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Ecuador Will Cease Participation In School Of The Americas

School of the Americas Watch Statement on Ecuadoran Decision to Cease Participation in SOA/WHINSEC | June 28, 2012

This Wednesday, June 27, Ecuadoran President Rafaeal Correa, after hearing from a delegation of SOA Watch, has taken the decision to cease sending Ecuadoran soldiers to the School of the Americas.

We wish to express our happiness for this decision by the Ecuadoran government, convinced that the School of the Americas – now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation –indeed trained and trains Latin American soldiers under the doctrine of National Security, based on fighting the internal enemy. This doctrine has borne human rights violations throughout Latin America.

In 2010, in the Truth Commission Report that investigated human rights violations in Ecuador, the training that Ecuadoran soldiers had received at the School of the Americas was called to attention, and the report recommended that the State cease sending troops to the military school. Today that recommendation has been taken into account and we are happy.

The thousands of victims of human rights violations in Ecuador and all of Latin America have the right to know those responsible for the killings, forced disappearances and torture, and that they are brought to justice to pay for their crimes. At the same time, nations must give guarantees to society and survivors that this will not happen again. One concrete way to do this is to end military training at the SOA, that has caused so much damage and suffering to our people.

Ecuador joins Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia, who have pulled out of the SOA. As a result, we call on the other countries of Latin America to stop sending their troops to the School of the Americas as soon as possible.

We congratulate President Rafael Correa for this sovereign decision and to finally protect the Ecuadoran people from being subject to future human rights violations.

In solidarity,

School of the Americas Watch

June 29, 2012 Posted by aletho | Subjugation - Torture | Bolivia, Ecuador, Latin America, Rafael Correa, School of the Americas Watch, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Our Man in Caracas: The U.S. Media and Henrique Capriles

By Keane Bhatt | NACLA | June 19th 2012

The presidential candidate of Venezuela’s coalition of opposition parties, Henrique Capriles, hosted a rally on June 10 to formally initiate his campaign against President Hugo Chávez. “Hundreds of thousands” of Venezuelans—according to Reuters, the Associated Press, and The Miami Herald—flooded the streets of downtown Caracas to support his candidacy.

The “good looks of the bachelor candidate” helped attract a huge crowd to the event in which Capriles walked or jogged six miles to register with electoral authorities, “burnishing his image of physical fitness,” per Reuters’s account. He “exuded youthful energy,” said the AP, and had won praise for being an “energetic and dedicated leader” as the governor of Miranda State, according to The Miami Herald.

All three news outlets contrasted Capriles’s vigor with Chávez’s frailty (he is recovering from an undisclosed form of cancer), while conveying Venezuelans’ disgruntlement. Even some Chávez supporters “have grown tired of a murder rate that rivals some war zones, sputtering public services such as electricity and periodic shortages of staple goods,” asserted Reuters. It was only natural, then, that a marcher was quoted stressing, “It’s time for a change.”

The AP, for its part, quoted a housewife who would vote for Capriles “because of his reputation as an efficient administrator and out of fear that Chávez will ruin the economy and drive millions of Venezuelans to emigrate if he is re-elected.” The AP used the housewife’s ominous prediction as the final sentence for its report: “If Chávez emerges as the winner in October, he’s going to destroy this country.”

Censure for Chávez has so thoroughly permeated Venezuela’s body politic, apparently, that even communists oppose him: “Chávez was the great hope for our cause, but we’ve given up on him because he has turned his back on the people even as he claims to be the voice of the people,” The Miami Herald quoted the secretary general of the Bandera Roja (Red Flag) Party as saying.

So it came as no surprise that just one day later, the U.S. press reported that Chávez’s own rally to officially inaugurate his presidential campaign attracted a crowd an entire order of magnitude smaller than that of Capriles. The AP’s headline, “Chavez rallies thousands launching re-election bid”—a figure also used by NPR and the Los Angeles Times—implied that the number of pro-Chávez participants could have been anywhere between 20 to 500 times smaller than the number present at the previous day’s pro-Capriles rally. The AP’s Fabiola Sanchez cited a higher estimate of “tens of thousands” in the body of her piece, but even this number (also used by The Miami Herald) amounts to just a fraction of Capriles’s “hundreds of thousands” of supporters.

Reuters went further in minimizing Chávez’s support. Correspondent Brian Ellsworth provided a sinister explanation for a 66-year-old pro-Chávez retiree’s observations, as she danced in the city square during the rally. “Look at this sea of people; look at the happiness,” she urged. “For every person that came out yesterday, we’ve brought out 10, 20, 30 more. And that’s going to be reflected in the election.” But Ellsworth countered this with circumstantial evidence that the event was little more than a Potemkin spectacle:

Hundreds of buses that ferried his followers to Caracas stood parked in side streets. . . . Critics accuse Chavez allies of using state resources to swell demonstrations and forcing government employees to attend. Opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez said the ruling Socialist Party had ordered ministries to help bring 120,000 people to the march, citing what he called an internal party document.

Reuters provided no follow-up on the veracity of the unnamed critics’ accusations, nor did it verify the existence of the internal party document that Leopoldo López cited. This lapse in journalistic ethics is even more remarkable considering that in relying upon López’s hearsay for the final word on Chávez’s mobilization, Reuters displayed exactly the same flaw as Fox News’ coverage of Venezuela in 2005. (López, as I will mention in further detail below, is a long-time collaborator of Capriles, and played a crucial role in the short-lived coup government that overthrew Chávez in 2002.)

Ellsworth’s article also failed to include any estimate of the number of participants at Chávez’s rally, despite a widely–distributed Spanish-language dispatch by Reuters itself, which stated in its first paragraph that Chávez was “accompanied by hundreds of thousands of sympathizers.” Although the Spanish news website Público.es and Britain’s The Guardian corroborated this estimate, no major U.S.-based news source used it to describe the number of participants in Chávez’s rally.

Far more troubling than partial reporting on the popularity of the two candidates is the U.S. media’s superficial portrayalof Capriles as simply a “a polite, non-confrontational politician,” above the fray of Chávez’s insults and negativity. “I want to be everybody’s president, not the president of a single group,” the AP quoted Capriles as saying. “I am not anybody’s enemy,” he continued. “I’m the enemy of problems.”

At times, Capriles deviates from this persona, as when he referred to poll numbers—many of which consistently show Chávez leading by double-digit margins—as the work of “immoral mafiosos,” according to Reuters. More importantly, his political record betrays far-right tendencies that contradict his inclusive, conciliatory image. As the BBC notes, Capriles “was involved with a group of other young politicians in setting up in 2000 a new opposition party Primero Justicia.” In the lead-up to the 2002 coup d’etat against Chávez, which killed dozens, Primero Justicia indirectly received hundreds of thousands of dollars and training from a foreign government—in this case, the United States, through the National Endowment for Democracy, an agency largely financed by Congress. Leopoldo López and Leopoldo Martinez, two of Primero Justicia’s other top leaders, went on to play key roles in the 2002 coup government of Venezuelan business magnate Pedro Carmona. López—who Reuters deemed fit to comment on the supposedly authoritarian nature of last week’s pro-Chávez rally—himself signed on to Carmona’s 2002 decree to abolish the General Assembly, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution.

During this U.S.-backed two-day coup, hundreds of anti-Chávez demonstrators destroyed cars outside the Cuban embassy in the Caracas municipality of Baruta. They also cut off water and electricity to the building. Capriles, then the mayor of Baruta, was filmed approaching the Cuban ambassador and reportedly asking for proof that there were no Chávez administration officials who had sought refuge inside the embassy. The Cuban embassy later released a statement condemning Capriles’s behavior: “The immediate responsibility of Mr. Capriles Radonsky and other Venezuelan state authorities was demonstrated when they failed to act diligently in order to prevent an increase in the aggression to which our embassy was subjected, causing serious damage and endangering the lives of officials and their families in clear violation of national and international law.”

