VEN Expels Two HRW Staff -- includes Jose Miguel Vivanco

[magbana]

NYT article followed by some right on analysis. Human Rights Watch's Jose Miguel Vivanco getting thrown outta VEN -- couldn't have happened to a better US agent

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/world/americas/20venez.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 20, 2008
Venezuela Expels 2 After Report on Rights
By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez's government expelled two
employees of Human Rights Watch late Thursday night after chafing at
their documentation of widespread political discrimination,
intimidation of union members and a subservient judiciary.

Armed men in uniforms apprehended José Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean
citizen who is the Americas director for the New York-based group, and
Daniel Wilkinson, an American who is deputy director for the Americas,
and placed them on a flight to São Paulo, Brazil, where they arrived
on Friday morning.

"About 20 men, some of them in military uniform, intercepted us when
we arrived at our hotel after returning from dinner Thursday night,"
Mr. Vivanco said in a telephone interview from São Paulo. He said he
struggled briefly with the security officials when he tried to send a
message on his BlackBerry to The New York Times about the expulsion.

The officials then disabled the BlackBerries of the two men and
prevented them from contacting anyone in Venezuela, including
diplomats from the embassies of Chile or the United States. "They
informed us of our apprehension and told us they had entered our rooms
and had packed our belongings," Mr. Vivanco said.

The expulsion, broadcast partly on state television here, comes at a
time of increasingly erratic actions by Mr. Chávez. In the last week,
he expelled the American ambassador, rounded up military officers and
accused them of plotting to kill him and clashed with the Vatican over
its granting of political asylum to a political opponent.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr. Vivanco violated the
law by entering the country on a tourist visa to do human rights work.
The ministry also said that Human Rights Watch, which is an outspoken
critic of the Bush administration, was acting in concert with the
United States government in a campaign of aggression against Venezuela.

"Accusing us of being part of a conspiracy is a distraction tactic
used to attack the messenger," Mr. Vivanco said. "We have never had
this experience anywhere in this hemisphere."

The expulsion of the two men came after they released a long report
here on Thursday documenting rights violations in Venezuela. They
pointed to Mr. Chávez's dismantling of judicial independence and his
use of a 2002 coup that briefly ousted him from office as a pretext
for consolidating power by weakening rights protections.

The report also discussed the government's intimidation of local human
rights defenders and nongovernmental organizations, documenting the
use of state television to carry out attacks on advocates doing work
that criticized Mr. Chávez's creation of a military reserve under his
command.

"Our expulsion reveals yet again the degree of intolerance of this
government," said Mr. Vivanco.


Analysis picked up from CubaNews listStaff

From: Joaquin Bustelo <[e-mail]>
Sent: Sep 19, 2008 7:09 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: It's about fucking time

Louis succinctly summed up the expulsion from Venezuela of imperialist agent Jose Miguel Vivanco, Latin American director of the so-called "human rights" watch outfit, with this pithy subject line. But, still, a few more things can profitably be noted.

The thing about Vivanco is, this was an obvious, conscious provocation.

The timing and location of Vivanco's Thursday press conference in Caracas was communicated to the imperialist and opposition media many days in advance. The event was carefully coordinated so that it would be transmitted live by capitalist TV locally and internationally through CNN en Español (and perhaps additional outlets). It was even slated to begin on the half hour (because Venezuela's local time is 1/2 hour off imperialist Eastern Time) to make it more convenient.

What surprises me is that the revolutionary government let him into the country AT ALL, for while citizens of many countries may be able to enter Venezuela for tourism with a minimum of visa formalities --or none at all-- it is an entirely different matter if you come in a professional capacity or to do work. The same is true of the United States and many other countries, if not all of them. Some French journalists a while back got in hot water and expelled from the U.S. when they came over as tourists and tried to cover the winter Olympics, I think it was. The only extraordinary thing about how Vivanco was treated is that they helped him pack his bags and simply ushered him to the airport and invited to leave, rather than dumping him in jail while the Venezuelan equivalent of la migra figured out what to do with such a conscious and blatant violator of immigration laws.

