blogs.salon.com By Miguel Octavio

For days I have been pondering on how to answer Ken Hagler on the comment he made on his site on my story “Woke up in a dictatorship today”. Ken’s comment was direct and simple, and coincides with my gut feeling when I see what is happening around me:   “I think at some point, perhaps now, the people of Venezuela should stop relying entirely on protests and exercise their right to "vote 'no' with the weapon of their choice."   You see, I have always seen myself as a pacifist. Never shot a gun. Never considered reacting or acting violently in my life. During the last year, I have gone to marches, demonstrations, and protests believing that the sheer numbers of people involved would convince the Government that the only way out of our crisis was some form of an electoral solution. It is in the Constitution, which Chavez himself created. That is what Constitutions are for, they are there, you have to respect them, and you look for the protections that it provides for you, even if you don’t like the Constitution. But it has not worked. The control that Hugo Chavez has on what are supposed to be the independent powers: the electoral commission, the Supreme Court and the National Assembly are such that we are further away from any election at this point when we were on Nov. 4th., when we submitted the petition to have the consultative referendum.   I also believed that the OAS mediated negotiating table, while useless in the end, would keep Chavez in check. It would stop him from going beyond what civilized rules call for. At that time it appeared as if Chavez and his Government were at least afraid of international opinion, which they had masterfully managed to their advantage. But Chavez is simply a user. Whether it is “the people”, his collaborators, international opinion or even his wife, Chavez uses people, gets the most out of them to his advantage and then disposes them at will. And he moves on.   And I marched, I blogged, I e-mailed, I chanted, I screamed and I did all of the things that I thought would inevitably force Chavez to come to terms with the fact that his mandate has been cancelled. He is no longer popular. His supporters are a minority across all social strata. The revolution is dead, it was simply not viable under his primitive and incompetent leadership.   But what has not been viable was my belief in decency, fairness and rationality. That is not how Hugo Chavez’ minds works. So, instead of the rosy electoral solution we have slipped further and further into this violent dictatorship. And if last week it was the shock to see the deaths of dissident military officers, followed by the order to capture the two most important opposition leaders, this week it is the shock of huge C4 bombs exploding at diplomatic missions four blocks from my home.   And thus we come to Ken’s suggestion to stop the protest and start relying on our weapon of choice. And I do want to march to the presidential palace. And I hate it everytime our marches are cancelled or stopped because Chavez’ violent supporters are there waiting for us. And I think it is time to prove to the country and the world that there is no space that can be banned to us. But at the same time, I believe that the only reason we are right, the only reason we are truly superior, the only reason why we are the honorable and decent opposition to an outlaw Government, is simply that we refuse to go and fight under their own terms. I prefer to blog tonight and then go to tomorrow’s march with my flag and whistle and get shot at by Chavez’ supporters, than to go armed and shoot somebody. Maybe that is why we are losing, if indeed we are. But I still feel we will win in the end, because we are indeed morally right, we are morally better. We have proven it!   Will this change if we start getting shot at daily? I don’t know, and I hope I never find out......

Comments in response to this post: Please find some time and post in The Guardian's Talkboards.

I sometimes post links to your blog. I'm sure other regular readers of your blog (by far, one of the best on Latin American issues) might be interested too.

talk.guardian.co.uk Jotavitch [jotavitch@worldcrossing.com] • 2/25/03; 7:12:55 PM

I agree with your strong and deeply felt post, Miguel. At long last the uneven fight is beginning to pay off, as more and more people see Chávez as he really is. Val [val@dorta.com] • 2/26/03; 6:43:20 AM

There are two options left for the opposition, Miguel. Option One: Civil Disobedience; it worked for Ghandi and Martin Luther King. What it requires is that opposition marchers must be willing to put their lives in immediate danger. For instance, marching to Miraflores knowing full well that armed Chavistas are there waiting to kill you. Besides the obvious danger of being killed, there is another caveat. It may not further illegitamize Chavez. This is because any violence visited upon opposition marchers would not be perpetrated by personnel in government uniforms. So Chavez could be able to deny that his government is culpable. Ghandi and Martin Luther King had the "benefit" of being assaulted by forces of the government. Therefore the media ran stories and film footage of peaceful protesters being beaten or killed by soldiers and policemen. This led to the de-legitimization of the policiy of segregation in the US, and also the policy of Great Britian toward its then colony of India. Opposition marchers will not have this advantage in Venezuela. Thus the option of Civil Disobedience could easily fail. The second option is for the opposition to meet force with force. In either case, Civil Disobedience or Use of Force, there is going to be bloodshed on the road to a resolution of the crisis in Venezuela. Gary Duncan [gduncan19@yahoo.com] • 2/26/03; 9:17:43 AM

Unfortunately I agree Gary, however, much like in April of last year, even if it is not soldiers or cops, the world will be watching and taping and everyone will know who they are, it should not make a difference. I think we have shown that we are willing to put ourselves in danger in the cases where marches were on the move before the violent Chavistas arrived. We(I) have been shot at three times so far. And the shots came, in every instance, at the same time the National Guard was using tear gas on us. It will happen again and I think it will be the magnitude of the bloodshed what will shock the world. In my mind it was the magnitude of the bloodshed which shocked Venezuela last April and made Chavez resign, the world was simply not watching. Miguel Octavio [moctavio@bbo.com.ve] • 2/26/03; 9:49:38 AM

Miguel, you are brave. Keep marching, keep blogging. This is a struggle. And as such, there are no easy solutions. Violence is always too easily opted for because it is just that, easy. We know who has the most guns, and it is not the people. This phase of the conflict, the arrests, bombings and continuing violence is going to be the hardest. This is the means by which the tyrant hopes to silence you. Get a louder whistle. Get a bigger drum. Paint yourself in the flag. In the end, you will win. Because you are right. Because you have the truth on your side...and the truth will set you free.--scott JS Barnard [jsb@earthdome.com] • 2/26/03; 11:12:22 AM

I agree with Scott. We are going through the hardest part of this struggle, but we have to endure and keep trying and trying the Democratic path. Look at Chile, with the most feroucious repression and dictatorship, they went to elections and at the end Democracy won. We can't abandon the streets, we can't let this Mother FFFF become what he wants to be, he is not already because WE the majority of the people haven't let him. We have to keep the negotiation table very much alive, opossition just have to find its way united and we will. We can't abandon Venezuela and just leave like cubans did letting Fidel do as he pleased with a resignated society. The truth is on my side. five5546@yahoo.com Symetric [symetric@ziplip.com] • 2/26/03; 11:49:17 AM

I think someone should start a campaign to donate tens of thousands of video cameras to the Venezuelans. Ron [ron@pdxnag.com] • 2/26/03; 12:33:56 PM

Thank to all of you for your comments, indeed what is happening here is quite amazing. As to Ron's suggestion on the video cameras, it is already happening. TV stations have shown amateur videos showing the excesses of state sponsored violence. Such was the case of the pro-Chavez people shooting at us in Los Proceres and in the "Valles del Tuy". Thanks again. There is a very good comment today by Francisco Toro in Caracas Chronicles (link on the left of my page) on those that say the opposition also abuses, in which he reminds people that Government's have a responsability towrds ALL its citizens. Anyway, read it he expresses it very well. Miguel Octavio [moctavio@bbo.com.ve] • 2/26/03; 2:04:37 PM

Plus a lot of us are film makers and we are trying to do our best work with documentaries and interviews... Soda Cáustica [causticasoda@yahoo.com] • 2/26/03; 4:52:03 PM

Or amateur reporters...like me....not like Francisco toro, who is a REAL reporter. Miguel Octavio [moctavio@bbo.com.ve] • 2/26/03; 5:59:08 PM

caracaschronicles.blogspot.com By Francisco Toro

I’ve been thinking more and more about these little stories, these stories that are rarely seen as important enough to get reported abroad, but that underlie the climate of tension in Venezuela. It’s hard for people abroad to quite understand the feel of the crisis here, in large part because stories like these just fly under the radar screen of the foreign press. But they’re important, so I’m going to write about them.

