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First, while there have been some peaceful opposition marches, the daily protests are anything but peaceful. In fact, about half of the daily death toll from Venezuela that we see in the media – now at 41 — are actually civilians and security forces apparently killed by protesters.

Of course the increased shortages and rising inflation over the past year have had a political impact on Venezuela, but it is striking that the people who are most hurt by shortages are decidedly not joining the protests. Instead, the protests are joined andled by the upper classes, who are least affected.

Henrique Capriles, who lost to Chávez and then Maduro in the last two presidential elections, was considered too conciliatory by the more extreme right, led by Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado. They decided that the time was ripe to topple the government through street protests. Both were involved in the 2002 military coup against then President Chávez; María Corina Machado evensigned the decree of the coup government that abolished the elected National Assembly (AN), the Constitution, and the Supreme Court.

Some criticisms of this campaign have implied that this issue is at odds with the views of Congolese people and civil society organizations. Again, this is simply false. We tend to be skeptical of anyone who tries to speak on behalf of “the Congolese people” because Congo’s population is far too vast, diverse, and opinionated to be reduced to a talking point

The Security and Exchange Commission is just beginning to work out the details of how the conflict minerals law will be implemented, and industry groups are lobbying hard to see that the SEC regulations carry as little weight as possible, by narrowly defining, for instance, which companies have to report on their activities in eastern Congo.

The Maduro government controls all branches of the national government and the majority of state and local governments. Most importantly, it controls the military, as well as the state oil company which is Venezuela’s main source of wealth. Two months ago it enjoyed a solid victory at the polls which effectively ended public questioning of its legitimacy. Finally, since the December elections the opposition has been beset with internal conflict and divided regarding what path it should take in the coming months and years.

Having said this, it should be noted that the Maduro government has done a couple of things that do not exactly exhibit strength and confidence. Yesterday during the conflict it took Colombian television channel NTN24 off the air while it was providing live coverage of the clashes in its usual tendentious style. NTN24 is openly anti-government, but its reach and impact is minimal, much less than the impact taking it off the air had.

López got ample international backing. In an interview on NTN24 Otto Reich said “the violence you are seeing in the streets is not the result of the people complaining, it is the result of the hordes that Mr. Maduro has organized to attack Venezuelans that are fed up with the incompetence and abuses of this government.”

Many of the cables focus on internal disputes within the opposition, with Lopez often in conflict with others both within his party and others in the opposition. Given this history, perhaps it isn’t surprising that the current protests that he has been leading, calling for “la salida” – the exit – of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have also caused internal divisions within the opposition.

This week, Smilde added in a quote to USA Today, "Before this happened, Lopez was playing second fiddle to Capriles… I think his goal is to try and leapfrog over Capriles. The student protests have put him in the spotlight."

The U.S. government has been funding the Venezuelan opposition for at least 12 years, including, as the State Department has acknowledged, some of the people and organizations involved in the 2002 military coup. Their goal has always been to get rid of the Chávez government and replace it with something more to their liking. However, their funding is probably not their most important contribution in Venezuela, since the Venezuelan opposition has most of the wealth and income of the country. A more important role is the outside pressure for unity, which, as these cables and the history of the past 15 years show, has been a serious problem for the Venezuelan opposition. The cables also show that this is a serious concern for the U.S. government.

While notable exceptions exist, the overall tendency of most accounts has been to compartmentalize and classify. Middle-Eastern resistance to dictatorship, Northern Mediterranean unrest against externally enforced austerity measures, and an Anglo-American revolt against the tyranny of the financial sector, have been analyzed as discrete cases each with their own structural and contingent dynamics. The results of this compartmentalization are all too predictable. Two years on, instead of a single image of global rebellion, we are left with fractured portraits of localized discontent.

Rather than view these uprisings within the recently sanitized history of revolution and an increasingly ineffectual grammar of social movements, it is high time to call the global occupations of public space what they are: social arrests.

The uprisings against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt were uniformly proclaimed as “expressing the will of the people”, while the strikingly similar manifestations of their Spanish, Greek, and American counterparts were all but ignored. This bifurcation in Western responses, one equally evident in governments and the mainstream media, is indicative of how we have come to perceive the role of mass political protest in the first decade of the 21st century. In the tradition of the French Revolution, uprisings against authoritarian rule are signified as acts of popular sovereignty — legitimate manifestations of a people unable to express their will through alternate channels — whereas similar protests within liberal representative democracies are marginalized as the acts of a raucous minority.

Whatever echoes there may or may not be, what is clear is that the global financial crisis — which many analysts declared to be at end now that the European debt saga finally seemed to be “under control” — is far from over, and may just have entered into a new phase.

As Larry Elliot of The Guardian, just put it: “all the ingredients are there for social unrest.” It looks like the world will be in for a rough ride in 2014. Better fasten your seatbelts — the next phase of the global financial crisis may be about to get started. Cities will burn and there will be blood. It won’t be pretty.

Both Venezuela and Haiti have been facing anti-government protests, with the respective oppositions citing poor leadership, corruption, electoral fraud, and a deteriorating economy as their primary motivations in calling for change. However, the international media’s escalation of the Venezuelan crisis and their complete silence when it comes to Haiti, raises some important questions about the United States’ inconsistency in upholding the values of human rights and democracy.

As evidence of Martelly’s unbridled commitment to democracy, instead of holding elections for mayors whose terms expired in 2012, he personally handpicked the representatives, appointing them as “municipal agents.”

Because the Haitian Senate has only 16 of 30 members currently active, the impeachment vote was not passed on a technicality. This was in spite of the decision, which saw 7 of the 16 members vote in favor of Martelly’s impeachment, with 9 abstentions and 0 voting against the motion. According to the Haitian Constitution, abstentions do not count as votes—with Article 117 stating that “All acts of the Legislature must be approved by a majority of the members present [emphasis added].” Thus, in regular circumstances the decision by the Senate would move forward with the impeachment. Therefore, this purposefully fragmented political system does a great deal to serve the interests of impunity.

But I think there is also a problem with Bourdieu’s conception of the public role of intellectuals, one which derives from a narrowness of vision. Bourdieu felt that “doing politics means exposing oneself to a loss of authority,” allowing one’s politics to be used as a means for discounting one’s academic work.

When people decry the lack of public anthropology, I think of all my friends and colleagues who are engaging in collaborative anthropological endeavors at the local level. I believe the problem is not that these anthropologists suffer from a loss of authority, but that these local interventions are not seen as mattering as much as the op-ed pages of the major American newspapers. Anthropologists should be careful about letting the mainstream media define “the public” for us. There are many publics and the ones anthropologists are involved with matter as much, if not more, than the one inhabited by pundits and policy wonks. Still, anthropologists could do more to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Perhaps by blogging about their work so that more people are aware of it, anthropologists could bridge the gap between these two publics.

The Egyptians in Tahrir Square were motivated by their connections to others in the group around them.  They wanted to go out in the street and be daring and take risks with their friends.  Real friends can flip a switch that turns ordinary people into heroes.  Online “friends” cannot.

What emerged in the gay marriage campaign in New York is that Friendfactor found a way to combine the agility of online communication with the strong ties of real-life friendship

The most intriguing statistic about the model is the ratio — an average of eight calls generated per page, essentially for free