Condi's Venezuelan Democracy: Only Her Vote Counts
After working to inflame the cartoon controversy, Condi Rice is now apparently on the war path against the popularly supported and democratically elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.
"The international community has just got to be much more active in supporting and defending the Venezuelan people," Rice said.
This is an amazing statement that reeks of arrogance. Rice is proposing the international community protect the Venezuelan people by working to actively undercut the person the Venezuelan people chose to lead; a person chosen via elections verified as legitimate by credible international observers. In effect, Rice is calling the Venezuelan people dumb fucks who need protection from themselves.
But, let's be clear, Rice no more cares about the majority of Venezuelans than she cares about what Michael Moore had for breakfast. The Bush's administration's policy in Latin America and the Caribbean is not about democracy or humanitarianism, it's about protecting the economic interests of international and American corporations and those foreign elites whose interests are intermingled with the corporatists.
The majority of Venezuelans understand they have a better chance of reaping some benefit from their oil reserves with Chavez than under anything Rice and Bush would ever prpose or support.
posted by Macswain at
10:34 AM
2 Comments:
Um, after reading some of the other related BBC articles, it seems like the election in Venezuela had some serious issues (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4496586.stm). It seems as if there was a large-scale boycott of the election there. It seems like your implication that the vote represents the majority opinion of Venezuelans (even if it was monitored by internation observers) is an oversimplification.
That having been said, I agree that Condi is a scumbag and that the Bushies don't care about democracy as much as they do promoting the interests of big business.
If they cared so much about democracy they could work to ensure that there are no more voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida.
By
Anonymous, at 10:34 PM
In the 2004 recall election Chavez received 58% of the vote despite massive funding by the Bush administration for the opposition. That election was the most closely monitored in Venezuelan history and one of the most closely monitored of any democracy ever.
This result was a huge embarassment to the opposition and Bush and undercut their arguments as to the extent of Chavez's support.
This brings us to the recent parliamentary elections which the opposition boycotted. There can be a certain number of reasons for a boycott - ranging from legitimate concerns of an undemocratic process, on one hand, to an understanding that you are about to get your ass whopped and would prefer to spin a boycott, on the other.
International observers were also present for these recent elections and I have yet to hear that there was anything amiss with how they were run. Please enlighten me if you have some info. We have seen populists, like elitists, turn to manipulating elections in the past. Yet, in the absence of any evidence of such, I'm inclined to believe the Venezuelan elitists - and their supporters in the Bush adminisration - did not want to suffer the embarassment of another sizable loss.
By
Macswain, at 10:01 PM
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