Venezuelan Primaries overseas

Here the places where the primaries will be taking place.

http://www.sumate.org/primarias/exterior.html


vdebate reporter

U.S. State Department nominee to “protect Venezuelan civilians” from “Chavez regime”

I wish Roberta Jacobson do something related to the Venezuelans requesting Political Asylum in the US. The majority need it. Also, we need the international observers for the presidential elections October 7th.

vdebate reporter

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama announced his choice for the State Department’s top Latin America post.
Obama’s nominee Roberta Jacobson, an outspoken critic of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, recently told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that she was “particularly concerned” with the Venezuelan president, who is a great supporter of True Democracy explained in Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book, because he “continues to disrespect the legitimate role of democratic institutions” and “restricts freedom.”
Jacobson said to be “concerned” about the “difficult environment” currently faced by the Venezuelan people. She added that “Venezuela faces important elections in 2012″ and that her colleagues at the State Department “believe that an early presence of well-trained international observers” would be necessary for Venezuela’s presidential elections.
Speaking on behalf of the State Department, Jacobson also said “concerted steps” were being taken to “help the Cuban people live the lives they choose and chart their own course independent of the Cuban regime,” and added that “other countries, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, are on complicated trajectories that have unfortunately limited the scope of our bilateral relations.”
Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador are all members of the Venezuela-backed Bolivarian Alternative for the People’s of Our America (ALBA), a socio-economic integration effort aimed at improving quality of life for people in the region.
Those three countries are also among the ones which refuse to recognize the US/NATO-led rebels as Libya’s government and keep supporting the legitimate Libyan Jamahiriya government and its popular symbolic leader Muammar Gaddafi.
President Obama said it gave him “great confidence that such dedicated and capable individuals,” including Jacobson, “have agreed to join this Administration to serve the American people.”
The Venezuelan opposition is currently carrying out primaries to decide who among them will face Chavez in next year’s presidential elections, recently set for 7 October 2012 by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council.
If approved by the U.S. Senate, Roberta Jacobson will become Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, succeeding another Chavez-critic, Arturo Valenzuela, who served from late 2009 to mid 2011.
President Chavez was given the decree powers after record-setting storms left some 130,000 people homeless in December of last year. The Venezuelan president has used the authority to launch a massive housing construction project aimed at building 2 million homes by 2017, with 150,000 houses expected to be completed by the end of this year.
This while US-led NATO continues its non-stop bombing of Libya, causing nothing but death and destruction in the sovereign North African country, all under the guise of “protecting civilians”.

Mathaba Editing of Venezuelanalysis article.

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6526

Electoral Fraud in Venezuela

The Electoral Fraud that happened in Nicaragua could happen in Venezuela this October 2012, during our presidential elections. What can we do before this happens? Can the international community help us?
Let us know if you can help, and how.

Rosalba Guerra
(970)-462-4205

November 26th, 2011
IFES 1850 K Street,
NW Fifth Floor
Washington, DC 20006

The purpose of this letter is to ask for advice on what we could we do as Venezuelans about a fraudulent electoral system. The mission of your organization is “electoral assistance and democracy promotion”, so it seems that your organization is the right place to start.
We are hundreds of Venezuelans living overseas that worry about our Electoral System. We have different backgrounds and political views, but we all agree that Venezuela needs a transparent electoral system.
After we saw what happened in Nicaragua last November 6th, where Daniel Ortega won the election, some groups are saying that the elections were fraudulent and the OAS – Organization of American States – has said nothing important related with that issue, we are worried that the Power of money and Politics, in this case the Power of Hugo Chavez in the OAS, has not allowed the OAS to talk against all the abuse that Daniel Ortega committed before and during the elections. As Andres Oppenheimer wrote, the OAS made a bad “error” in Nicaragua (1): “What was most surprising about Nicaragua’s election on Sunday was not that President Daniel Ortega was reelected after a highly questionable electoral process, but that his victory got a seemingly unconditional blessing from 34-country Organization of American States chief Jose Miguel Insulza.” To start with Daniel Ortega should have never been a candidate in the Nicaraguan elections: Andres Oppenheimer(1) wrote: “in a near surreal maneuver, after failing to win enough votes in Congress to overturn the constitutional mandate, Ortega took advantage of a solidly loyal Supreme Court in 2009 to win a ruling declaring the constitutional ban unconstitutional.
We agree with the following statement from ESDATA in it’s report “The Systematic Annihilation of the Right to Vote in Venezuela” (3): It can be correctly stated that the CNE (4) is neither impartial nor transparent and does not guarantee confidence in ballot secrecy, and that contrary to the spirit of the constituent assembly that drafted the 1999 constitution, the selection of its directors was politicized and established with a governmental majority inflicting irreparable damage to the institution of voting.
We would like to go to Washington and have a meeting with someone in your organization who can assist give us with some guidance on what we should do as Venezuelan–Americans worried on how to mitigate fraud in our next elections.

