World Threats

HT: USA Today

The Venezuelan Parliament erupted with violence between pro-government, and opposition lawmakers last night when opposition members, who have been banned from serving on parliament committees and public speaking until they recognize Maduro as the winner of last month’s disputed presidential election, unfurled a banner stating “coup against the parliament.”

Tensions have remained high since April’s disputed election that officially Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s hand picked successor, won over opposition leader Henrique Capriles by an insanely narrow 1.5% margin that opponents have blamed on voter fraud, which government officials have dismissed wholeheartedly.

And amid aforementioned tensions, mostly political mixed in with some street violence between police and opposition demonstrators, Maduro’s supporters have labeled all attempts to question his election as a coup and have gone to great lengths to silence their fellow lawmakers for refusing to recognize his questionable victory.

Thus the sparking point for the unfurling of the banner last night, that according to opposition lawmakers, led government supporters to lash out at them from behind and turn the Venezuelan legislative body into a brawl scene and further worsening political tensions in this already declining state of government affairs.

What say you?

Violence has broken out in the aftermath of a possibly fraudulent election in Venezuela. Many signs pointed to the opposition under Henrique Capriles winning against Hugo Chavez clone Nicolas Maduro. Now, four have died in violence following large protests by Capriles supporters.

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With 92% of registered Falkland Island voters coming out to vote in their just held two-day referendum on whether they want to retain British rule over these small, barren Islands that fueled a brief, and bloody war between Great Britain and neighboring Argentina over three decades ago, the results are breathtaking.

99.8% of Falkland Islanders, the majority residing in the capital city of Stanley, voted to retain British rule, while only three people on the entire Island voted against. Their point: to show the Argentine government they are British and proud of it and to hopefully gain sympathy from the international community.

This comes in the aftermath of unrelenting pressure from the Argentine government on the international community to force the British in negotiations over the “disputed islands,” which the two nations fought for claim of almost three decades ago, and which the British won decisively with assistance from the Reagan White House.

What can one really say… The Falklands have been under British possession for almost two hundred years, they are historically and culturally British, they have shed the blood of Britons and Falkland Islanders in war brought upon by the Argentinians, and the citizens of the oil rich Islands, under the principle of self governance, have voted essentially unanimously to retain British rule.

It is time for the international community to stop buying into this besieged colonialist idea from Argentina, which is obviously interested in the Falklands for oil and natural gas reserves, and to respect the people who dwell on the Island and who want to remain under the British flag and the old empire’s two century old claim and governance.

What say you?

With the death of anti-American and avowed socialist leader Hugo Chavez today, our focus should shift from his death to who will run the South American nation responsible for exports of sweet Venezuelan crude and soul crushing anti-colonial marxism.

Although the nation’s constitution is vague on presidential succession, Vice-President Nicolas Maduro is all but guaranteed to assume control of Venezuela’s sprawling government of restricted freedoms, political prisoners, antisemitism and never ending class warfare.

Maduro, who rose from a simple Caracas bus driver thrity years ago to the man responsible for maintaining unity in Chavez’s complicated coalition of socialists and military officers, is known for being a strong internal and external negotiator and diplomat (he also served as President of the legislature and foreign minister) that could be up to the difficult task that awaits him.

Unfortunately for American interests, Maduro sees fulfilling his mentor’s ideological legacy as a personal crusade and responsibility, and considering he has already developed strong relations with Cuba, Russia, Iran, and other allies in the anti-west axis, he is likely to continue the disruptive forces of exported socialism across Latin and South America.

So, essentially, same old domestic ideology and foreign policy, just with a different face on things…

What say you?

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More here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-21689355

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Great:

Early election results have a difficult time for incumbent strongman Hugo Chavez. Early exit polls have Chavez trailing Henrique Capriles.

Despite the express prohibition of the Venezuelan electoral law to publish polls, apparently the opposition leader would get 51.3 percent of the votes, while the incumbent candidate would get the 48.06 percent of the ballots.Variance director, Rafael Delgado, explained to Caracol Radio that the exit polls survey was conducted in the Capital District and the states of Zulia, Lara, Aragua, Miranda, Carabobo and Anzoategui .

Good news, but Chavez has fixed an election before.

