Nicky is destroying whatever shreds of democracy are left down there.

But there is no way in hell I would go down there right now & risk being arrested as a spy & becoming Nicky's pawn in his war on democracy!

Just like I would love to visit Iraq, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, etc., but the risk of being used as a pawn by the governments or radical groups in these countries far outweighs my interest in visiting.

I knew people from small countries in Europe that were jealous that I didn't need a visa to enter many countries. Sure, I don't need a visa to go to some countries, but now there are people who just see any American as a legitimate target. Me go to the ME? No. Not this lifetime. I went to Russia long ago, before Putin slipped into whatever psychosis he has.

But it's also strange that there are many on DU supporting all those gov'ts and groups just because they are anti-US.

No visas.

Rinse and Repeat. Final Act of the farce that is the Presidency of Nicholas Maduro.

Right?

crap. Not even Nicaragua. Much less Cuba. Just Maduro.

That seems high considering we would never meddle in another countries affairs.

They're pretty busy places.

link please.....

Can't figure out how to do that yet.

Is the internet your only source of factual information?

anyone with money and skills are getting out before the collapse.

First it was the rich. Then it was the skilled oil field operators. Now it is the middle class.

The Miami is becoming a little Caracas.

And is it even true? What is your source for this "information"?

I was merely point out that processing visas is a big job down there, whether they be tourist or immigration visas.

Believe me, if people have the money or chances to leave, they're gonna take it. I've got a shitton of friends along with their families trying to leave, and know many who would be willing to, and there are thousands of others that I know have made it. I currently live in Doral, FL, which has the largest Venezuelan community in the world outside of Venezuela, and it's basically becoming the Little Havana of Venezuelans. Is it really that hard to believe that people want to leave a country with the world's biggest inflation rate, worst crime rate, and where the government often takes people's businesses away for the "good of the people"?

I always wonder what people like you that call those Cuban dissidents "worms" would react to those people if you came up to one face to face. Probably wouldn't say the same thing.

There's the ambassador and his/her staff, the consular staff (people who approve visas), and public diplomacy (this is things like the press secretary, the person who runs the exchange student and Fullbright programs, the cultural exchange person, etc.). These people also need to be able to check their email and print, so there's computer staff. They need housing so there's the facilities people. They need to be paid so there's HR. And so on.

Shame amurka aren't as hard working or resourceful as their counterparts.

it's those USAID and NED ones that are the real enemies of democracy.

is the banning of conservative repugs.

Of course, they will just move somewhere else. But kicking them out is good in itself.

...is that no matter how stupid and erratic Maduro seems to us, he may be making perfect sense to Venezuelans who are sick and fucking tired of the shit the US pulls in their country. And everyone else's country. Including our own.

- Maybe that's the one we should be worrying about......

K&R

[center][/center]


You know what's weird? That there are some people who think we have a right to play policeman and to run around this world sticking our noses in other people's business and telling everyone what to fucking do with their lives.......

goes around pissed off because of the supposed "US interference in his/her country"? If so, then you've never been in Venezuela. What they ARE sick and tired of is the slide into third-worldism that Chavez and now Maduro have brought about by their total ignorance of how an economy functions. The people are dead tired of standing in interminable lines to try and buy basic foodstuffs and 'luxury' items like toilet paper. They are dead tired of having an inflation rate that now tops 78%!. That's why they're pissed off.

From Venezuela’s Continuous Coup

by ALFREDO LOPEZ

~ snip ~

Is there a coup planned in Venezuela? All the time.

As Ledezma, a virulent right-winger and participant in Venezuela’s violent and aborted coup of 2002, was being dragged off to jail, people in the surrounding “barrios” of Caracas probably applauded. This is a man who made a career of initially ignoring them and, when finally forced to acknowledge their existence, insulted their work habits and intelligence. Now he was being jailed for trying to return their lives to the ones they led prior to 1999.

Back then, many of these residents had no water, sewers or electricity and very few paved streets. In fact, many of the neighborhoods that surround Venezuela’s capital weren’t even displayed on the map: they were unrecognized by the government so the government had no need to provide services, and they were politically powerless because people in unrecognized areas were seldom registered to vote.

Much of that was true of all the poor areas of the country and in the countryside, but all that has changed since 1999.

There is nothing in recent history like Venezuela. An oil-rich, modern and moderate-sized country in a continent whose production and consumption reaches the entire world, Venezuela set a precedent: it installed a revolutionary government by election — after a long history of social neglect, political repression and fawning collaboration with and domination by U.S. corporations.

