Actual Venezuelan Tupamaros, above, aren’t afraid to display their colors and logos and flags. This is in stark contrast to their ideological opponents, whose name isn’t the only thing ironic about them:
Ismael León, the national director of the opposition party “Voluntad Popular” (“Popular Will”, VP), presented a series of photographs, purportedly about the Revolutionary Tupamaro Movement (MRT), accusing them of being an armed party.
The national directorate of the MRT denied it via their Twitter account, @TupamaroMRT, in which they assured that the photographs published by León were not of members of the Tupamaro party.
On VP’s Twitter account, they claimed that the armed persons seen in the photographs are from the MRT, stating that the subjects are wearing hoods with colors alluding to the pro-government organization.
The VP directorate claims that their own party was born of social actions, while that of the MRT was born of weapons. One thing that the persons who know of the social activities of the Tupamaros might want to question, since the MRT party is characterized by a struggle to make the most impoverished communities visible through cultural, social and political activities.
Translation mine.
Obviously, Voluntad Popular represents nothing near half of the popular will, since the Bolivarian parties (supporting Nicolás Maduro) got more than half the vote in the last presidential and municipal elections. So there’s one irony.
The other? The fact that VP actually has its origins in armed putschism. Leopoldo López, its official leader, is currently in jail for that. It is most certainly NOT a party of social actions, unless by “social action”, you mean strategic bribery around election time. And terrorism after your party invariably loses. In which case, yeah, they’re a party of social action, all right.
But back to the MRT, the Tupamaros of Venezuela. These should not be confused with the Uruguayan guerrillas of the same name, who DID wage an armed struggle…way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were rounded up, jailed and tortured by the US-complicit government of the day. The movement ceased its activities long after, with members either imprisoned, gone to ground, or having fled the land. Today, one former Uruguayan Tupamaro is president: Pepe Mujica, himself a prisoner back in the bad old days. But the Tupamaros as an armed urban guerrilla movement are no more in Uruguay, and in Venezuela, the group named after them is not an armed guerrilla movement either…even though their enemies would love to paint them as such:
José Ignacio Bombace tweets back at the VP liars:
“@VoluntadPopular That photo is NOT of the @TupamaroMRT. Here’s the link to the page they took it from…”
And the official Tupamaro tweeter sez:
“Origin of the photos. Neither our colors nor our logos in them. @VoluntadPopular [are] desperate clowns.”
“@VoluntadPopular Wrong again! Here’s the link…and the photo.”
So there you go. For a bunch that are trying so desperately to tweet out the “truth” about Venezuela (note the quotes, there for a reason), the party of un-Popular Will sure has to resort to an awful lot of bullshit.
PS: And for added hilarity at the oppos’ expense, here’s a Google translation of a recent screed by Benito Mussolini’s great-granddaughter in defence of the poor widdle dears, saying they just want a better life, an education, food, etc. Yup, nothing says democratic credibility quite like a fascist scion, defending other fascist scions by claiming they’re not fascists, they’re just hungry! (Which, of course, is not true either. Ruffles chips are too expensive for poorer Venezuelans to afford, after all.)