UPDATE 9:33 pm:

The voting booths remain open– despite a complaint from Capriles’ campaign that voting is over, with Chavez cronies rallying (or threatening) voters:

Mr Capriles has complained via Twitter that electoral authorities should close voting stations because most lack queues.
Dozens of red-shirted Chavez loyalists on motorcycles are cruising in central Caracas, and a Capriles campaign spokesman is calling for them to be banned from the streets.

UPDATE 9:42: Venezulean newspaper the Week has declared Chavez the winner with 53% of the vote:

Chavez won with 53 percent of the presidential vote

UPDATE 9:52: And the military is surrounding the Presidential palace. 

UPDATE 9:59: A new exit poll has Capriles ahead:

According to an initial exit poll from the Varianzas agency, Henrique Capriles has won 52.6 percent of the vote against 47.4 percent for Hugo Chavez.
Now, we often hear that polling companies in Venezuela are either notoriously unreliable or hopelessly biased. Does this apply to Varianzas? Daniel Duquenal, one of Venezuela’s leading dissident bloggers – and a sharp-tongued critic of most opinion polls – had this to say about the company in a post about a September poll conducted by Varianzas, which placed Chavez two points ahead of Capriles:
Let’s note also that Varianzas has had a good track record recently and that YVpolis considers it the least biased of all pollsters in Venezuela.

OH NO 10:39:

The election commission has declared Chavez the winner…..

The president of Venezuela won with 54.42% in Venezuela’s presidential election.

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Cuban, Iranian and Venezuelan officials have been caught actively considering cyber attacks on the U.S., including ones that would be “worse than the World Trade Center.” In the frightening documentary, the U.S.-based Spanish languageUnivision also exposes subversive operations by Iran in Latin America.

The undercover operation began after a former computers instructor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University was recruited by another professor in 2006 for a cyber terror plot requested by the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The instructor, Juan Carlos Munoz Ledo, turned the tables on the Cuban government and later, its Iranian and Venezuelan allies. He said he’d go along with the plot and get some students involved to carry it out. In reality, he and his partners were starting a seven-month investigation that would expose the evils contemplated by these governments against the U.S.

Click here to read the rest of my FPM article.

U.S. Spanish-language television network, Univision, has released an investigative documentary in which it is claimed that Venezuelan and Iranian diplomats negotiated with Mexican hackers to break into White House, Pentagon, and FBI databases, as well as U.S. nuclear facilities. Critical to these allegations are a series of recordings made by one of the hackers, who went undercover and attempted to document the conspiracy.

According to the report, Juan Carlos Munoz Ledo, a computer instructor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, was recruited in 2006 to participate in cyber attacks on US government websites. In later years he met with former Iranian ambassador to Mexico, Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri, and former cultural attaché of the Venezuelan Embassy in Mexico, Livia Acosta, to give updates on the project’s advance. In a recording from one of these meetings, Acosta, who is now the Venezuelan consul in Miami, can be heard saying she could get information from the hackers sent directly to Hugo Chavez.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner says his government is probing the report but hasn’t confirmed its claims.  However, he suggested Tuesday the implications were “very disturbing.”

Solomon Chang, a researcher on cyber security for strategic planning and forecasting consultancy Wikistrat, suggests the report raises “alarming” uncertainties as it remains unclear exactly what the hackers were trying to achieve. “Were they trying to advance their technological capabilities at the expense of the U.S. military? Are they simply trying to explore U.S. cybernetic structural weaknesses? Sabotage the infrastructures? These questions remain unanswered,” he said.

In response, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida) has written Secretary of State Hilary Clinton asking for an investigation into Acosta as a result of her alleged “willingness to undermine U.S. interests.”

Earlier this year, Chairmen of the Senate Foriegn Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ)  called for hearings on Iranian activities in Latin America. This week’s report comes just months after U.S. prosecutors accused factions in the Iranian government of a plot to recruit a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. by bombing a Washington-area restaurant.

In response to the Univision report, Venezuelan opposition leader Pablo Medina has called ties between his country and Iran troubling, and the latest allegations “very serious.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, meanwhile, has called the report “lies.”

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Trevor Westra is a  Contributing Anaylst at Wikistrat Inc. – www.wikistrat.com

First, Hezbollah came to Venezuela and now it is in Cuba, just 90 miles away from Florida. The Italian press reports that in a secret, $500,000 mission called “The Caribbean Dossier,” three Hezbollah terrorists in Mexico are now in Cuba. Another 23 are on their way. The goal of the new base is to logistically assist Hezbollah’s other operatives in Mexico, Paraguay and Venezuela. I assume Hezbollah is also looking to make some cash off of drug trafficking by accessing new markets.

