Saturday 30 June 2012

Message to EFE et alia: Venezuela's Alpha and Omega

I don't think you have to be a genius or an economist to grasp this but, apparently, few journalists and historians and politicians abroad grasp it: oil prices are still at a record high this year. The price drop during the last few months could so far be considered as a local minimum. EFE and others keep repeating Chávez has had to deal with oil price drops...but again: they are just local minima. Oil prices - I repeat - oil prices haven't been as high as they are today for several decades now. This doesn't have to do with an anti-imperialist strategy, with "just deciding to sell oil at a higher price and not like the compradores were doing". It has to do with supply and demand. It has to do with China's gigantic evolution and to an extent that of many other countries developing and demanding more oil.

Chávez's regime is still receiving much more money than what several previous governments got - inflation considered. Please, put the price drop of the last few months in context.

Below you see OPEC's average price evolution. Venezuela's crude oil is generally cheaper, but the price evolution is very similar: ups and downs go more or less like here

Thursday 28 June 2012

Chávez buys more Russian tanks but Venezuela has too few schools

Russian newspaper Kommersant (via Lenta) tells us Chávez wants to get another set of 100 T-72B1V tanks. The T-72 is a slightly improved version of this thing:



I reckon they are still for the "asymmetric war" the caudillo so often talks about. Or are they not? In any case, they will be paid with part of the $4 billion credit the Chávez regime got from the Russians last October just to buy weapons made in Russia. 

According to Kommersant, Venezuela's debt for the Russian arms deals amounts to some 7.2 billion dollars (2.2 billion from a credit in 2009, 4 billion from that credit of 2011 and a little more from some other times). Most of the Venezuela money for buying this stuff does not come from the defence budget but from FONDEN, the Fondo Para Desarrollo Endógeno, which is supposed to be money for sustainable development. European sycophants of Chávez still say Venezuela's defence expenditure is peanuts based on the defence budget and comparisons to - oh, what else? - the USA.

The loans are linked to Venezuela giving Russian companies preferential access to oil fields such as Carabobo 2. Rosneft' is the main beneficiary but Garprom Neft', Lukoil, Surgutneftegas and TNK-VR are also involved in Junin 6 thanks to the military caste of my country committed national resources for the Russian weapons industry. Igor' Sechin, one of Putin's closest pals and like Putin a KGB man, was the guy doing the final killing.

Meanwhile, the children attending the Francisco de Miranda school, very close to where I grew up, have classes under the skies...the school is just too small, there are three classrooms for 250 pupils.

I wonder what new wonders Chávez's sycophants abroad will write about at this stage. Will they still say that there is less illiteracy in Venezuela than in Germany as communist-turned-social-market-expert Sahra Wagenknecht says, "according to UNESCO"*? Yeah, she knows because she has been to Venezuela. And I am an expert on Swahili.


Hallo, Sahra...was sagst Du jetzt? Es ist "entweder Chávez oder Bush"? Entweder Chávez oder die Vaterlandsverräter, die Un-Venezolaner


*Please, check out what scholar Francisco Rodríguez said about the education scam in my country.


Wednesday 27 June 2012

"I love you madly" and other things Sasha told Hugo


I stumbled upon an article from Belarussian Telegraph, not your newspaper unless you are really interested in Slavic-Venezuelan relations.

As you may or may not know, dictator Lukashenko was on a visit to the Land of Grace.On a speech there he said he was sure his buddy Hugo was going to win again. "I know that you will win over them". He didn't just say "win" but "them". Tibisay Lucena, you better listen to Lukashenko! 

The Master of Belarus also said that whoever knows him knows he is not going over the top praising people but if there weren't any Hugo Chávez, "there wouldn't be these projects and successes  and Belarus wouldn't be in Venezuela". Sure, buddy, for the same reason Chile has more trade with Argentina than with Kyrgyzstan: it doesn't make much sense to do otherwise and they are no successes for the Venezuelan nation but overpriced projects or simply scams.
It goes both ways

Belarus' dictator also said most Venezuelans supported the strong relationships between Belarus and Venezuela (yeah) and that even if there are some "mates" (tovarish is the word he used) who are opposed to that due to the "sharp political moment" Belarussians came to Venezuela as friends to help "our patriot-president". He reiterated that Chávez was his friend and (hence, I guess), friend of the Belarus nation and last but not least, Belarus' government will do anything, "anything he - Chávez, my friend Chávez" - tells them to do.

And I suppose that means also getting the Belarus KGB to further help Venezuelan military and intelligence officers in learning more tricks on "intelligence", including eavesdropping and sabotage at the Belarus Academy of War (Военная академия Республики Беларусь).


Monday 25 June 2012

Brasil: ¿Qué pasará si los hispanoamericamericanos siguen así?

Aquí tienen la evolución porcentual del crecimiento demográfico en Suramérica entre los años 1900 y 2010.

El peso demográfico de Brasil ha aumentado poco a poco. Esto no quiere decir gran cosa: no significa que crezca de manera proporcional su peso socioeconómico o político.

Pero Brasil también ha conseguido ampliar su territorio a costa del resto de Suramérica desde tiempos de la Colonia. La expansión se hizo en numerosos conflictos: tras la Guerra de Paraguay, tras la Guerra del Acre, en una expansión cuando los gobiernos civico-militares vecinos se la pasaban guerreándose a sí mismos o robando a sus pueblos. 




Brasil sigue creciendo en lo político y en lo económico. Sigue siendo un país pobre, pero definitivamente esto no será así para siempre. Aunque otros países como Chile han logrado a veces avances relativos mayores, el peso de Brasil va generando una dinámica particular.


Se habla de integración suramericana, pero los pueblos hispanoparlantes tienen que preguntarse si es conveniente tener primero una integración donde un estado tiene ya la mitad del peso demográfico o si es preferible realizar una integración entre sí. Los presidentes de Brasil ayudan a los empresarios de su país a aumentar el superávit comercial con Bolivia, con Venezuela, y se ocupan de que el club de Presidentes de Latinoamérica siga compuesto por personas que sirvan a los intereses brasileños.

Los militares y políticos hispanoparlantes siempre han sido miopes, increíblemente miopes. Chávez ha declarado mil veces que está independizando a Venezuela de los Estados Unidos. Lo que no dice es que la va regalando Venezuela un poquito más cada día a empresarios de Brasil, de China, al gobierno cubano.

A mediano plazo, Brasil va a asumir una posición más y más intervencionista en Suramérica si los suramericanos de habla española no procuran disminuir sus nacionalismos feudales-militares sin visión.





Sunday 24 June 2012

Der venezolanische Militärführer und das Vaterland


Der seit 13 Jahren amtierende Präsident und Caudillo Hugo Chávez hat eine Debatte mit Henrique Capriles, dem Kandidat der alternativen Kräfte, abgelehnt. Nun sagte er, er würde sich schämen, gegen ein solches "Unwesen" zu debattieren. "Ich würde lieber ein Schwergewicht vor mir haben". Chávez hat übrigens niemals an einer Debatte teilgenommen. Ferner erklärte der Militär, seine Bewegung, der Chavismus, sei nicht Chávez, sondern "Vaterland" pur...ein Chávez-Anhänger sei ein Patriot und diejenigen, die Vaterland wollen, sind mit Chávez, es gäbe keinen anderen Weg". Wo haben wir das schon mal gehört?

Der Meinungsforschungsfirma Hinterlaces zufolge hat der Caudillo, der das Land im Laufe des längsten Erdölbooms der Geschichte regiert, einen klaren Vorsprung gegenüber Capriles: 51% gegen 34% der Stimmen.

Der Präsident hat heute Viktor Sheiman, einem weissrussichen  Militär mit KGB-Verbindungen und engstem Freund des Diktators Lukaschenkos, die Medaille "Stern von Carabobo" erteilt. Bald wird Lukaschenko selbst Venezuela besuchen. Wahrscheinlich will der slawische Autokrat sicher sein, dass das Erdöl weiter Richtung Minsk fliesst.

Caracas ist eine chaotische Stadt. Die Abgasen der Autos werden sehr deutlich gespürt. Es gibt kaum Lebensräume für Kultur, für Krankenhäuser. Die Militärs wollen aber den Militärflughafen nun zum Teil in eine Rennstrecke für Formula 1 verwandeln. Der Grund? Der frühere Militär und nun Formula-1 Pilot Maldonado, der dank Millionen Spende nun endlich was gewonnen hat, unterstützt öffentlich den Caudillo.

