Now what? Maybe I should look into the vaults of this blog...

Last night I stumbled on a post published December 29 2008. At the time I thought it worth a translation on December 30. That post was an end of year introspection, in between the results of the regional elections which negative results Chavez was busy undoing while campaigning hard for the eternal election amendment about to be voted on in February. Needless to say that the lack of response of the opposition then was rather debilitating as it seems the confused reply of the MUD and Capriles himself to the obvious electoral fraud is going to cost. Though I could add that many opposition politicians were actually not opposed to the amendment as they thought it would benefit them too. Look at the recent Ojeda-Paraqueima scandals and you will know that Venezuela has a particularly sorry lot of politicos.

Coming back to that old post I want to paste below one paragraph:

To crown this already telling year, Chavez within hours started yet a new electoral campaign where he threw aside all pretense of the noble aims that he tried to make us believe guided him: a single amendment to the constitution to allow his reelection. Simply put, Chavez is blackmailing the country with the reactionary argument that if he is not allowed to run for office again, that if he must leave office one way or the other, the country will fall into chaos. The implication here is not that Chavez should be allowed to run again for election, the implication is that not only he should be allowed to do so but that he should be allowed to use any forcible mean to ensure that he is reelected. Make no mistake: this coming referendum is also a referendum on Chavez campaign style, on the material abuses he commits, on how he twists the law to remove any opponent that could become a threat to his hold on power. Those who will vote YES on the February 2009 referendum will also vote to allow a man to use such tactics that he will never be threatened at the ballot box. We saw those tactics in 2008, they include from incomplete electoral results release to restrictions of civil rights to whomever displeases him.

Emphasis added today.

This blogger knew in December 2008 what was going to happen last October 7, and the months before for that matter.  Was he the only one knowing that? Can we really say that the opposition did its best to counter what it was supposed to know and supposed to counter?

I should definitely read again my older entries. And this should be my main labor when I retire from current events blogging. Right now I am finishing to cover the aftermath of October 7 as promised (or threatened for some readers, I am sure). I will start to slow down on current events letting this to other blogs that still are unwilling to admit to themselves how useless they have become after October 7.  Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong, but for me it is now irrelevant.

However one idea came for 2013 activities. Since I consider that after December 16 I will be too ashamed to keep covering this godforsaken country (unless miraculously the opposition gets AT LEAST 8 states) and since I want to keep blogging anyway because I like it and I like to think I may be of help for some people, perusing old archives might be good and useful,  if anything to help us understand how come we have reached such a disgraceful situation.

We are talking here of a ten years record (in early December we will reach the date for the first post which came on line officially in January 2003).  If I assume that there is in average of one telling post a month, there might be up to 100 posts in a decade worth reading again, editing if necessary, commenting with hindsight information,  looking at consequences  etc, etc...  2013 might simply be not enough time for 100 posts to comment in depth, the more so if that commenting is done by readers who may remember where they were physically and mentally at a post given date!

Perhaps those might not be the most popular posts ever, but did I not make it clear since October 7 that popularity is now the least of my concerns?  The objective will be, if enough readers agree, to comment on my old posts. Not for glory or anything of the sort: after all I am sure that as I dust them in a few ones I will come across as quite silly. The point will be to see why I/we was/were wrong or why I/we was/were right, or in between as the case may be. That is, old posts will be a template where all interested can discuss what we did not understand then, what we missed, what we were foreseeing and why. This exercise will not be for the faint of heart as it will involve often quite a feat of self criticism, starting with yours truly.

We will mourn the loss of all comments before December 2009, a date where the old commenting service was unable to accommodate my blog format. That forced me to change the template  without being able to recover the comments from before. Commenting there was sharper as often as we were still deciding how bad chavismo was . Now we all agree it is a neo-totalitarian expression so what can we discuss about? The way they will finish us off?  But then again it may be a blessing in disguise since we would have to rethink all anew, without benefit from our past thoughts.

Thus we have the first theme to be covered in the second decade of this blog, or at least as long as chavismo allows me to remain in Venezuela. Let's see what other ideas I can come up to write about so we do not get too depressed by the exercise proposed above, where I hope at least a dozen of you guys will accompany me. Heck, you can already start today with the post linked above!