By Eva Golinger - Postcards from the Revolution, Aug 12th 2011
Since Hugo Chavez won his first presidential elections in 1998, the US government has been trying to remove him from power. With multimillion-dollar investments, every year Washington’s agencies advise and aid anti-Chavez groups with their campaigns and strategies against the government.
On Friday President Hugo Chavez announced the creation of the Ministry of Youth and Students which aims to address the needs of young people, and will be run by them.
23 days into a hunger strike led by students of the Venezuelan opposition, on Monday Venezuela’s Minister for Justice and Internal Affairs Tareck El Aissami presented the protestors with a proposal they considered “sufficient” to end the strike.
A revealing report published in May 2010 by the FRIDE Institute, a Spanish think tank, prepared with funding from the World Movement for Democracy (a project of the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED), has disclosed that international agencies are funding the Venezuelan opposition with a whopping $40-50 million USD annually.
During his weekly television show "Hello President" on Sunday,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez criticised protests by right-wing opposition
student groups over alleged political persecution in Venezuela as "defending
impunity and corruption."
Twenty-four
years have passed since my feet first touched Venezuelan soil. Recently as I watched a group of students
march in a protest against the current government, I realized that they have none of the
memories that I have of the years of supposed "democracy" before the arrival of
the government led by Hugo Chávez in 1999.
By Zachary Lown – Venezuelanalysis.com, Jul 8th 2009
The
Venezuelan government's decision to reduce federal funding for the nation's
public universities in May generated two months of political turbulence that
erupted into violence on university campuses. The conflict is rooted in a
broader national debate over the role of education in society and the role of the
state in public education.
A group of Venezuelan university students and administrators, opposition political party officials, and employees of the opposition television station Globovision marched to the Higher Education Ministry on Wednesday to protest the government's 6% cut in university budgets as part of an overall government spending reduction amidst the world economic crisis.
Venezuelan authorities arrested eight Merida state police officers on Tuesday for their suspected involvement in the fatal shooting of student leader Yuban Ortega during a protest last week.
Parts of the city of Mérida, Venezuela have been shut
down by three days of student and youth-led protests. The protests began in
reaction to internal university issues and turned violent once riot police
allegedly shot a projectile into the head of a student leader, who died early
Friday morning.
