EDITORIAL: Our hearts bleed for Venezuela ... just throw away the keys and switch off the lights!

VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: Pardon my French but what the **** is going on!

Is Venezuela on a suicide mission with a quest for oblivion or is a self-seeking minor official manipulating his/her way into some expectation of an under-the-table contribution to a personal retirement fund?

With things going really to pot in the middle-management of President Hugo Chavez Frias' administration, we already know that the President's best ambitions for the Venezuelan people are being stymied at a 'helluva' rate that makes us conjecture this Eve of the 1st of May, that the President is either blind to what is going on, or that he is being increasingly marginalized by 5th columnists and traitors in his close proximity.

With friends like those, President Chavez certainly doesn't need enemies and our greatest fear is that their sycophantic slaps on the back will so readily, almost inevitably turn to Brutus stabbings that will send Venezuela's new-found democracy into retrograde.

Today's news that the "office of permits at Venezuela's environment ministry has informed the Venezuelan Guyana Corporation (CVG) that it has denied an exploration permit at Las Cristinas" is so illogical as to be quite incredible!

The communication to the CVG, and onwards to its contractee Canadian Crystallex International cites "sensitivities surrounding indigenous peoples, small miners and the environment."

It's just so much bull****! In fact a veritable dung-heap!

Venezuela's Environment Ministry has been with the project every step of the way (admittedly through a musical chairs of ministerial responsibilities) and they had several months ago already signalled a project go-ahead with compliance statements and bonds paid by Crystallex International ... although, quite frankly, why it was not the responsibility of the CVG to pay the charges out of their own corporate pocket for the work on their own (or the Venezuelan State's) property escapes me.

All these issues of the Imataca Rainforest and "sensitivities surrounding indian tribes, small miners and the environment" have been known about for years, and years, and years.

What other motive than bureaucratic graft can there be by raising a spectre such as this at the fifty-ninth minute of the 11th hour in more than a decade of perpetual dilly-dallying?

Wasn't it enough that Crystallex stumped up US$15 million to fund former CVG president Francisco Gomez' bid to become Bolivar State Governor.

Isn't it enough that the Canadian company has since plowed further US$ millions into the dirt around the Sifontes municipality to give employment to several thousand locals who have been ignored by central government and deprived of gainful subsistence for so many years?

Is Crystallex going to happily walk away from its contract and give the middle finger to Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolutionary ambitions simply because some anonymous official sees opportunity to feather his Miami bank account before either US Special Forces pour over the border from Colombia or the Venezuelan opposition and their cohort traitors within the Chavez administration launch a more successful copycat of the April 2002 coup d'etat?

Disgraceful!

It's a blight on whatever shreds of international decency remain on the body politic of Venezuela ... rather the bare bones of a skeleton that once had borne flesh but is now rotten to the core.

It shames me ... as a staunch supporter of Venezuelan democracy, constitutionality and the rule of law, to see such a bastardization of President Hugo Chavez Frias' original ambitions for a better life for the Venezuelan people ... all 25+ million of them and not just the single figure percentage of filthy rich who infested Venezuela before he came to power in 1999.

In the current climate of mayhem that is Venezuela's governance just now, right is wrong and wrong is right!

Venezuela's grassroots citizens are realizing their democratic power and getting ready to take on the challenge of pushing for solid change from the bottom up.

It's what President Chavez has stated as his guiding light and it is a flame, a beacon for everything that is good about the Bolivarian Revolution ... but the traitors in President Chavez proximity are doing their damnedst to quench the flame of hope!

Now is the time ... already it was the time like yesterday and the day before, not 'manana' ... for Venezuela's grassroots citizens to rise up this May 1st and seize what is rightfully theirs!

They seek a government that is free from corruption.

• A government that is just and fair in all its dealings.


• A government that seeks respect, not disrespect and ridicule abroad.


• A government that lives up to higher standards of probity and honesty than that which assails Venezuela from the North!

Is it too much even at this late stage to ask Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias and other true patriots of Venezuela to stand up and be counted. To reject the corruption and malfeasance which is very quickly suffocating Venezuelan democracy to the very core.

US President John F. Kennedy once told his people "ask not what your country can do for you" ... NOW is the time for all good and true Venezuelans to come to the rescue of this beautiful and honorable country and to deal resolutely with the crime and corruption that permeates almost every level of the administration and beyond.

If not? Our hearts bleed for Venezuela but just throw away the keys and switch off the lights!

Roy S. Carson
vheadline.carson@gmail.com