Little things Venezuelan thugs use

I read the news today...yet another attack by Venezuelan thugs against police. Everything started after the security services killed three gangsters a few days ago.

Just one thing mentioned on the side: the attackers outgunned the police forces. The thugs were using AR-15. Do you know what that is?

Those things look like these:

Do you think they could have got them from the military?

Perdidos en la Inseguridad

El gobierno madurista se ve obligado, una vez más, a entregarse al ritual público de preparar un nuevo plan de seguridad. Esta vez  el proceso se reinicia por el revuelo generado ante el asesinato de una famosa ex-reina de belleza y de su esposo. La noticia se ha regado por el mundo entero y Maduro nuevamente tiene que pretender hacer algo, que refuerza y repotencia el sistema de seguridad. Miguel Rodríguez Torres,  duodécimo ministro de lo que ahora se llama "Ministerio del Poder Popular de Interiores, Justicia y Paz y decimotercio cambio ministerial en catorce años, ha anunciado que se reunirá con todo el mundo - hasta con los líderes opositores. Este ministro no es un especialista en derecho, en logística o en sociología. Es un militar más de los que lideraron las sangrientas intentonas de golpe de Estado de 1992 y que dominan la política de Venezuela desde el 99. 

Entre otras cosas, Rodríguez anuncia nuevos controles en la carretera que une Puerto Cabello con Valencia, donde la pareja famosa fue asesinada el 6 de enero. 

Ante esto uno tiene que preguntarse hasta qué punto el gobierno nacional e incluso nuestros líderes opositores tienen una visión y un deseo de analizar las cosas de manera racional.

El mapa que ven aquí es de Estado Carabobo, donde ocurrió el asesinato que volvió a generar protestas extras contra la inseguridad. He usado las estadísticas publicadas en periódicos regionales y los datos del último censo de Venezuela para calcular la tasa de asesinatos de cada municipio (X homicidios por 100 mil habitantes).

Así, el Municipio Puerto Cabello, que es ahora el centro de interés de los medios de comunicación y del gobierno, registró una tasa de 49 asesinatos por 100 mil personas el año pasado. Esto es muchísimo. Es más del doble de la tasa de asesinatos a nivel nacional de 1998, el año antes de que el chavismo llegara al poder. Ahora bien: si vemos alrededor, nos damos cuenta que hay muchas otras regiones en el estado que tienen una tasa mucho mayor. El infierno de Carabobo es el Municipio Libertador - Venezuela tiene un montón de topónimos repetidos debido al culto a la personalidad de militares-. Ese municipio, donde se halla la cárcel de Tocuyito, tiene una tasa de asesinatos de 100 muertos por 100 mil habitantes. Le sigue el municipio Diego Ibarra, que se halla cerca de la ciudad de Maracay. Valencia sigue algo después. La tasa de asesinatos de este municipio es algo que merece un mejor análisis: más de la mitad de la población de dicho municipio vive en la mega-parroquia Miguel Peña y es allí donde probablemente se produzcan más de 3/4 de todos los asesinatos del municipio.

Los municipios menos peligrosos son el municipio básicamente urbano de San Diego, manejado por el opositor Scarano, y los municipios rurales de Miranda, Montalbán y ante todo Bejuma.

El gobierno habla ahora de "planes inteligentes". Sería interesante que algún vocero explicase porqué estos planes son tan inteligentes. Se basan, ante todo, en restringir los horarios de los motociclistas - en base a que los asesinos suelen ser personas que se mueven en motos.

Una de las primeras cosas que hizo el caudillo Chávez al llegar al poder fue sacar de las cárceles a miles de presos. En teoría se trataba de darle libertad a aquellos que habían quedado enredados en un sistema judicial que no procesaba, que no investigaba, que no resolvía nada. Aun así, tampoco se sabe qué procedimientos y que seguimiento se hizo de estos liberados. Solo se sabe que la tasa de asesinatos pasó de 19 asesinatos en el 98 a 34 en 2002.

En 2012 y 2013 se produce una nueva ola de liberaciones por los mismos motivos. La ministra "del Poder Popular de los Servicios Penitenciarios dice que está acertando un certero golpe al retraso procesal...que según ella se originó en la Cuarta República. Quizás debería hablar de golpes certeros, en plural, porque desde 1999 se la pasan en eso.

Definitivamente, los que mandan o quieren mandar parecen no tener ni idea de qué hacer con la situación, salvo pretender que están haciendo algo.

