Questions to Frans Timmermans / Vragen aan Frans Frans Timmermans

I just read the questions to the Dutch minister of Foreign Affairs and his answers about the Carvajal affair. You can read that here (in Dutch). I am no deputy and I am not a Dutch citizen. I am a Venezuelan and a EU citizen. Still, I hope some Dutch journalist or politicians will manage to get the information from the Dutch government.

Mijnheer de minister Frans Timmermans

Als Venezolaan zou ik zo vrij willen zijn om U dit willen vragen:

1. Welke nieuwe informatie had u om van het eerdere standpunt af te wijken, om hierna de immuniteit van Hugo Carvajal te erkennen? (uw antwoord op vraag 3 kan dit niet uitleggen)

2. Wat is nu de reden om Hugo Carvajal ¨persona non grata¨ te verklaren in het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden? 

Met grote belangstelling zie ik Uw antwoord tegemoet.

In English:

Dear Minister Frans Timmermans

As Venezuela I want to ask you the following:

1. Which new data did you have that compelled you to change the initial position and recognise Hugo Carvajal's immunity? (your anwer to question 3 doe not tackle this point)

2. What was the reason now to declare Hugo Carvajal "persona non grata" in the Kingdom of the Netherlands? 

I look forward with interest to receiving your response.

This post will go with copy to the Dutch embassy in Venezuela, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to De Telegraaf and to several opposition deputies of the Netherlands and Venezuela.

Hugo Carvajal, a perspective

In January 2014 one of the best known Dutch newspapers, De Telegraaf, published an article about  the retired general Hugo Carvajal. A few of the issues it stated were:

• Aruba is worried about the nomination of Carvajal, a general suspected of being involved in drug dealings as Venezuelan consul
• Carvajal has been linked to the torture and killing of two Colombian military men
• The US had him in the Clinton list since 2008 in relation to drug trafficking and the FARC

The Aruban Parliament had been discussing this back then. Opposition deputy Evelyn Wever-Croes from the MEP party had demanded from the Aruban government an explanation. The government responded it was up to Den Haag to decide whether to accept or not the man as a consul. 

Maduro had signed that nomination 16 January of 2014.

There are lots of Venezuelan "diplomats" in the Netherlands and in the ABC islands and it seems incredible none of them read that article. Why was Carvajal going to Aruba at this stage in a private airplane?

Hugo Carvajal was born in 1960. There are two versions about his birth place: Puerto La Cruz, Anzoátegui or Viejo Fresco, close to Maturín, in the Western Llanos (not far from where Diosdado Cabello was born). I believe the right location is the latter. His sister, Wilma Carvajal, is the mayor of the Cedeño municipality, close to Maturín. She won over Pedro Emilio Briceño. I mentioned Briceño's clan in another post about gangsters from the Maturín region. Nepotism was always an issue in Venezuela but we keep reaching new levels.

Back to Hugo Carvajal: he finished his military studies in 1981.

In February 1992 he took part in the bloody coup led by Hugo Chávez. Carvajal was called "the other Hugo" and he was in the same prison with the caudillo until president Rafael Caldera set them free in 1994.

He worked for the Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) from 2002 and he became its head in 2004. In April 2002 he was in Russia for training when the coup against Chávez took place and he came right away from Moscow. He arrived in Caracas and, handling a machine gun, asked everyone he met in the state buildings who was against Chávez. He was one of the first who got into the Miraflores building. He became colonel and vice-head of the Military Intelligence. 2 years later, in 2004, he became the head of the institution. He remained there until 2011.

Carvajal was in charge with negotiating the liberation of Richard Boulton, who was kidnapped by the FARC.

In 2008 United States accused him of cooperating with the FARC. Chávez defended him.

In 2012 opposition deputy Ismael García wrote on his Twitter account someone told him Carvajal and a judge had left the country. This was false but: is there something about this?

24 April 2013 Maduro named him head of Military Counterintelligence, which is the new DIM. If you visit the site of that organisation you will see they don't even update the dates (2012 is the latest).

In 2014, when Maduro decided to send Carvajal to Aruba, he named general Iván Rafael Hernández Dala (born in 1966) the new head of the Military Counterintelligence. Hernández Dala had been colonel until mid 2013.

What game is being played here? What can Ismael García tell us now? Why did Maduro think it was a wise move to propose Carjaval as consul to Aruba? Or did he just sign something proposed by someone else? Who was that?

US Congress representatives supporting Maduro's regime

Conyers

The House of Represenatives Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill for sanctions against Chavista oligarchs. Apparently, a bunch of representatives led by John Conyers (born in 1929) is asking Obama to repel the bill.

