Venezuelan Quotes

Venezuelan dream dolls? We have some on display in the palace. They're incredibly rare." He examined its back. "What is it doing here?" "I'm pretty sure Thorne stole it." Kai's expression filled with clarity. "Ah. Of course." He nestled the doll back into its packaging. "He'd better plan on giving all this stuff back." "Sure I'll give it back, Your Majesticness. For a proper finder's fee.

Mierda.” José screeched to a halt, and reversed to start a three-point turn – of which points two and three never materialised as, looking back, the road from where we’d come was now filled side-to-side by an advancing column of police, some with riot shields, some on horseback, marching towards us. José decided, quite reasonably in my opinion, that this wasn’t a place to be trapped so his passenger could try out his Spanish with the Venezuelan Riot Police. His solution – drive straight ahead at a tangent to the road, across a vast stretch of wasteland.

I'm not a vampire" he snapped. "Well, you drink blood to live and you have retractable fangs just like your wings. I'd say that makes you a vampire." I thought for a moment. "Or a Venezuelan fruit bat." Michael was not amused.

While the Venezuelan people starve, the Chavistas post photographs on Facebook of their European vacations, their lavish parties, their designer outfits, the bouquets of fresh flowers that adorn their homes.

Dave Concepción exceeded everyone’s expectations—everyone’s except, perhaps, his own. That’s because as a kid, Concepción idolized Major League Hall of Fame shortstop and fellow-Venezuelan Luis Aparicio, and he aspired to become that same caliber of player.

Some people point to me as the cause of all society's problems, others as if I am the benefactor, responsible for everything good, but I am neither the former nor the latter. I am but a man in particular circumstances, and the most beautiful part is that an individual human life is capable of contributing to the growth, the awakening of the collective strength. That is what matters!

But in Venezuela, as in America, it is quite possible for “public servants” to become very rich. In fact, it is hard to name any prominent figure on the Venezuelan left, as on the American left, who hasn’t profited handsomely from their politics. Apparently they all came to do good and stayed to do very well.

Finally—and this is the seventh familiar theme of Venezuelan socialism—there is getting rich off politics. Once again, that does not occur in Scandinavia. There is not a single politician in Norway, Sweden or Denmark who has gone from zero to $10 million—or $200 million—while largely employed in the public sector.

you give up on trying to make it perfect on trying to weave each strand seamlessly into the next you can’t braid layered hair without the fringes sticking out

When we consider the major themes of Venezuelan socialism, we can see right away that every one of them parallels the themes of the American left. American leftists are wannabe Maduros pretending to take their cues from Sven. If we continue to move in the direction that the left is taking us, we are going to end up not where the Scandinavians are but where the Venezuelans are. Pack your bags, and make sure you label them correctly. It’s not “Stockholm, here we come” but “Caracas, here we come.” It won’t be pretty.

Rubio's sudden concern for the humanitarian situation in Venezuela smacks of hypocrisy, as he supported all US sanctions that have made life for Venezuelans miserable.

she said yes to the Curzon Soho cinema date to see a Venezuelan film on a Sunday afternoon

For the Obamacare rollout, Obama worked with the same public relations specialists who also did the publicity for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Celinda Lake and American Environics, the leftist pollster who advised the Obama campaign to make contraception for women one of the central issues in the 2012 presidential campaign, offered data that was useful. But the driving force in developing the strategy behind branding Obamacare was the Herndon Alliance. They’re the ones who came up with the now infamous line, “If you like your health-care plan you can keep it.

Venezuela, a state that is a calamity for Venezuelans and a friend of the most shunned regimes (Pakistan, of course, along with North Korea, Iran, Russia, and others just as odious), while also being the architect of the farcical “Bolivarian alliance.

American socialists and leftists were some of the most ardent devotees of Stalinist and Maoist socialism. They also embraced German national socialism, Italian national socialism, Cuban socialism, North Korean socialism and now Venezuelan socialism. We can see this devotion in contemporary progressives and socialists from Bill de Blasio to Bernie Sanders. We also see it in leading progressives and socialists of the past: Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, Corliss Lamont, W. E. B. Du Bois, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal “brain trust.

Ancient Spanish ranching techniques were adopted—and adapted—all over the American continent and took slightly different forms, spawning different vocabulary, from place to place. Argentines call cowboys gauchos; Peruvians, chaláns; Ecuadorians, chagras; Venezuelans and Colombians, llaneros; and Chileans, huasos.

