The Devil's Excrement

Back home sixteen hours after I left. This is the end of this post, now we start the rumors and the wait. That will be the next post. Drinking some wine,  we did a good job, at least there is that satisfaction, thanks all for “watching”

8:05 PM Joy to the world! No audit for me! We now have to sign everything and pack up votes, results and materials and we are done!!!

In my table it is 90% nominal vote for the opposition, this is higher than usual

6 PM it’ closing time, final tally 345 voters 62.18% of those eligible, for the full school the number is higher 64.1%. Order is to shut down if nobody in line. Witnesses walking in now en masse to view audits, 5 out of 8 tables in my center get audits. Hopefully mine does not, very tiring, ready to finish and go. Dont believe rumors, until tables are shut down a real estimate is alnost impossible.

5PM We are at 340, so we will be very close to 65%, 12 more voters in the last hour, some tables in my center have slightly higher percentages, others lower, this is just a little better than the 2009 referendum.

4 PM there has been no real pick up, only ten voters between 3 and 4 PM , we are at exatly 60 % we need to average 27 voters per hour in the last two hours to get to 70% lools tough, but people say it will pick up now based on experience. 328 at this time.

3 PM People clearly having lunch, it slowed down by now, small lines, we even had time to eat something . We are at 318 around 58% so far. Wish I had time to read about the outside world, this is very intense and tiring, but we still have hours to go. Rainibg now hard in Caracas.

2 pm We are up to 293 which means we are over 50% and likely to go into the upper 60’s, better than in 2009

1 pm: First big problem, voting machine jammed voter did not notice, voted twice. Nobody knew exactly what to do. One ballot is dropped in box, a report is written, the lines grows. Bummer. We had been very efficient. 250 voters at this time. That’ like 46% with five hours to go. Hungry!

Noon: we have 214 voters so far, 39% of the total that is about normal for this center. One machine still down , has to be replaced

11:00 AM We are up to 178 at this time, a slight acceleration. The bottleneck now is at the fingerprint machines. Howewer three of the eight machines were jammed when people pulled the ballot and are not working at this time.

10:00 128 about 40 per hour, that’ s 20% so far, 60 %, if lines stay full

9:00 AM so far 88 slow but faster, small lines, my mouth tastes like iodine from the ink.

8:24 am The biggest bottleneck is the machine, people sometimes fail to make all choices, other times they press twice and it erases the vote. Line is not big but once in a while people get confused and gets backed up. Funniest moment was a guy showed up to complain his father reappeared in the electoral registry, he would have been 127 years old. He wanted his protest registered. It was.

8am Still slow 46

7 am 13 voters, slow

6:28 AM we have been ready a while but no voter has been allowed in, some heated discussionson how to manage lines, pro Chavez coordnator wants people to wait outside, we wantthem inside the school. Are they trying to slow down things?

For the time being, I am in charge of ink ugh, fingerprint machine outside not working yet.

6:01 AM All systems and people ready on time we will bring first voter in in minutes

5:50 am machine is ready as you can see below:

I screwed up somewhere erased the post i wrote earlier, it went something like this

5:15 problem solved, we just walked in without waiting for military coordinator

5:10 Military coordinator for center has not arrived, people are mad, they dont let us in, if he does not show up we will have a revolt. People are in line

4:33 being intense i woke up early to blog, adrenaline flowing a bit sleepy right now.

For comparison purposes my center had 33.4% abstention in the 2009 referendum, today there are 546 voters in the “table” I am working in.

On January 3d. of  this year 2010 a police officer named Junior Galué was admitted to the Hospital Universitario de Maracaibo , with two bullets in the head and his condition, of course, was absolutely critical.. He was attended to by Doctor Frank De Armas.

This doctor graduated twenty years ago and in his student days he became president of the Student Union at the University of Zulia. When De Armas was preparing to intervene agent Galué he received from the Director of the Hospital Universitario, Dr. Damaso Domínguez, this unlikely command: “Send him to a private clinic because he belongs to the police of the Municipality of Manuel Rosales.” De Armas, absolutely stunned, said the wounded man was dying and needed to be intervene immediately.

Dr. Damaso Domínguez retorted, even more unusually, “If you do not abide by my order, tomorrow you are fired.”

De Armas, faithful to the Hippocratic oath and his human sensitivity, disobeyed the baseness and cruelty of his superior and operated the hapless agent, and by the way, he saved his life.

But the next day, Frank De Armas was fired, as he had been promised by Dr. Dominguez. Frank De Armas denounced the abhorrent behavior of his boss to the Prosecutor and the people´s Ombudsman. Until now, nine months later, no response has been received and he informed us that is waiting for the expiration of the periods granted by the law for actions by national authorities, and if this does not occur he is prepared to bring the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

We are told that Dr. Damaso Dominguez is a very reputable doctor. There are no special reasons to doubt that, in addition to being a good professional, he  is probably a normal citizen, a good father, a follower of his duties and may very well be liked by his friends.

Like all maracuchos, there would be nothing unusual for a person is friendly and open.

What has caused one person to be basically normal and correct, as Dr. Damaso Domínguez is, to make him act as a monster, capable of ordering that  a patient not be catered to because he is from the “other side” and then fired from his job just because a doctor attended to the dying patient? Is there a brain poisoned by the hate speech, who exudes contempt and insults against his opponents, who insists on considering them as “enemies”, continually threatening to “pulverize”, “annihilate” people back turning them into “cosmic dust”, or “demolish them.”

It is a discourse that has transformed ordinary people into fanatics, in individuals who have delegated the power to reason within their heads to the Maximum Leader, “who is never wrong.”

The Leader thinks for them, but also by some of his opponents. Eleven years after that speech we have been sickened  as a society and each end of it is simply the mirror image of another.

Fortunately, the ends are in the minority and the common sense is winning. But that is until now, the most painful and infectious legacy of Hugo Chavez

Chavista Deputy Desiree Santos Amaral: “The opposition will not come back, because we don’t feel like it”

A profound anti-democratic statement from the one time investigative reporter.

Comptroller Clodosbaldo Russian: “The poor are the ones that suffer the most from the world’s financial crisis”

And in Venezuela they suffer from the Government’s financial irresponsibility and useless spending by the Chavez Government including sending and paying for Ruffian The Comptroller to give this empty speech.

Telesur President Andres Izarra: “Pornographic reporting is a symptom of desperation by the opposition”

This from the man whose Hyena-like mock of the tripling of crime in Venezuela during the Chavez regime made the news around the world. As for lies, jeez Andres, you are the expert.

Jose Vicente Rangel (as Marciano): “The only objective of the opposition is to finish off Chavez”

A noble goal to limit and stop Chavez’ power, before Chavez finishes off the country. Unfortunately, Chavez is going faster than the opposition. He seems to be winning so far…

Jose Vicente Rangel (As himself): “The opposition uses the media to destabilize the people:

Wow! change opposition for Chavez in that sentence and you get the correct sentence. Who controls the media in Venezuela? Who goes on TV daily to instill fear in people in Venezuela? Only Hugo.

Minister of Higher Education Ramirez: “Venezuela tops the US in university enrollment 83% to 82%”

Jeez, if this guy really believes in this, let me just innocently ask: What’s the average number of years to graduate? How many Professors with a graduate degree teach at these “universities”? How many do research? How did you count it? If kids don’t graduate from elementary or secondary school in the same numbers, how can that number be so high? Was the CNE involved in the calculations?

Cilia Flores, President of the National Assembly: “The opposition is ready to cry fraud in the elections”…”The opposition has to say it will accept the results of the elections”

Cilia, Cilia. Why don’t you start by recognizing the results of the 2007 Constitutional referendum? It seems to me that the Assembly you preside approved 20 Laws that go against the results of that referendum and the “will of the people”. The same seemed to happen with the elections for Governors where you approved legislation to violate and limit the funding, power and ability of opposition Governors to act and thus restrict the will of the people you claim to defend.  From this, it seems to me it is you and your little Dictator who have to come out and say they will respect the results on Sunday September 26th., it is your track record, that of PSUV and Chavez that is extremely fishy.

So, for the seventh or eight time this year, the Government made headlines with the US$ 20 billion loan from China to Venezuela, as Chavez said the first US$ 4 billion had been deposited. This is the same agreement reached in April, which is still a little murky, and which was announced again in August.

Funny thing is, the money already arrived according to Chavez, but it was only this week that the Venezuelan National Assembly approved the deal.These Chinese guys are great, they send the money ahead of time, that’s how much they trust Hugo!

Half of the money of the loan will be in Yuan and half in US$ and Venezuela will send 200,000 barrels of oil a day to China. That is, until the money gets paid some time after 2020 with current oil prices, you have to forget about any future cash flow from 200,000 barrels of oil a day.

Whether you believe Venezuela produces 2.5 or 3 million barrels of oil a day, this may not seem like much, except that we are using some 800,000 barrels of oil a day locally, so the real “exports” of the country are 1.7 to 2.2 million barrels of oil a day, from which you have to subract like 160,000 barrels for which the country gets no cash flow (Cuba, Argentina, Petrocaribe) and now an additional 200,000 barrels less of cash flow a day.

Not pretty…

And then, Reuters is saying (Thanks Setty) that the recent fire in Bonaire, will limit what Venezuela can send to China.

If oil doesn’t go into a bubble we will be in trouble. And right now it actually looks like it may do exactly the opposite in the short and medium term, as it seems to be breaking down (Thanks PR!):

Brace Yourselves!

It gives me chills that this happens in my country. Kudos Simon!

I was away for three days in Colombia, a country that seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction of Venezuela. It is simply booming, with over US$ 10 billion in foreign investment this year alone in oil and mining. This boom creates problems, the currency has appreciated quite a bit, In February of 2009 it was as high as 2,590 pesos per US$, it is now around 1,800 pesos per US$. This creates problems for exporters, so the Government has to intervene to force the currency to devalue, exactly the opposite of what happens in Venezuela. Unemployment remains stubbornly high too, near 12% levels, so everything is not rosy, but things are really looking up.

Everywhere I went, people talked abut Pacific Rubiales, the Canadian oil company, created and run by Venezuelans fired from PDVSA, who have become the darlings of the local stock exchange in that country.  The company, which has taken the Rubiales oil field from 20,000 barrels a day to 130,000 barrels a day and expects to reach 225,000 barrels a day of total oil production by the end of the year, has become the second largest oil producer in Colombia after Ecopetrol and above all of the operating oil multinationals in the country

There was actually an article in today’s El Tiempo, which I can’t find online, about the company, describing how the company took first class workers from PDVSA and raised the money to make this very successful company. Yes, these were the same people who used to run PDVSA, whose production keeps dropping. There are two or three more Venezuelan-owned and run companies in Colombia working to increase that country’s oil productions.

More than once I heard Colombians say: “We have Chavez to thank for these people being in Colombia” .

Funny thing is, all these companies and their people are all banned from working in their own country, Venezuela, as they find black gold and get lots of respect in Colombia.

A few months back, I can’t remember which of the pro-Chavez pseudo-economists was suggesting that the January devaluation would have very little impact on the Venezuelan poor, because of the programs like Mercal, PDVAL and the like the Government had in place to aid them. A few years back I actually posted an estimate of how inflation hits the different classes in Venezuela, but that data was outdated.

But the graph above, courtesy of the data from the Venezuelan Central Bank and published by El Universal, shows it with real and very recent data for the first eight months of the year. Level I (Dark line with solid dots) corresponds to the lowest strata of the population under the BCV’s definition. As you can see, the devaluation had the opposite effect, in the months following the devaluation they felt the most impact, an effect that still lingers to this date, wth an accumulated inflation of 21.7%. The second lowest strata is next, up 21.6%, Level III has had 21% inflation and the well-off have had 19.1%  so far in 2010, proving that it is actually the other way around.

No mystery here, it is the poorest who spend the most on food and it has been food, despite the Government controlling certain basic staples, that has gone up the most.

I haven’t said much about the upcoming elections, Daniel and Quico, know much more about the subject quantitatively than I do, so I have enjoyed reading their projections and insights. I am a little concerned that the people around me are somewhat over optimistic about the upcoming results, they read that Chavez’ popularity is below 40% and interpret it to mean the opposition has 60%. But nothing is further from the truth, the other 60% is composed of a block slightly below Chavez’ size and then there are the Ni-Nis, the undecided and the apathetic, all of which will be key in what happens.

I view this election as an incremental step, but somehow people view it as a deciding one. This election will be one more step towards a more balanced country and yes, a more democratic one, not only because the other side, known as the opposition, will occupy a larger and more space in the Assembly, but because as people are more and disappointed with the revolution, they are more willing to tolerate and listen to other points of view.

Case in point is the picture above, taken today, of opposition candidates openly campaigning in the 23 de Enero parish, something which would have been unthinkable three or four years ago. And they went there with concrete proposals for urban renewal, protected not by a bunch of thugs or bodyguards, but by the fact that their increasing support in what once was a Chavista stronghold, protects them from abuse as threatening or harassing them would only give them more votes.

Because of the gerrymandering and redistricting, this is a very difficult election to predict. Chavez is using all of his resources and those of the State without morals and this reflects in the polls, he has been going up in the last eight weeks, but the scandals, inflation and skepticism about the President  make it difficult for him to recover his lost popularity in the last two weeks.

