The Devil's Excrement

If things
are frustrating for us, that have always been able to see through the
revolution and oppose Chavez, imagine how supporters of the revolution who can see
from the inside how the daily cesspool gets filled with more and more filth. Most of
them remain silent, but others just can’t and risk their status within the
revolution when they speak out.

One such
man is Eustoquio Contreras, a Deputy from Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo (MEP) who is
the Vice-President of the Comptrolling Committee of the National Assembly. While
the Comptroller says everything is peachy and there has been corruption since
the times of the Romans and continues to illegally collect both his pension and
his salary; and a former Comptroller reminds him that Chavez giving Bolivia
helicopters and deciding on the spot to give money to something or other is
simply against the laws, including the anti-corruption law, Contreras says things are really getting ugly. But the former
Comptroller is not pro-Chavez, but Contreras is, and here is what he had to
say in his press conference yesterday:

”Many
thing are happening that after seven years should not be happening: fights over
bureaucratic spaces, corruption among us, people defending the corrupt and
attacking honest people, a President that speaks and nobody listens to him,
people without a roof and without answers”

He enumerated
some of the sins he has encounteres: “Fondafa refuses to give loans to honest people,
INTI protects large landowners, some of which are part of the Vth. Republic,
while it tramples over those that have all their paperwork in order, it is us
that are administering the wealth of the country”

“the
(election) on the 4^th. of December was an electoral and political, reversal
because of a campaign conducted by people surrounding the highest levels of Government,
the Governors and the Mayors”

I could
say Eustoquio should read this blog, but no, most people that support the Government
can see this everyday, they just don’t have the guts nor the honesty to say
like Conttreras does what they feel, for fear they will be separated form the
revolution. I am sure Eustoquio will be ostracized for this, but it is
comforting to know there are still men of principles within the revolution even
if I disagree with their support of Chavez.

Weil shows once again his brilliance, this time clearly understanding that the choice for the CNE was as simple as this:

(Text: You will audit the Electoral Registry)

Former
Professor and University President Ivan Olaizola also had something to say
about the acquisition of the 100,000 rifles by the Venezuelan Army in today’s
Tal Cual (by subscription). I thought it was not only good, but clever and
it would be worth translating for you all.

And the rifles arrived by Ivan Olaizola

At last the moment has arrived. Another day for the annals of the history of
the homeland. 30 thousand beautiful AK-103 rifles, specially designed by Mr. Kalashnikov for the Bolivarian revolution, pretty, armed and
peaceful. The truth is that the ceremony of the opening of the first box of
rifles, in front of a thick, truly really thick group of high military
officials of the also tall military command, headed by the Minister of Defense
himself, the thickest one of them all, and a true, a really true Admiral, with three
suns, of those that have sailed the seven seas, was something that is hard to
describe. The official announcer of the TV channel that belongs to MVRTV, had
his voice broken over, he could not contain himself in the face of such a
historical and transcendental ceremony. We heard the voice of the Minister
giving the order to some underlings, all with gloves and their mouths covered,
that they could open the first box of rifles. With care, a lot of care, because
they are the jewels of the revolution.

The Minister
raised the first specimen. Here it is my Commander in Chief, holding the first
AK-103, which weighed 4.1 Kilos. And at a cost of US$ 386.22 (something like
Bs. 850,000)

To hell with the FAL’s (the previous rifles of the Venezuelan Armed
Forces). Now get your bayonet out with care.

Beautiful
instrument of fine craftsmanship that can cut a hair in the air, as people say.
One could see in a brief glimpse the boxes which contained the two and a half
million bullets of 7.62 caliber. In the background, a dove fluttered around
during the ceremony. Those that were accompanying the Minister had misty eyes;
it was all emotion, maximum adrenalin, 120 beats per minute. And it could not
be any other way. In the remote distance the supreme leader of this process
licked his lips and rubbed his hands. Total revolutionary orgasm.

Puerto
Cabello
also paid its respects, its usually calm waters choppy with giant waves to
greet the revolutionary and pacific particiapants of the event.

But there was more.
The remainder 70 thousand AK-103 will arrive for Christmas as a present of the
God Child, not from Santa.

And our skies were cut through by 15 Russian helicopters: 6
MI17, 8 MI-35 and one MI-26 and 18 and more are on the way. But the peaceful
list does not end there. There are also orders for fighter planes, submarines,
torpedoes, missiles, bombs, grenades, mines, tanks and convoy vehicles. The
Russian ship ANYA has cargoes for a few months. Mission Peace, we could call
it. Billions of dollars for peace. Thus declared the Vice President of the
Republic. Write it down well, mister reporter, so you don’t twist the news,
noted Ministers Aristobulo and Moncada. You can write in your article that the
AK-103’s are for the revolution like pencils, notebooks, computers, desks and
books.

This revolution has provided us with beautiful days, with
shining sun and soft breeze, but I doubt any other one like this one.

Let the schools and the Bolivarian high schools and the
universities wait. Pensioned off teachers should be patient.

Potholes will be covered and bridges repaired. The victims
of natural disasters will be dignified. No more Vargas, no more viaducts.

No more kids in
the streets. There will be no more blackouts, nor water shortages, but the
lemna will indeed be gone. Healthcare for everyone. From the arsenal of the
Armed Forces in Maracay, where they
were taken to be custodied, they will be distributed to all the defenders of
the pretty and peaceful revolution with 30 cartridges per charge, so they can
fire 30 kisses of love for their fellow human beings. At the tip of ethe barrel
of each AK-103 there is a flower of hope. Mi wife whispers at mi ear: didn’t
you tell me once that someone invented a machine to cut necks with and they
tested it with him? The truth is I don’t understand, what does that have to do
with this?

The issue of crime is getting lots of press, a former General said today that this was a war, coinciding with our view last week.Meanwhile, a former Chavez Minsiter of Defense noted today that Venezuela has gone from a policy of international cooperation to one of international confrontation and denies Venezuela is being forced to buy all the military equipment it is buying. Then comes this very good article by Ana Julia Jatar in today’s El Nacional which combines these themes into a single article that I thought was worth translating:

Who is he aiming at with his Russian rifle? By Ana Julia Jatar

To see a President dressed in military garb
with a rifle in his hands provokes shivers through anybody’s spine. Last week,
President Chavez did it and he did with cruelty. As if the absolute control
that he has imposed on all public powers was not sufficient, with the dexterity
of one who was trained to kill in the armed forces, he held a recently acquired
Russian rifle and threatened us again.

As usual, the threats were directed to other supposed
allies of yanquee imperialism.

This time it was the turn of the TV broadcasting
stations.

We already know the game, under the excuse that we are going
to be invaded by the enemy from the North; this President steals our freedom,
arms himself to the teeth and allows for the inefficiency and corruption of his
Government to destroy the country.

To understand where the Venezuelan President is truly, truly
pointing at, it is sufficient to remember what he said at Fort Tiuna
in November 2004. At that time he told the Venezuela people:

“In this new stage those that are with me, are
with me and those that are not with me, are against me”. Thus, his battle is
not against the empire of the North, his war is here in Bolivar’s homeland and
his weapons are aimed at us. Besides, aiming at Venezuela should not surprise us;
he has been doing it since 1992 when he staged a coup against a democratically
elected Government.

That is why, Mr. President, who do you think
you are deceiving? You removed your mask long ago! Moreover, when you, rifle in
hand, threaten to shut down TV stations, do you think you are being original?
Don’t even think about it, we have seen that movie before in many dictatorships
and by the way the stuff with the rifle …

Only from the military and right wing at that.
Let the world of the intellectual left that you want to charm with your lies
see it: you are a soldier that is arming himself to repress the Venezuelan
people, not to defend it.

You call the broadcast media “Troy
horses of imperialism” Why? Could it be that it irritates you that we learn
through them of the stream of dissatisfaction that there exists in the country?
Perhaps you don’t even want to be reminded of a small detail; that small piece
of data missing from your equation, from your delusions of grandeur: reality.
You live happily in a miserable farce of being the people’s savior, the same
people you distance yourself more from everyday. And you know it.

You know the country is in flames. Everyday your revolutionary Government uses
force to “repress” an average of three protests against inefficiency and
corruption in your administration. Excuse me, who did you say you are arming
the military to defend us from?

Mister President, of course you have the people that protest and the broadcast
media in your sight. Everything you can’t control at your whim drives you crazy.
The broadcast media
reported during the last month dozens of protests.

For example, a protest was repressed on highway 10 that goes to Brazil because
people were asking for drinking water. Over there, in your land of Barinas
they protested the arbitrary detention by the army of 30 peasants. In Maturin, the police intervened
to control protests over to the lack of electricity. In the East of Caracas, in
Petare, and in the west, in El Paraiso, transportation drivers shut traffic
down many times because they are fed up of being killed like dogs. The students at the University of the Andes were also repressed while Minister Jesse Chacon was accusing them of destabilizing
the country. In Caracas,
Polimiranda aborted a student protest.

In Carabobo people went out in the streets frustrated by the
unfulfilled promises of housing. In Güigüe and in Caracas the same thing happened in front of
the offices of CONAVI (Housing Office). The prisoners at El Dorado went on a hunger strike while in
the El Junquito prison, three prisoners died. By the way, so far this year there
have been 117 deaths and 244 injured in our prisons. And the list of dissatisfactions
in the last thirty days continues, but I am running out of space.

Let’s remember in closing that due to your
constant preaching of war and confrontation, this land of Bolivar
has turned into the most violent in the hemisphere, 44 Venezuelans die everyday
and many of them happen in confrontations with the police and the National
Guard. And Mr. President, I am sorry, but I still don’t understand. Who are you
arming the military to defend us from?

We reached the software limit on the comments on the posts “The real war…..” below. This has happened before, but people keep posting. It has to do with a limit either in the size of the comments or the numbers of posts, I have never been able to figure out which. I have removed comments that were way off topic in order to accomodate as many as possible, but if you post a comment it will simply not appear.

Interesting
debate in today’s newspapers and the news about the so called audit of the
Electoral Registry being performed by the CNE. First, in El Nacional there is a
face of between the President (Rector in Venezuela) of Universidad Simon
Bolivar and the Rector of Universidad Romulo Gallegos. This open debate, which shoudl be part of any democracy, simply enraged the Minister of Communications, who called it  them a campaign to disqualify the audit. He is wrong, the CNE did that when it structured  the auidt it the way it did.

The Head
of Simon Bolivar University Benjamin Sharifker, probably the best internationally
known academic to reach that post,  in
his statements is sharply critical of the CNE techniques calling them XIX th.
Century, but does try to leave a door open to have the universities that are
participating in the process join the audit. Sharifker actually gets combative,
saying that the group of which his university is part has not made any statements
or proposals of auditing border municipalities, which leads him to suggest that
this is something that is feared within CNE. Basically Sharifker says that the
audit needs to have demographics in it and that rather than making it just a
random sample, you hovel to use modern techniques that optimize the possibility
of finding problems with it.  

In
contrast, Luis Gallardo, the Rector of Romulo Gallegos University, who was
named to the position, gives vary vague assurances about the audit in what is essentially
a political statement. He does say something which is incorrect that there will
be a demographic study, yes there will be a demographic study, but it will not
look outside of the electoral registry into the database of the National
Identification System like proposed by the universities which are not participating.
 

Finally, there is
an interview in El Universal with Central University
math and statistics Professor Ricardo Rios, which the reporter chose to
highlight with a headline that says “Even the country’s Liberators will be able
to vote in the election”. Rios is none other than the man that designed the so
called “Kino” in the elections for representatives to the Constituent Assembly
in 1999, which allowed Chavez to have 96 of the 100 members of that Assembly,
which was a violating of the Venezuelan Constitution which guaranteed
proportional participation. In the interview Rios actually acknowledges that he
came up with the idea which led everyone to think that he was pro-Chavez. But
he defines himself as not pro-Chavez, left wing and suggests this is a
totalitarian Government, not left wing but simply a military Government.

Rios
begins by saying that even the audit being carried out without their participation
has not really started because there are problems 9n the databases that make
comparisons between the current and prior registries problematic. He claims
that 80to 90% of the registry is fine, but the question is then whether the
part that is not right can be used to change the outcome of an election. He
notes the inordinate amount of old people in the registry, including what he
calls the “immortals”, the close to 40,000 Venezuelans of age over 100 that
vote and will be able to vote in the December election. He suggests that they have
found other anomalies, such as very anomalous distributions of the last digit
in electoral centers, as an example of strange things in the registry. Thus, he
concludes only by being able to do a comparative sample with the data of the electoral
registry and the national ID registry would one know whether the registry is
valid or not. By the way, he blames the bad state of the registry on the “Mision
Identidad” which bypassed procedures and validatiosn in order to carry out its
goal.

The
touchiness of the Government with the subject became once again obvious when
Minister of Communication William Lara, found the time in between  soccer matches (Chavez cancelled his Alo
Presidente because it coincided with the time of the Brazil-Australia match) to come
out and blast Sharifker and Rios. Lara, who has yet to realize that there
is an ethical problem and a conflict of interest in being the spokesman for the
Ministry and for Chavez’ MVR party at the same time, said he was representing the
party. He called these interviews “the instrumentation of a campaign to
disqualify in advance the audit being preformed on the registry”. He called Sharifker
and Rios part of the “recalcitrant opposition” (He did not call Gallardo a Government
puppet though) saying that Sharifker was using his position as President of
Simon Bolivar University to “disqualify automatic voting in Venezuela”.
Amazing how Lara can come up with these things given his unethical status
whenever he says anything as both Minister and spokesman for Chavez’ political
party. 

He also
took advantage of the opportunity to blast the media for participating in this campaign
and obviously even suggested there was a transnational strategy against the country
in all this.  

Clearly
the manipulation of the way in which the audit is being performed did not go as
well as they expected and they are quite sensitive about it. To top it all,
Sharifker announced they will hold a seminar at Simon
Bolivar University
on the subject and will invite the best researchers in the area outside Venezuela to participate.
This is what Lara is actually afraid of, that the charade of an audit the
Government put together with the institutions it controls will be openly
revealed and even ratified by these international academics who are the true
experts in audits which involve voting rolls and demographics.

It is Sunday, Brazil is playing, time for something light, below left a spectacular picture of the Roraima mountain in Guayana published in today’s El Nacional (page E-1). Below on the right, a better picture from last week’s Oscar D’Leon concert than the crummy one I posted taken with my cellphone. I took it from sin flash, where you can see many more.

President Chávez and
the old guard Generals that surround him speak at every turn of the so called
“asymmetrical war” the country is supposedly engaged in. It even goes beyond their
simple words, with the Government spending close to US$ 5 billion in new
military equipment, from Kalashnikovs rifles, to helicopters to jets, all in the
name of this phantom war, which appears to exist only in the febrile brains of
the President and his comrades and which is used to generate political goodwill
for the Government.

Meanwhile, Venezuela is
truly engaged in a very asymmetrical war. It is a tragic war, because more people
have died from it since Hugo Chavez took power in 1998, than either in the war
in Afghanistan or the war in
Iraq.
It is asymmetrical, because despite the Government’s claim to care about the
poor, this war mostly affects those without the resources to defend themselves
from it. I am talking about the war in which 44 Venezuelans are killed everyday
near their homes or at their homes, murdered by common criminals or too often
in confrontations with the very same people that are supposed to protect them
from the criminals: the police.

The war is doubly
asymmetrical in that the same Government that spends billions in military
equipment, gives away billions in aid and gifts to other countries, or makes
useless and senseless investments in other countries, spent a scant US$ 63
million in providing equipment for all of the local police forces in the
country.

