Blogging the democratic revolution
What do you do if you are a Venezuelan? Your country is ruled by a madman, a communist, a tyrant. You are steadily watching as all of your freedoms erode. Your country’s institutions are being rapidly politicized, the gears of your own power are being stripped and you are powerless to stop it. The U.S. is not going to invade to save you. What do you do? You fight. You fight for democracy even though you are deeply discouraged, knowing that not only is your opponent much bigger than you, he’s paid the ref to rule against you. You fight…
You might wonder about the mysteries of the stars or you might wonder about why Ecuador is so screwed up, and in either case you’d be touching on the immutable truths of the universe. While we’re on Ecuador, something interesting has happened. After confiscating $6 billion in investment from Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, and scrapping its entire free trade pact with the U.S., effectively swapping market access to a $11 trillion economy for $1 billion in oil pumping equipment, Ecuador is moving back in the direction of good sense. Ecuador has decided – at the last minute – not to…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls himself a revolutionary, but his principal achievement has solely been to tear things down. In a technical sense, I suppose that means he’s making a difference but its not quite the difference most people would like to see. Chavez has wrecked the political infrastructure of the country, the civil institutions, the courts, the bureaucracy, and the security and turned them into zombie institutions that exist solely for his own aggrandisement, his own perpetration in power. Everything in Venezuela is politicized now. But there’s no need to stop at political things. He’s also wrecked the roads,…
Venezuela is getting increasingly militarized. We know that from the photos of Hugo Chavez brandishing rifles, alongside his vow to start a Kalashnikov factory. That doesn’t mean his military is getting more professional, however. If anything, they are more incompetent, and easier to beat in battle than ever. Chavez’s priority isn’t military excellence, but to expand and use the military to scare his neighbors. He’s wasting state funds on unproductive investments. He’s contributing to crime as extra rifles get into the hands of drug criminals. He’s intimidating Venezuelans. Of all the things Venezuelans need … like, good roads, good bridges,…
Less than a week after Hugo Chavez threatened to shut down the broadcast press by yanking their licenses, a newspaper editor for the weekly Ahora newspaper was gunned down in a targeted hit. His death raises the total of news editors shot dead to at least four that I know about. Hugo Chavez has it in for the media. And there will be no letup. The death of this editor shows the range of tactics he intends to employ as he begins to dismantle the independent media. Can you imagine the impact of this on the rest of the free…
As Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez flashes his rifles this week, ranting on and on about a nonexistent “U.S. invasion” – a real war is going on in Venezuela, one in which real criminals are waging on Venezuela’s poor people, and one in which its combatants, the police, are starved for funds, as Chavez happily shoots his wad in a bid to buy ever fancier military hardware. Miguel has the facts and figures on this, in an extraordinarily good essay that can be easily understood, even by people not familiar with Venezuela. Read it here.
Chavez taking aim Source: Globovision Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez vowed to shoot down the independent press today, in perhaps his most pointed threat against it ever. Amid all the Chavista propaganda reported here in the States, suggesting that Venezuela is not a dictatorship because of an existing free press, the fact today is that the media has been threatened with total destruction. Chavez vowed to yank the broadcasting licenses of any television station that opposes him or whose coverage he didn’t like in 2002, showing that once again, he is unable to distinguish party (which he represents) from state (which…
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez unveiled thousands of cartons of rifles, bought from Russia supposedly to head off a U.S. “invasion.” Lovingly, his official press office released the dingbat photo above. What a bunch of slobs. Via a Bloomberg item found by Alek Boyd at VCrisis, here is what Chavez had to say about this new development, and I kid you not: “Soldiers, this rifle is your new girlfriend. A real soldier loves his rifle.” Miguel has tons more photos of Chavez posing with his “girlfriend” in this special link here.