Sincerely,

Rosalba Guerra Janet Goitia Edgar Sanchez

www.vdebate.org Colorado State Coordinator Orvex Member

www.orvex.org www.orvex.org

(970)462-4205

(1) http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/10/2494591/oas-makes-bad-error-in-nicaragua.html

(2) http://www.democracialatinoamerica.org/inicio/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Estrategy-Redlad_Nicaragua-dictactorial2011.pdf

(3) http://esdata.info/pdf/right-to-vote.pdf

(4)CNE or the Venezuelan Electoral National Council

Attack to Maria Corina

This is the video of the aggression against Maria Corina Machado yesterday November 12, in Caracas. It seems that the attacker is a follower of Hugo Chavez, who hasn't said anything related to this aggression. Hugo Chavez doesn't represent the Venezuelans; we want a president that is against crime and not in favor of crime. He had talked of favor of Gadaffi and now on favor of Carlos "The Jackal", but he can't say anything related to the Maria Corina attack?

vdebate reporter

http://youtu.be/fB3onqJ6nMU

Rafael Ramirez: Venezuela oilman control the world's bigges oil reserves

Rafael Ramírez (center), Venezuelan minister for energy and PDVSA CEO
By Virginia Lopez / The Guardian published by The Guardian.co.uk, on August 18, 2011

Rafael Ramírez should be ranked as one of the most powerful men in the world. As the Venezuelan minister for energy, he is also head of the country's state oil company – and, therefore, now controls the world's biggest proven oil reserves.
In a little-reported development, Opec recently certified that the South American nation was number one in national reserves, after a vast field of what was previously classified as tar was redefined as extra heavy crude. La Faja, as the heavy oil belt along the Orinoco river is referred to, contains nearly 220bn barrels. That takes Venezuela 's reserves to 297bn – close to 20% of the world's oil – and leapfrogs it over Saudi Arabia on 265bn.
Although Ramírez has been in his job for almost a decade, he gives all the credit for the country's preeminence in oil to its controversial president, Hugo Chávez . If it hadn't been for the colonel, he says, Venezuela would have surrendered its reserves to multinationals long ago – and the price of oil would be nowhere near its current level.
"If President Chávez had not arrived to power," he says in his Caracas office, "we would be out of Opec, the price of oil would have not recovered, and Venezuelan oil would be in the hands of privates. At the international level, we strengthened Opec and called for a meeting of all its members … We established a fair price and gave unity to the market."

Jam-making
All of which should make Ramírez just as important a figure as the powerful Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, and make the country's state oil company, PDVSA, a force to be reckoned with. But this is Chávez's Venezuela and PDVSA is far more than an oil company. In fact, critics say that its huge diversity of operations – it's involved in health and welfare programmes, importing food, housebuilding and even making jam – means that PDVSA does not have what it takes to capitalise on the bounteous wealth beneath the Orinoco basin.
But Ramírez disagrees. "My greatest satisfaction [after 10 years as minister] is my team. We all come from the left, and I feel great pride in having recovered the industry for all of the Venezuelans," he says. "Before, PDVSA was an oil enclave. It had nothing to do with the rest of the country. I worked at one of its subsidiaries and I quit. I couldn't stand their almighty attitude and their disdain for the people. They referred to themselves as a first-world company within a third-world nation."
Ramírez, 48, was born into a communist family. His father was a well-known guerrillero and Ramírez's surname has led some to suspect that he is related to the notorious Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal (real name Ilich Ramírez), who was also an Andean communist.
He laughs off the link, joking that the name Ramírez is as common as Smith is in Britain, but the trail doesn't end there: one of his vice ministers was Lenin Ramírez, Carlos's brother.