It is remarkable that
this war generates so little publicity, almost no noise and is so far from
being the international scandal that it should be. According to official
figures 68,926 Venezuelan were killed by common criminals or in violent
confrontation with the police since Chávez took over in 1998. Compare that to
the 23,700 killed in the seven years prior to Chávez being elected the first
time and nobody can even begin to blame the current levels of homicides to the
previous Governments or the 40 terrible years of the IVth. Republic. As with so
many things in Venezuela
today, like corruption, poverty or inefficiency, things are simply so much
worse with Chavez, even if they were already pretty bad before him.

But compare the same
numbers with real wars elsewhere and it just so happens that more Venezuelans
have died from homicides since Chávez took over, than people on both sides have
died in the Iraqi war (63 thousand ), or
the war in Afghanistan (33 thousand) or the war in Chechnya (50 thousand) or proportionately
even the armed war in Colombia (73 thousand in the last ten years)

But this war does not
affect me, as much as it affects the ordinary Venezuelans that live in the
barrios, where most of these deaths take place, in a proportion which is
inordinate with the size of their population. And it does not affect revolutionary politicians and their families who go around the country in armored cars full of bodyguards. Meanwhile, Chávez wears Panerai watches, plays
with rifles to scare the population and gives away the money of those same
Venezuelans all over the world , in order to increase his influence and promote himself.

It is indeed a very
asymmetrical and almost silent war, which receives little coverage on the part of the official
media, which receives little attention from the Government, which is never
mentioned by Hugo Chávez and which is simply ignored by the Government’s
unconditional supporters both here and abroad.

It is another human
right denied to all Venezuelans by a negligent and fraudulent revolution. Another seldom
told tragedy of the last seven years, which incredibly does not even touch the
sensitivity of the insensitive autocrat.

KA has taken the trouble to make the movie “Radiografia de una Mentira” (X-Ray of a Lie) available to watch or download from the web. The movie debunks the propoganada film “The Revolution will not be televised” and how the Irish filmmakers manipulated images to make the facts fit their desired conclusions. The file is 650 MB if you want to download or watch and the movie is in Spanish, but I think it is very useful to have it available to everyone.

So, Chavez
said he
would not renew the license of opposition TV stations next year? As Ravell
from Globovision said, let him do it, doesa he dare do it? This is what Fhavez wants us to talk about his threats, but there are so many real things going on and happening. I will not even talk about the issue,
because what is important is the dictatorial Government this country is under,
the billion dollar levels of corruption we are witnessing, the destruction of
the economy that is still taking place as we become a purely transactional
economy, the giveaways abroad to promote Chavez’ stature, the huge expenditures
in military equipment as Venezuelans go hungry and the inefficiency and the
violation of human rights, including the right to vote. This is what is
important and real toda.

The latest
pet project by the autocratic and dictatorial Government is a law to control
NGO’s. Whether they are political, defenders of human rights, against AIDS or
the environment, this new law would impose absolute government control over
NGO’s, which would make them subject to Government inspection and supervision.

I am sure
some of our naïve readers that think there is really a revolution taking place
in Venezuela
are now nodding in agreement with the proposal. They actually believe Chavez is
well meaning and is imposing controls that are reasonable. Well, courtesy of
Tal Cual here are the quotes from the nice, democratic, tolerant,
respectful and well meaning Deputies of the Assembly and what they think of the
project and why it is needed:

–“These
(the NGO’s) are oppositionist institutions, that see no further than their
interest, that even affirm that the Government only wants the control of
independent institutions, given that they are NGO’s that receive money from Governments
form other countries

— “These are the same organizations that backed the coup
that did not denounce (??) those deaths of peasants; definitely they are lackey
organizations….”

–“Of course we are going to control these organizations
this is what the “people” (??) are asking for”

–“We have
received very strong attacks like that by Alan Garcia…this has to end”

–“We have
information (??) that Sumate has 12.5 million dollars for the campaign and
primary elections of one sector of the country, where they get this money needs
to be investigated”

Can it be clearer than this? It is simply more control, more censorship, fewer rights. No honest motives involved.