The Devil's Excrement

Smart move, the University of El Zulia, the University of the Andes, University of Carabobo and the Metropolitan University will join UCV, USB and the Catholic University in the counterproposal to the audit of the REP. This means that the top five public universities in the country and the top two private universities in the country are saying the current audit is a fraud.

What can the CNE say now? What will it say?

Yes, there is a very good reason not to invest in Venezuela, it is called Hugo Chavez:

“Caracas, Jun 10 (EFE).- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez asked the
nation’s business leaders to repatriate $10 billion of the dollars they
have overseas and invest it in their own country.

“I ask you to bring back the $10 billion you took out over the last 10 years and invest it in this country. If you don’t we will have to take measures after our victory on Dec. 3,” Chavez said at a ceremony in Maracaibo, 700 kilometers (435 miles) west of Caracas.”

I only have three questions:

–Who was in power most of the time while this money was being “taken”?

–What are you afraid of that you have to wait until winning in Dec. 3d. to do it?

–Who gave you the $10 billion figure?

By now,
maybe Hugo Chavez wishes he had kept some institutional checks and balances in
place, as corruption and corruption scandals mount. Whatever the connection
between the various scandals, it is clear that there are some serious struggles
taking place within the Government and it is a struggle mostly over money and
power, in that order.

What lies
behind these fights is beyond me, but I can’t dismiss the removal of Justice
Velasquez Alvaray and the death of his right hand man that easily. To see it
significance, it is important to recall who Velasquez Alvaray was. He was a
Chavez friend and confidant, from his own state of Barinas who participated in all stages
of the Chavez Government, elected to Congress, the Constituent Assembly and the
National Assembly before being promoted to Justice of the Supreme Court.

Velasquez
Alvaray was very powerful, in charge of the much hailed “cleaning up” of the Venezuelan
Judicial system, single handedly removing more than 400 judges from their
positions, leaving some questionable ones in place, including recent law
graduates and even convicted murderers. (Some of those fired reportedly will now ask to be rehired) And then, one day out of the blue, he is
accused of corruption in the purchase of land for the a judicial compound in Caracas, in a
country where there have been clear cut cases of similar overpaying during the robolution (The Nobrega
case with the Citibank building, for example) with not even an investigation.

Then
Velasquez Alvaray claims to have taped most telephone conversation and accuses
the Vice-President and the Minister of the Interior or getting rid of him. He
does not show up to defend himself at the National Assembly, leaves the country
and his right hand man, dies under confusing circumstances. (The police has not
confirmed it was a suicide). It is almost like something out of a John Grisham movie.

And his
right hand man was no slouch either. A good friend of Chavez since they were
young, Antonio Bazarate also worked closely with Chavez’ father in the Barinas
Governorship up to the day his friend Velasquez Alvaray called him to work for
him. Barinas is not only Chavez’ state, but also the one in which there seems
to have been the biggest corruption scandals in the last three months,
including the sugar processing plant that never was, the tomato plant that does
not even exist and now this.

And the
conflict over the issue is larger than many think. More than sixty Chavista
Deputies did not even show up for the vote in protest, including most of the
Barinas clan. Not one of them explaiend hisor her absence.

Meanwhile,
the sudden wealth of the Minister of the Interior’ brother is not investigated
(Velasquez Alvaray had long ago denounced him for asking him to deposit Supreme
Court funds in his bank). Few Governors (or the CNE!) do not follow the open public
bidding law, including Chavez’ father, but it is only an opposition ex-Governor who
is charged for it, a Chavista Deputy tells the world what we already knew that
the coop initiative has become simply a way of evading taxes and not paying
workers well (Makarem’s Petrozulia is one such coop), Fondafa has become a
source of corruption and commissions financing areas larger than Yaracuy state
while farmers there say they can’t get loans and anyone and everyone
surrounding the financial part of the state exhibits such wealth that we are no
longer talking about millions of dollars, but billions of them. You have read
here all of the schemes these members of the Government’s organized crime units use
to make money. Certainly not a pretty picture.

Meanwhile,
the trusted head of the foreign exchange control office CADIVI resigns, saying
that she is doing it because she “disagrees with the rest of the Board”. Rumors
have it that empty containers arrive regularly at Venezuela’s ports, simply empty as
part of massive fraud via CADIVI, while Chavez tells the new Head of CADIVI
that he wants fewer imports of old Scotch, since the “people” don’t drink it.
Of course, Venezuela imported US$ 24 billion of stuff, including not only old
Scotch, but also BMW’s and Mercedes Benz’, which are imported at the official
rate of exchange. After all, the new nouveau rich revolutionaries need to
satisfy their tastes too.