I am in the 50/50 camp, the vote will split evenly which will favor Chavismo, but I know that the final number will be a matter of how motivated Chavismo is to go out and vote. I am assuming it is less motivated than in the February 2009 referendum, but not as lazy as in the 2007 one, thus my 50% split prediction. I do hope I am wrong.

But one has to view this election more in terms of goals. These are for em the major ones:

Base Scenario: Opposition obtains enough votes to stop Chavismo from having a two thirds majority.

This should be the most basic goal of the opposition, to obtain enough Deputies such that Chavez can no longer Legislate by whim as he has done in the last five years. Not getting to this level would represent a dramatic defeat for the opposition. Remarkably, this would occur if the opposition got below 47% of the vote, showing how rigged the system is, with 47% of the vote, you get less than 33% of the Deputies in the National Assembly. It looks like the opposition will achieve this.

Second Best Case: The opposition obtains 50% of the popular vote.

Even if obtaining 50%+ of the popular vote will only give the opposition around 43% of the 165 Deputies, it would send a strong warning to Chavismo and would show the world that Chavez’ famous legitimacy does not exist as even in the face of a popular defeat, he retains control of the National Assembly.

Third Best Case: The opposition obtains a majority of the Deputies.

This happens around 53-54% of the popular vote and would be quite a dramatic victory for the opposition. Chavismo, which has been accustomed to not talking to anyone, will have to sit down. This will shake the confidence of the most ardent Chavista and will allow the opposition to open investigations on all cases of interest. Obviously Chavez will ignore and bypass the National Assembly, but the visibility of the opposition will increase dramatically.

Can this happen? Certainly. Large Chavista abstention in key areas of the interior of the country could swing the majority to the opposition. The opposition is motivated, we just don’t know how motivated Chavismo is or isn’t or if it is distributed geographically to produce this result.

Dramatic Opposition Victory: Opposition wins 66% of the National Assembly allowing it to change “revolutionary” laws.

This scenario is possible, only because of the redistricting and gerrymandering that has taken place, the opposition could reach this with as little as 58% of the popular vote. This is unlikely to happen unless disappointment is such that Chavismo stays at home. I don’t see it being that large.

I personally believe today that we will get the second case, a 50/50 split and around 60-plus opposition Deputies out of 165. The precise details will depend on abstention, with abstention on the Chavista side being more critical than that of the opposition.

Will update right before the election my prediction and any changes.

To Kika, with all our cariño

What’s up with Fidel Castro and Hugo, really? They have been sending mixed signals in the last few days that would make a Chavista squirm.

I mean, to have Fidel say the Cuban model has failed, while Huguito is trying to imposed an oil rich based version of the Cuban model in Venezuela, must be somewhat unsettling to those peddling (or attempting to peddle) XXIst. Century Socialism and the Chavez revolution here.

In fact, The Simpsons thought Fidel doing this would actually be funny:

But nothing funny to local Chavistas about the old man reneging.

This is worse than the Venezuelan communist party suing the opposition for accusing the Communist party of…

being communists.

And just when I learned that the Jerusalem Post has called Jews in Venezuela “the most embattled Jewish community in the world“, with half its members leaving the country in the last ten years, here comes Huguito’s mentor Fidel, father-image and all and goes and questions the anti-Semitism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and urged him to recognize the Jewish Holocaust and Israel’s reasons to fear for its existence.

What is going on here? Is the man senile or doesn’t he know Hugo is running for his life?

And just as fast as you can say Ahmadinejad without stuttering, Hugo himself comes out and says “We respect and love the Jewish people” and that he has been unfairly painted as being anti-Semite.

Jeez, I wonder who talked about the “descendants of the killers of Christ controlling the world” or even being responsible for Simon Bolivars death. Was that you Hugo or your alter ego? Remember Norberto Ceresole? Remember the raid on Hebraica? Wasn’t that your police? The desecration of the synagogue?

How come you never questioned these events and now you are buddy-buddy with the Venezuelan Jewish community?

What changed? or is this just posturing by the old man and yourself Hugo?

The truth is, the whole thing must really confuse Chavista purists, those that chant the party line day after day.

Maybe tomorrow they will say Fidel is getting old. But I would bet this will only happen after the election, you don’t want to embarrass Hugo.

Por ahora… For now…

But the truth is that half of the Venezuelan Jewish community which was welcomed to Venezuelan society in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s has now left the country in fear, despite their magnificent contributions to this country.

You will all be missed, thank you for all you did, but who can blame you for leaving…