The Devil's Excrement

I never liked now Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel when he was a reporter. He would sometimes use his column to vent personal issues with people and would make outrageous accusations using his “sources” but never would provide proof about anything. Curiously, he made his career and reputation blasting the military for corruption and later became great friends of the same people and as a member of the Government has done nothing but defend them against all charges of corruption. While he blasts the “oligarchs” he fails to mention how rich he is, his immense art collection and the fact that he has always drawn a salary from the state and got to where he is today thanks to the space given to him by the major media outlets.

But I never believed he would be the great cynic that he has proven to be. In a post last Thursday I showed pictures of Rangel in Plaza Altamira (Francia) the day the pro-Chavez march went by, invaded the Plaza, took over the whole area and proceeded to destroy what was there, including an image of the virgin that was beheaded and another that was painted over with graffiti and desecrated. The picture is very clear; Rangel is looking towards Plaza Altamira and applauding. There is no other possible interpretation to what he is doing, he is encouraging, approving what the Chavistas are doing, and he can not be applauding the dissident military in the Plaza. Whether at that time the religious figure were being abused or not is irrelevant. He was there, the Vice-President of Venezuela, approving the invasion of the Plaza by political thugs . That is not what civilized people do, his role should have been the opposite, he should have tried to ask the Chavistas to follow the path of the march, avoid confrontation, violence and respect private and public property. That is what leaders are supposed to do, lead by example. Instead he encouraged the destruction and it went overboard.

But his cynicism today was simply too much. In statements made to the press, he asked the Catholic Church leaders to be more “responsible” questioning how Bishop Porras could even look towards the Government and blame it for recent attacks on the church. He said there were millions of Catholics in Venezuela, many of them Chavistas and they should be respected. The climax was when he denied that Chavistas have participated in attacks on the church in Caracas or Falcon state. (The only attack in Caracas was the one from which the pictures below were taken). He finally suggested that the church leaders look to the dissident military of Plaza Altamira for the blame in the violence against the church. Ummm, the same ones that placed the altar and the images in Plaza Altamira and have been there for over a year. I guess Goebbels would have been very proud of him.

Ah! I almost forgot, but Pedro reminded me of this article in today’s New York Times about Venezuela. Just to be fair, I have to say it is the first article by Juan Forero which I don’t get mad at, even if it is quite negative.

Ah! I almost forgot, but Pedro reminded me of this article in today’s New York Times about Venezuela. Just to be fair, I have to say it is the first article by Juan Forero which I don’t get mad at, even if it is quite negative.

Another attack on a church, the same church in Los Teques where a Molotov cocktail was thrown last week, was attacked past midnight last night when gasoline was sprayed  in front of it and set on fire. The gate and the roof were damaged.

The National Electoral Council announced today that it had unanimously decided not to modify the regulations for the evaluation and validation of the signatures for the request for a recall referendum. The decision closes the door on an additional source of tricks. Carrasquero said that the CNE would not change the rules in the middle of the game, but it failed to disclose why it was that the issue was even considered in the first place. In fact, the pro-Chavez forces had brought a proposal for change which was countered by a different proposal. In the end neither was approved and the regulations were left as approved before the petition drives by both sides took place. This seems to be the logical decision and there was definitely something sinister behind the proposed changes.

The opposition also announced that it will hand in the signatures on Friday. No matter what anyone says, the pro-Chavez forces which gathered fewer signatures a week earlier than the opposition have yet to submit theirs, but the Chavistas keep criticizing. The total number of sigantures to be handed in will be 3,467,050, after the names crossed out and the bad forms were eliminated. The total numbers of signatures processed today had topped 2.6 million with about 600,000 to go.

Separately, the OAS submitted a proposal to the CNBE on its role in the verification process. Twom months ago, any foreign or international particiaption was rejected outright, by now it is a given that it will be present guaranteeing the transparency of the process.

After both the pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez groups have gathered the required signatures, there have been indications that the Consejo Nacional Electoral, might modify the regulations wunder which the signatures and the tabulations will be accepted or rejected. The point is a fairly subtle one. Essentially, in Venezuelan elections the final tabulations play an important role. Votes are counted at each polling station and a final document with tabulations and observations is drawn up by all the observers and signed. In the past, significant discrepancies between this document and the tabulated numbers, would lead even to the rejection of all of the votes from a polling station. As an extreme example, if the total number of votes exceeded the number of registered voters in a polling station, all those results were rejected and not taken into account in the election.