It is in this light that Chávez’s public broadsides against Capriles become more understandable. The Miami Herald quoted Chávez at his June 11 rally as saying, “We have made the vital strategic decision that every time there’s aggression from the imperialists and the bourgeoisie . . . we will respond by deepening the socialist revolution.” But the Herald leaves out any background information about the 2002 coup d’etat, in which the military reportedly threatened to bomb the presidential palace. Only within this context does the Herald’s quotation of Chávez make sense: “‘Their plan is the imperialist project from Washington,’ he said. ‘They are the puppets of imperialism…and now they hope to trick the people to take back the Miraflores [presidential palace]. But they’ll never get it back.’”

The truly remarkable aspect about Capriles’s candidacy is that more than a decade of aggressive poverty reduction and social spending has created a political climate that has forced an otherwise reactionary opposition to fully endorse Chávez’s social programs in order to be viable with the Venezuelan public. Ten years after the Cuban embassy fiasco, Capriles says he would be “mad” to end Chávez’s Barrio Adentro program, which dispatches Cuban doctors to poor neighborhoods in Venezuela to provide residents with free healthcare. Capriles reassured Venezuelans by saying “the missions belong to the people,” and on a separate occasion announced, “I want to expand them.” In a fairly stunning transformation, the opposition—rather than plotting coups and carrying out debilitating oil strikes—has rallied around Capriles, who has publicly modeled his platform after that of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who the AP said “financ[ed] expansive social programs . . . that made him popular among the poor.”

As all of the press coverage duly notes, Capriles has an uphill battle, and the poll numbers are not in his favor. It’s hard not to see why. As journalist Stephanie Kennedy notes in the Huffington Post, Venezuela was ranked the “happiest” country in South America by Columbia University, which she attributes, in large part, to serious improvements in Venezuelans’ material conditions under the Chávez administration:

The country currently boasts the highest minimum wage in Latin America and its latest bill for workers rights hails in a new era of legal protection and social security to a large part of the population who had up until recently been labouring within informal and vulnerable frameworks. Domestic workers, voluntary full time carers of family relatives and housekeepers now too have rights and a state pension, whilst peasants, fisherman and others practicing the more traditional trades, who have always been omitted from formal registers, will now enjoy the same rights as their urban peers. There are local clinics where people had never seen a doctor before, new brick-layered houses for people who had been living in cardboard slums, and subsidized food products and medicines.

A leader seeking reelection with a track record of spearheading the policies listed above can surely afford some bravado on the campaign trail.

Henrique Capriles, Chavez Challenger, Leads Massive March In Venezuela (huffingtonpost.com)
With song and dance, Venezuela’s Chávez launches reelection bid (miamiherald.com)

June 20, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception | Associated Press, Hugo Chávez, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Reuters, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Venezuelan opposition plays the nationalist card in territory dispute with Guyana

MercoPress | June 7, 2012

Venezuela’s opposition accused the government on Wednesday of turning a blind eye to neighbouring Guyana’s oil exploration in a border region claimed by Venezuela, potentially inflaming a territorial dispute that dates back more than a century.

The conflict was stirred up in recent days by local media reports that Exxon Mobil Corp, in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell, is exploring for crude off the coast of the disputed Essequibo region.

The two South American neighbours squabbled over the area, which is the size of the US State of Georgia, for much of the 20th century. Venezuela calls it a “reclamation zone,” but in practice it functions as Guyanese territory.

”(We) firmly reject the concessions granted by the Guyana government in Venezuela’s Atlantic waters,“ the opposition’s Democratic Unity coalition said in a statement, slamming the government’s stance as ”weak“.

”In the face of the activation of the concessions in the area, the government of President Hugo Chavez should address the issue immediately.“

An Exxon spokesman said in an email it and Shell ”have had an active exploration license offshore Guyana for several years, and we have obtained multiple seismic data sets in the area.”

Oil companies have shown growing interest in the north-eastern shoulder of South America, with industry experts describing a recent discovery off nearby French Guyana as a game-changer for the region’s energy prospects. Local media reported that Guyana halted exploration of the offshore block called Stabroek in 2000 following a protest by Venezuela.

The dispute over the region known as the Essequibo resurfaced last year when Guyana asked the United Nations to extend its continental shelf – the area where countries control ocean resources – toward a region where Venezuela has granted natural gas concessions.

The much smaller and poorer Guyana still relies on imports for its energy needs and has invited companies including Spain’s Repsol to drill for oil in other offshore areas not affected by the dispute.

The Essequibo, an area of rolling savannah and isolated jungle, shows little sign of Venezuelan presence. Many Guyanese see it as a crucial to their economic future due to its reserves of minerals including gold, diamonds and bauxite.

Chavez has taken a conciliatory stance in the dispute, striking up a friendship with former Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo and selling fuel to Guyana on advantageous terms under the Petrocaribe energy initiative.

June 15, 2012 Posted by aletho | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Bharrat Jagdeo, Essequibo, ExxonMobil, Guyana, Hugo Chávez, Royal Dutch Shell, Venezuela | Leave a comment

An Englishman in Venezuela

By Paul Dobson | Morning Star | June 10, 2012

World Bank president Robert Zoellick said last week that the days of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez were “numbered” economically and politically following a wave of nationalisations.

Zoellick spoke ominously of “an opportunity to make the western hemisphere the first democratic hemisphere” by exploiting Chavez’s hypothetical downfall to force “rapid policy changes” on other countries, naming Cuba and Nicaragua.

Without a trace of irony he talked of how the US could make Latin America “a place of democracy, development and dignity” rather than one of “coups, caudillos and cocaine.”

A bit rich from the country which organised the coups, bankrolled the caudillos and bought the cocaine for decades before the progressive movement spearheaded by Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution began to reshape the continent.

But Zoellick may be underestimating his target. The Bolivarian revolution has made tremendous gains for Venezuela’s democracy, development and dignity precisely by challenging the might of exploitative transnational companies. Here we can look at just one example – Venezuela v a British man nicknamed “Spam.”

Or to give him his full title, Samuel George Armstrong Vestey, third baron Vestey, lieutenant in the Scots Guards, peer, ex-chancellor and lord prior to the Order of St John of Jerusalem, deputy lieutenant of Gloucestershire, Master of the Horse of the Sovereign, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.

He’s 27th in the Order of Preference for Gentlemen in the UK – a who’s who of the nobility – the ex-husband to Prince Harry’s godmother and owner of the 2,430-hectare Stowell Park estate in Gloucestershire. More importantly he’s the head of Vestey Group.

The group is a British foodstuff conglomerate founded in Liverpool in 1897, which made its fortune importing meat. It moved into Venezuela in 1903 and bought 11 ranches in prime-quality land (classified in the country as “A1,” the best possible for farming), setting up the Compania Inglesa subsidiary in the country which itself set up Agroflora, the cattle-ranching arm of the business.

The company did well, buying up land in a range of other countries from Australia to China and making vast profits for its owners William and Edmund Vestey. William managed to get ennobled as a baron despite opposition from King George V, who was irritated by his demand for tax-exempt status at the height of World War I.

When this demand was refused they went into tax exile in Argentina before setting up a dodgy if legal scheme involving a French trust fund that enabled them to evade almost all tax in Britain until the loophole was closed in 1991. A Sunday Times investigation once revealed that in 1978 the firm had managed to pay just £10 in tax on a profit of around £2.3 million.

They were at their height called “the richest dynasty in the land apart from the Windsors.” Biographer Philip Knightley wrote: “They did not live on the income, they did not live on the interest from their investments. They lived on the interest on the interest.”

Business and tax evasion went excellently for William’s successors until 2001, when the Chavez government passed a new land law allowing it to look into all landholdings of over 5,000 hectares and forcibly nationalise them with compensation if they were deemed inactive, idle or no project was presented for their development.

Spam had a problem – he owned over 420,000ha of land in Venezuela and over 130,000 head of cattle. Twelve of his ranches surpassed the 5,000ha mark. So he held a one-man protest outside Venezuela’s London embassy in February 2001.

Squatters began to settle on his lands and cultivate crops. Though they were making use of previously inactive land, there are reports of these landless farmers being shot at and even murdered by men allegedly paid off by Spam.

In 2005 things got even worse for the tycoon. The government sent troops into his Charcote ranch and confiscated 13,000 cattle. After coming to an agreement with the government Spam received the equivalent of £2.65m in local currency as compensation for two ranches he was forced to give up.

In 2008 there was controversy over the plight of 400 indigenous people who lived on his Morichito ranch. By the terms of the land contract they were literally owned by Spam.

In October 2010 he faced his biggest problem yet when Chavez declared: “All the lands of the so-called Compania Inglesa will be nationalised now. I don’t want to lose another day. Free the land, free the slave labour.”

That meant around 300,000ha of land, all his remaining ranches and 120,000 cattle.

The Central Bank immediately approved funds for buying up the ranches. Chavez pointed out: “We must recognise what is really private land, we’re not stealing it from anyone. Some companies like this insist we pay them in foreign money. No – we are in Venezuela.”

The ranches passed to the state and the jobs of the workers were guaranteed. Some land was distributed to those who lived or worked on it to set up co-operatives, some continues production under state administration and some areas are being restructured for crop rather than cattle-farming.

Spam said: “We have been in constructive discussions with the Venezuelan government for some time now and we continue in that vein in order to find a friendly agreement.”

These discussions went on for about a year. But in October 2011 talks fell apart over the payment issue and lands were ordered to be taken by force.

Spam was offered compensation in the overvalued local currency and no other, a total of 274m bolivars (£46m).

Poor Spam was left without a single ranch.

Many economists, landowners, cattle-ranchers and general bigwigs were up in arms over these land-grabs.

Many peasants, workers, patriots and general country folk supported them.

But the government pointed out that Spam’s deeds had not been in order – and that anyway if you went back far enough the land had been nicked off the people in the first place.

It also reminded us that 90 per cent of the meat produced on these ranches was to be sold in Britain. Venezuelan land, Venezuelan cattle, Venezuelan labour, but virtually no meat for Venezuela at a time when the country was importing 70 per cent of meat consumed.

That this was A1 fertile land – perfect for crop production, not cattle-ranching.

And finally that there were millions of Venezuelans without land, houses or businesses who could benefit from the lots of all three owned by the absentee landlord.

So 2011 was the year that concluded the story of Spam in Venezuela. But not to worry – the third baron Vestey’s colonial adventures continue in, among other places, Australia, Brazil and China.

Venezuela Happiest Country in South America (webabuser.blogspot.com)

June 14, 2012 Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular | Hugo Chávez, Robert Zoellick, Venezuela, Vestey Group | Leave a comment

Media & Opposition: False Perceptions of Venezuela’s Democracy

By Rachael Boothroyd | Correo del Orinoco International | May 25th 2012

Earlier this week Al Jazeera English published an article by Nikolas Kozloff, a former academic turned author who now spends his time writing satire and lambasting the Venezuelan government while hiding behind his Oxford PhD as a veil of objectivity. The focus of Kozloff’s latest article was the Cuban-Venezuelan “Barrio Adentro” initiative, a social mission which provides free healthcare to Venezuela’s poor, and free, community based training for Venezuelan medical students.

Despite the program being one of the government’s most popular, and the fact that it is often cited as an exemplary case of Cuban internationalism and solidarity, in his article Kozloff instead decides to detail the alleged “harrowing” conditions that Cuban doctors are subjected to while treating patients in Venezuela.

According to Kozloff’s article, Cuban medical personnel are overworked, obliged to treat 60- 70 patients a day, constantly spied on, and used by the Venezuelan state for political purposes. The sources of Kozloff’s outlandish statements are none other than leaked documents from the US embassy in Caracas, which, the cables reveal, has been aiding dissident Cuban doctors to apply to the US government for “humanitarian parole” so that they might be transferred to Miami as “asylum seekers”.

According to the documents, 73 Cuban medical personnel were transferred to Miami by 2009. Despite the fact that over 80,000 Cubans have worked in the mission, with 30,000 Cuban medical personnel currently working in Venezuela, Kozloff finds that these 73 Cubans are representative enough of the whole Barrio Adentro mission for him to conclude that the program is “fraying at the edges” in the run-up to this year’s elections.

But questionable e-mails written by staunchly anti-Cuban US diplomats might not be the best sources for judging the merits of a social program which has, by all accounts, dramatically increased Venezuelans’ standards of living. So much so, that despite the vast amounts of propaganda against the healthcare program, the opposition’s candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, has been forced to pledge that he will maintain it should he by some miracle win the elections this year.

Kozloff’s selective analysis of the state of the Barrio Adentro program is typical of most “political commentaries” covering the Venezuelan elections in the international press, which are currently contributing to a distorted understanding of Venezuela’s political reality in the run up to the October elections.

Opposition Out of Touch

While most commentators either stress Capriles’ youth (he’s 39) and his energetic campaign, or apparent “indecision” on the part of Venezuelan voters, the reality on the ground is quite different in Venezuela. The opposition have faced defeat after defeat for the past two months.

Not only do nearly all polls in Venezuela give Chavez a 20-30% lead over his opponent, but the Capriles campaign has also made several tactical mistakes. In a move that alienated working class voters in May, Capriles announced that he did not attend the country’s International Workers’ Day march because he was an “employer” and not an employee. His campaign has also been responsible for the persecution and assault of several community media journalists, harking back to the days of repression under previous governments.

In the international arena, in a subtle snub against the Venezuelan opposition coalition, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos stated in an interview that Chavez represented “stability” for the continent that was both essential for regional unity and beneficial for Colombia. Meanwhile US ally and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe’s vocal support for Capriles has backfired, only serving to reinforce the perception of Capriles as the candidate of US imperialism amongst the Venezuelan public. Just this week, Capriles’ US advisor, Peter Greenberg, also admitted that Chavez’s lead over Capriles was “irreversible”.

These concerns are also being echoed by conservatives inside the country with even rightwing journalists such as Rafael Poleo mourning Capriles’ “hopeless” election campaign and members of the opposition coalition demanding that the campaign be restructured. “Capriles could be out anywhere today, but the rest of the country does not know about it… (his) strategy is not working, his candidacy is not growing, and Chavez’s illness has hyper-personalized electoral debate. People are only talking about Chavez”, explained Oscar Schemel, President of the Hinterlaces polling company.

Throughout this election campaign the opposition’s most serious failure is to have misunderstood the extent to which new mechanisms of participatory democracy have grown in Venezuela. The concept of democracy has taken on new meaning and the working class and organized communities are currently at the helm of an unprecedented experiment with radical new forms of democratic participation. Citizens’ democratic participation is now channelled through communal councils, communes, socialist workers’ councils and cooperatives, which extend the democratic process into their everyday lives and allow them to transform their own socio-cultural surroundings. Venezuelan democracy is no longer reducible to national elections every 6 years, rather it is something constructed every single day.

Following an unsuccessful 12-year battle against Chavez waged on its own terrain, the opposition is now attempting to compete on the Revolution’s terrain and the results are perhaps even less rewarding. The opposition has totally failed to understand just how Venezuela’s political terrain is constantly shifting and continuously being propelled forwards by the country’s new grassroots democratic format.

Just like Kozloff, the Venezuelan opposition continues to look at Venezuela from a distance. Their sources are US diplomats, US political advisors or the Venezuelan elite. From this perspective, Barrio Adentro is merely a political strategy. For Kozloff, it is merely the product of a transient deal with Cuba which can be rolled back should another government take power. For Capriles it is a program he must pledge to maintain in order to have any chance of winning votes.

But for many Venezuelans Barrio Adentro is more than a political strategy and more than a program, it is a social process which has become an integral part of their everyday lives, which has brought dignity, value and identity, and shaped their communities and changed their educational possibilities. These are changes that can’t be perceived from the upper class district of Altamira in Caracas, and much less from a newsroom in New York.

Germany Asks European Union to Step Up Support for Venezuela’s Opposition (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Venezuelan Opposition Promises “Renewal” for Venezuela-Israel Relations (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Why Do Venezuelan Women Vote for Chavez? (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Capriles and Chavez Neck and Neck, and Pigs Might Fly, or Conduct a Poll (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Immigration to Venezuela Double that of Emigration (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 26, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Capriles, Chavez, Cuba, Henrique Capriles Radonski, Juan Manuel Santo, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Venezuelan Opposition Promises “Renewal” for Venezuela-Israel Relations

Correo del Orinoco International | May 21st 2012

Over the weekend, Venezuela’s anti-Chavez minority conﬁrmed reports that one of their own recently met with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and promised to re-establish ties with Israel if the opposition is somehow successful in this year’s presidential election. Speaking on behalf of the opposition’s so called Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma is said to have promised both economic and political rewards in exchange for Israeli support of MUD presidential hopeful, Henrique Capriles Radonski.

