Chavez Deports Representatives of Human Rights Watch from Venezuela
Late Thursday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez sent armed men to detain two researchers from Human Rights Watch and deport then from the country, following release of a 230-page report critical of the government’s human rights record.“About 20 men, some of them in military uniform, intercepted us when we arrived at our hotel after returning from dinner Thursday night,” José Miguel Vivanco, HRW’s Americas director told the New York Times. Vivanco and Daniel Wilkinson, HRW’s deputy director for the Americas, were forced onto an overnight flight to Brazil.
The Report from Human Rights Watch, “A Decade Under Chávez,” was released Thursday in Caracas. It charges: “In its efforts to counter political opposition and consolidate power, the government of President Hugo Chávez has weakened democratic institutions and human rights guarantees in Venezuela.” In particular the report criticizes the Venezuelan government for its infringement of the autonomy of the judiciary and its persecution of dissent.
Those readers who feel an affinity to Chávez historic revolution to redistribute Venezuelan wealth towards the nation’s impoverished should not too quickly dismiss either Human Rights Watch, it report, or the significance of Chávez’s ousting of the two researchers.
First, Human Rights Watch is not a right-wing organization with an agenda. Readers might recall that during the most repressive days of the War on Drugs here in Bolivia, HRW was one of the few foreign organizations, alongside WOLA, that was doing investigations and putting the public spotlight on that repression. My impression of them then is the same as it is now – a group dedicated to rigorous research that lets the cards fall where they may in terms of who’s political ox gets gored.
Second, regardless of what we like or don’t like in a government’s policies, free dissent is essential. My commitment to that is evidenced here on the Blog where, for many years, our comments section has remained an uncensored space, one far more critical of what I write than supportive. I value being challenged, and so should governments of any political stripe. Stifling dissent is not a progressive value, not in Bolivia or the U.S. either.
I hope that readers who have more knowledge of Venezuela than I will offer their comments and critique of the HRW report in this space. If there are inaccuracies in it, let’s hear them. In my view, documenting those inaccuracies would have also been a better road for the Venezuelan government to take than sending armed men to deport two researchers.
A Request on Comments
Because of some complaints and problems of late, I am adding this request as a template for a while to all posts. The comment space on this Blog, always lively, is also unmoderated and uncensored. First, we welcome all points of view and second, I have no time or interest in reading and reviewing every comment posted. So to keep the comments section a place of open debate, here are some requests:
1. Please keep comments focused on the issues rather than personal insults. Anonymity should not be used as an excuse for attacking one another.
2. Please avoid pasting huge documents in the comments section. These only make the section harder to read. If you think an article is of interest to others, post an introduction and a link to the full version and let readers decide for themselves.
3. The one hard rule for comments is that we do not allow the space to be used as a forum for personal threats, against me or anyone else. On the occasions where this has happened we have shut down the comments section altogether and will not hesitate to do so again. This would be a loss to those who want to use it as a forum for genuine debate.
posted by The Democracy Center at 10:26 AM
100 Comments:
Perhaps Jim's most balanced and thoughtful post ever. And the first I'd wholeheartedly agree with.
No, I wouldn't say Jim's post is balanced. Naive maybe.
Here's the report posted at Venezuela Analysis:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3813
[quoting the Human Rights Watch report in question],
"Specifically, the government has engaged in "discrimination on political grounds," "open disregard for the principle of separation of powers," and has "undercut journalists' freedom of expression, workers' freedom of association, and civil society's ability to promote human rights in Venezuela," according to the report, which bases its conclusions on interviews conducted over the past two years."
[This seems harsh and unbalanced in the extreme. I'm sure there are some excesses; but compared to most countries in Latin America?
[In reply,
the U.S.-based Venezuelan Information Office (VIO) says,]
"the HRW report portrays isolated incidents in Venezuela as though they were common occurrences, and "reads like the talking points of Venezuela's discredited opposition."
The VIO further pointed out that the "most fundamental" human rights to food, education, and health care have been expanded in Venezuela, and that this has been recognized by the United Nations Development Program."
[And further:]
"The Venezuelan representative in the Inter-American Human Rights Court, Germán Saltrón, said the accusations of political discrimination in the report are contradicted by the fact that the people who participated in the coup against Chávez in April 2002 were granted amnesty."
[HRW in Bolivia may act progressively; but I have seen reports of their blatant bias and meddling in other countries, such as Eastern Europe.
By the way, while on the subject of the "peace Corps," there have also been recent admissions by some volunteers that they were approached by the CIA to spy for them, no?
Did you not post those reports yourself, Jim?
You seem to be forgetting that.]
Here's another, more in-depth review of that report.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3812
I admire your commitment to non-violence and fair-play Jim; but when the other side do not play fair, (when they are, in fact, fascistic thugs) it's very difficult to move forward without stepping on some constitutional toes.
All considered, I think Chavez is doing a fine job. He can be arrogant at times, a bit of a blow-hard, (such as when he issued dire warnings about people having to support him in the last lost referendum. A mistake, obviously, which he and his people are having to deal with).
At any rate, whether or not he's for real comes down not so much to him, but whether he is empowering the people at the grassroots level to take over the leadership.
The communal-councils say it all: a revolutionary, community-based transformation from the ground up, being sponsored by the government.
Unheard of; and something which every right-wing thug or know-nothing is bitterly opposed to.
keep up the good work.
peace.
'roo.
This article appears in the November 21, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Soros Has Dumb Dems
Diving for Dope Dollars
by Scott Thompson
If financier George Soros, who is trying to buy out the Democratic Party, and his Republican twin, George P. Shultz, the godfather of the neo-conservative fascists who run the Bush Administration, have their way, mind-destroying drugs will be legal in the United States within 4-5 years. In turn, this legalization will be forced upon other nations under the rubric of "free trade," and globalization. It is part of the Synarchist International's war against civilization.
This was the message delivered at the bi-annual conference of George Soros's Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), at the Sheraton Meadowsland Hotel in New Jersey from Nov. 6-8. Throughout the three days, when away from the cameras and the tape recorders, speaker after speaker called for the legalization of drugs, and gleefully discussed how they would implement it, all the time whispering that legalization has to be "kept separate" from Soros's latest front-end operation: the takeover of the Democratic Party of the United States.
On Oct. 27, Democratic Party Presidential candidate for 2004 Lyndon LaRouche warned against the Soros operation to buy up the Democratic Party. "We caught them dead to rights," said LaRouche. "They're pushing drugs, which is what George Soros is doing. And Soros is trying to buy the Democratic Party with the proceeds of his policy.... My line is that any Democrat who takes Soros's money, perhaps should think about retiring. Or the very least, admit that they are taking that money.... I, as a Democratic candidate, say that anybody who is taking money from Soros ought to know what Soros's policies are. And then: What do they have to say about drugs? Are they, in one sense or another, actually drug pushers? And if so, why, they should say so; put that on their campaign website: 'I am a drug-pusher. I'm pushing cocaine.' "
Just two weeks later, on Nov. 10 and 11, Soros's buy-up of the Democratic Party suddenly became the hottest political news: in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Guardian, CBS News, and the National Review. After LaRouche associates had exposed the Soros/Democratic Party alliance as a "Cheney protection racket" (see EIR, Nov. 14), Soros went into high gear and high drama. In an interview, he declared that defeating George W. Bush in 2004 "is a matter of life and death," and "the central feature of [his] life." Soros, the megaspeculator, who has destroyed Third World nations' currencies and economies, poured out crocodile tears, and said he loses sleep every night, because "America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. If necessary, I would give more money." Then, giving Soros the cover he needs to become "the opposition," the Republican National Committee criticized him through spokeswoman Christine Iverson, who complained, "George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party."
What all these stories about Soros's "war" against Bush leave out, is that George Soros is the biggest drug legalizer in the the United States, and probably in the world. The role he is playing in the 2004 elections is even more sinister—to attack Bush, while leaving the Cheney imperial apparatus intact.
The 'Two Georges'
George Soros is not a Democrat. He is, like Shultz, a high-level operative of the "Synarchists," the international fascist movement created in the 1780s in reaction against the American Revolution, to impose "beast-man" dictators from Napoleon Bonaparte, to Adolf Hitler, to Vice President Dick Cheney. The Synarchist International (see "Synarchy vs. America," EIR, Sept. 5) is the heart of the drug and terrorism operations that are used to destabilize most of the nations targetted by Dick Cheney's cabal today.
Soros is actually part of the Cheney operation, by virtue of Soros's alliance with fellow drug legalizer Shultz, the man who created the Bush Administration. Shultz assembled, in 2000, the team of Halliburton's Cheney and of the neo-con Likudniks Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, to control then-candidate George W. Bush. The pre-emptive nuclear war policy of the Bush Administration that Soros says is a "danger to the world," was created by Soros's own cohort, Shultz. According to eyewitness accounts at Soros's Drug Policy Alliance conference, it was Shultz who created North America's biggest "legalized" dope operation in Vancouver, British Columbia—which is now being used by Soros's DPA as the model of models for North and South America. From that conference, EIR can also report that Shultz and Soros have been working together for the last decade, including during the time Shultz created Soros' "enemy," Bush.
According to EIR's Special Report, Bush's Surrender to Dope, Inc., Shultz had already called for drug legalization in an Oct. 7, 1989 address to the Stanford Business School. Shultz told alumni that the time had come "to make it possible for addicts to buy drugs at some regulated place at a price that approximates their cost." He asserted that the "criminal justice approach" to fighting drugs had failed, because what drives the drug trade is simply the economic marketplace. "These [criminal justice] efforts wind up creating a market where the price vastly exceeds the cost. With these incentives, demand creates its own supply and a criminal network along with it.... We're not going to get anywhere until we can take criminality out of the drug business.... We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization of drugs."
The attention given to the the Soros/Shultz alliance was one of the most startling developments at the DPA conference, which was, admittedly, full of bizarre events. DPA's annual award was given to the current and former Mayors of Vancouver, for establishing on Sept. 21, 2003 the first legal heroin injection center in North America, with a legal cocaine center to follow. And it turned out that the Vancouver model was Shultz's brainchild. The story was told at the session called "Those Wild and Crazy Canadians," where former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen, who took office in 1993, said that in 1995 he had travelled to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, for a seminar. There, George Shultz and Soros's protégé, then-Baltimore-Mayor Kurt Schmoke, convinced him that the War on Drugs was a "disaster."
Back in Canada, Mayor Owen opened a similar seminar modelled on the Hoover Institute event, and held dozens of meetings with Vancouver citizens, while coordinating with the Canadian government in Ottawa. What came out of this was the "Four Pillars Declaration" for effective legalization, and Owen, who had been in phone contact with Shultz throughout this period, returned to see Shultz in California, with a Vancouver drug addict at his side, once the declaration had been accepted.
Having served the longest consecutive term of any mayor in Canada, Owen did not run again in 2002. He was succeeded by Larry Campbell, a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who set out to implement the Shultz/Owen program. While Campbell claimed support from 80-90% of Vancouver citizens, opposition was such that he could not open the first legal heroin injection center in North America until September 2003—eight years after Owen had begun the Shultz drug legalization campaign.
But even with all the hype about "harm reduction," in the short six weeks since the opening, there have already been 20 overdoses (though no deaths). No problem for Campbell, who forecast that "financial breakeven" will be reached if the number of HIV cases among the addicts is less than ten, since it costs $150,000 to treat an HIV/AIDS patient. Next, he promised a legal cocaine center.
At the DPA's conference, Campbell let the cat out of the bag. After a night in which the DPAers kept at him to try marijuana, he agreed he would not bust pot growers in Canada, "because if we did not have those $3 billion [from the pot trade], we'd be in a recession."
A last-minute add-on to the Canadian panel was Philippe Lucas, Director of Vancouver Island Compassion Society/Canadians for Safe Access. He gave a computerized slide presentation that demonstrated the superiority of Vancouver and British Columbia grown marijuana (20% THC content) over that grown in a zinc mine by the government (3% THC)—ostensibly for medical marijuana purposes.
Canadian national Senator Pierre Nolin told the conference that his Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, has issued a comprehensive report calling for the legalization and regulation of marijuana in all of Canada.
It cannot be assumed accidental, that one week before the Soros conference, Forbes magazine—owned and run by Steve Forbes, another Hoover Institute sympathizer and former GOP Presidential candidate—hailed British Colombia's economic pot "boom" on its cover.
'Grass Roots'
The Democratic Party has reinvented the meaning of "grass roots," and is going down for the Soros-connected dope dollars, in the biggest political buyout in decades. Not since the "Southern Strategy" of post-1972, when Democrats picked up on Dick Nixon's embracing the Ku Klux Klan in his 1968 Presidential campaign, have the Democrats embarked on such suicide. It is completely out in the open, that LaRouche's rivals for the Democratic Presidential nomination—especially those most active in keeping LaRouche out of the debates—are all on Soros's dole. Led by Howard Dean, for whom Soros threw a major fundraiser, others of the "nine dwarves" whom Soros supports also include John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Richard Gephardt, according to the Washington Post. Soros told the Post that the Democrats who set up America Coming Together (ACT), Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm, "were ready to kiss me," when he told them he would be giving them $10 million, bragging that "Money buys talent."
Soros and his buddy, dope legalizer Peter Lewis, announced on Nov. 10 that they had committed $5 million for a matching-funds program for the "progressive" organization, MoveOn.Org, which earlier this year refused to include LaRouche in its Internet "primary."
As EIR already reported, Soros's front groups are a re-tread of the discredited Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The Jewish Times on Nov. 11 reported that Soros is working with Michael Steinhardt, the organizer of the Mega group of billionaires, who made his fortune using the organized crime lucre of his father, the fence for Murder, Inc. boss Meyer Lansky. Steinhardt used his money to found the DLC as the "second Republican party." For the DLC, Steinhardt, Soros, and the dope legalizers, LaRouche is "Public Enemy No. 1" because LaRouche's organizing is the Franklin D. Roosevelt tradition. LaRouche is organizing to stop the Democratic Party from "going to pot."
Soros is not the only pot-pusher who is providing the Democrats with big bucks. Co-financing the takeover is fellow drug-legalization financier Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corp., an Ohio-based insurance company. For more than a decade, Soros and Lewis have poured tens, if not hundreds of millions into a single "grass roots" cause—drug legalization. Together with Arizona Republican moneybags John Sperling, Soros and Lewis poured $30 million into California alone in 1996, to push through the paradigm-shift legislation—"medical marijuana." These three financed decriminalization measures nationwide, and are adoringly referred as "The Funders," by the dopers backing legalization. In 2000, Lewis, the head of the fifth-largest insurance company in the U.S.A., was arrested with hashish and pot in New Zealand, while attending a yacht race for the jet set. He was let off with a "contribution" of $5,000 to a drug rehabilitation center.
Now the Democratic Party, led by hedonistic Baby Boomers devoted to "feeling good," are going for the money from Soros & Lewis, while abandoning those FDR referred to as the "forgotten man"—the lower 80% of the U.S. population suffering under economic depression.
The vehicle for the Soros takeover is a series of organizations called "527's," created after the McCain-Feingold legislation passed to bar "soft money" and special interests. Ironically, the legislation gave even greater power to the super-rich, such as billionaire Soros, by "privatizing" the soft money. Now billionaire pot-lovers like Lewis can buy up organizations like John Podesta's Committee for American Progress (CAP), Americans Coming Together (ACT), the Partnership for American Families (PAF), and the (formerly) radical MoveOn.org.
Baby Boomer Democrats, such as Soros fan Harold Meyerson, editor of the American Prospect, believe that using big, easy money from Soros and Co. is better than organizing real people. Writing in the Washington Post on Nov. 12, Meyerson falsely claimed that Soros was responsible for the landslide victory of Mayor John Street, Democrat of Philadelphia, who had been targetted by Attorney General John Ashcroft, and whose re-election was secured when his campaign called in a deployment of the LaRouche Youth Movement—the envy of Democratic Party hacks across the United States. Meyerson actually attacked the idea of a youth movement. He wrote that Mayor Street, whom he calls not one of the "great American mayors," was saved by Soros's dope money. Now, organizations funded by Soros have "the resources to hire ... as state directors experienced operatives ... not the 25-year-olds who have often run such operations in the underfunded past."
Case Studies in Insanity
Soros has other plans for youth: They're the market for his legalized dope. And, this was clear at the Drug Policy Alliance conference.
Years ago, Soros had hand-picked Ethan Nadelmann, now the head of the DPA, his chief henchman for drug legalization. The DPA is the product of a series of mergers of Soros-funded groups including the Open Society Institute's Lindesmith Center, which Nadelmann originally headed, and the Drug Policy Foundation (DPF). Going back to 1994, at pro-legalization Drug Policy Foundation meetings, this author recalls the cackles of the DPF leadership as they plotted how "medical marijuana" would be the foot-in-the-door for broader legalization schemes. But these drug legalizers are usually slick enough to pose as reformers when TV cameras and tape recorders are on.
But the following case studies from breakout sessions, and other events, of the DPA conference begin to show the dangerous nature of the real Soros agenda.
Case Study I: "MamaCoca": the International Plan. Matthew Briggs, who is Research and Publications Director of the DPA, moderated the panel on "Drug Wars in the Americas: The View from the South." He began with a rousing cheer for the coup that overthrew the elected leader of Bolivia, stating that this was the beginning of a "mass resistance movement to the War on Drugs" in the region. Brazil, Bolivia, and Colombia were each targetted in turn. Dr. Fabio Mesquita of São Paolo, Brazil, after a lunatic and lying history of the drug wars, suggested that a combination of Brazil's Lula, Mexico's Vincente Fox, and the new head of Argentina would ally to break the diktat from Washington for a "War on Drugs".
Jeremy Bigwood, who is purportedly an independent journalist despite having received money from Soros's Open Society Institute, started with a rousing defense of coca as a benign, short-lasting stimulant. He praised the 1901 period when there were coca lozenges, extracts, teas, etc. He complained that a plan by himself and three friends to start growing coca in the United States was stopped by then President Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs.
Bigwood is "on the case" in unstable Bolivia, claiming to be in close contact with Bolivian Evo Morales, Soros's man among the cocoleros, who want to place coca on the same legal basis as coffee and tea, and make it a major trade commodity. The trick that Bigwood and others use to push legalization, is saying that coca should be legal, but its refined product, cocaine, should still be illegal. Care to buy a bridge in Brooklyn?
