Cleaning up the sty in the Land of Grace

We, civilians, need to explain how we are going to get Venezuela out of the mess - even before we vote the military regime out of power. Explaining how we will do it will speed up the process and improve the chances of stability and progress for Venezuela after the change.

Cleaning up: we have to do it on a permanent basis

Countless individuals have proclaimed since colonial times that they were going to fight corruption only to break new records on crookedness once they came to power. One example is that of military caudillo José Tadeo Monagas, who claimed to be fighting for the poor and against oligarcs but who instituted, together with his brother José Gregorio, the Monagas Dinasty and ended up being chased from power with the crowd shouting "death to the thieves". That is just the general rule in Venezuela.

Hero, Dictator, Thief

Can we set up mechanisms that are fool-proof and Venezuelan-proof to fight and actually reduce corruption?

The first thing we need to realise is there is absolutely no mechanism that can function perfectly all the time. Fighting corruption will need to be like fighting a virus: there is a constant race and you have to outsmart the evil creature time after time because it is bound to mutate over and over again. Any system for transparency and accountability has to be reviewed on a permanent basis and the reviewers cannot come from one single party but from the whole society.

Once we understand that, we can start proposing some real rules that may, willy-nilly, force the country towards more honesty.

Let's begin with this:

1) every contract between the Venezuelan national government or any regional government with a value higher than Bs 10000 must be published on the Internet for everyone to see. People would see details about the company and about the state functionaries signing in. No company can get a zillion contracts fo Bs 9999 to circumvent this.

2) FONDEN, the billionaire "Fund for Development", now used as the Chávez piggy bank and Bolivourgeois black box, must be fully transparent. Every piece of information about every dollar or Bolívar spent needs to be put online. Only a small amount of the Defence budget can be hidden from the general public but the accounts about this must be checkup up by a 10-member commission of the National Assembly made up of deputies from the current government and the opposition. The leader of such commission must be elected by random selection and changed every 6 months.

Getting Venezuela out of underdevelopment

Francisco wrote a provocative post some days ago. It was about oil policy and how hard it is to make this a topic of discussion in Venezuela for everybody. Details about what we need to do with oil are just hard to explain to most people. 

He started this topic after some previous posts discussing Leopoldo López's ideas on a future government. López basically wants to let Venezuela produce more oil. He also wants more transparency about its use, more investment, blablabla. The details, though, aren't there.

And the discussion ended up again on whether we should produce more or less oil. What we don't discuss is how to get off oil dependency. Apparently, a lot of people haven't got a clue. The thinking goes around "invest in petrochemistry" and at best "invest in R&D", apart from the eternal "invest more on education".

But nothing, absolutely nothing will change until we start discussing about the details. We need to do that not after the elections but right now.

One of the main topics about which we have to discuss details is how to bring transparency and accountability to investment.

Is there a fool-proof way of doing so? Can we device a mechanism so that those getting resources from the State are not like now the relatives of the president, the friends of the military case or the friends of the party?

We need a plan for accountability and transparency that is so tough a lot of politicos are going to fear a government advoting such a plan is elected but the vast majority of Venezuelans get excited about it.

Chávez discovers America

This was yesterday. Now this is a suspicious behaviour

Now that Venezuela's military caudillo is presumably sick, he is starting to discover some obvious things. For instance, today he came to the conclusion it is "suspicious to be completely dressed in red".

I have written a lot about red as ideological Ersat in our banana republic (like here, here and, in Spanish, here).

The caudillo's followers have to adapt to what their commandant thinks now. They used to think until yesterday that dressing up in red would make them ideologically consistent...now they will have to check out what the caudillo is wearing.

Venezuela, parasite nation (II)

When you have an oil producing country where the work of a few can provide for billions of dollars, you can keep up millions living off as parasites for quite some time.