Is this what I think it is?" Having returned his focus to his own crate, Kai held up a carved wooden doll adorned with bedraggled feathers and four too many eyes. Cinder finished unloading the handgun and set it next to the others. "Don't tell me you've actually seen one of those hideous things before." "Venezuelan dream dolls? We have some on display in the palace. They're incredibly rare." He examined its back. "What is it doing here?" "I'm pretty sure Thorne stole it." Kai's expression filled with clarity. "Ah, Of course." He nestled the doll back into its packaging. "He'd better plan on giving all this stuff back." "Sure I'll give it back, Your Majesticness. For a proper finder's fee.

Another casualty of Feisal’s return to power was Abdullah Tariki, the general director of petroleum and mineral resources. Tariki is a well-known figure in global oil politics, mostly because in 1960 he cofounded, along with Venezuelan oil minister Juan Perez Alfonso, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as the OPEC cartel.

Merry Christmas me bollocks. The words of the Pogues's 'Fairytale of New York' also came to mind: surrounded by scumbags and maggots, I prayed God it would be my last in Los Teques.

The world currently has two reasonably disturbing and disturbingly reasonable examples as to what this unraveling might look like: Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In both cases mismanagement par excellence destroyed the ability of both countries to produce their for-export goods—foodstuffs in the case of Zimbabwe, oil and oil products in the case of Venezuela—resulting in funds shortages so extreme, the ability of the countries to import largely collapsed. In Zimbabwe, the end result was more than a decade of negative economic growth, generating outcomes far worse than those of the Great Depression, with the bulk of the population reduced to subsistence farming. Venezuela wasn’t so . . . fortunate. It imported more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs before its economic collapse. Venezuelan oil production dropped so much, the country even lacks sufficient fuel to sow crops, contributing to the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere. I don’t use these examples lightly. The word you are looking for to describe this outcome isn’t “deglobalize” or even “deindustrialize,” but instead “decivilize.

You get three Venezuelans together and one will play the drums or the guitar and the other two will dance; there is no ill that can resist that treatment. Our parties, in contrast, seem like funerals: the men gather in a corner to talk business and the women die of boredom. Only the young dance, seduced by North American music, but as soon as they marry they turn solemn like their parents.

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you’re a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it’s life or death. But at Harvard, it’s about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue—it wouldn’t hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they’re really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who’s genuinely starving?

Trump was actively involved in the pageants. After Miss Universe Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan, gained considerable weight in 1996, Trump publicly excoriated her. He staged a photo op to show Machado exercising at a Manhattan gym. In front of about eighty reporters and photographers, Trump said, “When you win a beauty pageant, people don’t think you’re going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state.” Machado called the photo op an ambush designed to humiliate her. “He had his triumphant entry,” she recalled, “and I got to feel like a hamster on a wheel for an hour. I was his first Miss Universe when he just bought the company. Unfortunately, this also meant that I experienced, firsthand, his rage and racism and all the misogyny a person can demonstrate.” Trump wrote years later that he did what he did to protect her from being fired: “God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains fifty pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her.” Trump

WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY | 838 words A slippery situation in the Gulf Black Horizon (Harper, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062109880), the 11th book in James Grippando's popular series featuring Florida attorney Jack Swyteck, opens with the two most important words of the lawyer's life: "I do." (Ha, ha—you thought I was going to say, "Not guilty.") The beach wedding in scenic Key Largo goes wildly awry when an epic storm arises in the Gulf, launching manifold repercussions for Swyteck and his new bride. One of the victims of the storm is a young Cuban oil rig worker whose wife emigrated to the U.S. ahead of him. He had planned to follow, but the deadly combination of high winds and an explosive oil spill have put paid to those plans forever. Now his wife would like Swyteck to file a wrongful death suit against the Chinese/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban consortium that owns the oil rig. This is no easy feat, since the rig is in Cuban waters, and the only tenuous tie to the U.S. legal system is the wife's residency in Key West. The situation is volatile; the adversaries are lethal; and the backdrop is a toxic oil slick poised to slime the Florida coast. Black Horizon is timely, relentlessly paced and a thrill ride of the first

