The Devil's Excrement

I find the
statements by the head of the Land Institute Eliecer Otaiza to be extremely
offensive. This is no way to lead a country and to promote hate and resentment
against anyone is irresponsible and racist. No Government official should be
allowed to promote hate against any nation, racial or social group. This is the
way to destroy a country not build it. Governments should promote harmony and
civilized behavior, not savagery. This is verbatim what
Otaiza said in the interview in local weekly Quinto Dia:

Q. Are you getting ready for a war?

A. The first thing we have to recognize is that when you go to war, you have to
begin to hate the opponent. You can not go to war loving the person.
Effectively, the bonds we have with the United States,
political, historical are too closely joined, but we have to prepare ourselves
to begin to see the gringos as enemies, and that would be the first preparation
for combat.
Q. We have to hate the gringos? We have to prepare the people so that they hate
the gringos?

A. If we are going to war we can not do it by saying we are friends. We are
going to war to shot each other, not to embrace each other. Then, the first
preparation is to understand that you have an enemy, the second, that it will
be a prolonged war, of at least seven, eight, nine years and that it will be a
war of resistance, where the gringos may end in two days all of the war
equipment we have. It is a very cruel situation for us, and we understand that
the whole country and maybe the whole continent will be involved.

Q. Do you think the country will embark in an adventure like this one?

A. The problem is not whether we will embark in it or not, the problem is where
we are.

This guy is absolutely crazy, nuts, irresponsible and I am ashamed that he
holds an important office in my country. Not only that, but previously he was
Head of intelligence and Head of the Trade Educational Institute (INCE). He now
leads the land institute (INTI), the same one that has been expropriating land
in the last few months.

Although I know it is useless, as a civilized Venezuelan I request that the
Venezuelan Government fire Mr. Otaiza for his irresponsible and immoral
statements.

Milagros
Socorro in yesterday’s El Nacional has the interesting story of the documentary
producers who made the film “Another way is possible…in Venezuela”
three years ago. The documentary turned out to be very popular so that the Cultural
office (CONAC) of the Chavez administration brought them back for a second
documentary. Except that…

This time around
the movie makers worked for more than the nine days spent in 2002 and stayed
two months going around the country without in Socorro’s words “the commissars
of the revolution pointing out what they had to film, and brought the images
they found: a poor country, backwards, full of contradictions, of postponed
aspirations, of evidence of corruption, that is, ready for a change.”

The movie,
entitled “Our oil and other tales” was shown for the first time On Feb. 23d. and
again on March 4^th. According to Socorro, the Minister of Culture almost
stopped the second presentation. What is interesting according to Socorro is
that the showing took place because other Chavistas demanded it shouting “revolution
within the revolution” at the showing.

This has
reportedly led to a controversy around the film between pro-Chavez’ groups. It also
led to a firm response on the part of the filmmakers who wrote a firm open
letter to the Minister of Culture. That letter says in part:

“A novel and
open process of change like the one taking place in Venezuela can not just occur in linear
fashion. We dare say this with some authority having captured it in our earlier
film “Another way is possible…” that has gone around the world contributing to an
important source of international backing for this process….It should be
evident that in this path nothing, nor anybody, should be exempt of the social
comptrolling and the critical capability of the people. As Socorro says “What a
pity that that such statements have not been expressed by Venezuelan intellectuals
that believe in the “process”

The film
apparently paints a bleak and black picture of Venezuela:” There is a tone of
sadness and misery throughout it. The film concludes that the Government and
Chavez are responsible for a variety of calamities and have betrayed the
process of transformation. “

Socorro
concludes by saying: “If all revolutionaries would repudiate the cult of
personality and would promote the accountability of power (which implies the
separation of powers) and would point out how malignant any form of apology for
the Government and its hegemony can be, I would assure you that I would not be
insulted with the qualifier of “squalid”. I would be on their side.”

As usual,
well said Mrs. Socorro!

One of
the reasons that it is hard to be optimistic in Venezuela is that while I don’t see
how Chavez’ economic programs will get the country going, the mentality in most
opposition leaders and parties is not much better. Venezuela has overprotective labor legislation
which is one of the causes of the chronic high unemployment this country
enjoys. There are things like you can’t hire workers by the hour because after
three hours they become full time workers anyway, there is a minimum salary
that is increased in compulsory fashion every year, there is a firing freeze
that gives you very little flexibility and there are all sorts of obligatory
benefits that imply that a workers salary is typically only 60% of his pay package.

This used to be worse, but when Petkoff was Minister of Planning in the second
Caldera administration he ironed out an agreement that eliminated double
severance pay if you were fired and simplified rules. Well, today
an opposition politician Alfredo Ramos, from Nuevo Sindicalismo who is a member
of Causa R is asking for legislation that would go back to that old system.
Moreover, he is proposing other things like night shifts can only be four hours
long. At a time when unemployment is 15%, they should be thinking about making
labor legislation more flexible, not less. What all of these rules do is to
make companies more conservative on hiring and hurt those that don’t work while
they benefit only those that do. It also reduces the competitiveness of the
country.

This mentality is pervasive in Venezuelan politicians, they don’t seem
to understand that you want unemployement to go down, not to give perks
and protection to those that already have jobs. After all, the employed are teh priviliged ones! Moreover, we need to be
able to compete in those areas where the country ahs advantages, but if
you increase labor costs, you will be killing those same advantages.
But try explaining it to them!

Victor
Salmeron is without any doubt the best investigative reporter in Venezuela of
those that cover the economic beat. Today he wrote
this piece in El Universal that I think is worth translating in the context
of my earlier piece on the return of Venezuela Inc. :

The puzzle of the Bolivarian state
capitalism by VICTOR
SALMERON

Riding the vehicle of oil high income and of the sources
of financing that have raised the criticism of analysts- foreign exchange
profits from the Central Bank, debit tax, issuing new debt- the Hugo Chávez administration
is increasing the role of the state in the economy, assigning it the role of
producer and occupying parcels that had remained in the hands of the private
sector.

Tractor
factories, nationalization of Venepal, the creation of a distribution network
for foodstuffs at low cost, media outlets, expansion of the public financial
system, the telecom company CVG Telecom, are some of the actions that show an increase
of the weight of the state in the economy.

“To this
conglomerate we have to add the non capitalistic arm, we are talking about the endogenous
nuclei and cooperatives, which do not have as their goal obtaining a profit. In
1998 there were only 4 thousand cooperatives, at this time the numbers reaches
24 thousand five hundred” EXPLAINS Jose Guerra, Professor at the School of Economic at Universidad Central de
Venezuela.

The
propagation of the state at a time in which the economy has stayed, in real
terms, at practically the same levels as of those of 1998, has as a consequence
that the participation of the private sector in the economy has been reduced, this
is what Jose Guerra defines as “a change in the structure of property in the
country”

What do
private companies that remain active face, given the advancement of this new
model? “They will have to compete with public enterprises, but at a
disadvantage. They will not receive direct public financing via the budget, they
will not receive the backing of preferential financing from Banco Industrial de
Venezuela, Bandes y Banfoandes, they will also not count with exemptions and fiscal
waivers” says José Guerra.

To the creation
of new public enterprises one has to add a regulatory framework in which the
state controls the purchase of foreign currency, the price of a wide array of products
and is preparing a foreign Exchange penal law to restrict the freedom of the
parallel market for foreign currency.  

Analysts estimate
that the macroeconomic conditions exist at this time to initiate a
flexibilization, as well as the lifting of controls, which arose in the middle
of the difficulties created by the paralyzation of PDVSA and the strike by the
private sector in 2003, but up to this moment there are no signs pointing to
this, on the contrary, the Government has shown that it wants to increase the
statist nature of the model.

Are we
facing a retrograde movement of returning to the seventies?  José Guerra thinks that “there are differences,
this state capitalism is a phase in a political Project”

Up to now,
the creation of public companies has not been successful. The banks of the
People and the Women, emblematic institutions in the game board of the
financial system that the Chavismo has created, are closing 2004 in the red,
according to the financials of the Ministry of Finance.

The oxygen
tank that the public budget represents will require that the price of the Venezuelan
oil basket stays at high levels to continue pumping fuel to this new state
structure.

During the last six years, the “revolution” has been promoting
mediocrity. Few Government officials have been considered either
experts or competent in their fields, as Chávez rotated Ministers and
officials from one position to another, independent of their
qualifications or knowledge of the field. Few Government officials even
had management experience but only the “belief” that anyone can do any
job, that knowledge, academic preparation or experience is not that
important.

Yesterday, the Minister of Education Aristobulo Isturiz, the same man
that before he was named Minister in 2001 said Hugo Chávez had
apparently “smoked an eggroll”, announced in the National Assembly that
this is in fact a state policy. Isturiz simply announced that all of
the changes being made in the educational sector are being made “so as
not to continue forming meritocrats”. In this manner, the Minister
ratifies what we had suspected all along, advancement in the revolution
will not be based on individual achievement or ability, but simply on
political loyalty to the “process”. According to Isturiz, the
system created “stateless” meritocrats and technocrats with no sense of
belonging. Of course, his sense of what the state is, what the truth
is, his own sense of belonging has to be imposed on everyone. His own
sense of mediocrity has to prevail. Only a mediocre Venezuela can
follow from that.

We may have known this all along, we may have suspected it, but to have
it articulated so clearly is simply shocking. It is indeed a sad day
for Venezuela. Just another one.

The Government announced yesterday
that it will, once again, extend the firing freeze for both public and
private workers that make less than Bs. 633,600 (US$ 295) a month. This
is one of those tropical economic inventions that simply become useless
in real life. The firing freeze has been in effect since May 2002.
During that time, the official unemployment rate in Venezuela has been
as high a s17.1% and as low as 10.9%. This clearly shows that the
measure is in the end irrelevant in practical terms, but it makes for
great grandstanding on the part of Government authorities who parade in
front of the TV cameras, talking about protecting the weak and
increasing employment. In reality, there are many ways to circumvent
this regulation and it has been tried by both this Government as well as prior
ones.

The revolution created two new and revolutionary banks to help the
“people”: The People’s bank and the Women’s bank. However,
in a country where the private banking system has had obscene profits
for the last few years, the banks created by Chavez leave a lot to be desired as banking institutions and will have to be capitalized (again!) soon.

The people’s bank lost Bs. 3.7 billion in 2004 on revenues of 5.6
billion and expenses of 9.3 billion. During that year 40% of
loans outstanding were behind, compared with only 2% in the private
banking system.

The Women’s bank lost 1.47 billion Bs. with a morosity of 52%.

Of course, both institutions have spent lots of money in systems and
travel. Both banks are already on their second information system in
three years and the travel has been made in order to learn of similar
experiences in other countries. Either those experiences were not too
succesful, or the people sent on these trips failed to learn very much
during their travels.

Tulio
Hernandez was an early supporter of Chavez and the Constituent process, but has
slowly been turning around against the current Government and its leader. With
this article in Sunday’s El Nacional he establishes, for the first time in my
memory, a wide distance between himself and the “revolution”

Little
stories of neo-authoritarianism by Tulio Hernandez

A planet where there are in
military academies, nor policemen nor jails, nor currencies

Victor
Valera Mora, “Relación para un amor llamado amanecer”

1.- Of Frustrations. She is 24 years old. She
graduated magna cum laude at the journalism school. With meager savings she
traveled to the US
during six months to improve her English. A good friend found her a job at a Ministry.
Enthusiastic about her new job, she rushed back to Caracas. On a Friday morning she was met by
the Head of Personnel and after the interview de rigueur, was immediately hired. She was assigned an office and
that same morning she started working. The reference from her Bolivarian friend
had worked. The joy of the first job.

In the
afternoon, about 3 PM, she was once again called to the Personnel office. “I am
sorry”, the lady told her with a face of consternation “you can not continue
here, we found out you signed, why did you do that? Why were you so imprudent?
She added. The first job had not even lasted her one day. She had made a
“professional” error: signing the request to recall the President. The smile of
the morning is still frozen in her memory.

