The project to study the constitutional "reforma" of Chavez, started on September 13, is advancing well, slow but steady. since the update of October 2 we have finally reached half of the articles commented. And those include most of the real important ones. New writers are coming on board so diversity will also increase. I hope that by November first, when the going starts getting tough in Venezuela, the blogs will be fully operational.
Which are these blogs?
In English we have Venezuela's Constitutional Reform. 15 articles out of the 33 proposed by Chavez have been commented so far. I will not include the new ones proposed by the National Assembly which brings it to close to 70. However if someone feels like making a review of these additional proposal, please, drop me a note. I do not think there is much point in discussing them in detail since they were probably already thought of before August 15 and the government was just waiting to see the initial reactions on the 33 original articles proposal to decide which ones it should add. The point I am trying to make is that the 33 announced by Chavez are the real stuff, in particular article 230 commented very well by Bruni.
Since opening these blogs I have been adding some material to them. These include a collection of links of important documents related to the "reforma" plus a list of important comments, or at least comments that I hope will help folks understand what is really going on with this constitutional coup d'état in progress.
In Spanish we have the translations of these articles at "No a la reforma constitucional de Chávez". For those of you who read Spanish, you might want to visit that blog also since some of the documents and comments are different. Liz and myself simply cannot translate everything :) Note that we still manage to have 9 articles translated so we are slower but we have enough to be of use (we should add about 4 more this week). At this point I would like you to visit the page of Ciudadania Activa which has some material in Spanish if you need it for your own campaign.
One thing that I am starting, and this with the first post by Mousqueton on the matter, is general comment based on the articles commented in these blogs. That is, I hope to have readers write up to half a dozen comments to make sense of all of it. Volunteers are required for the task, please let me know if you are interested and what would you like to write about. Your comments can be written originally in Spanish or English, we do have translators if you cannot do so. Their publication would be reserved for November , as a continuation of the specifically commented articles.
Finally, to conclude this post there is the logo made by Feathers which graces the side of this blog. Below you can find the HTLM if you wish it to put somewhere in your web page or if you know someone who would like to do so. The HTLM allows you to click on the image and be directed straight tot he blog of your choice (NOTE: you must remove the four * inside the links, I had to put them if not blogger would post the image directly).
In English, to Venezuela's constitutional reform
<*br/><*a href=" http://constitutional-reform-venezuela.blogspot.com/"> <*img border="0" width="200" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2143/1493964048_5b9dfd4401_o.gif " height="200"/><*/a><*br/>
And in Spanish, to No a la Reforma Constitutional
<*br/><*a href=" http://reforma-constitucional-venezuela.blogspot.com/"> <*img border="0" width="200" src=" http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2143/1493964048_5b9dfd4401_o.gif " height="200"/><*/a><*br/>
Note that depending of your page coding you might want to adapt the script further.
And with this the new sites are officially launched. May they serve as one of the best source of information around.
-The end-