The Devil's Excrement

Lots of articles about the Viaduct #1 in today’s papers both
El Nacional and El Universal give brief histories of the problem as well as the
search for an alternate route. El Universal probably devotes the most space to
it (which is good since it is free) with articles about the history
of the road and the viaduct, with some really neat pictures of the viaduct
being built, unfortunately only one appears in the online version.

I did learn a few things which in the end show how
inefficient the previous Governments were, which is not new, but the whole
story certainly puts most of the weight on the responsibility of the Chavez administration, even if they want to deflect the blame.

In 1988 the then Ministry of Transport requested bids for
building a new viaduct. The results of that process were voided. In 1993
another process was opened, eight different consortia presented 12 different
proposals. The bidding process was never completed.

Finally, in 1995 there was a process to choose who to give
the concession for the upkeep of the highway. The winner would have to, among other responsibilities,
the task of building the new viaduct from the tolls collected. A study
determined then that the minimum toll that needed to be charged had to be US$
0.60 per car and higher for trucks and buses. The plan was to start low and increase it
to a higher level so that in time the average would reach the required amount. It never
happened. The toll never got above US$ 0.20 and when the Chavez administration
got to power the contract to the company running the highway was rescinded due
to the protests by those that drive the road (Who all happen to own cars or buses). Since then (2001) there has been no toll charged on the highway in typical populsit style. The
company that ahd the contract went to arbitration and won a verdict of US$ 13 million, which the
Venezuelan Government paid. Curiously, the toll of US$ 0.60 was below the toll charged to cars from
1953, which started at US$ 0.857 in 1953 and was still US$ 0.697 when the first
big devaluation took place in 1982, when another incompetent Luis Herrera Campins was President..

There is also an article in the print verison that I can’t find in the online version
of El Universal by a Professor of Topography of the Catholic
University. He relates
how he was hired in 1992 to make measurements on the viaduct and he detected the curvature
that eventually led to its demise. He noted in his report that some special
structures built into this viaduct, it was the only one of the three viaducts that had
them specifically because of the problem with the displacement of the mountain
on the south side, had all collapsed.

He tells how he was hired again in 1997 and how in 1999, his
contract, which he says was quite cheap, to make measurements was ended by this
Government. In its place, the Ministry decided to buy a system of GPS’s for
early warning. It was never installed. (Will someone investigate this?)

In 1999 he made a proposal to isolate different parts of the
viaduct (I did not quite understand his explanation). He says this was exactly the opposite
of what was done. The attempt to fix the viaduct added weight to its structure and affixed
it more to the side of the mountain under displacement. He claims the repairs
attacked the problem by fixing the viaduct, but the problem was the displacement
of the mountain which pushed the viaduct, they tried to fix the effect rather than the
cause.

I relate all of this, because I have heard some remarkable, irresponsible
and outrageous statements in the last few days, which is simply alarming. The first one is that the National
Assembly will not look into whose responsibility the closing of the viaduct
was, but iwill only look for solutions to the problem. This is absurd, that is not
exactly their job description, unless they pass a Bill to temporarily suspend the laws of
physics so that the mountain stops pressuring the viaduct.

Then, there is the mindless Chavista Deputy who said on
Friday that five years was not enough time to take care of this problem. Clearly
he does not even know how to count, Chavez has been in power seven years, but
he forgets the highway was built in only three years by a Government which was
as autocratic as the current one, but was efficient.

But the most bothersome statements I heard this week, is
that there is no project for an alternate viaduct. That’s right; according to the
President of the Colegio de Ingenieros in yesterday’s El Nacional, all that
exists is a preliminary project which lacks soil studies, feasibility studies
and environmental impact studies. Now, that is scary! All these guys trying to defend
the Government’s work and it turns out that the only plan is to pave a road in
the bottom of the ravine that the viaduct spans over, right on top of a river
of sewage that may be less stable than the viaduct itself. This is absolutely
irresponsible!

And think not only about the overall impact on the economy,
such as the slowness for freight to move from the La Guaira airport and port to
Caracas, or simply business people not being able to come easily or travel abroad
easily. No, think about the people in Vargas state, who suffered the mudslides in
1999, that half destroyed their state and are still waiting for the promised reconstruction.
They have now lost two of the most important sources for their income: They are
unable to come to Caracas where a large fraction of them work and people will
be unable to go to the beach to spend the day or to stay at the numerous clubs or
buildings there, the main livelihood of those that live in that state. The
third source of income in that state are the jobs at the port and the airport,
both of which will see reduced activity due to the closing of the road.

