Protests Continue in Venezuela against a Nightmarish Regime

Protests Continue in Venezuela against a Nightmarish Regime By Jerry Brewer

The broken silence in Venezuela is deafening as the once proud and strong nation is facing mass protest demonstrations, many of which have turned deadly over the past three weeks. And the violent situations are exacerbated with the threat of anti-government protesters clashing with pro-government groups and/or security forces.Thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in cities throughout Venezuela, to stand boldly as military, police, rogue security officials and violent civilian pro-government enforcers moved in with aggressive maneuvers and weaponry. Much of the nation’s message is that they will no longer be silent after 15 years of repression and corrupt iron-fisted rule.

The official death toll is inaccurate -- actually it is unknown, this due to the massive government crackdown on media coverage. Hundreds have been injured, hundreds more detained, many are missing, a number of the dead have been killed by tactical-style shots to the head by snipers. As well, pictures coming out of Venezuela taken by citizens and disseminated worldwide via the Internet show what appear to be military and police firing randomly, as well as up at apartment buildings and their balconies. Graphic pictures of beaten victims and bloody corpses have strewn the Internet.

And while President Nicolas Maduro should be urging restraint and tolerance, especially of his government enforcers, while allowing freedom of expression and calling for peaceful demonstrations, with a straight face (as the late Hugo Chavez frequently did before him) he is instead accusing the United States of organizing this movement against the nation, and he claims the goal is a coup d'état.

Referring to protesters in the region of Tachira last week, Maduro said, “If I have to declare a state of exception, I’m ready to declare it and send in the tanks, the troops, planes, all of the military force of the country.”  He also threatened to jail other opposition politicians and protest leaders – and he has done just that.

Much like his predecessor and idol, Hugo Chavez, Maduro rejects any action or words that are not consistent with tight presidential rule and mandates. Voices of the people in opposition are not welcome, they must not be tolerated, and they must be repressed from world scrutiny as if the citizens are puppets, robots, or perceived stupid by nature.

Opposition legislators have been barred from debates and stripped of committee posts in the National Assembly. And when an opposition leader called for a protest last week, “Mr. Maduro scheduled his own march to start at the same spot and dispatched the National Guard to try to block protesters from rallying elsewhere.”

Veracity was never the strong suit of the buffoonish-style of diplomacy of Hugo Chavez or his choice of successor, Nicolas Maduro. Truth had no place in Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution as he misled an entire country, a revolution nurtured by and through Fidel Castro’s original failed Cuban revolution -- both, bringing death and misery to the people of Cuba and Venezuela over long periods of dictatorial rule. This while the Castro brothers and Chavez became wealthy and managed to hold on to power.

What was the record of Hugo Chavez’s rule; what did his legacy leave; and what has Maduro done to perpetuate the Chavez/Castro ideology? It appears they are still on the same page this very day. The problem is that Maduro struggles to understand fact from fiction, while trudging on into an ever sinking pit of common personal and professional destruction which threatens to bring the nation down with him.

The disastrous record left by Chavez shows massively squandered oil wealth, depleted with practically no record of accountability. Chavez’s sudden personal wealth -- now enjoyed by his heirs, is graphically archived in page after page on the Internet as “La fortuna de Hugo Chavez.” And one of Chavez’s most ironic and memorable quotes is also pasted on Internet pages of the world's media: “Ser rico es malo" (to be rich is bad).

Although it did not start under Maduro’s continuation of Chavez doctrine, Venezuelans today are plagued by empty food market shelves. Staples such as milk, sugar, flour, eggs, and other grocery items are rare. As well, the nation is suffering from a decaying infrastructure, thousands of people are living in squalor, there are rolling blackouts of electricity, and related inconveniences.Being kept silenced, threatened, and imprisoned for speaking out was the last straw for the thousands and thousands who have taken to the streets to voice their outrage, with many willing to die for their beliefs. One of the cries heard throughout the now bloody demonstrations: “… days of protests for 15 years of silence.” To which, unfortunately, the roguish Maduro regime has replied with relentless retaliation.

Silencing the media in Venezuela, and controlling what is seen and heard, began with Chavez and rapidly accelerated under Maduro. The only television station to regularly broadcast voices critical of the government was sold last year.

Last week Maduro banned a foreign cable news channel after it showed images of a young protester shot to death. Subsequently he revoked the credentials of a CNN news team and sent them packing.

As President Maduro voices strength and adherence to the socialist revolution, he ignores the truths and realities of his failures and blames the US for interference.

So, how does he ignore the hundreds of thousands throughout Venezuela that are demanding to be heard and willing to tell him to his face where the blame lies? It appears that Maduro does not want to hear any of this, and most importantly -- he does not want the world media to report his own people echoing it.

Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global threat mitigation firm headquartered in northern Virginia.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a Sick Man

Agree 100% with this article of Jerry Brewer vdebate reporter

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is a Sick Man
By: Jerry Brewer
President Hugo Chavez’s physical and mental health transcends a myriad of opinions and judgment.Chavez’s ever-growing and strong political opposition stands firm in awaiting what many believe is the end of his socialist version of the Bolivarian Revolution, either by election defeat or he succumbing to his critical physical illness.
Chavez pompously says he will be president through the year 2030.To a man who adores his own “one-way freedom” with the media, he closely guards his medical condition; waffling from just needing one treatment of chemotherapy; and sequentially now reaching his fourth recently conducted again in Cuba.
Bolivia’s leftist President Evo Morales went there to be at the side of his socialist mentor. Morales left Cuba to speak at the United Nations last week- assuming Chavez’s usual anti-US and Israel diatribe. Trying to defend world accusations of his regime’s complicity in drug trafficking and terrorism, he chose to blame the US for rumor-mongering. A pretty heady position by a rogue leftist leader who“kicked”the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) out of Bolivia; following the lead of Chavez who did the same. The region’s drug activity for both nations is very well known to a free world’s acute focus on the truth. How can any savvy, sane and inquisitive, person believe Chavez and Morale’s pathological nonsense? Adjoining Latin American neighbors are not fooled.
Morales is now having his own problems at home with the indigenous Bolivian people violently oppressed while trying to assemble peacefully in disagreement with the government.
Let’s face the fact that Hugo Chavez is Venezuela’s master of lies and thus must keep his regime constantly censoring the media. His one-way media output constantly reflects his physical and mentalfitness, as well as his frequent sound-byte attacks on the US (capitalism and imperialism). This, muchlike the father of lies- Fidel Castro’s lengthy absence from the public eye for around four years. Fidel Castro later would emerge and truthfully state that he was near death.Chavez frequently goes to extreme measures to censor Venezuela media- especially after the Christian Science Monitor exposed and published the steady stream of wealthy Venezuelans abandoning theirformer beloved homeland for Panama. Too, it was reported that Chavez’s top military leaders were involved in contingency plans on a move to Panama- this via one of “Panama’s top real estate developers.” The pathological nature of Chavez’s words and tenure in office as Venezuela’s rogue leftist leader, isgraphically and factually demonstrated by the embarrassment of slim victory for majority rule in the 2010 parliamentary election in Venezuela on September 26, 2010.This sparked a tirade of Chavez anger that led to his usual non-stately and crude political demeanor of confrontation. He quickly embarked on travel to meet with his mentor and revolutionary partner Fidel Castro in Cuba, as well as to the embracing arms of Iran’s Ahmadinejad. Too, his stops did not forget his pals in Russia, Syria, and others.
Chavez recently continued to exhibit his flawed and ill propensities to embarrass a once proud and prosperous democratic populace in Venezuela, by “solidarity wishes to Libya’s“on the run”PresidentMuammar Gaddafi and Syria’s embattled President Bashar-al-Assad whose regime is hunting down and killing street protesters. Chavez, as usual, blames this on“Yankee aggression- allowing his flawed mental capacities to ignore a majority world support of those people of those actions wishing to be free of oppression and lies by their rogue leftist dictators.Chavez’s mental illness, whether temporary or not, also does not allow him to see that the people on thestreets in protest against the murdering regimes of Libya and Syria are their own people in masses.
What part of that does Chavez or his own supporters miss? All they have to do is use the free world media for the facts, and not his own personal blog (Twitter) that spews his tired rhetoric of falsehood and subterfuge. He goes by the name of “Chavez Candanga (literally-“the devil”).”
Now there is acurious mentor for him also.The squandering (and the simple disappearance) of billions of dollars in hard earned oil revenue forVenezuela’s citizens, is Chavez’s rationale to deceive a very savvy (but violently oppressed) Venezuelan people into believing Venezuela is to be invaded by the “Yankees.”
This allows him to buy and hoard massive weapons and issue blank checks to leftist regimes throughout the world that care not one iota for the true welfare of the Venezuelan people. Only Chavez garners the accolades for“his”generosity and personal support of murdering world dictator-like regimes.
The truth is that the world has previously seen leftist leaders and regimes telegraph their true intention sthrough their anger and arrogance while consolidating power. Those acts routinely weaken democratic institutions, and trample on the guarantees of human rights. In the absence of a credible judicial control in Venezuela, the Chavez government has implemented “systematically discriminatory policies that have limited the exercise of freedom of expression of journalists, the right to freedom of association for workers and the civil society capacity to promote human rights in Venezuela. The Chavez government has implemented discriminatory practices against its political opponents and critics.
At times, the president himself has openly endorsed acts of discrimination.”Chavez has further defined his sinister agenda through a manifest disregard of the principle of separation of powers and, especially, the idea of an independent judiciary that is “indispensable for protecting fundamental rights in a democratic society.”
What more proof is necessary? It came with the political take over of the Supreme Court by Chávez and his regime.The people of Venezuela, both supporters and non-supporters of Hugo Chavez, urgently need to implement surgical-like fact finding- the search for the truth and facts from a “world”media. In this manner, they can be sure that they did their own homework; used their own God-given minds; and made the right decisions for their future and families. With a factual search for the truth- a free world believes they will say“Nunca mas,”to Hugo Chavez, or any similar leader of destruction and misery.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATES United States of America—Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates (northern Virginia), a global risk mitigation firm.
Website is located at http://www.cjiausa.org/.
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