ABC interview new Honduran “president”

Jeffrey Kofman from ABC interviewed the new Honduran leader. In this video he shares some of the interview details.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa on Honduras: CNN Video

Excellent interview with Vargas Llosa. His analysis of the geopolitical implications of the Honduras situation is super interesting. The video is in spanish.

HRF calls on the OAS to suspend Honduras’ antidemocratic government

The following is the HRF press release on the Honduran crisis:

The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has called on OAS Member States to apply the democratic clause and suspend the government of Honduras that forcibly overthrew President Zelaya. Pursuant to the Charter of the OAS and the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the situation in Honduras amounts to a grave alteration or interruption of the democratic order, and it is the duty of the OAS to act, said HRF.

“In application of its own rules, the OAS must undertake every diplomatic measure that may be conducive to the immediate reinstitution of Honduras’ constitutional President”, said Javier El-Hage, General Counsel of the HRF. “But in case these measures do not render prompt results, the OAS must suspend Honduras’ government from participation in all bodies of the OAS.”

According to the Charter of the OAS, “[a] Member of the Organization whose democratically constituted government has been overthrown by force may be suspended from the exercise of the right to participate” in the OAS (Art. 9). Along the same lines, the Inter-American Democratic Charter states that “access to power in accordance with the rule of law” is an essential element of democracy (Art. 3) and that “an unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order or an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order in a member state, constitutes, while it persists, an insurmountable obstacle to its government’s participation” in the OAS (Art. 19).

“It is profoundly antidemocratic to attempt to solve a crisis between the branches of government, by having the chief of the executive power forcibly sent to exile. The unconstitutional actions by President Zelaya must be addressed in absolute respect of his constitutional rights and not through further unconstitutional acts,” said El-Hage. “The armed forces claim to have acted in compliance with a judicial order and under the approval of the legislative power, but Art. 102 of the Honduras Constitution expressly bans the ‘expatriation’ of any Honduran citizen, let alone a democratically elected president that has not been duly prosecuted. Latin-American politicians must once and for all understand that forcibly overthrowing a President, is simply not an option,” he concluded.

As part of its “Mr. Insulza and the Democratic Charter” project, the HRF has already sent five letters to the Secretary General of the OAS criticizing him for failing to apply the democratic clause against the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, which have repeatedly and with impunity violated the essential elements of democracy set forth in Art. 3 of the Democratic Charter. HRF has also strongly condemned the recent resolution favoring the government of Cuba’s reincorporation to the OAS, decrying Castro’s appalling human rights record and its failing to comply with any of the essential elements of democracy, as recognized in the Democratic Charter. “The forcible overthrow of a government is not the only fact that must trigger the activation of the democratic clause. Antidemocratic governments, whether self-defined left-wing or right-wing, simply cannot participate in the OAS,” said HRF.

HRF also announced that in the following days it will publish a legal report that thoroughly addresses the conflict of powers that deteriorated into President Zelaya’s forcible overthrow. The purpose of the report will be to individualize those responsible for each of the constitutional violations effected in Honduras, and to recommend actions for Honduras’ branches of government to democratically solve the political gridlock in the country.

HRF is an international nonpartisan organization devoted to defending human rights in the Americas. It centers its work on the twin concepts of freedom of self-determination and freedom from tyranny. These ideals include the belief that all human beings have the rights to speak freely, to associate with those of like mind, and to leave and enter their countries. Individuals in a free society must be accorded equal treatment and due process under law, and must have the opportunity to participate in the governments of their countries; HRF’s ideals likewise find expression in the conviction that all human beings have the right to be free from arbitrary detainment or exile and from interference and coercion in matters of conscience. HRF does not support nor condone violence. HRF’s International Council includes former prisoners of conscience Vladimir Bukovsky, Palden Gyatso, Armando Valladares, Ramón J. Velásquez, Elie Wiesel, and Harry Wu.

Contact: Javier El-Hage, Human Rights Foundation, (212) 246.8486, info@thehrf.org

Human Rights Beyond Ideology (From the WSJ)

From the Wall Street Journal
By JOHN FUND

Oslo

Twenty years ago, as Soviet communism was collapsing and new democracies were springing up everywhere, there were bright hopes for the spread of human rights. But while this year marks the anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling, yesterday was also the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre in China, a reminder of just how unyielding authoritarian governments can be.

