Venezuelan soccer fans protest Chavez at Copa
Despite Chavez best efforts to keep protesters away from the Copa America soccer tournament, Associated Press reports about half of the 40,000 fans broke into anti-Chavez chants;
MARACAIBO, Venezuela (AP) – Thousands of Venezuelan soccer fans used an international tournament to show opposition to President Hugo Chavez, rising to their feet with chants of “Freedom!” The chants, which included “This government is going to fall,” began shortly into the second half of Thursday’s match between the United States and Argentina in the western city of Maracaibo, a stronghold of opposition to Chavez.Â
Chavez opponents are hoping the arrival of thousands of tourists for the Copa America tournament will draw attention to their protests against the president’s refusal to renew the licence of a popular opposition-aligned television channel.
“We want the world to know we’re not all with Chavez,” said Gabriel Gonzalez, a business student at the University of Zulia, who attended Thursday’s match.
About half the crowd of 40,000 appeared to join in the chants, which filled the stadium for about three minutes.
Chavez, who was re-elected by a wide margin in December, has gone to great lengths to keep Venezuela’s bitter political divide from spilling into the tournament, banning protests in and near stadiums and ordering state security forces to crack down on any that do arise.
Only one match in the three-week-long tournament is being held in the protest-prone capital of Caracas.
But opposition activists seem determined to voice their criticisms about Chavez to the world.
“I don’t really know whether it’s spontaneous, semi-spontaneous or directed from above” by the political opposition, said Steve Ellner, a political science professor at Venezuela’s University of the East. “This could be part of a strategy to erode support and create uncertainty.”
The chants on Thursday followed a heckling incident two days earlier, when a small number of fans booed Chavez as he attended a ceremony.
All this despite Chavez best laid plans to make the Copa about him, according to Daniel at Venezuela News and Views;
As expected Chavez could not resist to make the Copa America his. From “ahora es de todos” the Soccer tournament went to “ahora es de Chavez“. How come the Conmebol allowed 1) the silly and stupid speech of Chavez, something which was never allowed in previous editions of the Copa? and 2) this picture below (from EFE through Tal Cual)?
Gateway Pundit has a link to the video on YouTube and another wire service story. But the Venezuelan blogs seem silent on it.
And Chavez is making deals with Russia to build four new refineries. No wonder he slammed the US missile defense plans for Europe. I wonder if he’ll be using Cuban slave labor for his refineries, too.
RCTV’s Observador Online reports that Chavez is in negotiations with Belarussia to buy Venezuela a modern air defense system including missiles, radar and a command system;
29 de junio de 2007.-
El presidente de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, llegó este viernes a Minsk, la capital de Bielorrusia, para concretar la adquisición de un moderno sistema de defensa aérea. Según medios rusos y bielorrusos, se trata de un sistema de defensa aérea a partir de baterÃas de misiles rusos S-300 PMU-2 y Tor M-1, dotadas de radares, para el que Bielorrusia ha ofrecido crear un sistema de mando automático.
Paranoia writ large.
Category: Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, Politics, Society
