According to Maduro Venezuela's opposition plans to copy the Egypt coup script

Yesterday, before the extraordinary meeting of UNASUR to express solidarity with Evo Morales, Maduro declared that the Venezuelan “right” is plotting to stage against him a coup similar to the one in Egypt against Mohamed Mursi:

“Now they are saying that, just like in Egypt, they deposed President Mursi, they derogated the Constitutions, and outside of the Constitution they named a government. Well now the opposition says they will do the same thing in Venezuela, now they say they will come and depose the government of Venezuela”

Maduro was born in Colombia

This theory claims that Maduro was born not in Venezuela but in Colombia, and therefore does not constitutionally qualify for the post of President of Venezuela.

The theory has been running around  in social media for a while, but it was only recently that opposition politicians have started to endorse it. The most strident seems to be National Assembly representative from COPEI, Abelardo Diaz, who yesterday claimed that Maduro’s parents are Colombian and that the President was born in the frontier city of Cúcuta.

Bloomberg ran a note on the issue yesterday, and the Blog Caracas Chronicles also made some very interesting comments about it.

But the most interesting piece was published last week by the Correo del Orinoco and republished in English in the pro-government blog venezuelanalysis. Until now, the issue has received little attention by local media (there have been opinion pieces about this in El Universal), however the article from Correo del Orinoco correctly informs that Spanish paper El País and Miami´s El Nuevo Herald have mentioned it. For both newspapers the source of the claim was Panama diplomat Guillermo Cochez.

Pay attention to the way Correo del Orinoco frames the news:

“As part of ongoing attempts to prevent President Nicolas Maduro from consolidating his leadership in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, right-wing forces at home and abroad have reissued false claims that he was born in neighboring Colombia.”

It later adds:

“As part of the anti-Maduro campaign described by Minister Villegas, private media outlets tied to the Venezuelan opposition issued their own interpretations of Cochez’s claim. In an article titled “What if Maduro is Colombian?”, Venezuelan daily El Universal published a piece by rightwing blogger Alexander Cambero in which he warns that “if Nicolas Maduro is proven to have been born in the Colombian city of Cucuta, in the state of North Santander, we will be facing the greatest fraud ever committed against the good will of the Venezuelan people.”

The claims that Maduro was born in Colombia would therefore be part of a campaign by “right-wing forces at home and abroad.” It seems that the best way to counter a conspiracy theory, is with yet another conspiracy theory.

University conflict continues. Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela rector claims it is all part of a coup plot by “the right”

A faculty strike in the five main public autonomous universities has reached its first month, despite government claims that professor’s demands have been met.

The rector of the main public (non-autonomous) university Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela (UBV), Prudencio Chacón, believes that professors are striking with the intention of “destabilizing the country.”

Today, on an interview transmitted by Venezolana de Television (VTV) Chacón declared that: “the problem of these universities has nothing to do with salaries or the budget. These universities are really on board the coup line of the right. They [the universities] are but one of the elements being used, just like in other countries, to destabilize the progressive governments of the world.”

He added that there is no excuse to continue the strike: “there is only the intention of generating violence and the destabilization of President Maduro’s government.”

Read here for the real reasons of why the conflict has not abated.

Independent analysis on Venezuela

First year of Venezuelan Human Rights and Politics, a blog hosted by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Fascism is everywhere

During his speech commemorating the anniversary of the Carabobo Battle, Maduro denounced that the “fascist right” was carrying on a “coordinated campaign to ridicule” the government’s slogan hoy tenemos patria.

Yesterday, in a newly invented tradition, Maduro ceremoniously received from a group of officers of the Guardia de Honor Presidencial, a red beret similar to the one Chávez used to wear. According to the officers the beret is “the presidential symbol of Comandante Hugo Chávez.”

Maduro thanked the officers and declared that: “They [the opposition], in their world of conspiracies, are sending a clear message of threat to the peace and stability of the Republic. (…) I do not fear the bourgeoisie, the fascists, the oligarchs, or any kind of empire in the world."

Fascismo is one of the most common terms used by Venezuela’s President to refer to the opposition. But not only Maduro, other government officials, and public media also recurrently make use of the term.

I did a quick tally of the number of articles that mention fascismo in the Sistema Bolivariano de Comunicación e Información (SiBCI) web page. From April 1^st, 2013, to June 28^th, I counted exactly 70 articles.

This is no content analysis, only a quick count, so it is likely that a few of the articles refer not to the Venezuelan opposition but to the historical “real” fascism of the XXth Century. But even those are obviously included in the SiBCI web page as illustrations of the “eternal fascism” lately resurrected in Venezuela (a good example of this is the article Fascismo by Luis Brito García.)

A sample of the articles included gives a flavor of how the term fascism is used in public media:

Xenophobia and Malinchism [love offoreigners]: Caprile’s fascist anti-nativism.

President Maduro urges the defeat of fascism and its methods with the truth.

José Vicente Rangel: April 15th was a demonstration that the right is reproducing fascist tactics.

The coup against Allende and fascist unrest in Venezuela.

We are committed to the defeat of Venezuelan fascism and to peace in Venezuela.

Our people need to be in combat against fascism.

Tves will show documentaries on The Faces of Fascism.

Fascism is linked to the worst forms of evil in the XXth century. The widespread use in public media of fascism as a term of abuse dehumanizes political opponents and precludes political dialogue. You simply don't negotiate with fascists.