The Devil's Excrement

Venezuela has many problems, old ones and
new ones. Anyone that believes that Government alone can solve all of them,
ignores both history and economics. In order to improve the lot of all
Venezuelans to acceptable levels there has to be a huge increase of at least
300-400% in the size of the country’s economy. Simple math shows that in the
last seven years, oil income has increased by a factor of four and nevertheless
that has not translated into an increase in the general well being of all Venezuelans
or in the size of the economy. Government alone just can’t do it; you need the
multiplier effect of the private sector in all areas of economic activity.

Two areas
where results in the last seven years, despite the hoopla, have not been good
are housing and agriculture. You can see a graph of the number of housing units
which is a
year old here. As you can see there, the number of new housing units built
by this administration each year is much less than those built during Caldera
and CAP II and those were terrible Governments, which are looking better
everyday! In fact, the Chavez administration in the last five years has built fewer
units than in the worst of the last four of Caldera’s years. 2005 was no
different. Despite Chavez lashing at his collaborators (and firing them!), his
unrealistic goal
of building 120,000 units was not even close. The last numbers are not yet in, but
in September the totals had reached less than 20,000 units in 2005, according
to the Government.

But the
Government continues its stubborn path to failure. The last seven years have
seen little construction of new housing units due to the uncertainty about private
property rights, as well as the fact that the Government decided to go at it
alone in building housing projects. Thus, the shortage of 1.7 million housing
units estimated by the Government a year ago continues to grow everyday. It
sometimes even gets funny as municipal officials have begun using the term “houses
from the secondary market” when referring to housing purchased from th private
sector by municipalities to solve emergencies when landslides occur.  

If you
want the cooperation of the private sector you need to send the right signals.
But the opposite is happening. Only yesterday, the Mayor of the Metropolitan
area of Caracas
expropriated two buildings, a brand new one and an old one, to give it to those
affected by the rains both in the vicinity of the viaduct, as well as near the
Cotiza brook in the West of Caracas. (By the way, that brook overflowed in the
1999 floods and the people went back to it, five people died two days ago when
a dam in Avila mountain gave in)

I watched
on TV when the Mayor arrived at the private new building to announce its
expropriation and take it over. The owner was there and asked the Mayor if he
had a representative from the Attorney Generals’ office, as required by law.
The Mayor said no, but went on to say that it did not matter because the
procedure was perfectly legal. Of course, no price has been set and this man,
who claims he put all of his money into this project of building an eight story
apartment building, says he now has no money and will have none until he gets
compensated, if it ever happens. So much for the Constitutional guarantee of
private property rights.

Similar
things are happening in agriculture, another area that Chavez has given a high
priority to. There has been an upturn in production in the last two years, as
interest on loans have dropped, but little of it comes from the takeover of
latifundia, most of which remain in the hands of the Government or have not
been exploited. Moreover, Mercal, rather than becoming a motor for local agricultural
production has become a huge importer that meets with local producers and
threatens them with imports rather than trying to work with them to produce
more locally.  Some of Venezuela’s
crops like coffee and cocoa have a lot of potential to become important export industries.
But this has been the case for decades and nothing ever happens.

The last
few months has seen a fight over wholesale prices for coffee that remain well
below international ones even after the recent adjustments. But coffee prices
at the retail level remain controlled at Bs. 7,400 per kilogram (US$ 3.44 per
kilo or US$ 1.56 per pound at the official exchange rate, way below world
market prices). The last few weeks there have been shortages of coffee and this
week a Government official suggested an increase in the controlled price was imminent,
which led to even more scarcity. Then on Wednesday the consumer protection
agency (Indecu) impounded
300 Tons of coffee at the distributor’s warehouses and two additional raids have
taken place. The coffee will be forcefully purchased at the official controlled
price.

Clearly, this
is no way to run an industry, if you are forced to sell your coffee at the
lowest price, can not even export it, even at the official exchange rate, there
are few incentives to invest, produce and as one coffee grower put it: why
should I even pick the coffee to sell it at a loss? There goes jobs,
investments, etc.

And then
today we had the bully himself, Hugo Chavez, saying that if coffee growers do
not sell the coffee to the distributirs, “we will take it away, that coffee
does not belong to them, it belongs to the country”. Well, so did the Caracas-La
Guaira viaduct and those entrusted with taking care of it did not and I see
nobody assuming that responsibility. And then Chavez began arguing about the
law, which guarantees private property and not the coffee for the President to
drink.

This is no way to run a country and these
industries will slowly disappear, much like the sugar industry in Cuba did, due
to Government control stifling it. The Government can not be coffee grower,
airline owner, telecom owner, hospital runner, regulator, steel producer and
oil producer all at the same time, just to give some examples. This Government,
much like the Cepal-oriented ones of the 60’s in Venezuela, is trying to do it all and
it just does not work. You need investment, technology and the ability to
compete here or abroad to make all these industries grow and be competitive. You
can’t regulate below cost of production. But when knowledge and common sense
are left aside the outlook simply becomes grim. And right now it is as grim as
the feeling one gets when looking at the pictures of the viaduct

(Pictures courtesy of Noticiero Digital)

It was less than a month ago, on Dec. 16th., that President Hugo Chavez toured the ongoing repairs of the viaduct of the Caracas La Guaira highway and said that the media had blown the problem out of proportion. For the next few days and weeks, the Minister of Infrastructure said that the viaduct would be repaired by cutting the old columns and displacing the bridge onto newly built ones.

On December 21st. as I drove over the viaduct, I noticed some ten to fifteen firetrucks hidden on a side road, which suggested to me that things were not as peachy as suggested. Today the highway was completely shut down. There has been no announcement whether it is permanent or not, but the Minister suggested it was. An announcement was made that the highway will be closed indefinitely. So much for the media blowing the issue out of proportion.

What is perhaps the saddest part, is that now nature in the form of the rains and the land moving are being blamed for the problem today. (Or is it the nature of our Government management style?)The truth is that Venzuela gave Jamaica this week US$ 300 million to build a highway, Bolivia another US$ 80 million and Ecuador US$ 30 million for road resurfacing. With a fraction of that a new viaduct or alternate road could have been built in our own country in the last seven years of oil widfall. But the problem has been ignored for the last 18 years, seven of which have been under the watchful eye of the revolution and Chavez.

But, of course, it is never the revolution’s fault, the revolution is perfect and never admits mistakes, as demonstrated by the statements by none other than the chief liar Jose Vicente Rangel as he toured the site and said: “Nobody knew that the viaduct could collapse“. Nobody? I imagine he means nobody in the Government, because on December 20th. 2005, the President of the Venezuelan College of Engineers said:

“The viaduct will collapse soon…We have been warning for a year and a half about this problem and have been giving solutions…the work being performed is oriented to prolongits life, but its death is reflected in it…the non-treatment of the emergency is a situation that has been going on for a long time and the responsible authoritites did not take the necessary precautions”

This was only 14 days ago, but the Vice-President still thinks the memory of the people is very short, like in so many other lies of the revolution. It was only two weeks ago that we were assured by Government officials: “The viaduct will be usable the rest of 2005 and in all of 2006” or “The repairs we are making will fix the problem”. “The viaduct will hodl until a new one is built”. Only Chavez actually told the truth when he visited the viaduct. After blasting the media, touring the works being performed, he let it out: :”There is no solution to this”.  I guess the VP does not think much of him either.

