Dictator Chavez steals second Hilton hotel in Venezuela

Well, the tin pot dictator wannabe is at it again, using yet another absurd excuse to do away with a media outlet that is (gasp! the horror!!) critical of him. For your reading pleasure:


TV channel owner ordered arrested in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant Friday for the owner of a television channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez. Intelligence agents arrived at a home owned by Guillermo Zuloaga seeking to arrest him and one of his sons Friday night, but their whereabouts were unknown, defense lawyer Perla Jaimes said.

Zuloaga is president and majority shareholder of Globovision, the country's only remaining channel on the airwaves that is stridently opposed to Chavez.

A court issued the warrant for the businessman and his son, also named Guillermo, citing accusations of illegally keeping 24 new Toyota sport-utility vehicles stored at a home owned by Zuloaga, Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. Zuloaga and his son are charged with usury and conspiracy.

Zuloaga has denied wrongdoing, saying the charges were trumped up in an attempt to intimidate him. Police and soldiers raided his property and found the vehicles in May 2009, but there had been little action in the case for months.

The arrest warrant came a week after Chavez publicly lamented that Zuloaga remained free.

"They caught that man with a bunch of cars in his house and that's a crime — hoarding. And he's free and he has a television channel," Chavez said in a televised speech. He called it a case of "structural weakness" in Venezuela's legal system.

Zuloaga, who also owns several car dealerships, has said he stored the cars on the property for safekeeping because one of his dealerships had been robbed.

He also is facing other accusations in court, including criminal charges filed earlier this year accusing Zuloaga accusing of making false and offensive remarks about Chavez at a meeting of the Inter American Press Association in Aruba.

The press association's president, Alejandro Aguirre, condemned the latest action as political persecution.

"Once again it's been shown that in Venezuela there's no independence of powers, an essential value of democracy, since the judicial branch seems to act every time the president speaks or orders it," Aguirre said in a statement. "It worries us that this is happening increasingly frequently."

Opposition leaders also strongly condemned the Zuloaga arrest warrant as an attempt by Chavez to intimidate critics and distract from domestic problems including a recession and the recent discovery of rotting food in government storage at a port.

Chavez has long accused Globovision and other opposition media outlets of conspiring against him. Globovision has been the only anti-Chavez channel on the air since another opposition-aligned channel, RCTV, was forced off cable and satellite TV in January. RCTV had been booted off the open airwaves in 2007.

In a June 3 speech, Chavez took issue with the fact that Zuloaga wasn't in jail in spite of the pending case against him for his remarks in Aruba.

"He's walking around free," Chavez said. "That only happens here in Venezuela. Let Zuloaga go to any other country and say the president ordered someone killed and let's see what happens. They'd put him in jail immediately."

Zuloaga accused Chavez of ordering security forces to open fire on a protest march that was headed toward the presidential palace shortly before a failed 2002 coup. Chavez maintains opponents were behind the bloodshed.

Zuloaga has said that what he did was simply "relate some historical events" and that Venezuelans have a right to say what they think about public figures such as presidents.

The attempt to arrest Zuloaga came as a Venezuelan journalist, Francisco Perez, was sentenced Friday in a separate case for slandering a public official. Perez, a veteran columnist for the newspaper El Carabobeno, called it a blatant violation of free speech and said he would appeal.

Perez was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison but was allowed to remain free on the condition he regularly appear in court and not practice journalism. Perez had written that Valencia Mayor Edgardo Parra, an ally of Chavez, had various family members on the city payroll.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-06-12-venezuela-tv-channel_N.htm


I await glynch's ardent defense of Hugo. I cannot doubt him. He will surely come up with an excellent explanation of this action.

 

Multinational hit squad, just take him out.



DD

 

Just a question but .. . who all would be on you HIT SQUAD list?


Rocket River
BTW if you do that . . .never b*Tch about suicide bombers or when someone puts hit out on our folx.

 

I was kidding about Chavez.....thus the winky guy.

