Venezuela enters Mercosur

It’s now official, and here’s the group photo to prove it:

Chavecito joins presidents Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Pepe Mujica (Uruguay), and Cristina Fernández (Argentina).

And in case you’re wondering how the biggest country in that market bloc feels about this, here you go:

This poster called for a big, huge demo saluting Chávez in front of the Brazilian government palace, the Itamaraty, today. There is no doubt he got it.

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3 Responses to Venezuela enters Mercosur

  1. Tommy says:

    I hope that this serves to force the government in Venezuela to make the proper reforms to free up and motivate the private industry so that it can grow and become international…

    But based on the last 14 years or so, where the private industry has been minimized and pushed around by an “expropriating hungry” government, to replace the basic services and suppliers with government connected/influenced importers, I highly doubt much change is going to come.

    The decision to accept the country, or rather to push the country into Mercosur by the South American allies is merely to ensure they can get a fatter portion of the pie without paying duties. Venezuela will continue growing as an importer country and will continue spending more and more, lessening the value of the national currency and of the national industries.

    If this is a sign of growth, then I don’t want to see where this is leading to.

  2. Tommy says:

    Hey Sabina,

    I didn’t want to leave you second-guessing or misjudging who or where I am from, but for some reason I couldn’t post on the other article (I was banned? maybe it closes after some time?)

    No, I’m not military, neither American. As for the IP, yes I am in Kuwait, although i can easily change it using a VPN tunnel, right? But nah, seriously, I am in Kuwait for business purposes. I work for an Oil & Gas services company (go figure a Venezuelan who’s good at Oil & Gas business).

    First, the easy one. Grab the picture from the post in Facebook, and do a search in Google images using that same photo (Google allows you to search with pics). You’ll see the same picture is shared in a bunch of places, but mainly in Portuguese websites, tied to Brazil. I’ve read rumors that she’s supposed to be a Brazilian model. As for the other “friends” in Facebook, 1 contact doesn’t exist, and the other has only 1 friend, that isn’t the girl named in the forum. If you ask me, this was made up in some underground place to play “dirty politics” in this electoral months (which doesn’t really surprise me, everyone from every political side does it). It could also mean that the profile was real and the picture was borrowed, but the facebook archives don’t show the profile either… but even so in Google one could or would still find caches or history of profiles (even those recently closed). it’s a bit tricky the whole thing, from either angle that you look at it.

    I don’t represent the full-blown globalizing capitalism, nor do I support it, but I don’t support either a government-run full-blown social program. Economies in Canada and great parts of Europe have demonstrated the weakness in these areas as well. I am more of a believer that there is a mid-ground between “free” private enterprise with properly-located and monitored government regulations. In other words, rather than the government playing an active role in controlling aspects of the everyday life, I see it more as a role of a regulatory agency. That’s the biggest weakness (for instance) in the U.S. (once the private companies entered the government that system of regulations disappeared).

    That being said, I’m glad about your clarification regarding the history of Venezuela from an economic and politics point of view, which goes much further back than the Caracazo, I guarantee you. The Caracazo was something considerably ambiguous (considering CAP’s campaign slogans a few months before he implemented the reforms that led to this), but if you think about it the reforms are rather similar to what they are now, aren’t they? Mainly on the reforms of import/export duties which we have to go through now to enter Mercosur (mainly import considering the only thing we export is Oil).

    I don’t think i’ll spend much more time debating as I’m honestly not sure if I couldn’t comment on the other post because I was banned, or it was simply a technical misunderstanding… Either way, I appreciate the opportunity to allow me to explain. Thanks.

    • Sabina Becker says:

      I don’t need to do an image search, I googled her name. Turns out she is real, and she is the candidate’s niece. How embarrassing for him to have THAT go viral, eh? Hence the quick scrub. I didn’t know when I first posted this that she was Capriles Radonsky’s niece, but now I do, so my sincere thanks for that, and for the timely reminder to look people up. This girl is really interesting! (And no, I do NOT believe that’s a stock photo. The background isn’t all white, you can see that it’s in an actual home someplace.)