Der Militär Chávez wird von Sahra Wagenknecht, Bundestagsabgeordnete, als grosser Demokrat und Held angesehen. Die Deutsche sagt, sie weiss, wovon sie redet, denn sie war in meinem Land. Vielleicht werde ich mich von nun an Deutschlandkenner nennen...ich war wesentlich länger in Sahras Land als sie in meinem.


Friday 15 June 2012

The History of the Decline and Fall of Chavismo


People interested in history will probably remember the classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Historian Gibbon analysed at great length the probable reasons for the end of Rome. There have been other contending hypotheses about how that powerful political entity came to its end and even now the discussion keeps stirring historians worldwide. When we take a look at Venezuela, though, the reasons for the eventual fall of Chavismo become much clearer even now.

On April 2010 - according to government officials - an iguana caused a major power outage in Western Venezuela.


On 14 June it was a common opossum that - again according to government officials - caused a prolonged blackout in Ciudad Guayana, one of our main cities.




As Miguel writes in his latest post, it is incredible that such important electricity hubs as the one of Ciudad Guayana could receive such a poor maintenance that this happens - if the story is true, of course.

The pattern is there for all to see: the total collapse of Venezuela's electricity network - and hence of the Bolivarian regime - will undoubtedly lie in the teeth of an agouti


or perhaps of a tapir?


Thursday 14 June 2012

The Economist on Venezuela


Election time...here you are.

The Economist basically comments on what we all saw...Hugo's bad health, his threats, his claims he would take Venezuela "irreversibly" to socialism.

What The Economist didn't seem to know: education has been free all the way to university level for many decades already. In fact: Chávez's parents - like mine - were teachers in public schools and his big brother went to university for free - many decades ago.

Capriles prefers to export food, Chávez prefers to export weapons

I think the choice should be clear for someone who wants Venezuela to progress. Yesterday, the exotic idol of the world extreme left, Hugo Chávez, declared Venezuela will be exporting weapons very soon. 

Today, Henrique Capriles, the candidate of the alternative forces in Venezuela, said what the policy will be if most Venezuelans elect him: to transform the country into a net food exporter, not a weapons producer.

Right now Venezuela is more dependent than ever on food imports. The Bolivarian regime says it's "because now we eat more". How come we can't produce more after 13 years of "development" and so many extra billions coming in through record oil prices?

I think every single person abroad who still supports the military caudillo should feel ashamed by now. I am afraid that is not going to happen yet...it's about their pride and their ideological blindness.



Macabre waiting or building bridges?

In the last months I have been observing how other bloggers take for granted Chávez's death or full incapacitation.

I am very worried. If that is what we need to win, we are in real trouble.

I know any opposition would have an extremely hard time in a country where the state (and thus the government) is getting a record amount of money thanks to high oil prices. That's the case in Russia, that's the case in Equatorial Guinea, that's the case in Kazakhstan and that is the case in Venezuela.

Still, we should be doing better in Venezuela. Why? Because Chávez's regime is squandering money so badly. How? We need to provide content. There is a big issue here: Capriles has to work hard on his oratory skills. There is no way around if he wants to reach more people. He needs to read books in Spanish, really. He needs to work on how to link ideas in a speech.

There are two major problems the opposition has to deal with:

1) There is not "a Venezuela". There are several Venezuelan regions, very clearly divided.

Most key political actors within the Venezuelan opposition are based in and come from Caracas, Maracaibo and Valencia. They haven't presented a clear development plan for each of the other regions. It's not that Chavismo has any plan in those regions apart from more control though the so-called "councils". It doesn't matter Chavismo is clueless: it has the petrodollars, you can only fight against that with well-developed plans, plans customized to your clients - the regions.

2) Venezuelans are basically deluded. They need to be informed about the real state of the nation if we want to defuse the socio-economic bombs that have been planted in the last few decades.

Venezuela is a pressure cooker. The vast majority of the population - the poor, the middle class and the tiny upper classes - hasn't got a clue about how fragile the economy is...Venezuela is structurally speaking in worse shape than other countries. Only oil prices keep us afloat - we still have much higher oil prices than in any previous year -.

The economy in Venezuela won't collapse this year. But the situation will become more critical in the next few years. Do we spend time now telling people about how unsustainable the economy is or we wait a little bit longer...yet again?



Tuesday 12 June 2012

Oil addiction running amok

The current president of PDVSA, Venezuela's state petroleum company, asked the Golf States to reduce oil production: oil prices are "too low". And I thought: how was it about the "fair price"?

I checked it out.