DD

 

Let's look at the facts. I don't love Chavez, but I don't buy into the propaganda against him either. He has clamped down on free press, and there is no excuse for that. He's changed laws to give himself more power. While not a dictatorship that is taking steps in that direction.

That being said, he's been elected in fair elections time and time again. He's greatly helped the poor with both education, and health care, and he hasn't been afraid to tackle big business interests or foreign powers to do it. He promised he would use his nation's resources to help those that were oppressed in past regimes and he's done it.

He's made some poor choices in his friends, but so has the U.S.

As far as this article goes its BS. It's already been pointed out that he owned the controling share. You can't steal what you already own.

While I do have faults with him, he's far better than the regime that was in power previously and other right wing groups the U.S. has supported in Cenral and South America in the past.

 

'Was that wrong?'

Sincerely,
Hugo Chavez

 

From what I've heard, the only people in Venezuela who don't like Chavez are the filthy rich elite who are in the US every single weekend.

Can't really shed a tear for those people. If dude is helping the poor (99% of the country), then it's not the worst thing in the world.

I don't turn a blind eye to his dictatorial tendencies. He should be held accountable. But to paint him as someone who is destroying venezuela and all venezuelans are outraged... that doesn't seem very accurate.

In this case, I just hope for improvement. If not, I hope they get rid of him and replace him with someone who does the same stuff within the confines of the constitution.

 

I am all for left leaning, independent, reformers taking on the entrenched oligarchy in South America. There are a bunch of interesting ones now. But Hugo Chavez is not one of those. Of course you have to use the force of personality in rough and tumble politics but you also have to retain a hint of accountability. The proof of whether he is a dictator or not is if/when you see a peaceful succession of power to someone else.

Commandante'-for-life = Dictator

 

His approval ratings in polling are right around 60%(source) according to pro-Chavez pollsters. Normally, in countries that limit the free press, the number of people who will admit that they don't approve of the current ruling party under-report themselves. But ignore that for a minute and assume the 60% figure is accurate.

With a national population of 27,935,000 that would mean that 11,174,000 Venezuelans would be visiting the USA every weekend. At about $600 for the cheapest airline flight, that comes to about $6,704,400,000 per weekend. Multiply by 52 weeks in a year to $349 billion. That exceeds the national GDP of Venezuela ($314 billion) by about $35 billion. And that would just be for the airline flights to the USA - no hotel rooms, clothing, or meals.

I would therefore suggest that your statement can not logically be true.

 

Certified gangsta.

 

The Hilton hotel was the issue this thread was about. Deckard can post a new issue if he wants, but nobody is required to address it. This thread wasn't about that.

But if you will notice in my post, I criticized Chavez for his curtailing of the free press.

As far as Ven. being a poorer country, that isn't the case. Sorry that facts disagree with your view. It's poorer now than it was 18 months ago, but the standard of living overall has gone up, especially among the impoverished of that nation. I've posted stats about that before.

In addition you can't call Chavez a dictator until you prove he isn't the duly elected leader of his nation. You can't because he wins election after election.

 

Saddam won elections. By an overwhelming margins. Guess that means we shouldn't have called him dictator?

Kim Jong Il too.

It's Cult of Personality 101. Totally control the input that people receive, and you can control the output. And if that doesn't work, a finger on the scales never hurt anybody.

Every dictator in every Central American Banana Republic for the past 50 years has called himself "El Presidente" and gone to great pains to make it look like he was elected democratically. Hell, Hitler got himself made Chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg according to the constitution. Should we stop calling him a dictator?

Read what Chavez said when he first attempted a military coup in the 1990's and was imprisoned for several years if you want to know what he really thinks of democracy. He was pretty clear about what he thought of democracy then.

 

What makes on a dictator?
Is it different than a KING or EMPEROR?

Rocket River

 

Chavez might not be the greatest, but he beats mos dictators. At least he gives money to the poor and their poverty rate has improved.

