Reply #1: This report is 4 months old. How come you shout the title, as if this were breaking news? [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

How come you didn't include the date?

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The Chavez government is not above criticism. But I think we need later news reports to properly assess this criticism. Did the guy arrested for insulting and hitting a woman police officer really do it? If so, is he above arrest and prosecution BECAUSE he is a Chavez critic? This report is vague on what the Globovision mogul said. Was he urging overthrow of the government, as he did in 2002? "Complicity in the escape of a former banker" fails to mention that the banker was a fugitive from justice.

This report lacks AI's more usual rigor and documentation. It is sketchy. It is out of date. And it doesn't provide **ANY** information on the justice and accuracy of the charges against these men, nor statements of the prosecutors, nor statements of the government. It is completely one-sided. It doesn't even give them a chance to defend their actions. Not one word. The report itself is doing exactly what the report accuses the Chavez government of doing--suppressing the opposition.

If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and the CEO of Fox News were arrested, I would cheer. I think they all are guilty of a coup d'etat. They belong in prison. I have a similar feeling about the "opposition" in Venezuela. They literally overturned Venezuela's elected government, and swiftly suspended the Constitution, the courts, the legislature and all civil rights. This is not normal politics, in either case. So, you will have to come up with more evidence that these arrests were unjust or merely political to convince me that these charges are true.

This is shoddy work by AI. And guess what AI did, under pressure from the Venezuelan media moguls, back in 2003, after the attempted coup that Globovision and RCTV participated in? They pulled "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"--a documentary about the coup--from their AI film festival in Canada.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/22/film.venezuela

AI is not always right. Neither is Chavez. But he at least deserves the right to say something in a report that condemns his government--as do the prosecutors, judges, police officers and others involved. Is the problem that prosecutors in Venezuela are unjustly charging opposition figures with crimes, or that the opposition in Venezuela tends to be criminal? Given the coup attempt in 2002, I would say the opposition is contemptuous of the law. The law is a trifle to them. They overturned every law in Venezuela with a stroke of their pens. And it is certainly interesting that it was AI-Caracas, not the main offices of AI, who said that merely showing "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" in AI's film festival, in Canada, would put them in danger in Caracas. What did they fear, if not the lawless rightwing? (The documentary is sympathetic to the elected government and to Chavez and his many supporters and provides an incisive analysis of the part played by the corporate media in the coup attempt.)