The Cato Institute has announced that Yon Goicoechea,
leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela that
successfully prevented President Hugo Chávez’s regime from seizing
broad dictatorial powers in December 2007, has been awarded the 2008
Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

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Renowned Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa remarked, “Freedom and
complacency are incompatible and this is what we are seeing now in
countries like Venezuela where freedom is disappearing little by
little, and this has produced a very healthy and idealistic reaction
among young people. I think Yon Goicoechea is a symbol of this
democratic reaction when freedom is threatened.”