Venezuela socialists met shaming, protests on trips abroad

Venezuela socialists met shaming, protests on trips abroad
ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON and JOSHUA GOODMAN • Associated Press May 30, 2017

MIAMI (AP) — Javier Fungairino was eating breakfast with his son at a
bakery one recent morning when he noticed a familiar face at a nearby
table: a former minister of Venezuela's socialist government whose
presence reminded him of the pain he suffered when he left his homeland
for Miami three years ago.

"I knew it was him," the 43-year-old Venezuelan businessman said of the
encounter this month. "But the first thing I asked was, 'Are you Eugenio
Vasquez?', and he said, 'Yes.'"

Immediately, an angry mob of scolding Venezuelan exiles surrounded the
former head of state-run Banco de Venezuela, shouting "Rat!" and "Get
out, thief!" until Vasquez and another man with him fled.

"I never laid a finger on him. I simply raised my voice," Fungairino
said. "They hate when people complain. They think they're so powerful
that they're not used to that kind of treatment."

The confrontation was captured on a cellphone video that went viral on
social media back in Venezuela among opposition members who for two
months have been protesting what they say is President Nicolas Maduro's
"dictatorship."

Public shamings are becoming more frequent. Whether it's attending the
opera in New York or strolling along a beach in Australia, current and
former Venezuelan government officials — even their children — are
finding it harder to enjoy the good life abroad while an increasingly
violent power struggle plays out back home

But the aggressive form of protesting has been met with some hostility
of its own.

Maduro has denounced the aggressive attacks on former and current
officials abroad as violent and undemocratic, comparing them with the
anti-Semitism faced by Jews in Nazi Germany. Even some of Maduro's
detractors oppose attacks on officials' families.

"If you find a figure in public, I am all for recording the encounter
and showing your disgust," said Mari Montes, a former sports journalist
who moved from Venezuela to Miami with her family in 2014. "But going to
houses where there could be children, I don't like that because it can
get out of hand. It's a risk we don't have to take."

The in-your-face heckling of top officials from Venezuela is similar to
how in the 1990s victims of Argentina's military dictatorship staked out
their former torturers in confrontations called "escraches."

The same practice has been employed against officials in Spain in recent
years by people evicted from their homes during the country's financial
crisis. In communist Cuba, loyalist groups have long carried out similar
public attacks known as "acts of repudiation," but there it is
dissidents, not officials, who are the ones targeted.

In Venezuela, social media has multiplied the political impact of the
confrontations with representatives of the socialist system installed by
the late President Hugo Chavez.

Pop-up protests against "Chavistas," for instance, are organized with
the WhatsApp messaging application among small groups of exiles. One in
Miami calls itself "Outing the Enchufado," or the "plugged in," and
announces its events just hours before they occur. Activists speaking on
condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation say they get information
from hackers in Caracas about where people with government links are living.

One recent week day, activists unfurled a giant, anti-government banner
outside a gated community in a Miami suburb known as Little Venezuela
where a purported front man for a prominent Chavista governor, Jose
Gregorio Vielma Mora, is believed to live with his beauty queen wife.

"He's killed a lot of young men in Tachira state, and he doesn't care.
And his buddies live here in Doral Isles," Jani Mendez, an accountant
from Venezuela, shouted from a megaphone as passing cars honked in
support. "Just so you know who your neighbors are."

In Bern, Switzerland, a woman recently confronted Venezuelan Ambassador
Cesar Mendez at a grocery store, yelling "corrupt" and "thieves" in
German as stunned shoppers looked on. Venezuela's ambassador to the
United Nations, Rafael Ramirez, was surprised attending the opera in New
York. In Madrid, a businessman linked to Maduro's government was
harassed at a bakery counter.

"Your time is running up, buddy," a man is heard yelling at the
businessman on a video taken with a cellphone. "You're all going to wind
up face down. Nicely strung up."

One of the most debated videos, seen hundreds of thousands of times,
shows Caracas Mayor Jorge Rodriguez's daughter Lucia Rodriguez walking
with a man along Bondi beach in Sydney as she is badgered in Spanish by
a woman who walks alongside shouting, "Thanks to your father, people are
dying!"

An online petition now signed by nearly 30,000 people asks Australian
authorities to revoke Rodriguez's student visa, saying that money of a
"dubious and dishonest origin" financed her filmmaking studies there.

The mayor appeared on state TV to denounce the harassment of his
daughter and identified her tormenter as Deborah Goldberg, who he said
left Venezuela in 2006 with much family wealth.

Rodriguez held up what he said was a childhood photo of Goldberg with
Lilian Tintori, the wife of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, and
said they are working together to tarnish the government's reputation.

"We know this is all part of a cooked-up lie to spread hatred," he said.

___

Joshua Goodman reported from Bogota, Colombia.

Source: Venezuela socialists met shaming, protests on trips abroad -
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