 

So you would call elections where dissent in the media has been methodically muzzled "free," FB? I wouldn't. I also wouldn't call the people of Venezuela who support him "dumb," as Jackie did, but rather poor and comparatively uneducated, without access to broad media coverage giving them all sides of the story with regards to Chavez. Has he helped to raise the standard of living of the poor? Perhaps he has, but at what cost? As Ottomaton said, being governed by a "cult of personality" actively encouraged by Chavez and insured by crushing opposition media isn't what I would call democratic. I'd call it a sham.

There are examples out the kazoo of leaders giving false legitimacy to their rule by making sure they can't lose an election. There are different ways to "buy" that insurance. Muzzling the ability of the opposition to give their side of the on-going "national story" certainly is one way to go about it. The wannabe dictator accuses his opponents of outrageous "crimes against the state," when the real crime is wanting to encourage a different candidate, with a different political point of view, or even a similar point of view, but not in the person of Mr. Hugo Chavez and his ilk. Shouting about "foreign threats to the motherland/fatherland/homeland, the freakin' land" is another. Chavez is constantly accusing his neighbor, Columbia, of plotting against him, as well as the United States. Have an election coming up? Move troops to the border to counter the alleged threat. Or, a dictator wannabe can actually start a war. That has happened often enough (see Argentina/Falklands for an example).

I simply don't like what he is doing to the country. It certainly isn't democratic and not similar, in my opinion, to the other left of center democratically elected leaders in South Amerca, which has been such a positive development. I'd say Hugo is busy searching for his tin hat.

 

Dictator used to not be a bad word. In times of crisis the Romans used to declare a dictator to lead for a temporary term. It wasn't a bad word until modern dictators so regularly turned out as bad as they have.

A king generally "pretends" to rule by divine providence and it is a hereditary position. The Holy Roman Emperor was an elected position. But Napoleon was essentially a dictator who called himself Emperor to add gravitas. The Austrian Emperor was basically given the title because he was king of several crowns simultaneously.

I think in most cases, the thing that separates modern dictators from old kings is that kings, for the most part, kings have been educated from earliest age to be rulers. Sometimes they pay attention to that education and are good rulers, and sometimes they don't and turn out bad.

Dictators, on the other hand, tend to be people who fall into the position by means of opportunity. As anti-American as hereditary rule is, there is something about being part of a long, long lineage and the expectations that it brings which tempers the capriciousness that you see in some of the modern dictators.

 

I lived in Venezuela for a while before Chavez got in power, it was terrible, not only in terms of poverty, but also for people with darker skin color. He really made a huge difference in these two areas. He's far from perfect but he's not the villan made out in most Western media outlets. All I know is that the change he brought was much needed in the time he brought it. I think he believes if he does leave things will become like before...I'm sure there are a few influential players in the internaional stage that would love to get their own man/woman in place.

 

This is interesting. I'm not making any accusations, but wouldn't you say that large corporations and media bias heavily influence the US elections as well?

I'm going by the thinking that Venezuelans are easily tricked due to the gap in education and access to information.

Through that theory, a more educated population would require a more educated plan to do the same thing. Do you think that the structure of the US elections can be compared to that of Venezuela's but tailored for a far more educated population?

Again, I don't really have an opinion yet, but am just interested in what the general sentiment is. It would seem to me that what makes Chavez "not elected" is direct disruption of the voting process. Can everything else simply be viewed as the same type of lobbying/etc which goes on in the US except for a more educated population?

I will repeat ONE MORE TIME. I'm not making an accusation. I'm no expert of US politics. I'm just wondering how everyone sees these things.

 

I would call the elections monitored by non-biased, outside, outside agencies free. It would certainly fit in with some of Chavez' other moves to foul up the elections, but the thing is, that he doesn't have to do that in order to win, and until the international agencies that monitor elections all over the world discover the whole thing is rigged, then I will accept that the elections are fair.

His opponents with the biggest chance of success against him so far, have all been tied to the old regime and it's cruel way of running the nation, that were fare worse than Chavez.