The Devil's Excrement

Nice Guy!                                                       Why is the Intelligence Police helping him?

Does this guy know how to shoot or what?             This one was ready for war with his helmet

Another angel!

I have started a Gallery of Chavista shooters from last Friday. If anyone has images, please send them. If they are opposition, please send them too!!!

The following article was written by Asdrubal Aguiar and published in local newspaper El Universal on December 28th. Dr. Aguiar is a Professor and former judge of the Interamerican Human Rights Commission. The article is quite long, but it gives a summary of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan crisis which I think many readers from abroad will like. I will only put the first part in the Home page and a link at the end to the full article.

About Chavez’ dictatorship
The shortsightedness of the European left

By Asdrubal Aguiar

“The weakness and greatness of democracy is that those that reach power thanks to a set of democratic rules may change them”
(Antonio Tabucchi, apud. Domenico Chiappe, Golpe a Golpe,
Caracas, Diario El Universal, 21-12-02)

It is not easy for foreigners living beyond our borders to have all of the elements, which are very complex and grave, that have impacted the severe crisis facing Venezuela today. The truth is that even we, Venezuelans, used to a lifestyle signed by tolerance and also educated in the practice of freedom-so much that our democracy was one of the most recognized and prestigious of the world-are confused by the mistaken and absurd circumstances which are currently governing us.

Certain strata of European public opinion and even, North American, find it unacceptable that sectors of the opposition, no matter how representative they may be, are asking Hugo Chávez to abandon the Presidency without completing his mandate. He, in effect, is exercising it on the basis of democratic elections. And it thus irritates them, that supposedly privileged sectors, encouraged by the media may question an official, who beyond his defects or conflictive personality, is concerned by the lot of the poor and the excluded and whose leadership is being exercised with a capacity never seen before in Latin America.

This posture, that 80% of Venezuelans, not a few times judge as insensible and reductionist, has its source in the simplicity with which we are observed from the outside and under the light of some paradigms that have little to do with the large cultural and political changes that have taken place among us during the course of the last few decades. Latin America, in general, is still being seen as the continent of social injustice. In other words and at the rhythm of a very worn out literature and tied to the ideological boiling of the 60’s and even from before, we are still supposed to be the slavist territory of large agricultural states: White dominating blacks and Indians; and also space fertilized by the “necessary gendarmes” and the gross contradictions: countries fed by enormous natural wealth and tied by Dante-like belts of misery and illiteracy. 

Thus, if a Latin American military ex-coupster, transforms like Chavez into President and has autocratic sparks, that would appropriate- according to the restful judgment of some industrialized nations-of our sociological condition of underdeveloped province. And if the man himself, moreover, happens to be elected by the majority vote of his people and assumes the compromise to defend the poor, before being a “gorilla” or a “milico” it would be a revelation: a sort of Messiah, who would have redeemed the sins of his primitive and corrupted fellow citizens.

Thus, when the opposition asks Chávez to resign or that he accept advanced elections, in the face of the dangerous crisis that-due to his actions or omissions- maintains the country at the edge of a possible civil war and when to that effect that opposition argues that such an alternative is proper of democracy, far abroad people only think and conclude what we have said earlier.  Those nations do neither notice nor their public opinion, what has been part of their own realities in very similar situations: Richard Nixon, is good to remember, resigned under the pressure of the North American media and in a framework that nobody labeled as antidemocratic. An in the parliamentary Europe specifically, its political and Governing crisis are overcome through early elections, so as to avoid a general crisis of democratic government.

2

Hugo Chávez Frías has, as President of Venezuela, an unquestionable legitimacy of origin. He was elected, despite his illegal swearing in, according to the constitutional rules of the so-called “puntofijismo” (1958-1998), which he has despised and against which he rebelled through the use of weapons. It was a time of errors, but also a time of enormous achievements. The average life span of a Venezuelan was 52 years in 1958, while in 1998 it had reached 73 years, a time when the networks of clean water and sewage which feed the whole country consolidated. Venezuela had in 1955, 3 universities, while at the moment of Hugo Chavez’ election, there were a couple of hundred institutions of higher learning. At the same time the number of hospital beds were 20,100 in 1955 and of the 228 hospitals then in existence opened the way for having 242 medical doctors for each 10,000 inhabitants. General hospitals were elevated to 340 and the strengthening of primary medical assistance gave place to 4,000 walk-in clinics both urban and rural.

Chavez, thus, in the manner of “caudillo” extracted from the pages of our ill-fated XIX century, filled the vacuum of leadership that – in the zero hour- the old political parties were not able to fill or could not fulfill with efficiency. But he was not able to identify and understand, besides the profound political changes that he had to lead and was asked to lead, those assets that the Venezuelan people made inalienable their own, beyond the deviations of the precedent Governments: Its vocation and disposition towards “consensual” decisions and the sacred recognition of its plurality in common mestization.

