Venezuela’s Continuous Coup

[Judi Lynn]

8. I've been aware of "guarimbas" since Chavez was inaugurated. Hardly a "game."

From various sources:

Why the Media Are Giving a Free Pass to Venezuela’s Neo-Fascist Creeps

Roberto Lovato interviews intellectual heavyweight Luis García Britto about the role of the media in the current conflict in Venezuela.
Roberto Lovato April 1, 2014

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Look at the violent actions like grabbing and holding middle-class people prisoners in neighborhoods with barricades called guarimbas. I’ve never understood it. This “strategy” was “invented” by a Cuban-Venezuelan named Robert Alonso, brother of a Hollywood actress, Maria Conchita Alonso, who did a movie with Schwarzenegger. Mr. Alonso invented the guarimba as a way for a fractious minority to gain media attention by shutting off the street. They chuck trash or debris or waste so that their neighbors can’t get in our out. It gets media attention, but also immobilizes the right, a real political marvel. The guarimberos are cutting themselves off from the very people who could support the right. You hear the complaints, but not in the news reports. So what are you thinking, shutting down, burning down your own neighborhoods?

What do you think will happen?

We’ve seen a lot of this before. The cameras like the guarimbas, but, looked at from within the country, it’s a ludicrous political action. Insane. They tried this out before, in 2004, and it failed. They’ve had political messiahs like Leopoldo López, most of whom have been forgotten. You saw the future in the recent Carnaval celebrations. The right called for a boycott of Carnaval. The poor rejected their call and filled the beaches and the streets with their celebrations. Yet again, the international media didn’t take notice. The Colombian novelist William Ospina says that in the entire world, the rich celebrate and the poor protest. Only in Venezuela do the poor celebrate and the rich protest.

http://www.thenation.com/article/179125/why-media-are-giving-free-pass-venezuelas-neo-fascist-creeps#

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Roberto Alonso


Roberto Alonso (born August 23, 1950) is an anti- Castro activist in Florida, United States where he lives most of the time. He also owns a ranch in La Mata, Baruta, in Venezuela near the capital Caracas. On May 9, 2004 the political police of Venezuela (DISIP) announced the capture of 55 Colombians accused of being paramilitaries on Alonso's ranch. After this announcement, he secretly moved out of Venezuela to the US, where he is currently awaiting a petition of extradition made by the Venezuelan government.

Biography

Roberto "Robert" Alonso was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, on August 23rd 1950. He arrived in Venezuela in 1961 as a political refugee with his family, including his sister María Conchita Alonso, now a Hollywood movie star and his brother Ricardo, a prominent lawyer in Caracas.

Alonso has been an anti-Castro activist since 1972 and a journalist since 1980. He has written 5 books: "Los Generales de Castro", "Memorias de Cienfuegos", "Alertas", "Los Evangélicos" and "Regresando del Mar de la Felicidad". “Que la Bête Meure”, a novel written by Gerard de Villiers was inspired on the “Paramilitaries Affair”, related to Alonso and his farm, Daktari.

He is considered the father of “La Guarimba”, an uprising technique designed by him to overthrow Hugo Chavez. “La Guarimba” was enforced in Venezuela between the 27th of February and the 6th of March, 2004, some Venezuelans attended his call blocking the streets and paralyzing the country with burning garbage and tires. Alonso is against any negotiation with the Venezuelan authorities and promotes deposing the government by means of civil disobedience.

According to the Venezuelan regime, Alonso is a Cuban traitor, a terrorist who joined the CIA in 1972.

http://www.reference.com/browse/getting+some+shut+eye

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Violent Protests in Venezuela Fit a Pattern
Sunday, 23 February 2014 09:43
By Dan Beeton, Center for Economic Policy and Research | News Analysis

Venezuela’s latest round of violent protests appears to fit a pattern, and represents the tug-and-pull nature of the country’s divided opposition. Several times over the past 15 years since the late, former president Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, the political opposition has launched violent protests aimed at forcing the current president out of office. Most notably, such protests were a part of the April 2002 coup that temporarily deposed Chávez, and then accompanied the 2002/2003 oil strike. In February of 2004, a particularly radical sector of the opposition unleashed the “Guarimba”: violent riots by small groups who paralyzed much of the east of Caracas for several days with the declared goal of creating a state of chaos. As CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot has explained, then – as now – the strategy is clear: a sector of the opposition seeks to overturn the results of democratic elections. An important difference this time of course is that Venezuela has its first post-Chávez president, and a key part of the opposition’s strategy overall has been to depict Nicolás Maduro as a pale imitation of his predecessor and a president ill-equipped to deal with the country’s problems (many of which are exaggerated in the Venezuelan private media, which is still largely opposition-owned, as well as the international media).

More:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22043-violent-protests-in-venezuela-fit-a-pattern#

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Sat Jan 31, 2015, 04:11 PM

As non-right-wingers already know, these protests,called "guarimbas" (violent protests) are violent.

