<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela´s Electronic News Posted: Monday, May 12, 2003 By: Francisco Rivero

Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 17:02:29 -0400 From: Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Not quite so simple

Dear Editor: In response to Ms. Gable ... she is absolutely right ... progress of humanity not necessarily moves in fits and spasms ... amateur historians are fond of recording revolutionary upheavals and quick to pass over more subtle and fundamental trends ... in human affairs usually the future is already here ... somewhere ... the (American) founding fathers and the rest of the Americans knew it when they saw it!

Here in Venezuela, more than 60% of Venezuelans have already seen it rather close to our shores ... and we do not like it at all!

What about slavery? You should know better!

Yanquees knew it because they thrived without it! In the North, the controversial social restructuring went slowly but surely, as your President Bush fancies to say!

The South lost the war! How about the giant leap into the scientific age? There are giant leaps and many many more smaller steps ... one of my youth heroes said “one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

Ms. Gable, you had better start paying attention to the fine print!

I agree that globalization is forcing us to create new paradigms ... but strongly disagree with your irresponsible ensuing statements ... they are the same ones repeated again and again by our worst butchers in modern history!

History has also shown that false and failed ideologies end up in the ash heap of history.

Best Regards, Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2003 By: Willy E. Gutman

Veteran journalist Willy E. Gutman writes: I was recently taken to task by an alleged journalist for my "dogged and virulent" attacks against the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) and for insisting that US "advisors" orchestrated the atrocities committed by its alumni in Latin America.

Opinions, the illegitimate offspring of proclivity and self-interest ... not fact alone ... predispose us to lean in one direction or another. Some of us, for example, are predisposed to glorify the SOA. Others, like me, who have documented its handiwork, witnessed the legacy it left behind and interviewed a number of its alumni, are predisposed to censure it. The truth, generally the stronger of two arguments, often rests on clever marketing and persuasive rhetoric aimed at an uninformed audience. Facts will bear me out.

Whether the US "ordered" the atrocities committed by a significant number of SOA graduates in Central and South America and in the Caribbean Basin, is irrelevant ... but I will return to this point further on. The indisputable fact remains ... and verifiable events confirm ... that SOA cadres were (a) trained by the US, (b) armed by the US, (c) funded by the CIA, (d) deployed in operations sanctioned by the US, and (e) coddled by regimes politically and economically subservient to the US

Co-founded by Argentinean strongman, General Leopoldo Galtieri, Honduran death squad Battalion 3-16, while staffed by Honduran officers, operated under direct US orders in "cleansing" forays approved by the Pentagon. I could cite a dozen other cases but, as a fellow journalist, my detractor should be familiar with the gory details.

I have interviewed ... and published the revelations of ... a number of Guatemalan and Honduran senior ranking officers implicated in well documented human rights abuses who affirmed that they had acted on orders of the US, sometimes under the supervision of US "advisors." These "advisors," I was told, did not take an active role in the various acts of barbarism perpetrated before their eyes; they merely "observed" the dastardly deeds from a safe distance.

One of these officers is a former Chief of Military Intelligence, now retired, and living on a fat US pension ... he and his cronies will never be called to answer for their crimes, he affirmed, "because the US has much to lose if we spill the beans."

Narco-trafficking schemes in which a number of SOA graduates were involved, have further helped tarnish the School's reputation. In Venezuela, General Ramon Davila Guillen, SOA class of 1967 (Irregular Warfare Operations) was indicted in November 1996 in connection with a shipment of one ton of cocaine into Miami in 1990, which he says was authorized by the CIA in an effort to catch drug dealers. In 1993, the CIA called the shipment "a regrettable incident" and dismissed the CIA agent involved. Several Colombian, Panamanian (among them Manuel Noriega), Honduran and Guatemalan SOA graduates were also implicated in narco-trafficking schemes as troops under their command were busy massacring their fellow countrymen.

I also interviewed two former SOA instructors whose sworn depositions confirm long-held suspicions that the SOA curriculum included training in "irregular warfare," with an emphasis on interrogation "techniques" (psychological and physical torture) as well as "pacification," a euphemism for brutal mass control of disenfranchised native populations.

Senators Joe Lieberman and Dodd, of Connecticut, with whom I have copious correspondence on the matter, expressed grave concern about the legitimacy and usefulness of the SOA, and about its abysmal human rights record.

Lastly, I had an opportunity to peruse an SOA Spanish-language manual adapted from a CIA handbook in which are prominently featured "persuasion methods" that clearly violate the Geneva Convention(s).

As a pragmatist, I am compelled to admit the value of military institutions and, on occasion the deplorable necessity for war. Years of extensive research into the SOA, however, suggest that there is nothing redeeming about that institution. After clamoring to have it shut down, I no longer advocate this course.

