The news are catching up with me

For the past few weeks I have avoided heavy news exposition. Deliberately. I was on some type of "recovery" period and I was more interested in writing down an analysis of the consequences of August 15. Not that I ignored the news, after all a few snipets emerged here and there in my recent posts, but really, what news were happening? The country was digesting the blow and that was that.

But this week saw a couple of interesting developments.

The dialogue

Chavismo has been calling for a dialogue. Unfortunately this sounded hollow real quick as they declared that they would decide who in the Coordinadora Democratica, CD, would be their chosen interlocutor. In other words, chavismo would decide who is a democrat. That did not go down too well, in particular with the real democrats in the CD...

Then chavismo met with the Venezuelan/North American chamber of commerce, their first foray with the private sector in years. That went OK, and the guests were quite prompt in saying ALL that happened in the reunion, preventing any idle gossip as to them "selling out". This was the prelude to the next step as FEDECAMARAS received an invitation. Well, the business organization debated for a while and accepted to go to the meeting 'IF' a few conditions were met, the main one was to set an agenda of topic to talk of.

This was very clever, if you ask me, of FEDECAMARAS. It is obvious that the government is trying fast to move away from the Recall Election moment, instead of basking in its glow. By receiving people for "dialogue" it is one way to demonstrate to the world that the country is slowly coming around. FEDECAMARAS of course could not refuse to go, but could demand that it would be a real dialogue around an agenda, not just a avail of the rule of El Supremo. After all, any "dialogue" with Chavez in the past ended up in utter failure as soon as chavismo was confronted with facts and figures. Sure enough within a few hours the government was excoriating FEDECAMARAS and that was that.

It is important to note that FEDECAMARAS replied to the invitation as an institution that could not waste its time in governmental posturing (which has been the institution attitude in the past since its foundation, with any administration in Miraflores). But also FEDECAMARAS allowed its affiliates to have all sorts of contacts with the governments that came and went in Venezuela. And today was no exception as FEDECAMARAS stated clearly that it was fine for anyone to go and discuss their particular economic sector with the appropriate ministry: the country needs to run no matter what.

Yet new videos

To confirm all of this and establish once and for all that the government does not wish anymore to discuss the referendum and its possible fraud, we saw two videos that speak volumes.

A first video came from the barracks of a group of soldiers set up to defend Miraflores. Some obscure event about internal corruption in Miraflores triggered the event and we were treated to a bunch of young soldiers who looked more like brainwashed kids expressing their love [sic] to Chavez and warning him of the internal corruption of chavismo. Nothing really, except the crude portrait of a developing tropical cult to personality.

The more important video was a group of National Guards tampering with ballot boxes. Miguel does even post pictures from the video. I am not expecting any result from any investigation. I will just say one thing: counting the ballot boxes at this point is useless. The army had had all the time it needs to tamper with whichever box it needed to tamper with. The fraud has been completely consummated. And readers of this blog know very well that I have never had any trust in the Venezuelan army, even before Chavez. Thus the video is no surprise to me, just a confirmation of why the Chavez administration is so badly in need to move away from fraud discussion.

Unfortunately for the Army if it counts with enough mercenaries and fanatics as the previous video shows, it is also its Achilles heel as one day or another someone that "did not get enough" or felt "betrayed in his love to the Revolution and its leader" will come out and spill the beans. By then Carter and the OAS would have been long gone.

Well, I think I better get to my unfinished series of posts, more interesting than watching videos on moral decay.