<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Friday, June 13, 2003 By: Kay Onefeather

Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 19:45:47 EDT From: Kay Onefeather Kaonefeather@aol.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com  Subject: Marta Altoaguirre

Dear Editor: Inter American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) president, Marta Altoaguirre has placed Venezuela in the same league with Colombia, Haiti and Cuba as countries where greatest human rights violations take place.

Senora (?): It seems so much easier to point fingers and accuse a sitting President of violating Human Rights, than it is to point fingers and place blame squarely on the shoulders of those actually guilty of human wrongs.

Those who are guilty ... they who have had free reign regarding human rights abuse over decades, without so much as a whimper from any human rights organizations.

Polarization is hardly NEW to Venezuela! (Where have you been?). It has been around for centuries, separating those that HAD, and those that HAD NO CHANCE!

Yet, over those centuries, who cried abuse, as the majority of people struggled in poverty, hunger and untreated illness/disease?

Perhaps, you prefer more recent times, say the last 50 years?

Or ... maybe the last 20 years?

Again, I ask ...Where have you been?

It seems only now that Human Rights warrant attention in Venezuela ... can one surmise that your attention is yet another feeble attempt to discredit the President?

Of the countries you mentioned, Venezuela is different in that human rights abuses are being addressed ... and changes are being implemented ... and, if President Chavez Frias wasn't constantly called to task for wrongs not of his doing, progress would be even speedier!

Kay Onefeather kaonefeather@aol.com

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Friday, June 13, 2003 By: David Cabrera

Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 14:47:43 -0700 (PDT) From: David Cabrera davidckr@yahoo.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Al Capone was a decent businessman

Dear Editor: Just like the top mafia don of the depression era would do away with meddlesome journalists and detectives accusing him of thug, delinquent and other epithets, the Bush administration has not hesitated to borrow the logic of a gangster at the peak of power and who dreams on justifying the unjustifiable, even beyond tolerable levels of absurdity, so it explains why we often hear and read ridiculous claims such as the White House telling the world that its troops could never be subjected to an international prosecution, because a move like that could be influenced by "frivolous" and politically-oriented machinations aimed at the discrediting of US generosity abroad.

• We, more than ever, are aware that the newly-approved UN ruling for another exemption of the US from the International Tribunal jurisdiction, is once again a renovated slap in the face to those who still care about what's left of international law.

This recent treacherous show of diplomatic nonsense would have us believe that International Law is a good thing only when it applies to judge the crimes of Saddam Hussein, Slovodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega, Robert Mugabe and the like ... but suddenly becomes an aberration if anyone dares to denounce the Bush administration for crimes that are often condemned with big fanfare and arrogance when the guilty are instead designated enemies of the so-called civilized West.

That's why we will never see any World Court trial convicting war criminals like Henry Kissinger for the atrocities he supported in Indochina, East Timor and most of South America; or take George Bush Sr., Oliver North and the rest of the Reagan-ites who coordinated the terrorist campaigns against Central American peasants and Catholic priests through the training and financing of death squads and military thugs; also Bill Clinton and the US army commanders responsible for the illegal bombings in Sudan in 1998, which wiped out a pharmaceutics facility that supplied more than half of the medicines of that devastated country, along with other US soldiers that may be implicated in recent cases of torture and massacres in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is just a minuscule example of dirty deeds that are not convenient to be left to justice because it would look bad within the agenda of "liberation" benevolence from which the US government disguise its crimes abroad but conceal from public scrutiny, all with a little dose of cynicism and hypocrisy of course. Thus, there is no doubt about the highness of those values that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co uphold and parrot-talk around incessantly, and which they desire to impose worldwide through their doctrine of humanitarian militarism, which message is: "We make a mess, and piss on the rest," apart from the already old-fashioned" Mess with the best die like the rest"

David Cabrera davidckr@yahoo.com

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Monday, June 09, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

El Ultimas Noticias editor, Eleazar Diaz Rangel says the heart of the conflict in Venezuela's Legislature lies in the legislation committee, which came under the complete control of the opposition with the desertion of Movimiento Quinta Republica (MVR) deputies ... "the committee did not reflect the correlation of forces inside the National Assembly (AN) and the problem is that the committee controls everything in Parliament ... nothing gets passed to the plenary session without its approval." 

After each attempt to change the composition of the committee was blocked, the government bench decided to approve the internal debate regulation, according to which a draft law would automatically pass on to the Assembly, if the committee did not present its report before the deadline. 

The opposition reacted making blocking the media content law a point of honor by using obstructionist tactics, such as stacking the list of orators to draw the process out. This time round, they decided to prevent the AN board from taking their seats and the result were the fisticuffs we saw last Wednesday. 

The government bench convoked a plenary session in El Calvario. 

The rule isn't clear about the need of the majority to hold sessions outside the Capitolio ... the government bench has shown it has parliamentary majority.

Rangel says he doubts whether the opposition is ready to challenge the basis of democracy which lies in majority rule, especially after signing the negotiations agreement, especially the clause defending the spirit of tolerance. 

