And with the same speed that judges reverse decisions when the Government asks them or forces them out, the accident statistics during the past Easter week also suffered from remarkable shifts as the week went along. First, the Head of Civil Defense Antonio Rivero told us that accidents were up 38%, which to him showed that the prohibition was a success, but he failed to explain how. But then, faster than a speeding bullet, the number of accidents was announced to be down by 11% by the Minister of Interior and Justice Pedro Carreño, who certainly can work miracles, even if his statistics seemed to mysteriously differ from those by the fire departments. And indeed if you look at the handy chart below from El Nacional, accidents were indeed down:
And so were the number of those injured in accidents too, but in another mystery, the number of deaths in these accidents was actually up 28% compared to last year, a curious result in a country whfrere accidents and injuries may be hidden, but cars can’t even be moved from the road until the medical examiner shows up at the scene.
But I can’t prove the numbers were fudged, but in any case that is not the main point of the post. What I found intriguing were the explanations given by Mr. Rivero about why the number of deaths were up. According to him, the New Man of the XXIst. Century, the new Venezuelan of the revolution has some sort of kamikaze wish inside and the high number of deaths arose due to a “psychosocial factors”, which he denominated “the revenge”, or “rejection of change”. Thus, Rivero explained, Venezuelan vacationers expressed their opposition to the prohibition by driving fast. Thus, he concluded: “People drank less, but drove faster”
Jeez, I don’t know where to begin in responding to this pseudo scientific research by Mr. Rivero. I guess it means, as I suggested last week, that we may have to experiment with having people be allowed to drink more, see if they go slower or drive better. That would follow from Rivero’s remarkable statement. The truth is that the ability of some Chavista officials to lie, twist the truth or simply invent the most far fetched concepts, has no limits and even Minister Carreño’s “we are being spied by the CIA via the Direct TV set top boxes” may soon be toppled as the all time worst.
The Devil's Excrement 
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