The Devil's Excrement

And today everyone was wondering why it was that CITGO backtracked on cutting off cheaper oil supplies to the US poor, which is distributed via Joe Kennedy’s Citizen Energy Corporation.

The press release two days ago by Citizen Energy certainly transmitted a feeling of being left out in the cold:

“Citizens Energy has recently been informed by CITGO that due to falling oil prices and the world economic crisis, CITGO has been forced to re-evaluate all their social programs, including the heating oil program, which has provided hundreds of thousands of low-income U.S. households with much-needed fuel these past three years.

I have reached out repeatedly to government officials in Venezuela at the highest levels, including former Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez and President Hugo Chavez.  While I have yet to receive any indication of their ultimate decision, I will continue to fight and advocate for a continuation of this critical assistance for our most vulnerable citizens.“

As you all know, I oppose this program and was actually surprised it was the first one to be cutoff, since it is the cheapest one in terms of cost of Chavez’ cheaper oil aid programs to other countries. In fact, I was wondering how priorities were going to be managed, since cutting Kennedy off (He makes about 400,000 grand a year as President of this noble cause for himself) was certainly going to have a bigger splash than for example, asking PetroCaribe nations to pay up 75% rather than 50% up front.

But the impact must have been felt and today CITGO backtracked and Kennedy apparently managed to reach out to someone and solve his problem. Thus, as Venezuelans are being asked to tighten their pants, their imports get more expensive as the Government reduces items that receive dollars at the official rate of exchange and the country’s reserves are threatened, Chavez once again, establishes politics as his main priority.

What else is new?

It was only about a year and a half ago that Hugo Chavez said in unequival fashion when talking about the 2007 Constitutional referendum to allow his indefinite reelection:

“No, no and one thousand times no. If there is continuos reelection here it should be only for the President…No, no, let’s forget about it..they are defending party interests. I will do what the people say, not what one group or the other says, the people own the sovereignty”

Of course, the people rejected that exact proposal in Dic. 2007, but he wanted to try again, but those silly polls put him so far behind that he had this sovereign revelation that the people somehow now want everyone to be allowed to be reelected indefinitely.

I wonder what happens now to the recently reelected President of the National Assembly Cilia Flores who said that it was not the same to reelect the Governor, or a Mayor than the President of the country, who directs national and international politics.

Or Deputy Carlos Escarra, who barely two or three weeks ago justified Chavez’ proposal to limit reelection to the President with these now infamous words: “To extend reelection to  other levels would be to split the Republic into fragments. Our vision is that of a State-Nation”

And he turned out to have a very short term vision, no?

So now everyone has to change their tune. The idea is that now that everyone can benefit from the indefinite reelection, they will work for it rather than against it like they did for the December 2007 Constitutional referendum.

Which still makes it illegal and now, in the eyes of the voters, the “people”, the owners of the sovereignty, extremely confusing. And the opposition has to take advantage of that. Show them Chavez versus Chavez, arguing both sides of the equation in his best incoherent style that we are accustomed to.

There is no Nation-State concept. It is just how to perpetuate Chavez in power stepping over the law and the Constitution and why not, everything said by Hugo Chavez before about the perversion of allowing everyone to be reelected indefinitely.

When Hugo Chávez first suggested an amendment to allow his indefinite reelection, one of the arguments given by his legal cronies was that an amendment was different than a reform and therefore was not covered by the Constitutional limitation (see Chapter IX) that the same reform can not be submitted within the same Constitutional period.

In time, polls started coming out against Chavez suggesting that the amendment proposal would be defeated by some 17-20 percentage points in a referendum, which would be hard to overcome, given that Chavez wants to also give the referendum an illegal fast track and vote on this before March.(The longer he waits, the more the people will feel the drop in oil prices)

Thus, yesterday the autocrat switched gears, saying that he will now ask for a Constitutional Reform (even if he is not calling it that) that would allow any elected position to have no time limitations. The idea behind this is that Chavez hopes that now other politicians will join him in his support of the proposal and this may somehow lead to its approval.

Chavez had curiously been against this concept, going as far as suggesting there is only one Chavez, so why should other positions be subject to reelection. But politics is politics and that is all Chavez cares about, so he changed his mind in the hope that this would allow the approval of the indefinite reelection for his Presidency which is scheduled to end in earlier 2013.

Except that this is plainly illegal. The Constitution is extremely clear on this and the question of Chavez’ indefinite reelection can not be brought up again until after he leaves office. In fact, if the law and the Constitution were followed, there could be no referendum until December and one could consider a proposal to have everyone but the President be elected indefinitely, but not Chavez. That is what the Bolivarian Constitution clearly and unequivocally states.

But the opposition seems to be playing Chavez’ game now. Since there is no hope that the Supreme Court or any Higher Court will go against the autocrat’s wishes and whims, then they are throwing Chavez’ playbook back at him saying, ok, let’s go vote on it and see what happens, because they know not only that they defeated Chavez once already, but that polls say that the people are so much against voting on the issue again.

Thus, this poor country has been thrown into a sort of legal limbo, where both sides are willing to step outside the rule of law and let illegal votes and referenda decide major issues.

The danger is that bending the rule of law like this by both sides may be one day bent beyond anything we can imagine today  by one of the two sides and turn the country into anarchy, where everything can be justified independent of the laws and the Constitution, as long as people vote on it.

And that is not what organized societies are all about. So, beware!

I have not been posting much, despite a number of interesting things happening, because my blog software provider, who also supplies with the storage space has disappeared and the code sent to me to increase the storage (after paying $40) does not work. I have called and sent emails, but after ten days there has been no response. I am almost out of space so that if these people do not resurface at some point I will have to either a) stop blogging, b) start a blog with another software/service or c) begin removing posts to make space.

I really don’t like any of the three options, so I will have to take things one post at a time for the time being…

An open letter to the more than 100 Latin American “experts” who criticized the report on Venezuela by Human Rights Watch

Dear Sirs:

We have read your letter criticizing the report A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela by Human Rights Watch and are flabbergasted by its superficiality and the same lack of academic rigor you unfairly attribute to HRW.

In fact, its title alone is quite deceiving as some of the names signing the letter hardly qualify as “experts” on Latin America and it is quite clear that the common bond of those signing the letter is simply a blind support towards Hugo Chavez and his fake pseudo revolution. It is not based on any factual knowledge about what is happening on Venezuela and what you criticize of the cited report.

On the issue of discrimination on political grounds, you are of course referring to the infamous Tascon/Chavez list, a perverse database of those that signed a petition to recall the mandate of Hugo Chavez, which has been widely used to discriminate in employment and providing services to Venezuelan citizens. You question the veracity of such discrimination, which Teodoro Petkoff has called an “apartheid” list, but maybe HRW should have linked this video from the documentary “The List” (For a written summary of “The List”, read here) where in minute 0:49 Hugo Chavez says “Anyone that signs against Chavez his name will be registered for history”. Later in minute 2:17 President Chavez in his Sunday variety show Alo Presidente (#214) jokes about the Tascon list and the fear people have of being in it. Finally in minute 3:08 at a public Cabinet meeting Hugo Chavez says: “The famous Tascon list should be filed away. That is now over. Let the Tascon list be buried, it surely played its role at a certain moment, but it is now over” :What else could the Venezuelan President have meant when he publicly made that order to “file away” and “bury” that list? Bury it had a very clear meaning: Chavez knew and backed the list for a long time, never condemned it and just ordered that it no longer be used. He ordered it buried as local newspapers began printing dozens of cases daily of discrimination and firings using the Tascon/Chavez list. Many of these cases are well documented in “The List”

But in the name of accuracy and rigor maybe you could all have simply taken the time to download the Tascon/Chavez database and played with it. This perverse use of technology represents and abominable example about what mankind can do in the name of ideology and politics. It classifies millions of Venezuelans as pro or against Hugo Chavez. Those in favor are called “Patriots”, of course, and to insure that the appropriate pressure can be brought upon those against this empty revolution, it includes everyone’s address, voting center and a powerful search function.

Just think, you can spy on your family and neighbors from the comfort of your own laptop and know whether they signed against Chavez (if you are against him) or whether they have benefited or not from the Government;s direct assistant programs (if you are for him), creating a tool for division and hate for all Venezuelans

Just its existence and elaboration by a Government that claims to be democratic is a violation to the rights given by the Venezuelan Constitution as well as the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And remember, Chavez ordered it buried, but never condemned it.

Yes, Venezuela is indeed not a political model for anyone as clearly exposed by HRW and Jose Miguel Vivancos. The country is a signatory of these International agreements and declarations which you failed to take into account in your letter. But not knowing them is no excuse, particularly when you are asking for the rigor that an academic peer review process should have.

And yes, in most cases it can not be proven that there was discrimination. When one of us was denied a passport, he was not given a piece of paper stating it was because he had signed against Chavez, but was told only verbally that was the true reason. This happened to thousands of Venezuelans who could not obtain a passport or an ID card for months after the 2004 recall referendum.

As for employment or Government contracts, even after Chavez asked that the list be buried, it was used to get rid of the enemies of the state who worked at oil company Sincor when the Government nationalized it. The newly named President of that company left no doubt about it: “This is a matter of the State. There is a list being circulated in the press and it is real. It came out of here, we are investigating it and whoever leaked it will go to jail. It will be applied to key personnel which is within or outside the company”. And yes the people were fired, so much for inaccuracy and hearsay, no?

And there is the case of Rocio San Miguel and two other lawyers (shown in “The List”) who worked at the Council for Borders, who just happened to tape 55 minutes of telephone conversations with their superiors, who explained to them they were fired for signing against Hugo Chavez and that the Venezuelan Vice-President directly approved it. That case is now in the Interamerican Human Rights Court.

And while you correctly state the Government had the right to fire the oil workers for striking, you bypass the not so irrelevant fact that it not only did it illegally, ignoring Venezuela’s strict labor legislation, but it confiscated severance pay (also illegal under Venezuelan law) as well as voluntary pension fund contributions and savings of all these workers without any Court order allowing it. These workers ranged from low level messengers to secretaries, to indeed, high level executives. Venezuelan Labor Courts have failed to process a single one of the appeals for these cases since 2003. If that is not overt discrimination and violation of due process and the rule of law, then what is?

As for self-censorship which you so un-rigorously dismiss, you fail to note the dozens of reporters whose programs have been cancelled in the media outlets who decided to “follow orders” from the Government, in contrast to the illegal termination of broadcasting license and seizure of the property of TV station RCTV, which refused to obey the orders from highest levels of power in Venezuela.

And it is absolutely laughable when you state that “The report even uses innuendo to imply that the government is to blame for attacks on journalists”, when the Venezuelan Government has failed to provide protection to over 250 reporters as requested by the Interamerican Human Rights Court, within treaties of which Venezuela is a signatory.

Finally, you question HRW from using a report by an “opposition blogger”, calling him mentally unstable, for which you also have no evidence as no professional has ever declared him so, but you fail to question a single fact of the reference cited by HRW. You will find this very difficult to do, since that reference is a factual description of the Tascon/Chavez database and proof that the Electoral Board authorized the release of copies of all of the signatures to pro-Chavez Deputy Luis Tascon.

And I do find it remarkable that you use as evidence that some people have called for the violent overthrow ofthe Venezuelan Government presided by Hugo Chavez who supported two coup attempts, violent ones at that, and who actually led one of them which left over 200 Venezuelans dead in the streets, including children. An interesting double standard you all have in the defense of human rights, to say the least.

In the end you letter is a defficient attempt at discrediting HRW, which curiously defended Mr. Chavez in 2002 despite the deaths induced by the Venezuelan President against a peaceful march. Your letter fails precisely where you attempted to find fault with the HRW report, it lacks rigor, it is superficial and represents a terrible error for you to sign such a partisan document.

Meanwhile back in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez seeks his indefinite reelection despite a referendum denying it in 2007 and against the express prohibition by the Venezuelan Constitution (Title IX) to consider the same question twice in a single Constitutional period. Moreover, Hugo Chavez issued 26 Bills in July 2008 which contain provisions also rejected in the same referendum.

This is the wholesale violation of the democratic rights of the majority of Venezuelans who voted against such provisions in December 2007

It has now been 10 years of the empty Chavez revolution. Venezuela has had revenues of over US$ 800 billion comparable to the rescue package for the US financial system. Despite this windfall, poverty numbers are barely improved, nutrition and health numbers are down, the Venezuelan hospital system is in shambles and crime has tripled under Chavez’ watch. But the country certainly has a very modern arsenal of military weapons, and Chavez regularly threatens the opposition with the fact that his revolution “is armed”, while corruption is so rampant that suitcases full of cash are flown in official Government flights and those caught red handed in the process describe how they made hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to their close relationship with Venezuelan Government officials under Chavez. And Hugo Chavez and his Government openly support the Colombian guerrillas.

Remarkably, there are still those like you “experts” that have barely probed the surface of what is going on in our beleaguered country that continue to defend the indefensible, continue to support an outlaw Government which lacks the support of Venezuelan academia and students, but you have failed to even ask yourself why this is.

Ironically, while you sit in the comforts of your offices supporting the Chavez revolution and working on your academic projects, your social science colleagues in Venezuela  receive meager funding and the annual social sciences award has not been given in the last two years .

It is truly sad when in the name of academia a serious and very unique institution exclusively devoted to the defense of human rights is attacked for political purposes in such a low quality and superficial way. But it is even sadder and a shame, when the systematic and well organized violations of human rights by the Venezuelan Government presided by Hugo Chavez are ignored by those that claim to dream with and believe in the basic dignity and rights of all human beings.