Venezuela Turns Away Journalists On Eve Of Planned Anti-Government Rally
Source: NPR
As a foreign correspondent based in Colombia, I've made dozens of reporting trips to Venezuela. But today's has been the shortest by far. As soon as I stepped off the plane at the Caracas airport, immigration officials confiscated my passport, then ordered me to take the next flight back to Bogotá.
I'm not alone. Alongside me as we wait to board the plane are Marie-Eve Detoeuf of the French daily Le Monde and Cesar Moreno, a reporter for Colombia's Radio Caracol. A few days ago, an Al-Jazeera TV crew was turned back at the airport.
We had all been trying to get into Venezuela to cover a major demonstration planned for Thursday. Opposition leaders hope to put a million people in the streets in a show of rejection for the beleaguered socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro, which is dealing with a collapsing economy, the world's highest inflation rate and a plunging approval rating.
But much more is at stake on Thursday which may help explain the crackdown on foreign reporters.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/31/492152387/venezuela-turns-away-journalists-on-eve-of-planned-anti-government-rally
It seems the Maduro regime is doing everything it can to keep the world from knowing what will happen tomorrow. They've even arbitrarily arrested a bunch of opposition leaders based on trumped-up charges. Chavismo's #2 man (Diosdado Cabello) is even claiming that the opposition is hiding weapons and explosives in the UCAB (Universidad Catolica Andres Bello), one of the most prestigious universities in the world, to which the university directors obviously denied. The Chavista leadership is getting more and more desperate by the day, especially as less people show to their rallies, and especially after they lost by a huge margin the Venezuelan parliament after the elections on December 6th of last year. Good ol' Hugo's "legacy" seems to be in its final breath, and all it took to kill and bury it was his incompetent and corrupt subordinates to take its helm. Even regionally they are more and more alone. Now the only governments that truly support Venezuela are those of Ecuador and Bolivian, all the rest have moved on from the pseudo-leftist movement that started to overtake the region under Chavez's example. Even Cuba is opening up now more to the good ol' "empire" since they know that their former sugar daddy, Venezuela, can't support them financially now.
texasleo
(11,298 posts)Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)I mean, they managed to pay off over 7+ million Venezuelans to vote against the narcochavista regime last December
Archae
(46,262 posts)But since Maduro is "leftist," he gets a free pass.
I saw the same thing with Maduro's buddy Mugabe.
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)They'll support any regime, dictatorial or otherwise, as long as they say they're "anti-imperialist" and consider themselves leftist, even when what they practice shows a clear disregard of human rights and enrich their own personal pockets with millions through corruption. It's just incomprehensible.
Dreamer Tatum
(10,926 posts)No need to name names.
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)Perhaps I'm being overly cynical here but I can't help but feel photos of "a cache seized from within the UCAB" will be published far and wide and the conspirators arrested and secreted away for the good of the people.
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)All trumped-charges about how they "found explosives" in his car. He's one of the leaders of Voluntad Popular, which is the party formed by Leopoldo Lopez, the most popular political prisoner of the Chavista regime. Maduro and his band of narcodelinquents is doing everything they can to pin VP as a terrorist organization. But everyone can see through the bullshit. I'm looking at the Twitter feed from Venezuela, and the opposition's turnout has been MASSIVE while the counter-protest hosted by Maduro and co. has been an utter failure. They lost the people, and are scared shitless about it, hence why they're acting so irrationally and paranoid.