Chávez, Putin's puppet, and other stories

Chávez, Russia's puppet: a bad joke?

The president of the oil company Rofnet's, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and former KGB agent Igor Sechin, gave Venezuela's military strongman Hugo Chávez a present from former KGB agent and current president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. The present is a puppet. What else did you expect?

Chávez must be very excited

Sechin said he came for a new project to building houses at the Fuerte Tiuna - it seems like that little area is the source for a thousand projects for foreigners to build houses in the country - and, last but not least, to invest in the Carabobo 2 oil fields. He also mentioned Russians could invest 20 billion dollars for 40 years cooperation in Junin 6. Right.

Rotten Food for Dollars

Meanwhile, an opposition deputy from central Carabobo, Neidy Rosal, reports there are 179 thousand tons of grain in 30 ships waiting to be disembarked in the haven of Puerto Cabello. A large part of that load will become rotten...and a lot of people involved in importing will get huge amounts of subsidized dollars for that cargo...which will allow them to have huge profits for stale food Venezuelans won't eat. This is still the Pudreval affair that goes on and on in Venezuela but it has become just recurrent news at a local newspaper. I am still not sure how much of the whole thing (the port's collapse, the rotten cargo) has to do with sheer incompetence from the port's functionaries and how much utter corruption from different groups.

Fatherland or electricity

Finally, the caudillo said in one of his latest speeches that what is at stake in Venezuela now is not whether we will keep having the power failures that plague the country in the last years or not...what is at stake is "the Fatherland". You bet.