Though the MUD have been totally unable to improve their standing in polls which predict a sweeping electoral victory for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this October 7, Ledezma’s comments in Israel provide a troubling glimpse at wishful opposition thinking in a post-Chavez period.

“SOLIDARITY” WITH ISRAEL?

Though he was in Jerusalem last week for the 28th International Mayors Conference, opposition lawyer and politician Antonio Ledezma took advantage of his publicly-ﬁnanced trip to meet privately with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the country’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Asked about the closed-door meetings, Ledezma said he had used his time in Israel to spread “the message that the Venezuelan nation has respect for Israel”.

Ledezma told reporters he spoke with Netanyahu and Lieberman about “the Venezuelan people’s solidarity with the Jewish community” and, “in addition, our (opposition) disposition to reestablish relations with the State of Israel under a new government presided by Henrique Capriles Radonski”.

“In contrast to the current political policy in Venezuela”, he said, “Capriles will re-establish our historical ties”.

Not needing to say so openly, Ledezma’s reference to “historical ties” includes both the United States and Israel, in contrast to Chavez administration policies favoring relations with the entirety of the Global South, including China, Russia, Iran and Cuba, to name just a few.

Pleased with the opposition spokesman, and in direct reference to the Chavez administration, Israel’s Foreign Minister responded to Ledezma’s comments by stating, “nations in the global village of today need reasonable governments that help encourage cooperation among peoples”.

Guaranteeing an opposition victory, Ledezma added that “our people, who don’t know how to mistreat, who value peace and love for one’s neighbor, mustn’t be confused with the decisions of an intemperate administration which has broken our historical relations and is on its way out”.

The right-wing mayor, who withdrew from opposition primaries for lack of electoral potential, told Israeli media he believed “the opposition’s chances are equal (to Chavez’s) and even greater, mostly because it is bringing a message of renewal to all of Venezuela”. Ledezma added that he hopes “the current government will allow for democratic elections”.

President Chavez, who holds a double-digit lead against Capriles Radonski in every poll taken to date, instructed his government to break relations with Israel after the Israeli military killed some 1,500 Palestinians and wounded another 5,000 during its 2009 siege on Gaza.

At that time, the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a press release stating that “Israel has repeatedly ignored the calls of the United Nations, consistently and shamelessly violating the resolutions approved by overwhelming majorities of member countries, increasingly placing itself on the margin of international law” and added that “Israel’s state terrorism has cost the lives of the most vulnerable and innocent: children, women, and the elderly”.

During his 3-day trip to Israel, the opposition’s Ledezma made no mention of Israel’s segregationist policies towards the Palestinians, the widely-condemned but ongoing blockade against those in Gaza, nor did he question the inhuman prison conditions currently under international scrutiny as several Palestinian hunger strikers near death.

PROMISING RESOURCES

Late last week, Venezuelan philosopher and TV journalist Miguel Angel Perez Pirela denounced the meeting between Ledezma and the Israeli Prime Minister, calling it “further evidence” of opposition plans to “destabilize” the country. Pirela reminded viewers that MUD spokesmen have now met with former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, with right-wing members of the anti-Chavez community in Southern Florida, and, now, with Israel’s Netanyahu.

Pirela explained that Ledezma spent tax-payer funds to ﬁnance his trip to Israel, and used his time in the Middle East to request Israeli support for MUD presidential hopeful Capriles Radonski. In exchange for support, he said, Israel was promised “access to the country’s resources” if the opposition were to somehow take this year’s presidential election.

“He who doesn’t want to see has the right not to; he can joke things off and accuse us of paranoia”, said Pirela, “but this smells rotten”.

“There are strong signs that they [opposition ﬁgures] are showing us the exact location from which the bullets will be ﬁred”, he said, suggesting recent opposition meetings in Colombia, Miami, Florida, and Israel are evidence of a larger opposition strategy to destabilize Venezuela with international support.

With respect to Israel, in December 2011 and with no evidence to back his assertions, Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya´alon accused Venezuela of working with Iran to create a “terrorist infrastructure” across the Americas that could be used to “attack the interests of the United States”.

In response to his statements, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry afﬁrmed, “such abusive and tendentious statements, which come from the representative of a government that itself participates in terrorist attacks against the Arab peoples, are part of a continuous campaign of aggression against our people”.

DEFENDING REVOLUTION

Speaking at a pro-Chavez rally on Friday, Mayor of the Caracas Libertador Municipality and head of the Chavez re-election campaign Jorge Rodriguez denounced the opposition’s international positioning. In the border state of Tachira backing grassroots efforts to re-elect Venezuela’s socialist President, Rodriguez accused Capriles Radonski of traveling to Colombia “to seek advice from known drug trafﬁcker and confessed paramilitary ﬁgure, (former President) Alvaro Uribe”.

Rodriguez told those gathered, “the lazy Mayor of Caracas, Mayor Ledezma, recently made his way to Israel and is also meeting with representatives of the extreme right”.

“They’ve already lost hope in winning the election”, Rodriguez afﬁrmed, “but if they try taking the path of destabilization they’ll face the people and homeland, ready to defend the Revolution”.

Germany Asks European Union to Step Up Support for Venezuela’s Opposition (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Capriles and Chavez Neck and Neck, and Pigs Might Fly, or Conduct a Poll (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 21, 2012 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Antonio Ledezma, Benjamin Netanyahu, Chavez, Henrique Capriles Radonski, Israel, MUD, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Germany Asks European Union to Step Up Support for Venezuela’s Opposition

By Rachael Boothryod | Correo del Orinoco International | May 18th 2012

A German news website has revealed that the German government has been pushing for Eurozone countries to adopt a more active role in backing the current Venezuelan opposition coalition, the Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD), in the run up to this year’s presidential elections.

In an article published by Amerika21 earlier this week it was revealed that German diplomats had taken advantage of a recent European Union Council meeting on Latin American affairs to call on members to offer “greater and more open support” to the MUD and its candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, who will stand against incumbent President Chavez in October.

According to the website, German delegates at the meeting in April had said that support for Venezuela’s opposition “should not be hidden from the public”, despite calls from other European nations such as France and Portugal who argued for a “more discreet” approach.

The news was disclosed as a team of representatives from the German Parliament took part in a governmental delegation to Venezuela, where they met solely with members of the country’s political opposition.

According to Prensa Latina news, which had access to the delegation’s agenda, the diplomats met with leading figures from the Venezuelan political opposition such as MUD Secretary General, Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, and other leading figures from opposition parties such as Democratic Action (AD).

The representatives are also reported to have met with anti-government NGOs during their stay, including organizations such as the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, which has previously been accused of carrying out acts aimed at sabotaging the national government and receives funding from the US government.

Meetings with the head of Venezuela’s business federation, Fedecamaras, and the head of Venezuela’s chamber of commerce, were also amongst the delegation’s agenda. “In Venezuela we met almost exclusively with opposition forces, while in Chile, our next stop, we met with people from the government”, reported German representative Heike Hansel from the German Socialist Party, Die Linke, in an interview with Prensa Latina.

The German government currently led by Angela Merkel has recently come under fire for its open backing of French rightwing candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, who lost his bid for reelection to socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, earlier this month.

The MUD currently receives direct financial support from US institutions such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), although President Chavez has warned that the US government may expand its support for the opposition into other areas as the elections draw nearer.

The Venezuelan President has also stated that the MUD is developing a strategy to contest this October’s election results in league with the US government.