Sean Penn mourned the death of the fifty-eight-year-old socialist creep. Sean wrote in a statement sent to the Hollywood Reporter: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” He added: “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.” Penn needs to tell you that he knew the guy. A world leader. That’s cool. I guess playing Jeff Spicoli and marrying Madonna wasn’t enough (one made your career, the other ruined your urinary tract). Yeah, this is the same chap who told Piers Morgan that Ted Cruz should be institutionalized. Talk about the pot calling the kettle batshit crazy. If Penn got any nuttier, he’d be a Snickers bar. Of course it would be uncool to point out to Penn that Chávez was no champion of the poor. Under his rule people became far poorer in Venezuela. And in the midst of an oil boom, Chávez engineered a murder boom. The murder rate in his country tripled during Chávez’s tyrannical tenure, hitting a high of 67 per 100,000 residents in 2011, compared with a murder rate of less than 5 per 100,000 in the United States (and that includes Baltimore). And about 10 or 20 less than the last Penn movie. Penn was joined, per usual, by director Oliver Stone, who said, solemnly, somewhere: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.” He added: “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history. “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.” This is from an adult, mind you. And no list of apologists for evil is complete without Michael Moore. This nugget comes from the Michigan Live website, which reports Moore praising Chávez in a feeble collection of Twitter messages, on the night the Venezuelan viper expired. Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous. US

Most of the cadets accepted an invitation to attend a reception at the Venezuelan Naval Academy in La Guaira. Don Silke and I had other ideas and figured on getting a cab to the capital city of Caracas. The ride would take about a half hour, if the car did not overheat going over the mountain pass on the newly constructed highway. The capital city had an elevation of 7,083 feet and we were at sea level. As we stepped off the gangway, I noticed two stunningly beautiful girls standing on the concrete dock looking at the ship. Neither of us could figure out why the girls were there. Perhaps they were tourists, but I would find out. Approaching them, I asked if we could help, but soon discovered that they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak what seemed to be French. It could have led to an impasse but my knowledge of German saved the day. It turned out that both girls were from France and one of them came from the Alsace Province and spoke German. They were both quite bubbly and we soon found out that they were dancers with the Folies Bergère, on tour to South America. From what I understood, they would be performing in Caracas that night and could get us free tickets. It all sounded great except that we had to be back aboard by 10:00 p.m., since the ship would be leaving first thing in the morning. Rats! You win some and you lose some, but at least we were with them for now. Don and I offered to take them aboard for lunch. It all seemed exciting for them to board a ship with so many single men. Ooh là là. The girls attracted a lot of attention and the ship’s photographer couldn’t stop taking pictures. The rest of our classmates couldn’t believe what they saw and of course thought that we were luckier than we really were. For us, the illusion had to be enough and fortunately the lunch served that day was reasonably good.

The plan was reminiscent of the Chávez government’s repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure. Unlike the Venezuelan president, however, President Trump was blocked by the courts.

Investigations revealed that two Venezuelan nationals, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano, who had been employed by Luis Posada Carriles, planted the bombs that destroyed a Cuban airliner. The men admitted to the crime and confessed that they were acting under Luis Posada’s orders. During the ensuing investigation, explosives, weapons and a radio transmitter were discovered at Posada’s private detective agency, in Venezuela. Posada was arrested and jailed in Venezuela. Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano were sentenced to 20-year prison terms. It was later learned that Posada was overheard saying, “We are going to hit a Cuban airplane and Orlando has the details.” Posada was tried and while awaiting a verdict escaped from prison once again. Apparently a sizeable bribe was paid to his guards and other authorities making it possible to buy his way out dressed as a priest. Once out he fled from Venezuela to Panama and then to the United States. It was only after his return to the United States and he was assigned to Nicaragua, as a deputy to Félix Rodríguez that his CIA connection became apparent. Félix Rodríguez was the CIA Operative who helped capture “Che” Guevara in the Bolivian highlands. After an investigation of Posada’s background by the press it became apparent that Posada was responsible for 41 bombings during the Contra conflict. By his own admission, he also planned numerous attacks against Cuba. In 1997, it was discovered that Posada was involved in a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba, with the intent of disrupting the country’s fledgling tourist industry.

…the following day, after only six months in office, Manuel Urrutia Lleó resigned from the Presidency of Cuba, to which people in attendance started to applaud. He simply took off his suit coat and changed into a guayabera. Then leaving through a back door, he made his way to the Venezuelan Embassy where he sought asylum. Shortly thereafter, he emigrated from Cuba to the United States where he became bitter and depressed. In 1964 the former President Urrutia wrote a book named ''Fidel Castro & Company, Inc.: Communist Tyranny in Cuba,” condemning the Castro régime. Urrutia charged that he had been ousted from the presidency because Castro sought to stop what he called the “neutralization of his march toward Communism.” On July 5, 1981, Manuel Urrutia Lleó died at St. John's Hospital in Queens, New York. At the time of his death he was 79 years old.

Revolutionists who took part in uprisings in one part of the globe would often migrate to take part in uprisings in another. Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan radical who launched his country’s wars of liberation from Spain, went to the United States to meet with revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine, and he participated in the French Revolution. Paine fomented revolt in the United States, England, and revolutionary France, where he was initially embraced as a hero.

Wh… What…?” the young Venezuelan activist mumbled. “See,” Pierce said with a smirk. “Amelia’s better already. The vaccine works. And we’ll

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

Ilich's academic syllabus motivated him much less than far-left politics, as he readily recognised: 'I acquired a personal culture by travelling in Russia and other countries. I learned to use Marx's dialectic method. It's an experience which is useful to all revolutionaries'. Fellow students describe him as passionate about Marxism, but as a romantic rather than an ideologue. An envoy of the Venezuelan Communist Party came to the conclusion that this young man had potential. But the offer of a post as its representative in Bucharest which Dr Eduardo Gallegos Mancera, a member of the party's politburo, made to llich when they met in Moscow did not tempt him. As his father had done, Ilich decided to keep the party at arm's length and turned Mancera down. His snubbing of the appointment did not endear him to the Venezuelan Communist Party, and he further blackened his name by supporting a rebel faction. Since 1964 a storm had been brewing back home following the refusal of the young Commander Douglas Bravo, in charge of the party's military affairs and loyal to Che Guevara's doctrine, to toe the official line. Party policy dictated that armed struggle as a means to revolution should be abandoned in favour of a 'broad popular movement for progressive democratic change'. The storm broke in the late 1960s when Bravo left the party. Ilich, still at Lumumba University, wholeheartedly supported him as a true revolutionary, and this led to his expulsion in the early summer of 1969 from the Venezuelan Communist Youth, the first political movement he had joined. Robbed of the backing of a Soviet-endorsed party, Ilich was an easy target for the university authorities, whom he had again angered earlier in 1969 when he joined a demonstration by Arab students. Moscow had no time for Bravo's followers: one Pravda editorial condemned Cuban-backed revolutionary movements in Latin America like Bravo's as 'anti-Marxist' and declared that only orthodox parties held the key to the future.

As his later cool relationship with Moscow was to show, he was far too independent-minded to take orders from the doctrinaire Soviets. Even if they did try to recruit him, the attempt was doomed to fail. 'They are full of self-importance and convinced that only they hold the truth. There is no truth other than theirs,' he fumed bitterly in front of one of his lawyers years later. To the same lawyer he also said that he hated the Russian Communists. He made a point of reaffirming his independence from Moscow, a matter of national pride in his eyes. 'Unlike other parties, the Venezuelan Communist Party is not pledged to Moscow, although it does have privileged relations with the Soviet Union. Venezuelans are a proud people. There is a strong libertarian tradition in the country.' Hans-Joachim Klein, Ilich's fellow traveller for almost six months in the mid-1970s, recalled his antipathy towards the Russian Communists: 'He didn't like them. He thought they were corrupt. He did not define himself as a Marxist, but rather as an international revolutionary, a bit like Che Guevara.' Klein dismissed out of hand the story that Ilich was a KGB agent: 'That's a joke. He was expelled from Lumumba University after he took part in a demonstration. They don't really like that over there.

Wow,” I remarked to an older man who had just turned away from a group. “That’s what I call a birthday cake. You think someone’s going to jump out of that thing?” “Hope not,” he said in a gravelly voice. “They might catch fire from all the candles.” I laughed. “Yes, and all that frosting would make the stop, drop, and roll so messy.” Turning toward him, I extended my hand. “Ella Varner, from Austin. Are you a friend of the Travises? Never mind, of course you are. They wouldn’t invite one of their enemies, would they?” He smiled as he shook my hand. His teeth were a scrupulous shade of white I always found mildly startling in a person his age. “They would especially invite one of their enemies.” He was a good-looking old guy, not much taller than me, his steel-colored hair cut short, his skin leathery and sun-cured. Charisma clung to him as if it had been rubbed in like sunscreen. Meeting his gaze, I was arrested by the color of his eyes, the bittersweet dark of Venezuelan chocolate. As I stared into those familiar eyes, I knew exactly who he was. “Happy birthday, Mr. Travis,” I said with an abashed grin. “Thank you, Miss Varner.” “Call me Ella, please. I think my crashing your party puts us on a first-name basis, doesn’t it?

This interventional neuroradiology group was rescued from Venezuela’s medical care-for-oil deal, in which the Cuban government sold over twenty-two thousand Cuban doctors into medical slavery. Venezuela got cheap medical care for the poor, which generated votes, and the Castros could keep their country’s cars and generators going, on free Venezuelan oil. The

A sexually unapologetic fashionista tries to find love in the big city … wait a second! This sounds like the premise of my show, The Mindy Project. But it’s not my fault. I didn’t come up with this format. Not many people know this, but The Mindy Project is actually based on a famous Venezuelan show called Puta Gordita, or “The Chubby Slut.

