In Caracas, it may soon be time to cry, and not just for Argentina. Bad storm up on its hind legs already.

When students take to the streets, whether in our country, or in Burma, in China, in Hungary, or elsewhere in the world, they have often been ‘the yellow canaries in the mines,’ the first ones to realize and to react to something being horribly wrong, unfair, deadening, illegal, unbalanced, against decency, against freedoms.

A summary of this storm walking the land in Venezuela. Rory Carroll, from Guardian UK, in Caracas:

Campuses are the focus of opposition to Mr. Chavez’s referendum on December 2 to permit him to run indefinitely and accelerate what he terms a socialist revolution.

Raul Isaias Baduel, a retired army commander and long-time Chavez ally, has joined the opposition to the draft constitution, saying it amounts to a coup.

The government called him a traitor, but the switch underlined unease among supporters as well as public opposition as registered in polls.

But the same polls suggest the referendum will pass because of measures such as shortening the working day to six hours, and Señor Chavez’s popularity among the poor.

Students have filled an opposition void with rallies accusing the president of Cuba-style authoritarianism.

The justice minister, Pedro Carreno, said the students were responsible for the violence.

A faculty president, Victor Marquez, said that claim was a lie. “They know perfectly well where the violence is coming from. These are the ones responsible, the government’s paramilitary groups.”

The violence referred to occurred when masked gunmen… the Miami Herald put it this way: “ambushed” anti-Chavez marchers last Wednesday, and opened fire on a university campus, shooting two students and injuring 7 others.

That was on the eve of tens of thousands of students planning to march through Caracas and other cities in protest of Hugo Chavez’s sudden announcement that he will amend Venezuela’s Constitution which does not allow him to run one more time. He has, by fiat, said he will rewrite the Constitution himself so that he can continue to rule, presumably without end?

The university said the government used thugs to intimidate protesters but Mr. Chávez blamed the marchers. “They generally take the path of fascist violence and confront the laws and the people, and they are always looking to the Pentagon, high-ranking generals,” he told a summit in Chile yesterday.

Presidente Chavez earlier last week at an summit of leaders from many Latino nations, called the former Presidente of Spain a ‘fascist’ several times. A Spanish dignitary reminded Chavez that people could disagree without name-calling, but Chavez kept on repeating ‘fascist’… until King Juan Carlos of Spain intervened, saying to Chavez, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Presidente Chavez has not moved on from that incident yet. Today he attempted to redefine his name-calling episode from last week by

comparing his wounded pride to the suffering of Jesus Christ and Latin America’s colonial oppression.

One wonders in terms of the blame game, where the buck, er, Bolivar stops in Chavez’s zeitgeist.

I’m personally of the mind, coming from an ethnic peoples massacred and pulverized more than once, that there’s a point to remembering and telling the blood lines of the story every once in a while, to honor and remember… and to teach. But, we’ll never win the most good for us, by reminding others how bad they’ve been to us.

There are lots of strategic philosophies out there about having a voice, doing good, turning the tide; all of them often ample and also imperfect, but some are far better and gain far more, than others.

There are millennia of egregious wrongs done to many classes of Venezuelans. Chavez seems to have tried to correct some of these, but also, it makes no sense to turn the groups of Venezuelans living now who had nothing to do with then, against each other. Blindly taking one side makes everyone walk crippled and blinded in one eye.

Division is the mark of a conqueror. In South America, where have we heard that before? Mending is the mark of a healer.

Which will it be, or is there a third and a fourth option? No matter what happens in Venezuela next, we could hope that Chavez will do no further harm to life just so that he can rule for life.

Additional blogs to look to on this:
Hall of Shame of Violence in the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution re Chavez

It never ceases to amaze it when the supporters and cheerleaders of the robolution and their leader Hugo Chavez are capable of defending him on the face of the violence of the last week, as if Chavez did not have a bloody and violent past.

http://blogs.salon.com/0001330/2007/11/11.html#a3720

A left/ right/left/right set of punches and interesting commentary of how controversy about ‘what really occurred,’ here at ‘A columbo-american’s perspective’ blog:

http://rolita816.blogspot.com/2007/11/let-misinformation-of-izmierda-begin.html

A call for Venezuelans to immigrate, given Chavez’s shut-down of media: at the English language news-blog of Panama:
http://www.panama-guide.com/article.php/20070602205950846

Radioactivecommunistzombies has a picture on his/her site taken by AP photographers, of the armed ‘masked’ guy (con t-shirt and firearm) is on the right, the fellow with the respirator who is unarmed, trying to close the door…well, you go see…
http://www.radioactivecommunistzombies.com/radioactive_communist_zom/2007/11/violence-begets.html

And here is a link to truthout blog, an editorial from July 07 praising Presidente Chávez.

Few world leaders are the objects of as hateful demolition campaigns as Mr. Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela. His enemies have stopped at nothing: coup d’etat, oil strike, capital flight, assassination attempts… We haven’t seen such relentlessness in Latin America since Washington’s attacks against Mr. Fidel Castro. The vilest calumnies …

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/080307G.shtml