[sunnykerr]

Colombia: Ingrid Betancourt is finally a free woman
http://www.fanforum.com/f117/fidel-c...dent-62828693/

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[sunnykerr]

On the last thread, we were discussing the extradition of Jorje Sosa to the United States when he's wanted for a huge massacre in Guatemala.

So, I said:

I know... How weird is it that they want him on citizenship-application lies when he's not even living in the States anymore... that makes no sense to me. Unless he happened to kill some American citizens during that Guatemalan massacre... or unless he's secretly an American spy... And now I'm writing fiction. It just doesn't make sense to me.

[_vega_]

They could also be trying to locate other people through him. Lets remember that the US organized the coup of 1954 in Guatemala which lead to the disasters in government for all the years later when the right wing governments and militars took control of the country, which ended up leading to the ethnic genocides of the 70's and 80's.

The US was supposedly long gone at the time Sosa committed all those crimes but it wouldn't surprise me it they had some sort of intelligence over there even then.

[sunnykerr]

And here I thought I was writing fiction...

But this is the only way that makes any kind of sense, isn't it? At the very least, they must think he has information they want.

Otherwise, why bother pursuing those charges when the guy isn't even living in the country anymore? Do government really waste their time chasing people who lied on their application for citizenship when they're not even living in the country anymore? I don't think so.

[Comfortably Numb]

Tftnt!

[sunnykerr]

Sure... I agree!

[_vega_]

Those charges are ridiculous . It really is an intriguing case.

[sunnykerr]

Venezuela sets 2012 presidential election date Venezuela's presidential election will be held on 7 October 2012, the electoral authorities have announced. The date is earlier than expected, as Venezuela's presidential polls are usually held in December. President Hugo Chavez has said he will seek another term to continue his left-wing "revolution", despite undergoing treatment for cancer. The main opposition coalition will choose a candidate to stand against him in a primary on 12 February. Mr Chavez immediately expressed his confidence that he would win a third six-year term. He wrote on Twitter: "7 October 2012: your destiny is written! We will write another revolutionary victory on your page! We will live and we will conquer!" The left-wing leader, who has governed Venezuela since 1999, has said he wants to serve at least two more terms, which would take him through until 2025. Mr Chavez, 57, says he is now convalescing after having surgery for cancer in June and subsequent chemotherapy, but the exact nature and extent of his illness has not been made public. Speaking before the election date was announced, he promised an energetic campaign despite his ill health. "You won't see Chavez hiding," he said. "You'll see a recuperated Chavez touring the country as a candidate, touring the streets at a rhythm set by circumstances." Challengers As well as giving Mr Chavez time to recuperate, the October election date gives the opposition Table of Democratic Unity (MUD) plenty of time to campaign. The favourites to win the opposition nomination in February's primary are the governor of Miranda state, Henrique Capriles Radonski, and the governor of Zulia state, Pablo Perez. Opposition leaders have welcomed the announcement of the election date, while expressing concern at the long transition period it will leave before the start of the next presidential term in February 2013. "This election date, two months earlier than is traditional, has an advantage in that we now have a date," MUD executive secretary Ramon Guillermo Aveledo said. "But the disadvantage is that it extends the lapse between the presidential election and the taking of office," he added. The opposition alliance says Venezuelans have had enough of what they say is Mr Chavez's poor economic management and dictatorial style. They are also hoping that dissatisfaction with high crime rates, inflation and electricity shortages will boost their support. But Mr Chavez still has strong support, particularly among the poor who have benefited most from his socialist policies, which have seen Venezuela's oil riches spent on services including health and education. Mr Chavez's personal charisma and promise of revolutionary change have helped him secure repeated election victories since he first won the presidency in 1999. Parliamentary elections last year showed Venezuelan voters evenly divided between support for Mr Chavez's socialists and the opposition.

Source

It's so funny. I remember when I first heard of Chavez... I was such a fan. I mean, I didn't know much about the man (still don't), but I liked what I heard.

And now, I don't mean to sound like some sort of capitalist monster.... but, yeah, not such a fan any more.

I would hope that the people of Venezuela can express fully their democratic vote, whether they re-elect him or not.

[_vega_]

Well, the Venezuelans will vote freely and they will choose Chávez.

Chávez doesn't need to fix the vote to win, he has the highest levels of acceptance of all the Latin American presidents. Sad but true.

[sunnykerr]

Okay... Are they real numbers, though?

That's the question that always comes to mind with "debatable" leaders, you know? I know it's not a real comparison but, for instance, Saddam Hussein held elections regularly, and he was always elected with 99% of the vote.