Then there is the case of Colombia. Representing the legalization fight was "MamaCoca" earth mother Maria Mercedes, who had been trained at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her website is in English, Spanish, and French, where she is known for her saying, "MamaCoca es la palabra." ("Mother coca is the word"). Mercedes says that the United States grows marijuana; Colombia grows coca and coffee; and, Holland produces "Ecstasy"; and that is a fine division of labor. She said that there is a time-bomb in Colombia; that when former President Pastrana's peace plan turned into Plan Colombia, which brought about "La Violencia." While totally excusing the actions of the narco-terrorist FARC, "MamaCoca" accused President Hector Uribe, Pastrana's successor, of using indiscriminate terror against peasants.
In addition, Soros's legalizers came up with a new tactic: a law enforcement front group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), led by one Edward "Eddie" George, a former Detective Chief Superintendent and head of the Scotland Yard Drug Squad. Long committed to legalization, George said in an interview that he only busted the big distributors, except for crimes committed to support a habit. Apparently, this means that a wealthy man with a heroin addiction is acceptable in his book. George peddles the usual pablum that that drugs should be treated like tobacco and alcohol, and nodded agreement with the "victimless crime" line of fellow Scotland Yard'er Lindesmith, after whom Soros's legalization project was named. He wants to see heroin injection centers like Vancouver's internationally.
Case Study II: Menticide Against Children. A major session entitled, "Congress, Club Drugs and the Business of Dancing" sought to protect the producers and club owners who put on Raves from prosecution, now pending in Federal legislation introduced by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). Raves are the all-night "dances" where there is high violence, and high consumption of Ecstasy, and increasingly of Methamphetamines, which are often sold by the Rave producers and club owners.
Biden Is Legalizers' Target
Hip-Hop historian and disk-jockey Davey D., who moderated the panel, claimed that if law enforcement could crack-down on club owners for 13- and 14-year-olds passing out from Ecstasy, then police should arrest college presidents for "frat house" alcohol excesses in colleges. When Rave disk-jockey "D:FUSE" called for more self-policing and no drugs at Raves, the other panelists attacked him.
DPA's Bill Piper zeroed in on Senator Biden. When Biden found that laws against crackhouses could not be applied to nightclubs, he introduced the Rave Act which passed committee in ten days, and seemed assured of success. The DPA launched a mobilization with the American Civil Liberties Union to kill the bill. He claimed that "tens of thousands" of protest letters caused two of the co-sponsors to drop out, and the bill was dead. The DPA is now mobilizing to fight Biden's Illicit Drug Non-Proliferation Act which has been attached as an amendment to a bill on child kidnapping.
The worst were "medical" experts. Chris Mann is the creator of MedEvent—a nationwide organization made up of volunteer physicians, paramedics, nurses, and EMTs who provide support for special events such as Raves. He argued that by making Ecstasy illegal, you are denying Rave participants proper medical attention, including chilling-out rooms. Dr. Julie Holland, the "wicked witch" of Bellevue Hospital, took the cake, claiming that human beings have "a biological need to alter their states of mind." She co-authored Ecstasy: The Complete Guide to MDMA.
Case Study III: Psychedelics. This panel was a Baby Boomer travelogue of bad LSD trips. But it had a "happy ending": the three panelists are now successful establishment figures, with studies approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and regular columns in favorite Baby Boomer journals.
Richard Doblin, Founder and President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), still takes psychedelics, but he is about to get FDA approval for a study of the effect of MDMA on rape victims. He also applied to the FDA for use of LSD on terminal cancer patients. Doblin's qualifications: he dropped so many psychedelics and had so many "bad trips" in the 1960-70s out of fear of being drafted, that it took him a decade before he could enter graduate school.
Then, self-described "Old Acid Head" John Horgan, author of Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality, and a fanatical hater of LaRouche, blathered about his bad trips, regretting that he confessed to continued tripping, in Slate magazine. During a trip in 1982 on a powerful psychedelic, he became convinced that God was a Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), and that this was demonstrated by behavior of human beings.
There was little wonder why the conference participants insisted to all who asked, that their efforts should be "kept separate" from George Soros' financial takeover of the dumb Democrats.
Oh yeah,
One more point:
It may look bad (to some) that the Venezeulan government is arresting and deporting two "researchers" (by armed guard); but I can fully understand their feeling: they've had it with these mouthy brats masquerading as "freedom-lovers," (that includes, it seems, over half of the jerks/paid-stooges leaving their stupid, asinine comments at this site); and Chavez and co. don't feel they have to tolerate them anymore. I guess they figure: "if it looks bad to know-nothings in North America, so what? Our revolution is no longer dependent upon American public opinion."
About time...
send the hacks packing....
Maybe the Peace Corps people and the Mormons are doing some good work. Maybe they're receiving money/influence from the CIA, (most-likely).
At any rate, if the Mormons and American "volunteers" take a six-month break, (or longer) Venezuela and Bolivia have quite enough resources to look after their own people, (if they can just get it out of the greedy hands of the oligarchs, parasites, and their paid servants).
thanks Jim,
'roo
Egads, what is up w/that Lyndon LaRouche crapola above? Take a look at the photos of, "Operation Mop-Up, " when the LaRouceite thugs beat up communists.
Lyndon LaRouche: Fascist Demagogue ,
http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/
More on LaRouche:
* The LaRouchite Secret Elite Synthesis
* Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag
* Roots of LaRouche's Antisemitic Theories
* A '60'S Socialist Takes a Hard Right
* NCLC: America's Largest Political Intelligence Army
* Operation Mop-Up
http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/synthesis.html
From Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort
by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons
New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
The LaRouchite Secret Elite Synthesis
©2000, The Guilford Press, all rights reserved.
This material may not be circulated on the internet or posted on other websites.
The authors thank Guilford Press for permission to post this excerpt online.
Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology.[1] Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a "humanist" elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions.
A former Trotskyist, Lyndon H. LaRouche , Jr., founded the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1968 as an offshoot of the radical student movement. But in the early 1970s, LaRouche engineered a political about-face, using cult pressure tactics to consolidate his grip over the NCLC and initiating a campaign of physical attacks on Communists and Black nationalists, which cut his followers off from the Left. The result was a fascist organization with some unique strengths: a dedicated, full-time cadre of several hundred members, a high proportion of intellectuals with advanced training, familiarity with leftist theory and organizing, and inside information about radical organizations and leaders.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the LaRouchites built an international network for spying and propaganda, with links to the upper levels of government, business, and organized crime. The LaRouchites traded information with intelligence agencies in the United States,South Africa, East Germany, and elsewhere. Their dirty tricks record included harassment campaigns against the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America in the 1970s. In 1980, they branded George Bush an agent of the Trilateral Commission to help Ronald Reagan win the Republican presidential nomination, and in 1984, they helped Jesse Helms retain his U.S. Senate seat by gay-baiting his opponent. During the 1980s, the LaRouchites raised an estimated $200 million through legal and illegal fund-raising and fielded thousands of candidates for political office in every region of the country. Seeking the George Wallace vote, the LaRouche candidates usually ran in Democratic primaries.[2]
The LaRouchites generally operated under front groups such as Food for Peace and the Schiller Institute, and put out such publications as New Solidarity (later The New Federalist) and Executive Intelligence Review.
In 1976 LaRouche’s original electoral arm, the U.S. Labor Party (USLP), published a conspiracist attack on President Jimmy Carter, claiming he was a tool of secret international elites. The Liberty Lobby criticized the report for failing to mention the role of Jewish bankers, and soon LaRouche publications picked up the theme.[3] The Liberty Lobby and the LaRouche group soon began to cooperate closely on projects. When some groups on the right criticized the Liberty Lobby for working with ostensible leftists, meaning the USLP, the Liberty Lobby defended the relationship in 1981: "No group has done so much to confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left as they have. . . . The USLP should be encouraged, as should all similar breakaway groups from the Left, for this is the only way that the Left can be weakened and broken."[4]
In the 1970s, the LaRouchites’ anti-Jewish propaganda was relatively explicit, as in LaRouche’s 1978 article "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism," which declared that "The B’Nai B’rith today resurrects the tradition of the Jews who demanded the crucifixion of Jesus Christ , the Jews who pleaded with Nero to launch the ´holocaust´ against the Christians."[5] Gradually the LaRouchites developed increasingly sophisticated ways to invoke antisemitic themes while still maintaining deniability.
The LaRouchites borrowed conspiracist elements from various sources to produce their own Manichean picture of world history. For thousands of years, they argued, the good "humanists" had been locked in a power struggle with a vast conspiracy of evil "oligarchs." In ancient times, the oligarchic conspiracy was centered in Babylon; later it shifted to Venice; in modern times it was centered in Britain’s royal House of Windsor. This narrative evoked standard elements of antisemitic doctrine: that Jews had dominated ancient Babylon and that Jewish banking families controlled the British government. Sometimes the LaRouchites highlighted prominent Jews as members of the conspiracy, such as "[Henry] Kissinger ’s friends, the Rothschild family, and other representatives of Britain’s financial power." At other times, they portrayed Jews as unwitting tools of the oligarchs, as for example, "Zionism is that state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of international Jewry."[6]
The LaRouchite analysis of British oligarchic control resembles a number of earlier right-wing populist works, such as E. C. Knuth’s 1944 tract The Empire of "The City": alias International Finance, alias the British Empire, alias "ONE WORLD" superstate. Knuth claimed that the Rothschilds and Sassoons controlled British financial interests, and he cited the International Monetary Fund as proof of their plot for global dominance.
