The Devil's Excrement

Some
damage control on the part of the Government, which in the end only complicates
matters:

–Chavez recognizes
there was “excessive use of weapons” and cynically begins talking about the
human rights record of the Government as if Fort Mara,
Puente El Llaguno, Plaza Altamira (twice) and many others had occurred in some
other era. Maybe someone should show him the video of the song by Panaminian Ruben Blades Prohibido Olvidar.

We are still waiting for those guilty of Fort Mara
to be charged. (In fact Chavez said one day it was a media scandal and the surviving
soldier had light injuries, he died that night). Chavez admits that there was
no confrontation.

–Chacon says
there were “only” six people dead, in a slip of a tongue, which may have meant,
thanks God there were only six.

–Andres
Velasquez takes the Government to task, saying
that the Government first denied the event ha taken place, then it said there
was a confrontations between miners, then the Minister said it was a confrontation
between the military and the miners and now the President admits there was “excessive
use of weapons” and expresses doubts about the version of a confrontation. Velasquez
ratifies that there are ten people dead, in contrast with Chacon’s “only six”
version. Who is right?

–The Brazilian Foreign Ministry office announces that it has asked the Venezuelan Government for “detailed information” on the event, as some of the “seven” dead are Brazilian, introducing a new number for the deaths as well as a new monkey wrench into the affair.

The problem is that the law in the whole Bolivar mining region has become the Law of the Jungle as the military tries to enrich itslef (What else is new?) at the expense of the miners. There continued to be reports that a lot of gold owned by the miners is missing and that there are some miners that have yet to be found.

From a punlic relations point of view, the
problem at this time is that the President and the Minister of the Interior and
Justice are giving versions which are exactly the opposite of what both the
Minister of Defense, General Ivan Baduell and the Governor of Bolivar State,
retired General Francisco Rangel Gomez have said, not once but three times, falling into a trap of too many contradictions.

Will they
then punish only some lowly soldiers for the massacre and not the high ranking
Government officials for trying to cover the massacre three times, as well as covering up what the source of the conflict is?

Last
Friday when I heard former Causa R Presidential candidate Andres Velasquez, vehemently denounce a
massacre by the Venezuelan military in a mining area in Bolivar state, I
decided that I had to mention it somehow, mostly because I have always respected
Velasquez and if he was making such a string statement, there had to be some
truth to the whole thing. Little did I know that the whole thing would escalate
so fast and that so far, the witnesses interviewed on TV have ratified
Velasquez’ statements.

The story
is confusing. The miners claim that military in helicopters rappelled down from
them and when they touched down, they started shooting. Two of the miners were
reportedly forced to kneel down and executed, while the survivors were told to
run and were shot dead. Reports are confusing. Velasquez first said there were five
dead, the Government then said there were four dead and now there are reports
that the bodies of two Indians have now been found in the town of Maripa, victims of a
separate military action about a day earlier. (The two towns are about 100
miles from each other). The inhabitants of Maripa burned down the house of the
Mayor and say about 100 miners escaped into the mountains, after the Army took
their gold food and instruments away.

Yesterday,
Minister of Defense Baduel said that the deaths
occurred in a confrontation between the military and the miners, when the military
tried to protect the environment. This version was denied
by the miners today, who noted that initially the Operational Theater #5 of the
Army even denied that they had been near the area and it was only when they
realized there was a witness that the story changed. There were
protests today and Velasquez is now charging that the military tried to
cover up what they did. The inhabitants of the town of La Paragua have blocked all access to it and
are demanding the presence of Hugo Chavez himself “because it seems he has distances
himself from the realities of the country”. One of the leaders of the miners said
it was the Army that massacred the workers and said the new Russian helicopters
were used, saying that the statements by the Minister of Defense are simply
lies.

Meanwhile, the Governor of Bolivar state made
statements that agreed with those of the Minister of Defense saying that
the deaths occurred during a confrontation. Curiously, the timeline he gives
for the events disagrees with that of Andres Velasquez who on Saturday morning
was already warning of what happened and that the miners were ready to block
the town. Governor Rangel Gomez, a retired General, said that at noon on
Saturday they knew about the problem, while Velasquez had denounced it much
earlier, but apparently the military did not know there was a survivor. (Globovision
posted it at noon, but it was shown on TV much earlier)

After the silence on Sunday (except for Baduell’s quick
explanation that it was a confrontation after a denial that the Army had
anything to do with it), today, the Prosecutor, Chavez
MVR and yes, belatedly
the People’s Ombudsman, who was too concerned about the problem the Minister of
Foreign Relations had at New York’s Kennedy airport and only said something
this afternoon after the miners
asked for his intervention.

According
to one of the miners “there is a confrontation between the National Guard
and the Army for the control of the mines, which are a scholarship for them
with the extortions and the smuggling of gasoline, it would seems they are
fighting for the area”

Reportedly, the Army wants the miners to leave the area,
despite the fact that it is not the area covered under an older agreement to
protect the sources of rivers and brooks in the area. The miners decided to
march back to their town and were then attacked by the Army. Coincidentally, the same had happened in Maripa just hours earlier.

Curiously, in the middle of the day, the Prosecutor’s
office gave a press conference to
announce they would be charging an officer of the investigative police
for a massacre which took place 22 years ago in 1986, while this case, an apparent attempt at cover up,
involving murder and corruption, seems to be gathering a life of its own, as
Government officials contradict each other, even as they are trying to confirm
each other’s stories, which are changing as fast as the size of the story itself .

After four years of blogging about Venezuelan politics, I think it is about time I give my readers a pop quiz to check whether you are paying attention or not:

Only question (ten points):

After a long weekend of protests, murders and abuses, who did the People’s Ombudsman (Called the People’s Defender in Spanish) came out and express his concern for first:

a) The voters whose rights are being violated by the fingerprint machines
b) The miners massacred in La Paragua, apparently by the military
c) Minister of Foreign Relations Nicolas Maduro
d) The more than one hundred killed in homicides in Caracas this weekend
e) The housing protesters

Well, all of your who said c) got it right. Greman Mundarain was quick to defend Maduro and even went as far as talk about Maduro’s human rights as if he would recognize one. Fortunately, he did not mention Maduros’ “wife”

This morning the inhabitants of the Ojo de Agua barrio near the highway that connects Caracas and La Guaira, blocked
the road in protest over their housing problem. Most of their homes
have been declared “uninhabitable” by the Government, but have received
little help, advise or even a response from the Government.

This
protest in itself would be no different from what goes on daily in
Venezuela, where the headquarters of CONAVI, in charge of housing, is
the subject of daily protests, since this Government has neglected
housing for eight years. What made the protests cute was the theme:
Batman. You see as the protesters began discussing whether to march to
the Presidnetial Palace or not, they started chanting “We want Batman!
We want Batman!”.

You see, according to the neighbors of
Ojo de Agua, Minister of Housing Carrizales lives in his batcave and
they want him to come out of it and give an answer to the protest by
more than one thousand families.

By the way, these people
protesting claim to be pro-Chavez and the feel they need to go directly
to the President for their problem to be solved.

My relative
Miguel Octavio is quoted in today’s “Expediente”
in El Universal talking about the capabilities of the fingerprint machines. Here is the detail of his calculations. Combine this with the error of the system calculated by Bruni and the system is simply a big joke and it is claer it does not do what they claim it does:

In the
absence of the details of the network, we can make the following simple
calculation: A press release by Cogent indicates they sell a
system that allows for the comparison of up
to 500,000 fingerprints per second, the highest number quoted on the
Internet that we have been able to find. But this refers only to the time one
server takes to make such a comparison. The CNE system would require, in order
to preserve the one voter, one vote principle to compares it to all previous
voters and add the new fingerprint to the database.

Let’s do a
simple calculation. We assume that on December 3d. 10 million people will vote
in more or less uniform fashion during ten hours. That is one million per hour
or 277 voters per second. That means, that the system has to evaluate those 277
fingerprints almost in instantaneous fashion, since any delay would make that the
next 277 fingerprints, would have to wait in the queue if the response is not
within one second. Let’s assume that the polls open at 8 AM and let’s imagine
that it is already noon that is 4 million people have voted.

Each
fingerprint needs to be compared to that of the 4 million voters that have already
cast their vote. That means that if there was only one server, it would take 8
seconds per fingerprint. Obviously this is unacceptable. A way to do it in one
second is to have half a million fingerprints per server and have eight
servers. The problem is that at noon we would need 277×8=2216 servers to be
able to complete the task in one second.

Nevertheless,
this simple calculation has a problem, the system can not be designed to handle
averages, but peaks, that is, moments in which you may have twice that number
of voters (There are 16 million registered too), since Venezuelans tend to go
and vote in the morning more than in the afternoon. That means we could be
talking about 4432 servers to satisfy the needs of the system.

But what
happens in the afternoon, let’s say at 4 PM, when we would have twice as many
votes and thus fingerprints and we would need once again twice the number of
servers , that is, 8864 to be able to compare the fingerprints and allow the
voter to vote or not?

The problem
is that this simple calculation does not take into account the design of the
network. Each fingerprint has to be sent to the CNE by satellite. There, there
has to be a server that acts as a traffic manager, deciding which server or
servers will handle the fingerprint that just arrived, which fingerprint is
processes first, which one is ready, which votes already voted and add the new fingerprint
to the appropriate server. You need to have some redundancy too, that is, there
has to be intelligent communication to be able to detect if a fingerprint
arrived or not, whether it had a conflict with another and the like.

 All of
this adds time to the servers and as far as we know, the CNE does not have a
huge number of them. It would not help either to have a huge and fast server
since what takes the longest time in the processing is the transfer of the
fingerprints from disk to memory and it would be difficult to have all of them
in memory. On top of that this would not allow the simultaneous processing of
more than one fingerprint.

In the
absence of more information from the CNE or Cogent there isn’t much more that
can be said. It would seem that Venezuela has the fastest AFIS system in the
world if you compare it to the leading crime institutions of the world, or
could it be that it does not do what it is supposed to do, that is guarantee
the principle of one voter, one vote as the CNE Directors say all the time, but
it objective is really something else?

Venezuelans should read the Washington Post’s Editorial, which in part reflects the cartoon below. In the end it is Venezuelans who will be hurt the most.

Chavez: “You are a devil, you smell like sulfur, you are a drunk, you are the demon, you are genocidal Mr. Devil, you are a Dictator, you are an assasin Mr. Devil, you are…”
Bush:”Yeah!Yeah!, everything you say, filler up boy!”

New York Times reports tonight Diebold refuses to have Princeton team examine their “new and improved” voting machine.How about asking Smartmatic or the CNE to send one over to Prof. Felten for testing?

–Foreign
Minister Maduro gets stopped leaving the US, different versions on both
sides. Update: US Embassy apologizes. Second update: Maduro’s trip was not scheduled, authorities did not know who he was, he showed up with wife and kid (offical business?) and paid tickets in cash.

–Dutch
National killed
very close to where I live, his companion is in very bad shape.

–Former
Radical Cause candidate Andres Velasquez says National Guard
killed five miners from a helicopter and is covering up.

–Drug
Lord arrested
and extradited yesterday lived in fancy home which people have been saying
for months belongs to a relative of the Governor of Miranda State.

–Conde
del Guacharo asks
Supreme Court to stop the use of fingerprint machines arguing they violate the Constitutional
right to protect your personal integrity (Art. 46), honorability and privacy
(Art. 60) and vote with freedom and secrecy (Art. 63)

–President
Chavez tells
people they should not have US dollars as the US is printing money. Does he know
monetary liquidity has doubled in Venezuela during the last year,
spending is up 85% this year and oil has dropped 20% since August? Should they
have Bolivars?

–Chilean politicians
ask the Government
to get rid of Venezuela’s
Ambassador. Ambassador says he was “misinterpreted”, video shows otherwise.

–Hezbollah’s
militias make Hugo
Chavez their hero. Do they want him?

–CNE
chooses witnesses for December election, haven’t met one yet. Still Looking,
will report back.

–Chavez says Bush now “really”
gave the order to kill him. Who gave the orders the other twenty or so times?
Like this one. Or
this one. Or this one. Or these
ones. Well, you get the picture.

–Supermarkets
ration
sale of milk and sugar.

–Vice-Minister
of Finance says
inflation for the year will end at 12%. Sure, for the first nine months it has
been 10.4%, the last four months it has been 1.6%, 1.9%, 2.2% and 2.4% and in
the last four months of the year we are to believe it will not reach 13%? Not
even revolutionary math can do that.

Romrod
wrote this in his blog in Spanish, reminding us that what Chavez did in New York is illegal in Venezuela

Devils! from Romrod’s blog

Yesterday
we were all witnesses to the peculiar verb of our President at the General
Assembly of the UN, when he referred to President Bush as the Devil himself. He
not only called him the devil at the UN meeting, but also in the press
conference he gave afterwards. I suppose that this could be considered an
offense to President Bush. Whether he deserves or not the offense I suppose is
another matter, but what I am sure of is that the offenses, at least the direct
ones, are not part of the language a statesman should use. Because it is said
that those that offended, denigrate, people stop taking you seriously and your
arguments lose strength.