2.-Of boastfulness. The office is located
in a building in the East of Caracas. Her boss, who had been named by the Minister,
was abroad on an official mission. In the morning, two Government official burst
in the office, Official Gazette in hand, and point out that new bosses have been
named for that location. With the bad temper which characterizes cheap cops,
the pair of neo-bosses threaten the professionals that are present, announcing
to them that from now on they are the new bosses, they place a poster of Chavez
and another one of Che Guevara on the walls and proceeded to submit-that is the
precise term- to an interrogation each of those present and, without any prior
authorization, with the aid of a technician that they brought expressly to
violently access it, they begin reviewing the files in the computer of the
outgoing boss, who you may recall, is not present. They say they are looking
for irregularities. One of them, with the same literary style that the highest
authorities have implemented in the country, exclaims: We are going to screw
him so that he stops saying such B.S.!

The
removed official returns to Venezuela,
tells the press and the radio that his rights have been violated and a week
later they publicly begin the process of “charging” him for crimes against the
nation. Well known professionals lend themselves to the game, but we all know
that, much like the boastful duo had warned earlier, the persecution has
nothing to do with any irregularity (if that were the case, half the Government
would be in jail)but only so that “he stops saying such B.S.”

3. – Of Dignity. She is an anthropologist.
Despite her young age, she is a specialist in linguistics of the indigenous
group which, according to the want ad she had read, the professional being
sought should work with. Following this, the young anthropologist submits her
CV and gets the job. But, oh tragedy! She had also signed the petition to
recall the President. Nevertheless, in contrast to our first story, she is
offered an alternative. :”In recognition of your extraordinary CV” says the bureaucrat
interrogating her, “we will hire you if you make public a letter retracting
from having signed the recall”.  The
young lady, alarmed, irritated and offended, no even allows herself to respond
to such a disparaging request and abandons the office. When she gets home, her
parents back her decision. They celebrate it. It is a matter of dignity and
values.

4.-Of footnotes. He works as a consultant
for international organizations. He is regularly hired to write reports about
specific topics. Generally the Venezuelan counterpart is a ministry or
autonomous institute. At the end of last year he handed in a report. A few days
later the official in charge of evaluating it gave him an appointment and told
him his report had not been approved and he could not pay him his
stipend…unless he corrected it. The reason? There were a large number of
bibliographical references and citations, almost ten, to authors that are
publicly against the “process”!

He now
knows that the official censorship of Pedro Morales’ work when it was selected
for Venice’s Biennial and the piece by Hector Fuenmayor “Mi delirio del chimbo
raso”, vetoed by the Alejandro Otero museum, were not lies by the press but
only a “bad custom” that little by little has been extending to other areas,
until it just touched him.

5. – Of little Creole pioneers. It is a TV
program called “Learning” It is shown at 9 AM in the official channel Vive TV
and in parts of its transmission last Tuesday it devoted itself to showing a
group of kids, members of the “patrolmen that protect our cultural heritage” or
something like that, training three other kids that were visiting the
headquarters of a cultural institution.

The matter
was enough to fill you with panic. In the part that by chance we managed to
watch, a kid, we concluded that he was the head of the patrolmen, was training
the three visiting kids following the martial ritual of questions and answers
with a loud and severe voice belonging to military forts or the little Cuban
pioneers “At eeease… Stand in attention” shouted the guide while the visitors,
with sweet clumsiness, were trying to follow his orders. Then the guide ordered
“the salute of the patrol” to the group of kids and they would join their heels,
placing their arms straight next to their bodies, trying to push their chests
out and responding in unison: “Culture is the power of the people” a salute
which the visiting apprentices had to emulate repeatedly, shouting as many
times as their “guide” requested it. At the end of the program they ask the
kids questions like: What did you learn today? To which they responded, among
other things, that they learned about the voice commands of “closed military
order” and that “culture is the power of the people”.

6.- Moral. Totalitarism acts like the lash of
the paw of a lion: quick, bloody, evident, and unable to hide. Neo- authoritarianism,
on the other hand, does it like a boa constrictor: it takes its time to slowly
asphyxiate the victim, in this case, hitting it where it hurts the most,
seeding with little fears their daily life to reach the same end: social
control. Nothing evident and with the least possible blood.