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Venezuela's Last Opposition TV Owner Arrested
WrongSizeGlass writes "AP is reporting the owner of Venezuela's only remaining TV channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez was arrested Thursday. 'Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovision, was arrested on a warrant for remarks that were deemed "offensive" to the president,' Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. This comes on the heels of last week's story titled Venezuela's Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom."
having lived behind the iron courtain, I could say that socialism or communism leaders never really cared about own ideology. What was important was that the masses should believe in ideology and obey. Have you read the G. Orwell's "Animal Farm" ? Shows nicely how this happened.
It disturbs me greatly that a man like this, and Fidel Castro regularly have been praising the direction our country is heading.
Yes, and when the devil says that 2+2=4, it has to be wrong. If you do the exact opposite of what certain people tell you to do, you're letting them influence you just as much as if you followed exactly what they tell you to do. The only way to deal with people like that is to ignore their populist comments.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I don't know that he can last too much longer. Even the poor are starting to turn against him. His attempt a couple of years ago to amend the constitution to allow him to run for president forever turned out to be an embarrassing failure, though he handled it with as much dignity as he has anything else. Oil revenues have declined as output has slowed, in part because much of Venezuela's oil is heavy and difficult to extract, and the expertise to do so was largely provided by foreign companies. When he nationalized the oil industry there, many of those experts told him to go pound sand when he asked for assistance. The electricity grid has declined in reliability as well, and the money just isn't there to fix it (courtesy of the declining oil production).
That Venezuela provides discounted or free oil to certain other nations does not help the fiscal line, nor does the refusal (or perhaps political inability) to charge market rates for petroleum products at home, which results in gasoline that costs a tenth of what it does elsewhere in the world, something that Venezuelans see basically as their right as an oil-producing nation.
He's also warned of "defensive actions" against Colombia (a nation that is not even close to being able to stage a successful attack on a country like Venezuela) on a couple of occasions, and has modernized the military. It would not surprise me at all to see them fighting in the next few years, though, and I will laugh if Venezuela's modern but inexperienced army gets their heads handed to them by the lesser-equipped but far more combat-experienced Colombian army.
Then again, I said that he couldn't possible last a few years ago when the troubles began. A fragmented opposition that can't get a basic unified message together combined with further limited opportunities to get the message out and Chavez's persistent presence on TV for hours on end mean that Chavez will continue to hold the edge for some time to come.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Actually, the venezuelan government has been trying to close Globovision for a while now, and one of the biggest problems is that they have NEVER advocated any kind of violence against the government, be it the president or anyone else. It would cost too much international support for them to close another oposition TV station without a good reason.
The other two big independent TV stations have been scared off enough that they don't dare play anything political. The only other one is VTV, the government's channel (and I don't mean Bush' Fox, I mean wholly owned by the government). They do play show like "La Hojilla" (The razor blade) that openly advocated a few times killing oposition as a legitimate means of defending "the revolution".
Not to mention Chavez himself sometimes applauding relatively violent acts in his defense.
Now, I won't say that Globovision is fair and balanced, but as far as I can tell they never outright lied about anything. I understand Fox news to be more radical and distorting than Globovision and yet I don't see the Fox owners being hounded for years and finally arrested like Zuloaga.
FWIW, it seems Zuloaga was released after appearing in court, with a prohibition against leaving the country. We'll see whether he'll fold and close Globovision or be thrown in jail on trumped up charges.
Time to claw things back and give Chavez a chance to reform the country, like a majority of the population say they want.
Disclaimer on my stance on the government: Chavez has been in power for 10 years. He's changed the constitution multiple times, tried out different reforms all while oil was at an all time high and money was flowing into the country like crazy. He's had a BIG chance to reform the country and It's all been a failure. Lately all he's doing helps the government more than the people.
Hell, we even have rolling blackouts now, when we used to export electricity. This is a situation that was predicted over a year ago, but 10 years of ignoring the power infrastructure have left its mark, and yet he blames it all on el niño and the previous governments.
If you want change, don't prop up the same old government. If you're a socialist, elect a different socialist president. If you're a capitalist, same thing. There's no reason to maintain Chavez in power for another 50 years.
You are mistaking socialism/communism for dictatorship/totalitarianism
Not really. Only a totalitarian state can force productive people to be slaves to non-productive people. The two modes are part and parcel of the whole.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
there was joke told in central Europe (formet soviet satellites):
introduce socialism in countries in the Sahara desert area, and in 3 years they will be shortages of sand.
You're saying socialism is being able to go on the dole but still make a pretty decent living. What you really mean is that socialism is communism living off of the fat of capitalism. It "works" in Sweden with a horrendous tax load on the working people of Sweden. But even then, the Swedes have had the benefit of a relatively homogenous society with some core values like not getting on the dole just because you can. This is becoming problematic for them as more imigrants are going into the country without those same values.
Dude, you are a nut or a lemming.
I listened to that video and what you took away from it is the worst possible interpretation. It's like you aren't interested in hearing what he said, only what you wanted him to say.
The video starts off with the guy decrying state controlled media and using the Rwandan massacre as an example. That ought to be a big clue as to his point of view right there. When he cites Venezuela, he's not endorsing Chavez, he's using the actions of oligopoly media in Venezuela at the time to support a coup rather than democratic change. In other words he's citing two examples of extremes - abusive state control of media and abusive private control of media.
You may be all for a coup to throw Chavez out, but he was democratically elected and at the time he certainly was a change for the better in the country - the percentage of people living poverty in Venezeula had more than doubled to two-thirds of the population over the two decades prior to his election. Just because he's gone overboard since then doesn't mean he didn't start off working to improve things, which is what that FCC guy was referring to with "begin to place things."
As for the "and we've had complaints about this ever since" line -- sounds to me like he's referring to the the CIA's involvement in the coup attempt - and I don't see a problem there, we constantly hear complaints about China and Israel trying to influence the US government, if they were part of an actual coup attempt in the US, we would never hear the last of it, we'd probably go to war over it.
Kind of funny-sad how going to google for this background info, all I got was a vast echo-chamber of blogs, none of them doing anything beyond parroting the invective, not one of them that I checked could be bothered to raise a single skeptical eyebrow instead of jumping on the bandwagon.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.