The United Nations General Assembly remains in a stalemate after several rounds of voting to try to pick a nation to fill a non-permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council ("U.S. and Venezuela Battle at the U.N."). The Security Council is charged with preserving security and peace among nations, and is the only arm of the U.N. that can declare binding resolutions on member states. Non-permanent seats on the UNSC do not have the power to veto Council decisions. The two nations that have been in the running for the Latin America seat are Venezuela and Guatemala. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has been campaigning for the seat as a platform to speak out against the U.S. Guatemala is the top choice of the Bush administration. The real battle appears to be between Venezuela and the United States, which has campaigned with equal vehemence to block Venezuela's bid. After three days of indecision in the General Assembly, rumors of a compromise Latin American nation are now circulating.
Do you think Venezuela will add balance to the Security Council, or serve only to antagonize U.S. interests? Is it appropriate for the U.S. to lobby against another nation's bid with such intensity? Is Guatemala a strong choice, or just a "not Venezuela" option?
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Comments: 15
but the balloting is not nearly so close. guatemala has a big lead. however, if they do get to a stalemate, then they may compromise on another candidate.
in 1979, balloting went 155 rounds.
the only conclusion that you can draw is that chavez is not going to get the seat. and he's been making silly allegations as he is starting to realize this.
and that's another reason why he should not get the seat.
Guatemala is not a strong choice, and I think Venezuela being an voice that is Anti-Hegemony that would like to see security in the Globe as opposed to just the United States will bring better balance to the security council.
We own the UN...it's just another Cabinet of the White House...it's purpose is to intimidate Third World countries into obeyance. Why Guatemala...why not Montserrat or San Remo?
The UN is responsible for the slaughter going on in Iraq? The UN rightfully called this enterprise 'criminal' under international law and all laws of common decency. No...650,000 Iraqis have been slaughtered because the neocons were in a World Hegemon mood and decided to make Iraq it's first victim.
The political agenda of the UN is...world peace...so I guess you're right...because the White House' political agenda is...war...but, we need not fear the UN...they're the fly...we're the elephant. They either pimp for us or we crush them.
Venezuela renegotiated with the oil drilling companies. The companies have agreed and are satisfied as their profits are very fair.
"Great argument Glen, are we saying Venezuela has a better model, should our government be seizing private property to increase its control of the nations resources and funneling that money into social and welfare programs? Hey that's what Cuba does. Maybe we should be more like Cuba Glen? That's how the Soviet Union did it, maybe they are a good example for our country?"
Like I said there are plenty of lies being spread about Venezuela and Chavez. The bottom line is that current Venezuelan government works for the people and not just the rich ones which is sadly unlike this country, yes. That's why when the attempted a coup the people took the country back.
As for the supposed poverty levels being worse I offer this link which shows that all that negative reporting on the Venezuelan economy have been misled or completely fabricated.
http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/downloads/ceprpov.htm
"I saw on the news just the opposite . The news commentator said that Venezuela had about 85 % poverity and that Chacez had one of his own people thrown into jail fo disagreeing with him. With this inf. and his actions at the UN meeting. I would vote for someone else. If given a choice it may not be Guatemala but not Venezuela either."
Reports of Chavez imprisoning people for disagreeing with him are completely fabricated. Do you really think the people would fight against a coup that deposed him if he was intimidating them? In Venezuela he actually criticized by some for not intimidating his opposition. Don't believe everything you hear from Bush and the Corporate Media.
God, will you people ever learn. Communism does dot work, especially when the people who are running the party are more concentrated on regional domination, rather than on the people of their country. It happened with Russia trying to take over all of eastern europe and incrurring into Afghanistan. Chavez is doing the same. He is doing it with oil revenues though, which should tell you something. If he was really working for his people, of which a good percentage is in poverty (and don't give me that crap about how well they are doing, even liberals acknowledge that most of the country has not seen a bit of the oil revenues directly), he would not be spreading that money all around the world in an attempt to get votes to get on the security council, and to influence elections in latin america, and to prop up the Cuban regime.
