Then and now: those Orwellian moments....

Readers will surely remember the picture from the La Planta jail in Caracas, smoke billowing out, sent by a reader (dodging the occasional "lost" bullet)..

La Planta aflame in tear gas, from a reader's window

Well, the same reader sent me a current picture where you can appreciate that the walls have been covered with giant posters of the beloved leaders. Mote the exquisite details on how the support columns have also been painted in red.

Renovating La Planta

In such ways is history rewritten. What was a jail riot where inmates had enough weaponry to hold off the army, where the incompetence of the jail minister was exposed crudely (she had not been able to even manage to put a director in a couple of months or feed them for that matter), where the "solution" was to allow inmates to go, un-cuffed, to the jail of their liking (with drugs and cash), where surprisingly no weaponry of significance was recovered is now set as a bright example on the prowess of El Supremo who recognized he negotiated personally with the inmates he could not control.  Then again, it was a meeting of the minds, a negotiation of pairs, of course.

Orwell would have had it this easy.