Blogging the democratic revolution
UPDATED: While President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia was ringing the opening bell of the New York stock exchange today, his ministers back home were announcing that interest rates would be slashed 50 basis points and nearly a billion more dollars in debt was being repaid. Meanwhile, Colombia’s trade surplus was expanding, tourism was up 19.5%,…
The signatures that led to a recall referendum in Venezuela last year have since become Hugo Chavez’s blacklist against his political enemies. Aleksander Boyd has a stunning collection of screenshots showing how Venezuela’s increasingly freedomless regime has used the latest technology to perpetrate low-tech vengeance. It’s a don’t miss because there’s something mind-changing about the…
That’s what Alexandra Beech argues is the real meaning of Secuestro Express, a scary new movie about ‘express kidnappings’ in Venezuela that is making waves in Hollywood. Read her fascinating analysis here.
Driving Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is his animosity directed at the U.S. He loathes the U.S. not only because it’s what he really feels (he is said to stiffen in the presence of U.S. citizens) but almost as importantly, because it is politically useful. In Chavez’s logic, if all the blame about the poverty and…
One of the most difficult things for outsiders to understand about Venezuela is the passion with which both sides argue about the April 2002 political mess that shook Venezuela. Chavez calls it a coup attempt. Opponents say it was pre-planned violence. Tiny details are bickered over and held up as proof. To an outsider, it’s…
Qando.net blog has a point-by-point comparison of the land confiscations going on simultaneously in both Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Other than his hint that Hugo Chavez, unlike Robert Mugabe, is actually a reasonable man who doesn’t quite realize what he is doing, it is a very valuable list of comparisons whose facts speak for themselves. Read…
Have you ever heard of anything more macabre? Dozens of life-size , lovingly constructed cardboard skeletons have appeared all over Caracas, on overpasses, on lampposts, on bridges, over highways. Miguel has a photo of the freakish spectre here. The dozens of hanging skeletons are a protest, something from a mysterious youth group called Cambio, which…
In Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s army, there is something called ‘military doctine’ and within that doctrine, is a weird fascination with ‘asymmetrical warfare.’ That asymmetrical warfare, of course, is block committees and ragtag guerrillas, all keeping their eyes on the barrios amid revolutionary vigilance in a strong bid to repress spontaneous groupings. It’s a real…
The Zimbabwe effect is rolling in fast and thick in Venezuela. Confiscations of churches, land, businesses and bank accounts are accelerating. Each day brings news of new expropriations in ‘the name of the people.’ Never before has such an abuse of property rights been so bold. Today, we noted that a Church had been taken…
Three attacks on the Church from the hemisphere’s Marxist Axis in two days makes me think there may be a coordinated effort by Chavez-Castro & Friends to confront the Church. Given the weak state of the Church in most of the world, it’s hard to grasp why dictators should see it as such a threat…
In the Chavista Revolution in Venezuela, no one is more neglected than the helpless. There are all kinds of soup-kitchen programs and money flying around, but they benefit only those who can help Chavez politically in return. That excludes many. Chavez’s revolution is Marxist, and as such, its philosophical foundation is materialism. For Chavez, the…
What does 6,000 extrajudicial killings by police sound like? Oh, but you remind yourself that Argentina’s and Chile’s dirty wars have long been over, as dictators like Pinochet are brought to justice. Well, there is one part of South America where these dirty wars have not stopped – in fact, they have started. Venezuela, one…
As Jesse Jackson visits Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chavez at the presidential palace this weekend, with timing that suggests a plan to denounce what he calls the ‘Rumsfeld-Robertson connection’, outside in the streets – violent protests have engulfed Caracas in a sign of Chavez’s tightening grip on power. El Universal has the story in Spanish here…
More thoughts on Pat Robertson’s public recommendation that Hugo Chavez be assassinated from Venezuelan bloggers: Tomas Sancio in Venezuela, in an open note to Robertson, notes Chavez’s many incompetences and says he’s incapable of being the ruthless dictator who could use assassination. (I strongly differ with Sancio here – all the dictatorships I have seen…
Alexandra Beech has a fantastically insightful essay debunking a truly lousy piece by airheaded Washington Post columnist Marcela Sanchez, who claims Hugie Chavez is just a teddy bear in the region capable of stabilizing it. Well, yeah, the way graveyards tend to be stable places I guess. But Alex shows the reality much better –…
Oh man, this is really gross – Hugo Chavez is bed with Marc Rich, the most corrupt speculator of all, a guy who makes George Soros look like a sweet little daisy. Rich is the ultimate sleaze in the world of capitalism, in bed with every dictator and criminal out there. I know a lot…
Venezuela’s revolution is complex because it has two sides claiming to hold the revolutionary mantle. The reality is, only one does, the one that does the democratic housework, not the one that spends the night painting the town – with red graffiti. What do the real revolutionaries do? They build the case for democratic revolution….
‘Christian’ televangelist Pat Robertson generated unprecedented headlines about Hugo Chavez in the blogosphere and in the U.S. media Tuesday when he publicly called for the assassination of the Venezuelan dictator. Technorati listed it as its top search on the blogosphere. Google listed it as its top story worldwide in all categories and ran it as…
In the new era of revolutions, tyrants often are reluctant to send troops in to shoot when the millions of people roll into the streets demanding justice. They don’t want CNN’s cameras on them and 20-year war crime trials in the Hague to follow. That’s one reason why the whole world has seen a democratic…
Ecuador is a basket case about to blow. It’s likely to get yet another a new president before U.S. Labor Day. And with its sudden oil production shutdown and troop dispatch, it’s also the leading news story moving world financial markets, hitting stocks and oil prices Friday. Just see the Top Ten leader here. No…
More from Harry Hutton on the Chavista Festival of Youth. Go see it here. UPDATE: Alek Boyd has more good stuff from disgruntled delegates who saw Chavez Venezuela just a little too closely – read it here.
Commercial aircraft crashes in Venezuela, 152 dead. How long before Hugo Chavez tries to politicize this? Prepare for any of these explanatory templates from Hugo Chavez sometime this week. That’s the kind of atmosphere Hugo Chavez has created for Venezuela. He’ll do it to whip up popular support, given his abysmal showing (last figure: 9%…
from Harry Hutton: QUOTE “At the Conference of the Americas, I????????m going to sneak up on him ÄBushÅ real quiet and shout BOO!” Hugo Chavez, speaking at the Tribunal Against Imperialism this evening. (Imperialism got convicted, you’ll be pleased to hear.) He doesn????????t often refer to him as Bush. Calls him Mr Danger. Ladies and…
The Florida register of companies contains details of the board of directors of Smartmatic Corporation, which is formed by Antonio Mugica, Alfredo Anzola, Antonio Mugica Rivero, Roger Pi????ate, Antonio Mugica Sesma and Luis Feliu Ä1Å. Its principal place of business is 1001 Broken Sound Parkway, NW, STE D, Boca Raton, FL 33487. The company’s history…