Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalThe Hummingbird Tweet: An Espionage Tale
Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014
The Hummingbird Tweet: An Espionage Tale
USAID Caught Using Tweets to Try and Overthrow a Government
by ALFREDO LOPEZ
For two years, starting in 2010, the United States Agency for International Development ran a social networking service — similar to Twitter — for the Cuban people. Its long-term objective was to forment popular revolt against the government and de-stabilize the country.
They called it “ZunZuneo” (Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s “tweet”) and launched it under absolute secrecy about who was really running it. “There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from one of the companies supposedly running the service. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the mission.”
The “mission” was to reach a critical mass of Cuban users by offering tweets on sports, entertainment and light news over the service and signing recipients up through word of mouth — you call a phone number and your phone is hooked up. With that critical mass in place, the tweets would start getting more political: inspiring Cuban citizens to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice to spark a kind of a “Cuban Spring” or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”
At one point there were 40,000 Cubans getting ZunZuneo tweets but the project was abandoned in 2012 when the initial funding ran out and the people who own the real Twitter refused to take it on.
The story, an investigative report by the Associated Press, is probably not surprising to most people in this country. After the NSA revelations, what could possibly surprise us? And besides, it would not be the first time that USAID was found doing the nefarious work of the CIA at undermining governments. But it is an embarrassing revelation about how our government is using the Internet and about how “hot” the Cold War remains.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/usaid-caught-using-tweets-to-try-and-overthrow-a-government/
Hugo Chavez: A Revolutionary Life
Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014
The New Socialism
Hugo Chavez: A Revolutionary Life
by RON JACOBS
Hugo Chavez was one of the most important public figures of the last twenty years. From the moment of the failed 1992 coup he helped foment until his death from cancer in 2013, his presence was felt around the world. Politicians, media outlets and capitalist power mongers despised his popularity and what they feared it meant for their future. Many of those around the world who are not among the powerful or working for their public relations machinery saw him as a hero and leader in the struggle against those very powers that repress the common people’s desire for a decent life and a more just world.
Chavez grew to understand this role and seemed to relish it the bigger he became. People cheered when he equated George W. Bush with the Devil at the United Nations and North Americans noted when he offered gasoline to the citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s intentional neglect of those victims. His popularity in his home land of Venezuela exists still and is a good part of the reason his successor Nicolás Maduro has been able to hold on to his office despite severe and violent pressures from the wealthy right wingers of Venezuela and their foreign allies. That part of Venezuela’s history continues to be written as I write.
For the past few years Pluto Press has been publishing a series of biographies of selected revolutionaries. The series is called “Revolutionary Lives” and has included the life histories of French Jacobin Jean Paul Marat, Chilean socialist Salvador Allende, and socialist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, to name three. The books are short, usually less than two hundred pages, and provide a leftist introduction to the subject and their place in history. One of the most recent biographies in the series is that of Hugo Chavez. Titled Hugo Chavez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century, and written by Mike Gonzalez of the University of Glasgow, this brief work does a very competent job of presenting Chavez’s political biography.
Gonzalez describes Chavez’s growing political awareness during his early years in the Venezuelan military while simultaneously giving the reader a general description of the historical class and ethnic divisions found in Venezuela. Although Chavez studied Marx and other leftist writers, he kept the writings of Latin America’s liberator Simon Bolivar closest to his heart. In due time, it would be Bolivar’s name that would become the descriptor of the government Chavez would lead—the Bolivarian Republic.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/hugo-chavez-a-revolutionary-life/
Guatemalan president eyes drug legalization proposal in late 2014
Guatemalan president eyes drug legalization proposal in late 2014
PANAMA CITY, April 2 Wed Apr 2, 2014 9:17pm EDT
(Reuters) - Guatemala could present a plan to legalize production of marijuana and opium poppies towards the end of 2014 as it seeks ways to curb the power of organized crime, President Otto Perez said on Wednesday.
Perez, a conservative retired general who broke ranks with the United States by proposing drug legalization shortly after he took office at the start of 2012, has yet to put forward a concrete plan on how it could be done.
Instead, a government commission has been studying the proposal, and Perez told Reuters in an interview that he expected the recommendations to be published around October and that measures could be presented at the end of the year.
Those measures could include an initiative for Congress to legalize drugs, in particular marijuana, he said.
More:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/03/guatemala-drugs-idUSL1N0MU2FP20140403?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssHealthcareNews&rpc=401
How Indigenous Communities in Honduras Are Resisting US-Backed Multinationals
How Indigenous Communities in Honduras Are Resisting US-Backed Multinationals
Beverly Bell and Foreign Policy In Focus on April 2, 2014 - 5:59 PM ET
“Screw the company trying to take our river, and the government. If I die, I’m going to die defending life.” So said María Santos Dominguez, a member of the Indigenous Council of the Lenca community of Rio Blanco, Honduras.
April 1 marks one year since the Rio Blanco community began a human barricade that has so far stopped a corporation from constructing a dam that would privatize and destroy the sacred Gualcarque River. Adults and children have successfully blocked the road to the river with their bodies, a stick-and-wire fence and a trench. Only one of many communities fighting dams across Honduras, the families of Rio Blanco stand out for their tenacity and for the violence unleashed upon them.
