Latin America,  The Left

“[P]lease refrain from picturing this gover[n]ment as you are doing…now”

As long as we’re complimenting political opponents, I want to congratulate Andy Newman at Socialist Unity for not deleting the following comment in response to a post proclaiming “victory” for “Hugo Chavez’s Socialist Party” in Sunday’s National Assembly elections:

Dude… really??? i mean do you live in Venezuela to tell how the situation is here? cuz i do, and you’re portraing this as the most democratic stuff in the world… did you know Chavez changed the distribution of the districs so he would get the highest amount of people on the congress?, you call that democracy? when the majority of a country votes against something but they still win? well i call that CHEATING…

Believe me i live in Venezuela and a goverment like this shouldn’t even be portrayed as a socialism… that’s only a joke, i majored in sociology so i guess i have a pretty strong base to say that… It’s not socialism when 50% or more of the population is living without running water and constant electricity, or when 90% of the public hospitals don’t work cuz they have nothing to work with… it’s not socialism when a pregnant girl comes to a hospital to deliver and she has to run through the city just to find a place to deliver her baby and she ends up needing to go to a private clinic… in the meantime the “socialist” govermen people spend millions in cars like Hummers, or HUGE houses on what would be the same as Orange County here in Venezuela… It’s not socialism when they can travel around the world with as many dollars as they want while the average venezuelan has to ask an institution to aprove em a top amount of 2000 us$’s.

It’s not socialism when public university students can’t graduate cuz they have no teachers or classes cuz the goverment isn’t paying the teachers so they are on strike… it’s not socialism when you can get killed on the street for your celphone and the people close to the goverment go around on huge armored trucks with bodyguards and stuff… it’s not socialismo when you go to the supermarket and get only 5kgs of sugar per person, if you can find some cuz there never is… same with milk… while the people in te goverment drinks as much milk and eats as much sugar as they want…

What do you tell me about Haiti? chavez sent em a container… full of food… expired food… the same food that they were selling on the goverment markets….

I mean it when I say this… if you are not leaving in Venezuela please refrain from picturing this goverment as you are doing right now, cuz the image you’re putting out has nothing to do with what we have to face here everyday.

Comment by Astrid Machado — 28 September, 2010 @ 2:46 am