The Devil's Excrement

While the Government prosecutes people for simply going to the
Presidential Palace on April 12th. 2002, prohibiting them from leaving
the country and harassing them, the man who started it all, General
Lucas Rincón is exempt from even testifying, least of all being accused
of anything. Last Sunday the Prosecutor said Rincón had been threatened
into saying Chávez had resigned. Today it is the Minister of Defense
Garcia Carneiro who says
that Rincón showed braveness and was under pressure that day.
Meanwhile, the other cynic, that modern version of Perez Jimenez’ Pedro
Estrada called Isaias Rodriguez, gives a speech
describing how he had to break the “information circle” to tell the
world that Chavez had not resigned. Neither of them notes the
“slight” inconsistency that it was only their hero and buddy Lucas Rincón who told Venezuela and the world that Chavez had
resigned. The rest is simply rewriting history the chavista way.

Thus, under the outlaw revolutionary justice and logic, Rincón is
declared innocent by all his buddies, without testifying or even
telling the Venezuelan public why he acted the way he did. Everyone
else is similarly guilty, tried and sentenced by the same legal code of
the revolution even before they testify. Such is the travesty of
Justice in Venezuela under the Chávez revolution.

Whenever people talk about whether there was or not a coup on April
2002, they tend to simplify the events of those April days. To me, what
is important is that April 11th. was a day for decency. Hugo Chavez did
not leave the Presidency because this group or that one decided to
stage a coup. He left, because for days he had been preparing to stop a
peaceful march using violent means and there was part of the
Venezuelan military that was not willing to allow this, in what was
then still a civilized country. Chavez left the Presidency, out of the
sense of outrage by many Generals, some of which had been with him
until hours earlier, over the killing of Venezuelans who peacefully
went that day to the Presidential Palace to protest.

General Manuel Rosendo, up to then a symbol of loyalty to Chavez was
present at a meeting a few days earlier when Chavez talked about using
violence agaisnt his fellow citizens. Not only that, but on the 11th.
Chavez activated the Plan Avila a military plan to repress the
Venezuelan population. It was out of a sense of decency that all of
these Generals decided to ask Chavez to leave. It was also out of a
sense of decency that nothing happened to Chavez that day. He asked to
be taken to Cuba, which some of these same Generals refused to, because
they thought there should be justice for those that had died that day.
Not one person threatened Chavez those days, despite the fantasies that
he has now told so many times that he appears to belive them himself..

The rest, as they say, is history. After that, there may have been
three or four coups and counter coups, as ambition and greed made
friends of enemies and enemies of friends. The same Generals that
thought that Chavez should leave, felt that the solution was worse than
the problem. Mediocre Pedro Carmona somehow took over and showed that
he was as much of an autocrat as Chavez is. Some important current
figures of the Chavez administration, barely protested at the time. The
President of the Venezuelan Supreme Court Ivan Rincon even offered his
name as a possible temporary President. Jose Vicente Rangel, today the
VP, went home and said that he would go back to being a newspaper
reporter. Infamous “three sun” General Rincon tried to arrange for
Chavez’ flight to Cuba from the La Carlota airport in Caracas after
which he also went home quietly. The word coup was not used for a
couple of months after the fateful events of April 2002. The formation
of a truth commission to investigate the events was called by all
sides, but blocked by the current Government. It would have revealed
the lack of scruples of Chavez and his cohorts. The same lack of
scruples that they use daily to express their love for the poor while
they buy weapons, get rich and throw away the country’s money.

But, yes, that day, April 11th. 2002 a group of Venezuelans, who were
then considered to be both pro and against Chavez prevailed out of
their sense of decency for their fellow countrymen and out of outrage
for an immoral President. Unfortunately, since then, decency is
defeated daily in Venezuela. And the President has not changed. .

Venezuela: From April 11 to today’s dictatorship by Veneconomy

The third anniversary of the historical events of April
11-13, 2002, is approaching, events that can be given two different
readings, depending on which side of the street you are on: the
government’s or the opposition’s.
Those who agree with the government’s doctrine will enjoy a week given
over to a full-blown propaganda offensive. The owners of the
revolutionary process will spare no efforts (or money) to continue
selling their concocted version of what happened, and there will be
many who, naively, will continue to buy it. After all, propaganda is
something that the Bolivarians have proved to be very good at.

In its determination to rewrite history –something that all victors
do-, the government has tried to erase what truly happened from
people’s memories and has invented a fairy tale of a coup d’état for
public consumption at home and abroad.

In order to successfully accomplish this mission, the Hugo Chávez
administration has resorted to media and resources of all kinds, from
making use of its iron control of the branches of government and the
abundant petrodollars to taking advantage of a rigged system of
justice. It has twisted the facts in a trumped up documentary entitled
“The revolution will not be televised,” and, as though that were not
enough, it has persecuted and cornered countless people who exercised
their legitimate right to protest, one way or another, against a system
they opposed, as well as those who, doing their job, defended them
against the barbarities committed by supporters of the government.

The sad fact of the matter is that three years after April 11-13 no
one knows with any certainty what really happened, largely because the
government itself has not allowed objective investigations to be
conducted and because it has deliberately manipulated the facts. This
is due, in part, to the regime’s desire to hide the fact that a
multitude of 600,000 to 800,000 unarmed people who tried to reach
Miraflores Palace to demonstrate their opposition to the political
project that the government wanted to implement in the country was
repelled by force.

The truth is that, in these past three years, the historical
distortion of the facts and the absolute power accumulated by means of
legal stratagems have turned a democratically elected government into
the strongest dictatorship that Venezuela has known since the times of
Juan Vicente Gómez.

One of the
biggest mysteries of what happened on April 11^th. 2002, was the role
played by General Lucas Rincon. Rincon was not only the Chief of Staff, but was
also the highest ranking General in the Venezuelan Armed Forces, the only one
to receive three stars in decades. Rincon was also the man the set in motion
the so called “coup” against Hugo Chavez by appearing on a nationwide telecast
that evening, surrounded by the Chiefs of Staff and said: “ We asked the
President for his resignation, which he accepted”.

The rest
is of course history. Chavez claims he never resigned, Carmona came along, Chavez
came back in what was probably a sequence of coups rather than a single one as
Chavez likes to make believe. To compound the mystery even further, Rincon
showed up again only months later in Chavez’ Cabinet where he occupied
important positions for a couple of years.

The final
mystery is how come, despite the incredibly significant role he played, the
Prosecutor’s office has never called Rincon to testify or even charged him with
anything. After all, it was Rincon who set in motion everything that happened
that night. Had he not shown up on TV that night history would have been much
different. Despite this, Rincon has never been called and his role remains a
mystery

Today (El
Nacional, page A-2), the Prosecutor himself, Isaias Rodriguez attempts to shed
light on it and his explanation is so laughable, implausible and improbable
that nobody will ever believe it. Moreover, it is not the Prosecutor’s role to
decide whether Rincon was or not involved or not, his role is to have him
testify and let others decide.

According
to Rodriguez, Chavez sent Rincon that day to negotiate with the Generals that
wanted Chavez out. When Rincon gets there, he is surprised that absolutely all
of them are against the President and they “forced” him.

Now, I
find it hard to believe that they would force him take their side! Even more, I
just can’t believe that if all of the Generals were on the opposite side, that
he would be forced to speak to the nation and announce Chavez resignation.

Even more
laughable is that Rodriguez then says: “I have information that a Colonel had the
intention of assassinating Lucas (Rincon) of shooting him up close”. When asked
who he was, the Attorney General says: “I can’t remember, but he must have been
identified because I am talking about something that happened. Lucas found himself
in a very complex situation, difficult, because he finds a de facto situation. At
that moment he called the President and tells him there is no possibility of negotiations.
Te President tells him: You know what we have talked handle the situation in the
terms that we have talked about…Rincon decides on his own in terms of what the
President said…he tried to gain time”

I see,
very logical, in order to gain time Lucas Rincon decided to announce to the
country that Chavez had resigned!

Rodriguez
then proceeds to talk about Rincon as having to deal with a situation he was
not accustomed to. He then toots his won horn, saying that he was, because he
has been a politician all his life. I see, a mediocre politician who only rose
in power because he rode Chavez’ coattails has more abilities than a guy who
became the only three star General in decades and Chief of Staff! This guy
really thinks the world is truly stupid.

But in the
end the Prosecutor/Attorney General fails to explain why Lucas Rincon’s role has
never been investigated, why he has never been called to testify. As the
Attorney General, it is unacceptable for him to first say that someone almost
killed Rincon, but he has failed in these last three years to even look into
that. This is the same man that is in charge of upholding the law in Venezuela! He
has had his people look at videos to charge the people seeing in them for just
going to the Presidential Palace on April 12^th., but has not bothered
to look into who forced Rincon to say he was against Chávez?

Everything
Rodriguez says is so implausible and inconsistent that anywhere else, he would
be forced to resign because his statements simply show he has not performed his
duties and has instead devoted his time to persecute the opposition.

This guy
must really take us for fools, but in the end, maybe we are anyway.

Excellent
article on Venezuela in Spain’s La Vanguardia by Joaquim Ibarz, he
definitely did his homework.

Poverty swallows Chavez despite the waste of petrodollars

President Hugo Chavez has one
hundred ideas a day. Some 97 are discarded as impractical, but the three
remaining ones can cost Venezuela
a lot of money, since they are aimed only at mediatic and political
repercussion, instead of economic return.

