Hugo the First and Kalashnikov

Our president, Hugo Chávez, has just given a copy of Simón Bolívar's sword as birthday present to AK-47 inventor Kalashnikov. The sword is supposed to have precious stones.

You can find more information on that in Russian here, in Spanish here.

We need to remind our readers that the Venezuelan government purchased about 100000 Kalashnikov rifles in 2006.
This year the chavista regime spent about 2.2 billion dollars in more Russian weapons, some I don't know what are for in Venezuela, like tanks.

The Kalashnikov is one of the weapons that more people has killed in the last decades. There is a huge black market with that weapon.

I would have other priorities. For instance, the money for that sword could have been used to buy books as price for pupils in poor schools who came from been bad pupils to become good ones. The money could have been also used to pay for Venezuela's entrance in the PISA programme, a programme for improving education standards that the Venezuelan government rejects.

The money Venezuela spent for the tanks could have been used for building with Venezuelan companies (not foreign ones) a couple of hospitals in rural Guárico or still more rural Amazonas, perhaps it could be enough to set up a real groovy public library to motivate children in the grassland state of Portuguesa.

It should be so obvious. I am sure most people agree. I am so ashamed Venezuela has such a president.

A beautiful red

The Eudocimus Ruber (in Spanish corocoro or garza roja, in English Scarlet Ibis) are gorgeous birds living across the Northern part of South America and some even up to Florida (although now much less). You can see them from time to time when you drive or sail along the Venezuelan coast. They love mangroves, lagoons, swamps. Their beaks are just perfect to catch the worms and crustaceans (specially crabs) as well as insects and seeds found in their habitat. The feather colour comes fro the pigment found in the crustaceans they eat.

When I see these birds they always steal a smile from me.

Chávez runs amok...again

The president of Venezuela, Hugo of Sabaneta, announced yesterday that the nation should prepare for war with Colombia. He ordered 15000 soldiers to be transfered to the border. Our neighbours acted in a more civilized way and asked for a meeting of the United Nations Security council. They want observers on the border to see what is really happening.

Presidential tantrums

When Hugo is in South America, specially in Venezuela, he very often says things like "blood will be shed and civil war break out" if he does not win this or that election or if something else he likes does not happen. He hardly says that in Europe or in the US. There he talks about the US government being the Devil, something that makes some people giggle like children or he praises the beauty of Russian girls or makes jokes with film directors. Northerners love that, "so folkloric". He signs agreements with Spanish ministers that provide billions of easy money to the Spaniards in exchange for some fast cash for Hugo and some political support.

People are used now to Hugo's tantrums in Venezuela and we usually abscribe his behaviour to his need for deflecting attention from the real issues and there are a lot of problems now in Venezuela. The place is still a place where you find posh shopping centres, where you see lots of people using BlackBerries and where the Venezuelan version of FOX News, very unprofessional Globovisión, says day after day that the president is a dictator. Venezuela is getting over 300% more money than 1998 out of higher oil prices. Still: things are getting more difficult.

The problems

Some of the problems:

1. Venezuela is by far the most dangerous country in South America and things keep getting worse. There are no more protests because the poor, those who suffer the most, don't know how bad their situation is compared even to our neighbours to the West or to Brazil, not to talk about Peru or chile.
2. The guerrilla is more present along the border than ever before: in Zulia, in Tachira, in Amazonas, in Barinas. The clumsy attempts by the government to deny their support for the Colombian guerrilla do not work.
3. Pegging the bolivar to the dollar ($2.15) while scaring away local producers and spending billions of petrodollars to sell cheap imported products has led to the highest official inflation in the region and to a much higher distorsion of the economy.
4. Blackouts are becoming more and more frequent.
5. Although it is still easy for the old and new high class to find whiskey, normal people are having more trouble finding sugar, coffee, rice, usual stuff and most poor are having more difficulty making ends meet.
6. Everybody knows chavista officers or friends of theirs who are getting richer by the day while the services for the poor are degrading again very fast

There have been several unexplained murders along the border and the Venezuelan government has declared automatically "it is the fault of right-winged paramilitary". Perhaps. Perhaps some. What about if that is not the case? What about if there is an open investigation? What about if we work together with our neighbours? The Venezuelan government does not want it, it hates transparency of any kind.

More than a tantrum?

There is extra stress in the border because the Venezuelan military are constantly closing the access. That creates a huge disruption in the lives of people on both sides: there is a huge smuggling market and normal trade between Colombia and Venezuela. A gallon of gas in Venezuela is 20 times cheaper than accross the border, a lot of people have a lot to win or lose one way or the other.

I believe the whole situation could worsen very soon if the international community leaves this conflict unattended, if the Moratinos and Lulas keep quite in spite of the belligerant tone used by Hugo time after time.

Reference

On the map: green spots are very vaguely representing the places where the guerrillas get into Venezuela to rest, to hide, to get more resources. The yellow lines refer to the main places were legal and illegal trade take place. The blue regions are municipalities were the opposition was elected in 2008 (although they can hardly do anything now after the actions taken by the regime as described here)

If things are left unattended, more and more shootings could take place, more disruption of normal life in the region. At this stage I still doubt a war could come. Our neighbours don't want one and the vast majority of Venezuelans do not want one either. Hugo, though, is losing more and more the sense of reality.











PS

Meanwhile: in Germany there are celebrations for the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I am happy for them (not that Venezuela has communism, it has a petrodollar dictatorship with a lot of communist talk).

Question to old lefties:

(just in case, I could also ask the same question to "righties" with similar figures)
For how long were you in love with this bloke?














Aye, I know a lot of people were meeting him years ago.




















And do you have now another idol?


Read about Mugabe's life here. If you want to learn a bit about where Venezuela differs and where it is similar to Zimbabwe, look, among other things, at my posts with the labels "ethnicity" and "corruption".

If you want an excellent post about how the gerrymandering in Venezuela will be organized, go to Daniel's blog.

Understanding how autocracies grow

In the last years we have seen how different Latin American presidents are trying to stay in power beyond the term limits set for them. They do the Belorussian thing: change the constitution when need be.

Many of the apologists of such regimes say that most Europe heads of states don't have term limits or that they even have unelected queens and kings. In reality this argument is moot: queens and kings, even if out of time figures, have no real power and all those countries in democratic Europe with no term limit for their "main leaders" don't have presidential systems, but parliamentarian systems and that is a completely different fish.

In this map you can see some interesting clusters:

• countries with presidential systems that allow only one consecutive term for the president
  
• countries with presidential systems that allow two to three consecutie terms
• countries with parliamentarian systems (no term limit)
• countries with the presidential system AND no term limit.

Something that is very striking: the last group is composed almost exclusively by countries with some reputation. Only Suriname can be seen - so far - as a democracy, but then the president is elected by 2/3 of the deputies and they have only had their first democratic president after a long dictatorship.

Now Colombia's Uribe is trying to run for a third term. Ortega in Nicaragua got his way to be re-elected and I am sure in Bolivia they will try to do the same thing Venezuela did.

Why don't we actually force the discussion about parliamentarian system for Latin America?

Venezuela, police, prevention and intelligence

Map 1: murder in Carabobo in October 2009. Source: Notitarde report here, based on police reports (CIPC)

Every single point in the first Carabobo map represents a murder committed in October 2009: two babies playing in a slum shot down while two drug bands were fighting each other, a young man who was shot down while driving on his bike in Guacara too late, several people shot dead when a man under drugs decided to get into a party in one of the many slums in Southern Valencia and take revenge because of some issue or no issue at all.

You can see here (1MB file, it takes some seconds) an animation of murder in this region from January 2008 until last October. Actually, the murders in any municipality were much more concentrated than the map shows. We could make fairly good predictions if we had all the details police agents can supply.

How we got used to crime and the World does not care

The news about violent crime in Venezuela have become so repetitive that the whole situation has been banalized. People have become used to it, sort of. The news about the situation are almost like weather forecasts in Britain: 32 murders this weekend, 40, 41, 34...

The government uses the silliest strategies to minimize the issue: crime is caused by the social injustice inherent to capitalism (sure and chavismo has been in power for almost 11 years now), the government is doing something about it (right, murder rate has gone up from 19 murders per 100000 in 99 to over 50* now), false statistics (using one week as reference for one year or assuming there are no ups and downs), referring to crime everywhere (Hugo in Bbc saying "even in Italy a politician was killed recently) or drama (how can the opposition use the suffering of people to do politics?). The Venezuelan government stopped sending murder stats to United Nations in 2002 when the trend became too clear to show. It still reports on "crimes" in general as it knows it can manipulate more easily the numbers of "crimes" as opposed to those of murders.

Meanwhile crime is without control and many of the best professionals leave Venezuela precisely because of that (political mobbing and economic factors come next). The opposition keeps showing the numbers it can get from the police. The problem is that most people in Venezuela don't know how night life is in Santiago, in Madrid...heck, even in Bogotá or Buenos Aires. People outside Venezuela know crime in Latin America is bad, so they assume it is a little bit worse in Venezuela...sad, but well, it is a Latino thing, isn't it?


chart: murder rate per country. Venezuela is in red. Other South American countries are in yellow. Based on Wikipedia stats.


Proposals

What can we do?

1) The opposition needs to inform people not just about crime in Venezuela, but about how crime is in Venezuela now compared to what it was earlier on and what crime in Venezuela now is compared to the rest of the world. As you can see from the first chart, Venezuela (in red) is one of the countries with the highest murder rate on Earth. Only Honduras, Sierra Leone and Jamaica are worse off. Venezuela is by far the most dangerous country in South America. I coloured the other South American countries in yellow.

How can the opposition inform better about the situation? People should forget the TV. Awful Globovision can be seen by less than 30% of the population anyway. Students should go to bus stations, to the underground, to the city centre, to the village and distribute the information in cheap flyers.

2) The opposition must publicly challenge the government over and over again to have an open debate about crime (and other issues). We know the government rejects any debate. We know the president does not meet journalists who could ask real questions (only state journalists who ask about children and favourite food or badly informed international "stars" such as Larry King, who never get deep into anything). The opposition has already asked the government for a debate, but it has given up fast. It thinks there is no use on insistng. I disagree. It matters a lot. Venezuela has never really known real debates and it needs them or at least it needs to know it needs them. We should demand them time after time. It is a shame the only person who really tried to challenge Hugo into a debate was Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa.

I believe we should publicly demand open, fair debates with international mediators. The government will have to give in or show to the general public it is afraid. We are actually addressing all Venezuelans through that challenge: us, the minority that still believes in the comandante and the large group of those who are nibs, who remain indifferent and think they can only shrug shoulders.

3) The opposition needs to choose shadow ministers as Britain does: politicians who take the time and show the brain power to analyse very specific issues and tell people about their ideas for Venezuela. It does not matter some of those ideas may be snatched by the government. Most probably the government will not "copy" what we propose, but if it does: so much the better for Venezuela. And anyway: we can make sure people know who proposed things in the first place.

4) Venezuelan mathematicians, geographers, sociologists, economists, security experts and other specialists should meet and discuss in public their proposals. The task is complex, very complex, but it is not rocket science. We really don't need a expert from the US/Spain/cuba/X who gives some agent a course about "the magic solution". It is not that I exclude using foreign experts, but above all we need to think for ourselves based on the best people we already have, on the models we have read about and on open debates. That is the only way we can get a sustainable plan that lasts one government or stays only in one region. Among other things, we can develop models about where crime is more likely to take place based on a systematic reporting of crime and studies carried out by all kinds of specialists working together. As you can see from some of the charts here, we can actually know that Valencia municipality will have about 90 murders this month and Diego Ibarra municipality some 9 this very month if nothing else is done and we know December will be much worse (we could predict the number of murders per square km very precisely, actually). I believe a digitalized system managed by experts can produce fair models about the specific streets and times where serious crimes are more likely to happen. Those models can be used to tell police agents and above all social agents where to act and when.

If the police force just goes on working as it does now, if the social workers in that municipality do what they do now and nothing more, if there are no libraries, sport facilities, hospitals and above all real jobs, things won't improve. Our experts need to get into the nitty-gritty at all those things and demand publicly for solutions to be implemented: for jobs, for health, for education, for general social problems, for drug abuse and for crime prevention through the use of cops.

5) Inform Venezuelans about the crime situation not just with absolute numbers, but taking into account the world context, so that the poor know the current state of Venezuela is far from normal even in South America.

6) Discuss publicly about where criminals are getting the weapons from and take actions to prevent them from doing that.

7) Demand a real transformation of the security forces within a specific time frame. The Venezuelan police sucks. It sucks big time. A Venezuelan policeman is 150 TIMES more likely to be a criminal than an average Venezuelan citizen. Among other things, the government must

• require an ever higher education level from police candidates
  
• increase the salary of police agents so that the ratio to the salary of Venezuelan deputies is similar to the ratio in Spain or Italy (right now the "Socialist" Venezuelan deputies earn net more than Europeans but police agents earn almonds
• increase the number of police agents per 1000 inhabitants to some normal ratio (use the money Venezuela uses in Russian tanks and presents to that effect
• limit the amount of police agents that are used as body guards for politicians to less than 5% of the force (now over 50% are used to protect our big politicos)
• force the police to digitalize the key data about crimes for every region and use it for crime prevention both at local and national level
  
• force the heads of the police to be accountable to the minister of Justice and force the Minister of Justice to declare at the National Assembly at least once every third month about the progress done
• demand that the minister of Justice be a person with a clean record and not the thugs we have right now (if you want to see a mind map in Spanish about the 10 ministers of Justice and Inner Affairs since this government started, go here)

Source: Notitarde stats based on monthly police reports from 2006 to 2009 as in map 1.

8) Demand social justice from the government. While people like Arne, the brother of the Justice minister, are now billionaires after being penniless in 2001, half a million people in Southern Valencia (the most dangerous region in the map shown first) are living without decent jobs, without a single general hospital (they have now to go to the Hospital general, which is for half of that state), without a real public library and with the worst public schools of Latin America.













*In reality it may be over 70, the government has classified a lot of murders as anything but murder, including a husband murdering his ex-wife.

Like a rolling stone

I was looking for this video about Venezuela's Pebble Toad for some weeks but it was not available yet. Now we have it. Sir David Attenborough narrates here about this little amphibian's strategy to survive predators such as the largest tarantula on Earth, the Goliath Bird-eating spider.



You can also read some in the BBC article and in Wikipedia (it is a threatened species).
The BBC rocks as well!