Venezuela's Useful Idiots

Defenders of the Venezuelan regime would never allow the White House to arrest opposition leaders and shut down unfriendly media outlets. So why the double standard?

At the southernmost point of Central Park, on a small strip of sidewalk abutting 59th Street, hundreds of Venezuelans swarmed a statue of Simon Bolivar, the Caracas-born liberator of South America and a figure now most commonly associated with the bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chavez and his rechristened Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. But it’s an association that when mentioned in this crowd produces furrowed brows and narrowed eyes, quickly followed by a rapid-fire recapitulation of Chavez’s many crimes.

The necessary symbolism of the meeting point trumped practicality: the crowd quickly swelled, spreading like an inkblot from the small patch surrounding Bolivar into a lane of midtown Manhattan traffic. They banged pots. They shouted slogans about the Cubanization of their patria, from which many are exiled. They carried signs detailing spiraling crime rates (23,000 murders last year), many plastered with grim photos of those abused and murdered, and others with mordant slogans (“In Venezuela everything is scarce, except bullets”).

We are far from the bloody streets of Caracas; these protesters are ringed not by heavily armed and body-armoured National Guardsman, but are politely attended to by a handful of paunchy and bored New York City cops. There was no threat of violence here--with the single exception of a slobbering, toothless, and possibly blotto Spanish speaker who, while ambling past the crowd, shouted something that drew the ire--and very nearly the flying fists--of a man with a large Venezuelan flag tied around his neck--the anti-Chavez superhero.

It was unclear what the slurring Chavista provocateur said, but surely, I told a woman next to me, it was a case of commitment to alcohol consumption and not commitment to revolution. But one had to admit, I continued, that many outside of Venezuela, including a small segment of the media, have fallen for the crude propaganda oozing out of Miraflores Palace. All over the internet, one finds a seemingly inexhaustible supply of useful idiots and Sandinista nostalgists willing to contextualize the disastrous Bolivarian Revolution.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/24/venezuela-s-useful-idiots.html