Blogging the democratic revolution
Two weeks ago in Caracas, I was continuously monitoring Globovision TV and El Universal newspaper for information about Viaduct 1 leading to Maiquetia airport. There was a real concern that the damn thing would collapse. It was the listing bridge on the only highway leading to the airport. Rains came down, and shifted the mountains, twisting the steel and cement linking bridge over a steep ravine. Without that highway and without that bridge, there was no getting out of Caracas. I began to consider how I could get to Maracaibo or some other city with an international airport if it…
What I reported here on the Caracas coffee shortage turns out to be a part of a much larger story many details of which I saw in different areas of the country. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has forced producers of coffee to sell their beans below cost, or face confiscation of assets. He’s also done the same for meat, as we reported here. And when I was in Caracas, a full-page ad taken out by Polar Group in El Universal warned that it was the same dynamic with corn flour – and that the company was unlikely to survive on…
That’s Strike Two for the Venezuelan dictator. Joining Mexico, Peru has pulled its ambasssador from Venezuela on the grounds that it’s now openly meddling in Peru’s presidential elections. Yesterday, far-leftist Presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, Evo Morales’ Peruvian ideological soulmate, decided to join the cavorting with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in public photo opportunities to consolidate the Axis of Evil, as Daniel in Venezuela notes. Just coincidentally, Humala was in Caracas for the festivities with the other two. It’s no coincidence that political meddling was one of the reasons Mexico also pulled its ambassador from Caracas last November – and…
Fausta’s come up with a fierce photoessay showing all the hugging with all the whos that Hugo Chavez has done this past year. It’s her inimitable contribution to the year’s many lists. Blech! You gotta see it right here! Hat tip: Val at Babalu.
In Hugo Chavez’s 21st Century Socialist Venezuela. El Universal has a superb roundup of the year, documenting the continuous stream of expropriations defacing Venezuela as its democracy slides into tyranny. Read it here and here.
From Venezuela’s government propaganda, a news organ called Venezuelan Global News reports meat shortages in Caracas, calling attention to a problem that obviously is being discussed in the streets by Venezuela’s poor, a topic Venezuela’s private-sector media, or at least the mainstream English-language media, may have missed. This is the first I have heard of this shortage. The meat reportedly in short supply is pork legs, used in the making of Venezuelan Christmas hallacas (we’d recognize that as a tamale over here), a traditional Christmas food. Although I had not seen any reports of pork shortages in the press, the…
Daniel at Venezuela News has scrolled through the year’s news and come up with a great list of awards for the year on topics ranging from man of the year to ‘analyst’ of the year, to assorted female categories. It’s great fun to look at – read the whole thing here.
Sounds insane, but it’s true. Venezuela has the world’s finest coffee, but when I looked around in the shops of Caracas for some bagfuls to take home for Christmas presents, there were none to be found. (I had trouble finding the Hugo Chavez Action Figure for Christmas, too. Not even the buhoneros had it in stock.) These shortages, like the various meat shortages seen around Caracas in past months, are glints of the shortages to come as the communist revolution of Hugo Chavez consolidates. They are a sign of something, the first shooting pains, and they don’t just occur in…
Daniel in Yaracuy has another elegantly done post comparing and contrasting two court verdicts in two highly politicized cases, one for the opposition, and one for the ruling party. As may be imagined in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the reality shows that Chavistas get about three times as much ‘justice’ as Venezuela’s battered opposition. I’ll add one more editorial note that Daniel didn’t: I don’t believe any of these verdicts reflects the truth of what happened and none of the people going to jail on either side had anything to do with the murders. It’s all politics, jumping from the pockets…
In one of his finest posts, Daniel in Yaracuy province describes the curious reverse phenomenon now seen in Venezuela under the Hugo Chavez regime: the effort to eradicate all symbols of secularism and holiday cheer in Venezuela, in favor of a highly politicized, chavista-cized more ancient Christian model. It’s a strike against globalization and the U.S. in particular. That’s why Daniel’s seeing some weird things around Yaracuy, and he’s posted all the photos, well worth a click here. While we are on the topic of Christmas, take a look at Alek Boyd’s ‘Merry Christmas Venezuela’ post and photo, showing Santa…
Saturday, I watched as about 1000 Venezuelans rallied at Altimira Square in Caracas for jailed union leader Carlos Ortega who was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison for organizing the great oil strike of 2002-2003. Ortega is a union leader whose career somewhat parallels that of Lech Walesa, but who also is a member of one of the old discredited opposition parties, known as AD, or the ‘adecos.’ He organized the strike in a bid to prevent the politicization of the Venezuelan state oil company and to keep unions strong and separate from the political cronyism of the Chavista…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez buys loyalty from supporters through handouts from Venezuela????s vast oil bounty. So while accidents are at a record high and investment is at a record low at Venezuela????s state oil company, something that high oil earnings should alleviate if PDVSA were a normal company, it has instead become Hugo Chavez????s personal ATM for social spending programs. Gustavo Coronel has a fine essay on the phenomenon here.
