The Devil's Excrement

The Sole Finger by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

The process of the creation of the Partido Unico Socialista (PUS, what an acronym!) is proceeding at full speed, adhering itself to the regulations inherent to a participative democracy like the Venezuelan one. The unique star of the revolution, the father of the ice cream, the exclusive owner of the votes, has participated his political allies that each political party can do whatever it wants, but if they do not join PUS, they will be kicked out of the Government. Obviously such a “democratic” and “respectful” query of the opinions of others must have the leaders of the parties that have accompanied Chavez’ MVR for the last eight year pondering.

The same thing must be happening with those in MVR itself, because after the public scolding that Chavez gave Jose Vicente Rangel and Jesse Chacon in the Panteon Nacional itself, live and direct, nobody knows how the Supreme Finger is going to move in the next few weeks. Chávez said that he was tired of the acts of his fingers, but surely that tiredness must be much like the one that he had after he “buried” the Maisanta/Tascon list. Neither that one lays cold in its tomb nor will his tireless finger cease pointing out who the leaders of PUS will be. Not even if he wanted it to be different, because article ONE of the tacit bylaws of the Bloque de Cambio (which is the name, for now, of the coalition of Chavista parties), clearly states that “the President will have the last word”, as has been said and repeated by any of our “countrymen” who gives his opinion about any matter related to candidacies, positions and other perks which derive from power. Nobody that surrounds him that is not insane, who does not tremble in his presence or sucks up to him, as it happens with all autocratic and authoritarian rulers, would even dare to suggest any name, until he is sure of what “I, the Supreme” wants.

A leader of MEP, the same person that once sent Chavez a letter complaining about his authoritarian style (of course not using that word, but it was very clear what he meant), has now rushed to assure us that his party is simply waiting for the order to live together, to take the step. The radicals have also reacted (at least via the mouth of its Secretary General) and has said that since there is no longer a Red Vatican that will tell him what to do, the will of the Unique Leader is sufficient for the Central Committee to approve the creation of PUS without the need for debate that, in any case, would be a waste of time.

But in PPT and Podemos, which appear to think that the votes they got, do not in anyway belong to Chavez, they are somewhat hesitant.

In fact, a leader of one of those two parties, who, using the newspaper cliché, “shall remain anonymous”-and I will not squeal on him- “If the votes were Chavez’ they would have been for MVR, if they voted for us, there must be a reason”

This has some logic, of course.

The problem is that the commander, like in the barracks, accepts no discussions.

The idea of plurality, diversity, respect for the opinions of others, is to them essentially repugnant.

He will surely get away with it because it is very difficult that the mortal dilemma that Podemos and PPT have (acceptance and perks or just suffer) will be resolved in favor of what we could call “principles”.

For two years the Prosecutor General, the one that never seems to close a case, because the investigations never find anything, has been going after the Mayor of Baruta Henrique Capriles for his “invasion” of the Cuban Embassy on April 12 2002. Capriles was even in jail for it for a while, because they wanted to try him while in jail, despite the fact that the law says otherwise. He was released after spending a few months in jail.

There is plenty of proof that Capriles did not comment any offense that evening, such as the testimony from the Norwegian Ambassador as well as a video in which Capriles talks to the Cuban Ambassador quite amicably and offers all of his help so that nothing happens to him. Despite this, the Cuban Ambassador was one of the first to accuse afterwards and the case moved on.

Yesterday, despite the biased Justice system, a lower Court exonerated Capriles. This decision surprised me because everything seems to be so controlled by the Government, that I did not think he would be found innocent . But he was, and I was planning to write an article tonight praising the decision and suggesting it was a positive sign.

To put it in its proper perspective, the Judge said there was no proof that Capriles had illegally gone into the Cuban Embassy or in violation of international principles, which protect diplomatic residences. The prosecutor had withdrawn one of the charges, when it was shown that Capriles had entered the Embassy building by the invitation of the Cuban Ambassador, who was seen in the video saying that he could stay as long as he wanted. The Judge said that Capriles was trying to mediate and look for a solution while there was an aggressive mob outside, but that all of the violence came from the outside.

Well, today the General Prosecutor said it would appeal the decision, showing once again that politics and political revenge rules everything. Thousands of homicides go unpunished, the truth of April 11th. and who killed 22 people that day has never been investigated, corruption is rampant, but this case is not only given priority, but after such a resounding decision the Prosecutor decides to spend more time, money and resources on an appeal. Capriles himself called on the Prosecutor to devote more time to assassinations and killings.

Thus this farce that Venezuelan Justice has become continues, abused by those that are supposed to uphold and defend the law.

I am not sure what to think about this, part of it sounds reasonable, but another seems fishy:

“The National Institute for Sports released a project that will regulate the issuing and registering of professional sports licenses in baseball, where children and adolescents that practice that sport will require express authorization from their parents to obtain the legal requirements to compete at that level.”

“The primary objective is to prevent the indiscriminate signing of Venezuelan youth and protect them in the face of any foreign country that wants to have them in their roster. We will seek to validate the principles of efficacy, objectivity, impartiality, honesty, among others, where the priority will be the integral development of the athlete”

The first paragraph sounds eminently reasonable, to insure the parents of local baseball players who are underage approve the signing and the terms of the signing, but the part about protecting the youth against foreign countries, given that only US teams come to Venezuela to sign baseball players, sounds like the Government will create obstacles for the development (and enrichment!) of our good players. Moreover, nly baseball is mentioned.

The Venezuelan Government already tried to create a parallel baseball league to undermine the local professional baseball league a couple of years ago. After a bombastic opening game, with Chavez in attendance, only one other game was played. A lot of money was wasted on that project.

It was a truly banner day for Chavista injustice in Venezuela. I imagine that some judges and prosecutors must be high-fiving each other behind the scenes, since they created such loopholes in order to screw their enemies. But the truth is that what they have done is so crude and crass, that some of those same high-fivers, must be feeling only shame inside:

—Venezuelan law is very clear, if you have been jailed for two years and have not been charged, accused or tried, after that you have to be tried in freedom. But this only applies to whomever the revolution wants it to apply and certainly not to Henry Vivas, Lazaro Forero and Ivan Simonovis. The three were part of the Metropolitan police on April 11 2002 and were jailed for being responsible of some of the deaths, but have not been accused or tried, because there is no evidence against them. Of course, we all saw the shooters of Puente El Llaguno, all Chavez supporters, who were not only speedily tried, but also exonerated and treated as heroes of the revolution.

—And how about the General Prosecutor, who presented today the “conclusive” act of the investigation of the assassination of Prosecutor Danilo Anderson, without concluding anything. The General Prosecutor criticized the law that limits the time he has to prove a crime, suggesting the law had problems because it was approved before the 2000 Bolivarian Constitution. Unfortunately the man in charge of preserving the law in Venezuela forgot that the same law was changed after the 2000 Constitution was approved, making his argument moot. Thus, instead of using the law and dropping the case against two of the people accused, he is “filing” the case against them and can reopen it at any time. This is simply not what the law says.

Curiously, the case against one of the accused, banker Nelson Mezherane, relies on the fact that his pilot is said to have taken part in one of the meetings and called some of the people involved, but curiously, the pilot has never been charged. In the case of reporter Patricia Poleo, because she fled the country, the case cannot be closed, in one very twisted logic since Poleo was accused because she had supposedly participated in a meeting in Panama in which the star witness had participated. Since then, the Prosecutor has determined the star witness was in jail in Colombia that day and Poleo was not in Panama when the meeting supposedly had taken place.

Thus, two years have gone by, the opposition was accused the first day, but not one single person has been charged and the investigation ahs been essentially useless. Meanwhile all of the avenues of investigation surrounding Prosecutor’s Anderson’s wealth have not even been followed.

—When PDVSA fired 18,000 workers in 2003 it did it in violation of the law, which prohibits massive firings, all cases have to be brought individually. Of course this has been irrelevant as labor Courts have yet to rule on a single one of those 18,000 cases, despite the fact that there are numerous irregularities and violations of the law. Well, today PDVSA began charging PDVSA workers individually by charging them with the company’s losses during the period odf the 2003-2003 strike. Very expensive almost full-page ads were published in two local papers, each ad charging one person. Reportedly 400 people will be charged this way. PDVSA is opening a penal and administrative case against each of these people with the intent of confiscating their savings plan, pension and property, as well as jailing them.

Thus, as Chavez and the Government speak of pardoning political prisoners, the President of PDVSA, waited until the election was over to proceed full blast with a heartless political revenge against his enemies.

Will he be charged one day for PDVSA’s loss of production and corruption in the same manner?

Over the weekend I became aware that I had been again nominated to the Weblog Awards as one of the best Latino, Caribbean or South American blog. I was honored to win the award last year, but I believe that it is in the interest of bloggers and blogging that other blogs have the chance to win. I started this blog with a mission in mind and I think I have done as much as I can in letting the world know what is happening in Venezuela by writing about it in English. But it is time for others to be recognized. I tried to contact the people who organize the Awards to withdraw my blog, to no avail, thus the reason for this post.

Perhaps the problem of Venezuela after the recent election is “passe” and you should go and vote for Val Prieto of babalublog who has been bringing us the problem of Cuba, a long standing problem which seems to be near a resolution, with passion and an open mind. If politics is your game, I recommend you vote for Val in recognition of his effort, his insight and his persistence. I know I will. If you are fed up with politics in our region, then vote for Luz de Luma, whose blog is more of a celebration of life, the life that all of the countries and citizens in our region deserve.

In one of the strangest pieces of news to come out of Venezuela, the President of development bank Bandes, Edgar Hernandez Behrens announced that the bank will open an office in Bamako. For those of geographically impaired, Bamako is the capital of Mali in Africa. Hernandez Behrens said that a commission had traveled to that country and would open the office to give that country a US$ 10 million line of credit.

It was unclear why a Venezuelan Government Development bank is so interested in Mali and Hernandez Behrens never explained it (because its poor?)

Bandes’ foray into Mali development comes after its recent incursion in Argentina, via a loan to milk cooperative SanCor. I wonder if any of the Bandes people have visited Venezuela recently.

