The Devil's Excrement

(Giving an opinion in Venezuela is a common crime, because nobody gives an opinion in favor of the regime)

The Venezuelan Supreme Court, the same one that has yet to respond to important human rights and electoral cases and injunctions after years, acted very swiftly, faster than Nazi Justice, to eliminate the immunity of Deputy William Azuaje so that he can be detained for a common crime. And the Venezuelan National Assembly acted even faster ratifying the decision by the Venezuelan Supreme Court less than six hours after receiving it and after a debate in which Azuaje was not allowed to defend himself. Azuaje was replaced in his seat in the National Assembly by a member of Chavze’ PSUV party.

The merits of the case are not the point. In the end it is Azuaje’s statement versus that of a policewoman that claims Azuaje abused her verbally and physically, while Azuaje says he did not abuse her physically and she asked for a bribe in order not to detain him.

The point is that Chavez has been going after Azuaje for quite a while, ever since he dared become a candidate for Governor in Barinas State, running against Chavez’ brother. Azuaje’s main campaign theme: That Chavez’ relatives have become large farm owners during the years of the robolution, growing their land and cattle holding by huge numbers. Azuaje went as far as presenting supporting documentation and presenting a formal accusation in the National Assembly.

Azuaje’s main accusation is that the Chavez family used their foreman in he family’s 50 Hectare farm La Chavera, to acquire an additional 600,000 Hectares and 5,000 heads of cattle, Azuaje’s main proof is that while the foreman is very well known to have been the family’s employee for years, he now owns the adjacent farm, without ever having had more than US$ 2,000 in his bank account, which Azuaje presented.

The National Assembly ignored the charges and decided instead to investigate Azuaje and even tried to remove Azuaje’s immunity, turning the case completely against him. Since then Azuaje became an independent Deputy continuing to accuse Chavez’ family of corruption and promoting his political career in Chavez’ home State of Barinas.

But now, the same Justice that is incapable of resolving cases in years or sentencing thousands of prisoners, in less than four days has jailed this enemy of the Dictator. As noted by Daniel, a rabid pro-Chavez Deputy Iris Valera was taped in a physical attack much more violent than the one that Azuaje is even accused of and no procedure was even started against her.

Such is the state of persecution, injustice and powers joined at the hip under the Chavez Dictatorship. This must clearly be another warning in Ramiro Valdes’ playbook: The media has been warned with Zuloaga, the opposition with Alvarez Paz, now the politicians have been warned. The question is simply who will be next?

If found guilty, Azuaje will not be able to run for reelection. All of those aspiring to be members of the National Assembly have been warned: The robolution will not tolerate anyone campaigning with accusations against Chavez and his Government.

The screws get tighter and tighter…

The consulting that Cuban murderer and Chief repressor Ramiro Valdes did for President Hugo Chávez one month ago under the disguise of advising Venezuela on elctric matters, finally generated a plan that is being implemenetd as the arrest of Oswaldo Alvarez paz for giving an opinion is now followed with that of the President of Globovision Guillermo Zuloaga.

Zuloaga will supposedly being accused of “disrepescing the majesty of the first authority fo the country and conspiring agsint Venezuelan institutions”

Jeez, half the world would be in jail for this in any country, Zuloaga simply gave his opinion on teh Chávez Government, an opinio now held by around 60% of the Venezuelan population, including this blogger.

But even worse, Zuloaga’s statements took place last weekend. Thus, it is simply impossible for the Prosecutor to ahve built  a case, called witnesses and their testimony in order to have a legal order for Zuloaga’s capture. Moreover, Zuloaga had to be called to give his testimony and yes, defend himself.

But in fact, Zuloaga’s lawyer said on TV that his client has not been shown any order by any judge, he this is being detained illegally  for expressing his opionion.

This is characteristic of the Dictatorship that has now been imposed in Venezuela as Chávez popularity and hold on the system weakens through the ineptitude of his Government.

This is clearly on purpose, This is the advise of Cuban esbirro Ramiro Valdes. The Chávez Governemnt will no longer walk the fine line between legality or illegality nor act in the middle of the night, it will now do it in broad daylight, it needs to repress, block delete and one day even mutilate the enemies of the State as defined by Chávez and Ramiro´s book.

Funny, Zuloaga said this abroad, so there is even a problem of jurisdiction involved. Even Quico may be now accused for having an opinion! Just kidding!

The letter above, shows a very peculiar style of management, ask everyone to resign from Corpoelec in the middle of a huge electric crisis.

This will do wonders for morale and hard work, capable people will simply quit and tell Rodriguez to stuff his electric problem and deal with it himself. Then we will see a bunch of Capitancitos and Tenienticos con “estudios” in engineering replace them.

I guess that is how you run a guerrilla troop, the only experience Rodriguez has in management. Oh! I am wrong, I forgot he fired 20,000 people from PDVSA and we all know how that turned out…

(That guy is CIA, Judge: Bravo!, That guy is ETA, Judge: Jailed!)

Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, the one time Governor of Zulia State and 1993 Presidential candidate for COPEI, was jailed today because…

I am not so sure.

You see, Alvarez Paz is supposed to be in jail for saying things like:

“Venezuela  has turned into an operations center that facilitates the business of  drug-trafficking”

live on much hated Globovision.

But, Alvarez Paz did not make this up, in fact, I wrote not long ago about a report by none other than the United Nations in which the UN said that Venezuela had become the “the largest transit country for cocaine in the world”.

He also said that “the Chavez  government has links to illegal, armed groups in Latin America”

once again, this is not new, the Spanish Audiencia Nacional accused the Venezuelan Government of precisely that recently, when Judge Velazco accused the Venezuelan Government of supporting ETA and FARC and setting up some explosives training exercizes using Venezuelan military and an ETA operative to train the FARC to blow up some Colombian Presidents or something like that.

So, Alvarez Paz did not invent the wheel in what he said, much like General Uson, who was jailed for five years for suggesting some Army soldiers were burned by a flame thrower. So, what’s up?

Because Minister of (In)Justice El Aissami said that Alvarez was imprisoned “because he lied” is as stupid as it gets. If we jailed Venezuelans who lie, the whole Cabinet would be in jail, from Chavez and his constant reinterpretation of the electric problem and the possible Guri collapse, which started with it is going to collapse if you don’t stop using energy, to it is the oligarchs who invented that it could collapse, to Giordani’s claim that the “Mutuos” created an avalanche of inflation, to El Assiami’s claim that crime is down, the Government lies, distorts and mutilates the truth daily without blinking. Just El Assiami’s claim that it was not Chavez but the “independent” Judiciary that jailed Alvarez Paz, should make Pinocchio’s nose pale in comparison.

Because in the end, Alvarez Paz was fairly irrelevant in Venezuela’s politics by now. He is not running for the National Assembly, is not that visible or even controversial.

So, what’s the grudge?

My feeling is the Government, yes Hugo Chavez himslef, wanted to intimidate and choose someone that was not a key leader of the opposition so that the message would get across without affecting someone involved in the upcoming elections or the Mesa de Unidad.

It is a warning to everyone to be careful, anyone can be arrested on the spot: Be careful what you say, nobody is untouchable, we are looking at you, this Dictatorship will not tolerate much!

As simple as that. Ramiro and Hugo are watching!

Because, among other things, Alvarez Paz is being accused of promoting hate, defamation and “conspiracy”. A conspiracy of one, which at least in Spanish makes little sense, but the robolution has never been a big one about making sense anyway.

But it is a scary step. The Chavez Government has decided to jail someone just because…To set an example. It is a new direction, overt, clear and direct intimidation.

Be ready!

I receive every month a very interesting report from the Venezuelan Academy for Engineering. It always has interesting facts, I particularly enjoy the pictures of unfinished public works by the Chávez Government.

In the latest report, which I got yesterday, there is this graph of the position of the turbines in Guri

As shown, eight of the Guri turbines (two of which are down) that generate 5,600 MW are at level of 238 meters, thus it would be impossible to operate at that height as said publicly by at least two Government officials. One of them actually said that it could operate at 236 meters. Note that there are six additional turbines at the lower level which are down.

The problem is that there is a phenomenon known as cavitation which damages the turbines. As the water level goes down, air bubble can gon in the turbines. These bubbles themselves are not the problem, the way I understnd is that as they collapse inside the trubine they create pressure waves which are at high frequency which lowers the efficiency and damages the turbines. The Guri dam specifications say that it should never be operated below 240 meters, but more importantly the specs say operation should be stopped even above that level.

An additional plot form the same presenttaion, not in the Bulletin of the Academy is shown below:

This plot shows the scheduled “new” capacity to come online in the next three years. As you can see Corpoelec projects new capacity in the next three years slightly above 4,000 MW, the same amount the Government claims it will install in the next 12 months. Note that this includes 400 MW of Planta Centro, which were scheduled to come online last October, then last February and now who knows when. Hopefully, the rest of the schedule will be more on time that repairing 400 MW of Planta Centro.

Today, the OPSIS website reports that inflow into the Guri dam jumped to 919 cubic meters per second, a sharp increase over the previous days. The water level dropped 14 centimeters, but it indicates there is significant rainfall in the Caroni basin. This is good news.

Thank you to all my readers who either wrote in the comments or an email to warn me about what a local rag had written about supposedly “US authorities investigating the violation of US laws for maintaining a campaign against the financial system in Venezuela” or something like that, which accused three blogs/webpages, including this one. This is the second time in a month that two similar publications publish such rubbish, which leads me to be believe it is either paid or planted.

While I despise the lack of ethics of these two rags and their reporters, I can not take it seriously, like some readers have suggested. Obviously, the US is not doing what the article says, but more importantly I have not done what it says. My track record is here in my blog. Everyone can see that I began writing about structured notes in 2008 and while the Chavez Government ordered banks to get rid of them, in the end it did not enforce its decision and allowed the notes to morph into a different animal. It was the Chavez Government that named the banks and those that got rid of them for real are still functioning, those that began “triangulating” with brokers and related companies to cover up their holes (some of which were new to the list) have been intervened.

Moreover, what I warned about was the panic created by shutting down banks that had been intervened. I said that was the wrong strategy. I was right, within a week the Government was announcing the reopening of the banks, even if it failed to recapitalize them. This means it is just pumping money into them.But reopening them calmed people down, even if all Venezuelans now have to pay for the incompetence and irresponsibility of the Chavez administration.

In addition I have not mentioned names at any point. In fact, the stupidity of the post in these rags is that Hugo Chavez on his program Alo Presidente was probably the person that did the most to unnerve depositors. After shutting down the first few banks, Chavez said on national TV that he “knew there were more banks in trouble” and he was “following them” going as far as practically naming the owner of one bank and mentioning a related business this person owns.

And you definitely can’t compare Chavez’ audience to mine. So, I prefer to spend my time reading in the New York Times about our now famous Bipolar Capybara, worry about the fact that 500,000 new Venezuelans are born every year and that the Government uses 48% of the country’s electricity. I can also spend more time taking pictures of my orchids for my orchid blog like the one above, which lately I have neglected. Those are certainly a better use of my time that suing these rags for defamation or asking that my reply to them be published.

As  have said before, I will continue blogging as long as I can, I am not a brave or daring person, if I ever feel truly threatened, I will see what I will do.

It just ain’t worth it!

P.S.: Coincidentally I was away this weekend without internet or computer, thus I was able to read the comments Friday morning as I left, but not write this post until tonight. Thanks to all that sent messages again!

(The Destructive Matrix)

When Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, one of his campaign themes was how he was going to reduce the size of the state, get rid of Ministries, airplanes and bureaucrats. He has don exactly the opposite. While he initially reduced the number of Ministries, by now there are more of them than in the country’s history, almost double the number of public employees and the number of public institutions has multiplied without control.

But what has been most amazing, has been how Chavez has tried fixing problems by creating new layers upon layers of bureaucrats in the belief that this will somehow fix problems. Case in point is the beleaguered electric system, where Chavez had CADAFE coordinating policy, created CORPOELEC, a whole new company on top of it and later created the Ministry for Electricity. Thus you have three layers of decision makers before you get to where the action is. Add to this that Chavez nationalized the private electric sector, held rates constant and you get an idea why the problems are so severe.

This also reflects how the Government does not admit that they don’t do things right.

So, after the financial crisis, which was due to lax supervision and the abuses of a bunch of members of Chavez’ Bolibouregois, the first step should be to professionalize and strengthen supervision.

But not for Chavismo. Without studies of any kind or even consulting with those affected, the glorious Venezuelan National Assembly approved this week a new regulatory body which will oversee the three components of the financial system: Banks, brokers and insurance companies. Thus,you create another layer on top of a system that showed that did not work well, but if the three regulatory bodies underneath remain filled with crooks, people without experience or no clue about what they are doing, this will change absolutely nothing.

But since they were at it, they went even further and decided to completely dislocate the whole financial system by introducing sweeping changes in regulation which may sound fine at first sight, but will not be if good regulation is not in place.

The Bill you see, separates the three businesses from now on. Banks will not be able to own insurance companies or securities brokers and vice-versa, as the three sectors will be obligated to work completely independent of each other. That is, now cross-ownership, no co-branding, no cross-managing, no connection, personal or institutionally among the three sectors of finance.

