The Ramirez case: how Chavez operates

A few hours ago I was giving some of the details on the Ramirez video. Now the link for the video is up and all can watch and make up their own minds.

Watching it again, mesmerized by the implied horror in it, I had to wonder about the real meaning of all of this.

Was it a plot within chavismo to get rid of Ramirez? Why? Why pay such a potential price? Are Chavez numbers that bad that he needs to throw to the lions perhaps his most faithful servant now turned into a liability? Because of course this leads us to the more important point: how can someone become so abject?

Watching Ramirez one must wonder. A friend was telling me that he might have been either drunk, or perhaps he was coming from some party tipsy enough to have the gall to say what he said and how he said it. Maybe, but another thought came to me: this is not about money, the guy actually does think like that, all what he does is a misplaced idealism that is able to kill and maim and ruin just for an ideal that he does not care how much it shared.

That friend also told me that he wished it would be about money and corruption, it would be easier to understand.

Now we know why Chavez placed him there: Ramirez is a faithful, one who does all the crimes he has done because he genuinely thinks that is OK to do such crimes (remember, he confessed of a few of them in this video, his guilt is not to be proven anymore). And we also see what dealing with the devil does to you, to your revolutionary ideals. Ramirez has become a mere criminal, an individual that in any country with a modicum of justice would end up in jail. In Venezuela it will not happen, yet. But Ramirez now knows his fate if Chavez leaves office, and he has no choice but to follow and push the envelope. He is strengthened in his thug action because he knows he controls the law, because law in Venezuela has become crime.

Thus we are all warned: Ramirez is what is waiting for all of us if we reelect Chavez. Chavismo will force us all, at some point, to bend over and execute the orders from above or revolt and die or leave our homes and our country; or even worse, become passive subjects that give up the pleasures of rational thinking for basic survival.

But I am not surprised at all that Ramirez-like people haunt the corridors of power: I know enough about history to have that air de déjà vu all over again. You did not get concentration camps guards early in a regime such as Cuba or Germany. The first years of such “revolutions” are dedicated to the moral corruption of enough individuals to ensure the survival of the regime. Ramirez not only will give “carajazos” to non fanatic PDVSA workers, but he will fire them, he will sue them, he will rob them, he will humiliate them, he will open concentration camps if he must. All of this while the chavista hoi poloi keeps blessing Chavez for whatever meager handout they receive from his hand. That is of course as long as they wear the red shirt.

Can I live in such a country?