Representatives Gregory Meeks (born in 1953) and Karen Bass (also born in 1953) are also supporting the move because they think any sanction would undermine a dialogue. There are a few others (11 in total) but I haven't been able to find the names.

Now, these three people agreed, like 99.7% of all representatives who took part on a vote, to support a motion "supporting the people of Venezuela as they protest peacefully for democratic change and calling to end the violence". What are they looking for now? Who are behind them? Not us, the opposition of Venezuela.

My question: what dialogue if Maduro has said he wants a dialogue but he won't accept negotiations? A Mugabe-style dialogue?

Meeks

Bass

Some of the Boligarchs these representatives would be protecting:

Diosdado Cabello, former coup monger and current president of National Assembly

Rafael Ramírez, oil company PDVSA mogul

Gringo secret agent detained for the third time in Venezuela

You read it right: Timothy Hallet Tracy, the US citizen who was detained yesterday while trying to leave the country through the Maiquetía airport and who was accused by  Nicolás Maduro of destabilizing our nation, had already been detained twice in the last few months. That's what El Carabobeño says. Last time was while he was filming a pro-Maduro rally in Puerto Cabello.

My question: how was it possible he decided to leave the country through the main door if he was a secret agent and had been detained twice before? Couldn't he find a yacht to take him somewhere else? Take a ferry? Go to Colombia by road?

Is that the way secret CIA agents operate these days? They keep getting caught by our extremely sophisticated intelligence experts until our extremely revolutionary government decides to detain them for good?

Timothy is a 31-year old man who read English at Michigan University. There, according to his dad, he met some Venezuelan students, became friends and decided to go to Venezuela to shoot a film about the political events in the country. I imagine those Venezuelans were the usual Caracas upper-middle class youngsters who go to US to learn English, and who, in their attempts to bring change to Venezuela, want to follow,  yet again, the methods published by Gene Sharp about non-violent political change. Unfortunately, it seems to me, these guys usually don't pay too much attention to content and to getting some insight into the historical, economic and political histories of the events in the old Czechoslovakia Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia or Venezuela. They specially don't pay too much attention about the different identities and myths circulating in our country. In any case, things happen as they usually happen: 

Eva Golinger (read about her in Carrol's El Comandante) will publish a couple of articles in her government-financed newspaper about how the Empire is trying yet again Otpor!-like  tactics for regime-change in Venezuela.

The Maduro criollo media will also have lots of material about how the Imperio is trying to bring down what Chavistas claim to be a revolution.

Venezuelan humble viewers in El Tigre or Punto Fijo will watch the explanations and either think that indeed the gringos are trying anything or think that they are running out of sugar and they have to find sugar and chicken and good maize oil and that's not easy.

I think in this case this Timothy simply wanted to shoot a film that would make him famous. He wanted to experience the emotion of some young revolutionaries who were, indeed, following Gene Sharps ideas and ideals. Now this gringo is detained, his family is worried and gringo diplomants have to go again to a jail to see that one of their nationals is properly treated.

According to the Maduro-military government, Timothy was a US secret agent in charge of destabilizing the nation. According to me - I might be completely wrong - he was a naive man who wanted to be a film maker and live through exciting times.

Meanwhile, the country keeps having the highest murder rate in South America. Those are the priorities in Venezuela.

A Canadian gringo explains where oil-rich Venezuela is getting petrol from

You have to go and see Steven's post. This is the kind of reporting you would normally read in a special article in The Economist, but instead you find it in a blog.

Venezuelans get less and less petrol from this place

Guess who Venezuela's "revolutionaries" are buying  it from

Carter, Carter, Carter, give up!

Ceaușescu and Carter

Shah and Carter

Chávez and Carter

The noisy American

Well, I am referring to Chávez, as he is, after all, a South American. He confirmed there was a US agent who was detained on a bus heading from Colombia to what I assume is Barinas. Venezuelan diplomats in Washington informed the US government about it directly and not through the customary channel, the US embassy in Caracas, which probably just means Venezuelan Bolivarian diplomats didn't know the usual procedure.

In any case: this looks like fun. How on Earth does a US agent arrive to Venezuela with a passport that has entry stamps for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria? What do you think? Is he really a mercenary? A weapons dealer? A joke?

It's cheap, give me two: Venezuelans in El Imperio

Venezuelans were among the top visitors to the US in 2011, which is not surprising at all.

On this chart you can see the top visitors to the United States for last year. Sources come from here and here. I reordered them by tourist per inhabitant. That is: I divided the number of tourists from country X by the population of said country X.

