VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: As far as diplomatic incompetence goes in Venezuela's Foreign Service, the current ambassadorial incumbent at the country's embassy in London sure takes some beating. A former head of the history faculty at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) in Caracas, Dr. Samuel Moncada was an unlikely candidate for the role of Venezuela's No.1 representative in the British capital ... and his performance over the last year, his initial year, in the London hot-seat has undoubtedly been his undoing.
Although it is an intensely personal opinion, regrettably, what has been an even greater undoing is Moncada's complete annihilation of the years of patient diplomatic groundwork put in place in Britain by his career professional predecessor Alfredo Toro Hardy, now a key defender of Venezuela's fortunes in Madrid, Spain.
One is certainly left with the feeling that Moncada was "blessed" in the sinecure by Chavez only as a means of putting him "out to grass" out of harm's way abroad, away from responsibilities he had had in Caracas as Chavez' Minister of Higher Education during the somewhat checkered establishment of a series of "Bolivarian" universities -- the "socialist alternative" to the breeding ground of well-established private universities that had become a stronghold of anti-Chavez contempt.
Changing faces at the Venezuelan London embassy and consulate were, perhaps, to be expected as Chavista political hacks drawn from Moncada's Bolivarian University grad-student base were expensively flown in from Caracas -- many without language skills and most without diplomatic skills either -- replacing staffers who had spent years forming good relations for and on behalf of Venezuela.
Wide-ranging cultural events were thrown out the window and everything begun from scratch with a focus on extreme left political cliques and Moncada enthusing widely about Chavez' democratic virtues in the communist Daily Worker oblivious, apparently, to the fact that their minimal readership is a drop in the ocean of the more conservative mainstream UK media.
Of course, in this, Moncada is not entirely to blame! He's been too easily led by the nose by 'special advisers' posing as unofficial 'press attachees' to the Venezuelan embassy, and by Northern academics who churn out scarcely-read tomes on Venezuela's socialist ascendency thanks to specious funding from the Swedish International Development Agency (with the curiously acronym SIDA -- Spanish for AIDS!) and more dubious agencies of the US State Department.
Visitors to the dismally-painted Venezuelan embassy on London's Cromwell road, in the shadow of the imposing Natural History Museum on the one side and the Victoria & Albert Museum on the other, find the Ambassador usually absent, dropping in to the legation mid-afternoon and commuting back to the Holland Park embassy residence shortly afterwards. What he actually does at the embassy is a mystery, but its known that there is "extreme dissatisfaction" among personnel on a number of levels that Moncada, apparently, is unable to cure.
Certainly there's a whole bunch of people asking simply why Venezuela bothers to have an ambassador in London at all, when the job could all the more easily be handled by a charge d'affaires or even a 1st Secretary (with training and qualifications)!
On the whole, Moncada's first year as ambassador to London can be described as a qualified disaster ... but it is apparently nothing compared to the mess left in the wake of expelled Venezuelan Ambassador to United States, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera who was widely known in Beltway diplomatic circles as an able networker, though somewhat incapacitated by an inability to hold liquor combined with marital complications through a liaison with a female employee at the embassy in Washington DC.
All good stuff for the US tabloids, undoubtedly, but with Alvarez Herrera in the southern half of the continent, he's been removed from harm's way even if the incompetence of his remaining staff has recoiled in the closure of the Houston Consulate and the expulsion of 12 diplomatic staff from that legation.
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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