The Devil's Excrement

Crime has
become a very severe problem in Venezuela.
Last July I showed
some statistics prepared by Human Rights organization Provea, using official
Government data which showed an almost three fold increase in crime since
Chavez took over nationwide. The same statistics showed that some progress was
made on this issue in the mid 90’s. There is no single reason for this dramatic
increase in crime, but the Chavez administration has never made this an
important issue and up to a month ago, the autocrat himself would not even
mention the topic. Of course, the deterioration and politization of the
Venezuelan police has contributed dramatically to the problem, as the cleansing
of police forces of those not loyal to the process has removed many of the best
trained professionals in those forces. This has led not only to an increase in
crime, but the obvious involvement of police forces in criminal acts, as in the
recent Faddoul case, but also to a huge increase of a factor of FIVE in the
number of deaths caused by policemen during the same years.

The results are obviously tragic as more than 70,000 civilians have died in
criminal acts in the last seven years. This affects mostly the poor and the young,
which led last Saturday to a protest organized by a group of university
students to “lay down for life”. The protest by well-covered with
lots of pictures by Daniel,
so I will not go over the details, but it was a huge success and addressed a
very important problem for all Venezuelans. I complain a lot about the lack of
involvement by people in what is happening in Venezuela,
but participation was not only quite a success, but the picture below, shamelessly
stolen from Daniel’s blog, shows the level of commitment by some to demand the
respect of human rights in Venezuela.

-In this “democracy” things are not even discussed anymore between independent powers. On March 16th. Minister of Oil Ramirez sent a memo “ordering” the National Assembly to approve the contracts for the new oil partnerships.They obviously did, you don’t argue with the autocrat.

-Curiously, for the champions of “sovereignty”, the approved contracts include international arbitrage, as ordered by Ramirez.

-And the new Cuban/Venezuelan oil company in which Cuba has 51% allows for Cuba to sell oil in the international markets, essentially giving a “legal” framework to what had been happening all along. Nice deal, you buy oil at preferential prices and preferential interest rates, don’t even pay for it, and then turn around and sell it at international prices. Ahora PDVSA es del pueblo…cubano? (Now PDVSA belongs to the…Cuban people?)

-The total amount of the gasoline subsidy (gasoline is sold at 4.46 US$ cents per liter or 17 US$ cents per gallon) is 14.5% of the National Budget or three times what is spent on the “Misiones”. By the way, my share of the subsidy as one that is in the top 25% of the population by income is ten times larger than that of those in the bottom quartile.

-In an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, that newspaper suggests that Chavez will also nationalize the heavy oil partnerships. Given the huge amount of resources required to further exploit the Orinoco tar sands and the fact that PDVSA has no money to do it on its own, this would mean that there will be no more new heavy oil projects in the foreseeable future. .

As someone said today, Chavez is so sure of winning in December that he no longer even gives a damn about Venezuelans.

I am back, except that the huge jetlag has been playing games with my life in such a way that I have not established a routine, let alone examine everything that happened during the trip. I was sort of connected, except that where I went Internet access was either very expensive or non-existent in a couple of cases, so I think I followed major events but want to bring myself up to date before saying much.

As usual I would like to thank Jorge Arena for allowing me to dump this responsibility on him and his time. Many things happened during the month that had to be covered and he did in the splendid manner we have become accustomed to.

As to the matter of whether a section on tomatoes should be included in my blog, which was the subject of discussion in my absence, I would suggest that rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and start something on that very difficult subject, they read and participate in the excellent blog which deals mostly with tomatoes Dad’s Tomato Garden Journal

As to where I was, I visited three wonderfull and exciting countries, concentrating most of my time on a single one of them. As they say, a picture(or a few) is (are) worth 10,000 words.

In an unprecedented show of democratic openness, Súmate is
proposing to organize the primaries to find the candidate that will represent
the opposition in the forthcoming Presidential elections.

Maria Corina Machado and Ricardo Estévez  exposed the
rules and the logistics envisioned by Súmate to choose the candidate.

I hope that the CNE and the “Aquelarre” of government
officials read them so that they can understand what an OPEN, CLEAN, FAIR and DEMOCRATIC process really means.

 The presentation in Power Point can be downloaded from Sumate
main page.

 Here is the main proposal for the election:

 1.- All those registered in the
REP as of March 2006 can vote in the Primaries

2.- The elected candidate will be
the winner by simple majority

3.- The voting will be MANUAL and
the scrutiny will be PUBLIC

4.- All the physical logs will be
destroyed.

5.- The whole country will be
covered with 3000 centers

 
Note that Súmate is proposing the destruction of the log
material to avoid any type of blacklisting like what happened with the signers
of the Revocatory Referendum.

 Here is the schedule:

 REGISTRATION OF CANDIDATES: MAY 8 TO MAY 15, 2006.

CAMPAIGN: MAY 21^st to JULY 14, 2006

PRIMARIES: JULY 16, 2006

REGISTRATION TO THE CNE: 
AUGUST 5 to AUGUST 28, 2006

 
Súmate is also asking for volunteers for the organization. If
you are interested, here are the telephone number and the email:

(0212)
715.28.15

voluntarios  at sumate.org

 
So now, we all know
what was the “Aquelarre”
Willian Lara was talking about! Súmate was preparing a demonstration of
democracy in action, that the government officials are not even able to
understand.

Reporting from
cyberspace,

Jorge Arena
Democratic
Venezuelan and Distinguished Ghost.

Everytime I see the MINCI home page without any picture of Chávez,
I get nervous.  I cannot help but wonder
what the heavy government weights must be concocting when Yo El Supremo is not
in their front page. The explanation might be very simple, the President might
be resting for a few days, but, noneless, I always wonder what is going on, in
particular when neither the Vice President nor Nicolas Maduro appear in their
pages.

My ghost experience has taught me that nothing is irrelevant 
in the Chavista kingdom of Venezuela.

However, I was relieved to see that at least William Lara, the
new Minister of Information was there today, in prime space. This time, the
object of his speech was Súmate. He accused the organization of starting the
“mediatic machine gun” against the committee that is selecting the new members
of the CNE. The article specifically says:

“invitó a venezolanos y venezolanas
que se oponen al proceso de cambio democrático liderado por el presidente
Chávez que no hagan oídos a este aquelarre montado por Súmate, que
probablemente tendrá eco mañana en otros portavoces de la política de Bush, y
que se mantengan leales a sus convicciones y prácticas democráticas”.

“Invited
Venezuelans that oppose the process of democratic change led by President Chávez
not to pay attention to the coven that Súmate is putting into place and that will
surely have an echo tomorrow in other spokepersons of Bush’s politics  and be [the Venezuelans that oppose..] loyal
to their convictions and democratic practices..”

So this Venezuelan and curious blogger
was pretty curious about what this “aquelarre” was all about. I looked it up
first in the Real Academia and found the following definition:

1. m. Junta o reunión nocturna de brujos y brujas, con la supuesta
   intervención del demonio ordinariamente en figura de macho cabrío, para la
   práctica de las artes de esta superstición.

So it seems that the aquelarre is a night
meeting of witches with the Devil’s intervention….

So what triggered Minister Lara to use
such a charming term against Súmate?

Well, the commission in charge of electing
the new CNE is about to provide the definite list in a week or two and the
rumors around the National Assembly say that three of the current officials
will be re-elected: Oscar Battaglini, Tibisay Lucena and Oscar León. Súmate has
objected their names because they say that those individuals did not  provide an account of their management or the
balance of their
budget during the years as CNE officials.

Now, this ghost blogger disagrees for the first time this
year with Súmate. They are absolutely, totally wrong to be objecting the term
of these three officials based on some trifle like lack of transparency and of
accountability! I take advantage of this ghost post to make a formal complaint
against Súmate’s objections of those candidates.

 
In fact, this ghost blogger strongly objects the candidacy
of those CNE officials as well, but not because of the mild reasons provided by
Súmate, but  because of their potential responsibility in handing
to the government the personal data of millions of Venezuelans that led to the Tascón
list, the Maisanta database and the Batalla de Santa Inés software that has
created a political apartheid in Venezuela.  

I want these guys to be investigated first. Did they approve
the handling of the personal data to the Maisanta campaign? Did they know that
the data was being used by Tascón in a public web page? Did they know that the
Maisanta command had elaborated a database and a program to be used for
political profiling and blacklisting of Venezuelan citizens? Did they protest
when they knew of the use of the data? Did they order an internal
investigation? Did they realize that the rights of millions
of Venezuelans were being violated?

I want to get the answers to those questions first before
these guys ever get to be nominated again for the CNE, Mr. Lara. So thank you
very much for reminding me that I should be loyal to my democratic convictions.
I agree with you, Súmate is wrong this time, but because they are being way too
mild.

And, BTW, dear Minister, many thanks also for helping me improve
my Spanish vocabulary.  I now have a new
precise word to ask you the following…

 What type of Aquelarre are all the President’s man putting
in place these days?

Reporting from Cyberspace,

 Jorge Arena
The Devil’s Distinguished Ghost.

I just read that VTV has announced that there will be no Alo Presidente this Sunday.

 I guess that Chavez decided to finally give a break to the
Venezuelan people and to the families of the Ministers and other
Goverment officials that have to endure the six hour Alo Presidente
marathons every Sunday.

So Happy Easter to you all!

And careful with the chocolates.

Jorge Arena
Cheerful Ghost Blogger.

http://www.11abril.com/

http://alfredo.octavio.net/2002/04/11.html

http://arenaspace.blogspot.com/2005/04/what-happened-on-april-11-2002.html

http://caracaschronicles.blogspot.com/2004/04/untold-story-of-venezuelas-2002-april.html

http://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com/2003_04_06_daniel-venezuela_archive.html

http://blogs.salon.com/0001330/2005/04/11.html

Jorge Arena.

After I published the last post where El Universal  mentioned the video sent to the family of the
Faddoul brothers, some of the readers were asking me about the three girls that
were kidnapped in the Tuy Valley,
the same area where the Faddouls were staying in captivity.

I did a little search and I found that the case had some similaritied  to that of the Faddouls.  The
story can be found here.

There were three sisters, ages 16, 14 and 13 that were
kidnapped closed to their homes in Ocumare del Tuy. They went out with their
cousin to buy Chinese rice and stopped in a convenience store where the
kidnappers took possession of the car. After a while, the kidnappers let the
cousin out of the car and took the three girls.

The girls were advised not to try to escape because the
whole region was full of “captors”.

The kidnappers explained to the girls that the kidnapping
had been planned in Colombia
with a roulette. They had chosen at random Venezuela,
then Ocumare del Tuy and finally they had searched the richest people in the
area. They knew exactly the dayly routine of the Blanco-Bandes family.

One day the girls were told that his dad had payed up the
ransom money and that they were going to be liberated. They were left alone.
The oldest stayed and told the other two to get into the bush so that if the
captors came back, they would only take one of them. But this time their dad
and the police were the ones who came and the story for them had a very happy
ending.

According to this link,
two of the kidnappers were detained when they were to Petare, in Caracas,
to take the ransom money. They were the ones that told the police the precise
location where the girls were kept. They belonged to the band of Alirio
Contreras, a Colombian with a kidnapping ring in all the Miranda state.

Now, about the dates. The report form La Voz says that the
girls were kidnapped on March the 3^rd and that they were liberated
on the march 10.

Interestingly,  a few
days later, La
Voz explains that  days after the
release of the three girls, the Police was searching the whole area to catch
the head of the kidnapers band, Alirio José Contreras.

Alirio Contreras was finally arrested in Petare on March the
15, according to El Universal.

After reading this story, I found the relationship with the
Faddoul case even more puzzling. When the Police was looking for Contreras,
didn’t they ask for hints about the Faddoul? 
Don’t forget that the Faddoul were in
the area all the days the girls were in captivity and afterwords when the
Police supposedly searched for Contreras.

 
Don’t forget either that the  Faddoul video was produced on
March 9 and handed to the family on March 12.

So here are the new corrected event dates (according to what
I could extract from the newspaper articles):

Feb 23, the Faddouls are kidnapped
March 3, the Blanco girls are kidnapped
March 9, the Faddoul video is produced
March 10, the Blanco girls are released
March 12, the Faddoul family received the video
March 10-15 the Tuy area is searched for Alirio Contreras
March 15 Alirio Contreras is arrested in Petare
April 4 The Faddouls are found dead
April 7 The case is almost solved.

Bad luck? Incompentence? Or convenient overlook by someone around
the whereabouts of the Faddoul brothers?

Reporting from Cyberspace

Jorge Arena
Devoted Ghost Blogger.
http://arenaspace.blogspot.com
http://chavezfortheun.blogspot.com

Just two days ago, I was writing about the absence of
President Chavez in moments of national commotion. I was amazed at the absence
of news about the killings in any of the official channels. I was surprised that
none of the Chavista heavy weights were out except the Justice Minister and the
Attorney General. The MINCI pages were for the first time in probably a year,
unadorned by ANY photo of Chavez (usually he is in ALL the pictures) and the ABN,
VTV and RNV were all very languid in their choice of topics.

The best that the Chavistas on call could come up with
during the few days that people went to the street in signs of protest, was to
shame the media for politicizing a sad event and mention here and there
that Colombians may be in the plot.

Then, all of the sudden, the wind changed. The new Minister
of information appears giving declarations about a new conspiracy theory. We
are saved! If there is a new conspiracy theory in town, we are in good hands,
we know that is business as usual. All of a sudden, President Chavez decides to
finally call the mother of the victims, after two days of absolute silence, and
tell her that the killers will soon be caught. The pained mother that the day before had
called a TV station declaring that she despised the government because of the
little attention they had put into the case, calls the program again and asks
the media not to politicize her suffering.

It follows that the MINCI publishes in its first page the mother’s
declaration so that EVERYBODY can conveniently read it in the most politicized
site that there is on the Venezuelan Internet . The article appears on the first
page just below
a huge face of a very calm and serious President Chavez occupying half page and
announcing, like a true statesman that they will not rest until all the guilty
are found. On the right, another article with
the Italian flag, that has not yet been changed by Berlusconi, where the
Italian government thanks effusively the Venezuelan government for having been
so efficient in the resolution of the Sindoni crime. Such a nice, very nice
piece of foreign gratitude was published alongside other news that recall that Venezuela
just signed an agreement with Italy to build a
network of trains.

Meanwhile, three suspects, all Venezuelans (didn’t they tell
us they had a Colombian accent?) are found. So quickly, in such an efficient
and dynamic manner that we all are I in awe at how quickly the Venezuelan
government is able to solve the case.

Then, I check VTV, Maduro is there again, in charge, just
finishing a technical workshop on, how convenient, Crime and
Violence. He was pretty busy because
a few days ago he was still in Cuba
with a parliamentarian Venezuelan delegation discussing parliamentary
discussions with the parliamentarians of the Cuban parliament. At that time, I
was amazed to learn that there was indeed a Cuban parliament, let alone that a
delegation had to go to Cuba
to learn anything from the parliament we did not know it existed.

I decide to see RNV. Here he is. A triumphant
Isaias Rodríguez saying the names of
the five suspects in the Faddoul case and announcing that they are also about
to solve the case of the killed photographer.

This ghost blogger keeps reading and is amazed at how
efficient this government really is. How
fortunate we Venezuelan are of having elected this group of dynamic and
competent people that can deal with the most difficult situations.

After finishing my official carrousel, I go to El Universal
and find a tiny note among tthose that are not considered important
news. It says that on March 12, the
Faddoul family had received a CD showing that their sons were alive. The video
shows an airport that looks like the one in
the Tuy Valley,
that is the area where the bodies were found. What is more amazing is that one
day before the kidnapping, three girls had been kidnapped in the same region
and were found alive six days afterwards. Moreover, it seems that the Faddoul
kids were never moved from the area and yet the area was never searched. I
figured the following dates:

The girls were kidnapped on February 22.

The kids were kidnapped on February 23.

The girl s were found on February 28

The video was sent on March 12

The kids were found dead on April 4.

The case is almost solved on April 7.

And this ghost blogger asks. Is it really possible that they
were so efficient at the end and so incompetent when it was really needed?

If the kidnapping had lasted a few days, I would understand
such an outcome: lack of time to find the people involved. But 40 days? In 40
days they either had the clue or they did not.

Reporting from Cyberspace,

Jorge Arena
Disgusted Ghost Blogger.

———————————————
Note.- I based the dates of the girls’ kidnapping using the information
reported by El Universal article. Further investigation shows that the
girls were kidnapped on March 3. Please refer to the following post for
the details. Jorge Arena.

So Chavez reappered tonight on the MINCI pages..just when I
had almost finished a post showing that for the first time in many months he
WAS NOT in the MINCI pages! Well that’s
the ghost blogger life. Some people get to swim among Polynesian sharks
and others have to rewrite their posts!

Chavez said that his
government will not rest until they find those guilty and mentioned that there
are those that are taking advantage of the situation to destabilize his
government.

Of course we still do not know what he was doing from the
moment the kid’s bodies were found until now. But we know that his government
has been busy trying to find some ways to put the blame of the righteous rage
that people were having due to the insecurity level of Venezuela’s
streets on the private media. As usual, Globovision was a
favorite target.

If Globovision didn’t exist, Chavez would surely invent it!

But the most cryptic and remarkable words of any government
official did not came from Chavez, but from the Minister of information
himself. Here is the link. Minister
William Lara said that he will propose to the Directive of Social
Responsibility to exhaustively examine the behavior of the media these days.

Lara then said that the government is considering the
Conspiracy theory. He said that there are indications that point towards a
plan, with transnational connections, against institutions and the People of
Venezuela.

Another hypothesis that Lara said is being thought of [I am
not making this up, it is in the MINCI article, I swear!] is to determine wether it is by pure chance that
two of the largest foreign communities in Venezuela,
the Italian and the Arab community, were the targets [of the Sindoni and
Faddoul cases]. Lara said that they do not do “little politics” and that, therefore,
he cannot make affirmations without proof but he makes assurances that when the government
will have conclusive evidences, they will be communicated to the Nation.

He then talked about the favorite Chavista theme, the events
of April 2002. And he finished saying that his government has a commitment with
the Truth.

So, this curious ghost blogger is wondering about the
Italian-Arab community Conspiracy theory. What did Lara exactly mean? That
because they are the largest, they have more probabibility of being hit? In
that case, the Spaniards and Portuguese should be careful. I have not checked the
migration statistics, but I think that they are larger communities. Is there
anything else that he would mean with his words?

Sad, remember when we all used to be just Venezuelans?
Since the Chavistas came to power, all of a sudden we have rich and poors,
blacks, white and zambos and now we even have Communities..

And this humble ghost blogger asks. Why don’t they just
accept that personal security in Venezuela
is a huge mess and that they cannot control their own police? Why don’t they
realize that their failure in solving the poverty problems, modernize the
justice system and reform the jails has to do with this?

Why don’t they realize that they should be busy solving
those problems instead of persecuting the very dangerous Maria Corina Machado?

Why don’t they have the humility of accepting their
responsibility?

I guess that is too much to ask.

Reporting from Cyberspace

Jorge Arena
Humble Ghost Blogger