December 3, 2007  Mounting evidence of civil- societal break downs under the Cuban-Marxist plan for Venezuela were so massively obvious on Sunday in Caracas that even Hugo Chavez and his millions of paid supporters globally could not dim the tiny hopes and small bright lights of truth tellers that barely managed to get their stories told- against great odds- and turned away Chavez's pre rigged so called constitutional amendment vote. In one of the most rewarding triumphs of what mankind can do when even small numbers of unpaid truth tellers chose to care enough about their heretofore incredulously vapid, morally compromised, and lazy lives and finally tell the truth, Hugo Chavez's massive juggernaut of deceit, fraud and crime was exposed for one brief shining moment in Caracas last night and was found to be lacking.
 
We say that unpaid truth tellers, also called volunteers and also known as ordinary human beings, made all the difference because this is true. Liberty lovers had no help from the USA, from the OAS, from the EU. The opposite has been the case for more years than we care to recall, at least five and counting. The USA and the OAS tell us that they have helped freedom lovers when they have not in any meaningful sense. The people of Venezuela, contrary to any backbone delivered from the OAS or the USA and EU which delivered a cut and run abandonment of all that they are supposed to stand for, did have strong moral backbone from the Vatican and this gave context to the play.  To be sure, nothing from the OAS or the Soros-Carter team helped anyone or anything in Venezuela, having been discredited years ago in their role blessing two past massive voter frauds.  The free world's free media still has egg on its face regarding the facts in Venezuela, continuously carrying half truths and half baked reliance on Chavez supporters who spin their yarns faster than spider webs. Worse yet, they sell us cheap discounted elections:


We say kudos to the people of Venezuela who faced massive odds yesterday to overcome their personal addiction to manipulative lifestyles where everything and everyone only considers themselves and not the common good, which is precisely what retains Chavez and Correa in their determinedly criminal authoritarian states.
 
We say bless you to the church for not once backing down and for refusing to surrender to the Cuban-Iranian mandates that they be tossed in prison with no habeas corpus for giving truth to power. For once in a very long time, the Jesuits were on the side of right. The students learned well their lessons.
 
This then is the story of what men can do when they must do something or die.
 
Abandoned and quite starkly naked in any meaningful sense, Venezuelans foolishly created their own embarrassment of fraud and deception by failing to do what humans do best: work under moral principles for a higher power of internationally recognized rewards of freedom. Rather, like far too many in the Andes, Caracas learned too little too late from their neighbors in Bogotá that came together  under Uribe and finally united to put the armed and weaponized criminals called the FARC under abeyance. For its part, Peru finally rallied to rejoice in their new found free speech and open media, vowing to never again abandon their rights to life under the Montesinos series of deceptions and statist controls during the Fujimori reign of manipulative power.
 
Neither Ecuador nor Bolivia chose to stand on principle and abandoned their higher calling to the self defeating and embarrassing adolescent demands of selfishness and fraudulent, manipulative government under the Chavez-Correa Cuban plan. In fact, Ecuador's collapse of principles is so deep and so rapid that Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro could be dead and buried but Rafael Correa would continue, as he does, to pretend that Castro is alive and Chavez is his great brother.
 
No one- no one at all- has turned on the lights of truth telling in Ecuador today. They are true believers in their own deception and are seriously addicted to manipulative politics of non truths. Look for the unintended consequence in the weeks ahead of the Chavez-Castro team littering Montecristi to turn up the heat to insure what is already guaranteed- a win-win for the Cuban communist feeding plan called Correa's regime.
 
Unlike the Venezuelans who learned the cold light of truth in 2002 that the real functionaries of the Clinton-Dodd and Soros teams would never stand to assist freedom fighters in Caracas, Ecuadoreans preferred to be lazy and pretend that the USA would bail them out of their own laziness and self avowed undereducation while no one- not one- lifted a finger to shine the light of truth on the Correa crimes underway. In fact, the Chambers of Commerce, notably the Ecuadorean American Chamber of Commerce readily coalesced with the very ones who delivered untruths and economic ruin, called the Correa-Chavez-Cuban plan in Ecuador. And still no one uttered one word: they all went shopping and abandoned their past principles, vacating hundreds of years of dependable morality.
 
 
We stand up and applaud Mary Anastasia O'Grady's terrific piece in today's WALL STREET JOURNAL, here, which reminds us what happens when good men and true....do nothing.

The effects of doing nothing today in the Latin continent are ruinous and have already plunged whole Chavez-satellite nations in to unending crime and unsecure lives where no one enjoys any confidence that economies and financial workings will be safe or secure. This is of course due to the large scale removal of democracy's prized tenant: rule of law, which of course the current ambassador of the USA in Quito reminds us often, is not supported at all by the USA. We remind Ms. Jewell that without rule of law, there is no democracy, regardless of the pap she tells us that Soros's alternative democracy of no rule of law- only arbitrary justice where all crimes are decriminalized and legitimate democracy is criminalized is only what the USA - writ her preferred Soros-US AID NGOS stand for.  In this, she knows well that the U.S. taxpayers watch this deception: calling U.S. funds as democracy building while enshrining democracy's end. This overt deceit must end.

Ecuadoreans must act to reverse their craven manipulative lives of ruinous inertia and vapidity. Linda Jewell's embrace of Chavez and Correa succeeds because Ecuadoreans let this lie succeed, irresponsibly believing that there is nothing that they can do except...continue manipulating life's choices and abandoning their small hopes for the future in to a world of self imprisonment because their pressures were, don't you see?- too strong. Making excuses did not win the day in Caracas last night. Venezuelans put their lives on the line and stood united- for once in a very long time. Billions and billions have been stolen by Chavez and billions wasted on his criminal adventurism which has yet to be stopped.  Truth tellers won the day in Caracas last night for one brief shining moment. All Andean souls must replicate the strengths grown by telling the truth.
 
On this day, we call on the Chambers of Commerce in Quito and Guayaquil, as well as the ridiculously unsupportable AMCHAM in Quito, to reverse their own sell outs to the Chavez-Correa lures of co opted living and untenable criminal rackets. We require that they craft full activity plans and deliver their agenda for the next two months to act responsibly with their members- the people of Ecuador or else abandon their well funded posts to others who would lead to defend....commerce in every sense. To do this, they will have to cease their three year steroid-packed addiction to manipulating the destruction caused by the Correa-Chavez Cuban plan underway in Montecristi. In fact, the Chambers will and can deliver the highest value of their over paid posts: give truth to power. They have done this before and can do so again. The crudely infiltrated Chambers must reject the lies that their silence will gain them ATPDEA free trade extensions for life and that their sell out and complicity to the criminal empire of the Chavez-Correa rackets will bring a blessing to their lives: this is not true and any who so say are liars.
 
We call on Ecuador's media to protest the ridiculous barring of free speech and media at Montecristi and stop pretending that they defend freedom's needed ingredient- open speech when they do not. Ecuador's media makes profit from free speech but does nothing to defend its money making caveat. This shows abandonment of principle and must be corrected. In fact, the media must sue before the OAS to force an injunction for free media at Montecristi or suffer what happens already- their own face of greed and willful complicity in self enrichment, currently on parade in Miami's Brickell Avenue. The days are over for all self absorbed Ecuadoreans who warn that life's highest purpose is to be "rich." Those days are exposed by the very necessary reinsertion of honor and truth telling  to fundamentally enrich lives, without which there is no richness to life- only disease, crime, murder, and an end to quality of life which is precisely the case in Ecuador today because Ecuadoreans sold out their principles to the manipulative deceit that money alone buys satisfaction. We have seen mankind go down that road before.

Lebanon today is a perfect example of this sell out while no government exists in that lawless land where no hope lives. Having stood for nothing but vapid self serving abandonment of any principles, Lebanon today has no principles and no government. It is a failed state and is ripe for Hezbollah's advances, as is the parallel case in Ecuador. Lebanon's values are now Ecuador's values where quality of life is meaningless because none act to deliver meaning...only self serving acts of untruths.
 
We denounce those who lie and mislead about the facts in Ecuador today. We reject their propaganda and refuse their ruses.
 
