FPF-fwd. - Url.:
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=47673
This editorial was originally published on April 10, 2002 ...
within 48 hours the April 12, 2002 coup d'etat had engulfed
Venezuela as Dictator for a Day Petdro Carmona Estanga seized
power and dissolved the Constitution, the Legislature and the
Judiciary in one fell swoop...
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=2839
Will corruption and injustice gain a stranglehold over
Venezuela's misery again?
VHeadline.com editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: With
new-found democracy and legitimacy now fighting for its survival
on political barricades in Caracas, the question must surely be
asked if truth and legitimacy is to be allowed to win the day ..
or, if Venezuela will be plunged into yet another four decades
of corruption and misery, where more than 80% of its population
has already been subjugated by political manipulators and
corrupt cliques, whose percentage is in the lower single digits,
but appears to have all the mouth in the current media war
against the democratically-elected government of President Hugo
Chavez Frias.
The question is not, or should not, be focused on the
personality of Chavez Frias, who may alternately be liked or
disliked according to the flavor of the day. The greater truth
is that the President has been elected, by a democratic
majority, to serve the Venezuelan people, and he has the clear
backing of a majority in the democratically-elected National
Assembly (AN), which was itself constituted by a reform
Constitutional Assembly, which was itself ratified by an
overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan people in a National
Referendum.
Chavez Frias chooses to call his specifically Venezuelan brand
of UK Tony Blair's "Third Way" socialism a "peaceful revolution"
... it is a long and tedious battle from the corrupt abuses and
blacker excesses of old discredited Accion Democratica (AD) and
Christian Socialist (Copei), where suppression of the news and
reporting freedoms were a rule of thumb and few, if any,
Venezuelan journalists would then have dared to say even a
fraction of what is being said today in a continuous spew of
anti-government rhetoric window-dressed as freedom of
expression.
What, however, is now at odds is a travesty of everything that
has been fought for as freedom.
The very manipulators and politically corrupt that festered
their way through the last forty years of Venezuela's decline,
are venting their venom against the Chavez Frias government with
a newly-discovered moral rectitude that belies their own deceit.
Corrupt executives and managers who have been swindling the
State-owned oil corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) out
of $ millions for years, are attempting to usurp the
government's lawful right to decide.
They're joined by corrupt union officials, typified by the
Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) president (?) Carlos Ortega,
who has stubbornly refused to hand in documents to establish
legitimacy under the Venezuelan Constitution, which mandated
democratic elections to decide trade union representation after
decades of unionized corruption and political gerrymandering.
Yet these people are taken seriously as Venezuela struggles
through its rebirth into recognizable democracy...
It would have been so easy for military-educated Lt. Col. (ret.)
Hugo Chavez Frias to team up with his 1992 failed coup comrade
Lt. Col. (ret.) Francisco Arias Cardenas to replace the doddery
Presidency of Dr. Rafael Caldera with a military regime. God
knows, Venezuela was ready for it after years of "pretend
democracy" under the likes of Jaime Lusinchi and Carlos Andres
Perez...
Any self-respecting reader will immediately recognize that, for
a country ... any country ... to thrive and succeed, the Rule of
Law must replace the assorted banditry of political thugs and
miscreants.
AD and Copei have been thoroughly discredited and, although they
twist and turn and pretend to be something else than their
rotten core, their intention is clearly to reinstate the
corruption and injustices that preceded their demise in December
1998 General Elections.
Today's question is not whether Chavez Frias will stand or
fall...
The question is if democracy will prevail ... or if Venezuela
will, once again, be plunged into thoughtless and unfeeling
misery for another half century ... or, this time around,
perhaps more?
Roy S. Carson
Editor@VHeadline.com
http://www.vheadline.com/spanish
http://www.vheadline.com/espanol
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