Chavez -- democracy organizers will be prosecuted

By Aussiegirl

Today's Investor's Business Daily has an excellent editorial concerning some Venezuelan activists who face 16 years imprisonment for taking National Endowment for Democracy dollars in order to gather signatures on a petition. (Hat tip to Thomas Lifson at the American Thinker.)

The NED is one of the NGO's that assisted Ukraine's Orange Revolution in and continues to fund free press and other civic organizations.

As the editorial states, America needs to be heavily involved in lending support to the democracy forces in that country if we are to prevent it from becoming another Castroite island of tyranny in our hemisphere, one armed with petrodollars and willing to do business with narcoterrorists and other nasty world players.

Maria Corina Machado and two others from a nongovernment organization called Sumate are facing 16 years in prison for accepting a $53,000 grant from NED, a bipartisan foundation sponsored by the U.S. Congress. The purpose of the grant was to strengthen democratic institutions.

And that's all it was. Sumate took the money and used it to exercise its existing constitutional right to gather signatures petitioning to recall Chavez. Sumate took no sides and made no statements on any preferred outcome. It only sought to make the process happen.

. . . Chavez hurled legal roadblocks every step of the way and tried to stop the volunteers. He told them their signatures were no good. His courts changed rules midway. He threatened to put signers on a blacklist. And still it went on.

Chavez, who sees no difference between himself and the state, could only call an effort to offer citizens the option to replace him "treason." He won the recall referendum last August amid charges of irregularities. But what's important is that it happened at all.

Recall what Venezuela was like in recent years. Churning crowds filled the streets demanding the resignation of Chavez. They said he was crushing the private sector, turning the state-owned oil company into a soup kitchen and relegating state power to agents of Fidel Castro. Hundreds of thousands continuously took to the streets. A vast oil strike nearly shut the economy down.

. . .But institutions are not what Chavez is all about. Chavez is about chaos and "Bolivarian revolution." He is systematically dismantling Venezuela's real institutions and replacing them with proxies held together by political loyalty -- a parallel army, a parallel educational institution and a parallel Cuban health system.

As beneficial as civic institutions are, even to Chavez, they are the last thing he wants to see. He wants the state to replace independent institutions, which says a lot about his intentions.

. . .Congress and President Bush should warn Chavez there will be consequences for crushing civil society efforts. Or Venezuela's sidelined institutions and angry streets may eventually do it for him.