Venezuela: Regime Change in Real Time

By Rodrigo Acuña

20 July 2017

Images of the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) firing tear gas at protestors in Venezuela cannot be provided to us in large enough quantities by the mainstream media. Look through the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or even the UK’s liberal Guardian and the government of president Nicolas Maduro is a dictatorship in all but name. As of the time of writing this article, with 103 people dead, television and print images of opposition protestors being tear gassed by police are what count and not any actual context of the violence taking place, or who, for that matter, is predominantly perpetrating it.

Venezuela: same old, same old...

By Rodrigo Acuña

25 February 2014

Latin America Bureau

The recent violence in Venezuela, which has left some 13 people dead, once again highlights how some sections of the political right in that country are unwilling to change their stripes. They have used force in the past and, as long as they continue to gain a sympathetic hearing in the mainstream media, violent protests can and will be used in order to project the image of an ungovernable country.

Apologists for State Terrorism

By Rodrigo Acuña

New Matilda

20 December 2006

It is a truism that all evaluations of history are tainted by one’s vision of how the world should work. Another truism is that a lack of primary sources can often leave certain grey areas in the historical record.

Sometimes, however, events or eras are roughly clear and some degree of consensus is achieved.

General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) is one such case. In particular, the illegitimacy of his regime and its vast human rights violations against anyone broadly on the political Left or who opposed his regime. Most serious Latin American studies scholars and journalists would agree that Pinochet brutally overthrew a government which, despite many faults, was democratically and legitimately elected.

Dissent from a consensus, of course, always exists and on 15 December, The Australian published a strange article by James Whelan, a neo-conservative journalist who for many years has written works which present the Pinochet era in a favourable light. Whelan’s piece was revisionism of the worst kind.