"President" Tracksuit has gone off the deep end in Venezuela

Russia jr.

 

We will just have to see what they do. As I have said before in the other thread, this is not something new for Venezuelan politics.

The Chavistas are learning the same harsh lesson that previous administrations have learned: if you have an extraction economy which has failed to diversify and is wholly dependent on one sort of resource, you are just asking to have sky high inflation and an increasingly dissatisfied populace.

Venezuela has always had leaders of dubious competence and integrity who have not respected human rights. The question has always been "who benefits" and how bad are the abuses. Despite how terrible the Chavez/Maduro administrations have looked like recently from a economic and human rights perspective, its still likely not as bad as it was before. The inflation rate is higher than it was in the 80s and mid 90s but only in the last year and a half as oil prices have taken a nose-dive. On the human rights end, Chavez/Maduro have actually done a better job than prior administrations at not murdering people for engaging in protests. I think the official number for people killed while protesting the Chavista government is around 50. On the other hand, just as recently as 1989, before the Chavistas took power, the Venezuelan government massacred between 286 and 2000 people engaged in protests and the government took away even more rights:

As weird as it sounds coming from America where we actually have freedoms and the government for all its faults is one of the best in the world, Venezuela has always been screwed up. The only question is who is at the top of the pile and who is extracting the most value out of their export economy. Here in Houston, a lot of us work with Venezuelans who were on the wrong side of the Chavista government, people who prefer the old regime and would like things to go back to the halcyon days that never were because it was what they were used to. The old regime was finally brought down by rampant dissatisfaction due to poor quality of living by most Venezuelans as well as a brutal human rights record. I expect the Chavistas to suffer the same fate. The pendulum will just keep swinging. My hope for their country is that slowly and slowly they will progress with both the left and the right over time doing a better job for the majority of Venezuelan people.

 

Great post especially the paragraph in bold. Repped

 

An excellent post, False. Now I'm waiting to see if glynch will do his usual defending of the regime, blaming the problems there on the United States and the old regime, or if he's finally come to the realization that yes, the old regime was a mess, to put it mildly, but the "new regime" is turning into something no sane person would want as a government, in my humble opinion.

I pity the people of Venezuela. Disagree with the regime? You are accused of "plotting against the government." An example? This happened last month. It would be like the Obama administration arresting the mayor of New York and accusing him of treason because he disagreed with government policy. This is from that right-wing British rag, The Guardian. (yes, that was sarcasm)



Venezuelan intelligence agents have arrested the opposition leader and Caracas metropolitan mayor Antonio Ledezma, witnesses said, after accusations he was involved in a coup attempt against President Nicolas Maduro.

The agents took him from his office in the banking district of Caracas without giving a reason, said witnesses including an opposition legislator and Ledezma’s wife.

“I just saw how they took Ledezma out of his office as if he were a dog,” said opposition legislator Ismael Garcia. “They broke down the doors without an arrest warrant.”

Reports of the arrest set off protests around the city, where people spontaneously banged pots from their windows or tapped rhythms on their car horns amid rush hour traffic. Hundreds gathered in front of the headquarters of the intelligence service police to vent their anger.

Ledezma won election in 2008, beating a member of the socialist party led by the late President Hugo Chavez.

The ruling party subsequently transferred nearly all of Ledezma’s powers, including control of police and schools, to a newly created government entity. Ledezma responded by accusing the government of marginalizing elected officials and staged a hunger strike that drew international attention.

His arrest on Thursday adds to tensions one year after the start of three months of opposition demonstrations demanding the resignation of Maduro, whose popularity rating has tumbled amid a recession and shortages of food and consumer goods.

Violence around the 2014 protests left dozens dead.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/20/venezuela-agents-arrest-caracas-mayor

 

3...2...1...glynch

 

False's take is about right, but Venezuela shows what often happens in societies of traditional income equality and plutocracy. When the people do take power, the response is often extreme in the other direction. The poorer leadership is always paranoid of moneyed class' ability to buy power and control over the national asset. The right wing coup de tat' has a 100 year history in Central and South America, usually backed by US corporate interest, so paradoxically, the concentration of power into the hands of a few seems from their perspective like the only way to insulate power from the plutocracy.

Democracy requires a balance between self-interest and the greater good. And the free exchange of ideas and criticisms. A lack of trust and goodwill between parties yields tyranny.

 

It is a shame that the US is backing the undemocratic forces in Venezuela who don't want to accept that they have lost recent elections fair and square. Many Venezuelans who just got things like literacy and health care and water and sewerage in their barrios have the right to have a type of socialism even if their elite and the elite in the US oppose that. Those who support the government have the right to support the government until they don't.

Is it possible that their plan for socialism or some of their economic policies are not the best? Well, yeah, but that does not mean that we should support undemocratic means to overthrow them. Our elites made major economic mistakes in around 2008. Does that mean we should have had a coup?

Why did twelve major governments in South American including Brazil and Argentina just issue a statement essentially telling the US to stop meddling in internal Venezuela politics. Are they all just totalitarians because you know how those Latinos are?

The opposition should try to win elections rather than call for the US to force out the elected government as we have done repeatedly in South America, Guatemala, Chile, Dominican Republic. etc. etc.

Ancient history? Well, "no". See Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras and Paraguay during the Obama Adminstration.

PS to Deckard and others. The US has never acknowledged ahead of time or when actively engaged in doing so that they are engaging in activities to overthrow democratically elected governments that they don't like. It is naïve to to expect them to do so now.

Despite being fooled by our government and the mainstream media hope springs eternal I guess. It's tough but our media and government does not always tell us the truth.

 

Good call.

 

One more comment. I am somewhat troubled by the assumption of powers by Maduro in response to the continual coup attempts, including the involvement of the mayor of Caracas backed by the right wing Venezuelans aided by the US. However, I view it as sort of like martial law or other temporary measures that would have to be taken in the US if we had a small group trying to actively overthrow the legitimate government by violent means.

 

Venezuela had a lot of opportunity and did some good things, but they also made some huge mistakes and have gone off the tracks and veered into the domain of authoritarianism and oppression.

 

glynch is a crazy left-wing extremist.

 

What was the "crazy" or "extreme" comment that he made in either of his two posts on this thread? I'm curious.

 

I realize that this wasn't direct at me, but can you point me to jailed opponents who have "committed suicide" while in detention. I looked through the U.S. Human Rights Report for Venezuela for last year and did not see any mentions of that being a pattern and practice. I saw that within that within the last couple of days one opposition protestor allegedly hanged himself in his jail. Whether that was a politically motivated killing or simply a suicide might never come to light. However, from what I read about it, the family seemed to acknowledge that the death was indeed a suicide. The family suggested that the unjust treatment, harsh prison conditions, and impending transfer to a jail for common prisoners as the precipitating factors.

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2015/03/14/venezuelan-protester-allegedly-kills-himself-after-being-taken-into-police/

 

Chivious emotional belittling rhetoric like "dear leader" "track suit" etc
Shows little concern for facts on this topic other than Fox News

 

Glynch, I read news from a variety of sources (except for Fox, which is a bad running joke), and it is perfectly clear to me that Maduro is busy suppressing democracy and setting up a repressive regime. You know, anti-democratic. Do you seriously support that? Because I don't, and find it astonishing that you would. It isn't about how the old regime went about doing things before Chavez. I'm not going to defend them. It's about what's happening now and over the last couple of years.

 

Exactly, but I would argue that the veer you refer to is not a recent development at all.