The SOA did "close," only to reopen the next day under a different and more sinister name ... The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

It will remain an arcane throwback of the Cold War and, like a chameleon, it will change its colors to suit its needs. It will never submit to accountability or transparency.

Perhaps one day history will get it right.

Willy E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com

Willy E. Gutman is a veteran journalist. He lives in southern California.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic news Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Francisco Rivero

Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 09:03:18 -0400 From: Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Reply to Mr. Elio Cequea

Dear Editor: To Mr. Elio Cequea. 

Quote: <a href=www.vheadline.com>Anyway, does this sound contradictory to him "... right on the surging of urban slums and shanty towns ... wrong to disprove robust economic growth."  It does to me ... I thought economic growth reduces the other one.Unquote

Beware of your common sense!  Your mind is operating on the following track ... urban slums and shantytowns are today’s flagship of misery and depravation in Venezuela ... so anything that triggered its surging could not be a good thing...

Wrong! let me give you a different perspective ... you are living in a country with a large and poor farming population living (¿really?) in appalling agricultural dwellings ... all of a sudden such a country’s economy goes into overdrive expanding at breakneck speed over a fairly long period ... (I know this fact is emotionally unacceptable to you because it does not fit your hair-brained theory of exploitation, decline and degeneration since discovery day ... masterly exposed in your letter “In Venezuela, even the Virgin Mary plays politics” and summed up in the following line “what have brought us where we are”).

Those humble families, at the end of their wits, scraping a life, saw better opportunities for them and their children around the industrial and urban poles of development.  Plenty of work opportunities and well paid jobs awaited them.  The spectacular growth of the economy triggered a massive shift from farm to city ... those people were not fools ... they knew better ... they knew what a hopeless life they were leaving behind ... humble families in the 60s did have hopes for better lives (not so for today’s humble families, and you can speak volumes about “the future remains to be seen”).

Why were those hopes for better life were dashed on the rocks of woe and despair?

We simply stopped growing ... sometime around the late 70s our national economy tanked and went into a long and unstoppable decline ... and the compensating and beneficial effects of a growing economy were not anymore there to cope with the initial surge from farm to city and the inertial population increases caused by better perspectives and better health care ... gross economic mismanagement for sure ... its roots could certainly be found in the period of fantastic economic growth and improving well-being ... however that does not invalidate the undeniable fact that such a thing really happened in Venezuela.

Your theory notwithstanding, there was an historical period in our history that the forces you stated did not operate...

Quote <a href=www.vheadline.com>In Venezuela we have both "world class wealth and world class poverty" ... one is getting wealthier and wealthier the other one, poorer and poorer.Unquote

That is absolutely true ... and nowadays things are really speeding up ... I can foresee we will solve this problem pretty soon ... the very very few numbers of the old-rich will leave the country and the entire Venezuelan population will scrape their lives with less than a dollar a day ... of course with the sweet little exception of the very very few numbers of the new-and-revolutionary-fluent-rich...

That is what we really need to stop!

Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com Caracas, Venezuela

<a href=www.vheadline.com>venezuela's Elecronic News Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Raymond Moyers

Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 08:58:53 -0500 From: Raymond Moyers  rmoyers@nop.org To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Our declared editorial bias is pro-democracy

Dear Editor: The left have mass murdered over 170 million people  ...  Lenin, Stalin, Mao, PolPot, Castro, Hitler's National Socialism.

The murder of millions when the Viet Cong came south ... incentive to work and produce is abolished by socialist taxation or collectivization, and is always eventually replaced by terror in the form of mass murder and slave labor at the point of a gun.

That is where you are heading, and we are watching.

The world is growing weary of death camps and leftist utopians that make excuses for mass murder, terror and bloodstained marxist oppression.

Look to the starving of North Korea to see your future, the reward of the bloodstained leftist secular religion that has, 1900-1986 mass-murdered over 4 times the total battle dead of all wars, to stand alone as the greatest cause of inhumanity to man.

Yes we are watching you, you evil bloodstained leftists, we know your history, we know what your evil holocaustic ideology delivers, and when you start abusing your people like all leftist states do, we will throw down another terror state, unearth your mass graves free those last survivors of your gulags, and add yet another chapter to the bloody history of Socialist-Communist infamy.

Raymond Moyers rmoyers@nop.org New Caney, Texas, USA

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic news Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Dawn Gable

Today's task is not to point fingers at the past, but to learn from it

Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 17:55:31 +0000 From: Dawn Gable morning_ucsc@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: In response to Mr. Moyers

Dear Editor: In response to Mr. Moyers ... good grief man, get a hold of yourself. Have you forgotten the mass murders committed by the Christians, the kings, queens and czars of yesteryears?

