Posts Tagged ‘Venezuela’

Hugo Chavez is doing to his own country what the U.S. is trying to do to North Korea, says Daniel W. Drezner:

Financial Times’ Benedict Mander reports that Venezuela’s new currency controls are affecting its import sector in a really sensitive area:

Unable to access enough dollars, local importers are feeling the pinch across a wide range of goods, from Scotch whisky, the nation’s favourite drink, to luxury foods and swanky cars…. [...]

The irony, of course, is that Venezuela is doing to itself what the United States has been trying to do to North Korea for years (and re-emphasized in the past few months) — denying access to luxury goods for the elites.

Daniel W. Drezner: Venezuela self-imposed Mad Men sanctions

Die Ausgabe der El Nacional vom 18. August 2010. Die venezuelanische Tageszeitung entschloss sich dazu nach einer richterlichen Verfügung, die für die nächsten vier Wochen das Abbilden von “gewaltätigen, blutigen [und] grotesken” Bildern sowie Informationen über Morde und Tode, welche das Wohlbefinden von Kindern und Erwachsenen gefährden könnten, verbot. An jenen Stellen, wo sich ein blutiges Bild befinden sollte, wurde lediglich das Wort “Zensiert” in roten Großbuchstaben gedruckt.

So Zirkumflex in dem sehr guten Blogbeitrag ‘Wie Chávez seine Macht zu sichern versucht’. Die New York Times hat gestern einen längeren Artikel über die rasant ansteigenden Mordraten in Venezuela veröffentlicht; seit Chávez Machtantritt 1999 hat sich die Mordrate in Venezueal mehr als verdreifacht, insgesamt sind seitdem 118.541 (!) Menschen umgebracht worden.

Venezuela hat ungefähr 26 Millionen Einwohner, damit verfügt das Land in etwa über die Einwohnerzahl des Irak, die New York Times stellt die Mordrate der beiden Länder in Relation:

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Im südamerikanischen Mordratenvergleich ist der Sozialismus des 21. Jahrhunderts ebenfalls unangefochtener Spitzenreiter, die venezuelanische Hauptstadt Caracas schlägt in Sachen Mord selbst die kolumbianische Hauptstadt Bogotá und die brasilianische Slummetropole São Paulo:

Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

Mehr erschreckende Zahlen und Hintergründe in der New York Times: Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why

Nick Cohen über den neuen Angriff auf die Meinungsfreiheit durch den UN-Menschenrechtsrat:

Interesting leader in this week’s Economist on the decision by the satirically named UN Human Rights Council to damn “defamation of religions” as a “serious affront to human dignity”. The Economist picks apart the sinister implications.

Und über die unheilige Allianz, die für die Resolution zur weltweiten Bekämpfung der Beleidigung von Religionen verantwortlich ist:

But the paper notes only in passing that the attack on freedom of thought was led by “the unholy trio of Pakistan, Belarus and Venezuela”. I would have spent a little more time on that trio. Pakistan is a Muslim country, obviously. But Belarus is a decayed Brezhnevian relic, ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’. Venezuela is led by a charismatic populist who wants to be president for life. Neither is a Muslim country or anything like one. Indeed the ruling doctrine of the old Belarus communists was militant atheism while Chavez claims to be a socialist. Nevertheless they support a universal blasphemy law pushed by the Islamic states. What we are seeing is an alliance of anti-democratic forces in a common front against democracy and liberalism. Never mind that theocratic measures are against everything that Venezuela and Belarus’s rulers once believed in. They are anti-Western and that is enough.

Nick Cohen: The red and the green.