The Devil's Excrement

And here is video of the skimpy crowd as Chavez continued to speak yesterday late in the afternoon, note how the girl looks bored until she notices the camera and cheers at that point.

Analyst Argelia
Rios has never been very optimistic about getting rid of the autocrat, thus I was
surprised to read this in El Universal

The Inverted Equation by Argelia Rios in El
Universal

The winds
are not blowing in favor of the leader. He is no longer the man capable of
connecting instantly with the humble people. The zeal to transform himself in a
new reference for the international counter powers has distanced him from
domestic problems.

His
grandiloquent speech has turned incomprehensible for the popular sectors, where
the new Chavez promises sound hollow, buried in the pit of his endless “blah-blah-blah”

What the
powerful chief has found upon his return is an atmosphere of indifference.

World
geopolitics ended up producing a growing uninterest on the part of the masses,
that do not understand even the glossary used by the one they believed to be
their best interpreter

The vanishing
of the magic with which a mystical relation between the poor and the President
had been created, has opened the way to disenchantment. The ears of the poor
are no longer a monopoly of the unique leader that is seeing how his people put
a surprising degree of attention on the new offerer.

In the middle of the most spectacular bonanza experienced by Venezuela, the
most humble sectors are weighing in, more each day, the smallness of what
Chavez has given them…

The inefficiency that the President has failed to resolve-because everything
ends in rotations and cosmetic changes to his team- has progressively planted
the idea that the leader has an important quota of responsibility in the
disastrous execution by his Government  and
that there is no solid compromise with the poor: only a utilitarian
relationship, in which the vote encounters a retribution which is barely
symbolic and basically residual.

“To try out” a new leader is no longer a possibility denied outright. Those who
have little to lose-the little that Chavez has given them-begin to accept “that
a change may not be bad”: an exemplary punishment, whose expression could be,
either indifference, materialized by the abstention of the clientele, or
perhaps its decided jump towards the territory of the novelty…

The fact  that the President not even considers poverty
a deplorable condition for human beings (because to be rich is bad or to wear
something for the first time at Christmas, or to aspire to an improvement in
the standard of living), is a sentence tattooed in the subconscious of those
humble beings that now observe with curiosity the other face. 

Certainly,
the decision is not there yet, but there is a sort of prowling around the
alternative. As Oscar Schemel from pollster Hinterlaces says, the people already
recognize that the President, while being a “good man”, may result “inconvenient”
for the interests of Venezuela, because he has not been able to assemble a
competent team (not even in an electoral year, which is revealing of his
incapacity to do it), because he does not listen to the people and has involved
Venezuela in an external machination that deviates, towards other nations,
resources that the poor need to reach a dignified standard of living.

In short, the roles have been inverted. It is now Chavez who has problems to
reconnect with the popular sectors. It is now him that is showing an erratic
and repetitive speech. It is now him that is undergoing a division
within his alliance and the threat that many of his allies, facing the decisive
ideological debate and the “forever”, will play to cheat on him in order to weaken
him. Chavez knows that the times for treason and rearrangements are coming, in
the social, civil as well as the military world. Money will not be sufficient
this time.