Hugo Chávez and the EU immigration law

I have to confess I have only read bits and pieces of the EU law on illegal immigration control and what I have seen I do not like (I will go into that in the next weeks).

Still, what president Hugo Chávez said now about not sending oil to European countries and threatening them with cutting off their investments in Venezuela if they were to implement that law is sheer stupidity.

Firstly: we all know Europe draws very little of its oil from Venezuela, namely around 0.9% of its needs.

Secondly: Venezuela needs those European investments more than the EU needs to invest in Venezuela.

Everybody in Europe knows Chávez threats are just empty. With that Chávez has only managed to deflate any serious discussion about any part of the law. The public opinion in Europe now just focuses in the fact that Chávez threats are pointless.

As we can see in Spiegel, De Morgen and other newspapers, everybody is just talking about the fact that Chávez just threatens without any consequence.

If Chávez really cared about human migrations, he could have started opening up a serious dialog about causes and effects of migrations, about basic human rights, about reciprocity at different levels. Instead, he just used what he knows best: threats everybody knows he cannot carry out.

Adiós a Eugenio Montejo

ποίησις ποίησις ποίησις ποίησις ποίησις ποίησις ποίησις

I have little time right now, but I just wanted to say Venezuela has lost a great poet.
Eugenio Montejo died last Thursday in Valencia, age 69.

Most people outside Venezuela heard about him just when they saw the film 21 Grams, where one of his poems was quoted. He wrote much better material than that, so I would suggest you try to find some of his books.

You can find some basic information on him in Wikipedia here (I was adding now some details there)

Here some links about him:

G. Parra in his excellent blog on Venezuelan poetry wrote an eulogy here, in English

And there is some in El Universal