Venezuela: no tin for coffins, no coffins for Venezuela's dead, more lies and repression for the living

Nice view until you start to fall

Maduro promised to eliminate extreme poverty for 2018. A few weeks earlier the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (INE) had published a report stating poverty had significantly increased in the last year but then one of Maduro's ministers said that was not true. That was the same minister who said the government didn't want to take people out of poverty for them then to become "squalid" (one of the words Chávez used to describe people who disliked his policies) and then said he had been quoted out of context. As the INE is fully dependent on the Executive and the Executive won't tolerate dissent, I am sure there will be more than reprimands. People are bound to get sacked for saying the truth or at least threatened with an immediate sack if they publish similar figures again.

All public organisations, including the Central Bank, talk about an economic war as reason for the complete economic decay and the shortage economy in Venezuela.

There is no tin production and hardly any dollars to import stuff, so even mortuaries are running out of coffins (which, I didn't know, usually contain tin).

The regime is going to investigate opposition leader María Corina Machado and others for "trying to assassinate Maduro". Since 1998 Chavismo has announced at least once every quarter a major assassination attempt. Since Chávez is "the Eternal Commandant" and Maduro is in power, the announcements have become more frequent.

The government wants to send all meaningful opposition leaders to jail or, preferably, to exile before the economy deteriorates further.

Meanwhile, South America's leaders are pretending they don't see anything. Almost all of their countries still have a trade surplus with Venezuela and the leaders of Brazil and Uruguay were tortured during dictatorships of the right...they apparently think human right abuses from regimes that wear the label "left" are better than others.

Ah, in Valencia, Venezuela's third largest city, there was a new march to protest the extreme pollution of the region's tap water. In the nineties bad sewage planning led to an increase in the Valencia Lake levels - levels that had been receding for centuries -. Chávez had the "great idea" to connect the water of the Valencia Lake with a water reservoir in Southwestern Valencia, the Pao-Cachinche reservoir. The problem is that the Valencia Lake waters are highly polluted, they are becoming more polluted by the day and the water treatment plant in Los Guayos that is supposed to deal with that is not enough and pigs could maintain it better than the current employees do.

If you open a tap in most of the Carabobo region and there is water, it will stink a lot and it will be either dark yellowish or extreme white, with chlorine levels that are not healthy at all.

Venezuela is falling apart.