The Devil's Excrement

(I think that food is not the only thing that is going bad in Venezuela)

With over 120,000 Tons of food found either in a putrid state or expired over the last month, you would think that the new head of PDVAL, locally called Putreval, Colonel Carlos Osorio, would spend at least his first month in office looking at the logistics of how the food is brought into the country and how is distributed, to understand why so much food was left in storage and allowed to go bad.

Instead, the Colonel spends the day visiting a Polar facility and meeting the press to denounce that, lo and behold, they found all of 79 Tons of margarine at a Polar storage building. Imagine that! 79 Tons of a product, when the company he presides has allowed four orders of magnitude more of food to go bad over a few months!

I guess they don’t teach orders of magnitude in military school in Venezuela or the Colonel was transferred just when the subject was going to be covered in class.

But this simple example shows why this Government is so incompetent and ineffective. A guy on his first day on a job which requires managerial experience, that he clearly does not have, (otherwise he would not be a Colonel) rather than attempting to tackle the overwhelming task in front of him, chooses to devote his time attacking the private sector, using a miniscule amount of food as an excuse to accuse them of hoarding.

Miniscule, because Polar provides a large fraction of the margarine in the country under a variety of names, in a country of 26 million people, where 160,000 tubs of margarine are probably sold every week of the year and as the Polar representative explained, since Thursday was holiday, there was more material in storage than usual.

But the problem is clear, the Government spends all the time on propaganda, avoiding responsibility and trying to distract attention from the myriad of problems it has created with its incompetence.

And this simply indicates that Colonel Osorio will be another failure in his new position, as he will not have the support either of funding or logistics that PDVSA used to have PDVAL. He probably thinks the military will do a better job than PDVSA, but this example clearly shows this is unlikely to be the case. He is as clueless as his predecessors and throwing money and soldiers at the problem will not solve anything. You just need organization, management and hard work!

But that is too much to ask from anyone in this Government, which always finds time to spend on the less important things.

Meanwhile the Legislative Council of Monagas State decides to investigate Polar for the firing of one worker, the same week that Chavez freezes all collective bargaining agreements in the country, forbids salary increases and bonuses for any worker in the Venezuelan civil service. But all these workers do not appear to have any labor rights, but the Polar worker needs to be protected.

It is all smoke and mirrors, trying to hide the reality of the failure of the robolution in all fields of Government.But after eleven years, people are no longer fooled as easily, no jobs, inflation and shortages have become the main concerns of the population which is tired of a robolution that has failed to deliver.