The Devil's Excrement

MINFRA is the Ministry of Infrastructure. Today Teodoro Petkoff blasts
the Government, saying things similar to some that I have raised, but in his
sometimes more blunt and much better style. He entitles it as MINFRACASO,
making a play on the name of the Ministry and FRACASO which means failure in
Spanish

MINFRACASO
by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

The mega hole in Paracotos, in the Central Highway of the country, has
served to corroborate dramatically the every day more frequent complaints by
Chavez about the inefficiency of his own Government. All of a sudden, as if it
were the blow up of a picture, the country has perceived with one stroke, that
in the administration of daily life, the Government screws up daily.

A country that used to gloat of having the most important asphalt road
network of the continent, lives today the frightening deterioration of many of
those highways. Holes, failures of the edges, landslides, fallen bridges,
sections that remain unfinished, are the testimony to the lack of attention and
negligence that now have lasted more then six years. The Minister of Infrastructure,
Colonel Carrizales, admitted today that they have been careless about maintenance.

It was inevitable, we add. That Ministry was dismantled. Civil Servants with
years of experience were fired and replaced by people with no qualifications,
many coming from the Armed Forces and there we have the results. An organization
that can’t handle its load.

The Government
spends its time and money in organizing international meetings, in Congresses
for “revolutionary” tourism, in costly youth festivals, while Vargas state, for
example, languishes since almost six years ago, a victim now, more than of the
landslides, of the monumental incapacity of those who had to take care of them.
Vargas has been the permanent warning that disasters like the one in the Central
highway were foreseen. Disasters not caused by nature, but by the incapacity of
those that should prevent them. That the Government expresses its solidarity
with countries hit by natural tragedies can not be objected, the terrible thing
is it can not also express its solidarity with its own people. It donates millions
of dollars to an African country but has not been able to rebuild the sewers of
the miniscule town of Camuri Grande, in the Central Coast, destroyed by the rains in February.

What
better proof of the incapacity of the Ministry of Infrastructure that the East Tower
of Parque Central, where, ironically, it had its headquarters? There it is,
that giant monolith, destroyed by the fire, the promises of recovering it in a
few months now forgotten.

Up to now,
the skillful trick of marking distance with his incapable Ministers. has worked
well for the President. When you hear him reprimand the Minister of
Infrastructure (“Carrizales, I came by and from Maracaibo
to Coro, that
road is horrible”), people think that Chávez is concerned for the state of the
roads, but there it is, that useless Minister, he does nothing. But it so
happens that at least five people have been through the top position in that Ministry,
without any improvement in how it works, in such a way that it gives way to the
following question:

Could it
be that the mother of all incapacities is in the Presidential Palace of
Miraflores?

This entry was posted on August 3, 2005 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Venezuela.