March 14, 2014

I've got information concerning El Salvador when Pres. Mauricio Funes' brother fought

for the side AGAINST the US-backed monsters there:

MILITARY ATROCITIES: El Salvador
By Megan Boehnke
Posted April 14, 2013 at 4 a.m.

In a 1981 civil war between the conservative government and leftist guerrillas, the United States backed the Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador, which rose to power following a coup d’etat two years earlier.

In December 1981, U.S.-backed troops visited the village of El Mozote, raping women and girls and interrogating the men using torture before slaughtering more than 800 people. The soldiers buried the bodies and burned down the buildings.

While The New York Times and Washington Post reported the massacre in January 1982, the U.S. and El Salvador governments dismissed the reports as biased and exaggerated and the journalists faced criticism from peers and conservative media-watch groups. In 1992, however, the Chapultepec Peace Accords included a United Nations-sanctioned Commission on Truth for El Salvador to investigate potential human rights abuses committed during the war. The Argentine forensic team began excavations that year, confirming the journalists’ earlier reports.

In 2011, the Salvadoran government formally apologized for the atrocity. In 2012, the inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the local government to investigate the massacre and bring those responsible to justice, ruling that amnesty laws do not apply.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/apr/14/military-atrocities-el-salvador/

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The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.

According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador-they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.

Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.

By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history-and it's got a lot of competition.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html

March 14, 2014

DU people of conscience have known the truth from the first.

There's no way you can hide behind your wild and reckless footwork, kicking up all the dust you can to cloud the issue. It's as plain as the nose somewhere on your body.

Quickly grabbed references from DU, already posted:

Lessons of the Paraguay Coup

Vinicius Souza and Maria Eugênia Sá
October 16, 2012

Co-opting nationalist soldiers to counter the "red threat" is no longer an essential condition for a successful political overthrow in Latin America. After the failed attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and the long deadlock caused by the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, the usual conservative forces—rural and industrial oligarchies, the leadership of the Catholic Church, mainstream media, and U.S. commercial interests—managed to refine the new model for overthrowing popular progressive leaders: parliamentary/media overthrow.

Before removing elected politicians from office, it is necessary to deconstruct their public image through denunciations, whether they be truthful or not, in the mainstream media. Also, lawmakers are enticed by profit sharing in deregulated international businesses in order to ensure a "coating" of legality in the process.

The first victim of this new kind of coup d'état was Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, a former bishop linked to liberation theology, who received more than 40 percent of the vote in 2008 to remove the Colorado Party from office after six decades, which included dictator Alfredo Stroessner's 35 years. During his visit to Brazil for the Rio+20, Lugo was surprised by the opening of an impeachment process (the 24th attempt in four years) that discharged him from office on June 29, in about 36 hours.

The accusations against the president are surreal, ranging from "poor administration of military installations" (due to the cession of a barrack in 2009 for holding a youth event) to incitement of invasion of properties, supporting leftist guerrillas and "attack on sovereignty" (with the signing of the new treaty for the use of Itaipu Hydroelectric Power Plant energy, which was bombarded in Brazil by the local press). Worst of all, though, is that the accusations don't need to be proven true since they are "of public notoriety … in conformity with the current public order," according to the Parliament's document.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11086537

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Paraguay's Forgotten Coup

Did a bloody confrontation over land rights lead to a coup against the country's former President Fernando Lugo?

People and Power Last updated: 26 Dec 2013 18:56

~ snip ~

By filmmaker Reed Lindsay

I first went to Paraguay in September 2002, and was shocked by the country's stark inequalities and seemingly brazen corruption.

One narrow street separated the Senate building from a vast slum of tin-roofed shanties. The economy was propped up by the smuggling of cigarettes and other contraband. And in the latest of a series of scandals, the president at the time was discovered to have been using a stolen BMW as his personal limousine. The brutal 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner had come to an end in 1989, but his Colorado Party was still firmly in power, causing many Paraguayans to question the benefits of their fledgling democracy.

But in the countryside, landless campesinos were taking full advantage of the dictatorship's demise. They were organising road-blocking protests and occupying land claimed by powerful businessmen and politicians, acts of defiance that would have been unthinkable under the iron-fisted rule of Stroessner.

However, as in many other Latin American countries, the battle over land in Paraguay played out in relative obscurity.