Municipio	Tasa de homicidios (2013)	Población*  (apr. censo 2011)
Valencia	68.69	829856
Libertador	100.5	166166
Los Guayos	56.15	149606
Guacara	58.45	176218
Carlos Arvelo	61.22	150277
Naguanagua	48.27	157437
Diego Ibarra	86.09	104536
Puerto Cabello	49.86	182493
Miranda	30.94	29092
San Joaquín	43.67	64124
San Diego	36.46	93257
Juan José Mora	62.11	69236
Bejuma	20.6	48538
Montalbán	24.09	24908

* La población en 2013 seguramente ha crecido, así que la tasa debería ser un 2% menor al total mostrado aquí. Lo que hice fue redondear hacia abajo. Quizás pude haber redondeado un poco más, pero eso no modifica las tasas mucho.

Ps. Aquí pueden ver un informe del Banco Central de Colombia sobre cómo ha variado la tasa de homicidio en Colombia en la última década. Observen en especial los datos en la página 26. Observen también cómo el informe explica previamente toda la metodología usada. Ojalá en Venezuela se llegue un día a producir estudios tan profesionales. Lamentablemente, hoy en día el Banco Central de Venezuela es una sombra de lo que antes era: manejado por personas que ni siquiera pueden hablar o sacar cuentas y que escriben informes sobre "guerra económica" y lo que ha hecho o no el supuesto "comandante eterno".

Bloggers and Venezuelan economics

Go read Daniel's description of some economic woes, what the government could do to get some relief, what it won't do, what it might.

Francisco also has a nicely written piece about how the Boligarchs and lesser Chavistas are grumbling now about the economic situation.

Do you know what frustrates me the most? That the majority of our opposition leaders - even those who are lawyers or economists and at the same time full-time paid deputies - seem incapable of explaining plain economic issues to the vast majority of Venezuelans, most of which have never been abroad. They really need no more than cross-multiplication and knowlege about how to plot some charts - everything you can learn between ages 9 and 13- to do the job.

All you need to know

Meanwhile Chavismo is carrying out a very intensive propaganda campaign to show the average Venezuelan that he/she is much better off than the Spaniard, who has become like the mythical anti-El Dorado figure - conveniently so with the economic mess Spain is in right now and the fact most Venezuelans have never been to Spain and don't have a real feeling about the average Spaniard or even average Colombian, Chilean, Mexican, right now.

 

Ein anderer Putschist als Finanzminister

Maduro ernannte gestern den Militär und ehemaliger Putschist Rodolfo Clemente Marco Torres zum neuen Finanzminister Venezuelas. Das ist schlimmer, als wenn Angela Merkel Boris Becker zum Finanzminister ernennen würde. 

Rodolfo Marco Torres, 48 Jahre alt, schloss sein Studium der "Militärwissenschaften" im Jahr 1988 ab und nahm am blutigen Putschversuch von Chávez im Jahr 1992 teil. Als der Militärführer dann 1999 an an die Macht kam, bekam Torres mehrere Stellen in staatlichen Institutionen, die mit Geld zu tun hatten: er war Präsident des Schatzamtes, Generaldirektor des Präsidentenamtes, Finanzdirektor des Staatssekretärs, "Unter-Kämmerer" des nationalen Schatzamtes und Präsident der "öffentlichen Bank". Frag mich nicht, was das alles war. In der Zwischenzeit war er auch mit FONDEN, dem Entwicklungsfonds Venezuelas, beschäftigt. Das ist ein Fond, durch den viele Milliarden Dollar jedes Jahr ohne jegliche Kontrolle der Nationalversammlung verwaltet -das heißt - ausgegeben werden. Es sind schon mehr als 21 Milliarden Dollar aus FONDEN verschwunden und kein Mensch weiß, wohin. Marco Torres wahrscheinlich auch nicht.

Sie können mich negativ nennen, wenn Sie wollen. Ich muss aber gestehen, dass ich nicht besonders optimistisch bin, was Venezuela anbelangt.

Dies ist Moe Howard, nicht Rodolfo Marco Torres

How we eat compared to the others (Oxfam dixit)

Oxfam has a new report explaining us how well people in different countries are eating.

