Category: Foreign Policy

An apparently innocuous story appears in the Financial Times this morning announcing that Chavez is appointing new cabinet ministers;

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced a major cabinet reshuffle on Thursday after a poll defeat last month wrecked his hopes of winning new powers to push ahead with his declared socialist revolution.

Chavez named a soft-spoken replacement for his combative vice-president, Jorge Rodriguez, and said he was making 12 other cabinet changes.

Mr Rodriguez was blamed by many government supporters for the referendum defeat in December, when voters rejected Mr Chavez’s bid for new powers and the right to run for reelection indefinitely

In recent days, an apparently humbled Mr Chavez has dropped his grandiose revolutionary speeches and has instead promised to tackle issues like crime and garbage collection that more directly affect his grass roots supporters

But there’s a little more to the story than FT lets on. Daniel at Venezuela News and Views expounds;

There is so much to post on such as the way higher murder rate in Venezuela than in Iraq or how Cabezas fiscal policies failed miserably as Venezuelan inflation reached 23%, almost the double of the set goal, the highest of the continent, about 4 times as high as the average. And let’s not even mention the very partial, very selective, very meaningless “amnesty”….

Gateway Pundit wrote on Wednesday that the murder rate in Venezuela is higher than the murder rate in Iraq. El Universo reports more than 12,000 murders last year in Venezuela. Earlier this week, Las Armas de Coronel posted pictures of Chavez’ garbage issues;

At The Devil’s Excrement, Miguel guesses that inflation is probably higher than what the government publishes and agrees that Chavez is just shuffling deck chairs while the Titanic sinks;

Clearly, Chavez is still shuffling people around, rather than looking for experts. He wants loyalty more than effectiveness and management capability. This bodes badly for him (and us!) in the near future, as there are significant problems that need to be resolved and tackled with true expertise. The most important positions that needed to be filled were the Vice Presidency and the Ministry of Finance, we shall see what the latter brings.

Tomas Sancio at Venezuelan Politics says it’s because Chavez is too rigid;

In the end, Chávez’s binary way of thinking is hurting him more than he would expect. The highlights of 2007 were that he closed RCTV for criticizing his government and pushed a Constitutional Reform that few people had any input in. In spite of record oil prices and largesse, his popularity suffered and will continue doing so in 2008 if he doesn’t become more flexible. Again, we wouldn’t bet on this.

But I think it’s because he’s a moron pretending to be one of the literati. He doesn’t understand economics, he doesn’t understand politics – I’m surprised that while he was a paratrooper, he could find the ground. Chavez thinks that things happen just because he says it happens. Look at the other members of his “gran revolucion” – nose picking mouth breathers all.

He’s assembled the biggest group of idiots across the globe with no other goal than to stick his finger in the eye of the United States, and George Bush in particular. What kind of vision is that? And how does that help the Venezuelan people?

Funny that it took the Spanish King to point out that Chavez has no clothes. And FARC.

Someone go tell Ollie Stone that the Miami Herald reveals the real reason that Chavez’ negotiations with FARC failed last weekend;

The man who dropped off the suspected baby of a kidnapped woman at a rural Colombian infirmary two years ago was given a deadline of Dec. 30 by FARC rebels to return the boy, Colombian authorities said Thursday.

”In 2005, members of the FARC came to his house to give him the child because they weren’t able to care for him during troop movements and combat,” said Col. Eugenio Ramos, head of police in the rebel-controlled province of Guaviare.

”They returned last month and gave him a deadline of Dec. 30 to produce the child, saying he and his family’s lives were in danger if he didn’t,” Ramos told RCN television.

From Las Armas de Coronel, the quotes from Stone as he left Chavez’ company of boobs;

Oliver Stone has just declared, in his way back to Caracas after the Colombian hostage fiasco, that “Chavez is a great man” and Uribe is “the guilty party, a fraud”.

Well, Ollie, I guess we know who the real fraud is here, don’t we? The party that was trading on the life of a hostage they didn’t have – a hostage they couldn’t even locate.

So, I guess Stone will be apologizing any minute for flying off the handle.

Ooops, Kate had this up two days ago.

UPDATE: CNN reports that a DNA test was taken on the boy thought to be the son of a hostage-taking narco-terrorist;

DNA analysis indicates a 3-year-old boy living in a Bogota foster home is the child of a woman held captive by leftist rebels for nearly six years, an official in Colombia’s federal prosecutor’s office said Friday.

The results suggest President Alvaro Uribe was right — and that the leftist rebels misled Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the world when they promised to release the boy along with his mother Clara Rojas and another hostage from their jungle camps.

“There’s a very high probability he’s Emmanuel,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and thus spoke on condition of anonymity. “The DNA of the boy is the same as his alleged grandmother.”

(Emphasis mine) Someone better screen shot that story – CNN says Uribe was right.

Update: Kate sends me a screen shot. I mean CNN says Uribe was right – next thing you know they’ll be calling Castro mean.

Photo from Reuters

As I predicted last week, FARC’s hand-over of their hostages ochestrated by Hugo Chavez has failed – and it’s Columbian president Uribes’ fault (if you listen to Chavez, FARC and Oliver Stone). From the Miami Herald this morning;

The plan to secure the release of three hostages held by Marxist rebels crumbled on Monday after President Alvaro Uribe said that intelligence information suggests that the youngest of the captives — a 3-year-old boy — may have been released more than two years ago and living with a foster family.