A decade later, the conflict between campesinos and landowners has taken centre stage politically like nowhere else in the hemisphere, bringing down a president and changing the course of a nation.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110824875

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Déjà Coup All Over Again
The U.S. is silent as Paraguay follows in the steps of Honduras
BY Jeremy Kryt

Diplomatic relations in Latin America were rocked by the ouster of Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo on June 22, after a hasty and controversial impeachment trial by the nation’s Congress.

Governments throughout the region denounced the proceedings as an “institutional coup,” and moved to sever ties with their soy-exporting, deeply impoverished neighbor. Meanwhile, in the capital of Asunción, schools shut down, shops closed their doors, and crowds of angry demonstrators took to the streets to protest the toppling of the first freely elected president in the country’s history.

Lugo is the third democratically-elected Latin American leader to be targeted for regime change in the last three years. A police-led uprising against the president of Ecuador was successfully put down in September 2010. A year earlier, in June 2009, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by soldiers and flown out of the country. As in Paraguay, the Honduran Congress was used to legitimize a puppet government.

A moderate leftist and a former Catholic priest, Lugo had been dragged before Congress on vague charges of “poor performance.” Given 24 hours to prepare a defense, he had just two hours to present his case before the opposition-controlled Senate. The verdict was delivered almost without debate, and the man known as “the Bishop of the Poor” was told to clean out his office—replaced by Vice President Federico Franco, a member of the far-Right opposition. ..................(more)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101639412

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In the Shadow of Paraguay's Coup: Social Movements Mobilize for Democracy

http://truth-out.org/news/item/10757-in-the-shadow-of-paraguays-coup-social-movements-mobilize-for-democracy

Rain or shine, every Thursday in Asunción, Paraguay, activists gather to protest the right-wing government of Federico Franco, which came to power in a June 22 parliamentary coup against left-leaning president Fernando Lugo. These weekly protests represent a new spirit and strategy of protest in post-coup Paraguay.

The coup gave birth to new corporate agreements, repression of citizens' rights and crackdowns on press freedoms. It also unwittingly created a new panorama of leftist social struggles and movements.
These movements for democracy have risen up against the coup government and the renewed state and corporate assaults on human rights, the environment, and small farmers. Some activists are protesting politically motivated layoffs while others are demanding a new constitution. Beyond questioning the Franco government, these movements are putting forth a progressive agenda in the debate about what kind of country Paraguayans want, regardless of who is in power.

Collective Resistance

"What we are seeing are self-organized protests that are organized collectively," Gabriela Schvartzman Muñoz, the spokeswoman for Movimiento Kuña Pyrenda, a socialist and feminist political movement which organizes the Thursday protests in the capital, explained in a phone interview from Asunción.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11084635

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A soft coup in South America

July 12, 2012
A soft coup in South America

The questionable removal of President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay by the country’s Senate, nine months before the end of his five-year-term in April 2013, raises questions about the state of democracy in South America, much as the coup in Honduras did three years ago for Central America. For a region with a recent transition to democracy, this is worrisome. For a country like Paraguay, dominated until 2008 by 61 years of uninterrupted rule by the Colorado party of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), that veritable archetype of the Latin American dictator, this is especially so.

Twenty-odd years into democratic transition and consolidation in Latin America, we were hearing that democracy had stabilised, that the concern was no longer of coups, but of the quality of democracy and the latter’s ability to deliver the goods and services citizens expected. Free and fair elections were taking place, alternation in power was the rule and civil liberties and press freedom were respected. The real challenge now, we were told, was how to move from these “low-intensity democracies”, to governments that ensured not just the respect of political and civil rights, but also those of social and economic ones. Latin America’s economic boom over the past decade and the social policies of some governments around the region were starting to make that happen, in a part of the world that continues to have the most unequal distribution of income anywhere.

~snip~
So, how did Paraguay fare under President Lugo? Was the country going down the drain, to “hell in a hand-basket” under the ministrations of the good bishop?

Well, not really. Although hit, like every other country, by the Great Recession of 2008-2009, in 2010, the Paraguayan economy grew 14.5 per cent, one of the highest rates in the world, comparable to the rates clocked by Singapore or some of the Gulf Emirates, and Paraguay’s highest in 30 years. It grew again at 6 per cent in 2011, and prospects are upbeat for this year as well. In other words, the country is booming, and doing better than it ever did in the past. This is largely driven by the cultivation of soya, of which Paraguay has become the fourth largest producer in the world, with 8.4 million tonnes in 2011, and some $1.5 billion in exports, much of it to China. President Lugo, aware of the significance of the Indian market for soya as well, had visited India in May. It is said that soya has become so significant that it has replaced smuggling as Paraguay’s main economic activity.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11084063

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Paraguay: coup backers push for US military bases
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Mon, 07/02/2012 - 23:30.

