Ooh, ahh…

Either Gainesville is a very small town, or it was a very slow news day. Or this “independent” newspaper is one of the many in the US that have a strange notion of what constitutes peace and democracy…

About forty people gathered Friday gathered with a simple message: “No more Chávez.”

Forty? Wowzers.

What started out with two students and a lone sign that read “No + Chavez,” slowly became a full-blown protest demonstrating against Hugo Chávez’s rule over Venezuela.

Though it was scheduled for 5 p.m., the protest took full force around 5:45 as the demonstrators, mostly students, trickled to the corner.

Yeah, I bet they were a real force to be reckoned with…

However, not only Venezuelans attended the protest. About 10 students from Honduras held signs and chanted in favor of democracy.

Kenya Perez, a Honduran junior at Santa Fe, said she felt inclined to protest because she is against communism in Latin America.

“We want peace,” Perez said. “And we hate Chávez.”

Yo, Kenya: Peace and hate cancel each other out. If you actually wanted peace, you’d be in favor of him–unlike Gorilletti, he’s never turned the army out to fire on its own people. Even when they demonstrate against him, as they do with nauseating regularity.

And what do you bet these Hondurans are all in favor of the very VIOLENT coup that took place just two months ago in their homeland–from which they are well removed? Of course, the author doesn’t go into THAT. The story was supposed to be on how “peaceful” and “democratic” it is to hate a very democratically elected, ratified and popular leader, and by damn, the writer stuck to it–even though the end result was, as you can see, pitiful!

Ah well. Things were pathetic all over for the disociados. Here’s what the “big” march in downtown Caracas looked like:

Mario Silva, of VTV’s La Hojilla, shows that not only was this “global” march extremely ill-attended (and short), the demonstrators were also drinking (illegally!) And most pathetic of all, when they got to the public prosecutor’s office, which was the end of their mini-march, there were no police or national guard troops there for them to fight with! Imagine, no targets for their empty booze bottles. They came loaded for bear, and went home without so much as a moth-eaten squirrel. That’s gotta hurt!

And how pathetic is it when even CNN–well known for its antisocial tendencies–is forced to report that things were a flop? Right in the headline, even?

Meanwhile, for REAL independent reporting, here’s what happened in San Francisco. This demo was small, too–but…

A handful of anti-Chavistas were there. We had 10 people present but only 2 of us went near the anti-Chávez demonstration. We intentionally kept it a secret from them that we had other people there so that they wouldn’t mess with them. These 8 people spread out around the perimeter of the demonstration, handing out flyers and telling people that the protest was in support of President Hugo Chávez.

Passers-by saw the group waving Venezuelan flags and the 8 pro-Chávez supporters handed out thousands of flyers to people explaining why they should support Hugo Chávez and, probably, most people figured the anti-Chávez protest was actually in favor of Hugo Chávez. It greatly angered the anti-Chávistas that only TWO people were disrupting their little demo by passing out pro-Chávez literature. IF ONLY THEY HAD KNOWN THAT EIGHT MORE PEOPLE WERE FURTHER AWAY, DOING THE SAME THING! We figured they would notice those 8 people — but they never did. The 2 people who got close did a good job of distracting them. The anti-Chávistas didn’t bring any flyers (well, they had maybe 20 copies of a “talking points memo” that they desperately tried to hand out to compete with the 2 protesters’ 1000-some flyers) and so all they had was an incoherent banner and a bunch of Venezuelan flags, making our job much easier.

The anti-Chávistas were too busy arguing with, pushing, and trying to mess with the 2 people who went up close to them to even notice the other 8 people who were there. Every time they said “there’s only two of you,” those 2 people just smiled, knowing that the anti-Chávistas had been outsmarted (not hard to do). Most people didn’t get close enough to the anti-Chávistas to know what they were saying and all they got was a flyer that explained in great detail why Hugo Chávez should be supported and gave URLs to good websites about the Bolivarian Revolution.

The 2 people who were close to the anti-Chávistas encouraged them to believe that there were only 2 of us present. In the meantime, we had our other 8 people calling a bunch of the local media — radio stations, etc, and reporting on the pro-Chávez demonstration. At least 3 local radio stations put us on the air, reporting “live from the Support Hugo Chávez Rally”.

But, really, there were only about 15 anti-Chávistas there. And there were 10 of us. They had all the time in the world to prepare — they had a permit and everything and weeks to prepare for the demo but still only about 15 people showed up. They CLAIM 40 people showed up against Chávez but that is just a lie. The pictures prove that. The closest they got to 40 people is when a bunch of Japanese tourists came by to see what was going on and even then, it was only about 20 – 25 people and the tourists only stayed around for 5 minutes or so.

We only found out about the protest TWO DAYS in advance. And, in those two days, we got together basically the same amount of people and, because of our superior protest strategy of spreading out and keeping the majority of us secret from the anti-Chávistas, we were able to use their numbers to make our protest look even bigger. But, like I said, we were about the same number anyway.

Once more, with feeling: