Chavez backers tear gas newspaper, threaten editor

Source: Internatonal Herald Tribune/Associated Press

Chavez backers tear gas newspaper, threaten editor
The Associated Press
Published: October 15, 2008

CARACAS, Venezuela: A radical pro-government militia is claiming responsibility for tossing tear gas at the offices of a Venezuelan newspaper and threatening its editor, who has been accused of encouraging the assassination of President Hugo Chavez.

Attackers who threw the tear gas at the Nuevo Pais daily in Caracas on Tuesday left behind fliers warning editor Rafael Poleo that he has been declared "a military objective."

The leaflets said a pro-Chavez militia called La Piedrita was responsible.

Nuevo Pais journalist Graciela Requena said the attack panicked the staff, but nobody was injured.

Government officials have criticized Poleo for saying that Chavez should be careful or he could end up "hanging" like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.



Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/10/15/news/LT-Venezuela-Media.php

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Note:

I will look for more on this story late tonight, when I will have some time to spend on a search.

Maybe the editor was being helpful? Warning Chavez of a potential weakness?

against Hugo with no mention of tear gas whatever. :shrug:

Reporter Rafael Poleo said on Alo Ciudadano, show of the private television channel, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez might end like Italian Benito Mussolini, hanged by his feet.

"That is a statement supporting crime, they are attempting on the President's life", said Daza on Venezolana de Television.

Venezuelan Minister of Communication and Information Andres Izarra said that Globovision is openly calling to assassination once again.

"They are urging citizens to non-democratic solutions we cannot tolerate, so we have to appeal to the people's conscience", said Izarra who urged all freedom of speech organizations to intervene.

Private mass media has openly taken a stance supporting attempts of a coup d'état and assassination that were exposed on September 2008 and resulted in the arrest of retired and active military plus some civilians.

http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID={20128C5C-33E6-4F4C-8C88-F85AB9DCEA02}&language=EN

actually takes his stories, the ones he sends out under his own name, from Globovision. Damned creepy, isn't it? He's lazy, all right, and has a political axe to grind. I can't remember who the guy was or which service: Reuters or AP. Makes you sick when you know what Globovision is.

Similar information:

Patrick J. O'Donoghue's round up of news from Venezuela -- October 14, 2008

~snip~
Editor/publisher of the opposition tabloid, El Nuevo Pais, Rafael Poleo has threatened President Chavez that he will end up like Mussolini. The veiled and surprisingly public threat was made during a program on Globovision. The editor suggests that the route currently being taken by President Chavez is similar to that of Mussolini and he should be careful not to end up like the Italian dictator "hanging and with his head facing the ground" .

Communications & Information Minister, Andreas Izarra accuses Poleo of calling for the assassination of President Chavez. What Poleo is after, the Minister muses, is to continue frightening people and inciting to non-democratic solutions. The Venezuelan people, Izarra insists, independent of their political position, cannot continue to accept this kind of comparisons with the head of state. Izarra reveals that he tried to get in touch with the program to answer Poleo but it already had gone off the air.

http://www.pr-inside.com/patrick-j-o-donoghue-s-round-up-r860420.htm

It's good to have the name of this pathetic fascist a-hole. It'll make it easier to locate stories on this.

HOW HATE MEDIA INCITED THE COUP AGAINST THE PRESIDENT
Venezuela’s press power

Never even in Latin American history has the media been so directly involved in a political coup. Venezuela’s ’hate media’ controls 95% of the airwaves and has a near-monopoly over newsprint, and it played a major part in the failed attempt to overthrow the president, Hugo Chávez, in April. Although tensions in the country could easily spill into civil war, the media is still directly encouraging dissident elements to overthrow the democratically elected president - if necessary by force.