Chavez, that he did, started his mandate openly and shamelessly violating the rules of Constitutional order that allowed him to gain power. And he has exercised that mandate, with his back and in open contraposition to the rules of the 1999 Constitution: his magnum opus. “The best Constitution in the world”, as he himself usually qualifies it.

It is not by chance that Chavez said once, publicly and textually, in front of the attendees of the International Congress of Agrarian Law last November: “I am the Law, I am the State”

You can find the full article here

Head of “Women for freedom”  argues with military police   Old lady being helped away

She left her shoes in the rush                                       Woman who fainted from the tear gas

He must be hot                             The effect of gases

Menthol on your face does help                                   She cried a lot

People marching and demosntrating around the monumentt to the first oil well ever in Venezuela the Zumaque I

Chavistas on the other side of the bridge             To the side more chavistas

Note they are practically all young men

We were gassed                                                               

The top part is fake, but not the people below at the anti-Chavez protest a couple of weeks ago in Caracas

Ricardo Hausmann, Economist and former Venezuelan Minister of Planning and Professor of of the School
of Government at Harvard University on Lula and Chavez, in today’s interview
in El Nacional, page B-2:

“I think the backing Lula has just given to Chávez will be costly for
Brazil. I am sure that his economic and foreign relations team is going to
complain to him”

Why?

“Brazil’s economic situation is very fragile. If good things don´t happen ,
even those that nonbody is expecting, Brazil is going to explode in the
sense that the exchange rate and interest rates will stay where they are,
thus they are going towards a financial crisis. Financial markets see Lula
and they perceive that he has all the incentives of the world to say what
they all want to hear, but they don’t belive what he says and are awaiting
his actions. Nevertheless, the lackluster mission of his international
advisor, Marco Aurelio García, in Venezuela, and the reaction when he
arrived in Brazil, indicate to international  financial markets that perhaps
Lula is more like Chávez than what he claims to be and what he has said
abroad. I think that Lula’s association with Chávez will be costly to his
Government in term of loss of confidence, at a time of financial fragility
in Brazil. Moreover, if Chávez ends up not being sustainable in Venezuela,
Lula will leave a vacuum in its bilateral relations with Venezuela, which is
not in the national interest of Brazil.”

One of the many marches to the West of Caracas –Now, which side of the rich versus poor battle are these nuns in?

More pictures in the Pictures section

The decision by the Brasilian Government, whether new or old, to send a tanker of gasoline to Venezuela, may have grave implications for the future of Brasilian-Venezuelan relations. For those of us in the opposition, this represents not only a clear intervention in the internal affairs of our country, but it also represents an act of agression against us. It is an agression because the Brasilian Government is taking sides in a conflict that matches a majority of 70-80% of Venezuelans, against a Government that has by now become absolutely illegitimate. We find little comfort from the words of the Brasilian Ambassador to Venezuela, who attempted to explain the tanker as “Humanitarian aid”. What defines “Humanitarian”? What if the gasoline arriving in Venezuela is used  by the National Guard to mobilize its troops to repress peaceful demonstrations like what has happened in the last few weeks? What if it is used to mobilize Chavez’ supporters in their demosntrations, while the opposition walks? What if is used to favor one group over another? This is what makes a mockery of the excuse given by the Brasilian Ambassador to Venezuela.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the gasoline tanker sent by Brasil, is to see Lula Da silva, the soon to be sworn-in President of Brasil, whose power base comes from the unions, act as a scab in a conflict where the largest Federation of Unions the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), is leading the general strike against the Chavez Government. It is remarkable to see how a “union man” who came to power changes his behavior even before he has taken power. Even worse is to see his personal emissary insulting Venezuelan media in what is clearly an intromission in Venezuelan affairs.

Politicians like to talk about history and supposedly it shapes them, Lula Da Silva should look at history and the history of rebellions. No Government can survive the level of rebellion and civil disobedience by the Venezuelan society in the last few months. No Government can fool the world all the time, the way the Chavez administration is trying to fool the world.  Thus, the relations between Brasil and Venezuela will suffer significantly if the Brasilian Government mantains its current attitude. If it does, the protest of Venezuelans will focus on Brasil. Venezuelans are currently mobilized like few citiizens of any country have ever been. Diverting even a small fraction of that protest to Brasil, its Ambassador, its Consul, its properties, boycotting its products will take little effort. The danger is that the Brasilian Government is acting against almost 80% of the Venezuelan population. A population that did not celebrate Christmas because getting rid of Hugo Chavez was more important. A population that sacrificed many things to get where it is today. There is no gas, soft drinks, some foodstuffs are scarce. Thus this same population can sacrifice Brasil and all things Brasilian if it finds that country acts agaisnt its will. We will miss Brasil, its music, its people, its futbol (soccer), its  products, but there are values definitely more important to us than that. Like democracy or freedom…….