More than half the Canadians went to the US in 2011. That is not astonishing, considering that most Canadians live less than 70 kilometres from the USA border and they can freeze to death if they travel rather to the north. Mexicans are less likely to visit their pals but almost every second Mexican city visit his gringo neighbours last year. Britons love their former colony and Australians are also have an intense relationship with the USA, so they are also among the most loyal visitors to that country. Then you see the rich Dutch, the also very rich Japanese, the still wealthy South Koreans, French, Germans...and Venezuelans.

Venezuelans are more likely to visit the US than Brazilians, even if Brazilians have a higher income per capita than Venezuelans. You can say Brazil looks rather to the South and you will have a point there. Brazilians inundated Argentina. But Brazil has also kept stronger links to Europe throughout the decades. Brazil's population hubs are mostly very far to the South. Venezuela's bigger cities all face to the Caribbean. I reckon Venezuela's government ain't happy with that.

The current Venezuelan regime imposed a strict currency control back in 2003 and it has become tighter: a Venezuelan citizen can only get so much in foreign currency per year for tourism. She has to prove her expenses by showing every single purchase bill if requested. This and many other things in Venezuela's subsidized economy have led to a huge black market. Venezuelans - the privileged revolutionaries or majunches alike - keep buying dollars and euros in that black market because they don't know when the bubble will burst but they do know it will. That is why many Venezuelan tourists also use their trip to the US to open a US account or to take with them as many dollars as they can to their old US accounts.

With a fraction of what is in Venezuelans' account in the US we could easily pay for a thousand new schools in Venezuela.

One of Chávez's honchos, former Acción Democrática, former Causa Radical politician and now PSUV leader Aristóbulo Isturiz once said the Chávez government couldn't do without the currency control because "it would fall right away". And sure it would...even if the country does need to do it...it is this currency control that keeps a powerful elite - left and right - becoming immensely rich at the cost of María González with her 6 kids in Maturín or Guanare.

Who's sleeping with the Devil?

We all remember our dear commandant-lieutenant-leader-president-macho-Bolívar 2.0 talking about the evil Empire and the Devil at the United Nations headquarters. The naive observer would think the US magnates and Venezuela's red-clad warriors are at a clinch with each other. Reality is a wee bit different.

Take the news coming from Norwegian Aftenposten about the Wikileaks. It seems the Norwegians were not very happy at the way US Chevron and Spanish Repsol decided to bid for the development of the Carabobo field.

Former US ambassador Patrick Duddy reported to Washington that Anders Hatteland, Statsoil representative in Venezuela, was mad about the way Chevron and Repsol reacted. The Venezuelan government had been making the rules of the game more and more difficult and the Norwegians were hoping for an international boycot of the tender. French Total and Chinese CNPC decided not to take part in that tender. But Chevron and Repsol did, in spite of what their past experience had been. The Norwegian said US Chevron is giving legitimacy to the Venezuelan government. I repeat: the Norwegian said US Chevron is giving legitimacy to the Venezuelan government. And it seems the "bonus" US Americans paid to Venezuelan authorities did some magic, even if that was not the only reason why they got that field.

The US reporter also said the Venezuelan government gave more money to Statesoil for its shares in one of the fields than reported in the media (130 million dollars).

Stay tuned, more funny stuff is to come.

Ps. thanks to a Norwegian friend
Ps 2. Journalist Setty linked to this post, but there is nobody like him to give a comprehensive background on energy matters in Venezuela.

Venezuela, nuclear weapons and the US: some questions

Do you see something with this timing?

On 16 September 2010 the Obama administration presents a report identifying what countries are cooperating what the US government calls the "war on drugs", something that has been a complete failure for decades now, as North consumers keep funding drug dealers. Venezuela is listed as one of the countries not cooperating, together with Colombia and Mexico, but the news agencies stress the Venezuela case.

On 16 September 2010 Venezuelan minister for Justice and Internal Affairs, El Aissami, announces the capture of INTERPOL-fugitive and drug dealer Beto Marín. There have been quite some captures of drug dealers in Venezuela this year and several of them have been deported to Mexico, the USA, the EU and Colombia. There had been some talk, specially supported by certain groups I mentioned in my previous post about an alleged Al-Qaeda-Venezuela connection through the cocaine trade. The cocaine comes from Colombia and it does not just go through Venezuela but through Mexico and not just through Africa to Europe but through many other channels.

On 16 September 2010 an article by Republican politician John R. Bolton appears about a possible Venezuelan involvement in weapons of mass destruction. You can read interesting stuff about Bolton's position(s) on WMD throughout the years. He was to a big extent responsible for derailing the biological conference in Geneva that wanted to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He did not want international inspectors to inspect suspected US weapons site. Bolton is a prominent figure of the Project for the New American Century. Mr Bolton is a commentator for Fox News and he is active for some think tanks like JINSA.