In South America Venezuela is again at the bottom: even oil-less Bolivia is a little bit better off than Venezuela when it comes to food. The Oxfam people basically compared things such as "enough to eat", "availability of food", "quality of food" and "unhealthy diet". The land ruled by the military since 1999 particularly struggles with food availability. Of course, the Ministry of Truth will again say this is all a capitalist fib.

Maduro, die Militärs und die Nationalversammlung

Maduro ist ein Zivilist. Er dankt seiner Macht aber Chávez, einem Militär und dazu Putschist. Er ist nur da, weil die Militärs es wollen. Darum will er immer wieder zeigen, wie sehr er diese Leute liebt. Zur Zeit spricht er immer häufiger über die Notwendigkeit, eine zivil-militärische Union zu verstärken. 

Morgen Mittwoch wird er vor der Nationalversammlung reden. In Venezuela braucht der Präsident nur einmal im Jahr vor der Versammlung zu erscheinen. Er muss keine Fragen beantworten, im Gegensatz zu einem Premier in einer parlamentarischen Demokratie. Von daher war es sinnlos, wie die Chávez-Apologeten die Abhebung der Amtszeitbegrenzung für Venezuela erklären wollten.

Maduro wird sprechen wie er will. Er kann sagen, bestimmte Oppositionellen sind Diebe und Mörder (schon gesagt), was auch immer: er darf das sagen, weil die Justiz in Venezuela ihm völlig unterordnet ist. Und die Staatsmedien werden seine Worte immer wieder wiederholen und die der Opposition nie, es sei denn, um sie zielgericht für Propagandazwecke zu benutzen.

Das ist die Regierung, die die Linksextremisten in Deutschland wollen.

"Ach, wenn Deutschland von Chávez gelernt hätte"

Justice ministers in Venezuela and elsewhere: what are they made of?

In the tables below you can see the list of ministers for Interior and Justice of Brazil, Chile and Venezuela since late 1998, with their professions. For Venezuela I added a star sign next to the name of those who very openly fell out of love with Chavismo - i.e. had a very public quarrel with Chávez. Brazil has serious problems with violent crime but the situation is better than it was in the nineties. Chile has violent crime levels that are so low as to be the envy of all of Latin America. Venezuela, on the other hand, is one of the most dangerous countries on Earth now. The murder rate of Brazil is about a third that of Venezuela. Just in case: I am not making big judgements on the value of a university degree for becoming a "Minister of Justice". I have heard quite some rumours about Venezuelan El Aissami and what he did when he was studying. He was the only one who studied law among Chávez's ministers in this field. But those are rumours. I hardly know anything about the different ministers in those other countries. Still, I think there is a pattern here. We need to remember this now, when in Venezuela Maduro is again talking about a stronger "civic-military" union.

BRAZIL
Renan Calheiros	“Politician”	1998
José Carlos Dias	Lawyer	1999
José Gregori	Lawyer	2000
Aloysio Nunes Ferreira Filho	Lawyer	2001
Miguel Reale Júnior	Lawyer	2002
Paulo de Tarso Ramos Ribeiro	Lawyer	2002
Márcio Thomaz Bastos	Lawyer	2003
Tarso Genro	Lawyer	2007
Luiz Paulo Barreto	Economist	2010
José Eduardo Cardozo	Lawyer	2011
CHILE
Raúl Troncoso Castillo	Lawyer	1998
José Miguel Insulza Salinas	Lawyer	2000
Francisco Vidal Salinas	History	2005
Andrés Zaldívar Larraín	Lawyer	2006
Belisario Velasco Baraona	None	2006
Edmundo Pérez Yoma	Arts,Entrepreneur	2008
Rodrigo Hinzpeter Kirberg	Lawyer	2010
Andrés Pío Bernardino Chadwick Piñera	Lawyer	2012
VENEZUELA
Luis Miquilena*	"Politician", union leader	1999
Ignacio Araya*	International Relations	2000
Luis Alfonso Dávila*	Military	2000
Luis Miquilena*	"Politician", union leader	2001
Ramón Rodríguez Chacín	Military	2002
Diosdado Cabello	Military	2002
Lucas Rincón Romero	Military	2003
Jesse Chacón Escamillo	Military	2004
Pedro Carreño	Military	2006
Ramón Rodríguez Chacín	Military	2007
Tarek El Aissami	Lawyer	2008
Néstor Reverol	Military	2012
Miguel Rodríguez Torres	Military	2013

Der Ministeriendschungel im bolivarischen Venezuela

Sehr verehrte Leserinnen und Leser,


Hier haben Sie eine Übersicht über die 30 Ministerien und 111 Vizeministerien, die Nicolas Maduro schaffen oder umgestalten will. 

