[Marxism] It's about fucking time

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, September 20, 2008
Venezuela Expels Rights Activists
By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez’s government expelled two 
activists from Human Rights Watch late Thursday night after chafing at 
their documentation of widespread political discrimination, intimidation 
of union members and a subservient judiciary.

Armed men in uniforms apprehended José Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean citizen 
who is Americas director for the New York-based group and Daniel 
Wilkinson, an American who is deputy director for the Americas, and 
placed them on a flight to Brazil, where they arrived in São Paulo on 
Friday morning.

“About 20 men, some of them in military uniform, intercepted us when we 
arrived at our hotel after returning from dinner Thursday night,” Mr. 
Vivanco said in a telephone interview from Brazil. He said he struggled 
briefly with the security officials when he tried to send a message on 
his Blackberry to The New York Times about the expulsion.

The officials then disabled the Blackberries of the two men and 
prevented them from contacting anyone in Venezuela, including diplomats 
from the embassies of Chile or the United States. “They informed us of 
our apprehension and told us they had entered our rooms and had packed 
our belongings,” Mr. Vivanco said.

The expulsion, broadcast partly on state television here, comes at a 
time of increasingly erratic actions by Mr. Chávez. In the last week, he 
expelled the American ambassador, rounded up military officers and 
accused them of plotting to kill him and clashed with the Vatican over 
its granting of political asylum to a political opponent.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr. Vivanco violated the 
law by entering the country on a tourist visa to do human rights work. 
The ministry also said that Human Rights Watch, which is an outspoken 
critic of the Bush administration, was acting in concert with the United 
States government in a campaign of aggression against Venezuela.

“Accusing us of being part of a conspiracy is a distraction tactic used 
to attack the messenger,” Mr. Vivanco said. “We have never had this 
experience anywhere in this hemisphere.”

The expulsion of the two men came after they released a long report here 
on Thursday documenting rights violations in Venezuela. They pointed to 
Mr. Chávez’s dismantling of judicial independence and his use of a 2002 
coup that briefly ousted him from office as a pretext for consolidating 
power by weakening rights protections.

The report also discussed the government’s intimidation of local human 
rights defenders and non-governmental organizations, documenting the use 
of state television to carry out attacks on activists doing work that 
criticized Mr. Chávez’s creation of a military reserve under his command.

“Our expulsion reveals yet again the degree of intolerance of this 
government,” said Mr. Vivanco.

----

Something I posted in 2001:

