Caracas Chronicles

“Bureaucracy doesn’t substitute  —nor intimidate — the People”.

Thus spake Chúo Torrealba, answering Francisco Ameliach’s declarations that the Recall won’t ultimately happen this year, and that he’ll take legal measures against MUD. Hearing Chúo speak, you’d think that MUD is completely convinced that there will be a RR this year, that the 20% signature drive will be a landslide, and that there’s consensus within the opposition.

MUD put out a communiqué entitled “Ten Days from the Recall” in which — I shit you not —the phrase “Tramposería Sale” is the main subject heading. Some kind of latin term-of-art, no doubt. Which in my opinion elicits as much respect as everyone else who uses that phrase: every eight-year-old in Venezuela. But hey, these are our best representatives available. Yay.

Economist Orlando Ochoa talked about inflation, saying that the BCV should emit banknotes for 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000 bolívares. He said that inflation could go as high as 2,000% in months. Similarly, Luis Oliveros stated that, with a budget that went from 1.5 billion to 8.5 billion, the government’s implicitly admitting to an inflation of 500%.

While we’re on the budget, lawmaker and president of Parliament’s permanent Foreign Afffairs comission Luis Florido denounced on Twitter that the national budget is destined to “international lobby and the purchase of weapons”, as opposed to solving the humanitarian crisis. So if you’re keeping score, we have an inconstitutional budget which bypasses Parliament, more than five times larger than last year’s, set to an unreal oil price, which prioritizes lobbying, and designed to allow the President to ignore states and use national resources as his personal wallet. And these are 2017’s problems while we’re in October of 2016.

So it’s a little as if Maduro was pregnant with 2017’s economic policy and, two months from his due date, he was taking up crack, eating breakfast at a roadside sushi buffet with an open bar of bootlegged cocuy, and thinking of naming the child Wilyeikerson. I’m not liking the child’s odds here.

More on the issue of Officially Ignoring the Existance of The National Assembly, Súmate reminded all those intending to be CNE rectors that the application process is open until today. I ignore whether anyone has officially applied yet, but we can be sure that the process will go on unencumbered, that the AN will name the most competent people available, and that the CNE rectors whose term is up (Tania D’Amelio and Socorro Hernández) will gracefully yield their post to their succesors.

On a happier note, our Under-17 women’s football team will be playing the semi-finals of their World Cup in Jordan. This is mostly due to an amazing girl who’s probably among our Top 3 athletes right now; Deyna Castellanos. Just look what she did to the Canadians:

Now the funny thing is that we won the quarter-finals against Mexico and will play the next match against North Korea, which makes me wonder two things: how apparently girls’ under-17 football is the only thing that stark “socialist” dictatorships are good at, and what sort of media stunt both governments will pull to pass the match off as an achievement of the revolution and their own personal success.