The Devil's Excrement

Reporter Patricia Poleo is sentenced to six months in jail
after she was found guilty of defamation of Minister of the Interior
and Justice Jesse Chacon. Chacon sued Poleo over her publication of a
picture of a soldier holding a gun over the dead body of a civilian at
the state’s TV channel.

Let’s examine the charges and the evidence:

Poleo published a picture of an armed soldier over a dead body the day of the November 1992 coup.

-Did Chacon participate in that November 1992 coup? YES

-Was Chacon present at the TV channel where the picture was taken? YES, he was part fo the attacking force.

-Was Chacon armed that day? YES, definitely.

-Did Chacon fire his gun that day at VTV, where innocent civilians were killed? Witnesses say YES!

-Did he kill anyone? Nobody knows, but we don’t know if the man in the picture killed anyone either.

So, the only thing you can accuse Poleo of is of misidentifying Chacon,
the rest is all true! So where is the act of defamation? Saying that
the picture is him, does not affect Chacon’s reputation (which is
what defamation is all about!), what damages his reputation is saying he
was there, he fired agaisnt innocent civilians and may have killed
them. But these are all true!

Of course, the Chavez administration just wants Poleo intimidated and jailed.

President Hugo Chavez continued playing the external enemy
threat card in his speeches, seeing ghosts everywhere in order to distract from
the failures of his Government. Like a modern poor version of Don Quijote, Chavez sees windmills everywhere. Besides the US
invasion, which he has focused on for the last few weeks, he started ranting
about the fact that NATO was using an invasion of Venezuela in its training exercises,
which
was quickly denied by NATO itself. As if this was not enough, he also responded
to supposed statements by Colombian President Uribe saying that unless Venezuela
changed, it would isolate itself. Chavez kept saying he would wait to reply to
see if the statements were true, but proceeded to answer to them anyway, not
once, not twice but three times. The Colombian Foreign Minister denied
that Uribe had even made reference to Venezuela while in Japan, but the
damage to Venezuelan diplomacy was done as Chavez proceeded to say this is all
part of the US plot against Venezuela.

This is all of course a textbook strategy for autocratic
regimes: since personality cults, fear and propaganda can only carry you so
far, you need to create the external enemy in order to reinforce the support of
the loyalist and keep on your side those that are doubters because of the lack
of accomplishments and progress by the Government. These strategies have been
clearly posed by Sakharov and recently presented in clear form in Sharansky’s
“The case for democracy”, a must read for anyone that believes in freedom,
democracy and human rights.

But Venezuela is becoming increasingly a militaristic
country, run by an autocrat who now controls all of the structures of the
state, including the military, who wants to merge the population with the Armed
Forces and who
finds glory in the bloody days of the beginning of the Republic, who talks
about “the civic military unit, forming citizen soldiers and soldiers who are
citizens…people and soldier, soldier and people, you are the most sublime
expression of the civic-military fusion which today becomes the strongest
column of the Bolivarian Venezuela”. Who talks about sovereignty or death, who
calls traitors those who do not understand the meaning of the newly created
reserves. Yes, Venezuela enters deeper into the territory of Chavez’ folly
today, that project that may irreversibly ruin this country for decades to
come, whose only objective is to preserve this madman in power.

And the madman is equally surrounded by
Generals, who not only believe in reincarnation and support his folly, but cry openly when people applaud him because he is a
patriot or justify the existence of the newly created two million men
reserve by
comparing Venezuela
to the State of Israel, “where every man is a soldier”. Meanwhile his Vice
President uses swear words to say that Chavez is great because he sent “el
Imperio al carajo”, an empire who in 1998 decided not to pay attention to
Chavez and let him be, but that Chavez tries to awaken at every step with his
continuous rape of democracy, democratic institutions and justice, in this
unfortunate country.

Meanwhile the death of 19 Venezuelans is celebrated three
years later as a day of “dignity” as there is total impunity in the
investigation of these deaths, let alone the over one hundred people injured
that day. Sadly, of the 19 deaths, people are jailed for only two cases,
because they may involve the Metropolitan Police controlled at the time by an
opposition Mayor. The other 17 cases are not even being investigated, as the
Prosecutor, the same man in charge of enforcing the law in Venezuela openly
says the National Guard refuses to turn over evidence to his office, which
simply proves what a joke he has made of that office which has simply become
another servile unit of the revolution and Chavez’ autocratic power.

In the end it is Chavez that has become the external enemy to all Venezuelans.
Driven by the bearded Cuban fool, he tries to introduce values that violate our
nature and sovereignty. Venezuelans are not militaristic, they do not hate,
they admire the US, and they
don’t want the country to become another Cuba. They just want a better
tomorrow, which has been constantly denied to them in the last thirty years.
But Chavez, the enemy within, just has grandiose plans for himself, not for his
people, which in the end can only have a sad ending for our poor country.