Fiascoes

Following Venezuela from afar is a painful exercise. All that I see are missed opportunities and grand thuggery in action. Not surprising of course when you know the actors. What is most offensive though is the reaction of these actors; as if they expected the outcome to be different than what was predictable.

I am speaking for all, not only the opposition post April 30 debacle, but also the regime failure to come up with a solution to its power holding problems, only insuring that everything will happen again. And let's not forget the international community either desperately clueless or desperately weak (or both).

They also have gay Komissars

I came across this tweet today and I can hardly express my indignation in words. Every day chavismo/madurismo seems able to reach new lows of vileness.

Gran jornada de atención social por la #Igualdad #ConMaduroSomosVisibles @NicolasMaduro nuestro protector #LGBTI pic.twitter.com/LNARAzcsK0

— C.Presidencial LGBTI (@CPGPSD) April 21, 2018

This tweet is to bring in the gay vote for Maduro through a special social "activity" to help the LBGT community.  Not only it is a vile attempt, but it is also an insult to the intelligence. Then again it is a chavista specialty, is it not?

Let's buy an election

In Venezuela elections have lost any meaning.

The regime now manufactures the votes it needs to win whatever it needs to win.  And now, courtesy of hyperinflation, it can also print money at will to throw at people. That whatever it throws at them is losing half its value within a month is a mere detail.  But the beauty of it all is that people that receive those crumbs need also to be duly registered with address on voting lists. Thus, in case printing both votes and money is not enough, you can also scare them into voting for you by visiting them on election day, say, at noon with a dry knock at the door and a "you have not voted yet; come on, let's go; we are taking you there".  "Carnet de la Patria" is indeed a wonderful tool of control. Who knew it?

So today we are going to examine all what you can get from Carnet de La Patria by election time.

How to legally cheat

The most surprising thing about Sunday's election fraud is how unprepared the MUD opposition was. I admit that it was difficult to prepare for the out of norms regime onslaught, but still...

And yet the electoral machinery of the regime was so powerful that it may well have "won" the election.

Fait divers: Lilian Tintori is parted from her cash

The talk of this end of week is not the Law against Hate, or the Stalinist tribunal that the constituent assembly has become, or that the regime celebrates has a major achievement the arrival of a wheat ship from Russia with wheat for, what?, 5 days? or more important matters.

The talk is of the millions of bolivares found in Lilian Tintori car, in cash.

Arming the unarmed, and unarmable

This weekend the dictatorship decided to perform "military exercises" to scare the US away from an intervention.  Not that it matters since the US will not waste a drop of Marine blood on a Venezuelan beach, but let's not go there now. The point here is that if Marines do not kill folks while landing at Patanemo, ridicule may finally be able to kill people.....

Certainly these week end activities are a circus show, this one segment even includes a midget at the end of the video.  Why, oh, why?

Luisa Ortega lavish life style

One dichotomy when you analyze the current regime of Venezuela is to decide if it is communist or fascist. In the grand scheme of things it does not matter much since they are both totalitarian in nature and end point. But the road chosen does have different collateral damage. I, for one, think that its narco-criminal nature makes it more of a fascist system that uses a populist/commie rhetoric to justify its means. But in the end, it is a smallish group of fascists strictly holding to their privileges.

Today we are going to comment the search at Luisa Ortega home. Please, let us know whether the lynching method is fascist, or communist.

Régimen hace un esfuerzo frenético x desacreditar a Luisa Ortega, ahora mostrando sus lujos, Y si visitamos a Diosdado o a Pedro Carreño? pic.twitter.com/3Nl2Om7Fje

— Johnattan Bilancieri (@Bilancieri) August 23, 2017

Speeding up to the grand finale

I was working on a text about how hard it has become to live in Caracas in the last month but today's news make me realize that it is going to get much worse fast.

Highlighting Gladys because
it makes me so happy

The Miami Herald gives you all. And it would be very difficult to exaggerate what they write or overstate the importance of it. Let's start with a sound bite from General Torrealba, the one who three weeks ago (I think) had his HQ filmed as a horde of paramilitary colectivo motorbikers were leaving it, breaking any law that used to exist in Venezuela. That video was frightening by itself and promptly the buildings from were it was taken were searched (I think, memory fails me, and if not those buildings Barquisimeto has had several nights of building searches and looting and abuse and violence anyway).

Tareck does the New York Times

Everyday brings a new outrage with the Bolibanana revolution.  Today it was Venezuela’s vice-president the Tareck El Aissami publishing an open letter in the New York Times. Before I get into the outrage let's look briefly at said letter.

An unacceptable proposal

UPDATED
Comments to the mediators' proposal has been included. I also include an additional conclusion next.

Commenting the proposal makes it even worse than what I thought it was at first. One wonders whether the regime wants any dialogue, of any type. It all seems to point to the regime looking for an excuse to dissolve the National Assembly since this one cannot stay in a dialogue under such conditions. One is left to consider how come the Vatican was drafted into such a scam. Or even if international pressure actually wants Maduro a couple of year more in office because other problems are more important. The money part of the proposal would indicate that, a goal to reach any sort of agreement so that the National Assembly votes the funds to pay Venezuela's commercial debts without it supervising the corruption of many of those. Truly a gross and amoral proposal.
-------------------------------

The mediators of the Venezuelan crisis, appointed basically by the regime, have been accused with just reason of taking the regime side. That the late comer Vatican has been embroiled in the mess comes from Obama's decision to avoid any trouble in Venezuela until the November election. Little good it did to him, and lots of damage for Venezuela. Meanwhile the Vatican is in deep doodoo losing its credibility for nothing to the point of threatening to withdraw. One wonders what pushed the Vatican to get involved so easily in such a mess, apparently against the own opinion of the local clergy authorities (we do have two cardinals now, you know).