In a well regulated world, these changes may seem to be ideal and reasonable. But in a system still reeling from the financial crisis, it may be asking for trouble.

First of all, you are going to force some of the best run and sound banks to get rid of their insurance arms and to get out of the securities business. For most banks, getting rid of the securities business implies shutting it down: They exist to provide the service to the bank’s clients and departments. Without the affiliation with the bank, its distribution network, its name, they are worth very little, if anything.

The insurance arms are worth something, but when you are obligated to sell them, you will not get a good price. And who will be the buyers? Certainly there will not be high quality buyers for the many insurance companies owned by the Venezuelan banking system.

And you are forcing these same banks to get rid of their securities business and leave it to the brokerage sector, which has recently been battered by the crisis as well as the elimination of the “Mutuos” one of their top two products.

Because in the end, banks did not fail because they used their brokers illegally. Banks failed because they used other brokers unrelated to them to lend to their own brokers, but in some cases simply used companies owned by the banks owners. So, in the end, the financial engineering that went on, originated on the lack of supervision and not in the structure of the system or its regulations. As an example, the two regulators of the securities industry named by Chavez until the crisis are a) In jail, b) being sought by Interpol for their crimes related to the financial crisis. These were people who had no connection, knowledge and/or experience with the securities business prior to being named to their positions.

Thus, all of this change for the sake of change will do little to correct the problems unless the four regulatory bodies, the insurance, banking and securities regulator, plus the new and improved Super Regulator are run by professionally qualified people and not by political and loyal appointees with no clue, track record or professional experience in the area.

Thus, the financial system will be shaken up by all this, many institutions will be in a holding pattern until the new rules are known and regulation will not improve because there is a new regulator on top of the old one. But Chavismo is like that, they believe anyone can do a job, anyone can improvise and it is always someone else’s fault.

And if it does not work, add another layer, because this time, it is surely going to work. Yeah, sure!

(The regime wants to monopolize falsehood)

Tonight that illustrious (but not illustrated) body, the Venezuelan National Assembly (formerly known as Congress, which never imagined we would remember fondly) decided to create a commission to investigate the “administrators” of webpages, based on the fact that Article 58 of the Venezuelan Constitution guarantees free speech, but they seem to like more Article 108, which says media should contribute to citizens education and public peace.

While I know it is presumptuos of me to pretend that I will be part of the investigation, since I am not a “portal”, nor do I have the ranking of ND or Noticias24, nor the humor of the Chiguire, I would like to emphasize the following points:

1) I do not administer this page. I write it. I allow free comments, as long as people don’t try to ignore what is said in it, come to fill my bandwidth or those who try to “outblog” me by writing comments that are longer than the post. I have banned one person (SteveH) and sometimes have erased  comments for a variety of reasons described here, but these incidents have been quite rare. I even allow lies (they can be shot down easily) and adoration of Chavez to be expressed, but I also call a troll a troll when it needs be.

2) Since my webpage is in English (even if it has a sister Spanish page, which contains 20% of the same content in Spanish and nobody seems to care for or even read it) it was not my aim to comply with Article 108 of the Venezuelan Constitution to “contribuir a la formacion ciudadana” (contribute to educate the citizens). You see, when I began this blog, I was trying to educate the citizens of other countries about the fake Chavez robolution, which at the time it still began with rev-. In fact, I sort of like Article 58 much more, because it is a right for all Venezuelans., while Art. 108 seems narrower and less important as it applies to the “media”, whatever it may be. As Chavez would say, Article 58 belongs to the “pueblo”, the “people”, Art. 108 seems more for the oligarchs, the “media” of any sort, or side. But what do I know.

3) Before the Assembly begins investigating I would like it to clarify whether if someone reproduces a Government lie, such as “It is not my fault if there is an electric problem’ or “the swap rate is going to Bs. 4.3per $” or reproduces a list that promotes hate like the Chavez/Tascon list, whether it will be the source that will be charged or those putting it up in Internet. This would be very important going forward, particular for those that use Twitter and hashtags (Chavistas: Look it up!), as we could create hashtags such as “Tasconslistpromoteshate or #ifnotchavezfaultwhoseisit?

4) Finally, I inform my readers that tonight I will proceed to erase all of the IP numbers and emails of everyone that has ever posted a comment in my blog. If you did not know it, every time you post a comment, your data is recorded. Given this threat to your privacy and your right to say what you want, I will help protect your rights as best as I can. (Including those that support the Dictator). I hate to see that database go…

Thanks for reading…