Unlike neonazi groups such as the White Aryan Resistance or the National Alliance, the NCLC has always denied that it is antisemitic and has always included Jewish members (such as LaRouche’s longtime security aides Jeffrey Steinberg and Paul Goldstein). The LaRouchites insisted they were not targeting Jews as a whole, but only the "bad" Jews such as Henry Kissinger,Roy Cohn, the Rothschild banking family, and the Anti-Defamation League.
The LaRouchites seem to have shifted from biological to cultural racism, at least in their public pronouncements. In the 1970s, LaRouche and his followers described the British oligarchs as a separate "species" and often referred to people of color as bestial or subhuman. But in 1995, New Federalist editor Nancy Spannaus declared, "We don’t believe blood or race has anything to do with determining history. Never fear! It’s ideas."[7] LaRouchite ideology has continued to glorify western Christianity and European civilization—especially the classical German culture of Beethoven , Schiller, and Leibniz—over the "barbarism" of non-Europeans. For example, LaRouchites asserted that by bringing Christianity to the Americas, " Columbus ’ discovery made it possible to liberate the native populations" from "the practices of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and slavery of the Aztec Empire." The LaRouchites vilified jazz and rock music while praising African American spirituals—so long as they conformed to the rules of European classical music.[8]
U.S. right-wing traditions such as business nationalism echoed loudly in the LaRouchites’ attacks on Britain, the "liberal Eastern Establishment," homosexuality, globalism, free trade, and international bankers. Producerism, with its problematic distinction between productive industrial capital and parasitic finance capital, was central to LaRouchite economics, as it enabled LaRouche to be procapitalist and "anti-imperialist" at the same time: "Imperialism was not the result of capitalist development; it was the result of the conquest of power over capitalist nations by a usury-oriented rentier–financier interest older than feudalism."[9]
Like traditional fascists of the 1920s and 1930s, but unlike many neonazis and other U.S. rightists today, LaRouchites championed a strong, centralized nation-state as vital to economic and social progress. They declared they were continuing the old Federalist–Whig program of economic protectionism, national control of banking, and government-sponsored infrastructure development to stimulate industrial growth. They attacked both states’ rights and laissez-faire conservatism as part of a British plot to undermine the nation-state.[10]
Also, unlike some neonazis, the LaRouchites vilified the environmental movement and nature romanticism while praising high-technology projects such as nuclear power. But here, too, the LaRouchites were partly repackaging earlier conspiracy theories. Their attacks on the Club of Rome, an ecology and population control group, echoed a 1974 article in the rightist American Mercury entitled "The Curious Club of Rome," which asked whether the group was "merely a bunch of boring pedants and doom- sayers, or is it a sinister cabal aiming for world control?"[11]
In 1989, LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for mail fraud conspiracy, based on illegal and manipulative fund-raising practices, as well as tax evasion. His organization continued to operate while he was in prison, and he was released in early 1994.
LaRouche continued his leadership role in various organizations such as the National Caucus of Labor Committees and the Schiller Institute while in prison, and after his release he resumed his peripatetic speaking circuit, quickly building contacts with a number of groups around the world. His call for new global economic policies in opposition to the International Monetary Fund found favor not only in Europe, but in Africa, Central and South America, and Asia. He spoke at a number of conferences organized in countries previously under Soviet influence or control.
During the 1990s, the LaRouchites once again adopted a more "progressive" guise. They opposed the Gulf War against Iraq and worked to build links with liberal and leftist antiwar groups. They made particular efforts to recruit African Americans. They opposed the death penalty, anti-immigrant racism, and law enforcement agencies’ harassment of Black elected officials. They defended social programs against Gingrich–Republican budget cuts. They praised the Israeli–Palestinian negotiations and the Israeli Labor Party while denouncing the rightist Likud Party and the Islamic fundamentalists in Hamas. Starting in 1990, the LaRouchites and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam cultivated friendly ties, sharing articles and praising each other’s work.[12]
The LaRouchites set an example of how to package fascist ideology as maverick conservatism, progressive antielitism, or both. In 1986, when LaRouche followers shocked the Illinois Democratic Party by winning the party primaries for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, other far rightists praised their efforts. Some, such as David Duke, looked for lessons in their electoral strategy.[13]
[1] See Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche.
[2] Ibid., p. 89.
[3] Ibid., pp. 39–40.
[4] Spotlight, March 2, 1981, p. 20.
[5] Lyndon H. LaRouche, "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism," New Solidarity, December 8, 1978, quoted in Dennis King, Nazis Without Swastikas, p. 9.
[6] "Zionism Is Not Judaism," editorial, The Campaigner, December 1978.
[7]New Federalist, June 19, 1995, p. 10.
[8]William F. Wertz, Jr., " Fidelo Magazine Refutes Slanderers of Columbus ,"New Federalist, June 29, 1992, p. 11; Dennis Speed, "African-American Spiritual and the Resurrection of Classical Art," New Federalist, October 9, 1995, pp. 6–7.
[9] "Imperialism . . . " quoted in LaRouche, Power of Reason, p. 191. "Kissinger ’s friends . . . " quote in Christopher White, "George Bush’s Countdown to Middle East War."
[10]In the early 1980s, LaRouche described himself as "an American Whig by family ancestry stretching back into the early 19th century, born a New Hampshire Whig, and a Whig Democrat by profession today," Lyndon LaRouche, "Is Republican George Bush a ´Manchurian Candidate´?" issued by Citizens for LaRouche, Manchester, New Hampshire, January 12, 1980; as cited in Tarpley and Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography , online at http://www.tarpley.net/bush16.htm. LaRouche briefly explains how one can be a modern Federalist Whig Democrat in Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., A Program for America (Washington, DC: The LaRouche Democratic Campaign, 1995), pp. 315–332.
On rapid growth economic and industrialization policies, see LaRouche, The Case for Walter Lippman: A Presidential Strategy (New York: Campaigner Publications/University Editions, 1977), especially pp. 164–167; LaRouche, There Are No Limits to Growth (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1983); and LaRouche, Program for America, especially ch. 4, " LaRouche’s Proposals for Economic Reform," pp. 37–120, including subtitles "Great Projects versus Kissinger Genocide," and "The United States Under President Reagan’s ´Hoover´ Recovery"; and ch. 8, "The Pathway to a U.S. Economic Recovery," pp. 263–313, including the subtitle "Reopen America’s Steel Plants Now!"
On a LaRouchite critique of the 1995 Republican Contract with America proposed by Newt Gingrich, see "How the Conservative Revolution Crowd Plans to Destroy America," pamplet, Leesburg, Virginia, New Federalist, March 1995.
On British conspiracy against the United States, see LaRouche, "Foreword," in The Trilateral Conspiracy Against the U.S. Constitution: Fact or Fiction? ([EIR Special Report] Washington, DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1985), in which the Trilateral Commission is identified as "merely one of numerous ventures, launched by the same Anglo-American Liberal Establishment which created the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)," p. 2; and Christopher White, "The Socialist One-World Conspiracy," The Campaigner, April 1981, pp. 2–3.
A large amount of LaRouchite conspiracist anti-British material was found at the American Almanac website, http://members.com/~american_almanac/britspt.htm April 1, 2000) including an entire section titled "´Winds of Change´—The Sun Never Sets on the New British Empire—Financial Control and the Destabilization of Governments." Another website containing material illustrating several of our points was "LaRouche’s Major Writings," at http://www.larouchepub.com/major_writings.html April 1, 2000).
[11]American Mercury, Fall 1974, p. 16.
[12] See the following articles from the New Federalist: Marianna Wertz, "American Opposition Is Growing to the Use of the Death Penalty," June 29, 1992, p. 12; Edward Spannaus, "Supreme Court Upholds Limits on Death Row Prisoners’ Habeas Petitions," July 15, 1996, p. 12; Stuart Lewis, "Anti-Immigration Fanatics Assess Efficacy of Efforts Against Mexico," June 12, 1995, p. 3; Debra Hanania Freeman, "National Scandal," June 12, 1995, p. 4; Marianna Wertz, "Clinton and Democrats Fight GOP’s Budget Gouging," May 29, 1995, p. 12; Anton Chaitkin, "President Rejects ´Crush the Poor´ Welfare Plan," June 19, 1995, p. 2; Richard Freeman, "Privatization," June 19, 1995, p. 11; Dean Andromidas, " Likud, GOP Out to Wreck Mideast Peace," May 29, 1995, p. 3. See also Caryle Murphy, " LaRouche Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison," The Washington Post, January 28, 1989; Associated Press, "Supreme Court Upholds LaRouche Convictions," The Washington Post, June 12, 1990; Peter Pae and Leef Smith, " LaRouche, Paroled After 5 Years in Prison, Returns to Loudoun," The Washington Post, January 27, 1994. On LaRouche’s postjail activities, see the following articles from the New Federalist: " LaRouche: Accepting Gingrich Nazi Policies Means Doom for the U.S.," February 26, 1996, p. 1; Rachel Douglas, " LaRouche Urges U.S.–Russian Cooperation Against British," May 6, 1996, p. 1; Nancy Spannaus, "The World Depression Has Arrived," February 24, 1997, p. 1. On LaRouchite continued Anglophobic conspiracism, see the following articles from the New Federalist: Jeffrey Steinberg, "Scandals Shake British Throne," October 31, 1994; Jeffrey Steinberg, "Prince Phillip’s Eco-Terrorists Make Death Threats vs. Clinton , Chirac," September 4, 1995, p. 1.
