The Devil's Excrement

I guess civility is no longer in place in the relations between the US and Venezuela. Republican Senator John McCain said today that the US can not be held hostage to “whackos” in Venezuela. This certainly can not help future relations between the two countries, but Chavez did go first, calling Bush an a……, Condoleeza Rice illiterate, and making some comments with sexual innuendo about her, as well as calling her “blackie” which may be an endearing term in Venezuela, but not appreciated in the US.

Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point in relations between the two countries, which will be very hard to turn back, at least as long as Chavez and Bush are Presidents, and now McCain may be extending it.

Not exactly the way civilized people and countries should treat each other, more so, when the US is Venezuela’s most important trading partner.

The opposition march was quite succesfull, I was suprised at the size of the crowd today as you can see on the left from the podium where the speakers were addressing the crowd. In the picture on the left you can not see the end of the corw as far as it goes. The pictures on the rights shows a lady holding up a poster saying that 2006 will be the year of change. I did not expect the march to be so large, publicity was scant, people were afraid and I thought apathy was the rule of the day. But they showed up in droves. When the speakers began talking, there were still people leaving the starting point a few kilometers away. If there was something different this time around is that the crowd showed a lot of anger, which I had not seen before in any of the opposition marches. The presence of cops, intelligence police helicopters and the simple mention of Chavez’ name simply released a lot of anger from the people there. You could also see it on the posters, lost of swear words in them, something you did not see as much before. People are p….., you better believe it and they are very vocal about it. The best part was: no buses like those Chavez needs to bring to his marches and everyone was there out of their own will, this is a powerful base for December 2006.

There were a few speakers, young and old, old and new, some good like Alexandra Belandia , others representing the old school of speeches that seem to scream at you, I could have done without Eduardo Fernandez and Ramos Allup, but nobody asked me anyway. This is a fisrt good step at mobilizing people in 2006, the crowd, the voters and the people are there, all they need is leadership. It felt good to march and end the day very tired again, with a feeling of accomplishment. Took lots of pictures, the best of the rest are here.