US Shelters Venezuelan Fugitive, Criticises Existence of “Drug Kingpins” in Venezuela (alethonews.wordpress.com)
CNN: The Latest Outlet for Roger Noriega’s Paranoid Speculations (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 18, 2012 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Henrique Capriles Radonski, MUD, National Endowment for Democracy, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

CNN: The Latest Outlet for Roger Noriega’s Paranoid Speculations

By Keane Bhatt | NACLA | May 14, 2012

On May 2, CNN executive producer Arthur Brice published what was purported to be a news article on Venezuela. Instead, Brice’s 4,300-word screed, titled “Chavez Health Problems Plunge Venezuela’s Future Into Doubt,” is little more than a platform for the bizarre theories of Roger Noriega, an ultra-rightwing lobbyist and one-time diplomat under George W. Bush, who Brice references over two dozen times throughout his article.

As a political commentator, Noriega pontificates with total brazenness. He appeared as the chief pundit in Brice’s CNN piece six months after announcing—based on what he said was the belief of Chávez’s own medical team—that the Venezuelan president was “not likely to survive more than six months.” Noriega is not fazed by facts. He promotes his fantastical claims in many major news outlets, often based on anonymous sources. Take, for example, his 2010 Foreign Policy article, “Chávez’s Secret Nuclear Program,” whose subtitle reads: “It’s not clear what Venezuela’s hiding, but it’s definitely hiding something—and the fact that Iran is involved suggests that it’s up to no good.” (State Department officials dismissed this suspicion with “scorn.”)

CNN’s interviews with Noriega and the other mostly rightwing analysts likely led to this demonstrably false claim at the beginning of Brice’s May 2 article: “Diosdado Cabello, a longtime Chavez cohort . . . amassed tremendous power in January when Chavez named him president of the National Assembly.” In fact, even El Universal, a daily Venezuelan newspaper long-aligned with the opposition, conceded in a January 5 report that Cabello was elected as the new president of the National Assembly, even if “only with the votes” of the majority United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Ewan Robertson of Venezuelanalysis.com found that 98 deputies of the pro-government bloc supported Cabello, while the 67-member opposition bloc opposed him. Such mundane electoral processes have guided much of Venezuela’s political dynamics over the past decade.

The rest of CNN’s long-winded compilation of hearsay proceeds in the same way. To give two examples, Brice turns to Venezuelan doctor Jose Rafael Marquina to shed light on Chávez’s current state of health. By Brice’s own admission however, Marquina “practices in Florida and has no direct connection with the case but says he has colleagues who know what is happening.” On the separate issue of Venezuelan politics, “the Cubans,” Brice writes, “may only have the power to suggest and manipulate as best they can,” but he also cites “some observers” who fear the Cubans could leverage their “perceived point men” in the country to unleash “militias in an attempt to take over.” Brice then quotes Noriega as saying, “I have no doubts that some Cubans would use violent means to deal with Venezuelans.”

These examples are indicative of CNN’s desire to spin a yarn of intrigue. Venezuela’s October presidential vote should be no different from the past. Closely monitored, free and fair elections have been the final word in political outcomes in Venezuela. But by relying on telephone interviews with self-proclaimed “analysts” almost exclusively based in the United States, CNN portrays Venezuelan politics as a grand chess game of “powerful men trying to bend the arc of history because they believe their president’s life may be slipping out of the hands of doctors and into the hands of God.” For CNN, Venezuelan voters play a marginal role, if any at all—it’s a sensationalized struggle between drug-dealing generals, Cuban spooks, well-connected cronies, armed militias, and a dying, charismatic strongman in thrall to Fidel Castro.

Had Brice decided to report on the ground from Caracas, he may have produced a video segment similar to the one that appears alongside his own article on CNN’s website. Journalist Paula Newton describes the free, government-provided medical attention in poor areas—a “concrete” reason why broad support for Chavez “isn’t exactly blind,” she says. Newton also shows Chávez voters displaying (reasonable) skepticism toward conjectures that the president is about to die or is already dead—a potentially valuable lesson for CNN, considering Brice’s general credulousness.

Noriega’s buffoonish commentary in outlets like CNN would be more amusing if not for his hands-on experience in crafting devastating U.S. policies toward Latin America. Noriega’s career in government, one may recall, includes administering “non-lethal” aid to the Nicaraguan Contra insurgency as a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) official in the 1980s. He followed this up as a senior staffer to Senator Jesse Helms in the 1990s, co-authoring the Helms-Burton Act, which intensified the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Bush II appointed him as ambassador to the Organization of American States in 2001, and in 2003, he replaced Iran-Contra veteran and Venezuelan coup-backer Otto Reich as Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. For this post—his last in government before switching over to the private sector—Noriega had big shoes to fill, and he undoubtedly rose to the occasion.

Whereas Reich failed to roll back the leftward tide of Venezuela in 2002 during his tenure (the military coup which overthrew Hugo Chávez lasted only two days), Noriega triumphed in damming the populist flood of Lavalas in Haiti. As the only mass-based political movement in the most unequal country in the hemisphere, Lavalas, headed by the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was an obvious threat to the Bush administration. The denouement of the administration’s destabilization campaign occurred in February 2004 when Aristide and his family were spirited away by a U.S. plane in the middle of the night. Noriega initially denied that the United States played a role in Aristide’s removal, feebly claiming that Aristide had embarked on the plane by his own volition. But according to Dr. Paul Farmer—Harvard health specialist and UN Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti—Noriega admitted “during a House hearing that Aristide did not know of his destination until less than an hour before landing in the Central African Republic.” Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, told Newsday right before the coup that “Roger Noriega has been dedicated to ousting Aristide for many, many years, and now he’s in a singularly powerful position to accomplish it.”

Today, Noriega divides his time between his post as a Latin America “scholar” at the pro-corporate American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank, and as a registered lobbyist for various interests in countries that are the subjects of his widely published commentaries. Noriega’s influence-peddling has been extremely effective in recent years. For example, in addition to writing opinion pieces defending the 2009 Honduran coup d’etat, Noriega—who was hired to represent a Honduran textile manufacturers group—organized a meeting between the coup regime’s supporters and U.S. Senators less than 10 days after the overthrow of the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. Daniel W. Fisk, who helped set U.S. policies in Central America as a high-ranking government official in the 1980s and ‘90s, attended the meeting. According to The New York Times, Fisk was “stunned by the turnout.” “I had never seen eight senators in one room to talk about Latin America in my entire career,” he was quoted as saying.

The Times framed Noriega’s actions toward Honduras as a vestige of Cold War planning. Noriega, Reich, and Fisk, wrote The Times, viewed Honduras as “the principal battleground in a proxy fight with Cuba and Venezuela,” two countries that the three men characterized “as threats to stability in the region in language similar to that once used to describe the designs of the Soviet Union.” Noriega certainly warned against a new red menace when he supported Zelaya’s overthrow; Honduras was ground zero in what Noriega called “the continued spread of Chavista authoritarianism under the guise of democracy.”

Given Noriega’s disturbing record, it is astonishing that CNN produced a news piece on Venezuela through the lens of a lobbyist with obvious conflicts of interest in Latin America. Brice’s article, which never mentions Noriega’s lobbying, is dominated by comments like these:

Noriega and other observers have said [Chávez’s] appointments of Cabello and Rangel Silva have turned Venezuela into a narcostate. . . . ‘If Cabello and Rangel Silva resort to dirty work to hold things together, Maduro is a guy they can bring in to give a veneer of respectability to the international community,’ Noriega said, calling [the hypothetical scenario he just created] a ‘junta kind of arrangement.’ . . . The military also would face deep divisions if called upon to fire on Venezuelan citizens. . . . “The elections are, from [Cabello and Rangel Silva’s] standpoint, expendable,” [Noriega] said. “On the other hand, if they believe they can add a patina of legitimacy, they will hold them. They’re going to be hard-pressed to make a legitimacy argument with a narco kingpin in power.”

Through CNN, Noriega is able to publicly fret over the prospects of a Venezuelan military coup (like the one the Bush administration and the IMF supported in 2002) and criticize Venezuela’s purported drug trafficking (like the kind carried out by CIA asset Manuel Noriega and the U.S.-backed Contras). Noriega preemptively disapproves of a hypothetical Venezuelan election whose purpose, he says, would be to “add a patina of legitimacy” (despite Noriega’s own endorsement of the U.S.-backed sham elections in Honduras in 2009, which were conducted under a dictatorship).

