Posted on 12/30/2007 8:10:39 AM PST by ricks_place
Caracas, Venezuela
IF President Hugo Chávez has dreamed of turning Venezuela into a Cuba with oil, the Venezuelans who oppose him have discovered the perfect antidote: the student movement.
At the time of last month’s referendum on Mr. Chávez’s efforts to remake the Constitution to his liking, I got to know some of the “chamos,” as the student activists are known. What struck me was not only how effective they were, but how different their movement was from almost all its many antecedents in the region.
Most important, the Venezuelans are not calling for socialist revolution, but for liberal democracy. Instead of vindicating the statist ideologies of the 20th century or the romantic passions of the 19th, they have embraced classic 18th-century humanism. “Our struggle is historic,” Yon Goicoechea, a law student at Andrés Bello Catholic University and one of the political movement’s leaders, told me as we sat, along with eight of his fellow leaders, in the offices of the independent newspaper El Nacional. They had brought with them pads and pens, but I was the one who learned and took notes. As Mr. Goicoechea puts it, “Like Martin Luther King, we do not fight against a man, we fight for the vindication of civil and human rights for everyone in Venezuela.”
As with the radicals who preceded them, they have genuine concern for the poor. But they also have concrete plans to develop their country, and they embody a hope for reconciliation across the brutal divisions of Venezuelan society.
Student movements have long been a decisive factor in Latin American politics...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Are you sure this is from the NYT ?
That was my first thought too. I thought the Times was a big Chavez supporter.
Notice that it is the students he calls the “radicals”.
Just like socialist America and socialist-liberal-almost communist Israel's governments. In the beginning, the model for Israel was communist. Communist were heavy into it and the Soviets were the main backers of the upstart Israel government. Even today, the majority votes for liberals and socialists. Conservatives are few.
Socialismo o Muerta!
(¿Que es la diferencia?)
marvel not that this comes from the NYT. The NYT never changes. This is a populist gambit: a confidence game.
Everyone knows Chavez is a psychopath. He makes less obsessed leftists look relatively sane. So a shot at him is a defacto kudo for, say, ________________ [insert favorite leftist here].
Next, the piece plugs the "student movement." Has there ever been a "student movement" anywhere that didn't seek to destroy everything in its collective sight, in its typical embracing of rebellion? If it's a "good" [read, useful] thing now, it will be a curse hereafter.
no hay ningun diferencia.
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