no major players in the 2002 coup have served any time in prison... Carmona, the dictator for a day, is living in Bogotá, perhaps waiting for Chavez's ouster to return triumphantly to Venezuela. By failing to enforce a rule of law for those that ignore the constitution and human rights, the Chavez government has failed to weaken the opposition. Not prosecuting the coup participants is a strategy, as has the Chavez's lax interactions with the libelous Venezuelan corporate media...

This has been at the crux of a long debate since April 2002 between many people, among them Chávez, who sticks with his non-repressive approach, and Fidel Castro, who is said to have advised Chávez to go after the coup plotters with full legal force. (This is very ironic, since the screeching squalid class always yelps about Chávez supposedly wanting to govern like Castro, even as they are the main beneficiaries of Chávez's kinder, gentler, approach.)

I do think that he has succeeded in weakening the "opposition" by giving them enough rope to hang themselves over and over again. I don't subscribe to the view that Venezuela is in any kind of chaos right now: it's just more squawking from the spoiled brats and their corrupt Commercial Media correspondents... read enough of geezers like Gustavo Coronel huffing and puffing from their golf courses about how they're gonna get violent now... of rich kids playing with molotovs and calling in the squalid press to report on the bombs that they don't then go out and throw (someone commented on a squalid blog the other day "hey, it worked for the Weather Underground!" but scualid blogger Francisco Toro, the disgraced former NY Times stringer, censored that comment)... Toro himself is talking all macho about how he's going to stop being a "flower eater" and go fight in the streets... good luck to him... he'll probably get hurt just tripping over his shoelaces... Why suppress them when they're their own worst enemies to begin with?

This "opposition" is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They've been outmaneuvered instead of being repressed. I think it's been a brilliant strategy on the part of Chávez that helps a lot in the longterm project that he has launched to bring the country forward on democratic terms.

We had a very emotional discussion at the February 2003 J-School about whether, and at what point, the Venezuelan government would be justified to take away the licenses of the dishonest Commercial TV stations. My position is yes: Paid speech does not merit the same protections as free speech. Others - particularly some North Americans - felt almost religiously opposed to any intervention even by democratic governments in the media. Different worlds and different world views...

But in that discussion an even better idea was raised, that seemed to be acceptable to all sides: to levy a special tax on Commercial Broadcasters that would be used exclusively for funding community-run TV and radio stations, of the kind that Venezuela has pioneered in recent years, and kill them with the thing they claim to support: competition, with a better product.