Pressure

It’s 3 am. You hear some strange noises outside your house. Half asleep, you crack the blinds open. You see a man, standing in the middle of the street right in front of your house. He’s looking straight at you. He has a gun in his hand. He points it up into the air. Suddenly you’re very much awake. He’s staring straight at your window. He shoots once into the air, then again, then four more times, quickly. Once he’s emptied his gun he climbs onto a motorcycle and speeds away.

That’s the worst of it, but only part of a broader pattern. Every day you get death threats on the phone. On email as well. And by fax. They know everything about you. They know where you live. They know where you work. They know your wife’s name, and your kids’. They’re following you. When you park somewhere unusual – a restaurant you don’t usually go to, say – you find notes on your windshield. “We’re following you.” This happens again and again.

Fiction? Not fiction. Just a peek into the daily life of a high-profile opposition activist in Venezuela. (I won’t reveal his identity for obvious reasons.) It’s not an isolated case.

The Chávez government has always hung its claim to respect human rights on the fact that no opposition figures have been murdered or imprisoned in Venezuela. The latter claim collapsed with Carlos Fernández’ arrest last week. The former, thankfully, still stands. But what these claims – and too much foreign reporting – gloss over is the systematic campaign of threats, intimidation and harassment government supporters have launched against all sorts of opposition figures.

The campaign is extraordinarily broad – most opposition politicians and pundits are under threat. Many journalists as well, and almost all private media owners. The threats are sustained, personal, delivered in a variety of ways. They target opposition moderates and radicals equally. Few have so far been carried out, but it’s hard to overstate the way this drip-drip-drip of intimidation poisons the political atmosphere here.

It’s important to keep this in mind when analyzing the private media’s behavior in the crisis. Media owners feel under threat. Personally. It’s not that their ideals are on the line, or their livelihoods. It’s their skin they’re worried about. Together with the high-stress nature of their jobs, the intimidation seem to be pushing some of them over the edge.

“I love my boss,” a friend of mine who works for a major media outlet tells me, “he’s a standup guy who’s taught me a lot. The problem is, he’s out of his mind.” He describes the way the mixture of the president’s threats to move against his company, together with the anonymous threats he keeps getting, have created this kind of siege mentality at the company. “He’s worked his whole life to get to the point where he can run a company like this,” my friend says “and he’s convinced that Chávez is going to take it away from him. He might be right, but the thing is that the pressure’s gotten to him. He’s just not thinking straight anymore.”

That doesn’t excuse the absence of balance in a lot of the media here, but it does help to explain it. They don’t call it psychological warfare for nothing. The unending personal threats, together with sporadic attacks against opposition newspapers and TV stations, are actually driving these people crazy. A lot of media people here have lost their ability to examine the situation in a cool, rational, detached way. The way they see it, it’s not just their livelihoods that are on the line. It’s their lives.

The threats, the torrent of well-orchestrated threats, can’t possibly be a matter of a few rogue chavistas striking out on their own to spook their political enemies. The campaign is too broad for that, too carefully run. If the government had any problem with it, it clearly could have cracked down long ago. Many here are convinced that the state security apparatus is behind it. And as the political violence escalates around the country, most are convinced it’s only a matter of time until these threats start turning into real attacks.

caracaschronicles.blogspot.com By Francisco Toro

Foreign philochavistas come in two flavors: the ones who don't know what the hell they're talking about and argue in broad strokes and abstract categories (those damn oligarchs are just angry because finally someone's taking on their privileges!) and the ones who do know what they're talking about - generally because they live here - and argue in good faith. While I have almost no patience for the former, I think it's important to engage the latter. Greg Wilpert, who is decidedly among the latter, writes in about my last post:

I am wondering if either you are not aware of the threats that prominent government officials and supporters live under or if you think that such threats are not worth mentioning. Perhaps you think they are not worth mentioning because you blame Chavez for creating the atmosphere in which such threats exist?

