Back in 2002, some Venezuelan folks tried to oust their president, the odious Sean Penn's favorite thug, Hugo Chávez. They failed, but there was quite a bit of turmoil in that country.
An online journal I noticed at the time remarked on Chávez' return to power follwing the coup as a time when "Things are looking up for the people of Venezuela."
Some of them, anyway. But you've got a better chance of living through the year in Iraq than in Venezuela. The homicide rate in Venezuelan capitol Caracas is 200 per 100,000 population. In Bogota, Columbia -- home of the 1980s boom in cocaine production and gritty low-budget straight-to-VHS action movies starring Michael Dudikoff as a tough cop who just can't play by the rules -- the rate is just 20 per 100,000. The 2008 rate for Detroit, often thought of as one of the U.S.'s least safe places to live, was 40 per 100,000.
El Nacional newspaper published a front-page picture of a dozen dead men sprawled in the city morgue in an attempt to open Venezuelan eyes to the problem. Chávez got a court order to ban newspapers from showing those kinds of pictures or printing stories about blood, guns, aggression and such. Problem solved!
Looking up, to be sure. But looking up what is a question with a decidedly unpleasant answer.
2 comments:
not to get all liberal on you - and chavez will rot in a very special place in hell, i suspect - but not allowing the press to show stuff ain't exactly venezuelan in origin: bush wouldn't let 'em show caskets coming back from iraq, and obama/bp kept the press off the beach when the first oil-soaked birds showed up.
just sayin'.
You're right, Hugo's not the only one who plays this game. And our two most recent presidents aren't the only ones who've tried it either.
But most of them have some offsetting good points; Hugo has none ;-)
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