FARC soon at a Venezuelan arepera next to you

ABC journalist and bete noire of chavismo for all of the insider leaks he has been reporting, Emili Blasco, writes a piece in ABC about how the FARC is preparing its retreat to Venezuela once (before?) any peace treaty is signed with the Santos administration.

Since it is in Spanish a short summary follows, plus what I wrote on that already in 2012:

Tales from the breadlines

Two short tales on food lines.

Esau would get a good deal from Jacob in Venezuela

The new minimum wage increase decreed by Maduro is of course a fraud. No need to insult the gentle reader reminding him or her that the inflation has already pre empted any increase Maduro may give us; and the relatively large but very insufficient increase will not solve the workers purchasing power problem while adding yet more fuel to inflation. Only chavistas do not know that, or worse, do not care about that.

The new minimum wage is officially 22,576 VEB. At the SICADI exchange of today we see that the VEB is at 645 to the USD. In short the minimum wage is officially 35 USD PER MONTH.

There goes the glorious bolivarian revolution in the name of workers.

And do not complain, I could have used the black market rate of 1,007 instead of 645 because that is the only one I can use to buy dollars with my 22,576 VEB. It would be, well, 22 USD.  How people can live off such a paltry amount is a mystery beyond belief, less than 1 dollar a day.

Me and Hillary

Around US election time I allow myself a post where I express my opinion. I am of those who think that foreigners should have a say in the US election since we will all pay the consequences of that vote. But of course, there goes another utopia. Also, I get a lot of flack from such posts, mostly from right wingers that understand any critical view of Republican candidates as pure and simple communism making Chavez too good for me, and... (more follows from puffed red faces that I can easily imagine from the comments).

Not for me at this point in life to be deterred by such comments, the more so that blogging has become an occasional hobby for me. So there I go.

No recall election in 2016: one hidden motive

As a supplement of yesterday's post where I explained why there would not be a Recall Election , or any election for that matter, we got some declarations today that definitely rule out a recall election in 2016. That is, these declarations technically do not rule out such a referendum but they describe very well that chavismo simply will not accept a recall election before January 10, 2017. After, we'll see but do not get your hopes high and at any rate it would be useless, ta-ta...

Now let's look at what is "new" today. Nothing really, just more clarity, so to speak.

Recall Election all but over

Today the head of the electoral board, CNE, Tibisay Lucena announced that "if all goes well" the gathering of the 20% signature from the registered electors could take place late October. TRANSLATION: even if the 20% is gathered late October there will not be enough time to fend off legal challenges so that the Recall Election is held before January 10 2017. If the recall election is held after that date and even if 90% vote to oust Maduro, his serving vice-president will replace in office to complete the two years in the presidential term.

In other words the regime has announced that there is no way they will risk a presidential election before December 2018. And if you still do not get it, the current cabinet of musical chairs will remain presiding over the country until January 2019 at the earliest.

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.