If you are not aware of the threats, I suggest that you talk to some MVR diputados, for example. Not too long ago Iris Varela's home was bombed, for example. Shortly after the brief coup attempt, even an insignificant person such as me received kidnapping threats via e-mail, for having written the truth about what happened on April 11 and 12. I've intentionally been keeping a relatively low profile as a result.

The upshot is, I have no doubt that the threats against prominent pro-government individuals are every bit as common as against anti-government individuals. The difference perhaps is that the threats against pro-government individuals are occasionally carried out. Perhaps you don't know about the over fifty campesino organizers who have been murdered in the past year? There are incidents happening all of the time, that don't even get mentioned in the government television, perhaps to encourage the image of a happy Venezuela.

You might think that foreign correspondents should mention the threats against anti-government politicians; I think they should mention all threats, no matter who is being targeted - that might at least correct the image of the oh-so holy opposition and the oh-so evil government. I personally believe that the balance of good and evil on both sides of the conflict is more or less the same.

Best, Greg wilpert@cantv.net

I'll be honest: I wasn't aware of a really broad-based campaign of intimidation against government supporters, though it sounds entirely likely that one exists. I've heard plenty about chavistas being harassed and intimidated when they go to the "wrong" public spaces, and I think that's awful, near-fascist, detestable, and I've argued against it both in private and in public. The overall breakdown of tolerance and civility in society is really one of the worst and most ominous aspects of the crisis.

But I have to admit I find it somewhat hard to believe that the intimidation being metted out to government supporters is anywhere near as systematic and broad as what the opposition is getting. And not because the opposition is good and the government is evil (a view I've argued against repeatedly for months,) but because in order to mount a campaign on the scale of the one opposition leaders are now subject to you really need an organization behind it - you need wiretaps and surveilance capabilities, you need money and manpower and technology and centralized decisionmaking. In other words, you need control of the state.

And this, to my mind, is the key difference, as well as the root of so much of the instability in this country: when a Chávez supporter is threatened, he can call on the state for protection. When an opposition leader is threatened, it's probably the state doing it. Or, at least, someone with the aid, or at the very least the quiescent complicity, of the state. It's the principle of equal protection under the law turned on its head.

If you want to know why Venezuela is so unstable, here's an excellent place to start. The notion that the state ought to protect all its citizens equally, regardless of their political views, seems to me like a minimal requirement for stable democratic coexistence. But President Chávez has never made a secret of his contempt for the idea. From the word go he made it clear, again and again, that he intended to govern for one part of society only, and against the other. For a long time he tried to sell the idea that he would govern for the poor and against the rich. But as anyone with open eyes here knows by now, the real dividing line is purely political: he governs in favor of those who support him acritically and unconditionally and against everyone else.

It seems entirely predictable to me that those who suddenly saw the might of the state turned against them would react with virulent rage. You threaten people, they respond. There's no mystery there. Some of those reactions have gone really way too far, and they've only made the original problem worse, yes. But the original problem hasn't changed, and it won't go away until those who have hijacked the state for their own personal purposes cease and desist.

As Teodoro Petkoff has argued many times, it's entirely specious to say that the government and the opposition are equally responsible for the crisis. Enforcing the law equally, without arbitrary distinctions, is one of the core duties of a democratic state. When a government flouts that duty as comprehensibly as this one has - when it systematically uses state money, state facilities and state power to intimidate critics, all the while giving its supporters carte blanche to do anything they want any time they want, then the minimal basis for stable democratic coexistence are compromised, and the entire edifice of a free society teeters.

And with the edifice we're in teetering, it's obviously crucial not to do anything at all to exacerbate the problem. So yes, you're right, my original post was wrong. At times like these it's very imortant to avoid mindlessly partisan postures. That's what this blog is supposed to be all about, and I was wrong not to bring up the detestable threats made against government supporters in my last post.