[13]Dennis King,Lyndon LaRouche, pp. 103, 119.
Case in point about the "paid hacks" visiting this site on a regular basis: see above.
Lyndon LaRouche, (Godfather of the above writer) is a long-time CIA asset and disinfo conduit: i.e. providing SOME valuable "inside" information mixed up with a whole lot of garbage that goes nowhere.
Yay for Roosevelt!?!
The point of the above obscenely-long posting (which has absolutely nothing to do with the post that Jim made about Venezuela) is designed purely to get in the way of the rest of us having a useful dialogue, (i.e. tire out, turn off the average reader who tends to give the radical-sounding post a listen).
That the person could be just so thoughtless and inconsiderate of the subject-matter being discussed is just too obvious for it to be anything but intentional.
There are wankers like this all over the net, paid to interfere with democratic dialogue, wherever it threatens to crop up, from Indymedia to the Democracy centre.
I think it seriously detracts from your site Jim, that you allow these agents to do their thing, (though what you might have to do to control it might not be worth the hassle, which is what they're counting on).
But your posts are still worth reading.
so thank again.
peace,
roo
As far as I know and read, no one in the Bolivian Gov. told the Mormons and Peace Corps to exit Bolivia.
The US government scared them away in the same fashion that it is scaring the American people into submission with their so called "war on terror".
So far the only attacks in the US have been crazies going postal in churches, colleges, malls etc. In contrast, the "democratic war" in Iraq, a war based on lies and accusations, has caused the deaths of tens of thousands, the displacement of millions of innocents and the fueling of anti-Americanism.
The war on finance can also be added to the wars now facing Joe Public. He and his fellow citizens are about to be harnessed with almost a trillion dollars worth of bad debt. Giddy up Joe! Get the apple -the “American Dream” apple. No, you may not get “socialized healthcare” but please enjoy socialized capitalism.
Franco
Roo:
I agree with you mostly. Expect for Larouche being a CIA agent. An agent who got 15 years in jail? and still works for them?
That´s like saying that Mandela was actually an agent to the Reunited National Party.
Jim,
Your article shows that you do have an unbiased position in your work.
I saw this in a search for genocidal policies. I thought it´s worth sharing.
Cheers!
We should say sorry, too.
Australia's apology does not absolve Britain of its role in the degradation of the Aboriginal race...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/14/australia
Wow. The lunatics really crawl out of the woodwork on Sundays.
Nice post, DC. I had lost hope in your ability to be impartial but I guess I'll start giving you the benefit of the doubt again. I would recommend that the DC's readers and in particular those Morales supporters that post here read HRW's report on Venezuela. Don't confuse HRW with Human Rights Foundation, which is a right leaning non-profit with an agenda. This group supposedly has an office or representative in Santa Cruz. Their name is totally deceiving and I assume gave it the moniker with the hopes that they'd be confused with HRW and have some instant credibility.
To the morons that post entire articles and plagiarized manifestos here: Such practices don't increase your dick size. This is a blog, i.e. it's meant for people to draft their own comments and opinions or at least original work, not cut and paste from other sources. If you want us to read an article, just post the link.
Another ultra-leftist trashing HRW. Likely would have been an apologist for Stalinism back in the day.
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_28263.shtml
Featured
Human Rights Watch Clowns Around
By *Arthur Shaw Exclusive
Sep 21, 2008, 13:38
Human Rights Watch, a NYC-based international "non-governmental" organization that conducts research and advocacy on bourgeois democracy, produces propaganda that glorifies or apologizes for atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by US imperialism and Human Rights Watch defames foes of US imperialism often with false reports of violations of democratic principles.
**The key instance of Human Rights Watch (HWR) producing propaganda that glorifies or apologizes for US imperialism is HRW's complete indifference to the US imperialist policy and massive program of genocide against the Iraqi people that has already occasioned the deaths of over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens. When US imperialists are not the monsters committing genocide, HRW treats genocide as a violation of human rights, for HRW has published extensively on the Rwandan Genocide.
Even when US genocidal policy and program grew transparent or, more correctly, conspicuous during the "surge" of genocide, HRW remained largely silent, participating in the cover-up of this systematic Hitlerian-type holocaust in Iraq. For more information on the HRW-neglected holocaust in Iraq, see "Bloodbath and the US Presidential Campaign," published here at Axis of Logic. HRW deceitfully turns the US imperialist genocide in Iraq into something that is merely episodic and sporadic, contrary, HRW falsely claims, to US policy.
The chief instance, of late, of the HWR producing propaganda that defames foes of US imperialism is the big pile of trash and garbage, stuffed with lies and other filth, titled "A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela."
.
HRW divides its bag of garbage which it calls its report on human rights in Venezuela into six sections -- political discrimination, the courts, media, organized labor, civil society, and the future of Venezuelan democracy.
In the first section on political discrimination, HRW makes three main charges [all lies].
In this section, HRW says the Venezuelan state:
1.
Fired and blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and from the national oil company;
2.
Denied some citizens access to social programs based on their political opinions; and
3.
Discriminated against media outlets, labor unions, and civil society in response to legitimate criticism or political activity.
Logically, #2 obviously deals with with citizens who are not government employees, and #3, deals with non-governmental organizations. Both are in essence, political and ideological derivatives or, at least, the parallels of #1, which deals with government employees or government job applicants.
So, we can examine (1) and not tediously rehash the same kind of arguments, again and again, for (2) and (3).
POLITICAL DISCRIMINATION
In (1) above, HRW says the Venezuelan state "fired and blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and from the national oil company."
"Some State Agencies"
Note the term "some state agencies. HRW gives no idea of the number of state agencies that allegedly fired and blacklisted political opponents. But even the lying HRW admits only "some" do it, not "all" state agencies; so, the allegedly fired or blacklisted opponents still have a shot at a job at another state agency.
Why didn't HRW holler and make a lot of noise when HRW heard that George W. Bush and US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were firing US attorneys either because Bush/Gonzales judged "some US attorneys" weren't reactionary enough or, worse, they were mildly liberal.
HRW kept its big mouth shut. This shows HRW is two-faced, bias, and full of lies; therefore, we shouldn't believe HRW about anything, including Venezuela.
"National Oil Company"
HRW says the Venezuelan state "fired and blacklisted ... from the national oil company."
In late 2002, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and US imperialists locked-out Venezuelan workers from almost all economic production and distribution, including the national oil company. Both pro-government and pro-opposition workers at the national oil company were locked-out.
In 2002, the national oil company was government-owned, but the company was infested and controlled by the reactionary sector of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and a swarm of US imperialists.
After the bourgeois lockout began, the state promptly took over the national oil company, ordered the perfidious sector of the bourgeoisie and imperialists off the premises, and called ALL of the workers ...both pro-government and pro-opposition ... back to their jobs. Most of the pro-government workers, a minority in 2002 of the company's labor force, returned to their jobs. And a significant minority of pro-opposition workers also returned to their jobs, both showing the "finger" to the reactionary Venezuelan bourgeoisie and US imperialists.
The state then fired ALL of the workers who refused to worked, the workers showing servility to the reactionary bourgeoisie and imperialists whether the workers were pro-government or pro-opposition.
About 18,000 renegade workers were notified not to come back or "blacklisted," after they repeatedly ignored calls from the state to return to their jobs.
Obviously, this is not political discrimination in any way or to any degree because the firing and blacklisting of renegades applied to all workers who refused to work, political supporters as well as opponents of the state.
[Editor's Note: At this juncture, we remember Ronald Reagan when he fired 11,345 Air Traffic Controllers under the pretext of national security after they went on strike on August 3, 1981. Reagan barred them from returning to government service for 3 years. - LMB]
Once Again, HRW's Defamation Tale About Political Discrimination In Venezuela
Let's revisit globally HRW's above-quoted accusation, namely, the Venezuelan state "fired and blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and from the national oil company. "
So, HRW hints if any agency of the Venezuelan state fires an employee who happens to be a political opponent, HRW assumes the reason for the firing is the employee's political opposition to the state, not the employee's corruption or incompetence or insubordination or larceny or sexual degeneracy on the job or absenteeism or drunkenness on the job or etc. or etc.
HRW claims it conducted "extensive interviews" for the piece of trash it calls its "report."
HRW's extensive interviews must have gone something like this:
HRW: When you worked for the state, were you a corrupt employee?
FORMER STATE EMPLOYEE: No madam, not at all. I swear.
HRW: Were you drunk or a sexually degenerate on the job?
FORMER EMPLOYEE: Why you ask me about that?
HRW: Again, were you drunk or a sexually degenerate on the job?
FORMER EMPLOYEE: What you mean by " a sexual degenerate on the job?"
HRW: Never mind. Based on your answers to my inquiries, I, on behalf of the HRW, find you're a victim of political discrimination.
POLITICAL DISCRIMINATION IN USA DOESN'T GET A HRW REPORT
Since HRW originates from the USA, the HRW should be at least concerned to some degree about allegations of political discrimination in the USA, including Alaska.
In Alaska, the "gop" VP nominee Sarah Palin fired the state director of public safety reportedly because the director refused the fire Palin's former brother-in-law. HRW will likely argue that this case doesn't amount to political discrimination because the former brother-in-law and fired public safety director are both "gops" like Palin.
When Palin was mayor of the City of Wassila, Alaska before she was governor, Palin fired the chief of police because he insisted on closing the saloons at 1 AM instead 4 AM after several serious DWI accidents early in the morning. The local bar owners were big financial contributors of Palin. The fired chief of police was a political opponent of Palin; he supported her unsuccessful mayoral opponent.
The slimy HRW didn't say a thing about this instance of political discrimination by Palin because HRW was too busy down in Venezuela digging up lies and defamations about the exercise of power by the Venezuela workers of a state that increasingly belongs to them.
These instances in Alaska show the two-faced nature of HRW.
Against the US bourgeoisie or a US bourgeois wannabe, HRW is nothing if not apologetic or, more often, a party to a cover-up of wrong-doing.
But against a foe of US imperialism, like the revolutionary workers of Venezuela, HRW is a gushing fountain of defamation.
VIVANCO, NOTORIOUS HRW TRAMP THROWN OUT OF VENEZUELA
"Vivanco has murky records and collaborated with the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Our country cannot accept anyone that comes to attack the people and the institutions. In Venezuela we are building a democracy that has the people’s power as the main protagonist, and we respect the Constitution approved by the majority.”
- Carlos Escarra, Parliamentarian
Venezuela National Assembly
José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for HRW, was expelled from Venezuela Thursday night, Sept. 18, after presenting to the vicious bourgeois media in Caracas an offensive report packed with lies and defamations about what is in fact a growing Venezuela democracy and the increasingly proletarian content of Venezuelan democracy.
Vivanco, a truculent imperialist tramp, refused to accompany the Venezuelan law enforcement officers who delivered the persona non grata order of expulsion to him at his hotel and Vivanco, a notorious foreign national working for the Bush regime, wrestled on the floor of his hotel with Venezuelan law enforcement officers who told him in a civil tone that he had to catch the next plane out of the democracy he defamed and hoped to defame even more.
Venezuelan Foreign Affairs Minister Nicolás Maduro explained that the Bolivarian state in Venezuela declared Vivanco persona non grata because his lies and defamations about the state were unusually huge. Since persona non grata is a term mostly used in diplomacy, the expulsion implies the Venezuelan state considers Vivanco a US government agent, notwithstanding the ridiculous pretensions of HRW as a "non-governmental" organization.
''This is the first time this has ever happened to Human Rights Watch in this hemisphere,'' Vivanco said after his expulsion.
Well, it's about time it happened.
HRW has been producing glorifying and apologetic propaganda about US imperialism and defamatory stories about the foes of the US imperialism for 20 years. So, an expulsion is overdue.
By contrast, the bourgeois US regime doesn't even issue entry visas into the USA to most prominent critics of the US regime from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. A couple of years ago the bourgeois regime in Washington threw a delegation of Cuban petroleum executives out of a US privately-owned hotel in Mexico City, Mexico and ... what's more ... the US regime kept $7000 the Cubans had paid the hotel in advance.
Naturally, the imperialist running dogs at HRW said not a word of criticism although the Cubans who were kicked out of the US-owned hotel in Mexico City solely because they were Cuban. Apparently, the HRW didn't believe the incident was a human rights violation or the HRW believes the bourgeois regime in Washington has the right to violate human rights.
At least, Venezuela workers let this imperialist tramp, José Miguel Vivanco, in before they threw him out.
The bourgeois US regime and US capitalist press exploded with rage upon hearing that the state of the Venezuelan workers threw Vivanco, the imperialist tramp, out. The Miami Herald, on Sept. 19, wrote "In a 230-page report, Human Rights Watch concluded, among other things, that the government of President Hugo Chávez had engaged in systematic political discrimination and shown 'open disregard' for the principle of separation of powers."
We have already examined the poor quality of report's lies and defamations about political discrimination. Perhaps, in the future, we should examine the report's lies and defamation on the separation of powers in Venezuela.
CONCLUSION
Two key transformations are underway within the Venezuelan state -- a move toward a more democratic government and a move toward a proletarian government. HRW falsely denies the reality of the first process, a matter of form, and fights the second process, a matter of content.
At the moment the middle and senior people in the Venezuelan state come from everywhere politically and ideologically. There are elements of the patriotic bourgeoisie at the top, working beside elements of proletarian revolutionaries. In the middle of the state hierarchy, we find the huge suffocating presence of a lazy and incompetent middle class, a class that is the long, greasy and hairy tail firmly attached to stinking rear of the bourgeoisie and often very hostile to the revolutionary policies of the increasingly proletarian state that employs slimy middle class parasites.
It is a error to attribute the laziness and incompetence of the middle class to the increasingly proletarian content of the Venezuelan state, for the middle class was present in the previous bourgeois regimes prior to the 1998 revolution and the middle class was just as lazy and incompetent in those bourgeois regimes.
The form of the state -- that is, the move toward more democracy -- rests chiefly on the rules for the exercise of power set forth in the Constitution of the state and whether the state in fact complies with the constitutional rules in the exercise of its power. The content of the state -- the move toward a proletarian state from a bourgeois state -- rests on the social class -- the lumpen, the proletariat, the middle class, or the bourgeoisie -- that chiefly occupies the policy-making and regulatory apparatus of state that exercises the power. Generally, the policy-making and regulatory apparatus of the state is far above and way outside of the civil service employment system that often ignores the political, ideological, and organizational qualities of the job applicants.
The transition from a bourgeois to a proletarian state is Venezuela consists of a flow of proletarian revolutionaries and other workers ... who at this point, have limited executive experience ... into policy-making and regulatory apparatus and the flow of workers into positions in a part of the regulatory apparatus once exclusively monopolized by the lazy and incompetent middle class which commonly used its position in the apparatus to practice corruption.
HRW, one of many mouthpieces or microphones of US imperialism, calls this transition in the content of the Venezuelan state from bourgeois to proletarian ... which happens to be too gradual due to the shortage of qualified revolutionaries ... "political discrimination."
**Related: Read Gabriele Zamparini's damning report on HRW and their "Senior Military Analyst", Marc Garlasco.
"Watching Human Rights Watch"
The following excerpt from Garlasco's biography provides a taste of Zamparini's report:
“Before coming to HRW, Marc spent seven years in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence analyst covering Iraq. His last position there was chief of high-value targeting during the Iraq War in 2003. Marc was on the Operation Desert Fox (Iraq) Battle Damage Assessment team in 1998, led a Pentagon Battle Damage Assessment team to Kosovo in 1999, and recommended thousands of aimpoints on hundreds of targets during operations in Iraq and Serbia. He also participated in over 50 interrogations as a subject matter expert”.
© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com
This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you!
Peace on earth.
http://www.laprensa.com.bo/noticias/21-09-08/21_09_08_opin2.php
About time HRW was removed. Its a front for US govt interests, and has links to the NED.
The only HR organisation of any real authority is the Red Cross..
Seriously, could you idiots stop posting entire 10 page articles.
Has anyone noticed Grindios absence amongst the turmoil? He's usually here posting how the right sacrifices babies and drinks their blood. hmmmm
Could it be he finally got out of the california burbs took the first flight to Bolivia and finally put his money where his mouth is.
'First, Human Rights Watch is not a right-wing organization with an agenda'
not so. Vivanco has long been targeting Chavez.
EG:
's court proceedings begin this month against four Venezuelans from an election campaign group that accepted donations from a foreign government ? something that is indisputably a federal crime under both U.S. and Venezuelan law ? it?s no surprise that members of the Bush administration in Washington cry that the sky is falling.
After all, it?s their money (well, on second thought, it is U.S. taxpayers? money) that is at the root of the alleged criminal enterprise. And the upcoming trial of accused Venezuelan electoral delinquents, held in the public light of day, will shine yet more sunlight upon Washington?s secret recipes for meddling in the elections of other nations.
On Friday, U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey and Jose Vivanco of Human Rights Watch ? thirteen blocks from the White House and on the same day - chirped in harmony to spin this story as a case of ?persecution? against ?legitimate electoral activities.? '
etc
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/venezuela/3285.html
in 2004, Greg Wilpert had this to say:
'Has Human Rights Watch Joined Venezuela’s Opposition?
by Gregory Wilpert
It looks like the cat is out of the bag: Human Rights Watch has formally joined Venezuela’s opposition. Well, not quite; it is not a formally consummated deal yet, since their latest report does appeal to President Chavez by saying, “the criticisms offered [in the report] [should] not be mischaracterized as a partisan attack.”
Then why has just about everyone who supports the Chavez government taken the latest Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Venezuela, about the country’s “Judicial Independence under Siege,” as precisely the opposite of what HRW says it is, as a “partisan attack”? Is it because they do not want to deal with the real issues, as HRW’s America’s Director José Miguel Vivanco suggests, or is it because the report actually is a partisan attack - one that is being launched just in time to turn national and international public opinion against the Chavez government as it faces an unprecedented recall referendum a mere two months from now?
