Oliver Stone: Responding to Leopoldo López

[Judi Lynn]

Oliver StoneAward-winning filmmaker
Posted: July 20, 2010 02:17 PM
Responding to Leopoldo López

Leopoldo López, a right-wing opposition leader in Venezuela who supported the military overthrow of the democratically elected government there in 2002, complains about my film (South of the Border), saying "Mr. Stone argues that the assault on human rights is of secondary concern."

But my film argues the opposite. It's just that the "assault on human rights" in Venezuela has come from the right, from Mr. Lopez and his allies. One of the first decrees by the coup government that Mr. Lopez supported was to abolish the elected Congress and the Supreme Court. Protesters were shot, and officials of the constitutional government arrested. And the victims of political violence to this day in Venezuela are also victims of the right - mostly poor peasants organizing for land reform, killed by landowners.

The struggle in Venezuela is not so much about one man, President Hugo Chávez, as the right would have us believe. It is a political battle between the left and the right. Not surprisingly, as in the rest of South America, it is the right that has the ugly record on human rights and issues of democracy. And it is the right that represents the rich -- López was former mayor of one of the wealthiest areas of Caracas -- against the majority of the people, much as in the United States.

Mr. López offers a "Tea Party" view of Venezuela, in which everything that is wrong with the country is the fault of the left government, and Chávez -- like Obama for the Tea Partiers -- is a "dictator." López is very selective in his use of statistics. He does not tell the reader that since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut in half, extreme poverty by more than 70 percent, and thousands of doctors added to the public sector now provide health care for the poor.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone/responding-to-leopoldo-lp_b_652925.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Prettyboy Leopoldo Lopez is at it again

Prettyboy Leopoldo Lopez is at it again
Posted by Sabina Becker on June 27, 2008 3:15 PM

Once more, a fascist makes all kinds of bogus claims, including that his human rights were violated. Aporrea has the details of the lie--and the video to refute the liar:

On Thursday, Mario Silva, host of the VTV show "La Hojilla", showed some video footage taken at Maiquetia Airport that refutes the accusations made by the mayor of Chacao, Leopoldo Lopez, who recently claimed he had been held illegally and been physically attacked by five or six members of the DISIP (Venezuelan federal police) in the airport.

The events occurred last Wednesday, when Lopez returned from a trip to the United States where he went, among other reasons, to denounce his political disqualification for receiving illicit donations when he worked at the state oil company PDVSA and received money from the company on behalf of the party Primero Justicia, which was then a "civil society" organization. Lopez also claimed he met with presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The video shows the arrival of Lopez at the airport. In it, there is also a person, possibly a DISIP agent in civilian clothes, who takes some photocopies of Lopez's passport, but at no time assaults him physically. Totally to the contrary, it is Lopez who launches himself at the other man, intending to attack him.

Lopez, for his part, also provoked other officials at the airport by trying to photograph them with his cellphone, and enters a restricted area in pursuit of one of the officials, who do not respond aggressively.

The video also shows Lopez leaving the airport, getting into a truck, and departing. The mayor later claimed that the officials had torn his shirt pocket, but the video shows it intact to the very end.

Afterwards, Lopez returned to the airport at Maiquetia with a team from the opposition TV channel Globovision to make his denunciation, showing the ripped shirt pocket and with a photocopy of his passport, which supposedly had been taken away from him by DISIP agents.

Translation mine. Video (in Spanish) at the bottom of the page.

You can see that Prettyboy (in a light blue shirt, white pants and dark belt) is very aggressive throughout it, particularly from the midway point of the roughly 20-minute first clip, when he starts chasing after the airport functionaries brandishing his cellphone and trying to take their pictures in order to provoke them into a fight. He also starts trying to shove them around. The security men, as you can see, refuse to bite; they just turn away from him and fend him off without throwing a punch. One of them is wearing a striped polo shirt; another, a dark suit. At no point does Lopez get attacked himself, nor is his shirt pocket ever damaged--UNTIL he drags in Globovision to "document" his tall tale of an attack that never happened, in the second clip, in which we suddenly see the pocket hanging by a thread. But in the first video, he's completely unrumpled. Which means that sometime between the first set of videos and the time he dragged in the Flojovision flunkies, he must have done the damage himself, or maybe he had his pal (with the knapsack in the airport video) do the job for him.

Aporrea also notes that Lopez recently claimed to have visited with Barack Obama, and had his picture taken with him. The pic in question, though, is very dubious, since both men seem to have the same skin tone in it. This even though Lopez is clearly a white man, whereas Obama definitely isn't.

One thing that is consistent about all these pics and videos, though, is the glassy, fanatical look of Leo's eyes. Scary little señorito refuses to blink. He reels off his spiel (just the usual blahblah about tyranny and how "we are not afraid"), all without pausing for breath. He's downright hyper. Is he on drugs, is he a religious cultist, or just a paranoid schizophrenic? Maybe any or all of the above; maybe none. One thing's for sure: As Mario Silva notes, he's a clown, but a dangerous one. He never loses an opportunity to make crapaganda, and the disociado minority, the Venezuelan ex-ruling class, never fails to believe him--even when he's caught in a lie, as here.

And of course, the lamestream English-speaking media will probably repeat his lies uncritically, too. He's their darling, after all--a young, superficially very good-looking white guy who "dares" to "stand up" to the non-white "dictator/tyrant/demagogue" Chavez (although, strangely, he's never had the 'nads to confront him directly on anything--probably because the Evil Big Red One would mop the floor with him without so much as raising his voice.) You'll note that they make a big issue out of the "blacklist" of candidates who have been found in violation of the law, Lopez among them--but they won't do any digging into what Lopez did that got him disqualified from running for office again.

And of course, they won't take a critical look at the airport video, either.

http://www.hollow-hill.com/sabina/2008/06/prettyboy_leopoldo_lopez_is_at.html

[EFerrari]

2. LOl! This is like using a hammer to kill an ant

but have to admit, :evilgrin: