This is too funny. Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles [4] last week demanded that President Nicolás Maduro [5], political heir to Hugo Chávez [6], clarify his citizenship status: "Where were you born, Nicolás? Venezuelans want to know. Will you lie? Show your birth certificate." It began with the claim that Caracas-born Maduro—son of a Colombian mother and Venezuelan father—holds a dual Venezuelan-Colombian citizenship, which would disqualify him from the presidency. But it quickly escalated as the opposition began distributing a supposed facsimile of his birth certificate, showing that Maduro was born in Cúcuta, Colombia. The Colombian authorities (no friends of the chavistas, needless to say) immediately issued a statement dismissing the facsimile as a crude forgery. (Bloomberg [7], Aug. 2) This is made doubly amusing by the fact that during the presidential race last year, chavistas utilized ugly propaganda [8] implying that Capriles' nativist creds were in question because of his Jewish ancestry.
The latest inflammation of the ongoing US-Venezuela spat came last month when Maduro demanded that Washington repudiate a statement by Samantha Power [9], newly appointed as UN ambassador, that Venezuela, along with Cuba, Iran and Russia, is guilty of a "crackdown on civil society." (Fox News Latino [10], July 19) Well, maybe it is [11]. But has Power ever had anything to say about the immensely more vigorous crackdown on civil society [12] in Colombia, South America's biggest recipient of US aid by far?
Just asking.
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