Hugo Chavez’s rant at the UN must be seen to be believed. He needs to switch to decaf in the morning. Thor Halvorssen provides a handy corrective:
Chavez has said the United States is “afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices,” yet Chavez has suffocated all dissent in his own backyard. Beyond rewriting the Constitution to bolster his legal power, he’s passed a law banning “the use of language deemed to be insulting to the President of the Republic.”
Indeed, any expression of dissent, public or in private, against any public official is punishable with prison.
Francisco Usón - a former minister in Chavez’s own Cabinet - recently drew a six-year jail term for expressing an opinion on television. Carlos Ortega - the president of Venezuela’s AFL-CIO-affiliated federation of workers - got a 16-year sentence for instigating a legal strike despite protests by the International Labor Organization of this unspeakable violation of human rights. (Ortega escaped from prison last month.)
Chavez claimed yesterday that the United States protects terrorism while his own government is “fully committed to combating terrorism and violence.” In fact, Chavez has demonstrably protected and armed the FARC terrorists of next-door Colombia. (He’s also presided during the greatest crime wave in Venezuelan history, with a death toll exponentially larger than any previous government’s.)
Chavez denounced capitalism as the generator of “mere poverty.” Yet, thanks to a capitalist oil boom, he has profited from the richest Venezuelan government in history - but squandered its wealth on a new Venezuelan oligarchy of petro-millionaires masquerading as government officials. Meanwhile, misery and malnutrition are at a historic high.
Chavez railed against Western-style democracy. Yet it was western style democracy that brought him into power (after his own armed coup failed) and may remove him in the end. This is why he does everything he can to hollow and weaken democratic institutions.
He has frequently praised the “participatory” models of Libya, North Korea and Cuba as ideal forms of government - countries where rulers, accountable to no one, torture, imprison and murder their opponents.
Can we all agree now that the United Nations is a worse than a farce—because at least a farce isn’t taken seriously? Still, given how some lefties love Chavez, perhaps all Bush needs to do to get some left-wing love is to start jailing his political opponents.
Posted by Hubbard in Those Wacky Foreigners, Dis-United Nations