These are real people, mostly poor, whose lives have been
hit extremely hard twice in five years, once by nature in 1999 and now by the inefficiency and
incompetence of their Government. The same Government by the way, that they overwhelmingly voted
for in 1998, 2000 and 2004. Go figure! But perhaps, Alberto Barreda said more succintly (El Nacional (page C-3)), what we have known for all of these seven years, the revolution has no shame in blaming others because: The revolution always begins tomorrow!

(Personally, the viaduct was a source of anxiety for me most of today. My 80 year old mother arrived today and we had to figure out how to bring her up, keeping tabs on her progress after she landed. To top it all off, her luggage did not show up, so now an additional trip has to be scheduled, under these difficult circumstances to go u and down to the airport, in order to go and get it whenever it gets here. Additionally, my wife will arrive in two days, her plane lands after the old highway is closed to passenger traffic (10 PM), so I had to work out how to bring her into the city using a 4WD vehicle via the Avila National Park, which is also closed to non-residents at night. Fortunately, there are some very enterprising residents in that Park)

I am dressing in black and trying it, just need to borrow a car…

In this video
from Noticiero Digital there is tape of the Mayor of the Metropolitan area of Caracas, Juan Barreto,
showing his intolerance, disrespect and poor manners by simply losing his
temper and insulting and reacting against a reporter that is trying to ask him
a question. The question is really never
answered.

Basically the
Mayor is announcing the expropriation of some 32 buildings in the Caracas area. The Mayor
begins saying that they will publish the pictures of the buildings so it is
clear which ones they are, because people are concerned and it is not true that
buildings are being taken over. The reporter points out that people have
started invading buildings since the expropriations began, she then asks what
will be done to the people that violate the law and he snaps back at her saying
you are cornering me and that is not how reporting is done and tells her she
should go back to the University, as his supporters join him, jeering at her. He
then makes some preposterous charges against Juan Fernandez giving oil away to foreign
countries and tries to draw a parallel to this situation. Fernandez, one of the
union leaders of the oil workers never had the level within PDVDA to even participate
in those decisions and it was not even his area of expertise.

The
reporter then repeats the question and he says he will apply the law. While he
is the one being aggressive, he tells her that she is being too aggressive. At
this point he leaves, loses his temper and a starts screaming at her telling
her she is no reporter that all she is an opposition leader, as his supporters
jeer and scream at her.

Another sad
show of the intolerance and aggressiveness by a leader of the pretty
revolution.

(Note Added: El Nacional today reports (page B-20, by subscription) that a total of 20 buildings have been invaded since Friday morning. This is what the reporter was asking the Mayor which he never answered, in fact he says in the video it is not happening)

MariPili Hernandez is a former TV announcer, Chavez supporter/adulator and was a Vice-Minister of Foreign Relations. She writes a weekly column in El Nacional where she sucks up to Chavez and treis to tell us how wonderful everything is under the revolution. Her latest was too much for Gustavo Coronel , who wrote this memo to her. It speaks for itself.

Memo
to Mrs. Maripili

Gustavo Coronel.

Mrs.
Maripili:

You just
wrote the following: “I certainly am one of those who think that there is no
Venezuelan with a clearer vision of what a strategic national plan should be
than our current president”. This statement provoked such indignation in me
that I have decided to send you this brief memo. What you wrote would have
merely been one more example of the abject adulation that you, the paid hands
of the regime, lavish on Chavez. But you said this at a very unfortunate time,
when the colorless Minister of Infrastructure is saying that the main bridge
that connects Caracas
with the world (Port and airport) is falling down and that the highway will
have to be closed indefinitely.

What this
means, in brutally simple terms, is that Venezuela
is abruptly being thrown back to the early XX century, when the only way to get
from Caracas to
the sea was a narrow and winding road built by Dictator Juan Vicente Gomez.
This trip was an adventure, taking long hours. Today, the adventure will be
magnified by the fact that the road is in poor conditions and is now part of a
huge marginal village, full of criminals who assault travelers who have the
misfortune of having a flat tire or falling behind a slow truck. The police as
defender of the people, as you well know, Mrs. Maripili, has ceased to exist in
Venezuela.

What a
poor timing you showed in writing your stupid statement. What f… vision can
Chavez have? Forgive me for the f.. Word, but I am sure that is often used
among your friends. What f… strategic vision can this man have? Tell me if a
person who does the following things can have “a national strategic vision”:
(1), gives away $1.2 billion per year of Venezuelan money to Fidel Castro; (2),
buys $1 billion in Argentinean bonds at a price above the market; (3), promises
a subsidy of $700 million per year to the Caribbean countries; (4), Promises
Paraguay to build them a $700 million refinery; (5), Donates $30 million to Evo
Morales on his recent visit to Venezuela, to be used at his discretion; (6),
gives $40 million in petroleum subsidies to the “poor” of New York City, Boston
and Chicago whose average income is ten times greater than our Venezuelan poor
who lack all essentials; (7), buys for his use a $70 million airbus without
proper budgetary appropriations, when Venezuelan roads are rotting away; (8),
acquires $6 billion in arms from Russia and Spain when the country is falling
to pieces; (9), promises Jamaica $300 million for a road when ours are a pile
of shit; (10), builds houses for Cubans when thousands of Venezuelan families
lack a roof over their heads; (11), tolerates the existence of 200,000
abandoned children in our cities and thousands of Indian mothers begging in the
streets; 12) finances those so-called Youth Festivals and Popular Congresses,
simple excuses for drug consumption and ideological incest, with money that
should be used to alleviate hunger and ignorance in our country.

What
vision of a national strategic plan can possess someone who surrounds himself
with such mediocre collaborators? How can a strategic national plan be
developed with people like Pedro Carreno, Lina Ron, Luis Acosta Carlez, Nicolas
Maduro, Isaías Rodríguez, Jorge Rodríguez, Jose Vicente Ramgel, Dario Vivas,
Cilia Flores, William Farinas, William Izarra, etc etc…? A national strategic
plan has to be put together as the result of an intense civic dialogue, has to
be made known by the citizens of the country, has to be executed by competent
and honest people, must be subject to accountability. Tell me, what are the
similarities between such a plan and the disaster you have installed in our
country?

I would
challenge any reasonably coherent member of the regime to a public debate on
Chavez’s “strategic national plan”, if such a coherent person could be found. I
discard challenging Chavez because he is incapable of civilized debate. He is
already an autocrat who will not dialog nor accept dissidence. His mind is full
of dreams of grandeur, of aspirations to become a new Tupac Àmaru, helped along
with our money, which is badly needed for tasks of real national development.
He does not have the time or the inclination to dialog on a democratic basis.

Your boss,
Mrs. Maripili, does not have the foggiest idea of what a national strategic
plan is or should be. When he is ousted, he should be condemned to work, with
pick and shovel, in the construction of the new highway from Caracas to the international airport and
port. Maybe he will be able to do that job although, every day that goes by, I
have more doubts.

Venezuela has many problems, old ones and
new ones. Anyone that believes that Government alone can solve all of them,
ignores both history and economics. In order to improve the lot of all
Venezuelans to acceptable levels there has to be a huge increase of at least
300-400% in the size of the country’s economy. Simple math shows that in the
last seven years, oil income has increased by a factor of four and nevertheless
that has not translated into an increase in the general well being of all Venezuelans
or in the size of the economy. Government alone just can’t do it; you need the
multiplier effect of the private sector in all areas of economic activity.

Two areas
where results in the last seven years, despite the hoopla, have not been good
are housing and agriculture. You can see a graph of the number of housing units
which is a
year old here. As you can see there, the number of new housing units built
by this administration each year is much less than those built during Caldera
and CAP II and those were terrible Governments, which are looking better
everyday! In fact, the Chavez administration in the last five years has built fewer
units than in the worst of the last four of Caldera’s years. 2005 was no
different. Despite Chavez lashing at his collaborators (and firing them!), his
unrealistic goal
of building 120,000 units was not even close. The last numbers are not yet in, but
in September the totals had reached less than 20,000 units in 2005, according
to the Government.