They have always been MEANT to be violent from the first day Hugo Chavez was in office.

Their very name means VIOLENT protest.

You can hope to mislead people for the rest of your life, but the truth will be known, regardless.

Posting the start of a letter to the President of UNASUR regarding "guarimba" as spear-headed and promoted from the first day of office for Hugo Chavez by Roberto Alonzo, a Cuban-Venezuelan "exile" who is currently holed up in Kendall, Florida after the Venzuelan government, tipped off by an informant discovered a group of over 100 Colombian paramilitaries living on Alonzo's ranch, Daktari outside Caracas, waiting to implement their plan to knock over a national guard armory and take over 1,000 rifles to use in an invasion of the Presidential Palace to kill Hugo Chavez.

Don't bother denying it, it was already confessed, and acknowledged.

When they were arrested and taken away, Roberto Alonzo fled to Florida, of course, to live among his political allies.

Here is a published letter explaining what has been happening under the "cute" term guarimba, named after a child's tag game.
It is of course still employed, as in the organized blocking of streets with bonfires, burning tires, and the use of wire across the streets to decapitate opposition motorcycle riders trying to pass through, a vicious, evil weapon they use to terrorize Venezuelans who stand by their votes for the Venezuelan government:

Miles de firmas lo respaldan

Doctor

Alí Rodríguez Araque
Secretary General UNASUR

Dear Secretary General:

Please receive our respectful, Bolivarian, revolutionary, patriotic and anti-imperialist greeting. Please make this greeting extensive to people working together with you in your important assignment in benefit of peace and the sovereignty of the South-American nations.
Currently in Venezuela, ultra-right-wing groups have developed an extreme and way to protest against the State and the Venezuelan people called “guarimba”. A guarimba is a lock-down sector of the city or neighbourhood. “Guarimba-people” or “guarimberos” block roads using different kinds of materials (barricades) and then proceed to control access of people and vehicles to such neighborhoods.

As part of the control they exercise, they proceed to charge a fee (in Bolivares), every time someone attempts to enter or exit the guarimba area. They not only control access, they specially target people using red-colour clothing, and even red-colour cars assuming they are Chavez's sympathizer (chavista). “Guarimbas” are a display of a dangerous lack of tolerance in Venezuela.

Under slogans such like “It is not a crime to think differently” they verbally and physically attack anyone they think may be a “chavista.” Their ideology is radically anti-socialist, anti-communist, and pro-USA. They demand “freedom” by denying freedom to others. They shout they are hungry but they burn-down trucks delivering food and food-storage places. They manifest not to have “freedom of expression” while being close-minded to other ways of thinking. They lay claim to not having security while committing criminal acts, including assassinations, and violent aggressions against civilians and security forces.

“Guarimberos” enjoy international support, including mainstream mass-media. Well-known artists, and politicians have expressed their support to the “guarimberos” in a very well organized international campaign of propaganda against the constitutional authorities of the country. This campaign has achieved such unbelievable distortions that they call “dictators” to free-elected authorities, who are exercising important restraints in dealing with guarimbas.

Current Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, is not only a convinced democrat, and a recently elected President with less than a year in power. Former President Jimmy Carter called the Venezuelan electoral system “the most perfect of the world.” Additionally, the Venezuelan constitution opens the possibility to a middle term referendum on his presidency. It seems crazy to think that some people around the world are supporting the deposition of an elected president, and in fact subjecting the Venezuelan people to a so called soft coup, to assassinations, and other types of human rights violations because Venezuela is practicing elevated forms of participatory democracy, which can set a bad example for other subjected countries.

In spite of a strong propaganda campaign talking about human-rights violations, it is the Venezuelan police force and civilians opposed to guarimbas who have suffered most of the deaths and injuries.

“Guarimberos” enjoy the services of a powerful buffet of lawyers. They also take advantage of weaknesses in the legal system where opposition judges can grant them freedom with ease should police capture them.

“Guarimberos” receive daily payments and armed protection from Colombian mercenaries. But they receive more than money, they have been subjected to a psychological campaign, which makes them believe that Cuba is damnation for the continent, and that to be subjected to USA's power is the only way to development and happiness. They march with the US flag and with an upside-down Venezuelan flag.

The propaganda campaign states that “guarimberos” are students. It is true, students do participate in protests, including pacific marches in support of guarimbas and demanding a change of government. Instead, “guarimberos” are criminals, period. They use the term “student” as a way of softening criminal acts, for public opinion sake. They attempt to present criminal acts as acts of revelry carried out by crazy youth to make their crimes more palatable. They have in fact among other crimes burned-down fifteen universities; several libraries; and natural forests. They have cut more than five thousand trees that they use to barricade neighbourhoods; and with no mercy they burn and kill cats and dogs in bonfires.

More:
https://nacla.org/article/how-venezuela%E2%80%99s-right-discovered-human-rights

(My earlier post #13,
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141002406 )