Why Venezuela's Neighbors Are Hoping For A Chavez Win Sunday
Why Venezuela's Neighbors Are Hoping For A Chavez Win Sunday
By Flavia Marreiro
FOLHA DE S. PAULO/Worldcrunch
SÃO PAULO - When Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos met with Hugo Chávez’s opponent Henrique Capriles, recently in Bogotá, the Venezuelan opposition brandished the pictures like a trophy.
In effect, this meeting was a rare achievement in a region where Chávez maintains a close strategic relationship with his neighbors, and is hailed as a benefactor by the countries to which he sells oil at bargain rates.
Most of Latin America is hoping for Chávez to stay in power after next Sunday’s election. Besides former rival Colombia, countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Nicaragua and Cuba want him to win as easily as possible, to avoid any turbulence in the region.
The only exception in the region is Paraguay, who opposed Venezuela’s entry into Mercosur this summer. Venezuela’s admission into the trading bloc was made possible thanks to Paraguay’s temporary suspension after its president was impeached.
More:
http://www.worldcrunch.com/rss/world-affairs/why-venezuela-039-s-neighbors-are-hoping-for-a-chavez-win-sunday/chavez-capriles-venezuela-election/c1s9727/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I raised the topic here years ago, and the same lame rubbish happened then, too.
Of COURSE we never hear of them from our own corporate media, that's NOT stuff they care about.
I took a quick look at google and this flew up immediately:
Murder of the campesinos
It is not Hugo Chavez who endangers Venezuelans, but the greedy landowners killing peasant farmers with impunity
Edward Ellis
The Guardian, Sunday 2 October 2011 16.59 EDT
Venezuela, the resource-rich South American country that is home to the largest oil reserves on the planet, has been a focal point for international journalists, pundits and human rights activists for the better part of a decade. This has been thanks to the provocative and defiant stance of the nation's leftwing president Hugo Chávez.
Unrelenting in his criticism of western governments, the socialist president has made countless headlines the world over for everything ranging from his nationalisation of key industries to his chemotherapy-induced baldness. Scant attention has been paid, however, to some of the grittier policy initiatives that have defined Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution".
Perhaps the starkest example of this neglect concerns the Venezuelan countryside – an area that has been transformed into the battleground for a conflict occurring beneath the radar of both the international human rights community and the major media for more than 10 years.
Since 2001, when the Chávez government pledged to break up the country's vastly unequal land holdings that have stifled agricultural development for more than a century, a wave of reprisal killings have consumed rural areas as large landowners contract assassins to end the "invasions" by pro-government campesinos on their illegitimately acquired and many times fallow estates.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/02/venezuela-land-rights-chavez-farmers
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Thanks for bringing up the subject, you are clearly right, not right-wing, to do it!
Welcome to D.U.
as hard as he could to get admitted to Mercosur.
Their legislature is loaded with members of the Colorado Party which controlled Paraguay for over 50 or 60 years, including over 35 straight years by a twisted, sadistic Nazi-supporting, genocide-committing monster, Alfredo Stroessner, who died a few years ago.
The Colorado Party still dominates Paraguay's politics, clearly, regardless of the fact Fernando Lugo, whose family was persecuted by Stroessner, was elected by a massive majority of the public, eager, desperate for change away from the Colorado Party's vicious leadership.
Genocide in Paraguay
Mark Munzel, a German anthropologist, was the first to call attention to the massacre of the Paraguayan Indians, with whom he lived for a year. He points out that "the Ache are inconvenient" - particularly, for the few enterprises with a majority of foreign (Brazilian, United States, and Western European) shares that dominate the Paraguayan economy, and for the Stroessner dictatorship that has imposed its terrorist rule with substantial U.S. support, as did its murderous predecessors. As the forests are cleared for foreign & domestic mining and cattle-raising interests, Indian removal, using some combination of outright killing and forcible resettlement , is a normal facet of "development" policy. In the case of a "poor man's Nazi" regime such as Stroessner's Paraguay, the nature of the resettlement (comparable to those in Nazi concentration camps"is such as to make the charge of genocide an appropriate one.
Munzel records the campaign against the Indians by manhunts, slavery, and deculturation. In manhunts with the co-operation of the military, the Indians are "pursued like animals," the parents killed, and the children sold (citing professor Sardi). Machetes are commonly used to murder Indians to save the expense of bullets. Men not slaughtered are sold for field-workers, women as prostitutes, children as domestic servants. According to Sardi, "there is not one family in which a child has not been murdered."
The process of deculturation aims at the intentional destruction of Indian culture among those herded into the reservation. Little effort is made to maintain secrecy about any of this, except by agencies of the U.S. government and by the U.S. media. For example, Munzel was offered teenage Indian girls by the Director of Indian Affairs of the Ministry of Defence, who "sought my goodwill," and he comments that "slavery is widespread and officially tolerated." Slaves can be found in Asuncion, the capital city.
Indians who survive the manhunts are herded into reservations where, according to Munzel, they are "subjected to stress and physcological degradation calculated to break the body as well as the spirit." Torture and humiliation of Indian Chiefs is a "standard procedure designed to produce the disintegration of group identity." Medication and nourishment are purposely withheld. When spirits are broken, the reservation is used " as a manhunt centre where tamed Indians are trained in fratricide." In a recent visit, Arens was impressed with the "striking absence of young adult males," the horrendous condition of the children, with festering sores, distended abdomens and widespread symptoms of the protein- deficiency disease Kwashiorkor, and the refusal of medication and medical care as a general practice. Arens, even on a guided tour, was aghast at the systematic maltreatment and felt himself "engulfed by the collective gloom of a people who had given up on life."
More:
http://totse2.com/totse/en/politics/foreign_military_intelligence_agencies/parageno.html
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Alfredo Stroessner
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Operation Condor
Paraguay was a leading participant in Operation Condor, a campaign of state-terror and security operations which were jointly conducted by the right-wing military governments of six Latin American countries (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil). Human rights violations characteristic of those in other Latin American countries such as kidnapping, torture, forced disappearance and extrajudicial killing, were routine and systematic during the Stroessner regime. Following executions, many of the bodies of those killed by the regime were dumped in the Chaco or the Rio Paraguay. The discovery of the "terror archives" in 1992 in the Lambaré suburb of Asunción, confirmed allegations of widespread human rights violations.
Pastor Coronel was the chief of the pyragüés (hairy-footed in Guaraní) or secret police. He would interview people in a pileta, a bath of human excrement or ram electric cattle prods up their rectums. The Secretary of the Paraguayan Communist Party was dismembered alive with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone.[9]
Under Stroessner, egregious human rights violations were committed against the Ache Indian population of Paraguay's east-coast. The Ache Indians resided on land that was coveted by foreign multinationals and had resisted relocation attempts by the Paraguayan army. The government retaliated with massacres and forced many Ache into slavery. In 1974 the UN accused Paraguay of slavery and genocide.[10]
Stroessner was careful not to show off or draw attention from jealous generals or foreign journalists. He avoided rallies and took simple holidays in Patagonia. He did become more tolerant of opposition as the years passed, but there was no change in the regime's basic character.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Stroessner
