I don’t like “attacking” people and prefer to keep discussions to ideas. It’s part of a program I try to practice of “principles before personalities” and my dear life partner and wife, Marcy Rein, has helped me in that process immensely. It’s particularly painful to me to go after someone who I’ve once respected and…
(traducido por Guillermo Useche del artículo en inglés, “Your Friend Trump.”) Imaginen mi sorpresa al escuchar que a los padres de mi amigo venezolano les gusta Trump. Yo supongo que “la distancia hace crecer el cariño” pues por muchos años Chávez tuvo el mismo efecto en mí. Y ya que estamos en aforismos trillados pero…
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…