Kurtofan posted:

They even got a guy with the same name, wow.

How did they hijack this party (Min Unidad) by the way? I read that they used to be an opposition party?

Chuck Boone posted:

The international war against the Bolivarian revolution continued unabated today as DEA agents arrested two of Cilia Flores' relatives in Haiti after they allegedly conspired to smuggle 800 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. Cilia Flores is the First Lady.

The two men were arrested on Tuesday and were scheduled to appear at a court in New York City today. The two men appear to be Cilia's nephews, but she raised one of them as her own child.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

I read these guys have diplomatic passports. Any chance they can use that to get out of this mess? Either way, it's funny and sad to see connected people like that get arrested.

Labradoodle posted:

What makes this more ridiculous is that the Flores family is notorious for their nepotism in the government, you can't throw a freaking in the center of Caracas without hitting a Flores second cousin with some cushy title, but the First Lady's "son" is relegated to making drug deals? Hot drat.

quote:

This week, big international media outlets have made defamatory allegations against the national executive as part of a dirty media war against Venezuela. The media has risen up as they look to the December 6 [election] (...) The Secretary General of the Organization of American States has spoken out against the National Electoral Council. At the same time, the head of the Southern Command from the United States government, along with European deputies [sic]. Yesterday, international infamy arose against the family of the primera combatiente [literally, "First Fighter"; meaning, "First Lady"], Cilia Flores, and the President of the Republic.

quote:

I think that they’re waiting for some concrete information on the issue. Imagine: you have a family member who goes on a trip and is kidnapped and taken to the United States. What information can you give out? I imagine that there is a group of lawyers looking for information so that they can be sure.
(...)
This is a common DEA practice, what took place. It’s the world’s biggest drug trafficking organization (…) this case is a plot to damage the revolution during an electoral campaign. I think that we all know President Maduro and Cilia Flores here in Venezuela, and not just recently but from many years ago. There are no doubts about their integrity and their honesty — never, never, there’s nothing. The people don’t believe lies. We won’t stop because of this.

quote:

Maduro: … if we let them. If they dare to, in that horror movie, we turn off their televisions, and we know how to do that. Those who understand well need few words. Right wing oligarchs: start praying for the revolution to win on December 6. Start praying for peace and calm so that you can be rid of this. And if not, we’ll take to the streets, and we’re like fire [unintelligible] on the streets, you hear? It’s better if we all stay here governing the people happily – pensions for the old folks, homes for the people, public education, and the revolution continues, right? The horror chapter is finished – I’m sorry.

quote:

Crowd: Chanting "Leave! Leave!"
Man Riding Shotgun: Back up. Back up. Don't go forward. Just back up like you normally would, and Mariana, record everything..
Woman (likely Tintori): Cilia Flores sent them.
Man Riding Shotgun: And the SEBIN [police] people are out there, and [unintelligible]. Keep backing up. We're not leaving because we want to. They're kicking us out. I mean -- they're intimidating us.
Man in Sunglasses: Move it! Move it! Turn it around, dude! Turn it around, you cocksucker!
Man Riding Shotgun: Now you can turn around.
Man in Sunglasses: Turn around, you cocksucker! Murderer! Get out of here!
Tintori: And the SEBIN did nothing.

quote:

Maduro: … I swear it before our people. It’s a personal promise with Commander Chavez’s legacy and the people. We’re going to reach the 3 millionth home — [basketball whizzes by] — ah! that’s true, look. Where’s the ball? Look, it’s true.

quote:

A TOP-SECRET NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY DOCUMENT, dated 2011, describes how, by “sheer luck,” an analyst was able to access the communications of top officials of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.

Beyond the issue of spying on a business, the document highlights a significant flaw in mass surveillance programs: how indiscriminate collection can blind rather than illuminate. It also illustrates the technical and bureaucratic ease with which NSA analysts are able to access the digital communications of certain foreign targets.

The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is a March 23, 2011, article in the NSA’s internal newsletter, SIDtoday. It is written by a signals development analyst who recounts how, in addition to luck, he engaged in a “ton of hard work” to discover that the NSA had obtained access to vast amounts of Petróleos de Venezuela’s internal communications, apparently without anyone at the NSA having previously noticed this surveillance “goldmine.”

