The Natives are restless: military abuse against Native Americans Pemon

Prisoner of the Pemon!!!!!

I had to wait to be ready to discuss the latest scandal of bolivarianism. And it is a big one. Imagine that: machete and small gun wielding Native Pemon of Bolivar state were able to take prisoner 43 Venezuelan soldiers of that powerful force designed to resit the onslaught of the Evil Empire through the use of sophisticated Russian weaponry.

It is a good thing that ridicule does not kill, otherwise we would have dozens of cadavers to pick up today, starting by a main ally of Chavez in the army, Cliver Alcala Cordones, a top brass in charge of the Southern Venezuela military area and also in the DEA list for links to drug traffic.  In fact initial reports said that Alcala Cordones was in the captive group. Whether he was does not seem to have mattered much on his mood as the picture circulating through Twitter shows us. The guy has been humiliated by the natives, and shows all the signs of the racist arrogance of too many Venezuelans towards natives, even inside the fraudulent revolution.

Fantasy Thursday

So we are here Thursday night and as expected the regime still has not published the decrees and their application rules. That is, people had to either fire every body and close shop, or cross themselves and wait for the worse.  In other words, severance packages as of next Monday may become as high as 35 fold more than they are today, something quite impossible to meet.

Or is it so?

Repression in Carabobo too

It looks like "gas, y del bueno" is not the reserve of Caracas students only (1).

Carabobo is one of the states where crime is highest in Venezuela, and I am talking per capita here. It also has a prosperous drug trade with cartels in formation. A future pre Uribe Colombia if you like, while the government does nothing, and even less now that it is much more concerned about finding ways to sabotage incoming governor Salas Feo administration. A few days ago a noted local journalist, Orel Sambrano, was assassinated by con men. The civil society organizations decided to hold a march to protest violence. And it was received by violence, directed at least in part by Cliver Alcala, one of the henchman of Chavez, the general that directs the area and who was already fighting with the preceding governor, Acosta Carles even though he came from chavismo.

Well, Cliver Alcala has startd behaving like your average proconsl taking over local functions including banning the Carabobo police force from future march security functions, deciding that the army will take them over, supporting pro Chavez hecklers, and arresting students taking them directly to military bases (where none can enter to see if they are at least alive) (2). I didn't think that Diego Arria words that I mentioned yesterday would have been confirmed so bluntly so fast: Clive Alcala behaves simply as if Venezuela was a fully fledged military dictatorship and he could do as he pleased with law and order. Amazing.....

But he will run in trouble soon as the president of the Carabobo university, Jessy Divo, told him that he will have to arrest her, just as the UCV president in Caracas told authorities there. They are standing by their students. I cannot wait to see when will Chavez order the arrest of these two courageous women.

1) The "best" "strongest" tear gas, in the now famous words of Chavez that will one day sen him to jail as the fascist he truly is.

2) The "crime" to the students hat Cliver is pissed at is that they drenched in blood (red paint I suppose) the Venezuelan flag. That is for you US readers who are allowed to burn the US flag as you please.

-The end-

What happened today: the post-Chavez regime digs in and scales up repression

Certainly today's headline is the Venezuelan High Court, TSJ, emitting one of its most shameful decisions ever (and the competition is stiff). But three other events today are equally telling and all put together are true reasons to worry.

Gladys Gutierrez,
the new chavismo head bitch, dye job and all...

Let's start with the headline. The TSJ had to make a decision on the challenge to the election of last April. The problem it faced is that any decision that would imply an actual revision of voting conditions for last April would without a doubt open a can of worms. There were already two clearly established electoral irregularities that did not require lengthy study: people accompanied forcibly to vote, on video, and the lists of people "dead" that did vote. Those two, by themselves, were enough to erase the "vote advantage" of Maduro in April and examination of the other claims would reveal that Maduro lost. The TSJ, formed by regime's place holders who simply sign decisions written by political agents, were in an impossible situation: accepting to review the challenges was opening the door for proving the illegitimacy of Maduro; refusing to review the challenges was tantamount to recognize that fraud had taken place. They chose a variation of the second, which is that the 10 electoral challenges were ill written and groundless, thus inadmissible for examination. The 10 challenges! As if all lawyers of the opposition were equally incompetent! As if the videos and death roll did not exist! As if what international observers reported on April 14 was misguided!

Understanding the political moment

I have been back for two weeks now and events are just unfolding too fast for me to write about them, considering the depression that arises from coming back to what has become a hell hole. Let's just order our thoughts together, shall we?

L'air du temps:
Borges getting his nose broken

One way is to look at the main hard data and its effects. The reader on its own will be able to draw the general picture after the fact.


Jail for you

The driving force in this mega crisis is that under the concept of world justice and transparency a few dozens of the higher up in the regime know they will never be able to find peace and solace once out of office. Their fate for them is jail, tomorrow, in a decade, it does not matter. If they do not die first they will end up in jail. They know that.