After expulsion, Venezuela's Houston consulate staff may never again be allowed to have dipomatic visas to the United States!

VHeadline Venezuela News reports: Twelve Venezuelan diplomats were hustled out of Houston Saturday on Caracas-bound flights ahead of a diplomatic embarrassing Sunday deadline following a bureaucratic 'cock-up' that only further serves to underline the incompetence of Venezuelan Foreign Ministry (MRE) officials in Caracas.

Now VHeadline can exclusively reveal that the US State Department has also prohibited the twelve expelled consular staffers from getting diplomatic visas to ever again enter the United States of America.

The brouhaha was started several months ago when the property owner required Venezuela to quit its consular offices in Houston because of the "unnecessary attention" of anti-Chavez demonstrators outside the Consulate General's offices. Alternative office accommodation was sought and the proper diplomatic transfer protocol begun in association with US State Department officials. Fresh problems arose after President Hugo Chavez Frias decided to unceremoniously expel US Ambassador Patrick Duddy and officials then attempted to impede Duddy's wife from returning to Venezuela to make arrangements for personal effects to be brought home Stateside. Further complications arose after Venezuelan officials deliberately delayed import documentation for embassy vehicles and visas for security personnel at the US embassy bunker in Caracas.

• VHeadline understands that the brown stuff really hit the fan when Consul General Antonio Padrino was inexplicably fired and replaced by an apparent political appointee designated by former Venezuelan Ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera without benefit of any form of diplomatic protocol as required in international law.

Venezuelan Embassy officials in Washington DC are too embarrassed to talk with the media about what happened, but Alvarez Herrera's precipitous actions to install family members in key positions in the United States was not viewed kindly by the US State Department -- already not on friendly terms with Caracas -- saw red and ordered the consulate closed until proper procedures had been completed. When the State Department's orders were completely ignored by Padrino's successor as Consul General in Houston, US authorities were left with no alternative but to order the 12 diplomatic staffers to leave Venezuela within 10 days, imposing a deadline that runs out today, Sunday.

Sheepishly, the consular staffers fled Venezuela, Saturday.

Humanitarian arrangements are, nevertheless, being made by US authorities to allow the affected diplomats' family members to change their visa status to remain temporarily to clear up personal issues -- children's schooling, etc -- but it is understood that many of them will have been forced to break lease contracts with penalties and fees that will have to be paid out of their own pockets, while others are left in a quandary and may be forced to sell their houses at a loss in the current state of crashed in property prices.

VHeadline Venzuela News
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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