Dear Codepink Activist, You're Right

I feel for you, I really do. In the last few days, following your action to protect the Venezuelan embassy in Washington from opposition-supporting expats, you’ve become the focal point of a hugely visceral campaign of abuse by hundreds of thousands of people you don’t even know.

Your embassy sit-ins touched a raw nerve in the Venezuelan diaspora. You’ve become a kind of alternate focal point of a startling hatred built out of the raw, unprocessed pain of Venezuelans who’ve had to leave our country because the revolution you support made it impossible for us to survive there. I get it how staggering that must be, and I accept that, in your own way, you’re trying to stand up for a vision of social justice and the radical transformation of an unjust system.

In the testy exchanges you’ve kept having with your diaspora tormentors this week, one trope shows up again and again: the people it comes from don’t look like everyday Venezuelans. Their skin is lighter than most Venezuelans, their English better, their clothes more expensive looking. Real Venezuelans, you keep telling us, are nothing like the elites hurling abuse at you for protecting the Venezuelan embassy on behalf of the socialist revolution.

And, you know what? You’re right.

more @ https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2019/05/04/dear-codepink-activist-youre-right/

Venezuela and the Half-Truths of Noam Chomsky

Published on March 25, 2019
Venezuela and the Half-Truths of Noam Chomsky
written by Clifton Ross

As a young socialist, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky and his late collaborator Edward S. Herman helped to convert me to the worldview of the anti-Imperialist Left. I remained a member of this political tendency, for whom Chomsky has become an unrivaled intellectual hero, for most of my adult life. That is, until I was confronted by the gap between its doctrines and an unfolding reality I really knew something about.

I continue to respect some of Chomsky’s writing on topics such as the devastation of East Timor by Indonesia. But the more one knows about a subject, the more apparent the selectivity of Chomsky’s analysis becomes. When Chomsky argued that the 9/11 atrocities were morally equivalent to President Clinton’s rocket strike on the Al Shifa medicine factory in Sudan (and that “we” should therefore hesitate before judging “them”), his erstwhile admirer Christopher Hitchens observed that, “Noam Chomsky does not rise much above the level of half-truth.” This, Hitchens went on to complain, had “lately become his hallmarks.”

In retrospect, a writer as intelligent as Hitchens might have noticed this habit earlier. In Chomsky’s writing on Cambodia (which Hitchens defended), the Balkans, and various other conflicts, complexity was reliably collapsed into a simplistic indictment of the West in general, and America in particular (irrespective of the sitting president’s political affiliation). Simplicity can be seductive, especially when it encourages moral outrage, and it wasn’t until I saw Chomsky’s half-truths deployed in defense of the Bolivarian regime that I began to question Chomsky’s honesty and interest in objectivity.

Today, Chomsky heads a list of radical academics calling themselves the Committee to Save Venezuela who signed and circulated an open letter in January “opposing the US-backed coup attempt” there. “The United States government,” the letter sternly begins, “must cease interfering in Venezuela’s internal politics, especially for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s government.” On March 2, 2019, Chomsky appeared on KFPK Los Angeles’s Ralph Nader Radio Hour. After 45 minutes of congenial chat about the malevolence of America, Israel, and powerful corporations, Nader turned to the topic of Venezuela.

more @ https://quillette.com/2019/03/25/venezuela-and-the-half-truths-of-noam-chomsky/

VENEZUELA'S MADURO GOVERNMENT CIRCUMVENTS CONTITUTION BY ALLOWING MINING ON INDIGENOUS LAND

Gold and Grief in Venezuela’s Violent South

Across swathes of southern Venezuela, army units, Colombian guerrillas and crime syndicates jostle for control over gold mines funnelling hard currency to President Nicolás Maduro’s government. Outside powers should stop considering military intervention and instead help broker a peaceful transition in Venezuela, lest chaos ensue.

What’s new??Venezuelan crime syndicates and Colombian guerrilla groups are creating new threats across southern Venezuela as they compete for control of the region’s valuable mineral resources. Tensions and violence have spiked in recent months, and could worsen in the midst of Venezuela’s presidential crisis.

...

Boosting the mining industry in Venezuela’s southern regions was problematic from the outset. Maduro signed the Mining Arc decree without consultation with or approval by the opposition-controlled National Assembly, as required under the Constitution. Indeed the Assembly voted to repeal the decree in June 2016, on the grounds that it had not been consulted, and argued that the 112,000 square kilometre mining zone overlaps with several protected areas such as forest reserves and national parks, including a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Canaima National Park. Nor did the government carry out obligatory socio-environmental impact studies or consult with indigenous communities beforehand, in accordance with Venezuela’s constitution.

More: https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/venezuela/073-gold-and-grief-venezuelas-violent-south

Editorials and other articles:
https://www.google.com/search?q=venezuela+mining+on+indigenous+land&oq=venezuela+mining+on+indigenous+land

Polica Nacional Bolivariana sets trucks with humanitarian aid on fire

Venezuela Denies EU Lawmakers Entry Given 'Conspiratorial Motives'

By Reuters
Feb. 17, 2019

CARACAS — Venezuela denied a group of European Parliament deputies entry into the country on Sunday, arguing they had "conspiratorial motives" for flying to Caracas in the throes of a political crisis.

The European Parliament last month joined a slew of Western nations in recognizing Venezuelan opposition chief Juan Guaido as interim head of state after President Nicolas Maduro won a second term in an election last year that critics denounced as a sham.

The four deputies from the center-right European People's Party (EPP) were traveling to Venezuela to meet with Guaido, one of them said in a video distributed via social media.

"They have retained our passports, they haven't communicated the reason for our expulsion," Esteban González Pons said.

more @ https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/02/17/world/americas/17reuters-venezuela-politics-eu.html

Maduro kicks off Venezuela's 'most important military drills in history' (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro has launched what he described as the ‘most important’ drills in history, preparing to repel any potential invasion after the US and its allies backed self-proclaimed ‘interim president’ Guaido.

The drills will last until February 15 and are set to become the largest military exercises the country has held in its 200-year history, President Maduro reiterated, as he arrived at Guaicaipuro Fort in Miranda State.

“We must prepare to defend [Venezuela's] sovereignty, territorial integrity, independence,” the elected head of state proclaimed, apparently fearing that Washington’s calls for a regime change and its aggressive backing of opposition parliament speaker Juan Guaido might escalate into a direct military invasion.

Guaido, who proclaimed himself ‘interim president’ of Venezuela in January and got the immediate blessing of the United States and its allies in Europe and across Latin America, did not rule out that he might have to make a “controversial” decision to “authorize” a “humanitarian” intervention. The Trump administration also said all options remain on the table to rid Venezuelans of the “oppressive dictator” Maduro.

more @ https://www.rt.com/news/451155-maduro-venezuela-historic-military-drills/

Stop parroting the propaganda of Maduro's regime in Venezuela

By Francisco Toro February 4 at 5:04 PM

Desperate for control of Venezuela’s oil, the Trump administration is going all-out to install a far-right puppet regime in Caracas by backing a military coup.

If you’ve followed the Venezuelan crisis, you’ve read some variant of this line a dozen times this week. It’s important — crucial — that you understand it for what it is: Venezuelan regime propaganda, carefully designed to resonate with reasonable people around the globe, for the sole purpose of keeping a dictatorship in power.

It’s effective because it’s enticing.

To millions of Americans on the center and the left scarred by the memories of past U.S. overseas adventures gone wrong, the message resonates with deeply held political ideals. To many Latin Americans schooled on stories of a hundred years of U.S. imperial overreach in the region, it strikes a deep chord of injured national pride.

more @ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/04/stop-parroting-propaganda-maduros-regime-venezuela/

Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled

Today, Venezuela is the sick man of Latin America, buckling under chronic shortages of everything from food and toilet paper to medicine and freedom. Riots and looting have become commonplace, as hungry people vent their despair while the revolutionary elite lives in luxury, pausing now and then to order recruits to fire more tear gas into crowds desperate for food.

Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.

Chávez was either admired as a progressive visionary who gave voice to the poor or dismissed as just another third-world buffoon. Reality was more complex than that: Chávez pioneered a new playbook for how to bask in global admiration even as he hollowed out democratic institutions on the sly.

Step one was his deft manipulation of elections. Chávez realized early that, as long as he kept holding and winning elections, nobody outside Venezuela would ask too many questions about what he did with his power in the interim. And so he mastered the paradoxical art of destroying democracy one election at a time.

more @ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/hugo-chavezs-long-con/2016/07/01/26e8b690-3f8c-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html

Radical tourists have been deluded pimps for Venezuela

Radical tourism is no different from sex tourism. In both the political and the coital, the inhabitants of the rich world go to the poor to find the thrills no one will give them at home.

Western men and women with nothing to recommend them except their wealth escape their sexless lives and buy prostitutes, who are not like those indifferent boys and girls who pass them in the street. They will play their part and pretend for a few hours or days to find the westerners sexually desirable. Sex tourist guides, in print and online, feed visitors’ illusions. In the Caribbean, readers are told that prostitutes aren’t prostitutes, just “nice” girls looking for a good time. In Thailand, bar girls aren’t exploited but engaged in a “fair trade”.

Pleasures sated, the tourists fly away from the poverty and the corruption. The lies they have lived and paid others to live on their behalf don’t bother them. They never noticed human trafficking in Thailand or chronic poverty in the Dominican Republic.

For their part, political tourists are stuck in a sexless marriage to a Britain that offers them no excitement. The proletariat has refused their entreaties to revolt. Their radical fantasies are never fulfilled. So they, too, scour the world. For years, the top radical tourist destination, the political equivalent of the Pattaya Beach brothel, has been Chavista Venezuela. Hollywood stars, the leaders of the British Labour party and Spanish “popular resistance”, and every half-baked pseudo-left intellectual from Noam Chomsky to John Pilger has engaged in a left orientalism as they wallowed in “the other’s” exotic delights.

more @ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/22/radical-leftwing-tourists-pimps-dictatorship-hugo-chavez-venezuela-sex-tourism

Venezuela under 'economic emergency' as court gives Maduro decree powers

Venezuela’s supreme court has overruled the opposition-controlled congress and granted broad decree powers to President Nicolás Maduro.

Congress in January had refused to approve Maduro’s declaration of an “economic emergency”. The court ruled in a decision made public on Thursday night that Maduro did not need congressional approval after all.

The court said the declaration of emergency was now in effect, granting Maduro greatly expanded authority over the struggling economy for 60 days.

Critics of Venezuela’s socialist administration immediately denounced the move as unconstitutional and tantamount to a coup.

more @ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/12/venezuela-under-economic-emergency-as-court-gives-maduro-decree-powers