The Honduran-owned, internationally backed DESA Corporation has teamed up with US-funded Honduran soldiers and police, private guards and paid assassins to try to break the opposition. Throughout the past year, they have killed, shot, maimed, kidnapped and threatened the residents of Rio Blanco. The head of DESA, David Castillo, is a West Point graduate. He also served as former assistant to the director of military intelligence and maintains close ties with the Honduran Armed Forces.
María Santos Dominguez’s prediction that she would die defending life almost came true. On March 5, seven people attacked her as she was on her way home from cooking food at the local school. They assaulted her with machetes, rocks and sticks. When her husband, Roque Dominguez, heard that she was surrounded, he and their 12-year-old son, Paulo, ran to the scene. The men brutalized them as well. They brought a machete down on the child’s head, deeply slashing his face, cutting his ear in half and fracturing his skull. Roque Dominguez’s hand was severely injured, and he also suffered cuts to the face. (Friends of the Earth has organized a petition urging the Honduran government to investigate, which you can sign here.)
More:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/179167/how-indigenous-communities-honduras-are-resisting-us-backed-multinationals#
Same church sent priests to torment leftist prisoners in Argentina's US-supported Dirty War!
Argentina's torture priest given a life sentence
Patrick McDonnell in Buenos Aires
October 11, 2007
No, a hanging's not on the cards, Father … the chaplain
reacts as the verdict is read in the La Plata court.
A CATHOLIC priest accused of collaborating with Argentina's military dictatorship more than two decades ago has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison.
The case of Father Christian Federico von Wernich, 69, a former police chaplain, had become a rallying cry among human-rights activists who said it was the first time the church's alleged complicity with the former junta had been addressed in court.
~snip~
The prosecution charged that Von Wernich abused his clerical status by offering spiritual comfort to prisoners, then informing on them to the police. The prisoners later were tortured and killed.
(snip)
A three-judge panel found him guilty of crimes against humanity in connection with what it called a genocide committed during the dictatorship.
Official figures indicate about 11,000 people were killed or "disappeared" during the rule by military juntas, from 1976 to 1983, but human-rights activists say the number was closer to 30,000.
More:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/argentinas-torture-priest-given-a-life-sentence/2007/10/10/1191695990475.html
Colombian killed in Venezuela clash: military
Source: Agence France-Presse
Colombian killed in Venezuela clash: military
April 03, 2014 07:49 PM
CARACAS: A Colombian national was killed and 14 others arrested in a clash with the Venezuelan military in the restive border state of Tachira, the military said.
The Colombian, identified as William Molina, was described as a "suspected paramilitary" in a Twitter message late Wednesday by National Guard chief Vladimir Padrino.
Padrino said 14 people were arrested with handguns and rifles.
He gave no details on the circumstances surrounding the clash.
It was unclear whether the incident was linked to protests against the leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro, or to the smuggling and guerrilla activities that are rife along the 2,200-kilometer (1,370-mile) border Venezuela shares with Colombia.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/International/2014/Apr-03/252209-colombian-killed-in-venezuela-clash-military.ashx#ixzz2xrC5BJcd
Venezuela: Global peasants’ movement Via Campesina urges support for revolution, government
Venezuela: Global peasants’ movement Via Campesina urges support for revolution, government
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Via Campesina is a global organisation of peasants and one of the largest and most significant international social movements. The statement below in solidarity with Venezuela’s revolution and peasants was released by its International Coordinating Commission of Via Campesina International, which met in Managua, Nicaragua on March 29.
* * *
We, Via Campesina Internacional, the international peasant movement that brings together over 200 million families in 77 countries, express our solidarity with the Venezuelan people, their peasant movement and the Bolivarian revolution.
The revolution is the victim of an imperialist crusade that, together with reactionary right-wing forces, conspires within Venezuela and abroad in a bid to retake the power they lost legitimately, democratically, and repeatedly at the ballot box.
Those of us who struggle for social justice, land reform, and food sovereignty consider the Bolivarian revolution a reference for social transformation and inclusion. As women, youth, rural workers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, and migrants, we reject all media-backed attempts at coup d etats.
They seek to place into the collective imagination the image of demonstrators frustrated with the consequences of an economic war being imposed on Venezuela by powerful oligarchical, fascist, and imperialist sectors — all aimed at destabilising the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
More:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56191
Venezuela: Amnesty lets down human rights defenders
Venezuela: Amnesty lets down human rights defenders
Monday, March 31, 2014
In a recent article, Amnesty International accused the Venezuelan government of a “witch hunt” when a right-wing opposition mayor Daniel Ceballos was arrested. However, Amnesty has yet to use such strong language against the five weeks of human rights violations people in Venezuela have suffered at the hands of violent opposition sectors. The “witch hunt” term demonises the people’s right to bring such criminals to justice.