This report is just the most recent and most revealing partisan attack against the Chavez government. It begins by basically equating the April 2002 coup attempt with the new Supreme Court law when it says, “When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías faced a coup d’état in April 2002, advocates of democracy in Venezuela and abroad roundly condemned the assault on the country’s constitutional order. Today Venezuela faces another constitutional crisis that could severely impair its already fragile democracy. This time, though, the threat comes from the government itself.” It ends by making demands that are typical of Venezuela’s opposition-demands that the government cannot possibly fulfill, such as suspending the new law, which has already taken effect. Then, since such a demand will not be fulfilled, the report, just as is typical of Venezuela’s opposition, takes the issue to international bodies, such as the World Bank and the OAS.
etc
http://voltairenet.org/article121200.html
There is a lot more info on the internet to show that HRW with regards to Venezuela and latin america as a a whole is very much serving US interests.
Ive long had my suspicions that perhaps Jim is like Vivanco...
Huma Rights Watch amnesia:
Gabrielle Zamparin corresponds with HRW:
HAPPY DAYS - Part I: Human Rights Watch's Amnesia
Part I - Human Rights Watch's Amnesia: An e-mail exchange with Human Rights Watch's John H. Biaggi - Acting Director Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
Dear John Biaggi,
I’m sure you’re very busy with the HRW Film Festival these days, but there is an urgent matter I’d kindly like you to consider.
I’ve just read in the Village Voice an article that reads:
The body count at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival rivals any in Hollywood's summer shoot-'em-ups: 400,000 killed in Laos; 250,000 slaughtered in Chechnya; 40,000 murdered in Chad; 3,000 Chileans disappeared under Pinochet; 1,000 Lebanese felled by Israeli bombs. Now add Iraq to the equation—some 90,000 violent civilian deaths and counting, according to IraqBodyCount.org—and you have a serious accounting of carnage, both past and present, reflected at this year's 19th annual event. [The Political Is Personal at the Human Rights Watch Fest. Putting a human face on global atrocity. by Anthony Kaufman June 3rd, 2008]
From the article I don’t understand if the figures about Iraq taken from Iraq Body Count has been adopted by HRW or it was just an insert from the Village Voice’s journalist.
As you surely know, the best estimates indicate the real figure is likely in excess of one million dead. I’m sending here below some resources I hope can be useful both to Human Rights Watch Film Festival and to the press.
Thank you and good luck with the festival.
Best wishes,
Gabriele Zamparini
Useful resources:
Iraq: the Human Cost
Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates
ORB Update on Iraqi Casualty Data
Answers to Questions About Iraq Mortality Surveys
Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy
What is the real death toll in Iraq?
Iraqi deaths survey 'was robust'
***
Hi Gabriele,
All the figures in this article are entirely the journalists, not HRW figures. Thanks for pointing this out.
Regards,
-John
***
Hi John,
Thank you for your quick reply. I appreciate it, especially knowing how busy you must be in these days with the HRW film festival.
The Village Voice’s article is indeed misleading. I wrote to them but I didn’t get any reply.
If I can abuse of your time and kindness for just one more question, do you know if HRW has an official position on the death toll in the Iraq war? Or can you please tell me to whom I may ask this question within HRW? I really would appreciate your help a lot.
Thank you very much – and by the way, I’m truly a great admirer of your festival which I think is really the best, more intelligent film festival running today.
Best wishes,
Gabriele
etc
http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2008/06/happy-days-part-i-human-rights-watchs.htm
Threat to Democracy in Latin America
By Harold Pinter, John Pilger, Tony Benn
20/09/08 "The Guardian" -- On September 10 President Evo Morales of Bolivia declared the US ambassador persona non grata. On September 11 (the 35th anniversary of the military overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile) the president of Venezuela asked the US ambassador there to leave the country. President Hugo Chávez believed he was facing the possibility of an imminent coup d'etat in which he said the US administration were involved. President Morales believed that his government was facing serious destabilisation which was also being fomented by the US. A third country, Paraguay, announced 10 days previously that it had detected a conspiracy involving military officers and opposition politicians.
Latin America now faces its most serious crisis since the reintroduction of democracy at the end of the 20th century. The plot against democracy in Venezuela centred on a conspiracy, revealed in telephone conversations between senior military officers broadcast on national television, to assassinate the democratically elected head of state. In Bolivia, the separatist prefects of the five eastern and southern departments have begun a campaign of violence and economic sabotage designed to destabilise the democratic regime.
These events show unequivocally who defends democracy and who threatens it today. We are appalled by the failure of much of the international media to provide accurate and proportionate coverage of these events. All democrats throughout should rally to defend democracy in Latin America.
Signed: Harold Pinter, John Pilger, Tony Benn, Ken Loach, Jean Lambert MEP, Ian Gibson MP, Kelvin Hopkins MP, Billy Hayes, General secretary, CWU, Bill Greenshields
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20820.htm
HRWL: loyally serving the Empire.
THE TRUTH SUFFERS IN HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT ON VENEZUELA
By Press Release
Sep 21, 2008, 19:53
On September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez.” The report contains biases and inaccuracies, and wrongly purports that human rights guarantees are lacking or not properly enforced in Venezuela. In addition, while criticizing Venezuela’s human rights in the political context, it fails to mention the many significant advancements made by the government on other essential human rights, such as access to education, healthcare, nutritious food, clean water, and housing.
MYTH: “Discrimination on political grounds has been a defining feature of the Chávez presidency.”
FACT: Human Rights Watch deems the 2002 coup against the elected government “the most dramatic setback” for human rights in Venezuela in the last decade, but criticizes President Chavez’s own public condemnations of the unconstitutional overthrow as examples of “political discrimination” against the opposition. On the contrary, President Chávez last year pardoned political opponents who backed a failed 2002 coup against his democratically elected government. “It’s a matter of turning the page,” Chávez said. "We want there to be a strong ideological and political debate -- but in peace.”[i] In this spirit, the government has often welcomed input from the opposition, for example, inviting the leaders of student protests to address the National Assembly.
MYTH: The Chávez administration has an “open disregard for the principle of separation of powers – specifically an independent judiciary.”
FACT: Human Rights Watch wrote in an earlier report that “When President Chávez became president in 1999, he inherited a judiciary that had been plagued for years by influence-peddling, political interference, and, above all, corruption...In terms of public credibility, the system was bankrupt.” Under Chávez though, Human Rights Watch admitted that access to justice in Venezuela was improved by the expansion of the court system.[ii] Also, the World Bank found that “the [judicial] reform effort has made significant progress – the STJ [Supreme Court] is more modern and efficient.”[iii] Testament to the strength of democratic institutions in Venezuela is the ability of the National Electoral Council to uphold decisions unfavorable to the executive, such as the “no” victory in the December 2007 referendum on constitutional reforms.
MYTH: “[Chávez] has significantly shifted the balance of the mass media in the government’s favor… by stacking the deck against critical opposition outlets.”
FACT: As was true at the time of the 2002 coup against Chávez, Venezuela’s media is dominated by opposition voices. The “anti-government” media mentioned by Human Rights Watch still maintains the largest share of the nation’s public airwaves, and their frequently extreme criticisms of the government have included calling for the overthrow of elected leaders (as in 2002). There are no major pro-government newspapers in Venezuela. The new government-funded television and radio outlets, such as TVes, Venezuela’s first public broadcaster – and TeleSur – a regional network with support from multiple countries – have a much smaller reach than the private outlets. Furthermore, the government has never censored or “shut down” opposition media. The private channel RCTV faced a non-renewal of its broadcast license due to persistent legal violations including inciting political violence, but the station easily made the switch to cable.
MYTH: The Chávez government “has sought to remake the country’s labor movement in ways that violate basic principles of freedom of association.”
FACT: The Chavez government has actively promoted the formation of labor unions and bargaining by organized labor, but has not co-opted this sector. The National Workers' Union (UNT) was founded in April 2003 by workers supportive of government policies. In 2008, the government responded to an ongoing labor dispute between steel workers and the foreign-owned firm Sidor by intervening to negotiate a settlement, and when this was found to be impossible, the government reasserted state control over the Sidor plant in response to worker demands. The steel workers themselves were also allowed to purchase a share of the business themselves and thereby assert more control over the company.
MYTH: The Chávez government has pursued an “aggressively adversarial approach to local rights advocates and civil society organizations.”
FACT: The Chávez administration has encouraged local leaders to create community councils that let localities identify and address their own problems – from garbage collection to school construction. The concept comes from the belief that local groups know what is lacking and know what they want for their communities. Community councils democratize local government and give people the funding and capacity to make decisions for themselves. Also subject to local decision-making are many of the social missions that are designed to help reduce poverty in the most marginalized areas of the country. Health clinics, educational centers, subsidized food markets and other initiatives rely on local volunteers and are accountable to these communities.
CONCLUSION
The Human Rights Watch report “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez,” provides an incomplete and biased account of Venezuela’s human rights record during the last decade.
