Yes, non-governmental Organizations have struggled against Human Rights abuses the world over since the 1970, but those NGOs were neither some sort North American monopoly nor could they have ever gotten off the ground without the concerted (and extraordinarily brave) actions of groups in Latin American and elsewhere that reached out to a global audience. This they did because leaders of groups like the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo understood explicitly that the intellectual authors of their victimhood were as much in Langley, Virginia as they were in the ESMA. If anything, they pushed North Americans (or at least some of them) to consider their own complicity in the genocides that were then taking place. I might add that the US continues to follow here. It was the Guardian, not the NYT, that broke this story. When the Wikileaks story broke, it was barely covered in the US.

What strikes me as particularly odd is the fact that so few North Americans are exercised about the sheer scale of the spying. I hear some saying that it is the price we pay for living in an age of terror. I hear very few wondering who will watch the watchers, and fewer still wondering if the price of empire is worth it. Yes, North Americans live in a security state because this is the price you pay for making the rest of the world live in fear that one of your drones will rain terror from the sky. Why don’t we ask if all that is worth it?

Of course, if you drive an SUV and live in the suburbs, you gotta have that oil.

Remember Operación Condor anyone? Hank Kissinger would be so proud.

Fraud does not mean voter suppression. It does not mean the abuse of incumbency advantages. It does not mean having an electoral list that is incomplete or has inaccuracies. It does not mean the intimidation of opponents, or inducements to vote. Those things are different from fraud in the specific sense that they cannot be demonstrated much less rectified by recounting the votes. There are many things that are wrong with Venezuelan elections. Fraud is not among them. What the critics of the election seem to want is for the election to be annulled on the basis of unfairness. That is fine. Just don’t suggest that a full recount is how you do that. You do that by building a democratic movement to argue conscientiously for freer and fairer elections.

The Venezuelan election gave us a pretty fair snapshot of the state of Venezuela today. It is deeply divided. Both sides need to learn to compromise and to work within a common set of political rules. A good starting point would be to use clear language. Let’s call a spade a spade. And let’s drop the loose talk of fraud. It earns you zero credibility.

It seems to me that where our perceptions differ from those of Mr. Coronel is not for the most part on the empirical details but rather on how to interpret them. Our comment about Capriles having “upped the ante” by calling for annulment of the election strikes us as accurate, and the question is whether it was a wise tactic. We think not, and we think that the comparison with Lopez Obrador’s political strategy in 2006 is valid regardless of how justified either party was in their respective accusations of fraud. Concerning the position taken by Latin American governments, we think that it is misleading to suggest as Mr. Coronel does that support for Maduro’s inauguration was limited to countries that had benefited from “Chavez’s past prodigality,” or that the stance taken by Peru’s Foreign Minister implies “reconsider(ation) of (an) invertebrate attitude” or, more specifically, a sign that the region’s governments are tilting away from their preference for Maduro. As for Washington’s investments in defeating Chavismo, we don’t know how else to characterize the expenditures made in Venezuela over more than a decade by the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Whether the NED’s “democracy promotion” efforts are prudent in the 21st century is also a topic for a future discussion – we believe that they are not – but to deny that they constitute an attempt to defeat Chavismo simply makes no sense.

On some matters we agree with Mr. Coronel, e.g. in an earlier post we referred to the government’s abuse of the advantages of incumbency. While we share the conclusion of analysts such as Max Cameron (http://blogs.ubc.ca/cameron/2013/02/26/delegative-vs-liberal-democracy-in-latin-america/), to the effect that the abuses do not cross the threshold where Venezuela should no longer be characterized as a (deeply flawed and imperiled) democracy, in part because of the capture of institutions such as the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, that threshold is admittedly murky and fair-minded observers will reach disparate conclusions.