Late that autumn a Venezuelan attorney, Alberto Jaime Berti, cooperated with Italian magistrates in return for immunity from prosecution on charges that the IOR was at the center of laundering several hundred million dollars through Swiss and Panamanian banks on behalf of a handful of senior Opus Dei officials.72 The Italian media reported that Berti fingered De Bonis as his Vatican Bank connection and produced dozens of documents with the monsignor’s signature. Prosecutors believed that De Bonis had the key to a safe deposit box at Geneva’s Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. It was in that box, said Berti, that a cache of documents laid out exactly how the IOR laundered the money. De Bonis, cloaked by immunity in his Knights of Malta position, denied even knowing Berti.73 The prosecutors, unable to move against him, had to stand down.

What the hell?” Two men stepped through the shattered glass door. They were wearing dark blue bulletproof vests emblazoned with the letters FBI. “Get your hands in the air!” “Do you know who I am?” Pollard snarled at the pistol aimed at his face. The agent smiled. “I know exactly who you are, you piece of shit. Jordan Pollard, you're under arrest for accessory to murder of Mexican and Venezuelan citizens, blackmail, and securities fraud. I could go on but I think you get the drift.” Strong hands hauled him from his desk and pressed him against the wall. Metal handcuffs restrained his hands behind his back. “You're making a big mistake, gentlemen! I have powerful friends.” “So do we, ours is a Supreme Court judge. Maybe we should get them together some time.

Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force. Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure! In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.

In the sagas of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, the scholar-adventurer burned his candle to a nub as he pored over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. A map drawn in faded ink, a cryptic document in Latin fell into his fingers. From such glimmerings, a glorious excursion into terra incognita unfurled, as the scholar’s team wound through an Icelandic volcano down to the center of the earth or traversed a lost Venezuelan plateau teeming with dinosaurs. As

Two Iranians lectured him in broken English about the Bill of Rights, followed by an indignant Sri Lankan couple who scolded him for ruining their honeymoon. Brandon stepped into the woods to pee later that night and nine Venezuelans surrendered. The shit-magnet razzing roared to new heights.

I have been so lucky to lead amazing teams to incredible places: the remote Venezuelan jungles of the “Lost World” in search of Jimmy Angel’s lost gold; or the remote white desert that is Antarctica to climb unclimbed peaks. (I managed to break my shoulder in a fall on that trip, but you can’t win them all!) Then we returned to the Himalayas, where my buddy Gilo and I flew powered paragliders to above the height of Everest. Once again, we were raising funds for the charity Global Angels, an extraordinary charity that champions the most needy kids around the world. But the flight itself was a mission that so nearly had fatal consequences. All the aviation and cold-weather experts predicted almost certain disaster; from frozen parachutes to uncontrollable hurricane-force winds, from impossible takeoffs to bone-breaking landings--and that was before they even contemplated whether a small one-man machine could even be designed to be powerful enough to fly that high. And if we could, it certainly then would not be possible to lift it on to our backs. But we pulled it off: Gilo designed and built the most powerful, supercharged, fuel-injected, one-man powered paraglider engine in history, and by the grace of God we somehow got airborne with these monsters on our backs. Some blessed weather and some ball-twitching flying, and we proved the skeptics wrong--even, at the end, landing effortlessly at the foot of the Everest range, nimbly on two feet, like twinkle-toes. Mission complete.

As we have seen, democracy is no guarantee that there will be pluralism. The contrast of the development of pluralistic institutions in Brazil to the Venezuelan experience is telling in this context. Venezuela also transitioned to democracy after 1958, but this happened without empowerment at the grassroots level and did not create a pluralistic distribution of political power. Instead, corrupt politics, patronage networks, and conflict persisted in Venezuela, and in part as a result, when voters went to the polls, they were even willing to support potential despots such as Hugo Chávez, most likely because they thought he alone could stand up to the established elites of Venezuela. In consequence, Venezuela still languishes under extractive institutions, while Brazil broke the mold.

Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez was a general in the Venezuelan army and served as the President of Venezuela from 1952 to 1958. He brought the Latin American country into the twentieth century by introducing programs to eliminate many of Venezuela's slums. Jiménez built public housing programs to improve the living conditions of the poor and built the Central University of Venezuela giving the country a period of prosperity and tranquility. At the same time he was extremely ruthless against critics who tried to overthrow him and opposed his rule. When Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted from government, he fled to the Dominican Republic and later to Miami. Here he met Marita in 1961, presumably because she was “Fidel's girl." They had an affair that resulted in the birth of a daughter (See the blog “Sex & Stupidity”). Jiménez lived in Miami until 1963 but eventually was returned to Venezuela to stand trial for the embezzlement of $200,000,000. For this he spent five years in prison before being convicted, and was then exiled to Spain where he lived in Alcobendas, a suburb of Madrid under Franco’s protection until his death when he was 87 years old.