Thy electoral CNE shoe droppeth

There will be a lot of brouhaha in the next days about the ignominious decision of the CNE to do its utmost to violate the constitution in order to block the Recall Election against Maduro. Let me try to make it clear for readers still hanging around here.

1) The motivation in any case is to annul the Recall Election, or in the very worst case push it to 2017 which means that the regime remains in office until January 2019 at the very least.

"Margarita follies": a cheap vaudeville in 5 acts

Prologue

PSUV tent city
Courtesy Elides Rojas tweet

In the fair city of Caracas, Henry Ramos gathers a few friends for a big party. Nicolas Maduro is not invited and he tries to sabotage Henry's party by complaining to the police for loud noise, and trying to hold a party of his own on a red shirt theme. His party is a bust: even people walking by Nico's party with red shirts take them off to go to Henry shindig.

Act 1 Nicolas at Pinkyville

Nicolas is furious at Henry and his friends, In particular those with orange shirts that accepted to don white ones at Henry's party. To get fresher airs he decides to go out of Caracas to visit a homestead where he is told lot's of people love him and would have gone to his party had he be willing to foot the cost. Lo and behold, when he reaches Pinkyville he finds his friends very pissed off at him because he took all of their food for his party in Caracas. Furious, they bring out a protest steel band of pots and pans to accompany their protest song. We will never now for sure but there may have been a exchange of more than just insults. Nico must make a quick exit and go back to Caracas swearing that all of these people have been sent by the folks of Henry's party.

Act 2 The revenge of the bitter

Narko-Radikalismus

When everything fails, repeat it all. In particular the parts that clearly are rotten at the root.

This is what Maduro has done last week.

Diary of Venezuelan businesses demise

It is now vox populi that Venezuela is suffering a major politically induced economic crisis which has yielded bread lines and people dead from the lack of medicine. The two root causes are well known. Historically it starts with a dependency on a major resource to feed a dysfunctional patronage and welfare state; oil. Populism has been the continuing line of politics since the late 60ies, a line dramatically expanded by Hugo Chavez since 1998. To this tradition Chavez added incompetency, empty ideas, willful prejudice, corruption and even drug traffic, the lone prosperous industry in Venezuela these days.

It is not the aim of this entry to detail the catastrophe that has befallen Venezuela. I will only write some of the key events that have happened to my business, making it nearly bankrupt not through my own possible incompetency but through regulations that have strangled the life of all private business that are not associated with the corruption of the regime.

The evil that circles us

Today Leopoldo Lopez had an OpEd piece published in the Washington Post. The piece may seem short on specifics for us here in Venezuela but we are not the audience. The audience is the US political class in its time of trial during primary season, to let them know that on inauguration day the worst problem in the Western Hemisphere awaiting them will be the humanitarian crisis that is starting in Venezuela this past few weeks. The silence of the US has helped a lot Venezuela become a failed state as Lopez letter implies.

Electricity shortage horrors

Before mentioning that I was victim last Friday I am going to mention briefly the last electricity horror shortage.  A few years ago, on account of El Niño, Chavez started an ambitious, no expense spared, plan to generate enough thermal electric energy to save us from the vagaries of the Caroni river from which, if well managed, we could get more than three quarters of our electricity. He went on one of his many idiocies implying that too many dams would dry down the "poor" river as an excuse for all the immense delays on the magnificent planning left by previous governments.

Where to start?

The economic emergency decree?

As readers already know this decree is a fraud and cannot be accepted as presented. The Assembly knows it is a vulgar trap to try to put the blame of the crisis on the opposition (which will not work chavismo is misreading the whole thing badly). So the opposition will examine the decree, and will reject it based on some of its glaring lacks suggesting politely that the regime reviews it.

La mendacidad de Elias Jaua

Es con usted, diputado Jaua

Leo su respuesta a lo que usted llama "infame el editorial de El Nacional".

Yo no voy a entrar en el debate de si la diputada Tamara Adrian oyó lo que ella oyó. Ella sabrá defenderse; y muy bien lo hará porque ella no tuvo nunca los apoyos que usted tuvo y que le permitieron tirar piedras toda su vida quedando impune.

Tampoco voy a especular si la diputada Adriana D'Elia es una lesbiana. Eso es irrelevante, y ni me importa como a usted no debería importarle lo que la gente hace con su vida privada mientras no afecte a otros. Le recuerdo que su vida privada si afecta a otros cuando, por ejemplo, usted hace que la República cubra los costos de viaje de su niñera bien armada.

A thank you note to President Barak Obama and Senator Marco Rubio

I suppose that it will seem weird to read that I am thanking at the same time both sides of US political divide. Or that, for that matter, I am picking Senator Rubio over, say, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. But please, bear with me, those will be, at the end, mere details.

What you have achieved in Venezuela, the Senator and his allies by forcing passage of a sanction law against Human Rights violators in Venezuela, and the President by finally applying it to 7 serious cases (and more to come?), is quite remarkable even if right now the casual observer may think it to be a diplomatic disaster for the US. Like many an historical good and well intentioned initiative from the US this one came out in a rather clunky presentation and on the surface seems to have united Latin America around its atavic anti US posture. Some even say that Maduro is reinforced, that the opposition received a patriotic blow that could endanger the electoral results of this year. All this is irrelevant.

Leopoldo Lopez versus Diosdado Cabello

Two major newspapers have published letters as OpEd from the two sides of the Venezuelan spectrum. I will let you judge by yourself comparing them. I also re-publish them integrally so you do not need to seek the the links.