Right now a group of government followers are outside one of private channels (Globovisión). This is a news only channel, so this is the one that the people is focusing the most.
This people are screaming and one of the things I could hear was: “Coño 'e Madres matan a su misma gente y le echan la culpa a los demás”
This is: “You (opposition) kill your own people and blame someone else”.
You can tell things are bad when your own family is asking for your resignation.
Chavez’s wife abandoned him last year (I think). I don’t blame her.
This link (in spanish) has some latest news about what’s happening RIGHT now.
http://www.gusanodelaluz.com/www/articulos.asp?id=1156
This is a really bad attitude from government followers and I can assure you that “authorities” won’t do ANYTHING to stop this attacks.
I know this is another hijack, but I have to ask-have you ever heard of Edward Brett? He was my advisor in college and he’s written a number of articles about Latin America, as well as two books-the latest was only published last month, I believe.
NOT MY OPINION JUST ON TOPIC>>>>
Racist rage of the Caracas elite
Venezuela’s embattled president faces a Pinochet-style opposition
Richard Gott
Tuesday December 10, 2002
The Guardian
Pilin Leon, a former Miss Venezuela, was busy judging the Miss World competition in London on Saturday when the oil tanker that bears her name, illegally at anchor in Lake Maracaibo (principal source of Venezuela’s oil), was boarded by Venezuelan marines. The end of history was supposed to mean an end to class struggle, but the current political conflict in Venezuela suggests it is alive and well.
When the captain of the Pilin Leon first dropped anchor, he was expressing his solidarity with the anti-government strike in Caracas. But the tanker’s crew were opposed the strike and their captain’s piratical action. When the marines boarded, on the orders of the embattled president Hugo Chavez, only the captain needed to be replaced.
For the past year or more, Venezuela’s upper and middle classes, opposed to Chavez’s government, have protested in the wealthy new neighbourhoods of Caracas, while the poor (the vast majority of the city’s population) have come from their shantytowns and demonstrated to defend “their” president.
Chavez celebrated his overwhelming electoral victory of four years ago at the weekend, at the end of a week-long insurrectionary strike designed to force him to resign, and so far he has displayed a Houdini-like capacity to escape from tight situations. In April, a similar scenario led to a brief coup d’etat, from which he was rescued by an alliance between the poor and the armed forces, and this time, the president says, he will not allow himself to be surprised.
The opposition has been hoping to repeat in December what it failed to achieve in April, but the situation is no longer the same. The armed forces are now more solidly behind the president than before. The most conservative generals no longer hold important commands; those involved in the April coup attempt have all been sent into retirement.
The international situation is different, too. The US welcomed the April coup, but this time, with more important problems elsewhere, Washington is being more circumspect. It has publicly thrown its weight behind the negotiations being conducted by Cesar Gaviria, the Colombian ex-president who leads the Organisation of American States.
Perhaps even more significant than the changing attitude of the military and of the US is the fact that the poor are more mobilised now, to such an extent that there is talk of a possible civil war. Until the April coup, the poor had voted for Chavez repeatedly, but his revolutionary programme was directed from above, without much popular participation. After the coup, which revealed that the opposition sought to impose a regime on Pinochet lines, the people realised that they had a government that they needed to defend. The opposition’s protest marches have now conjured up a phenomenon that most of the middle and upper classes might have preferred to have left sleeping - the spectre of a class and race war.
Opposition spokesmen complain that Chavez is a leftist who is leading the country to economic chaos, but underlying the fierce hatred is the terror of the country’s white elite when faced with the mobilised mass of the population, who are black, Indian and mestizo. Only a racism that dates back five centuries - of the European settlers towards their African slaves and the country’s indigenous inhabitants - can adequately explain the degree of hatred aroused. Chavez - who is more black and Indian than white, and makes no secret of his aim to be the president of the poor - is the focus of this racist rage.
The trump card of the opposition, in April as in December, has been the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, often described as the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, and an important supplier to the US. Nationalised more than 25 years ago, it has been run over the years for the exclusive benefit of its employees and managers - its profits being invested everywhere except Venezuela. Before the arrival of Chavez, it was being prepared for privatisation, to the satisfaction of the engineers and directors who would have benefited. But with a block placed on privatisation by the new Venezuelan constitution, the company’s middle class and prosperous elite has been happy to be used as a shock weapon by the leaders of the Pinochet-style opposition, and they have tried to bring their entire industry to a halt.
The vital task for Chavez is to bring the oil company back under government control, replacing the conservative management with the radical executives who had been forced out in earlier internal struggles. If he is to support the crews loyal to the government on tankers such as the Pilin Leon, he may yet need to impose a state of emergency to regain the upper hand.
· Richard Gott is the author of In The Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela
sorry i forgot to say that this is from the “Comment & Analysis” section of the paper not the main international news section.
Mogiaw
No, sorry.
Regarding The Guardian article, perhaps they might be interested in having **Chumpsky ** do an Op-Ed piece as well.