I obviously don't mean to compare the situation in Hussein's Iraq with Venezuela. I'm just using an extreme to illustrate my point.

[_vega_]

Yes, those numbers are real.

In Latinobarometer, which is an international survey where every year you get data from 18 countries in Latin America about people's perceptions on freedom and democracy, Venezuela always comes up the highest in "trust in democracy". So they at least believe they are in a democracy and they are more content with their government than the rest of us.

Of course, not everybody follows Chávez, he is mostly followed by the lower classes and, just like the rest of Latin America, those are the mayority of the population. The ones who get directly affected by his policies end up being even fewer as many of them get out of the country (because they are the ones who have the means to do so).

He might be an authoritarian leader but he is not a dictator. His discourse, not force, is the tool he uses to atract people to his cause, and that's pretty much what politics is about.

I do think with every passing year his discourse is being revealed more and more as the fallacy it is but I don't think 2012 will be the moment when things will change. I'm very sorry about that, because I have a very dear friend in Venezuela who just can't wait to see him go.

[sunnykerr]

Well, just because we can tell that it's not going to end well doesn't mean it's not going well for enough people at the moment, right?

It's kinda like the Chinese one-child policy and how it led to a massive increase in male children (and baby girls being put to death, but that's besides the point I'm trying to make now). The rest of the world can see the flaws in the plan; China's probably just doing the best it can to stem overpopulation and there's a big DANGER sign ahead.

Similarly, we all can see the flaws in the Chavez of doing government; he's probably doing what he thinks is best (for him, for Venezuela, maybe a little bit of both, who the heck knows); and there's an obvious problem with the way he's doing things.

First of all, yeah, he's no dictator, but he's starting to sound a bit like one of those Soviet leaders who thought they were next to God, you know? Secondly, I'm not really a fan of having super rich people control corporations and business, but you can't keep nationalizing everything. Sooner or later, he'll run out of industries and, as we found out with the Soviet Union, that's just not a practical solution for social engineering...

And that's just the problems I can think of off the top of my head.

So, I think, maybe, it's going well enough for enough people to keep him in office right now... But I don't think he's helping out Venezuela on the long run.

[_vega_]

Of course, some of the things Chavez has done has been good for them and it is impossible to understand for many of those who have been benefited by his policies that what he is doing is creating a bigger problem at large. That kind of situation is all too common in every country in the world and it is much more worrisome in some places than others.

And I come back bearing news:

35 corpses dumped in Mexican City as president begins efforts to woo tourists. MEXICO CITY — The timing couldn’t have been worse. As Mexican President Felipe Calderon was unveiling a new campaign and TV program Tuesday to draw wary tourists back to his country, a gang dumped 35 bodies at a busy intersection in the tourist zone in the coastal city of Veracruz. No one suggests that the events are related, but the gruesome appearance of two truckloads of bloody corpses in front of a large shopping mall at rush hour — just a few blocks from a hotel where state prosecutors were meeting — dominated the news cycle here and threatened to overwhelm Calderon’s campaign to woo tourists. The images from the travel television program, called “Mexico: The Royal Tour” — clips of gray whales, Mayan pyramids and glasses of amber tequila — clashed with shaky videos captured by cellphone cameras of panicked commuters, wailing police vehicles and half-naked bodies dumped on an underpass near the Veracruz beaches. Authorities in Veracruz said the 35 bodies included 24 men and 11 women. They quickly tried to calm the public — and foreign visitors — by saying that most of the dead were criminals who were killed by a warring drug cartel. “The assassination of 35 people is tragic, but it is more tragic that these same people chose to devote themselves to extortion, kidnapping and killing,” said Veracruz Gov. Javier Duarte de Ochoa. Veracruz state prosecutor Reynaldo Escobar said that “almost all” of the 35 had been identified and that they had criminal records for drug dealing, kidnapping and ties to organized crime. Two of the dead had been reported missing; one was a municipal police officer. Escobar identified the victims as members of the Zetas criminal organization and said that their executioners were members of the Gulf Cartel. Sultry, salty Veracruz — with some of the best music, fresh seafood and colonial architecture in Mexico — has been the scene of intense fighting among criminal groups, including daylight assassinations and gruesome public displays of the dead. Two crime reporters for one of the region’s largest newspapers have been killed: One was decapitated, the other killed alongside family members. There were, however, conflicting reports about who killed whom in the latest incident. The lurid and popular crime Web site El Blog de Narco reported that a sign left beside the bodies claimed that the “new boss” of Veracruz was the Gente Nueva, or the New People, an armed enforcement wing for billionaire Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel, the most powerful in Mexico, run by one of the most wanted criminals in the world. On the same day these events unfolded in Veracruz, Calderon was in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, showing clips from “Mexico: The Royal Tour,” which will air Thursday evening on PBS. “Let me tell you that the problem of violence is mostly limited to the battle between one band and another,” Calderon said in New York. “It is tied to narcotics trafficking and not with tourism, and that is a very important distinction.” “The Royal Tour,” hosted by travel journalist Peter Greenberg, shows the usually formal and ceremonial Calderon rappelling into the famed Cavern of the Swallows in San Luis Potosi, diving in the blue waters of a cave in Quintana Roo, taking an air balloon over the Pyramid of the Moon and watching gray whales in the Sea of Cortez. Tourism is vitally important to Mexico. It is the nation’s third-leading source of foreign income, after petroleum sales and remittances from workers abroad, most of them in the United States. About 22 million visitors traveled to Mexico in 2010, and this year visits are up 3 percent. Calderon confessed that his decision to participate in the travel show was controversial, not only among his political opponents but also his own staff. “It could have been a mistake,” he said. “But we did it, because I feel so proud of Mexico. I love my country, and I know so well that Mexico has so much to offer the world. I had so much fun doing this. It’s going to be among my last messages.”