There is also some historical context behind Brice’s unquestioning use of terms like “narcogenerals,” “narcostate,” “narcoterrorism,” and “narco kingpin” with relation to Venezuela. Many of these instances originate from Noriega’s direct quotes to CNN. This is just the latest example of media manipulation that Noriega’s colleagues mastered long ago. From 1983-86 Reich headed a taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet, the Office of Public Diplomacy, which, among other activities, placed false reports in major outlets that the Sandinista government in Nicaragua was involved in narcotrafficking. Haiti is another case: In 1992, the CIA created a fraudulent psychological profile on Aristide, which Senator Jesse Helms then used to denounce the president as a “psychopath,” a claim that was uncritically parroted by the press at the time. Aristide, the diminutive liberation theologian, was also the subject of a U.S. grand jury investigation due to his alleged involvement in narcotrafficking. Although the media repeated the claim that Aristide’s was running drugs, human-rights attorney Brian Concannon pointed out in 2006 that ultimately, “not a single charge [was] issued from the courthouse.” (U.S. efforts to assassinate Aristide’s character through the courts continue up to the present day.)

Roger Noreiga’s nuttier theories, thankfully, were not incorporated into the piece. Here are just a few short excerpts of Noriega’s baseless output as of late:

In a March 2011 article for AEI titled, “U.S. Diplomats Clueless on Alleged Chávez Plot to Kill the President of Panama,” Noriega asked, “If Panamanian authorities dismissed this as a hoax, why have senior officials of that government expressed their gratitude to me for revealing the plot months since the incident? And why on earth would Chávez risk an attack on Martinelli? I cannot answer these questions.”
In another AEI entry from October 2011, titled “The Mounting Hezbollah Threat in Latin America,” Noriega contends that “Hezbollah’s presence in Latin America dates to the mid-1980s, when it began sending operatives into the notoriously lawless region known as the tri-border area . . . Their activity also includes pirating software and music.”
In the March 2011 Washington Post op-ed “Is There a Chavez Terror Network on America’s Doorstep?” Noriega is able to find both al-Qaeda and Iranian operations in Venezuela: “The threat posed by globe-trotting terrorists is ever-present,” he writes. “A U.S. security official told me in mid-January that two known al-Qaeda operatives were in Caracas planning a ‘chemical’ attack on the U.S. embassy . . . A Venezuelan government source has told me that two Iranian terrorist trainers are on Venezuela’s Margarita Island instructing operatives who have assembled from around the region. In addition, radical Muslims from Venezuela and Colombia are brought to a cultural center in Caracas named for the Ayatollah Khomeini and Simon Bolivar for spiritual training.”

In Noriega’s April 2010 ultimatum in The Wall Street Journal, “Time to Confront the Tehran-Caracas Axis,” he uncovers yet another sinister plot: “[T]he Canadian uranium exploration company U308 Corp has recorded a substantial source of uranium in the Roraima Basin, which straddles the border between Guyana and the Venezuelan province of Bolívar. Iranian or other Middle Eastern individuals operate a tractor factory, cement plant and gold mine in this region.”

Noriega concludes this WSJ op-ed by appealing to international law. He writes that Venezuela’s nefarious plans “should be challenged as a threat to peace and an act of aggression under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter.” This is a perfectly appropriate way to deal with any rogue state that, in Noriega’s words, is prone to “meddle in the internal politics” of other countries, and provides “support for terrorist groups in the Americas.” Unfortunately, Noriega has it upside down. It is not Venezuela, but the United States that is unequivocally responsible for doing both kinds of activities. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Noriega to equally apply such standards.

US ambassadors to Venezuela: chronology of failure (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 16, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | CNN, Diosdado Cabello, Paula Newton, Roger Noriega, United Socialist Party of Venezuela, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Why Do Venezuelan Women Vote for Chavez?

Improving the Lives of the Poor and the Disadvantaged

By MARIA PAEZ VICTOR | CounterPunch | April 24, 2012

If the the international press is to be believed, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a dictator, a menace to the region and is driving his country to the ground. If that is so, why do his people vote for him in landslide numbers? Why does he have an enormous following of the women of his country? Are they all deluded? Are they all paid or coerced to vote? It would seem so to the casual reader of headlines because the achievements of the Chávez government are treated like a top secret: Venezuela’s new participatory democracy should not be advertised. A new form of economic and social development that does not pay homage to global capital should be shunned. Nevertheless, a new world is being formed in a Latin America that has refused to be any power’s “back yard”. These developments are not ignored in Latin America where the Venezuela revolution has had a deep impact. The women of Venezuela have especially embraced the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, not because they are “followers” but because actually, they have become protagonists of a social, economic and, cultural revolution that has transformed Venezuela and the region.

It all started with the Constitution of 2000, written by an elected assembly in clear and inclusive language, which contained legislation that would transform the lives of Venezuelans and particularly, of women. It gave women the right of equal pay for equal work, (Article 91); the right to a life without violence, according to International Convention against Discrimination against Women (Article 21): the right to protection and public assistance during maternity in all its phases (Article 76); and the now world famous Article 88 that recognizes women’s domestic work as productive economic activity entitled to public pensions. The constitution also adheres to the International UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

When the Constitution was only two years old and by no means was its mandate entirely implemented in law, in April of 2002, President Chávez was deposed and kidnapped in a coup d’etat orchestrated by the financial elites and abetted by the United States. It lasted 48 hours. The catalyst for its end was the tens of thousands of ordinary people who took to the streets to demand the return of their democratically elected president. They faced sharpshooters who were shooting indiscriminately at the crowds to create chaos. Masses of these people were women – women who realized that this government that they had elected now had been taken from them. The loyal armed forces then chose to side with the people and not the elites, and President Chávez was returned to his rightful position, becoming the first president in modern history to be deposed only to brought back due to widespread popular protest.[i]

There have been many accounts of heroic interventions during this critical time in which women figured prominently. Such as the older women of the slum area of El Valle who assumed leadership of the multitude that surrounded the country’s largest military headquarters, Fuerte Tiuna, and diffused a potentially deadly situation by shaming soldiers to put down their guns. Or the girl who gathered together her friends with motorbikes and actually took back the government’s TV station that had been ransacked and shut down by the coup supporters. President Chávez has often paid tribute to the extraordinary role women assumed in fighting the coup.

Today, 13 years after President Chavez’s first election, the lives of Venezuelan women have dramatically changed. The constitutional promises have been implemented in regulation and policy concerning gender equality and for the prevention violence against women. Laws have outlawed discrimination and have categorized 19 types of violence against women and created the institutions necessary to make the rights of women a reality.[ii] Granted, these issues all call for cultural and attitudinal changes in the relationships between men and women, which take time and education, but a clear legal basis is a strong impulse for such changes.

One of the main factors for the popularity of the Chávez Government is the reduction of poverty. This was largely attained because the government took back control of the national petroleum company PDVSA, and has used the abundant oil revenues, not for benefit of the rich as previous governments had done, but to build needed infrastructure and invest in the social services that Venezuelans so sorely needed. During the last ten years, the government has increased social spending by 60.6%, a total of $772 billion. [iii]

Women tend to be the majority among the poor all over the world due to their economic and social disadvantages and Venezuela has not been an exception. The Chavez government has significantly reduced general poverty from 49% in 1998 to 27% in 2011 and extreme poverty has been reduced from 27.4% (5.5 m) in 1998 to 7.3% (2.5m) today. [iv] The Organization of American States and the UN Development Program have both stated that Venezuela is at the head of the list of countries of the region that have reduced poverty the most.[v]

Economic milestones these last ten years include a reduction in unemployment from 11.3% to 7.7%; doubling the amount of people receiving social insurance benefits, and the public debt has been reduced from 20.7% to 14.3% of GNP. [vi] In general, the Venezuelan economy has grown 47.4% in ten years (4.3% per annum).

Among the many initiatives to promote popular economic enterprises, BAN MUJER was established in 2001, a bank solely for women. A very successful instrument helping women create their own businesses, it has given out 150,000 micro-credits to 2.5 million women, along with technical expertise and support for cooperatives.[vii] The substantive land reform also favours women, as women head of households are given priority when it comes to land redistribution. Furthermore, Venezuela is the country in the region with the least inequality (0.389 Gini index) and best redistribution of wealth between social classes.[viii]

Women in Venezuela have become not only the majority of the users but also the majority of providers of social services and anti-poverty programs[ix]. They are the majority in the election units of the governing party (PSUV) and very impressively, 70% of the members of the approximately 30,000 Communal Councils in the country are women. These Communal Councils play a pivotal role in decision making at the grass roots level to satisfy community social and economic needs and are the basis of participatory democracy.

Women hold some key and powerful positions in the government: as several ministers, President of the Supreme Court, Attorney General, National Ombudsman, National Elections Council, and Vice-presidency of the governing party PSUV are all women. Indeed, Venezuela is the country in the region with the highest inclusion of women in education and professional fields, according to the UN Human Development Program.

Health is an issue very dear to women’s hearts. In the new Venezuela, it is considered a human right, which the government is obliged to promote. Perhaps the most important, anti-poverty program that has galvanized women’s support is the government’s health care services and policies.

In 1998, access to medical care was abysmal and expensive, with only 20 physicians per 100,000 inhabitants. A creative arrangement with Cuba whereby in exchange for 100,000 barrels of petroleum, Cuba sends to Venezuela 45,000 health care workers, mostly physicians, [x]has made possible the health delivery program Barrio Adentro that places experienced physicians throughout urban poor neighborhoods, rural villages, and indigenous settlements. The huge majority of Cuban physicians in Venezuela are women. This program since its inception in 2003 has saved 302,171 lives and reduced maternal mortality as 99.3% of women giving birth attended by the Barrio Adentro physicians survive. [xi]

Today there are 59 physicians per 100,000 inhabitants, new clinics, and renovated and new hospitals throughout the country. There are now hundreds of emergency clinics, primary health clinics, and rehabilitation centres where a decade ago they were scarce. There is a new medical curriculum with the help of Cuban medical professors that emphasizes health as a human right and medical services grounded in the community. And, 70% of the new physicians graduating in the country are women.

One of the most important indicators of the welfare of a nation is the infant mortality rate. In 1998, that rate in Venezuela was 21 baby deaths per 1000 births. In 2011, the rate is 13.7 per 1000 births, the third lowest in Latin America, and an astounding achievement. [xii] Infant malnutrition went from 7.7% in 1998 to 3.2% in 2011, that is a 58.5% reduction, the 5th lowest in the region. [xiii] There are five laws that protect and promote breastfeeding, which is considered the very first act of food sovereignty. Breastfeeding increased from 7% a decade ago to 40% in 2010, and there are breast milk banks for babies at risk. In 70% of public schools, 4 million children are provided with free quality hot breakfast, hot lunch, and a nutritious snack before they leave school. There are 6,000 food dispensaries that feed 900.000 people in dire need– in total, about 5 million Venezuelans are provided with free food. [xiv] Thirteen years ago, there were approximately 8,000 children living on urban streets, and today they are practically negligible due to the programs to support street children.

Malnutrition in general has decreased due to these government food security measures plus others such as a real land reform, investment in agriculture, and promotion of cooperatives among rural workers and fishermen, and breaking up food distribution monopolies with a public food distribution network.

The better health of the population is not entirely due to medical services, but to the combined action on the social determinants of health: better nutrition, clean water and sanitation, more jobs and income per families, greater educational and training facilities, and greater social support and networking at the local levels, a literate and politically active and conscious population. And the government has had environmental initiatives and policies like no other previous administration, including, environmental assessments and protection, tree planting, water protection, energy efficiency and educational campaigns.

The government’s educational policies have rendered sterling results. Backed by UNESCO, Venezuela can claim to have eliminated illiteracy using the Cuban method of adult education with which 2 million people learned to read in less than 2 years. There are programs to help students finish High School, adult education to help people go to university, and a number of new universities in the country. The rate of students in primary school has increased from 85% to 93.6% and students in high school has increased even more, a 14% increase equivalent to 400,000 adolescents who are now continuing their studies.[xv] There are 20% more women than men continuing their studies.[xvi] And in the military field, which was a decade ago an exclusively masculine domain, today the majority of students at the military university UNEFA, are women. It is estimated that about 1/5 to 1/3 of the population of the country is enrolled in some educational program. Venezuela has met its educational Millennium Goals.

The United Nations has rated Venezuela among the countries with high level of human development, ranked #69 in its Human Development Index having advanced six places in ten years. [xvii]This indicator is supported by the Gallup Poll measuring happiness published by the Washington Post this year, that ranks Venezuela as the 5th most happy county tied with Finland.[xviii] This in itself should have made headlines around the world, but unfortunately, the international campaign to discount and denigrate everything related to the present Venezuelan government, denies the public knowledge of its considerable achievements.

While problems inherent to developing countries still persist in Venezuela, the progress that its government has made to satisfy its people’s real needs is impressive, and it is the reason that it has overwhelming support of women because it has improved their lives and those of their families. It is an indictment of the sorry state of the media in the northern developed countries, supposedly “independent” but prisoners of their political biases, that those achievements are not better known. On October 7 of this year, when President Chávez is elected with a handsome majority, those who have been fed by the mainstream media distorted views of the situation in Venezuela will be shaking their heads, not understanding that there are pivotal reasons why people in Venezuela vote for him, especially the women.

Maria Páez Victor, Ph.D., lives in Toronto.

Notes.

[i] Se video: The Revolution will Not be Televised” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144

[ii] George Gabriel, Gender Advance in Venezuela: a two-pronged affair, 13 March 2009, http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/gender-advance-in-venezuela-a-two-pronged-affair

[iii] National Institute of Statistics, AVN March 4, 2012

[iv] AVN Prensa, 27 March 2012; National Institute of Statistics, AVN November 14, 2011

[v] Adrián Carmona, Algunos datos sobre Venezuela, Rebelión, marzo 2012

[vi] Adrián Carmona, Algunos datos sobre Venezuela, Rebelión, marzo 2012

[vii] Alba Carosio, Banmujer: 10 años impulsando la economía popular con igualdad, Rebelion, Feb. 4, 2011

[viii] National Institute of Statistics, AVN/ November 17/2010

[ix] The Guardian, Women Back Chávez, Feb. 25, 2005,

[x] http://www.aporrea.org/misiones/n199049.html

[xi] AVN Prensa 26 August 2010; YVKE Mundial/AVN/18 April 2011

[xii] Adrián Carmona, Algunos datos sobre Venezuela, Rebelión, marzo 2012

[xiii] YVKE/ 1 April 2011

[xiv] Statement by the Vice-President Elías Jaua, AVN April 23, 2012

[xv] Adrián Carmona, Algunos datos sobre Venezuela, Rebelión, marzo 2012

[xvi] UNESCO report, 2012

[xvii] AVN , January 13, 2009

[xviii] http://www.gallup.com/poll/147167/High-Wellbeing-Eludes-Masses-Countries-Worldwide.aspx#1

US Shelters Venezuelan Fugitive, Criticises Existence of “Drug Kingpins” in Venezuela (alethonews.wordpress.com)

April 24, 2012 Posted by aletho | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Hugo Chávez, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Venezuelan Government Promotes “Car-Free” Caracas for Urban Cyclists

By Rachael Boothroyd | Venezuelanalysis | April 23rd 2012

Caracas – Venezuelan citizens took to the streets of Caracas yesterday as part of the government’s “Caracas Free Wheeling” campaign, a plan aimed at reducing the unnecessary use of cars and promoting a healthier lifestyle for residents of the nation’s capital.

With a slogan of “the car is turned off and you get active”, the campaign began on the 25th of March and involves the closing of roads across the city from 7 am to 3 pm every Sunday so that cyclists, runners and skaters can have free rein over the capital – without worrying about Caracas’ infamously hectic traffic.

So far the Venezuelan government has spent over 30 million bolivars ($US 6.976 million) as part of an initiative to take back areas of the capital city for its citizens, with “Caracas Free Wheeling” being the latest project launched. Open air gyms and children’s parks have also been built across sectors of Caracas.

Jorge Rodriguez, the Mayor of Caracas, said the project’s goal is to create spaces of “enjoyment and recreation” in the capital, and to “re-create a different city to that rushed metropolis which is full of cars”.