Somehow, I doubt this was an oversight, but rather a statement by the revolutionary government. They consciously LET Vivanco have his "Venezuelan is a dictatorship where no one can criticize the government" press conference so it could be transmitted "Live from Caracas," without interference or interruption, both within Venezuela and throughout the hemisphere. An expression of what in Spanish we would call "sovereign" contempt for the yanqui fabrications.

I know in the Spanish-language US newsroom where I work, the irony was not lost on many. And then, just in case someone thought that Vivanco got away with it not because the revolutionary government is simply unafraid of criticism, especially such a contemptible source, but rather because this was someone from Washington, they kicked his ass out of the country so hard he landed in Sao Paulo.

Where, it should be noted, he was interviewed ONCE AGAIN this morning, this time by phone, by CNN en Español, about how "brutally" he had been treated. Vivanco was livid. Why the Chavista thugs didn't even let him use his Blackberry to call another press conference! Not that it mattered, because opposition TV station cameras just HAPPENED to be in Vivanco's hotel room when the Venezuelan immigration authorities came calling late, late last night. Now all the TV news producers --and the CIA-- are saying": thank God for coincidence!

Two things that should be noted, the first being the overall ideological CONTENT of Vivanco's presentation. While the group calls itself "Human Rights Watch," this is the old anti-communist CIA front "Helsinki Watch." What it tries to do is convince everyone that human rights consist of rich people being allowed to use their money to impose on society the messages they want to convey, and that's it. There are no other human rights. No political nor --heaven forbid!-- social or economic rights other than the right of rich people to use their money to impose their will on society as a whole.

While it was "Helsinki Watch," the outfit had the brutal arbitrariness of the Stalinists in Moscow and other East European capitals to help its credibility. Nowadays it is such a shameless CIA sock puppet that it doesn't even bother to issue at least a token, ritual denunciation of the American concentration camp and torture center in Guantanamo for cover.

Thus while Vivanco claimed in his Caracas presser that Chavez had "used" the 2002 coup to deprive certain elements of their "human rights," he had not a word to say about the coup itself being a *monster* violation of the human rights of the ENTIRE Venezuelan NATION. Nothing about the human rights of the Venezuelan people to have the government they elected --not once, but REPEATEDLY-- in power, nor to have carried out the revolutionary project on behalf of poor and working people that THIS government was elected to put in place. The only human right that exists is that of the moneyed minority to oppose and block the will of the majority by any means, fair or foul (though if truth be told, exclusively foul).

The second thing that should be noted is the TIMING of the event. It comes at a time of stepped up provocations against the sovereignty not just of Venezuela, but of Bolivia.

Yet whether Evo Morales is proving to be a masterful politician with his temporizing tactics against the "half moon" autonomists, or just got lucky, it turns out the result of the recent weeks of maneuvering has been that the opposition last week had enough rope to hang itself, or at least to give itself such a severe whipping that it's close to being on life support. The opposition has isolated itself from regional backing, including Brazil's, which is very important, the trump card they had been secretly (and not so secretly) been counting on.

And they succeeded in at least *formally* uniting ALL of South America against them. This is important. Until Monday's summit in Chile, only convened on Saturday afternoon, BTW, UNASUR --the fledgling Union of South American Nations-- had been a hope, or, at MOST, a plan. On Monday it became a REALITY.

How? Why? Well, on the 11th, there was a massacre in Pando Department in Bolivia of pro-Morales marchers. And I think all of a sudden the presidents of Brazil, of Chile, of Argentina, of Peru, of Uruguay and Paraguay all saw a page of their own histories from the 1960's, 1970's or 1980's flash before them.

Perhaps if it had not been on the anniversary of the Pinochetazo (Pinochet coup) in Chile in 1973, September 11, the reaction might not have been so strong. Or perhaps if President Bachelet of Chile hadn't been president pro-temp of UNASUR. But as it was, this is a history that the presidents of South America, called together by one of their own, and speaking at least this once as true representatives of their peoples, unanimously responded to with "never again."

So they gave Evo Morales's government their full support as the legitimate government of Bolivia, and denied any legitimacy whatsoever to those who would either overthrow him or dismember the country, whether officially or just in fact.

