Politicians From Venezuela

"All across the so-called liberal media, the reporting and analysis on Venezuela the past weeks has been atrocious. And actually, it has been this way for a long time. We should remember that The New York Times actually openly supported the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez. But in the wake of the recent Venezuelan elections, there has been a total uniformity to the characterization of Venezuela’s suffering and chaos as the sole fault of Nicolás Maduro. The elections are being denounced by anchors as though it’s just accepted fact that Maduro is only president because of corruption. Almost never mentioned prominently is the fact that Venezuela has been systematically targeted by the United States and its allies and its puppets in Latin America or the impact the economic sanctions have had on the country or the fact that there was an attempt to kill Nicolás Maduro with a drone packed with explosives. The story is just “Maduro is a corrupt Socialist dictator. He needs to be taken out so that Venezuela can be free.” The central role that the U.S. has played under Bush, under Obama, and now, under Trump in destabilizing Venezuela"

"Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, has been even worse. He’s Chávez without the mo. He accelerated Venezuela’s transition to authoritarianism while devastating its economy and people."

"For many media commentators, Maduro sought to strengthen his position internally by putting on display the support he counts on from powerful international allies. Fear of a U.S. military response may be a more plausible explanation for his motives.... The presence of Russian bombers in Venezuela last week and the possibility of future deployments are clear examples of the undesirable consequences of Washington’s unyielding hostility toward that nation."

"President Chavez, from here, on behalf of our people, I thank you for the good you may have done (...) and the bad and you have failed to do, the history will judge you."

"The Venezuelans ought to become inspired by the Honduran model, and strive for a change of government as soon as possible, through pacific, democratic, and constitutional means--and not just electoral--to avoid a national tragedy."

"Dr Insulza is quite an idiot, a true idiot. The insipid Dr Insulza should resign from the secretariat of the OAS for daring to play that role."

"Go to hell, gringos! Go home!...What does the empire want? Condoleezza said it. How are you? You’ve forgotten me, missy...Condoleezza said it clearly, it’s about creating a new geopolitical map in the Middle East...They took out Saddam Hussein and they hung him, for better or worse. It’s not up to me to judge any government, but that gentleman was the president of that country."

"The two of them [Bush & Negroponte] are criminals. They should be tried and thrown in prison for the rest of their days. If he had any dignity, the president of the United States would quit. The U.S. president doesn't have the political or moral capacity to govern."

"No se trata de estatizar toda la economía (...) No, nuestro socialismo acepta la propiedad privada. Solo que esa propiedad privada debe estar en el marco de una constitución y leyes y de un interés social."

"Critico, aunque respeto, a mis amigos que sostienen la idea marxista leninista de que no debe haber propiedad privada, porque no la comparto."

"La propiedad privada es aquella que pertenece a personas naturales o jurídicas y que se reconoce sobre bienes de uso y consumo y medios de producción legítimamente adquiridos."

"Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

"If the United States was mad enough to attack Iran or aggress Venezuela again the price of a barrel of oil could reach $150 or even $200."

"A Third World War? With an atom bomb? He said it, with an atom bomb. There would be no more world. The world would end. Humanity would no longer exist. I think he has to be put in an asylum. He has to be put in an mental asylum."

"If the "yes" vote wins on Sunday and the Venezuelan oligarchy, playing the [U.S.] empire's game, comes with their little stories of fraud, oil shipments to the United States will be halted [on Monday]."

"We're not really confronting those peons of imperialism. Our true enemy is called the North American empire and we're going to give another knockout to Bush."

"If any international channel comes here to take part in an operation from the imperialist against Venezuela, your reporters will be thrown out of the country, they will not be able to work here. People at CNN, listen carefully: This is just a warning."

"I nationalize strategic companies and get criticized, but when Bush does it, it's OK. … Bush is turning socialist. How are you, comrade Bush?"

"Every factory must be a school to educate, like Che Guevara said, to produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."

"It doesn't smell of sulphur any more. No, it smells of something else. It smells of hope, and you have to have hope in your heart."