A new flavor Frito Bandito? Source: Venezuela Today Have you ever wondered whether leftist populist Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was really cut out of the same kind of cloth as his natural ally, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez? This informed essay by Gustavo Coronel, on Venezuela Today lays the two of them out, side by side, for your own comparison, well worth reading here. UPDATE: Real Clear Politics has found a second essay on AMLO on The New Republic, delving deeply into this issue, telling us what AMLO is really like, that’s well worth reading here. UPDATE: Two…
In his most direct and brazen threat against the private sector yet, Hugo Chavez has warned Venezuelan businesses that unless they repatriate $10 billion in capital flight for his own disposal, he’ll take every last thing they have left in Venezuela. It’s a profoundly menacing statement, and not only because he mentions he’ll act in just a few months, after he’s reelected in December but because he sounds so sure he’s going to win. If Venezuela were a true democracy, (and Chavez was not an election cheat) he would not be so sure of that. But more specifically, the threat…
Here’s something exciting: In the days since his spectacular comeback election as president in Peru, Alan Garcia has made some softie statements about wanting to get along with Hugo Chavez and having no intention of leading a regional antichavez movement. However, Garcia’s first actions upon his election this weekend are telling quite a different story. He’s going after Chavez right at the source of his power: energy resources. Garcia says he wants to triple Peru’s natural gas investment, something that’s already on the upswing, based on ongoing capital flight from Bolivia. He pointedly says he wants to sell natgas to…
London 09.06.06 ö At last, a group of Venezuelan opposition politicos is playing the cards right and it’s cornering Hugo Chavez’s electoral minions. So far so good. As Miguel and I have reported any semblance of meaningfulness vis-a-vis the audit to the electoral roll proposed by Venezuela’s most respected universities -UCV, USB and UCAB- vanished after the details of the CNE-sanctioned audit were announced in press conference by new ‘minister of elections’ Tibisay Lucena. Teodoro Petkoff was attacked by supporters of chavismo yesterday in truly exemplary fashion of official consent towards dissent. Julio Borges asked UCV, USB and UCAB to…
Long overlooked on the world scene, China has been a great destabilizer of several regions of the world by its strategy in seeking to lock up supplies of oil. Sudan. Iran. Venezuela. Ecuador. China is a player in all of these areas and more. China’s efforts to lock up oil may not be as barbaric in means as the Japanese, who went on resource conquests just before World War II but it is the same idea. In any number of ways, it could lead to World War III. It’s no good for anyone. Fausta at Fausta’s blog has an illuminating…
The unqualified success that Hugo Chavez has had at picking apart Venezuela’s democracy, buying political support with oil, getting his men into office in other countries, supporting terrorist groups, and pressuring political opponents has led many to think that a tidal wave of totalitarian leftism is sweeping the southern continent — and that it’s unstoppable. Until now he has been. The Bolivarian Revolution has marched on and on without impediment. It’s quickening pace has led people to believe in his self-fulfilling prophecy. What is never taken into account is that his actions must inevitably provoke a reaction. The same has…
Today’s the Big One, Peru goes to the polls today. I’ll have something up on that in a minute but here is an important background topic I post as a sidebar: Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s political meddling in Peru during its election. At times, it’s been the central issue of the entire Peruvian campaign in the second round. Meddling is such a vague term. If a foreign leader expresses preference for a certain candidate in another country’s election, I don’t exactly consider it major meddling – I consider it really just dumb. After all, voters do not have to heed…
I visited Yaracuy, Venezuela, a few months ago. It’s an agricultural state famous for its sugar and it looks like this: A Yaracuy sugar farm But the atmosphere was tense everywhere, for land wars were going on, and people were getting their farms confiscated. That wasn’t the only fear. Every day, I witnessed people worrying about kidnappers grabbing them for ransom. Farmers cellphoned their wives every few hours from the fields and the pickup trucks to assure them so that they didn’t worry. Everyone tried to keep a low profile because fear reigned the day. Still, the fear of the…