But right
hand men seem to be dropping dead all over the place. What started with the
right man of the General Prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, was followed up with the
right hand person of Francisco Ameliach and now Velázquez Alvaray’s second. I
guess nobody wants to be called Chavez’ right hand at this time, just in case.

In the
end, this putrefied picture of graft, corruption and murder can simply be
traced to the disappearance of checks and balances. Chavez controls everything,
but does not get involved in the details. He has allowed others to set up their
own fiefdoms of power and corruption, as long as they do what he wants and when
he wants it. But he let’s them be in between and they do not check on each
other unless they step over each other’s territory of graft or power. And that
is exactly what is happening today. Feudal lords encroached in their
positions are fighting over territory all over the place.Just this week, a suposedly close confidant of a Governor was reported by two newspapers to have been robbed from his apartment 18 million euros and 2 million dollars, all in cash.  And there are exchange controls! Ugly and suspicious indeed!

In the end
it is the absence of checks and balances that is haunting Chavez. He removed
them to do whatever he wanted, but he failed to understand that dictators and
autocrats need efficient control and his Government is anything but efficient
or even controlling of its own people. Power groups, both political and economical,
have sprung up all over the place and they seem to be enjoying the good life
and are willing to fight and apparently even to die for it. It is not only
Chavez that exhibits luxury in his surroundings and on him, it is all over the
place by now. Private airports are full of new jets and the owners are mostly
members of the new oligarchy, even if once in a while they let an old one buy
one too. Fancy cars are selling like hotcakes, but the old oligarchs don’t want
them for fear for their lives. Even suit salesmen are now carrying unheard of
top of the line $1,500 Italian suits in order to please the revolutionaries. This
had not happened since the days of ta’barato (In the 70’s the cheapest thing in
Venezuela was a buck and
Venezuelans would invade Miami
to shop, saying “ta’barato” (it is cheap), give me two)

Thus,
Chavez faces some tough choices, but he is unlikely to do anything before December.
Whether the Chavistas without Chavez exist or not, or the midgets gang really exist, is hard to
tell, but Chavez needs at this time their support to get elected, as he spends
his time projecting himself abroad. For
now, the carnage is likely to continue, gangland style.

Paroding Venezuela’s logo “Venezuela ahora es de todos”, El Morrocoy Rojo comes out with this hilarious cartoon modifying to Bolivia ” Bolivia now also belongs to Fidel”

As pro-Chavez groups threw tear gas at Teodoro Petkoff after his presentation at Universidad Central de Venezuela (Do I hear there is democracy here from any PSF reader?), opposition figures have begun to assume their positions on the issue of the REP audit. Petkoff himself in his Editorial in Tal Cual said “The decison by the Board of the CNE goes in the sense opposite to offering guarantees for electoral particiapation, which have been so severely damaged in the last few years, as evidenced by the election last December”. Later he said “It is unaceptable for them to propose such an audit of the registry which is nothing but a joke, not serious and which shows a lack of respect for Venezuelans. We should protest it with lots of energy”.

Meanwhile Zulia Governor Manuel Rosales said that his party Nuevo Tiempo will do an independent and parallel audit of the Electoral Registry (REP). Primero Justicia candidate Julio Borges called for the three universities excluded from the process to do their independent audit using the 2005 registry. COPEI’s candidate Sergio Omar Calderon said the decision is ” a blow to the trust of the voters and weakens even more the possibility of going to an electoral process which is transparent and can be trusted”.

Thus, there will be a battle. Once again, Rosales comes up with the most politically savy proposal, let’s do our own audit and we will see. That ought to worry the Chavista members of the CNE.

What we feared became true last night: The CNE managed to make the audit
of the Electoral Registry (REP) appear to the world to be respectable, but all it is simply a charade
which will make the world believe there was truly an honest audit but in truth
is simply a grotesque and dishonest manipulation by our electoral authorities. Simply
one more fraud! 

As you recall, three universities, Universidad Central de Venezuela,
Universidad Simon Bolivar and Universidad Catolica Andres Bello had months ago
made a proposal to audit the registry. When the new CNE was named, some
universities questioned why only those three should be involved and the CNE
“invited” seven universities and a scientific research institute to participate
in the audit, in the interest of more democracy, participation and transparency.
 

For the last week, the three universities that originated the project
have been objecting to the fact that the committee became basically a political
committee in which the seven “new” institutions would vote as block drowning
the technical proposals of the original three and preempting them. In the end,
these three universities simply said that they strongly disagreed with what was
approved, in that the CNE was limiting the audit to the internal consistency of
the registry and a more thorough job had to be performed in the interest of transparency
and in order to have everyone trust the registry.  

Now, clearly this is a technical issue. You need experts in databases,
demographics, modeling, statisticians and the like. Therefore, the CNE should
ask academic institutions that have expertise in these fields to participate if
it wanted additional input or a wider range of experts. Let’s first find a way
to evaluate qualitatively the institutions involved on both sides. 

An easy way would be to look for the total number of publications from
each institution last year or in a longer period of time, but this may be too
stringent a requirement for some young universities. There is a simpler and
more self-consistent way, which is to look at the Program for the Promotion of
Research (PPI) which is run by the Government itself via the Ministry of
Science. This program is a yearly evaluation of credentials for which Professors
need to show either that they are “active” via some form of publication in a
regular fashion or that they are at the beginning stages of a career in
research in either the social or the natural sciences, even if one has no
publications. This seems fair, since the technical requirements for the audit
fall in the general area of sociology, statistics, mathematics and computer
science. You would think that any well qualified Professor in the academic
world in these areas, would and should be part of such a system. Additionally
those that qualify get paid an additional amount of money every month, so it is
your own interest to qualify.

Well, there are 4432 Professors and/or researchers who are part of the
PPI. Of these, only 58 are from the six universities that the CNE requested
help from, while 1,215 are from the three original universities that submitted
the first proposal, UCV, USB and UCAB. Moreover, only one of the six
universities in the CNE group ranks in the top ten in the PPI among public
universities in Venezuela,
this is Universidad Simon Rodriguez which actually has 45 of the 58 Professors
that qualified for it from this group, leaving a scant 13 from the other five!
In fact, three of the six have zero Professors in the PPI, including the Maritime University whose technical connection
with the audit is tenous at best!

Curiously, the only one in the top ten, Universidad Simon Rodriguez, has
no technical careers, but it specializes in Education (including Natural
Sciences), business and food technology. Why did the CNE not invite the other
seven Universities in the top ten, the majority of which have Math, Computer
Science, sociology and engineering departments in favor of these obscure
institutions with little relation to the technical issues at hand and the
lowest academic levels in the country? I wonder if the CNE members would do the
same thing if they were looking for someone to operate on their brains, for
example. 

Additionally, the six universities that are participating fall under the
regime of experimental universities which have limited autonomy and in many
cases do not even elect the people that run them, but are directly named by the
Government, i.e. Chavez himself. This
has been covered quite well today here (In Spanish) in Cuentos Intrascendentes.

Case apart in the CNE group is the seventh member, the Venezuelan Institute
for Scientific Research (IVIC). This research institute does have 260
researchers who did qualify for the PPI. However, the CNE “invitation”
specified that no statisticians
should be in the group and that the committee from IVIC be composed of “more
than just the researchers”. Thus, IVIC’s representatives to the audit are a
sociologist who specializes in the History of Science, two researchers from
Anthropology, two technical people from Anthropology, two technical people from
Physics and the Head of the computer network. Curiously, no one from the math
department was involved. Additionally, recall that IVIC’s Director was named by
Chavez despite the fact that he lost the election by something like 60 to 17
within the community of researchers of the institution. So, he is clearly pro-Chavez
and willing to defend the revolution.  

Thus, the CNE has managed to do it again, manipulate the process in such
a way so as to make it a charade, but make it appear respectable on the surface
in the eyes of international opinion and even in the eyes of Venezuelans who
may think the Bolivarian University and the others in the group have any
semblance of academic excellence or technical expertise. All of this in the
name of democracy and transparency. But the truth is that this is one more fraudulent
process by the Chavez administration to control and cheat in any electoral
process that takes place in order to preserve Chavez and his revolution in
power and trampling over democratic principles and fair practices.

I can already see the President of
the CNE gloating after the audit that they the whole process was transparent
because these excellent group of institutions audited the questioned registry.

Clearly, there is a lot to hide in
Venezuela’s
Electoral Registry, but we already knew that!

Kudos to Alek Boyd for suing the Mayor of London for calling him a terrorist. Hope he wins! I buy the drinks if he does!

Our esteemed General Prosecutor said when former Justice Velasquez Alvaray that the recordings and statements made by Velasquez where simply gossip and he did not investigate gossip (At least against Chavistas). Well, in today’s Tal Cual, the newspaper shows two pages from an affidavit that arrived anonymously at the newspapers office in which the first circuit control Judge of Bolivar State and his assistant say that they were called on the phone by people who identified themselves as convicted murderer and Judge Maikel Moreno and the Vice-President so they keep their hands off the candidate as Mayor for the Caroni municipality Saul Cordero who was charged with eight counts for crimes ranging from illegitimately jailing someone to abuse of power.

Of course, in this country where justice is “supposed” to be beginning to work this has not been investigated. It is gossip or hearsay according to the General Prosecutor!