But I reject, strenuously, the notion that that means that we can just split the blame down the middle and leave it at that. The Venezuelan state belongs to all Venezuelans equally - all Venezuelans have a right to demand its protection regardless of their political views. It just so happens that the Venezuelan state is momentarily led by someone who vigorously disagrees with that view, someone who's launched a sort of personal crusade against the principle of equal treatment under the law, who sees of the state as a personal plaything, as a political sledgehammer he can use to pound his enemies and a petty cash box he can use to bankroll his friends. So long as we're led by someone who thinks that way, Venezuela will never be both stable and democratic again.

www.journalnow.com Thu, February 27, 2003 By Michael Biesecker JOURNAL REPORTER

Whenever weather forecasters call for ice and snow, Randy Hayes knows to expect a busy day.

A delivery driver for Quality Oil Co., Hayes crisscrossed southern Winston-Salem yesterday, topping off tanks with home heating oil.

"We're just like the grocery store," he said, his breath expelling a cloud into the falling sleet. "Whenever there's going to be bad weather, we get a lot of business."

As with other petroleum products, the price of heating oil has risen dramatically in recent months. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, yesterday's average price in North Carolina was $1.52 a gallon - a 49 percent jump from a year ago and a new high for the state.

The increased cost for oil has strained household budgets, especially for those living on fixed incomes.

"I just get Social Security," said Betty Robbins, who had her tank filled by Hayes yesterday. "I've spent a lot more on oil this winter because of the storms, and the price just keeps going up."

Officials said that the increase is the result of higher demand for fuel oil during the unusually harsh winter, a prolonged strike in Venezuela and uncertainty about war in Iraq.

"Heating-oil prices are tied directly to the crude-oil market," said John Cogan, a spokesman for the Energy Information Association, the statistical arm of the federal Energy Department. "This year, those three factors have conspired to push crude prices upward."

The high cost of oil has drained the resources of agencies that help those who otherwise wouldn't be able to pay their heating bills.

"We're helping as many people as we can," said Jim Campbell, the emergency-assistance coordinator for the Forsyth County Department of Social Services. "We're getting about twice as many calls as last year."

Campbell said that during a cold week, his office has been processing about 120 applications for heating assistance each day. Because of increased fuel costs, the department can only afford to pay for about 100 gallons of heating oil or kerosene for each family - roughly a one-month supply.

The county receives $400,000 a year in federal crisis-intervention money to help poor, elderly and handicapped people with home-heating and cooling bills. Campbell said that the program will probably run out of money before spring, leaving nothing to help with energy costs this summer.

"If you have to choose between heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, heat is going to win," he said.

• Michael Biesecker can be reached at 727-7338 or at mbiesecker@wsjournal.com

• People who need help paying heating bills can call the Forsyth County Department of Social Services at 727-2060.

athena.tbwt.com By Saul  Landau ZNet Article Dated 2/26/2003

If you had taken up terrorism as your life's vocation, or even as a means to a political end, President Bush's State of the Union words would have put you into a state of terrible gloom. "We have the terrorists on the run," he boasted, "we're keeping them on the run. One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice." He referred to "3000 terrorists arrested in many countries." He alluded to other terrorists killed by the forces of good.

"My God," the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist would say, "Bush seems serious about punishing terrorists or anyone even harboring a terrorist. My professional life is over. How will I make a living and God willing, overthrow Fidel Castro with force and violence? For forty years I have plotted safely with my co-conspirators in the United States," he complains, "and now Bush, whom we helped elect by intimidating the vote counters in Dade County Florida and by voting ourselves early and often rewards us by making such terrible threats against terrorists? Damn him and those crazy Al-Qaeda Arabs as well! By crashing those planes into the twin towers and Pentagon, they gave terrorism a bad name."

Not so fast, I say to myself. President Bush excoriated the terrorists who had done the 9/11 deeds. He even called them "cowards," which I couldn't quite understand. But he had a silent qualifying clause: terrorists who want to kill Castro, bomb Cuban targets, hijack Cuban planes or ships or do any other kinds of violence against Cuba still have the green light from the White House.