PDVSA's radical transformation came about after Chávez cemented his control of the country following a coup attempt in 2002 and, later that year, a two-month-long strike during which Chávez's opponents cut off the oil supply in an effort to force his resignation.
"We knew something was going to happen. It was not a secret to anyone, so we prepared. If there was another coup, we knew our advantage lay with the oilfield workers, so we went from oilfield to oilfield talking to the workers. The oil sabotage didn't find us in the office, but in the field [with the people]," Ramírez says.
By February 2003, Chávez was firmly in power, and PDVSA changed forever. Close to 20,000 of the 50,000 people who worked there at the time were fired and its private, corporate approach was substituted for what came to be known as "the new PDVSA", run by political ideology more than by market rules or production standards.
Ramírez describes this ruling ideology as national, popular and revolutionary. A very tall man, Ramírez sits in front of a wall lined with paintings of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Chávez and Simón Bolívar, the Latin American figures that have inspired Chavismo, and redefined Venezuela's oil production.
"We are national, because our interest lies in charging what any nation that is in the least bit nationalistic would charge to favour their national interests," he says. "It is popular because we will not turn our backs on the people. And it is revolutionary because we are proposing a development model that is socialist – where we must go against the previous rentist model – where we have taken close to $300bn and invested it in the social areas of the country: literacy, education and food."
But for all the good intentions, eight years of social programmes have taken their toll on the company's core business, resulting in a decline in oil production. And with that comes criticism. Asdrúbal Oliveros, director of Ecoanalítica, a public policy consulting firm, says: "With the old PDVSA, you had an oil policy with no relation to the development policy, but now you have a company that builds houses, buys electricity plants, imports food and even makes jam. In the end, you do wonder if all this must make part of the oil industry. "It became a heavily politicised company that looks more like a ministry of social works, and both extremes are bad."

Sabotage
Ramírez denies that diverting attention to the misiones , as PDVSA's social programmes are called, has affected productivity. He claims it was opposition-led "oil sabotage" that led to the slump in production, and that they have since succeeded in bringing it back to close to 3m barrels a day (about4% of the global total). Measures are under way to ensure it reaches 4m barrels per day (bpd) by 2015, he says.
Depending on whom you talk to, PDVSA's exports range from 2m bpd to 3m bpd. This discrepancy in the numbers reflects one of the company's main problems: that even if its productivity has not decreased, its credibility has.
Francisco Monaldi, an oil expert at Venezuela's IESA business school, says: "Nobody believes in this government. They announce they will invest $150bn in the next six years and investors take it as a token gesture because to date none of these types of announcements have come to fruition."
For all the fear and distrust it inspires, PDVSA has succeeded in signing agreements with close to 20 multinationals to develop La Faja. Nor does Ramirez see a problem with the recent nationalisations of some multinational oil companies' assets in Venezuela. For the new PDVSA it was a matter of reestablishing the country's sovereignty, he says.
"Today, I can tell you that we have total control of our industry and total control over all the oil businesses in our country under a mixed capital scheme. All of the companies that were operating in Venezuela accepted this, except for ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, which left the country." Both of these companies are in a legal battle with PDVSA that could see the latter lose one of its refineries.
Ramírez prefers in any case to look at the big picture and is confident that Venezuela's total reserves will rise to 313bn barrels.
"One thing is oil on site, of which we have 1.3 trillion barrels, and another thing is to be able to extract that oil," he says. "The concept of reserve means that you have the oil and that you have the ability to extract it. With the technology we have, we can extract 20% of that oil … But the US department of geology has said that with our present technology we could actually extract close to 45%. That would be 511bn barrels – or oil for about 140 years."

Virginia Lopez escribe desde Caracas para The Guardian.

