The Devil's Excrement

I guess this country has been screwed up for quite a while when the Student Union leaders at Central University (UCV) and Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) are named Stalin Gonzalez and Nixon Moreno respectively..

What were they parents thinking of? Funny thing is, they both ended up on the same side. I bet their parents never thought that possible.

(I just checked, there are over 1600 people with Nixon as first, second or last name registered to vote, very few as last name. Remarkably, there are only 1400-plus Stalin’s, but over 4500 Lenin’s)

Former Yaracuy Governor Eduardo Lapi was detained this morning as his home was raided by the intelligence police. Reportedly he will be charged with misuse of funds. Thus, as the robolution robs, steals and charges commisions, opposition figures are detained for subtle charges of misuse of funds. If the same criterai were applied to the Government, they would all be in jail, beginning with William Lara who one no longer knows if he is speaking as Minister or as spokesman for Chavez’ political party MVR. Or how about former CNE President Jorge Rodriguez who still has ten bodyguards and three official vehicles for his use.

This weekend Hugo Chavez continued intervening in the Peruvian election, in violation of the OAS Interamerican charter, going as far as calling Alan Garcia a thief, which is probably true, but curiously saying little about Ollanta Humala whose curriculum is as bad as Garcia’s. But he really stepped over the line calling President Toledo a traitor and a madman. He seems to be doing that daily these days.

But if anyone seems to be losing it is Chavez himself. Despite the oil windfall, he has little to show in Venezuela beyond his promises. He travels abroad promising the world and giving away Venezuela’s money as protests increase at home. But he seems not to care. Students at ULA and other universities continued their protests today over electoral autonomy, while protests shutdown the streets in Caracas near CONAVI, the housing institute and charges and countercharges of corruption continue to fly around between Government figures.

But Chavez is removed from all of this, as he has been outside of Venezuela two thirds of the days in the month of May, going as far as promising to “save the world”, giving away US$ 1.5 billion to Bolivia, more than CITGO originally cost in what has always been called an act against the country’s sovereignty, except we still own CITGO and it is worth much more. So much for defending sovereignty! It is unclear if Venezuela will get anything out of these US$ 1.5 billion, except some solidarity out of that country’s leader, who may not be in power for long, if the history of that country is any guide.

But Chavez has found a tough enemy in Ala Garcia and even in lame duck Toledo, who clearly is not going to go down without a fight. Today Toledo called on the OAS to act on Chavez’ intromission in Peruvian affairs, saying the organization can not wash its hands on this problem. For the OAS this represents a problem, it does not want to get on Chavez’ nerves by acting, but it damages the reputation of the institution when such a fragrant violation of its charter is ignored.

Meanwhile, Chavez the madman, proposes a new “Bolivarian Andean” Community after destroying the previous one, without asking his countrymen or Cabinet about it. It was just a whim. But as Rafael Poleo said in his “Pendulo” column last week, Chavez gave a press conference in which he basically defined his sphere of influence in South America. The problem is that if Garcia wins, the Chavez’ new community might be smaller than Chavez wants or even smaller than the previous one. Colombia is unlikely to go with it; neither will Peru if Garcia wins, leaving Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia to participate in this novel union. But this is too small for the absentee landlord of Venezuela. What will he do then? Poleo thinks that Chavez will include Argentina and Paraguay, basically leaving Peru, Colombia and Brazil outside of his loop.

This may seem like a losing proposition for anyone, but that is not how Chavez thinks. He is frustrated by his lack of accomplishments at home. He controls the country, but he has little to show in the last seven years despite the huge oil windfall. He knows the ten million votes in December is very far from reality, even manipulating the vote. So his personal project is more important than the local one. He is the new Simon Bolivar, the new integrator; even if he acts like a disintegrator in the short time since his project was formally aired.

The problem is that he has gained some powerful enemies on the way. Lula, Fox and now Toledo have been irked by Chavez to the point that they have gone on the offensive against him. When Toledo says that he will remain active in Latin American politics in order to “promote and preserve” democracy, the message seem to be very clear: He is ready to go around lobbying against Chavez’ project in his spare time. Lula talks softly, but Petrobras is wielding a big stick. Uribe can now claim a huge mandate, which clearly does not include Chavez in the plans.

