Vacation almost over

Monday 5, January 2004 (blogger down again...)

Yep, soon I will be back to work in Yaracuy so I am trying to finish as many vacation projects as I can finish. Including a few hikes in the Avila Mountains to try to work out some Christmas damage.

Nothing much happening fortunately. This morning though was the official return of politics. And they were as usual but worse. That is, on Monday morning talk shows the chavistas attending seemed to have all the same language no matter what the topic at hand. You guessed right, the "megafraude" of the opposition. The discourse is now finely honed to an elemental "the massive fraud of the opposition will be uncovered finally" but we are still waiting for a serious evidence able to invalidate, say, 100 000 signatures.

It is so ridiculous that this morning I was wondering what would one of these Chavez agents would say if the journalist asked "Is the sky blue this morning?". Probably "It would have been bluer had the opposition not falsified the signatures". But perhaps I should worry, repeating the same leitmotiv over and over again might have some effect in a country where journalists are not very good at asking the tough and real questions. One full month after the signature collection some people might start forgetting what really happened. And buy Chavez line.

The other interesting item is that some recent polls give somewhat better numbers for Chavez. With the Christmas lull and the money spread over the last three months this is normal. However at least one poll reported that the numbers of other chavista officials were not improving. I have not been able to track that particular poll yet so I do not want to speculate too much on it. I heard on TV that the chavista office holder numbers represent the real hard core Chavez vote. Thus the bonus gained by Chavez might be very weak and hardly sustainable without an improvement of the economy, a real one that is, creating real jobs. We’ll see.

I probably will write from Yaracuy next.