Venezuela’s National Bolivarian Police Continue to Expand

Venezuelan secret service erased our data, claims journalist

Critic of Argentinian and Venezuelan regimes 'detained at airport for two hours after covering Chavez election'

Argentina's top TV journalist Jorge Lanata has alleged that he was held in the basement of Caracas airport for nearly two hours while Venezuela's secret service erased his team's camera, computer and cellphone memories. Only then, he says, were they allowed to leave the country.

Lanata, a harsh critic of the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez and of the Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner, was returning to Buenos Aires on a regular airline flight after covering the Venezuelan election. One of the most popular segments of Lanata's show is a comedy segment with Chavez and Kirchner impersonators that has made his show, Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism for Everyone), one of the most popular on Argentine television.

The journalist said that he and his team were interrogated by Venezuelan secret police and accused of spying because, during his report last night for the Argentinian TV channel 13, he showed two written orders from Venezuela's secret service ordering his surveillance while in Caracas.

"We are very shaken and they erased all the material we were bringing back," said Lanata on his release. The passengers of Lanata's airline flight had to wait for nearly two hours while the journalist and his team were interrogated.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/argentina-journalist-venezuela-detain/print

Venezuela’s Opposition Struggles for Unity

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

CARACAS, Venezuela — Ramón Guillermo Aveledo has been something of chief herder of cats for Venezuela’s political opposition, cajoling, arm-twisting and pleading to keep a contentious gaggle of parties all across the political spectrum from going their separate ways.

His job is not about to get any easier.

Battered by the re-election of President Hugo Chávez this month, Venezuela’s fractious opposition is struggling to remain united and rally its followers for crucial elections for governors in December.

“There is nothing to suggest we would do better apart than together,” said Mr. Aveledo, the executive secretary of the opposition coalition, known as the Democratic Unity Table, which backed Mr. Chávez’s challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski.

Mr. Chávez, who has been in office for almost 14 years, was re-elected Oct. 7 with 55 percent of the vote, compared with 44 percent for Mr. Capriles. It was the best showing by the opposition in a presidential election since Mr. Chávez first came to office in 1999.

But a loss is a loss, and now the opposition has the difficult task of rousing its supporters for the elections for governors in the nation’s 23 states on Dec. 16.

Eight governors currently belong to the opposition, but all of them must run for re-election. That includes Mr. Capriles, the governor of Miranda, who said last week that he would run again.

Opposition activists secretly fear a debacle if their disillusioned followers refuse to go out and vote. Mr. Chávez won in 21 states, including Miranda, suggesting that he may be poised to take away some of the governorships currently in the hands of the opposition.

In two states, the opposition even seems to be helping the president’s chances; in those states, Táchira and Monagas, the opposition holds the governorships. Yet a second opposition candidate has filed to compete against the incumbent in each state, meaning they could split opposition votes and clear the way for the pro-Chávez candidates.

“The key to success is to get up quickly and keep going,” Mr. Capriles said at a news conference two days after the election, referring to the blow of losing.

But much will depend on the ability of the opposition to stay unified. The coalition did especially well in legislative elections in 2010, when the opposition won a large number of seats in the National Assembly. But now it must overcome frictions that built up during the presidential campaign.

During the race, Mr. Capriles pushed many opposition politicians and their parties to the sidelines, confiding in a small group of advisers. That was done in part to protect against charges by Mr. Chávez that he represented old parties that had failed to solve the nation’s problems before Mr. Chávez took office.

Some of these strains were visible. Activists from parties in the coalition complained that the Capriles campaign would not let them get involved.

“We were not treated well,” said Henry Ramos, the head of Democratic Action, a social democratic party that, along with the Christian Democrats, dominated Venezuelan politics during the second half of the 20th century.

Mr. Capriles’s attempts to distance himself at times took on comic dimensions. At one Democratic Action event, party officials prominently displayed a life-size cutout of Mr. Capriles, who was not in attendance. Some observers saw a dig at the candidate, though Mr. Ramos said that was not the intention.