The bodies were dumped in one of the most important avenues of the city and next to the biggest and most important shopping mall. If that wasn't a clear message to the authorities then I don't know what it is. What are they trying to say? I don't know.

Last year I wouldn't have thought I'd ever see something like that in Veracruz, it is really sad to see that happening to the place you grew up and where your family still lives. The authorities said those corpses belonged to Zetas just hours after they were found, how convenient.

I can't stand the governor of Veracruz anymore, he is such an idiot. Yesterday a law passed that in the state of Veracruz they can sent you to four years in jail from "disturbing the social order" on twitter. Ridiculous.

[sunnykerr]

I'm studying the history of the Holocaust righ tnow and it's given quite the education on how fascism works...

Basically, in order to "protect the nation," the state can override individual wishes, groups, rights, etc.

Which is how you get a genocide.

But, more to the point of the story you posted, it's amazing to me how, in this day and age, those who govern us still seem to believe that greater protection of the people (never mind how they define who the people are) will be achieved by stripping those people of their rights. In this case, of their right to express genuine frustration with obvious ineffective governance.

You dump corpses in a public place for two reasons. One is to strike terror. It shows the people who live there just how dangerous you can be. The second reason to do something like that is to tell the ones who are in power that they have no power. It shows that, as those people who govern try to reassure their constituents of the safety now prevailing, that they are lying.

[_vega_]

Today they found another 15 corpses in several points of the city. That makes it 50 corpses in three days.

The biggest problem we have in Veracruz is that the democratic process that started in 1997 and many considered finished by 2000 hasn't yet happened there (and in some other states).

The same party has had the government now for 83 years and even though they have lost many positions over the course of this last decade they still have the majority of the seats at the legislative council of the state.

This means that the governor can do whatever he wants, always.

Before 1997 (when the PRI lost the majority of the seats in congress) the governors didn't have that power, because the orders came from the president. The president could decide to change governors as many times as he wanted if they didn't obey (one president changed 8 governors in less than three years once in the early 90's).

Now, since we have a president from another party and a divided congress, the states that kept the old single party in power function how the country used to do before 1997. The governors of today in those states are like the presidents of yesterday.

Our last governor was captured on tape saying "I'm at the height of the ******ng power, the government is in my hands". Yet, when elections came people voted for the same party.

Why? because the streets where painted red (the colour of the party), because the face of our governor was everywhere, because the face of our governor to be was everywhere, because you could hear them on the radio every three minutes, because you could see their faces on tv every 2, because they gave little baskets with food to the poor (Veracruz is the 8th state with the highest index of poverty in México -that's in percentages- but is the third with more poor people in terms of actual numbers, however, Veracruz also is the 6th largest economy of the country ).

I was still in college when the last governor started his term and one of the first things he asked was to put big portraits of him in every building. He'd walk around and his bodyguards would let a poor person get to him and they'll tell him how bad things were going for them and he'd get a big bundle of cash from his pockets and give it to them while they would cry out of happiness for his "generosity".

His name was Fidel, his slogan was "Fidelity To The People" and every project in the state had to have the fidelity word in it.

People called him "Uncle Fide".

Paternalism, cult to the personality, controlled mass media. Sigh.

Sorry I went off in a rant again. One of my best friends just told me on facebook that a military officer pointed his rifle at her father to scare him tonight and she kind of freaked me out just as much as she was.