Opposition forces have tried to change the balance in Parliament using bribes and even though the government majority has waned, it is still majority and must be respected, as the steamrolling Accion Democratica (AD)- Christian Socialists (COPEI) were in the old Congress and AD and Movimiento Quinta Republica (MVR) majorities in the Constituent Assemblies in 1946 and 1999 respectively.

Rangel suggests that both sides are obliged to act according to the negotiations agreement spirit. "I don't think that the opposition is so blind as not to realize that policies such as the current one means ignoring the golden rule of democracy and not accepting that they are in the minority ... it could force indecisive sectors of society to move in to the government camp."

<a href=www.latintrade.com>LatinTrade June, 2003 Saddam today, Fidel tomorrow. Sound far-fetched? I wish it were. In a policy document produced in September 2000 by conservatives close to U.S. President George Bush, called the “Project for the New American Century,” the United States is urged to increase its permanent military presence beyond the 130 countries where Washington already has troops. It argues that the state of the world demands “American political leadership” rather than that of the United Nations. The paper’s authors—who include Paul Wolfowitz, No. 2 at the Pentagon, and John Bolton, the U.S. undersecretary of state—suggest that the United States “utilize airfields ranging from Puerto Rico to Ecuador” for these ends.

The United States will likely cite the war on terrorism as justification for increasing its forces in Latin America. Washington has already shifted its focus away from the drug war in Colombia by sending more soldiers to help the government in its four-decade-old civil war with leftist guerrillas, primarily the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

U.S. troops could also be sent to the tri-border frontiers of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, where some 20,000 Arabs have settled. In January, Gen. James T. Hill, commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami and charged with military relations in Latin America, warned that Middle Eastern terrorist groups operate in the border area. Under “Operation New Horizons,” U.S. soldiers are scheduled to train Paraguayan forces in anti-terrorism tactics.

I am worried, as are major Latin American political leaders. What, asks Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “gives the United States the right to decide unilaterally what is good and what is bad for the world?”

Good question. Giddy over his victory in Iraq, Bush now could easily expand his “axis of evil” to include not only the hard-line ayatollahs in Iran and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il but also Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and the FARC, which already appears on the State Department’s list of terror groups. He has baldly threatened Syria, Iraq’s neighbor, although talk of war is premature, Britain says. “Tomorrow it could be Andean narco-terrorists,” says Lima daily Correo.

The Castro regime, which the administration has accused—without showing any evidence—of developing biological weapons (sound familiar?), has recently heightened tensions by cracking down on democracy activists, including reported executions of three men who hijacked a ferry to reach the United States. The charge? Terrorism, said Cuban state TV (now does it sound familiar?). Caracas daily El Nuevo País, meanwhile, warns that “North American opinion, especially in the upper echelons in Washington, takes it for granted that Hugo Chávez will be the next objective” after Saddam Hussein.

History repeats. Latin Americans understand better than anyone that pre-emptive military action to force regime change isn’t a Bush invention. Regional commentators recall CIA-orchestrated coups against democratically elected governments in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973), and the hundreds of civilians who died the last time Washington removed a brutal despot by force, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, in 1989.

Yet this administration’s hawks are especially dangerous. They distrust the United Nations and multilateralism. They are eager to realign the Middle East, politically. And once they turn their attention away from Iraq, there are signs that it will re-focus on Latin America. Deploying U.S. soldiers on Latin American soil will revive anti-Americanism and undermine economic reforms associated with the United States. Public opinion is boiling over.

In Bogota’s El Tiempo, columnist Luis Noe Ochoa called Bush “perhaps the most hated man in the world today.” Rafael Fernández de Castro, in Mexican daily Reforma, writes that “the United States is willing to intervene in any part of the world, at any moment, to destroy anticipated threats. We are facing the emergence of a new era of global U.S. hegemony and an unknown stage in the history of the international order.”

I hope these predictions are proved wrong. I hope we aren’t headed toward the Bush administration’s dangerous new version of the old gunboat diplomacy: Forget talking softly, just swing a big stick.

Author: Jack Epstein

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, June 08, 2003 By: Elio Cequea

Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2003 12:44:24 EDT From: Elio Cequea  Feico57@aol.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Luis Zuleta comment

Dear Editor: In regard to Luis Zuleta comment about me claiming "in typical chavista fashion" that whoever that does not support Chavez is misinformed, that is not what I wrote about in my letter. However, now that he brought it up, I have some questions for him. Can he named 10 of the 47 laws people signed against in El Firmazo? How many people he thinks can named at least 5? Do they understand how these laws particularly affect them and the rest of the country? There are definitely a lot of misinformed people in the opposition…

I would never say that everybody who is against Chavez is ignorant and misinformed. But, there is one thing of which I am convinced 100%. Only a hand full of people in the opposition fully understand the effects and repercussions of these laws. That handful of people are the only one affected negatively by them and they are the ones pulling the strings of the opposition. These are powerful, rich, intelligent and, of course, informed people.

These people are absolutely NOT idiots!

Elio Cequea feico57@aol.com