Hugo Chávez declared in 2006 the fair price for oil shouldn't be under 60 dollars a barrel. In 2007 he said the fair price should be between 90 and 100 dollars. The next year the military president thought the price to pay should be around 100 dollars. In 2009, he declared "the fair price for oil is 60 dollars a barrel". The next year, that very just of all prices had to be at not less than 80 dollars. In 2011 the level was 100 dollars.

Here I plotted OPEC's average price (in red) against Hugo I's "Fair Price" (in blue). Mind: I didn't select Hugo's "average" fair price, but the first "precio justo" of his for any given year that I could find on a very quick search. The average price for Venezuela's petroleum this year is around $114 but the current price is actually around the "fair price".

What does this show us, ladies and gentlemen?

It's all the opposite to sustainable development. I wouldn't even call it unsustainable development. The current government is running a rat race.




Venezuela and war

Venezuela is the second most warring country in South America, after Colombia, which is in a civil war. That's the conclusion of the people behind the Global Peace Index.



This doesn't surprise us at all, of course. Only nine countries spent more money importing weapons last year. Some of Chávez's sycophants abroad say Venezuela's Defence budget gets a lower chunk than in other places but they seem to forget (or they pretend to ignore) that a lot of what the current military regime spends on weapons comes from Fonden, the Fondo para el Desarrollo Endógeno.

19 thousand people were murdered in Venezuela last year. The murder rate has more than tripled since the caudillo from Venezuela's Llanos came to power 13 years ago.

Monday 11 June 2012

An English-speaking BBC reporter screwing it up yet again on Venezuela


BBC can produce some nice journalism in many topics. Unfortunately, Venezuela hasn't been very lucky with the kind of English-speaking BBC reporters it is getting. There is BBC Mundo - with Latin American reports with background on the area - and there is BBC English - represented by journalists who simply haven't got much insight about what is really happening in our country. 

Today BBC News wrote that the candidate for the alternative forces, Henrique Capriles, is "against Chávez's left-wing policies". Curiously, that reporter didn't ask herself how come parties such as Causa R, the majority of people under Podemos and PPT and even Bandera Roja - of all parties - can stand behind Capriles. I wonder how good Sarah Grainger's Spanish is. Perhaps as good as Will Grant's? 

Capriles has repeatedly said he supports a system similar to the one in place in Brazil now and he admires Lula. Of course, Lula has said he supports Chávez...Realpolitik and Reaispolitik above all: he would be foolish not to, Brazil's businessmen are making a good killing out of Venezuela's economic disarray and ever-growing dependency on oil. 

So...what are "left-policies"? In reality Capriles would be in many ways left of Labour...and yet BBC says he is against left-winged policies...it does not specify which ones.

Capriles is not against "socialism". He is not "for capitalism". He has repeated time after time he goes beyond that. He represents democratic, pluralistic forces, forces that go from very left to very right. He himself would be left of most in Europe and definitely in Britain. And it is not as if Chávez were such a socialist, as El País reports.

BBC has had a terrible record when it comes to Venezuela. German and Dutch news agencies have done a much better job in portraying what is happening in my country. This is definitely not about BBC being "too lefty". The English-speaking part of BBC is sending journalists who do a very superficial work on Venezuela.

Latin American heads of state and power

It is a pity we never hear the discussion about parliamentarian versus presidential democracies when "experts" talk about re-elections in Latin America. Parliamentarian democracies are completely different from presidential democracies and these differences are essential if people want to understand why there have been term limits for presidential systems, specially for very strong presidential forms. The US allowed indefinite re-election until Roosevelt, but even then a US president had more limited powers than a president in other countries.

It is incredible so many sycophants of "left nationalist" presidents say that the possibility of indefinite re-elections in Germany, Spain or Britain are a reason to allow that in Venezuela, with a completely different - strongly presidential - system.

Here you have the chart of Latin American heads of state and, rounded down, their time in power.


Today Venezuela's military caudillo will register as a candidate for re-election once more. He has been in power since early 1999, more than any  other head of state in Latin America.



Saturday 9 June 2012

Venezuela im Juni

Morgen wird Henrique Capriles, der Kandidat der alternativen Kräfte in Venezuela, sich beim Wahlrat einschreiben. Wir erwarten mit absoluter Sicherheit Schikanen seitens der jetzigen Regierung.
Wird der Caudillo in seiner dreifarbigen Jacke, in einem Anzug oder in seinem Militäruniform erscheinen?

Übermorgen wird der Caudillo - von manchen DDR-Menschen als "Linksnationalist" angesehen - dasselbe tun. Die Regierung wird dann alle staatlichen Mittel benutzen, um Leute nach Caracas zu bringen, damit sie ihre angebliche oder echte Unterstützung zeigen. Beamten werden um ihren Job bangen müssen, wenn sie nicht dabei sind.

Die Regierung hat zwei sozialdemokratische Parteien "enteignet": ihre Gebäude und alles dabei sowie die Namen werden nun Chávez-Anhängern zugesprochen. Die meisten Menschen dieser Parteien hatten vor etwa zwei Jahren ihre Trennung vom Chavismus bekanntgemacht. Der Caudillo konnte das nicht akzeptieren. Also sagte er den Richtern, dass sie eine für den Chavismus geeignete Entscheidung treffen mussten. Und genau das haben die Richter getan.



Thursday 7 June 2012

Venezuela's murder in perspective

Some people are discovering the wheel about crime in Venezuela. I have written previously a little bit about the topic. Here I wanted to add one extra reference. 

Venezuelans and some foreign historians have a problem in understanding long-time developments. Some Venezuelans with authoritarian tendencies tend to become nostalgic about Pérez Jiménez's dictatorship because of low crime levels back then. I am not sure about how "normal violent crime" was then: even if I have heard elderly in my family talking about how safe it was at night, how people would not lock their doors, I have no data. Of course, Pérez Jiménez did get  a lot of people tortured and murdered - a lot of them socialists, even if not all. The self-styled "socialist" Chávez, who has publicly shown his admiration for Pérez Jiménez, got elected, among other reasons, because some silly people thought he would bring back that "peaceful time". 

In some history books supporting Chávez we read as one of the boldest criticisms that "Chávez probably hasn't been able to manage the crime issue". They say crime levels before Chávez had dramatically increased. Was it so? How was the general development, really? 

I haven't been able to find murder rates for many periods of time, but I found some numbers about crime in 1911-1913. If you read Spanish, you can take a look at the document here, specially at the bottom. I translate a fragment:

Until the sixties, the murder rate and the amount of wounded were considerably higher in rural areas and they kept being very high until the seventies (Gómez Grillo, 1979). From then on, violent crime has dropped in the rural areas to increase in the urban ones. 

That is interesting.

I also have detailed information from 1995 on. My guess is that crime got to a historical minimum in the seventies, started to rise considerably in the early nineties and was going to stabilize about the time our current caudillo got elected. As soon as I can, I will try to find some hard data for the sixties and seventies. And then we can start bringing up a few more hypothesis and possible solutions.



Wednesday 6 June 2012

This year at a public hospital built in Venezuela over 45 years ago

I was born in this public - free - hospital several decades ago. It is still the only general public hospital in my city, Valencia. Valencia has over 1.3 million people. There are several private clinics, a couple of specialised hospitals and a series of tiny health centres  that are supposed to be one of the successes of the so-called "Bolivarian revolution". Foreign sycophants of Venezuela's caudillo praise those centres as "a great advancement". 

Venezuela now, thanks to external factors, is receiving several times the amount of petrodollars it used to get in the nineties - before Chávez came to power. Still, the "civic-military government" has let most hospitals - but for one or two Potemkin villages - crumble down.








Tuesday 5 June 2012

Chávez's deaths and bets

I am worried by the way some Venezuelan oppos are falling for the rumour of Chávez's imminent demise.
When one analyses the possible sources they are basing themselves on, suspicion creeps in: they think they are hearing new confirmations of what they had previously heard when they are recycling the same data over and over again, data we simply can't rely upon.

Let me clarify: I don't know what Chávez really has. All I know is that we should not focus on that. If he is lying, if he is exaggerating his disease and he is already cured or he was fine for a long time or if he is very ill but he is in reasonable shape to appeared cured for October, the opposition will come up as fools and Chávez will sell himself as The Bolivarian Phoenix. And that will be enough for him to win more momentum and push forward more autocratic measures in the following months. And that would be bad, whether he lives much longer or not.

If he does die before 7 October, he dies. Then we will know. On a political level, we shouldn't be busy about it. Instead, we should be talking to the country about how Bolibarchs are plundering Venezuela and we should be explaining how Venezuela's socio-economic structure is becoming more rotten than ever.