Ariane,” she said. A common Julian name, derived from the rockets launched from Kourou, which Eve Julia had defended by nuking the Venezuelans. “Ariane Casablancova.” Meaning that she was the daughter of a woman named Casablanca, after the White House.

Habana Eva" released in 2010, Habana Eva is a funny Romantic comedy. Eva works as a seamstress in a sweatshop where she dreams of becoming a fashion designer with her own a room. Her love is her longtime partner Angel, a charming yet lazy islander. Her dream of marrying Angel fades when she meets Jorge, a handsome and wealthy Cuban raised in Venezuela who returns to Cuba, with a more ambitious project than taking photos of Eva for a book. Eva who has been living with her aunts falls for him and has to decide which of the two men she will want to marry. Directed by Fina Torres, starring Prakriti Maduro as Eva and Juan Carlos García as Jorge and Carlos Enrique Almirante as Angel. Venezuelan produced and filmed in La Habana, Cuba. Habana Eva film won the Best Picture award at the New York International Latino Film Festival on August 2, 2010.

It is not that Argentinians are just naïve and think that Juan Perón or the more recent Perónist politicians such as Menem or the Kirchners are selfless and looking out for their interests, or that Venezuelans see their salvation in Chávez. Instead, many Argentinians and Venezuelans recognize that all other politicians and parties have for so long failed to give them voice, to provide them with the most basic public services, such as roads and education, and to protect them from exploitation by local elites. So many Venezuelans today support the policies that Chávez is adopting even if these come with corruption and waste in the same way that many Argentinians supported Perón’s policies in the 1940s and 1970s.

In fact, if Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro passed this same law, Americans would properly see it as a thinly veiled attempt to squelch the political rights of Venezuelans and to entrench himself in power.”19 To be clear, it was not “the Senate,” but the Democrat Party.

In the eyes of its citizens, the Venezuelan state is little more than an ATM—the magic box that stands between the oil in the ground and the outstretched palm, the device that performs the alchemy of turning oil into money in my pocket.

FDR also declared an all-out embargo against the Japanese and forbade them the use of Panama Canal, impeding Japan's access to Venezuelan oil.

Inspired by the traditions of Piedmont comes a handcrafted, milk chocolate gianduiotto truffle speckled with roasted hazelnuts. This is to honor my late husband's family, the Savoias." When Sara and Carmine sampled the truffles and nodded their approval, Celina breathed a sigh of relief. "Next, we'll sample the sweet lemon flavor of sfusato amalfitano, formed in the shape of lemons and dusted with sea salt to enhance the flavor." After explaining her inspiration for this local favorite and receiving approval, she gestured to Karin and moved on to the next one. "This one is a twist on basil, mint, and limoncello. These flavors are enrobed in rich, dark Venezuelan chocolate. I import the cacao beans and roast them downstairs in my kitchen." Surprise crossed a few faces, followed with growing delight. Celina continued. "Next, you'll sample a truffle infused with blood orange and topped with roasted pistachios from Sicily, and sweetened with Madagascar vanilla.

the congenital disease that in those years afflicted the Venezuelan middle class: the defects of nineteenth-century white Venezuelans grafted onto the chaos of a mixed-race society. A country where women birthed and brought up children on their own, thanks to men who didn’t even bother pretending that they were stepping out for cigarettes when they decided to leave for good.

In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (“not at all democratic”) to 10 (“completely democratic”), 51 percent of respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher. Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

As a former CIA operative, I've heard a lot of statements that have chilled me as though I had a foot-long icicle down my throat while sitting naked and wet on an ice floe. (By the way—don't go to Greenland. Ever.) Things like, Open up! It's the police, and we have a flamethrower! and Tell me the code or I'll have to use this pair of pliers on your eyelids. All terrifying under normal circumstances, but throw in the Iranian secret police or a Venezuelan death squad dressed as circus clowns, and they have a smidge more gravitas. But nothing…nothing compares to what I was just told. "What do you mean we have to sell cookies?" I asked Kelly with a slight tremble in my voice. "To people? On purpose?