And in the process UNASUR was truly born. For once, Latin American states, dealing with a political crisis with dire regional implication in which the United States was OBVIOUSLY a major player --for it was the expulsion of the American "verga de oro," Ambassador Goldberg, that detonated the escalation of the crisis in Bolivia-- took a stand WITHOUT the United States and *against* the designs of American imperialism.

And it even had repercussions BEYOND South America, to Central America, with its weak, balkanized republics, where Honduras, in a gesture of dignity and solidarity with Bolivia, cancelled the ceremonial, formal presentation of the new yanqui ambassador's credentials. A tiny, purely symbolic act of dignity and rebellion -- but from such cracks, empires crumble.

These events are a harbinger of the future when we Latin Americans will not only be "un pueblo sin fronteras" --a single people without borders-- but also without the humiliating tutelage of the OAS, the "Organization of American States," so justly condemned by the greatest Latin American patriot of them all as "el ministerio de colonias yanqui." (The U.S. Ministry of Colonies).

Meanwhile, the yanqui-inspired provocations of the autonomists finally forced Bolivia's raucous left, with its many problems and divisions, to see its way clear to uniting in its big majority around defense of the Morales government. And the opposition is effectively divided, with the Pando departmental prefect in prison facing murder charges for the Sep. 11 massacre, and the others disavowing what he did and seeing no alternative but to accept the restoration of the functioning of central government offices and institutions in their areas as the price for the government entering into a dialogue with them. Again, a small, symbolic thing, but of extreme importance: formal, official, and on the ground recognition by these wannabe leaders of a slaveholder's rebellion of the sovereignty and authority of the central government headed by compañero Presidente Evo Morales over the entire territory of the Bolivian nation.

Venezuela is, of course, a different matter. The revolutionary government is firmly in control. Vivanco's rehash of trumped up charges and long since discredited horror stories might, at most, send a message to the opposition that Washington --however distracted by its collapsing financial system-- is still with them (for whatever that may be worth by Monday morning).

But it also shows regular working people in Venezuela that Chávez is right, their real enemy is U.S. imperialism. For while Vivanco may speak with a Chilean accent, the real provenance of his provocation was there, printed quite plainly in the booklet detailing Chavez's supposed "abuses" that he handed out to journalists: "Made in USA."

Joaquin

[EFerrari]

1. And here we have Mr. Romero working it again:

"The expulsion, broadcast partly on state television here, comes at a
time of increasingly erratic actions by Mr. Chávez. In the last week,
he expelled the American ambassador, rounded up military officers and
accused them of plotting to kill him and clashed with the Vatican over
its granting of political asylum to a political opponent."

Chavez is erratic.

[Bacchus39]

2. Chavez is an erratic idiot cabrón. do you have any news? n/t

m

[EFerrari]

5. Maybe news to you: you projections are showing.

[roody]

4. Chavez sounds CONSISTENT to me.

[EFerrari]

7. Yes The powers that be always try to use the crazy smear.

They have a basic misunderstanding of time, I think. :)

[Judi Lynn]

3. Good for you for posting this. I had to literally laugh out loud at the beautiful beginning

of the first one. Absolutely SUPERB.

I had been wondering what the hell Vivanco was doing in Venezuela at the time he decided to release his stink bomb. I had actually suspected he was there consulting with the oligarchy leaders. Oh, this IS interesting. Glad to see he took it so well.

Concerning the information on Bolivia's massacre in Pando: had been trying to read backwards to figure out when it happened. Knew it was roughly a week ago. Had NO IDEA they had decided to make a "statement" massacre, as in overturning a leftist President on September 11, just as it happened 9-11-1973 in Chile. Un-freaking-believable. Hope everyone connected spontaneously combusts.

Thank you, magbana, many times over. This post is worth its cyber-weight in cyber-gold.

[EFerrari]

6. I sent this in, more or less, to OpEdNews. It's not Shakespeare but there it is.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Human Rights Watch!

