Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): The economy no longer seems to be doing the job in terms of creating employment in the regulated "formal sector" of the labor market. Getting unemployment down has been one of the government's big claims in the run-up to state and municipal elections later this year.
Even as Interior and Justice Minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin insists the new intelligence laws are necessary, argument rages about whether disbanding existing services and replacing them with four new ones will work against the interests of the citizenry. The minister says changes have to be made because the old secret services were not under any sort of regulation, and "atrocities" were committed.
The intention is that the state security service, Disip, and the military intelligence directive, DIM, will go within a year ... not least, it's said, because they've been infiltrated.
The decree which President Hugo Chavez used to promulgate the new order under the special powers set out in the Enabling Law justified the need by saying the changes would "protect and guarantee the stability, integrity and permanence of democratic institutions." But for some critics, that's precisely the problem ... they argue that setting up the new intelligence services doesn't actually address the problem, which they see as ingrained attitudes within the intelligence community. They say they don't see this necessarily changing.
Provea, a civil rights group, on Tuesday told the French news agency, AFP, that the new intelligence structure put Venezuela on the brink of a police state. The rationale for this, said Marino Alvarado of Provea, was that the thrust of the plan was "to convert every citizen into a policeman."
Critics say the law implies that not to inform on someone working against the democratic institutions of the state would in itself constitute a crime punishable by jail terms of several years. The trouble with this, critics claim, is the lack of precision in the new law about just what would constitute working against said institutions of state.
The question, they say, goes like this: at what point would someone be obliged, at risk of themselves going to prison, to start informing the authorities?
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Why complain about Chavez creating a society of informers when that has already been done by George W. Bush in the U.S.? Why can't you Americans see the problems confronting your own country before you complain about the Chavez of Venezuela? Is it because if you did complain you would be on your way to a secret prison somewhere in Eastern Europe or the Middle East?
ReplyDeleteIt is about time that the U.S. press started to explain its own collusion in the censoring of the news emanating from America and telling the world the truth about what is really happening there.