The Devil's Excrement

(Este post en español aquí)

Altamira overpass at 4 PM today, picture taken by Twitter user tukeke

Distribuidor Los Campitos, same time today. Unknown author

(Of course, according to Jacqueline Farias, thanks to the work she did, there are no “lagoons” nor has any street collapsed. I guess this is just a “sensation”, a “feeling” that we have that there is lots of water, but it just ain’t there)

(Este post está en español aquí)

Dramatic article about Barinas State in the New York Times. It shows Barinas is just Venezuela’s problems magnified and enhanced by the nepotism, inefficiency, crime and neo-capitalism of the Chavez family. Some highlights:

“An intensifying nationwide crime wave over the past decade has pushed the kidnapping rate in Venezuela past Colombia’s and Mexico’s, with about 2 abductions per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Interior Ministry.”

“This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power as the rest of us fear for our lives,”

“Politicians once loyal to the president who have broken with him and his family here contend that Mr. Chávez’s family has amassed wealth and landholdings through a series of deals carried out by front men.”

“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money”

“A new soccer stadium, built under the supervision of Adelis Chávez’s at a cost of more than $50 million, is still unfinished two years after its first game in 2007”

and the grandfinale:

“More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800″

Let’s review the stages of what happened in Honduras:

-President calls for a vote on having a referendum to allow his reelection

-Supreme Court and Assembly say it is illegal and Court rules so. Military warns that the law should be obeyed. Constitution actually says even promoting reelection is illegal.

-President removes Chiefs of Staff of military, Court tells him he can’t do that.

-President continues with plans to carry out vote on Sunday. On Sunday, military arrests him.

-National Assembly votes unanimously to name a new President, Supreme Court backs it.

-World is in outcry over Zelaya’s overthrow but was not over outright coup against Constitutional order.

The first question is why was the removal of Zelaya illegal, despite all independent institutions backing it, while similar removals of elected Presidents in Ecuador and Bolivia did not even raise an eyebrow in the world’s international “democratic” institutions and Nations?

The second question is why it appears as if democracy in our Hemisphere refers only to the fact that Presidents are elected, but somehow they can ignore the laws, the institutions and the Constitution once they get there and its fine with the world, but any attempt to force these elected Presidents to respect the institutions is somehow ignored and even considered suspect by world opinion, particularly if the elected President seems to be left wing. There is clearly a double, if not triple standard in all this.

Finally, why is it that the OAS can meet so fast to meet in these cases but has yet to look at the rape of the Venezuelan Constitution by Hugo Chavez or even his role in the Honduran affair. Chavez was indeed elected by the people but that does not give him the right to violate our rights, anymore than Zelaya attempted to violate everyone’s rights in Honduras by carrying out an illegal vote.

Until institutions like the Supreme Court, the National Assembly and others are not allowed to curtail Presidential power, by maintaining checks and balances and limiting what Presidents can do, our countries will not have a true democracy. The Constitution is there for everyone and the President should be the first person to defend it and promote. If not, it is the people that are left defenseless from the Dictadorcitos that fate throws upon us like Hugo Chavez and wannabe Zelaya.

Zelaya simply tried to stage a Constitutional coup because he was the President, but somehow the world seems to have ignored all of this, against the background of institutions that in the end did follow the law and the Constitution in order to remove him.

The Honduran military has arrested the President over the conflict of the removal of the Chiefs of Staff, this is an old fashioned coup, no laws were followed in  the process even if Zelaya was trying to violate the law or not following it.

Will Chavez really intervene?

Note added: Chavez offered the military of Honduras “war” if the Venezuelan Ambassador was hurt or the Embassy violated. The Venezuelan Ambassador was briefly detained, so we may never know. El Heraldo says the presence of Cuban and Venezuelan troops prompted the coup, also says troops turned back at border. Honduran Supreme Court issues strange communique justifying coup, Assembly says Zelaya resigned.

I know I am obsessing with the whole Iranian thing, but these Iranian soccer players certainly had Major Legaue guts, when they dared wear green wristbands during their game against South Korea yesterday. Iran was disqualified from the World Cup,. The question is, will the Government do something? These guys could be in real trouble, but they did it! Hats off to them!

I don’t like to comment about what I don’t know much about, but I have to relate to you how mesmerized I have been in the last twelve hours by what is going on in Iran.

First, the use of technology has been truly remarkable to the point that the Government shut off the use of SMS messages before the polls closed as a way of apparently stopping communication among opposition people. However, they seemed to have forgotten twitter, which became the preferred method of communication until it was shutdown a couple of hours ago. Bloggers of course have been doing a wonderful job, I have been reading many, but I think the Huffington Post through this post may be the simplest way to follow things.

There are certainly strange things happening there, from the fact that the opposition candidate was told he had won, to the fact that a large turnout was supposed to benefit him but did not, according to the official results. However, what I find most fascinating is that reportedly the mullahs are calling now for a repeat of the election, remarkably given the almost 2 to 1 margin for Ahmadinejad. And talk about speed, while Chavez took a couple of years to jail Rosales, apparently loser Mousavi is under house arrest one day after polls closed.