On 16 September 2010 Fox reports Venezuelan airline Conviasa declared it had just suspended flights between Iran-Syria and Venezuela. Fox says normal users could not buy tickets for that trip.

On 17 September 2010 the couple and former Alamo scientists Mascheroni is detained and indicted on charges that they passed weapons secrets to somone they believed to be helping the Venezuelan government but who turned out to be an FBI agent.

Now, the indictment does not come as a surprise. Very strangely this is not mentioned in the normal press. I had read about this Mascheroni case many months ago. The couple gave an interview at the end of 2009 after the FBI had raided their houses. Even the Mascheroni themselves said they had sold some nuclear-related information to someone they thought belonged to the Venezuelan government. The Argentine says he did not provide anything that was not available on the Internet and the prosecution says the couple provided secrets to an FBI agent thinking the agent was someone representing the Chávez government.

And on the same 17 September Conviasa declares it is suspending all national and international flights.

I have no idea. Do you see some patterns? Am I mixing up two different "issues" or not?

Obama got the Nobel prize. Is it important for Venezuela?

Barak Obama got the Nobel Peace prize. I have to say I was a wee bit surprised. I think it is way too early to be sure what Obama's real contribution will be. Does this event concern Venezuelans? Not really, but it may be time to discuss about where we stand. We all know Hugo Chávez craves for attention. He seems to be telling the personalities of the whole world "Please, come talk to me" although he does not seem to be interested in listening to his own people. He has a particular crush on Obama. At the same time he knows his main tool abroad and often in Venezuela is to say "los gringos tienen la culpa de todo" (everything is the gringos' fault). He knows he can accomplish a lot with that among the US bashers (although this seems to be more difficult now).

Obama has indeed tried to promote cooperation throughout the world. He has pushed for concrete steps in different fronts (although perhaps in too many). He is trying to listen to what people in other cultures have to say. He has avoided to treat them in an arrogant way as some of his predecessors did (still, see here).

On one side I put this:

• He recognised the rocket systems in Poland and the Czech Republic would provide no extra defence but restart an unnecessary arms race with Russia. The West does need to be vigilant towards Russia for many things (human rights, EU gas dependency, industrial espionage and much more), but simply the rocket shields there made no sense, in spite of what the Poles would think. If you were following the Russian mind very closely (not just from US news) you will know it was the right decision.
  
• He has looked for a dialogue with the Arab world.
• He has asked the state of Israel to stop its expansion in occupied Palestinian territories , although now Lieberman, the minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, says things will go on like now. I suppose that minister wants settlers to keep on taking as much land as possible to "negotiate concessions" in a decade for areas still to be occupied.
• Obama has asked also the Arab world to recognise the state of Israel and bring about democracy in their own countries (well, I have little hope on the second part, but the first part is possible).

On the other side of the balance I put this:

• after a good start with the way to treat the Venezuelan regime, he remained silent regarding the worsening of the human rights situation in Venezuela.
  
• Obama's position towards Honduras has been like the Honduras situation itself: chaotic, uncoordinated. Let me be clear here: Micheletti is a coupster and his coup should be rejected. On the other side, Zelaya was also a self-coupster and no more kosher. His "referendum" was going to be organized with the support of chavismo, including voting material from the notorious Venezuelan National Electoral commission. Honduras needs elections, but elections need to be monitored by foreign observers and these observers cannot be the ineffective lot of OAS, an organisation that seems to be mostly a club of the present presidents of Latin America (alas, there is no single Parliamentarian system in Latin America).
• the Israeli government seems to want to speed up the expansion of illegal settlements in occupied territories for the next years and their lobbying in the US will guarantee the US does not do anything.
• Obama should put more pressure on the Arabs to denounce Akhmadinejad's claims that the Holocaust did not take place (even if he has).
• After so many years and the loss of so many innocent lives, the US (and the EU) are not sure about what to do in Afghanistan. This is a tragedy as the West could have done a lot of good there if they had had a better strategy from early on and it is not that they did not know what happened to the Soviets there. One of the last losses of US lives in that place took part in Kashdem, Nuristan. If you want to know how life is there right now there, you can take a look in a very dry but real report from an NGO here: 95% of illiteracy, no school building, lots of girls dying from menstrual anemia...even if billions of dollars have been spent. The US and other powers need to listen more to the normal people of those nations, not to their corrupt potentates.
  

Obama has definitely a complicated work South of the border. The United States has intervened in Latin America too often in ways that were very pernicious for the region even when the region was by no means a threat to them, from early XIX century to this day. On the other hand, the US has also provided a model of democracy that, although far from perfect, is better than anything Latin America has had.

I would love to see Latin America to try to find out a bit more what other regions can teach as well: how free education works in Western Europe, how industrialization was possible in Japan, how parliamentarian systems work in Canada and Western Europe. Above all, I would like Latin America to take responsibility of its own destiny, on one side being aware of what foreign powers have done in the region, but on the other recognising it is up to us to get over the injustices and that it has been Latin Americans themselves the ones who have been hampering their own development the most 200 years. Unfortunately until now we find in Latin America too many people who either see the US (or Europe) as the perfect model to copy without any own analysis or the source of all their problems.

Now, back to the US: will this change things towards Venezuela?

I predict Venezuela's Fat Man in the Palace will now suffer more the pains of his unrequited "love", he will cry louder to get Obama's attention and try to force it in many ways.

What should Obama do? I think he should repeat the message he gave in Miami about what chavismo is about. He should also support transparency in elections in both Honduras and, next year, in Venezuela, and he should support above all education programmes throughout Latin America. The US administration can play a bigger role in supporting basic education programmes in Latin America. Otherwise, I think he should focus on other topics.

The Venezuelan mess should be solved by Venezuelans alone. They can get some support in the future with real observers from the EU or Oecd in general (not the horrible disaster that was the EU mission of 2006), but otherwise, they need to put their act together on their own, make sacrifices to reduce ignorance, to help the poorer, denounce human right abuses and propose concrete steps to take the country on the path of sustainable development.

Obama and the Stalker

Fundamentalists from right and left are both desperate because of the meeting where Barak Obama shook hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

I am happy. It is pathetic the way Chávez craves for attention and it is not a nice sight to see Obama going to shake hands with him, but most Venezuelan opposition people, people in the middle and non-extreme supporters of Chávez welcomed the move. Obama has done so far the right thing towards Chávez. The Venezuelan former military and coup monger would have wanted to steal the show anyway. Obama neutralized him and then focused on other matters. Chávez at the beginning seemed ravished, excited. Still, I am sure after that he felt fool and now he is wondering what to do. Even if Chávez craves for attention, he has not gained the respect he wanted. Most importantly: it has become much more difficult for him to attack a US president who is - so far - much more respected abroad than any of the other US presidents of the last 15 years or so. And I don't thinkObama will do the Carter or the Kissinger thing (and shaking hands is not THE thing).

Obama should maintain a cool attitude. We, as Venezuelans, though, should not expect much from the United States than respect. It is up to us to get rid of Hugo Chávez - by democratic means and not using the ways of Hugo Chávez in 1992 or Carmona in 2002.

It is going to be difficult and it will take probably a couple of years but we will do it. More importantly, though, we will have to have a good plan for after Chávez.

Obama wins, Chávez is worried

On the 4th of October we could see a great example of how democracy works. Obama became the president of the United States of America and McCain conceded in an excellent speech. As Miguel, I am also happy Obama won. There are several reasons why I think Obama is better for the United States, but here I want to talk about why he is good for Venezuela.

• Chávez thrives on insulting Bush. He needed badly someone as unpopular as Bush. Obama will probably enjoy more respect than Bush and it will be more difficult for Chávez to find a "devil" to blame for every evil on Earth
  
• Obama knows how to deal with the Venezuelan autocrat: he can very well express his understanding and concern for different nations and expose at the same time the ways in which Chávez tries to manipulate people and misuse democracy.
• A change of power in the United States, in spite of all the discussions and mud thrown ing during election time, is done in a fairly respectful manner for Venezuelan standards. That is something Venezuelans can see and hope for in Venezuela. I'd rather have Venezuelans see more of how other democracies work, like those - also very imperfect - in Westen and Northern Europe, but the United States is closer and good enough.
  

When Chávez was defeated in 2007's referendum, the parties of the extreme Left in Europe shamefully said Chávez had shown statemanship by conceding defeat the first day. They did not say Chávez soon ordered all TV and radio stations to broadcast his message (as he does for hours every week) where he claimed the opposition's victory was a pyrhic victory and a "shitty, shitty, shitty victory" and where he further announced he would not change anything from his proposal but propose it later. He claimed people had just not understood and listened to the opposition's media manipulation. Perhaps some lefties abroad still think Venezuela's media is mainly opposed to Chávez. In reality, only the TV channel Globovisión can be seen via open signal in Caracas. RCTV and Globovisión have to be received via cable or satellite and less than 30% of Venezuela's population have satellite or cable.