Maximo Roboto posted:

that's a photo of Francisco Pinochet

Echo Chamber posted:

https://twitter.com/fictionsofhaiti/status/1191782201236455424?s=21

Echo Chamber posted:

https://twitter.com/fictionsofhaiti/status/1191782201236455424?s=21

Lightning Knight posted:

me, smol brain: oh yeah we have so much money and food to send them!

NYT Opinion writer, drawing bombing routes onto a big map: uh

Fast Luck posted:

look they decided to cover it, even though they're doing so at arm's length
https://twitter.com/uspresstracker/status/1191797086603358208

Fast Luck posted:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1192886224618438657
https://twitter.com/LulaOficial/status/1192888341584322562

CharlestheHammer posted:

if you are going to coup you could at least do it in person, no need for a paper trail

Fast Luck posted:

https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1192871956221235203

quote:

Activista boliviana por #DDHH. Bolivian Human Rights Activist. Co-fundadora @RiosDePie @StandingRivers. Freedom Fellowship Manager @HRF & @OsloFF. Opinions mine

quote:

A controversial son of Venezuela's elite brings a Cold War sensibility to the chaotic 21st century. "I'm not washing my hands here," says Thor Halvorssen.

[...]

"The truth is that I'm a rather unfortunate son of Venezuela's elite," Halvorssen said in an interview with me on the last day of the Oslo Freedom Forum in May. We were up in the press room in the Christiania Theater in central Oslo where he had impressed the importance of Christian Bale on Chen Guangcheng, a few blocks away from the Royal Palace. I had been waiting to do the interview for about an hour as Halvorssen buzzed around the room, talking to his staff, introducing people to each other, and becoming absorbed in his laptop at random intervals.

Halvorssen's name is as Nordic as anyone else in the forum's host country, but culturally and linguistically, he belongs nowhere. He speaks four languages fluently — English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese — and says he understands Norwegian, adding, rather cryptically, that "it's easier" if people don't know he speaks it.

Halvorssen was born in Venezuela, as were his two siblings (a younger sister named Randi, a Pilates instructor in England, and older brother Edward, a construction contractor in Miami). His mother, Hilda Mendoza (also at the conference, along with Randi), is a descendant of Simón Bolivar whose family has been in Venezuela since the 1530s, Halvorssen says. His father, Thor, and uncle Olaf were in their day "Venezuela's most eligible playboys," as The New York Times described them, and the elder Thor was a senior aide to President Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodriguez.

The first Pérez term — he served twice, once from 1974–1979, and the second time from 1989–1993 — was a time of newfound prosperity in Venezuela, as Pérez, who had been exiled during an earlier authoritarian period, nationalized the country's oil industry. The second was more challenging, marked by unrest and coup attempts as well as a $4.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. One of the coups was led by Hugo Chávez. Pérez was impeached and booted from office in 1993 for corruption. The elder Halvorssen served as the president of the state telephone company during Pérez's first term, and the anti-drug minister in the second.

In 1993, Halvorssen fell from grace and found himself locked up. In an op-ed he published in 1994 in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote that his work led him to "incontrovertible evidence of money-laundering in Venezuelan banks" and that he alerted U.S. authorities. Halvorssen was arrested shortly thereafter and beaten, he wrote, as well as "psychologically and physically tortured." He was accused of having planned a series of bombings in Caracas the year before.

The elder Halvorssen was also a CIA informant, though never a paid agent. He admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's newspaper that he had worked closely with Duane Clarridge, a former top CIA official in Latin America who was indicted during the Iran-Contra affair and who now runs his own spy agency.

The younger Halvorssen rejects the idea that his father had a special relationship with the CIA.

"My father was the ambassador for drugs," he told me. "He talked to every government and every intelligence agency. It's an absurd statement. When he was in prison, all sorts of stuff started coming out. [Pablo] Escobar's people were on a rampage to silence him."

As his father fought it out in Venezuela's domestic politics, which would soon be reshaped by a new left under Col. Hugo Chávez, the younger Halvorssen went off to college at family alma mater Penn. He edited an alternative conservative school paper called Red and Blue and lived the life of an American college kid, albeit one more worldly than most. His crowd was "the international crowd," he told me. "Lots of Brazilians, Mexicans, and Persians." Halvorssen found ways to cross paths with influential American and international figures.

[...]

Halvorssen is a Venezuelan citizen but hasn't been back there in five years. He says he'll be arrested if he returns. He is also, for a sort of international celebrity, an intensely private figure: He refuses to talk about his sexuality or relationships on the record ("irrelevant"), or where he lives exactly, citing death threats he's received (though he is based in the United States and travels constantly). He even refuses to discuss his hobbies on the record. "That's irrelevant for BuzzFeed or anywhere else," he said. He did tell me about how he has already paid up to have his body cryogenically frozen, an idea he says he picked up from Peter Thiel.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/is-this-the-face-of-a-new-global-human-rights-movement#.eregxXQQXa

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://twitter.com/RYP__/status/1035982206320046080

Corky Romanovsky posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/danielmarans/status/1192487932709494784

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1193381654070464512

420 Gank Mid posted:

They're saving a lot of work by just reusing all the old material from the failed Venezuelan coup earlier this year

Homeless Friend posted:

Al! posted:

what if it doesnt work

Al! posted:

what if it doesnt work

Al! posted:

what if it doesnt work