Indeed, he, his brother Jeb, the Florida Governor and his Attorney General John Ashcroft, have made a point of not only harboring, but actually coddling - in 1950 Joe McCarthy falsely accused the State Department of "coddling communists" terrorists. On May 20, 2002, Bush specifically invited several famous notorious? terrorists to hear his speech in Miami.

Orlando Bosch at first received an invitation to sit on the platform. Later, when one of his advisers discovered that Bosch had earned the FBI's label of the Western Hemisphere's most dangerous terrorist, the seating arrangement changed and Bosch got dis-invited off the platform and moved into the audience.

Bosch claimed credit in an interview with the Miami New Times (see Oct. 4, 2001 for further reference) for helping to blow up a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados in October 1976. The police caught him after he fired a bazooka at a Polish ship in the Miami Harbor in 1967. This former pediatrician has cared little about children's health, but found his calling in violence and spent much of his adult life after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959 practicing that vocation.

Observers noted the Bush family attachment to violent Cubans when President George Bush I (41), with help from Otto Reich, his then Ambassador to Venezuela, overruled strong advice from the FBI and INS and admitted Orlando Bosch into the United States.

Similarly, just before 9/11, Bush (43) also disregarded strong opinions from the FBI and INS and ordered the freeing from INS deportation custody of Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio Suarez. Both men had received twelve year sentences for confessing to conspiring with Chilean Secret Police officials to assassinate Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in a September 1976 car-bombing in Washington DC.

But a photograph showed a lesser terrorist actually sharing the platform with President Bush. According to a former, federal law enforcement official, the Prez must have told the Secret Service to find a seat for "that good old boy."

This referred to Sixto Reinaldo Aquit Manrique (aka El Chino Aquit). The Secret Service apparently seated Aquit, arrested in Florida in 1994, a few rows behind the President as he spoke.

After his speech, Bush attended a $25,000-a-couple Florida Republican Party dinner to help finance the reelection campaign of his younger brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is running for re-election. Some of the big donors, members of the governing board of the Cuban American National Foundation, have also financed terrorists like Bosch and his erstwhile partner in the airplane bombing, Luis Posada Carriles. That's what Carriles told Anne Bardach of the July 12-13, 1998 New York Times

We've gotten used to the war on terrorism as a fact of daily life, inured ourselves to the security procedures following 9/11, the long airport waits, the somewhat embarrassing "wanding" process and even the routine shoe removal and carry-on bag search. Some of us even suppress yawns when Attorney General Ashcroft or Homeland Security Tsar Tom Ridge warn of the next imminent terrorist attack and encourage us to join TIPS, a national informers' association to spy on neighbors and anyone who might be suspicious.

Why then does the Secret Service not apply a standard set of rules? The answer, according to a former FBI Special Agent, is that the President told the Secret Service that there are good former terrorists especially those who strongly backed his younger brother Jeb for reelection as Florida governor and bad ones.

"There's no way the Secret Service didn't know that the man had been busted for a terrorist rap," the former federal police officer said. Indeed, the Miami Herald (Nov 4, 1994), on November 2, 1994, reported that the FBI anti-terrorism squad nailed Aquit after he and two colleagues had "pulled up to a Southwest Dade warehouse...armed with 10 gallons of gas, fuses, and a loaded semiautomatic handgun." The story cited police saying "the men smashed a window and tried to get inside before officers moved in."

Miami Herald reporter Gail Epstein cited FBI Special Agent Paul Miller of the FBI's Terrorism Task Force who said "there was enough fuel to destroy several warehouses." The warehouse stored supplies for the Pastors for Peace who intended to ship them to Cuba.

In 1993, according to Cuban authorities, Aquit fired a 50 caliber machine gun at a Cypriot tanker in Cuban waters off the province of Matanzas. The UN Rapporteur cited this event in his 1994 annual report on human rights in Cuba.

Aquit proudly claims membership in the anti-Castro Secret Armed Army. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to five years by a Florida court. But, according to El Nuevo Herald reporter Cynthia Corzo, the state office of the public prosecutor let Aquit and his terrorist co-conspirators off with two years of house arrest (allowing them to go to work, church or to the market) followed by three years of probation and an additional 150 hours of community service.

