Si eres hombre y quieres morir joven en Suramérica: Venezuela

Expectativa de vida en años desde 1990 en algunos países de Suramérica

Hay muchas conclusiones que se pueden sacar de analizar de manera correcta los datos de la Organización Mundial de la Salud relativos a la expectativa de vida en el mundo. Aun así, lo primero que me llamó la atención fue  el hecho de que actualmente Venezuela posee las segundas peores expectativas de vida de Sudamérica si uno es un hombre. Solo en Bolivia los hombres tienden a morir antes. El desarrollo de la expectativa de vida para las mujeres también se está rezagando, pero la situación es particularmente mala para los hombres venezolanos. La causa principal es evidente: violencia.

Aquí pueden ver cómo Paraguay y Colombia superaron a Venezuela en 2004 y 2008 respectivamente, en pleno período de Hugo Chávez. Eso fue algo que los tontos útiles que otrora aplaudieron al chavismo no percibieron.

Espero volver pronto con un post que ponga en perspectiva el desarrollo de la mujer en Venezuela en comparación con el resto de Suramérica.

More on food and sustainability

As you probably know if you follow Venezuelan news, people can't even find maize flour - cornmeal-, which is staple food. The government forces companies to sell one kilogram for 20 Bs, which is way under production costs.

Shortages in Caracas are bad, but other cities fare worse. Most Venezuelans live in those cities. The situation is a little bit better in semi-rural or rural areas...but even there it is bad and it is getting worse as urban people go to those areas to get some of the  food.

The picture below shows a stand where a street vendor in a village close to Valencia sells maize dough, which is the way maize was prepared in the times of my grandparents, before industrialized cornmeal appeared. You can make up to 7 arepas with one of those 1 kg dough bags. For comparison you can produce about 16 arepas out of a kilogram of industrial cornmeal. The price for those dough bags is right now about Bs 400. That means: one arepa costs you around Bs 57.1. If you could get a cornmeal package at the official price - those Bs 20 I mentioned earlier - you could cook 1 arepa for Bs 1.25. As I said, there is a huge shortage of industrial cornmeal. Right now you have to pay 1000 bs or more for one kilogram at the black market. That means if you want to cook arepas and have only access to the blac market, you have to pay Bs 62.5 in cornmeal per arepa. That is how the maize dough market came to be.

Of course, this alternative is not very scalable: firstly, the method is work intensive. Then there is the land: Venezuelans have transformed in the last few decades most of the most productive agricultural areas around the major cities into badly designed urbanizations or slums. Most of the agricultural areas in the highly fertile Tuy and the Victoria-Valencia Valleys and in a lot of areas around the coast is gone. Most of this production is coming from the  little gardens of people who have no property rights for their pieces of land close to the more mountainous areas of Guacara or places like Miranda.

That is why people in many poor urban areas like La Isabelica, in Valencia, are looting.

Venezuela på norsk

The Norwegian TV has a little documentary about the mess in Venezuela.

Og her kan du også lese om Venezuela.

Hats off to S.

My poor Venezuelan people under Chavismo

Venezuelans used to eat maize flour. Production is collapsing because of the whole price controls, the currency control with several exchange rates favoring more corruption, the massive stealing from military and state functionaries and general mismanagement of the economy.

Now Venezuelans are eating cassava. That is a plant that can be easily planted. There are several problems with its use, though. Firstly, people need to cook it very well because otherwise cassava can be highly poisonous. There is the issue of scalability: there is only so much land, cassava has never been produced on an industrial scale in Venezuela and anyway, trying to make cassava production scalable is pointless if we haven't addressed the collapse of maize production in the first pace...but then you would need to change the essence of corrupt Chavismo.

This is what my relatives in poor areas of Venezuela are telling me right now: A kilo of fresh cassava costs Bs. 600. With a minimum wage you can buy 19 kilos every month...and nothing else.

A full minimum wage would give you otherwise 13.5 kg of beans, 11.57 kg of carrots or 3 kg of chicken. Yes: your minimum wage salary gives you three kilograms of chicken.

My relatives and friends are spending more and more time queuing up. It would be interesting - although a full challenge - if someone could come up with a way to gauge the increase in hours spent on those queues.

The government as well as some deluded people from the extreme left claim it's all because of some economic war. Shortages were not just part of the end of socialist or pseudo-socialist regimes with price controls and no independent powers. Shortages were present throughout the existence of those regimes - since Lenin times through Stalin - and later on.

Repression will scale up. Venezuelans need more support from the outside world.

Der Spiegel und Venezuela

Hier können Sie einen neuen Artikel des Spiegels über Venezuela lesen. Die meisten Texte, die dort über mein Land verfasst werden, sind in Eile aus verschiedenen Agenturen zusammengefügte Nachrichten oder Texte des Herrn Klaus Ehringfelds - auch ohne viel Kontext. Der verlinkte Text gehört zur Ehringefeld-Kategorie. Irgendwie hat der Spiegel Schwierigkeiten damit, venezolanische Oppositionspolitiker zu interviewen oder die Meinungen unterschiedlicher lateinamerikanischen Experten aus Lateinamerika, nicht aus Bielefeld, darzustellen. Das ist seltsam, denn sonst lese ich in der Zeitschrift Interviews mit allen möglichen Akteuren aus Syrien, Saudiarabien, China, Uzbekistan und so weiter. Ist Venezuela zu entfernt, so dass nur die von ehringfeldartigen Journalisten zufällig getroffenen Venezolaner zu Wort kommen, wenn überhaupt? Ich weiss es nicht. Auf jeden Fall finde ich es schade, dass Venezuela generell in den deutschen Medien vor allem von anderen, vor allem durch deutsche "Experten" erklärt wird.