A group of US generals reportedly visited Paraguay for a meeting with legislators on June 22 to discuss the possibility of building a military base in the Chaco region, which borders on Bolivia in western Paraguay. The meeting coincided with the Congress's sudden impeachment the same day of left-leaning president Fernando Lugo, who at times has opposed a US military presence in the country. In 2009 Lugo cancelled maneuvers that the US Southern Command was planning to hold in Paraguay in 2010 as part of its "New Horizons" program.

More bases in the Chaco are "necessary," rightwing deputy José López Chávez, who presides over the Chamber of Deputies' Committee on Defense, said in a radio interview. Bolivia, governed by socialist president Evo Morales, "constitutes a threat for Paraguay, due to the arms race it's developing," according to López Chávez. Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over the sparsely populated Chaco from 1932 to 1935, the last major war over territory in South America.

The US has been pushing recently to set up military bases in the Southern Cone, including one in Chile and one in Argentina's northeastern Chaco province, which is close to the Paraguayan Chaco, although it doesn't share a border with Paraguay. Unidentified military sources say that the US has already built infrastructure for its own troops in Paraguayan army installations near the country's borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil; for example, an installation in Mariscal Estigarribia, some 250 km from Bolivia, has a runway almost 3.8 km long, in a country with a very limited air force. (La Jornada, Mexico, July 1, from correspondent in Argentina)

The Chaco is thought to have some oil reserves. Richard González, a representative of Texas-based Crescent Global Oil, announced on June 28 that the company was investing $10 million in the region, starting with exploratory drilling in September or October of this year. The announcement came after Crescent's representatives met with Federico Franco, who was Lugo's vice president before being appointed president by Congress. Supporters of Lugo's ouster claim the investment by the US company could ease Paraguay's total dependence on foreign oil. Venezuela, which supplies 30% of Paraguay's oil, cut off shipments after the removal of the elected president. (Prensa Latina, June 29; La Nación, Paraguay, June 29)

http://www.ww4report.com/node/11243

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March 13, 2014

Backdrop to a Coup: Rio de Janeiro in 1964

March 12, 2014
Backdrop to a Coup

Rio de Janeiro in 1964

by MICHAEL UHL


Rio de Janeiro in 1964 remained the de facto seat of the Brazilian government and home to its corps of international diplomats. Despite the fact that Brasilia, the modernist architectural ghost town erected in the scrublands of the country’s isolated interior was designated Brazil’s new capital in 1960, the foot dragging went on for years before the embassies and the governing bureaucrats accepted the inevitability that they would have to, not just occasionally commute between Rio and the new capital, but actually decamp and live there. Think of the founders and the whole apparatus of State being forced to abandon cosmopolitan Philadelphia in 1800 for swampy, malarial Washington. By 1964 standards, going to Brasilia, today Brazil’s 4th largest city was worse.

Thus, when the coup unfolded on March 31, 1964 that brought down the democratically elected government of Joao (Jango) Goulart, American diplomats were still pulling strings on behalf of the Putschists from their comfortable embassy board rooms on the Avenida Woodrow Wilson in downtown Rio. And yours truly, a wet behind the ears undergraduate at the local Jesuit university for a year, in a Zelig-like coincidence, witnessed the military takeover from a window facing Copacabana beach in a building where the deposed president himself had an apartment.

Michael Uhl is the author of Vietnam Awakening.

This article originally appeared on In the Mindfield.

The dictatorship and its afterglow endured a quarter century until the direct election by popular vote of Fernando Collor de Mello in 1989, following the creation a year earlier of a new constitution, by far Brazil’s most democratic. Even then the military hovered in the wings having inserted into the new charter, according to historian Daniel Aarao Reis, the authoritarian wedge “of the military’s right to intervene in the national political life if they are summoned by the head of one of the three branches of government.”