As for the UN. I recently read some posts on BBC's Have your say that made me seriously think about whether the U.S. should pull out of the UN. The organization is such a terrible waste of space and resources. They can't do ANYTHING. They talk and debate about genocide in Darfur, and then they ASK the people who are supporting the genocide if they can PLEASE let peacekeepers into the country to stop the slaughter of people. If that isn't the dumbest crap i've ever heard...
We should get out of the UN. Of course that will severely deplete the little power that the UN has because of all of the money that we pay (25%) of their budget, not to mention the building in NY (that is PRIME real estate). Maybe Venezuala will pick up the slack with that oil money they're using to help "the people".
For Glen, read this, reported from Venezuela:
PAIN IN SLUMS OF CHAVEZ
CARACAS KIDS LIVE IN FEAR
October 3, 2006 -- I'D LIKE Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to meet one of his countrymen, 15-year-old Manuel Gonzalez.
Manuel, who's never been to school, lives in a tin-roofed shack with walls made of slabs of half-inch-thick wood, cardboard and flattened oil drums. His "house" clings precariously to La Vega, one of hundreds of hillside slums that dot Chavez's oil-rich capital.
Each day, Manuel lugs buckets of water or propane tanks so his pregnant mother, 12-year-old sister and 1-year-old brother can eat, bathe and flush the toilet.
"I'm scared. I don't want to live here, but I have to take care of my family," Manuel told me.
Chavez should come here, as I did, to see firsthand his country's horrific underbelly - the worsening poverty that he neglects even as he pretends to be a champion of the poor.
It'd be a better use of his time than trips abroad and to New York, where Chavez created an uproar last month by denouncing President Bush as "sick," an "alcoholic" and the "devil."
Here, it seems the devil is closer to home.
At night, Manuel's mother loops a thick chain through a hole in their shanty's thin metal door to barricade her family from murderous teen thieves who roam with impunity.
"Three kids under the age of 18 are murdered in Venezuela every day," said Fernando Pereira, a coordinator for CECODAP, a nonprofit human-rights group trying to save children.
"We don't know of any government program that exists to combat this phenomenon."
The astounding youth death rate belies the public persona Chavez exhibits whenever he comes to New York and eagerly embraces, and sometimes kisses, every little kid he sees.
Chavez recently proclaimed during a ceremony announcing a $16 million plan to rehabilitate 704 homes in a shantytown that extreme poverty has dropped from 21 to 10 percent. But critics say 50 percent of the county's 26 million inhabitants earn less than $2 a day.
Luis Pedro Espana, director of the Economic and Social Research Institute at the Andres Bello Catholic University, said poverty has remained constant since Chavez was elected president in 1998 - despite the country's oil wealth.
Only 10 percent of the work force has jobs, while 52 percent are "freelancers" - street vendors or people who sell goods from their homes, Espana said.
He complained Chavez's socialist, anti-big-business rhetoric and actions have scared off private investors, who currently support only 10 percent of the job market, compared to 25 percent in the 1970s.
"It's not just the issue of how many people are working, it's the quality of the jobs and the low wages that come with it," he said...
While some, like Pereira, give Chavez credit for trying to help parents buy school supplies and combat the dropout rate, they fume that he's done little to create jobs that could absorb the 300,000 people who enter the job market every year.
"For a crisis of this magnitude, it is a shame that there hasn't been any attempt to change the system," said Pereira.
The poverty and lack of jobs have bred out-of-control crime.
Of the estimated 12,000 homicides every year, 90 percent of the victims are men between the ages of 15 and 35.
Manuel's never even been to school. His mother, Thaivis Castro, 32, thought the Chavez government would make room for her son, but they only offered him night school.
"Are you crazy? I'm not going to let my son go out at night so that he gets killed," she said.
Manuel stood a few nights ago in their kitchen, sadly using a dirty rag to wipe the sink.
"I want to go to school because I want to become a policeman when I get older," he said.
