Venezuela allows possible deadly force at protests
Source: BBC
New regulations have been published in Venezuela allowing soldiers to open fire if they feel their lives are at risk during demonstrations.
The rules specify a scaled approach to maintaining public order, up to and including the use of deadly force.
Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez said the changes were made in response to three months of violent protests last year.
Citizen rights groups in Venezuela say the new rules are "dangerously vague".
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-31070279
Sounds like a bad idea.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Sun Feb 1, 2015, 12:53 AM - Edit history (1)
If you were an oligarch.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1014&pid=1002513
Caracazo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Date 27 February 1989 - March 1989
Location Caracas
The Caracazo or sacudón is the name given to the wave of protests, riots, looting, shootings and massacres[4] that began on 27 February 1989 in the Venezuelan capital Caracas and surrounding towns. The week-long clashes resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, thousands by some accounts, most at the hands of security forces and the military.[2][5][6] The riots and protests began mainly in response to the government's economic reforms and the resulting increase in the price of gasoline and transportation.[4]
Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 Background
3 Protests and rioting
4 Aftermath and consequences
5 See also
6 Further reading
7 References
Etymology[edit]
The word Caracazo is the name of the city plus the -azo suffix, which denotes a violent knock. Its translation could therefore be "the Caracas smash" or "the big one in Caracas". The name was inspired by the Bogotazo, a massive riot in neighboring Colombia in 1948 that played a pivotal role in that country's history. Sacudón is from sacudir "to shake", and therefore means something along the lines of "the day that shook the country" (see Spanish nouns: Other suffixes.)
The words are pronounced [kaɾaˈkaso] and [sakuˈðon], respectively.
Background[edit]
Due to a fall in oil prices during the mid-1980s an economic crisis had taken hold in Venezuela, and the country had accrued significant levels of debt. Nevertheless, the administration of the Left-leaning President Jaime Lusinchi was able to restructure the country's debt repayments and offset an economic crisis while allowing for the continuation of the government's policies of social spending and state-sponsored subsidies.[7]
Lusinchi's political party, Democratic Action, was able to remain in power following the 1988 election of Carlos Andrés Pérez as president. Pérez then proposed a major shift in policy by implementing neo-liberal economic reforms recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This program, known as the paquete (the "package"
, was contrary to statements made during Pérez's populist and anti-neoliberal campaign in which he had described the IMF as "a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing"[8] and had said that World Bank economists were "genocide workers in the pay of economic totalitarianism".[citation needed]
Measures taken by Pérez included privatizing state companies, tax reform, reducing customs duties, and diminishing the role of the state in the economy. He also took measures to decentralize and modernize the Venezuelan political system by instituting the direct election of state governors who had previously been appointed by the president. The most controversial part of this economic reform package was the elimination of the gasoline subsidies, which had long maintained domestic gasoline prices far beneath international levels (and indeed beneath the production costs of gasoline).[citation needed] When the subsidy was eliminated, gasoline prices rose by as much 100%, and subsequently, the costs of public transportation rose by 30%.[citation needed]
Protests and rioting[edit]
The protests and rioting began on the morning of February 27, 1989, in Guarenas (a town in Miranda State about 30 kilometres (19 mi) east of Caracas) due to a steep increase in public transportation prices.[2][9] The protests and rioting quickly spread to the capital and other towns across the country. A lack of timely intervention by authorities (some police were under orders not to take action) led to the Metropolitan Police quickly being overwhelmed.[2] Despite initial debate within the government over how to manage the situation, a heavy-handed approach was implemented and a state of emergency and martial law was imposed.[2]
On February 28 President Carlos Andrés Pérez suspended a number of articles of the Constitution, including Article 60 (right to individual liberty and security); Article 62 (inviolability of the home); Article 66 (freedom of expression); Article 71 (right to gather publicly and privately), and Article 115 (right to peaceful protest).[10] These rights were not completely restored until March 22, and in the interim, there was no official decree or resolution defining how government authority would be exercised in the absence of those constitutional rights.[10]
The subsequent crack-down against the protesters included "widespread incidences of soldiers firing wantonly into residential buildings and crowds of people, killing unarmed civilians."[2] Tactics used by security forces included raids on homes, disappearances, the use of torture, and extrajudicial killings.[6]
Allegations of extrajudicial killings of known criminals have also been made.[2]
The initial official pronouncements said 276 people had died,[9] but many estimates put the number above 2,000.[3]
Aftermath and consequences[edit]
On March 3, 1989, President Pérez spoke with U.S. President George H. W. Bush. President Bush offered President Pérez a US$450 million emergency loan. President Pérez thanked the President Bush and asked him to support a change in debt policy toward Latin America, stating, "I want to tell you if there is no change in [international] debt policy then whatever we may do here may be useless."[11] President Pérez told President Bush that he had sent him a letter several days earlier and that he would appreciate it if he would read it.[11]
The clearest consequence of the Caracazo was political instability. The following February, the army was called to contain similar riots in Puerto La Cruz and Barcelona, and again in June, when rising of transportation costs ended in riots in Maracaibo and other cities. The free-market reforms program was modified. In 1992 there were two attempted coups d'état, in February and November. Carlos Andrés Pérez was accused of corruption and removed from the presidency. Hugo Chávez, an organiser of one of the coups, was found guilty of sedition and incarcerated. However, he was subsequently pardoned by Pérez's successor, Rafael Caldera, and went on to be elected president after him.
In 1998, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemned the government's action and referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 1999, the Court heard the case and found that the government had committed violations of human rights, including extrajudicial killings. The Venezuelan government, by then headed by Chávez, did not contest the findings of the case and accepted full responsibility for the government's actions.[9]
In August 2009, then-Defense Minister Italo del Valle Alliegro was charged in relation to the Caracazo.[12] In July 2010 the Supreme Court overturned an appeal court ruling which had declared the case covered by a statute of limitations.[13]
See also[edit]
and moved to Florida to live with his mistress.
There are heavy estimates the death toll from his attack on the poor of Venezuela killed 3,000 people. This article from BBC News explains why the number has been vague:
27 February 2011 Last updated at 19:03 ET
Victims of Venezuela's Caracazo clashes reburiedBy Sarah Grainger
BBC News, Caracas
Exactly 22 years after violent clashes between police and protesters killed hundreds of people in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, some of the victims have been reburied in a special monument in the city's biggest cemetery.
The bloody clashes in February 1989 became known as the Caracazo - literally the big one in Caracas - as security forces loyal to the then president Carlos Andres Perez cracked down on protesters demonstrating over price rises.
Official figures put the number killed at around 300, but some reports suggested as many as 3,000 people lost their lives.
Many were buried anonymously in mass graves, making it impossible to be certain of the number.
The 71 laid to rest on Sunday had originally been buried in a communal grave in a section of the capital's general cemetery known as "the Plague".
Their remains were exhumed in 2009 and taken to a military base where they were checked to verify that they dated from the Caracazo.
More:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-12593085
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
I've read accounts that Perez sent bull-dozers to the location where they pushed the dead poor people's bodies into a mass grave site they dug for them.
Photos of that massacre by Carlos Andres Perez, who is still revered, loved by the Venezuelan racist right-wing:
[center]
Former Venezuelan President
Carlos Andres Perez during a
party in his honor celebrated
in Miami
Credit: Conexiones
He was discovered to have used his then secretary, Cecilia Matos to help him set up several joint bank accounts in the United States, totally $17,000,000.00, FAR more money than he ever earned as Venezuela's President.
As soon as the right-wing gets its mutant into the Presidential Palace again, you can be sure these historical images in the murals are going to be destroyed immediately. They don't want the poor of Venzuela publicizing their exploitation and abuse at the hands of the oligarchs, who fear and abhor them. [/center]
The joke of the "revolution" is staggering! Cant blame the US when we were tossed years ago, followed by most other countries who were robbed by the Chavez/Maduro disaster. Proof is seen daily. 15 years and the country will slide further and further into the abyss.
This is Brazil.
It seems so hard for them to realized that the poverty in Venezuela was created ages ago, that's something any one would recognize at a glance.
The people who have been running Venezuela until February 1999, when Chavez was inaugurated, are the ones who caused this desperate poverty over a hundred years of massacres, race hatred, greed, government assassinations, oppression of the great masses of poor people, locking them out of safe, adequate housing, basic needs like access to water, electricity, fuel, even rudimentary plumbing, access to medical treatment, education, etc., etc., etc.
Even now Venezuelan doctors will go NOWHERE near the barrios to bring help to the poor, and the oligarchs want to push out the Cuban doctors who have set up clinics there to bring help to the poor for the first time in their lives.
They mock, revile, hate the poor, make fun of them, and have treated them like dirt from the very, very beginning. They have NOT changed as anyone honest who goes there will attest.
What would be natural common sense to most people simply eludes ignorant, racist, greedy right-wing clowns. They are blinded by their ignorance and hatred.
[center] ~ ~ ~[/center]
Venezuela: Where the Wealthy Stir Violence While the Poor Build a New Society
By Dario Azzellini Berlin, Germany
April 28, 2014
Artist and documentary filmmaker Dario Azzellini argues the protests in Venezuela represent a vicious attack on the country’s social progress under Hugo Chávez, spurred on by anti-Chavista politicians in affluent regions.
[font size=1]
The barrios of Caracas, Venezuela. Film still from Comuna Under Construction (2010), directed by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler.
[/font]
Before Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1999, the barrios of Caracas, built provisionally on the hills surrounding the capital, did not even appear on the city map. Officially they did not exist, so neither the city nor the state maintained their infrastructure. The poor inhabitants of these neighborhoods obtained water and electricity by tapping pipes and cables themselves. They lacked access to services such as garbage collection, health care and education altogether.
Today residents of the same barrios are organizing their communities through directly democratic assemblies known as communal councils—of which Venezuela has more than 40,000. Working families have come together to found community spaces and cooperative companies, coordinate social programs and renovate neighborhood houses, grounding their actions in principles of solidarity and collectivity. And their organizing has found government support, especially with the Law of Communal Councils, passed by Chávez in 2006, which has led to the formation of communes that can develop social projects on a larger scale and over the long term.
You will not hear about the self-governing barrios in Western reports of protests spreading across Venezuela. According to the prevailing narrative, students throughout the country are protesting a dire economic situation and high crime rate, only to meet brutal repression from government forces. Yet the street violence that has captured the world’s attention has largely taken place in a few isolated areas—the affluent neighborhoods of cities like Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia, San Cristóbal and Mérida—and not in the barrios where Venezuela’s poor and working classes live. Despite international media claims, the vast majority of Venezuela’s students are not protesting. Not even a third of all people arrested in connection with the demonstrations since early February are students, even though Venezuela has more than 2.6 million university students (up from roughly 700,000 in 1998), thanks to the tuition-free public university system that Chávez created.
A look at recent arrests reveals that the “protest” leaders are really a mixture of drug traffickers, paramilitaries and private military contractors—in other words, the mercenaries typical of any CIA military destabilization operation. In Barinas, the southern border state with Colombia, two heavily armed barricade organizers were arrested, including Hugo Alberto Nuncira Soto, who has an Interpol arrest warrant for membership in Los Urabeños, a Colombian paramilitary involved in drug trafficking, smuggling, assassinations and massacres. In Caracas, the brothers Richard and Chamel Akl—who own a private military company, Akl Elite Corporation, and represent the Venezuelan branch of the private military contractor Risk Inc.—were arrested while driving an armored vehicle in possession of firearms, explosives and military equipment. Their car had been equipped with pipes to be activated from inside to disperse motor oil and nails on the streets, not to mention tear gas grenades, homemade bombs, pistols, gas masks, bulletproof vests, night-vision devices, gasoline tanks and knives.
More:
http://creativetimereports.org/2014/04/28/venezuela-where-the-wealthy-stir-violence-while-the-poor-build-a-new-society-dario-azzellini-protests-in-venezuela/
[center]
After a landslide in the Manizales slum.
Bogota, Colombia
Bogota
Bogota
Bogota[/center]
At least these people are not living in an area like Buenaventura, Colombia, where neighbors hear people shrieking wildly at night as they are hacked to pieces by gangs in their "chop houses," nor have their children been made ill drinking water contaminated by run-off from mass graves as has happened in La Macarena, Meta, Colombia.
Colombian Mass Grave Of More Than 2000 May Be Civilian Trade Unionists, Not Military Casualties
Colombia is currently the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, and the U.S. is likely implicated in the murders.
August 5, 2010 | If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military.
According to the Colombian high command, the mass grave just outside the army base at La Macarena contains the bodies of guerilla fighters killed between 2002 and 2009 in that country’s long-running civil war. But given the army’s involvement in the so-called “false positive” scandal, human rights groups are highly skeptical that the dead are members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, the two insurgent groups fighting the central government.
“False positive” is the name given to the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and then dressed them up in insurgent uniforms in order to demonstrate the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy, thus winning more aid from the U.S. According to the human rights organizations Comision de Derechos Homanos del Bajo Ariari and Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda, some 2,000 civilians have been murdered under the program.
The bodies at La Macarena have not been identified yet, but suspicion is that they represent victims of the “false-positive” program, as well as rural activists and trade unionists. The incoming Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defense secretary when the murders were talking place. Santos also oversaw a brief invasion of Ecuador in 2008 that reportedly killed a number of insurgents. The invasion was widely condemned throughout Latin America.
More:
http://www.alternet.org/story/147728/colombian_mass_grave_of_more_than_2000_may_be_civilian_trade_unionists%2C_not_military_casualties