In the case of petitions for referenda, this tabulation becomes less relevant, since it will be the CNE itself that will add up and verify all of the signatures directly from the submitted forms. Thus, the regulations for these documents drawn up when the new CNE was named, dealt little with this subject. Well, now some pro-Chavez lawyers within the CNE have proposed a new set of very strict regulations which would allow, for example, for a whole set of forms from a polling station to be rejected if, for example, the number of forms that the document said contained differed by one. This is of course simply a maneuver designed to try to invalidate signatures wholesale. Moreover, the opposition has prepared all of its strategy based on the current regulations so that only a minimum number of signatures can be rejected by the CNE. Forms and processes were planned according to the regulations existing then. Moreover, it definitely smells fishy to be introducing new regulations after the signatures have been collected and handed in. The issue is so subtle and confusing that I have read dozens of times the statements by the Head of the Consejo Nacional Electoral yesterday in El Universal, and I am still not sure whether he concludes that it will be possible or not to invalidate a whole set of forms at once o not. At one point he seems to say that it will not, but at another the reporter concludes it is possible, using a variation the old Venezuelan electoral axiom “Acta mata planilla” (Final tabulation kills forms), which of course used to be “Final tabulation kills votes”. The opposition is now requesting that no modifications be made of the regulations retroactively and is saying that the forms will not be handed in until all regulations are in place.

Another trick, another day

Good one from Rayma in today’s El Universal

“I recommend the referendum route, this is a blind street”

Good one from Rayma in today’s El Universal

“I recommend the referendum route, this is a blind street”

The flu has kept me from blogging this weekend, but not from spending a couple of hours helping verify the petition signatures. Very interesting process, an all volunteer force shows up at whenever time they want to verify at the 200 computers (I would bet there were even some 486’s there). You are shown a screen with four digitized national id numbers from the petitions, you type in the numbers that you think you are seeing (More on that later) and click on continue. The data, as digitized with the handwritten name of the person and his/her birthdate as written on the form, is then presented to you in a new screen for the same four id numbers as the previous screen, with a comparison to the database from the Consejo Nacional Electoral, If the name and the birthdate agree, you accept it. The criteria to accept are that at least two names should be the same and the birthdate should match, admitting both formats dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy. As per the CNE criteria you are allowed to accept up to a two year difference on the yyyy, but no difference on the day and month. You are told that when in doubt is better to reject a signature, than accept it. You had to click on the reason for rejection. In the first screen there were two reasons, illegible or crossed out (Whenever and error was made on a form, that line was crossed out). In the second screen you would reject on the basis of name difference or date difference or illegible. I was really concentrating on the work, so I did not keep statistics of rejections, but my guess is that I was running at an 8-15% rejection clip. The biggest reason for rejections was simply people’s handwriting; there were many confusions between 4’ and 9’s, 3’s and 5’s and some 1’s and 7’s. The second reason was bad quality in the digitization, the third was a funny one, many people born in the 70’s appear as having been born in October, when they were born a different month. If it was illegible, you would say so and it will be processed separately. If there was no agreement it will be verified again manually too. As of yesterday 2.33 million valid signatures had been verified. With more than one million left, by Wednesday the process should be complete and then the petition can be handed in.

Since I have terrible handwriting, I can’t complain about how badly people write, but I think they were quite careless sometimes. Numbers were sometimes small, difficult to distinguish, unreadable. The names were many times written in cursive, or very small letters, making it difficult to distinguish. In general, it was the birthdate that was easiest to check. I processed 450 in less than two hours, but got up once to look for someone about a case there were no rules about. Have no clue about whether this is low or high or average. The whole thing is very well organized.

As for the flu, it is doing quite well, I am not; I had actually gotten a flu shot about two weeks ago, so I probably feel better than I would otherwise. I do have to mention Saddam, what can I say but it will help closure in Iraq. Chavez did not mention anything about it in his Sunday speech, but I can’t help but remind everyone of this event when Hugo Chavez became the first Head of State in the world  to visit Saddam Hussein after the 1990 Gulf war in 1999. As usual, a picture is worth 10,000 words: