Blogging the democratic revolution
He just doesn’t get it, does he? Just picture what the people in that room were thinking. Just when you thought the revolution had gone dead in Venezuela, this thug reminds you there is still reason for one out there. He never lets you down. Miguel has a photo of Hugo Chavez pontificating away at this, and notes his Parisian-tailored custom suit. Don’t miss this picture here. UPDATE: And Alek Boyd has an actual video of the grotesque spectacle here. (Scroll down on the page, and look for the item bylined ‘By Hugo Chavez.’ Indeed.)
The press is reporting that Paraguay’s ambassador to Venezuela was physically attacked in Caracas Friday. This comes on the heels of the kidnap/murder of Paraguay’s former first daughter by FARC guerrillas directing the operation by email from downtown Caracas. Paraguay has done literally nothing to Venezuela to attract this kind of thuggery. It does however have a weak state, a leftist guerrilla insurgency, and a rightwing government. Clearly, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez thinks he’s got a state he thinks he can kick around with impunity. It’s not going to go down well in the streets of Asuncion. Read it here.…
Alek Boyd emailed one of Prime Minister Zapatero’s minions about the purpose of selling chemical agents to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. He writes that in the reply he got from Spain, the Zapatero official said the exported chemical agents were used in tear gas. I guess we know what Hugo Chavez is planning now, given the disposition of Venezuela’s citizens. It should give one pause. Take a look at what Alek has learned here. UPDATE: U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice has expressed concerns to Spain about its arms sales to Venezuela.
Venezuelan journalist Patricia Poleo, whose case we have tracked here was sentenced to six months’ jail by a Venezuelan kangaroo court. They said she misidentified a photo in one of her stories. It’s a characteristic of tyranny to issue draconian sentences for technicalities. But for Venezuela, the free press loses another voice. Government bureaucrats can safely operate outside free scrutiny. This is an outrage. Here is the email I got: Acaban de sentenciar a Patricia Poleo a 6 meses de carcel en el juicio con Jesse Chacon. VIVA LA LIBERTAD DE EXPRESION!!!!!!. UPDATE: Miguel Octavio has an insightful longer essay…
The sad reality of Venezuela’s opposition is its meltdown. Agencia EFE gives a good description of how opponents of the Chavez regime have largely drifted over into Miami, where they are both invisible and increasingly irrelevant to the revolution. Coming to the U.S. is, in a sense, a revolution of its own, because it’s a transformative experience, that of becoming a free person, but given the choice between freedom here and fighting a thug at home, most people prefer to melt into the milieu. It’s kind of sad. The regime knows this and is using it as a safety valve…
In Venezuela during the April 11, 2002 coup attempt, Miguel analyzes the chain of checks and balances that prevented the event from being far bloodier and more violent than it originally began. Those checks and balances – which he broadly reads as ‘decency’ – are now absent in today’s Chavez regime, which has since slid into tyranny. The analysis is critical to understanding how democracies metamorphasize into nondemocracies. Read it here.
In unstable countries, the fuse of revolution is lit from a burning dollar bill. And right now in Venezuela, there’s very dry tinder indeed. Billions of dollars of oil cash is being stolen by the cronies of dictator Hugo Chavez on a scale never seen while poverty there rises. Forty percent of Venezuela’s economy is oil, and all of that from an inefficient state oil company. What does that mean? Money that should be used to reinvest in equipment and maintenance to create jobs and keep the operation going is instead going into corrupt pockets while the pumpjacks, pipelines, refineries,…
Remember how thrilled you were when that clown-faced leftwing South American dictator with the leering grin got thrown out of power, in April 2002? And then just as swiftly, like some demented jack-in-the-box popping back out of his sealed box, he popped back into the seat of power? Jorge Arena has an interesting interview with Francisco Toro who was an eyewitness to the April 11 coup event in Venezuela, discussing the sights, moods and voices of the country during those uncertain days. Ruefully enough, it illuminates just how unworthy and incompetent Chavez’s opposition was. No wonder Hugo Chavez made it…
In view of the utter silence of the anglo phone MSM with respect to recent announcements of chemical warfare agents and other weapons sold by Spain to Venezuela Ä1Å I decided to dig a little and the findings, as usual, are rather grim. It turns out that Venezuela has been spending, since 2000 Ä2Å, substantial amounts of money in the procurement of defence and “Double Use” materials. According to Spain’s Customs and Special Taxes Department of the Treasury ???????247.509 and ???????2.812.827 worth of defence and ‘Double Use’ materials were acquired by the Hugo Chavez administration in that year; in 2001…
Miguel has translated a dazzling article from Spain outlining, in the most precise and concrete terms, why Venezuela can have all the poverty it cares to pay for. It’s chilling and illuminating. Read it here.
Miguel Octavio reports a wave of purges in Venezuela for workers who had the temerity to sign the Recall Referendum petition last August. Dictator Hugo Chavez’s vengeful party apparatus is hunting them down, one by one, and either denying them employment or firing them from their jobs. It’s all very redolent of the days of Stalin’s henchmen during the dark days of the Soviet Union or the Castro regime of Cuba over the years, and quite chilling. It heralds the complete politicization of society so characteristic of communist regimes and it will get a lot worse. Read the whole story…
Venezuela is the only country I know of whose Embassy employees in Washington are regularly commissioned to harass bloggers. Honestly, I don’t understand how this can be legal. We all get emails from them. They are worse than that, though – their crazed leftist “press” minions on the Internet, who have some sort of relationship with them, post bloggers’ home addresses, work places, phone numbers and e-mails on their sites. They also have called bloggers’ employers and attempted to get them fired. And of course they try desperately to find out who some of us are. This is all perfectly…
Blogger Miguel Octavio warns that despite the difficulty for many of taking Hugo Chavez entirely seriously, we Americans would be wise to pay attention to the rising tide of anti-Americanism now appearing in Venezuela. Don’t dismiss these ravings, they mean something, he warns. Based on what he knows of the Chavistas and their inherent psychology and known pattern of behaviors, he believes things could get serious.
