Political Developments

As if his post were at stake, Venezuela's left-wing President Hugo Chávez is showing up all over the country at election rallies, caravans, public works inaugurations, nationally televised public events and highly publicised midnight calls to his party's local offices in remote towns.

While on the surface it may appear to be a simple electoral battle, something much different is at stake on November 23. Once again, the intricate process of the Bolivarian revolution will put its strengths and weaknesses in play in the form of an electoral contest.

“On November 23, we will not just be voting for this or that governorship, we will be deciding the destiny of this revolutionary process”, says Stalin Perez Borges, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) and United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) militant.

The uniformity of the collapse of Latin American economies raises important questions about the changes and claims of independence, decoupling and post-liberal models, which many regime leaders, ideologues and progressive US-European Latin American writers made over the past several years.

Talk of assassination plots and rising concerns about a high abstention rate have marked the beginning of the November 23 regional elections race.

Can it be? This strange Miami suitcase trial has come to its last stage. The prosecution and the defense have made their closing arguments, and Friday the jury began deliberations on whether to send Franklin Duran to prison for "acting as an unregistered agent" of the government of Venezuela. Weeks of headlines, and still nobody knows what that means.

The September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch report, “A Decade Under Chavez,” raises a few problems with regard to the protection of political rights in Venezuela, but the few places where it is on target are almost completely drowned in a sea of de-contextualization, trumped-up accusations, and a clear and obvious bias in favor of the opposition and against the government.

A close reading of the recent Human Rights Watch "Report" on Venezuela reveals an astonishing number of blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.

With a few months left in office, the Bush administration may be unleashing its last hurrah in Latin America. A "hail Mary" effort to reclaim the region. Remove its weak democracies in countries like Bolivia and strong ones in Venezuela.

When we read in the American press that two officials from Human Rights Watch have been booted out of Venezuela, our first thought will not be, "what did they do". It won't be. We expect people who work for Human Rights Watch to, well, watch human rights.