Late in August, I am not sure what day, landslides in the road to Choroni blocked the road. I have two friends in their eighties that had to be helicoptered out that week. At the time, the wise Governor of Aragua State said that it would take four days to clear the road.
It may seem like a chicken and egg problem, the Governor says these are the worst landslides in history, but the rainy season has not been particularly bad. It could be a maintenance problem, or may be not.
But what is amazing is that today, the same guy, Governor Isea, gives a press conference to say that tonight, sometime after 7 PM, traffic was partially restored on the road to Choroni.
We are talking SEVEN times later, 28 days to be exact, rather than four and there is still a rock on the way such that only one car can pass thru at a time. Yes, in the middle there was partial access, but these guys are ONLY a month late!
Is he proud of this? Does he really think he is a hot shot Governor? How clueless can he be? We are talking about beautiful Choroni, a town that lives off tourism being isolated for a full month!
Even if the beach is nice:
an believe it me, it is. Why would you even bother to try to go there?
And you will not even bother going until the rains end, maybe in February?
This does wonders for the local economy of Choroni.
And in talking to my friends, who have had a house there for decades, they don’t ever remember the road being closed for more than two or three days and it has now been a month!
And you can bet Isea will hold a press conference when full traffic is restored! That’s how clueless these guys are, they don’t even know how to deal with a landslide or a series of landslides, which are not even a record.
But they think they are doing great!
The Devil's Excrement 
September 14, 2013 at 2:46 am
財布 人気 カバン おしゃれ http://www.jpp13.com/
September 28, 2011 at 9:02 pm
Miguel, socialism these gobernates practice is called back all crap, but a lot of money in their accounts in the Paris prosecutors are all thieves are a quarter of infants in comparison to ethos.
September 28, 2011 at 7:57 pm
I am not pissed about the comments, it’s just that it looked like I said it and reporters called me.
September 28, 2011 at 8:05 pm
sure, because each comment that is cherry picked has an @moctavio at the end of it. No wonder reporters are hounding you as the source.
September 28, 2011 at 8:38 pm
The more I think about it, the more I’d ask you, Miguel, to request of this Silvers character that what happens in TDE stays in TDE. Looks to me as though Silvers wants to expand eyeballs under his name, via the work of others.
September 29, 2011 at 9:31 am
He can wish all he wants, when people see the source, thats the end of it.
September 28, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Descifrado:
En las últimas horas se han producido reuniones entre representantes de Miraflores y voceros del poder Legislativo y el Psuv para discutir sobre el tema del estado de salud del jefe de Estado. La cúpula del partido de gobierno, la Asamblea Nacional y una delegación de Palacio dialogan al respecto, según revela Descifrado.com
El Presidente estaría en aislamiento tras un descenso en sus defensas tras el último tratamiento de quimioterapia recibido en Cuba y no se descarta su traslado a un centro de salud privado, mencionándose hasta ahora el Hospital de Clínicas Caracas.
September 28, 2011 at 3:54 pm
As I stated before, any acute complication could be serious enough to take his life. Talk is about sepsis. The majority of CA patients succumb to it. Antibiotics can do only so much, and without a reasonably healthy immune system, the prospects of recovery are dim. The MUD be better prepared for this.
September 28, 2011 at 4:19 pm
I wonder which “voceros del poder legislativo” are there. All the Asamblea I doubt.
But that is irrelevant and it doesn’t really matter. I hope the MUD is meeting as well.
September 28, 2011 at 7:57 pm
two days ago I “crystal balled” 2-4 weeks. last night I started thinking 1-2 weeks. the countdown is on. I don’t wish anyone death, but I fear things are heading that way.
September 28, 2011 at 3:01 pm
The group benefiting from Chavez might not be that small.
There are some getting rich but others, are just scared to lose their stupid petty jobs…
I have a group of family members( maybe 13 or 14 cousins ) living in El Tigre….none of them like Chavez but they will vote for him in order not to lose their jobs.
Many people supposedly hate Chavez but pretend to be Chavez- lite in order not to lose a job.
.
September 28, 2011 at 7:53 pm
the jobs are not stupid nor petty to those who are doing them, FP, especially in a more rural setting where jobs are hard to come by.
September 29, 2011 at 7:21 am
they are petty and stupid in light of their consequences Syd..it is all relative
September 29, 2011 at 10:58 am
Perhaps you could define your terms, as to what these so-called stupid and petty jobs really are, FP, and what would the viable alternative be so that your family members could put food on the table. By the way, are these family members part of the 1000 that you said you have in Venezuela?
September 28, 2011 at 2:56 pm
I agree 100% with JMA: “They are just there for the power and the money.”.
Fixing a road in 7 times longer than originally announced is, in my mind, a bare minimum just to make it appear there’s a working bureocracy (local governments, etc.). It is clear there’s no incentive to make Chavistas in charge fix a road quickly, just as there isn’t to execute a plan to improve the country’s economy, to decrease “la delincuencia”, etc., etc. “au contraire”, when there isn’t an explicit plan to destroy (i.e., the economy, jobs) there simply isn’t any plan at all (thus fixing the road to Choroni may as well have taken 2 full months, instead of 28 days).
And so, people are now waiting for Chavez’s health to crap out, since they, the people, can’t do anything about the situation, right? What if Chavez’s health doesn’t crap out any time soon? What if he fully recovers and stays in power until (or beyond) 2021 as he’s announced in the past over and over? Are we waiting for divine intervention to “take care of the situation” since we, ourselves, can’t? How pathetic are we, Venezuelans, to let a group of “vendepatrias” hijack the country and where ever possible give positions of power to a foreign country (Cuba)? Is there anything more pathetic than this? A whole country watching in the sidelies how the country itself is being destroyed for most of the people while a small group are truly benefiting (and benefiting they are, there’s no question about it).
September 28, 2011 at 3:49 pm
There are people working on the situation, even if it doesn’t seem to anyone that what they are doing will be effective, but there are many making an honest effort. As for Chavez, you can be as sure as you breathe air that this guy has much less than a year of life left in him.
September 28, 2011 at 2:47 pm
JMA and others:
When I spoke of denial I wasn’t speaking about Chavistas in particular,(Carolina got the picture), I was speaking about people in Venezuela in general.
Many Chavistas are criminals, or sociopathic in some way…their primary defense mechanism is often blame shifting .It is always YOUR fault, not theirs..it is the fault of the Empire etc etc.
After a while it is hard to distinguish what is being projected and what is being distorted…
September 28, 2011 at 2:17 pm
It’s not about chavistas being in denial or self-delusional (which they are). In this case it’s simply the fact that how you measure your accomplishments is relative to how difficult they were for you to accomplish them, not how difficult the task was per se.
Think about the first time you managed to send an email without needing your tech-savvy cousin sitting next to you. Or the first time you passed your driver’s test. Or the first time you managed to change the theme on your WordPress website without making everything go to hell.
Sure, for anyone with any modicum of experience and/or talent, those accomplishments are the intellectual equivalent of making a cheese sandwich. But for you, those were ground-braking accomplishments that made you feel like you just flew all the way to the moon.
And for chavistas whose greatest intellectual accomplishment is to open a bottle of beer on the first try, anything they do feels like they just built the Pyramids with their bare hands. For them, it IS an incredible accomplishment to do in a month what any non-retarded person would do in 3 days.
September 28, 2011 at 2:42 pm
So, Senor Guest, are you saying -give the chavistas more time
(all of the time they need) and eventually they will build marvels
that rival the pyramids?
Or, that with time and training they will one day become
functioning adults and productive ones, meanwhile, we
wait and suffer..
September 28, 2011 at 7:47 pm
Let’s see. chavistas take 30 days to accomplish what should take 3. If we take that ratio over the course of 12 years, chavistas have managed to accomplish 10% of the norm. I think you’re being too generous.
(But I get the gist of what you’re saying. chavistas have a very limited range of experience, for any number of reasons.)
September 28, 2011 at 1:12 pm
No se por que los brackets triangulares no salen.
September 28, 2011 at 2:37 pm
All aboard! Ready for take-off, Captain Miguel!
September 28, 2011 at 1:03 pm
I fixed it, son brackets de estos
por fuera ambos
September 28, 2011 at 1:33 pm
de que estas hablando
September 28, 2011 at 12:45 pm
September 28, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Twilight Zone?
Now seriously. What are they waiting for?
September 28, 2011 at 2:02 pm
What a coincidence. I have a similar reaction each time I see you know who …
September 28, 2011 at 8:25 pm
The ex wife?
September 29, 2011 at 10:14 am
That one too!
September 28, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Peripheral chavistas may very well be self-delusional and live in denial. But those running things are simply and plainly malandros that don’t care. They are just there for the power and the money. If you believe this, your life gets somewhat easier and you would have no qualms about doing what is necessary to get them out of there. A month and there is still a rock in the road. WTF?
But, look at this:
[img src=”http://imagenes.lapatilla.s3.amazonaws.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Karilg17.jpg”]
I thought of writing Boeing asking what could have caused this, but, of course, they would reply that they can’t tell me that, if they ever answered me.
if you told me before it happened that this was possible, I would have told you to go easy on your recreational drugs. Metal fatigue? Who knows? I am no expert. But I now firmly believe that people down there are flying in their coffins. A tragedy is waiting to happen.
Like I said, malandros, pues.
September 28, 2011 at 1:35 pm
how do you know it’s a Boeing?
September 28, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Actually, it is not. It’s a McDonnell Douglas DC9-50. However, some years ago, Boeing bought that company and the later iteration of this plane became the Boeing 717. They are now in charge of anything related to McDonnell Douglas’ planes.
September 28, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Chavez is currently in intensive care. He went into Hospital Militar in a wheelchair.
September 28, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Frdliberty? Where did you get that information?
September 28, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Someone actually retweeted this with my name and I got calls from reporters about it. Not funny!
September 28, 2011 at 4:43 pm
Sorry for the mixup. @VenezuelaBlogs re-tweets all comments on this blog, to draw attention to the discussion. Cheers to everybody. http://twitter.com/#!/VenezuelaBlogs
September 28, 2011 at 4:52 pm
All the comments??? I better watch my mouth.
September 28, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Why would you do that? it’s the most idiotic use of Twitter I’ve seen. You want to spark discussion? link to the post, you are littering Twitter and taking discussions out of context.
Show some respect.
September 28, 2011 at 7:37 pm
agree. Care to explain, silvers, why the comments are being cherry picked with no associated post, and under the responsibility of moctavio.? No wonder the blogger is annoyed.
September 28, 2011 at 7:50 pm
Ditto.
September 28, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Not only Miguel, but Quico and Daniel as well.
October 10, 2011 at 10:53 pm
My comments are meant as part of a discussion, just as are yours, I presume. @VenezuelaBlogs was created to draw attention to intelligent discussions on Venezuelan politics.
Yes, all comments are ReTweeted. The aim was and is to increase international exposure to the tenuous situation in Venezuela in hopes of holding an authoritarian hybrid regime in check. A comment Tweet can bring a new reader to an interesting post and teach them something, regardless if the context is missing upon impact.
International attention is still important.
September 28, 2011 at 1:31 pm
I’m not surprised, if it’s true.
September 28, 2011 at 12:12 pm
This problem with landslides will be solved when the Chinese
masters take over. Moslem masters don’t care. Russian
masters don’t care. Chinese masters will get the road fixed
in record time!
Seriously- I say send the military out to fix the road -give some
Cubans a shovel!!
September 28, 2011 at 10:21 am
The answer is keep digging. Honestly, they always keep digging when they get caught doing something stupid, you’d think they KNOW this one.
September 28, 2011 at 10:17 am
The photo of Choroni reminds me of my favorite things about Venezuela- the natural beauty. I used to drive to playa colorado and was so saddened by the state of the roads and all the trash on the sides only to end at a gorgeous beach. In going the other way to the airport in barcelona was like driving through a war zone. We were forever reminded of what a tourist paradise Venezuela could be but would not be without development and education. Chavez has rolled that clock back about 50 years.
September 28, 2011 at 8:04 pm
Nail on the head.
September 28, 2011 at 8:22 am
“Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.”
I have noticed this defense going on in every single friend and family member i have in Venezuela, to a greater or lesser degree.I am sure it is the only way they can stand living there.
I get email all the time from friends who admit to a bit more crime or even a lot more, but continue to see the good side of the situation larger than the bad side.At the very least they do not focus on the danger.
Often time when someone breaks through the barrier of defense, they move.Either they move, or they become chronically enraged.Most people don’t have the inner strength to stay enraged.
