This is absolutely irregular and, if confirmed, it means a declaration of civil war.
According to José Vicente Rangel (former Vice-President of Venezuela and a journalist by profession, pictured), the bourgeois opposition of Venezuela purchased nothing less than 18 war aircraft in the USA, which are to be stationed in a Colombian base.
In his weekly TV program José Vicente Hoy, Rangel declared that the purchase was signed in San Antonio, Texas, in a meeting between opposition leaders and members of the US military-industrial complex.
The new rebel 'air force' would be located at a Colombian air base with the coordinates P 11° 25′ 31”, M 72° 7′ 46”. P and M surely stand for parallel and meridian, in Colombia meaning N and W respectively, what means a location in the Guajira Peninsula, North of Maracaibo, just a few kilometers away from the Venezuelan border (→ map).
The rebellious purchase is meant to be effective by November this year and may signal the beginning of an armed rebellion of some sort.
The veteran journalist did not reveal the source of his information but asked the security agencies to check the veracity of it.
Rangel also mentioned that the travels and expenses of the bourgeois opposition coalition MUD are financed by the US Congress via the National Democratic Foundation.
This guy is a very wealthy Boliburgués. What's the proof he submits?
ReplyDeleteI liked Soviet Pravda more...closer to the "truth".
This is the kind of people who are telling us Venezuelans don't have toilette paper now because they eat too much and that they don't have now maize flour because "capitalists are hoarding" (they don't explain how that is possible in Venezuela and in Venezuela only in South America, they don't have a clue about supply and demand, about costs, because they NEVER, NEVER produced anything, they were military, guerrilleros who never had a proper job or sociologists...who also never had a job).
The only people who will believe Rangel are the people who believe Chávez appeared as a little bird and talked to Maduro.
Don't you think that, if this is real, it is a most serious crime of high treason?
DeleteAnd what is very real is that the MUD is paid largely by the USA.
"... Chávez appeared as a little bird and talked to Maduro".
Alleluyah!
I guess it makes more sense than to believe in little baby Jesus and all the other lies of the child-raping priests.
I understand that people turning to hummingbirds is an old American tradition in your former part of the world, Mr. Belgian.
...
Look: I just hope that the Venezuelan process to socialism goes to the last consequences. As anywhere else on Earth. If the instrument to for that is named Chávez, Maduro or Yemayá, I do not really care, as long as they collectivize all relevant capital and put clear (low) limits to wealth accumulation.
However Maduro would look better with full beard, the moustache is just too old-style macho. He should also try to stop playing Chávez' style: one must be oneself or become a lie.
People turning to hummingbirds in Latin America is less frequent than Basques wanting to remain a part of Spain, Maju.
DeleteAs for Venezuelan process "to socialism": a quién estás tratando de convencer, hombre? This movement is falling apart. We still are in the middle of the longest oil boom and there is a crisis (and you can't compare it with the very serious crises we see in non-oil exporting countries, as they go through different cycles).
Outside Caracas there are blackouts almost daily and those blackouts last for two or more hours. We didn't have that before. Now there are again as many beggars or more than in 1998, when the military you so much fancy got elected.
Venezuela is now more feudal than it ever was.
Chavismo has let public schools to rot in such a way that the percentage of people trying to get their children to private school has actually increased (I went to a public school).
People have to spend HOURS a week trying to get flour, chicken, cooking oil and much more, which we didn't have before.
Still: lots of the Boligarchs are becoming millionaires or billionaires with the black market for the dollar (the Bolivar is incredibly overvalued).
Venezuela is importing even black beans and coffee now, it even imports some petrol, as its distilleries are crumbling down.
PDVSA is now more sold out to Chevron and to Chinese corporations than it was during the presidency of very corrupt Carlos Andrés Pérez.
Maduro is a comprador of the Chinese and the same goes for the rest.
What are you talking about?
Do you really think Venezuela is going to go to socialism?
Like the Soviet Union did? At least the Soviets improved education and equalized society, promoted industrialization.
Venezuela is becoming a rotten backyard of the Chinese (and still of the US Americans, by the way), plus delivering some cash for the old Castro brothers to survive a little bit more.
You really sound like these Jehova Witnesses: now yes, now yes, the end is nigh, yes, now we do have signs!"
Give me a break. First Aznar becomes the president of Bilbao
than Venezuela becomes anything socialist. It's just a banana republic becoming more primitive by the day. But people are getting fed up with these corrupt guys.
No, they won't get a "true" socialist country. You keep dreaming with Euskal Herria, it's more realistic.
"People turning to hummingbirds in Latin America is less frequent than Basques wanting to remain a part of Spain"
ReplyDeleteAs a matter of fact, polls (including a very recent one) consistently show that most Iberian Basques want to remain in Spain. Let alone French Basques' feelings towards independece..
To be sure, I would expect results among native Basques to be less conclusive but I happen to be one of them and I also don't think that I would vote for independence as things stand right now. I feel that there are too many people with very radical views similar to Maju's. And it's not quite clear if many of them have stopped supporting the execution of their political opponents or not.
Basically, why would I want to risk having my family and myself live in a Caribbean-style socialist republic rather than inside the EU?
Speaking of Caribbean revolutions, one thing I don't understand is why it matters so much to people like Maju what the real results of the elections were. Having stated why he supports that revolution, it seems more logical to do away with "burgeois" elections altogether, as Castro is reported to have recommended.
On the other hand, I'm very impressed with Maju's other blog, which is what brought me here. He's clearly a very bright guy. But, as I was saying, one oddity of the Basque Country is that, if you want to be "in", you need to be a radical leftist. Decades of violence and moral contortions produce strange effects in a society. Or at least that's my explanation.
58% of polled Western Basques declare to want greater self-rule: http://forwhatwearetheywillbe.blogspot.com/2012/12/western-basque-socio-political-survey.html
DeleteWhy do people speak so arrogantly about what Basques "want" and then reject to even give us the right to express ourselves freely in a vote?
58% is exactly the percentage of the popular vote gathered by the nationalist parties in the latest elections (http://forwhatwearetheywillbe.blogspot.com/2012/10/western-basque-elections-nationalists.html). Immigrants from Spain, even recent ones, can vote, but immigrants from other states, including Northern Basques, cannot.
In Navarre, the presence of independentism was weaker (because of the highly romanized southern areas essentially, as well as a long history of Spanish imperialist manipulations beginning with the 1932 fraud, in which electors voted (after due bribe or coercion) against the union with the Western provinces. However unionism has shot itself on the foot after so much corrupt coalition between neofascist right and pseudo-left and latest polls show a quite clear win for the nationalist and genuine left (federalist) forces: http://forwhatwearetheywillbe.blogspot.com/2013/06/navarre-opinion-polls-show-collapse-of.html
"And it's not quite clear if many of them have stopped supporting the execution of their political opponents or not."
The same applies to Spaniards: both mainstream political parties, as well as the new maverick neofascist UPD have actively sought by legal and illegal means, including death squads, the physical suppression of the Basque activists in particular (http://forwhatwearetheywillbe.blogspot.com/2013/06/basque-official-report-on-victims.html) and of their political opponents in general. It's not just the most recent violence but also (and we must never forget nor forgive) the violence of Fascism since 1936, which only in the war killed around one million people in all Spain, mostly in ideological cleansing behind the fascist lines, and then continued oppressing the peoples of the state with brutal violence, very particularly against ethnic minorities like Basques or Catalans.
Why do you think that ETA has such a widespread support? Obviously because there is no democracy nor human rights for us Basques, who cannot rule ourselves almost at all.
In the North the situation is complex because the coast has suffered massive immigration and the associated process of denationalization, while the interior has suffered the opposite process of emigration. The electoral system is not even remotely proportional, what always favors large parties at the expense of democratic representation (still the Basque Nationalist Left AB has been growing steadily).
DeleteHowever a consensus demand, actively or at least nominally supported by the local candidates of the French parties, is the creation of a distinctive Northern Basque semi-autonomous region of some sort, at the very least a department. Practically every single Basque elect for the last many decades has got that in their program. However each time the matter reaches the Parisian institutions it is rejected upfront (once and again, year after year), what again underlines the need of Basques to make our own decisions independently of foreign imposition because we can't count on the respect of our stronger and arrogant imperialist neighbors.
"... I don't understand is why it matters so much to people like Maju what the real results of the elections were".
DeleteIt's a matter of legitimacy, of course.
"Having stated why he supports that revolution, it seems more logical to do away with "burgeois" elections altogether, as Castro is reported to have recommended".
I do not support the Cuban political system either: it's obsolete and authoritarian. However I do not like bourgeois tricked representation systems either: only very few bourgeois states can be considered genuinely democratic: Switzerland, Iceland and a few more maybe. The right of the People to ratify or reject key parliamentary decisions via referendum, the right of the People to take active part in decisions from the local level upwards via assemblies or "soviets", the right of the People to rule over the economical sphere (as workers and as citizens), the right of the People to take part in all judicial process, the right of the People to rule with large autonomy at local and regional level, the right of People-Nations to self-determination, etc. are all key aspects of democracy that "remote democracy" bourgeois systems clearly disdain and undermine.
If the USSR and others were labeled (surely correct) as "dictatorships" for having a single party system, equally the twin party systems in which both "alternatives" are identical, totally denaturalizing the electoral process, exactly the same that the CPSU undermined the grassroots soviet democracy, must be labeled (again correctly) as such dictatorships. Hence the USA for example is a dictatorship (and not just because of the pointlessness of elections, also for other reasons such as the absolute hegemony of corporations in the decision making process, etc.), while many other similar regimes dangerously approach that stage and must be labeled at least as authoritarian regimes.
To be overly simple I want a regime that is like Cuba in the socio-economic aspects and like Switzerland in the political-representative ones, including the right of the People to bear arms.
