The Devil's Excrement

A while back I wrote this long post
on the corruption racket in Venezuela with
official deposits in the private commercial banking system. Basically,
28.6% of all the country’s monetary liquidity is owned by
the Government and deposited in private banks, which makes no sense,
since the
Government issues bonds in local currency in order to get liquidity to
pay
Government institutions. But then, these same institutions simply turn
around
and deposit the funds in private banks getting interest, and the banks
use those funds to buy the more
Government debt at higher interest rates. The amount is simply
staggering, it was US$ 6.76 billion when I
wrote the article. This means that the Government is getting financing
that it
simply does not need in huge amounts. While people don’t say much
publicly
about this, there is a simple explanation for it: corruption, these
deposits move around on the basis of commisions paid by some private
banks to attract them.

Well, last week two economists who used to work at the Central
Bank decided to do something about it and went to the Comptroller’s Office and asked him to investigate the “equity
damage” for the country, implied in the Government issuing debt without needing it. This
essentially asks the Comptroller to investigate, without specifically telling
him where the source of corruption is, let him figure it out!

According to the two economists, the Ministry of Finance issued
new debt in the amount of Bs. 9.9 trillion (US$ 4.8 billion) in 2004 and 2005, despite the fact that the
Government did not need to issue any debt, as it had almost twice that amount deposited in the
private banking system.

Thus, these two economists ask:” If the Government has such
a high surplus, why does it need to issue debt?” They claim the
Government paid Bs. 1.34 trillion (US$ 640 million) in the last two years
in unncessary interest. Moreover, the damage will continue as
most of this debt is medium term and additional unnecessary interest will need
to be paid before it matures. They ask the Comptroller to investigate the reasoning behind all this, which would lead to
what I posted about in August.

The only question is whether we will ever hear anything from
the comptroller; after all he has not acted in previous cases of blatant
corruption as he is an integral part of the support system for the “robolucion”

Last week,
a document which had been circulating via the Internet was actually posted in
its entirety at this web
address. The document entitled “Pensamiento Militar Venezolano” or “Venezuelan
Military Thinking” looked too elaborate to be a fake, but doubts lingered in
some circles. Well, today a number of those that were linked to the creation of
the document, including a retired General, Gral. Muller Rojas, and the Minister
of Defense, Gral Maniglia, were asked about it in local newspaper El Nacional (page-A5).
The first one said that the document is an earlier version that is missing the
last chapter and goes on to describe that what is missing is a historical
recount of the thinking of Venezuela’s
forefathers. The second one considers it unlikely that it is the “true”
document , as only one person of those involved in writing the document has an
electronic copy. But Gral. Muller Rojas is supposed to be the coordinator and
seems to have vouched for its veracity, which is downright scary.

As
described in PMBcomments
in Chapter V of the document, the military defines its views and their role in
Venezuelan political life in a very confrontational manner, defending the
historical and geographical heritage of Venezuela as originally “developed
by the forefathers of the homeland”. The whole document is based on a perverse
view of ideological differences in terms of military confrontation, conflicts
and war, defining the US as
the enemy, envisioning provoking the US
into invading Venezuela
in order to develop a demoralizing war of insurgency against that country. It
presents a romantic view of Venezuelan’s ability to use creativity and ingenuity
to defend their homeland, as well as their idealized solidarity to help defend “that
peripheral world, condemned to exclusion by Darwinian policies advanced by the
neoconservative forces”. Moreover, the
document even includes a justification for military action against those that
oppose the Government locally, viewed as a “fifth column”, who simply wants to
defend the “Empire” and the ideas of “Free Markets”.

This
document defines a scary outlook of the role of Venezuela as military
interms of confrontations, where instead of using ideas (even if claims science and
technology are integral part of the weapons for the upcoming battle), force and tactics will be used to
impose on others the “only correct” ideas, those of their leader Hugo Chavez expouses,
whatever they may be now or evolve into in the future.

In the next
few days this document should continue hitting the news with force and showing
the true face of this not so pretty revolution, whose main goal is to promote the
image and increase the power of autocratic Hugo Chavez. Maybe its veracity will begin to be denied. For those supporting Hugo
Chavez, here and abroad, they will have to face an important decision in the upcoming
days if the document is defended by the Government: Do they fall on the side of
an autocratic, corrupt, incompetent, fascist, militaristic, warmongering and
non-democratic revolution, or do they defend the most basic rights of human
beings? The choice is clear.

The show was good. Backed by a good group of Mariachis, the star
of the main event sang some of his top hits, including “El Rey”,
“Mexico Lindo” and “No soy monedita de oro”. The small audience asked
for crowd favorites such as singing “La Bamba” or dancing “La Raspa”
and insults for Vicente Fox, but it was not to be. The star refused to
repeat his perforamnce, despite his success with it last week. Below
some pictures of the star during his performance, wearing his
traditional revolutionary and colorful red costume, combined with a
beautiful Mexican sombrero, making him look like a very different charro. The Caracas Pop
Festival will continue tonight with Ricky Martin as the main event, Black Eyed Peas to follow tomorrow.

The revolution was caught on three big lies in the past two days, but
other bloggers have beaten me to most of it, so I will be brief:

-Response to Ted Koppel: Ted Koppel had challenged the Chavez
administration for evidence that the US Government was planning to
invade Venezuela under the so called Balboa plan. Two months later nothing had been sent. But then a couple of days ago the Minister of Information sent the “so called” evidence as reported by vcrisis.
Well the infamous Balboa evidence truned out to be 2001 Spanish
military exercize that can even be found over the Internet. (Will link
to the documents sent by the Government here when I can manage to
upload them to the Internet). PMBcomments correctly notes
that if it were true, then it was Spain King Juan Carlos who was
planning to invade and not Mr Danger, thus the true headline should
have been: “King Juan Carlos wants to recolonize us…Hugo Chavez” .

-The Head of the National Assembly accused today
the President of the Globovision TV channel of being at a meeting
Monday night with banker Nelson Mezerhane, accused in the Danilo
Anderson case, in which the judge in the case was bribed with US$3
million in cash as described in detail by Daniel.Unfortunately
for Maduro, Mezerhane was in jail Monday night (which could be
explained away in a country full of corruption), but the President of
Globovision was at a meeting with some 200 people at the TV station and
this meeting supposedly had taken place outside of Caracas. Way to go
Maduro! Your credibility remains intact as President of the National
Assembly! You are at good making up stories as you were at not getting
elected to be Head of the subway workers union.

-The Government tried indirectly to explain away the discrepancy
between the ID number of the Minister of Information and his age, by
saying that Mr. Pimentel came to Venezuela as a young kid, was born in
Angola and nationaized when he was thirteen. Well, they almost got it
right, but…thirteen years old corresponds to that cedula number
V-21759900 today,
not when Mr. Pimentel was 13 years old!It still does not explain why
such a loyal member of the revolution did not register to vote for
Chavez in 1998, 2000 or in the recall vote in 2004.

For
the past few days Sumate has been blasting the Electoral Board, but it
appears as if the whole country has been anesthetized into a stupor as
nobody seems to care, either within the political parties or the
voters. Essentially, Sumate has found numerous violations of the
Electoral Laws of Venezuela, none of which can be explained as simple
mistakes, omissions or misinterpretations. In fact, most of them
suggest to anyone with any ability to reason, a concerted effort to
deceive, manipulate and control the election. While there was some
progress yesterday, as the OAS met with the CNE and attempted to
convince the Electoral Board to a) count more of the ballots and b)
allow political parties to have access to the Electoral Registry,
conditions are still iffy as best as Sumate has shown.

Sumate’s criticism is centered on the following issues:

Counting the Ballots: Article 172 of Venezuela’s Suffrage law
says that even if electronic means are used in the voting
process, all ballots have to be counted manually and their number
compared to the total number indicated by the voting machines.
According to this all ballot boxes should be opened, their number
counted and totals compared. According to the same law, if this total
is not in agreement, the votes from that machine are simply not valid.
None of these steps were followed in the 2004 recall vote, regional
elections in October 2004, and regional elections in August 2005 or is
being planned for the upcoming Assembly elections in December. Do I
hear Rule of Law from any of my readers?