By Maurice Lemoine

~snip~
Scaremongers
"Free" opinions published in print -"Time for a change of government" or "Time to overthrow this government" (7) - were reinforced by dubious manipulation of the broadcast media. On 5 April two TV presenters gave their own commentary on a strike of petrol stations that was linked to the PDVSA conflict: "Have you remembered to fill up? Hurry, because tomorrow there won’t be a drop left in the country." By encouraging motorists to rush out to buy petrol, they provoked unnecessary chaos, though the strike was only partial and the stations were still receiving supplies.

On 7 April Ortega and Carmona announced that there was to be a general strike. The editor of El Nacional, Miguel Enrique Otero, stood shoulder to shoulder with them and spoke on behalf of the press: "We are all involved in this struggle in defence of the right to information." Two days later the BPV, which had just been visited by the new US ambassador, Charles Shapiro, decided to back the strike. From then on the television companies broadcast live from the headquarters of the PDVSA-Chuao, the designated assembly point for opposition demonstrations.

"Take to the streets" thundered El Nacional on 10 April (in an unattributed editorial). "Ni un paso atrás! (not one step backwards)" responded the hoardings on Globovisión. Another TV company broadcast: "Venezuelans, take to the streets on Thursday 11 April at 10am. Bring your flags. For freedom and democracy. Venezuela will not surrender. No one will defeat us." The call to overthrow the head of state became so obvious that the government applied Article 192 of the telecommunications law. More than 30 times -for all television and radio channels - it requisitioned 15-20 minutes’ air time to broadcast its views. But the broadcasters divided the screen in two and continued to urge rebellion.

On 11 April military and civilian press conferences calling for the president’s resignation marked the next phase. On RCTV, Ortega called on the opposition to march on Miraflores (the presidential palace). At about 4pm, when the scale of the conspiracy was apparent, the authorities gave the order to block the frequencies used by the private channels. Globovisión, CMT and Televen went off air for a few moments before resuming their broadcasts using satellite or cable. All screens broadcast an image that had been edited to show armed counter-demonstrators firing on "the crowd of peaceful demonstrators". As a result the Bolivarian Circles, the social organisation of Chávez supporters, were blamed for deaths and injuries (8).

The conspirators, including Carmona, met at the offices of Venevisión. They stayed until 2am to prepare "the next stage", along with Rafael Poleo (owner of El Nuevo Pais) and Gustavo Cisneros, a key figure in the coup. Cisneros, a multimillionaire of Cuban origin and the owner of Venevisión, runs a media empire - Organización Diego Cisneros. It has 70 outlets in 39 countries (9). Cisneros is a friend of George Bush senior: they play golf together and in 2001 the former US president holidayed in Cisneros’s Venezuelan property. Both are keen on the privatisation of the PDVSA (10). Otto Reich, US assistant secretary of state for Interamerican affairs, admits to having spoken with Cisneros that night (11).

More:
http://mondediplo.com/2002/08/10venezuela

From the past : 18 November 2005

Key Suspect in Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Murder Turns Himself In :

Nelson Mezerhane, who has been indicted for being a mastermind of the murder of Venezuelan State Prosecutor Danilo Anderson, faced a courtroom delay yesterday, after the judge assigned to his case recused herself and a new one was assigned to the case.

This latest event came after Mezerhane, partial owner of Venezuelan opposition television station Globovision, turned himself into the Caracas court on Monday. Authorities had been looking for him for a week and a half. He attributed his delayed appearance to being out of the country.

Two of the three other people accused of planning the murder earlier this month, Retired General Eugenio Añez Núñez and anti-Cuban activist Salvador Romaní were quickly arrested. The other, opposition journalist Patricia Poleo, is still in hiding.

Mr. Anderson was murdered almost a year ago while investigated some 400 people, many said to be part of Venezuela’s business elite, for their involvement in the brief April coup that removed President Hugo Chávez Frías from power for two days and dissolved the National Assembly and constitution. A car bomb went off in Mr. Anderson’s SUV about five minutes after he left a university graduate course in Los Chaguaramos, Caracas, according to the Venezuela scientific police (CICPC). Shortly after his murder, three people, Rolando Guevara, Otoniel Guevara, and Juan Bautsta Guevara, were charged with planting the bomb. Earlier this month, Mezerhane was charged, along with the three others, with the planning of the attack.

