LETTER: More likely SA will follow Venezuela’s path
It would be a grave mistake to 'forget Venezuela', as Tom Eaton suggests in his column
It would be a grave mistake to "forget Venezuela", as Tom Eaton suggests in his column, "Forget Venezuela, stay away from Brazil" (October 30). The likelihood is much greater that SA will follow Venezuela’s trajectory than Brazil's. It is therefore Venezuela's lessons that must be heeded, rather than Brazil's. The rhetoric of Venezuela's leftist dictatorship is no less repulsive than that of Brazil's president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro. Ahead of the 2013 Venezuelan elections, government media described the prominent opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, grandson of Holocaust survivors, as “Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie” and called on voters to reject “international Zionism”. In 2005 former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez implied that then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was asexually frustrated. He added that, even so, he would refuse to have sex with her: “She should forget about me. I won't make this sacrifice for the fatherland, let someone else do it.” Bolsonaro says he suppo...
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