Sanity on the Paramilitaries
Well, it’s still hard to know what to make about this whole hubbub. A few things we can say for sure:
With astonishing speed, the chavista propaganda machine has moved to twist and distort the story. The uncomfortable fact that opposition-led police forces were first on the scene and called in the chavista authorities is simply never mentioned in Chavista accounts. Video evidence or no video evidence, this particular event has been scrubbed from official history. This in itself speaks volumes about the government’s iron determination to politicize and twist absolutely everything.
Attempts to link the Colombians to the Coordinadora Democratic look especially manipulative and indefensible – a blunt ploy to justify arrests and raids against opposition leaders. In short, even if – as seems possible – parts of the Bloque Democrático had a conspiracy to use Colombians to spark a coup against Chavez, the government has squandered the upper hand through its typical mix of selective vision, exaggeration, and plain old lying.
I’ll save the reader the tedium of having to go through another impassioned plea for a credible impartial investigation we all know will never take place.
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