Americans operate from a position of privileged naivete, a kind of concrete operational thinking: we believe things are what they are called especially when it comes to public life. If someone reads us a bill called “No Child Left Behind”, we go ahead and assume it will help children. If an act named the “Help America Vote Act” passes, we expect that our elections just got better. The Heritage Foundation is surely an organization that has something to do with colonial hardiness and a can-do spirit. There is nothing more sad than we are when we learn, against all reason, that NCLB is a hijacking of our schools by privateers or that HAVA makes our elections vastly more vulnerable or that The Heritage Foundation is a right wing propaganda mill that is every day finding better ways to funnel our tax money into corporate wallets with a nakedness that Lady Godiva could only aspire to.

So, when we read in the American press that two officials from Human Rights Watch have been booted out of Venezuela, our first thought will not be, “what did they do”. It won’t be. We expect people who work for Human Rights Watch to, well, watch human rights. They have a web site and everything, just like Amnesty International and the International Red Cross. And maybe that kind of optimism, that positive expectation, has its value in these difficult days. But it’s misplaced if one is trying to understand what is going on in Venezuela, in Latin America and in our relationships with both as the Bush administration is shaping them. Or, misshaping them.

Human Rights Watch is not a merely group of concerned citizens monitoring human rights any more than the Heritage Foundation is a think tank that seeks to preserve traditional American values, despite their website’s claim. Their board and donors come from the bedrock of the US political power establishment. So, there’s that.

And then, there’s the matter of our intelligence services hanging out in NGOs. (I suppose, our overseas operatives can’t all work at the local embassy.) A friend of mine from El Salvador reminds me that during the war, a planeful of “humanitarian workers” was shot down and apparently, somehow it was full of US government operatives instead. It was shot down close to the capital and Rolando believes it was the government, not the guerillas, that shot it down. The government had had enough of the “Peace Corps” meddling with their affairs, allies or not. The few survivors of the crash were executed on the spot, it was later determined. Guerillas didn’t operate that close to San Salvador during the war, so this was a terrible case of a US client state sending back a message to Washington.


More recently, as Amy Goodman has reported, arriving Peace Corps volunteers and young visiting scholars were solicited to spy for our government when they went to be briefed at our embassy in Bolivia. They were there for a welcome to the country and instead, they were told to spy on Venezuelans and on Cubans. It must be very upsetting to believe you are in Bolivia to work on hunger or to write a study on literacy and then to have your own Ambassador direct you to violate the trust of the very people you look forward to working with. These kids hadn’t even unpacked before they were enlisted to violate international law.

Regardless, they were caught up in the Bush administration machinations that last week resulted in our ambassadors to Bolivia and to Venezuela being asked to leave. There is evidence that the Bush government has been backing the white separatists in Bolivia, the same ones that went on a genocidal rampage recently. The latest coup plot discovered in Venezuela, at the same moment as the uprising in Bolivia, came with a taped discussion of American support.

In short, the Bush government has accelerated its attempts to destabilize democracy both in Bolivia and in Venezuela in the last two weeks and, they got caught. It was into this already turbulent, even deadly, landscape that Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch decided to release his 10 year review of Venezuela five months early.

There is nothing in this new report that is new, let alone so urgent that it justified an early release by five months. Vivanco repeats past criticism of the Chavez government regarding the judiciary, the media and labor unions and his critique doesn’t bear inspection. These are old chestnuts. Vivanco’s blustering about the judiciary has been debunked; it’s exactly how FDR rehabilitated a stacked Supreme Court. Vivanco’s support for the Uribe government, which leads the world in murdering labor organizers, disqualifies him from commenting ever again on the state of Venezuela’s official relations with labor unions. His championing of RCTV, who tried to get Chavez killed during the 2002 coup they hosted in their studio, has been rebutted by F.A.I.R. and condemned by leading intellectuals around the world.

It’s an easy matter to determine that Mr. Vivanco has a pattern of sticking his oar into Venezuelan internal affairs at politically sensitive times. All you have to do is look for a vote any time during his tenure in that country and his name comes up in the press. Wilkinson, his deputy, is less overtly partisan. His work combines the color of a travelogue with the mannerisms of an academic writer. But, his core positions on Venezuela seem to be identical to Vivanco’s if his February 2008 article in The Nation is any indication. The same discredited complaints are trotted out with nothing new to recommend them and they are awash in a romanticized pessimism that would astonish community organizers in Caracas.

