Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Venezuela: Leopoldo Lopez cries out to wife he was being tortured

Leopoldo López has been held in solitary confinement for 71 days, and has not been allowed to speak to his lawyers for 81 days.

Yesterday his wife tweeted this,
“Leopoldo himself cried out from his cell that he’s being tortured. I demand to see him and know he’s well!”

She was not allowed to see him.

In Venezuela, prisoners say abuse is so bad they are forced to eat pasta mixed with excrement

Earlier this month, the judge who upheld López’s jail sentence was shot dead during a robbery.

Daniel blogs From official terror to article 350 – 1) life in Caracas, the least of which being,

If you are living in opposition areas your Internet and light and water services have noticeably decreased in “quality”, as if they ever had any in the first place.

From official terror to article 350 – 2) state terrorism reflects chavismo division

Apparently Maduro Is Rapidly Running Out Of Friends; the question is, who comes after him?

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

UPDATE
Trending at Bad Blue.

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Cuba: Pres. Trump expected to clamp down on Cuba UPDATED WITH SPEECH

Pres. Trump is on his way to Miami, where he will deliver a speech reversing Obama’s policy of embracing and backing Cuba’s murderous and repressive apartheid dictatorship.

The administration says its goal is to put an end to business transactions that financially benefit the Castro regime while the Cuban people get little in return.

Tourist travel and transactions with Cuban military will be curbed, but many normalization steps will be maintained

While the individual cultural travel rule will be terminated, many of the regulations to relax trade and travel will remain, along with some of the measures that allowed increased telecommunications services. The countries’ embassies will remain open and the “wet foot, dry foot” policy won’t be reinstated. And U.S. travelers who still head to Cuba will continue to be able to bring back as many cigars and as much rum as they want.

Individual travel will remain legal through more than 10 categories, including research and humanitarian work, and family visits.

UPDATE
Full speech

Earlier,
News live stream below the fold:
[Read more…]

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Colombia’s pro-FARC land reform

Pres. Santos’s May 29th land redistribution decree is “right out of Cuba’s totalitarian playbook,” writes Mary O’Grady:
Colombia’s Chávez-Style Land Reform. Ranches can be taken if they are not in the social and ecological interest. (emphasis added)

To implement it, the Santos-controlled Congress granted him rule-by-decree powers much like what Chávez got from his National Assembly.

The land reform is the product of those powers and will advance the full FARC takeover of the country’s institutions. As FARC leader Iván Márquez asserted in an October 2012 speech in Oslo, “The concept of land is inextricably linked to territory.” They “are an indivisible whole that go beyond the mere agrarian aspect and touch vital strategic interests.”

Those interests are eventual iron-fisted control of the country. It is why the FARC demanded, in Havana, that the government claim arbitrary powers to expropriate land and redistribute it. Under Mr. Santos’s decree the state will rule on whether there is an illegal concentration of land and local committees will decide when the use of private property is not meeting social or ecological interests. Courts are sidelined; property is taken administratively.

And how does that advance “the full FARC takeover of the country’s institutions”?

The rural areas where FARC has concentrated for transition to civilian life are also areas where there will be new property titling. Those same zones are slated to become congressional districts, where newly-minted FARC politicians, flush with weapons and cash, probably will be the only ones on the ballot.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE

Here’s Santos yukking it up with his FARC buddies,

“How shameful!
“So much laughter with and homage of terrorists from @JuanManSantos and his administration, while Colombians ask to be heard.”

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Castro & Lopez Rivera

Zach Dorfman writes about the communist mentors:
How Fidel Castro Supported Terrorism in America. ‘FALN was started in the mid-1960’s with a nucleus . . . that received advanced training in Cuba.’ (emphasis added)

According to court documents, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, who is believed to have helped co-found the FALN, told an undercover NYPD officer in 1983 that he had received explosives training in Cuba. And the FBI estimated that by 1973, roughly 135 Puerto Rican militants had received “extensive instruction in guerilla war tactics, preparation of explosive artifacts, and sophisticated methods of sabotage” from Fidel Castro’s intelligence services.

The full extent of the FALN’s Cuba connections is unknown. But they may be more enduring than has been publicly reported. According to an NYPD document I discovered at the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford—undated, but apparently circa 1977—by that time officials had come to believe that “the FALN was started in the mid-1960’s with a nucleus of Puerto Rican terrorists that received advanced training in Cuba. . . . After their advanced training in Cuba they returned to Puerto Rico and a wave of bombings and incendiary incidents struck the [latter] island. Within the last few years they have shifted their activities to the mainland. . . . It is believed that they have maintained close links and may in fact work closely with Cuban intelligence operatives.”

