Yes, Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is languishing in a French jail for his atrocity, but President Hugo Chavez is quite correct in stating that as far as Venezuelan jurisdiction is concerned, Carlos the Jackal can be seen to be as innocent as the driven snow if he were to be allowed to return to his homeland. THAT doesn't detract from the blood of three human beings that was spilled in the 1975 attack on OPEC but if we are to consider the fact CIA terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is walking free in Miami after killing seventy-three innocents aboard Cuban airliner 455, just a year later in 1976, we can tot up the body-counts and ask vital questions that still largely remain unanswered...
Why Idi Amin should have been drawn into the equation is anyone's guess. My (admittedly Chavista) colleague had ventured the catch-all that the President was speaking to "a specific audience" ... but with TV lenses and microphones at the ready, does it take any stretch of the imagination to understand that off-the-cuff remarks about Amin's supposed cannibalism would be pounced upon by any reporter who was not submitting him/herself to self-censorship for political if not personal security considerations.
Considering the fact that most if not 99.999% of Venezuelan government officials demand to know a reporter's political allegiances as a preliminary to deigning to cast his or her verbal pearls before media swine, it's more than likely that the presidential faux-pas might have gone unreported ... but the essence is really that, in a curious parallel with urban mythology in the run-up to the Great War (1914-1918), could it really have been true that German men and women had a predilection for eating new-born babies?
Whatever the official explanations, gloss-overs, accusations of out-of-context, government cover-ups and denials etc., etc., Chavez' tendency to say just the wrong thing at precisely the right (wrong?) time to get him the most international exposure, highlights a serious absence of competent presidential advisers who might otherwise have had the foresight to have a kindly whisper in El Comandante's ear before he lets his mouth run away with him.
Not for the first time, we have remarked about the 'looney-toons' at Venezuela's Foreign Ministry and assorted Venezuelan embassies around the world, where it might have been hoped that Nicolas Maduro might have done a better job of guiding foreign policy through the thicket of international intrigues than he did guiding a fully-laden Metrobus through congested Caracas streets.
We have no record of any traffic pile-ups in bus driver Maduro's wake, but the Foreign Ministry's trajectory in recent years has been in gridlock with increasingly toxic fumes coloring the Casa Amarilla an even fouler shade of mustard.
Trained diplomatic professionals' chances of gainful purpose at MRE are about as unrealistic as a 'non-Maduro/Flores dynasty' applicant's chances of getting on the National Assembly's family payroll. It's not unrealistic to observe the prevalence of a 1990s urban guerrilla fraternity in the hallowed halls of both institutions (?) with the fear of imminent personal extinction the controlling factor in a mafia that's about as far removed from people-power democracy as you can possibly get this side of the galaxy.
When, as often is the case, he's NOT talking about Carlos the Jackal and Idi Amin, Chavez talks of the urgent necessity to combat corruption ... but his efforts in that direction appear to be just as fruitless as a career opportunity at MRE or the AN conditioned on the acquiescence of fraternal corruption and contempt for Venezuela/Venezuelans as a whole.
What the future will bring for Venezuela/Venezuelans is anyone's guess at this juncture. Security threats (real or imagined) continue without stay, and the United States' McCarthyistic psych-ops war fuelled by their paranoia for modern socialism (with all its faults in implementation) is their own disgrace.
It continues to amaze simple observers like myself why a strategist such as Hugo Chavez Frias, himself, should fail to recognize that he must tackle the well-funded and professional disinformers at their own media game. It's all very well to pay $$$s for international movie celebrities to make corporate appearances at the Miraflores Presidential Palace while, with one side of its mouth, the US State Department complains that Venezuela isn't doing enough to control the flow of cocaine from Colombia to ready consumers on the streets of the United States at the same time condemning Venezuela for taking remedial action.
Where, indeed, was the Venezuelan PR team -- any PR team with sufficient media savvy -- to tell the world the true facts when the Venezuelan Army blew up a couple of ramshackle border bridges over which Colombian drug-traffickers had plied their trade.
Heck no! Better to let the gringo media portray the incident as "yet another" aggression against "peace-loving" Colombia where US troops are supposedly stationed to cull the cartels when they've nothing better to do after routine espionage operations against Venezuela and the rest of Latin America from curiously named Forward Operations Locations bought with Washington's (US taxpayer) bucks paid into the coffers of Alvaro Uribe's re-re-re-election campaign. Oh yes, nothing's changed!
Rather than be caught continually hopping on a media front they may wish to ignore -- but which nonetheless dangerously (for him!) exists -- Chavez' incredibly motley crew of ministerial and bureaucratic incompetents could/should do no better than to move over to make way for those whose skills and competence can save Chavez and Venezuela from the sorry mess that it's, unequivocally, in.
Fat chance, realistically, of that happening without electrified cattle-prods...
Would, indeed, that Chavez could actually do something to bring about the social and political revolution to which he originally aspired in the early days of 1999. He had promised a new era of power to the people with decisions enacted from the grassroots upwards through the already corrupt administration all the way to the top.
Some years ago, Chavez had confided to a friendly foreign visitor that his true strength was the ordinary people of Venezuela and that the intermediate layers of indolent and corrupt officialdom would die its own death as "the people" took over the management of their own rights as citizens of the republic.
The solution, Woods concludes, is for the grassroots to take the power that the Constitution has entrusted to them to ensure that their exploitation and marginalization will not go unopposed.
While hope/aspiration for that Valhalla is still not lost, one needs to wonder how long it will take before ... or if ... Chavez will wake up to the fact that he'd better hold his mandibles the better to cannibalize his own ministerial team more diligently than Idi Amin is supposed to have devoured political prisoners and flayed his wives.
Constitution of the
VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: My usually pro-Chavez colleague tries to tell me that at his outspoken best, President Hugo Chavez Frias is addressing a specific (local, Venezuelan) audience when he makes outlandish statements such as his most recent about international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos 'The Jackal') and Uganda's Idi Amin ... it certainly makes one wonder what Chavez seeks to achieve by heaping contentious coals on the fires of an already negative image that he has engendered in the international media.