Now, with twenty five years of democratic governments under their belt, and a flow of peaceful transitions from one presidential term to the next – including the resignation of President Collor under investigation for corruption – a Brazilian electorate many times larger than the one that brought Jango to office in 1961, might finally imagine itself immune from any future threat to democratic rule by the military, despite the menacing clause that lies dormant in their constitution.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/12/rio-de-janeiro-in-1964/

March 13, 2014

Human Radiation Experiments in the Pacific

March 11, 2014
Bravo at Sixty

Human Radiation Experiments in the Pacific

by GLENN ALCALAY


” . . . protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources; protect the health of the inhabitants . . .” (1)

According to Marshallese folklore a half-bad and half-good god named Etao was associated with slyness and trickery. When bad things happened people knew that Etao was behind it. “He’s dangerous, that Etao,” some people said. “He does bad things to people and then laughs at them.”(2) Many in the Marshall Islands now view their United States patron as a latter day Etao.



Castle-Bravo

Sixty years ago this month the American Etao unleashed its unprecedented fury at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It was nine years after the searing and indelible images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the world first learned about the dangers of radioactive fallout from hydrogen bombs that use atomic Hiroshima-sized bombs as triggers.

Castle-Bravo, the first in a series of megaton-range hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll on March first of 1954, was nicknamed “the shrimp” by its designer – Edward Teller – because it was the first deliverable thermonuclear weapon in the megaton range in the U.S. nuclear holster. We had beaten the Soviets in this key area of nuclear weapons miniaturization when the Cold War was hot and the United States did not need to seek approval from anybody, especially the Marshallese entrusted to them through the U.N.

At fifteen megatons – 1,000 times the Hiroshima A-bomb – the Bravo behemoth was a fission-fusion-fission (3-F) thermonuclear bomb that spread deadly radioactive fallout over an enormous swath of the central Pacific Ocean, including the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utrik in the Marshalls archipelago. The downwind people of Rongelap (120 miles downwind of Bikini) and Utrik (300 miles east of Bikini) were evacuated as they suffered from the acute effects of radiation exposure.

As an international fallout controversy reached a crescendo, a hastily called press conference was held in Washington in mid-March 1954 with Eisenhower and AEC chair Admiral Lewis ("nuclear energy too cheap to meter&quot Strauss, his Administration’s top lieutenant in nuclear matters.

Adm. Lewis Strauss: “I’ve just returned from the Pacific Proving Grounds of the AEC where I witnessed the second part of a test series of thermonuclear weapons . . . For shot one (Bravo) the wind failed to follow the predictions, but shifted south of that line and the little islands of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utrik were in the edge of the path of the fallout . . . The 236 Marshallese natives appeared to me to be well and happy . . .The results, which the scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore had hoped to obtain from these two tests (Bravo and Union) were fully realized. An enormous potential has been added to our military posture.” Strauss added the caveat that “the medical staff on Kwajalein have advised us that they anticipate no illness, barring of course, diseases which may be hereafter contracted.” (3)

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/11/human-radiation-experiments-in-the-pacific/

March 13, 2014

One-Third of Colombia’s Newly-Elected Senators Have Paramilitary Ties

One-Third of Colombia’s Newly-Elected Senators Have Paramilitary Ties
Analysis by Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, Mar 13 2014 (IPS) - In July 2004, when paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso was demobilising, he admitted to the Colombian parliament that the illegal extreme rightwing forces controlled 35 percent of the seats. Ten years later the situation is very similar: one-third of the new senate, where congressional power mainly resides, is allegedly linked to the paramilitaries.

These are the conclusions of the non-governmental Peace and Reconciliation Foundation’s monitoring of candidates in the congressional elections of Sunday Mar. 9.

Thirty-three candidates related or allegedly related to paramilitary forces active in the Colombian armed conflict were elected to the senate, equivalent to 32.4 percent of the 102 seats. In the lower chamber, 37 were elected, or 22.3 percent of the 166 seats, the Foundation said.

They are the heirs of politicians related to paramilitarism (the parapoliticians, in local terms, dozens of whom have been tried and convicted), or they are alleged to have direct links with the criminal organisations that took over after the paramilitaries demobilised under then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The specialised web site VerdadAbierta.com (OpenTruth) says that 15 politicians elected to the senate were under investigation for allegedly making pacts with the paramilitaries, while 11 under the same suspicion won seats in the lower chamber.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/03/one-third-colombias-newly-elected-senators-paramilitary-ties/

March 13, 2014

In Defense of Venezuela

In Defense of Venezuela
Posted: 02/20/2014 1:53 pm EST Updated: 02/21/2014 9:59 am EST

The U.S. media, echoing the sentiments of the U.S. government, is openly encouraging violent regime change in Venezuela. An emblematic story from yesterday was aired in what is considered a "liberal" media source, National Public Radio (NPR). In short, this piece featured claims of Venezuela at the precipice of "economic collapse," and spoke in glowing terms of the opposition's hopes for a "coup" to overthrow President Maduro. This type of reporting is not only irresponsible, but it is deeply misinformed.

