Venezuela: Government plays confusion card well
By Miguel Octavio | The Devil's Excrement
22.01.05 | The Chavez Government is once again trying to use its favorite tactic: confusion. After being hit with a list of Colombians, including their criminal details, that according to that country’s Foreign Minister was sent yesterday and not the day before, at the request of Venezuelan authorities, now the Government wants to claim some Venezuelan terrorists that are in Colombia and are saying that it is Colombia that has a problem. The reality is that there is a difference, Colombia has a problem of guerrillas and terrorists that it is trying to fight, while Venezuela has been harboring terrorist and not helping the Colombians in their fight.
Today, there were quite a few reports of the Government’s hypocrisy. One of them claimed that during Chavez brief departure in 2002, the police found the business card of none other than the FARC’s Minister of Foreign Relations Rodrigo Granda in his office. Separately an opposition municipal Deputy said that the Government had also given the Venezuelan nationality to “Commander Gabino”, information that the Deputy said had reached his hands via intelligence from the Government itself.
Meanwhile, Chavez wants to generate additional confusion by scheduling a march for Sunday. You see, Sunday is the 56th. Anniversary of the end of the last Dictatorship, a date that Chavez has celebrated and not celebrated on off and on during his six years in power. The opposition has been calling for a march starting in the East of Caracas, which was denied permits by both the pro-Chavez Mayor of the Libertador District Freddy Bernal and the pro-Chavez Mayor of the Metropolitan area Juan Barreto. Of course, this is simply a smokescreen to have Chavez steal the show by calling for a march to defend the country’s sovereignty starting curiously in the East of Caracas, where Chavez has not been in quite a while, because he is no longer the man of the people that could walk calmly anywhere he wanted. But he claims he will try and go to the Colombian Consulate, which happens to be in the most anti-Chavez Municipality in the country: Chacao. Chavez has in fact cancelled his “Alo Presidente” program as his advisers are probably recommending that he shut up for a while so that things don’t get more complicated than they currently are.
I can imagine the scenario this Sunday, the recently invented Chavista march, clashes with the opposition march which will be declared illegal by the pro-Chavez municipal authorities and the Minister of Information Andres Izarra will come on TV to describe in his best Goebbelian fashion the excesses of the opposition. Izarra (Hi Andrés, in case you are reading this!), gave a press conference this afternoon to talk about the list that Venezuela will hand over to Colombia after finally being run over by the length and detail of the Colombian one and add the pro-tsunami telethon to his appearance, with a final sprinkling of how much support the policies of defense of the sovereignty of the country have among the Venezuelan population, as determined by the most obscure pollster in the country or the US.
Meanwhile, the most pro-Chavez European leader cancels his visit to Venezuela as the Colombians and the US continue playing hardball distributing the list of terrorists in Colombia as well as evidence of the locations of guerilla camps under the blind eye of the Venezuelan authorities. And that is the problem when you try to ride double speak the way Chavez likes, Rodriguez Zapatero may be a leftist, but he got to power on the coattails of a horrible terrorist attack on his own people and country Thus, he can not afford to be seen in the company of thugs, that clearly support what his people consider as their own enemies.
Unfortunately, all of these controversies cloud the news behind the news that the Supreme Court named a new Electoral Board in which four of the five members are clearly Chavez loyalists. Thus, we get screwed once again (or is it once more?) as if we had a chance of having fair elections before, but the possibility is simply very remote now. The whole thing is so ludicrous, that this is the second time the Supreme Court names the Electoral Board due to the omission of the National Assembly, which is probably illegal. The reality is that the Chavistas in the Assembly don’t even want to start doing the democratic exercise of choosing an Electoral Board agreeable to everyone. Instead, they want to wait until the new Assembly is elected fraudulently and then they will fill their mouths with “democracy at work” as the most Stalinist Government in Latin American history ratifies, once again, the Chavez dictatorship in Venezuela.
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