Caracas Chronicles

This last weekend was the bloodiest of the year in Caracas' undeclared civil war: 67 people were murdered between Friday and Sunday. 

The AFP account - which, by the way, makes its way to newspapers the world over - is gripping. People shot down while enjoying a beer with their friends, cab drivers shot down while resisting a robbery attempt. One of them came into the morgue with nine gunshots wounds.

What forces prompts someone to shoot another human being and conclude that one gunshot wound is not enough, that they need to be gunned down nine times?

Pollsters have been telling us recently that poorer Venezuelans are reluctant to pin this obvious, horrific failure of the government ... on the government! They tend to see the crime problem as related to poverty, not public policy.

This is bonkers on many, many levels, but it is what it is - although I've yet to see this theory tested in a more rigorous fashion.

Think they could never censor the Internet? Think again.

Think they won't take away all the powers of the legislature if they happen to lose next September? Think again.

At this rate, our best-case scenario is to have a majority in a hollow-shell AN next year.

They're laying the groundwork people. Guerra avisada ... mata igualiiito!

Teodoro Petkoff's editorial today is, as usual, worth a read. In it, he takes stock of the opposition's method for deciding unity candidacies. He finds a lot to like, but takes the opportunity to slam the naysayers.

Petkoff reminds his readers the opposition umbrella group, the Mesa de Unidad, agreed that the "list" candidacies for the National Assembly should go to the parties that are strongest in each state. In other words, Primero Justicia gets Miranda, UNT gets Zulia, Copei gets Táchira, etc.

With regards to political prisoners, he says that an effort was made to place them as candidates in "sure-fire" or "close-to-sure" districts, and to avoid having them compete in a primary. That is what the Mesa has done, placing Iván Simonovis as a candidate in Baruta, Richard Blanco in El Recreo, and Gustavo Azócar in San Cristóbal.

So, guess who puts food on the Palin family table? 

If you're Venezuelan, you do!

How does that work out? As with Kevin Tocineta, there are six degrees of separation:

1) Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, is a snow-mobile racer.

2) He participates in a snow-mobile race called the Iron Dog.

3) Todd Palin's team is sponsored by Mystik Lubricants, as you can see in the picture - 

4) Mystik Lubricants is owned by ... (you probably suspect where this is going by now) ... CITGO!

5) Citgo is owned by Hugo Chávez. 

6) Chávez es el pueblo.

Ergo, you pay for Sarah Palin's groceries.

This is the kind of story the blogosphere was created to spread!

Mudflats is calling it Sarah's Socialist Snow Machine. Palingates says Sarah is "palling around with Communists." Andrew Sullivan, of course, had to give up a link.

Personally, this seems like a silly, inconsequential little news item to me, but Quico talked me into posting about it because...well, because Sarah is a traffic magnet for blogs!

Angel Falls, Venezuela. The world's tallest waterfall, or what's left of it.

Pass the Zoloft.

Last week, the Chávez-friendly polling firm IVAD published its latest survey. The numbers are devastating for the government.

While 48% of Venezuelans would like Chávez to end his term in 2012 and make way for someone else, a full 26% want him out of office ... this year. Only 11% of Venezuelans want to see him govern until 2021.

People's self-identification with chavismo is at an all-time low. A full 41% of people surveyed identified themselves as "not chavista," while only 29% identified themselves as "chavista." 23% of them identified with neither chavista nor "not chavista".

Close to 40% of Venezuelans blame the government for the electrical crisis. But close to 60% disapprove of the government's handling of the crisis.

The percentage of people who think the country's situation is positive (including those who think it's moderately positive) is 35%. The percentage who think the country's situation is negative is 62%. A full 42% think the country's situation is either "bad" or "very bad." 54% of Venezuelans have little to no confidence on the President.

Is the opposition poised to reap the benefits of this disaster? Somewhat.

Its numbers are not great, but they are much better than they had been. 

For example, 50% of Venezuelans think the opposition has a plan for the country, versus 41% who think they do not. A full 59.6% of Venezuelans think the work of the Mesa de Unidad is positive (including those who think it's moderately positive).

On the other hand, Venezuelans are evenly split on the opposition's work on behalf of the country, with 49% labeling it "positive to moderately positive," and 45% labeling it "negative to moderately negative."

