Fausta's Blog

In today’s upside-down world, just as food rationing starts, the UN Congratulates Venezuela for Reducing Hunger, handing out an excellent photo-op to the new dictator,

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, poses with FAO director Jose Graziano da Silva. On Sunday, The FAO, aawarded Venezuela a special certificate for reducing hunger by half, despite current food shortages in the South American nation.

Too bad they didn’t choose this location at the nearest store,

Maduro set off on a triumphal tour of Europe, stopping in Portugal, Italy, and visiting with the Pope,

just as if he was a legitimately elected head of state.

Over in Venezuela, Venezuela’s cardinal says pope should pressure Nicolas Maduro focus on democracy, coexistence, and, To avoid crime, Venezuelans run together.

Wouldn’t surprise me at all if Nicolas gets a Nobel Peace Prize before Diosdado gets rid of him.

Imagine, if you may, this sequence of events:

• Dictator dies
• Dictatorship expels superpower military attaches in March the same day dictator dies
  
• Dictatorship perpetuates (or at least attempts to perpetuate) itself through electoral fraud
• Superpower ignores election results
• Big OAS pow-wow date looms on the horizon
• Dictatorship kidnaps citizen of superpower
• Behind-the-scenes deal takes place
• To add urgency, the dictatorship places the citizen of the superpower in one of the most dangerous jails in our hemisphere
• Citizen is released and returned
• Superpower’s Secretary of State and dictatorship’s foreign minister get together for photo-op
• Everybody’s happy

You don’t think that’s what happened in the Timothy Tracy case?

Think again:

John Kerry Meets With Venezuela’s Foreign Minister; Talk Of Improving Relations

On his first trip to Latin America since taking office, Kerry said he was hopeful that a rapprochement could be achieved. The meeting, which came at Venezuela’s request, took place just hours after Venezuela released from prison an American filmmaker who had been jailed on espionage charges, removing an immediate irritant in the relationship.
…
Meanwhile, in a speech to the 35-member OAS annual general assembly, Kerry did not mention the developments with Venezuela, but reiterated U.S. concerns that some countries in the hemisphere are backsliding on their commitments to democracy and seeking to weaken OAS institutions that monitor and report on human rights.

Any questions?

UPDATE:
Linked by Pirate’s Cove. Thank you!

Primera parte ayer; segunda parte hoy,

Primera parte hoy,

Ni Uribe ni Bayly tienen pelos en la lengua. Bayly presentará la segunda parte esta noche en MegaTV. Pondré los YouTubes mañana.

[To my English-only readers, I don't post a translation because of time constraints.]

Scandal in Washington; Hope in Latin America

As a Huge crowd cheers Argentine leader’s 10-year rule, ‘Bad vibes’ spoil Kirchners’ decade in Argentina.

“Bad vibes” is one way to call high inflation, near-default debt, persecuting economists, capital flight, takeover of private pension funds, Aerolíneas Argentinas and Repsol’s YPF, and the decline of the farming industry while the judiciary and media are under siege , and Cristina keeps making rude noises about the Falklands (between shopping trips to Paris).

Yeah, “bad vibes”.

AFP has a report in Spanish on the “K” decade,

Related:
Google no longer able to pay Android developers in Argentina, pulling apps on July 27th

Developers in Argentina have begun receiving letters from Google informing them that “Google Play will no longer be able to accept payments on behalf of developers registered in Argentina starting June 27, 2013.” The change applies to both paid apps and apps that use in-app purchases. The move appears to be related to new, restrictive regulations the Argentine government has imposed on currency exchanges, which The Telegraph detailed this past September.

Article sent by three friends on how the dissidents that the Communist regime has allowed to travel have been met by their Miami compatriots:
Dissidents Find ‘Cuba Outside Cuba’ in Miami

When Cuban hunger striker Guillermo Farinas arrived in Miami, he said he was prepared to face rejection from radical members of the Cuban-American community who do not believe in pacific opposition.

The reaction has been far different. When he went to the Versailles restaurant, a traditional gathering spot for older exiles in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood, he was embraced. During an event at Miami’s iconic Freedom Tower, he was applauded.

“The love the exiles in Miami have shown us makes us discard what the government, over 54 years, has planted in our minds,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

While you’re at it, if you understand spoken Spanish, listen to Jaime Bayly’s interview with Berta Soler,

Part 1,

Parts 2, 3 with Laura Maria Labrada and Belkis Cantillo (also in the photo above), and 4.

