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Monday, February 24, 2014

MEDIA COLLEAGUES IN VENEZUELA PLEA FOR THEIR COUNTRY

San Cristobal, Venezuela, Tuesday Night
FROM THE CARACAS CHRONICLE:
The Game Changed in Venezuela Last Night – and the International Media Is Asleep At the Switch


GUEST BLOG--By Francisco Toro, founder of Caracas Chronicles blog:

Dear International Editor:

Listen and understand. The game changed in Venezuela last night. What had been a slow-motion unravelling that had stretched out over many years went kinetic all of a sudden.

What we have this morning is no longer the Venezuela story you thought you understood.

Throughout last night, panicked people told their stories of state-sponsored paramilitaries on motorcycles roaming middle class neighborhoods, shooting at people and  storming into apartment buildings, shooting at anyone who seemed like he might be protesting.

People continue to be arrested merely for protesting, and a long established local Human Rights NGO makes an urgent plea for an investigation into widespread reports of torture of detainees. There are now dozens of serious human right abuses: National Guardsmen shooting tear gas canisters directly into residential buildings. We have videos of soldiers shooting civilians on the street.

And that’s just what came out in real time, over Twitter and YouTube, before any real investigation is carried out. Online media is next, a city of 645,000 inhabitants has been taken off the internet amid mounting repression, and this blog itself has been the object of a Facebook “block” campaign.

What we saw were not “street clashes”, what we saw is a state-hatched offensive to suppress and terrorize its opponents.

Here at Caracas Chronicles we’re doing what it can to document the crisis, but there’s only so much one tiny, zero-budget blog can do.

After the major crackdown on the streets of large (and small) Venezuelan cities last night, I expected some kind of response in the major international news outlets this morning. I understand that with an even bigger and more photogenic freakout ongoing in an even more strategically important country, we weren’t going to be front-page-above-the-fold, but I’m staggered this morning to wake up, scan the press and find…

Nothing.

As of 11 a.m. this morning, the New York Times World Section has…nothing.....

For complete posting of above posting go to:
http://caracaschronicles.com/2014/02/20/the-game-changed/

NOTE: This from the Miami Herald:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/21/3952201/venezuelan-violence-has-roots.html

MORE FROM CARACAS CHRONICLES

GUEST BLOG, By Rodrigo Linares, posted today on Venezuela-based independent blog CaracasChronicles.com

Venezuela is in full-blown crisis mode. The violence has been in the making for years. It’s not a social or economic crisis – the economy is in shambles, but it’s not yet at its worst. Crime is stratospheric, but then, it has been high for years. The crisis, it seems, goes beyond this.

What makes the current conflict so sad is that it could have easily have been avoided if minimal spaces for dialogue between opponents had been safeguarded. The crisis, it seems, is institutional.

The recent violence has taken place against a backdrop absolute institutional decay. The rock-bottom-basic institutions a modern country needs – the high school civics triad of the Executive, the Legislature, and the courts – have just plain stopped operating in anything like a recognizable form.

The key shortcoming of a presidential systems is the overload of legitimacy on a single human being and his or her agenda. Take this example: a president that gets elected by a narrow margin, say by 1.49 points. In this example 20% of the voters abstain. That 50.61% (out of the 80% that voted) who elected the president did so because they favor something like 75% of his agenda, while the others that didn’t vote for him, supported only a fraction of that. And yet, the president feels he can legitimately push 100% of his agenda.

Sound familiar? That is Nicolás Maduro for you.

The problem of excessive power in the hands of the President is not a Venezuelan issue. This is a problem with the system we have chosen for ourselves. We chose it because the forefathers of Venezuelan democracy thought a strong Executive was needed to govern in Venezuela. This was a choice made in 1961, but its roots go back to the 1820s.

Yet, in theory, there’s supposed to be a National Assembly and an independent Supreme Court in place able to keep an overzealous President in check. That is where Venezuelan institutions, and its politicians, have failed the country. First, in 2004, the Supreme Court was packed with a gaggle of unconditional yes-men (and women), ending any hope for judicial redress. Then our parliament went into a protracted death spiral.

A simplified mission of the Parliament is, of course, to pass legislation, but it is a lot more than that. It is place for different political forces to meet and talk (parler in french). In this space, political forces look for common ground to reach solutions that satisfy all representatives, and through the representatives, the constituents. The Parliament is an outlet for discontent, a space for negotiation where progress is slow but effective.

We talk and argue in Parliament so that we don’t have to do it out in the streets. But we broke Parliament, and turned it into a boxing ring, and we allowed our courts to be packed, breaking the one final check to authoritarian control.

This degradation was years in the making. First, the opposition boycotted the 2005 parliamentary elections, which ended with a meager 25% voter turnout. This broke not only the checks and balances, but the opposition walked out of a space of dialogue. A culture of imposition was created inside the halls of the National Assembly, one we really haven’t shaken off yet. For five years the opposition was not to be represented in the central government, and no alternative outlet for discontent was provided.

The 2010 reforms, just weeks prior to a new legislature taking office, left the Parliament an institutional husk. This was exacerbated with every Enabling Law that gave the President the power to legislate by decree, of which we have had two since 2010. Add to that aggressive nationwide gerrymandering in 2009, which ensured the government ended up with 49% of the votes and 59% of the seats, and the Parliament’s emasculation was complete.

When you thought it couldn’t get worse, chavismo made it illegal for representatives to vote against party line – whoever does so loses his or her seat, so long as the majority approves it. In other words, voting the party line is now mandatory…but only for regime supporters. There are no penalties for opposition members who switch sides to support the government. (It bears noting that Venezuela’s constitution explicitly forbids this rule, not that that’s made a difference.)

Since then, the opposition in Parliament (and their constituents) have been harassed, insulted, physically beaten on the floor of the Assembly, with all ability to legislate or hold a dialogue or issue a vote of no confidence effectively gutted. With no institutional space for dialogue, there is no democracy.

So history repeats itself. It has happened all over the world – when one large chunk of the population doesn’t feel represented, riots eventually follow. Democracy is all about muddling through to minimal mutual accommodation. Elections are just one mechanism to help bring that about, but you can’t expect the losing side to go dormant between elections while it is being insulted and humiliated, and while their legitimate interests are attacked.

When dialogue stops, we descend to anarchy. In other words, we see what we are seeing.

About the Blog:
CaracasChronicles.com has been the place for opposition-leaning-but-not-insane analysis of the Venezuelan political scene since 2002. Run by Juan Cristobal Nagel – a Venezuelan political junkie now living in Chile – the blog’s goal is to breathe life, insight and wit into a discussion too often dominated by fringe loonies of all political stripes.

Since 2012, journalist Gustavo Hernández Acevedo (A.K.A. Geha) has joined the team, reporting from Barquísimeto on Venezuela beyond the capital. In early 2013, opposition activist Emiliana Duarte also joined the team.

The blog’s founder, Francisco Toro, stepped aside to pursue a different project in February, 2014.


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