Hugo Chavez finances poverty
so that everyone depends on him a Venezuelan entrepreneur of asturian origin, explains in a few words
the orientation of the revolutionary regime that is being implemented in
gradual fashion in Venezuela.

Financing poverty, without
creating wealth, is very costly to a State that in six years has not only spent
US$ 200 billion that have been received thanks to high oil prices, but has also
increased external debt (from US$ 22 billion went to US$ 27 billion) and
multiplied internal debt (In six years, from US$ 1.069 billion it became US$
13.5 billion). One has to add US$ 1 billion in a euro bond and a new issue of
some US$ 1.5 billion.

To prevent that the incumbent
President dilapidate oil income, the Macroeconomic Stabilization Find was
created destined to generate savings when the price of oil was over that one
fixed in the national budget. The differential would be reserved for when the
price went down; it was like insurance for junctures with fiscal deficits.
Chavez no only eliminated the Fund, but as if it were petty cash, he grabbed
the US$ 7 billion that had been saved up to 2002.

The increase in debt has
taken place in the middle of an oil boom. According to analyst Gustavo Garcia
Osio, what is happening with Chavez is the same that happened with the
management by Carlos Andres Perez and in the Government of Luis Herrera, when
public debt was multiplied in the middle of a spectacular rise in hydrocarbons,
whose bad consequences Venezuelans know well. When the price of oil moderated,
the debt became impossible to pay, which brought successive devaluations of the
Bolivar and a deterioration of public expenditures.

Chavez is repeating the same
errors of Perez and Luis Herrera, Chavez is a good exponent of the past he
denigrates so much, says to La Vanguardia, economist Hugo Faria. According to this
Professor, Chavez shows great fiscal irresponsibility to finance the uncontainable
public expenditures, not only with petrodollars and an increase in debt, but
also with successive devaluations. The curious thing is that Chavez devalues
while his mentor Fidel Castro, thanks to the billion dollars that he receives
from Venezuela
in cheap oil, revaluates the peso. In all of America, local currencies
are revaluing with respect to the dollar, except in Venezuela,


No country has managed to reduce poverty without sustained economic growth points out Farias.

A large part of today income is wasted on current expenditures looking for
electoral yields. Chavez said it very clearly: the money has to be spent with
political criteria, not an economic one. The purchase of Argentine bonds for
US$ 500 million is not advisable from an economic point of view, but it is from
a political point of view. Although the income from the petrodollars is huge,
the expenses are even bigger. Populism is expensive and there are many
interests, both internal and external, that have to be covered. Only part of
the expenditures goes through the official controls, the rest goes via parallel
paths, without much supervision.

The budget of the Ministry of Defense, which is higher than the Education one,
was increased with the boundless purchase of war material. Military
expenditures are shooting through the roof with the creation of a body of
reserves which is the equivalent to a parallel army, which must be composed of
hundreds of thousands of people. In the same manner, in the last few months he
has created five new Ministries, with the corresponding increase in payrolls.
The National Institute for Statistics (INE) has registered that between
February 2004 and February 2005 the public sector hired in the same period
227.201 workers, while the private sector only added 24.069 workers to its
staff.

Even though Chavez
devotes a good part of the oil income to assistance plans destined to those
that have the least, during his term, poverty has increased by 10.2 percentage
points. According to the President of INE, Elia Eljuri, when Chavez assumed the
Presidency the poverty index was 42.8%, while at the end of 2004 it has
increased to 53% (Non Government organizations raise it to 80% with 50% of the
population in extreme poverty)

Poverty is swallowing Chavez; he thought poverty could be reduced with subsidies and giving away money,
but only creating wealth can you combat poverty in a sustainable way. Chavez is
not concerned with generating growth. Because he thinks wealth is badly
distributed, he looks to eliminate inequality making everyone poor as
manager Gustavo Nahmens tells us.

Creating wealth is not Chavez€™ priority. On the contrary, he seems intent in
destroying it. Instead of backing private initiatives, he harasses the private
sector, who he considers his enemy for having signed in favor of the recall
referendum. The populist policies of the Government, together with the lack of
confidence in the future of the country and to a tax policy that forces
companies to pay the VAT ahead of time-on the basis of measures set by the
State-provoked the fall of investment and the bankruptcy of many firms.
According to data from Fedecamaras, in the last six years half the private
companies have disappeared, which was followed by and increase in unemployment.

The high
price of oil, debt, the improvement in tax collection and the CD’s issued by
the Central Bank (by as much as US$ 5 billion) are insufficient to take care of
the expenditure race that Chavez is propelling. Despite the increase in income,
the fiscal deficit increases (US$ 9 billion)

The lack of administrative control and competence facilities corruption. A new
revolutionary elite has surged that moves from the poor barrio to live in the
mansions of exclusive areas. Despite the bad economic situation, there is a
waiting list in Venezuela
to buy high end cars, that only enriched Chavistas are ready to acquire.

