Mr. Banana and his grand revolution

While I was out of town, the Venezuelan Legislature rubber-stamped Chavez constitutional reforms. Michele Malkin reported it and asked where Sean Penn, Danny Glover and Naomi Campbell were.

So with a referendum imminent, Venezuelan students took to the streets again this week, with grave results.

Photos from Venezuela News and Views

The Devil’s Excrement has unmasked the shooter in the second photo;

And he also has photos of the getaway vehicles;

Notice it’s a police vehicle – which explains why the shooters were able to pass through the police lines without being apprehended after shooting at least nine protesters.

The AP described the incident;

In fighting that included gunfire, teargas and stone-throwing, some pro-Chavez men were trapped in a faculty building surrounded by opponents until others burst into the campus on motorcycles, shooting in the air to rescue them.

However The Devil’s Excrement explains it differently;

While we have known that the Chavez Government lacks scruples and has an absolute disregard for the law and the truth, it never ceases to amaze us how cynical they can be in terms of distorting the truth. The savage and brutal attack on the students by a group of Chavista thugs is quickly becoming a sort of Puente del Llaguno II, where the hoodlums that attacked the students returning unarmed from their peaceful march are now supposed to have cornoered and attempted to lynch the “poor” Chavistas who were at the University.

First of all, pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez students coexist peacefully at Central University, so there is no explanation for this sudden impulse to lynch them. They have faced each other in debates and elections and there has only been violence whenever outside groups have gone in and stirred it up. Like yesterday.

Let us first recall, that at around 4 PM, the Vice-Minister of the Interior and Justice sent police groups to all entrances of Central University and appeared on TV saying that he was doing this to stop any extraneous groups from creating violence. Why did he do this and why did he say it? Then the violence began and in most of the videos and pictures (there is one in my mind that is not clear if the guy is  part of the pro-Chavez thugs or not) those armed, organized and attacking the students with weapons and on motorcycles are pro-Chavez groups. 

CNN reports (hat tip to QandO) that Chavez, in true Orwellian language, beseeches the Venezuelan Right to avoid the “facist path” of violence;

President Hugo Chavez condemned Venezuela’s opposition on Friday for resorting to “fascist violence” in protesting constitutional changes that would greatly expand his power.

Police officers fire tear gas and rubber bullets at university students protesting Thursday in Caracas, Venezuela.

 But Chavez did not respond to accusations that his government is responsible for the upheaval.

Portraying his political foes as anti-democratic right-wingers, Chavez accused opponents of seeking help from Washington and Venezuela’s military.

“I urge the people of the right not to go down the fascist path,” Chavez told state television from Santiago, Chile, where he was attending a summit of Latin American leaders. “They generally take the path of fascist violence and confront the laws and the people, and they are always looking to the Pentagon, high-ranking generals.”

Dislike for Chavez is apparently not confined to Venezuela according to Reuters;

Protesters for and against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez got into shoving matches outside Venezuela’s embassy in Chile on Thursday as leaders from the Latin world arrived at a summit to discuss tight energy supplies and other issues.

The leftist Chavez, a strident antagonist of Washington who has used his country’s oil wealth to spread influence in Latin America, has supporters among some Chilean leftists but others declared him an unwelcome guest ahead of his expected arrival. 

So what was Chavez doing while Venezuelans were being gunned down in the streets? Meeting with thugs from FARC, of course;

President Hugo Chavez met with a representative of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group Thursday, saying he and Luciano Marin Arango held their first talks aimed at negotiating a swap of rebel-held hostages for jailed guerrillas.

“We are here trying to put the pieces to together” for an agreement, Chavez told state television as Marin Arango, better known by his nom de guerre Ivan Marquez, stood next to him on the steps of Venezuela’s presidential palace.

Reuters wrote that Venezuelans are flocking to Panama, something I can attest to, having just returned from Panama City myself;

Wealthy Venezuelans are emigrating to Panama in increasing numbers, snapping up luxury homes as they fear their leftist President Hugo Chavez will hold onto power for life and rebuild the country in the image of Communist Cuba.
 
With a shining new skyline, Panama is starting to rival Miami as a center for Venezuelan expatriates, who are attracted by the Central American country’s booming economy and a lively Caribbean culture like their own.

But they’re driving up real estate prices and pricing Panamanians right out of the market. Panmanians are already blaming their economic problems and their social stagnation on Venezuelans and Columbians. 

Chavez is making emigration more difficult according to Venezuelans and Panamanians I talked to there. Chavez has said he’ll allow adults to leave Venezuela but their children must remain behind (to get that mandatory indoctrination Chavez demands). He’s also trying to limit the amount of money they can take out of the country to about $5000/year. Those two measures should pretty much prevent anyone from leaving. People I talked to in Panama compared it to East Germany’s wall.

American Leftists continue to write idiocy to support Chavez and his grand experiment in “dual power”, because afterall, it’s only brown people who’ll suffer;

These perspectives are erroneous, since they cannot account for what have emerged as the central planks of the revolutionary process. I will focus on the most significant of these planks: the explosion of communal power.

Communal councils in Venezuela are merely Chavez’ rat patrols set up to skirt the influence of local elected officials who stand in his way to control every aspect of Venezuelan life. If Chavez believed in democracy, as he claims, he’d concede to local elected government. But of course he doesn’t – the reason for the existence of communal councils.

But, he insists his reforms are democratic;

The socialism that Venezuela is constructing is “totally democratic and humanist,” Chavez reiterated, and the reforms, which recognize new forms of collective, communal, and social property alongside private property, as well as giving more power to grass roots communal councils and social programs, among other changes, aim to establish “a communal, socialist economic system in each commune.”

He explained, “this economic system will be managed by everyone, by all the constituents of the communes.”

For example, he argued, gas stations would be managed by the communes, and that the income from this could be used to provide resources for social programs and community projects.

To democratise the economy, Chavez argued, “Is the only way to defeat poverty, to defeat misery and achieve the largest sum of happiness for the people,”

However, he said, this contradicts the interests of capitalism and imperialism, and an international media campaign to demonize the reforms and the revolutionary government in Venezuela, has already begun, in order to justify a possible military coup or foreign intervention.

“This is a battle, a political war, it is part of an international conflict,” he continued, “because we have declared ourselves free, and we are constructing freedom and imperialism is not going to take away our vision.”

Funny how the Left always sees politics as a war and a struggle against some invisible enemy – like the Democrats in the US who proclaim that they want to fight for me.

Katy from Caracas Chronicles highlights the real difference between the two sides;

So while we contemplate with horror how students are attacked, let’s keep our heads cool and remember a few key ideas:

1. We offer reconciliation and peace, chavismo offers violence. This idea may sound like a cliché, but it should be the core of our message, and this has practical implications. Restraint is the key here. If we defend ourselves using violence, we can no longer confidently say that we are for reconciliation.

Kate from A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective links to a Noticias24 story about the defacement of a mural equating Che to Simon Bolivar painted by socialist students at the Central University;

I guess that’s a whole lot better than getting shot, isn’t it?

Category: Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, Politics