Tiananmen was very much on the minds of the 200 human-rights activists who gathered in this tidy capital city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded every year. But the Oslo Freedom Forum, organized by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, was unlike any human-rights conference I’ve ever attended. As at other such gatherings, racism and gender discrimination were on the minds of plenty of participants. But there was no desire to blame such problems on the U.S. or other Western nations. The emphasis was on promoting basic rights in all nations at all times.

“It’s pretty simple,” says Thor Halvorssen, a human-rights activist and the conference’s 33-year-old founder. “We all should want freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom from torture, freedom to travel, due process and freedom to keep what belongs to you.” Unfortunately, he explains, “the human-rights establishment at the United Nations is limited to pretty words because so many member countries kill or imprison or torture their opponents.”

Indeed, the U.N. Human Rights Conference held in Geneva last month was a disgrace, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denouncing Israel as a “racist regime” and saying that “Zionism” was dominating the media and financial systems of the West. The U.S. didn’t send a delegation to Geneva, and a number of the European representatives walked out during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rant.

The Oslo Freedom Forum, by contrast, was a serious gathering of grown-ups. Even Oslo’s leftist newspaper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) overcame its initial skepticism, declaring the forum “an impressive assembly of people.”

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, former Czech president Vaclav Havel and Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, couldn’t attend due to ill health, but all sent videotaped statements. Ms. Bonner challenged delegates to combat the “anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment growing throughout Europe” since she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize here on behalf of her husband in 1975. Vladimir Bukovsky, a scientist who was tortured by the KGB for years, warned that many of Russia’s old oppressors were “safely in power again” in new guises.

The conference also brought together activists from far-flung corners of the world. Palden Gyatso, a diminutive Tibetan monk, told horrifying tales of being imprisoned for 33 years and being tortured by Chinese captors who wedged electric batons into his mouth and destroyed all of his teeth. After his talk, he was embraced by Harry Wu, a survivor of 19 years in China’s network of labor camps, which still contain untold numbers of prisoners.

Although quiet and reserved, Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane kept his audience riveted as he told of how he’d been raised in an elite Mauritanian family that kept slaves even after the practice was officially abolished in his land in 1981. While living in Paris as an adult, he became infuriated at the world’s indifference to slavery and teamed up with a former slave from Mauritania to provide legal help to escapees and also conduct covert rescue operations of those still in bondage. Mr. Ethmane’s talk was followed by presentations from two powerful speakers from Kurdistan and Uzbekistan, both women who had served time for democratic activism.

Some voices at the Oslo meeting are seldom heard in the West. Victor Hugo Cardenas of Bolivia prides himself on his indigenous background but is an implacable opponent of leftist President Evo Morales, a protégé of Hugo Chavez. Mr. Cardenas, a former vice president of Bolivia, called Mr. Morales a “false indigenous icon” who was deploying “shock troops” to silence critics. Indeed, he said that some of Mr. Morales’s thugs had recently attacked his house and beaten members of his family. “But you will hear little of this from our media, much of which is bought by the Venezuelan money of Hugo Chavez,” he thundered.

The Norwegian hosts seem keen on repeating the event next year. The forum certainly attracted the right enemies. During the conference, Norwegian papers reported that the Cuban Embassy had emailed a lengthy denunciation of the forum, accusing Mr. Halvorssen and former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares of being CIA agents. The embassy also wrote that Mr. Valladares was a “terrorist,” and it accused the Human Rights Foundation’s Bolivian representative of “providing the bulk of the funds for the terrorist gang” that had supposedly plotted to assassinate President Morales.

Mr. Halvorssen expressed both amusement and exasperation at the charges. “They accuse me of working for the CIA in countries I’ve never visited,” he told me. “As for Ambassador Valladares, he was Amnesty International’s first prisoner of conscience from Cuba. Amnesty doesn’t usually protect CIA agents.”

Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.

Some Political Analysis as referendum approaches in Venezuela

Excerpts from article by Anastasia O’Grady

When Venezuelans cast their votes on Feb. 15 they will be answering just one question: Do you approve of changing five articles in the constitution so as to allow for the indefinite re-election of the president, legislators, governors and mayors?

The referendum question did not originally include legislators, governors and mayors. But when an earlier proposal asked for indefinite re-election only for the president, it met with widespread skepticism. So Mr. Chávez decided to widen the field in the hope of picking up support. Even so, everyone knows this is a referendum on the president.