It’s happening in three countries of the Americas, simultaneously at this very moment: Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. In at least two of the three cases, Venezuela and Bolivia, there’s a rapidly building case for civil war as productive land owners seek to defend their life’s work from the Mugabization of it all into smoking ruins. Bloodshed will follow. Land wars are nothing new in Latin America but they haven’t happened in about two decades, so this is a negative new development powerfully signalling a spread of tyranny. In every land war, a dictator seeks to destroy the very concept of…
Whenever Sandalistas gather in Caracas, the net result is a grotesque orgy of consumption, where leftwing political tourist after leftwing political tourist buys up Che t-shirts, Hugo Chavez barbie dolls, hippie bracelets, Castro bumper stickers, tapes of Chavez’s speeches, pot-leaf ski caps, fake Birkenstocks, Hugo-Chavez coffee cups, hammer and sickle posters, Allende backpacks and anything else the exporting merchants of capitalist China can dream up, sure these suckers will buy, mom’s credit card or not. These vast Sandalista bacchanals help these leftists feel good about themselves as they consume away like Roman epicures – amid the sea of quietly piled-high…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez addressing OPEC this morning Source: Associated Press, via Yahoo! OPEC is holding its quarterly meeting in Caracas right now and sure enough, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his new best-friends-forever in the Iranian regime have sought hard to cut oil production to drive up prices and stick it to the Americans. That’s gone over like tar sands in the Hummer tank among the OPEC heavies, and these nations, mostly Arabs, who KNOW what the oil cycle is like, and who know that $70 a barrel oil is always a prelude to $8 a barrel oil, have…
It was Publius’ and Venezuela Today‘s scoop last May 10. Hugo Chavez has a new role in Hollywood, not as an Oliver-Stone conspiracy hero, but as a videogame villain. Apparently, he caught wind of our post because we were the only ones posting about it, and has now blown up, calling it a CIA conspiracy and all kinds of entertaining things that ensure his reason for being in the world videogame pantheon of villains. Enjoy this news here!
I have dreaded this topic, because I hate the revolting Jimmy Carter more than anything. The only good thing Jimmy Carter did was give back the Panama Canal and make me a flaming Reagan Revolutionary. In other words, he’s a perfect example of a stopped clock being right exactly twice a day. Everything else Carter ever did was not only bad, it was PROFOUNDLY bad. He’s a textbook example of what not, what never, to do. That’s why his Carter Center’s coming back into the news is so utterly repellent. But come back he is. He’s sent his emissaries back…
Nutsy leftwing conspiracy-theory-loving Hollywood director Oliver Stone repudiated Hugo Chavez’s claim that Stone would be making a movie, all about him. And that’s not surprising. Stone is trying to go mainstream in the U.S. film scene, cranking out a watchable, straightforward, decent portrayal of 9/11 cops in his upcoming World Trade Center movie, which is probably well worth seeing when it arrives in August. Even if it were a crappy movie, I’d go see it anyway, based on Stone’s public repudiation of the brutal Venezuelan dictator this week. That stung Chavez hard, in a way the dictator didn’t expect. After…
So goes the apocryphal “chutzpah” story of the man who was put on trial for killing his parents and asked the judge to show him some mercy for being an orphan. Such also is the world of Chavistas who get caught with their hands in the till. Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles has a short “stomach turner” on a local Chavista official, who ripped off the state coffers bigtime, and then after he was caught, started hollering political persecution – using the very language of political dissidents. Francisco says this is not only infuriating but downright dangerous for the real…
Ahead of December’s presidential elections, Venezuelans don’t have many avenues within their own government to plead for free and fair elections. Political power is consolidated into the hands of a single party, and what’s more, that one party is very closely aligned to the ideals of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who has not allowed a free and fair election in Cuba in 47 years. As a matter of fact, Castro’s operatives taken over many operations of the Venezuelan government, without even a smokescreen of “assistance,” but just as pure undisguised control. What’s at stake in this December vote is Hugo…