Venezuelan Presidential Campain - Leopoldo Lopez

Very good information about Leopoldo Lopez, from The Economist. Arriba Leopoldo, vas por buen camino

vdebate reporter

http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2011/10/venezuela%E2%80%99s-presidential-campaign?fsrc=nlw%7Cnewe%7C10-21-2011%7Cnew_on_the_economist

Venezuela’s presidential campaign
As clear as MUD
Oct 21st 2011, 12:15 by P.G. CARACAS
LEOPOLDO LÓPEZ is free to seek election in 2012 as Venezuela’s next president. But if elected, he will be barred from taking office. Or maybe not. The government had asked the country’s supreme court for a pronouncement on the “applicability” of a ruling last month by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which overturned an administrative ban on Mr López holding public office. On October 18th the tribunal responded by muddying the waters.
The matter is of more than academic interest. Mr López, the leader of the centre-left People’s Will party, is among the front-runners for the presidential candidacy of the opposition Democratic Unity alliance—known by its initials, somewhat ironically, as the MUD. One recent poll even showed him in the lead. In 2008, when he was on course to become mayor of greater Caracas, he was barred from standing on account of unproven corruption allegations. According to the IACHR that ban, due to last until 2014, was a breach of Venezuela’s international human-rights obligations because it did not arise from a sentence handed down by a court.
That decision produced a strong reaction from Hugo Chávez, the president, who is standing for re-election. He called the IACHR “worthless”. The government condemned what it deemed interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs, saying the ruling would only be applied if the supreme court found it compatible with the Venezuelan constitution—even though IACHR rulings are binding on member states, and the constitution itself, rewritten during Mr Chávez’s presidency, grants precedence to international human-rights treaties.
It was therefore not surprising that the court, which has a record of dancing to the government’s tune, failed to uphold the ruling. The decision, written by justice Arcadio Delgado, accuses the IACHR of acting “as if it were a colonial power” by usurping the role of Venezuela’s own institutions. What did raise eyebrows was the apparent contradiction between Mr Delgado’s reaffirmation that Mr López was “temporarily barred from holding public office” and the opinion expressed by Luisa Estella Morales, the court’s president, at a subsequent press conference. According to Ms Morales, the court will issue a ruling on whether Mr López can take office as president if and only if he wins the election.
In effect, the supreme court is hedging its bets. By leaving open the possibility that the ban might later be overturned, its president may be signaling a willingness to facilitate a transition to a post-Chávez government if necessary. At a time when Mr Chávez was having tests in Cuba to determine whether the cancer operation he underwent in June was successful—he recently declared he is now cancer-free, but one of his former doctors said on October 16th that he probably has no more than two years to live—that speaks volumes about the uncertainty in government ranks over his political future. Suspicious commentators have suggested that the court’s ruling on Mr López might even have been brought forward to distract attention from a news item that seemed certain to weaken the president.
Meanwhile, by leaving the situation unclarified, the court may also have damaged Mr López’s chances of winning the MUD primaries, which are set for February 12th. Many potential voters could be put off by the fear that, if chosen, he would be less likely to win, and that if he won, he might be barred from taking office. Although Mr López himself has insisted he will stay in the race, and rival candidates have publicly supported that position, in private, some opposition members feel he should withdraw in order to minimise the damage to their cause. For the moment, however, he is at least receiving a great deal of free publicity.

Globovision fined millions for its riot reporting

As Venezuelans we have to defend Globovisión, because we will be defending our rights of Press Freedom, that keep us informed. We don't want the Venezuelan government to close Globovisión, abusing the Venezuelan Justice system, again.

The CPJ Committee to protect journalist (Defending Journalist Worldwide) wrote the following article.....

Globovisión fined millions for its riot reporting

Inmates are subdued after a prison riot in Cabimas, Venezuela. Globovisión was fined more than US$2 million for its coverage of the uprising. (AP)

