This essay (vea al español original después de la traducción) came to my attention well over a year ago and I found it so powerful that I decided to translate it. Luz Varela teaches history at the University of the Andes in Mérida, Venezuela. Like so many thoughtful academics, she’s worked to refute the simplistic…
At long last Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his mafia have been indicted in the US for cocaine trafficking. Back in November 2015 when the First Lady’s nephews, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, were busted for attempting to smuggle 800 kilos (that’s roughly one ton) of cocaine into the US it…
(This is a revised version of a piece first published at Caracas Chronicles. I think that piece lacked nuance, so I’ve worked it over here) Imagine my surprise to hear that my Venezuelan friend’s parents “like” Trump. I suppose that “distance makes the heart grow fonder” since for many years it had the same…
My post was “Editor’s Pick” at Caracas Chronicles this week. Thanks. Go figure. I spend hours on some articles that no one seems to notice, and other posts, like this one, take about an hour out of a morning. I clearly don’t understand the secret to “success.” If I did, I might have the misfortune…
Naky Soto has an excellent, spunky piece up at Caracas Chronicles on the January 5th Chavista golpe de estado. Read it. She talks about the Bolivarian government’s attempted overthrow of the last independent, democratically-elected power of Venezuela, the National Assembly (NA). Of course, the NA take-over was as sloppy as all their other mischief, including…
A Venezuelan friend recently told me that he thought Trump will win re-election. “He sounds every day more like Chávez,” he wrote me. I’ve been thinking the same things, myself, these days as I’ve tuned in and out of the impeachment hearings. And I also recall another Venezuelan telling me once, some fifteen or…
(This article was first posted at Caracas Chronicles) A month or so ago, my wife came home growling about a pro-chavista program she’d heard on KPFA radio. Of course, I thought, what’s new? Originally founded by Lewis Hill in 1957 as a “free speech” station that crossed boundaries and included broad swathes of countercultural and…
(This is a second flyer I wrote for the Dan Kovalik event. It’s probably more useful in that it has bullet points and works for concision, but that would be a judgment others would have to make. I tried to avoid redundancies, but there may be some. Here it is, in any case.) Many of…
I wrote this piece as a flyer to hand out at the Dan Kovalik talk in Berkeley. This version contains all the links. Venezuela is suffering today under a set of failed policies and unkept promises made by the late President Hugo Chávez and maintained by the “chavista” loyalists under Nicolás Maduro. Chávez promised to…
My piece on the art of avoiding reality, particularly Venezuelan reality, is up at Caracas Chronicles. It’s short, not-so-sweet, and to the point. I’m learning to economize on words these days… Update: It came out in Spanish at Tal Cual digital here, thanks to the work of Guillermo Useche. How is it that the socialist…