Right-wing Venezuelan deputy Alfonso Marquina, wearing a motorcycle helmet in parliament. Was he planning maybe to pop a wheelie in the Hemiciclo?
Ah yes. The peaceful Venezuelan right just keeps getting more and more peaceful all the time…
The right-wing opposition presented itself with pre-planned violence in the National Assembly.
It was so thoroughly planned that Alfonso Marquina arrived wearing a helmet, while the putschist media owner Alberto Federico Ravell tweeted:
“@AlbertoRavell: We hope that ANTV [the legislature’s dedicated TV channel] doesn’t censor the broadcast from today’s session.”
He knew of it.
Thus, in the midst of opposition-generated violence, several female deputies of the PSUV were assaulted, and immediately the revolutionary deputies fought back.
The right-wing deputies learned of the decision of National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello to not let them speak in parliament if they refused to recognize the constitutional President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. That was when they began their attack.
The session was later suspended.
Note: The opposition deputies ran out of the chamber. Where to? To a health clinic? Noooo. To Globovisión, which was waiting for them. It was a long way, but they didn’t clean themselves up, because the idea was to put o a show. There, they began to proclaim themselves as martyrs.
The Telesur correspondent in Caracas, Rolando Segura, tweeted from @rolandoteleSUR: “Several PSUV deputies were attacked during the plenary session where five additional credits were discussed.”
[…]
The PSUV deputy and faction chief, Pedro Carreño, denounced opposition deputies for assaulting various Chavistas in the Federal Legislative Palace.
Carreño said that “it is inconceivable that the parliamentary right-wing would want to ignore the popular will”, in relation to the presidential election results announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE), wihch the opposition refuses to recognize.
“The problem is not the difference, but that they were hatching a putschist plan,” asserted Carreño at the end of the ordinary session of the National Assembly.
[…]
According to some media reports, the confrontations began when some right-wing deputies began to blow vuvuzelas, as a form of protest after the parliamentary president, Diosdado Cabello, ratified the decision to forbid the right-wing deputies the right to speak during the session, since they refused to accept Nicolás Maduro as legitimate president of Venezuela.
Translation mine.
So, to recap: Oppos refuse to recognize legitimate president, based on the results of the cleanest, fairest, freest election possible. Government, realizing this as part of a putschist plan, suspends their right to speak until they do the democratic thing and concede defeat. And since they knew this was coming (it was announced ahead of time, and no one can pretend they didn’t hear), they come prepared for violence — some with vuvuzelas, others (see Marquina) with a crash helmet. Even before it starts, putschist media owner Ravell, of Globovisión, tweets that he hopes there won’t be any censorship. And of course, there isn’t, since the ANTV recording clearly shows the opposition attacking the Chavistas:
Here you can see it all exactly as it goes down. Before the trouble starts, the ruling PSUV wing of the parliament is completely calm, not expecting any trouble; the PSUV deputies keep to their seats and go about their business very normally. The other side, however, is a beehive of very strange activity. Lots of oppos are standing and moving around. You can see María Corina Machado, that lamb so lionized by the Washington Post, obviously urging some very un-kosher activity as she moves from row to row. You can also see right-wing deputy Julio Borges reaching under his desk for a small black knapsack, which he hands to a woman oppo seated in front of him. She takes something out, then passes the bag back to Borges, who also removes something from it. The something turns out to be an airhorn (these are the “vuvuzelas” from the piece I translated), which several other oppos also produce from their bags in order to generate noise and chaos. The oppos then swarm the dais where Assembly President Cabello and the two vice-presidents sit, assaulting and attacking PSUV deputies along the way. In typical cowardly fashion, they beat up the women first.
And of course, the PSUV members fight back, because that is what one often does, quite naturally, when assaulted. And the oppos get what’s coming to them:
Here, we see that Julio Borges got a little help from Globomojón’s makeup crew before appearing on camera to whine and kvetch about how there’s no democracy in Venezuela, and how he got beaten up for not accepting the fact that there IS democracy, and his side simply lost. This after he and MariCori (more about HER later) went out of their way to pick a fight.
Classiest sore losers ever, those guys.
