Alek Boyd has taken some photos of Puerto Cabello’s refineries, showing all how Hugo Chavez is painting the entire industrial complex a bright communist red. Rather than the ethereal white of the Long Beach refineries, it’s this rage-inducing comrade red, Chavez’s own color. The only othe place I’ve seen this done is Tijuana, Mexico, where the ruling PRI party has begun painting the flimsy corrugated metal border fence their own vulgar PRI red. No wonder everyone hates the border fences. No wonder everyone hates Chavez’s ugly paint job on refineries. It’s really gross.

This may surprise you, but taking those pictures was dangerous for him. He doesn’t say that, but I will. I was at the same refinery less than a year ago and took two pre-red-paint photos of it here:

and

Admittedly, it did need a coat of paint, but mainly because Chavistas graffitied it up with their ugly subliterate radical-left slogans. Now, since Alek has seen it, and you can match it up exactly with my two photos, it looks like this:

All communist red, just waiting for a little gold hammer and sickle decal in the corner and a thick heavy steel-teethed comrade tractor driver lady on the road below. It also represents a change in the nature of Chavismo. Early Chavismo had shantytown dwellers go paint things up any way they wanted, no matter how meritlessly. After all, they were “the people.” Now things are different: they are corporate, they are uniform, they are the result of central planning, not worker soviets, as the early Soviet Union and the early days of Chavista Venezuela once had. Through these aesthetics, we can see that the Stalin era for Venezuela is dawning. Call it Red Dawn.

Alek no doubt means to show how politicized the Venezuelan oil company is getting – oil workers have to vote Chavista or as Chavez put it, “go to Miami.” But I note that taking the photos was dangerous. When I took those top two photos, two Chavista army men patrolling the area stopped, pointed their rifles at me, called me a spy, and ordered me to stop. Cripes, I thought it was just scenery. I waved back to them and barreled back into my friend’s car as we took off at highway speed. I comforted him that maybe they could not know that I was a gringo. Close call, those refineries are paranoid places, and by now they are even more paranoid.

Go see Alek’s whole photo album, taken at great risk to show us exactly how bad it’s getting in Venezuela, in this post here.