Amigo wrote:Answer. Yes, your source matters. Who is Chavez in a cold war with? The U.S.. Why in the hell would you show me a Human rights report from the U.S. about Chavez. I read Amnesty International report about Chavez and Venezuela.
So - am I understanding you correctly - you are discounting Human Rights Watch because it's based in the US? Any source based in the US can not be trusted?
Do you realise that this would also include, say, SOA Watch, which you have quoted and linked in extensively above (that's PO Box 4566, Washington)?
And Amnesty International, that's based in Tony Blair's UK, Bush's obediant poodle ally. How's that any better?
This is, of course, a non-argument. Fact is, that HRW is an independent human rights organisation, not connected to the US government, not connected to the US political parties, and that it has fiercely criticized governments of rightwing and leftwing persuasion alike, whenever it noted human rights abuses.
Fact is, that the same Human Rights Watch has been fiercely critical of
US governments, the Bush Jr. one not least. I already brought a bunch of links in which HRW criticizes the Bush administration's abuses of human rights in Guantanamo as stridently as it did Chavez's human rights violations.
So what is your point here? If you do see this all simply as one big fight between the US and Venezuela, HRW is obviously not part of the US side - its on the fence. Much, in fact, like most of your fellow-posters here. Wouldnt that be a POV you'd want to consider rather than dismiss immediately?
Amigo wrote:Why is the World Bank, American Development Bank and application of an American States Democratic charter suggested as a cure to the Human rights problem considering they are the biggest pepetuators of Human rights violations in Latin America? (do I really have to post all the crap again about the School of the Americas, American Corparate interest, Death squads, Jhon Stockwell, etc, etc?)
The World Bank, an intergovernmental institution of 184 countries, has now somehow merged into one fluid whole with the US's School of the Americas and the death squads it trained? I have not agreed with many of the World Bank's policies either - I think they're too neo-liberal, though not half as much as those of the IMF, with which the WB has an often strenuous relationship. But this careless plumping together of everything you associate with the West one way or another, as one sorta unified kind of being is - what?
Furthermore, you are not reading the very quote you brought here yourself correctly. Nowhere did the HRW suggest the World Bank and the OAS "as a cure to the Human rights problem". This is what you quoted:
"[the] humans rights watch report [is] "recommending that the Organization of American States ought to get involved and apply its Democratic Charter" and also recommends that the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank should condition future loans on the government's implementation of the recommendations contained in the HRW report."
All HRW here suggests re: the World Bank is that, as long as the government does not stop violating human rights, intergovernmental institutes like the World Bank should not give it further loans.
Seems straightforward to me. What exactly do you object to in the proposition that international organisations should not lend money to governments that violate human rights? You can bet HRW suggests the same kind of approach to rightwing governments that violate human rights.
Otherwise, basically - lest I repeat myself - my answer to your question is in the last paragraph of my previous post.
Now, if we can get beyond the knee-jerk reaction of impugning the source, I hope you will still also get round to actually addressing the warnings about concrete human rights violations in Chavez's Venezuela that were listed in those HRW items.