You mean the black, mulattoes and mestizos I saw protesting on TV were fake? Maybe foreign actors? Maybe they painted their face?
God, those guys in the opposition had all figured out, even making sure that there were non-whites in the protests. :rolleyes:
Link to the Guardian article. Mogiaw, you’ve got too much of it quoted for copyright-happiness on the part of the Moderator.
Remember this?
Well, now do you remember this?
Yup. I knew this would happen.
The other thing that comes to mind is this:
Reporter: Mayor Bernal, are all the marching government followers unemployed?
Bernal: But what do you say that? Why do we have to be unemployed? Are those of the opposition unemplyed?
Reporter: It’s that if they aren’t unemployed, then they are obeying the strike…
begob, i didn’t realise there was an issue with copyright at all. Thanks for pointing that out.
Mogiaw
:smack:
It’s okay, it’s not a crisis. 
That article said that Chavez is too dark-skinned for some people’s taste in Venezuela–
–but there’s a good picture of him here, and he doesn’t look that dark to me. He looks “Indian” to me, actually. Maybe I’ve just got more of a multi-cultural outlook.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/americas/12/10/venezuela.unrest/index.html
So, ZooMetropolis, is it really all about “race”, like the Guardian says?
IMHO opinion, it’s about races for Chavez’s people. I say this, because there are a LOT of poor people thaat are against Chavez.
The main reason of this hatred was started by Chavez. There are some things that I may address where he is wasting money in nothing.
Why it MAY look like a racial struggle for the uneducated eyes:
Black and Indians were used by the Spanish conquistadors as cheap/free/slave labor. When social and political reform aknowledged that ALL individuals have the same rights under the law (which occurred much later than in the US, in Brazil as late as the 20th century), it didn’t automatically changed the fact that blacks and indians were on average more illiterate, uneducated and poorer than the ruling classes (that were in its majority, guess what? white).
So, it turns out that poverty breeds poverty. The chances of a poor person, be it black or white, breaking the circle and becoming educated and financially successful is much lower than that of the people that were already born within a family that could provide for them. So, from a racial struggle it developed into a social struggle. Black people are kept down not because they are black, but because they are poor (I reckon I am oversimplyfing). But there are people in the other end of the Pantone hue that are also poor, dirt poor in many cases.
Now, once in a while there comes a populist leader, with little to say that plays the racial card (see my post about Aristide). It is an easy way of bullshitting the people into defending the undefensible. Sometimes they speak out agains “whites” sometimes against “blacks”. That is inmoral, irresponsible and dangerous. Things may turn out worse than expected, and dividing a country into color tones is never a good thing.
We had our own bigot here, Trujillo, who thankfully is dead, and if hell exists he is there. Even if I wasn’t born in those days I am very ashamed that we as a nation sank that low (even if the population didn’t really supported it but were to damn scare to say anything).
There was a good column in today’s Miami Herald by Andres Oppenheimer
Is being an idiot a “psychiatric” condition? If so, I agree with the columnist.
The situation is getting worse. The strike continues. The army has taken charge of the oil tanker whose captain joined the strike. Supplies are disappearing and Chávez has ordered emergency imports of basic supplies like milk and gasoline. Things seem to be getting worse rather fast and Chávez shows no sign that he may step down.
I would like someone to explain to me something that has been puzzling me throughout this entire thread:
Was Chavez not legally elected? I mean, I’ve been reading the timeline and stuff, and I don’t see any suggestions that the elections in 1998 and 2000 were not valid elections, there are no accusations of Robert Mugabe-style election-stealing. Or am I missing something?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/americas/1229348.stm
So, here are all these people trying to oust him. Didn’t they vote for him? Who voted for him? Somebody must have voted for him, and it must have been the majority of the Venezuelan population, or else he wouldn’t have been elected.
Considerations of whether or not he’s “ruining the country” aside, if the people of Venezuela aren’t happy with the way their elected government officials are running the country, they do live in a federal republic, same as the U.S., and if an American president begins to be perceived by some Americans as “ruining the country”, we don’t deal with it by organizing coups and national strikes and trying to oust him.
So, whassup with Venezuela?
Chavez is repeating that nothing is going on, that the press is “exaggerating”. Whacko.
DDG, yes, Venezuela is a federal republic, but its constitution is not that of the US, impeachment is out of the question. The only constitutional resort to terminate Chavez’ term before it ends in another 4 years (presidents are elected for a 6-year term in Venezuela) is a referendum. But here is the trick, the referendum is allowed mid-term, in this case it will be on August next year. Venezuelans are not willing to wait that long. So what to do when you DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT your president? Hairy, huh?
The only other constitutional choice is resignation. That’s what they’re trying to do, force Chavez to resign. Not working.
If Venezuelans work out the kinks of this situation and feel inmediately compelled to change the constitution yet again* (Chavez changed it after coming into power), I hope that the fear of another Chavez doesn’t give them the idea of making the president easily “kickable”, that will lead to a inherent weakness of the figure of the president.
*In Latin America changing the constitution beats football (futbol here) and baseball as national sports :rolleyes: