The Devil's Excrement

Lots of
things happening and not enough time to blog all of them in detail:

—Revolutionary
Lying: For two years we have been told the country is producing 3.3 million
barrels of oil a day, but in Sunday’s release of the financials of PDVSA, it
clearly says that production in 2003 was 2.7 million barrels per day. Of these,
1.8 million were produced by PDVSA and 429 thousand by the partnerships in
2003.

—Bizarro
scene of the week: The Minister of Information and new President
of Telesur was complaining that with all of the extra hours at the official TV
channel VTV, the budget would not last the year. Funny, I thought he was the
boss of the Head of VTV. Has she been fired? No. Wonder how long the Telesur
budget will last. Nobody is reponsible for the circus, that is why the clowns go wild.

—Helping
the needy: Venezuela will subsidize
oil exports to poor Uruguay.
That country will purchase up to six shipments of 900,000 barrels paying 67% up
front and the rest financed with very low interest rates. Funny, Venezuela
with
a GDP per capita of $4,000 per inhabitant will help out those poor
Uruguayans
who have a GDP per capita of $12,600. Did I mention that Venezuela will
issue a bond in US$ at not such a low interest rate in the next couple
of weeks?

—Wasting
time and money: Caracas under piles of garbage
but the Mayor of the Metropolitan District came out today with his third spread
in the newspapers explaining why he wants to change the name of Caracas and the
anniversary of its founding. In a four page spread in Caracas’ most important dailies, the Mayor
explained the reasons, correcting the orthographic mistakes of the previous
ads. Hopefully those doing the research on the history of the city will not be
the same ones that don’t know how to spell. Obviously, the taxpayers pay for
these ads.

—10^th.
Milestone. Yes, Venezuelans now have ten million cell phones in their hands in the
latest statistics by telecom regulator CONATEL. Amazing for a country of 25
million where half the population is under 18. I still remember a telecom exec
explaining to me in the mid-90’s why it would never go above 5 million in the
next decade. I heard the same about Internet users three years ago. I did
mention the cell phone anecdote too.

–Revolutionary
Justice: The Electoral Hall of the Supreme Court denied tonight the
injunction requested by opposition groups against the electoral registry, in
the face of the election next Sunday. Of course, the registry is perfect as
claimed by the Head of the Electoral Board, if not ask “Henri Charriere” better
known as “Papillon, still
registered to vote after being dead for only 32 years.

—UVE’s
legality approved: The Electoral Board announced today, only three days before
the election, that the UVE party is legal. Hey! It is illegal to campaign since
Sunday, but you can legalize a party fielding thousands of candidates three days
before an election. Makes sense, no?. UVE is just
an electoral trick by Chavez’
MVR party created as front to clearly violate the Venezuelan Constitution. The party
simply does not exist. Another day. Another trick. Do I hear the word
democracy? The word Justice? We will have to appeal this one to the Celestial
Hall of the Supreme Court.

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?

I thought
that today was the three year anniversary of my blog and was planning to
celebrate it with a post about it and tell you how happy I was to find out
today this
link to my page on a page named Justice for Linda,
sponsored by the International Planned Parenthood
Federation’s Western Hemisphere Region,
to support the case of Linda
Loaiza. It turns out the anniversary of the blog is Saturday, but it does not
change my satisfaction at being linked to promote Linda Loaiza’s cause.
The link is to this post
that
I wrote explaining the case and why it bothered me so much about what
it meant in the context of my country. I was quite mad
that day at the case, at the Government and at our joke of a Judicial
system. Somehow being upset leads to good posts. If that post in any
way contributes to Linda
Loaiza’s cause, the three years minus two days of blogging would have
been
definitely worth it.
Please help!

It is now official, the man who was removed as head of Fogade for
suspected curruption, investigated by Congress, who admitted using
Government property and airplanes for personal use, but never charged is now the General Secretary of Carabobo State.

Kudos to the Chavista workers of that Governorship who protested the nomination.

Another step forward for corruption under the revolution.

In the context of the problems with the highways that lead into Caracas, a friend reminds
of this article in April by humorist Laureano Marquez in Tal Cual

Official Communiqué by Laureano Marquez

Today when we commemorate the nineteenth anniversary of that fateful
day, the day in which the fascist scoundrels took over power for 24 hours, initiating
one of the most brutal repression ever known in our history, we remember the
facts as they took place, avoiding manipulations that North American imperialism
has been divulging throughout the years, hurt in their pride, as it is, by the
defeat our troops have inflicted upon them, first in the Battle of the Highway
in 2007, when we intentionally tore down Viaduct #1 of the road to La Guaira,
making the imperialist troops desist of the idea of invading us, even if, in
the beginning, to gain time, our maximum strategist, with the military
brilliance which is only comparable to that of Napoleon, made them believe that
it had fallen down because of negligence. He even managed to fool us! A brilliant
asymmetric and preventive strategy which managed to end forever the possibility
of a foreign invasion., which at the same time promoted the endogenous development
of the city of Caracas, achieving, on the one hand, the dispersion of the city
when more than two million inhabitants decided to voluntarily move elsewhere,
both to the interior of the country and abroad, and on the other, promoting food
self-sufficiency, when cultivation in the balconies of apartments developed as
well as in the Doña Elena Farm (formerly Parque del Este)

The gringos have also been hit hard since we decided to eliminate supplying
them with oil and now they use these very ugly panels on their roofs and some ridiculous
windmills that have reduced oil consumption by 80%.

Better for us, we now have abundant gasoline and thanks to our
endogenous Cuban technicians, the oil feeding plan, with the empanada route of
crude oil, the minestrone of Orimulsion, the cachapa of asphalt and many other
delicacies of national food made with derivates from crude oil, which is rich
in nutrients, calcium, phosphorus, niacin and three rich vitamins.

Thanks for everything Fidel. We take this opportunity to congratulate
you our on your 97th. Birthday.

Coming back to April 2002. As the truth commission determined, which-
at last- was named by the National Assembly, after the parliamentary elections
of 2005, when the opposition lost all of its representation, the facts took
place as we narrate in the following:

About 10 in the morning on April 11th., a demonstration backing the
Chief if State met at Tarek William Saab square, in Chuao, with the objective
of marching towards Miraflores.

More than a million people (a number never seen in our history, as
later revealed by aerial photography in 2006) marched through the highway. It
was all done to confound the opposition, it was an enveloping strategy.

The demonstrators decided to disguise themselves as opposition forces and even use
their slogans, avoiding in that way the numerous infiltrators from the CIA,
such as one John Smith, a gringo from Ohio-as we later learned- who made people
call him Carlos Ortega and a Spaniard with white hair that Aznar himself infiltrated
whose name was Carlos Fernández Carmona, as revealed years later by the
Prosecutor, who was actually one of us. It was none other than the
Vice-President with the clear eyes, infiltrated by us to disarticulate the conspiracy.
This explanation clarifies the doubts about where the Vice-President was those
three days.

Unfortunately, as we learned in 2009, in a new speech by the Prosecutor, a
group from the opposition had penetrated official lines since way back, turning
officials and councilmen. Taking strategic advantage of this, they placed themselves
in Puente LLaguno and shot at random against our people. They managed to fool
us for the first few years. Well, they thought they did, because out
intelligence bodies knew the truth, they just wanted to gain time to see how
they could arrest them.

There were new revelations in 2013. A General with three suns, who for many
years made believe that he supported the President, was in reality the true
clandestine leader of the opposition, he pressured the President in order to
ask for his resignation, while his double allowed himself to be taken prisoner
to confound the opposition even more and gain time. While this was happening,
Carmona, in a movie set made to look like the Miraflores Palace, was faking
that he had everything under control, placing next to him a bunch of actors
dressed like military All of us, to gain time and manage to get the “people” ,
which supported the President 100%, take to the streets, which eventually
happened.

More than four million people, did I say four? Ten or more for sure, surrounded
the Miraflores Palace. The President, machine gun in
hand, fought war planes sent by President Bush, low noise airplanes that nobody
felt flying at that time, as we later learned thanks to the speech by the
Prosecutor in 2015. The President personally shot three of them down, thanks
God they fell into the Guaire
River and the currents
dragged them, because otherwise there could have caused a terrible tragedy.

That also explains why nobody saw them then.

This is the truth of the facts, although we do not rule out that next year, in
a new anniversary of this date, our lifetime speaker reveals more data, because
as he himself has pointed out: the investigation remains open, in order to gain
time.

Yesterday
I used the word disbelief to describe what I felt when I heard Chavez and
Diosdado Cabello talk. I really don’t know which word to use today to describe
what I felt when I
heard the statement by the Minister of Justice and the Interior Jesse
Chacon say when swearing in the new Directors of the Investigative police
(CICPC) and I quote:

“To those that have the responsibility, which is not easy what they are facing,
but I am sure we are going to meet the challenge…you have two options, either
you win and we transform the CICPC or after this management we eliminate the
CICPC”

Anyone get the solution? If these guys are not successful in running the
investigative police, we will eliminate it. And then what? Is this from a
management book? Or he plans to give the job to the Cuban police? This is
simply ignorance. Institutions such as the CICPC work everywhere in the world
under competent and knowledgeable management. If it does not work, the
problem is not solved by getting rid of the institution. This is stupid; it is
like the old joke of the guy who sold the sofa, because his wife was cheating
on him with another man using the living room sofa. But this reflects the same
tragedy of the Chavez revolution I mentioned yesterday, Chacon is another
unconditional, mediocre, former military that Chavez likes to have around. With
incompetent people like him, nothing will ever get done.

