Venezuelans Ask The United Nations To Be Heard [PHOTOS]
By Germania Rodriguez
Venezuelans from all over the United States took to the streets of New York last Friday to protest the possible admission of Venezuela as one of the non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. They protested outside the United Nations for several hours, asking for the organization’s acknowledgement of the Venezuelan government’s abuses.
Signs describing Maduro’s human rights violations and mismanagement of the country could be seen all over the protest. One of them read: “24,763 Venezuelans murdered on 2013: the genocide that no many see.”
Venezuela’s murder rate of 53.7 per 100,000 people places it as the second highest murder rate in the world, just behind Honduras. In 2013, that was an average of 38 murders a day, of which nine out of ten went unsolved.
Since the days of the late Chavez’ presidency, the Venezuelan government has often been accused of committing human rights violations. Nicolas Maduro has continued with this legacy; several politicians have been imprisoned for publicly opposing the government, such as Leopoldo Lopez, who President Obama mentioned during his speech at the Clinton Initiative’s conference this month and called for his release. Maduro’s government, like Chavez’s, has also put great restrictions and fines on the country’s media, and most recently has been blocking the nation’s newspapers’ access to printing paper.
The country’s economic crisis was also in the protesters’ list of complaints — inflation hit a staggering 63.42 percent this August, making it the world’s highest. Venezuela has one of the highest oil and natural gas reserves in the world and is the third largest exporter of crude oil, so this economic woes are largely blamed by Venezuelans on government corruption and mismanagement. Common goods such as toilet paper, diapers, milk, and meats are becoming increasingly hard to obtain, further adding to citizen’s unrest.
“Y no, y no, y no nos da la gana una dictadura igualita a la Cubana,” was the most repeated chant in the protest, which translates to: “ And no, and no, and no we don’t feel like having a dictatorship just like the Cuban one.” Fidel Castro was Hugo Chavez’s mentor and the inspiration for his “Bolivarian revolution” in the country.
But Venezuela will most likely win the chair to represent Latin America and the Caribbean in the Security Council, which Argentina currently holds, because it has the support of the region’s countries, and no opposition from any of the 192 members who will vote on the matter in October. When President Hugo Chavez bid for the seat in 2006, a more vocal US government successfully campaigned against him. The colorful Chavez and President Bush had a more rocky relationship; at the 2006 United Nations meeting, when Chavez took the stage he infamously proclaimed that the place still smelled of sulfur (the devil’s scent, as written in the Bible) and then directly told the crowd of world leaders that “the devil himself” had been there the day before, referring to President Bush.
Some American media have rejected Maduro’s bid; The New York Times and the Washington Post published strong editorials against it. However, Obama’s administration does not seem to see Maduro as a significant threat and has shown no resistance against his bid for the seat.
If Venezuela does obtain the spot in the Council, the representative that Maduro sends, who will most likely be Chavez’s oldest daughter and current UN ambassador, Maria Gabriela Chavez, will be seated right next to US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, as the seats are arranged by alphabetical order. This setting will surely make for interesting debates, as the Venezuelan government pretty much stands for everything the US opposes. Maduro, a former bus driver, has repeatedly expressed support for President Vladimir Putin and the Russian expansion, and in his speech at this year’s UN meeting, he openly praised Syrian dictator Bashar al- Assad.
[images courtesy of author]