The problem is that life for Chavez is also getting tougher at home. The whole point about having a primary is precisely that the opposition candidates can openly make these points. Meanwhile, corruption is internally eroding the revolution as factions within the Government fight to preserve or even gain more territory. People protest daily, most of them you don’t even read it in the news.

If I were Chavez I would leave my international ambitions aside for a while and concentrate on controlling the local herd. I hope he doesn’t! This looks like it may unravel for him quite fast at the rate it ahs been going

It’s 10 PM, 99.82% of the Colombian votes have been processed manually and Uribe is the winner. We still don’t know the final results of December’s election and it took weeks for the final result of the recall vote to be announced. I wonder what Carrasquero, Rodriguez and Lucena have to say about their new-fangled 300-million dollar automated system they purchased, but can’t produce similar results.

So much for the best voting system in the world as the Chavistas call their automated system.

I still find it amazing that many Chavez supporters still are in denial
about the depth and scale of corruption in the revolution. After the
confession by the corruption Czar Eliecer Otaiza, that of Chavez himself saying
that the Caracas corruption stops everything from moving forward where has he
been in the last seven years) and now the charges by the once trusted
Magistrate Velasquez Alvaray, I still get e-mails telling me that there is no
proof, that this is all hearsay and the revolution is pure and honest.

Well, let me, once again, challenge these people who only want to write
anonymously to explain to me something that was supposed to have disappeared by
now with the creation of the Bank of the Treasury and is likely to be a billion
dollar size source of corruption. I will be brief, since I gave a long
explanation earlier:

When Chávez got to power official deposits, that is funds by Government
institutions in the commercial banking system, were 1% of all deposits. Today
they are around US$ 10 billion or 27.7% of the monetary liquidity in the
country. This makes no sense. Why borrow money to give to Government
institutions if all they do is keep it in the bank? Something is rotten
somewhere.

Now, this has been going on for some years now, as the funds move according
to commissions that are making a bunch of people very rich: the Government
officials that get paid by the banks to divert their money their way and the “new”
bankers who pay the commissions and have seen their banks grow in obscene
fashion. So have their profits.

Last year, I actually applauded the decision to create the Bank of the
Treasury to manage these excesses. I said: “I was quite pleased to hear that
the Government was going to start a “Banco del Tesoro”. “ Well, once again I
was wrong in my praise of the revolution.

You see, the idea was that funds would flow to the Bank of the Treasury
and the corruption racket would disappear. Well, it has been almost a year. The
Bank of the Treasury is fully functional and official deposits have gone down
by less than 1% (It was 28.5% last August).

Why? Money, money, money.

There is absolutely no justification for this. As Ochoa says in
his interview today, if the Treasury were to be managed efficiently, the
Government would not even have to issue new debt. Imagine that! But of course,
commissions would disappear.

The worst part is that for this to continue to happen, it has to be
known all the way to the top. Maybe Chávez does not know it, but the layer
below does. Without their collaboration it could simply not happen.

That is how bad corruption in the Vth. Republic
is, the so called pretty revolution that has become a “robolution”. In my
earlier post, my calculation was that commissions were way over a billion so
far, around US$ 500 million last year alone.

This does not include, Argentinean bond corruption, inside information
about debt buybacks, “special sales” to friends and the like. This is ONE
specific case that has no other explanation or justification. So, open your
eyes my friends, the country is being pilfered and raped by these crooks in the
name of the revolution and the poor and one day we will all have to pay for it.
Will you still be in denial?

Well,
after last night’s post on the new Corruption Czar, it turns out that even a
bigger cesspool was opened up today by the Supreme Court Justice that was suspended
yesterday from his position by the Consejo Moral Republicano (CMR).

The
Justice, Luis Velásquez Alvaray, was none other than the writer, when he was an
MVR Deputy, of the new Supreme Court Bill, which allowed Chavez to increase
that Court by 12 members by simple majority. But curiously, that Bill also
included the possibility of having the CMR suspend anyone from the Highest Court in
the land if there were charges against him or her. Even more ironically, it was
opposition Deputies who opposed this feature of the Bill, since it was then
directed specifically at then Magistrate Franklin Arrieche, in revenge for him having
written the majority opinion that said there was no coup in April 2002.