If you think our country is too big to fail, you’d be among the millions of Venezuelans who thought so, too. Regarded as the richest country in Latin America just two decades ago, Venezuela is in shambles today. The average person has lost 20 pounds due to food shortages and there is no relief in sight. Millions of citizens are now in exile.[18] ​Once some of the most beautiful and safest cities in America mere decades ago, are now mired in filth, degradation, homelessness, crime, drugs, etc. San Francisco, L.A., Chicago and Detroit are on downward spirals. The common denominator: all have been under Democratic rule for decades.

According to Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, Chavez's Bolivarian revolution created a country that ranked 164th out of the 178 nations surveyed -placing Venezuela below Haiti in perceptions of corruption. Unfairness in the Venezuelan public sector was at the level of Congo, Guinea, and Kyrgyzstan. Unfairness, of course, is the precise opposite of equality.

In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.

Mamacita, take a walk inside! Take a walk inside!” They are accustomed to seeing “Vennies” scurrying around the back streets—to them, every Latina is a Venezuelan whore—so they take her money and ask no questions.

Their few empty invocations of equality advance no further than the clichés of the French Revolution, and are soon reissued as mathemes by way of shielding them from argument. But when it comes to real politics they write as though negation is enough. Whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the IRA, the Venezuelan Chavistas, the French sans-papiers, or the Occupy movement – whatever the radical cause, it is the attack on the ‘System’ that matters. The alternative is ‘unnameable in the language of the system’. Didn’t Paul Cohen prove the point?

Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote, “Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class. The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.

In 2013, the Venezuelan government accused the opposition of hoarding toilet paper and causing a national shortage.

Doral used to be swampland, but now Carnival Cruise Lines and one of the major Miami papers makes it their home. Everyone who knows Florida well enough calls it Doralzula because so many Venezuelans live there. Rich Venezuelans, the beneficiaries of the old “re-distribute the wealth” scam of socialism, which fails repeatedly and consistently — though this fact is rarely ever mentioned in the media — around the globe. Once they had theirs, of course, they were off to the land of plenty, leaving the masses to wallow in poverty, under corrupt iron rule, while they golfed and ate at fine restaurants and bought exotic cars and slept with beautiful women who could be bought with luxury. Perhaps there was love sometimes, too, but I was always skeptical of any woman under forty wearing designer clothes. The far left loves countries like Cuba, and Venezuela, never taking note of the conditions, the poverty, or the people trying to get out and have a better life; most of whom will never make it to those golden shores of Florida. They are the first to cry over the oppressed, the victimized, the impoverished, as though they are their champion. Unless, of course, those unfortunate folks live in a country in line with their hard-left-leaning ideology, then they are willing to ignore their plight completely. There is no hypocrisy so bald as that of the liberal do-gooder. Talk to a real Venezuelan, or better yet, a Cuban refugee who’d made it to Miami, and ask them how it is there. After you do you will roll your eyes at the next liberal trying to convince you the time has come to embrace these countries.

After opposition parties won control of the Venezuelan congress in a landslide election in December 2015, they hoped to use the legislature to check the power of autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. Thus, the new congress passed an amnesty law that would free 120 political prisoners, and it voted to block Maduro’s declaration of a state of economic emergency (which granted him vast power to govern by decree). To fend off this challenge, Maduro turned to the supreme court, which was packed with loyalists. The chavista court effectively incapacitated the legislature by ruling nearly all of its bills—including the amnesty law, efforts to revise the national budget, and the rejection of the state of emergency—unconstitutional. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the court ruled against congress twenty-four times in six months, striking down “all the laws it has approved.

the Venezuelan government had given Bosch safe haven in Caracas while he was a fugitive from the United States Government. (He had left the country while on parole after serving time for firing a bazooka at a Polish ship that was docked in Miami Harbor while en route to Cuba.)

Ruling Venezuela as the unelected military strongman from 1948 to 1950 and as President from 1952 to 1958. The President of Venezuela was Marcos Pérez Jiménez, a Venezuelan General, who also considered himself to be a civil engineer. He spent much of the country’s oil profits modernizing the infrastructure, including the construction of the new Caracas to La Guaira highway. The new road was terribly expensive requiring bridges and tunnels. Two tunnels alone cost $20,000,000 and nearly broke the State Treasury, but the road was completed in 1953, just in time for me to ride on it up the mountains to Caracas. The old taxi went uphill at very steep angles, reaching an altitude of 7,400 feet before dipping back down into the city. Looking into the deep ravines next to what had been the old road, I could see wrecks of the vehicles that were unlucky enough to have gone off the road. Finally crossing the top of the Coastal ridge, we followed the winding road down into the extinct volcanic basin that housed the capital city. As we got closer to the downtown district, I noticed that the Guardia National police were everywhere! The traffic was horrendous and there was a layer of smog in the valley, but everything was reasonably quiet except for loud banging sounds. Since there was a noise ordinance in Caracas, cars were not permitted to blow their horns. Instead, the cabdrivers banged the side of their car door with their hand.