Als Maduros Vorgänger und Idol, der Caudillo Chávez, an die Macht kam, versprach er, die Ministerien der "4. Republik" drastisch zu reduzieren. Stattdessen wurden es mehr. Schlimmer noch: Chávez wechselte die Minister durchschnittlich jedes Jahr, manchmal schneller. So hatte seine Regierung in 14 Jahren 12 Innenminister. Die Mordrate Venezuela ist in dieser Zeit um über 300% gestiegen.

Maduro will diese Tradition fortsetzen. Ich habe in Gelb die Vizeministerien gezeichnet, die ich besonders albern finde. Unter diesen Vizeministerien zählt man das Vizeministerium für das Höchste Soziale Glück des Volkes und das Vizeministerium für die physische Aktivität.

Eine der interessantesten Stellen ist die des Vizeministers für Soziale Netzwerke des Ministeriums für die Volksmacht der Kommunikation und der Information.

Man kann das Bild klicken und vergrößern!

A bloody coup monger as minister of Interior, Justice and Peace...and other things from the Venezuelan fraud

I just write this to remind foreigners about who the people in power in Venezuela are.

Miguel Eduardo Rodríguez Torres, the current minister of "the Popular Power of Interior, Justice and Peace", was one of the coup mongers who attacked the Presidential House in February 1992. He lead a group of military who killed quite a lot of innocent people there.

He has been involved in the training of the paramilitary Bolivarian circles.

He has been in charge of the security services SEBIN.

And he is one of the many pseudo-revolutionaries who want to minimize the crime situation in Venezuela.

As Rocío San Miguel explains, this guy has now managed to increase his power. He can be considered as influential among the military strongmen as that other coup monger, Diosdado Cabello.

Yesterday Maduro ratified Rodríguez in his position and proceeded to change some ministers, as Chavismo so often does. Below you can see a chart of the new changes.

There is a bad singer who got the ministry of Sports as he was not elected as mayor last December. He replaced a woman who was at that position for just a few months. There is another former coup monger, Wilmer Barrietos, who now became head of the "Despacho para la Presidencia", a sort of Presidential Office - don't mix up with the Presidential Secretary.

Venezuela's wonderful tourism in the times of the civic-military "revolution"

This chart shows the evolution across time of the amount of foreign tourists to American countries outside North America and huge Argentina and Brazil. Apart from a group of hardly known islands, you have them all: from Aruba, Colombia and Peru to Venezuela. I got the data from the World Bank.

The red dotted line at the bottom represents Venezuela. 

Some things you can spot right away:

1. Venezuela receives less foreign tourists now than in 1997, but has basically got the same amount of tourists
2. Cuba had as many foreign visitors as Venezuela in 1998 whereas now it has more than 5 times the tourists Venezuela gets. A similar case goes for Guatemala, Costa Rican, Ecuador and other countries.
3. Even El Salvador, formerly described by someone I knew as Central America's Armpit - surpassed Venezuela
4. The same goes for Honduras, in spite of its also horrible murder rates
5. Aruba, a tiny tiny little island off the coast of Venezuela with fewer beaches than those we have in just a fraction of the Paraguana region, has almost twice as many tourists as Venezuela from Guajira up to Guyana.
6. Few countries get less visitors than Venezuela: a few tiny islands that can hardly receive more tourists, natural-disaster-ravaged, extremely poor Haiti and the tiny group of Guyana and Suriname.

Venezuela has never received many tourists because 1) the country has been very dependent on oil, 2) it has been rather expensive and 3) the authorities have never ever developed infrastructure. 

I remember having visited the ministry of tourism in the early nineties to find out what the hell they were doing. Apparently, their main concern was to publish posters of how beautiful Venezuela was and producing some examinations for tourist guides. 

Now, in the year 2014, we haven't got proper tourist offices or the like just yet. We get posters of the "Comandante Eterno" saluting foreign tourists when they arrive. Things have got grimmer and grimmer. Other bloggers have written about the case of former Miss Venezuela, Miss Spears, who was recently murdered, together with her husband and in front of their little child, while on a tourist visit to her home country. She died in similarly horrible circumstances as many others that same day. The difference was that she was a well-known figure who was currently living abroad and came to Venezuela to promote its tourism. 

