Upon arrival at the airport last night, two things reminded me of the strange ways in which problems are sometimes solved in Venezuela:
–The Government has recently built a new arrivals hall at the international airport. The new hall is right above the old one, which now sits there empty, dark and unused. The new hall is very luxurious; the new baggage carrousels work well and the whole thing is very well organized, for now. The same was the case of the old one when it was first opened up in 1980. The problem was there was little maintenance since then, just enough to keep things running. The solution was typical of Venezuelan Governments, past and present: throw a lot of money at a problem building a new hall from scratch, rather than fix what was there. The old conveyor belts could have been fixed and the old hall fixed up. The arrivals hall at Kennedy airport is still the same one that I used to arrive at when I was an undergraduate. And that, my friends was a LONG time ago
–As you exit customs your luggage has to go through an x-ray machine. This applies to everyone. There was a line of maybe 20-25 people waiting to do this. I was maybe in the middle, when four guys with luggage carts went straight to the head of the line “aided” by some customs officers and ignoring the line. I could not stay quiet and started shouting that there was a line for everyone and these people were bypassing it and please they should go to end of the line. The Venezuelan solution to the problem: Easy, get rid of the complainer! A customs lady approached me and led me to a second machine way at the other end of the Hall that had nobody in line, while the four guys went ahead of the first line anyway.
The Devil's Excrement 
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