Anti-Chavez students and M13 gang attack police in Venezuela

[Judi Lynn]

(If you didn't check "Editorials" you missed this. Joanne98 posted it there.)

Anti-Chavez students and M13 gang attack police in Venezuela
Posted by Joanne98
Well isn't this interesting. Maybe Hugo Chavez should call ICE!

venezuelanalysis.com)-- A notoriously violent Venezuelan student organization aligned with the Venezuelan opposition known as the March 13th Movement (M13) fired gunshots and threw Molotov cocktails at police officers, blockaded streets using seized university buses, and ransacked sections of the Andean town of Mérida on Thursday and Friday, to protest crime and insecurity in the city.

So far, one student is dead and three injured, two police officers were shot and more than a dozen injured, dozens of city blocks were severely vandalized, and 5 local businesses were sacked as a result of chaotic street battles initiated by the student group, which is registered at the University of the Andes (ULA).

The events are reminiscent of destabilization campaigns led by the M13 during crucial political junctures in the past. Most recently, during the run-up to the December 2007 constitutional reform referendum, the M13 created nodes of destabilizing violence to sway voters against the proposals of the Chávez administration, using similar tactics to those used this Thursday and Friday.

Mérida’s State Secretary, Jairo Rivas, commented Friday, “There is no sincerity in what the students are suggesting, since the routine work of the police is affected in order to attend to these problems of public order” created by the protests, which were advertised by posters earlier in the week.

Rivas, whose administration identifies itself as a “Bolivarian” ally of President Hugo Chávez, pointed out Friday that Venezuela is in the midst of regional and local electoral campaigns, and at the top of the opposition electoral platform is citizen security in the country. “We consider this to be the real, end motivation that the students have,” Rivas told the press.

Thursday morning, 50 masked students blocked off several intersections in front of the ULA Medical School, burning dozens of tires and riddling the streets with glass bottles and rocks, then retreated to university grounds.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3640

Editorials:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x371133

[roody]

1. What a strange way to protest crime and insecurity!

[Judi Lynn]

2. A DU'er who lives in Venezuela currently personally has seen these guys, and wrote about it

in a post to Joanne98's article in "Editorials:"

justinaforjustice (161 posts) Mon Jul-14-08 01:18 PM
Response to Original message
3. U.S. Eye-witness to the Merida Disruptions.

I live in the neighborhood of Avenida 16 and Don Tulio, site of the disturbances in Merida, VE, and personally observed these so-called "students" who were blocking traffic, burning tires, throwing rocks, bottles and molotov cocktails at the police as well as threatening passersby here this past week.

The youths all wore woolen balaclavas over their faces to hid their identity. The police closed off streets in the area and remained largely passive as the thugs aggressively attacked them. The police relied largely on tear gas to prevent the youths from disrupting a wider area. When the youths started shooting at the police, as they did in front of my building the other night, the police were forced to use their own weapons.

The University of Los Andes (ULA)administration is actively supportive of the anti-Chavez opposition and allows the right wing youths to use university facilities and student government funds to support their anti-Chavez actions. Historically, the universities have been "autonomous" although funded by the national government. Their autonomy includes the fact that their campus is off-limits to local and national police, which allows the youths to make forays into the community and then evade police by seeking cover on university grounds.

The right wing student leaders claim to the press that their demonstrations were peaceful and focused on the demand for more public safety in Merida. Thus, in the name of increasing public safety from crime, these youths, using guns and molotiv cocktails,attacked the police. Hundreds of police were diverted from their regular duties protecting public safety in order to protect the city from the violent students. Reportedly, stores of weapons are cached on university property in preparation for these "peaceful demonstrations".

Right wing groups opposed to Chavez have been using the students to disrupt traffic and foment violence in order to destabilize the government preparatory to coming local elections. Many of these opposition groups are actively supported by the U.S. government. Undoubtedly our U.S. C.I.A. is helping to direct the disruptions.

It should be noted that only a small number of youths are involved in these actions. Many are not even students but thugs recruited for pay. But because Merida is a very narrow city with only a few main streets, it is very easy for small mobile groups, riding around on University owned buses, to create roving traffic chaos which prevents ordinary citizens from getting to and from work at considerable economic cost to themselves and their employers.

Observing the youths riding their ULA bus through my neighborhood, cursing and shouting at my neighbors, I was reminded of Hitler's youth gangs who were used in the same manner in Germany in the 30's. As in Germany, the actions of these youths are not spontaneous political expression of principles, but the intentional creation of chaos to serve managed political ends.

As an American, I am once again appalled at the Bush-Cheney administration's use of U.S. tax dollars to fund anti-democratic forces in Latin America. Bush-Cheney seeks to depose the democratically elected Chavez in order to put a right-wing puppet in place who will allow the U.S. to control Venezuela's oil.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x371133#371171

~~~~~~~~~~~~
She doesn't write here too often, and every time she does, it's clear, intelligent, personal, and authentic. Looks as if they've got perceptions of these guys we aren't hearing about here!

[Judi Lynn]

3. More on these violent fascist scums:

VENEZUELA: Escualido war at the University of Los Andes?

Coral Wynter & Jim McIlroy, Caracas

Merida is a lovely city located high in the Andes. It is a famous resort, well-known to tourists. On the afternoon of June 21 students were watching a game of football on the TV set in the cafeteria of the humanities department of the University of Los Andes (ULA). Suddenly, an armed group wielding large calibre weapons and wearing balaclavas descended from a university bus and entered the cafeteria. The group threatened to shoot everyone there.

Students ran in all directions. One of the armed group brutally beat up a female student. Another beat up Inti Sarcos, a student known as a supporter of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s socialist president. Sarcos’s face was disfigured and his kidney almost ruptured. The armed group is still wandering around ULA with impunity.

The revolutionary process that is taking place in Venezuela is being fiercely resisted by opposition forces, known here as escualidos. The radical “Bolivarian revolution”, which has begun to empower the poor majority of Venezuela, has been led by Chavez and his supporters.

A number of key public officials in Merida back the anti-Chavez forces. Merida was one of the cities where the most violence took place during a US-backed coup in April 2002 that briefly overthrow Chavez. During the coup, the Andean public prosecutor, Galucci, was responsible for assaulting the governor of Merida, kidnapping and beating him. Galucci has never been charged for this crime and is still retains his position.

Merida is also one of the states with the greatest number of assassinations of peasants by Colombian paramilitaries, hired by the cattle barons opposed to the Chavez government’s land reform policies, occurs regularly with impunity.

The Andean gang of escualidos includes the rector of the ULA, Lester Rodriguez, who is a high-ranking member of the reactionary Catholic secret society Opus Dei; the vice rector, Humberto Ruiz; and the dean of the faculty of humanities, Laura Luciani Toro.

Rodriguez is described by the progressive Caracas weekly Los Papeles de Mandinga as a “criminal who organises armed gangs”. The ULA rector controls a group of criminals called Movimiento 13 de Marzo (March 13 Movement — M-13), whose members include Nixon Moreno (his parents named him after Richard Nixon) and Alfredo Contreras, who have been terrorising the academics and students of ULA.

Moreno, the leader of M-13, has been a “student” at the faculty of humanities for 14 years and has been involved in numerous violent actions at ULA.

~snip~
It is this same gang of criminals who have controlled the ULA Merida student union for many years, with their student credentials supplied by Toro. Usually, the university authorities administer the elections, but because of the bloody disturbances the court ruled the elections should take place under the auspices of the National Electoral Council.

From Green Left Weekly, July 19, 2006.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/675/6224

[roody]

4. How sad!

[AlphaCentauri]

5. Are these the students who were paid 500 000 for their opposition to the referendum?

[AlphaCentauri]

6. See, do what we say and we pay you. something to read for the novice

Venezuelan Opposition Student Leader to Receive $500,000 Award from U.S. NGO
Written by James Suggett
Friday, 25 April 2008
Link to article

The libertarian, U.S.-based Cato Institute awarded the $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to Venezuelan opposition student leader Yon Goicoechea for his leadership in student protests against the non-renewal of the public broadcast license of Radio Caracas Televisions (RCTV) and against the constitutional reform in 2007.

Goicoechea was chosen because he is “a passionate opponent of the erosion of human and civil rights under the government of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez,” according to the Cato Institute website.

The Cato Institute , which was founded in 1977, espouses a libertarian free market philosophy, supports the privatization of social security, and is opposed to environmental regulations to halt global warming, but has clashed with the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush over the Iraq War.

Goicoechea organized “massive, peaceful student marches” which “successfully prevented President Hugo Chávez`s regime from seizing broad dictatorial powers in December 2007,” when the constitutional reform lost the popular vote by a slim margin in a nation-wide referendum, Cato says.

Goicoechea, a 23 year-old law student at the private Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, told the press Wednesday that “this award is not only for me, but for thousands of young Venezuelans who came out to struggle for freedom.”

The student leader said he will not keep the money for himself, but rather will use it to found a new “leadership school for freedom” which will offer political training to young people, including youth from Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia, he specified.

The award “opens many international doors to spread our message and bring the world’s progress to Venezuela,” Goicoechea added.

Goicoechea now plans to launch a political career in Venezuela, he told the opposition television station Globovisión.

He added that the next step for the student movement will be to protest the educational curriculum reform proposed by the Education Ministry, which will be in a period of public discussion among the nation`s teachers until 2009.

Details on where the award money came from are not available on the Cato Institute website. Cato’s 2006 budget was $20.4 million, fed by contributions from dozens of corporations, including ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart, FedEx, Microsoft, several automobile companies, tobacco companies, and communications companies including Time Warner and Comcast, according to the institute’s 2006 annual report. Cato says it does not accept government funding, and that most of its funding comes from individual donations.

The selection committee for the award included the CEO of the transnational Koch Industries, Inc. , Charles Koch, the head of the chancellery of the Republic of Georgia, Kakha Bendukidze, the former Mexican finance minister, Francisco Gil Díaz, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Mary Anastasia O`Grady, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria, and Andrew Mwenda from the Advocates Coalition for Development in Uganda, along with Cato Institute officials.

Venezuelan-U.S. lawyer Eva Golinger denounced on Thursday that awarding Goicoechea is a surreptitious way for the U.S. to continue funding the Venezuelan opposition, since traditional avenues for funds such as the National Endowment for Democracy have come under intense criticism since Venezuelan opposition groups which received these funds participated in the April 2002 coup and numerous destabilization efforts thereafter.

The award “legitimizes capital that will be used to destabilize governments in Latin America. It is a way to filter money through supposedly clean institutions,” Golinger alleged.

In 2007, Goicoechea-led student protesters supported the renewal of the public broadcasting license of RCTV, which the station had used for over half a century. The concession was not renewed because the government said RCTV had participated in the coup against President Chávez in April 2002 and because the station had over 500 cases against it for violations of the Law for Responsibility in Radio and Television. RCTV continues to broadcast on cable television.

Student groups led by Goicoechea fiercely opposed the constitutional reform proposal. Had it passed, it would have banned the funding of Venezuelan political groups by foreign governments. It also would have guaranteed social security to informal workers, removed the limit on how many times the president can run for office, banned discrimination based on sexual orientation, and created new forms of collective property.

Milton Friedman, a conservative economist who died in 2006 at age 94, received the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976. His ideas greatly influenced the policies of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the International Monetary Fund throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the developing world.

For this reason, Golinger expressed on Venezuelan television Thursday that the award money is stained by the “blood of millions of Latin Americans who have suffered the hunger and misery implanted by economic packages that only benefited the giant corporations.”

Previous recipients of Cato’s Milton Friedman award were Mart Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, and the British Economist Peter Bauer.

http://medialeft.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=551&Itemid=183

[Bacchus39]

7. the dead one?? n/t

dd

[AlphaCentauri]

8. Read post #6

:patriot:

[Bacchus39]

9. I guess not, so that answers your question too n/t

n

[AlphaCentauri]

10. LOL