Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-11-Speech-4-191"
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"en.20040311.11.4-191"2
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"Mr President, Europe formerly knew of Venezuela only as a supplier of crude oil and iron ore and as a base for European adventurers. Now that a stubborn president is refusing to accept the democratic will of the people, must the country go back to being what it was? I want to share with this House my own experiences of it.
Half a century ago, I was one of the children in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, who did not go to school but instead roamed through sewers and shanty towns built against mountain slopes, their houses made out of orange crates with roofs of corrugated iron. Large cars, luxurious houses and golf courses were enjoyed by a small elite, while, on the street, close to the doors of smart offices and shops, I saw sick, legless beggars. The hospital where my father died was filthy and chaotic. What limited public transport existed was in the hands of various companies, each with buses in their own colours, but without proper connections. In other parts of the country, in the second city, Maracaibo, for example, I saw Indians, impoverished and shunned by everyone. The road from the capital to the coast was lined with crosses for people who had fallen to their deaths, while, on other roads, dust storms were whipped up as you drove along. The president was a dictator who had his opponents hanged from lampposts by his police force, recruited from Italian immigrants.
My experiences at that time gave me the hope and the expectation that the people would not always accept this scandalous combination of dictatorship and extreme wealth, extreme poverty and extreme neglect. Forty years later, they stopped resigning themselves to their lot and could at last have a hope of a stable existence, growth and solidarity. By a large majority, they democratically chose a parliament composed along different lines, a new constitution and a quite different sort of president.
That President Chávez put too much faith in the army and did little to help the victims of the great natural calamity does not justify the coup d’état in which he was abducted and replaced temporarily by the chairman of the employers’ federation. Nor do his shortcomings justify the forging of an immense number of signatures in order to get sufficient support for a referendum aimed at again deposing him.
While the United States recognises the present Venezuelan Government as legitimate, the two major groups in this European Parliament allow themselves to be led by their contacts with parties that were formerly in government, but have been voted out by the Venezuelan electorate. Things can and must get better in Venezuela, but going back to the way things were will not help matters at all. The European Union’s support for the new Venezuela is the best way to prevent provocative and violent acts on the part of both the government and the political opposition, but unwarranted nostalgia leads only to disaster."@en1
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