This doesn't count if you don't have the people to take care of tourists or to protect the environment

Venezuela's murder rate went from 19 murders per 100 000 inhabitants in 1999, when Chávez started to rule, to 34 in 2002 to 45+ to 70 now, depending on what statistics you want to believe (the government stopped sending murder numbers to United Nations in 2002).

Nope, this doesn't count if you don't have the people to take care of tourists or to protect the environment

There are simply more tourists everywhere in the year 2014 than 15 years ago. Not only are there more people but the middle class has grown almost everywhere in emerging markets and there are more flights. In spite of that, Venezuela's at the bottom and still the "minister of the Popular Power for Tourism" - a relative of yet another left-winged military man- has the chutzpah to brag about how he is promoting tourism.

This doesn't count either while we are polluting it as few do it in the Caribbean and you can get robbed more often while enjoying it because our government is simply incompetent (and now I will be accuse by the government of being the cause of so few tourists: a traitor of the Vaterland for writing this)

Venezuelan genetics in context

The chart below shows the main genetic components of nationals from different Latin American countries based on DNA tests carried out for a Brazilian research project. The chart represents the "average" citizen. We know Latin America shows a huge variance. As a reference, my DNA profile says I have about 67% European, 25% native American and 8% sub-Saharan markers. That is still close to the Venezuelan average. As we know, every region has its tiny but clear variations.

Latin America, Internet, Venezuela and Cuba

This chart shows the average download speed on the Internet across most American nations. As you can see, Venezuela's average Internet speed is at the level of Cuba - which has Internet connection for the better connected thanks Venezuela - and of Bolivia, an extremely poor country.

And this is what the Boligarchs want - to control and curb the flow of information more and more.

Understanding Venezuela for foreigners: the Minister of Information

Querida Delcy Rodríguez, "camarada": este post será enviado a un montón de organizaciones internacionales. Hay algo que se llama "estado de derecho". Eso incluye la prohibición a empleados como tú de abusar de información del Estado - que no es lo mismo que gobierno - con fines políticos.

The Venezuela minister of Information, Delcy Rodríguez, just tweeted a "list of shame" with the names of opposition-minded people who travelled abroad for Christmas, the date of departure and the destination. Ms Rodríguez wrote "Don't miss the list of foreign holiday destinations for opposition leaders". Then she added the list including mostly elected politicians in local elections but also a regime-critical journalist.

Venezuelans abroad have taken countless pictures of the Boligarchs, as we call the state oligarchs pretending to be revolutionaries, abroad. One example is this of the Attorney General getting out of at a posh shop in Paris or Chávez's daughter travelling all around the world or another of communist deputies full of purchases in a gringo shopping centre, in the middle of the Evil Evil Empire. But those pictures are taken by some of the over 1 million Venezuelan expats. What this minister is doing is showing a list that was obviously obtained from the security services.

It is hard for a foreigner to get a real picture of what Venezuela's communicational landscape is like if she doesn't know what information the average Venezuelan in the average Venezuelan city can get. The average Venezuelan city is not Caracas, Valencia or Maracaibo: more than half of Venezuela lives in such cities as Punto Fijo, Charallave, El Tocuyo, Guacara, El Tigre. The fact Venezuela is a highly urbanized country does not mean Caracas but Punto Fijo. Less than 40% of Venezuelans have Internet connection and Internet speeds in Venezuela are among the lowest on Earth. We can envy Nigerians or Malians for the Internet speed they enjoy. Globovisión is now a lame duck and the "many" private TV and radio channels don't dare to show more than baseball, soap operas and the like. If you speak Spanish, you can listen for a couple of minutes - or more if you can - to the current state radio or TV. When I was a child, state radio and TV had mostly educational programmes. Sure enough, we still have badly founded opposition-minded newspapers...in a country where hardly anyone reads. Try to find El Universal outside the very centre of Punto Fijo or Guacara.

Now state TV and radio have reached a level of brainwashing as you wouldn't have seen in Soviet Russia. And that's funny because Venezuela still doesn't have a form of socialism. Not that I would defend socialism - I would only defend pluralism of ideas and a real multi-party system with real competition and a separation of powers. Venezuela simply has a pseudo-communist-led, very dysfunctional Malawi-related form of petro-feudalism with no rule of law.

And yeah, here I put the destinations according to the list the minister used based on immigration data only state employees can have:

What's the problem, Deisy? Only Boligarchs can travel around?