Venezuelans protest opposition TV channel closure
Sat May 19, 2007 4:45PM EDT
CARACAS (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of protesters on Saturday denounced President Hugo Chavez's plans to close an opposition television channel, accusing their leader of maiming Venezuelan democracy as he forges a socialist state.
Sunday, 27 May 2007, 01:38 GMT 02:38 UK
Venezuelans protest over TV issue
By James Ingham
BBC News, Caracas
Tens of thousands of people are protesting in Venezuela this weekend as a TV station critical of the government is taken off the air.
President Hugo Chavez has refused to renew a licence for Radio Caracas TV, saying the station actively tries to undermine his government.
Originally posted by Britguy
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Do you have actual documented evidence that it was the Chavez supporters who shot the protestors? I mean, actual footage of the killings, not scenes of people shooting and then cut to scenes of victims? The Irish team footage showed no Chavez supporters shooting at protestors. Why would they lie, they were an impartial group caught up in the events, not a biased paid pro Chavez film crew.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Public Statement
AI Index: AMR 53/006/2003 (Public)
News Service No: 087
10 April 2003
Venezuela: A Year on -- Face up to the Facts of April 2002
A year on from the failed Coup d’Etat of 11 - 14 April 2002, when more than 50 people lost their lives and scores of others were wounded, Venezuela’s government and opposition have failed to face up to their part in the tragedy and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice, Amnesty International said today.
"It is time that both the government and opposition stop attempting to use the events of April 11 to serve their political agendas and instead create the climate in which the facts can be established, justice can be secured and the victims can receive reparations."
"The recent dismissal of murder charges against those accused of shooting from the Puente Llaguno, and the failure to charge Metropolitan Police implicated in the deaths and injuries suffered on 11 April, demonstrate the weakness of the official investigation. It also raises serious concerns about the capacity of the state to effectively prosecute all those responsible," the organization continued.
Poverty (% of population below national poverty line)...... 26%
Urban population (% of total population) ............................... 86%
The Venezuelan government’s claim of illiteracy eradication is generally taken at face value by specialists as well as by casual observers. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reports that “illiteracy, formerly at 10 percent of the population, has been completely eliminated.” UNESCO’s latest Education for All Global Monitoring Report reports that 1 million people learned to read and write in Venezuela between July and December 2003. The source cited for this information is a presentation made at the UNESCO meetings by the Cuban Communist Party’s organization Juventud Rebelde.
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One puzzling fact about the government’s claim is that, according to official
statistics, the number of illiterate Venezuelans before the start of Misión Robinson was already well below 1.5 million persons. Table 1 presents the evolution of Venezuelan illiteracy as reported by the national censuses from 1936 to 2001. The pre-Robinson 2001 census reports only 1.08 million illiterate Venezuelans of age 15 and greater – the standard UNESCO threshold - in 2001. Indeed, according to the census data, Venezuela appears to never have had as many as 1.5 million illiterate adults during the past seventy years.
This inconsistency was recognized by Education Minister Aristóbulo Istúriz in the July 3 Aló Presidente program, where he claimed that the Census figure of 1.2 million illiterate individuals underestimated illiteracy rates and that estimates carried out by the Ministry of Education in 2003 had put the number of illiterates at the higher 1.5 million.7 These estimates referred to by the minister do not appear in any official publication and are therefore difficult to evaluate.8 If we take this figure to be correct, the government’s claim of having taught how to read and write to 1.4-1.5 million persons would imply a reduction of illiteracy to less than 0.1% of the country’s adult population.
Summary, CIA Electoral Interventions, and Nicaragua as a Model for Venezuela
It is no secret that the government of the United States is carrying out a program of operations in favor of the Venezuelan political opposition to remove President Hugo Chávez Frías and the coalition of parties that supports him from power. The budget for this program, initiated by the administration of Bill Clinton and intensified under George W. Bush, has risen from some $2 million in 2001 to $9 million in 2005, and it disguises itself as activities to “promote democracy,” “resolve conflicts,” and “strengthen civic life.” It consists of providing money, training, counsel and direction to an extensive network of political parties, NGO’s, MASS MEDIA, unions, and businessmen, all determined to end the bolivarian revolutionary process. The program has clear short, medium, and long-term goals, and adapts easily to changes in the fluid Venezuelan political process.
The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela
Philip Agee is a former CIA operative who left the agency in 1967 after becoming disillusioned by the CIA’s support for the status quo in the region. Says Agee, “I began to realize that what I and my colleagues had been doing in Latin America in the CIA was no more than a continuation of nearly five-hundred years of this, exploitation and genocide and so forth. And I began to think about what, until then would have been unthinkable, which was to write a book on how it all works.” The book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was an instant best-seller and was eventually published in over thirty languages. In 1978, three years after the publication of CIA Diary, Agee and a group of like-minded journalists began publishing the Covert Operations Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly), as part of a strategy of “guerilla journalism” aimed at destabilizing the CIA and exposing their operations.
Originally posted by forestlady
venezuelamatters.blogspot.com...
Here's an URL with a 25 min. video depicting the other side. In 63 days of the oil strike, more than 17,000 propaganda messages were sent out by RCTV.
There is a law in Venezula, guaranteeing free speech by the media, as long as they don't use propaganda or censor any news. RCTV is clearly in violation of this law.
All of the other stations are privately owned corporations.
Originally posted by Souljah
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Of course, SOME shall say I am only spitting out Anti-USA BS and only diverting the attention of this topic to some Bush-Bashing. But before you do that, may I suggest you read some more about CIA interventions in South America - Thank You:
They explained in their congress resolution, "The Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) decided in its 12th congress that we are in the midst of a revolutionary process of national liberation that has to succeed in conquering complete national independence and liberation, advance the conquest of social justice and equality and deepen the popular revolutionary democracy with a participative and protagonist content to the transformation and liquidation of the old oligarchic bourgeois state that, to be able to achieve the historical tasks which exist in society, necessarily has to overcome the unjust mode of capitalist production of exploitation of man by man, the principal cause of all inequality and threats that affect human kind".
In the real world of food, housing, wages, employment and other conditions which determine the standard of living of the working class and poor "the protagonist and participative content of the transformation and liquidation of the old oligarchic bourgeois state" does not instil the reader with much confidence or clarity about how these tasks will be fulfilled. Even less clear is which class in society will play the leading role in overthrowing capitalism.
