The preliminary number for the petition drive today are outstanding. The effort was organized in ten days once the referendum was suspended by the Supreme Court. It was done privately, only in high population centers, without Government help and, in some cases, no security to protect the people. Despite this, the preliminary estimate is that more than four milion people voluntarily went to sign the petitions for as many as 9 different things, all promoted by the opposition. This is more than Hugo Chavez got in votes in the 2000 Presidential election. Curiously, it was Hugo Chavez the one that promoted “participatory” democracy, a very primitive concept in which all issues are decided directly by the people. Well, now the people have turned the concept back at him, but he refuses to accept it. This is impractical democracy, but it is incredibly democratic when you think about it! And the results are very clear….
Archive for the 'Venezuela' Category
Preliminary numbers for the Firmazo
February 2, 2003Some violence during the sign up.
February 2, 2003
In the downtown area of Caracas some Chavista thugs began throwing rocks at people lining up for the “Firmazo”. They damaged one car, injuring the girl that was driving it and burned the car of TV station CMT.
The real PDVSA picture
February 2, 2003During the last week, there have been what people abroad consider to be positive news surrounding PDVSA activities, specially in believing taht the fiscal picture has improved dramatically. In particular, crude oil production has increased significantly from the beginning of the month. This has been done by emphasizing younger wells with natural flow, which require no injection. Moreover, these wells are mostly located in the Eastern part of the country, rather than in the more “militant” area of Zulia State where Lake Maracaibo is located. As of yesterday, production was up to 1.044 million barrels a day, of which 692 thousand comes from the East, only 269 thousand from the West and 92 from the South. The Western area has about two thirds of the capacity of the country, but they are mostly older wells.
Gas compression on the other hand, has not increased as much, going from 2.7 billion cubic feet per day in early January to 3.9 billion cubic feet per day now. Total production is normally roughly 9.4 billion cubic feet per day. Where things have change little is in refining capacity. The Puerto La Cruz refinery remains at the same level as the beginning of the month with 75 thousand barrels a day out of a capacity of 120 thousand. Paraguana is barely producing 50 thousand out of a capacity of 800 thousand and El Palito is not producing, due to an accident that took place earlier in the month. Sources in PDVSA suggest that without the return of oil workers, it will be extremely difficult to increase oil production beyond 1.8 million barrels and the likely steady state level will be closer to 1.5 million barrels. Additionally, there is little maintenance going on in any of the areas of business.
To understand the implications of the numbers above better, it is interesting to consider what the “true” fiscal contribution of current or prospective oil production may be. Under normal circumstances, Venezuela consumes 230,000 barrels of gasoline a day, which given current conditions is down to roughly 100,000 barrels per day. Of these, only 20,000-30,000 is being produced locally at the Puerto La Cruz refinery, with the balance being imported. However, imported gasoline is purchased at international prices of roughly $38 per barrel and is being sold in the local market at a price of approximately $5 per barrel. Thus, the net 70,000 barrels that need to be imported are paid with the funds obtained from exporting 532,000 barrels of crude. This currently leaves less than 500,000 barrels that have a fiscal contribution. However, those that result from the production of the operating agreements, approximately 250,000 barrels a day, have a much lower contribution given the conditions under which this exploration tracts were sold. Essentially, the fiscal contribution of these exports is much less, since depreciation and amortization costs can be deducted directly from the fiscal contribution. Note that this calculation assumes the current level of gasoline consumption, so that any easing of the general strike, without PDVSA going back to work, actually goes against the Government, since gasoline consumption may actually increase dramatically. Thus, barely a quarter of a million barrels a day has a full fiscal contribution today.
Looking into the future another 400,000 barrels of heavy crudes from the Orinoco Belt joint ventures could come on line, if the natural gas situation is normalized and workers could be found to replace those that refuse to go back to work. Once again, the fiscal contribution from these projects is smaller since they pay only a 1% royalty but they do have the usual tax contribution. Thus, any news on the oil front has to be interpreted with care. The country could quickly move up to 1.5 million barrels of production a day, without having a large impact in terms of fiscal contribution. It is only above 2 million barrels of oil a day that the fiscal constraint would ease, but such a level may not be reached in 2003 if maintenance efforts are not sustained.
Another strange anecdote of the negotiatons
February 1, 2003Many times, the negotiators for the Government have not shwon up at the negotiaton table for scheduled meetings, which Venezuelans in the opposition interpret as the lack of interest by the Chavez administration to find a solution to the crisis. Well, last night they did not show up to meet with the six Vice-chancellors who were here. Thier excuse “it was not safe” due to the opposition’s march. Humm! interesting. this is the Government saying that! What can the opposition say then…..
