Ex-official: Venezuela leader aided Sandinistas

[Bacchus39]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101229/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_nicaragua_venezuela_perez


MANAGUA, Nicaragua – A former vice president in Nicaragua's Sandinista government said Wednesday the movement received crucial financial aid to oust a dictator from Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, who died Saturday.

Novelist Sergio Ramirez told the Managua newspaper La Prensa that Perez gave the movement more than $1 million to help the guerrillas topple Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Ramirez said that fellow novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the one who first put the Sandinistas in touch with Perez in 1997. Calls to Garcia Marquez' number in Mexico City, where he lives, went unanswered Wednesday.

Perez gave "more than $100,000 per month for the revolutionary cause" and also aided by immediately recognizing the new rebel government as soon as it seized its first city in Nicaragua, Ramirez said.

[Judi Lynn]

1. The Sandanistas would never have approved of the slaughter of so many Venezuelans by Perez.

That truth will never be spun convincingly.

Wiki:

The Caracazo or sacudón is the name given to the wave of protests, riots and looting and ensuing massacre<1> that occurred on 27 February 1989 in the Venezuelan capital Caracas and surrounding towns. The riots — the worst in Venezuelan history — resulted in a death toll of anywhere between 275 and 3,000 deaths,<2> mostly at the hands of security forces. The main reason for the protests were the neoliberal, pro-market reforms imposed by the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez.<3>

The word Caracazo is the name of the city plus the suffix -azo, which implies a blow and/or magnitude. It could therefore be translated as something like "the Caracas smash" or "the big one in Caracas". The name was inspired by the Bogotazo, a massive riot in neighboring Colombia in 1948 that played a pivotal role in that country's history. Sacudón is from sacudir "to shake", and therefore means something along the lines of "the day that shook the country". (See Spanish nouns: Other suffixes.)

~snip~
ConsequencesThe clearest consequence of the caracazo was political instability. The following February, the army was called to contain similar riots in Puerto La Cruz and Barcelona, and again in June, when rising of transportation costs ended in riots in Maracaibo and other cities. The free-market reforms programme was modified. In 1992 there were two attempted coups d'état, in February and November. Carlos Andrés Pérez was accused of corruption and removed from the presidency. Hugo Chávez, an organiser of one of the coups, was found guilty of sedition and incarcerated. However, he was subsequently pardoned by Pérez's successor, Rafael Caldera, and went on to be elected president after him.

In 1998, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemned the government's action, and referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 1999, the Court heard the case and found that the government had committed violations of human rights, including extrajudicial killings. The Venezuelan government, by then headed by Chávez, did not contest the findings of the case, and accepted full responsibility for the government's actions.<4>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracazo

[paulk]

2. I think the discomfort with Perez from some of our more ardent

Chavezistas on this site is that he started on the the left side of the political spectrum - before drifting toward the dark side...

Parallels could be drawn with Hugo, perhaps?