The mayor of Caracas, a fascist named Antonio Ledezma, has been arrested by Bolivarian authorities. A huge crowd is forming outside the SEBIN security forces building in Caracas. I believe SEBIN may be the Venezuelan equivalent of the FBI. Ledezma, along with a couple of other fascists – Leopoldo Lopez, leader of the Popular Will Party who is now in jail where he belongs, and former legislator Maria Corina Machado – had recently called for regime change in Venezuela and a government of national transition.
They are just sore losers. They lost the last election, although it was very close. They election was probably as free and fair as any election anywhere on Earth these days. There were election observers everywhere, paper ballots, the voter could see his vote tallied as he voted to see if it was marked correctly, both parties had poll watchers at every polling station and votes were counted by a neutral institution.
Immediately after the sore loser fascists lost, they started screaming “Fraud!” The Obama Administration and the opposition had plotted this strategy for months. If the opposition were to lose, the strategy was to charge fraud and then go from there. It didn’t matter if the election was fraudulent or not, they were just going to scream fraud anyway to try to force their way into office undemocratically like fascists always do.
That Obama was in on this crooked strategy shows just how sleazy and wicked US imperialism is. The Chavistas have to go one way or another. If we can’t vote them out of office, we will try to get them out by other means, including violence. Of course this is SOP for US imperialism since Day One and we have always had contempt for democracy when the voters elect the wrong guys.
The election was very close, 51-49, but Machado won as the new Chavez. Immediately the opposition started screaming fraud although there was no basis for making this claim. They circulated all sorts of wild charges that suggested an unfair election. Most if not all of these charges were apparently just made up out of whole cloth.
The next day the Venezuelan media (75% opposition owned) which makes the US media look like Mother Theresa and tells more lies than truths, began running all sorts of wild stories that seemed to be completely made up. They were accompanied by genuinely alarmiong photographs. For instance, one photograph showed ballot boxes thrown into a ravine. The Venezuelan press went wild with the claim that this was one of many cases were ballot boxes from opposition districts were simply thrown into canyons and never counted.
The Western “free press” printed all of these stories as if they were true without even bothering to check any of them out. Turns that the ballot boxes photo was from an election a few years back. After the vote had been counted, some of the ballot boxes were disposed of in the time honored Latin American fashion of throwing them into a ravine as litter. So the crime was littering and not vote fraud and it happened 3 years ago in another election, not yesterday in this election.The newspaper that originally ran those photos apparently knew full well that they were fake and ran them anyway, CIA style.
The opposition went into a virtual frenzy with all of these crazy charges and a lot of opposition supporters got all riled up. They went on a wild rampage and attacked Bolivarian party offices and the offices of Bolivarian officials all over the country. In addition, they attacked many of the social missions that the government had set up. Special attention was given to the clinics for the poor that are staffed by Cuban medical workers because the opposition hates those clinics more than anything. Some Cuban health care workers were wounded and killed in shootings and bombings. A number of these buildings were burned to the ground.
The basic idea, typical of US imperialism, that is the US clients decided that if they lost at the ballot box they were going to take power by force and shoot their way into force. Usually when US imperialism loses a free election in the 3rd World, the US then tries to overthrow the democratically elected government by force. Out attitude is we get the last vote no matter what.
The riots and chaos did not overthrow the state, so the fascist maniacs named above gave out orders to their followers to take to the streets and show your rage and topple this government. It was called “the forced exit” campaign. Months of wild rioting followed, with street barricades set up all over Caracas and regular riots on a daily basis. Police attempts to dismantle barricades were met with violence.
When it was all over, ~35 people were dead and many others were wounded. Quite a few of the dead had simply been murdered as a number of the rioters were armed with small arms and bombs. A significant number of the dead were police who were murdered by the rioters. Others were often innocent passerby who got caught up in the riot. All in all, the rioters were responsible for ~70% of the deaths. The police were responsible for some deaths and there were a number of cases of police abuse of the rioters. But you would have to wonder how the US would respond to such a situation.
At some point, they were not able to riot and shoot their way into power and overthrow the government by force Maidan style, so the riots petered out. However, the state did charge Maria Corina Machado with incitement to riot and a number of other crimes. Of course she was guilty of all of them. She was imprisoned for a number of months and frankly she was just where she belonged, behind bars. The Western media went nuts claiming that the Chavistas were “persecuting the opposition” by throwing a leading opposition figure in jail.
Leopoldo Lopez has recently been jailed on similar charges as he was one of the other masterminds behind the violent riots.
Now that Antonio Ledezma has been arrested, it appears that all three of the ringleaders of the riots have been arrested at one point or another. No one knows that the mayor has been charged with, but I assume he has been charged with crimes surrounding his masterminding of the riots. The opposition is throwing a huge fit about “the jailing of the opposition mayor” and you can expect to see plenty of stupid lying headlines in the press tomorrow about this event.
This is a developing story and I will be following it as I have a feeling this is going to head into a great big mess here.
