Published: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 Bylined to: Roy S. Carson
Will corruption and injustice gain a stranglehold over Venezuela's misery again?
VHeadline.com editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: With new-found democracy and legitimacy now fighting for its survival on political barricades in Caracas, the question must surely be asked if truth and legitimacy is to be allowed to win the day ... or, if Venezuela will be plunged into yet another four decades of corruption and misery, where more than 80% of its population has already been subjugated by political manipulators and corrupt cliques, whose percentage is in the lower single digits, but appears to have all the mouth in the current media war against the democratically-elected government of President Hugo Chavez Frias.
The question is not, or should not, be focused on the personality of Chavez Frias, who may alternately be liked or disliked according to the flavor of the day. The greater truth is that the President has been elected, by a democratic majority, to serve the Venezuelan people, and he has the clear backing of a majority in the democratically-elected National Assembly (AN), which was itself constituted by a reform Constitutional Assembly, which was itself ratified by an overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan people in a National Referendum.
Chavez Frias chooses to call his specifically Venezuelan brand of UK Tony Blair's "Third Way" socialism a "peaceful revolution" ... it is a long and tedious battle from the corrupt abuses and blacker excesses of old discredited Accion Democratica (AD) and Christian Socialist (Copei), where suppression of the news and reporting freedoms were a rule of thumb and few, if any, Venezuelan journalists would then have dared to say even a fraction of what is being said today in a continuous spew of anti-government rhetoric window-dressed as freedom of expression.
What, however, is now at odds is a travesty of everything that has been fought for as freedom.
The very manipulators and politically corrupt that festered their way through the last forty years of Venezuela's decline, are venting their venom against the Chavez Frias government with a newly-discovered moral rectitude that belies their own deceit.
Corrupt executives and managers who have been swindling the State-owned oil corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) out of $ millions for years, are attempting to usurp the government's lawful right to decide.
They're joined by corrupt union officials, typified by the Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) president (?) Carlos Ortega, who has stubbornly refused to hand in documents to establish legitimacy under the Venezuelan Constitution, which mandated democratic elections to decide trade union representation after decades of unionized corruption and political gerrymandering.
Yet these people are taken seriously as Venezuela struggles through its rebirth into recognizable democracy...
It would have been so easy for military-educated Lt. Col. (ret.) Hugo Chavez Frias to team up with his 1992 failed coup comrade Lt. Col. (ret.) Francisco Arias Cardenas to replace the doddery Presidency of Dr. Rafael Caldera with a military regime. God knows, Venezuela was ready for it after years of "pretend democracy" under the likes of Jaime Lusinchi and Carlos Andres Perez...
Any self-respecting reader will immediately recognize that, for a country ... any country ... to thrive and succeed, the Rule of Law must replace the assorted banditry of political thugs and miscreants.
AD and Copei have been thoroughly discredited and, although they twist and turn and pretend to be something else than their rotten core, their intention is clearly to reinstate the corruption and injustices that preceded their demise in December 1998 General Elections.
Today's question is not whether Chavez Frias will stand or fall...
The question is if democracy will prevail ... or if Venezuela will, once again, be plunged into thoughtless and unfeeling misery for another half century ... or, this time around, perhaps more?
Celebrating the life and times of: Bolivar's Aide-de-Camp Gen. Daniel Florence O'Leary
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Constitution of the
VHeadline.com editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: With new-found democracy and legitimacy now fighting for its survival on political barricades in Caracas, the question must surely be asked if truth and legitimacy is to be allowed to win the day ... or, if Venezuela will be plunged into yet another four decades of corruption and misery, where more than 80% of its population has already been subjugated by political manipulators and corrupt cliques, whose percentage is in the lower single digits, but appears to have all the mouth in the current media war against the democratically-elected government of President Hugo Chavez Frias.