Oh! By the way, this is the same
guy in charge of the infamous maintenance and disaster prevention committee
that Chavez named. Maybe they should eliminate that too!

Sometimes you read the local papers in disbelief. First there is Chavez himself, saying that he is not only very unhappy
about his Government, but that he is very unhappy about the job his
Minister of Housing is doing. He should be. During the Chavez
administration, an average of 16,000 housing units have been built per year, down from 60,000 plus during the bad Governments of CAP and Caldera. You can see the graph here.
The problem is that Chavez has been promising an improvement for a
while and nothing happens. In fact, he promised 100,000 units in 2005
and 200,000 in 2006, but so far in 2005, only 17,000 units were built.
The question is: Why is Montes still Minister? Chavez has scolded him
publicly time and time again and if anything, things get worse rather
than better.

The
second statement that was surprising was that of the Governor of
Miranda State and former Minister of Infrastructure Diosdado Cabello,
who said that the highways of the country were coming to the end of
their useful life. He did not clarify if he was referring to those
built by Dictator Perez Jimenez in the 50’s, or the newer one from the
60’s 70’s, 80’s or 90’s. But all of them?

Let me explain what the context of this statement was. There are essentially three highways that lead in and out of Caracas. (There is also the Pan-American Highway,
but in most countries that would be called just a road). The Caracas-La
Guaira highway that goes to the port and international airport near
Caracas (White line towards the North below), the Regional highway that
goes South and West (White line out of Caracas below) and the Eastern
highway (White line to the right below), the name of which says it all. During
the last year there had been problems with two of them: The Caracas La
Guaira highway, built in the 50’s by Dictator Perez Jimenez, has a
viaduct that is being displaced by land movements and also had a
stretch of surface of it that suffered a drop of about half a meter.
The latter is being fixed and supposedly the displacement is also being
worked on and has been slowed down. The Eastern highway had also had
problems. Twice during the last six months part of the road had simply
disappeared under the action of running water.

Fortunately
the third one, the “Autopista Regional del Centro” the most important
road in the country had not been affected. Until yesterday when the
following hole opened up in it:

To
give you a perspective of how big the hole is, it covers both sides of
the highway including four lanes and two parking lanes. Sadly, a
lieutenant that was helping out, was speaking on his cell phone and
fell to his death in the hole yeasterday.

In
the meantime, all traffic will have to use the Pan-American Highway
until this one is fixed, which, to give you an idea, has so much
traffic, that I used to live in the city of Los Teques up to six years
ago, only 22 Kms (14 miles). away, but it would take me 2 hours to
drive that stretch each way every day. So I moved to Caracas. For the next three weeks, which is the estimate to fix up the hole, the flow of both roads will go through the much smaller Pan-American Highway. Truly a mess.

Venezuelan
Governments have never been very good at maintenance; they are not
“show off” projects that people see visibly. But what has changed is
that, much like in the housing sector, which I have discussed before,
Chavez looked for people loyal to him, rather than looking for people
who support him, but are not unconditional. Such is the case of
Minister of Housing Montes and Minister of Justice Chacon. Not that
long ago (April?) Chavez named Chacon, who already is Minister of
Justice and the Interior as Head of the Committee for Maintenance and
the Prevention of Disasters. We have not heard anything from that
Committee since and Mr. Chacon is no expert in either topic and
has his ahnds fulll anyway. Maintenance is not something a
committee decides or does. Maintenance has to be part of a state
policy. In fact, it has to be almost a state of mind.

The
sad fact is that despite the huge resources the Government has had in
the last seven years, little has been spent in infrastructure or
maintenance. The former Minister of Infrastructure is wrong in saying
that these highways have come to the end of their useful life. The fact
is that they were all built at different times, so it would be
unrealistic for all of them to be in the same state at the same point
in time. Furthermore, much like my airport story last month, maintenance is the key.

The
scary part is that the situation has never been worse than it is today.
The highway that was shut down yesterday is the one trucks use to
supply Caracas from the Puerto Cabello
port, the largest port for imports in the country. Alternate routes,
nighttime shipping and other adaptations can compensate for the
problem. But, should another problem occur or the Caracas La Guaira
highway has a problem, it could truly become critical.

In
the end, it is a matter of management and responsibility. Everyone
speaks (This is not new!) as if it was never their problem, nobody
takes responsibility for it. And then there is management. All of
Chavez’ close collaborators on these matters are former military, none
of them with even distinguished careers in the Armed Forces, but they
are loyal to Chavez. Unconditionally. Thus, he does not replace them,
he does not look outside of that circle for Ministers and
collaborators. In a country as complicated as this, that is surely a
path to failure.