Man sieht schon, dass Ehringfeld - wie Heinz Dieterich- das Scheitern des Chavismus erkennt. Man sieht aber auch, dass er über die ganze Opposition, die jetzt ganz deutlich die Mehrheit der Wähler bildet, eine sehr verallgemeinernde, negative Meinung hat. Und man sieht, dass er das Land immer noch nicht versteht.

Das von manchen Deutsche immer noch bewahrte alte-neue Bild Lateinamerikas

Und hier einige Zitage dieses Herren:

"die schlechte (Nachricht) ist, dass der  Ton vor allem bei der  Opposition schärfer wird."

Anscheinend hat Ehringfeld den Ton des Maduros und seiner Bonzen gar nicht verstanden.

Da sagt der frühere Putschist Mota und jetzige Gouverneur von Nueva Esparta, dass die Namen aller Menschen, die für das Referendum unterschrieben, bekannt gemacht werden und dass diese Leute mit Folgen zu rechnen haben. Andere Chavistas, wie der ebenso Militär Diosdado Cabello, haben klipp und klar gesagt, dass jeder Beamte, der für das Referendum unterschrieben hat, seinen Job verlieren wird. Das ist natürlich nichts Neues: wir haben das schon mit der Lista Tascón im Jahr 2004 gesehen und das war nicht schön.

"Auslöser des aktuellen Zorns der Opposition ist die angebliche Untätigkeit des Wahlrates CNE".

Nein, nein und nein. Es ist nicht angeblich. Es ist sehr tatsächlich. Wenn man im Gesetzt sagt, dass ein Schritt des Referendums in 5 Tagen durchgeführt werden muss, ein anderer in 20 und so weiter, ist das nicht angeblich. Die Liste der Gesetze, die der Wahlrat verletzt hat, ist sehr gross. Die Liste der Verfassungsabsätze, die das von der Exekutive völlig kontrollierte Obergericht, ist fast so gross wie die Zahl aller Absätze. Die Anzahl der Venezolaner, der politische Gefangene sind, wächst weiterhin. Die Mangelwirtschaft, die schon zu Zeiten des Caudillos Chávez Schwierigkeiten bereitete, verschärft sich sehr schnell.

In einem anderen Artikel spricht der Spiegel über vereinzelte Plünderungen. Was versteht man unter "vereinzelt" auf Mediendeutsch? In 3 Monaten 10? 20? 100? 200? So was und so was und so viel mehr?

OPEC-Fass: Erdölpreise

Venezuelan politicians do not want to be in congress, they want to be caciques

Venezuelan deputies don't want to spend much time at the National Assembly. We have seen this before: most prefer to be mayors of a small city in a poor area than a deputy in Caracas. The reason is simple: they have more power, more money and more possibilities to give employment to their people.

We saw that with the PSUV deputies and we see it now with the opposition deputies.

Examples:

Deputy Larissa González now wants to be the governor of Delta Amacuro.

Deputy Carlos Ramos wants to be deputy of Mérida.

Mind: these people were elected as deputies just 5 months ago!

We should have an open discussion before National Assembly elections: do you want to be deputy just to use the position as a platform?

Venezuela now and what to do (I)

average yearly price for an OPEC oil barrel

Above you see Venezuela's Alpha and Omega...it's the average oil price as dollars per barrel for each year. Actually: the data reflects OPEC average barrel whereas Venezuela's oil is somewhat cheaper. Prices have started to increase since February. As usual, some so-called specialists say there is a clear trend now and some other so-called specialists there is none. Their guess is almost as good as your or my grandfather's.

Even if prices were to keep increasing, anything under 100 dollars a barrel won't be enough to keep Venezuela's economy afloat.

And yet: we have seen Chavismo is able to  keep power even if Venezuela is in misery...as it has been for several years now. Beyond Caracas, Valencia and Maracaibo and some surrounding areas, the regime firmly controls what people can watch and read. Your average Russian Ivan Popov in Nizhny Novgorod or even a village around Kemerovo is more likely to be able to surf at high speed on the Internet than my José González or María Rodríguez in Guacara, Calabozo or Quíbor, the kind of urban centres where more than half of Venezuela's population live. Even though the vast majority of Venezuelans are spending many hours every week queuing up to be able to buy a few basic products and find only a fraction of them, even if murder rates are among the highest in the world, even if the inflation is the highest at all, there is still a 30% of the population that keeps supporting the regime. Why? Because for them a turning back is just too painful, because they know nothing else, because they fear to lose the state jobs they now have. 

Don't fool yourself: Chavismo is led by gangsters who have a lot of skeletons in their closets. Chances they leave power willingly are less than of bank robbers of turning themselves to the police unless they are completely cornered.

What is going to come? 

We might find some support from the new government in Argentina, but Macri is very busy now trying to fix an economy plundered by the Kirchner family. Peru's future is still to be decided. Brazil is in a mess of its own. Other Latin American countries are getting into recession mode as well.

Venezuelans of good faith are again left to their own. Still, there is a lot they can do.

Let's start with this: Venezuelan expats need to organise demos in front of the embassies of Latin American countries in Latin America and all of the Americas to 

1- denounce how the Supreme Court in Venezuela is constantly violating the Venezuelan constitution

2- force the renewal of the Judiciary 

3- make the Venezuelan regime accept independent observers who will prevent abuses of power during the recall process.

Venezuelans in Brazil need to talk about these things in front of the embassies of Peru and Colombia, Venezuelans in Germany need to do that in front of the embassies of Colombia and Mexico, Venezuelans in Washington need to do the same in front of the embassies  of Chile and Costa Rica and so on. The whole world needs to know Venezuelan democrats are asking their Latin American neighbours to support democracy the same way Venezuelans supported democracy in Latin America when most countries were living under military dictatorships.