I’d heard that Britain’s Labour Party, in full-on PTSD mode after its unexpected electoral shillacking at the hand of Cameron’s conservatives, was flirting with electing an out-and-out leftie nutter as leader. But did you know that Jeremy Corbyn is also a fully paid up member of the Bolivarian Solidarity movement? I’m serious as a heart attack!…
Little by little, Venezuela’s supposed “allies” are acting against her interests by reaching agreements with the “imperialist” powers of the West. On the heels of Cuba’s rapprochement with the US, today we learn that world powers have struck a deal with Iran that would lift sanctions on oil exports in exchange for limits on Iran’s…
The head of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), well-known chavista hack Alicia Bárcena, was in Caracas yesterday. While she was there, she praised Venezuela for “poverty reduction” and for fighting inequality. It’s too bad that Bárcena doesn’t read her own reports. As we wrote about months ago, her very own organization…
Fresh from the delicious story of Karen Halnon, the Penn State Abington sociology prof who recently declared she was smoking on an international airline flight in solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution, I’m just going to leave this here for y’all to mull… Damascus, SANA – Hundreds of Syrians staged Thursday an event to show their support…
teleSUR English recently had the curtesy to run a hatchet job on me built around this post, from December 2013, which they didn’t have the actual courage to link to. Classy! Reciprocity dictates that I won’t link to their half-literate ad hominem, nor in fact respond to it. I will, however, repost the 2013 piece which,…
Imagine what would happen to your business if you discriminated among your employees based on nationality alone, and they knew about it. What would your workers do if they found out that some of their colleagues earn 100 *times* their salary by virtue of simply being foreign? Well, could you blame them if they took the story to…
Roy Chaderton, Venezuela’s Ambassador to the OAS, has always been a curious little beast. A product of Venezuela’s ancien regime, he is one of the few highly-educated diplomats that remained in good standing with Chávez after the Revolution came to power. After the tides turned, many people in top positions turned in their resignations in disgust – Ambassador…
(Disclaimer: I wrote this post last night; obviously, after today’s events, Venezuela is NOT being ignored in Washington, but I will post about this tonight) By now, it has become common knowledge that Latin America simply does not care about the abuses heaped by the Maduro government on our people. Their main goal is to ensure…
What a disaster the recent UNASUR visit to Venezuela has become. If you don’t know, UNASUR is the main international body for South American nations. A brainchild of Hugo Chávez and his allies, the body has struggled to gain international recognition. When they announced they were traveling to Venezuela to help foster dialogue, few in…
Canada is in da house! Today we have a Guest Post from Sancho Panza, who went to see Venezuela’s Ambassador designate to Ottawa give a bit of a speech and lived to tell the tale… On Thursday, February 26th in a balmy Toronto, in a beautiful room of one the University of Toronto’s most beautiful…
Our co-blogger Emiliana Duarte was on Al Jazeera’s The Stream the other day, sharing her thoughts on Venezuela with, among others, a very unpleasant misinformed gringo chavista (isn’t it time these people moved on and became “experts” on Greece or something?). Here’s the video. Kudos to Emiliana for doing a fine job.
There’s a certain tendency among conservatives to see the macroeconomic chaos Venezuela is experiencing as the inevitable result of radical leftist government. But this must be one of the easier fallacies to refute: Latin America is peppered with radical leftist governments that are chipping away at democracy in a context of macroeconomic order and growing prosperity. Prof.…
This article by Spain’s El País is a bombshell. In a secret report, Venezuelan ambassador to Spain Mario Isea talks about the opportunity chavismo has in Podemos, the upstart party that is leading in the polls in Spain. That Podemos is Spain’s version of chavismo is no news. That the memo, part of a presentation…
Cross-posted on CaracasChronicles in Japanese. This April, as the streets of Caracas, San Cristobal and many other Venezuelan cities were alive with protests, I felt powerfully called on to do something, even if small, to lend my support. Though I was in Montreal, I found myself helping my Japanese friend to organize “#SOSVenezuela en Japón”…
One of the challenges of writing about Venezuela for a foreign audience is that while your readers may be less informed about the country than you are, they generally have a refined sense of BS detection. Tell them what is going on, and they will be amazed, horrified even. But if you go too far…
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