But what
called my attention was the looseness with which Chavez insulted Bush in front
of the whole planet. Mr. Bush, may be, as they say in my town, a tremendous
imbecile, but it just so happens that for now, he occupies the position of
President of the executive power of that country, that is he is the legitimate
representative of the people of the US. Thus, when we offend him one
could take it to mean we are offending the whole country. That is the way
offenses between public officials work.

And to
prove it, as they say in Venezuela,
a button. A legal and current one published in the page of Mintra:

“Article 148.-Anyone that offends orally or written, or in any
other way disrespects the President of the Republic or whomever may be
replacing him, will be punished with prison of between six months and thirty
months, if the offense were grave, ad half the punishment if it was light.

The punishment will be increased by a third if the offense were made publicly.

Unique
paragraph: If the offense were against the President of the Legislative Branch
or the President of the Supreme Court, the penalty Hill be from tour months to
two years when the offense is grave and half that when it is Light.

Thus, can you imagine any Christian of this Bolivarian country telling Chavez
he is the Devil himself? Would they apply this article for offense to the
majesty of the Presidency of the country.

This
article by the way was written and approved by the fans that our President
maintains within the Nacional Assembly.

(My
comment: While this article has never been applied, it is there, like the sword
of Damocles, ready to be applied at the Government’s convenience. In fact,
former Minister of Finance Francisco Uson, was applied a similar
article from military law, for disrespecting the majesty of the military
because in a TV interview he said that the soldiers burnt
at the Mara Fort, were likely killed by a flamethrower. He was sentenced to
five years in prison and is the only person in jail to this day, in the case
where three soldiers died of burns within a military prison. )

—In the
2005 proposed budget for 2005, the caring revolution budgeted US$ 1.56 billion for
Defense and US$ 1.85 billion for public health. During 2005 the National
Assembly approved an additional US$ 571 million in “extraordinary” credits for
Defense, usually approved to cover insufficiencies in the budget that can not
wait, but only approved US$ 31 million for public health in similar credits. This
is a country where public hospitals are dysfunctional, have no supplies and turn back people regularly. In the end, Defense
spending was 6.6% of the budget, while public health was only 5.8%. Chavez cares so much for his weapons, no? Certainly more than for the people.

—During
a meeting at the Argentinean Foreign Office last year, PDVSA officials and Argentinean
companies and Government offices met to discuss possible joint technology
projects. Wind power! proposed on Argentinean company. How about solar energy
for remote areas? Suggested one university. Biodiesel! Suggested the University of Santa Fe. Why don’t we develop software? Suggested Argentinean company Softlab? No, said the PDVSA representatives we
have orders from above to work in a joint project to build nuclear reactors for
the Orinoco Oil Belt. That was the only project signed during the trip. PDVSA has
no nuclear engineers or specialists.

—And how
abut the People’s Ombudsman, known in Spanish as “El Defensor del Pueblo”. He
continued his long career in simply defending Hugo Chavez when he defended this
week Chavez’ speech at the United Nations: “I think Chavez said what he had to
say in the right place” said Chavez’ Defender. He continued by defending, who
else? The government! by saying “We don’t have the levels of violence that
people want everyone to believe…I don’t know where the analysts get their numbers,
how can we think that Venezuela has more violence than Central America? Well,
Mr. Mundarain, the analysts get the numbers from official sources, which you should
know, if you were really trying to care and defend the people, instead of your
boss the autocrat. His office should be renamed “El Defensor de Chavez”

—And in another harebrained priority project of the
revolution, the National Assembly rushed through its first discussion the law
that creates the Bolivarian Aerospace Agency, jokingly referred to as the “URO”
(Unidentified Revolutionary Object). The Bill is full of truly revolutionary definitions:

Article 2. In the context of the present Law and its regulations, we define
the following:

Aerospace: It is the space formed by the terrestrial
atmosphere and the near external space or ultra terrestrial space….

Ultra terrestrial Space: It is the zone located further
than the atmospheric space which extends all the way to infinity.

You’ve to got to love the priorities and imagination of
the caring revolution. I wonder if by law, the Assembly has decided that the
Universe is indeed infinite, resolving once and for all that scientific
controversy.