Venezuelans vote on Chavez rule (BBC)

[mom cat]

Venezuelans vote on Chavez rule


Queues started forming hours before polling stations opened
Voting has been extended for four hours in Venezuela where huge numbers have turned out for a referendum on whether Hugo Chavez should remain as president.
Officials decided to keep polling stations open until 2000 (0000 GMT), faced with long queues of voters that stunned even veteran election monitors.

The president's opponents called the referendum, accusing him of dictatorial behaviour and economic mismanagement.

But his supporters say he is the first leader to care about Venezuela's poor.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3566970.stm

[Just Me]

1. Why do his "opponents" call him a "dictator"?

Hmmmmm. Must have something to do with his "opponents" being so much more "special" than the rest of humanity.

[mom cat]

2. They are afraid of losing their cheap labor and ill-gotten "status"

[cprise]

3. Because he 'dictates' things the people vote for

He also shut down a private TV station that called for the overthrough of the government (this was after the coup against Chavez failed).

These are things our own "democratic" leaders won't do.

[leftistagitator]

4. Really

If CNN called for violent overthrow of our government we would allow it? You must be delusional, there is no country on the planet that would allow incitement of violence against the government. And he is able to "dictate" things because his Party swept the Senate. So, to paraphrase your position, he is a dictator because the people believe in him so much that they voted for him on multiple occasions, including today, and even voted for anyone who he supported for Senate. He used the authority given to him by the people in ways the people support by wide margins. And lastly, in his most dastardly act of tyranny, he refused to allow actual traitors to openly carry out insurrection. What a bastard.

[cprise]

5. I posted that faceteously

I agree with you.

[leftistagitator]

6. Heh, my mistake...

sorry about the indignant flame.

[Cha]

13. It was the "democratic leaders" in quotes that

made me think you were playin'.:)

[Cha]

14. I'm kinda glad you got to "rant" cause I've

been defending Chavez on other threads from posters who were calling him a "dictator" and I really didn't know why they were.

All I knew is that Carter, Jesse, and Kucinich sent him an encouraging letter and he couldn't be that bad!

And he was elected and now another vote on a recall.

[Judi Lynn]

11. I'd like to see if we're thinking of the same tv station

This is something I discovered after it had been circulated that the Venezuelan government shut down a station. This article says it was the mayor of Caracas, an enemy of Chávez who seized their equipment, and shut them down. I'd really like to know if we're thinking of two entirely different events:

A recent Human Rights Watch report, which was harshly criticized by supporters of Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution', said that "there are few obvious limits on free expression in Venezuela. The country's print and audiovisual media operate without restrictions." Two months after the report was published, on July 14, one of the country's audiovisual media outlets came up against a rather serious restriction-it was shut down and its equipment confiscated. The outlet in question is called CatiaTV, but it was not shut down by the Chavez government but by the mayor of Caracas, Alfredo Pena, who is an opponent of Chavez.

CatiaTV was an experiment in genuine community television. It was started by a group of people in Catia, a vast and extremely poor borough of Caracas, who thought to film one of the community's events to show it to the community. It gave poor people the opportunity to make their own programs, about themselves, for themselves. In April 2002, when the coup against the Chavez government took place, workers in CatiaTV were instrumental in helping to get the state television channel, Channel 8, back online, breaking the monopoly of misinformation of the private television networks and facilitating the reversal of the coup.

Reporters Without Borders (which did protest against the closing of CatiaTV), demonstrating a disappointing lack of understanding of the Venezuelan media situation, said that reporters there were "caught between an authoritarian president and an intolerant media." The private networks are advocates of a coup, call supporters of Chavez 'monkeys', and distort information to a remarkable degree. But the people can't rely solely on the state media. This is exactly what makes community media like CatiaTV so important. It is also why Alfredo Pena shut it down.
(snip/...)

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3993§ionID=45

There are so many accusations and charges flying, and not by accident, as you can imagine, it's really hard to keep them straight.

A confused public is a goofy, and helpless public!

[lottie244]

7. Because the US has taught them how to define their enemies.

You just call people you don't like or who oppose you "terrorists" "communists," "dictator," "militants," "thugs," "evildoers," "socialists," or "liberals."

[Cha]

15. ANd we call them...

Facists!

[lottie244]

8. Just think, when this election is over, Chavez will be more legitimate

than Bush as the head of state.

[Darranar]

9. Chavez is already more legitimate than Bush as head of state. n/t

[tblue37]

10. Heck,

I am more legitimate than Bush as head of state! In fact, I know a gecko that is more legitimate than Bush as head of state--and a cactus, and a dust bunny--I could go on, but I legitimately have a country to run.

[Cha]

16. Yeah!

I know I'll check out my computer tomorrow morning before I head for work so I can find out what happened!

[struggle4progress]

12. The Carter Center’s Jennifer McCoy: Can She Observe Venezuela’s ...

... Referendum Impartially?

By Justin Delacour and Diana Barahona
Reporting from Caracas, Venezuela
August 15, 2004

<snip>
Unfortunately, McCoy has not always demonstrated political impartiality in her assessments of Venezuela’s political actors, nor does she seem to disassociate herself from U.S. imperial prerogatives in her articles and presentations concerning Venezuela.
<snip>

In an article that McCoy co-wrote with fellow Carter Center associate Laura Neuman for the February 2001 issue of Current History, the authors unmistakably portray Chávez as childish and irresponsible for “thumbing his nose at the West.” “He embraces world pariahs and seems to enjoy provoking the United States,” write McCoy and Neuman.

It is worthwhile to examine the authors’ use of language. The labeling of some of Chávez’s allies as “pariahs”—a term that is almost exclusively applied to militarily weak regimes that periodically violate international law or internationally-accepted democratic norms—is politically loaded. The term “pariah” is virtually never applied to large, militarily powerful states that violate international law with impunity, such as in the case of Ronald Reagan’s contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s or George W. Bush’s “preemptive” war against Iraq.
<snip>

Equally interesting is McCoy and Neuman’s use of the term “provocative.” By what logical standard could one argue that Chávez provokes the United States? In common parlance, one state’s provocation against another generally involves some type of threat to another state’s security. McCoy and Neuman cite Chávez’s calls for “a new foreign policy” to create a “counterbalance to United States dominance in the Western Hemisphere” as an apparent provocation against the U.S. One such example that McCoy and Neuman point to is the Venezuelan government’s initial opposition to the U.S.-backed Plan Colombia, combined with Chávez’s denial of American requests to allow U.S. “drug-surveillance planes” to fly over Venezuelan airspace. In other words, the Venezuelan government’s defense of its national sovereignty in the face of a U.S.-sponsored militarized solution to a neighboring country’s civil conflict was “provocative,” according to McCoy and Neuman. But, in this case, it’s worthwhile to ask which governments have operated in a truly “provocative” manner. Is it not “provocative” for U.S. administrations—which have been clearly hostile to the Chávez government—to increase their military presence in a country that borders Venezuela?
<more>

http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1042.html

[Joanne98]

17. That's a good article

I wonder about the Carter Center sometimes. Although I hate to admit it.