Put quite simply, although Thompson claims his resignation was "to pursue personal interests" it is patently clear that he has simply given up on any further dialogue with Caracas and prefers to step aside to allow his boss, the political and economic heavyweight, Canadian-Chinese business mogul Robert Fung to clear the shrubbery and emulate Robocop.
Lest the picture is not sufficiently clear: the current scenario is that President Hugo Chavez Frias wants Venezuela's sovereign resources to remain the property of the Venezuelan people. Nothing wrong in that! He also wants to reconstruct Venezuela's industrial life into socio-economic cooperatives and/or joint ventures where Venezuelan interests take precedence over outside interests (traditionally mainly USA). Nothing wrong in that either!
And ... the Venezuelan government has belatedly discovered its primary role in the protection of the environment. Nothing wrong in that either, since in the battle for economic survival it has always been the environment that comes off the worst ... you need only drive some distance in Venezuela to see the swathes of litter that festoon the sidewalks and along the highways throughout the nation.
But a more ham-fisted way of politicizing environmental protection has yet to be witnessed after Environment Minister Yuribi Ortega de Carrizales slammed the brakes on further industrial gold mining in Venezuela on the ridiculous pretext that she was protecting the environment.Very obviously she had not had any greater familiarity with the working and living conditions of thousands of would-be voters hundreds of miles away in the predominantly gold-mining areas of the deforested jungles of southern Bolivar State, otherwise she would have noticed that small-scale and artesanal mining has been polluting the environment for decades and there is precious little she, or the combined forces of the Army and the National Guard can do about it.
As a pretext for political-economic reform, the Environment Minister's edict is scarcely motivated by concerns for the environment or indeed the conditions under which the electorate toils to eke a subsistence far removed from her air-conditioned offices in the capital. Agreed that the economic mayhem of previous decades needs to be sorted out. The outdated system of preferential concessions gifted by previous (corrupt) governments must go, but slap-dash political maneuvers to disenfranchize the "owners" of their assumed rights simply does not wash. Rather that the government should honestly face the challenge and clearly state that "concessions" per se are a thing of the past and, after the inevitable brouhaha has subsided, to go about the normal business of government under new and more democratic rules.
So why the "slash and burn" procedures being implemented by an Environment Ministry that has all the hallmarks of being out of control?
Is it a question of a lady minister who had the "cojones" to take on the transnationals? Or is it a jousting for political position in an economic cabinet where a "new elite" is stealthily replacing the old elites that ruled Venezuela in bygone years. Since there is no other rational explanation, it is the latter, I fear!
While President Hugo Chavez Frias remains steadfast in his ambitions to create a more egalitarian Venezuelan society in which each and every citizen can realize the fulfillment of his/her dreams; where a new form of democracy has taken shape allowing the grassroots to sieze the power that has been denied to them for so many decades, the transition has brought about a dangerous level of political and economic cliques that undoubtedly present an even greater danger to Venezuela's ultimate destiny than any current opposition radicalism.
The danger to Venezuela's emerging democracy lies in a newer form of "inclusion" and "exclusion."
While the Venezuelan political opposition by its extremity in opposition to President Chavez' continued existence has automatically excluded (auto-excluded) itself from being "worthy of consideration" by those currently in possession of governmental power, the bitter fact remains that, to survive in Venezuela's close-knit brother- and sisterhood of political discourse you must submit yourself to a curious form of blind allegiance that precludes critique. To do otherwise is to auto-exclude oneself and be met by closed doors in what should rationally be open exchanges of ideas towards a better understanding of everyone's point of view.
It is here that Venezuela's revolution is going sadly wrong!
One can perhaps take comfort in the success of last weekend's PSUV primaries in which perhaps 2.5 million voters expressed their preferences ahead of the November elections. One can view the abstention rate in a claimed membership of 6.5 million as perhaps indicative or otherwise, but the happy fact is that it is the beginning of a new form of political representation that should more truly seek the expression of the grassroots people of Venezuela if it can only make it through to those elections unhindered and uninfluenced by devious foreign intrigues and manipulations.
The next step, of course, is to see how the Venezuelan opposition tackles its own primaries and how the machinery of current government deals with the electoral significance of an independent National Elections Council (CNE) and its ability to serve both factions in the increasingly wide divide. It will be interesting to see if Venezolana de Television (VTV) commits as much wall-to-wall coverage of the opposition primaries as it has to last week's PSUV elections. It may, of course, be a reflection on the opposition media's own scant coverage of last weekend's events if VTV does a tit-for-tat on them, but will it jive with Venezuela's new-found democracy? That remains to be seen...
However, getting back to the resignation of Crystallex' CEO Gordon Thompson, the fact of the matter should send a clear warning to the Chavez administration to get its act in order.
Does the Chavez government want to see even more used mercury floating down the Rio Caroni?Does the Chavez government rather want to stimulate the national economy? Does the Chavez government want to provide jobs for those critically poor mining families? Does the Chavez government want to deal resolutely with rainforest degradation, continuing mercury and cyanide pollution of its great rivers? Does the Chavez government want to be accepted as a pulsating motor of its own economy, serving the best interests of its own people, its electorate?
Does the Chavez government want to see 5,000 or more critically poor voters decline into even greater poverty through unemployment?
Does the Chavez government want to stand idly by while gold, diamonds and other precious stones disappear conveniently over the border into Colombia, Guyana or Brazil?
Or should they send a clear signal to the international community that Venezuela is NOT a place to be taken seriously, certainly NOT a country in which to invest.
Will Chavez simply pull down the shutters on the outside world and send smoke signals to stay away?
Is that really what the Venezuelan people, who so overwhelmingly elected him to office, really want?
While we cannot speak for Gordon Thompson, who has chosen to resign from all further negotiations with obtuse Venezuelan officials "for personal reasons", it is easy to understand the man's frustrations and his wish to get away from the insanity of even attempting to fathom the motivations of an Environment Minister who seems to think that environmental protection is somehow synonymous with keeping indigenous tribes and artesanal workers in abject poverty, allowing continued mercury pollution of the rivers and at the same time rejecting rational and well-regulated mining operations.
The standing joke is that when God created Paradise, he had Venezuela in mind; but to even out the score, the Devil created Venezuelans!
Viewing the calamity that is Venezuela's government today, methinks there is some truth in the old joke!
Roy S. Carson
vheadline@gmail.com
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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.
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