The Italian newspaper reports that Hezbollah may be planning to strike an Israeli target in the Western hemisphere in retaliation for the killing of Mughniyah. Hezbollah already tried to bomb the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan but failed. Hezbollah may also want to react to the U.N. Special Tribunal’s accusations that it was behind the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, but carrying out an attack won’t exactly alleviate the political pressure on the group.

Despite weeks of deception and affectation of good health, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is in Cuba for chemotherapy, heightening speculation about whether he’ll still run for re-election in 2012 and how the regime will survive after him. His declining health adds another burden to his campaign for a third term, as a majority of Venezuelans already oppose his re-election due to a horrible economy, a soaring murder rate, and relentless power grabs.

Rumors about Chavez’s health began when he disappeared for weeks in Cuba, absent from the limelight he craves. His government originally claimed he had a pelvic abscess, but reports that he had prostate cancer quickly spread. Chavez has since admitted that a baseball-sized tumor was removed on June 20, without offering any details. He says he is now cancer-free, but is going back to Cuba for chemotherapy to prevent the return of the cancer.

Click here to read the rest of my FPM article.

Hugo Chavez has not been seen in public since June 10, when he underwent surgery in Cuba. The Venezuelan government insists he was successfully treated for a pelvic abscess, but there are consistent rumors that the strongman has prostate cancer. The opposition is demanding answers, while the government says Chavez is ruling from Havana.

The country has not heard at all from Chavez except for one phone call to a state television program. His mother and daughter flew to Cuba to visit him, giving the impression that his illness is more severe than is being portrayed. The Vice Foreign Minister shot down rumors about his health, tweeting, “President Chavez is recovering well from his surgery. His enemies should stop dreaming and his friends should stop worrying.”

Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation, told FrontPage that he is cautious about reports of Chavez’s impending death because it may reflect wishful thinking, and rumors about the demise of tyrants are common. However, “something of consequence is occurring when the Venezuelan president has vanished from the public eye after working 12 years to become the center of the universe in Venezuela complete with a cult of personality.”

Click here to read the rest of my FPM article.

Unofficial results appear to show a very tight presidential race in Peru. Facing off is leftist populist Ollanta Humala and the daughter of a former disgraced president, Keiko Fujimori.

As of now the results are:

Humala: 51%
Fujimori: 49%

Humala was supported by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. There may be a recount. Source: Yahoo.

Cross-posted at Pundit Press.

Reports are emerging this week that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has finalized a strategic agreement with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that will provide for the construction of a joint Iranian-Venezuelan military base on Venezuelan soil. According to Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, a small group of leading engineers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s construction company, Khatam al-Anbia, have decided on the Paraguana Peninsula as the location for the building of planned medium-range missile launch pads.

The report indicates that Iran’s Air Force head, Amir al-Hadschisadeh, visited the site in February to finalize building plans and that experts from the chemical plant departments of Tehran Polytechnic and the Sharif University in Tehran who were included in the planning and design phase joined him.

Israel’s Jerusalem Post adds:

The Iranian military involvement in the project extends to bunker, barracks and watch tower construction. Twenty-meter deep rocket silos are planned. The cost of the Venezuelan military project is being paid for with Iranian oil revenue. The Iranians paid in cash for the preliminary phase of the project and, the total cost is expected to amount to “dozens of millions” of dollars.

The project appears to have originated during a Chavez visit to Tehran in October, 2010, where it is reported the two countries agreed on a tentative plan for a jointly operated military base in Venezuela. The signing of that agreement went down around the same time NATO was holding its Lisbon Summit to hash out a missile defense strategy that would protect NATO-allied European populations from the threat of Iranian missile attacks.

The proposed Venezuelan site, should it materialize, would allow the Chavez government to attack American cities and important US partners like Columbia on behalf of Iran should the Islamic regime ever face Western military action. Additionally, the site may be used as part of Venezuela’s suspected attempts to circumvent the United Nation’s monitoring of Iranian weapons trading. In November, the Iranian ally agreed to purchase a number of S-300 missile systems from Russia that were originally part of an $800 Million-dollar air defense package Moscow had signed with Iran but were forced to cancel because of UN sanctions.