You may have heard that Venezuela recently re-vamped its intelligence apparatus. Actually what you probably heard is that a New Spy Law threatened to throw Venezuelans into prison if they didn’t spy on their neighbors just like in Cuba! That was sort of the gist of this hysterical front page New York Times story last week. The Economist, hilariously backtracking on years of hyperventilating over Castro-comunismo in Venezuela, actually noted that the Chavez administration had “never been particularly repressive, let alone a dictatorship.” Until now, that is! The law was going to turn the country into a police state once and for all. It was even drawing comparisons to the Patriot Act, for gawdsakes.
Except that it didn’t quite do that. The law, as originally written, required people to turn over information about terrorism or threats to national security, but even that is moot because the government declared yesterday that it would amend it to remove the passages deemed controversial by human rights groups. Lamest. Dictatorship. Ever.