Follow the facts from Bolivia in O'Grady's superb road map of the Cuban-Chavez Marxist bloc...insert Correa and Ecuador for exacting parallels in this parallel universe where the criminal is legitimized, extracted here:
 
"...Mr. Morales has met substantial civic resistance to his power grab. So last week his government moved to resolve the problem by employing the military, the national police and paramilitaries to physically block elected members of the opposition from entering the constituent assembly in Sucre and the national legislature in La Paz -- so that it could push through its centralizing agenda.

These events didn't get much international attention, but they signal that the government has decided to accelerate its accumulation of power in La Paz through the use of force. It is said that Mr. Morales's vice president, Álvaro García Linera, is heading up this project and this doesn't bode well for democracy. The upper-middle-class Marxist of European extraction from Cochabamba has a record of leading "armed struggle" in indigenous communities that goes back decades. All indications are that the tiger has not lost his taste for brute force.

Why remote Bolivia should be important to Washington may not be any more apparent at this time than Afghanistan was prior to 2001. But there is a reason that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited La Paz at the end of September. Bolivia matters to hemispheric stability. In 1967, Che Guevara recognized that Bolivia's borders with Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile gave it enormous strategic value. So did the anticommunist government which killed him there that year. Thirty years later Bolivia's potential to destabilize remains.

The U.S. ought to also be concerned about the tinder-box issue of poverty. Mr. Morales has used this misery -- and his indigenous background -- to rally support for his socialism. But if living standards are to improve, Bolivia needs property rights, investment and trade. Not only is Mr. Morales's left-wing populism an improbable model for growth but, sadly, it is the indigenous poor who are likely to suffer the most from his retrograde experiment in collectivism.

The Bolivian president assumed that consolidating power would be a cakewalk. He had planned to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Chavez, slowly closing the noose around the Bolivian democracy while using his popularity as a shield. Step one was to call for the election of an assembly to rewrite the country's constitution. But the opposition forced him to accept the stipulation that each article be ratified by a two-thirds vote. Unfortunately for Mr. Morales, his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party only won just over half of the delegates, not enough to get its version of the constitution rubber stamped.

The public has yet to see the proposed document, but among the most contentious aspects is the question of decentralization. Of the nine states (aka `departments') in the country, the prefects of six are now openly opposed to the MAS agenda, which seeks to consolidate its power in La Paz by depriving the states of authority over their own revenues.

The state of Chuquisaca has a special reason for joining the rebellion against the Morales machine. Its MAS representatives in the assembly want the seat of the executive and national legislature to be returned from La Paz to the state capital of Sucre, where it was before 1898. When the rest of the president's backers in the assembly refused to allow the subject on the agenda, massive street protests erupted in Sucre, which also happens to be where the national constituent assembly has been meeting. Three people have been killed in clashes with police, and more than 100 have been injured.

Last week, the government unilaterally relocated the assembly to a military installation outside the city, and used force to keep assembly representatives who oppose it from attending. The pro-Morales quorum then held a vote and `passed' its version of the new constitution. In the same week, a meeting of the national legislature in La Paz was similarly closed to all but pro-Morales forces. It voted to seize provincial hydrocarbon revenues to pay for an expanded old-age pension program. Liberal Bolivians are now worried that similar lockout tactics will be used to get the constitution approved article by article.

Bulldozer tactics are consistent with the politics of Mr. García Linera, whose résumé includes a stint in the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, and who did time in prison on terrorism charges. Last week members of the Red Ponchos, one of Mr. García Linera's favorite militant groups, amassed in Sucre to threaten MAS opponents. A YouTube video shows them hanging small dogs on a clothesline and then slitting their throats. The incident conjured up memories of Peru's bloodthirsty Shining Path, which also mistreated dogs as a warning to the uncooperative
 
This then is the `democracy' of Mr. Morales and Mr. García Linera. It's hardly surprising. Their power came about illegitimately, with dynamite and road blocks that brought down two elected governments. In the short run, Bolivians may have no recourse. But a good first step from the international community would be a recognition that the democracy has been struck down, even if no one heard it fall."
 