"I'm not loved by Hillary Clinton... and I don't love her either."

"If there was any armed aggression against Venezuela from Colombian territory or from anywhere else, promoted by the Yankee empire, we would suspend oil shipments to the United States even if we have to eat stones here. We would not send a drop more to U.S. refineries!"

"Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, 'You've got to find Chavez to kill him'."

"You should resign. It's the least you can do: Resign, along with those other spies and delinquents working in the State Department."

"Liberator of Libya, He will be remembered as a great fighter, a revolutionary and martyr. They assassinated him. It is another outrage."

"Mr. Obama decided to attack us, Now you want to win votes by attacking Venezuela. Don’t be irresponsible. You are a clown, a clown. Leave us in peace … Go after your votes by fulfilling that which you promised your people."

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet"

"I extend from here my recognition of all who voted against us, recognition of their democratic weight."

"El socialismo bolivariano nosotros tenemos que construirlo en el marco de la Constitución Bolivariana. [...] Nosotros no tenemos prevista la eliminación de la propiedad privada, ni la grande ni la pequeña. [...] El socialismo tenemos que construirlo, los sectores de clase media, profesionales, técnicos, nos hacen falta para construir un socialismo productivo. Nosotros necesitamos a la clase media, a los profesionales, a los técnicos, a los empresarios, a los agricultores, a la juventud, que se incorpore a un debate amplio. El socialismo del siglo XXI es democracia. Nosotros no estamos hablando de la dictadura del proletariado. No."

"We have arrived again to Venezuela, Thank God. Thanks to my beloved country."

"I don't want to die. Please don't let me die."

"Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all, I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today - ethics, and moral...[Capitalism is] an infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell."

"Democracy is not just turning up to vote every five or four years, it’s much more than that, it’s a way of life, it’s giving power to the people."

"Within the framework of capitalism it is impossible to solve the challenges of fighting against poverty, misery, exploitation and inequality."

"I call on private businessmen to work together with us to build the new economy, transforming the capitalist economic model into a social, humanist and equality economy."

"Mr. Chávez is my brother, he is a friend of the Iranian nation and the people seeking freedom around the world. He works perpetually against the dominant system. He is a worker of God and servant of the people."

"The stem cell debate was an introduction to a phenomenon I witnessed throughout my presidency: highly personal criticism. Partisan opponents and commentators questioned my legitimacy, my intelligence, and my sincerity. They mocked my appearance, my accent, and my religious beliefs. I was labeled a Nazi, a war criminal, and Satan himself. That last one came from a foreign leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez."

"Last Friday, Chavez held a press conference with foreign correspondents in which he showed pictures of the alleged leaders of the paramilitary group. “The paramilitary incursion is a historic incident with worldwide resonance which only the local private media have tried to minimize,” said the President. The President spoke out against Capitalism, and criticized the fact that after the Cold War many on the left stopped talking about Capitalism, replacing it with the word Neoliberalism. Both terms refer to “the same assassin, perverse and stinky empire”. During his presidency, Chavez himself has spoken out against Neoliberalism, while claiming to lead a revolution to build “Capitalism with a human face”. He has only recently started to criticize Capitalism directly."

"It is difficult to fathom the level of economic and social degradation occurring today in Venezuela under chavismo, the movement founded by the late leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who died of cancer three years ago. What began as a war against the “squalid” oligarchy in order to build what he called “21st-century socialism” — cheered on as he was by many leftists from abroad — has collapsed into an unprecedented heap of misery and conflict. Unsurprisingly, Chávez was incapable of reinventing socialism as anything other than a prescription for abject failure. Ultimately, all he wound up bequeathing to his people is this century’s longest national train wreck."

"Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world"

"He was a great politician for his country and for the world as a whole."