Maju, I'm not much into politics, so whatever you support and stand for is fine by me. What I would find kind of hard to accept is your support of someone killing me because I happened to be a councilor of a non-nationalist party. Or definitely, your support for someone planting a bomb in a public space whith the result of children and civilians getting killed. Who that someone would be certainly matters very little.
ReplyDeleteWhat I do have a strong interest in is economics. Two years ago I travelled to Cuba to witness first-hand its economic reality and to try to understand what it is that still lures so many people about that country's economic model. I travelled through rural Cuba and I found ordinary people's life conditions appalling. I don't think I had ever seen such levels of poverty, even in the "bohíos" at the outskirts of Havanna. And I've been to places like Bolivia, Morocco or Egypt. Most striking was the ever-present extreme level of inequality. People with access to CUCs, especially foreigners, were able to lead a luxurious life while ordinary Cubans with access only to CUPs and food stamps lived in misery.
I'm not sure if you are aware of it. But the fact is that the existence of a good number of people with your economic and political objectives is an objective hurdle for the expansion of the support for independence in the Basque Country.
There are things that cannot be discussed in public: it is a "crime" to speak freely about them. That's the kind of "freedom of speech" we have: you can freely deny the Holocaust and praise Hitler but when it comes to Basque freedom fighters, then the opinions cannot be expressed freely at all.
DeleteSo you will excuse me: change the fascist laws first, and then we will have a free public debate on the matter.
Whatever the case it is a war, and ugly things happen in wars from both sides: one side enjoys torturing, the other suffers with collateral victims, even if foreign, but both cause undue harm of course. The causes of this ware are in the Castilian invasion, nothing else. Once they leave our country, the war is over. It's a purely defensive war.
As for the rest:
Apoliticism = conservatism. I'd suggest you look for more conservative blogs for your self-complacent monologue. I'm not interested, really.
What do you mean by "poverty" in Cuba? Did they lack anything basic like shelter or food? I'm pretty sure they did not, and that is the key. Instead in the USA and most other countries you can indeed see homeless people who have to search in the trash for food and the like. Cuba has one of the highest life expectancies on Earth, so I'm sure they are not suffering malnutrition nor lack of health care. Cuba also ranks among the top countries in several scales of human development and happiness.
True wealth is not about having gadgets and cars but about not lacking anything and, based on that, being able to enjoy the only life we have.
As for the dollarized semi-capitalist economy, I'm not sympathetic to it because it is a form of prostitution of the system. However for as long as Cuba does not develop its own industrial fabric (a key error of the Soviet network, which was specializing by state and region) it needs hard currency, so maybe they have not many other options while the US Empire rules the World.
I like the concept of Western and Eastern Basques but I'd personally put the frontier at a different place. My choice would be east-west of the valleys where "z" and "tz" acquire a distinct pronunciation. So that would place the divide in the middle of Gipuzkoa, more or less. Nothing scientific, of course. But to my Easterner ears Basque has a very different sound and flavour at each side of that line. Not that I expect anyone to care much about such a concept but well, I wouldn't be a real Basque if I didn't enjoy staring at our collective navel sometimes, I guess.
ReplyDeleteThe concept, as I use it, is merely historical-political, not about linguistics. High Navarre and the BAC (Mendebaldea = The West) have different institutions right now, also between 1200 and 1521 they were part of separate states. It has no other implications.
Delete"Did they lack anything basic like shelter or food? I'm pretty sure they did not, and that is the key. Instead in the USA and most other countries you can indeed see homeless people who have to search in the trash for food"
ReplyDeleteYou've *obviously* never been to Cuba. I wonder what your explanation is for the glaring human development differences between North and South Korea. Little to do with the former's economic system as well, I presume.
"Apoliticism = conservatism. I'd suggest you look for more conservative blogs for your self-complacent monologue. I'm not interested, really."
Sorry if my uninvited ramblings caused any displeasure. Having spent quite a few years outside of the Basque Country, I was very curious about what someone like you really thinks on the topics above. I've already found out. If no further dialogue is of your interest so be it. Nothing serious for me either. I do hope to learn some more genetics and improve my understanding of what you guys are discussing in your other blog.
"You've *obviously* never been to Cuba".
DeleteI do not have money for tourism indeed. But I have read enough and watched a bunch of documentaries on the island. Cuba is generally perceived by those who have visited it from progressive ideologies, as a quite good place to live in spite of the limitations imposed by the US siege.
"North and South Korea".
North Korea is not a socialist but an outright fascist regime. Now use another cliché and say "China" or "Vietnam", which are also fascist-capitalist regimes under a red banner.
I have nothing to do with them and I do support communist revolution against the bourgeois-bureaucratic fascist regimes in those states.
"Sorry if my uninvited ramblings caused any displeasure."
Well, I obviously do not write this blog for people like you or Kepler. I have not much interest in what people with your kind of cliché bourgeois ideas may think: I already know it, how could I not being immersed in daily bourgeois propaganda, no matter how hard I try to avoid it? Your thoughts are no novelty for me, they are also not interesting in my opinion, just parroting what the usual TV channels and newspapers may say once and again. It gets boring, you know.