Blogging live from Caracas, Venezuela today, I found myself stuck in an hours long taxi line at a mall in Chacao, an upper middle class neighborhood in Caracas. Amid the prettily decorated mall trees, people were carrying red and green cello-wrapped baskets of Bimbo-brand Panettone and bottles of Concho y Toro wine, something nice for the holidays but certainly not rarified upper class delights. The line moved unbelievably slow and darkness fell after a couple hours. I started asking people around whether they voted, what they thought of their president and what they thought the future held. I had expected…
You may have noticed a lack of updates today. While it’s partially due to end of semester term papers and finals (oh, you should see my last-ditch effort at putting together a piece on Lebanese consociationalism as a model for Iraq), it also has to due with a very special project I was putting together. The Venezuelan blogosphere scooped the mainstream media when it came to the phony elections held on Sunday, but the problem was that nobody was really telling the story. Well, problem solved. Read the special report at Pajamas Media here, which gives well deserved press coverage…
That????s what happened in Venezuela today. I????m blogging live from Caracas, and today I saw utterly empty polling stations, one after another, guarded only by tinpot military men with big guns and the occasional red-t-shirted chavista troll on the street corner, standing around looking mean and intimidating for voters. On and off it rained, as if to signal the end of Chavez????s fortunes. A news story about the fiasco is here. Miguel Octavio and I went across the entire city of Caracas in search of a polling station full of people. Or half full. Or people at all! We targeted…
02.12.05 ö Diplomatic sources in Caracas report about an opinion trend that appears to be gathering force. The “electoral boycott” hypothesis, peddled by Venezuela’s officialdom and its OAS sidekicks, has it that the decision of opposition political parties to withdraw from Assemblymen elections on December 4 constitutes, at best, a “boycott” and at worse “an electoral coup.” Chavez opponents also stand accused of having, irresponsibly, broken an agreement with the OAS whereby participation in the race was a given. Let me be real clear about the reason that prompted such a reaction by the opposition. On Wednesday 23 an audit…
The Primero Justice party has pulled out of the coming Venezuelan election Sunday, leaving just Hugo Chavez’s MVR party all by its lonesome to run for Congress. This news comes from Marta Colomina, a well-known journalist in Venezuela. This pullout represents the full unification of the Venezuelan opposition, something never seen in Venezuelan history. They have all decided together to refuse to acquiesce to electoral fraud through a rigged election. All of the parties who can make a statement by pulling out have done so now. They are demanding free and fair elections or they won’t participate at all. This…
Agencia EFE has the first reports on a clash over bus fares. Alek Boyd has more preliminary reports of riots in three cities over the stacked, rigged, fraudulent election here. GATEWAYPUNDIT has a major roundup, with photos of the week’s multiple events here. UPDATE: Miguel has riot photos here. UPDATE: Scott has a terrific roundup of choice quotes here.
Speaking from Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa really gave it to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The short news account is here. It follows recent condemnations of the Venezuelan dictator by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, here.
…except Hugo Chavez’s MVR party, exiting because the electoral setup is utterly tainted. It lacks transparency, it lacks secrecy and it lacks integrity. By doing this, the opposition is saying: No more participating in fraud. It’s amazing that whole political machines can operate in unity like this. It is the first time I’ve ever seen the Venezuelan political opposition ever agree on anything. Now they have, and now they finally have power. The move comes five days before the scheduled Dec. 4 election day for congressional seats. The only remaining opposition party now is called Nuevo Tiempo, and it’s running…
On Dec. 4, Venezuela will hold Congressional elections. They are expected to be the final nail in the coffin of the Venezuelan opposition as dictator Hugo Chavez consolidates power and installs a Marxist regime. There are pretenses of them being legitimate as a vote however and therein lies the farce. A test of the Smartmatic voting machines and the Cogent Systems fingerprint machines showed that not one ballot had ever been secret when the matter was put before European Union election observers, who indeed were not fooled. That led to a threatened boycott of the election and this morning, the…
Hugo Chavez is meddling in more than just Bolivia. He’s got a northern front and that’s the U.S. Using the good offices of willing dupes like Congressman Bill Delahunt and Congressman Jose Serrano, he’s delivering cheap oil through their offices in return for their support in U.S. Congress. Next time Hugo Chavez invades a small country or throws a dissident in jail, he won’t have a thing to worry about in Congress because he’s got his own U.S. Congressmen in the bag with cheap oil. It’s a truly disgusting subversion of democracy and democratic revolution, both in the U.S. and…
Christian Science Monitor has some hagiography on Hugo Chavez’s own house organ, Telesur, insisting that it’s — no, really — full of professional journalists. It cites as proof the Telesur chief, the creepy, rat-like former Chavez shill and spokesman, Andres Izarra, a man who was suddenly forced to leave CNN a few years ago, and on very murky grounds. The one who, when he was Chavez’s shill, used to read off journalists’ names at Caracas press conferences to say just how much he didn’t like their reporting. That one. Extolling Telesur’s questionable leadership is something Telesur tried to do when…
Markets exist to distribute resources most efficiently. Rejection of them inevitably leads to huge, Soviet-style inefficiencies, all the way up to the violation of human nature itself. But in the end, markets, which chase out the inefficient in favor of the efficient, always triumph. Francisco Toro has a fascinating little essay about the economic principle of creative destruction applied to the dictatorship of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who in fact presents a vastly better technical model of how to be a political leader than his older opposition. It’s an intelligent and well-argued essay well worth reading here.
Miguel Octavio presents new evidence that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez continues to persecute his political opponents through the use of a blacklist called the ‘Tascon List.’ This blacklist was derived from the public signatures of all the Venezuelans who signed the recall referendum petition against Hugo Chavez, something they legally had a right to do. Chavez “won” the recall referendum anyway, and like a captured weapon, he then used the petition signature list as a blacklist and an instrument for politically motivated revenge, something that truly destroys faith in democracy. Miguel’s post is well worth reading here.