Whatever the outcome, it will be a momentous change for Iran. If the protests get nowhere, the Iranian revolution will lose legitimacy, if the protests win, Ahmadinejad and even the Iranian revolution woudl have suffered a huge setback and a more open and freer society may emerge.  This is the most intriguing thing, that Moudavi wanted and campaigned for a more liberal society which energized the electorate. I hope his supporters don’t get squashed and the Government instills fear in them, the way Venezuelans seemed to have been silenced into a corner in the last few years.

Alluh Akbar!

(Note added: Hard to believe it, but this is what pajamasmedia is reporting: Reports are circulating that Venezuela has sent anti-riot troops to Tehran to help Ahmadinejad)

This Editorial in the Wall Street Journal talks about a conference on human rights, organized by a Venezuelan who “gets it”.

Human Rights Beyond Ideology

By JOHN FUND
June 5, 2009; Page W13
Oslo

Twenty years ago, as Soviet communism was collapsing and new democracies were springing up everywhere, there were bright hopes for the spread of human rights. But while this year marks the anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling, yesterday was also the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre in China, a reminder of just how unyielding authoritarian governments can be.

Tiananmen was very much on the minds of the 200 human-rights activists who gathered in this tidy capital city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded every year. But the Oslo Freedom Forum, organized by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, was unlike any human-rights conference I’ve ever attended. As at other such gatherings, racism and gender discrimination were on the minds of plenty of participants. But there was no desire to blame such problems on the U.S. or other Western nations. The emphasis was on promoting basic rights in all nations at all times.

“It’s pretty simple,” says Thor Halvorssen, a human-rights activist and the conference’s 33-year-old founder. “We all should want freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom from torture, freedom to travel, due process and freedom to keep what belongs to you.” Unfortunately, he explains, “the human-rights establishment at the United Nations is limited to pretty words because so many member countries kill or imprison or torture their opponents.”

Indeed, the U.N. Human Rights Conference held in Geneva last month was a disgrace, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denouncing Israel as a “racist regime” and saying that “Zionism” was dominating the media and financial systems of the West. The U.S. didn’t send a delegation to Geneva, and a number of the European representatives walked out during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rant.

The Oslo Freedom Forum, by contrast, was a serious gathering of grown-ups. Even Oslo’s leftist newspaper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) overcame its initial skepticism, declaring the forum “an impressive assembly of people.”

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, former Czech president Vaclav Havel and Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, couldn’t attend due to ill health, but all sent videotaped statements. Ms. Bonner challenged delegates to combat the “anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment growing throughout Europe” since she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize here on behalf of her husband in 1975. Vladimir Bukovsky, a scientist who was tortured by the KGB for years, warned that many of Russia’s old oppressors were “safely in power again” in new guises.

The conference also brought together activists from far-flung corners of the world. Palden Gyatso, a diminutive Tibetan monk, told horrifying tales of being imprisoned for 33 years and being tortured by Chinese captors who wedged electric batons into his mouth and destroyed all of his teeth. After his talk, he was embraced by Harry Wu, a survivor of 19 years in China’s network of labor camps, which still contain untold numbers of prisoners.

Although quiet and reserved, Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane kept his audience riveted as he told of how he’d been raised in an elite Mauritanian family that kept slaves even after the practice was officially abolished in his land in 1981. While living in Paris as an adult, he became infuriated at the world’s indifference to slavery and teamed up with a former slave from Mauritania to provide legal help to escapees and also conduct covert rescue operations of those still in bondage. Mr. Ethmane’s talk was followed by presentations from two powerful speakers from Kurdistan and Uzbekistan, both women who had served time for democratic activism.

Some voices at the Oslo meeting are seldom heard in the West. Victor Hugo Cardenas of Bolivia prides himself on his indigenous background but is an implacable opponent of leftist President Evo Morales, a protégé of Hugo Chavez. Mr. Cardenas, a former vice president of Bolivia, called Mr. Morales a “false indigenous icon” who was deploying “shock troops” to silence critics. Indeed, he said that some of Mr. Morales’s thugs had recently attacked his house and beaten members of his family. “But you will hear little of this from our media, much of which is bought by the Venezuelan money of Hugo Chavez,” he thundered.

The Norwegian hosts seem keen on repeating the event next year. The forum certainly attracted the right enemies. During the conference, Norwegian papers reported that the Cuban Embassy had emailed a lengthy denunciation of the forum, accusing Mr. Halvorssen and former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares of being CIA agents. The embassy also wrote that Mr. Valladares was a “terrorist,” and it accused the Human Rights Foundation’s Bolivian representative of “providing the bulk of the funds for the terrorist gang” that had supposedly plotted to assassinate President Morales.

Mr. Halvorssen expressed both amusement and exasperation at the charges. “They accuse me of working for the CIA in countries I’ve never visited,” he told me. “As for Ambassador Valladares, he was Amnesty International’s first prisoner of conscience from Cuba. Amnesty doesn’t usually protect CIA agents.”