Community members of Pie del Tiro in Mérida maintain a watch in their streets a day after barricades set up by opposition protesters had been cleared. “They [the protesters] rob us…they charge us a toll to cross the barricades.”
For Maduro, while strengthened momentarily, the challenge will come from confronting not these protests, but the ones that may yet to come when opposition hardliners leave the streets.
A week before the one-year anniversary of Chávez's death, panelists Mark Weisbrot, Dan Kovalik, Julio Escalona, and James Early discuss the late President Chávez's global political and social legacy.
With few exceptions, most international media coverage of the recent protests in Venezuela gives little sense of the response from the popular social movement actors who support the Maduro government but operate independently from it.
Blogger Francisco Toro claimed in the New York Times that Venezuelan "government pressure ensured that no broadcast media carried coverage" of a speech made by opposition leader Henrique Capriles. But the two largest private media outlets did in fact cover the event.
What you're seeing is a portrayal of Venezuela as some kind of a chaotic economic basket case. But when you look at the macroindicators, inequality has been reduced so drastically that it's now the lowest in Latin America.
Since the death of Hugo Chávez in March of 2013, new Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his government have received critiques from its traditional opposition and from new critics as well.
The supposed “irony” of whistle-blower Edward Snowden seeking asylum in countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela has become a media meme. Of course, any such “ironies” would be irrelevant even if they were based on factual considerations.
Last week’s grounding of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane in Europe, after U.S. officials apparently suspected whistle-blower Edward Snowden of being on board, caused an uproar in Latin America. If the U.S. government was seeking to intimidate Morales and other Latin American leaders who might consider harboring Snowden, its strategy has completely backfired.