Now, the law is obviously screwy, but it is the law.
This is part of the problem with the autocratic style of this
Government, just because the law says you have to count the ballots
without reading them, which is non-sensical; it does not mean it should
not be done. In fact, do it and once you are there, read the pieces of
papers and give the whole process more transparency to do it! Instead,
international observers are negotiating to increase the ballots that
would be “audited” (not tallied, audited) and the Electoral Board in a
magnanimous offer is willing to consider increasing the “audit” from
32% to 47% of all boxes. And we are expected to be grateful!

The Audit: On
top of the above, the “audit” that is being planned has been suddenly
changed. In the August regional elections, ballot boxes were opened and
on the same tally sheet printed by the electronic machines, the manual
count was inserted. This time around, the regulations which were
approved last week, instead of the six months established by law, say
that the tally sheet printed by the machine will be put in an envelope before
the manual count begins. The manual count will then proceed and will be
written on a separate sheet, put in a different envelope and sent to
the CNE, which will have five weeks to compare the results! Yeah, sure,
the CNE itself will do the audit and tell us what happened. That looks
more like a secret audit and certainly makes no sense.

Electoral Registry: No
Electoral Registry was handed over to the political parties as required
by law six months before the election. Then, it was handed over a month
ago and it has many errors. I already reported on the amazing Gonzalez family
of Zulia state, which had 2002 people with that last name born on the
same day in 1974. Moreover, many of them only had one last name,
illegal according to the law. The President of the CNE dismissed this
as “errors” common in all electoral registries in the world which
typically have 5% of errors. And we are supposed to believe it

      But
Sumate has expressed other concerns. There are for example, the
“immortals”, those Venezuelans who are one hundred years of older and
are still in the electoral registry. They happen to be over 0.1% of the
population, outside of actuarial ranges as shown below

Besides
this remarkable number of very old people, which should call for a team of
experts from the WHO to come and study them, there is the peculiar
person born in the XVIII th. Century which should be the subject of
investigation on his/her own.

Besides
this, there is the growth in the number of people registered to vote as
well as migrated from one municipality to the other as seen in the
table below:

The
number of new voters increased between August 03 and October 05 by
18.3% (and has reached 20% at the time of this writing). The Government
explains this by saying that this is the result of a program to include
people in the electoral process, however, the “inclusion” is highly
non-uniform concentrating in the border states and Caracas.
At the same time 21.8% of the voters have moved since August 2003,
13.9% since the recall vote which is quite surprising more so when you
find out that an inordinate proportion compared to historical patterns
is to a different state (20%) or a different electoral circuit (10%).

-In 1980 Venezuela and Mexico had export levels that were similar,
roughly US$ 20 billion in exports, mostly oil. Twenty five years later
Mexico exports are expected to be between US$ 222 to 240 billion a year+, of which barely 11% is oil,
Venezuela on the other hand will export around US$ 45 billion, still
mostly oil.

-In 1980, Mexico’s GDP was US$ 4130, Venezuela’s was US$3580. In 2004 Venezuela’s was US$ 5800, Mexico’s US$ 9600.

-In 1987, the market capitalization (Worth of all stocks that trade in
it) of the Mexican Bolsa and the Venezuelan Stock Market were roughly
the same: US$ 10 billion. Today, the Mexican market is close to US$ 164
billion, while the Venzuelan Stock Market capitalization is less than
US$ 5 billion.

–Despite not believing in free trade, the Chavez Admisnitration will
send a delegation of 130 people to the WTO meeting in Hong Kong.
Curiously, the only expert in the Foreign Minsitry on the subject is
not going.

–Lost in the shuffle on Sunday, Chavez said that Venezuela had no use
for the Andean Pact of which Venezuela is an integral part. The Andean
Pact has been very good for trade, increasing it by a factor of three
in the last 15 years between all the countries. However, Venezuela has
had trouble competing with manufactured products versus Colombia and
Peru. Can Venezuela compete better with Argentina and Brazil?