The revelation came amid Venezuela’s accusations that Uribe’s government had been interfering with the hand-over plan, dubbed ”Operation Emmanuel,” after the alleged captive toddler.

The Herald calls it a “surprising twist”, but its really not surprising at all – Chavez and FARC have been dangling this in front of the media for months and the reason it hadn’t happened was because FARC and Chavez both need this drama play – and they both need it to continue and they both need the continuance blamed on Uribe for political and media points.

Sunday, Daniel at Venezuela News and Views wrote;

Chavez declarations are even becoming indecent, inappropriate, vulgar. I heard him for example declare that in spite of all the falling out with Uribe (“platos rotos” broken dishes) if this one would allow him he would jump in a plane and fly over to Colombia to retrieve the hostages himself. But do not be fooled in thinking that maybe it is just Chavez high on something. No, it is a well concerted propaganda effort. These days watching the Venezuelan state TV one assists at a full fledged viva Chavez show. We have reached now such a crescendo over that that now the FARC have become guerilla victims of Colombian aristocracy. Never mind that Uribe was reelected with more than 60% of the votes. And we hear such incongruities as Isturiz speaking of a certain guerilla as been “an excellent guerilla” (excelente guerillero). No, I am not making this up. How do you rate such a guerilla? Kills only cops? Sends flowers on Mother’s day? Is from the FARC rather than the ELN? Feeds his hostages?

Even to Venezuelans, who are treated to Chavez bizarre behavior daily, he’s really outdone himself with this one. At The Devil’s Excrement, some history of FARC’s hostage politics;

As I have suggested before there is no reason for this to be so complicated, but the diverging goals of those involved: Chavez, Uribe and the FARC made it complex as each group wants the other to look bad. What is a mystery is why the FARC have so far left Chavez out in the cold each time he has tried to mediate the handover of some hostages. In the past, the FARC has broken truces with the Colombian Government, failed to return hostages when promised and once killed eleven Deputies who were in captivity and were supposed to be about to be returned. The Colombian Government recently released the Foreign Minister of the FARC to the French Government as a goodwill gesture. There has been no reciprocal gesture from the FARC, who had only agreed to release these three hostages, two women and a kid, despite having thousands of hostages in their hands.

The Herald writes that the changeover went sour before Uribe made his comment;

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez — who is serving as the key mediator between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the Colombian government — said he received a letter from the rebels saying that military operations in the jungle region where they are hiding the hostages made the hand-off impossible.

Uribe dismissed the FARC claim as a lie, saying his government would permit a cease-fire corridor to let the rebels turn over the long-held captives.

”The FARC terrorist group doesn’t have any excuse,” Uribe said from the central Colombian city of Villavicencio, which had served as the base for coordination efforts. `They’ve fooled Colombia and now they want to fool the international community.’

Can you guess which side Oliver Stone takes?

”Shame on Colombia, shame on Uribe,” Oliver Stone, the American filmmaker, told The AP shortly before boarding one of three Venezuelan jets carrying the observers back to Caracas.

I’m sure if he tries hard enough, Stone can blame President Bush, too.

Venezuela’s strongman socialist leader Hugo Chavez promised a rescue operation for hostages held by the Columbian narco-terrorist group FARC “within hours” back on Wednesday. So how’d that go? From CNN;

It was not immediately clear when the operation would begin. However, Chavez described Colombia’s agreement as the last step before the operation to free the hostages would begin.

Yeah, that was on Thursday. The Miami Herald reports this morning;

Two Venezuelan helicopters sent to Colombia to retrieve three rebel-held hostages sat idle on a runway on Saturday, waiting for the coordinates on the pickup location.

The information never came.

Marxist rebels announced last week a deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to release former vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas, 44, her jungle-born toddler and former congresswoman Consuelo González, 57. The women have been held for more than five years in a portion of the jungle controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

With Colombia’s go-ahead and much fanfare, Chávez organized a mission of high-profile international observers, adorned two Colombia-bound choppers with required Red Cross insignia and had the hostages’ relatives flown to Caracas for the planned reunion. But as of late Saturday, family members and observers were still waiting for the one detail on which the entire mission depends: instructions from the rebels on the hostages’ pick-up spot somewhere in FARC-controlled land, which is about the size of France.

I suggest the whole thing is an attempt by Chavez to take the focus off of him in regard to the two Maleta-gate cases that are being investigated by the media and US prosecutors.

Tomas Sancio at Venezuela Politics wonders why a few non-Venezuelans are more important to the Chavez regime than 33 Venezuelans everyday;

The previous article would probably make us look insensitive if the facts weren’t as grim for the amount of people murdered in Venezuela during 2007. 12,249 people were murdered according to government figures. That’s 33 persons per day. We didn’t use the word “people” because an average of more than one person per hour is killed and this person that is killed every 44 minutes is just as important as the ones being rescued this weekend in Colombia.

The Interior Minister’s reaction is a typical one. He states that the opposition’s figures are exaggerated. But what can be more exaggerated than 33 people murdered on a daily basis. Is 100 a figure to worry about?

Well, actually solving Venezuela’s problems is pretty hard, and if it fails, there’s no one to blame. There’s only an upside to getting FARC’s hostages released – and if it goes south, he can blame it on Uribe.