So, Venezuela will lend money to SanCor on its own, nobody else will invest, so that it is run by the same people who got it into debt and could not pay it. Hopefully they will survive long enough to pay us back with milk. The investment by Bandes in Argentina is 60 times what the Government has invested in the area in the last three years, according to the Center for Economic Research. I guess Sancor got money, Venezuela got milk!

Venezuelan and Argentinean milk farmers probably got screwed!

XXIst. Century Corruption by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

It was not one of his opponents that said it, he himself said it. That bureaucracy and corruption are his worst enemies. We are not going to argue with him; since his own experience must have dictated such a revealing conclusion-even if it is akin to discovering warm water. But, if it really has to do with fighting that plague-which, for the good of the country, we all want-the continuist should make an auto critical exercise and think about his own responsibility in the expansion of that calamity. First of all, a petro state like ours is inherently bureaucratic and corrupt-even under a democratic Governments-but, if, on top of that, the Government is authoritarian and autocratic, it becomes even worse. To govern ignoring the Constitution and the law, with the top chief being the alpha and the omega of the managing of the country and concentrating all of the powers in the fist of the President, happens to be the unbeatable condition so that those perversions may thrive in the civil service. An authoritarian ruler generates fear and adulance and with that, all control begins to vanish.

He does what he wants. If, on top of that, all public institutions are subjected to him, the possibility of any controls definitely disappears.

When Chavez got to power he found thirteen ministries; he said they were too many and reduced them to eleven, to “reduce bureaucracy”. So far we are now up to 26. A step back to gain momentum. Some of them even overlap functions.

Each of them has generated its own and growing bureaucracy.

The number of institutes and commissions created throughout these years is countless. The bureaucracy and buruacratism are the inevitable consequences of such a proliferation of institutions.

The State and the Government have become more pachydermic, more rigid and extremely complicated in its procedures. Even worse, instead of reforming what he found-which was already deficient-, the Government has created a parallel public administration, with its own budget, as opaque and as inefficient as the first one.

Thus, the problem now is twice as large. We have to reform two public administrations.

How can corruption in the country not increase in a country where there are two budgets? The National Assembly approves one and the other one Chavez manages at his own discretion, with PDVSA’s money, which feeds directly the funds that have been created without laws and regulations, without being accountable to anyone and undercover from any from of control. How could corruption not increase in a country where all deals go through the petro-stat and where “how much is in it for me?” is the tacit norm. because all controls have disappeared?

On the other hand, the abundance of the military in public administration complicates things even more, because their training leads them to a style of management without deliberation, of “I lead and I order” and without control-more so because of the fear they inspire in their civilian colleagues, who see them as copies of “I, the Supreme Being”

The President should thus start, by looking at that sliver in his eye if it is true he wants to go further beyond his occasional speeches on the subject, just so that others believe in him, but without anyone in Government feeling that they are being alluded to.

Somehow it seems wrong to find something positive about someone’ death, but I can’t help but feel that the world is better place because Augusto Pinochet is no longer with us. Remarkable to see both people mourning him and celebrating his death at the same time. The world will be an even better place if these two groups switch sides soon when the Dictator in Havana joins the Chilean Dictator in the only place he can be.

It did not take long for Hugo Chavez to start spreading Venezuela’s wealth around after being reelected. Upon his arrival in a “private” trip to Argentina, he announced that development Bank Bandes was ready to lend or capitalize US$ 80 million into milk cooperative Sancor, in a somewhat strange deal. I guess Bandes’ bylaws did not specify that it was meant to develop only Venezuela and it continues helping richer countries develop.

The details are still somewhat sketchy. Sancor was a milk cooperative which has been criticized in Argentina for acting like a coop when it is convenient and like a company most of the time. Sancor has been unable to repay some US$ 150-200 million in debt and a company partially owned by George Soros, Adecoagro, had reached an agreement to obtain control (62.5%) of Sancor by paying US$ 70 million in debt and capitalizing the rest. The rest of the shareholders of Adecoagro are from Argentina. An Argentinean group, the Petersen group, led by Enrique Eskenazi, also made an offer which was rejected by Sancor. Eskenazi, a strong supporter of President Kirchner, owns a number of banks in that country and was reportedly pressuring the Argentinian President to stop the sale to Adecoagro. There have been charges that one of Eskenazi’s banks forced the sale of Sancor by not lending it more money.

What is unclear at this time is if Chavez is siding with Eskenazi or wants to save Sancor by himself. Some people believe that Sancor would have a hard time getting out of its agreement witn Adecoagro. Others think that Chavez is siding with the Argentinean oligarchs in their confrontation with international capital. What makes the story so strange is that Sancor was badly managed by its current administrators and if it could not repay its old loans, it seems difficult that it can repay the loan to Bandes. Curiously, Soros has more affinity politically with Chavez than Eskenazi, other than their support for and friendship with Kirchner.

Newspaper reports from Argentina say that Sancor is asking Chavez for US$ 120 million, which suggests they want to go at it alone. This would make the deal a bad one for Venezuela, as Sancor clearly needs different management if the loan is ever to be repaid.