Chaos in the financial
execution of public funds accentuated with the creation of a parallel financial
sector. Without much infrastructure and without experts who had his confidence,
Chavez created eight new banks-Bank of Women, Bank of the People, Bank of
Popular Housing, Bank of the Armed Forces etc.-which give out loans without
guarantees and without worrying about collecting. Delinquency in Venezuela
ranges between 8 and 10%, but that if these banks reaches 53%, despite their
recent creation, some have been refloated by the State up to four times.

Social programs under Chavez are
doubly costly, since they duplicate activities and function of already existing
institutions. In the poor barrios he created health clinics and centers with
Cuban doctors, but he is allowing the slow agony of the Social Security system
(Hospital and emergencies), cutting their budgets. All of it has a political
end. For Chavez, what was there before he got to power, does not work. The only
things that work are those he creates.One of the measures that increased the popularity of the
Venezuelan President the most before the recall referendum was a network of
popular supermarkets known as Mercal-that offer foodstuffs at subsidized
prices. In some products, Mercal supplies 40% of what Venezuelans eat. Sugar,
flour, rice, beans, milk, oil, canned goods, pasta and other products enjoy a
direct subsidy (the difference between the purchase and the sale price) and an
indirect one when the price is not affected by operating and administrative
costs. The program is beginning to come apart at the seams: an increasing number
of foodstuffs are detoured to parallel markets at free market prices. The same
beneficiaries stockpile them, and sell them. Mercal confronts increasing
difficulties due to its management, commercial and financial contradictions.

Chavez is
imposing a barter economy. He gives oil in exchange for political support or
diverse products. To Castro’s regime he facilitates under advantageous conditions
some 80,000 barrels of oil a day, that Havana
pays for by sending 16,000 doctors sports trainers m advisors and agents of all
kinds. Given the good friendship n that Chavez maintains with Kirchner, he will
buy 500 million dollars of Argentine debt and sends crude in exchange for pregnant
calves. He exchanges with China
fuel oil for bicycles and tractors.

Alberto Barreda in today’s El Nacional (page A-12) expresses something
I have always believed in about the Venezuelan military, which becomes
even more important in the context of the new reserves and the
assymetric war:

“It it not an epistemological whim. The truth is that I can not stop
thinking that armies, in general, are symbols of backwardness in our
civilization, an expression of human misery, of the inability to face
and resolve differences in a different way. The history of humanity can
be a detailed registry of the adminsitration of violence, of its
controls, of its domination. Armies are the last powerful reresentation
of a kingdom that should by now be, more than anything, an antiquity.”

President
Chavez continued raising the specter of an external enemy Friday. This strategy
of inducing fear and nationalistic feelings in the population is typical of
autocratic regimes that want to hide the failure of their accomplishments. In
this case, the Chavez administration has raised the fear of a US invasion
which is seldom mentioned explicitly but is referred to as the “asymmetrical
war”. The subject is brought up almost daily and is accompanied by the daily
mention of the military reserve, which has quickly grown from an already exaggerated
half a million men to two million in less than two weeks. The whole thing is
not only typical of autocrats, but it shows the military framework of Chavez’
mind.

This is a
folly that will cost money and effort and bring nothing to the Venezuelan
population but grief and wasted resources. Chavez’ folly is embarking Venezuela in a
terrible path attempting to create fears that exist only in Chavez’ mind. But
as usual, it will be the people, those same “people” that Chavez regularly
claims to love and care for that will pay and suffer for all of it.

On Friday Chavez
announced that in the next few months there would be joint military exercises
between the armed forces and the civil population. About the only good thing he
said was that Otaiza was wrong in calling for the hate of the US, but Otauza
is still holding his post. Here, in his own words, Chavez defines the asymmetric
war and the folly he is embarking this poor country on:

“ Never in
100 years, that we recall, the thesis that is being considered that leads us to
think in military maneuvers that are not only military, but are
civilian-military has occured. The participation of the people in the defense of the
country, and in the promotion of the country, is essential in the asymmetric war
we are starting to focus on here”

“The
asymmetric war, in short, can be described as a war strategy that a contender under
inferior conditions uses to confront an enemy whose military forces openly surpass
their own, not only quantitatively but technologically. The asymmetry supposes
the application of non conventional tactics, like guerrilla war and terrorism,
with the purpose of wearing down the adversary: it is considered that the US
Army is involved in an asymmetrical conflict with the Iraqi resistance.”

“In an
eventual conflict, there will be various steps of defense; the first one will
be the structured armed forces, the second one, the organized reserve, and the
last, all of the people, in a sequence of retreats to the plains, the barrios, and
the mountains. With this the potential enemies that would think of invading Venezuela to appropriate
its oil richness “would leave with their tail between their legs.”

There you have it, direct from the madman’s mouth.