The ability to lie and twist is legendary for the Chavista revolution. From illiteracy to oil production, facts are changed, twisted and massaged in order to fit what Chavez and the Government want to say they achieved, even if complete lies have to be said.
The latest is the new euphemism the Government has found for what constitutes building a new home. Given that the country’s problem is the shortage of housing, estimated at over 2.5 million housing units, a new home should be a newly built unit, until Chavez decided he wanted to build 150,000 housing units in 2011.
It was an impossible task from a Government that has never built more than 80,000 housing units in one year and given the fact that his “Mision Vivienda” was announced in April. But by the end of the year Chavez was talking about completing 94% of the goal and the year ended with an official number of 146,714 units built by the Government.
The number has been repeated so many times, that it has become the truth, even if nobody believes it. But this week, Minister of Oil and Energy Rafael Ramirez explained the “miracle”, Chavismo simply changed the definition. How? It now includes among new housing units built all rancho (shacks)”substitutions”.And it says that a whopping 45% of all the “new” units, were actually “substitutions”.
From what I have been able to understand, a “substitution” is the definition for a rancho (the type of elementary housing you see in the hills of Caracas) that has been upgraded in the materials that are used in its construction. Which means we have no idea what it really means.
Which also implies that we have no clue what it really meant when the Government claims to have built only 80, 692 new housing units, its best number in thirteen years, but still above other estimates.
So, maybe next time you drive by a barrio, look up and if you see a freshly painted rancho, you are seeing one such “substitution”. Not much change beyond that.
Another way of hiding the revolutions inability to do anything, just change the definition and the goal has been accomplished and Chavez is certainly pleased.
As it should be.
The Devil's Excrement 
January 29, 2012 at 5:24 pm
Not a surprise, kind of sad that a shanty town is now considered a housing development.
January 24, 2012 at 6:31 am
I have said again and again that the Chavez dictatorship has invented nothing new. I’m sure you have all heard of the famous Russian “Potemkin villages” built to impress Tsarina Catherine by her then current lover, Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tavricheski.
There was a rumor going around in my youth that Francisco de Miranda shared Catherine with Grigory. We have done EVERYTHING! We even did the Tsarina! LOL
I did comment how Chavismo splashed bureaucrat gray paint on all the facades along the route the CELA dignitaries were going to take though Caracas. More of the same.
January 23, 2012 at 1:28 pm
O sea, they are counting any new rancho ‘e bloque they help to “repair” as a new official housing unit. Which they technically are, but…
January 23, 2012 at 11:21 am
O/T-so many financial scandels by Chavez: Here’s one from Nicaragua,
Chavez and Ortega shady deals. Ripping off PDVSA and Venezuela…
http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/3388/las-cuentas-secretas-de-albanisa
January 23, 2012 at 10:40 am
Hardly any surprises here! What is incomprehensible is WHY,after allof these years which have proved Hugo Chavez a liar & manipulator, don’t the citizens of Venezuela rise up and get him OUT??!!!
January 22, 2012 at 10:25 pm
sigue la guachafita, bread and circus, smoke and mirrors. remember c. 2000 , when *the revolution* was promoting its overhaul of grade schools? Turns out, a German journalist broke away from the tightly scheduled tour, and walked towards the back of the school being promoted. What he found was that things were pretty much a mess, behind the façade of new paint on the front of the school building.
January 22, 2012 at 10:40 pm
I remember one school-the front was freshly painted red. Nothing else
changed..
January 22, 2012 at 8:26 pm
How do you know if a politician is lying?
If his mouth is moving, he is lying!