I have a friend in Margarita who has been claiming for years that she was protected by her belief in GOD.Last week, malandros cleaned out her house, and she is now for the first time thinking of becoming a nomad, and live by visiting her friends throughout the world.Her defensive barrier was destroyed by a shock, which is what it usually takes.
This same defense maintains inertia- which maintains Chavismo.Not everyone uses denial as a primary defense mechanism, but I have noticed it is super common in Venezuela.
Facts mean nothing.Only shock will bring about a profound change.
September 28, 2011 at 10:10 am
Very interesting FP.
It’s true that a lot of people are in denial in Venezuela, not only chavistas. Last time I was there my cousin -non chavista – told me something like “if you don’t watch globovision life goes on better, things are almost the same than when you left” (i left in 1998 before Chavez!!!!!!!!)
I remember an old posting (about 7 years ago?) from Alek Boyd in VCrisis that was called “Nothing happenes here” or something like that. If I recall correctly, he was frustrated at the general denial of the situation. I think it was one of the last posts of VCrisis.
September 28, 2011 at 8:04 am
Miguel – I do feel sorry for the people of Choroni. Not only that they live of the tourism, but also their day by day. How have they been getting supplies? By sea or helicopter?
In any case, I must say I’m having troubles focusing on your posting. My eyes keep going to the spectacular photo of the beach. I do miss that a lot. Thanks for the little gift.
September 28, 2011 at 8:22 am
the beach is gorgeous!!!!
September 28, 2011 at 7:25 am
Kepler,
I have an uncle that is the same way…he is on a pension, he has a hard time keeping up financially due to all the medicines that he is taking, but hte world is falling apart while Venezuela is “viento en popa”. I stop talking about politics with him, because we will always fight about…I just hope that he live long enough to see the change.
September 28, 2011 at 7:33 am
I talked to my aunt recently on the phone and she asked me when I was going to visit Venezuela again, after we had talked a lot about politics. I suddenly felt like saying: I don’t want to for the moment, people like you are preventing me from going. I bit my tongue. Your decision about not talking politics is a wise one.
September 28, 2011 at 9:32 am
You bit your tongue? Parió la abuela!
September 28, 2011 at 8:18 am
Here is a Chavista that doesn’t think everything is going that well:
http://cesarguevarairreverente.blogspot.com/
He hasn’t written for a while. Reading the comments he got, on that last posting, I would understand.
September 28, 2011 at 9:48 am
Interesting post from the blogger who manages to view the panorama of ex-chavistas with a balanced perspective. The comments.are revealing, especially those from “Lucas”. De dónde sacan estas ideas? As though Britain with its minor economy now rules the world?
September 28, 2011 at 4:32 am
Antonio is so right. They were not only at university. My “chavista” aunt is one of them. She was a primary school teacher. She doesn’t say she is Chavista anymore because absolutely nobody else on that part of her family is Chavista. Still, she is…she just say “I don’t belong to a party” and pretends to be “just” a nini. I think she will be fully with Chávez as long as her pension arrives. She went into pension shortly before he was elected and at that time there were permanent delays with that.
It doesn’t matter what I tell her about the outside world. She says she watches TV (does it a lot) and sees how things are in Spain, in the US, in France, whatever…she has no real reference framework, but even if she had: hers is an attitude. She doesn’t want to be proven wrong. If she admitted it, her whole world – and not just since Chávez – would fall apart.
September 28, 2011 at 3:11 am
Miguel, jc: I think you are both right in saying that “they think they are doing great!” and “a self-delusion that they know, believe deep inside, that they’re doing great”. These are the same type of people we used to meet at school and university all those years ago (presumably they also existed elsewhere, but I am not sure). Dogmatic in their belief in the revolution of the proletariat. Believers in something that does not demand results. So long as they advance the cause, it doesn’t matter much how one gets there. It helps if one has an income from somewhere to survive without doing useful work, as is the case of Mr. Isea. These guys will always be around. I used to hate them.
September 28, 2011 at 1:56 am
Miguel, I don’t think this is about thinking they’re doing great, I think this is partially due to a self-delusion that they know, believe deep inside, that they’re doing great, and a resulting propaganda effort to inflate their greatness. It’s self-perpetuating, self-delusion results in propaganda. If only they had a ministry of truth they could use to erase past history where they made a claim about something only to fail miserably, it would come full circle. Instead it just is something to laugh (and possibly cry) about.
September 27, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Ignorance is bliss!