“Caracas is different if you travel it by bicycle, walking in the city is wonderful. There are spaces which have been recovered by the revolution for the enjoyment of all Caracas residents and visitors,” he added.

Venezuelan families turned out in droves yesterday to take advantage of the closed roads, either bringing their own bicycles or borrowing one of the 200 government bicycles made available through a joint manufacturing project with Iran.

“We want to promote the use of bicycles and skates, to encourage people to walk freely in the streets,” said Manuel Valera from the Urban Guerrilla Cycling collective, who praised the initiative.

“You get to know Caracas in a totally different way and you fall in love with it,” he added.

The government hopes to keep progressively increasing the amount of “car-free areas” throughout the city, eventually bringing the total amount of routes to 17.5 kilometres. Another cycle path was opened yesterday, giving Caracas residents the option of three different routes spanning a distance of 8km.

April 23, 2012 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Caracas, Rachael Boothroyd, Venezuela | Leave a comment

US Shelters Venezuelan Fugitive, Criticises Existence of “Drug Kingpins” in Venezuela

By Rachael Boothroyd | Venezuelanalysis | April 19^th 2012

Caracas – A Venezuelan judge has fled to the United States after he was dismissed as a Supreme Court Magistrate on March 20^th, when an investigation was launched into his links to Venezuelan drug lord Walid Makled. Venezuelan born Makled is currently on trial in the country for crimes including narco-trafficking and murder, after being extradited from Colombia to Venezuela in May last year.

According to the charges levelled at the ex-magistrate, Eladio Aponte, the judge granted a falsified identification document to Makled which named him as a member of the magistrate’s staff, permitting him free passage to anywhere in the country.

In an interview on Wednesday night for US television channel SOiTV, the ex-judge hit out at Venezuelan politicians and high ranking members of the army, accusing them of having intervened and manipulated the Venezuelan judicial system. He also added that he thought Makled to be a “reputable businessman”.

The government has categorically refuted the claims, which they say are an attempt to smear the Chavez administration.

“He is an ex-magistrate being prosecuted for his links to drug trafficking, and who has sold his soul to the devil,” said Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Nicolas Maduro, whilst defending the country’s judicial institutions as independent.

“We can say with total certainty that in the case of Aponte, the decisions taken by our public institutions were in total compliance with the law, demonstrating that there are laws in Venezuela, that here there or no privileges and that no one is protected by narco gangs”. “Aponte is a totally discredited man,” he added.

The minister also went on to criticise the role of the U.S.’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in engineering Aponte’s escape after it emerged that a DEA plane had transported the fugitive from Costa Rica to the United States.

“The DEA now takes away this man accused of being linked to drugs trafficking mafias to turn him into a spokesman against Venezuela… The United States continues to be a sanctuary for drug traffickers, the corrupt, traitors and terrorists,” he said.

Maduro’s sentiments have been echoed by other members of the Venezuelan government and armed forces, as well as by US- Venezuelan attorney and investigative journalist Eva Golinger, who said that Aponte’s claims were part of a “systematic” campaign by Washington to depict Venezuela as a “narco-state” using whatever means possible.

OFAC Criticises “Worrying Trend”

Aponte’s flight to the U.S. comes as the Director of the United States’ Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Adam Szubin, criticised a “worrying trend” in Venezuela, relating to the presence of “drugs kingpins” in the country.

In an interview with opposition newspaper El Universal earlier this week, Szubin stated that the organization was particularly concerned with individuals who were in violation of the “Kingpin Act,” which “goes after foreign persons” accused of financially aiding or supporting the international trafficking of narcotics. Several Venezuelan government officials have been controversially added to the organisation’s sanctions list since 2008.

“The designations made over the last two years,” said Szubin, “conform to the Kingpin Act and point towards a worrying trend in Venezuela.”

“Nobody is added to the list by mistake,” he continued, although conceding that 400 individuals had been removed from the list since 2009.

Szubin went on to cite current Venezuelan Defence Minister, Henry Rangel Silva, who was placed on the agency’s sanctions list in 2008 for allegedly attempting to increase cooperation between the Venezuelan government and Colombia’s FARC guerrillas as proof of this trend. To date, no evidence has been presented by the OFAC in support of these allegations.

As a division of the Treasury Department’s “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence” agency, the OFAC is responsible for administering and enforcing sanctions against states, individuals and groups accused of terrorism, such as those currently being enforced against Iran. The agency is described by the Washington Post as being an institution that “U.S. policymakers increasingly rely on to advance national security and foreign policy goals in the post-9/11 era”.

Since 2008, six other members of the Venezuelan government, including former Caracas mayor Freddy Bernal, have also been added to the OFAC sanction list.

Relations between the United States and Venezuela in the fight against the international drugs trade have been strained since the latter expelled the U.S.’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 2005 for acts of espionage, with the Venezuelan government charging the agency with maintaining a consistent campaign against the left wing politics of the government, as opposed to focusing on counter-narcotics operations.

April 21, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Drug Enforcement Administration, Eva Golinger, Freddy Bernal, Henry Rangel Silva, Venezuela, Venezuelan government | Leave a comment

More than 1 Million Venezuelans Benefit from Land Reform Program

Correo del Orinoco International | April 20, 2012

The President of Venezuela’s National Land Institute (INTI), Luis Motta Dominguez, affirmed that more than 224,000 families have benefited from redistributed farmlands made available through the Chavez administration’s agrarian reform program.

The announcement was made during an interview with state television on Tuesday when Motta gave an update on the progress being made with respect to the country’s land redistribution program.

“It we take an average of 5 people per family, then we’re talking about 1.3 million people who have benefited from the redistribution”, the INTI President said while interviewed on the program Toda Venezuela (All of Venezuela).

Venezuela’s agrarian reform began in November 2001 when President Hugo Chavez signed by decree the Land Law, mandating the break up of fallow landed estates, known in Spanish as latifundios. The law gives the state the legal authority to expropriate any lands underutilized or illegally acquired and redistribute them to farming collectives comprised of wage workers previously without access to their own parcels.

According to Motta, INTI has been able to regularize some 7.7 million hectares (19 million acres) of land over the past 11 years and redistribute some 1.1 million (2.7 million) of those to rural laborers involved in state projects.

“The expropriation of these lands happens when there is a latifundio. We need to act so that these lands that were once concentrated in the hands of a single person and weren’t being used are handed over to the small producer”, the Land Institute President declared.

In addition to providing land and meaningful work to rural laborers, Venezuela’s land redistribution program is also designed to help decrease the country’s reliance on imported food items, a historical problem in the OPEC member state.

This is done, Motta informed, by turning the once underutilized lands into productive tracts in line with the country’s needs.

“All those lands that are not productive are being rescued. They’re being handed over to collectives or to agro-ecological projects in order to consolidate the food security and development. There is a constant monitoring and we’ve seen how production has increased throughout the national territory”, he said on Tuesday.

Recently, the government introduced a new program, Mission AgroVenezuela, with a similar goal – to stimulate agricultural production by providing assistance to any farmer willing to dedicate their land to domestic production.

The assistance comes in the form of low-interest credits through state financing as well as access to technical aid, supplies and farming machinery such as tractors and harvesters.

These initiatives along with continual evaluation and rescue of fallow lands have led, Motta argued, to greater work opportunities and higher living standards for Venezuela’s small farmers.

April 20, 2012 Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular | Hugo Chávez, Land Law, Redistribution of wealth, Venezuela | Leave a comment

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Jack Ruby: Israel’s Smoking Gun

BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 13, 2021

By a strange paradox, most Kennedy researchers who believe that Oswald was “just a patsy” spend an awful lot of time exploring his biography. This is about as useful as investigating Osama bin Laden for solving 9/11. Any serious quest for the real assassins of JFK should start by investigating the man who shot Oswald at pointblank in the stomach at 11:21 a.m. on September 24, 1963 in the Dallas Police station, thereby sealing the possibility that a judicial inquiry would draw attention to the inconsistencies of the charge against him, and perhaps expose the real perpetrators. One would normally expect the Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby to be the most investigated character by Kennedy truthers. But that is not the case. … continue

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