Maar wie is José Miguel Vivanco? Om kort te gaan: hij lijkt vooral een neocon-propagandist die per ongeluk bij een mensenrechtenorganisatie terecht is gekomen. Zo verspreidde hij in 2007 ook het propaganda-verhaal dat de commerciële rechtse zender RCTV op zwart gezet zou worden door de Venezolaanse regering:
Pick up a newspaper -- El Universal and El Nacional are two of the biggest -- and the vast majority of the headlines are trying to make the government look bad. Turn on the radio and most of what you will hear is also anti-government. Television now has two state-run channels, but these only counterbalance the rest of the programming that is opposition-controlled. Venezuela has a more oppositional media than we have in the United States.
In fact, if the government carries through on its promise to turn RCTV's broadcast frequency over to the public, for a diverse array of programming, then this move will actually increase freedom of expression in Venezuela - rather than suppressing it, as the media and some opportunistic, ill-informed politicians here have maintained.
Sadly, some human rights officials here have also, without knowing much of the details, jumped on the media and political bandwagon. In a press release this week, José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said that "The move to shut down RCTV is a serious blow to freedom of expression in Venezuela." (Of course RCTV will not be "shut down," since it can continue to distribute its programs through cable and satellite media).
Om zichzelf in dezelfde week trouwens weer tegen te spreken:
Vivanco en HRW speelden ook een dubieuze rol tijdens de mislukte CIA-coup tegen Hugo Chavez, in april 2002:
But in an interview the same week Vivanco gave a different view, criticizing "those who claim that the fact that the Chavez government is not renewing the license for RCTV, per se implies a violation of freedom of expression. That is nonsense. . . you are not entitled, as a private company, to get your contract renewed with the government forever." So why is a station that has repeatedly violated the most basic rules of any broadcast license entitled to another 20-year state-sanctioned franchise?Bron
Kennelijk is de wereld van het mensenrechtenactivisme geïnfiltreerd door neocon-tuig en spindoctors. Je zou bijna denken dat er een oorlog wordt voorbereid.José Vivanco is either ignorant of United States law and the true provisions of Venezuela law, or he is being dishonest enough to "play along" with this latest smear campaign against Venezuela and its Bolivarian Constitution and democratically-elected government.
Vivanco and Human Rights Watch - a bureaucrat and an organization that both went AWOL during the April 2002 coup d'etat in Venezuela: HRW, with a cowardice that shall live in infamy, was completely silent on the abuses committed, crossing its fingers, hoping the coup would succeed, until the coup was over - would do better to invest their attention on real human rights abuses in this hemisphere: the tortures in Guantanamo Bay, for example, where the screams of the victims occur today and tonight, but cannot be heard through Jose Vivanco's partisan earplugs.
Instead, Vivanco is in Venezuela today, attacking that country in knowingly false and inflammatory terms for doing nothing more or less than what the host government of Human Rights Watch has wisely done in its own land for more than two centuries. If HRW were doing its job according to its stated mission, it would be supporting the new provisions in Venezuela, and instead using its multi-million dollar budget to call for the use of such time-honored impeachment provisions in the United States to remove the justices that imposed a Court-Appointed torturer to that country's highest office.
Heard or not, the screams continue today from Guantanamo, from Colombia, from the cell of Pacho Cortes in Bolivia, and not to mention from Iraq and so many other torture chambers throughout the world. How low does José Vivanco's cowardice go to further muzzle the sound of those screams by wasting his organization's time and money to create a media show across the Caribbean that only distracts from the real human rights crises in our hemisphere? If anyone should be impeached from a job of arbitor or judge of anything in our América, it is José Miguel Vivanco.Bron
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten