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<h2>What You Should Know About the Ukraine-Style Anti-Government
Protests in Venezuela</h2>
<p><b>The Venezuelan autocrats of the past are now masquerading as
democrats</b><b>with the aim of just getting all their old privileges
back</b></p>
<p><b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://bolivariannyc.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/what-you-should-know-about-the-ukraine-style-anti-government-protests-in-venezuela/">http://bolivariannyc.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/what-you-should-know-about-the-ukraine-style-anti-government-protests-in-venezuela/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</p>
<p>by <a sl-processed="1" title="Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya"
href="http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/author/mahdi-darius-nazemroaya/"
rel="author">Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya</a></p>
<p>The US-supported opposition in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
is taking its cue from the anti-government protests taking place across
the Atlantic Ocean in Ukraine. Failing to win any of Venezuela’s
elections by earning a popular mandate from the majority of the
population in the last few years, the leaders of the mainstream
opposition are now resorting to colour revolution tactics and a
Ukraine-style disruption strategy. The aim of these opposition leaders
in Venezuela is to manipulate the galvanized anti-government protesters
into creating a political crisis in Caracas. Mainstream opposition
leaders are doing this by instigating the protesters into taking steps
that are geared at toppling the Venezuelan government.</p>
<p>The same opposition leaders and their foreign supporters are using
the cover of the undeniable misgivings about rising crime rates,
political corruption, and economic turmoil in Venezuela as a disguise
for what is essentially looking like an attempted coup. The
socio-economic misgivings of a segment of the population are being used
as a pretext to legitimize street action and violence aimed at toppling
the government</p>
<p>It is ironic that many of those opposing the Venezuelan government
in the name of democracy, equality, and security were once supporters
of autocratic and openly corrupt governments before the Chavez era.
Memory loss or outright hypocrisy is at play. When the same oligarch’s
that form and finance the Venezuelan opposition that is supporting and
instigating the current anti-government protests were in charge of
Venezuela, corruption was widespread, poverty rates were much higher,
inequality was greater, and there was much higher inflation. Nor was
Venezuela even a functioning democracy.</p>
<p>Despite the Venezuelan governing party’s democratic mandate, which
includes winning most the municipal seats during the country’s December
2013 elections, the US-supported Venezuelan opposition wants to use
flash mobs to oust the government and to take over the country. Of the
337 mayors elected in December 2013, the final vote counts awarded 256
mayor positions to the ruling party and its coalition of pro-government
forces. This amounted to a win of seventy-six percent of the
mayoralties in the South American country’s municipal elections, which
confirms that the majority of the population supports the current
Venezuelan governing party and its political allies.</p>
<p>Despite their short comings, the governing United Socialist Party of
Venezuela and its political allies have one of the most democratic
mandates in the world. In relative terms of fair voting, the government
in Caracas has much more democratic legitimacy than the governments in
countries like Britain, Canada, France, and the United States, which
portray themselves as champions and models of democracy. The governing
United Socialist Party and its coalitions, including the Great
Patriotic Pole (GPP) coalition, have gone to the poles more times and
for more issues than any of the current governments in Britain, Canada,
France, or the US. On any occasion where constitutional issues or major
issues involving Venezuela’s political structures were being
contemplated, the government and governing party let the Venezuelan
voters make the decisions through popular referendums.</p>
<p>From 1999, the period that the Chavez era started in Venezuela,
until 2014 there has been six referendums dealing with the country’s
national constitution, union structures, and even an opposition motion
to have President Hugo Chavez removed from office through an electoral
recall at the polls. Four presidential elections, four parliamentary
elections for the National Assembly, and four regional-level elections
for state governors and legislatures have all taken place too. Nicolas
Maduro’s election as president in April 2013, just a few months after
Hugo Chavez had won the presidential elections in October 2012,
reconfirmed the support and confidence that over half of the population
had for the government. Moreover, not only has there been four
municipal-level elections, but municipal leaders began to be
democratically selected by election ballots instead of being appointed;
it was the leaders of the US-supported opposition that preferred to
appoint municipal leaders outside of electoral mechanisms instead of
letting the people decide themselves through voting.</p>
<p><b>The Mainstream Venezuelan Opposition is Anti-Democratic</b></p>
<p>What the US-supported opposition has been trying to do is to take
over Venezuela outside of electoral mechanisms. It does not care about
democracy or what the majority of Venezuelan citizens want. Where the
mainstream opposition leaders have failed to get popular support or to
win via the ballot box, they have used trickery and every option
available to them for taking over the South American country. This
includes the use of force, instigation of violence, attempted coups,
intense propaganda campaigns, continuous collusion with the US
government, and deliberate price hikes.</p>
<p>The leaders of the 2014 anti-government protests are the same
Venezuelan mainstream opposition leaders that supported and
collaborated in the 2002 coup, executed by a small circle of military
officers, that was coordinated with the US Embassy in Caracas and US
Ambassador Charles Shapiro. Although the USA falsely claims any
involvement, Ambassador Shapiro would quickly run to meet the coup
leaders and even joyously take photographs with them after they had
their soldiers kidnap President Chavez. Through access to US federal
government documents under the Freedom of Information Act, it has been
indisputably proven that the CIA was even given the coup’s conspiracy
plans five days before the Venezuelan opposition launched their illegal
and short-lived takeover of Venezuela.</p>
<p>The leaders of the mainstream opposition have continued to lie
shamelessly since that day. Paradoxically, they have also been major
benefactors of many of the democratic mechanisms of political and legal
recourse that Hugo Chavez created for Venezuela as a means of
increasing democratic participation and the channels of empowering
people and any form of democratic opposition against the government.
Mainstream opposition leaders used one of these avenues of recourse
against the government in 2004 by petitioning for the removal of
President Chavez, which resulted in a national referendum. The
mainstream opposition leadership, however, refused to recognize the
electoral results of the very same 2004 referendum that it had
initiated to remove Chavez through an electoral recall by voters, just
because the results were not what it wanted.</p>
<p>During the same 2004 referendum, the mainstream opposition leaders
even tried to manipulate the Venezuelan voters and create a political
crisis through a doctored recording intended to discredit the
government by alleging fraud by Chavez. Their argument was fallacious,
because the recording was a parody that was being circulated for months
before the election. The opposition leadership merely decided to use it
as an excuse to allege fraud and to delegitimize the whole referendum
and the Venezuelan government.</p>
<p>Members of the same opposition later boycotted the parliamentary
elections in 2005 after they had created an electoral crisis prior to
the voting. Originally, the National Electoral Council of Venezuela
wanted to use fingerprint scanners to securely register voters, but the
Venezuelan opposition refused to participate if this took place. One of
the reasons for the move to use fingerprint scanners was to reduce
fraud or attempted fraud during elections. After the National Electoral
Council backed down on its decision to install fingerprint scanners,
the main opposition parties still boycotted the 2005 parliamentary
elections and nevertheless tried to delegitimize the Venezuelan
government.</p>
<p>These same opposition leaders have tried to utilize technicalities,
in attempts to manipulate the law, to also take over and divide the
government and its allies. When President Chavez got sick and then
eventually died, the mainstream opposition forces tried to use <a
sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-to-keep-vilifying-caracas-even-with-chavez-dead/5329032">constitutional
pretexts under Article 233</a> of the Venezuelan Constitution to push
National Assembly President/Speaker Diosdado Cabello to assume the
interim presidency, hoping it would create a rift between him and
Vice-President Maduro that would divide and ultimately weaken the
Chavistas and the United Socialist Party.</p>
<p>After Nicolas Maduro won the April 2014 presidential elections,
Maduro’s opposition rival from the Coalition for Democratic Unity
(MUD), Governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, refused to even recognize
the electoral results and unceremoniously declared fraud. With the
initial support of the US government, Governor Capriles refused to
accept the results even after an audit of more than half the votes was
conducted through his insistence. Capriles then demanded that all the
votes be recounted, which was accepted by the National Electoral
Council. Capriles, however, made additional demands including a call
for the full audit of the voter registry and essentially a retracing of
all the votes cast (not merely a vote count). Even when the National
Electoral Council with great hardship tried to meet his increasing
demands and did verify that Maduro won the election fairly, Governor
Capriles refused to admit defeat and said that the election was a hoax.
