Blackmail as the last electoral tool left for Chavez

Numbers must not be good in chavista polling rooms for Chavez having to resort to the crudest form of blackmail.  Today he announced that he would stop sending any funds to Miranda state and Sucre town-hall because they are ruled by bourgeois officials and that it is impossible to work with them.  His exact words:

"A qué gobernador o alcalde burgués voy a darle yo un centavo, ¿para qué?, sin con ellos es imposible trabajar" ....."Yo llamo al alcalde Jorge Rodríguez y le doy los recursos que necesita. A Jackeline Farías, jefa del Distrito Capital, le aprobé la otra vez 70 millones de bolívares para que reparara todos los ascensores de los bloques del 23 de Enero"  

To which bourgeois governor or mayor will I give a penny?  What for?  It is impossible to work with them"  " I call [myself] mayor Jorge Rodriguez and I give him the money he needs.  To Jackeline Farias, chief of Distrito Capital I approved 70 million bolivares for her to fix the elevators of the 23 Enero bloques [high rises for the lower classes]

That is right, Chavez wants you to believe that he has a cozy relationship with all chavista governors and mayors and that he himself decides with them whether elevators should be fixed.  When he cannot control the flow of food at PDVAL? but I may be digressing, no?

There are two readings on that, once we get down to reality.  Chavez said that while campaigning in Petare, blackmailing the poor of the Petare slums who vote now up to 40% for the opposition to come back to chavismo or else.  Since he despises them anyway, considers them idiots easily manipulated, he tries to make them believe that if they had a chavista mayor he would have a red line, so to speak, to Miraflores. He insults the intelligence of the Petareño who has not forgotten that for 8 years before Ocariz they had an incompetent and corrupt chavista mayor in the son of former vice president Jose Vicente Rangel.

The second reading is the more interesting one.  For those who might have thought that denying funds for the Hospital of Petare Perez de Leon might have been a lapsus in the heat of the moment, he confirms that he is not a democrat, that those who do not agree with him just deserve to drop dead.  It is this type of thinking that leads straight to civil war or totalitarianism, whichever comes first.

Needless to say for the well educated reader of this blog that it is absolutely unconstitutional for Chavez to deny a certain portion of state revenue that must go by law to all local administrations.  He has been able, illegally, to reduce such revenue but he cannot erase it at will.  Not that it matters much probably as he named Giordani to the Venezuelan central bank board, giving a new shade to the meaning of "fox watching over the chickens".  See, apparently the only minister that Hugo the First cannot name to that Board is the one job of Giordani but that did not stop him.  "Whatever I say, goes!"

I never thought I would come to see the "rojo-rojito" of 2006 PDVSA as a more subtle form of blackmail and extortion....