The Devil's Excrement

Today the Homeland Security Department issued a warning about the fact that it has been unable to check security procedures at Venezuelan airports from which flights go to the US. This is due to the lack of cooperation of the Venezuelan Government. I was planning to write about it, but Veneconomy sent this opinion piece this afternoon that simply said it all:

Direct Flight to backwardness by Veneconomy

For many years, Venezuela was given a Category II rating by the US aviation authorities, which meant that
Venezuelan airlines were prevented from flying to the United States.

In 2006, after making many adjustments to meet international standards,
complying with endless technical requirements, and undertaking extensive
modernization in the area of infrastructure, the National Civil Aviation
Institute (INAC) culminated a long process for recertifying Venezuela in
Category I, as a result of which domestic airlines were once again able to fly
their routes to the United States under the Venezuelan flag and with Venezuelan
crews and Venezuelan registered aircraft.

However, this progress seems to be about to suffer a setback.

This weekend, the US Department of Homeland Security reported that it had been
impossible to determine whether or not Venezuelan airports and direct flights
between Venezuela and the United States
complied with the security rules established by the International Civil
Aviation Organization (ICAO). According to press reports, this impediment is
apparently due to the fact that the Venezuelan authorities have refused to
allow the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to inspect Maracaibo and Valencia airports alleging that,
under international security standards, the only agency entitled to conduct
these inspections is the ICAO, which has a visit scheduled for January 2009.

VenEconomy respects the
INAC’s legal right to reject the visit by representatives of the TSA. But it
costs nothing to be polite, and Venezuela
has always extended this courtesy to US government officials in the past.

However, according to Nelson Bocaranda, the government’s intolerance has reach
such a pitch that the INAC has threatened to eliminate some flights of US airlines
between the US and Venezuela.
VenEconomy considers that an
inspection of this type would be most timely at this moment, when there is a
clear conflict of interests in this area in Venezuela. A single person occupies
the presidency of the INAC, the Executive’s Coordinated Air Transportation
Service (SATA), and the airline Conviasa. In other words, the supervisee is the
same person as the supervisor.

For example, this three-hatted president would have to answer questions from
the US security representatives such as: Why did you allow the Conviasa
aircraft, which crashed a few days ago in Ecuador, to do a night flight when
international standards indicate that, if an aircraft does not meet all air
navigation standards, it should only fly during the daytime? or, Why, if it was
a well-known secret that some pilots took illegal shortcuts when departing from
MéridaAirport, the INAC did not take the necessary measures? Had they done so,
perhaps the accident of the Santa Bárbara Airline, in which so many lives were
lost, could have been prevented.

In short, it seems that the US
transportation security authorities are sending a very important message on the
state of airport security in Venezuela.

A guide for understanding
freedom of speech in Venezuela by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

I don’t know if it is a
coincidence, but what is happening to the Villegas brothers, Vladimir, Mario
and Ernesto is something that should be in Ripley’s. Besides the curious detail
that three members of the same family, reporters all three, have been victims
of measures that if they are not repressive they are quite close, the case of
the three Villegas’ could serve well to the “revolutionary tourists” to
understand well how it is that freedom of speech is handled in Venezuela. These
good souls, like Ignacio Ramonet and Danny Glover, when not the kids from the
Unified Spanish Left, always have on the tip of their tongue the topic of
freedom of speech in Venezuela.
One explains to them that certainly, there is no censorship here and that in
some media outlets you can say all you want against the Government and its owner. One
attempts to clarify that this is due more to the fact that these people do not
allow the Government to intimidate them with its pressures, threats and
blackmail, but that quite a few of these media outlets have been broken and
become “accommodating” to the Government. Then, so that they understand well
how things work, here is the Villegas case. Mario, the oldest, who is not
pro-Chavez, works as a professional at the tax office SENIAT, but because as a
columnist for El Mundo he has spared no effort to criticize and point out things
about the regime, SENIAT sent him to Santa Elena de Uairen in the border with
Brazil. Vladimir, the second oldest, pro-Chavez but not unconditional nor the
type to shut up, has just been fired from the TV Station run by Maripili
Hernandez, precisely because his opinions do not adapt themselves to what “I the
Supreme” expects from his followers. Ernesto, the third one, one of the anchors
of channel 8, who is also pro-Chavez, came out to defend the cameramen
attacked by the top Capo. “Coincidentally” his morning program has been
suspended since then. Do you Sean Penn now understand how things work in
Venezuela?

Hugo Chavez cut short his visit to South Africa, reportedly to take
charge of the electricity problem after last Monday’s blackout, but the
truth is that he came back early because as Venezuela’s power went on
the blink on Monday, reports came out showing a drop in the
Government’s popularity which was not going to be helped by the
nationwide power shortage.

Then, in an improvised nationwide TV address Chavez tried his old
formula of blaming the past, saying he is in charge and promising that
in three months the whole problem will be solved. Of course, the
deadline is right after the regional elections, just so that nobody can
say he promised and did not deliver before then.

And there is no way he can deliver, because his speech was a potpourri
of lies and incoherent facts, none of which are based on the reality of
the country’s electric grid. In fact, even the simplistic explanation
given by the Government, a sudden fault in one of the trunk lines,
seemed fishy as not everything on this side of the guilty fault
actually lost power.

The reality is that the bombastic energy plan announced in December
2006, has not been able to fulfill its goals for the electric sector in
its first two years, as most projects are still in the drawing board
and they are not even at the stage of ordering equipment.

Meanwhile, there has been little investment and maintainance since
1998. Chavez suggested that there had been no maintenance in the Tacoa
plant since 1981, but this was one of those lies he delivered with a
straight face, which had no foundation, Tacoa was built in 1978 and
suffered a fire in 1982 that required major repairs.

And a similar charge about Guri holds no water (yes, it’s a pun), as
without Guri the problem would be quite severe. Chavez also lied about
Caruache, which he says was in shambles when he arrived in 1998.
Nothing further from the truth, the Caruache plant was on schedule in
1997.

As an example, an engineer formerly in charge of Planning at Edelca,
which runs Guri, said that at the Planta Centro power plant, one unit
stopped working in 2000, another in 2002 and the remainder lines are
functioning at 50% capacity. Chavez suggested that one of the units in
Planta Centro was going on line as if he had bought it and delivered it
as part of investment under him, but the truth is that this unit broke
down and has finally been fixed.

Chavez mentioned projects, which are really not part of the solution.
He spoke of 32 projects but none are major and the one he devoted the
most time about, is a regional project with no direct link to the
national network.

The truth is that Venezuela has daily rationing of power and blackouts
are the daily fare in the interior of Venezuela This was the second
large blackout this year and Caracas, where blackouts were rare before
the nationalization of Electricidad de Caracas, has joined the country
in suffering from regular problems.

Like many other things in the country, the power grid suffers from too
much politics and too little management as military displaced
professional managers in the major electric corporations and
professional teams were disbanded. Add no investment and lack of
maintenance and this was another Chavez recipe for disaster in the
making.

Add a small emergency power plant to the future needs of your home. This problem will not be solved anytime soon.

It never ceases to amaze me how politicians seldom seem to assume responsibility for the things they do wrong. But the leaders of this fake revolution have to be the worst ones at never assuming responsibility for the destruction they have brought on this poor country and how they are never critical of the bad job they are doing, even internally.

A couple of weeks ago, Hugo Chavez recognized publicly that his Land Bill has not shown a single success and he is getting impatient. Funny, that Bill is eight years old and among others, his wonderful and genius brother Adam, was in charge of its implementation at one time or another. Same with cooperatives, the one time wet dream of the autocrat, turned into absolute failures, but good money keeps been thrown after bad, just because nobody dares pull the plug on one of the autocrat’s pet projects. Imagine, he might get mad and fire them!

But the ultimate insult to anyone’s intelligence was last week’s press conference by the Minister of Finance Ali Rodriguez, where among other pearls, he suggested that Venezuelan inflation is a structural problem due to speculators and “thieves”.

However, if you look at the CPI over the last ten years, as you can see it looks anything but structural, as it has jumped from 10% to 30% twice in that time after flirting with the 10% level. Thus, if anything, it looks like structural inflation is about 10% and the remainder is due to the incompetent and irresponsible policies of the Chavez Government, no? In fact, it is hard to call the latest rise structural, when it keeps going up and up! (In the plot I have been generous, extrapolating end of the year CPI to 30%, it is likely to be higher 33-35%)

But if that graph looks irresponsible, Venezuela has the highest inflation by far in Latin America, the next graph below shows accumulated inflation since Chavez came to power.

It is an almost 800% rise in these long ten years. I guess this must be part of the revolution. What is amazing, is that people have taken it and Chavez remains popular. Because salaries have not gone up 800% in the last ten years and if I showed food inflation, it would be even worse. But nothing like blaming others for your incompetence.

The worst part is, we haven’t seen anything yet, things are so distorted that something has to give and todays’ inflation will seem low when things unravel in the face of such stupid and irresponsible economic policies.

(Love those Excel Mac graphs!)

(In Spanish here)

As part of the evidence to prove that Franklin Duran was
acting as a foreign agent in the US, the Prosecutor will introduce as evidence
a Venezuelan Army credential that was on Duran, when he was detained in Miami.
Duran’s defense lawyer will call on a former Venezuelan official whose name is
Daisy Canizales, who will testify that such credentials are honorific and are
very common in Venezuela.