democratic revolution nearly impossible. He carefully…
Both Venezuela and Bolivia will hold watershed elections this December 4. Political pictures, and the outlook for democracy, could change as a result. Venezuela will elect National Assembly members ahead of dictator Hugo Chavez’s planned “changes” to the constitution. Bolivia will hold long-anticipated presidential elections after the leftist street-mob toppling of their second president in…
Francisco Toro, after a (too-)long hiatus, is back to blogging thoughtfully about Venezuela. His new blog has a beautiful new design (although truthfully, the last two were extraordinary, too) and a new format of short posts with pithy original ideas. I don’t always agree with him on everything but I would say I do like…
Not through guerrillas this time but through pork-barrel-spending. Along with Hugo Chavez’s oil billions, Evo Morales has taken the lead in the Bolivian polls. Castro knows exactly why he’s doing this. Do we? Read the whole thing here or here. It’s on Real Clear Politics here.
Alexandra Beech, who is Venezuelan, has written a compelling personal story of her observed differences between Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe – and she notices that the differences between the two men are strong. The essay, which amusingly enough has the same title as mine here, couldn’t be more different in…
Brazil’s failure as a regional leader in the face of growing communist aggression from the likes of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is a major concern, I argue, in this American Thinker essay here. UPDATE: It’s on Real Clear Politics this morning here. VCrisis has an in-depth analysis from a famous…
Daniel has a good thorough roundup of the ongoing electoral mess in Venezuela, which faces congressional elections on Dec. 4. This will be one hell of a fateful day for this country’s ‘democracy.’ Chavez is likely to totally consolidate power and end elections forever more in Venezuela after this. There’s the interesting problem of his…
Miguel Octavio writes a post about the unbelievable hassle of getting a passport out of Venezuela. He studiously describes the incredible shenanigans citizens must go through (something the FARC, which gets its Venezuelan passports handed to them never worries about) including high bribery rates, unfathomable delays, government blacklists, and now a particularly slimey government official…