That the NSA, unbeknownst to itself, was collecting sensitive communications of top Venezuelan oil officials demonstrates one of the hazards of mass surveillance: The agency collects so much communications data from around the world that it often fails to realize what it has. That is why many surveillance experts contend that mass surveillance makes it harder to detect terrorist plots as compared to an approach of targeted surveillance: An agency that collects billions of communications events daily will fail to understand the significance of what it possesses.

This newest revelation of NSA spying, reported as part of The Intercept’s partnership with teleSUR, comes just weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. government has launched “a series of wide-ranging investigations” into alleged corruption at Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA. That the NSA had obtained access to the electronic communications networks of key PDVSA officials raises the question of whether the agency’s spying has secretly aided the criminal investigations into corruption as well as other government actions targeting the company.

Access to these official PDVSA communications came at a critical moment in U.S.-Venezuela relations, which have been fraught since Hugo Chávez was first elected president in 1998 and particularly since a failed 2002 coup attempt by U.S.-funded groups. Two months after the discovery of this spying access, the U.S. State Department announced the imposition of economic sanctions against PDVSA, accusing the company of trading with Iran in violation of unilateral U.S. restrictions.

At the time, Venezuela was also confronting multibillion-dollar arbitration cases in international tribunals filed by U.S. oil giants Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. The companies claim the Chávez government illegally expropriated large-scale drilling operations in the Orinoco oil belt and handed them over to PDVSA subsidiaries without just compensation.

The NSA analyst who stumbled into this access began his investigation inauspiciously. As he recounts, he opened PDVSA’s website in a browser and wrote down the names of the company’s leaders. He then simply plugged those names into a handful of internal NSA tools and databases such as CADENCE, UTT and PINWALE.

He quickly compiled an enormous cache of valuable leads: over 10,000 employee information forms containing email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying details — information that could be used to retrieve communications stored in the agency’s huge databases and for future targeting. The analyst also obtained 900 username and password combinations, which he handed off to the NSA’s top hacking team, Tailored Access Operations, to penetrate the company’s network and infect its leadership’s computers with malware.

“By sheer luck, (and a ton of hard work) I discovered an important new access to an existing target and am working with TAO to leverage a new mission capability,” he wrote.

Prior to this breakthrough, the NSA’s spying efforts against Venezuelan energy operations were producing very little fruit, but not for lack of interest. Petroleum represents “more than half of all government revenues,” wrote the analyst, and thus, “to understand PDVSA is to understand the economic heart of Venezuela.” But a 2010 review showed that collection had gone “stagnant.”

One “telltale sign” that the NSA was failing on this target set, he said, was that “most reporting was coming from warranted collection.” That likely meant that the only surveillance the NSA was able to exploit was coming from communications transiting U.S. soil, which would require a secret warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

To ratchet up warrantless surveillance, the analyst decided to rebuild the collection strategy from scratch, running what he called a “target reboot” in search of “information at the highest possible levels” of PDVSA: “namely, the president and members of the Board of Directors.”

The analyst initially searched for those names in PINWALE, the NSA’s database of digital communications that have been automatically culled from the massive flows of intercepted data using a dictionary of search terms, or “targeting selectors,” including email addresses, IP addresses and user IDs.

This produced few emails from PDVSA’s leaders, but the 10,000 employee contact profiles, included those of PDVSA’s then-president, Rafael Dario Ramírez, and former company vice president Luis Felipe Vierma Pérez. “Now, even my old eyes could see that these things were a goldmine of valid selectors,” the analyst wrote, full of previously unmonitored “work, home, and cell phones, email addresses, LOTS!” In other words, the analyst had uncovered another set of leads to run against larger NSA data sets.

Later, the analyst gleefully realized that these profiles were not available on the public web. They were all being served to private IP addresses. “WTHeck??? Yep, seems I had been looking at internal PDVSA comms all this time!!!”

Accessing a foreign private network is often technically challenging but bureaucratically simple by NSA standards, requiring low levels of internal review and legal authority. For a target such as an oil company, internal communications are the most valuable intelligence resource possible.