      BTW, her Twitter account (referred to on the other post) references a news item sent to her by Ibeyise Pacheco. If you’re Venezuelan, you should know who SHE is, right? Only one of the leading opposition journalists. Meaning, our little “fake” Venezuelan oppo is connected to some very real biggies in local right-wing propaganda. Which makes sense, considering she talks about how much of PDVSA her family owned (ha, not anymore, and never again!) and how her profile states that she works for Empresas Polar, which happens to be one of the big local food/drink companies, a local partner of PepsiCo, and a major importer back in the days when 80% of Venezuelan food was imported. (It isn’t anymore!) These birds all flock together. They’ve all come down in the world a bit since Mercal came on the scene with fair-priced local goods (and fair-traded imported ones through ALBA), but they’re still not exactly hurting for cash. Her tweet to Pacheco sounds bored and dismissive. And she doesn’t even bother to deny that she wrote that horrible shit, either! (And yes, her orthography is just as terrible on the tweeter. Surprise.) Given all that, I’m sure that she is, in fact, quite real, and simply embarrassed to be seen on Facebook for the time being.

      I also happen to know that Venezuela’s present day troubles go back way further than even 100 years ago. Petroleum was discovered there when, again? Juan Vicente Gómez was the first US-compliant dictator to give Venezuela the Dutch disease. And even he had antecedents. Hell, Bolívar himself predicted it — not the Dutch disease, as that came 100 years after him, but the Monroe Doctrine. He foresaw a US imperialist thrust in Latin America breaking up and slowing down revolutionary efforts at true independence, and he was absolutely correct about that. Had he known that his sister’s descendants would play a shamefully complicit role in helping to maintain that hegemony, who knows what he’d say? Probably something considerably less polite than I’m saying here.

      And there’s nothing “ambiguous” about the Caracazo, it was very clearly a crackdown on the poor by an oligarch who played the populist democrat and then sold out to the IMF. The people couldn’t afford to live on what his 1989 “reforms” (which, unlike those of the 1970s, bear no resemblance to those of Chávez) would have left them. So they fought back and got killed. Greg Palast calls the Caracazo an “IMF riot”, BTW; Naomi Klein calls it the Shock Doctrine. Both assert that such measures are used to control and beat down the populace into submission, and they are right. I’ve seen the footage from then, and there’s nothing ambiguous about trucks piled high with coffins, and mass graves in La Peste. That repression lasted for over a decade. They’re still digging them up to determine the exact number killed, which is probably many times higher than the vague official estimates. The barrios you mentioned earlier are still pocked with bullet holes from then. Wasn’t Chávez who did that, it was the fake democrat known as CAP. I’m not surprised that they support Chávez there and still curse CAP’s name; I would too.

      I also happen to know that the locals in those same barrios have taken a lot of local improvements (such as the Technical Water Councils) in their own hands, and did so even before Chávez; the difference now is that they have money from the oil industry to help them do what’s been badly needed for decades. They weren’t bought out; they made input to the Revolution, democratically, and got a hearing and the federal funding they needed. They are self-organized from the base, not top-down. There is all the difference in the world there. (I’m also not surprised that Capriles isn’t popular there. What has he really done for those people, other than appear briefly in photo-ops and make vague statements like “there is a way”? They are all educated now, and while poor, they are NOT stupid.)

      I’m pretty sure it’s that democratic redistribution of power, as well as that redirection of money from the oil industry into education, health, agriculture, local co-op businesses and self-help agencies, rather than the purses of the insanely rich, that’s what’s really galling our friend Adriana Mendoza Capriles. Heaven forbid that the Devil’s Excrement should do the Lord’s work, eh? And heaven forfend that Empresas Polar and its pricey imports should be shut out by cheap, healthy locally grown food…and that the local oligarchy no longer rules by divine right of near-total ownership, and that global empires no longer have malleable local puppets to do their lucrative dirty work for them.

      And funny, too, that you should mention VPN tunnels and dirty politics. Because that’s EXACTLY what US military psyops does all the time. Did you know that they pay “consultants” to pose as people they’re not, and to plant plausible misinformation on websites like this one? They fake all kinds of things, including news items…and “private corporations” with a lot of strangely close ties to the US military, which can be dissolved at will to prevent tracking by outsiders. The NSA runs them, as does the CIA. Look up Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, if you don’t believe me. (I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, BTW. You still smell an awful lot like one of them to me.)

      Lastly, I apologize for the comment that didn’t go through; I assumed it was on the other thread, rather than this post, and forgot to approve it. I kept looking for it and wondered why it didn’t show up there. I’ve approved it now. It was human error on my part, and I do regret that.

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