Still, Mr. Ramos said he stopped attending campaign meetings a few weeks before the election after a leader close to Mr. Capriles referred to Democratic Action and other groups as “parasite parties.”

Mr. Capriles did nothing to heal potential rifts in comments he made after the election. “I defeated the old politics,” he said.

Mr. Ramos scoffed at his comments. “He didn’t defeat anyone,” Mr. Ramos said. “They defeated him.”

Still, he predicted the Unity Table would stay together, and others agreed.

“The main element that will make unity stay together is the pressure of the citizens,” said María Corina Machado, a conservative politician. “Wherever you go, people tell you, ‘You have to stay united.’ ”

Leopoldo López, who heads a small party called Popular Will, said the main achievement was to run primary elections that produced a single slate of opposition candidates. But, he added, “it’s not enough; we have to go deeper” and work more closely with groups like unions and rural organizations.

But as the opposition struggled to recover from defeat, small cracks were showing within Mr. Chávez’s ranks as well.

Mr. Chávez handpicked his candidates for governor from loyalists within his cabinet, the ranks of retired military officers and his own party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, ignoring in many cases candidates proposed by other leftist parties allied with him.

That prompted rare public criticism from Mr. Chávez’s allies. In several states, leftist parties entered their own candidates to run against those chosen by Mr. Chávez, which could divide the vote on the left.

Mr. Chávez used his election victory and the coming races to shake up his cabinet. He sent Vice President Elías Jaua to run against Mr. Capriles in Miranda. And he named the foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro, as his new vice president.

The appointment immediately ignited speculation that Mr. Maduro is the favorite to succeed Mr. Chávez, who has never made his choice of a successor clear. Mr. Chávez has been battling cancer, leading to jockeying within his inner circle and much public discussion over what would happen if he became too sick to continue in office.

Under the Constitution, if the president dies or leaves office in the first four years of his six-year term, the vice president will take over while new elections were called. If the president dies or leaves office in the last two years, the vice president will serve the rest of the president’s term.

Mr. Maduro is a former bus driver and legislator, a dedicated promoter of Mr. Chávez’s socialist program who is seen as a favorite of Mr. Chávez’s Cuban allies.

Mr. Chávez has helped prop up the Cuban economy with oil shipments on preferential terms, and he is very close to the Cuban leadership. He has had at least two cancer operations, chemotherapy and radiation therapy in Cuba over the last year and a half, and Mr. Maduro accompanied him on many of those trips.

The foreign minister since 2006, Mr. Maduro helped build close ties with Iran, Syria and Libya, before the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. He helped engineer the recent inclusion of Venezuela in the Mercosur trade bloc, and Mr. Chávez also put him in charge of drafting a landmark labor law signed by the president this spring.

“Maduro becomes the man of the succession,” said a headline in the newspaper El Nacional.

But Mr. Ramos, the Democratic Action politician, was skeptical.

“Chávez is an expert in public appointments and hidden moves,” Mr. Ramos said. Why, then, was Mr. Maduro chosen as vice president? “Perhaps,” he said, “to hide the true successor.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/world/americas/venezuelas-opposition-struggles-for-unity.html?ref=americas&pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

Chavez petrodollars fuel voter worship

By John Paul Rathbone, Saturday, October 13, 3:37 AM

CHUAO, Venezuela — It has been a week since Hugo Chavez’s landslide electoral victory — but that is not why the president’s supporters are still laughing in Chuao, a fishing village on Venezuela’s surf-pounded Atlantic coast.

Last Sunday, in the general hilarity and excitement of the results, a carouser popped a wheelie by Chuao’s colonial-era 17th-century church and fell off his motorbike. When the gas tank ignited in the crash, the bystanders’ laughter soared into the night sky alongside the roaring flames.