Velasquez
Alvaray’s press conference was wide ranging, quite juicy and even included
some taped conversations which he picked from what he called an “extensive
collection of tapes.” The now suspended Magistrate was charged with a corruption accusation related to the construction
of the new headquarters for the judicial system, named “Ciudad Lebrun”. There
are charges of Velasquez Alvaray profiting from the purchase of the land, as
well as kickbacks and bribes in the process of building the new headquarters of
that “Judicial City”. Velasquez Alvaray took offense to
the charges and the suspension, but reportedly he was told that he would not be
suspended by the CMR. But he was.

Velasquez
Alvaray’s statements show what happens when checks and balances disappear in a
political system and a single political faction controls everything. In
revealing what he did, he showed not only how corrupt the revolution and the
Government are, but also how he had kept that knowledge to himself, protecting
his comrades in arms, until he found himself accused of corruption and not
protected by his former revolutionary buddies.

His most
damaging charges were directed against the Vice-President, Jose Vicente Rangel,
the President of the National Assembly, Nicolas Maduro and his accuser Minister
of Interior and Justice Jesse Chacon. He claimed they wanted to remove him
because he has tried to stop them repeatedly. He called
them “The axis of Chavismo without Chavez…which would not be socialism, but
capitalism of the XXIst. Century…who want to take over the state so they can
commit their abuses….”

He claimed
that President Rangel and Maduro knew who the members are of the infamous “Band
of the Midgets”, which is supposed to control the judicial system. However, he
failed to mention if he knew who they were. Why?

He repeatedly
made connections between Rangel and the case of murdered Prosecutor Danilo
Anderson. He asked aloud: “Why does the Vice-President keep such an eye on the Anderson case?” He
claimed that they started going after him when Rangel called him and asked him
to remove Judge Alejandra Rivas, who was in charge of the Anderson case. But, he claimed, he found the
Judge to be honest and decided not to listen to Rangel. But, he questioned, “What
is Rangel’s interest in all of this?”

Velasquez
played a recording in which he is talking to Judge Rivas and she describes to
him irregularities in the Anderson
case at the request of members of the National Assembly and another one in
which she says that Rangel knew who the “Midgets” were. Pretty amazing stuff, when you consider that
he is accusing the Vice-President and the President of the Assembly of trying
to intervene in a case that they should have nothing to do with under the
separation of powers. A case that has been extremely murky, in which the
Government has tried over and over to blame the opposition, but all evidence
points more and more to some sort of inter-Government fight as the explanation
for the assassination In any decent country heads would be rolling tonight, but
not in this autocracy which later has an absentee autocrat.

Velasquez
Alvaray then began asking why a whole bunch of recent millionaires are not investigated
by the Moral Council. Among others he mentioned:

–Julio
Macaren. This character is none other than the owner of
Petrotulsa and North American Opinion Research, Chavez’ favorite pollster. The
same one that openly and publicly threatened bloggers calling us The Anglo
Venezuelan Connection (TAC), who said his cooperative was one of these “social”
programs, but apparently it is making him a millionare. Well, Velásquez Alvaray
accused him of enriching himself suddenly at the expense of the revolution. He called him one of the largest intermediaries
of the Government. What an impartial pollster, no? He is the one that says
Chavez ahs 70% popularity. Velasquez Alvaray also accused him of bribing a
Judge to accuse him.

–Pedro
Torres Ciliberto: One of the owners of Bankinvest, Alvaray called him the main financier
of the Government, suddenly a very rich man.

–Arne
Chacon. The brother of the Minister of Interior and Justice has gone in three
years, as reported here in the Devil in 2005, from lowly employee of the tax office to part owner of a
Bank and he
even put in an offer of US$ 10 million to buy some milk pants from Indulac,
the milk producer. Of course, nobody investigates him, the Comptroller says
nothing and the Prosecutor says nothing, simply because they all know too much
about each other and how they are all becoming millionaires in the name of the “robolution”.

–Maikel
Moreno: Only last night I mentioned the
honorable judge Moreno, the only convicted murderer in the world who has
been named a Judge after being released from jail. Alvaray played a recording
of Moreno
asking him to release someone, telling him the Vice-President of the Republic
was asking for it! This is the great “new” revolutionary judicial system Chavez
imposed.

Of course,
Velasquez Alvaray claims he is so honest and just. But you have to wonder why did
he hide all these facts while being a member of the Supreme Court? How does
that fit with his claimed honesty? Shouldn’t he have reported it all? Denounced
it with the same vehemence that he does now?

But no.
The problem is that they are all covering each others asses, as the country is
being pilfered, robbed and abused in the name of the revolution. Meanwhile Hugo
Chavez is going around the world giving away the country’s money as if it were
his, while locally the bounty is being distributed by revolutionaries and the
enemies of the revolution alike. And nobody is watching. Absolutely nobody.
What a disgrace this revolution has turned out to be!

Meanwhile,
Rangel blames
the Justice’s emotional state for his statements, saying that “Each thief
judges others based on his own behavior”. Obviously he denies everything. What
else can he do?

But the
cynical Prosecutor rather
than saying he will investigate, says that the audio tapes have no legal
validity. He says that if Velasquez presents evidence he will investigate. Of
course, everything else against his enemies he investigates, even if it is just
only hearsay. But Arne Chacon’s wealth is public knowledge. The audio tapes
were real. But that is not enough to investigate his own comrades in arms. Of
course, he does not want to touch the Anderson
case, where he has built a sand castle with his so called evidence to involve
opposition figures and reporters.

They all
protect each other. Where is the corruption Czar today? Robbing someone or
setting up his gym in his new office?

And the
pretty robolution marches on, while the absentee landlord/autocrat travels
around giving away the country’s wealth and caring little about what is going
on. How long can this go on?

Hopefully
not long…

The fascist roots of the revolution sprung up today, when the National Guard raided
the University of the Andes, violating, once again, the Venezuelan
Constitution, that gives university campuses autonomy. This has been
ver rare in Venezuela’s recent history, with the raid by Rafael Caldera
in the late 60’s being the one that generated the most controversy and
political conflict. Long gone are the days of the first year of Chavez’
Presidency when Generals visited campuses to show that this Government
was “different”.

The Guards went in to the campus to quelch
the protests in that University which arose from a decision by the
Supreem Court to suspend the elections for Student Union in that
University. Reportedly, the Guards removed the media from the
University and then proceeded to gas the students that were protesting.
There many students and police injured.

The Supreme Court
suspended the election in response to an injuction from a pro-Chavez
group that was asking for the CNE to organize the elections, rather than
the students themselves as has always been the case. This is also
considered to be a violation of the autonomy guaranteed to universities
by the Constitution. University autonomy is a right in most Latin
American countries.

Chavez seems to have forgotten Art.67 of the Venezuelan
Constitution written by a Constituent Assembly that he ran and controlled:


“Artículo 67. Todos los ciudadanos y ciudadanas tienen el derecho de
asociarse con fines políticos, mediante métodos democráticos de organización,
funcionamiento y dirección. Sus organismos de dirección y sus candidatos o
candidatas a cargos de elección popular serán seleccionados o seleccionadas en elecciones
internas con la participación de sus integrantes.

Loosely
Translated”

“All of the citizens have the right to associate themselves for political
goals, using democrataic methods of organization, functioning and direction. The
organsims of direction and their candidates to popular elections will
be selected using internal elections with the participation of its
members.”

Given this how
can Chavez criticize Sumate saying: “Why is Sumate calling for
primaries?…… the empire is pressuring for primaries…they want to become a
parallel Electoral Board, calling for primaries”

Well Hugo, its your law, your Constitution, that is what iternal elections means, just because you don’t follow it,
does not mean others should not or is an order of the Evil Empire. So, you
better get your story straight, read your little blue book again, maybe you may find it. It’s called democracy, but I know you don’t quite understand that concept yet.

–This morning a local newspaper denounced that Judge Gumer Augusto Quintana had been in jail for armed robbery. This afternoon he was rmoved from his position. What’s the big deal? We already have Judge Maikel Moreno, a convicted murdered as one of the most trusted judges of the revolutiion.

—Peruvian TV reports that Chavez protected Fujimori’s trusted adviser Vladimir Montesinos. Really? Didn’t Deputy Carreno say that Montesinos was dead when the Venzuelan press said he was here? But Montesinos later showed up here alive and well and was sent off to Peru in minutes? Why did Carreno say that? Why did the Head of the intelligence police hold a press conference to deny Montesionos was in the country?

—Carter Center representative Jennifer McCoy shows up and expresses her backing for the new CNE. I guess she used the same criteria as that fateful day of the recall vote: Absolute Ignorance, Total Loyalty. That is one stupid statement by Ms. McCoy. Has she read their statements so far? Does she really back them?