It overstates the issue of political discrimination, accusing the Chávez government of targeting opponents, when in fact it has pardoned supporters of the coup and promoted open dialogue. The report is also wrong on the separation of powers and the media. The branches of government provide strong checks and balances, and institutions have improved since Chávez was first elected. No censorship of the media occurs, and the opposition still dominates the airwaves. In terms of civil society, labor organizations and community groups enjoy more support from this administration than ever before.
Venezuela has a strong record on human rights. Many of the important guarantees set out in the 1999 Constitution have indeed been enforced, particularly those relating to the fundamental needs of citizens, such as food, shelter, healthcare, access to education, employment, social security, and the right to participation in cultural life.
Human Rights Watch details none of the impressive progress made in these areas. For example, the UN Development Programme has found that Venezuela has already achieved some of the Millennium Development Goals, and is on track to complete the others by 2015. Notably, the country has seen a 54% drop in the number of households living in extreme poverty since 1998, and its overall poverty has fallen by 34%.[iv] Facts such as these provide a much more complete picture of the human rights situation in Venezuela.
[i] “Chávez pardons accused coup backers” Ian James, Associated Press, December 31, 2007.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/topstories/2007-12-31-1482318110_x.htm
[ii] Human Rights Watch, “Rigging the Rule of Law: Judicial Independence Under Siege in Venezuela,” June 2004, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/venezuela0604/
[iii] World Bank, Project Information Document, Report AB510, December 9, 2003, http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDS_IBank_Servlet?pcont=details&eid=000104615_20040226144554
[iv] Instituto Nacional de Estadística http://www.ine.gob.ve/pobreza/LIgrafico2sem.asp
The Venezuela Information Office is dedicated to informing the American public about contemporary Venezuela, and receives its funding from the government of Venezuela. Further information is available from the FARA office of the Department of Justice in Washington, DC.
http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/downloads/HRW%20Myth%20Fact.htm
Brian
Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party
Including A Review of Weighing the Evidence: Lessons from the Slobodan Milosevic Trial (Human Rights Watch, December, 2006)
By Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, George Szamuely
IAEA Logo
Part 1: Introduction — The Role and Biases of Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) came into existence in 1978 as the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee. Early documents affirmed that its purpose was to "monitor domestic and international compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act." [1] But though a private U.S.-based organization whose vice chairman once stated "You can't complain about other countries unless you put your own house in order," [2] its main focus was on Moscow. Thus its literature also affirmed that founding the Committee "was intended as a gesture of moral support for the activities of the beleaguered Helsinki monitors in the Soviet bloc," and its early work was well geared to advance the U.S. government's policy of weakening the Soviet Union and loosening its ties to Eastern Europe. [3] While the organization has broadened its horizons and grown enormously since its $400,000 seed money from the Ford Foundation, it has never sloughed off its close link to the Western establishment, as evidenced by its leadership's affiliations, [4] its funding, [5] and its role over the years. Because of its institutional commitment to human rights and its broad purview, however, HRW has done a great deal of valuable work, as for example in helping to document the character and effects of the Reagan era wars across Central America, where its Americas Watch reports on the U.S. support for the Nicaragua Contras, the Salvadoran army and death squads, and Guatemalan state terror were eye-opening and led to intense hostility on the part of the Reaganites and Wall Street Journal editors. [6]
But despite these and countless other constructive efforts, the organization has at critical times and in critical theaters thrown its support behind the U.S. government's agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment. Since the early 1990s this tendency has been especially marked in the organization's focus on and treatment of some of the major contests in which the U.S. government itself has been engaged — perhaps none more clearly than Iraq and the Balkans. Here, its deep bias is well-illustrated in a March 2002 op-ed by HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, published in the Wall Street Journal under the title "Indict Saddam." [7] The first thing to note about this commentary is its timing. It was published at a time when the United States and Britain were clearly planning an assault on Iraq with a "shock and awe" bombing campaign and ground invasion in violation of the UN Charter. But Roth doesn't warn against launching an unprovoked war — though wars of aggression had been judged by the Nuremberg Tribunal to be the "supreme international crime" that "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." [8] On the contrary, Roth's focus was on Saddam's crimes, and provided a valuable public relations gift to U.S. and British leaders, diverting attention from and putting an apologetic gloss on their prospective supreme international crime.
Three years earlier, when the NATO powers had begun the bombing of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999, HRW said nothing critical about that action; as we shall see, it focused mainly on the crimes of the target country then under attack. In a 1998 commentary for the International Herald Tribune, Fred Abrahams, an HRW researcher whose major focus has been Kosovo, urged regime-change for Yugoslavia, either through President Slobodan Milosevic's indictment or a U.S. war to affect the same outcome. "At what point will the Clinton administration decide that they have seen enough?" Abrahams asked. "[T]he international community's failure to punish Milosevic for crimes in Croatia and Bosnia sent the message that he would be allowed to get away with such crimes again. It is now obvious that the man who started these conflicts cannot be trusted to stop them." [9] This line also served the United States and other NATO powers well, and both cases show a clear adaptation of HRW definitions of human rights and choice of worthy victims to the needs of the Western powers and institutions that nurture the organization. (In Part 3, we deal with the mind-boggling misrepresentation of history in Abrahams' statement about Milosevic's unwillingness to stop these wars — in fact, Milosevic signed-on to every major peace proposal 1992-1995, whereas Abrahams' favorite state regularly sabotaged them.)
Roth's "Indict Saddam" starts as follows: "The Bush administration's frustration with a decade of porous sanctions against Iraq has led to active consideration of military action. Yet one alternative has yet to be seriously tried — indicting Saddam Hussein for his many atrocities, particularly the 1988 genocide against Iraqi Kurds." This clearly implies that the sanctions imposed on Iraq were ineffective ("porous") and that the administration's alleged frustration on that account was real and well grounded, establishment claims that were false and misleading and that an unbiased analyst might have had some doubts about at the time. We may note also the lack of concern with the "active consideration of military action."
etc
http://www.electricpolitics.com/2007/02/human_rights_watch_in_service.html
Brian
It's the final countdown for Jim's blog.
When ultraleft kooks drown the blogs with copied articles, it's the beginning of the end of such blogs.
The current ultraleft kooks should learn from a collegue of theirs: Quasimodo's aka el Grindio. At least he could articulate his nonsense and condense it to less than 1,000 words. You bipeds are so boring you even scared him off!
;-)
The Croats are Morales' Jews
Beni is Morales' Katrina
I just can't wait to hear that these kooks will have to say against:
Amnesty International
Mother Theresa
Santa Claus
Easter Bunny
Valentine's Day
They probably have nothing against the Unabomber, McVeigh, or the Galleanists.
Hey, everybody. Let´s stop playing games!
We all know we are on the road to one world socialist order.
That it´s a british iniciative.
That Bolivia is one of the testing grounds for implementation.
So what!. How bad can it be. I mean after all it´s British, right?
Great Rock, best drugs in the planet, horniest chics, and scotch!
What the fuck else do you want, you stupid Bolivians?
Mike
Okay, while we're all distracted by the chavez mess, the morales supporters continue to close in on Santa Cruz. To the north they are in Portachuelo about 20 km west of Montero. they'll have another 20 km to Warnes and about 25 more to Santa Cruz. 65 km is about 35 to 40 miles. They should be able to cover that in 2 days. What a coincidence! That would put their arrival on 24 September, Santa Cruz Day, right in the middle of Expo Cruz! The fiscales went out to meet them. Apparently they (the MAS supporters) have stopped kidding us about coming unarmed. All the film of they showing off their rifles, sticks, dynamite and slings probably. Anyway, the fiscales asked them to leave the guns behind. They said only if the fiscales can guarantee their peaceful entry into Santa Cruz. Meanwhile they vandalized Portachuelo and threw explosives near what looked like a gas plant. The Catholic Church in Santa Cruz has been calling for a peaceful response when the campesinos arrive. Thursday was dedicated a day of prayer for just that. Unfortunately, it only takes a couple of hundred antagonists to turn this into another Porvenir and that may be exactly what morales is hoping for.
Now one thing might set this off a bit early. You have to cross Rio Pirai between Portachuelo and Montero. That would be a choke point - key terrain.
Well, I hope we can get through this peacefully. The guns, sticks dynamite and slings don't encourage me, but miracles do happen.
Mike,
The one world rule order is a masonic conspiracy, not a socialist one.
I find it very interesting that all of the sudden these commentators come of out of the woodwork when Chavez' name is raised. They were silent on far more controversial topics, but know they want to crucify Jim because he dared support a clearly left-of-center NGO, calling him a sell-out and acussing the rest of us of being on the CIA payroll. El ladron piensa que todos estan en su condicion, and thus I conclude that these are paid chavistas that scour the internet and troll on any board that dares question the little venezuealan rabid macaco.
To all: Do not feed the trolls.
Ey, troll buster!
"The one world rule order is a masonic conspiracy, not a socialist one."
I find it amuzing that you repeat part of the language in the troll´s comment, while you say "d not feed the trolls".
This reminds me of the argentinian novels on television
"CALLATEEEE...PELOTUDAAAAA!...., POR QUÉ NO PODÉS HABLAR SIN GRITAAAAR"
FPの家 評判 三洋ホームズ 評判 片瀬建設 評判 アットハウジング 評判 欧倫ホーム 評判 城南建設 評判 ユニバーサルホーム 評判 クレバリーホーム 評判