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teleSUR, the Workers’ Paradise? A Caracas Chronicles exclusive

(The full 5,500-word leaked email in Spanish and English) As teleSUR prepares to launch an English-language satellite station in July 2015 (its 10th anniversary), there is unrest in the Caracas and Quito headquarters. Several high-level employees have been mistreated and/or expelled by the inner circle in Caracas, and disparities in wages, shift schedules and workloads are…

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We applaud the sanctions

Up until now, we´ve resisted taking a position on the Menendez-Rubio act imposing sanctions on Venezuelan human rights violators. That stops now: all of the CC bloggers agree that this is not something we are going to oppose. This bill is targeted at certain individuals. The idea that these sanctions are somehow hurting the Venezuelan people is…

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Sanctions are go!

One day after the historic reboot of U.S.-Cuba relations, Barack Obama has signed into law what will officially be known as the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014 (and unofficially as the Rubio-Menendez Act), which sanctions specific members of the Venezuelan government involved in human rights abuses in response the protests early this year. Looks…

God gave me hair, but not a clue...

Trolling the Kremlinologists?

On any normal day, Diosdado Cabello penning a lie-filled Op-Ed for The New York Times about Venezuela’s human rights record would have been the big story. But today was so crazy, the only bit of his Op-Ed anyone will remember will be the third-to-last paragraph. It took me a third reading to get it, and I think…

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The Intelligence Blunder of the Decade

Cuba and the U.S. spent a year and a half secretly negotiating the normalization in their diplomatic relations through a Canadian back-channel. A year. And a half. Still, when it was announced this morning, the Venezuelan state seemed caught totally off-guard. State media went into deer-in-the-headlights panic mode, defaulting to silence for hours on end while…