In its March 20 statement, “Venezuela: Arrest of local mayor signals potential 'witch hunt'”, Amnesty says Ceballos, mayor of San Cristobal, capital of Tachira state on the Colombian border, was arrested for his “alleged involvement in anti-government protests ... authorities in Venezuela seem to be setting the scene for a witch hunt against opposition leaders”.
It is important to counter the horrendous distortions contained in this article, because the private media will quote its positions as fact. Articles like this embolden the criminals and coup participants who are among opposition leaders. It also makes it harder for those of us who have suffered from opposition violence to demand arrests, and authorities to carry them out.
As I write here in Merida, I can hear constant gunshots coming from down the road. Violent groups, who demand elected President Nicolas Maduro resign, are firing at people, buses, and cars on a main city intersection.
More:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56178
Video of a typical oppositiion "Guarimba" being constructed on a road in Venezuela
Video of a typical oppositiion "Guarimba" being constructed on a road in Venezuela
By Arturo Rosales, Columnist, Axis of Logic
Saturday, Mar 29, 2014
The video presented below shows how the guarimberos operate to disrupt public order in Venezuela and blame it on the government. This guarimba takes place in the Mirandean Heights about 15 miles outside Caracas in the area known as San Antonio de Los Altos which is part if the Municipality of Carrizales.
José Luis Rodríguez is the opposition mayor of Carrizales and also a member of the opposition political party. "Un Nuevo Tiempo" i.e. "A New Time." The governor of Miranda state is Henrique Capriles Radonski has a police force equipped to deal with this sort of road blocking and arson but refuses to enforce the law. Therefore, an opposition mayor and governor are implicated in these actions that verge on terrorism.
Some readers may think of a street and road barricade like the one shown in the video are relatively harmless, little more than annoyances or as "civil disobedience" by people protesting against the government. As with most opposition barricades, the materials used to install this one are combustible, wood, plastic, a bed mattress with gasoline as a catalyst. These are then set ablaze, blocking traffic with dramatic effects for striking fear and terror. In this guarimba perpetrators also burned the forest.
Last week, fascists burned Güaraira Repano, the precious Avila National Park which overlooks Caracas, ringing it with fire. (see photo below the video). Nationwide it is estimated that the guarimberos have cut down or destroyed 5000 trees. Their willingness to destroy nature reveals their true character. Guarimbas like the one shown in the video are the most frequently-used traps for killing people. After they've been abandoned by the guarimberos, motorists are shot by snipers in hiding or from a distance when the leave their car to remove part of the barricade to continue on their journey. Members of the National Guard and National Police have also been shot and killed in this manner when clearing road barricades.
More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66509.shtml
Defeating Fascism before it’s too Late
Defeating Fascism before it’s too Late
By James Petras.
Sunday, Mar 23, 2014
Editor's Comment: James Petras makes a powerful argument for the imperative for revolutionary governments to aggressively eliminate fascism with force early on and by avoiding the traps set by the fascists themselves. He describes ways in which "Constitutional Democrats" tend to fall into the fascists' plots that demand submission to their "democratic norms;" their rules for "democratic freedoms;" their intimidating human rights organizations, their international media campaigns and other quicksands in which revolutions of the past have been defeated.
Petras describes how fascist leaders cover themselves with "respectabiity" while their thugs carry out their "clandestine violent underground." He warns against the pitfalls of trying to negotiate with the aggressor and of being "overly sensitive to hostile criticism from overseas and domestic elites who rush to defend fascists" – in the name of “democratic freedom.” Petras advises, "The challenge in Venezuela is to cut-off the economic and political basis of fascism."
Earlier this week we published news of the success of President Nicolas Maduro's government in putting down the guarimbas (localized riots) but never thought for a moment that the U.S. government would suddenly stop it's 15 year war against the Venezuelan people. This week the fascists escalated their campaign with direct armed attacks on the police and National Guard. The leaders of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America will do well to heed Petras' warnings. His wise counsel is rooted in his years of revolutionary work on the ground in Latin America and his intimate experience as an advisor to former President Salvador Allende during the time of the 1973 US-backed coup d'état in Chile, ending with Allende's death and thousands more of the Chilean people by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. I do not add the following gratuitously: Pinochet's henchmen dropped pregnant women out of airplanes following the dictator's orders, "If you kill the bitch, you kill off the offspring." If the fascist opposition were to ever succeed with a coup in Venezuela, make no mistake, there would be a bloodbath. The US State Department would applaud and the western media would cover it as a success.
- Les Blough, Editor
Axis of Logic
Introduction
Captain Jose Guillen Araque, of the Venezuelan National Guard, recently gave President Maduro a book on the rise of Nazism, warning that “fascism has to be defeated before it’s too late!” In retaliation for his prophetic warning, the patriotic young captain was shot by a US-backed assassin on the streets of Marcay in the state of Aragua on March 16, 2014. This raised the number of Venezuelan soldiers and police killed since the fascist uprising to 6 with 31 deaths overall. Yesterday, an additional 4 police officers were attacked and wounded with gunfire in Merida and members of the National Guard wounded by gunfire in Bolivar State.
More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66493.shtml
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