The sickening violence at Venezuela's Mother of all Marches
The socialist failures of Chavista Venezuela are well worth noting, given their hugeness and their totality.
But there's something deeply disturbing about the small, individual, personal horrors that cannot but draw one's attention, because they shock the conscience.
At the Mother of all Marches, held in 12 or 13 cities across Venezuela, the Chavistas did what they always do: they sent in some motorcycle goons to casually fire a weapon at the crowd, killing one or two members, in a calculated move to scare the others off. Nobody ever gets punished for these state-sponsored murders. The Chavistas attribute them to random street violence and over-excited passions of mobs, the same way Susan Rice and her little pawn Ben Rhodes once attributed the calculated murder of a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya to a mob incited by a video.
The Chavistas did it in 2003, they did it in 2012, they did it in 2014, and they did it now. This time they picked off three people, two of them teenagers, ending their lives in seemingly random, violent shootings, all the name of their "revolución" continuin. It has the look of sacrificing children to Molech.
BBC reports:
A 23-year-old student, Paola Ramírez, was shot dead in the city of San Cristobal, in western Venezuela.
Her boyfriend told Reuters news agency that they were chased by armed men on motorbikes as they were leaving an anti-government protest in the city, also on a motorbike.
Ms Ramírez was shot dead shortly afterwards at a square where she had been looking for her sister, her boyfriend said.
The BBC pinned the blame where it belonged, reporting:
Witnesses in the killings of Mr Moreno and Ms Ramírez said that the shooters belonged to "colectivos", pro-government militant grassroots groups.
I saw the graphic, disturbing photos and videos of her being shot dead on Twitter, lying on her back in the street, clad in a lacy white teenager-type top with jeans, a small lethal-looking blood spot on her face where some thug had aimed well as people hovered around helplessly. It was deeply disturbing.
The other victims have similar stories. The young man who was killed had his death dismissed by the Chavistas as soccer hooligan violence. Another woman was randomly shot in San Cristobal, the otherwise beautiful colonial city out on the Colombian border.
Daniel Duquenal, who was at the march, describes it as "Terror in Caracas" in a powerful blog post. It wasn't just the shootings, but the mass terror of the shootings. He has four disturbing, frightening photos on his blog here. Here is just one of them:
About ten minutes before the gassing started I was where the cell phone add was (white, black sash), at the end of the curve. That is where we decided to go back as it was becoming impossible to go further and people were already going back. Within minutes the police was bombing the area and and [sic] a few minutes after we had to take refuge in the street on the right in an eatery that shall remain nameless because they have already being in trouble.
It calls to mind why these beasts deserve any part of power or have any right to rule. Up until now, the socialists have been recognized as the lawful government of Venezuela. Now all we see is Syria-style terror and violence, from an illegitimate regime desperate to cling to power at any price. They use violence the way Bashar Assad uses chemical warfare on civilians. They should be in line for the exact same fate he has in front of him. It would be right for the U.S. to take some comparable action.