Do you not know of the cruel and torturous genocide of hundred of thousands of natives by colonial, capitalist invaders in what is now the USA?

...or the enslavement and murder of millions of natives by the European colonizers of the now called Latin America in a frenzy to extract the mineral riches.

What about the  capture, enslavement and barbaric treatment of Africans brought to the Americas upon whose back the capital of the USA was built.

Or more recently, the dropping of the bomb on innocent civilians in Japan; or the cruel and disgusting oppression of South African apartheid levied by our dearest friends.

Ok so, can we only ... in light of this information ... say that both systems can be distorted into a murderous policy?

Or can more be said?  Maybe, we should look at the world today a little closer.

I think it's fair to say that, today, the world economy is basically running on a capitalist model and there's rampant poverty worldwide, starvation and disease afflicts billions of people the world over.

Oh yes, the capitalist model is working just splendidly. NOT!

The point is,  that today's task is not to point fingers at the past, but to learn from it ... and move forward ... developing alternatives that may include the best of both paradigms. But, more likely, it will be found in a completely new one.

Creativity is what we need ... plowing forward on new experiments, new social structures: this is the only way to truly solve the dire problems facing our planet.

I believe that if everyone would get off Chavez' back, he could lead Latin America forward on their exploration for a just and prosperous society.

Dawn Gable morning_ucsc@hotmail.com

From: Jessica Rosenberg Date: Jueves, 08 de Mayo de 2003 02:48:51 p. To: jessica@obraweb.com   El Arca de Noé Ricardo Ball   Domingo, 4 de mayo de 2003   Aparte de nuestro gusto por las arepas, los venezolanos distamos mucho de ser un pueblo homogéneo. Tenemos gustos distintos y gracias a Dios, todavía gozamos de la libertad para escoger. El sistema democrático es un corolario de nuestro comportamiento.   Los argumentos a favor del candidato único son muchos, pero el más contundente parece ser que sin éste el presidente Chávez es imbatible. Desafortunadamente, si eso es así el ganar unas elecciones con el sólo propósito de sacar a Chávez del poder no es una solución duradera en el tiempo y asegura un retorno del mandatario al poder.   La experiencia en este país, las recientes elecciones primarias en Argentina y las ultimas encuestas en el Perú, nos demuestran la cantidad de ex presidentes en Latinoamérica que resucitan principalmente debido a que los gobiernos que los siguieron fueron incapaces de revertir las malas políticas impuestas por ellos. Como muchos somos nostálgicos por naturaleza, nos parece que el pasado fue mejor y caemos en el engaño de elegir líderes que en un momento fueron considerados como fracasados, pero que en vista de las nuevas realidades son investidos con aura de libertadores.   La Coordinadora Democrática ha sido una solución para enfrentar un problema coyuntural. Sin embargo ha sido el pueblo Venezolano quien ha dictado la pauta y los ha obligado en varias ocasiones a modificar sus planteamientos. Sin embargo, la Coordinadora Democrática no ha sido electa. Es una organización que acoge a todos los sectores descontentos de la realidad venezolana y que entre sus miembros distan mucho en estar de acuerdo en sus soluciones. El hecho de que muchos de sus integrantes hayan sido miembros de gobiernos anteriores no los descalifica ya que ellos y otros líderes que han emergido han hecho un extraordinario trabajo y han demostrado su capacidad individual de lograr la creación de un cuerpo que mal que bien ha canalizado el llamado de la oposición al cambio.   Sin embargo el hecho de que haya sido una pieza importante en esta época de protesta publica hacia el régimen, ello no implica que sean el vehículo que gobernará el destino de la nación. Si bien es importante la unificación de los factores de oposición para que el referéndum sea exitoso y lograr parar la onda expansiva de la Revolución Bolivariana, la solución no está en seleccionar a dedo un vehículo o una persona sino en lograr que la propia población se convenza y vote por el líder que desea.   Pareciera que en la medida en que existan más candidatos u opciones para la oposición, en esa medida se diluyen los votos lo cual evidenciaría un triunfo para el Presidente Chávez. Desafortunadamente si eso es así, habrá que respetar los resultados. Por eso es muy importante que la oposición y sus integrantes, del bando que sean, presenten sus respectivos proyectos económicos, políticos y sociales con suficiente antelación y darle la potestad al electorado de elegir el programa que más los convence. Ya sabemos cual es el camino que quiere tomar el Presidente Chávez. Pero aparte de sacarlo democráticamente del poder, la oposición no maneja de sus líderes ninguna información coherente sobre las políticas a seguir si acaso llega a tomar las riendas del poder y eso es algo que a muchos no los convence.   (*): Economista   email: ricardo_ball@hotmail.com   www.analitica.com