Interestingly, voting intention for September 26th is split three ways. 29% expressed a desire to vote for the opposition candidate, 28% prefer to vote for the chavista candidate, and a whopping 29% prefer to vote for an "independent" option. If you add the "opposition" and "independent" options to the opposition (a big if), chavismo is in for a crushing 2-to-1 defeat in terms of votes.

 ... to focus your attention on the strength of Colombia's, where the Constitutional Court is set to reject a referendum on allowing Alvaro Uribe to run for a third consecutive term.

The Court's decision has not been announced, but it has been widely leaked. You can follow the developments in the mainstream media, or better still, via the great Colombian blog La Silla Vacía. 

To a lot of people, Uribe is an authoritarian leader. But he's an authoritarian leader of a democratic state.

Chávez, on the other hand, is the authoritarian leader of an authoritarian state. This distinction makes all the difference in the world.

Update: El Tiempo has confirmed the Court rejected the referendum on a 7 to 2 vote.

Whopper of the day: "The Fourth Republic (Translation: the governments prior to Chavez) did not carry out the necessary investments to solve the country's electricity crisis." 

Vice-President Elías Jaua at the National Assembly today.

Whatever happened to El Niño being the cause of the crisis? 

Update: Boludo Tejano, in the comments section, FTW: "Similarly, Abraham Lincoln did nothing to deal with the Great Depression. Thomas Jefferson did not prepare the US for World War II. Truman, for all his campaign talk about the "do-nothing Congress" in 1948, did nothing to deal with the 2008 financial crash. Do-nothing Presidents."

I can see it now. Foreign journalists in Venezuela beginning to board the Henry Falcón bandwagon, naming him Chávez's strongest rival, clapping away at their keyboards discussing "chavismo sin Chávez."

I can practically hear the chitchat in the bakeries of Las Mercedes, in the halls of plush condos in La Castellana, where the Marialejandralopeces of the world, excited about their "reasonable" chavista, are talking about how the government is discombobulated and has a rival it fears in Falcón.

It's all a ploy.

This latest PR stunt by Colombia's FARC guerrilla group would be funny ... if it wasn't so creepy. (Hat tip: JR)

Update: TalCual has the backstory. Complete with Reyes laptop emails and high-dollar payments - it's almost as bizarre as the song itself. Turns out FARC has a guy, Julián Conrado, working full-time as an in-house jingle composer. That'll look great on his resumé. 

The obscenity-laden "chou" that Hugo Chávez and Alvaro Uribe put on in Mexico made its way to CNN's main page.

You know you've hit rock bottom when the Cuban President ends up playing peacemaker. The only thing missing in this surreal summit was Peter Sellers yelling: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!"

Sad.

Austin, Texas, USA. 9:30 AM, one foggy day.

Ciudad Ojeda, Estado Zulia, Venezuela. 4 PM.

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New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. 5 pm.

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Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. No need to hang at precarious angles from your windowsill to catch the most scenic bit of your view - just send us an honest shot of what you see when you look up from the place where you typically read this blog. And please - send files no bigger than 400 KB.

Last week, Venezuela's hyper-nationalist government - the same one that bitterly decried the 1990s' Apertura Petrolera as a giveaway of National Sovereignty - signed an enormous deal with multinational oil companies to expand Venezuela's oil production. It was the first such deal in the oil industry in Chávez's 11 years in power. Chevron and Repsol won.

The event was remarkable on several counts.

In contrast to the much-maligned apertura, the winning bidders will actually be able to list Venezuela's oil reserves under the "assets" column in their balance sheets - a virtual privatization of our oil before it's even been pumped out of the ground.

And while chavismo hailed the auction as a victory, the process took much longer than it needed to, and the government's initially preposterous terms were significantly softened after the first couple of attempts to auction off the blocks flopped.

It's when you get to the details that the irony gets heavy: a government that spent years gleefully going to town on the low royalty rates charged on the initial set of heavy-oil apertura projects ended up having to slash its regalía demands by fully one third. A movement that  has long portrayed international arbitration clauses as  "instruments of transnational capital's domination of the third world" found itself forced to put the clauses back in. All to sweeten the deal for transnational capital. Even then, their name is so black in international oil circles that one of the three blocks put up for auction didn't manage to attract any bids - which is crazy, considering there was zero exploration risk.

But I'll leave debate of the terms of the transactions to the experts (a good place to start is Miguel's excellent summary). What strikes me is that if all you did was listen to our opposition politicians, you wouldn't have heard about any of this.