One for the skeptics on both sides
February 1, 2003Here is one for the skeptics on both sides: The pictures below show a jeep (left) with a person on top shooting at the opposition march. The one on the right shows a gunman in gray (in the middle) who in videos is seen shooting at least twelve times to the opossition march on Januray 19th. where 1 person died and 29 were injured. This jeep was even protected by the local (pro-Chavez) police.
To the pro-Chavez skeptics: Today the police identified the man on the left as Rafael Simon Navas Carrasco, a leader of the pro-Chavez “Bolivarian Circles” who has a criminal record. The man on top of the jeep is Joel Andres Montoya, a local chavista activist according to the police, who also has a record and is known as “Garlic Lollipop”. The driver and owner of the jeep is Rafael David Castillo, who also has a criminal record but the police did not say if he was a Chavista or not.
To the opposition skeptics (including myself!): The Attorney General’s office has actually ordered the capture of all three men, who have now dissapeared. Note that there has been 48 people dead and 804 injured in marches and demonstrations during the last year. Of these, three shooters caught on video firing at the opposition march are in jail*. One man is in jail for the deaths in Plaza Altamira on Dec. 6th.(caught by the local municipal police that day) and now these three are sought by the police. Tha’s it! Thus, it is significant that these three are being sought by the police at the request of the Attorney General’s office, at least it is a change in attitude.
*Note that these three, one an MVR City Councilman and the other two workers for the that city, when initially jailed, were freed by a judge, despite the video showing their guilt, but the Venezuelan Supreme Court ordered them captured and demoted the judge for her behavior. She was hired the next day as a lawyer by the pro-Chavez Mayor of the Libertador District of Caracas, where the three worked.
Strike to ease
February 1, 2003The Democratic Coordinator said yesterday and ratified today that it will allow the general strike to become more “flexible” starting next week as a “gesture” to the Group of Friends visiting Caracas. I suspect the real reason is that after two months of the strike, too many companies were on the verge of bankruptcy and they were ready to open. In my opinion, this means we failed, we started out with the strike to have a referendum, but we will not have one. In my opinion, the negotiation table is our last hope. If it does not reach an agreement I truly believe there will be no free elections in Venezuela, neither in August, nor when Hugo Chavez’ term ends. Just like it is being done with the increase in the number of Supreme Court Justices, Chavez will find a “legal” way to avoid elections, whatever it takes. So, let’s hope the negotiations yield an electoral solution, I doubt it, the Government continues to send signals that it will not negotiate and that the destruction of PDVSA is an ongoing project.
Big Sign-up day (Firmazo) on Sunday
January 31, 2003Since the referendum was suspended due to political manipulation, the opposition will hold on Sunday what is called the “Firmazo” (The big sign-up) day. The idea is that people will go to their polling station as if the referendum was going to take place and sign the petitions to ALL the possible electoral outcomes available, as well as petitions to recall the pro-Chavez Deputies that were elected under their own name rather than the party slate. The petitions will include the one for the Constitutional Admendment, the August recall referendum and a call for a Constituent Assembly. The drive will concentrate in the larger cities of the country with the idea of collecting a minimum of 2 million signatures. There will be places to do this even abroad, those Venezuelans living abroad who are simply registered to vote should see this link to find where to go in their respective country.
Sense of humor still strong
January 30, 2003Venezuelans continue to have a strong sense of humor as demonstrated by these parodies of dolls of some of the most relevant political figures
From Chuky Cahvista, to Ken Chavez: who lies and 100% full of hate, to Chavez’ wife: she blew it!, nobody loves her, now you can play with her, to the Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel: Lies, limited memory, toxic toy, shameless, does what you tell him to do, include Viagra.
Chavez’s bizarre behavior by Georgie Anne Geyer
January 30, 2003CHAVEZ’S BIZARRE BEHAVIOR MIRRORS VENEZUELA’S CHAOTIC STATE
It has been my sage observation over some 30 years of interviewing world leaders that the press usually attack them. The journalists are the questioners and complainers, not the other way around.
But when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez came to the United Nations last week for a speech and afterward admitted a few of us to a press briefing, the quixotic Chavez did things a little differently — and perhaps that should have been expected.
Stalking into the room at the Venezuelan Mission on 46th Street, Chavez looked for all the world the vengeful enforcer, the raging godfather, the paranoid-in-winter. His once-handsome and controlled face was dark and brooding, his eyes tight and wary as he constantly scanned the room. What was left of his nervous restraint broke down completely at the first question from a Latin female journalist: “Why is it that so many say you are capricious and ineffective?”
“It is very difficult for me to talk about myself,” he began, before speaking for nearly 25 minutes about himself. “Not only do they call me ‘capricious and arbitrary,’ but they call me an ‘assassin … Hitler … Mussolini …’ I believe that I am the victim of a psychological war. I am in the laboratory, and you on the radio and in the newspapers, you repeat it over and over, as if I were Jack the Ripper. If you repeat the ‘big lie’ 10 times, or a thousand times, people will begin to believe it.”
Why, he asked, do so many Americans tell him that he is the “enemy of America“? He told us that he said to people in New York: “I am not an enemy; it is the information you are getting. For instance, I was in Baghdad last year, and I was riding around in a car driven by Saddam. How could I know that no president of any country had gone there since the Gulf War? I was also in Riyadh, in Doha, in Djakarta, with other presidents, but nobody was interested in that. “I met with the pope three times, and that was never published anywhere.”
Then this man who has called the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela a “tumor on Venezuelan society” suddenly proclaimed to the journalists, many of whom were looking more than slightly stunned: “I am a Catholic!” Pregnant pause. “My mama wanted me to be a priest.” At this, he began humming the Mass. “And I am a Christian,” he added. He suddenly took a small silver cross out of his pocket, kissed it vigorously and began to sing robustly, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“They’ve made me into a devil,” he said a little later. He paused, and an ambivalent small smile played around his lips. “Perhaps,” he added, “we need an exorcist.”
Other stories were told that late afternoon, many of them about Fidel Castro, whom Chavez constantly referred to emotionally as “my friend!” But after seven weeks of upheaval, violence and oil strikes in his country, the Venezuelan opposition are not his “friends” at all.
“They ought to be in prison, those terrorists of these last few weeks,” he stated in an obviously disturbed voice. “Why are they here and not in prison? I have political power, but I am not a dictator — otherwise, I would have shot them! In other times, they would have shot them in the patio of the military barracks. Shot them! That has not happened in Venezuela.” With disdain and derision virtually dripping from his words, he added, “You can see what quality of opposition we have in Venezuela — a bunch of fascists!”
At this point, he looked very deliberately at the reporters whom he knew were from Latin America, directing his remarks particularly to Brazil and Ecuador, where fellow leftist leaders of his have just been elected to the presidencies. “It’s fascism, brothers!” he went on. “Because tomorrow it could be you. Until now, the rich have given us presidents, and the rich have taken them away. This is the war of the end of the century, the war of the end of the world. I will fight to the death.”
And all the while — the meeting went on for most of an hour and a half in the early winter’s evening — the Venezuelan president carefully and suspiciously checked off each questioner on a media list prepared for him by his information officers in order to know who was who.
As I watched and listened, I could not help but compare this man of dark rages and apocalyptic visions to the Hugo Chavez I had interviewed in Caracas only four years ago, just before he was elected president of the country. Much thinner, infinitely sunnier and charming, Chavez then spoke only about peacefully reforming the country in its own historic Venezuelan way. “There isn’t any model,” he told me then, “certainly not Cuba or the Soviet Union. We don’t copy other models, we invent them.”
But in these four years, Hugo Chavez has gone completely to the left. Fidel is his best friend and, despite his fulminations to the contrary, the pope is not. After seven weeks of oil company and other strikes that have paralyzed the country, Chavez is at total war with the opposition, which is a melange of substantial middle-class people, trade unionists and businessmen, but also leftover politicians from the two “democratic” parties that ruined and scavenged the oil-rich country for 40 years.
This same week, a “friends” group made up of the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Spain and Portugal has been formed to try to broker a peace settlement between Chavez and the opposition. But one has to wonder whether it is too late. The sense of the Venezuelan crisis, from the Chavez left, is that they are in an all-out push for revolution, no longer for reform. The opposition seems to plan no further ahead than the next day’s demonstration — and every day, those demonstrations grow more violent, more obdurate and more dangerous.
From Caracas, the message is that it is too late for negotiations. The world oil markets have been shaken by the cutoff of Venezuelan oil. An estimated 50 percent of small businesses are in danger of collapse. “Here, there is a clash of systems,” the Venezuelan scholar Alberto Garrido, a specialist on Chavez’s philosophy, was quoted as saying this week in The Washington Post, “something that neither (the Organization of American States) nor the United States understands. For this reason, no negotiation is possible.”
If Chavez believes what he has said, that the country’s public and private institutions must be broken down in order for his revolution to take root in Venezuelan soil, that appears to be what is happening in that important Latin American country. If so, the United States and the world could be up against a war even more bizarre and threatening than Hugo Chavez’s words.
Democratic Coordinator makes election proposal
January 30, 2003The Democratic Coordinator presented today a modified version of the Carter proposal for a Constitutional amendment. Essentially, it will imply shortening Chavez’ perios to four years, alowing him to be a candidate and shortening the period of the Deputies of the National Assembly to four years also. The amendment has the advantage that the referendum for its approval would take place 30 days after the petition is handed in (Art. 341). Elections would follow within 90 days after the amendment is passed. I think it was smart of the Coordinator to hand it in today right before the arrival of the Group of Friends, it puts the “democratic” ball on Chavez’ Court…..