In the past month, Chávez enforcers have been attacking student groups that are trying to rally Venezuelans to vote “no.” Tear gas and rubber bullets have produced both physical injuries and rising fears of violence around the country. This could affect voter turnout. It also raises doubts about whether enough opposition observers can be mobilized to guard the vote on election night. If not, and Mr. Chávez “wins,” things are likely to get a whole lot scarier.

Full article

Bolivia: Vote NO or God will be angry…

Christianity is about to be destroyed in Bolivia… or so would some of the media spots make you believe. Advertisements condemning homosexuality and protecting the church from the new unholy constitution have sprung up everywhere. As a fervent defender of democracy and fair government, I find these scare tactics offensive and disappointing.

There are a number of reasons to vote NO, but scaring people based on religious affiliation should not be one of them. Specially when leaders use gay citizens as targets. How are Bolivian gays going to feel comfortable in a society that openly uses their life as a political target. Absolutely ridiculous.

The opposition should be defending every citizen’s freedom of religion rather than focusing on the defense of Christianity. This is a lost opportunity to take the high road, the correct road.

Why not oppose Morales based on the divisive nature of his politics. Why not oppose the new constitution because of its poor structure and wacky writing? Why not oppose the new constitution based on the elevation of communal justice to a dangerous place in Bolivian society? Why not oppose the constitution based on the dangerous precedent this government has set for freedom of the press and freedom of expression? Why not vote NO because this government has lost the trust of a significant portion of Bolivian’s due to its constant hypocrisy and underhanded politics?

Mixing religion and politics never leads to a safe and harmonious ending point.

Perhaps it is time to stop and think “What Would Jesus Do?”. Guarantee it is not what is happening on the ground today.

This is a video that shows some of what is going on in Bolivia. God Bless.

Chavez: Presidency for Life

Interesting article reposted from The Huffington Post.

By Francisco Toro

Why Chavez Wants To Be President for Life

Read More: Chavez, Chavez Referendum, Hugo Chavez, Opposition To Chavez, Support For Chavez, Venezuela, Venezuela United States Relations, World News

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s narcissist-Leninist president, surprised precisely no one last week when he coyly gave his supporters “permission” to petition for a referendum to abolish presidential term limits. It didn’t exactly come as a shock: Chavez has never really hidden his determination to exit the presidential palace horizontally.

This indefinite re-election proposal is actually a bit of a mulligan for Chavez. A year ago, Venezuelans narrowly rejected the idea in a referendum, setting a theoretical end-date for the Chavez era in January, 2013. By then, the man will have been president for 14 years: not nearly long enough to crush capitalism and save humanity, apparently.

Will Venezuelans vote the way they’re told the second time around? It’s not at all clear. Chavez remains genuinely popular: his folksy charm and generous social spending initiatives have earned him a him deep reservoir of good will among a broad swathe of Venezuelan society.

But Venezuelans’ attitudes towards our leader are more nuanced than is typically realized. Chavismo is more a continuum than a monolith, ranging from a broad center that likes the guy personally even if they’re not so crazy about his ideology all the way to a hard core of socialist ideologues who hit the kool-aid pretty hard.

That range shows up clearly in polling. In a recent survey, Datanalisis, a local pollster, found that 58% of Venezuelans like Chavez, but only 31% express confidence in his ability to solve the country’s problems. Majorities dislike his endless televised rants, question key parts of his socialist ideology, reject the Cuban model of society and criticize his government’s performance on all kinds of bread-and-butter issues…but they still like the man personally! What the data show is something Chavez himself has never quite grasped: that most Venezuelans like him despite his hyper-radical ideology, not because of it.

Who are these elusive moderates? They’re pocket-book voters, working class folks who appreciate the way Chavez has re-oriented the government’s priorities and centered them on the problems of the poor. They know for sure that they prefer his brand of leadership, warts and all, to the kind of catatonic gerontokleptocracy that preceded it. But ask them if they want this enormously volatile and endlessly pugnacious leader to, potentially, run the country for life, and a lot of them get a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

Chavez’s electoral fortunes have always hinged on his standing with these folks. If he lost the 2007 referendum on lifting term-limits, it’s because his moderate supporters largely sat out a vote they saw as being more about solving his problems than theirs.

So Chavez needs them, but weirdly, he talks to their concerns less and less these days. Instead, he’s devoting ever more of his time to the kind of superfly TNT rhetoric that made him famous worldwide, but that only the kool-aid brigade really goes for back home.