Is it a suspicion that perhaps the Venezuelans in general are a bit like the Colombians in general? Let there be no doubt about it, there are no two nationalities on the face of the earth who could be more different. There are no people in the whole of the Caribbean—in the whole of the tropics indeed—who are, on the whole, more honest and trustworthy than the average Venezuelan. There can be a very few tropical countries better policed, nor more incorrupt. There is no reason why anyone should not sail for Venezuela and cruise her coast with the utmost confidence in others, as long as he has the right charts and goes about it in a seamanlike manner, and pays his way.

Most frightening of all was Alibek’s recounting of experiments to insert the gene of Venezuelan equine encephalitis, a mosquito-borne virus that attacks the brain—into vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine. If this were successful, it would be only a small step to put it into smallpox itself, with which he assured us Biopreparat had been well stocked, creating a superweapon against which the US vaccine would not work. This research was part of an organized program, he told us, known as the Chimera Project.

Simón Bolívar was born on 24 January 1783 to an enormously wealthy and distinguished Venezuelan family that had aristocratic roots in the mountainous and windswept region of Vizcaya (Biscay) in northern Spain.

In the eyes of the government, there are three types of enemies: companies that intentionally produce less toilet paper, distributors who hoard the paper rolls hoping to sell them to desperate consumers for higher prices, and misguided Venezuelans who buy more rolls than they should. As far as the government is concerned, the mark of a revolutionary Venezuelan is to stoically wait and endure toilet tissue shortages while politicians work to erect a socialist system with the country’s oil wealth.

Alongside the general fetishism of the state that manifests in the Venezuelan context as a fetishization of Chavez the man, there stands as well an equal and opposite fetish of what has been called “horizontalism,” the fetish of refusing or ignoring the state a priori as in Holloway’s insistence that ‘the world cannot be changed through the state.” To fetishize means to worship something human as though it were divine, and I hope that the literal fetishism of both positions is clear: the first refuses to see the state (and Chavez) as produced by human hands and therefore subject to radical transformation; the second—in its denial of human organizational capacities, of organic leadership through struggle. and of the delegation of power—sees such transformation as utterly impossible and futile. For both, in other words, the state is a superhuman entity to be either worshipped or feared but never transformed.

Their name comes from bachaco, a large and industrious ant found in the Venezuelan Amazon. And it is a fitting name. After all, ants are known for the ability to carry several times their weight, just as Venezuelans haul away bags full of merchandise they later resell.

He is a human credit card for me and for scores of diplomats, oil executives, journalists, and any person living in Venezuela who needs to convert a dollar paycheck into bolivars. He buys dollars from those who have them and sells dollars to Venezuelans and companies who desperately need them. He operates in secret. As far as the government is concerned his business doesn’t exist.

In late January 2015 Venezuelan intelligence officers arrested the president and operations vice president of Farmatodo and charged them with “boycott and economic destabilization” for not having enough cash registers functioning in one of the chain’s pharmacies.26 The executives were held in jail for fifty-six days and given a conditional release that forced them to show up in court every fifteen days while the case continued.

As León sees it, price controls and the resulting bachaquero class “have built a system of economic redistribution from richer Venezuelans to the poor.

Tune in to any Venezuelan television channel in January 2015, and you would see government-funded ads featuring famous singers, soap opera actors, and television personalities with one message for shoppers: “Cool it with the nervous purchases.

Many of these products come from state-owned retailers and prominently feature government propaganda printed on the plastic packaging. Cartoons depict political scenes that show, for instance, the heroes—dark-skinned, poor Venezuelans—kicking capitalists, portrayed as a pink-skinned Satan wearing a suit.

Oy, Virgilio,” said his grandmother—his Lola—when he came in. She didn’t look up. She was in the kitchen, slicing a mango. “Come take one of these. Your mother bought too many again. They were on sale, so she buys ten. And what do we need ten mangoes for? They’re not even from the Philippines. They’re from Venezuela. Your mother bought ten Venezuelan mangoes, and for what? That woman would buy kisses from Judas if they were on sale.

I like that I get to go home and do whatever I want. I get to watch what I want on TV. I get to take a really long shower. I get to order Venezuelan food. Thumper and I will get into bed around midnight, and we will sleep soundly, a luxurious amount of room between us in our bed. And I think if you like your evening plans, you're not allowed to regret what led you to them. I think that should be a rule.