That training would help explain the FALN’s professionalism, as well as its ability to bedevil law enforcement. An FALN instructional manual, which I also found at Hoover, includes sophisticated directives for compartmentalized clandestine communications between different “cadres,” or cells, as well as espionage and countersurveillance techniques. “One must observe religiously the rules and regulations of security in order to protect the organization, its cadres, its secrets, its documents, its arms, [safe] houses, and other instruments of work,” the document says. According to the manual, this hyperattention to security even extended to meetings of the MLN, the FALN’s above-ground political organization.

Viewed from this broader perspective, the FALN was not merely a “highly motivated and intelligent adversary,” as the NYPD document I found puts it. It was an instrument in the decadeslong shadow war between the U.S. and Cuba.

López Rivera is scheduled to march on Sunday‘s Puerto Rican parade.

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Cuba: One caption says it all

Article title: Inside Manzana de Gomez, Cuba’s new luxury mall

Photo caption:

“Antonio, a Havana local, visited the new mall and laughed at the prices.”

Flashback:

The ultimate Potemkin village show went to Cuba, obscene as it could get, which inspired Juan Abreu’s NSFW Ayer soñé con el culo de Lagerfeld (H/T Babalú). Hollywood Stars Cavort in Cuba while Arrests of Dissidents Hit New High

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Venezuela: RCTV shut down 10 years ago

The great Joel D. Hirst remembers RCTV – The Day the Music Died.

Hugo Chávez denied by decree RCTV’s license renewal, not by due process of law. Hirst writes,

Ten years ago now – ten years. Maybe that was when it ended. It certainly was dramatic. Hugo Chavez had just won a landslide re-election in a contest that was free but not fair (a distinction without a difference, thanks Jimmy Carter!). Rapid change was going to begin. 2007 – that was the year; nationalizations of Venezuela’s oil fields, collapsing Chavez’s own tri-color support base into one monolithic political party called – wait for it – the Socialist Party. A referendum on a new constitution that would do away with democracy once and for all. And, some payback. Ending the last public TV station whose editorial line did not bow to the whims of the despot.

Even then I knew this was a crucial moment. I did a podcast and posted on it, knowing democracy was done for in Venezuela. I can’t explain why I knew; maybe it was simple speculation that Chávez would never stop accruing power.

I even remember making the actual podcast from my kitchen table during a very warm evening. This is the only podcast, out of hundreds, that I specifically remember making.

RCTV was closed. Its assets were seized.

A year later, its anchorman was stabbed to death in his apartment.

Cross-posted at WoW!Magazine.

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Venezuela: Nomura was in on the Goldman Sachs bond purchase UPDATED

When Goldman Sachs essentially sent the communist regime a US$2.8 billion lifeline, I said,

As long as someone is willing to be part of the debt pyramid scheme, it’ll continue. Let’s hope it’s not the U.S.

Sure enough,
Japanese investment bank Nomura admits part in Goldman Venezuelan bond deal

A Japanese investment bank has admitted it was part of a controversial deal with Goldman Sachs to buy Venezuelan government bonds.Nomura Securities said it also bought about $100m worth of the bonds last week, according to Reuters reports.
. . .
Reuters reported that Nomura said its purchase had cost $30m.
Goldman said its asset-management arm acquired the bonds “on the secondary market from a broker and did not interact with the Venezuelan government”.
. . .
Even at 31 cents on the dollar, Nomura is taking a risk buying the bonds. In November, its own head of Latin America fixed-income strategy, Siobhan Mordan, warned investors: “The bottom line for bondholders is not if, but when is the timing for debt default?”

When? When the debt pyramid collapses, that’s when.

Ellen Wald posts,

Goldman Sachs, apparently, was unaware that: 1) Historically, when a political party is forced out through revolution, coup, or other extralegal means, the new government does not always pay the debts incurred by the old one, and 2) It is strategically beneficial to the opposition party in Venezuela to deny payment to Goldman Sachs.

Wald assumes the current regime can be ousted, Maduro or no Maduro. For the time being, that’s unlikely.

I hope I’m wrong.

UPDATE
About the pyramid,
WSJ:

Nomura was approached by the same intermediary, the London subsidiary of a small broker, Dinosaur Merchant Bank Ltd., some of the people said.

Goldman bought the bonds for an emerging-market fund it manages on behalf of outside investors. Nomura bought the bonds through its broker-dealer, which will seek to sell them to clients at a higher price in the coming weeks, the people said.

Buyer beware.

UPDATE, Friday June 2,
Goldman’s Venezuela Bond Trade Wasn’t Reviewed by Top Executives

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