> NY Times, July 10, 2001 
> 
> Rights Group Lists Abuses by Guerrillas in Colombia
> 
> By JUAN FORERO
> 
> BOGOTÁ, Colombia, July 9 - The largest rebel group here regularly violates
> the rights of noncombatants by attacking civilians, kidnapping for ransom,
> recruiting children and focusing on medical workers, all in spite of the
> group's occasional pledges to abide by some international rights norms,
> Human Rights Watch says in a new report.
> 
> Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/10/world/10COLO.html
> 
> -----
> 
> HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH BOARD OF DIRECTORS WHO'S WHO
> 
> 1. Robert L. Bernstein, Founding Chair
> 
> Almost every Wednesday morning as many as 25 people gather around a
> conference table on the 12th floor of the Random House headquarters on
> Manhattan's East Side. But this is not an editorial-board meeting. It is
> the weekly get-together of officials of Helsinki Watch and Americas Watch,
> private organizations that monitor human-rights practices in various parts
> of the world. 
> 
> They meet in a publishing house because both organizations -as well as Asia
> Watch, which meets there on another day - were founded by Robert L.
> Bernstein, the chairman of Random House. 
> 
> While Mr. Bernstein usually keeps his publishing and human rights concerns
> separate, from time to time they overlap. In fact, Random House and Alfred
> A. Knopf, one of its imprints, have wound up with several best sellers from
> such authors as Arkady Shevchenko, the highest ranking Soviet defector, and
> Jacobo Timerman, who was tortured by the military regime in Argentina. 
> 
> It has two more probable best sellers scheduled for the fall, when Random
> House publishes the memoirs of Anatoly Shcharansky and Knopf publishes
> those of Yelena G. Bonner, the wife of Andrei D. Sakharov. When those
> human-rights activists were reunited recently, for the first time in nine
> years, it was no accident that they met in Mr. Bernstein's office. (The New
> York Times, August 6, 1986)
> 
> 2. Dorothy Cullman 
> 
> Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman, who have quietly pledged more than $80
> million, mostly to civic and cultural institutions in New York City, are
> known as "dream" patrons. 
> 
> "They are hugely generous, highly intelligent and participate without
> pulling rank," said Robert Marx, the director of the New York Public
> Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which is receiving $12.5
> million of the $30 million that the Cullmans have pledged to the New York
> Public Library in the last five years. "And they give -- often anonymously
> -- with no strings attached." 
> 
> A scion of a wealthy New York tobacco family that once owned Benson &
> Hedges, Mr. Cullman is founder and chairman of Cullman Ventures Inc., which
> includes the profitable At-a-Glance Group, the diary and appointment book
> manufacturer. 
> 
> They have quietly given large grants to dozens of city institutions, among
> them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the American
> Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden and WNET, Channel
> 13 in New York. (NY Times, Feb. 3, 1997)
> 
> 3. Gina Despres 
> 
> OVER scrambled eggs four years ago, a group of powerful Washington lawyers
> and lobbyists challenged Gina Despres to defend the Bradley-Gephardt Fair
> Tax reform legislation - the forerunner to the final tax-reform legislation
> backed by President Reagan and expected to be signed by him shortly. 
> 
> Mrs. Despres, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley's legislative counsel
> on taxes, remembers the meeting as her ''trial by fire.'' Twenty men
> sitting around a conference table simply said, ''Explain yourself.'' 
> 
> She explained it and recalls, ''One of the things I learned as a result of
> that meeting, and others like it, was that if you are really serious about
> trying to do something that makes sense, you have in your own mind to
> distinguish what you believe and what you know.'' (Christian Science
> Monitor October 6, 1986)
> 
> 4. Edith Everett 
> 
> The new Central Park Children's Zoo will roar in on schedule in September
> despite a couple's yanking a $ 3 million donation, Mayor Giuliani and zoo
> officials pledged yesterday. 
> 
> Philanthropists Edith and Henry Everett pulled the contribution after
> howling about the city Art Commission's decision to reward their big gift
> with a little plaque. 
> 
> "There had been so many changes made about what kind of acknowledgment we
> were going to get that I told my husband I had had enough," said Edith
> Everett, former vice chairwoman of the City University of New York. (Daily
> News, May 16, 1997)
> 
> 5. Vartan Gregorian 
> 
> The Carnegie Corporation has chosen Vartan Gregorian, the exuberant scholar
> who revitalized the New York Public Library and led Brown University for
> the last eight years, as its new president. (Jan. 7, 1997)
> 
> McGeorge Bundy, who as national security advisor to Presidents John F.
> Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson played a key role in the Cuban missile
> crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the military buildup in Vietnam, died
> Monday at 77.
> 
> Bundy supervised the staff of the National Security Council and was among a
> group of young, bright advisors that Kennedy had called on, including
> Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 
> 
>>From 1990 to 1993 he worked at the Carnegie Corp. of New York. . . (Los
> Angeles Times, September 17, 1996)
> 
> 6. James F. Hoge, Jr. 
> 
> Arguing that its survival is at stake, The Daily News asked its 10 unions
> for a $30 million cut in annual labor costs yesterday, according to
> participants in the meeting. 
> 
> In return, the participants said, the newspaper pledged to invest $210
> million in a new plant. 
> 
> The publisher of The News, James F. Hoge, told the labor leaders that The
> News had an operating loss of $3 million for the first nine months of the
> year, according to the participants. They asked not to be identified out of
> fear of jeopardizing the talks. (The New York Times October 24, 1986)
> 
> 7. Bruce J. Klatsky
> 
> The nation's largest apparel union has accused the Phillips-Van Heusen
> Corporation, the nation's largest shirtmaker, of undercutting workers'
> rights by closing its factory in Guatemala -- the only unionized factory
> among the more than 200 export-oriented apparel factories in that country. 
> 
> Jay Mazur, president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile
> Employees, said the factory closing was intended to warn apparel workers at
> other plants in Guatemala and Central America that if they voted to join a
> union their jobs would be in jeopardy. 
> 
> But Bruce J. Klatsky, chairman of Phillips-Van Heusen, which is based in
> New York City, said that the union was blowing the plant closing out of
> proportion. He said the company had closed the Guatemala City factory
> because a large customer, Mercantile Stores, had turned to another company
> to make its shirts, leaving Phillips with too many factories. (New York
> Times February 28, 1999)
> 
> 8. Sid Sheinberg 
> 
> BIG GIVERS (Daily News, Apr. 7, 1996)
> 
> Sid Sheinberg (MCA): $ 107,000 includes $ 100,000 to Democratic National
> Committee 
> 
> Lew Wasserman and wife (MCA): $ 143,544 includes $ 100,000 to Democratic
> National Committee, $ 1,000 to a GOP candidate 
> 
> Edgar Bronfman Jr. (MCA): $ 134,000 includes $ 125,000 to Democratic
> National Committee 
> 
> Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks): $ 121,000 includes $ 100,000 to Democratic
> National Committee 
> 
> David Geffen (Dreamworks): $ 110,800 includes $ 100,000 to Democratic
> National Committee 
> 
> Barbra Streisand: $ 61,000 includes $ 50,000 to Democratic National Committee 
> 
> Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks): $ 43,500 includes $ 25,000 to Democratic
> National Committee 
> 
> 9. Gary G. Sick 
> 
> The controversy involving author Salman Rushdie ''has put on hold'' Iran's
> effort to have normal relations with the rest of the world, Gary G. Sick, a
> White House aide during the Iran hostage crisis, said Wednesday at
> Washington University. . . Sick was a staff member of the National Security
> Council from 1976 to 1981 and was the principal White House aide for
> Iranian affairs during the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis. (St.
> Louis Post-Dispatch, February 23, 1989)
> 
> 10. John Studzinski 
> 
> John Studzinski - or "Studz" to his colleagues - is helping to lay an
> unprecedented siege to Europe's investment banking market. 
> 
> As a leading figure in global finance, the head of European investment
> banking for Morgan Stanley exemplifies the US institution's foray into
> European business circles. 
> 
> Born in Massachusetts, Mr Studzinski carved out his niche in London through
> 15 years of relentless socialising and shrewd networking. (Financial Times,
> January 28, 2000) 

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