Venezuela, an overview

Corrected (missing NOT)

Chávez approved a labour law. Daniel Duquenal wrote an excellent post about that. 

Venezuela's Alpha & Omega: oil prices

Chávez used his pathos yet again in a show where he announced this. He also talked about how he is going to besiege cancer. Then he left once more for Cuba to get cancer treatment. He definitely does not trust Venezuelan doctors. He will be in that island for some weeks. He refuses to give power to the vice-president for a single minute. People keep wondering whether the military strongman will die soon or whether it is all a scam.

It does not really matter: society keeps decomposing. Violence in Venezuelan jails got some space in Venezuelan newspapers yet again: prisoners in La Planta rebelled once more. There were shots, some got killed. As opposition candidate Henrique Capriles said, 5066 prisoners have been murdered in Venezuelan prisoners since 1999. Last year 560 humans were killed in our prisons. Prisons are just a continuation of slum violence, but more concentrated, with more weapons, more drugs, more of everything. Never mind we now have a minister for prisons. 

A few days ago, a prisoner of that same La Planta prison killed his girlfriend while the girl was "on conjugal visit". The girl knew him for 3 months only and yet she was visiting him there, something that would NOT be allowed in other countries with generous conjugal visit programmes. He started threatening her one month ago and yet she kept on going. After the jail employees found her and took her away to a hospital, the other prisoners killed the man,. It's so easy to kill a man in Venezuela. No one talks about the psychology behind all this and no one in Venezuela talks about how often women get abused and deal with this abuse. Psychopaths are widespread in Venezuela, as late psychiatrist and writer Herrera Luque said. No one discusses that. 

One more time, pressure is building up

I just talked to a good friend of mine...a Chávez supporter from a secondary city. We didn't talk about politics but the topic of violence came up. She, lower class, was kidnapped last year for half a day. I asked her if things are fine now. She said: yes, only that recently her daughter was almost raped, a man threatened to kill her baby if she didn't let herself be raped or pay 20000 Bs. That's several month's salary for a worker. "It was awful. But now things are fine", she said. I was speechless. She repeated several times: "things are fine now, not then, not then".

Humble supporters of this regime keep denying reality. They don't see another way. They couldn't get out of the country and they know no alternative. My friend knows things in her town were very safe a decade and a half ago. She says violence came with the many homeless that arrived from the Vargas region after the 1999 flooding. That was 13 years ago.

This is what the useless idiots in Europe and the States call a "revolution". Revolution my foot.