Venezuela Watch

Who gave you "a job" here? Are you engaged in a mission ordained by a higher power?

You can find my views on the matter back in the earlier pages - before the dialogue was killed by your numbingly pedantic pasted screeds.

No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children's gratitude or woman's love.

A hasty general observation..

...1973 - Senate report released, finding that after the corporate/CIA/State Department had failed to influence the election, ITT changed its strategy to make sure Allende "would not make it through the next six months." Most alarming to the Senate was the relationship between ITT execs and the US government, including communications between ITT execs and Henry Kissinger and the preparation of an 18 point strategy for the Nixon administration that contained a clear call for a miliatary coup.

...1973 - Senate report released, finding that after the corporate/CIA/State Department had failed to influence the election, ITT changed its strategy to make sure Allende "would not make it through the next six months." Most alarming to the Senate was the relationship between ITT execs and the US government, including communications between ITT execs and Henry Kissinger and the preparation of an 18 point strategy for the Nixon administration that contained a clear call for a miliatary coup.

Yup, and we did it again over twenty years later in Serbia, this time under President Clinton. In both cases the world and the country in question were well-served.

Your views can be summed up in a few words, George; slavish devotion to a string of corrupt and murderous governments.

People that actually have a sense of morality would not do this.

In the case of Venezuela, the media is more pro-active, with lots of grossly exaggerated editorials and op-eds, news articles that sometimes read like editorials, and a general lack of balance in sources and subject matter.

But Venezuela is not Pakistan. In fact, it's not Florida or Ohio either. One reason that Chavez could be confident of the vote count is that Venezuela has a very secure voting system. This is very different from the United States, where millions of citizens cast electronic votes with no paper record. Venezuelan voters mark their choice on a touch-screen machine, which then records the vote and prints out a paper receipt for the voter. The voter then deposits the vote in a ballot box. An extremely large random sample - about 54 percent - of the paper ballots are counted and compared with the electronic tally.

If the two counts match, then that is a pretty solid guarantee against electronic fraud. Any such fraud would have to rig the machines and stuff the ballot boxes to match them - a trick that strains the imagination.


http://www.cepr.net/content/view/1383/45/

General Fortifies Venezuela Against the U.S.
CARACAS - In 2002, President Hugo Chavez left it to his comrade and friend, General Raul Baduel, to defend Venezuela against external threats - especially threats from the United States.
General Baduel did just that: he achieved legendary status within Chavez's administration in April of that year for thwarting an attempted coup, which both men claim the U.S. government had a hand in (though the U.S. denies this). Baduel says while the coup unfolded, American boats entered Venezuela's waters and U.S. helicopters ran routes in its airspace. He could monitor them "with the same radars the U.S. used to monitor drug trafficking." Baduel's actions saved Chavez's regime and kept him in power.

Five years later, Baduel turned against Chavez and his administration. He retired last year from his post as Defense Minister and shocked Venezuela by publicly denouncing Chavez's constitutional referendum, dubbing it another "coup" to consolidate his power and undermine democracy. But even out of military uniform and away from official rhetoric, Baduel still harbors suspicions about the role of the U.S. government in his country...

Chávez's Fix

Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months, including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

The killings, carried out by combat units under the orders of regional commanders, have always been a problem in the shadowy, 44-year-old conflict here -- one that pits the army against a peasant-based rebel movement.

But with the recent demobilization of thousands of paramilitary fighters, many of whom operated death squads to wipe out rebels, army killings of civilians have grown markedly since 2004, according to rights groups, U.N. investigators and the government's internal affairs agency. The spike has come during a military buildup that has seen the armed forces nearly double to 270,000 members in the last six years, becoming the second-largest military in Latin America.

There are varying accounts on the number of registered extrajudicial killings, as the civilian deaths are called. But a report by a coalition of 187 human rights groups said there are allegations that between mid-2002 and mid-2007, 955 civilians were killed and classified as guerrillas fallen in combat -- a 65 percent increase over the previous five years, when 577 civilians were reported killed by troops.

Colombia's Right-Wing Paramilitaries and Splinter Groups

Colombia seizes uranium from leftist guerrillas 27 Mar 2008 01:46:45 GMT
Source: Reuters