"1.- Luis Miquilena, a political mentor who helped steer Chavez to the presidency in 1998, has done an about-face since leaving the government in 2002. This week, he described it as a "hypocritical authoritarianism that tries to sell the world certain democratic appearances". 2.- He said of him:... he is made for the confrontation... his style of governing was an almost of teenager... he is not a man furnished well mentally... he has not definite ideology... he is incendiary... he is erratic... he is unpunctual... he is disordered... is lover of luxury... he is limited... he is emotive... he was operating with total arbitrariness, as if he was handling a personal ranch... "annotate me there, to give 4 billions to this bank"… he has not rules of control... he does not know of finance... "Fidel had put in his head from a beginning, the idea that he could to be assassinated"."

"The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past make US US aggression against it possible in the present. It is worth summing up some of these key lies: Venezuela was “once prosperous” and ruined by socialism. In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth, which had generated huge export revenues since the 1920s. Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, Venezuela’s democracy was a gravely flawed system in which politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo. Chavismo ruined Venezuela’s democracy. Chávez indeed attempted to carry out a coup in 1992, but he came to power through an election in 1998, and afterward made changes through extensive democratic processes."

"In his State of the Union address on February 6, 2019, Donald Trump said: We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom—and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Trump’s ridiculous comment was not considered controversial, because the Western media, including the anti-Trump outlets like the New York Times, have spent many years conveying a lie: that Venezuela had been very prosperous and democratic until Hugo Chávez, and then his successor Nicolás Maduro, came along and ruined everything. If readers believe that, then they may indeed wonder, “Why shouldn’t the US government help Venezuelans return to that prosperous state?”"

"A tropical Mussolini."

"But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps. In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.” When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy. It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the government blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition and packed the supreme court, but Chávez’s landslide reelection in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favor. After Chávez’s death a year later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and in 2014, his government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015 legislative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy."

"you asked about Hugo Chávez a while ago. I mean, there’s a whole lot going on in Latin America, and there’s an overall push to the left overall — not every country, and not everything, but I find it very encouraging, you know?"

"The history of Venezuela and oil flows through Mene Grande like the crude oil through the silver pipe. The first oil workers’ strike occurred here (and was put down here) in 1925. In 1976, during the country’s first petrodelirium, when oil prices quadrupled, President Carlos Andrés Pérez came to Mene Grande to declare the nationalization of the oil industry. Three decades later, in the midst of an even bigger boom, President Hugo Chávez came here to announce a second nationalization, changing the terms by which foreign oil companies operated in Venezuela and giving the government a controlling stake in everything that happened in the oil fields. There were information boards at the edge of the parking lot commemorating the dual nationalizations; in their telling, Chávez got all the glory. Chávez had died a year earlier, in 2013, after fourteen years as president. A former soldier, he called himself a socialist and a revolutionary and he delighted in thumbing his nose at the United States, the imperial power to the north, to which he sold most of his country’s oil. His successor was Nicolás Maduro, a less talented politician who styled himself as the ideological heir of the man he called the eternal comandante. In Maduro’s short time as president, there had been waves of protest, the economy had begun to contract, inflation was soaring, and shortages of food and other goods were becoming acute."

"At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Venezuela, the authoritarian populist Hugo Chávez and his disciple Nicolás Maduro initiated a similar policy of massive spending, corruption and nationalization. The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’ On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire. But still, it is not much money if you do not invest it productively and if you destroy the ability to create new wealth with nationalization and price controls. When the price of oil began to fall only slightly, it became obvious that the business sector was in a shambles and the oil industry had been demolished by corrupt mismanagement and underinvestment. The result was one of the worst economic disasters to have occurred anywhere in the world in peacetime. Between 2010 and 2020, Venezuela’s average income plummeted by an incomprehensible 75 per cent. South America’s richest country suddenly turned into South America’s poorest country with breadlines and a mass exodus from an increasingly tyrannical state. Around seven million Venezuelans have fled the crumbling country, an unbelievable 25 per cent of the country’s population. Since then, Venezuela has been less frequently mentioned as the hope of the international working class."

"This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our establishment media. This year’s so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor... Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor.... The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy, internationally connected minority operating by a regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser — a plan to control Venezuela and its oil, as Bolton openly proclaims."