There is a scandal in the United States, and this one is not about anything the government has done. This one is squarely on the media, which is virtually ignoring what's going on in Venezuela. There, the population is rising up en masse against the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro - the successor to the late anti-American strongman Hugo Chavez.
People continue to be arrested merely for protesting, and a long established local Human Rights NGO
makes an urgent plea for an investigation into widespread reports of torture of detainees. There are now dozens of serious human right abuses: National Guardsmen
shooting tear gas canisters directly into residential buildings. We have videos of
soldiers shooting civilians on the street.
The entire post is worth your time to read, in addition to other coverage from this thorough and excellent online media source.
Here is one of the referenced videos, by the way. It purports to show police shooting a civilian. The actual details are hard to make out and the subtitles are in Spanish, but you definitely get the sense of what's going on in the streets.
We
discussed last week what led to all this, and the best way to sum it up is simply that socialism leads to misery, and the people of Venezuela, who were fooled for a time by Chavez's populist rhetoric, are finally waking up to the realities of what they voted for. Not a moment too soon, either. The socialists did well in municipal elections that were held a mere two months ago, although it's perfectly reasonable to question how legitimate those results were. But it's clear from what's happening in the streets that the Maduro government does not have widespread support among the people, who are finally recognizing that a nation as oil-rich as Venezuela should be not experiencing 50 percent inflation and shortages of basic items like milk and toilet paper. That only happens when those in power are corrupt, incompetent or both.
So why is the news media ignoring this? It's hard to believe an ideology sympathetic to the socialists is the sole reason. It's not like they ignored the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think part of it is that, at least in America, news coverage has become increasingly about politics and elections, and if they can't see an angle for how the unrest in Caracas affects the 2014 mid-term elections in the United States, they simply fail to see the news value.
I also think, on a certain level, the media follows Barack Obama's cues in terms of what's really newsworthy. He doesn't show much interest in international affairs, so why should they?
In truth, what happens in Venezuela is crucially important to the United States because we buy more oil from them than from any other country. And if they ever rejected socialism and got their act together, they could be a very valuable trading partner and ally. It sounds like those kinds of changes are much on the minds of the Venezuelan people today, and the strongmen who still control the government there are determined to do whatever it takes to prevent those changes from happening.
Let's pray for peace and justice here, as soon as possible.
UPDATE: As you can see here in this image posted to Facebook by Detroit Tiger Miguel Cabrera, the situation in Venezuela is much on the minds of ballplayers from that country as they go through spring training this year. The signs translated (thanks to Jim Gungor for help with this): Bottom, being held by coach Omar Vizquel: "Those here all united for Venezuela." Middle: "We are your voice, Venezuela." Right: "Away but not absent."
