Election day and PDVSA |Wahltag und PDVSA

Heute werde ich auf Englisch und auf Deutsch bloggen. Hier könnt Ihr von der Ferne eins der zahlreichen Installationen von der staatlichen Erdölgesellschaft PDVSA sehen. Die ganzen Zäune sind mit Werbung für Maduro und Erinnerungen an den Militärcaudillo Chávez versehen. Dies ist gesetzwidrig, aber Gesetze gelten nur für eine Seite.

Today I will blog in English and German. Here you can see from the distance one of the numerous facilities belonging to the oil state company PDVSA. All the fences are covered with propaganda for Maduro and reminders of the military caudillo Chávez. This is against the law but the law is for one side only.

Ps. I see Francisco Toro discovered America: now he finally remarked that what counts is the mobilization the opposition can make of classes D and E...still, many of his English speaking Venezuelan readers are pissed off he remarked the focus on the opposition's effort abroad is wrong. I actually agree with Francisco but I think he is very late...at least ten years to remark something that should be obvious by now. Apparently, Francisco had to go through some study by an Omar Z.

This is worrying. If he, a political scientist blogging about Venezuela, has been so late about this issue: what to expect from the rest of our "elite" or best educated? Still today one of the deputies the opposition for the Latin American Parliament, José Ramón Sánchez, spends most of his time coordinating Venezuelan voters in the US and Europe. That's pretty pointless because they do not need that. I have had a couple of twitter exchanges with him and it is quite disconcerting how disconnected he seems to be. When I told him last year he should spend more time organising help for voters in Venezuela he replied stuff like "We are one million abroad" (but only 60000 are registered to vote and even if, we won't be counted until results in Venezuela are announced and the victor decided). Or he said "we are doing things but they can't be publicly said". Right, and I also know what kind of things. He still cannot recognise priorities. At the least, he should be doing a stronger work on openly denouncing at international level the misuse of state resources, the government attacks against the opposition in the interior (that area he seems to know so little about) and so on. Instead, he is reporting about how many Venezuelans are going to vote in Paris or Madrid.

Few paid attention when I explained time after time most poor still do not have a car and that the low-key opposition activists from outside Caracas were using their own cars to transport others and that they urgently needed more support. Chavismo did not only have more people like that but also the whole state vehicles and employees.  I wonder when he is going to realise we also have big big problems with coordination of witnesses

Do you need to read field studies to discover elections in Venezuela are won by the way we can mobilize poor people? 

Last year Francisco was still thrilled by Capriles' team producing ads about Venezuelans of all classes meeting in front of a hot dog vendor. Somehow the hot dog vendor is the only place most Eastern Caraquenos have of meeting people from other classes. He still believes what notorius Caldera told him a few years ago that we have witnesses everywhere and actas are under control. He was probably right about El Hatillo and Chacao. 

Francisco dismissed my stories as anecdotal when I said in lots of places witnesses left earlier, in some other places they left with the actas but the actas were never collected, they never arrived to Caracas. Apparently, many people within the opposition living in El Hatillo, Chacao or Montreal do not know what it takes to be a witness in the average city of Carora, El Tigre, Punto Fijo or Maturín and be forced to decide what to do without a car to go home in a poor, isolated neighbourhood.