Skip to main content

David Anderson & Hugo Chavez : Socialist Birds of a Feather

Hey David, it's not just all about economics.

Socialism seeks to socialize a nation (or the world) to mandated norms of behavior and lifestyle, most usually accomplished by state control of economic ways and means.

But we all know such totalitarian statism is never content with, nor limited to, expropriating just your wallet...

By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 4 (IPS) - One Friday at around midnight, on Villaflor Street, a favourite spot for gays and lesbians in the Venezuelan capital, Yonatan Matheus and Omar Marques noticed two Caracas police patrol vans carrying about 20 detainees, most of them very young.

When Marques and Matheus, who are gay leaders of the Venezuela Diversa (Diverse Venezuela) organisation, approached to find out what was happening and take pictures, they were picked up too.

"Like most of those arrested, our identity documents and mobile phones were taken away, we were beaten, our sexual orientation was insulted in degrading language, and we were refused permission to speak to the Justice Ministry officials and members of the National Guard who were present," Matheus told IPS.

The vans set out for the Caracas police headquarters with their load of detainees, but Marques, Matheus and two minors were left by the main highway crossing the city. They had to walk to the city centre, where they contacted officials at the Ombudsman's Office to file complaints.

This incident in October was one of the multiple arbitrary arrests carried out against the GLBTI (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgender and intersex) community, within the framework of Operation Safe Caracas, a campaign to crack down on crime involving personnel from several police forces and the National Guard, a military body with police functions.

The Venezuelan capital, with five million people living in the metropolitan area, is one of the most dangerous cities in the world; the annual murder rate is in excess of 135 per 100,000 population. In the third week of October alone there were 65 murders, and the central morgue has been stretched beyond capacity several times this year.

"Operation Safe Caracas has meant more insecurity, because it adds police harassment to attacks by common criminals and homophobic citizens," César Sequera of the Venezuelan GLBTI Network, a recently formed coalition of groups defending the rights of sexual minorities, told IPS.

In Caracas and the oil-rich western state of Zulia, where Venezuela Diversa is also active, "so far this year nine transsexual persons have been killed in violence related to their condition, so one of our most urgent claims is proper guarantees for the right to life," Matheus said.

Astrid, a transvestite sex worker who finds her clients among drivers on Libertador Avenue in Caracas, told journalists that "sometimes the police stop us, take our money and even force us to have sex with them under threat of being beaten or dropped off in a dangerous part of the city."

......................

The non-governmental organisation Citizen Action against AIDS (ACCSI) carried out a 2008 survey of 742 people in the GLBTI community in Caracas and the western cities of Maracaibo and Mérida, to investigate negative experiences with the police.

Half the interviewees said they had experienced situations in which their rights had been violated, although most did not report them, out of fear or a sense of shame. The most common behaviours they complained of were verbal aggression (36 percent), extortion (20 percent), physical aggression (12 percent) and deprivation of freedom (11 percent).

"GLBTI persons suffer strong rejection in Venezuela, because of dogma, social prejudice and mistaken medical or psychiatric diagnoses," said Edgar Carrasco, who directed the survey. "And the worst of," he added, "is that the discrimination and impunity is related to the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic."

The depth of this rejection was spelled out to IPS by Fernando, a 22-year-old cookery student who came to Caracas "practically in headlong flight, because if we are excluded in Caracas, where gays gather in large groups to go out or spend time together, imagine what it's like in a small town full of prejudice like Altagracia de Orituco," in the central plains of the country, where agriculture and ranching are the main activities.

Article 21 of the 1999 Venezuelan constitution states that all persons are equal before the law and, consequently, discrimination based on race, sex, creed or social condition is prohibited.

On this basis, the Supreme Court ruled in March 2008 that no individual may be discriminated against by reason of his or her sexual orientation in any way that implies treating him or her in an unequal fashion.

Yet based on article 77 which protects marriage between a man and a woman, in the same ruling the Supreme Court refused to equate the rights of stable homosexual unions with those of heterosexual married couples.

Sequera of the GLBTI Network emphasised that "many of our rights are still being infringed: in the first place, respect for our identity and self-image, and secondly the right to health, since we are often denied access to public and private health care centres, and we aren't even considered as possible blood donors, for example."

Matheus also complained of "employment discrimination in terms of access to jobs and treatment in the workplace, as well as discrimination in schools and educational institutions, where we are harassed by teachers and other students, leading many of us to drop out."

"But police harassment remains a serious concern, because in effect it abrogates our right to freedom of movement, to use the public thoroughfares of this country, or to freely and peacefully go to night clubs or shopping centres to exercise our right to leisure and entertainment, just like everybody else," Matheus concluded. (END/2009)

I hope David Anderson and his homophobic compadres over at "Delaware Politics" are happy to be in league with Hugo Chavez's government.

And lest David come here and try to put gauzy white gloves on his own rendition of the iron fist applied to same-sex couples, splitting hairs that he and his fellow travelers in the U.S. of A. aren't just as authoritarian and troglodytic as Huggy Chavez's regime.....save it, David.

Socialism can, and often does, rise out of (pseudo)-religious underpinnings. I am sure David knows all about so-called "liberation theology".

Arbitrary state denial of equal rights, on the bases of superstition, fear, and/or hatred, is no less abhorrent because it hides behind religion, rather than merely a sick secular desire to control. In fact, to me, using religious faith to such ends is even worse in its blazing hypocrisy....especially from those claiming "Judeo-Christian faith".

Jesus Christ would positively rail against your self-serving ideology of self-validating intolerance and obeisance to state power, as long as it enforces (by majoritarian will) your narrow ends, purely at the expense of others in a vulnerable minority position in society.

Comments

Hube said…
Chavez is a thug in line with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad et. al. He's an anti-Semite, too, besides a homophobe.

He's slowly turning Venezuela into Cuba 2.0, all the while los panas that can afford it and/or work it out are fleeing in droves ...
Tyler Nixon said…
Chavez is a 21st century clone of Castro circa 1960, but with tons more resources at his disposal.

I fear he will be a source of dictatorial mischief and human misery in that region for decades to come.

No wonder he lionizes Fidel. The state-sponsored gay-bashing is but more evidence of what filth he really is...right in line with Iran, Stalinist USSR, North Korea, and the 1930's National Socialists in Germany.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?