Even the US government was forced to back down from supporting him.</p>
<p>After his defeat Governor Capriles instead instigated his followers
into igniting violence in the streets. US-based organizations like
Human Rights Watch (HRW) totally ignored the role that Capriles and the
opposition played in igniting the violence, instead taking the
opportunity to criticize the Venezuelan government. HRW actually had
this to say about the street violence that MUD leaders had started:
“Under the leadership of President Chavez and now President Maduro, the
accumulation of power in the executive branch and the erosion of human
rights guarantees have enabled the government to intimidate, censor,
and prosecute its critics.” Not once were the violent actions taken by
the mainstream opposition or the corruption of their leaders in the
states or municipalities that they administer ever mentioned by HRW.</p>
<p>Governor Capriles and the leaders of the mainstream Venezuelan
opposition have deliberately been trying to instigate violence and a
loss of human life as a tactic to delegitimize the Venezuelan
government and to justify the mainstream opposition’s strategy to work
outside of any democratic framework. It cannot be emphasized enough
that their aims are to increase political chaos and to disrupt
Venezuela’s political stability with the goal of creating a vacuum to
justify acting outside of the democratic framework of elections.</p>
<p>The objectives of the Venezuelan oligarchs controlling the
mainstream opposition are not to establish a just society or to weed
out corruption and crime in Venezuela. Their objectives are to reassert
and entrench their privileged positions in Venezuelan society and to
undo the reforms that Hugo Chavez enacted to help the poor in
Venezuela. They want the law to cater to their needs and to merely
serve as a tool of enforcing their dominance. Through the major private
corporations that they own they have been increasing prices. Moreover,
in many cases organized crime is tied to Latin America’s oligarchs
themselves.</p>
<p>When asked about Chavez’s legacy, many of the supporters of the
mainstream opposition parties will admit that Chavez helped the poor,
but emphasize that Chavez “did nothing for the country (Venezuela).” In
what has the possibility of being cataloged in the psychological
research on class, <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc">privilege, and
perceptions of entitlement</a> by <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc">Paul Piff of the
University of California in Berkeley</a>, this attitude exposes the
psychology of entitlement that is the motivation for the mainstream
Venezuelan opposition: many of these individuals (who are clearly
“individuals” in the sense of being individualistic) see themselves as
“the country” and exclude the Venezuelan poor from being part of the
country. Thus, bridging the gap between poor and rich or improving the
quality of life for the underclass citizens of Venezuela means nothing
to these supporters of the mainstream opposition and does not even
psychologically register as doing anything worthy to improve Venezuelan
society. Only service to them and their interests can be categorized as
legitimate and noteworthy.</p>
<p><b>Students Are People, They Should Not be Romanticized</b></p>
<p>The imagery of student activists has been a key characteristic of
the anti-government protests in Caracas. It is worth quoting the <a
sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.coha.org/venezuelan-government-shows-restraint-and-resolve-in-the-face-of-anti-chavista-mayhem/">February
14, 2014</a> statement of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)
about the opposition protests in Venezuela. The COHA declared that it
viewed “with great alarm the violence perpetrated against the
democratically elected government and civilians in Venezuela that has
resulted, as of February 12, 2014, in three confirmed deaths, 61
persons wounded and 69 detained.” The COHA also noted in the same
statement that the bloodshed in Caracas came “on the heels of generally
peaceful marches held on the 200th anniversary of the battle of La
Victoria, a battle in which students played a critical role in a
victory against royalist forces during Venezuela’s war of independence.”</p>
<p>Students should not be romanticized as the exclusive defenders or
proponents of civil liberties or democracy. Perceptions that view
students this way without any assessment are romantic, wrong, and
disconnected from the reality on the ground. Student groups can also
represent various class and group interests that clearly contradict
equality and justice in their societies or the broader world. The
romanticization of students and student movements as justice-seekers
merely gives these groups blank cheques and moral credit, when students
and student movements should be supported on the basis of their motives
and the understood causes they are promoting.</p>
<p>In Venezuela’s fellow Latin American country of El Salvador, medical
school students from private universities doing their residencies
refused to allow those Salvadorian medical school students doing their
residencies that were trained in Cuba to do the same examinations as
them. They fallaciously argued that the Cuban medical school standards
were lower and equated the standards of education and training with the
costs of the universities and medical schools. What they demanded was
that the Cuban-trained doctors do an additional year of residency.</p>
<p>While the Salvadorian government argued that the examination results
would declare who was qualified and who was disqualified, the non-Cuban
medical school students resorted to protests and political tactics by
blockading the examination halls and trying to disrupt the Salvadorian
healthcare system instead of letting the test scores speak for
themselves. These Salvadorian medical school doctors, mostly from
private universities, wanted to merely eliminate their better trained
Salvadorian rivals by imposing additional restrictions on their
Cuban-trained counterparts by forcing them to do an extra year of
residency.</p>
<p>The medical school protest in El Salvador was clearly a question of
economic competition and personal interests and not one of justice,
fairness, professionalism, or standards. If it was a question of
standards, the Cuban-educated doctors were their superiors. The medical
school students ultimately forced the Salvadorian government to put
restrictions on the Cuban-trained medical school doctors instead of
fairly settling the matter through the universal examination that all
medical school graduates must do, which means they used pressure to
bypass the most logical and fair means of deciding the matter.
Moreover, it is worth noting that whenever the Salvadorian government
has asked for doctors to volunteer their services to help in community
health initiatives it has always been these Cuban-educated doctors and
residents at the forefront that have offered their services and not
their counterparts.</p>
<p>Looking back at Venezuela, it is important to identify the nature of
the student involvement in the anti-government protests and to note
that the students are actually divided into pro-government and
anti-government camps. It is also critical to point out that the
opposition leaders of the anti-government protest are hiding behind the
images of the student activists to gain wider support for their
objective of delegitimizing the Venezuelan government. In the <a
sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.coha.org/venezuelan-government-shows-restraint-and-resolve-in-the-face-of-anti-chavista-mayhem/">words
of the COHA</a>: “While some groups of students marched in celebration
of the Day of the Student, anti-government demonstrators used the
occasion to protest episodic shortages of some basic goods, persistent
crime, and to demand the release of students who had been arrested in
earlier demonstrations.”</p>
<p>It is also important to point out that the faction of students that
the mainstream opposition leaders are hiding behind generally comes
from privileged families that can afford to send their children to
private universities and post-secondary institutes of higher education.
The perceptions of students in these private universities and schools
can be radically different from their public university counterparts
about subjects like neoliberal economics, privilege, and governing.
Although proper survey work and research is needed on the matter, the
students in private post-secondary institutions in Venezuela and other
polarized parts of Latin America are more prone to support coups,
holding different perceptions about the military being used to bring
the groups that they support into power by overthrowing legitimate
governments, and the unequal distribution of wealth. These types of
views have been psychologically conditioned through group-think that
has been hammered in by propaganda, peers, families, and the media that
caters to their class and lifestyles.</p>
<p><b>Constructing False Narratives About the Anti-Government Protests
and Hiding the Riots</b></p>
<p>A distorted narrative about the anti-government protests and riots
is being constructed. Many of the anti-government protesters with
legitimate grievances about crime and inflation themselves are being
mislead by the protest leaders. As mentioned earlier, there is no
denying that there is a crime problem or inflation in Venezuela, but,
again, it cannot be overemphasized that the motivations of the
mainstream opposition are not socio-economic grievances. These
grievances are merely being used as pretexts by the opposition leaders
to manipulating the protesters.</p>
<p>Furthermore, it must be understood that the Venezuelan opposition,
in the first instance, owns almost all the mainstream media in
Venezuela. The Venezuelan opposition literally has a choke-hold on most
the news whereas the government only owns public television, receives
support from community-based radio stations, and is allowed by law to
get all the networks in Venezuela to release important public messages.
In this context, the opposition leadership has used its control over
the media to paint a false image of the events on the ground and to
heavily distort the image of the Venezuelan anti-government protests in
the minds of its grassroots followers and to whitewash the riots and
acts of vandalism that have also taken place in parallel to the
protests. Communication and Information Minister Delcy Rodriguez has
also commented on this, saying that the government will prosecute those
that are knowingly providing a cover for the violence in the streets
through media distortions.</p>
<p>The Venezuelan opposition has been fighting a continuous propaganda
war. The distortion of the anti-government protests is merely its
newest chapter. The mainstream opposition is now involved in a
propaganda campaign similar to the one launched in front of the
Miraflores Palace in 2002 that led to the attempted coup against
President Chavez. Opposition leaders pushed for violence and then when
blood was spilled because of their deliberate instigation, they used
the carnage to justify undemocratically removing the
democratically-elected Hugo Chavez by force.</p>
<p>The opposition leadership has engaged in a dishonest campaign.
Doctored images and false stories are being used by mainstream
opposition supporters to depict the Venezuelan government as an
authoritarian regime that is using brutal violence against unarmed
civilian protesters. Unflattering pictures of Argentine, Brazilian,
Bulgarian, Chilean, Egyptian, Greek, and Singaporean police and
military forces in crowd control mode and anti-protest operations have
been circulated and passed around through mass communication and social
media by Venezuelan opposition forces as actions taking place in
Venezuela during February 2014. This even includes pictures of
government supporters that were hurt by opposition supporters and an
edited photograph from a homosexual pornography video where the police
are forcing a civilian to give them fellatio or oral sex which was
circulated by the anti-Chavez actress Amanda Gutierrez as the brutal
group raping of an unarmed anti-government protester in Caracas by the
government’s riot police.</p>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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415 863.9977
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