May 31, 2007  Hugo Chavez’s government has collapsed. He is no longer leading Venezuela in any sense of the word, except with repressive actions and flawed KGB-style paid propaganda. Today, Chavez has ignored the best course for his own citizens which is to deliver principled leadership based on functional governing. The Venezuelan regime in Caracas has chosen to refuse to hand back the promise of an organic future for Venezuelans even as it refuses to return the stolen assets of its own citizens and many others as well as numerous companies, such as RC TV. Chavez refuses to append a sustainable future for his country and encourage growth. Instead, he now insists on dooming Venezuela under the Chavez plan of an endless series of Chavez controls which doom the once vibrant Venezuelans for untold years. Chavez, in other words, is a failure and needs to depart.

While this may surprise some who have cravenly abetted and profiteered from the completely corrupt Chavez regime for far too long, it is a commonly held truth that leaders who can only hold their position by violence and repression are failures. Chavez has ruled by avarice and deception and old fashioned, violent bully-boy tactics for too long. A quick roster of those in his wallet becomes must-read material…and the list today is embarrassingly lengthy and reprehensible. As of right now, Hugo Chavez has retreated into the darkest non-governance possible by his Orwellian insistence on totalitarian controls. Any who are in Chavez’s wallet are today on his payroll to destroy all that mankind has worked very hard to achieve and would now abandon. 

Either the Western world accepts and embraces the growing totalitarian regimes which we observe with horror or stand unified in any way to cancel this cancerous tumor which is already killing many and destroying any future possible for tens of millions. And while we are raising the long overdue veil of principled positions on Chavez, we ask right now: where are the children of Venezuela? Where did the Chavez goons whisk them off to? The world must demand the basic right to protect the innocent young students of Venezuela whose whereabouts today are unknown. In addition, the charges that Chavez’s thugs, also called his police and military, are lacing their crowd control water cannons and tear gas bombs with Vladimir Putin-style narcotizing chemicals to cause crowd control by sending the victims into chemically destabilized bodily conditions, mostly lasting about four or so days while some end in death must be investigated.

Pretty words of tepid support for liberty’s lights lend political cover to those shallow few who utter them but are meaningless in the face of evil. And Hugo Chavez today has funded evil so debasing for his own citizens that to ignore his total plan for regional darkness enveloping Latin America is…a crime.

Specifically, Chavez is accused correctly of removing freedom of expression, a cherished freedom and a pillar of democracy. But this week’s criticisms, however correct, are again lazily missing the mark of the utter depravity of Chavez’s rule. Chavez not only denies freedom of expression but he has also denied rule of law and all that it means. And he has sold this perverse playbook to the masses of Latin leftists who seek advantage where law and order is no longer in play. When rule of law is removed, security and stability dies.

Rule of law is never as sexy an issue as freedom of the media, which is truly important. But without the security and stability under normative rule of law, all features and factors of life fall away and become meaningless, slipping in to the void of nothingness. North Korea is just such an example where quality of life is stripped bare. Zimbabwe, Iran and Cuba are prime examples too. Hugo Chavez calls these criminal regimes….role models.

But Venezuela is unique because it is this young century’s retelling of man’s refusal to enshrine security and stability in favor of insecurity and instability. While some murky offshore derivatives, spot oil traders, and hedge funds may profiteer mightily off the tragedies of instability and insecurity, it is perverse to insist that human beings must continue as pawns for Chavez’s Latin lovers of murky lawless, hidden profiteers as their very lives becomes as meaningless as rashes of lemmings. With no rule of law in Venezuela under Chavez, life is meaningless and no rights of mankind flourish. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has destroyed freedom of expression in Venezuela in every sense and has destroyed rule of law and he is poised to strike again. There is no excuse for this and there can be no support for the Chavez regime at all.

This time, Chavez has every intention of installing total martial controls over the very persons who live in his region while permissibly glowing and fawning with his corrupt corporatist swindles underway. Like all bad adolescent boys who have taken the family car for a joy ride, it is long past midnight in Venezuela and long past time to take away the keys to the engine which Chavez drives the entire Andean region with…off a cliff. “Worried” is what failed parents are when their children have stolen the family car and run over innocent victims. Instead, responsible adults move from being “worried” about violence and crime to fact-based analysis and corrected behaviors, none of which are apparent in today’s crop of enabling leaders who have foolishly bought into the Chavez extortion plans.  Chavez’s bad boy joy ride today includes military tanks criss-crossing Venezuela to convert Venezuelans in to docile, subdued serfs of the totalitarian strong arm machine. It is past midnight and time to take away the keys. 

Rather than one more day of wasted words such as `the free world is worried’ about Chavez, we propose instead an end to the abusive propaganda underway regarding Hugo Chavez. Worried would have been appropriate five years’ ago. Today, the crash and clash of humanity is on the edge. This is not to deny freedom of expression but rather to deliver freedom of expression’s demands: the facts. For without verifiable facts and core due diligence, freedom of expression is nothing more than a prostitute for political and/or personal gains, as hollow as the paid propaganda from which it stems. Chavez claims to abhor capitalism which of course delivers the very food he eats and the very engine he drives while he also feeds and sustains the growing communist media empire called Castro’s Cuba.

Chavez must be tried and held accountable today for his insistence that totalitarianism and all its evil horrors, be enshrined. Totalitarianism does not need to be enshrined. Indeed, it must be condemned and cured for the criminal and violent scam that it is.

In Venezuela today, the world must insist that Chavez depart and surrender the keys.

The choice is ours. We are all- all of us today- Venezuelans, with all their warts and all their depravities and past sins born of the mythical belief that oil riches yield the false, vapid allure of body numbing silicone and botox injections or the mind numbing daily Latin shopping mall escapism rituals which will save them. Instead, the ages-old human reminder and today’s facts are this: everything is nothing under totalitarianism and there is no escaping this fact while no retreat brings comfort at all. Chavez is selling totalitarianism and we must not let him. Like a door to door Fuller Brush man selling fake products, Hugo Chavez must have the door of acceptance slammed in his face for all that he is a fraud, a leader of criminals, and an abjectly failed leader of men.

Mankind has the tools to grow liberty’s blessings. We have consistently applauded these blessings, born of common sense and sound applications of democracy’s four main pillars.  Mankind, too has also been handed the keys to the family car. As long as corrupted politicians, who are in the pocket of some of history’s most brazen manipulators, continue to bar restoration of freedom’s lights, the cancer of criminal totalitarian regimes grows.

Far too late, we condemn Chavez for removing one of democracy’s four pillars: freedom of expression. The failure to acknowledge the end of all four of democracy’s tenants by Hugo Chavez is itself criminal and must be corrected. Millions and millions of Venezuelans are trying to tell us all that democracy has been fully dead under Chavez since 2004 and was mostly dead by 2002. Millions more are being romanced by the Chavez money teams to engage in perverse criminality. Susceptible zones include Bolivia and Ecuador which have been wooed and now are full partners in Chavez’s dysfunctional marriage of criminal convenience, killing democracy and law and order. The death of RC TV in Venezuela is more than a symbol. It is the exposure of the reality that Hugo Chavez has killed democracy in full, not just freedom of expression. The perps in this criminal perp walk parade are becoming more well known. Perpetuating narcolepsy with the now dead entity of previously alive democracy in Latin America is untenable. Chavez’s brutal totalitarianism is here for you now. The choice and the responsibility to act is yours.

-Pedro Camargo for Ecrisis