Chavez remarks about the descendants
of the killers of Christ controlling the world, which in Catholic countries has always referred to precisely the Jews, no matter what the revisionists who visit this blog wants to suggest,
have reminded me, via one of the comments by Klina, a similar episode which took place in
the first few months of the Chavez administration, involving the now deceased Argentinean
Norberto Ceresole. Ceresole was a political scientist who was a sociologist by
training, who came to Venezuela
in 1994; at about the time Chavez was pardoned by President Caldera for his
bloody coup attempt in 1992. It can be said that Hugo Chavez had
three mentors, current Planning Minister Jorge Giordani on economic
matters, Luis Miquilena on political matters (who was later discarded and
replaced by current Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel) and Norberto Ceresole on
ideological matters and the
path of the revolution. To me, Chavez’ comments, both in the context of saying that those that killed Christ control the world and then following up with saying that those that control the world also killed Simon Bolivar, are no different than the anti-Semtic/conspiracy theory by powerful groups writings of Ceresole. In fact, most of the thinking by Ceresole about the revolution can be seen today, after his death, in the ideas and actions of the evreyday Bolivarian evolution.

Because of this, the personality of Ceresole, his influence over Chavez and his project deserves to be reviewed again, since there are so many short memories about Venezuela and the last seven years under Chavez.

Ceresole linked up with Chávez and spent
over a year going around the country with him in what was then Chavez’ effort
to promote the overthrow of the Venezuelan Government. Ceresole was a curious personality,
having started at the left, claiming to be a Peronist, later a Montonero, only to
shift later to the right turning into a pro-Arab, anti-Israel, neo-nationalist,
calling for militaristic leaders across Latin America in order to preside over
a “post democratic” era in which the army and the people would somehow merge into
one, led by “Caudillos”. (Sound familiar?)

In 1995, Ceresole was
kicked out of Venezuela
for his supposed ties to Arab terrorist groups. The truth was that Ceresole was
giving seminars across Venezuela, in which he would state that the future of
Venezuelan democracy was doomed, which given his affiliation with Chavez and
the fact that he was a foreigner, did not sit well with then President Rafael
Caldera’s Government.

Ceresole returned soon
after Chavez’ 1998 victory in grand style. He lived at the “Circulo Militar” a Hotel/Country Club
facility run by the military in Caracas. at Government’s expense.
He relished the limelight, giving interviews to the press and anyone that may
listen about his theories about post-democracy and the civic-military union as
the way to go in Latin America. Quotes like
this one:

“The Venezuelan model is
differentiated from the “democratic model” (be it liberal or neoliberal)
because within the popular mandate there is an implicit idea that power should
remain concentrated, unified and centralized. The people elect a person (who is
immediately projected to the metapolitical level) and not an idea or
institution. This is not an anti-democratic model, but a “post-democratic one.””

became an embarrassment
for the political operators of the newly assumed Chavez regime, who were trying
to sell the world the image of a softer, gentler and more democratic Hugo Chavez. It was
one of them, Luis Miquilena who got rid of Ceresole, even if Ceresole himself blamed
what he called
the more “democratic” part of the Chavista Government, as represented by current VP Jose
Vicente Rangel.

In my own personal recollection,
it was the combination of Ceresole using the word “post-democracy” suggesting some
sort of strongman regime, which people were afraid of, together with the strongly anti-Semitic
statements repeatedly made by Ceresole in the numerous interviews that he gave
to the press, that got him into trouble in Venezuela with the political
operators. He blamed Rangel in most of his latter writings, including his “book”
called “Caudillo,
Ejercito, Pueblo” (Leader, Army, People) about the Chavez revolution. Curiously
that book has an introduction, which is followed by a sort of preface entitled “The Jewish
question and the State of Israel”, a sort of strange preface for a book about Venezuela. But
it all relates to his anti-Semitism and the fact that he blamed Israel and the world Jewish community for him having to leave Venezuela in 1999.

Reportedly, Ceresole got
interested in Judaism and the State of Israel, as described by himself in
the book “The forging of Reality”, when he began investigating the AMIA (Asociasion
Mutua Israelita Argentina) Headquarters bombing in which 85 people
died. Ceresole supposedly reached the conclusion from his findings that there
was a huge cover-up of the internal fight in the Jewish community of Argentina which
led to the bombing (!!) and that the Jews
use the “myth” of the Holocaust to control the world. Curiously Ceresole said that
this is not anti-Semitic. He repeatedly made the argument in interviews and
writings that he did not dislike human beings who are Jewish, but it is the
State of Israel, which he used very loosely, and its control of people that had taken advantage of the
myth of the Holocaust to control the world.

But let’s see exactly how
he defended his supposedly non-anti-Semitic position in his book
about Chavez:

“Of course I am not “anti-Semitic”
nor am I “neo-Nazi” Recently a serious magazine, the pretended Spanish language
version of Foreign Affairs, (Política Exterior, Madrid, noviembre-diciembre de
1999, p.32, Vol.XIII, Nº 72) defined me as a «montonero», the ultra left of Peronismo
in the seventies

I am, that I am, a critic of the
State of Israel
and of the international Jewish organizations, to which I have devoted my last
few books. I consider myself part of a new revionism whose objective is to demonstrate:

1. That an important part of the
canonical tale of deportation and death of the Jews under the Nazis has been
arranged in the form of a myth.

2. That such a myth is utilized to
preserve the existence of a colonial enterprise endowed by a religious ideology
(monotheistic and mythic-messianic): the disownership by Israel of the Arab Palestine

3. That that myth is also utilized
to financially blackmail the German state, other European states and the US Jewish community in the US and other countries
with significant Diasporas.

4. That the existence of this
political enterprise (Israel a power shaped under the monopoly of monotheism
and implemented by an army, various police forces, jails, tortures and assassinations)
looks to consolidate itself via a series of ideological manipulations in the bosom
of the hegemonic power of the US, which procures by any means to be accepted
about the owner of the world using generalized terror and also via dissuasive
and persuasive practices.”

Ceresole’s work is plagued
with statements such as the one above in the claim that the Holocaust was small
and is being used by the State of Israel as a way of controlling the world. Of
course, he claimed to have proven this and thus it is a fact and not an anti-Semitic posture. And we are expected to believe him of course, when he traced back
this behavior as far back as the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the
XVth. Century, which in turn led him to propose that other influential groups, in this case the British Masons, conspired to kill Simon Bolivar.

In fact, in the book about
Chavez, Ceresole concluded among other revionist facts that:

“there was, in no case-(in the German
concentration camps of the era of the Third Reich, including the German
territory militarily administered by Germany) the use of homicidal gases
that supposedly operated in the so called “chambers””

Or

“Less than 40,000 people between
non-Jews and Jews (died in Auschwitz)”

And

“The revionist analysis have absolutely demonstrated that those “memories” that
pretend to replace non-existing documents (such as extermination orders (official
or non-official ones, budgets to build death factories, designs or credible
representations of the weapons of the crime, administrative procedures to execute
such a vast crime, etc..)”

Ceresole’s theories about
the unity of the army and the people, led by the Caudillo could be the subject of
many posts, but basically what Chavez has proposed and continue to propose today is not that
different from what Ceresole postulated in his book: a single “political unity”
to replace political parties composed of the leader, the military-civic union, arming the citizens, all anti-US,
with the leader trying to break up the bipolarity of the world by joining with the Arab world
and confronting the US.

In fact, the only
divergence between Ceresole and what has happened in Venezuela after his death, is that
Ceresole had no love lost for Fidel Castro, who he considered a failure.

In a prescient prediction, Ceresole foresaw, for example, the reaction of the
Venezuelan left to Chavez’ militaristic project:

“The liberals and Marxists of all kinds will look to attack the Venezuelan
model-simultaneously or alternatively-from two angles that have already been
perfectly designed. The first will ask for the “distribution and
democratization of power” and the second for “popular participation” in the
sense of replacement of the caudillo (leader, concrete, physical) by the “people”
(abstract, generic).”