While the U.S. government and media have been portraying Venezuela as a basket case ever since Hugo Chavez took office in 1999, this is far from the truth. Indeed, if we look at the UN's Human Development Index, which measures several key indicators of the health of a country's citizenry (e.g., life expectancy, income, education, equality), we see that Venezuela has actually experienced a steady growth in such human development indicators since Chavez took office with a total Human Rights Index score of .662 in 2000, and rising to .748 in 2012. See, Table 2 at p. 149 of the UN Report. Significantly, Venezuela had a huge relative increase in this index during that time, jumping nine (9) rankings in the HDI chart from 80 to number 71 in the world.

If we compare this to Venezuela's neighbor, and chief U.S. ally in this hemisphere, Colombia, that country has been stuck at position 91 in the world during that time same time period. Moreover, in terms of human rights, there is no comparison between these two countries with Colombia, one the largest recipients of U.S. military support in the world, having the dubious distinction of leading the world in forced disappearances at 50,000 and internally displaced peoples at over 5 million.

Moreover, it is the very poor and those of darker skin tone who have benefited most from the improvements since the election of Hugo Chavez, and it is they - by the way, the vast majority of the Venezuelan population -- who support Chavez and his successor the most. Of course, the U.S. government and its compliant media openly side with the white, wealthy elite - such as Kenyon and Harvard trained right wing leader Leopoldo Lopez -- against Venezuela's poor in their current cheer leading for the opposition. Again, the NPR story is notable in this regard.

Without irony, the media fulminates about Venezuela's alleged lack of democracy (again, ignoring Colombia's death squad violence against its own population) to justify its open support of Venezuela's elite opposition. However, as Chilean writer Pedro Santander recently put it so well:

Regarding the supposed "democratic deficit of the Venezuelan regime", the facts speak for themselves. Since 1998 there have been four national plebiscites, four presidential elections, and eleven parliamentary, regional, and municipal elections. Venezuela is the Latin American country with the highest number of elections and it also has an automatic electoral system (much more modern than Chile's one), described by Jimmy Carter, who has observed 92 elections in all continents, as "the best system in the world".

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/in-defense-of-venezuela_b_4824494.html

March 13, 2014

Uruguay planning to sell legally cloned marijuana by year’s end

Source: Agence France-Presse

Uruguay planning to sell legally cloned marijuana by year’s end
By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, March 12, 2014 20:57 EDT

Uruguay plans to begin legal marijuana sales of pot grown under government control by year’s end, using cloned plants, President Jose Mujica said Wednesday.

Mujica, speaking to a local newspaper during a visit to Chile, said the process was complex because it was regulated by the market.

“We try to use what we have,” Mujica told La Tercera daily, referring to land where the marijuana would be grown.
“It will be grown in one place, probably in an armed forces’ facility. There will probably be private producers, but under certain conditions.”

Predicting that sales would begin in December or January, Mujica said the marijuana would be cloned to reproduce the same genetic code, which would give the plants a clear identifier for tracking.

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/12/uruguay-planning-to-sell-legally-cloned-marijuana-by-years-end/

March 13, 2014

A Manufactured Crisis: Venezuela is Not Occupy

March 12, 2014

A Manufactured Crisis

Venezuela is Not Occupy

by ROGER D. HARRIS

With demonstrating students in the streets confronting state security forces, the recent unrest and violence in Venezuela superficially bears a resemblance to the Occupy Movement that began in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 2011. But there the similarity ends.

Manufactured Crisis

The overwhelming character of Occupy was its spontaneity, unpredictability, and certainly its independence from corporate or government influence. Occupy appealed to and was supported by the disposed and marginalized. The Venezuelan unrest has been the opposite. Building on genuine popular discontent in an already highly polarized context, the recent violence in Venezuela has all the elements of a manufactured crisis.

To find a script for the violence to come in Venezuela, one need only go to the Brookings Institute’s January 23rd memo1 to President Obama suggesting “inciting a violent popular reaction” could “oust the radicals and president.” In the polite doublespeak of the Washington consensus, the memo deplores violence at the same time it welcomes its possibilities including a “traditional coup” in Venezuela.

