Caracas Chronicles

Chavismo, always whoring for a public spectacle, has decided the meeting between the National Assembly and Cardinal Urosa will be held in closed doors. The Cardinal, being the gentleman that he is, has shown up on time, with little fanfare, and without speaking to the press.

Funny how these things work. When you've decided that the spat with the Cardinal is a losing strategy because it reminds voters that we're headed for Communism, and you engender an international crisis to change the topic, the last thing you want to do is to go back to last week's news cycle.

Update: El Universal is tweeting that the Cardinal wanted the hearing to be public because he was attacked publicly, but Cilia Flores has denied his request. Dissident congressman Juan Jose Molina is tweeting the hearings.

Speaking of Oliver Stone...wearing his historian's hat, Larry Rohter of the New York Times offers a devastating critique of Stone, Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali, and their specious arguments in defense of Venezuela's indefensible Revolution.  You owe it to yourselves to read it.

It's a follow-up to a previous article in which he bashed Stone's documentary slash love poem to Hugo Chávez. 

Quick, chavistas: what better way is there to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon?

Forget spending time with the family, the only right answer is: going to a swearing-in ceremony for the PSUV in a government-owned stadium, and have the ceremony force-fed to the entire country.

That's what happened yesterday. Hugo Chávez presided over the ceremony - and yes, if "swearing-in" of volunteers sounds a bit, I dunno, Stalinist, then you're right.

The speech itself was unremarkable to someone used to Chávez's rants and abuses of power. But those who believe Venezuela is a Jeffersonian democracy will find themselves with a lot of explaining to do.

You come here for contrarian views, right? So here's one:

I think Colombia did a poor job today, and I think the Venezuelan opposition should come out and blast them for it.

The opposition needs to side with the people, those who live on the border, those who benefit from trade, and those who suffer at the hands of the FARC.

Colombia's escalation today, predictably followed by an intemperate rupture of diplomatic relations, does nothing to advance the cause of Venezuelans in any of those fronts.

It hurts Venezuelans on the border, compromising their security. It hurts our economy, compromising trade. Worst of all, it entrenches chavismo's tacit alliance with FARC, strengthening rather than weakening its position. 

A chavista tragedy in three acts.

Act 1: 2,046 new school teachers, with a specialization in "Cultural Development" (whatever that is), graduate under a government-sponsored program. Good for them, I guess.

Act 2: Hugo Chávez goes to the graduation and forces all TV and radio stations in the country to carry his speech for several hours, live. In it, he blasts everyone who doesn't agree with him. (more on that in a separate post)

Act 3: The head of the program, a heretofore unknown bureaucrat named Andrés Rodríguez, goes on state-sponsored TV and says that the 2,000 new teachers are a "slap in the face of Venezuelan oligarchy and the church" because "they believe that a university education is only for the few." He went on to say, quite ludicrously, that graduating teachers is something that "can only happen in a revolution."

Caracas' bus drivers must be the most embattled people on the planet.

Imagine having to endure the city's traffic and crime, along with the Venezuelan government's regulations, 12 hours a day, 365 days a year ... as your job.

Nobody deserves a fate like that.

Now, they are beginning to feel the heat of the Communist Revolution. There is now a credible threat that the government will expropriate all private transport - the thousands of camioneticas, jeeps, and ramshackle buses driven by lower-middle class Venezuelans associated in cooperativas, trying to earn a buck, may soon become part of Venezuela's voracious state.

Everyone is feeling the heat. No one is safe.

After getting drunk the last few years issuing bonds to borrow from capitalist banks domestic and foreign , the chickens have finally come home to roost: Venezuela's government has a $1.5 billion payment due in August.

This should be no sweat, right? After all, as we have been repeatedly told by "experts", Venezuela has a large piggy bank. 

Well, Veneconomy begs to differ, and so does Victor Salmeron at El Universal. Apparently, the government doesn't really know where they are going to get the money from. Firms such as Barclay's don't really know either, claiming that the only way to pay its debt is ... incurring more debt.

Thinking about the absurdity of last night's seance involving the remains of Bolívar lying in the Panteón Nacional, a minute ago it suddenly hit me: what exactly was the Prosecutor General doing there? 

We saw the pictures of the forensic team apparently taking a sample from the remains of the Liberator. We snickered watching Prosecutor General Ortega, all dressed in white like the villains from E.T., but carelessly forgetting her hair net. We recoiled in pena ajena reading Chávez's over-the-top live tweet of the event.

But only when you stop to think about it does the absurdity of the whole thing really sink in.

It's no secret the motivation behind this whole chou is the fact that Chávez thinks Bolívar was murdered, and so, in his mind the Prosecutor General had to be there. It is a crime scene, after all, right?

"I don't persecute anyone. Law enforcement persecutes. The law persecutes, but I don't give out orders."

Hugo Chávez a few hours ago, making the case for judicial independence, discussing his total non-involvement in the case against Globovisión owners Zuloaga and Mezerhane.

"A whole mafia; Econoinvest was a den of gangsters. They even stole computers... these guys even held forged ID cards; we found 700 files containing the identification of individuals, all of them with the same address and the same telephone number."

A few weeks ago, filmmaker Oliver Stone embarked on a publicity tour for his bro-mantic, critically-panned documentary on Hugo Chavez. 

Among the many myths that he spread, there was this little exchange from his interview with Larry King:

"KING: -- He (Chávez) s dismissed as a dictator. How do you see him? (Note: good question Mr. King - you should have followed up with "what do you think of George W. Bush?")

 

STONE: Oh, I don't see him as a dictator. He's been elected three times as president. He's having another election coming up in September. It's going to be monitored again by international groups. 15 times he's been elected. ...

 

KING: He comes down tough on free media, though. You wouldn't call this an absolute democracy, would you?

 

Comin' at you, fast and furious.

The fat man yesterday, in a vain attempt to run away from his best friends:

"We love Cuba very much, but Cuba is Cuba, and Venezuela is Venezuela. What we are building is socialism with Venezuelan characteristics."

Jackson Diehl has a predictably apocalyptical article in today's Washington Post about the new charges being leveled against Globovisión's owners, Guillermo Zuluaga and Nelson Mezerhane.

While I was reading it, I was struck by the fact that the all-opposition-news channel remains, in effect, rudderless. With the government raiding Mezerhane's businesses and Zuluaga likely applying for political asylum, what obstacle is currently preventing Lina Ron from hosting Buenas Noches?

In other words, why is Globovisión still on the air?

The theater of the absurd continues.

Here is the fat man yesterday, giving a political speech on the grounds of the Military Academy, reiterating that he is not a communist.

This "communist" meme sure is touching a nerve.

"We are not looking to establish marxist socialism, that is a lie the size of the sun. What we are establishing is democratic socialism ... but these opinions only prove that in Venezuela there is total freedom of expression."

Tell that to the Twitter two.

It had to happen.

The Venezuelan government has just detained two people for things they wrote on their Twitter boards.

One of them is Luis Acosta Oxford. His twitter name is @leaoxford. What ticked the government off was his tweet saying Venezuelan bank Banesco was not healthy. I cannot find the twitter account of Carmen Nares, the other person detained.

I guess Venezuela's police have too much time on their hands.

Venezuela's opposition has apparently found a new chink in the chavista armour.

The government has gone to great lengths in recent days to reassure the population that, no, Venezuela is not headed toward communism. This comes on the heels of Venezuela's Roman Catholic Cardinal pointing out, in very matter-of-fact terms, that yes, it was.

Globovisión, Venezuela's sole opposition-minded TV station, has been doing a fairly decent job tracking the ever-growing scandal of the thousands upon thousands of kilos of food purchased by the government and left to rot in the nation's ports.

But I hesitate to give them full credit because, in typical Globovisión fashion, they keep getting in the way of a story that has shown some remarkable legs.

Case in point: this news item.

Globovisión managed to get their hands on a 2008 document where Venezuela's National Guard talks about 24,000 kilos of chicken they incinerated due to its advanced state of decay. They talk about the hole they're going to dig and how they're going to dig it. The only thing missing were pictures.

But watch the video to get the full Globovisión experience.

Following Juan Manuel Santos' scorching landslide in Colombia's Presidential election, much attention has been paid to the Venezuelan expert who, seemingly, helped turn his campaign around when Antanas Mockus became a threat.

In this interview (in Spanish), J.J. Rendón says a lot of things about Venezuela's peculiar situation, some of which are interesting, some of which I don't agree with (for example, he is far too critical of the opposition's lack of leadership, and he overemphasizes the opposition's role in changing the perception of foreign public opinion).

But his emphasis is in the right place: more than "unity," our opposition would do well to unify its message and not respond to the thousand red flags Chávez throws our way. Furthermore, he seems to understand that most Venezuelan voters are not in tune with the day-to-day of politics.

Hugo Chávez has been included in Foreign Policy's list of the world's worst dictators.

For any reasonable Venezuelan, this is just another embarrassment.

For Chávez, it reads like a Facebook page: so many new friends to make! You know it's coming:

"Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad and Raúl are there, but Blaise Compaoré? Where have you been all my life? 

Maduro, préndeme la joya. Nos vamos para Burkina Faso!"

BBC News has a video on the efforts to reduce crime in Petare. Reporter Will Grant toured with the Sucre police, and the piece is boiler-plate, a missed opportunity.

Not helping to disguise the piece's stench of journalistic tourism is its lack of precision.

Petare is in the "state of Sucre"? It's the "largest, most violent shantytown" in Latin America? (sez who?) The mayor's name is "Carlos  Oscaríz"?

And how about showing video of Chávez's National Police in action, on the streets, and not just showing us (for the n-th time) the same 50 recruits training in Fuerte Tiuna?

Hack job, BBC. 

Hugo Chávez just announced the suspension of enforced blackouts across the country. The rationing scheme was triggered by Venezuela's electricity crisis.

The suspension coincides with an increase in the reservoir levels in the country's main dams...but also just happened to come a day ahead of the World Cup. Coincidence? Nah...

Good news notwithstanding, don't get your hopes up. If you've been following Setty, you know this problem is here to stay.

Lights on, por ahora.

The attempts to convince Venezuelans he's just a middle-of-the-road guy are not restricted to economics. As the fat man said yesterday, while a chavista "priest" blessed him by creepily fondling his head on TV:

"Christianity and socialism can perfectly go hand in hand through the roads of history."

Ugh.

(Hat tip: JesusRZ)

The Master Thespian himself, on yesterday's Aló, Narcisista, doing his best Sybil imitation while talking about himself in the third person once again:

“(Business groups) Fedecámaras) and Consecomercio are engaging in ideological warfare to make people believe Chávez wants to end private property, which is a lie... we are willing to protect private property, as long as it benefits society.”

Really? What are they using for this ideological warfare - a collection of your own quotes?

Far as I know, the only ones talking about ideological battles are Chávez and his minions.

We all but predicted Antanas Mockus would coast to victory in the Colombian election, but Colombia's voters had another plan.

Today, in the first round of voting, Colombian voters gave Uribe protegé and Chávez nemesis Juan Manuel Santos a whopping 46% of the votes in the first round.

Mockus, in turn, came in second with 21%, an unsurmountable difference of 25 percentage points. This is much, much more than polls had predicted. This wasn't an election, it was a mauling. 

The second round is a mere formality. Unless something dramatic happens, Juan Manuel Santos is the next President of Colombia. Which can only mean things between Colombia and Venezuela are bound to get worse, not better.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for the Venezuelan Internet magazine Prodavinci on the importance of property rights in Venezuela's poor barrios. (Click here if you'd like to read it, it's in Spanish)

A commenter left a link to this audio-visual essay, which I found fascinating. You should check it out. Make sure you skip the intro and head to the section on Caracas.

Former taxman José Vielma Mora will now be known as something other than "the only chavista who is semi-competent": a traitor to the Revolution!

Here is Vielma Mora's hilarious, totally unbelievable attempt to stake out a position as some sort of moderate chavista, a position he conveniently expressed only after he didn't get the cambur he was gunning for. It's quite a performance:

"Expropriations must be paid immediately ... we have to strengthen private companies in Venezuela, and make them more dynamic."

Of course, it's all smoke-and-mirrors. In fact, he's already backing away from what he said.

Very entertaining!