1 million swarm Caracas roads to demand Chavez's resignation

Several hundreds of thousands of foes of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez march through the capital to demand his resignation after he rejected U.S. calls for early elections, in Caracas, December 14, 2002. Chavez, facing a protracted opposition strike that has crippled the nation's vital oil industry and rattled markets, has repeatedly dismissed opposition demands he step down and call for immediate elections. REUTERS/Daniel Aguilar

Luis Yanes, a supporter of President Hugo Chavez, dances during a rally in support of Chavez outside of Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Dec. 13, 2002. Beating drums and blowing whistles, supporters of Chavez surrounded the government palace Friday, drawing accusations from the opposition that they were forming a human shield to protect their embattled leader.*** (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

Caracas daily TalCual reports that refining units at Petroleos de Venezuela's (PDVSA) El Palito refinery have suffered substantial damage as a result of failed efforts by unqualified personnel to restart the facility.

That's all thay need is damage to refineries. What happens when some inept worker make a big mistake and causes a refinery to go down in flames? Even operated by experienced personnel refinery fires/explosions occur.

"They are confused. We will have to send them a copy of the constitution."

Please do. But also include a copy of ours. Other than Ron Paul, no one in DC seems to have read it.

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

From my amigos in Caracas, some more photos below, and their comments that actual number was likely in excess of 2 million anti-Chavez marchers. Also, Chavez supporters tried to do a counter rally and only pulled about 3,000 and that was with promises of free beer & food. (CNN won't tell you that, instead they give more time to Chavez supporter on camera rattling off endlessly how it's just the rich against the poor. Wow, looking at all these folks here, sure must be a lot of wealthy Venzuelians there!)

Below here the opposition marchers have covered up a main highway in Caracas.

Frequent updates from the Venzuelan top military that have quit Chavez (and know well and are telling all about his shenanigans) here at http://www.militaresdemocraticos.com/sp/index.html.
See the headlines to the right under "Noticias". Run them through an spanish to english translator, if you don't read espanol. English version coming soon.

Also, to see a very impressive line-up of all these top generals (Including heads of Army, Navy & Air Force, etc.) who have galvanzed this latest effort to oust Chavez, look at this here...
http://www.MilitaresDemocraticos.com/sp/oficiales.html

My first-hand story/photos from there last week & Venezuela backgrounder on Chavez doings and why top military has abandoned him in droves over the last 60 days, posted here...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/802763/posts.

-Shane

Yeah! I love all those wealthy Venezuelans. Great Post!

Hugo Chavez has two jobs: Venezuelan strongman and Cuban First Lady.

One-liner of the day.

You don't know much about the Venezuelan military. They will fire on anylne they are ordered to. I've seen them fire heavy weapons into apartment buildings just to get at some presumed anti-government groups who may or not have been in the building. I watched them rake the university buildings and grounds with fifties from low-flying copters. Men and women were falling dead all over the place. The Venezuelan grunts are not concerned about human casualties, only obeying their leaders.

Wow! Thanks for the great pictures and the links!

The Venezuelan grunts are not concerned about human casualties, only obeying their leaders.

Hopefully, what'll be different this go-around, and give them some pause, is that the grunts very top 'leaders' have publicly and vocally left Chavez in protest. Also, many still there amongst the rank & file and in the barracks, have already contacted their previous superiors vowing their support to the opposition and number over 17,000. They've been instructed to stay in-place and await their orders and, in the meantime, to keep feeding intel out till the time is right. Those are only the ones who have made themselves know to the opposition Generals and officers, there are surely many more, too. Also, there is a big push on in the marches appealing directly to the soldiers there and everywhere to do the right thing when the time comes, etc.

See http://www.militaresdemocraticos.com/sp/index.html for the current numbers of officers that have left and are now at Altamira Plaza, below that the officers & grunt supporters of them still inside, and finally the number of public also contacting them to offer their support to the military dissenters, too. Those three numbers are listed there vertically in the center of that page, for those who do not read espanol.

BTW, clicking on the navigation link in the top left reading "Los Militares" will take you to that line-up of opposition top officers we are talking about here.

The violence I'm most worried about is the civilian 'Bolivarian Circles' or brigades Chavez has used in the past and has recently fortified with additional arms. One incident, related by grunt who was involved and then promptly told to the opposition military, was the (week ago last Thursday) transportation and passing out of 750 FAL's and 1.8 million rounds of ammo to local leftist gang of about 1,000 strong called "Caraoaica y Tupacamaro" in poor neighborhood west of Caracas called "23 de Enero" that's adjacent to the Presidential Palace. They were key players in the failed April coup attempt and can wreck much havoc upon the civilian populations.

-Shane

Foreign and local critics of the left-leaning Venezuelan leader, who has vowed to bring social justice to his oil-rich but poverty-plagued nation through a ``peaceful revolution,'' have accused him of moving toward authoritarian rule.

"By no means all socialists were killers or amoral. Many were sincere humanitarians; mostly these were the adherents of democratic socialism. But democratic socialism turned out to be a contradiction in terms, for where socialists proceeded democratically, they found themselves on a trajectory that took them further and further from socialism. Long before Lenin, socialist thinkers had anticipated the problem. The imaginary utopias of Plato, More, Campanella, and Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel Looking Backward, was the most popular socialist book in American history, all relied on coercion, as did the plans of the Conspiracy of Equals. Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it."

-- the closing paragraph of Joshua Muravchik's Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Racial Left…… Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not inhabited the progressive mind are able to grasp the ruthless cynicism behind its idealistic mask or the fervent malice that drives its hypocritical passion for "social justice."

No matter how great the crimes progressives commit, no matter how terrible the future they labor to create, no matter how devastating the catastrophes they leave behind, the world outside the faith seems ever ready to forgive them their "mistakes" and to grant them the grace of "good intentions."

It would be difficult to recall, for example, the number of times I have been introduced on conservative platforms as "a former civil rights worker and peace activist in the 1960s." I have been described this way despite having written a detailed autobiography that exposes these self-glorifying images of the left as so many political lies.

Like many New Left leaders whom the young Mrs. Clinton once followed (and who are her comrades today), I regarded myself in the 1960s as a socialist and a revolutionary. No matter what slogans we chanted, or ideals we proclaimed our agendas always extended beyond (and well beyond) the immediate issues of "civil rights" and "peace."

New Left progressives-including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee-were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers.* We did this then-just as progressives still do now-in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.

As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you."* Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists-and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now-a principle they denounced as "racist" then-even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity-often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?***.....David Horowitz

bttt