BlogHer invited me to write about the Heritage immigration study:
The Heritage Foundation and IQ: Not a Reflection on the GOP.

IQ is a side issue; the real issue is what policies and laws the government enacts, and we should be cautious when watershed laws are rushed through.

Please read the article and leave a comment.

The big news this week, Fascist Venezuela: The end of the National Assembly

ARGENTINA
Buenos Aires Lures Foreign Buyers
A hunger for stable U.S. dollars is creating opportunities for buyers to nab steeply discounted properties. As long as the properties are owned by sellers willing to do a foreign-account-to-foreign-account sale, that is.

BOLIVIA
Bolivia throws out USAID

BRAZIL
Dams in the Amazon
The rights and wrongs of Belo Monte
Having spent heavily to make the world’s third-biggest hydroelectric project greener, Brazil risks getting a poor return on its $14 billion investment

Shock over latest Brazil bus rape
Police in Brazil are looking for a man who raped a woman on a moving Rio de Janeiro bus, in a case that has shocked the host nation of the football 2014 World Cup.

CHILE
Statistics in Chile
How many Chileans?

COLOMBIA
Colombian government FARC peace talks, first 6 months

CUBA
Political Change in Cuba so that Everything Remains the Same

FBI Adds Cop Killer Joanne Chesimard To Most Wanted Terrorist List
She Was Convicted Of Gunning Down A New Jersey State Trooper In 1973

In poor health, Cuban prisoner of conscience Marcos Lima released from jail

COSTA RICA
Costa Rica Declares Obama Visit a National Holiday

ECUADOR
Judge dismisses $19B Ecuador judgment against Chevron’s Canadian subsidiary

MEXICO
Obama In Mexico Gives Cartels Short Shrift

Evolving U.S.-Mexico Relations and Obama’s Visit

Mexico’s Drug War and Booming Economy

THE GANG OF EIGHT’S TORRENT OF IMMIGRANTS: IS THE REAL NUMBER 57 MILLION?

NICARAGUA
Nicaragua cloud forest ‘under siege’
Indigenous communities say that illegal logging and land speculators are threatening Central America’s most important tropical forest.

PUERTO RICO
Another top university official in Puerto Rico resigns amid protest

URUGUAY
‘Breaking the wall of impunity’ in Uruguay
Uruguayan judges and prosecutors begin to defy the Supreme Court of Justice’s closure of human rights investigations.

VENEZUELA
For foreign non-illustrated media and chavista supporters: chavismo media lock up

Mario Vargas Llosa: La muerte lenta del chavismo
PIEDRA DE TOQUE. Al mismo tiempo que el Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro convertía el Parlamento en un aquelarre de brutalidad, la represión se amplificaba y se detenía a funcionarios por votar a la oposición

The week’s posts and podcast:
About cinco de mayo, the American holiday

Venezuela: 50 shades of crazy

Obama in Costa Rica

Cuba sheltering Most Wanted Terrorist

Venezuela: The Cuban perp?

Obama heads to Mexico

Fascist Venezuela: The end of the National Assembly

Bolivia: No term limit for Evo

Ecuadorian Ambassador to Peru allegedly kicks a woman in public

Cuba’s message to dissidents: You had your trip, now we’re coming after you

Immigration from south of the Mexican border

Podcast: In Silvio Canto’s podcast.

Nicolás Maduro first said the yankis were going to kill Henrique Capriles, then he said the Salvadorans were plotting to kill Maduro, and now’s saying that Colombian ex-president Alvaro Uribe is plotting to kill him, too,

“Uribe is behind a plot to kill me,” Maduro said in a televised speech. “Uribe is a killer. I have enough evidence of who is conspiring, and there are sectors of the Venezuelan right that are involved.”

He did not provide details.

Maduro, as we know, talks to the birds, and placed an oath on anyone voting against him.

Yesterday Maduro also said he’d “willing to talk to the Devil for the peace of Venezuela”, while casting aspersions on the opposition (video in Spanish),

Rather than worrying about Uribe, Maduro ought to keep en eye on Diosdado, or he may get his wish sooner than he thinks.

Linked by Pirate’s Cove. Thank you!