But the
Government continues its stubborn path to failure. The last seven years have
seen little construction of new housing units due to the uncertainty about private
property rights, as well as the fact that the Government decided to go at it
alone in building housing projects. Thus, the shortage of 1.7 million housing
units estimated by the Government a year ago continues to grow everyday. It
sometimes even gets funny as municipal officials have begun using the term “houses
from the secondary market” when referring to housing purchased from th private
sector by municipalities to solve emergencies when landslides occur.  

If you
want the cooperation of the private sector you need to send the right signals.
But the opposite is happening. Only yesterday, the Mayor of the Metropolitan
area of Caracas
expropriated two buildings, a brand new one and an old one, to give it to those
affected by the rains both in the vicinity of the viaduct, as well as near the
Cotiza brook in the West of Caracas. (By the way, that brook overflowed in the
1999 floods and the people went back to it, five people died two days ago when
a dam in Avila mountain gave in)

I watched
on TV when the Mayor arrived at the private new building to announce its
expropriation and take it over. The owner was there and asked the Mayor if he
had a representative from the Attorney Generals’ office, as required by law.
The Mayor said no, but went on to say that it did not matter because the
procedure was perfectly legal. Of course, no price has been set and this man,
who claims he put all of his money into this project of building an eight story
apartment building, says he now has no money and will have none until he gets
compensated, if it ever happens. So much for the Constitutional guarantee of
private property rights.

Similar
things are happening in agriculture, another area that Chavez has given a high
priority to. There has been an upturn in production in the last two years, as
interest on loans have dropped, but little of it comes from the takeover of
latifundia, most of which remain in the hands of the Government or have not
been exploited. Moreover, Mercal, rather than becoming a motor for local agricultural
production has become a huge importer that meets with local producers and
threatens them with imports rather than trying to work with them to produce
more locally.  Some of Venezuela’s
crops like coffee and cocoa have a lot of potential to become important export industries.
But this has been the case for decades and nothing ever happens.

The last
few months has seen a fight over wholesale prices for coffee that remain well
below international ones even after the recent adjustments. But coffee prices
at the retail level remain controlled at Bs. 7,400 per kilogram (US$ 3.44 per
kilo or US$ 1.56 per pound at the official exchange rate, way below world
market prices). The last few weeks there have been shortages of coffee and this
week a Government official suggested an increase in the controlled price was imminent,
which led to even more scarcity. Then on Wednesday the consumer protection
agency (Indecu) impounded
300 Tons of coffee at the distributor’s warehouses and two additional raids have
taken place. The coffee will be forcefully purchased at the official controlled
price.

Clearly, this
is no way to run an industry, if you are forced to sell your coffee at the
lowest price, can not even export it, even at the official exchange rate, there
are few incentives to invest, produce and as one coffee grower put it: why
should I even pick the coffee to sell it at a loss? There goes jobs,
investments, etc.

And then
today we had the bully himself, Hugo Chavez, saying that if coffee growers do
not sell the coffee to the distributirs, “we will take it away, that coffee
does not belong to them, it belongs to the country”. Well, so did the Caracas-La
Guaira viaduct and those entrusted with taking care of it did not and I see
nobody assuming that responsibility. And then Chavez began arguing about the
law, which guarantees private property and not the coffee for the President to
drink.

This is no way to run a country and these
industries will slowly disappear, much like the sugar industry in Cuba did, due
to Government control stifling it. The Government can not be coffee grower,
airline owner, telecom owner, hospital runner, regulator, steel producer and
oil producer all at the same time, just to give some examples. This Government,
much like the Cepal-oriented ones of the 60’s in Venezuela, is trying to do it all and
it just does not work. You need investment, technology and the ability to
compete here or abroad to make all these industries grow and be competitive. You
can’t regulate below cost of production. But when knowledge and common sense
are left aside the outlook simply becomes grim. And right now it is as grim as
the feeling one gets when looking at the pictures of the viaduct

(Pictures courtesy of Noticiero Digital)

It was less than a month ago, on Dec. 16th., that President Hugo Chavez toured the ongoing repairs of the viaduct of the Caracas La Guaira highway and said that the media had blown the problem out of proportion. For the next few days and weeks, the Minister of Infrastructure said that the viaduct would be repaired by cutting the old columns and displacing the bridge onto newly built ones.

On December 21st. as I drove over the viaduct, I noticed some ten to fifteen firetrucks hidden on a side road, which suggested to me that things were not as peachy as suggested. Today the highway was completely shut down. There has been no announcement whether it is permanent or not, but the Minister suggested it was. An announcement was made that the highway will be closed indefinitely. So much for the media blowing the issue out of proportion.

What is perhaps the saddest part, is that now nature in the form of the rains and the land moving are being blamed for the problem today. (Or is it the nature of our Government management style?)The truth is that Venzuela gave Jamaica this week US$ 300 million to build a highway, Bolivia another US$ 80 million and Ecuador US$ 30 million for road resurfacing. With a fraction of that a new viaduct or alternate road could have been built in our own country in the last seven years of oil widfall. But the problem has been ignored for the last 18 years, seven of which have been under the watchful eye of the revolution and Chavez.

But, of course, it is never the revolution’s fault, the revolution is perfect and never admits mistakes, as demonstrated by the statements by none other than the chief liar Jose Vicente Rangel as he toured the site and said: “Nobody knew that the viaduct could collapse“. Nobody? I imagine he means nobody in the Government, because on December 20th. 2005, the President of the Venezuelan College of Engineers said:

“The viaduct will collapse soon…We have been warning for a year and a half about this problem and have been giving solutions…the work being performed is oriented to prolongits life, but its death is reflected in it…the non-treatment of the emergency is a situation that has been going on for a long time and the responsible authoritites did not take the necessary precautions”

This was only 14 days ago, but the Vice-President still thinks the memory of the people is very short, like in so many other lies of the revolution. It was only two weeks ago that we were assured by Government officials: “The viaduct will be usable the rest of 2005 and in all of 2006” or “The repairs we are making will fix the problem”. “The viaduct will hodl until a new one is built”. Only Chavez actually told the truth when he visited the viaduct. After blasting the media, touring the works being performed, he let it out: :”There is no solution to this”.  I guess the VP does not think much of him either.

Chavez remarks about the descendants
of the killers of Christ controlling the world, which in Catholic countries has always referred to precisely the Jews, no matter what the revisionists who visit this blog wants to suggest,
have reminded me, via one of the comments by Klina, a similar episode which took place in
the first few months of the Chavez administration, involving the now deceased Argentinean
Norberto Ceresole. Ceresole was a political scientist who was a sociologist by
training, who came to Venezuela
in 1994; at about the time Chavez was pardoned by President Caldera for his
bloody coup attempt in 1992. It can be said that Hugo Chavez had
three mentors, current Planning Minister Jorge Giordani on economic
matters, Luis Miquilena on political matters (who was later discarded and
replaced by current Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel) and Norberto Ceresole on
ideological matters and the
path of the revolution. To me, Chavez’ comments, both in the context of saying that those that killed Christ control the world and then following up with saying that those that control the world also killed Simon Bolivar, are no different than the anti-Semtic/conspiracy theory by powerful groups writings of Ceresole. In fact, most of the thinking by Ceresole about the revolution can be seen today, after his death, in the ideas and actions of the evreyday Bolivarian evolution.

Because of this, the personality of Ceresole, his influence over Chavez and his project deserves to be reviewed again, since there are so many short memories about Venezuela and the last seven years under Chavez.

Ceresole linked up with Chávez and spent
over a year going around the country with him in what was then Chavez’ effort
to promote the overthrow of the Venezuelan Government. Ceresole was a curious personality,
having started at the left, claiming to be a Peronist, later a Montonero, only to
shift later to the right turning into a pro-Arab, anti-Israel, neo-nationalist,
calling for militaristic leaders across Latin America in order to preside over
a “post democratic” era in which the army and the people would somehow merge into
one, led by “Caudillos”. (Sound familiar?)

In 1995, Ceresole was
kicked out of Venezuela
for his supposed ties to Arab terrorist groups. The truth was that Ceresole was
giving seminars across Venezuela, in which he would state that the future of
Venezuelan democracy was doomed, which given his affiliation with Chavez and
the fact that he was a foreigner, did not sit well with then President Rafael
Caldera’s Government.

Ceresole returned soon
after Chavez’ 1998 victory in grand style. He lived at the “Circulo Militar” a Hotel/Country Club
facility run by the military in Caracas. at Government’s expense.
He relished the limelight, giving interviews to the press and anyone that may
listen about his theories about post-democracy and the civic-military union as
the way to go in Latin America. Quotes like
this one:

“The Venezuelan model is
differentiated from the “democratic model” (be it liberal or neoliberal)
because within the popular mandate there is an implicit idea that power should
remain concentrated, unified and centralized. The people elect a person (who is
immediately projected to the metapolitical level) and not an idea or
institution. This is not an anti-democratic model, but a “post-democratic one.””

became an embarrassment
for the political operators of the newly assumed Chavez regime, who were trying
to sell the world the image of a softer, gentler and more democratic Hugo Chavez. It was
one of them, Luis Miquilena who got rid of Ceresole, even if Ceresole himself blamed
what he called
the more “democratic” part of the Chavista Government, as represented by current VP Jose
Vicente Rangel.

In my own personal recollection,
it was the combination of Ceresole using the word “post-democracy” suggesting some
sort of strongman regime, which people were afraid of, together with the strongly anti-Semitic
statements repeatedly made by Ceresole in the numerous interviews that he gave
to the press, that got him into trouble in Venezuela with the political
operators. He blamed Rangel in most of his latter writings, including his “book”
called “Caudillo,
Ejercito, Pueblo” (Leader, Army, People) about the Chavez revolution. Curiously
that book has an introduction, which is followed by a sort of preface entitled “The Jewish
question and the State of Israel”, a sort of strange preface for a book about Venezuela. But
it all relates to his anti-Semitism and the fact that he blamed Israel and the world Jewish community for him having to leave Venezuela in 1999.

Reportedly, Ceresole got
interested in Judaism and the State of Israel, as described by himself in
the book “The forging of Reality”, when he began investigating the AMIA (Asociasion
Mutua Israelita Argentina) Headquarters bombing in which 85 people
died. Ceresole supposedly reached the conclusion from his findings that there
was a huge cover-up of the internal fight in the Jewish community of Argentina which
led to the bombing (!!) and that the Jews
use the “myth” of the Holocaust to control the world. Curiously Ceresole said that
this is not anti-Semitic. He repeatedly made the argument in interviews and
writings that he did not dislike human beings who are Jewish, but it is the
State of Israel, which he used very loosely, and its control of people that had taken advantage of the
myth of the Holocaust to control the world.

But let’s see exactly how
he defended his supposedly non-anti-Semitic position in his book
about Chavez:

“Of course I am not “anti-Semitic”
nor am I “neo-Nazi” Recently a serious magazine, the pretended Spanish language
version of Foreign Affairs, (Política Exterior, Madrid, noviembre-diciembre de
1999, p.32, Vol.XIII, Nº 72) defined me as a «montonero», the ultra left of Peronismo
in the seventies

I am, that I am, a critic of the
State of Israel
and of the international Jewish organizations, to which I have devoted my last
few books. I consider myself part of a new revionism whose objective is to demonstrate:

1. That an important part of the
canonical tale of deportation and death of the Jews under the Nazis has been
arranged in the form of a myth.

2. That such a myth is utilized to
preserve the existence of a colonial enterprise endowed by a religious ideology
(monotheistic and mythic-messianic): the disownership by Israel of the Arab Palestine

3. That that myth is also utilized
to financially blackmail the German state, other European states and the US Jewish community in the US and other countries
with significant Diasporas.

4. That the existence of this
political enterprise (Israel a power shaped under the monopoly of monotheism
and implemented by an army, various police forces, jails, tortures and assassinations)
looks to consolidate itself via a series of ideological manipulations in the bosom
of the hegemonic power of the US, which procures by any means to be accepted
about the owner of the world using generalized terror and also via dissuasive
and persuasive practices.”

Ceresole’s work is plagued
with statements such as the one above in the claim that the Holocaust was small
and is being used by the State of Israel as a way of controlling the world. Of
course, he claimed to have proven this and thus it is a fact and not an anti-Semitic posture. And we are expected to believe him of course, when he traced back
this behavior as far back as the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the
XVth. Century, which in turn led him to propose that other influential groups, in this case the British Masons, conspired to kill Simon Bolivar.

In fact, in the book about
Chavez, Ceresole concluded among other revionist facts that:

“there was, in no case-(in the German
concentration camps of the era of the Third Reich, including the German
territory militarily administered by Germany) the use of homicidal gases
that supposedly operated in the so called “chambers””

Or

“Less than 40,000 people between
non-Jews and Jews (died in Auschwitz)”

And

“The revionist analysis have absolutely demonstrated that those “memories” that
pretend to replace non-existing documents (such as extermination orders (official
or non-official ones, budgets to build death factories, designs or credible
representations of the weapons of the crime, administrative procedures to execute
such a vast crime, etc..)”

Ceresole’s theories about
the unity of the army and the people, led by the Caudillo could be the subject of
many posts, but basically what Chavez has proposed and continue to propose today is not that
different from what Ceresole postulated in his book: a single “political unity”
to replace political parties composed of the leader, the military-civic union, arming the citizens, all anti-US,
with the leader trying to break up the bipolarity of the world by joining with the Arab world
and confronting the US.

In fact, the only
divergence between Ceresole and what has happened in Venezuela after his death, is that
Ceresole had no love lost for Fidel Castro, who he considered a failure.

In a prescient prediction, Ceresole foresaw, for example, the reaction of the
Venezuelan left to Chavez’ militaristic project:

“The liberals and Marxists of all kinds will look to attack the Venezuelan
model-simultaneously or alternatively-from two angles that have already been
perfectly designed. The first will ask for the “distribution and
democratization of power” and the second for “popular participation” in the
sense of replacement of the caudillo (leader, concrete, physical) by the “people”
(abstract, generic).”

Ceresole, tried sometime to minimize his perosnal importance for Chavez and the revolution, saying he was just an individual visitor at the time of the scandal that led to his departure, but at the same time he always talked in the sense of “I told Hugo this or that”, “these writings are the results of many meetings with Chavez’ military officers” and the like.

All of this demonstrates
to me, the deep influence that Ceresole had on Chavez’ ideas and on his project. I can
not say that Ceresole implanted the anti-Semitic words in Chavez’s mind, but
Chavez’ statements last week are fairly clear in my mind. To anyone that
has ever lived in a Catholic country, it was not the Romans that killed Jesus, it was the Jews. This was the case in Venezuela, which had a very large Jewish communities since WWII, which helped mitigate anti-Semitism and this was more strongly felt in Spain, where the Jewish community has been quite small.

It is also no accident that Chavez linked Christ and Simon Bolivar in his statemnet, this is also part of Ceresole’s writings. Ceresole blamed
the death of Simon Bolivar, on another conspiracy, not on the Jews, but he drew
the analogy to the Jews as a group of power who likes to control the world, much like the British Masons felt the threat of a unified Latin America, leading him to blame them for the death of Bolivar:

“the great Masonic loggias, those positivistic para-religious lobbies of
British capitalism, who aspired to destroy that vast, complex and extraordinary
geopolitical architecture represented by the Spanish American Provinces…it is
thus that the fall and death of the Liberator (Simon Bolivar) is produced. To realize this operation London turned to the second line of its roster, the great traitors of the American homeland” (In the section “A geopolitical
response to external aggressions” in Ceresole’s book “Caudillo,
Ejercito and Pueblo”)

And I will leave it at
that. To me the connection is clear and direct between Chavez intellectual mentor,
his thinking and the anti-Semitic statements made my Chavez a week and a half
ago. Chavez is no dummy, he probably started on the Christ statement and when he realized
that this was politically incorrect, he concatenated it with the teachings of
his old mentor abiut the Masons and Bolivar’s death. To me, it is all there in white and black.

In some sense it was lucky for the Chavez
revolution that Norberto Ceresole died in 2003, because he was direct
and very clear in his thinking, which Chavez is not. Thus his physical absence allows the
revolution not to have to live with the embarrassment of having his writings and statements
exposed day after day. But his teachings live on in the daily actions of this
militaristic, one man-show which has come to be known as the Bolivarian
revolution.

*The links I have provided
in English are not the best, but I wanted to give as many English language
links as possible about Ceresole, which are scarce. In the end, Ceresole’s own
words in Spanish in interviews or his books are the best reference.