By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront T he streets of Venezuela are like a battlefield. The blue smoke of teargas engulf the cities like Caracas, the country’s capital. Thousands of people have been marching on the streets to end the rule of Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government beginning March, 2017. People have been joining protests from the slums of Petare to low-income quarters of Caracas city such as El Valle and La Vega. Graffiti’s such as “ Abajo La Dictadura ” meaning “ Down With Dictatorship ” in Spanish greet the photojournalists on streets.  Infact, on 207 th anniversary of Venezuela’s independence from Spain, over two million protested against the government. The event had been called as the ‘ mother of all marches ’ on the international media. The critics of Nicolas Maduro think that him rewriting the constitution will be a final blow to their democracy. While many of his supporters belonging from United Socialist Party, known as Chavistas, h...

By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront Hugo Chavez has died of cancer at 58 on March 5, 2013. His body will be embalmed and put on a display in a glass casket for eternity at a military museum after a big state funeral, like the one which has not been seen since the death of Argentina’s Eva Peron, before the country braces itself for a tumultuous election campaign. This Latin American Socialist icon had been widely regarded as one of its most popular leader, amongst the new wave of leftist parties that are working for the emancipation of Latin American countries. Chavez was seen as a virile force of nationalisation by the Venezuelans and he drew inspiration from the Cuban Revolution, the leftist governments of Juan Alvarado and Omar Torrijos in Panama. He used his country’s rich natural reserves such as oil for which he was seen as a liberator of the poor. He invested millions of dollars in oil in countries that were ideologically similar. In 1992, Chavez launched Revolutionary...