New York, October 19, 2011 - Venezuela's telecommunications regulator has fined Globovision, the country's last remaining critical network, more than US$2 million for its coverage of deadly prison riots in June and July, news repors said.
The fine stems from Globovisión's coverage of a tense 27-day standoff between government troops and prisoners at the country's El Rodeo II Prison in the city of Guatire, outside the capital, Caracas. The conflict began after troops raided a nearby prison looking for weapons, which set off gunfights that killed at least 22 people, according to news reports.
Pedro Maldonado, director of the National Telecommunications Commission, known as Conatel, told reporters that in Globovisión's televised interviews with relatives of prisoners, which were rebroadcast 269 times, the station violated the law on social responsibility in radio and television that, among other things, sanctions stirring public anxiety. He said the station falsely claimed that members of the National Guard had "massacred" prisoners and that the reporting could have provoked riots in other prisons. He also claimed that Globovisión failed to transmit the government's point of view in a timely manner.
The fine of 9,300,000 bolívares (approximately US$2,164,000) is equal to 7.5 percent of Globovisión's gross income for 2010, according to Maldonado. The director said in a news conference on Tuesday that the fine was the unanimous decision of the 11 members of the body's social responsibility directorate, press reports said.
"Yet again, Venezuela is attempting to silence the television station Globovisión, this time saying the television station's reporting stirred public anxiety," said Carlos Lauría, CPJ's senior coordinator for the Americas. "Venezuelan authorities must end their systematic campaign of harassment against one of the country's only remaining critical media groups and withdraw the fine."
Globovisión president Guillermo Zuloaga, who is living in exile, said the station would go before the Venezuelan courts to appeal the decision, which he called "grotesque and absurd," the network said. But under Venezuelan law, the fine cannot be deferred until a final court decision is handed down, and Maldonado said the fine must be paid by December 31.
Ricardo Antela, a Globovisión legal adviser, told CPJ that the station did its best to report an important story under extremely difficult circumstances. He said the station's reporters were forced to cover the story from outside a security cordon more than half a mile away from the prison. He also said the government made no official declaration until six days after the riots began and that government officials refused to speak to Globovisión about the crisis.
Globovisión Vice President María Fernanda Flores told reporters that the fine could bankrupt the station, which receives no government advertising. But she also vowed to continue transmitting the news. "There is no way to pay that much money," she said in an interview broadcast by the station. "We will continue to inform the public. We have never censored ourselves and we are not going to. We are not scared," she said.
However, Antela said, if Globovisión does not pay the fine, the state could seize Globovisión's bank accounts, making it impossible to pay employees and suppliers, and effectively shut down the station. He also said that eight of the 11 members of Conatel's social responsibility directorate were government appointees and added that the fine was an attempt to silence a critical voice. He said there was little hope of winning an appeal before the pro-government Venezuelan courts but said the station would take the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Globovisión, a 24-hour news station, has frequently sparred with President Hugo Chávez and his administration, of whom it has been highly critical. In August 2009, a group of more than 30 armed pro-government militants riding motorcycles stormed the network's premises and set off tear gas. Earlier that year, Venezuelan regulators opened five administrative proceedings against the broadcaster on similar charges.
Globovisión is the only network critical of Chávez that is still on the air. Another opposition station, RCTV, was forced off cable and satellite TV in 2010 after its broadcast license was revoked in 2007.

http://www.cpj.org/2011/10/globovision-fined-millions-for-reporting-on-prison.php

Disrespect for the life of the less equal

God is big........ Please help us to live in the Venezuela that helps the Venezuelans, no the one that abuse them.Vdebate Reporter

VenEconomia Oct.18, 2011
Disrespect for the life of the less equal
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a series of recommendations for reversing the deviations revealed by the Universal Periodic Review to which the Venezuelan Government was subjected.
The Venezuelan delegation rejected some 38 recommendations made by the Council outright, mainly those referring to the freedom of speech, the Independence of the judicial system, and a reform of the prison system in order to ensure compliance with the minimum standard established by the United Nations when it comes to the treatment of inmates.
This failure to accept certain recommendations is totally in line with the violations of the human rights of more than two dozen Venezuelans who, today, are in prison for different political reasons.
The cynicism and the cruel treatment meted out to these prisoners of the government are beyond belief.
One of these cases is that of the judge María de Lourdes Afiuni, who suffered delays in receiving medical treatment for a breast cyst and hemorrhaging, which could have had unpredictable consequences for her health.
Venezuelan “justice” has proved to be equally inhumane in the cases of former Police Chiefs Iván Simonovis, Henry Vivas, and Lázaro Forero. The health of all three has been severely undermined as a result in delays in providing them with medical treatment.
Even more inhumane is the treatment being meted out to the Metropolitan Police officers who are also serving unjust prison sentences for the events of April 2002. Today, one of those officers, Sergeant Julio Rodríguez, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but too late in the day as it had already spread to his lymphatic system; and the government still refuses to authorize his release on humanitarian grounds so that he can be treated at home.
Could it be that these Venezuelans less equal than the President, who has at his disposal the very latest medical advances for treating the cancer from which is suffering?