+I had earlier used the number quoted by Fox on CNN yesterday, I have
corrected it to reflect the Mexican Government’s projection (US$ 222
billion) and a Wall Street Broker (US$ 240 billion) that I have a paper
report for.

Slowing down the Law of the Jungle, The Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Government had to suspend the exprpriation of the Polar silos in Barinas state. As described here
in late September the Governor of Barinas State who happens to be
Chavez’ father, expropriated the plant without following any of the
legal procedures established in the law. Of course, they can now go
back and do things right to satisfy the Court, but at least they will
have to follow the procedures established in the Constitution for
expropriating something, which includes the National Assembly
declaring it a public utility and paying compensation.

You have to love the revolution and its “accomplishments”. Today, Globovision reported
that “Venezuelan scientists initiated the operation of the first plant
for the production of blood derivatives, among which one may highlight
human albumin”…Yeap! They initiated it before Chavez even got to
power. In fact, it may have been before Chavez even decided to join democracy and become a candidate*!

You see, a person I know extremelly, extremely well, was on the
Board of
that company for six years until exactly a year ago and the company had
been
producing albumin since before that person was on the Board, that would
make it eight years total, or at least more than one year before Chavez
won his first election. As I recall, we used to laugh because President
Luis
Herrera Campins (1979-1984), held ceremonies to begin the construction
of that plant twice in his Presidential period.

I guess Governements past and present don’t have a sense of the ridicule,
to claim they either started someting or accomplished something. The
more things change the more they stay the same in our beleagured
country and I am not even going to argue about the fact that this was
not a scientific project, but a technological project as there was
nothing “new” involved, just the implementation of well known processes
and techniques.But I guess science under the revolution has little show
other than the Intevep genocide.

*Chavez staged a coup and supported a second one in 1992 and was
calling for the overthrow of the elected democratic Government of
Venezuela until 1997, when he was convinced by Luis Miquilena that he
could win the election.

Teodoro Petkoff, founder of the Socialist Party (MAS) and Editor of Tal Cual, never signs the Editorials he writes, but given the personal attack by the Prosecutor General Isaias Rodriguez, yesterday’s Editorial did carry his signature:

The Prosecutor General at the edge of a nervous breakdown by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

The best
demonstration that Isaias Rodriguez, the Prosecutor General, has lost it and
should resign is given to us by the childish insult he sent me last week.
Leaving aside the tortuous manner of the offense-in which even a cardboard
psychiatrist like Geovanny Vasquez de Armas would find no major difficulties in finding dark
passages in the personality of Isaias Rodriguez with interesting evidence about
his sexual orientation, but that of course, is of no interest to anyone nor
pertains to the exercise of his position-, what really matters is that Isaias Rodríguez
does not have the stature to continue to hold the high investiture of Prosecutor
and Attorney General of the Republic.

Serious psychiatrists
have told me that Isaias is at the edge of a nervous breakdown.

On TV he
appears overwhelmed by stress and, for his health as well as for that of the
country, he should hand over the position.

The Prosecutor General’s office has handled the Danilo Anderson case
in a somewhat pitiful way. It has been a year of contradictory postures and
movements forward and backwards that have culminated with the presentation as
witness of a psychopath, whose identity the Prosecutor’s office – the nth
evidence of its incompetence- did not even take the precaution of verifying. .

Isaias Rodriguez is a public servant that can not consider
himself to be above criticism. Least of all when his handling of the case has
been tinted with errors and clumsiness that we do have a reason to complain
about.

His frequent discourteous reactions, sliding
into the terrain of the most primitive personal attacks, speak of an inadmissible
intellectual indigence in a public servant that is in charge of a position as
demanding which is as that of Prosecutor and Attorney General of the Republic.

An emotionally disequilibrated person lacks the discretion
to run the public ministry

The only dignified path he has in the face of this is his resignation

Teodoro Petkoff