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eyes on the U.S.

Former US Envoy To Venezuela Slams Maduro For Accusing Him Of Murder Plot

EL PAIS (Spain); TELESUR (Venezuela); REUTERS

Worldcrunch

WASHINGTON - Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez never tired of accusing the U.S. government of all types of nefarious deeds. His hand-picked successor, acting president Nicolas Maduro, is keeping up the tradition.

First, days after Chavez's death, Maduro accused Washington of somehow infecting "El Comandante" with his fatal cancer. Then, perhaps even more strangely, the interim head of state said Sunday that there was a murder plot to kill Henrique Capriles, his own opponent in next month's presidential race.

Speaking on state TV station Telesur, Maduro even accused former US Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich and former Bush Administration official Roger Noriega of the supposed plot, in order to “fill Venezuelans with hate” ahead of the April 14 election.

On Thursday, Reich, who is now a Washington-based international consultant, fired back with an open letter published in top Spanish daily El Pais. “Dear Mr Maduro, I’m responding to your most recent allegations. Don’t worry, this is not a threat to you; you’re making things up and what follows is my response to them,” the letter reads. “No, Mr Maduro, I did not have anything to do with with the cancer that killed Hugo Chávez, nor do I have any intention to assault Mr. Henrique Capriles (nor any other citizen of your country). These allegations by you can only have two explanations: either you don’t know the truth or you don’t know how to tell the difference between the truth and lies. You tell me which it is.”

[rebelmouse-image 27086542 alt="""" original_size="179x249" expand=1]

Otto Reich. Photo by US State Dept.

Reich suggests that these accusations were made because Maduro wanted to distract his country from the disasters that his party has subjected the country to over the last 14 years.

“Your accusations are so far from reality that we must ask what is their true purpose -- what are you hiding behind this smokescreen? Could it be that your government is planning to eliminate Capriles, as others who have challenged your monopoly have been?”

Reich writes that Maduro’s tactics echo those Chavez employed over the years. “Every day that you make these accusations is another day that Venezuelans don’t hear that there is a viable alternative for peace, honor and prosperity for their country.”

Full text of letter in Spanish here, published by El Pais

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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