Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Venezuela: Cuba and Iran in the picture

Yesterday’s referendum results will remain symbolic, by design:

“In reality, it is the Venezuelan regime that has already brought foreign intervention into Venezuela by calling on Cuba, Iran, and Russia to circumvent its sovereignty and provide lethal aid to its violent suppression and intimidation of the Venezuelan people.”

Cuba:
How Cuba Runs Venezuela. Havana’s security apparatus is deeply embedded in the armed forces.

To keep its hold on Venezuela, Cuba has embedded a Soviet-style security apparatus. In a July 13 column, titled “Cubazuela” for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba website, Roberto Álvarez Quiñones reported that in Venezuela today there are almost 50 high-ranking Cuban military officers, 4,500 Cuban soldiers in nine battalions, and “34,000 doctors and health professionals with orders to defend the tyranny with arms.” Cuba’s interior ministry provides Mr. Maduro’s personal security. “Thousands of other Cubans hold key positions of the State, Government, military and repressive Venezuelan forces, in particular intelligence and counterintelligence services.”

Every Venezuelan armed-forces commander has at least one Cuban minder, if not more, a source close to the military told me. Soldiers complain that if they so much as mention regime shortcomings over a beer at a bar, their superiors know about it the next day. On July 6 Reuters reported that since the beginning of April “nearly 30 members of the military have been detained for deserting or abandoning their post and almost 40 for rebellion, treason, or insubordination.”

The idea of using civilian thugs to beat up Venezuelan protesters comes from Havana, as Cuban-born author Carlos Alberto Montanerexplained in a recent El Nuevo Herald column, “Venezuela at the Edge of the Abyss.”

Iran:
Venezuela is Syria in the New World
Podcast:

Read more (emphasis added)
[Read more…]

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Argentina: Cristina, Iran, #Nisman, and The New Yorker and The Tower reports

Six months ago, prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead of a bullet to the head on January 28 in his Buenos Aires apartment, on the eve of the day when he was scheduled to testify to congress on his findings regarding a civil lawsuit he had filed the week prior accusing president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of colluding with Iran to obscure the investigation into the 1994 AMIA bombing.

Nisman’s civil lawsuit was dismissed.

The investigation into his murder is still pending.

Three days ago, president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner tweeted a transcript and video of her interview with The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins,

Cristina may have been hoping for a puff piece like Vogue magazine’s infamous profile of Asma al-Assad.

Filkins met her at the Quinta Olivos, asked questions, and let her talk (which she did – boy, did she ever, for over two hours).

Rather than a puff piece on the self-absorbed Cristina, Filkins wrote an excellent article on the Nisman case,
Death of a Prosecutor
Alberto Nisman accused Iran and Argentina of colluding to bury a terrorist attack. Did it get him killed? This is what Filkins had to say about his conversation with Cristina,

Pesident Kirchner works in an ornate mansion in central Buenos Aires known as “the Pink House”—for the tint of its walls, once supplied by horse blood—but her official residence, in a northern suburb, is called Quinta de Olivos. Dating to the sixteenth century, Olivos, as it is known, is a white three-storied palace that resembles an enormous wedding cake.

When I met Kirchner there, two months after Nisman died, the mystery was still dominating the news. I was ushered into a wide split-level room that had been set up as a television studio. Kirchner entered a few minutes later, in a flouncy dress and heavy makeup, followed by two dozen aides, nearly all of them men. With the cameras running, Kirchner reached over, before the interview began, to fix my hair. “Is there some girl who can help him with his hair?” she asked. “We want you to be pretty.” Then she began to straighten her own. “I want to primp myself a bit,” she said. “Excuse me, I’m a woman, besides being the President: the dress, the image—”

“Divine!” one of her aides called from off the set.

While Filkins did not refute any of Cristina’s lies, his is not a puff piece at all,

Over time, Kirchner has grown more dictatorial and, according to muckraking reports, more corrupt.

The article must be read in its entirety.

Likewise, Eamonn MacDonagh reports at The Tower on Alberto Nisman’s Secret Recordings, Revealed
Before he was murdered, the Argentinian prosecutor investigating the massive 1994 Buenos Aires bombing wiretapped over 40,000 phone calls. His one question: Did the Argentinian government conspire to cover up Iran’s involvement in the attack?

An idea of the importance of the recordings can be gleaned from a February 2013 conversation between alleged Argentine government intelligence operative Ramón Héctor “Allan” Bogado and Khalil. In that call, which was widely reported in the Argentine press, Bogado told Khalil, “We have a video of the [AMIA] attack,” leading Khalil to reprimand him for not being more careful when speaking on the phone. Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure who Bogado meant by “we,” but one distinct possibility may be that the AMIA bombing was filmed by Argentina’s intelligence services, or that a video recording of it, perhaps containing vital evidence about the identity of the terrorists who carried out the attack, fell into their hands.

Both Filkins’s and MacDonagh’s articles are indispensable reading on the Nisman case.

Investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, in his show Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism For All), continues his coverage of the Nisman murder, and commissioned forensic expert Cyril Wecht for his opinion on whether Nisman’s death was a murder or a suicide. You can watch the report here.

Wecht’s interview starts 35 minutes into this YouTube; the show is in Spanish but Wecht’s portion is in English,

One of the world’s foremost forensic experts, Wecht asserts that Nisman’s death is most likely a murder.

Which comes as no surprise.

Also in Lanata’s report: The man in charge of internet security at Nisman’s apartment building has been in charge of cyber defense for Argentina’s military since January.

Tom Clancy would have had a field day.

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Venezuela healthcare system approaching Cuban levels

One of the most tragic consequences of Venezuela’s premeditated Cubanization is the descent of its healthcare:
Venezuelans Suffer Amid Crumbling Health System
As country’s economy struggles, lack of hospital funding and widespread shortages of medicine and surgical supplies put patients at risk
For instance:

In late November, the director of cardiovascular surgery at the University Hospital sent out letters to the cardiology ward’s patients, telling them they were being discharged. The reason cited: a dearth of operating-room supplies—no catheters, no working blood-processing machine, no heart valves.

A comment on the following graph: Any information on Cuba’s spending is provided by the government, and, therefore, dubious,

Read Juan Forero’s article in full, and browse through the comments.

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Venezuela: AP does Orwell so well

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

George Orwell, 1984.

AP Report on Venezuela Touts How Chronic Shortages ‘Bury Mindless Consumerism’ (also at Bizzyblog)

It’s amazing how any reporter can cover the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela without saying a word about how the country got there.

But Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier was up to the task. In a bizarre, sickening November 20 report on how its people are having to get “creative” in the face of chronic shortages of basic goods to get by, she acted as if those shortages — and the over five decades of worse problems in Cuba — somehow just happened.

Dreier also virtually celebrated the fact that conditions in that country can be seen as the fulfillment of a fond “dream” of deceased dictator Hugo Chavez’s dreams

Among Hugo’s “dream” you could count the Bolivarian [un]sanitary napkin.

I suggest Dreier try those.

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Venezuela: Beyond-the-grave nepotism

Your country seeks a seat in the UN’s Security Council. Who better than the late dictator’s daughter, who has never held a job?

Security Council-ready!

Chávez Heir Lands First Job: U.N. Envoy
Some say María Gabriela Chávez, a daughter of Venezuela’s late Socialist leader Hugo Chávez, is unprepared to be deputy ambassador to the United Nations, as Venezuela seeks a Security Council seat on the world body.

Ms. Chávez, 34 years old, has never held a formal job and is known as a socialite—the Kardashian of Sabaneta, her father’s hometown—who posts “selfies” on social media, said former diplomats and political analysts. Unlike her older sister, Rosa Virginia Chávez, who studied international relations, the younger Ms. Chávez has demonstrated little inclination for geopolitics.

Rosa Virgina is not to be confused with her other sister, Rosinés Chávez who has demonstrated some, shall we say, unsocialistic tendencies,

while María Gabriela knows all the right people,

She’ll fit right in at the UN.

[Post corrected to add omitted text]


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Cubazuela: Free healthcare for all

Without further comment,

Cuba:
An essay on the decay of the Pedro Borras Hospital, an Art Deco landmark building which housed one of the best hospitals in the Caribbean, The Ghost of a Preventable Death (via Babalu).

Venezuela:
Life in short supply at the Hospital Universitario’s HIV department,

“There are like sixty-five thousand patients receiving treatment in the country. We receive about ten percent of them,” he says, referring to the Universitario, a public entity supported by the government. “There are normally about twenty types of antiretrovirals in the country, of about thirty that exist in the world. Most of them are now not available.”

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Venezuela: Tricks for bucks, Trix from Doral

A roundup on the rolling disaster 21st Century Socialism has wrought:

Tricks for bucks: Sex, Dollar Bills, and the Venezuelan Black Market. Just like in Cuba,

Venezuelans are living in a two-tiered society, in which those with access to dollars can buy goods that are unavailable to others, as Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, points out.

Trix from Doral: Shippers send more boxes of groceries from Doral to Venezuela

Companies specialized in shipping boxes to be delivered at people’s front doors in Venezuela say that boxes now carry products not usually sent to that country. Amazon books, spare parts for cars and electronic items are now being replaced with cans of tuna, rice packages, coffee, medicines and even bathing soap.

The BBC visits Hugo Chavez’s own Potemkin village, complete with Chavista tour guide.

Leopoldo Lopez was interviewed from jail. Caracas Chronicles has the story. PanamPost has more on Leopoldo López and the Death of Freedom
The Spirit of Venezuelan Freedom Fighters Will Triumph, Redeem His Sacrifice.

Daniel observes how All is dissolving, slowly but surely

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