Hospitals without drugs or surgical supplies. Lines hours long for the most basic items, doled out in a quota system according to the day of the week and the number written on your arm. Lines of people forced to wait in parking garages so that the lines won't be too obvious to photographers and/or other observers. Inflation that is more like Zimbabwe than a Latin America nation. Unreliable electric supply. Sounds like parts of sub-Saharan Africa rather than the modern, progressive Venezuela of a short 15 years or so ago.

That just won't work for anyone who has bothered to inform him/herself.

Your language, description of "life" in Venezuela should be accompanied by credible sources, not creative perception molding attempts.

To any serious readers, please take some time occasionally to start diving into research on any news you want to verify. It takes longer than reading lies, but it's far, FAR more worth your efforts.

and who cannot read anything sourced in the original language. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to make sweeping pronouncements about a country of which you know little and understand even less.

Are you serious? How many more videos and photos posted here on DU graphically showing the things I have described do you need to see before you concede the truth? Or are you actually asserting that:

1- Venezuelan hospitals do not have a shortage of medicines and surgical supplies
2- Ordinary citizens are not required to stand in long lines to try and obtain foodstuffs and other daily articles?
3- People standing in line are not only allowed to buy certain products on certain days (when available). They are not given a number which is usually marked on their arm by a government official.
4- People standing in line are not 'encouraged' to wait in parking structures, out of sight of observers and the press.
5- Inflation in Venezuela is not currently about 78%

Instead of three or four pages of cut and paste or diatribes about how this is all the US' fault how about just responding to whether these statements are accurate. It's not hard.

And yet you people from the I<3Hugo fan club don't even mention that little fact. It seems like you guys don't mind supporting a tyrannical regime as long as it calls itself "leftist" and yells "Death to America!." But if Maduro said he was from the right, you'd be calling for his resignation.

without breaking a few heads.

I'm sorry. I don't have the time to worry about the police killing people in Venezuela since I have to watch those here. I have children and grandchildren I worry over since we're African-American, I especially have to worry in this racist country, you see?

And exactly who the hell gave you the right to decide who is in whose fan club? And/or what someone should be worrying about?

America has become DEATH.

We rain it down indiscriminately on BROWN PEOPLE the world over.

I don't blame him for kicking America out. He's BROWN.

It's the only sane action he can take given our track records with droning, killing and assassinating people we disagree with.

No, it's YOU people and your selective vision and memories that are the bane of humanity's existence. Not me. I acknowledge the truth while you hide from it. Because it is YOU people who make THESE people possible with your superiority complexes. You're gonna fix every damned thing. Well, you fixed this too.

You wanna talk about kids dying? Explain this then. The White House has ''No Comment.''



If you're so worried about dying kids then you should focus on the number one cause of dying kids in the world. Whether here or there, it doesn't matter, it's The U.S. that does the killing on this planet.......

The point I was trying to make is that these atrocities happen in many other countries too, not just America. I apologize if you feel insulted by putting you in the blind chavista support group in this forum, but from what I have seen whenever the topic of discussion is Venezuela (which is my home country, btw, so I have as much right to criticize it and its government and society just as much as you have with the US,) the people who get defensive about Maduro and the chavista regime tend to turn a blind eye to any kind of blatant act against democracy and freedom perpetrated by said regime because they believe they have to defend any government that calls itself leftist and is fervently anti-American, no matter how obviously corrupt and tyrannical it is. If I offended you in some way because I associated you in some way to that group, I apologize if my words came out wrong. My intention was to point out the hypocrites who think that they have the right to bring up atrocities happening in their own country when the same kind of shit (or worse) happens in nations ruled by corrupt regimes they love to support.

Which is certainly true in your case insofar as Venezuela is concerned. The same would apply to me and America. In the end the U.S., and all nations are just Granfalloons.

They will become whatever we make them since they are purely our invention. So if we are not satisfied with them, it can only be laid at our own feet. None of them can grant us freedom -- that is our birthright. Pieces of paper do not freedom make. Paper can be erased. And burned. For one's freedom as a birthright, well you have to stand up and claim that.

Chavez, Maduro, Obama. What do they all have in common? They all inhabit (or inhabited) a planet that has finite resources that had everything already here and in-place when everyone of us showed up.

So no one gets to claim that they own this world because ''some papers and traditions'' say so. That's bullshit.

And no one gets to say they can tell anyone else what to do. To do so you must become a thug.

I don't like thugs of any water. Especially nuclear thugs.

- This is my mindset. Until the rest of the people on this planet get this same mindset, then we will be at loggerheads. I refuse to compromise. I refuse to give in.