a recorded conversation between two anti-Chavez operatives, which has gotten a lot of play in some circles in Venezuela:
June 9 / 10, 2007
Who's Pulling the Strings?
Behind Venezuela's "Student Rebellion"
By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
~snip~
Firstly, opposition parties made a clear decision to stay out of the spotlight, emphasizing the "independent" and "spontaneous" nature of the student protests. Beyond anything else, this gesture proves the degree to which the opposition has been discredited, garnering a reverse Midas touch through years of poor decisionmaking and supporting coups. From the beginning, the government was arguing that opposition politicians were behind the student mobilizations, and so when government-run channel 8 covered one of the early student demonstrations in Plaza Brion in Chacaito, the headline read "opposition demonstration disguised as a student demonstration."
This claim was perhaps justified by the appearance at the demonstration of Leopoldo López, mayor of opposition stronghold Chacao, formerly of far-right party Primero Justicia, which he more recently abandoned in favor of Manuel Rosales' nominally social democratic Un Nuevo Tiempo. Opposition news channel Globovisión countered with the thoroughly unconvincing claim that López, 36 years old and an established politician, was a "youth leader." López himself wouldn't help the situation when at a press conference he "accidentally" called for the students to employ "non-peaceful" tactics (he later claimed that he had meant to call for "non-violent" forms of protest).
That the "student leaders" are tied to the opposition is far from controversial: for example, spokesperson Yon Goicochea is a member of Primero Justicia and the aptly-named Stalin González belonged until recently to the strangest of opposition organizations, Bandera Roja. BR is a nominally Marxist-Leninist group which made the unlikely transition from a respectable guerrilla organization to the attack dogs of the far right, claiming to use the opposition as a vehicle to topple the fake communism of Chávez and institute a true dictatorship of the proletariat. But González recently revealed the extent of his opportunism by joining Rosales and Un Nuevo Tiempo.
But the contours of the opposition's hands-off strategy wouldn't be fully clear until the revelation of a taped phone conversation in which Un Nuevo Tiempo leader Alfonso Marquina spoke of the need to remain in the background, but to pull the strings regardless: "Let's mobilize all the kids We have a strategy as an organization Let's mobilize all the kids, because you know {UCV student leader} Stalin {González} is our vice president here in Caracas Let's mobilize the kids from the Catholic {University} We've decided that the politicians won't intervene, that we'll leave it to the kids in their natural environment. We'll give them support, stick them in trucks If I go out there, they'll say it's the politicians that are calling the kids out"
"The only thing that can save us in this situation is if something extraordinary happens," replies Elías, an advisor to RCTV head Marcel Granier, on the leaked tape. It's comments like this that lead the Vice President of the National Assembly Desiree Santos to argue that the political opposition to Chávez was "looking for a death" among the students, to "repeat the actions of 2002" in which pre-meditated deaths were inserted into a pre-fabricated media strategy to overthrow Chávez.
(snip/...)
http://www.counterpunch.org/maher06092007.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Right on schedule, they are sending the students out to do the front work for the opposition which has discredited itself by failing in its earlier ventures.
God only knows what they've got planned next if their students failed. You can be sure someone's going to get killed, or MORE than someone, when they decide they'll just "kick it up a notch."
Creepy, slimey, self-centered, nasty bastards.