The Devil's Excrement

The Minister of Health demonstrated her ignorance today when she said, in reference to the Court’s decision on the Cuban medical doctors: ” No decision by a Court can be above the right to health and life”.This is simply ignorance.  First of all, it is precisely the Courts that decide in issues of conflicts between rights, not Minsiters. Second, the right to work of unemployed Venezuelan workers is being violated and that is also a right established by the Constitution. Third, there is a law regulating who can practice medicine, precisely to protect the rights to health and life of those being treated, otherwise anyone can claim they have some training that they do not. Venezuelan medical doctors are, in general, better trained than the Cuban ones. For decades anyone wanting to practice medicine in Venezuela had to pass an equivalency program in order to treat patients directly. Finally, it is incredible to me how the Venezuelan Government discriminates against its own citizens in the interest of ideology.

Omar “Cura” Calderon the former Governor of Tachira State was rescued yesterday in a joint effort by Venezuelan and Colombian police. Calderon said that he was kidnapped by Colombian common criminals in Venezuela, who thought that he was a rich man. The Government immediately said that the opposition had said this was political and that finding him shows it was not. What the Vice-President seems to have forgotten was that the puzzle when Mr. Calderon was kidnapped was the almost total silence by Government officials who essentially ignored the fact that an important opposition figure had been kidnapped. In fact, the only public statement the first two days was that of Tachira Governor Rnald Blanco who accued Mr. Calderon of kidnapping himself in order to gain publicity. This fact was never mentioned by the Vice-President in his customary selective memory. Events like this should be handled as non-political issues but that seems to be impossible in Venezuela today.

It was a day for articles about Venezuela in the international press. RMG sends this article from the BBC on the Cuban Doctors in Venezuela. meanwhile Scott from Burtonterrace, always concerned about our country, sends this link from a fairly good article by The Economist on the recall referendum. I particularly like the sentence in which the author says “Mr Chávez has suddenly gone cold towards this aspect of participatory democracy“, a point that only those that live here can truly appreciate since we had to put up with Mr. Chavez’ almost daily boasts that he was such great democrat that he wanted every issue decided by the people. Not anymore. Finally, there is the article in The Wall Street Journal (by subscription) entitled “Low maintenance, investment, hamper oil output in Venezuela“. The article coincides with oil experts and even Chavez’ slip yesterday that the ccountry’s oil production is coming up short, but it does send shivers up my spine to wonder what is going to happen to our country going forward. (Daniel also has anecdotal evidence of the problems within the oil industry) Here is the lead paragraph of the article, followed by the last one:

“Venezuela’s oil production, after a surprising rebound from a midwinter, antigovernment strike, now appears to be declining because of insufficient investment, poor maintenance and a shortage of skilled workers, industry analysts contend.

A variety of estimates peg the reduction at about 500,000 barrels a day below prestrike output of three million barrels a day. The delayed, poststrike shortfall, though only one piece in a world-wide oil-supply puzzle, is contributing to currently tight global supplies, experts say.”

“The loss is mainly occurring in the older oil fields in western Venezuela near Lake Maracaibo. Many of those wells, some of which have been in production for decades, need constant maintenance and redrilling to keep operating. Others must be injected with water or natural gas to coax heavy crude to the surface. The western fields naturally lose 15% to 25% of their annual production capacity if they don’t receive costly technical attention, analysts and industry experts say. “The real production issues are poorly done maintenance and too much pumping early on,” said Roger Diwan, an analyst with Petroleum Finance Co. in Washington. “Basically, the wells are buckling, and sand is moving in the fields.”

A scary picture for a country with an extremely bleak fiscal picture.

PDVSA announced it has named Boris Marchegani as the new Head of International Commercialization. Who is he? Easy, Mr. Marchegani is the CEO and co-founder of Pepex the same company that PDVSA handed all of its commercialization to last February. Unfortunately for PDVSA, Pepex and Venezuela, the results were a fiasco as other oil traders began arbitraging PDVSA and its customers. At that time, PDVSA had to stop working with Pepex due to the poor results. Now, the “genious” and CEO behind that company is brought in by the same man, Aires Barreto, who originally hired Pepex. Barreto, who had retired from PDVSA where he was a Director for Hector Ciavaldini, a jump well-above his previous managerial level at the company, was recently named Vice-President of the company and more recently Head of Commerce and Supply. Indian-born Barreto has more lives than a cat, the only question is why he keeps involving Mr. Machegani in PDVSA’s dealing or why Mr. Marchegani would even be interested in the position after being CEO of Pepex. Somehow, I can’t help but think that some interesting business deals are involved and not precisely in PDVSA’s or Venezuela’s interests.

For months, both local and foreign experts have been saying that Venezuela was producing no more than 2.5 million barrels of oil while the Venezuelan Government and the Minsitry of Energy and Mines was assuring everyone that the amount was 3.2 million barrels a day. Well, today President Chavez himslef said the country was producing 2.3 million barrels of oil. Innocent mistake or slip of the tongue?

The First Circuit Court on Administrative matters admitted the injunction introduced by the Venezuelan Medical Federation and suspended the permit given by the Medical College of Caracas (This is not a school, it is a union and the Federation is the union that encompasses all unions) to the Cuban doctors working in the program within the barrios. The Court ordered that any foreign Doctors that are in violation of the Law of Medical Practice to be replaced immediately replaced by Venezuelan ones. Here is the decision.  

This country is in trouble, the Venezuelan Supreme Court rules that the National Assembly incurred in omission because it did not name the members of the Electoral Board before the legal deadline for it. The Court gave the Assembly ten days to do it and set a deadline of an additional ten days to name a provisional Board. Well, there are now widespread rumors that the Court itself can not find one person considered to be “impartial” to both sides. If the rumor is true, this country is in more trouble that I thought it was, all our leaders are simply irresponsible!