VENEZUELA

zmag: Gaviria Should Leave Venezuela

"As in Eastern Europe 13 years ago, the final defeat of dictatorial power in Venezuela came last night at the doors of its “control rooms” – the TV stations.

On Monday night, the Venezuelan majority - unwilling to allow an upper-class economic coup d’etat that poses dishonestly as a “strike” to unseat its democratically elected government - took to the streets on a scale only seen once before in the nation’s modern history; as they had last April, when they turned back a military coup d’etat.

By early Tuesday morning the masses had every Commercial TV station in the nation surrounded. Their weapons were nonviolent and theatrical: pots, pans, fireworks and thousands of defiant but smiling faces. "