Tag Archives: Iraq

Dec
7
2011
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ICYMI – Israel: Chávez backs incoming terrorism in the South Cone

Israel: Chávez backs incoming terrorism in the South Cone
El Universal

Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon declared on Monday in an interview that Iran is framing, with the little help of Venezuela, a “terrorist infrastructure” in Latin America against the United States, Israel and their allies.

“The idea is framing a terrorist infrastructure to be underlying for a while and in due time be able to attack the interests of the United States or in the United States,” as well as “Israeli or Jewish interests or of any other country opposed to their political stance,” he uttered, as quoted by Efe.

Ya’alon, who completed in Montevideo a visit to Uruguay where he met with Uruguayan Vice-President Danilo Astori, among other authorities, put as an example of such theoretical strategy an alleged plot against the Saudi ambassador to the United States, recently replaced.

That case, where the United States fingered Iran and which was condemned last November 18 by the UN General Assembly, is not the only one, as proven by other episodes in the past, he remarked.

“Such a terrorist infrastructure worked already in 1992 against the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires and in 1994, against the AMIA Jewish community center,” also in the Argentinean capital city, he specified.

According to Ya’alon, the strategy forms part of Tehran plans to “export the Iranian revolution, firstly to surrounding countries,” such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon or the Palestinian territory, “and later to the West.”

The Vice Prime Minister, who in the nineties was the chief of military intelligence, explained that data available in his country reveal that in Latin America “such an infrastructure includes Muslim elements existent in the area and it also relies on drug kingpins.”

“It is also based on the impunity enjoyed by Iranian diplomats in the area” and “takes advantage very especially of the hospitality of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and in this way enters the whole continent,” he denounced.

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Sep
14
2010
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The Cost of Chavez

This article was originally posted by Front Page Magazine

Since coming to power in 1998, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez has presided over radical changes inside the country. Promising to create “21st century socialism,” he has reformed the constitution, giving government-funded health care to all. He has nationalized key industries in repeated attempts to address what he perceives as an imbalance between Venezuela’s business elites and its masses of poor, including a “re-nationalization” of the oil sector. He’s worked within OPEC to keep the price of oil high and contain America’s power (while also blaming it for his economic woes).

Most alarmingly, he has turned into the bully of Latin America, purchasing large quantities of Russian weapons, threatening his neighbors with war and constantly yammering on about American assassination plots and military threats whenever he needs a boost to his domestic approval ratings. He has supported the FARC terrorists in their insurgency campaign against US-ally Colombia. Clearly, the man has been busy. So busy, in fact, that it was to be expected that he would drop at least one of the balls he was juggling. Too bad for the people of Venezuela that the ball in question was the one concerned with keeping crime low and the streets safe: Under his leadership, Venezuela has become a disaster.

The statistics are sobering, and astonishing. On the whole, the country, with 26 million people, saw a whopping 19,000 murders in 2009. To put that into perspective, the state of Texas, with a comparable population of roughly 24.5 million, experienced 1,374 murders in 2008, considerably less than a tenth of Venezuela’s total. Indeed, the United States as a whole, with roughly 12 times the population of Venezuela, recorded nearly 3,000 fewer murders in 2008 than did Venezuela in 2009. (Please note the differing years reflect the most recent available data for both nations.)

Put another way, it is safer to live in Iraq than it is in Venezuela.

 
Aug
31
2010
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Will Chávez steal parliamentary elections?

This article was originally posted by The Miami Herald

The situation in Venezuela is becoming dangerously tense. Ramón Guillermo Aveledo says that the Sept. 26 parliamentary elections may be the last ones in the country — ever.

Aveledo, a prestigious lawyer, writer and former president of Congress, is the executive secretary of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática, the umbrella organization for the united opposition.

What’s happening in the country? Possibly, Hugo Chávez could lose, so he’s looking for a way to tamper with the results. One month away from the elections, the most reliable survey — by Consultores 21, as disclosed by expert Joaquín Pérez Rodríguez — gives the victory to the opposition, 52 to 42 percent.

That fact is reinforced by another question that is even more revealing. When voters are asked whether they like or reject Chávez, 37 percent say they like him, 56 percent don’t.

Obviously, Chávez’s popularity has plummeted for at least five powerful reasons:

• The unbearable violence that has turned Caracas into one of the world’s most dangerous cities and all of Venezuela into a slaughterhouse with more victims than Iraq, as The New York Times has reported. Almost 120,000 persons have been murdered since Chávez came to power. Violence has risen fourfold.

• The whole of society detests the existence of paramilitary armed gangs in the service of the government. CNN called them “Chávez’s Guardians” in an excellent documentary that rattled the country. Their task is to intimidate and mistreat the population.

• The infinite clumsiness of a government that, despite receiving a torrent of petrodollars, is incapable of supplying markets, conserving food (millions of kilos rot in warehouses or vanish), maintaining the infrastructures or equipping hospitals halfway decently. With good reason, Venezuelans perceive that no other country in South America is as poorly governed.

• Venezuela’s uncomfortable occupation by Cubans and the donation of much of Venezuela’s wealth to Havana, Managua, Bolivia and the rest of the famished family of 21st-century socialism. With those subsidies, Chávez buys his international importance and fosters the highest level of corruption Venezuela has ever known — which is saying a lot.

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