Let’s give credit to Kevin Spacey, the Academy-award winning actor, for finally seeing the light on the cruel and authoritarian Venezuelan regime.
Back in 2007, the noted liberal actor joined with Hollywood’s resident radicals Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, and Danny Glover in a three-hour dinner with the late Hugo Chávez at the presidential palace in Caracas. They shook hands warmly on the red carpet after the dinner. But unlike the others, Spacey made no comment on his views on Chavez.
Last week, Spacey took to his blog to embrace the students who are protesting President Nicolás Maduro’s mad policies:
These students were standing for basic human freedoms and engaging in the right to protest, which is a sacred right whether in Boston, Belarus, or Venezuela. The government of Venezuela responded with heavy-handed repression. Within two weeks Leopoldo Lopez, the leader of the opposition party, Voluntad Popular, called for nationwide peaceful demonstrations to address the problems facing the country. These problems include chronic food shortages, the highest inflation in the world and ongoing censorship of the media. Even the Oscars were not allowed to be broadcast — for the first time in Venezuelan history.
More than 1,400 students were arrested, there are more than 40 confirmed cases of torture and Leopoldo Lopez still sits in a Venezuelan military prison. . . . Amnesty International said the charges against Lopez recall “politically motivated attempts to silence dissent.” Human Rights Watch says “the Venezuelan government has openly embraced the classic tactics of an authoritarian regime: jailing its opponents, muzzling the media and intimidating civil society.”
I support all of the Venezuelans who peacefully and non-violently claim their right to self-determination and protest. I hope you will join me in asking them not to give up and to not become numb to the violations and abuses committed against them. We who are fortunate enough to live in freedom must stand up to oppression and injustice and remind the Venezuelan people that they are on the right side of history.
Spacey plays a manipulative and murderous politician in House of Cards, and he apparently can spot one in real life in Nicolás Maduro. Bravo for breaking with the silence of much of Hollywood and standing with the students against Venezuela’s reactionary government.