If you cannot muster the intelligence to grasp the stunning parallels of the ruinous road to Castro's hell under Correa-Chavez, then you really should not be reading this site's missives. You should return to your TVs and shopping malls. But if you care one bit for your patrimony, consider this: truth carries a burden to act. Truth is not truth if it is shuttered away. Truth, contrary to what our mothers tell all our families now, cannot be manipulated and live. Truth is the first victim in any dead zone and its death comes from manipulated lives. Honor is the next to fall.
 
To us, we proudly announce our winner of the week- the truth tellers of Venezuela, the Vatican and Sr. Quiroga of Bolivia. They have acted nobly and are noble entities. We would love to add some Ecuadoreans- any Ecuadorean- to this list of high minded nobility who are making a difference. Colombia's majority of its people and exemplified by the exemplary Alvaro Uribe are already tops on our list and we are thrilled that their lives and economies and futures have vastly improved because Colombians chose for the first time in fifty years to stand on principles and not manipulations with evil. It has paid off and Colombia, like Peru, is enjoying interim serenity which they had forgotten can exist when manipulations end and truth begins. Ecuador is still cheerfully embracing evil and gayly embracing the unembraceable. History was made yesterday in Venezuela because the civil movement was too obvious and too strong to announce the pre rigged Chavez election results.
 
With the First lady of Venezuela- FARC moll and Chavez's doxxy front and center in the person of Piedad Cordoba, Venezuelans had to suffer the midnight ride of Hugo Chavez who looked overly medicated and mentally unhinged, which he no doubt is. Why Venezuelans permit Piedad Cordoba to live rent free at Miraflores to aid and abet the FARC and Chavez's perversities is up for grabs.
 
But Piedad Cordoba was not the real first lady of Venezuela last night: it was the miracle of god's grace that for once in a very long time the obviousness of Chavez's fraud was exposed. Rather than face sudden and instantaneous civil war, as was amassing, Chavez threw in the towel and reluctantly admitted that his vote did not pass. This saved Chavez not only a civil war but a multi party war, complete with exposure of his years of criminal fraud. By quickly abandoning last night, Chavez is still free to waste many more billions as he has done for years now, reinforcing his criminal empire built on fraud, financial racketeering and deceit. Grace won out last night in order to permit Chavez's rackets to continue unabated. The work is not over and will not be over until accountability and rule of law is reinserted in Venezuela.

To date, the criminal rackets are still winning even though Chavez does not get automatic rights to re carve the country's provinces a la Castro nor the right to rule automatically for fifty more years. But the real work is still ahead. We will know that Chavez has truly lost when RC TV's assets are correctly returned. We will know that Chavez has really lost when he unlocks the prison to Dr. Biscet's torture prison in Cuba and allows men of good conscience to live freely.  We will know that Chavez has lost when Bolivia and Ecuador return to their senses and stop profiteering from their national past time of contraband transshipments and financial rackets. We will know that Chavez has lost when Correa and Morales rip up their fraudulent sell outs of their nations with Iran's Ahmadinejad. We will know that Chavez has lost when Correa stops his revelries in cheesy hotels in the North of Quito, now moved to the trailer park town of Montecristi. We will know that honor and truth telling exists when....it exists. Instead of mobilizing paid FARC foot soldiers in Caracas and Quito-Montecristi, they should be under trial instead of well paid. We can hardly wait.
 
Venezuela, which has not been a democracy for over five years now, narrowly dodged a bullet last night. Chavez protected his ill gotten assets in the face of civil war at his door step and announced defeat of sorts. In this time and in this place, we are reminded that the truth won out last night in Caracas. The Vatican's divine intervention to remind us all that honor and truth telling still matter shames all who advised us to abandon principles because... principles are not welcome in the Andes any more are known now for who and what they are. Civil war was in the air last night in Caracas- complete with wide spread death and destruction.

Chavez's blather and threats did not turn away the facts for once, no matter the billions he plies yet today.
 
This story is far from over. But for now, we give thanks to grace which re opened the window to hope. Keep the light burning.
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis