A day for translations. Here is the first one, a letter from Teodoro Petkoff to the President of the Government’s TV station Vladimit Villegas, which appeared in Tal Cual today (by subscription):
I write to you because we have been friends throughout many years, because I am also a friend of your siblings Mario and Esperanza-and not so much of Ernesto, whom I have dealt with little personally-. But above everything I write to you because you are the son of Cruz Villegas, a man whom I shared with many years of struggles and a brotherly friendship. I write to you, because I would like to know if you truly believe that broadcasting through the TV station you lead a private conversation, whose participants were talking about every day topics these days (recall referenda, ratifying signatures, what to do) and in no way you could argue that the conversation was being made public because there was some sort of criminal element to it, if that, I repeat the question, has anything to do with the ethics taught to you by old man Cruz, and with which, in your younger years, you built a reputation as a social fighter.
You know very well that what you have done through Channel 8 constitutes a crime, a crime that you yourself many times denounced when others did it. You, like a good Chavista, know by memory “that animal” (The Constitution). Just in case, I copy what Article 48 says: “The secrecy and security of all forms of private communications are guaranteed”… “They can only be intervened by the order of a judge in fulfillment of all legal regulations and preserving as private whatever has nothing to do with the corresponding process”. Thus, Vladimir, Quiroz and I had a fundamental right violated.
I don’t know who taped the conversation and, in any case, I could not demonstrate it, but I do know that it was channel 8 that broadcast and violated the privacy of that communication, and you are its President. Your duty as President of that TV station is to tell the tramp that approaches you with a taped conversation that the station can not broadcast it, because it happens to be a crime.
If you don’t do that, you turn into an accomplice of the crime. Of a crime that in someone who claims to be a revolutionary is unacceptable because it pertains to human rights, pertains to values that you drank from your mother’s milk and you learned from the behavior of that honest and integral man that was old man Cruz Villegas.
There is no revolutionary cause, Vladimir that can sustain itself on the neglect of the rights of others. The only thing that can sustain such a weak base is Stalinist fascism, that perverse form of politics that makes of the manipulation of souls and of the violation of consciences, a horrendous modus operandi and drove the sinister totalitarisms of the last century, some of which have survived in this one.
You said in your El Nacional interview, that you are a political militant and as such, as President of that TV station, you were at the battlefront. I can understand that, but what I can not understand is that to fight that struggle you have to violate the values and principles that are inherent to the cause of justice and freedom that, I can imagine, still gives sense to your life. Believe me Vladimir, today I feel sorry for you.
The Devil's Excrement 
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