A 15-year-old who wants to work and be a productive member of society hasn't even started school yet.
Hugo, who's the devil now?
Contentment in Caracas
by John Pilger
I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog. Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform," "popular democracy," "equity," "social justice," and, yes, "freedom."
The other night, in a room bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I heard these words spoken by the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86, Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two young children. Until about a year ago, none of them could read and write; now they are studying mathematics. For the first time in its modern era, Venezuela has almost 100 percent literacy.
This achievement is due to a national program, called Mision Robinson, designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because of poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a secondary school education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century). Named, like much else here, after the great liberator Simon Bolivar, "Bolivarian," or people's, universities have opened, introducing as one parent told me, "treasures of the mind, history and music and art, we barely knew existed." Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela is the first major oil producer to use its oil revenue to liberate the poor.
Mavis Mendez has seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside over the theft of tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to Miami, together with the steepest descent into poverty ever known in Latin America; from 18 percent in 1980 to 65 percent in 1995, three years before Chávez was elected. "We didn't matter in a human sense," she said. "We lived and died without real education and running water, and food we couldn't afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the east of the city, where the mansions are, we were invisible, or we were feared. Now I can read and write my name, and so much more; and whatever the rich, and their media say, we have planted the seeds of true democracy, and I am full of joy that I have lived to witness it."
Latin American governments often give their regimes a new sense of legitimacy by holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution. When he was elected in 1998, Chávez used this brilliantly to decentralize, to give the impoverished grassroots power they had never known, and to begin to dismantle a corrupt political superstructure as a prerequisite to changing the direction of the economy. His setting-up of misions as a means of bypassing saboteurs in the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical of the extraordinary political and social imagination that is changing Venezuela peacefully. This is his "Bolivarian revolution," which, at this stage, is not dissimilar to the postwar European social democracies.
Chávez, a former army major, was anxious to prove he was not yet another military "strongman." He promised that his every move would be subject to the will of the people. In his first year as president in 1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether or not people wanted a new constituent assembly; elections for the assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new constitution — 71 percent of the people approved each of the 396 articles that gave Mavis and Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children and grandchildren, unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the first time recognized the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom Chávez is one. "The indigenous peoples," it says, "have the right to maintain their own economic practices, based on reciprocity, solidarity, and exchange … and to define their priorities…." The little red book of the Venezuelan constitution became a bestseller on the streets. Nora Hernandez, a community worker in Petare barrio, took me to her local state-run supermarket, which is funded entirely by oil revenue and where prices are up to half those in the commercial chains. Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written on the backs of soap power packets. "We can never go back," she said.
In La Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round black woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a program aimed specifically at poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution, women have the right to be paid as carers, and can borrow from a special women's bank. From next month, the poorest housewives will get about £120 a month. It is not surprising that Chávez has now won eight elections and referendums in eight years, each time increasing his majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of state in the western hemisphere, probably in the world.
That is why he survived, amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002. Mariella and Celedonia and Nora and hundreds of thousands of others came down from the barrios and demanded that the army remain loyal. "The people rescued me," Chávez told me. "They did it with all the media against me, preventing even the basic facts of what had happened. For popular democracy in heroic action, I suggest you need look no further."
The venomous attacks on Chávez, who is on a private visit to London this month, have begun and resemble uncannily those of the privately owned Venezuelan television and press, which called for the elected government to be overthrown. Fact-deprived attacks on Chávez in theLondon Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher's and Blair's "one true way," follow a travesty of journalism on Channel Four News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan president of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an absurd fantasy. The reporter sneered at policies to eradicate poverty and presented Chávez as a sinister buffoon, while Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to Hitler, unchallenged. In contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic record, having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote and caused the violent death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd political survival tale.
Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English cooperative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage. In the U.S. media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being "softened up" for something similar. A U.S. Army publication, "Doctrine for Asymmetric War Against Venezuela," describes Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism." When I said to Chávez that the U.S. historically had had its way in Latin America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no surprise. But the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack. We ask only for the support of all true democrats."