Vivanco’s pattern of disruptions are, of course, nowhere in the two spammed articles that reported his expulsion from Venezuela over the weekend. And, the blame cannot be put solely at his door if the profound silence of Human Rights Watch regarding US predations in Haiti is any measure. But, the American press seems to trust the Bush government and its adjuncts with all things Venezuelan and has once again simply passed on and proliferated the official story. I wish my betters in the press corpse would wake up and smell the disinformation. Last November, they printed the story that the Venezuelan referendum would not have election monitors. They knew because the State Department said so. That turned out to be embarrassingly wrong: the NAACP and National Lawyers’ Guild were on the job by invitation.. More recently, they forwarded the story that one or more captured FARC laptops – that survived US-guided direct bombing hits as miraculously as a hijacker’s passport – contained damning emails from Chavez proving he was funding the guerillas. Greg Palast made short work of that rumor but the bureaus never turned a hair. They were on to reporting without any self-consciousness at all that Venezuela and Bolivia were not doing their part in the War on Drugs. Their sources were Bush administration “officials” who apparently forget at their convenience that the world’s largest suppliers of drugs, Colombia and Afghanistan, are both American client states.

So on Friday, the talking point was: Chavez has expelled two human rights workers. That these two men have been more active in critiquing Chavez politically than in observing the steadily improving state of human rights in Venezuela never caused the smallest ripple in the coverage. These HRW representatives have repeatedly timed their critiques to coincide with Bush administration attacks on the Chavez government at sensitive moments. Nobody in the media seems to be noticing that they have done exactly what they have been accused of by the Chavez government, of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs, although anyone with a search engine and an hour to search has access to that information. The coverage hasn’t once ruffled the cover.

It’s saddening to find that Human Rights Watch is not exempt from the long history of US government “tampering by NGO”. Human Rights Watch has allowed Mr. Vivanco to so misconstrue and overstep his mission in Venezuela that the organization itself has lost credibility and a great deal of good will. The decisions HRW makes going forward will determine if that organization is ever able to recover the good name it has so casually sacrificed in service of an openly political agenda and in the last chaotic days of the Bush disaster.

There is, though, a sort of wonderful image floating around the internet as a direct result of this latest battle of the war on democracy in Latin America, as John Pilger calls it. Long rather than tall, it is a photograph of twelve Latin American leaders flanking Evo Morales, showing their support for him during this last violent attack on his government by the Bush administration and the interests that Bush fronts. Mr. Chavez is off to the left, waving but not asking for focus. When you look at the image, you can’t help but think of that Obama campaign slogan: Not this time.

Maybe the good people at Human Rights Watch should take a look.

EF
San Francisco

[Judi Lynn]

8. Wonderful, so well done. There's a real place for this article now, as in immediately.

The more people to start thinking seriously about these guys, the better.

You encourage people to go look for more information themselves. It 's urgent they do. Information people dig out for themselves as they learn to search and compare material makes an imprint like nothing else. They need to be nudged into the kind of action which will educate them, and provide the kinds of answers which themselves suddenly start explaining what the hell has been missing from all the crap we've been seeing and hearing: the TRUTH!

Nothing convinces better than information personally studied and lived with personally, the kind of information breakthrough which changes EVERYTHING in the way you've been seeing things before. Once you're there, you can't go back to the darkness and the emptiness of the information hole we were raised in, with junk mind food thrown in which never truthfully addresses the issues.

There has been a vacuum around people like Jose Vivanco, and why IS that? His name isn't well known, yet look at his impact on our corporate "news" product. People haven't taken the time to start looking into these things. That actually takes a sacrifice, a loss of more immediate satisfactions in pursuit of finding deeper, more complete, more honorable information.

Absolutely hooted internally seeing your use of "news corpse." That one is fantastic. So loaded, so true! It should get right into daily use as quickly as possible!

Thanks for giving DU'ers the first look.

[EFerrari]

9. This is the link, in case anyone wants to spam some mailboxes, lol.

When they reframed this as Chavez being instransigent, they're able to cover up the scope of the "war on democracy". That really gets to me!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/I-Can-t-Believe-It-s-Not-H-by-Elizabeth-Ferrari-080922-709.html