I have heard about this through other sources, knew it was connected to Colombia in some ways, and would have missed the whole damned thing if you hadn't just posted it. It surely fills in a lot of holes for me.

This is horrendous. I'm posting the next paragraph after your snip:

According to court documents, Mezerhane, who is co-owner of the Venezuelan oppositional television station Globovision, was accused by Giovani Jose Vasquez De Armas, a key witness for the prosecution, of attending meetings in Panama, Miami, and Maracaibo, where the killing of Anderson was planned. Mezerhane’s lawyer maintains his innocence, saying that there is absolutely no truth to the charges against his client.

According to public prosecutors, Vasquez, a member of United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia (AUC), a Columbian right wing paramilitary group, has admitted to having been in charge of the logistics of Danilo Anderson’s murder. Vasquez has also implicated the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency agents as being complicit in the assassination. Merzerhane is currently being held in a private cell in the headquarter’s of Venezuela’s secret police.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article131174.html



Nelson Mezerhane

Thanks, again, for this info. You can be sure I'm keeping it for my own files.

"fool me once, fool me twice, bling, bling, bling...." It's not as if the Associated Pukes don't make shit up.

Remember those pro-Chavez shooters during the 02 coup (that creative editing by RCTV)? Oh, and those other entirely mythical pro-Chavez student shooters later on (who locked Chavista students into a building and tried to set it on fire, while thugs on motorcycles circled outside shooting guns)? And the entirely mythical, oft-repeated pro-Chavez "voter fraud" that Penn & Schoen (USAID) at one point was pushing with a false poll (another coup plot)?

Venezuela is having by-elections. As here, the fascists are a small minority and have nothing constructive to offer, so they make shit up, and the Associated Pukes broadcast it far and wide.

We liberal types remain a bit Pollyanna-ish in our inability to grasp that fascists and Bushwhacks, and their Corpo 'news' monopolies, lie for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then go home at night and lie in their dreams. They lie to God. They lie to their mothers. They lie under oath, and not under oath. Their lies are especially frequent during elections, because they don't believe in democracy--or when they are stealing or waging unjust war. They lie to get their way, and they lie even when it doesn't get them anything, just to inure us to false reports. Lying is their whole thing. And we continue to expect them not to do it. We read something like this, and think, 'oh, dear, some Chavistas went too far and tossed tear gas into a newspaper office; gee, the fascist dickheads are going to make hay with this"--then we find out, two weeks later, it was the fascists throwing the tear gas--the opposite of the truth.

I like our side for continuing to be shocked when the lies, eventually, are exposed--for continuing to believe in other people--to believe that reporters, journalists, editors, Corpos and rightwing political opponents couldn't possibly be lying again. But we do need to be wary of this tendency in ourselves to expect others to tell the truth. It can lead to poor reaction time, in efforts to prevent death and mayhem.

DID Chavez supporters tear gas a newspaper office? Considering the source, I'd guess that the opposite is true, and will eventually come out, via alternative news sources, with no retraction by AP. AP has been extremely unreliable on Chavez, Venezuela and the South American left. They are as bad as the Miami Herald. They are a conduit of Bushwhackism and are equally untrustworthy. It's not that such a thing couldn't happen. It's just that it probably didn't. We cannot rely on AP's word. That is the bottom line. And we need to stop making that subconscious presumption that we can. The Corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies count on it.

members of its own group in order to create the illusion it has been attacked by its enemy in order to launch an all out living hell of a war on the parties they mean to destroy!

If author James Bamford hadn't kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing, we would have never known about "Operation Northwoods" which he finally was able to uncover through the Freedom of Information Act:

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba
Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba
By David Ruppe
N E W Y O R K, May 1, 2001

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

More:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662

On edit: It IS strange that the emphasis of the article is placed on the reaction to the editor's death threat on their elected President, not the death threat, itself. Seems a little unprincipled.