Even if you don’t speak Spanish you can probably figure out what this cartoon, posted by Mexican blogger Cosme Hace says. I laughed when the cartoon comparison was made between Lopez Obrador and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Lopez Obrador was described as not another Chavez because he wasn’t ‘frivolous and stupid’ enough. Obviously, Hugo Chavez’s acquired a certain image around Latin America we all might not be aware of. Check it out here.
…and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez behind it. I wrote an analysis for American Thinker this morning. It’s here.
Blogger Daniel keeps us well-apprised of the everyday aspects of Venezuela’s descent into communism. Today, the grocery stores are demanding ID for even the purchase of bread and water. This is the beginning of rationing. Daniel also gives us a rundown on Venezuela’s state oil company and Hugo Chavez’s mysterious unwillingness to open the books on it, and wonders if might be the real reason he wants to cut off oil from the U.S. Americans keep very good tabs on how much they buy and how much they pay, and Hugo Chavez probably doesn’t want anyone to know how badly…
No, it’s not a democracy. No, Hugo Chavez was not fairly elected. Yes, there are arbitrary arrests. Yes, there are political prisoners. Alek Boyd has an ever-lengthening list here.
Jorge Arena has an extraordinary personal account of what Venezuela was in the 1960s, the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo, and the conditions that led up to the rise of Hugo Chavez. It’s readable and lucid and a must read – a truly excellent essay. Read the whole thing here.
There’s no clearer sign a regime is going communist than in the telltale spread of mediocrity. Communists are the great levelers, the equalizers, the exponents of the lowest common denominator as an end in itself. This is why communism in theory is so attractive to tyrants, regardless of their beliefs. If everyone who can make decisions is stupid, tyranny is easy. That’s why political loyalty substitutes for objective merit as totalitarian power consolidates. The net result is Blotting Paper Bureaucrats, first described by Vladimir Voinovich in 1982. Solzenitsyn, with his physicist’s low boiling point for stupidity, also wrote of the…
Venezuela and the U.S. won their wars for independence against their respective colonial masters at about the same time. Six years ago, Venezuela, very quietly, was our number one overseas oil supplier. You never heard about any of this because – guess what – the U.S. and Venezuela have always been amigos. There’s never been a history of anti-American sentiment there. Until Hugo Chavez showed up. Swapping Venezuela’s longtime friendship with the U.S. for that of mendicant Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, bloggers have noticed a dramatic rise of anti-U.S. ravings from Chavez minions in Venezuela. This occurs on the same…
The Nation magazine has a sugar-coated vision of Hugo Chavez’s Veneuzela, described in an article purportedly written as a “news” story by Christian Parenti, someone who used to spend his time at Young Communist League meetings in San Francisco. Parenti’s trying to make his story appear a respectable reporting job (as Cuban propagandists coincidentally advise) but it’s pretty clear he’s ignoring the biggest parts of the story in his bid to plug Hugo Chavez. Essayist Gustavo Coronel, a Venezuelan who knows the deal, gives a good factual, statistics-heavy rebuttal to this blatant propaganda effort to defend the indefensible. Read the…
Common canard holds that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, whatever his faults, at least is ending poverty through his soup-kitchen programs. Andres Oppenheimer blows the lid off that steaming pot, though, by taking a good look at the Venezuelan government’s own statistics. What he sees appalls him. He writes: Indeed, the latest poverty figures from Venezuela’s official National Institute of Statistics — buried in a mountain of figures deep in the bowels of its Internet site, www.ine.gov.ve — contain the most damning condemnation of the Ch????vez government I have seen anywhere. The figures, on Page 5 of the Institute’s Social Report,…
Back at Columbia, my roomate was a Cuban-American lawyer. She insisted that if you are a lawyer, it is an absolute that you can write. All lawyers know how to write, she added. If law school can teach you one thing, it is the capacity to write well. But now an apologist for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez named Eva Golinger, who says she’s a lawyer, has taken to writing malevolent – and sub-literate – gibberings full of raging personal attacks against noted investigative researcher Alek Boyd. Her suspect activities have been exposed by Boyd, and she’s reacted like a cornered…
It’s a little known but important topic – the systematic war on science that is fuelling the coming Venezuelan revolution. It might come as a surprise to many but Venezuela produces some of the finest scientists in the world and they have low tolerance for the political hackery of Chavistadom. They stand up for their findings even when Chavista hacks try to make them back down to enable the regime to ‘look good.’ The sad part is, childrens’ lives are affected by the gagging and attempted gagging of the findings. For political purposes! Blogger Miguel Octavio keeps watch on Chavez’s…
Alek Boyd is doing an extraordinary job exposing the Venezuelan communist networks that are infiltrating the U.S. through Venezuela’s oil cash. He’s uncovered another $180,000 that’s been spread around like butter today. I am in awe of his extraordinary work, miles ahead of the news and performing a valuable service to any American interested in learning how a dictator is influencing thought about him in the U.S. Compelling reading, read the latest installment here.