The source of this memo is not a fringe right-wing nut-shop. The Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute is funded in major part by the U.S. government and is ranked as the most influential think tank in the U.S. and in the world.2 Some 98% of Brookings’s employees’ political donations went to Democrats.3 The positions of the Brookings Institute are generally considered reflective of official U.S. policy, which is to achieve regime change in Venezuela despite the democratic will of its people.

Sabotage by the Wealthy

Venezuela is experiencing serious problems: rampant inflation, scarcities of basic consumer goods such as toilet paper, and one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. Crime and consumer product shortages are complex problems deeply rooted in Venezuela’s history and the predominant role of oil in its economy. Neither President Chavez nor President Maduro’s governments have been fully able to resolve these problems; both committed missteps as well as had their efforts blunted by individual corruption within state agencies. But in major part, the Venezuelan people have been victims of deliberate sabotage by elite domestic elements backed by the U.S. Unlike the under-funded Occupy Movement, the opposition in Venezuela has enjoyed hundreds of millions of U.S. aid dollars according to WikiLeaks documents.4

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/12/venezuela-is-not-occupy/

March 13, 2014

How Florida Reactionaries Undermine Venezuelan Democracy

March 12, 2014
The Anti-Cuba Privateers

How Florida Reactionaries Undermine Venezuelan Democracy

by W.T. WHITNEY


Remember the Tonkin Gulf Resolution? In 1964 that joint congressional resolution propelled the United States into war lasting nine years. Resolution 488, passed by House of Representatives by a 393 – 1 vote on March 4, is a moral and practical equivalent. Its title was “Supporting the people of Venezuela as they protest peacefully for democracy, a reduction in violent crime and calling for an end to recent violence.”

The vote took place under a provision known as “suspension of the rules” which Congress uses for “legislation of non-controversial bills.” The sole dissenter was a Kentucky Republican. Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced R 488. In Florida she represents the 27th congressional district, part of Miami-Dade County. All but unanimous backing for the resolution is reprehensible – for three reasons.

One, the resolution did not tell the truth. It speaks of Venezuelans “protesting peacefully.” Actually as of March 7 protesters had shot five people dead. Three were soldiers. Six deaths are attributed to opposition roadblocks, 30 more because roadblocks prevented access to emergency services. Soldiers had killed three people, one a government supporter. When protests started in Táchira, Mérida, and Caracas in early February, police did not intervene until government offices and police cars were being attacked and burned and until food and medical supply trucks were blocked. The government arrested officers who violated orders to to act with restraint.

The resolution suggests Venezuela is undemocratic. Over 15 years, however, governments there have won 17 out of 18 national elections. They are elections that for fairness and efficiency are “the best in the world,” according to the Carter Center in Georgia. Press freedom abounds: Venezuela’ predominately privately-owned newspapers and television outlets disseminate opposition viewpoints. Their television broadcasts reach 90 percent of viewers nationally.

Real democracy means uplift for everybody. In Venezuela poverty dropped from 50 percent in 1998 to 32 percent in 2011. Social spending increased from 11 percent of the GDP to 24 percent. Pensioners rose from 500,000 to 2.5 million; people finishing college, from 600,000 to 2.3 million. High school enrollment increased 42 percent. Children malnutrition and infants deaths have fallen dramatically. Every year the minimum wage has increased 10 – 20 percent.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/12/how-florida-reactionaries-undermine-venezuelan-democracy/

March 12, 2014

A Coup in Venezuela Means Another Victory For Corruption

A Coup in Venezuela Means Another Victory For Corruption
Posted: 03/12/2014 5:27 pm

The United States and Canada have plenty of reasons to be afraid of the (oil rich) Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, so they are doing their utmost to address their perceived problem.

The US, in particular, fears that Venezuela's social democracy will set a dangerous precedent, and that, if allowed, other countries will follow suit. They also fear the status quo, wherein they are denied control over Venezuela's oil reserves (the world's largest).

The Bolivarian revolution itself, initiated by late president Hugo Chavez in 1998 and continuing with president Nicolas Maduro, is emblematic of the US' s "problem", even as the legitimacy of the revolution is beyond dispute:

Chavez, who died of cancer on Tuesday, March 5, 2013, won 18 of 19 contested elections in a country whose electoral system was described by former US president Jimmy Carter as "the best in the world".

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mark-taliano/venezuela-politics_b_4948047.html