Ceresole, tried sometime to minimize his perosnal importance for Chavez and the revolution, saying he was just an individual visitor at the time of the scandal that led to his departure, but at the same time he always talked in the sense of “I told Hugo this or that”, “these writings are the results of many meetings with Chavez’ military officers” and the like.

All of this demonstrates
to me, the deep influence that Ceresole had on Chavez’ ideas and on his project. I can
not say that Ceresole implanted the anti-Semitic words in Chavez’s mind, but
Chavez’ statements last week are fairly clear in my mind. To anyone that
has ever lived in a Catholic country, it was not the Romans that killed Jesus, it was the Jews. This was the case in Venezuela, which had a very large Jewish communities since WWII, which helped mitigate anti-Semitism and this was more strongly felt in Spain, where the Jewish community has been quite small.

It is also no accident that Chavez linked Christ and Simon Bolivar in his statemnet, this is also part of Ceresole’s writings. Ceresole blamed
the death of Simon Bolivar, on another conspiracy, not on the Jews, but he drew
the analogy to the Jews as a group of power who likes to control the world, much like the British Masons felt the threat of a unified Latin America, leading him to blame them for the death of Bolivar:

“the great Masonic loggias, those positivistic para-religious lobbies of
British capitalism, who aspired to destroy that vast, complex and extraordinary
geopolitical architecture represented by the Spanish American Provinces…it is
thus that the fall and death of the Liberator (Simon Bolivar) is produced. To realize this operation London turned to the second line of its roster, the great traitors of the American homeland” (In the section “A geopolitical
response to external aggressions” in Ceresole’s book “Caudillo,
Ejercito and Pueblo”)

And I will leave it at
that. To me the connection is clear and direct between Chavez intellectual mentor,
his thinking and the anti-Semitic statements made my Chavez a week and a half
ago. Chavez is no dummy, he probably started on the Christ statement and when he realized
that this was politically incorrect, he concatenated it with the teachings of
his old mentor abiut the Masons and Bolivar’s death. To me, it is all there in white and black.

In some sense it was lucky for the Chavez
revolution that Norberto Ceresole died in 2003, because he was direct
and very clear in his thinking, which Chavez is not. Thus his physical absence allows the
revolution not to have to live with the embarrassment of having his writings and statements
exposed day after day. But his teachings live on in the daily actions of this
militaristic, one man-show which has come to be known as the Bolivarian
revolution.

*The links I have provided
in English are not the best, but I wanted to give as many English language
links as possible about Ceresole, which are scarce. In the end, Ceresole’s own
words in Spanish in interviews or his books are the best reference.

Getting late, even if I am not partying tonight, I want to wish
everyone a great 2006 and wish that the New Year will make people think
about all of the changes this country needs that are not being made.
That 2006 will become the year of a single country for all Venezuelans.

The
Venezuelan economy has always had contradictions and distortions that
eventually need to be resolved and cause a lot of pain, grief and damage n the
popeulation. Irresponsible Governments use oil money to create artificialities
that eventually blow up in their faces as the strain on the economy becomes simply
too much. Here are some of the more significant ones in 2005, most of which
will likely get worse in 2006:

-The
Venezuelan economy grew by 9.4% in 2005, but the oil economy grew by only 1.2%.

-The
Venezuelan economy grew by 9.4% in 2005, but the Caracas Stock Market was the
worst performing market in the world of the 79 covered by Bloomberg, down 32.4%
for the year in US$.

-Inflation
in 2005 was 14.4% but the yield on a 91 day Treasury Bolivar note closed the
year at 7.83%.

-The
country received US$ 48.34 billion for its oil exports and only US$ 7.25
billion for non-oil exports, an increase of only 6% for the latter.

-The
country had imports of US$ 25. 17 billion, an increase of 45% over the previous
year and a historical high.

-Venezuela issued over US$ 4.1 billion in new foreign
debt, but purchased over a billion US$ 1 billion in Argentina’s debt.

-The
Government says unemployment is at 8.4%, but 45% of the workforce is part of
the informal economy and not measured.

-Controlled
prices were up 10.2% in 2005, those not undrer control were up 18.1% in 2005.

Good friend (and photographer!) Awacate,
sends these two pictures taken near La Bandera. These makeshift homes
under bridges (above left) are now all over the city and pictures like
the one on the right can be taken at any time.

A reader (Gene) points me to this
post which contains this
link to an official Government site with the complete transcript of the
visit to a center for the homeless in which Chavez made his anti-Semitic
comments. This is a translation of that part of his “speech” or
conversation (page 18) that day and leaves no doubt as to what Hugo Chávez said and from an official transcript at that!:

“…that is why I say that today more than ever and in 2005 years we need Jesus
the Christ, because the world, the world, the daily world is ending, each day, the
wealth of the world, because God, nature is wise, the world has sufficient
water for all of us to have water, the world has sufficient wealth, sufficient
land to produce food for all of the world population, the world has enough
rocks and minerals for all of the constructions, so that nobody would be
without a home. The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that
a minority, the descendents of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendents
of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in
their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia. A minority has taken possesion
all of the wealth of the world, a minority has taken ownership of all of the gold of the
planet, of the silver, of the minerals, the waters, the good lands, oil, of the
wealth then and have concentrated the wealth in a few hands: less than
10% of the population of the world owns more than half of the wealth of the
world and …more than the population of the planet is poor and each day there
are more poor people in the whole world. We are decided, decided to change
history and each day we are accompanied and will be accompanied by more Chiefs
of state…”

Thus, as my esteemed ghost blogger Jorge Arena has noted, why the collusion by the
press? Why is it that this incredibly offensive and insensitive
remarks by the Venezuelan President have had no repercussion in the
Venezuelan press? Why hasn’t theworld press communicated these remarks
by the heroe of the people? You tell me…

Scanning Venezuelan news and blogs, your favorite ghost blogger* *was
alerted by this article about Chavista anti-semitism, written by Alex
Beech

I learned that the President was reported saying the following:

“Christmas is Christ rebellious, revolutionary, socialist” and “the
descendants of those that crucified Christ have taken ownership of the
wealth of the world, and they have concentrated it in a small number of
hands”.

The remarks appeared on December 25 in Noticiero Digital , quoted from
the “minute to minute” section of El Nacional. Now, if the reader goes
to the link where it appeared, the news have been replaced by today’s “minuto a
minuto” news. I even checked Dec 26^th El Nacional editorial (page A6)
that mentioned the Christmas message, but found nothing about anti-semitism.

Annoyed by the lack of a formal referral link and puzzled by the
editorial, I started digging the official sources:

VTV, ABN ,MINCI ,RNV and Aporrea :

They all reported a Chavista-Christian message of love and peace, and
even (see RNV, Aporrea) wrote verbatim the sentence about Christ being
rebellious, revolutionary and socialist, but nothing about any
descendants of those that crucified Christ.

I then checked El Universal:and,
strangely, the news was cited directly from Agencia Bolivariana de
Noticias (ABN).

I even went to the Alo Presidente site, and there was nothing about the latest
Chavez’s comments.

Finally thanks to Google, I was able to dig this link from a Chilean site:

Also thanks to Google, I got the magnificent « cache » from El Nacional
that I am pasting at the end.

So, what happened? Was Chavez misquoted? Or is there a collusion of
official information sites trying to clean the damaging remarks? What
about the other Venezuelan private media? Why are they not reporting or
just reporting the ABN version? Why El Nacional did not emphasize in
their editorial the anti-semite message that was previously reported? Is
this the effect of the muzzle law? Or is everybody on vacation?

Reporting from cyberspace,

Jorge Arena

Favorite ghost blogger.

http://www.arenaspace.blogspot.com

*Internacionales*
*Presidente Chávez asegura **que**
“aún tenemos mucha pobreza”*

El presidente Hugo Chávez reconoció la tarde de este 24 de diciembre
*que* aunque su gobierno ha “logrado cosas, todavía tenemos mucha
pobreza” y pidió a sus funcionarios “centrar su atención allí”.

Dijo *que* para combatir la miseria será lanzada formalmente el próximo
14 de enero la “Misión Negra Hipólita” y adelantó *que*, como parte del
programa, en cada barrio se formarán comités de protección social.

“Tiene ocho líneas de acción: primero *los* niños en situación de calle,
luego *los* adultos en situación de exclusión extrema, las adolescentes
y adultas embarazadas en situación de pobreza, la prevención y atención
al consumo de drogas, la atención al desarrollo de comunidades
indígenas, la atención a la familia en situación de riesgo, la atención
a personas con discapacidad y la promoción de la participación popular”,
detalló.

Las afirmaciones las realizó al finalizar un recorrido *que* hizo en el
Centro de Desarrollo Endógeno Integral Humano “Manantial de *los*
Sueños”, ubicado en el estado Miranda, donde se recuperan 160 personas
de la indigencia.

En el lugar, y con motivo de la Navidad, señaló *que* “*Cristo* debe
vivir en nosotros”. “Hoy está más vivo *que* nunca (…) La Navidad es
*Cristo* rebelde, revolucionario, socialista”, refirió. Para Chávez
“*los* *descendientes* de *los* *que* *crucificaron* a *Cristo* se
adueñaron de las riquezas del mundo y las han concentrado en pocas manos”.

Se declaró “decidido” a cambiar la historia y aseveró *que* cada día lo
acompañan “más cantidad de jefes de estado y líderes en esa lucha”.
Estima *que* “la cosa más grande” *que* ha hecho su gobierno es
“libertar a nuestra patria del dominio norteamericano y de la oligarquía
criolla”.

*EC/el-nacional.com*

I grew up in Venezuela, so I am quite used to amazing news and a
Macondonian way of life. However, since the arrival of President, soon
to be King, Chavez, the amazing happenings are considered non-news,
maybe because there are so many of them. This week, doing my job while
Miguel is away, I came across these two pieces of news that left me
speechless.

First, let us talk about radioactivity.

The Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias reports that the State of Lara
police is desperately searching for stolen radioactive material. It
seems that a truck that belongs to a radio inspection company was stolen
in the State of Yaracuy by two individuals. There was radioactive
material left inside. Now, this naïf ghost blogger asks the following
questions: did the thieves know about the radioactive material or was it
just bad luck for them? If they knew about it, why were they interested
in it? Is it possible that radioactive material be transported without
any signs of it? Why is just the regional police of the Lara State the
one that is interested in this event? Why is there just one small
article in the ABN about this? Why is the minister of the interior not
talking about this?

A quick search on Google provides some alerts on the Internet,
particularly on environmental sites. Reuters even reports a state of
emergency called by the chief of the Defensa Civil in Venezuela. (see ) and another
search in EUD gives just this small news item. 
Even after these results, I am still amazed at the little importance
this very serious piece of news is been given both by the government and
the media.

The second news that I want to comment on is the incredibly slow CNE. On
December 22nd , El Nacional reported (page A4) that in a press
conference Jorge Rodríguez said that there will not be a definite
bulletin about the December 4 elections UNTIL after January 16!!! They
have not verified the “actas” of some centers in 22 states!

So this humble ghost blogger asks the following: what is the use of tens
(or is it hundreds?) of millions of dollars worth of electronic machines
if the final results are available a month and a half after the
election? Beats me!

Unless the CNE needs extra time for some creative vote counting….

Jorge Arena
http://arenaspace.blogspot.com/