The red herring, students and Chavismo

How can a revolution be of any meaning if students do not support it?

Chavez supporters claim students at Venezuelan public (and free) universities are mostly sons and daughters of rich people. They do that because Venezuelan students have shown time after time that most of them reject the present government. There is indeed a higher proportion of people from the upper middle class at public universities than there should be according to their total numbers, but that is the case even in rich countries where I have been able to live in Europe. When I was a student in Caracas, I slept at residences that were not precisely luxurious. A lot of my pals were poor. My dad was poor and he got through university via a scholarship many decades before Chavez came to power.

In 2007 big student protests started to appear in Venezuela. Chavistas had a big PR problem. One of the things they decided to do was to set up groups of so-called Bolivarian "students".
Actually, few real students but those in some areas support Chávez, even if many do not support our disastrous opposition leaders. When the students opposing the measures against RCTV and other measures of the government asked for the right to talk at the National Assembly, the Assembly accepted, but it also decided to invite some Chavista "students". They wanted to transform the whole thing into a "debate" where the moderator was one of the main Chavistas (the head of the National Assembly, Cilia Flores), in a room full of Chavista deputies only and surrounded by a Chavista mob. The students did not accept that, they decided to give their speech, they said they were ready for open debates but those debates had to be really open and then they left. When they left, they had to be protected by a huge amount of policemen and they were taken away in special military vans because of the Chavez mob. The Chavista "students", though, played along with the government and decided to give different speeches about how the others were not really caring for Venezuela and the only solution was the "Socialism, Fatherland or Death".

After that, Chavista "students" appeared in many TV shows organised by the state channels. After a while, we started to see them everywhere. The fact is they were hardly any students. They all got now some Chavista job.

You can see one of those "students" behind Chavez on the picture above. He is dressed, like Chavez and all in that picture, fully in red because it is only like that that he can show he is a "socialist". Without red clothes, their so-called socialism simply ceases to exist.

No, the read herring is not the poor animal hold by Chávez.