“At least the motorbike didn’t explode!” grinned Elvis Morillo, a burly Afro-Caribbean fisherman.

Chuao is a “chavista” stronghold and also one of those semi-mythic Latin American towns that seem to leap from the pages of a novel. It is accessible only by boat, so that even the town’s new school bus had to be brought in by surfing it on the waves.

Two hundred years ago, Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator and Chavez’s hero, passed a night of despair here — and, some say, contemplated suicide until the aroma of the cacao drying on the church patio lifted his spirits.

Four years ago, Chavez used Chuao’s cobbled streets and palm-fringed bay as a backdrop for his “Al Presidente” television show. “Hello, Chuao!” he exclaimed at the start of the eight hour talk-a-thon, before declaring a series of new socialist projects.

Such histories, old and new, make Chuao a folkloric microcosm of modern Venezuela. It is also why the town and its 3,000 inhabitants help illuminate why Chavez has been reelected president for another six years after what many consider 14 ruinous years in power.

“Of course I voted for ‘mi presidente,’ ” said fisherman Orlando Santana, while tying up at Chuao’s new stone wharf, built thanks to a $698,000 “revolutionary” reconstruction project, as a broken billboard nearby declares. “Why would I vote for anyone else?”

However, Chavez’s political success owes less to revolutionary ideology than to a petrodollar-financed love affair with voters.

Black gold flows through Venezuela, the Saudi Arabia of South America but with more oil reserves, and over the past decade Chavez has showered it on Venezuela’s poor. The flow has been immense: $1tn of revenues over the past decade. Yet as Chuao shows, Venezuelan history is replete with natural bounty abundantly displayed: It is Latin America’s traditional, some say pre-modern, way of doing things.

Chuao’s ancient hacienda still grows a cacao so fine that chocolatiers, such as France’s Valhrona, consider it the “best in the world.” In colonial times, this “premiere cru” cacao turned Chuao into such a font of wealth — the oil gusher of its day — that it financed the first university in Caracas, a white neo-Gothic structure near the Plaza Bolivar.

The education that Chuao provided then and that Chavez provides now — he has expanded university enrolment four times — can be a source of both personal self-advancement and revolutionary renewal, as Chavez so often says.

Indeed, when the hacienda’s last owner, the pious Dona Catalina Mexia del Castillo died in 1669, she bequeathed Chuao to the slaves who worked there on the condition that they stayed and grew cacao.

Which they did, so forging a distinctively rebellious local popular culture.

At religious festivals, masked men dressed as laughing devils castigate onlookers while cackling with laughter. It’s a culture in keeping with a gauche brassiness that is peculiarly Venezuelan, and with which Chavez empathizes.

“I’m also a devil. We’re all devils — good devils, because there are bad devils, too,” he had joked to his Chuao audience during his TV show.

As elsewhere in Venezuela, not everyone is won over by Chavez’s demagoguery or folksy turns.

“I voted for the opposition because I’m the only intelligent person here,” said Juan Velocidad, an overweight beach restaurateur.

The waste and corruption of Chavez’s extravagant state-sponsored populism is huge. As they say in Caracas: “Any senior chavista who hasn’t made millions is a ‘huevon,’ ” or fool. Yet with 300 billion barrels of oil reserves, worth more than $30 trillion at current prices, people’s lives have improved, and the government still enjoys a huge margin of error.

That is just as well, because the 58-year-old Chavez, although he says he is cured of cancer, may have just begun a tricky transition by appointing Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, a street-sharp former union bus driver, as his vice president and eventual successor.

Not that anyone in Chuao seems worried about such distant political concerns. Here, the smooth continuation of Chavez’s presidency has returned life to the way it was four months ago, before the election hysteria, which is why the burning motorcycle, for now, is the only news worth talking about.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/chavez-petrodollars-fuel-voter-worship/2012/10/12/39d1c90e-1498-11e2-bf18-a8a596df4bee_print.html