In Venezuela half the population has no proper job. They are in the so-called "informal sector", which means they usually have to sell Chinese panties and Spanish skirts or drive a pirate taxi. The panties and the skirts and the cars are bought with those petrodollas. Millions of people are happy if they get food, something to drink and a ceiling. And it is that you don't need much more in tropical Venezuela. There are also a lot of people in state jobs thanks exclusively to their political loyalty. And with oil prices at $100 a barrel, a government can provide for some goodies for all of them, at least for some time, as population keeps growing.

Today deputy Aristóbulo Isturiz -former AD politician, former Causa R politician and now PSUV politician and enemy of AD and Causa R- announced that Venezuelans are invited to go at 2pm to the Bolívar Square in every town to celebrate the birthday of the current military caudillo, Hugo Chávez.

Yesterday the government issued new bonds that need to be sold at a high cost for the nation.  Wealthy profiteers will be able to get the bonds and earn a lot. The military regime will be able to keep the pressure off the currency for some time. The average Venezuelan will have to pay very dearly after the 2012 elections.

But half of those that will have to pay will celebrate today the birthday of the guy who is responsible for this mess. They will do that instead of trying to figure out how to get Venezuela on the road of sustainable development.

This made me think about this:

Don't just look at their legs

These are two red-legged hokeycreepers. The male has blue plumage, the female is green. The picture was taken in Aragua state, in Northern Venezuela.

This is NOT a joke

Military strongman Chávez creates the Ministry of the Popular Power for the Penitentiary Service. The first minister will be charming Iris Valera.

Bolívar: One of the most damaging personality cults on Earth

Today is a holiday in Venezuela. It is the day our first national caudillo, Simón Bolívar, was born in 1783. Mind: Bolívar had some good ideas - none of them original - and some very bad ones. After he miserably failed as a military to defend Puerto Cabello, an easy job Miranda had given him, after he betrayed Miranda and delivered him to the Spaniards to save his own skin, he managed to lead military troops for some time. He got rid of people who could become a competition to him, like Piar. He also got Venezuela into incredible debts with Britain in order to get enough mercenaries and weapons to further his cause. In the end, Venezuelan troops led the liberation of several lands and Bolívar was acclaimed as "the Liberator", as if hundreds of thousands of others hadn't done more for the same thing - paying with their lives in very violent ways. 

Bolívar did not have much money to pay mercenaries and national military men, so he gave them land and power and in that way Venezuela became the most militarily obsessed country in South America. It did not fight anymore with other countries in Latin America (it couldn't have done it), but its military just dedicated themselves to be declared some sort of superior caste...the inheritors of "The Liberator".

Venezuelan military decided to promote the cult to Bolívar. Pseudo-historians decided to transform Bolívar into a demi-God. This helped them in their careers, specially as the military were strengthened by this. Now there is no Venezuelan with political ambitions who would dare have a more critical view of Bolívar, the caudillo who wanted to rule for life. This has done a lot of damage to the country: every new generation of military and politicos claim to be the "prophets" of this new Bolívar religion.

What would have happened had Bolívar not been born? Nothing, really. We would have got our independence at the same time, a little bit later or a little bit earlier. We would have probably let Bolivia and Peru be liberated from within or by Argentine and Chilean forces. We would have got less debts with the Britons. We wouldn't have had to lose so many lives. We would not have a third of all muninipios called after some military strongman. Other than that, things would have been probably more or less the same.

Today Chávez felt the need to come over to Venezuela for the usual rites of worship. Here you see some of his very kitsch tweets on Bolívar today:

"Let'sSingThenAndBeConsequentWithOurChantOfFatherlandOf21Century,LongLiveBolívar,BolívaLives!

"

"I talk to you Venezue,My People:Let's make Bolívar live now and forever in us, in our ideas, our behavior each day"

"Let'sSingWIthPabloNedura:Everything has your name, father, in our home, everything that is ours comes from your life, your inheritance is our daily bread"

"Sunday 24 July, bless you, day of God we declare you, day of Fatherland, day of Subleme Birth, let's sing to Simón Bolívar the Eternal"

Chávez will probably "reveal" today some results from the investigations on Bolívar's bones.