More importantly, Aquit's terrorist actions took on near epic status for the violent anti-Castroites when the President apparently made a special exception and contradicted his own rules in the war against terrorism. Or did Bush omit a paragraph in his speeches that specifies that the "terrorism" charge applies only to those who have an Abu or Bin in their names?

Those who have followed the course of Bush's "war against terrorism" will appreciate the nuance that he has aimed his aggression at violent Islamic people, not at violent anti-Castro Cubans whose patriotic zeal impels them to use explosives against targets located in the United States. By inviting Bosch and placing Aquit on the platform with him, Bush acknowledged his debt to certain Miami Cubans. What's a long history of terrorism compared to loyalty to the Bush family?

The Bush family rewards those who help their campaigns and helps them get asylum and prestige if they are criminals or high level appointments if they merely represent criminals. Bush appointed the Cuban-born Otto Reich Interim Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs after the Senate refused to confirm him. He has made several Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointments of prominent Cubans as well like Commerce Secretary Mel Martinez.

He even moved the ubiquitous Reich to a National Security Council job after a Republican-controlled Senate told him to ditch the ultra reactionary whose policies aimed at hurting Fidel Castro, not helping the United States and helped give the Administration a bad name throughout Latin America. In April of 2002, various newspapers reported that Reich had collaborated with the unsuccessful Venezuelan putschists that tried to kidnap and then replace elected President Hugo Chavez.

In is State of the Union, Bush called Saddam Hussein an imminent threat because he was arming terrorists. He also had unkind words for the Iranian regime, part of his infamous Axis of Evil. I wondered if he had forgotten that his own father had helped send weapons of mass destruction to an even more radical Islamic government in Iran during the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s.

I wondered as well if he had forgotten that several of his top level appointments had gone to men who had participated in the illegal arming of the Iranian government: John Poindexter, head of TIPS (the ultra secret snitch operation), Elliot Abrams, now a policy planner, John Negroponte, the UN Ambassador and of course the omnipresent Reich.

So, count on Bush to reward his old friends no matter what their role in previous harboring or arming of terrorists and also rely on him give anti-Castro terrorists get out of jail passes and opportunities to share his platform as long as they don't have Arab-sounding names.

With this kind of presidential support it is small wonder that no jury in south Florida convicts anti-Castro Cubans any more. Indeed, the juries down there award them large settlements in cases that other juries and judges would laugh at or just throw out of court. In a default judgment

Fidel Castro didn't show up for the trial because he claimed the court lacked jurisdiction --in late January, a south Florida jury awarded $40 plus million in damages to Jose Basulto, founder of Brothers to the Rescue. In February 1996, Cuban MIGs shoot down two planes flown by Brothers' pilots. Basulto escaped. Like Bosch and Aquit, Basulto has a long record of violence. He told a Florida court just two years ago, however that he had converted to pacifism, except for Cuba where violence was necessary.

In December 2002, a Cuban hijacked a plane and flew it safely through the Florida radar and landed. He got a hero's welcome and a shifty lawyer filed suit demanding that the plane, Cuban state property, be auctioned off and the proceeds given to his "emotionally wounded" client. What a precedent for skyjacking planes! What a lesson for prospective terrorists! The violent anti-Castroites, dense as they are, have noted the different standards Bush has set for them and the other terrorists.

I told my wife that the scriptwriters for The Sopranos, HBO's hit program about the life of a mafia gangster, his family, friends and world, must have spent time in South Florida courtrooms. In one episode, a mob guy informs a juror at the trial of Tony Soprano's uncle that he has a nice family and he hopes they live a long and prosperous life sufficient to insure that the juror will vote not guilty in the government's absolutely airtight case against Tony's uncle.

Is life imitating TV? "The Sopranos" is a well-produced farce. Real life is not as well scripted.

Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. His October 2001 film, IRAQ: VOICES FROM THE STREETS, is distributed by Cinema Guild, 1-800-723-5522. For more discussion on this article and to see what others have to say click on the link below to go to discussion forums.