“It’s interesting that the analyst ‘discovered’” access to internal PDVSA communications, Matthew Green, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, wrote in an email to The Intercept after reviewing the document. The word “discovered” suggests that the NSA either “didn’t realize” it was collecting on this important source or there was an internal communications failure. The NSA possesses the equivalent of “a very ugly version of Google with half the world’s information in it” and a plethora of automated tools to exploit it, said Green, but “an analyst has to occasionally step in and manually dig through the data” to find the treasures hiding in plain sight.

“They’re capturing so much information from their cable taps that even the NSA analysts don’t know what they’ve got,” he added.

Petroleum has long defined U.S. government and corporate interest in Venezuela, which possesses the largest proven reserves in the world. In a 1974 State Department cable, then-U.S. Ambassador Robert McClintock wrote: “As a principal supplier of oil and iron ore to the U.S., as a major trading partner and host to a large U.S. private investment, Venezuela is fa[r] too important to allow us to drift into an adversary relationship.”

Two years later, Venezuela would nationalize its oil reserves, but U.S. interests continued to be served for decades by a series of U.S.-friendly, U.S.-supported right-wing governments. That all changed when Hugo Chávez swept into the presidency in 1998 on a populist mandate and began to change the decadeslong status quo.

“Along comes Chávez and closes the loopholes in the 1976 nationalization law and alters the nature of the relations between the state and the foreign companies,” Miguel Tinker Salas, historian of Venezuela’s oil industry at Pomona College, told The Intercept.

Washington viewed the Chávez government as an economic and political threat that derived its power from petrodollars. According to a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, “PDVSA funds and runs the revolution.”

Previous Snowden revelations show that PDVSA is not the only major petroleum company to be targeted for economic espionage. Brazil’s government-controlled oil company, Petrobras, as well as its ministerial overseer, the Ministry of Mines and Energy, were targeted by the NSA and Canada’s CSEC, respectively, according to documents published by TV Globo in 2013. Russia’s Gazprom was also listed as a “target.” Intelligence reporting on oil in Venezuela is referenced in a 2013 presentation detailing the NSA’s PRISM program.

Prior to the Petrobras revelation, an NSA spokesperson told the Washington Post, “The [defense] department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber” (emphasis in the original).

After the Globo story, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper significantly narrowed that broad claim. In a statement, he acknowledged that the United States does conduct economic espionage: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.”

But Clapper denied such intelligence is used to directly benefit U.S. corporations. “What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line,” Clapper said.

Subsequent to the PDVSA “target reboot,” the U.S. executive branch has undertaken multiple actions — including sanctions against the state-run company in 2011, a money-laundering finding and an executive order, both in March 2015, and multiple reported corruption investigations — putting additional economic and reputational pressure on a company already squeezed by low global oil prices and protracted court battles with U.S. oil majors.

According to Tinker Salas, the Pomona professor, “It is difficult to imagine that the [U.S.] sanctions and the ongoing dispute with Exxon are not connected.”

In the lead-up to next month’s legislative elections, U.S. actions against the Venezuelan government have amounted to a “full-court press,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Intercept. “In recent months, Washington has been campaigning to de-legitimize the Venezuelan election, with leaks and even indictments from the Justice Department and DEA.”

On November 10, weeks before Venezuela’s national elections, DEA officials arrested two relatives of President Nicolas Maduro, who were indicted for allegedly conspiring to traffic cocaine to the United States.

Anonymous government officials told the New York Times last year that defendants in U.S. courts “have no right to know” if warrantless NSA surveillance collected abroad was used to build the case against them.

President Maduro said last month that he will file a lawsuit in the U.S. to challenge the executive order against his country.

The U.S. Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept.

PDVSA and Venezuelan government officials declined to comment for this story, as did the NSA.

quote:

Some media outlets falsely claimed that 800 kilos of drugs were found on the plane, however Haitian government officials later denied the claim. A DEA official who participated in the arrest told CNN that the pair were arrested over allegations that they were in Haiti to finalize a deal to import that quantity of drugs to the United States.

The other 4 individuals traveling on the plane were released without charge and the plane was allowed to return to Venezuela.

Cabello questioned why the DEA would allow the plane, associated with alleged drug trafficking, to be released. That only two people were ultimately arrested led the president of the National Assembly to classify the detention as a kidnapping.

The two individuals arrested are said to be the nephews of Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Maduro. However, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest could not confirm they were in fact connected to Venezuela's first family.

After the two men were arrested, some international media reported on Friday that authorities raided a house and yacht in La Romana, Dominican Republic, that allegedly belonged to the Flores family.

However, the Dominican national drug control agency dismissed the claims as “speculation,” saying there was no official information to suggest the house and yacht were property of the Flores family. The Dominican anti-drug agency also confirmed that the raid happened the day before the two men were arrested, even though the event was only reported and linked to the family days later.

Tania Diaz, a candidate for the upcoming Venezuelan legislative elections for the ruling socialist party said the media coverage of the arrest was part of an orchestrated campaign to influence the country’s upcoming Dec. 6 elections. The two men arrested appeared in court in New York last Thursday and must appear again on Wednesday.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

So what day do elections start? I'm crossing my fingers they go well for you guys, but I'm pretty worried from all that's been said.

quote:

SANTA ELENA DE UAIREN, Venezuela — It used to be that to learn about Venezuela’s socialist revolution, the reporting of prominent U.S. newspapers would be about as useful as a solitary photo negative; reduced to light and dark, good and evil, the colors would appear reversed, and the chronology of struggle quietly absent.

But while the undertones of doom have been present for over a decade, this year’s 159 percent inflation rate, according to the International Monetary Fund, and a 10 percent decline in the nation’s gross domestic product have raised serious questions about the impact of the economic crisis on ordinary Venezuelans and in turn on the government’s ability to maintain popular support.

It’s true, the economy is shot. In the past year, oil prices tumbled from $105 per barrel to under $50, cutting the country’s foreign earnings by half. A battered exchange system and booming illegal market has seen the Venezuelan bolívar devalued to the point that the monthly minimum wage was on par with a 36-pack of diapers or a few kilos of dried beans, until President Nicolas Maduro doubled it on October 15.

Car parts are hard to find and vehicles languish in backyards, and between patchy imports and the widespread hoarding and reselling of food by vendors called bachaqueros — a reference to leafcutter ants — scarcity has made grocery lists a fool’s errand.

Despite the best efforts of the state media apparatus — which is in full campaign mode for the December 6 congressional elections — to ignore these realities, it’s impossible not to witness them on the ground.

Across the country, the streets buzz with numbers as friends and strangers compete with stories of outrageous prices: “1,800 bolívars for a kilo of lentils!” “I paid 600 bolos for the taxi home!”

The official exchange rate for the bolívar has remained at 6.3 to one U.S. dollar since February 2013, but its black market value has tumbled from 110 to the dollar in October 2014 to the current rate of 820.

An Invisible Catch-22

Bachaqueo has mutated into an invincible catch-22, as many wage-earning families make ends meet with profits from illegal sales while simultaneously driving the cycle of inflation with their cutthroat prices. Meanwhile, as more people get in on the business, the lines outside supermarkets with low, government-regulated prices grow ever longer with hardly anyone buying for themselves.

Yet the telling difference between Chavista complaints and those of the opposition is that the former analyze causes, starting with the country’s invariable dependency on oil revenue and a “fast money culture” fomented by the illegal market. For the latter, a tirade of insults against Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong suffices.

The government favors a simplistic defense, accusing the private business sector of sabotage. The Central Bank has avoided releasing any official data on inflation since last year, on the grounds that the country is at war.

Meanwhile, the media chorus against Venezuela has only gotten louder since the March 2013 death of Chávez, the country’s charismatic leader, and the ascension of Maduro, his hand-picked successor. Wall Street seizes every opportunity to forecast default, driving up the interest on Venezuelan bonds. Leading companies have ceased production, either from a lack of imported dollars or as an act of deliberate subversion.

Since the government instituted a three-tiered foreign exchange system in 2003, there have been phantom importers manipulating the system, resulting in an accumulated $300 billion in capital flight. The manipulations also contributed to scarcity, as many of the items being imported on paper were never actually brought into the country.

Over the years, the buying and selling of subsidized U.S. dollars on the illegal market became the most profitable business in the country, undermining both the program’s intent and the national currency.

But are the government’s hands tied? Victor Alvarez, an economist and former minister under Chávez, estimated in May that “70 percent [of scarcity and speculation] is due to depletions, deviations and errors in economic policy, while 30 percent is caused by opposing sectors who play at destabilization.”

According to Alvarez, currency controls were set in place as a “temporary measure” to reduce dollar dependency, but the government had no “justifiable reason” to maintain them beyond 2006.

Today, the U.S.-based currency-tracking website DolarToday holds the bolívar in a vise. Its publishers can set off rounds of inflation just by raising the price of the black market dollar on a whim, claiming all the while that their calculations reflect the “objective street rate.”

Earlier this year, in an attempt to undercut the black market, the government launched Simadi, a free-floating rate starting at 172 bolívars to the dollar. At the time the black market rate was 185.

In the weeks following, DolarToday drove the black market rate out of reach, effectively neutralizing Simadi.

On October 23, the Central Bank filed a lawsuit in the United States against DolarToday for cyberterrorism, demanding that it be made illegal for the site to publish unofficial exchange rates and suing for damages.

While many Venezuelans support the case against the website, leftist critics generally accuse the government of putting more energy into blaming the opposition than into fixing the problems at hand. The lack of official economic data has further alienated Venezuelans who are struggling with inflated prices and don’t see the state corroborating their experience.

Concrete Solutions

However, in the void left by Maduro’s inaction, grassroots activists have turned inwards and begun to seek concrete solutions.

With the help of key ministries that continue to grant money to social movements, these activists have become the motor for a renaissance of small-scale production in this oil-dependent nation.

In Guatire, a working-class suburb of the capital city of Caracas, Alejandro Baiz, a young filmmaker, and a group of volunteers have received funding from the Communes and Housing Ministries to remake an abandoned lot into a center of social production called Territorio Caribe.

The space now boasts greenhouses where local children learn about urban farming, a community news station and an educational space that offers classes on everything from carpentry to natural childbirth.

The Communes Ministry supports Venezuelans in creating autonomous socialist collectives that emphasize self-sufficiency and self-governance, in accordance with Chávez’s dream of gradually replacing the bourgeois state with a communal state. Thousands of these collectives are registered across the country, with the more prolific examples focusing on permaculture and participatory democracy.

“We’re not trying to change the world, only create an alternative from our immediate possibilities,” Baiz explains.

If bachaqueros are the foot soldiers of the economic war, Alejandro and his crew of around 70 volunteers meet them on the proverbial battlefield. By producing homemade soaps, deodorants and shampoos, the people at Territorio Caribe are bringing their communities products most commonly monopolized by bachaqueros.

By selling arepa flour made from yucca, plantain and taro, they are providing a local alternative to the Harina P.A.N. corn flour produced monopolistically by Empresas Polar, Venezuela’s largest private corporation.

Farther from the city lights, Gabriel Garcia, 55, keeps busy organizing against genetically modified seeds with help from the Communes Ministry.

Born and raised on the fertile land of Lara State, Gabriel is behind Venezuela’s decade-old National Campesino Seed Day and the trailblazing International Seed Forum in 2012 to protect organic seeds native to the Americas.

“But it’s not all talking,” promises Gabriel. “We put it in practice, we grow our own food out back. We keep seed banks and make sure they are available to growers.”

Even with the extra labor involved in organic farming, Gabriel says, all-natural and communally grown produce can be even cheaper than conventional counterparts when the high cost of imported agrochemicals and extensive distribution chains are factored in.

Lara has more communes than any other state and a long tradition of subsistence farming. That has, to some extent, protected the region from food scarcity. With government support, the local communes are currently building
defenses against speculation by seeking ways to distribute goods in the state capital of Barquisimeto without intermediaries.

“We’ve seen more clearly than anyone that the best way to combat the economic war is by producing, by growing, wherever there is free space,” Gabriel insists.

But if the revolution loses the next elections, he warned, free space may be harder to come by.

“Landowners and cattle herders, these people have tremendous power and are looking to regain their empire,” he said, recalling the segregated and exclusive countryside that existed before Chávez’s 1999 constitutional reforms outlawed large rural landholdings.

Upcoming Elections

The international media has hailed the December 6 elections for the National Assembly as a plebiscite on Maduro, but it is highly unlikely that the opposition will win with a majority wide enough to alter the government agenda. A two-thirds majority is needed to revise constitutional law or petition the Supreme Court for presidential impeachment. A three-quarters majority would be required to remove the vice-president or ministers from office.

A poll conducted by the Caracas-based firm Hinterlaces in July saw 67 percent of Venezuelans agree that the opposition garners votes “because of the discontent in the country, but does not have popular backing.”

Aside from a pervasive anti-Chavista sentiment, the opposition coalition MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) is composed of a wide range of parties from reactionary to liberal reformist, with no clear leader nor ideological goals to bring them together.

Currently, a pro-government coalition holds just under two-thirds of the 165 congressional seats.

For Rodrigo Acosta, a Chilean muralist whose family fled the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1984 only to settle in Venezuela during the neoliberal era that preceded Chávez, an opposition win would mean disaster.

Harkening back to Salvador Allende’s brief socialist reign in Chile during the early 1970s, Acosta recalls the rightwing congressional majority that blocked every initiative proposed by Allende’s party.

“We have to prepare ourselves to resist,” Acosta says, while clarifying that resistance from here onward should come “from within the organized
commune.”

Now a longtime resident of the Andean city of Merida, Acosta is part of a vibrant campaign that aims to revive Chavista spirit around the country.

Conceived from a symposium of artists from Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Colombia, the campaign flooded social media recently with evocative
designs of anatomical hearts and veins intertwining across Latin America.

The beating heart is a reminder of “the deep sentiment that still unites us,” Acosta says.

In the past few years, many Chavistas have experienced a “crisis of morale,” he broods. It’s a collective exhaustion that “comes from seeing many of the revolution’s achievements be abandoned and uncared for.”

The goal is to remind people of their role in Venezuela’s participatory democracy, and to echo Chávez’s parting advice to work together toward a communal state.

“We can’t leave everything to the administration, we can’t sit and wait for a solution,” Acosta avows.

Still, as far as the economy is concerned, there’s little indication of when the hard times will end. Many professionals and young artists have left the country in search of better opportunities, leaving devastating gaps in public services. Crime has risen across the board, causing security forces to focus their efforts on blitzes and raids against urban gangs, while the state appears unable to curb petty crime such as bachaqueo, even despite strict new laws.

The 2016 budget was unveiled in October with emphasis on diversified trade and punctual debt payments, but with imports dropping, many economists have questioned this approach. And according to budget documents provided to Reuters, the official exchange rate of 6.3 will be carried into the coming year, making it unlikely that the illegal market will be weakened.

Venezuela’s social movements have a history of confronting adversity, but 17 years into the Bolivarian Revolution, the epoch of high-minded ideas bolstered by abundant resources is long gone.

The difference will be made in Venezuela by those who see opportunity in its absence, not the opportunity to profiteer and drive the economy further downward, but the possibility of regeneration.

Borneo Jimmy posted:

quote:

These regulations are not a new thing. They existed in previous governments, but they were frequently revised. A product never retained its price for three years, for example, as we see today. Even though presidents before Chavez also controlled foreign currencies in the country, companies could always count on the dollars they needed to maintain operations.

quote:

A little birdie told me that they were at a meeting with the pelucon del diablo [a derogatory term that means something like “aristocrat from hell”, referring to Mendoza], and he was pulling his hair like he was crazy because he didn’t understand all of the evil that he has done, hiding all the products from the people and charging whatever he wants for them. Well, after December 6 you will lose everything, pelucon del diablo. After December 6 you and I will face off, pelucon del diablo. I’m waiting for you after December 6, face to face, coward. Coward!

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

You are a shameful human being.

Borneo Jimmy posted:

Glenn Greenwald's just published a really good in depth article on the NSA spying on PDVSA
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/overwhelmed-nsa-surprised-to-discover-its-own-surveillance-goldmine-on-venezuelas-oil-executives

quote:

Woman: It's 6:00 AM. Take a look at these animals. They're around their coops, out in the wild looking for food. They have no food. What a huge shame. The efforts of all our work for so long is disappearing in mere weeks because we have no way to feed them. There's no food at [Bs.] 1,300, 4,000, or 3,700 -- or at any price. It's such a shame that all of our efforts over the last few years - after everything we've gone through - is being lost.
We don't know what to do. This is a really sad and painful situation, not just for us but for all farmers. We let them out in the wild to see how many of them will be able to survive, but we already have some animals at their limit. You're about to see some chickens over here that are doing really poorly because they're so hungry, and they've been hungry for so long. There is no food at all in their troughs. There's nothing. This is sad and terrible. Here's a little chicken near its end - look. And she's not the only one. This is really sad.
I'm putting all of my pain in God's hands, along with everything else that is happening. I don't have words anymore - only pain. Sadly, this is the reality that we are living.

Crowsbeak posted:

How dare the US spy on foreign governments and their organizations! Especially if it is in conflict with them.

Chuck Boone posted:

What's funny about this story is that out of every entity the US spies on (read: everyone), PDVSA is actually pretty high on the list of "espionage worthy" organizations. There is all kinds of evidence that Rafael Ramirez turned it into a front for laundering drug money. Knowing everything we know about the company, I'd be infinitely more surprised if I somehow found out that the US was not spying on PDVSA.

Azran posted:

I love how Maduro comes across as totally deranged whenever he speaks in public.

Crowsbeak posted:

All the article proves to me is why Gleen Greenwald should be ignored.

BeigeJacket posted:

I've often wondered, when reading the English translations provided by goons, whether Maduros speeches sound as rambling and word salady in Spanish. Because that poo poo seems to be all over the place.

Chuck Boone posted:

"candela con burundanga". I have no idea how to translate slang like "burundanga" into English

zocio posted:

You might want to try with equivalencies, burundanga is pretty much dark magic, so what type of dark magic do english speakers know?, voodoo; so you might say "taking the streets by storm like voodoo fires", that's how I often do it, not that it adds anything to your translation, but it gets the message across that Maduro's rethoric is on another level of crazy than what most people (including people from normal Latin American countries like me) are used to.

zocio posted:

You might want to try with equivalencies, burundanga is pretty much dark magic, so what type of dark magic do english speakers know?, voodoo; so you might say "taking the streets by storm like voodoo fires", that's how I often do it, not that it adds anything to your translation, but it gets the message across that Maduro's rethoric is on another level of crazy than what most people (including people from normal Latin American countries like me) are used to.

BeigeJacket posted:

Does Maduro have any of Chavez' charisma or common touch at all?

zocio posted:

Is there anyone who does make what he rambles about become reality?, Diosdado maybe?

Chuck Boone posted:

Diosdado is a different creature because he doesn't talk as much as Maduro on television, but when he does he's usually "unveiling plots" or accusing people of stuff directly. He has a television show that airs on Wednesdays called Con El Mazo Dando where he tends to do just that. My impression of Diosdado is that he's more threatening and vicious than Maduro. Maduro will go off on someone from time to time, but there's something more meticulous and premeditated about Diosdado spending time on his television show presenting evidence against some enemy of the government that makes his speeches more sinister. That's my impression.

Below: Diosdado with his mazo ("mallet"; the name of the show translates to "Hitting With the Mallet"). No, these images are not photoshopped.. That is the actual club he uses as the prop on his show, although it's usually just placed on his desk as the second image shows.

Munin posted:

Why is that?

BeigeJacket posted:

I've often wondered, when reading the English translations provided by goons, whether Maduros speeches sound as rambling and word salady in Spanish. Because that poo poo seems to be all over the place.

Crowsbeak posted:

Why should the USA not spy on its rivals? Or does Greenwald just live in a fantasy land with unicorns?

Borneo Jimmy posted:

Here's an interesting article on the upcoming elections.
https://indypendent.org/2015/11/11/venezuela-impasse


Good to see the collective actively organizing and providing concrete solutions to the economic crisis.

quote:

You know, we’re heading into an election. If the Venezuelan right-wing wins the parliamentary election, you can forget about your homes and your communes; you can forget about your communal councils, your pensions. Forget about computers for kids and healthcare. You can forget about absolutely everything.

quote:

Wherever there is a [public] work by the Bolivarian revolution, there also will be Chavez’s candidates, [candidates] for the homeland and the Bolivarian revolution.

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We have experience when it comes to that. It wouldn’t be anything new.