Here I’m forced to say a few words about Chavez’s rhetoric, because nothing in most Americans’ life experience quite prepares them for the majestic, terrifying, otherworldly spectacle of Hugo Chavez in full rant mode.

The world Chavez paints with words is a world painted in black and white: an endless, epic struggle between the forces of absolute good and pure evil, with Chavez playing quarterback for the Good team. It’s a world where anyone who questions him, even in the slightest and for any reason at all, is instantly identified as an agent of evil: a fascist running dog of American imperialism and, more than likely, a traitor on the CIA’s payroll. Chavez’s basic M.O. is to take the “with-us-or-against-us, dissent = treason” tropes of the post 9-11 Bush administration and crank ‘em up to eleven.

It’s only when you get a feel for this deranged little morality-play-cum-ideology that chavistas’ single-minded obsession with lifting the president’s term limit starts to make sense. To the radical chavista mindset, Hugo Chavez is no ordinary leader. More than a politician, he’s a mystical figure. More than representing the people, he embodies the people. As an old chavista slogan – splashed on hundreds of billboards and painted on hundreds of walls – once put it: Chavez es el pueblo. He is the people.

It’s the feel for this kind of chavista fanaticism that I always find hardest to convey to my leftie friends back in the U.S. Understandably, a lot of them have a hard time grasping what my big beef is with the guy. He’s clearly popular, and he keeps winning elections. What could possibly be so undemocratic about that?

The only way I can really answer that question inevitably sounds like a bit of an evasion: if I could get you to spend half an hour watching Venezuelan state TV, soaking in the weird, sect-like vibe chavismo gives off these days, you wouldn’t need any more convincing. It takes immersing yourself in the messianic maelstrom of chavista discourse to quite grasp how a country can retain all the institutional trappings of democracy even as its contents are gradually stripped out and replaced with a good, old fashioned cult of personality.

To call what’s emerging in Venezuela a “dictatorship” would be to miss the mark just as widely as to call it a “democracy”. What we’re seeing is something different, something that doesn’t have a name yet: a place where the leader’s megalomania and his followers’ atavistic drive to submit to him meld together to create not the usual murderous totalitarianism, but instead a tsunami of histrionics, a never-ending pantomime put on for the benefit of a political sect masquerading as a revolutionary movement taking cover behind a parapet of democracy.

Of course these guys are pushing for open ended re-election: they’ve crafted a worldview that only makes sense so long as Hugo Chavez holds on to power. Our only hope now is that enough Venezuelans – and enough moderate chavistas – still have enough common sense to realize that if we lift the end-date on this mad experiment, we really will go collectively insane.

Bolivia: 245 attacks against reporters in 1 year

Bolivia’s National Media Observatory recently stated that there have been a total of 245 attacks against reporters and members of the press and that the attacks have increased over the past few months. The incidents have mostly taken place during coverage of political events and the Observatory notes that reporters from different channels are associated to a certain political viewpoint or agenda and are targeted because of that.

President Morales has followed the example set by his coach, Hugo Chavez, and has repeatedly stated that the media is part of his opposition. His supporters have been targeting reporters because they consider them to be enemies of the political vision set by Evo Morales.

These attacks and the political situation in Bolivia will not get better until Morales realizes he has been given the honour to serve the Bolivian people, not the authority to be their supreme leader. The language his government uses should reflect that.

Castro’s first foreign trip as leader

The Cuban leader met his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez, a key ally of the communist-run island state and a long-time admirer of Fidel Castro.

After their meeting, the two leaders presided over the signing of a series of joint energy and commercial deals. Mr. Castro, 77,and Mr. Chávez discussed a range of cooperation projects in areas including agriculture, education, medicine and athletic training that are supported by thousands of Cuban advisers operating in Venezuela. The two leaders signed an agreement opening the way for Venezuela to continue assisting Cuba in increasing its oil-refining capacity and to eventually build a plant in Cuba to import liquid natural gas.

Cuba is by far the largest beneficiary of Venezuela’s foreign aid, receiving more than $150 million to build a petrochemical complex in Cienfuegos on Cuba’s southern coast. But with oil prices plunging recently, the financing for some of Venezuela’s foreign aid projects has come into question.

More articles on this:

New York Times

BBC World

CNN

The Hugo Chavez Show: Chapter 4

Part 4 of the documentary “The Hugo Chavez Show”. I consider chapter 4 of the documentary to be the turning point of the film. The end of this chapter begins to show some of the concerning traits of the Chavez government and what it has meant for Venezuela.
Enjoy.