On his October 11th national TV show "Hello President", Chavez denounced the Nobel Prize winner as a "dissident counterrevolutionary who...probably violated Chinese laws.
Debate in Venezuela is divided. Did Chavez make this statement (which isn't really in the core competency of the Venezuelan Presidency) because of his general sympathy for autocrats? Many say yes! After all, the Chinese "revolution" of which he speaks has pretty much created a capitalist society run by an unelected caste of party bureaucrats, so "counter-revolution" might be a good thing.
But others say the real reason is that Chavez is the money Chavez gets from China, $20 billion since April. This is a huge sum for Venezuela, something like $750.00 for every man,. woman and child in the country. And this is on top of another $12 billion dollar loan made by China earlier in the year.
Of course, it could be both his sympathy for autocracy AND his dependence on Chinese money which causes him to side with the Chinese state, and against the basic human rights norms set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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